A Poison Tree (Time, Blood and Karma Book 3) (4 page)

4

DAVID

Piece by piece, we remember. Our youth. Our life. The things that made us.

The
poet’s heap of broken images. How it began.

Ah, yes.
That bittersweet indulgence of memory.

Claire
.

Claire – or Claire Elizabeth, to be more accurate – is the younger of the Holland sisters by a year. Her sister Anna, in fact, was my initial acquaintance in that family.

Anna and I were both twenty at the time we first met. I had just flunked out of university, much to my father’s disgust, and was taking a few summer months off before joining the family firm and beginning my climb up the greasy pole of business. Anna was part-way through an English
Literature degree at a redbrick university, and likely to graduate with an upper second, at least.

The Holland family were farmers from just outside Market Harborough, and were pillars of the local community. It was a matter of some chagrin to Richard and Natalie that their elder daughter had embraced vegetarianism and had, on one occasion, threatened to boycott the hunt ball which they were attending to air her feelings on the topic of fox-hunting. She was not, however, rebellious by nature – or at least no more so than any other teenager – and by the time I got to know her she had mellowed into a kind and generous-spirited young woman.

And she had style and grace about her. Her skin was pale, almost translucent. Her face was pretty rather than beautiful, with a Celtic feel to it. But her most noticeable feature, and one she shared with her mother and sister, was a mane of fiery red hair which spilled across her shoulders and down her back.

Anna’s
temperament was far from fiery. I found her shy and oddly lacking in self-confidence. Later I was to discover this was the effect of being overshadowed by both an independent, outgoing and popular sister, and a forceful and flirtatious (and, it must be said, still attractive and desirable) mother. Natalie Holland would come on to me outrageously whenever I dropped by the farm, and reduce me to a stammering and crimson-faced juvenile until, finally, she would relent with a giggle, and leave me to recover my fractured dignity as best I could.

Anna’s disposition, I think was more akin to that of her father
Frank, a sensitive and reflective man of plump stature and ruddy complexion, who bore his wife’s extrovert behaviour with resignation.

“What’s it like being a vegetarian?” I asked
Anna.

“I don’t know,” she answered
. “What’s it like being a carnivore?”

“An omnivore,” I corrected her
. “I eat anything.”

“So I noticed at the buffet,” she said
, smiling.

We were leaning against a fence, enjoying the cool late-evening air. The barn dance was still in full swing, but we had stepped outside for a temporary respite from the caller’s relentless insistence that we ‘dance and enjoy, dance and enjoy’.

“I can only stand so much enjoyment before my ears start to bleed,” Anna had announced.

“Seeing that your parents are lending their barn to host this cornucopia of the senses,” I ventured, “I should have thought you’d have worn your perforated eardrums as a badge of honour.”

In reality, my attendance at this event was something of a fluke. I was chaperoning Sally Glenister, a neighbour’s daughter, who had taken a shine to a visiting Australian country-dance fan by the name of Shane. Sally, needless to say, had no intention of being chaperoned, and she and Shane spent the evening in each other’s company, no doubt tentatively exploring her plans for becoming Mrs. Shane Brough: plans which, in the event, would be brought to fruition within a few years.

This left me at a loose end for the evening. Fortunately for me, Anna Holland was also at a loose end, and proceeded to befriend this stray puppy from the other side of town.

And so we became friends. Over that hot and endless summer of glorious irresponsibility, we walked the country pathways of Leicestershire and picnicked and enjoyed an ease with each other, the like of which I have not experienced before or since. The issue of romance between us never surfaced. To have even contemplated such a thought would have been to sully something fine, a noble friendship.

“Tell me, David,” she said on one outing, “
what are you going to do with your life?”

“Apart from running a hospital in the slums of Calcutta, you mean?”

“I’m serious.” She pulled a grape from the picnic basket and threw it at me.

“Find a good woman and settle down, I suppose.” I sipped at my wine
. “And you?”

“Find a bad man and do the same.”

I squeezed her hand, and she rested her head on my shoulder. We sat together a while against the tree, and watched in the distance the slow grind of overheated traffic through the valley. After a while she fell asleep, and a little later so did I.

Claire arrived back in the country towards the end of September, shortly before Anna was to resume her studies.

She had tak
en a year out after her A-levels, to travel around Australia. I recollect being in awe of someone who, at eighteen, had packed a bag and, with only a few hundred pounds in her pocket, and a promise of initial lodgings with an émigré uncle, had jumped on a plane heading east.

I can still remember my first sight of Claire.

She was sitting at the kitchen table of the Hollands’ farmhouse. It was early evening and I had called round to see Anna on some errand or other. The easy familiarity I had attained over that summer, and the Hollands’ welcoming generosity of spirit had accustomed me to wandering around the farm like one of the family. And so it was that I blundered in, without knocking, on Claire’s homecoming.

The sunlight was slanting through the window behind her, giving her hair a luminescence
like fire. Her full lips were slightly parted in mid-sentence, and her green eyes looked up in surprise at my entrance. Natalie, Frank, Anna and the two Labradors also turned to stare at me. Seeing my face beginning to redden with embarrassment, Natalie leapt in and made the introductions.

Smiling
with mischief at my discomfort – as her mother had before on several occasions – Claire extended her right hand while her left hand swept back her long hair that had fallen across her face.

“Pleased to meet you, David,” she parted those feminine lips revealing even, white teeth
. “Anna has told me so much about you.”

“Nothing good, I hope.”

“Oh, no. Nothing good.”

I joined them at the table while Claire recounted some of her adventures.

