The Poison Tree (40 page)

“Why?”

“He lied to me, Karen. Anything to do with my dad, we swore to each other we would always do together. It was bad enough that he wrote those letters behind my back, but telling Guy about them. Guy, that bloody idiot. Rex betrayed me utterly. Rex, who I trusted more than anyone . . . I wasn’t thinking straight. Do you know what I thought when he told us to get out of the house? I thought, it’s the least he can bloody well do after betraying me like that.”

I took her hand in mine, guilt deflating me. All I was thinking about when I replied was healing the rift between brother and sister.

“Biba, he didn’t,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Rex didn’t tell Guy about the letters. I did.” Her hand flinched under mine and she withdrew it.

“You did?
You?
” She lit a cigarette, and I automatically stood to open the window for the baby’s sake. Biba jumped up and slammed it shut again, nearly catching my fingertips. “How
could
you?”

The air in the room was dead. A pulse throbbed somewhere between my ears, and my eyes seemed to beat time with the muffled roll of a bass line from somewhere else in the building; above, below, or adjacent, I couldn’t tell.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen, did I?”

“You were the one person I thought I had left after Rex,” she said. “But it just goes to show that you can’t fucking trust anyone.” She flicked the tip of her cigarette in the baby’s direction, deliberately and in anger. I wiped the flake of ash from the baby’s cheek and took her next door to the bedroom. When I returned to the living room, the television was on. She never really looked at me properly again.

In the days that followed I found myself echoing Rex’s behavior patterns, consumed with guilt and doing anything and everything I could think of to make her happy. I made sure she always had wine and her cigarettes. I became the most overqualified and underpaid nanny in London: when the baby woke in the night it was me who rose to feed or change her. I bought Biba a copy of
The Stage
and encouraged her to read it, told her that I would look after the baby if she got an acting job, but she never opened the magazine. I wrapped the baby up in her mother’s sundresses and ball gowns to try to make her laugh, but nothing worked. A smile from Biba, even an acknowledgment of all that I was doing, would have wiped out every wrong thing she had ever done. But none came. She slept on the sofa while I stayed in the bedroom with the baby. It was impossible to believe that we were not strangers, let alone that she had once drawn me into her magical intimacy and made promises of everlasting friendship underneath a full moon. She disappeared into a world of her own, and this time she did not invite anybody to follow her in.

I stayed despite her malevolent sulk, hoping against all the evidence that our friendship was still retrievable. I had nowhere else to go except back to my parents’ house. And besides, Biba and the baby needed me. One afternoon, I returned home from the supermarket to find Biba leaning on the rails of the balcony, the little girl half-frozen in only an undershirt and a soiled diaper, balanced rather than held. Biba’s embrace was so slack that had the baby moved unexpectedly, or thrown out her arms and legs as she was wont to do when startled, she could easily have fallen to her death. When I reached out my arms for the baby, Biba simply relaxed her grip and let her fall. I only just caught her. She had risked her child’s life to scare and unnerve me. With chilling unease I realized that I could not leave them.

She had left the note tucked into the pouch on the front of the baby’s romper suit.

“I’ve had enough. I can’t stay here with you, and I can’t look after a baby. I’m so, so sorry. Tell Rex I love him. Biba.” No stars or smiley faces brightened the page this time, but there was a postscript in the bottom right-hand corner. “I like the name Alice.”

My handbag had been tipped upside down and my purse turned out. She had left my cards and my license, but forty pounds in cash was missing and my car keys were not on the hook by the door where I had hung them. I placed the crying baby on my shoulder and went to look over the balcony. There was a space where my car had been, a pale gray rectangle untouched by the rain that had been falling all night.

F
IVE DAYS LATER, HALF crazed with exhaustion and with the baby drooling in her sling on my shoulder, I risked tying up the telephone line and called my parents. It had been nearly three weeks since we had last spoken. As far as they were concerned I was still in Switzerland, and even as I heard their telephone ring I was not sure whether I would tell them where I was. The relief in my mother’s voice when she answered was disproportionate.

“Thank God, thank God.” She sounded close to hysteria. “Karen, thank God! John!” she called, before I could explain myself to her or she herself to me. “It’s her!”

“What’s up, Mum?” I said. “I’m only a couple of days late.” Alice wriggled on my breast, her mouth rooting for her bottle. I had none prepared and cursed myself for this oversight. I crooked my little finger and stuck my knuckle between her gums.

“More like a week! Are you okay?”

No. “Yes.”

“How long have you been back?” said my dad, coming on the line. The urgency in his voice disarmed me and my rehearsed lies were forgotten.

“How did you know?”

“We had a call from the police,” she said. My limbs felt loose in their sockets.

“What did they want?” I tried to keep my voice neutral.

“They found your car abandoned at Beachy Head. We thought you’d done something stupid.”

I recalled a large square book, its spine cracked, lying open at a photograph of white cliffs. The memory of the photograph was as vivid as any other tableau from that summer. The flecks of cannabis and tobacco that scored the point where the pages met. I could picture the curve of the cliff where the grass, smooth as baize, met the chalk. And then I visualized the cluster of cars parked in the curling corner of the page, so tiny that they looked like miniature plastic beads. My car would have been among their number in the last few days. Was it still there? The inappropriate thought came to me that Biba would never have paid to park, and I wondered if the National Trust or whoever owned the parking lot bothered to chase parking fines in suicide cases. Laughter that tasted like vomit caught in my throat and the realization of what she had done, what she must have done, overwhelmed me. I tortured myself with a mental image of my friend standing on the dizzy edge. I remembered her speech about it, floating elegantly to her death, words that I had dismissed as yet more attention-seeking, actressy hyperbole and knew that she would have jumped or stepped or thrown her body down not in petulance but in anger and sadness and a desperation I could not begin to fathom. I felt like I was the one falling.

