The Burning Air (18 page)

35

JANUARY 2013

W
E PLUNGED DOWN winding lanes so steep that it felt as though the car were going deep below sea level. Shadows swam like fish across the windshield. Then a sharp right down a ditch-trimmed track, and there it was, the heathen chapel of Far Barn. This was where the MacBride children had played while I was learning poetry by rote.

I took in the solid wall of books, the fire where a television should be, the low sofas strategically arranged so that no matter where you sat you were forced into facing someone else. A strange noise fought its way out of my throat.

“You can shout for help as loud as you like,” said Tara. “In Devon, no one can hear you scream.”

“Ha!” I said. “Just testing the acoustics.”

She disappeared into a little room off the kitchen and fiddled with the thermostat.

“OK if I go for a run before dinner?” I said, squinting through the kitchen window. “How far can I go?”

“I don’t know. A mile or so? You’ll hit a fence at some stage. If you get chased by a cow at any point, you’ve gone too far.”

The run was all wrong from the first stride. I couldn’t get my footing well enough to build up speed. I literally stumbled across various decaying outbuildings scattered across the land. It took me half an hour to reach the fence, making nonsense of Tara’s estimated mile. On the way back, I took time to stretch at the little cottage. The doors and windows were all sealed up with plates of some kind of metal that was almost too cold to touch with my bare hands. I tried to prize one open, to look inside, but it was as stuck fast as though it had been soldered on. I looked closely at it, and saw that the grille was not actually bonded but lowered onto a sort of peg on either side. It took strength to lift it up and off. I doubted a woman could do it.

There was nothing interesting inside, just a dank sort of room with another low little chamber leading off it. The ground inside was silver with frost. I hooked the grille back on its pegs and it fell like a portcullis.

I anticipated with pleasure the smell of onions and the sizzle of a good steak but was greeted at the border of the garden by a bitter, charred smell. A pan smoked on the range and Tara was a tiny shape in the vast sitting room, the phone at her feet, her face raw and tearstained. When she saw me she leaped to her feet and threw herself against my chest.

“We’ve got to go back to Saxby, now,” she wailed.

“What’s the matter?”

“FelixjustrangMumsgotcancer.”

“What?”

A bubble of snot inflated and deflated in her right nostril. “My mum’s got . . . ovarian cancer. It’s in her lymph nodes, it’s in her spine, it’s . . .” I lost her to a succession of hiccups and shrieks. “She collapsed and she’s been taken into hospital. She didn’t even tell Dad. She’s going to
die
, Matt!”

“What’s the prognosis?” I said.

“Felix said it could be this week.”

I was actually speechless with the injustice of it.

“I don’t
believe
this is happening,” I let slip. Tara’s interpretation was typically solipsistic.

“Oh, Matt, thank God for you, thank God for someone to lean on.” Wet blue eyes gazed through spiky blond lashes. “What have I done to deserve you?’

36

JANUARY 21, 2013

I
PARKED UP IN the ambulance bay at Saxby Wellhouse. It was next to the gardens that gave onto the psychiatric ward. I noted that I was about twelve years late for my outpatient appointment. Usually I would have found that funny but my sense of humor had deserted me. In fact, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that I was in as much agony as Tara was. She blew her nose for the hundredth time that hour.

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“Yes, she’s in a private room in the oncology department.”

Of course she was. I watched Tara disappear—tiny as a wooden doll—through the great doors, to join her family at her mother’s deathbed. The impulse to abandon the car where it was, run after her, tell all of them everything nearly overtook me. The diaries were in the school. Lydia was in the hospital. Only one of those places was accessible to me. I was faced with the impossible choice: did I bring my imperfect showdown forward, or did I wait and execute perfect revenge after her death?

My phone had been switched off for the journey. When I turned it back on, the screen was measled with little red dots: texts, e-mails, voice mails, missed calls. While I was staring at the screen wondering which to tackle first, the phone buzzed in my palm. It was Rikesh.

“Where’ve you been, man?” he said. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours. You haven’t been picking up your letters, have you?”

What did he expect? I’d spent the few days before traveling to Devon in Saxby, using Tara’s flat as a base while I oversaw the construction of the gym at Rory’s hotel.

“Where’ve you been? Your accounts are
months
overdue. If you don’t get them to me this week you’re going to be hit with a massive fine.”

“Then I’ll pay the bloody fine,” I said. “I’ve got other stuff on the go.”

