The Burning Air (19 page)

38

FEBRUARY 2013

F
AURÉ’S
REQUIEM
WAS sung in full by the Saxby Cathedral School Choir and the vast nave of the cathedral was swollen with mourners. The great and the good of Saxby city squeezed into the short pews, spilled into the aisles and onto the flagstones and the grass outside, paying their ignorant respects to Lydia MacBride, JP, MBE, liar, murderer. The air was thick with their tributes, their cumulative whispers roaring in my ears. I saw faces I recognized from the streets of my childhood. PC089 was there, his apt black uniform now of the dress kind, the rank of sergeant visible on his lapel. I saw him deep in commiserative conversation with Rowan. At the wake, in the Cathedral Hall, the four remaining MacBrides were still points in the milling crowd of mourners. I pictured myself tinkling a fork on a glass, giving my speech. The theatricality was tempting, but it was not yet time.

Jake’s paternal grandparents had flown over from Ghana; he all but ignored them, following his mother around, a protective hand on the small of her back. She kept giving him little pushes in their direction but instead, he came to me. There was a half-moon of fuzz on his upper lip and I wondered if Tara was expecting me to teach him how to use a razor. Let the boy find out with a face full of lacerations, just as I had done.

“I’ve got fuck-all to say to them,” he said, gesturing to the African couple. “It’s so fake. It’s so
hypocritical
. They’re not sad for me or for my grandma, they’re just here to remember my dad all over again. Like Mum isn’t fucked up enough over all this. I didn’t even know my dad and they want me to get involved in all this bullshit charity work. They don’t
know
me, though. Not like my real granny did, not . . .” His eyes began to brim. This time when he sidled back to Tara, she kept him close by.

I loaded a china plate with a slab of poached salmon and a puff of salad and carried it to a table. The empty chair next to me was filled by Will.

“Old boy?” he greeted me.

“Old
boy
. How are you bearing up?”

“Hard to tell, to be honest,” he said. “It’s all so . . . everything at once, you know?”

He gestured to Sophie, center stage in the middle of the hall, the baby a fat white larva on her shoulder. The way she looked at everyone but her husband told me that she had indeed seen my photography. I felt the waste keenly, like a bitter loss. The frustration at not having been the one to deliver the photographs was only partly tempered by the knowledge that they had clearly hit home. And still the couple was together. What did you have to
do
to this family to break them up?

“The boys are with a neighbor,” said Will, never taking his eyes off her. “I hope we’ve done the right thing there. I mean, Toby might be up to it, but it’s so hard to make a call between him and Leo, and obviously with Charlie being so . . . I mean there’s no
way
 . . .” He pushed his food around his plate a few times. Once or twice he took a breath as though about to speak and then thought better of it. I held my own tongue: something about his expression suggested to me that he was on the brink of sharing a confidence, and I even dared to hope that he was going to give me the inside story on the secondary tragedy striking his marriage. Instead, he gave me an embarrassingly transparent display of joviality.

“Feels strange to see all the old faces again,” he said. “Makes me feel guilty, like I haven’t done my homework.”

“What do you mean?”

“Half the people here used to teach me,” he said. He pointed with his fork. “That’s my old games master, Mr. Potts. That’s Mrs. Hilton, she taught Latin, and I’m sure I took history with that old guy in the tweed. What’s his name, now? It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

“
You
were a pupil at the Cath?”

“Well, yes. That’s where I met Soph, although we didn’t get together until we were at Durham.”

“I had no idea,” I said. I pressed my fork through the fish and into my plate with force, daring the china to shatter. “I’m quite the odd one out, not having passed through the hallowed gates.”

“Oh, don’t feel badly about that. Between you and me, old boy, I’ve always felt like a bit of an imposter myself. I only got in through the back door.”

I knew what was coming next.

“I was a scholarship boy. I think they felt sorry for me. It was just me and my dad at home, not the best of times after we lost my mum, you know.” He coughed into his napkin for punctuation. “Anyway, since I’ve been with Sophie, the MacBrides have been all the family I could ever ask for.”

