The Burning Air (15 page)

28

B
ACK IN EALING, I offered her a shower, showing her the en-suite in the guest room and getting out two white towels, one smaller than the other, as though I were used to visitors. While she was in there I threw all of her clothes into the washing machine, condemning them for being too cheap, too black, too lacy, too synthetic.

The thrum of the machine drowned out her presence and then suddenly she was there, swathed in a towel, wet hair snaking darkly over her shoulders.

“Where’s my stuff?”

I gestured to the machine and patted the sofa next to me. I untucked the corner of the towel, ready to retreat at the first sign of resistance, but there was none. I unwrapped her like peeling notes off a wad of cash. I had to catch my breath. Her body made a mockery of my livelihood. That perfect fluke of fat and bone, firm and soft: you could strap most women to a machine for a year and this wasn’t waiting to emerge from underneath. Her papyrus skin was flawless but for a faded vertical stretch mark under her navel, intersected by a scar just above the neat triangle of pubic hair, to form an inverted cross. She was reticent at first, but with a little encouragement grew more vocal, the way I liked them to be.

It was the first time I had ever slept with a girl who knew my background. With anyone else, that would have made me feel vulnerable, but not with Kerry. I was so lucky with her: because of Dean Prescott and the other men who had gone before me, it was like riding a horse who expects to be whipped so jumps at the slightest tug.

“Why did you put up with him?” I asked her.

“It was all right at first, you know. He was a good laugh, and he had loads of mates, and that. And he had a really nice flat, it had views right over the countryside so even if you were stuck in all day you never got that feeling of being in prison. I used to like waiting for him to come home at night, rolling him a spliff and having it ready for him. But then he did his back in and he couldn’t get work, and he was at home all day, and he started to take it out on me; just digging at me all the time. I thought it’d get better if I was pregnant. I thought a baby might give him a reason to lay off the gear and get a job. And for about five minutes it was, after I’d done the pregnancy test. But then, as soon as I started to show, it got worse. That’s when he started whacking me about.”

“So why didn’t you leave him
then
?”

She was incredulous. “Because you’ve got to give a baby its dad, haven’t you? At least a
chance
of a dad. Hardly anyone I know has. I wanted my baby to be different.”

“Some mothers can compensate for the lack of a father. If they love enough, if they’re strong enough.” I was, of course, talking about my own mother but that was not Kerry’s interpretation. She nuzzled into me.

“Dean would have never said anything like that,” she said. “You get that I could have been a good mum. You see it, don’t you?” A pause hung between us until she bridged it. “You’d never have hurt me like that if it was our baby, would you?”

If Kerry had been able to conceive, I’d have worn three condoms to avoid impregnating her, but, “I’d never do that to you,” I said, reaching for her hand. Promises leave the lips like breath when there is no question of their being kept. The crying started up again. I tracked the tears’ progress down her cheeks like racing raindrops on a windowpane.

“What is it?” I said, when they grew too many to count.

“If only I’d met you before,” she sobbed. “Just two years earlier. If only we’d known each other then. Life could have been so different.”

She had little choice but to be financially dependent on me; at twenty-three, she had literally no skills and her work history was checkered and sporadic. As my live-in partner she was entitled to no unemployment benefit and I would have been too proud to claim it if she were.

Because she asked for nothing—her only desire was both priceless and impossible—I took pleasure in giving her everything. I educated her on the broadways of Sloane, Regent, and Bond Streets, passing on the lessons of reinvention I had taught myself a decade before. I took her to a hairdresser who taught her how to spin silk from cotton, gave a Fenwick personal shopper carte blanche and my Black Amex. I could not part her from her gold hoop earrings but even they had their own charm, an anomalous remainder of the gypsy I was beginning to tame. At home, I taught her basic civilities such as how to make real coffee in my espresso machine, and I cooked to reeducate her palate. I didn’t need her to eat haute cuisine every night, but I did need her not to turn her nose up at anything that didn’t come with ketchup.