“You might not mind the fine but believe me you don’t want to be investigated and if you default once more that’s what you’re looking at. Can you get the VAT stuff over to me in the next couple of days, at least?”

“I’m not in London.”

“Then get your missus to send it.”

The thought of Kerry sifting through my filing cabinet was even more stressful than the thought of leaving Saxby. I traveled the well-worn groove of the motorway. At home, Kerry was in front of the television. I caught the phrase “British couples who go abroad to adopt” before she leaped up from the sofa, fumbled for the remote, and turned the set off. Her hair was undone and in thick waves and she was wearing my dressing gown. She looked awful without makeup, eyes all piggy and puffy.

“I didn’t know you were coming home today,” she said.

“Clearly not,” I said. “I’m not. I just need to pick up some stuff together, then I’ve got to get back to Saxby.”

“Again?” Kerry pouted and followed me into my office. I gathered the VAT file from its place in the cabinet, slid it in a Jiffy Bag, and addressed it to Rikesh.

“Shall I make you a coffee?” she asked.

“I’ve got to catch the post office before the counter shuts,” I said. “This has to go recorded delivery.”

“And then you’ll come back?”

“Kerry, were you
listening
when I told you what was happening in Saxby? We’re at a crucial stage. She could die any minute, and I don’t know what’s in those diaries, I haven’t got a confession from her, I don’t know whether to tell her who I am, or what. Have you got any
idea
of the stress I’m under right now?”

“I know what’s good for you when you’re stressed,” she said. She sidled up to me, slid my dressing gown off her shoulders and put her hand on the crotch of my jeans. I shrugged her off. Sometimes she felt like a plastic bag over my head.

“Look, Kerry, this is important,” I said. “I thought I had your support on this.”

“You do!” she said, but I was already leaving, package under my arm. “Come back! Please, Matt, I hate being on my own here, please, come back! It’s only because I miss you. Please! Come back!”

Compared to Kerry, I sometimes thought, life with Tara was almost relaxing. Even my marriage was Lydia MacBride’s fault. She was, after all, the one who introduced us.

•   •   •

I stood behind the bus shelter outside the Wellhouse. The blank diary, filched from Tara’s bookshelf, was in a supermarket carrier bag at my feet. It was a desperate bluff, but I had no other ideas. Hadn’t Lydia written, years ago, that everything she had ever felt would eventually end up in her diary? Why, then, should I not hasten the only entry that mattered to me?

I watched Tara and Sophie hug their father good-bye outside the Wellhouse. Rowan disappeared into the coffee shop next door to the hospital. Through the plate-glass window I saw him join a long line. I left my hiding place and ran to the oncology ward, knocking as a precaution. Felix opened the door.

The room smelled like bile and flesh that was already beginning to rot. The scent pulled me back with force to our rooms on the Old Saxby Road, my mother lying on her back. Death was in the room as sure as if he were sitting in one of the empty chairs at Lydia’s bedside.

“You’ve missed Tara,” said Felix. “She and Sophie have gone to pick everyone up from school.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Felix, are you all right? You look a bit peaky yourself. Why don’t you go and get some fresh air?”

“I don’t like to leave her alone,” said Felix.

“She won’t be alone,” I said. “She’s with me. Come on. You look very pale.”

“Yeah, maybe a ten-minute breather won’t do me any harm. I’ll go and find Dad, I think he’s gone for coffee. Want me to get one for you?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Cheers, Matt,” said Felix, patting my arm on his way out.

Lydia’s hair had grown out around her face, prematurely and erroneously making an angel of her. I looked at the tempting pillow but that thought was dismissed the second it arrived. Let her die as my mother had, terrified about her family.

I poked at her arm until she woke up; you could see the effort it cost her to open her eyes, and then it took her a few seconds to identify me. Her eyes passed over my face unfocused but as soon as she saw the book she became completely lucid, as though the saline drip in her arm was delivering a hit of adrenaline, not morphine. “How did you get that?” she said. I felt a corresponding rush: I’d hit a nerve here. Whatever else happened today I at least had confirmation that somewhere a diary existed. I no longer felt as though I was calling her bluff.

“I had to pick some stuff up for Rowan,” I said. “It was just lying around.” She grasped for the button that would raise the bed into a recline. “Lydia. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to read this. I wouldn’t have thought you could be so cruel.”