A little scuffle at the far side of the room had caught his eye. A woman with thin white hair was trying to take the baby away from Sophie, who all but hissed in her face.

“Ah, hell, I’d better . . .” said Will, and loped across the hall after his wife.

39

AUGUST 2013

W
E SAT IN an old-fashioned tearoom on Winchester Street, a cake stand laden with tiny sandwiches between us. A scratchy recording of the Andrews Sisters played through a discreetly concealed loudspeaker; in cloyingly close harmony they begged the listener not to sit under the apple tree with anyone else. A poster above our heads urged us to keep calm and carry on, a command repeated to the point of nagging on tea-towels, posters, and mugs. Kerry was enraptured by a noisy toddler in a highchair at the next table. When he left with his mother, I was the only male in the place.

This Victorian parade, a down-at-heel area on the western edge of town, had rebranded itself as Saxby Vintage Quarter. The only shop that remained from my childhood was the cycle shop, and even that had had a retrogressive makeover, a sit-up-and-beg bike with a wicker basket in the window display. As well as the tearoom there was a sweet shop with candy canes and bonbons in glass jars, half a dozen vintage clothes shops, a secondhand bookshop, and a hairdresser’s called Pin-Up with red leather seats and pictures of Rita Hayworth and Vivien Leigh in the window. Directly opposite us was a shop called Spirit of the Blitz that sold reclaimed and antique furniture, reproduction prints, toys, and accessories. In an uncluttered corner, Felix was sandpapering a chair.

“There he is,” I said. Kerry’s eyes started to fill.

“Not again. Kerry, your
makeup.
”

I’d done her up in the kind of thing that I thought would appeal to Felix, although it did nothing for me: hair swept to one side, eyeliner, shirtdress. Her scarlet lipstick was a desert rose in the sallow plain of her skin.

“I don’t want to do it. I don’t like his funny eye.” I felt sorry that Kerry had to sleep with Felix, especially when she was used to me; and at least with Tara I wasn’t writhing around with a monster. I took the fold of notes from my wallet, laid twenty down on the table, and gave her the remainder.

“That’s nearly a thousand pounds there. Even at his inflated prices there ought to be enough for you to buy something that needs delivering, something you couldn’t get up the stairs yourself. Ask him to deliver it himself. He’s got a van, I’ve seen it. What did we rehearse?”

She absently stroked the scar tissue of her earlobe. “I’ve just rented a new flat, and I want to do it up, make it a bit more personal, but I don’t know where to start, and I’d like some advice.”

“Good girl.”

“What about those diaries and that, do I ask him about them today?”

“No! For fuck’s. . . .” I clenched my fists underneath the table. “Kerry, how would he know that you know about them? That’s the last thing you do. All you need to do is just . . . make him like you. If he talks about his mother, listen, and report back to me, but that’s it. I don’t want you ad-libbing.”

“What’s that mean?”

“No making it up as you go along.” I took both her hands in mine, to still them. “You’re not going to let me down, are you? Just think about afterward.” She shook her head and nodded it at the same time. “Good. Well, you look very pretty.”

That, at least, coaxed a smile from her.

The street outside was sunny. I pressed myself into an alcove between two shops. Kerry pushed Felix’s shop door. A brass bell jangled and he jumped up to serve her. I could see the drawing up in height, the tentative smile on his face, the forelock being tugged over his missing eye. Suddenly it mattered less that language was not Kerry’s strong point. She was, after all, at her best when she did not speak. I saw that the seduction, at least, would take care of itself.

•   •   •

While Kerry was staying in Saxby, I took a room in Rory’s manor house, the newly renamed Saxby Falls. Rory was weeks away from opening; half the guest rooms were still plaster-boarded cells, but the gym, pool, and spa were finished, machines already installed, and staff from beauticians to chambermaids to chefs practicing their trades on Rory and a rotating squadron of human guinea pigs, of whom I was one. From my window on a clear night I could see the amber-sequined circle of the city’s ring road.

He joined me at breakfast one morning; he was a poor advertisement for the lifestyles he peddled as he piled his plate high with heart-furring meat and eggs.

