The Poison Tree (15 page)

Next came a loose stack of flimsier papers, a seemingly random selection torn from old magazines. Some were advertisements featuring slick-limbed models, while others were interviews with actors, writers, musicians, Roger Capel’s photo credit their only common theme. Satisfaction at solving the mystery was immediately replaced by puzzlement. If their father was long dead, who had taken those very recent pictures of Biba?

I found my answer at the bottom of the box; more loose photographs, snapshots this time. The first curling photograph was blurred but there was no mistaking the two children who splashed in a wading pool surrounded by trees, or the woman who crouched at the edge of the water in her bikini. Rex and Biba’s mother shared their features as well as their laughter. I flipped back to the top photographs: now that I looked again, they weren’t of Biba at all, but of the woman who had bequeathed her her face. The likeness was uncanny.

There were a few more from the same film, mostly of Rex and Biba frolicking in the wading pool, their parents out of the shot. Finally the photographer appeared before the camera; the man I presumed to be Roger Capel sat on the edge of the pool, jeans rolled up to his knees, feet in the water. I was only guessing that he was their father from the indulgent expression on his face: he was short and stocky, with full lips and a round, feminine face, far removed from the etiolated beauty of his wife and children. I wondered if it had bothered him, fathering two children to whom he had had no evident genetic input. Another more formal and much earlier portrait, posed in a studio on a sheepskin rug with pampas grass motionless before the dappled backdrop, showed the infant Biba asleep in her mother’s arms while Rex sat on his father’s lap, his serious little face regarding the camera with something like suspicion. I wondered again what double tragedy had robbed these happy children of both their parents.

I would have overlooked the sliver of newsprint if I hadn’t been so diligently trying to replace everything exactly as I had found it, to remember which photographs had been where. The slim, yellowing column had been folded three times, the creases as sharp as razors through years of being pressed in Rex’s box.

The photograph was a reproduction of the sunny meadow picture. It was impossible to tell which newspaper the cutting had originally come from, whether it had been national or local press, and there was no date. The language was the unambiguous and unembellished terminology of a court reporter.

Rex watches any retrospective television programs with the concentration of someone cramming for an exam. He doesn’t discriminate between the lowbrow and the heavyweight as long as the time documented is the time he spent inside; he pays the same attention to clip shows featuring celebrity scandals as he does to serious political debates. Today it’s the latter; a discussion program about Tony Blair’s legacy is showing on a worthy channel somewhere in the high numbers. The studio debate is preceded by a montage of news footage from Blair’s career. It’s the same old footage they always show. It begins with clips that Rex would have seen for the first time by my side in Highgate, the fresh-faced PM eulogizing the People’s Princess, and soon leads to footage that he will have seen, if at all, on the television in the common room in prison. The baby on the doorstep of number ten. The Millennium Dome. The airplanes crashing into the towers. The aerial shot of the lonely car, its owner’s body hidden beneath a tree. Crowds jumping in the fountains at Trafalgar Square as the Olympic bid is won. The London bus, its top deck opened out like orange peel. The flag-draped coffins carried onto the runway. The final wave good-bye. The images are soundtracked with the song that will always be associated with Blair: “Things Can Only Get Better.” It was still being played on the radio well into the summer of 1997. Things did not get better for us. We were not supposed to end up here.

The conversation is dominated by Iraq, but a woman in a blue tweed suit is keen to move the discussion away from the war and toward home policy; prison reform, to be precise. She wants to build more prisons so that judges will be able to hand down appropriately lengthy sentences for serious crimes. She cites a couple of examples of men who served only half or even a third of their sentences. Rex’s name is not mentioned, but it could be in this context. My hand is poised over the remote but Alice zoned out as soon as she heard the word
politics
and is absorbed in her magazine.

“I’d say New Labour did us a favor, then,” says Rex. “If there were more prison spaces perhaps I’d still be inside.”

I’m sure that, while overcrowding and lax sentencing are to some extent responsible for Rex’s early release, other factors played their part.

Alice decides that now is the time to vocalize her boredom.

“This program is completely
retarded
,” she says.
Retarded
is a banned word.

“Fifty pence,” I say automatically. That’s the amount docked from her weekly pocket money whenever she says anything that doesn’t fit in with my idea of what’s appropriate or, I suppose, politically correct. Rex looks bemused but doesn’t question me. I suppose I will have to commit to paper the list of proscribed words and phrases that, until now, it has been enough to carry around in my head.

Alice shrugs and doesn’t argue, revealing that that was no slip of the tongue but a deliberate test. She has done this a couple of times in the last few days: purposefully pushed her boundaries to see if I will relax now that Daddy, the soft touch, is home. I need her to learn that this only means I will play bad cop to his good cop. I have seen what happens when children grow up without boundaries and without love, tough or otherwise. I will not spoil Alice.

She stomps the few paces to the dark kitchen and opens the fridge with an ostentatious sigh. She is spotlit in its glow. When she shouts out it is with unnecessary volume that makes both of us jump.

“Mum,
se nos ha acabado el zumo de naranja, ¿No queda mas?
” My reply is automatic.

“
Sí, en el armario al lado de la nevera, donde siempre
.”

Alice and I realize our faux pas at the same time and for a second we are conspirators. She is waiting for permission to giggle but Rex’s voice denies it.