When I had to travel she was content to stay in watching TV talent shows and reality-TV imports from America. Entire days passed with me making calls from my office while she watched back-to-back episodes of
The
Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
and
Jersey Shore
. She was bewitched by a channel called Home & Health that screened back-to-back documentaries about motherhood, every aspect of the condition from miracle conceptions to multiple births. If the reality shows were opiates, these were stimulants, rousing in Kerry a flash of the same hysterical passion I had glimpsed when she had shouted at Lydia from the dock. At first, she was consumed by her grief, desperate to talk for hours about her lost babies.

“Kerry,” I would say to her, “you’ve got to stop this. It’s not good for you to talk about it.”

I had to be cruel to be kind: the sooner she moved on, the better for both of us.

That side of Kerry was not a broken horse but a wild one. Hers was a double tragedy; not only did she have all that pent-up pain and passion, but it had nowhere to go. It could not be converted into ambition on her own behalf, for the worst had already happened to her. It was only right that I harnessed that energy, channeled it away from her useless grief and into my own scheme. Even if her grief had come with an accompanying plan of revenge, the force of my own obsession was such that no relationship I had would ever be able to accommodate anyone else’s. I called up the telecom company and had Home & Health blocked from my subscription.

In some ways Kerry was a distraction from the MacBrides—my time and energy were of course finite—but in one crucial respect she redoubled my intentions. Before I met her, the war on the family had been a cold one. In ten years, I had barely progressed beyond studying them, and I had not shared my intentions with another soul. The moment I told Kerry my story, the thaw began.

MARCH 2012

I was in my home office, the first coffee of the day—she was getting better at making it—steaming on my desk. I delved into my e-mails. Every morning several Google alerts were waiting in my inbox; I had saved scores of searches—one for each of my products and projects, one for each of my professional competitors, one for each of the MacBrides, one for the school, one for my own name and another for Kerry’s. The business searches yielded results most days: as for my parallel project, I was lucky to get one a week. That morning, though, “Lydia+MacBride” generated dozens of links to the same story. She had been named in the New Year Honours List.

The
Saxby Courier
had the most in-depth coverage, under the headline
FROM JP TO MBE.
The accompanying photograph was new. She had finally begun to show her age, or perhaps it was the black robe she wore, rather like Rowan’s academic gown, that leached the color from her face. She was in her study; I recognized the carved cherrywood bookshelf, although the walls had been repainted. Lined up behind her, out of focus and unidentifiable to the ignorant eye, were two rows of thick brown diaries. I ran my fingers along them as though I might be able to pluck one from the screen.

“Well, well, well,” I said.

My voice summoned Kerry from the sitting room.

“Is the coffee OK?” she said, and sidled onto my lap. Her lips moved as she read the text underneath, and I correctly anticipated her question. “What’s an MBE?” she said.

“It’s a queen’s honor,” I said. Kerry remained blank. “It’s like a prize. It’s a good thing, though: the higher she rises, the farther she falls when I take her down.”

“You still haven’t told me what we’re going to do to get our own back,” said Kerry. “Are you any closer to getting them diaries yet?”

“
Those
diaries,” I corrected. I saved the new picture in a file called “MacBrides_Collective” and flicked through the other photographs I had captured from Tara’s Facebook account. I stopped on a recent one of the whole clan wrapped up warm and holding sparklers.

“It’s a shame, really, that they hate you so much,” said Kerry. “It’d be easy enough to hurt them if they loved you. D’you want another coffee?” She slid off my lap and went into the kitchen, where presently the espresso machine began to belch and hiss. I remained motionless but for my right hand clicking through the album, coming to rest on a snapshot of Tara, Jake, and various other parents and children at sports day. Tara still seemed conspicuously single, and the germ of an idea began to form. Kerry’s words echoed in my ears: “It’d be easier if they loved you.”

Yes! No.
Could
I? It would solve everything. It was audacious, but if I were successful the rewards would be proportionally spectacular. I thought of Kerry and, in a further burst of inspiration, I clicked onto the cache of photographs labeled “Felix,” filled the screen with thumbnails, and it hit me for the first time that I had never seen him pictured with any kind of girlfriend. Kerry could have her own role to mirror mine.

