The Poison Tree (19 page)

“It’s an ITC qualification,” says Rex. “Computers. I’d have a degree by now if they hadn’t gone and let me out early, the bastards.” He breaks the deadpan with a smile, giving Ben permission to neigh a nervous laugh.

“Haha! Very good. Well done, anyway. Now, this sounds pessimistic, but the easiest way to proceed is to rule out the things you can’t do with this before talking about the ones you can. CRB checks are becoming standard across most industries, so you won’t get security clearance for any big companies. Council work will be dodgy, too. Obviously anything that involves working with children or the vulnerable is out . . .”

“So what
are
my options?” says Rex. “I want to work, you know.”

“That’s what I like to hear. We want you to work, too. Hmm. Can’t you set yourself up as one of those people who takes in computers and repairs them?” suggests Ben. “When my hard drive collapsed I’d have given anything for a local bloke to come around and put things right. Had to take it all the way back to Dixons in the end. You could work from home.”

The thought of Rex sharing my desk space, of him always being here, triggers a surge of claustrophobia that swells my lungs and closes my throat. I focus on keeping my breathing slow and controlled, so absorbed in this task that I miss the rest of the conversation and am aware of Ben’s presence only when he stands up to leave. He is on the doorstep before I find the courage to ask my final question.

“Ben?” I say. “How easy is it for people to find Rex? I mean, for someone from prison to trace him here, or for someone local to find out about his record?”

“Well, you can find anyone if you really want to,” he says. “But it’s much easier to disappear than it ought to be. I lose loads of cases.” He pulls a sheet from his frilled wad of papers and blinks up and down it. “He was known as Capel in prison, so the name change should go some way to, ah, keeping the wolf from the door.” Embarrassed by his own gauche turn of phrase, he shuffles out to his car without a proper good-bye.

We stand in the window and watch Ben go. Even his driving is nervous and hesitant; he checks all his mirrors three or four times before signaling and pulling slowly away.

“It doesn’t look good, does it?” Rex murmurs into the fold of my neck, in a voice I haven’t heard him use for years. He sounds vulnerable. He has worn optimism lightly since his release, and it hasn’t taken much to strip him of it. “What am I going to do, Karen? What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Who’s going to give me a job?” His hot sigh condenses on my skin. “I want to provide for you both. Big house, all that . . .”

“There’s no rush. This house is big enough for now. Three can live as cheaply as two. I make enough.”

“And have you resent me with every day I don’t work and you do? No thanks.” He has voiced my own fear, and in doing so diminishes it. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. It’s just that I kind of saw leaving prison as the end of a process and actually, it’s just the start of a whole new struggle. I don’t know if I’m up to it.”

“Of course you are,” I tell him. “We’ve been through worse than this.”

“You can say that again.” He detaches himself from me. “Let’s talk about something else. Will that tea still be hot, do you think?”

While Rex fetches his mug I go to draw the curtains, checking the street before I close the house up for the night. I am almost resigned when I see the white car. The driver is still in the seat, face turned toward our terrace but features once again hooded and indistinguishable. I have noticed, although I wonder if it is just a coincidence, that when the white car is parked outside, the anonymous, silent phone calls never come.

In spite of the boasts Biba made to her father, she never did become a famous actress and make him proud. In the end, Roger Capel’s eldest children drew attention to him in a way that he could never have predicted. I wonder if, like me, he often replays that scene in his front garden. I hope he wishes he had played it differently.

I often daydream about the career she could have had. I think she would have been suited to the life of a London actress, still living in Highgate and disappearing to the West End every night to work on her craft and delight her public. She would pick up the odd role in a costume drama or commercial so that when we were walking down the street together, people would nudge each other and whisper that that was the girl from the television. She would be successful and fulfilled, but not so starry that her calling would have taken her away from me. Occasionally I wonder what her life would have been like if she had achieved a Hollywood career, having her face in the press for all the right reasons, on the covers of magazines, and the name Biba Capel emblazoned across the sides of buses. This reverie is less comfortable and one I indulge in less often: there is no place for me in that alternate reality except through Rex.