“Alice, can you give Mummy and me a moment?” he says firmly. No
sweetheart
, no
please
. It is the first time Alice has heard Rex speak with decision and authority and only the fourth or fifth time I have. It’s rather thrilling.

“Why don’t you give Jade a call?” I say to Alice. “You can use the phone in my room.”

Her delight at unsupervised telephone time quenches Alice’s thirst and her curiosity.

“What the hell was that?” he demands.

“Spanish.”

“Since when does Alice speak Spanish?”

“It was her first language when she was little,” I admit.

“And when were you going to tell me? Or were you going to keep it a secret between the two of you? To push me out of the only family I’ve got left?”

“She was only asking where the orange juice was,” I say.

He closes his eyes, runs his hands through his hair, and takes six or seven deep breaths. When he looks up again he has regained control. Is this something he learned in prison? Ten years ago this flight of fancy would have escalated into full-blown paranoia, but now he is able to put the brakes on it. If the last decade has nurtured in me an instinct to protect at all costs, then Rex has mastered the art of suppression. “I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me, that’s all. I could have learned too. I’ve had ten years.”

“I can teach you,” I say feebly, my heart sinking at the idea of the patience I will need to teach Rex, one of nature’s monoglots, a foreign language. Perhaps now is the time to tell him about the darkness I experienced when Alice was a baby. How the scope of the world, so recently made available to me in widescreen, dwindled to a pinhole. The loneliness and frustration of living back in Bletchley with my hurt, confused parents and a dumb but vocal baby. Speaking to Alice almost exclusively in Spanish for the first few years of her life was the only thing that kept me sane. It preserved somehow the identity I had had before Biba and was a threadlike connection, a flimsy lifeline to the future I could have had if I had never met her. Instead I give him the acceptable answer, the one I gave to my mother and father at the time. “I thought it would be nice to pass a skill on to her.”

Our discussion is curtailed by Alice hovering at the top of the stairs. The staircase lines the left-hand side of the living room and she is sitting on the top step, peering through the banisters with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity. She has changed into the beloved and vile pink pajamas my mother bought her during an unsupervised visit to Lakeside. The words I’M A LITTLE PRINCESS are emblazoned across her chest in purple glitter, as if she needed the encouragement.

“New rule,” I tell her. “One I should have told you before. Daddy doesn’t understand Spanish, so when he’s around, we only talk in English, just like we do with Grandma and Grandpa.”

“Of course,” she says seriously, either because she doesn’t want to cause another argument or because she is mulling over the divide-and-conquer potential of what she’s just learned. I wouldn’t put it past her. Children are naturally Machiavellian and Alice is no exception. “I wish I’d never been born” is the insult hurled from the child to the parent, but in my darkest times, especially when she was little and I was so alone, I often thought its reverse: “I wish you’d never been born.” It is a poisonous thought to carry around. Like Alice, I have a list of proscribed words and phrases. I can never casually say, “I’ll kill you,” “I could kill her,” or “I could kill him.” That empty cliché was a favorite of Rex’s.

“Who wants fish and chips?” I say, more to break this chain of thought and get out of the house than to fulfill a craving for battered cod. Alice, unused to such spontaneity, claps her hands and races upstairs, returning seconds later wearing the cheap zirconia tiara she saves for exciting occasions, and which never fails to enchant. She
is
a manipulative child with her preciously stage-managed outfits. Her clothes are never just thrown together but chosen with delight and calculation, just like Biba’s always were. But she has something else in common with Biba; when Alice’s mood exults, it is contagious. Rex and I need that dynamic, that third person brimming with possibility and irresponsibility to draw us out of the diffidence to which we are both naturally inclined and into a world of potential and fun. Rex helps her tuck her pajama legs into her green rain boots, which have frog’s eyes and a red mouth on the front of each toe. With any luck she will ruin the trousers on the beach.

The coast is only twenty minutes away but we have left it late and are the last people in line for the fish bar. Alice can barely see over the counter, so is hoisted onto Rex’s hip and insists on reading the whole menu aloud before making her choice. The girl behind the counter, sheened in grease, is visibly cheered and charmed by her enthusiasm. By the time Alice’s wrapped-up food is handed over, she is so overexcited I worry she’ll make herself sick before the first chip is eaten.

We eat our fish suppers with our fingers in a pool of lamplight on the edge of the dark beach. There is no moon tonight and the sea is invisible behind a ridge of shingle, the only evidence of it the boom, shatter, and drag as every seventh wave advances and retreats. Above our heads, seagulls circle in a starless sky, biding their time. When we have finished we shake the hard little chips and flakes of fish from the bottom of their wrappers and the white birds swoop.

Our house seems smaller than ever after the expanse of the beach. The cottage seems to have been resized since Rex came home. His height has shrunk the place and turned a pretty and feminine home into something quaint.

Before we go to sleep, I press 1471 to see if anyone has telephoned while we were out. The automated voice informs me in mechanically flawless Received Pronunciation that I was called today at 20:49 hours. The caller withheld their number.

A
LOUD CREAK AND a pulling on the bedclothes around my feet broke into my sleep. Biba had used my bed as a launchpad to propel the top half of her body through the skylight. Her legs dangled through the frame like the severed bottom half of a shop mannequin.