“Swear to God half the bookings I’m getting are on the strength of your machines,” he said. “If it carries on like this they’ll have paid for themselves within six months.” It was the longest I had ever heard him speak without uttering an obscenity. “Here’s to lazy, gullible fat fuckin’ bitches.” He raised his coffee cup in a toast, then set it down, sloshing coffee over the tablecloth. “I don’t suppose I could make you an offer? Buy you out?” he said.

“No way,” I replied automatically, although even as I spoke, my internal motor was whirring. Selling the business was not something I had thought of, but already I could see various advantages to making a clean break.

We spent the rest of the breakfast in silence, punctuated by the clicking of BlackBerry keys and the odd lip-smack from Rory. He cleaned his plate of protein in the time it took me to eat half my spinach and egg-white omelet. He pushed back his chair and threw something across my plate. It was a starched cotton napkin with a long number scrawled across it in ballpoint, four zeroes at the end that suggested the switchboard of a large company.

“New phone number?” I said, trying to decipher the city code.

“No,” said Rory. “That’s how much I’m willing to offer for your business. Think it over.” He downed his coffee. “Enjoy your fuckin’ rabbit food.”

A waiter poured freshly squeezed orange juice from a pitcher into my glass. I stared at the number the way other men read the
Financial Times
. With money like that I could start again once I had finished with the MacBrides. I could really start again this time, safe in the knowledge that my work with them was done. Until that was over I wouldn’t know whether, this time, I would build a new identity around Matt or strip myself back to Darcy. What was certain was that Kerry would not be part of it. The second the revelation was made, her usefulness expired. I raised the glass of glowing orange liquid to my lips. Its sweetness turned to vinegar as it hit me that half the sum before me was legally hers.

SEPTEMBER 2013

She was crying again. Tears had become her default setting. At least now they had a focus other than babies.

“Are you like this with Felix? He’s going to think you’re a nutcase.”

“No,” she said. “It’s all right when I’m actually
there,
it’s just that afterward I come and see you and . . .” She dissolved again.

After a while, I got used to it, the way you do with a car alarm in the street outside your window.

I met Kerry almost every day; it was safer for her to take a taxi to see me at the hotel than it was for me to risk being seen with her in Saxby. Every time, she asked me if we were any closer, if the diaries were in hand, when it would end.

“You’re not being unfaithful to me,” I said. “How can you be, when you’re acting on my instruction? It’s only cheating if you’re doing it behind my back, without my permission.”

“I just don’t think if you loved me . . .”

“It won’t be long now,” I said. “You’re doing really well.”

In fact, she was more successful, more swiftly, than either of us could have anticipated. Twenty days after I had sent her into Felix’s shop he had told her that he was falling in love with her. While I did not doubt Kerry’s loyalty, I was less sure of her ability to sustain the deception. I knew what she was like when she was nervous. She grew gauche, she gabbled, she said things she shouldn’t. To slow this process it was necessary to reduce the amount of time she spent with Felix. We began to spend weekends in London again. There, Kerry’s telephone cheeped like a hungry chick.

“He’s got it bad, hasn’t he?” I said as she turned off the handset. “I can’t wait to see his face when he finds out what’s happened.” This progression lent my campaign against the MacBrides a feeling of momentum and urgency and I cultivated the rest of my life accordingly.

I did not accept Rory’s offer, so he made me another, better one, to buy out my entire company. I combed my way through the contract myself before signing. It was stressful managing without an accountant or financial adviser—I was having to do all the research myself, and was reminded of those early days in Vass’s house, reading all his business books—but I knew that when the time came for me to go, I wanted as few ties to my old life as possible. Once the deal was done, I had no business partner, no assets, no accountant breathing down my neck—only the money. I was ready to move. There was a definite feeling that things would soon come to a head.

•   •   •

Jake had gone to the cinema to text his friends all the way through a film, and Tara and I were in her flat, in bed. I was present in body only, my mind whirring, and the faster it turned, the harder it became to think in a straight line. My uppermost thought lately had become the riddle of how I might get into Rowan MacBride’s apartment. I asked if he needed anyone to help him deal with Lydia’s things: he said he could not bear to touch them. I asked if he needed any jobs doing about the place. He told me not to be silly, that that was what the school caretaker was for.