I hardly listened. I was too captivated by the physical aspects of the woman to concentrate on her words, try as I might.

Superficially, she was not dissimilar in appearance to Anna, although her figure and limbs were more willowy. Her face was somewhat longer than Anna’s, and she had Natalie’s high cheekbones. The greenness of her eyes had a penetrating quality, and they sparkled with that sense of assurance her elder sister lacked.

Chemistry,
I thought.
There is some chemistry at work here.

Claire had flown out to Melbourne the previous autumn – she recapped for me at a later date – to stay with one of Natalie’s brothers. Then, buying a Greyhound bus pass, she had visited Adelaide, Ayers Rock, Cairns, then went on to Sydney via Brisbane. In Sydney she had washed up in a youth hostel in the Kings Cross area. By this stage her money was fast running out, and she took a job house-sitting in Rose Bay. When that ended, she worked for a month in a sandwich bar before the agency she had registered with placed her as a nanny to a wealthy solicitor’s three children in a large house on the North Shore. There, she had had a basement flat that she shared with a few lizards. After six months as a nanny, she had flown home via Singapore, where she stayed for a week and blew what small savings she had accumulated during her time with the lizards. She arrived back in England broke, breezy and ready for whatever life next threw at her.

It turned out to be me.

With Claire’s homecoming, I felt Anna begin to fade into the background. It was as if, in some strange way, the whole family had been marking time, doing their best to fill some void in the house. Now that Claire was back, everyone could resume their normal roles, and in Anna’s case this meant withdrawing into herself. For those last few days before she left for
university she became diffident and shy with me. She showed no signs of resenting her sister’s return, despite the attention her parents showered on the returning prodigal. On the contrary, she was at pains to make Claire feel welcome, and gave her the sort of attention she had been giving me over the summer.

Although this gave me a pang of sadness, I could
not complain. It must have been obvious from an early stage that I was fascinated by Claire. What was not so obvious was why Claire should be attracted to me. Though I had an athletic build, and was fairly fit – thanks to playing regular rugby – I would not have described myself as handsome. Rugged looking, more like. I suppose I was from good local stock, and expected to inherit the family businesses, but Claire did not strike me as someone who would choose her man based on the size of his bank account.

“Why don’t you ask her out?” Anna asked.

“What?”

“Why don’t you just ask her out?”

“Who?”

“Oh, David,” she sighed, “
don’t be so stupid.”

“Ah.” I could feel my face heating up with embarrassment.

It was our last picnic of the summer. We were sitting at the spot where we’d both fallen asleep some weeks earlier. The day was not so warm and sunny, but we’d decided to make the trip regardless.

“It is quite all right,” she said
with kindness, touching my hand.

“I’ve been dreading having this conversation.”

“Why?”

“And yet
–”

“You wanted to
tidy things up before I went away.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a nice man, David, a kind man. That’s quite rare.”

“Is it?”

She smiled. “Sisters talk, you know. Especially sisters like Claire and me. We’re very close. Quite dissimilar in lots of ways – apart from the hair, of course – but we do understand one another. That same evening she met you, we had a little heart-to-heart. She asked me what the arrangement was between you and me. Didn’t express any interest in you herself, not straightaway, that wouldn’t have been appropriate. If I had told her we were an item, she’d have left you alone.”

“She
has left me alone.”

“Yes
.” She bit into a crunchy red apple, and some of the juice ran down her chin. I handed her a napkin.

“So what did you tell her?”

“I told her that we were good friends –”

“Which we are.”

“– but that was all.”

We sat silent for a few minutes. I felt there was something I should say, but could not for the life of me think what it was.

At length, I said, “Are you disappointed?”

She looked at me
. “About what, for goodness’ sake?”

“Oh, I don’t know.
About the fact that I haven’t made a pass at you all summer, and that I fancy your sister something rotten. Most women would be rather pissed off about that, I’d have thought.”

She laughed. “Dear David, I hope we
will always be friends.” She kissed me on the cheek.

I continued to look at her.

“What?” she said. “What? Have I got something stuck on my teeth? What?”

“I’m waiting,” I said.

“For what? I’m not kissing you again. That was a one-off.”

“I want to know whether Claire fancies me.”

“Why shouldn’t she?”

“Well
you
don’t.”

She punched my shoulder.
“Do your own dirty work,” she said. “Now pass the wine over here.”

I passed the wine. She looked relieved that we’d had the conversation, and seemed a little more like the Anna I’d first met.

I had the delicacy to wait until Anna had been back at
university for two weeks before asking Claire out.

The summer by then was well and truly over.

I had begun my apprenticeship in one of the family businesses, the Braddock car dealership. I was to start at the Northampton branch, then move on to Nottingham, and finally Leicester, which was also Head Office to the property and textiles businesses.

The Braddock
dynasty had begun in land ownership and shoe manufacturing during the last century, before diversifying. The shoe business itself had been sold off to a conglomerate at a handsome price during the 1960s and the proceeds reinvested, mainly in property. My father, Edward Braddock, thus came from a long line of shrewd Midlands businessmen, and he had his fingers in several local pies. He had spent the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s as a plantation owner in Malaya, where I was born and where my mother died. He had remarried shortly after her death. My Thai stepmother, Nang, was the one who effectively raised me. In 1964, we returned to England where my father started up a number of companies and continued to build his gold pile. He also bought a part share in a golf club just outside Marbella, and picked up a non-executive directorship on the Board of a minor quoted company. He believed all our businesses needed to pay their way. The only sentimental investment he ever made was in The Bell at Bewdon, a tribute perhaps to the many happy years that he and my stepmother had spent in the village.