The Poison Tree (42 page)

“It’s okay. They’ve all seen me cry before,” he said drily. “I had quite a reputation for it when I first arrived.”

“I can’t bear to think of you in here for another nineteen years.”

“It won’t be anything like that,” he said. “It’ll be more like twelve with good behavior. I keep my head down. I’ll be all right.” He looked at Alice. “I’ve got a reason to make sure I am now.”

Even the bell that signaled the end of our visiting session sounded like the one from my school. Rex handed Alice back to me, lowering her into her sling and keeping his hands on her as I secured her. His thumb traced the springy velvet skin just beneath her chin.

“Who were you expecting, anyway?” I said as she settled onto my shoulder. “You knew someone was coming.”

He grimaced.

“The Drop-ins,” he said. “They’re a charity group who visit people who don’t have anyone. I assumed you were one of them. After a while you’ll do anything just to talk to someone new.”

“I’ll come back next week,” I said. “I’ll come back every week for as long as it takes them to let you go.”

“What, and deprive me of my hour with the Drop-ins?” His grin was fleeting. “Look, did you just come here to tell me about Biba and the baby, or are you back? I mean, does this mean we’re back on?”

“Of course,” I said. “We’re all that’s left, aren’t we?”

With Alice on my hip, I leaned over the table to kiss him. The tiny current of electricity infused my whole body. I bit his lower lip. “I love you,” I said.

I finally summon the courage to contact Alison Larch. Making sure that I withhold my own number, I call her and pretend to be a commissioning editor from Channel Four looking to hire her for a documentary I’m making about women’s prisons. The lie comes easily. They do these days.

“God, sounds fascinating,” she says, even though I haven’t really outlined the project in any real detail. Her voice is just as I remember it; she still sounds blond and overbearing, with an ability to take control of the conversation even when I am ostensibly the senior person. “I’ve got some great contacts in the prison service. Just finished doing a really juicy piece for the Beeb about lifers and the parole system. There was this one guy I was tailing . . . what was his name?” I hear the flick as she goes through a load of papers on her desk, imagine documents pertaining to Rex’s case, old newspapers, grainy photographs of the three of us. Her voice becomes muffled and her fingers click the keys of a computer as she searches a different kind of filing system for the details. “Big black bloke. You know the one.” I can’t name an individual from that description but am fairly sure that she is not talking about Rex. Alison Larch sighs and her voice becomes clear again. “But anyway. I’m basically not free until the spring. I’m doing a series on oligarchs’ wives, I’m going to be in Russia for months. It’s only by luck that you’ve caught me on my London line at all. What kind of lead time are you looking for with this? Any chance we could pick it up next year? What did you say your name was? Shall we meet for a coffee or something?”

“I’m actually working abroad myself from tomorrow,” I say, my heart surfing a wave of euphoria at the knowledge that her current project has nothing to do with us. “I’ll call you when I’m back.” And I hang up. Within the hour, the euphoria has been replaced with the acceptance that the perpetrator of the phone calls is probably just a random dirty dialer, what we used to call a “heavy breather.” I wish I had been able to come to this, the most obvious of all conclusions, weeks ago. The time and energy that I have wasted worrying will be better spent focusing on my future, on my family. I will call the telephone company tomorrow and have our number changed.

Rex picks up on my good mood, not staying up to watch the news tonight but taking me and our bottle of wine to bed as soon as he is satisfied that Alice is asleep. We are both falling asleep when the telephone rings. Rex half-opens his left eye.

“It’ll be for me,” I say. “I’ll get it.”

I pad downstairs and pick it up. “Hello?”

There is an oddly familiar silence.

I am tightly wound tonight. I know that you should never react to nuisance callers but I am tired and I am angry and I have had enough.

“Look, who is this?” I say. “How did you get this number? I think you should know that I’m going to inform the police about these calls.” I hear the ignition click of a cigarette lighter and a soft sucking sound. Can a sigh have its own identifiable timbre? Can you recognize someone’s breath in the way you can a voice?

“Is it you?” I croak. There is a protracted exhalation during which I hold my own breath. “Talk to me,” I say. “Please, talk to me.” The voice is lower than it used to be and husky, polluted with years of cigarettes; but that beautiful accent, the first thing I loved about her, remains pure.

“
Darling
,” she begins.

I
THINK I MIGHT be sick. My mouth is awash with excess saliva. I thought a cold sweat was just a figure of speech but it is happening to me now, perspiration making my hands slippery and my armpits clammy. Saltwater gathers on my upper lip.

“Hello, Karen,” she says, as though we last spoke yesterday, as though she hasn’t just unraveled my life with one swift tug on a loose thread.

“Where are you?” is all I can manage.

“At the station,” she says simply. To me, “the station” means the nearest stop on the branch line, ten or eleven miles across open country. I murmur the name of the town, more as a reflex action than because I think she might really be there.

“Yes, where else?” she says impatiently. “I wondered if I could pop in.”

“Pop in?” I echo. “
Pop in?
” The pathways that connect my mind, body, and mouth appear to have been rerouted and articulate speech does not come easily.