I even got desperate enough to consider burglary. I managed to wheedle the apartment’s location from Jake—it was, of course, in the heart of the establishment, overlooking the central courtyard—but when I tried to find out from Rowan what kind of security they had in place, he shrugged and said that it was all Greek to him. I even offered to pick Jake up from school, hoping that a spontaneous tour of the grounds would ensue but he told me that he couldn’t think of anything gayer. Was there any other way I could insinuate myself into the building, in some kind of official capacity? The school often had visiting speakers, but the Cath did not shape its young men and women to become entrepreneurs. The irony was not lost on me that I could probably have walked into any English lesson and taught the subject in greater detail and with more sensitivity than a master of thirty years’ standing.

The right idea was in there, if only Tara would stop bloody
talking
. I closed my eyes the better to tune her out but short of wrapping the pillow around my ears there was little I could do to block out her strident voice.

“It’s Tar Barrels soon,” she was saying. “Between you and me, I thought we’d give it a miss, what with it being so soon after Mum, but Sophie thinks it’d be good for Dad, for all of us, she reckons if we don’t do it this year we might never do it again, and it’ll become, like, a
thing
, like getting back on a horse, and it’d be such a shame for the boys to miss out on it. It was such a lovely part of our own childhood. So I suppose I agree with that. And she thinks it might be nice to scatter Mum’s ashes there, thinks it’ll help Dad move on. Well, I guess she thinks it’ll help
all
of us move on, and—
anyway
. Dad’s got to vacate the flat, and he’s going to bring all the stuff that he can’t fit in storage down to the barn and store it there. Loads of Mum’s things that he’s found squirreled away and can’t bear to part with. Old diaries . . .” I felt my throat constrict. “Are you all right? What’s wrong with your mouth?” She reached across to the bedside table for a glass of water. Half of it went onto my chest. “That better? You gave me a fright there, I thought you were choking. OK, so, yeah, diaries, photo albums, all the stuff he’ll never look at again . . . Hellooo? Earth to Matt? Are you free, or what?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” I said in a voice that sounded even to me like someone had their hands around my throat.

•   •   •

Back at Saxby Falls, I had Champagne on ice waiting for Kerry. For the first time in months she did not arrive in tears. She knew when she saw me that something good had happened, and her own face lit up in reflection.

“You’ve got them!” she said.

“As good as,” I said, popping the cork. It hit the wall and Kerry jumped and pressed her hand to her breastbone. Clearly the stress of maintaining the pretense with Felix was tightening her strings. The glasses I filled were nine-tenths froth but I raised them anyway. “The end is nigh. We’re all going to spend the weekend in their holiday cottage for Bonfire Night. Tara just told me that Rowan’s bringing the diaries. They’re actually bringing them to me, they’ll physically be in the same place the whole weekend! I
told
you it was worth waiting for. I
told
you that when it came good it would really come good.”

I drained my glass, feeling the sparkling liquid fizz down under my collar like a long fuse, but Kerry left hers untouched.

“What do you mean, we’re
all
going to be there?”

“You’ve got to get yourself invited; it should be a piece of cake if he’s as keen on you as you say he is.”

“You and Felix in the same place?” said Kerry. “What if it all goes wrong?”

“Well, it
is
going to go wrong, from their point of view, isn’t it? But from ours, don’t worry. Once I’ve got those books I’ll be in complete control.”

Kerry drank her champagne in silence.

“What are you thinking?” I said, tracing my thumb along her cheek, feeling the folded tissue of her earlobe.

“There’s going to be a baby there, isn’t there?” she said eventually.

That was the first time in a long while that she had mentioned babies directly. Only a couple of months earlier I would have pulled her up on that, told her how self-serving she was, reminded her that there was no room for her petty obsessions in this marriage. But now I didn’t even bother to respond. If anything she had done herself a favor and made it easier for me to let her go.