The Poison Tree (23 page)

Actually, pedophiles are the least of my worries.

“I was only out of the room for a minute,” says Rex apologetically. But that is all it would take. I know that I can’t protect her forever. But she is still so young. For now, I can keep her within my sight. I can hold her—not back, exactly, but where she is, for a little while longer.

Alice has so far been content with the scraps of the story I have fed her, but she will soon want to put flesh on its bones. She doesn’t know that Rex’s surname used to be Capel but I have let slip the name Biba and that clue is all it would take. I discovered the Capels’ history slowly and by stealth: not for Alice. She won’t have to scavenge scraps of newsprint and listen at doors like I had to. The stories it took me months to learn and years to cover up she can probably unearth with a few clicks of the mouse. The names Rex and Biba are unusual enough to come up with a hit for that kind of thing, newspaper archives. The perceived glamour of what happened—the youth, the money, the bohemian family background—means that Rex’s crime tends to be anthologized on grisly Web sites run by people who fetishize these things. I searched for it myself once a month or so before Rex came home. It’s all there.

There is one thing at least that she can’t find out on the Internet, and that is the nature of my own undetected crime. That is not to say that my secret is safe. Far from it. There are things that could happen, potential emergencies that could force the facts blinking and unwilling into the light. Time does not lessen the odds in my favor. If anything, it becomes more likely every day as she grows up. What will happen if I am found out? I don’t even know what law I have broken, but I must have, it must be illegal. And how would they punish me? What punishment could be worse than the knowledge I live with every single day?

“You’ve got until the end of the day to give me your list.”

“Excuse me?”

“The guest list for your party. We’ve only got two weeks, we should have started inviting people ages ago, really.”

My own twenty-first birthday fell a couple of months after Biba’s, at the end of July, and she approached it with the same enthusiasm with which she had done her own. My heart sank as she described the party she was planning: the music we would play, the ball gowns we would wear, the kitchen table brought up to the dining room and laid with a whole roast hog for us all to tuck into “and then lots of amazing drugs for pudding. Everyone will be fucked.” The party sounded like one I would have loved to attend with someone else as the guest of honor, but with me as its hostess it was pure fantasy. Who was there to invite? My tiny social circle, the three people I counted as friends in London, were somewhere in France with my ex-boyfriend. Nina was similarly unreachable. Even the friendly and nomadic Tris and Jo were unlikely to come all the way back from Devon to celebrate the birthday of someone they had met only twice. Rachael was nearby, but to have Biba’s other close friend and the former occupant of Attic One as the only guest I knew at my birthday party smacked of desperation. I’d rather have either twenty other people or just the three of us.

“I don’t want any fuss,” I said, and on seeing Biba’s crestfallen face, “Perhaps we could just scale it down a bit. I have the best evenings when it’s just us three. We can still have the music and the hog roast and the excellent drugs.”

“Yeees . . .” she said doubtfully.

By the time my birthday came around, no plans had been made, no provisions had been bought, and the only acknowledgment of the occasion was a birthday card signed by the two of them. It was a beautiful card, a local artist’s watercolor of the woods that captured perfectly the way I saw them: shimmering, ethereal, and almost unpeopled. It sat on the mantelpiece in my attic for the rest of the summer. It was one of the few possessions I salvaged from the house when I ran away, but I don’t have it now. I burned it on the patio of the house in Brentford when I was finally alone. But that was all I had: no presents, and certainly no party, not even a secret visit from Rex. I lay on my bed for two hours in the middle of the afternoon, ostensibly reading but really waiting for Rex to seek me out, but he did not come.

At five, he turned up on the terrace where I was sunbathing and Biba was reading, a smile dancing shyly at the corners of his mouth. I wore a bikini and Biba the T-shirt she’d slept in.

“You can’t go out dressed like that,” he said to us. He looked at his watch. “You’ve got two hours to get ready for Karen’s birthday banquet.” From the pocket of his cut-off jeans he produced a roll of twenty-pound notes. “I’m taking my two favorite girls out for the evening.” He clapped his hands twice. “Come on! The earlier you start, the prettier you’ll be.”

Biba had opened a window in her bedroom, perhaps in honor of my birthday, and the usual stifling smell of hair and skin and bedclothes was absent. There was a knock on the door followed by the sound of Rex’s sandaled feet flapping away down the corridor. Outside the door, a bottle of supermarket cava stood in a flower pot filled with ice on a tatty old black tray with a gaudy seventies print of concentric circles on it. The two champagne saucers that flanked the bottle already sparkled with gold bubbles.

“What will I wear?” I said to Biba as the first glass disappeared in two gulps. “I haven’t got anything dressy here.”

“You have now,” she replied. From somewhere in the bowels of her wardrobe she produced a flat, tissue-wrapped package. “Happy birthday, Cinderella. You
shall
go to the ball!” The scarlet dress that I shook out was old but immaculate: it was a full-skirted halter-neck dress, the kind girls wore to go jitterbugging with GIs in the forties. It fit me better than anything new I had ever worn.

“Thank you,” I said. “I love it.”

“Perfect!” Biba clapped her hands with delight. She picked a red lacquered chopstick from a pewter mug on her crowded dressing table and fixed my hair on top of my head in a loose chignon, exposing the brown roots that looked black against the blond of my hair. Finally she handed me a lipstick the same color as my dress and turned her attention to her own outfit. She chose a pale pink petticoat and wrapped a black ribbon around her neck. With her hair in a low bun, she looked like a Degas painting. She locked eyes with me in the tarnished glass.