I had my first taste of what life with Biba as a working actress would be like in the week leading up to her graduate performance. The preparations for her role in
As You Desire Me
were a drama in themselves: pacing, reciting, slammed doors, and agonized, bitchy telephone conversations with Rachael about the director and other cast members that lasted long into the night. I longed to be Biba’s confidante, but when I tried to ask her how it was going she told me I wouldn’t understand—she needed to talk to another actor.

I had expected the theater to be a sumptuous West End hall, all footlights and gilt, opera glasses tucked into the back of red velvet seats. A closer look at the address should have put paid to those ideas. It was on the wrong side of Marylebone Road, just off Lisson Grove. The theater was a low square building fronted by a pair of unsightly fire doors, watched over by the scowling windows of a housing project block. Inside, it was deceptively spacious but that was about all you could say for it. The walls were exposed cinder block, peeling with layers of wretched flyers for long-forgotten past productions. The artwork, if you could call it that, was weird glazed clay shapes attached to burlap backing. Here and there the strings had broken like old tennis rackets. I wondered if this ugly space would remain unrefurbished for long enough to come back into fashion. I couldn’t understand why anyone would build a theater like this when the traditional kind was so much more exciting, so much more appropriate. Biba, I’m sure, would have argued that the language of Shakespeare or Ibsen or whoever should be so powerful that the venue didn’t matter.

In the bar, a crowd of parents milled about, their formal clothes at odds with the hot weather. Fathers sweated in heavyweight suits while mothers fanned wilting hairstyles out of their eyes with their programs. Most of the chatter was supplied by people my own age, drama students or their friends. I knew no one and was suddenly desperate to have someone to talk to. Even Rex would have done. But he had taken my car and was running late, probably trying to find somewhere to park.

The warm white wine they served gave me an instant headache. I felt physically sick at the thought of seeing Biba perform. I was about to be let into her other world, the one that took her away during the days when she rehearsed and would take her away from me during the nights when she was successful. Like Rex, I recognized Biba’s work as an unassailable rival, something almost umbilically connected to her that I could never compete with. Another doubt tickled the back of my consciousness like a cough I couldn’t swallow. What if she was awful? What if the respect and admiration that our friendship was based on fell flat when I saw a bad performance? I hoped I would still be able to admire, or at least tolerate, her artistic temperament even if there was no great talent to justify it.

The klaxon that heralded the opening of the auditorium sounded more like a four-minute warning than an invitation to a performance. I jumped and knocked my elbow against the man behind me, and turned to apologize. Rex stood there silently.

“How long have you been here?”

“Literally just got here,” he said. “Don’t worry, I haven’t been hovering behind you for five minutes or anything,” he said, convincing me that that was exactly what he had been doing. He had gotten his hair cut, the cowlick that tufted out the back of his neck replaced by a short back and sides that left the quiff at the front standing up in a proud pompadour. He wore an old suit with a one-button jacket that flattered rather than ridiculed his skinny frame with a faded Rolling Stones T-shirt underneath. It was a look that would have seemed studied to the point of pretentiousness on anyone else, but I knew that it was the only suit Rex owned, and he’d been wearing the T-shirt that morning and it wouldn’t have occurred to him to change. The result was a genuine artlessness that was surprisingly attractive.

“This is our little girl’s big night, huh?” he said, squeezing my arm. As the crowd filed into the auditorium he cast his eyes desperately around and I noticed that he held four tickets in his hand. “He’s not coming, is he? Let’s go in.”