“I’m having a nightmare trying to get a cab,” she says, and I suddenly realize the magnitude of the threat. She could be here in fifteen minutes. I glance toward the stairs, picturing myself shaking Rex awake, telling him that his sister is alive and in the same county and on her way over. I have often missed her and wished her back, daydreaming of a happy reunion, but it was only wishful thinking. This is an eventuality I have not planned for and I must think, think faster and harder than I have had to for years. But now that the fantasized moment is here I feel only panic. I have perhaps a quarter of an hour to find the words to tell Biba that I am the only mother Alice has ever known. Then, with Rex, we have until the morning to figure out how we are going to tell Alice, who longs for an extended family, that Daddy has a long-lost sister we never thought to mention. This is too much, too fast. I need space to think, but Biba is jabbering away in my ear, her words scratched out by the poor connection.

“Hang on, darling,” she says. “I’m out of change. I haven’t used a phone booth in years and it’s
eating
money, twenty fucking pee . . .”

The line goes dead. I stare at the phone, almost expecting her to appear from it, for her physical form to squeeze through the holes in the mouthpiece like some kind of genie.

With clumsy fingers I dial 1471. For once, the number has not been withheld. To my utter astonishment a local code is repeated back to me. I jab at the number 3. She picks up the phone before I hear it ring.

“Hi!” she says brightly.

“Where are you? I mean, where exactly are you?” I say. “I’m going to come and get you.” I can think in the car, and tell her on the way home.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got money.” It is the first time I have ever heard her say that and my astonishment is an aftershock following the news that she is alive. “There’s only a couple more people in front of me in the taxi line. I know where you live . . .”

“
How?
” I ask, but the connection has been broken again and there is only a vacuum of silence where her voice was. I punch the numbers one more time and let the phone ring and ring but this time nobody answers. I have to get to her before she gets to us. In desperation, I gather my things and get into the car.

She is still outside the station. I would know her form anywhere, even if she is swathed in so many layers that she is completely shapeless. A huge red woolen shawl shrouds her from head to toe and there are two large bags at her feet, suggesting that she intends to stay. And she is looking directly at me, as though she knew which car would be mine. I find myself gagging on tears.

Underneath the red shawl is another scarf, violet this time, wound around her neck. As she climbs into the passenger seat I notice that she has grown her fringe out, and wonder when this happened. She is downlit by an unforgiving interior light, and I am shocked that she has aged: my memory had preserved her at twenty-one. Older than I am, older looking even than Rex, whom she now resembles more than ever. Her jawline is tight again, but her hair is dull and her skin weathered. Faded freckles dot her nose and cheeks while folds of white unblemished skin around her nose and mouth, and in the crease between her eyes, suggest that she has been squinting at the sun for years. She is still striking, although she has the face of a character actress now rather than a leading lady. Her beaky nose is pink-tipped and shiny and her fingers, when she takes off her leather gloves and lays them on her lap, are skinny and ringless. When she kisses me on the cheek her eyelashes brush my temple and her lips are cold and dry. “Oh my God” is all I can manage.

“Karen Clarke,” she says. “You look exactly the same. Aren’t you pleased to see me?” She shrugs off her top layer and spreads it over the car seat. “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?” We are having two different conversations here. I’m struggling to make myself coherent, wondering how to condense ten years of struggle into a ten-minute drive, and she’s making small talk.

“We thought you were dead,” I say. “You let us think that you were
dead
.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and although she seems to mean it, it is such a tiny and poor little word.

“How did you find us?”

“Well, the prison told me Rex was out,” she says. “But they wouldn’t tell me where he’d gone. So I called QCC. You forgot to take yourself off the Graduates Association contact list. Look, can we talk about this at home?” Not “at your house” or even “your home” but “home,” as though I have extended the welcome she takes for granted.
Mi casa, tu casa
. Does she mean to come and live with us? The four of us in a cottage that is too small even for three? For so long, all I wanted was for the three of us to be together again. Now the thought fills me with dismay and even revulsion.

“Was that you, calling and hanging up?” I ask. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“I was trying to get through to Rex,” she says. “Don’t you let him answer the phone?” Despite everything, I am hurt that she only came to me by default. “Are we nearly there yet?”

“Not far,” I say, knowing that we don’t have anything like enough time to say all that needs to be said, even if I drive the long way home. The pace this time is much steadier, I actually have time to see the rabbits whose eyes catch my headlights and they have time to get out of my way. Biba coos about how lovely the countryside is, starts telling me something about how you think you can see the stars out here but I should see what they’re like in Morocco where there is no light pollution and you can still see shooting stars.

“Is that where you’ve been?” I say. “Morocco?”

“Among other places,” she says. “I stayed with Nina and the kids.”

“Does she know?” I was aghast. Nina was not a conventional parent but she was protective of her children, and I could not imagine that she would harbor a killer.

“Which bit? About losing my temper?” She gives a half-laugh at the inadequacy of the euphemism. “Or leaving Rex in the shit? Or having a baby and leaving it? Or leaving you?”

“All of it. Any of it.”

“I told her the official story. She thinks I was running away from all that.”