“You realize that he’s in love with you, of course,” she said to my reflection, pulling a loose strand of hair away from my face and winding the end of it around the chopstick. “Is there anything you want to tell me?” she asked with a sly smile. The blush that spread across my neck and chest, a brighter, hotter red than my dress, was all the answer she needed.

“How long have you known?” I said to my flounced lap. “I wanted to tell you, but . . .” When I looked up, she was smiling. “You don’t mind?”

“Mind? I was
willing
it to happen. If you’re with Rex, you’ve got two reasons to stay here. So now you
have
to stay with us.”

“Why would I ever leave you?” I said. I wanted more champagne but the bottle was already empty. I had only had two glasses.

“Everyone does.” She shrugged. “Eventually.”

“Ladies!” The summer air was so thick that Rex’s voice was muffled, as though he were in the house next door and not on the landing outside. “Your carriage awaits!”

A taxi—the black kind, not a minicab—waited with its motor running in the street. Biba slid down the banisters and whirled Rex around in a little polka at the foot of the stairs.

“As you might be able to deduce, she knows about us,” I said to Rex.

“I couldn’t be happier for you both,” she said. Then she smacked Rex lightly across the cheek. “That’s for not telling me,” she said. Her slap had been playful, but it left a four-fingered handprint that didn’t fade until we were nearly at our destination.

The restaurant we went to was somewhere in Bow or White-chapel or Shoreditch. I didn’t know the fashionable part of the East End then, and I still don’t know it now. Perhaps if I had stayed longer, Biba and I would have explored this hinterland on the other side of the Old Street traffic circle, but I didn’t stay and who else would I have gone with on my return? I was not too old, I am still the same age as many of the people who will throng the bars and clubs of Hoxton tonight. But circumstances limited my opportunities in every conceivable way. I doubt those places have baby-changing facilities or a children’s menu, even today.

I had read in one of Biba’s magazines that this area was the new Soho, but that you had to know where you were going if you didn’t want to spend your evening wandering around abandoned warehouses in the hope of stumbling across the week’s must-visit bar or restaurant. Every building we passed looked derelict and foreboding to me; even those modernized few where entire walls had been replaced by glass intimidated me, showcasing as they did sprawling groups of confident, fashionable people who would surely recognize and despise me as an outsider. Fortunately, and rather astonishingly, Rex appeared to be among the cognoscenti: the sooty four-story building that he instructed the taxi to pull up alongside was one I would never have given a second glance were it not for the flaming torches that blazed on either side of the doorway. I don’t remember the name of the restaurant and wouldn’t know how to find my way back there, but I can recall every detail of its astonishing interior to this day. It was a high-concept, high-fashion place a world away from the pizzerias and gastropubs of my experience. Stuffed animals lurked under glass jars and hung from the ceiling. A bulldog with butterfly wings, suspended by wires, swooped perilously close to the two giant crystal chandeliers that dominated the room and cast sequined highlights on our skin. Oil paintings in rococo frames crowded the walls, and huge candelabras flickered on every table. The wait staff were works of art in themselves, beautiful people dangerously dressed. I noticed that the sober, suited city workers who made up around half the diners were seated in the darker corners of the restaurant, and I was gratified when our waitress, a mixed-race beauty with dreadlocks that swung to her hips, led us to a table in the middle of the room.

“Well done, Rex,” whispered Biba as she took the most prominent seat. “You’ve finally found your fabulous gene. Proof at last that we’re related.” As if anyone who saw them together could ever doubt that.

The menu was the size of an unfolded broadsheet newspaper and written in complex, florid French with English footnotes that did little to enlighten. I translated as best I could, and when the waitress came, ordered for all three of us. It was the first time Rex had heard me speak a foreign language and only the second time Biba had. I lapped up their admiration.

“How can you afford this?” said Biba as her first course arrived, a stack of interwoven green vegetables drizzled in a white sauce. “I mean, I’m not complaining, I love it here, but I thought we were broke?”

“I sold a contact sheet,” said Rex. Biba halted, an asparagus spear on her fork hovering an inch away from her mouth. I remembered again just in time that I wasn’t supposed to know about the boxed memorabilia beneath his bed. “They’re, like, these sheets of paper with little prints of all the photos from one session so you can choose the one you want to use. My dad left some behind when he went. They can be quite valuable if they’re of someone famous, or they’re signed. We flogged all the real collectors’ items years ago, but I got a couple of hundred quid for one of the leftovers.”

“Did it mean an awful lot to you?” I asked.

Rex shrugged. “This means more.”

We could have caught the Tube home but Rex insisted on another taxi, which used up the last of his twenty-pound notes. The three of us sat on the backseat together, and they each put their head on my shoulder without realizing the other had done so. In that moment, I experienced happiness on an almost transcendental level and didn’t want the journey to end. I no longer felt like an outsider but something they had in common.

The house stood in darkness. My nose twitched as I waited at the foot of the stairs while Rex and Biba bickered about the faulty lock. When you don’t smoke, I’ve noticed, your sense of smell is sharper and you can smell things that smokers can’t (woe betide Alice when she’s a teenager if she thinks she can get away with secret cigarettes). Someone nearby was, or had recently been, smoking marijuana. It was a heavy, dizzying smell quite unlike the light, almost floral hash that Rex kept. This was dark and spicy, like the pungent skunk weed that Guy had brought to the house. I followed my nose with my eyes. Guy was quick, but not quick enough to disappear into the wood completely before I saw him withdraw, as though afraid of a confrontation. He needn’t have worried that I would tell the others he was there; I would not have let him intrude on my perfect birthday. The orange tip of his joint was the last thing to disappear between the trees. With a crackle of footsteps that could have been anything, he was gone, leaving only a trail of smoke imperceptible to anyone but me.