She returned with my cup; quickly I filled the screen with a spreadsheet. I was letting my imagination run too far ahead of what I knew to be possible. I could not possibly ask Kerry to dive in before I had even tested the water.

29

APRIL 2012

W
HEN I GOT to the church hall, Tara had already made herself a space at the front of the class. From a tattered, sausage-shaped bag made out of sari material, she unfurled a pink yoga mat and spent the minutes before the class began in the downward-facing-dog position, arse in the air, palms and soles in contact with the floor, evidently aiming for some future rather than present grace.

Afterward we were all given licorice tea that looked and smelled like plant fertilizer.

“Great class,” I said to Tara. “I feel inches taller.”

“You’re very bendy for a big man,” she said. I raised an eyebrow; her cheeks became embers. “What I mean is, you get all these big blokes in here who can lift their own bodyweight on a bench press but when it comes to balance and flexibility they’re all off kilter, they’re not used to using their own bodyweight as resistance . . . God, I’m rambling. What do you think of the tea?”

“Disgusting,” I said.

She laughed. “It’s very cleansing. I’m on a detox.”

“That’s a shame. I was going to ask you if you wanted to go for a glass of wine or something with me. But I don’t want to be a bad influence.”

She blushed again. “I’d love to. It’s just, I’ve got to get back to my son.”

“I understand,” I said, and left it there. I counted in my head: one, two, three, four—

“Next week, maybe?” she said. “A retox?”

“I don’t want to keep you away from your little boy.”

“Oh, he’s not that little. He could actually feed himself, but I’ve got nothing in . . . he’s fine if he
knows
I’m not going to be around. It’s only spontaneity that’s tricky. I’m Tara, by the way.”

“And I’m Matt,” I replied, pouring my licorice tea into an oversized cheeseplant pot. “I’ll hold you to that drink next week.”

The following week, she had painted her toes seashell pink and was wearing perfume and I knew things would go my way. Over a glass of nasty pub wine she told me things I already knew about her and I told her things about myself, some of which were true.

“If you live in London, what are you doing here in Saxby?” she said.

“Last week, it was business,” I said. “I’ve got an interest in a new spa-hotel not far from here, and I’m on the lookout for staff. Far easier to take a yoga class than to interview a yoga teacher.”

“And what brings you back this week?” she said, running her finger around the rim of her wineglass. The feed line was so obvious I was almost embarrassed by my reply.

“You.”

She smiled. “Jake’s staying with my parents tonight.”

Half an hour later, we were entering her flat. I barely had time to register the interior—textiles everywhere, rugs, throws, and kilims on the walls as well as the floor—before her hands were on the buckle of my belt. Half a minute later, with one hand on each of her shoulders and her feet crossed at the small of my back, I felt a thrill of trespass comparable to my first time in Cathedral Terrace.

As Tara slept, I explored her flat. The fridge was a solid wall of photographs of the MacBrides. Shelves were crammed with ethnic knickknacks from Buddha heads to African masks via Indian woodcarvings with tiny little gods and goddesses. A diary like Lydia’s lay on its side, heavy enough to bookend a row of paperbacks. I tried not to raise my hopes yet felt them plummet when I opened it to find the pages entirely blank.

Tara woke me the next morning with a cup of tea.

“Are you around later?” she asked. “Jake’s got cricket practice after school, so I’d have the flat to myself for a couple of hours.”

“I’m a busy man,” I said. “I’ve got an empire to run, I’ve got a nation to save from morbid obesity. I need to be back in London this afternoon.”

“Next week?” she said.

“I’d like that.”

I drove back to London on autopilot. My thoughts were all of Kerry, and how I was going to sell this scheme to her. She would understand the desired outcome—my dreams were hers—but the method? If only there were some way of keeping her onside, some big declaration that would show her that this thing with Tara was nothing more than a means to an end. If only you could wrap an idea in a gift box, if only persuasion were as easy to bestow as a necklace or a—

The solution occurred with such startling clarity that I swerved in the road, as though the idea itself had driven out in front of me without signaling.