The greenhouse is old, the whole structure slightly rickety-looking, as if a breath of wind could knock it askew. Leaves press up against the panes, making it difficult to see inside. The effect is almost like camouflage. I knock on the door.
‘Hello?’ I say, pushing against it. It’s stiff, the rusted hinges squealing agonisingly. I am sure it will be William, his phone in one hand with his trousers around his ankles, breathless and red in the face. I almost hope it is. I want to catch him, want to see the look on his face as all his deception falls away.
‘Frances?’
Not William.
‘Alex?’ A shard of disappointment.
He straightens up and looks at me. ‘Everything all right? Is Mum okay?’
‘She’s fine.’
I squeeze into the crowded space and notice immediately the smell. It’s bright and green like cut grass, almost sweet. It’s hot, too, pressing against you like folds of velvet, slightly damp. Everywhere there is foliage: serrated leaves of deep, mossy emerald, slightly bristly to the touch. The tomato plants swarm into one another, tangling together like drunks, spilling out of pots and clambering up bamboo-screen trellises, drooping beneath the weight of ripe, glossy fruit. There are also tomato plants hanging from the ceiling in baskets, and young plants, their leaves slightly curled at the edges, pale green, crawling out of old ceramic chamber pots balanced on a trestle table. I pick a small cherry tomato, bright red and shiny as a button, and look over at Alex.
‘Someone really likes tomatoes,’ I say.
‘Yeah. Dad.’ He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. He’s wearing old clothes – an old grey jumper fraying at the elbows and jeans splattered with paint – and in that moment I can see Edward Thorn, his father, in him. Stale and grey and sensible, obsessed with conjuring life from the earth. I put the tomato in my mouth and it pops beneath my tongue, as sweet as honey.
‘It looks like a lot of work.’
‘It is.’
‘What do you do with them all?’ I pick another. It’s not like he’s going to run out.
‘Make stuff. Soup, ketchup, passata. We tend to get a glut in the summer and so we end up giving loads away. The season’s tailing off now, though.’
‘Your mum wants you to meet a good woman.’
‘Ha! Is that what she said?’
‘She seems clear-headed today.’
‘I noticed. It’s good. We’re hoping for longer spells of clarity as she recovers.’
‘What happened?’
‘Huh?’
‘When she fell. What happened?’
Alex looks at me steadily. He peels off his gloves and picks up a mug from somewhere among the plants in front of him, takes a long sip.
‘It was late. I thought she was in bed. I didn’t hear her on the stairs. The bulb had gone so the hallway was dark, and she didn’t know where I was. I’d say she tripped over something – a cord maybe, or just the runner where it’s frayed. Either way, by the time I got to her she was unconscious, and there was a lot of blood. Nearly stopped my heart, seeing her like that.’
‘It must have been scary.’
‘It was.’ Alex pushes his hair away from his face. ‘You sound like the policeman who spoke with me afterwards.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the hospital. “Where were you when your mother fell, sir?”, “Is it just the two of you in the house?” I told him right there that if I was planning to kill my mother I wouldn’t push her down the stairs.’
‘Why not?’
‘Too messy. Not sure enough.’
We’re silent, staring at each other. The smell in the room is prickly, like the leaves. It makes me want to scratch at my skin. It’s cold too, a creeping, sinister chill. I fold my arms. I’m thinking of the story William told me, of the little boy who found a dead sheep at the bottom of a well and who went back every day to mark its decomposition. Alex, who, even now, twenty years later, keeps the polished sheep skull over his bed. People think it odd, a man his age still living at home. They talk. How strange that he wears his late father’s clothes, still sleeps in his childhood bedroom, is so close to his mother. William dismisses it as small-town gossip but I know that gossip can sometimes be the thorn on the briar that spikes the finger. Sometimes it can make you bleed.
‘How would you do it?’
He looks up through the glass of the roof, thinking. His Adam’s apple bobs in the column of his throat. ‘Poison,’ he says finally. ‘A little bit in her food each day. You do it slowly enough, it’s insidious and almost untraceable. I know enough about plants to know which ones can stop the heart or induce organ failure. You know foxgloves can kill you? Few years back a woman in Colorado was accused of attempted murder after she fed her husband a meal of spaghetti and salad that had foxglove leaves in.’
I take another tomato and put it in my mouth but this one is sharp, unripe. It floods my tongue with bitterness. Alex is pulling his gloves back on, bending over. He talks to me over his shoulder. ‘Is that why you came in here, Frances? To find out my plans for matricide?’
‘No! I – I was looking for William.’
‘He’s gone to the supermarket.’
‘Okay. Okay, great.’
‘Are you quite sure everything’s all right with you two?’
He’s talking more quietly now, not lifting his eyes. His voice is a purr; low, steady. I move closer to him, through the leaves. He is standing in front of a