Like a proud parent, I had made up my mind that she was going to be great before she took to the stage. And like a proud parent I lacked any kind of objectivity. To me, the fact that my friend was on stage was mesmerizing before she even began to perform. I knew nothing of theater apart from the foreign plays I had studied, and I had struggled to care for or understand them. How could I tell good from bad? I could see that she had presence on the stage, that she looked the part, and that she had finally mastered the umlaut, but apart from that I was struggling to form an opinion. The play was such a self-conscious piece of theater—with such absurd dialogue and such a disjointed plot—that it was impossible to tell the wooden actors from the naturals.

“What do you think?” said Rex at intermission.

“I think she’s brilliant.”

“Really?” he said. “Between you and me, I can’t really tell. I don’t know what anyone’s on about up there. It’s all ideas and no proper story, isn’t it? Those characters all exist to make a point rather than to develop or go anywhere. It’s not what I’d call a plot.”

“I actually studied this play,” I said.

“Oh God, I’m sorry,” said Rex, fumbling for forgiveness as though I’d written it myself.

“Don’t be. I don’t really get it either.”

During the second act, which involved a lot of dramatic posturing on a white staircase in front of a painted sea view, I rehearsed my congratulatory speech, wondering how best to praise her without giving myself away.

“What happens now?” I asked, after it had ended.

“Well. There are a lot of agents here, and they’ll all be trying to snap up the students. We hope. If she doesn’t get approached tonight, then it’s a question of waiting for a phone call. Not a situation I particularly want to live with. So I guess everyone’s backstage. Still. You can bear my company for an hour or so while we wait, can’t you?”

The hour turned into two, during which time the bar gradually emptied. Performers, some looking crestfallen, others elated, left in twos, with parents or partners. Rachael was there, her peroxide hair shorter and brighter than ever. She looked like a lightbulb in the dingy black bar.

“Rex,” she said. “What did you think?” She kissed the air on either side of his ears.

“Well done, I thought,” he said. “Really, really well done.” Rachael looked expectantly at me.

“Yes, well done,” I said. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, and then to Rex, “Are you guys having any kind of after-party?”

Rex blinked. “Not that I know of,” he said. “Is that what Biba’s saying backstage? I mean, we could, but we haven’t got anything in, and . . .”

“No, I was just hoping. Biba hasn’t said anything,” said Rachael with a wink. “Where is she, anyway?”

“Is she not backstage?” asked Rex.

“Hard to tell, darling,” said Rachael, beginning to lose interest in us. “It’s a bit of a scrum. Listen, I’ve got to go. Let’s get together soon, yeah?”

“Who did she play?” I asked Rex when she was out of earshot.

“No idea,” he said.

We were a pair of nervous parents desperately restraining the urge to seek out their child in order not to embarrass her in front of her friends. We waited until the foyer was empty and echoing, our small talk bouncing half-heartedly off the concrete and glass walls. A bronze plaque told me that the theater had been unveiled by an actress, a dame no less, in 1969. She was no one I had heard of. I caught myself and Rex reflected in the surface of a convex mirror hanging from a square pillar and tried to see us as others would. We looked like a couple, but not, as I would have expected, the awful kind who go out to dinner and eat in silence, but an established pair, comfortable in each other’s silence. I hadn’t noticed, until I saw his arm slung over the back of my seat, that he had been sitting so close to me.

“When B’s a working actress,” he said, “we’re going to use the money she gets and we’ll redo the rooms so we can rent them out to other actors as digs when they’re in London,” he said.

“Does that mean I’ll have to train as an actress if I want to stay living with you?” I asked.

“Please don’t. I’ll need your normality as an antidote to the insanity of a house full of mad theater people. I want to get the walls properly plastered, a couple more bathrooms, and you can get this laminate flooring stuff that looks just like the real thing. Not to mention sorting out the wiring.”

“It wouldn’t be the same if it conformed to health and safety standards. Come on. How many houses in London are left like that?”

“Believe me, the novelty wears off, especially in the winter,” he said. “What I’d really like is to install underfloor heating throughout, but Biba will have to get a major role before we can afford that kind of upgrade.”

Or perhaps you could get a job, I thought, but what I said was, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Rex, but why don’t you work?”