“Karen?” Dad was saying, over and over. “Karen, love?”

“It must have been stolen,” I said. “I’ve never been to Beachy Head.”

“Enough’s enough,” said my dad. “We know it’s been tough for you but you’ve got to come home. Just come home. Please.” His voice cracked.

Alice took in a lungful of air. I said a rushed and inadequate good-bye and hung up the telephone while both my parents were still speaking.

An unbearable sense of responsibility compounded my grief, and I knew that I must bear this guilty burden as surely as I held the orphan in my arms. A fresh wave of despair came over me as I realized that I would have to inflict a similar level of pain, or something like it, on Rex. I would have to tell him. I could not bear to imagine the look on his face when he realized that his terrible sacrifice, his years of drudgery and adoration, had all come to nothing. It would rob him of any strength he had left. How would he survive without the incentive of protecting his sister? Losing the house, losing his liberty would be nothing to this. Alice parted her lips and began to wail. Throwing my head back onto the sofa, I cried as loudly as she did. The next-door neighbor banged on the wall and told me to keep the noise down. I picked up a tumbler that contained the dregs of the last wine we had shared and threw it at the wall. It broke neatly into three pieces and the wine trickled down the wall. The plum-colored stain it left was translucent, like a watercolor.

Camden Town Hall does not look like much from the outside. Its entrance is in a nondescript side street near St. Pancras station and its facade is the kind of dark gray concrete that always looks as though it’s just been rained on even in blazing sunshine. But inside, a marble staircase like something from an Italian palazzo provides an appropriate sense of stateliness and occasion. It divides the main atrium in two and all the function rooms feed off it. Arriving early for my appointment, I walked Alice up and down the staircase, inviting her to guess what was happening on the other side of the doors, not bothered if anyone heard me asking rhetorical questions of a month-old infant. A few days into my role as her mother and I was already losing the self-consciousness that had at first forced me to whisper my baby talk so that no one heard me.

A wedding party burst out from the door nearest to me, hooting and cheering. There were only a handful of guests, their similar ages suggesting friendship rather than kinship. The bride wore a long-sleeved shift dress cut off at the knee and carried a tiny posy of roses in place of an elaborate bouquet. Saddled with a baby and a backpack, I thought that I had never seen a woman look so free and unencumbered. It was a wonder that both her feet were still on the ground. In her position I was sure I would develop the ability to fly. She kissed her groom at the top of the stairs while their friends whooped and cheered and took photographs. Their echoing voices and handclaps woke Alice, and I scurried down the steps before I had a chance to find out what a newborn’s cry sounded like somewhere with such sharp acoustics. She flexed her lungs as I was on the very bottom step. The flowers flew past my ear and landed in a heap at my feet. The bride and her friends shrieked with laughter.

I followed the sign on the wall that told me where to commit my necessary crime.

The registrar’s name was Comfort Murphy. She wore a navy suit and a cerise corsage in her lapel. Her hair had been relaxed and then teased into a hairstyle rather like the queen’s and her voice had been given a similar treatment; her vowels were those of a minor aristocrat but she dropped her
h
’s from the beginning of her words and the
g
’s from the ends.

“I remember what they’re like at this age,” she said. “You think you’re goin’ mad for the first three months, but it does get better.”

“Do I look that bad?” I managed to laugh, and she joined in. For a second we were conspirators, mothers together. There was a bang on the door behind me and I nearly dropped the baby, expecting the police to swoop, but it was only the wedding party making their way into the street. There was no reason why anyone should come after me. She was not a missing baby and the hospital records I showed the registrar bore my name alongside “Baby Girl Clarke.” The registrar shuffled the documents that would bind us together forever and I tried to shrug off the enormity of what I was doing. I tried to make myself think like Nina, who I knew would have done this in a heartbeat, done anything that made life easier for her and gave security to this orphan child. But I was not like Nina. I was not a rule breaker or a free spirit. Alice wriggled and looked at me with eyes that had only learned to focus in the last couple of days. The woman’s glance at the naked ring finger on my left hand was so discreet I almost missed it.

“Were you married to the baby’s father at the time of the birth, Miss Clarke? Because you only have to put his name down if you were.”

I looked at the form in front of me.

“If I give you his name, do I have to give you his address?”

“Yes, please. His address at the time of the birth.”

The pen was slippery in my hand as I wrote the name Rex Caspian Capel in one box and HMP, Brixton, London SW2 in the other. If the registrar was surprised or disapproving she did not show it. She filled out the vellum-colored certificate in front of me using an old-fashioned fountain pen and waved it in the air for a minute or two waiting for it to dry. Then she rolled it into a scroll, placed it in a plastic tube, and handed it over. She wrapped my hands in hers for a second or two before letting it go. Her skin was powdery and soft.

“Keep this somewhere safe,” she said. “And good luck. With everythin’.”