“Oh, hell,” she said, hands going limp. “I don’t know why I wrote it down, I meant to destroy it, and then the next thing I knew I woke up and I was already in here. Tear it up, Matt, get rid of it.”

“I can see why you don’t want it made public.”

“Never mind the
public,
” she said. “Can you imagine what the family would think of me? Can you imagine what it would do to Tara? You wouldn’t want her to see it, would you, Matt, I know you think the world of her.” I reached into my pocket for my mobile phone to record her confession. My hands grabbed cloth; I saw the phone plugged into the charger in my car. I was furious at myself. “If you’ve read it, you’ll know how sorry I am. You’ll know I didn’t mean for them to die.”

This pulled me up short. “Them? Only my mother died. Only Heather Kellaway died.”

“Yes, and then there was the boy,” she murmured.

I massaged my forehead. She wasn’t coherent, after all—although in a way she was right, she had killed Darcy Kellaway, forced the conception of Matt Rider.

“No, you stupid bitch,
I’m
the boy,” I blurted, but Lydia’s eyes were closed and her mouth slack, the window of clarity abruptly curtained again by sleep.

Felix and Rowan were back, Starbucks in hand, sandwiches in paper bags, faces concave. I dropped the book into my carrier bag just in time.

In the corridor outside, I clung to the positive. Through my own carelessness, I had not recorded the confession. But Lydia had confirmed the existence of her diaries and effectively appointed me their guardian. It felt as though she was giving me her blessing.

37

I
LAY ON VIRGIN sheets. The Van Gogh blossom print over my head had been in season when I hung it back in May. Now the white flowers and the blue sky were another reminder of how long it had been since I bought the flat. If Lydia had not become ill when she had, Kerry would be in here by now, working, under my supervision, on Felix. It was so unfair the way the goalposts kept shifting.

I went to the hospital every day, my phone always charged, in my pocket, and set to record at the touch of a button. I had by then decided that, if necessary, I would force the confession in front of her family, but that last speech I extracted from her had, for all I knew, been the last she ever made. Her mind was now a ransacked library of non sequiturs and fragmentary sentences. Through the jumble of her words it was evident that she was in distress, a state that her family said had inexplicably come over her a few days before. It must have been because of me, and I drew comfort from that.

I was unable to be alone with her, although we established one last private connection. While Lydia’s family mumbled around her, her eyes suddenly found their focus on mine. There was a pleading in them that she could not have achieved with language. I’m trusting you, those eyes said, to protect my family, to destroy those books. There was a secondary plea for a reassuring smile, for some signal from me that I would do what she wanted, that I would keep her secret. I stonewalled her. Her eyes twitched about wildly in panic or recognition or both, then a bubble of morphine made its way into her vein and she was under again. The corners of my mouth were tugged upward by a force I could not fight, and I had to leave the room.

•   •   •

“I got all your stuff for the VAT return,” said Rikesh. There was an uncharacteristic hesitancy in his voice that concerned me.

“Everything OK?” I asked.

He forced a laugh. “I was about to ask you that, actually. I think you sent me something by accident. A spreadsheet that doesn’t mean much to me, but it’s got some very strange things written on it. A sort of . . . like you’re keeping tabs on someone. And you’ve put through some expenses from a spy shop, whatever that is. Are you adding Private Eye to your many talents?”

My stomach shifted, as if I was in a car going too fast. “Oh, that. It’s just . . . I was just having a laugh. I wouldn’t take any of it seriously. Just, you know.”

“Right,” said Rikesh. “I’ll bin it then, shall I?” I heard paper being scrunched into a ball. “I take it this isn’t the only hard copy. I think we sent the other stuff on for you.”

“What other stuff?”

“I don’t know, some parcel or something had got in with all your files as well. Lucy took care of it. Lucy? What was that thing in Matt Rider’s records, can you remember where it was going?”

“It wasn’t a parcel, just a large letter,” came a tinny voice. “An address in Saxby. Went in the first-class post, should’ve got there today.”

My heart swerved. In my mind’s eye I saw the carelessness with which I had bundled everything up, a result no doubt of the exhaustion caused by leading a double life.

“Fuck!” I shouted.

“Dodgy spreadsheets, letters in the wrong places. Maybe you need a holiday, mate.”

“Maybe I need a new accountant.”

There was a sort of shocked chuckle on the phone.

“I’m going to put the phone down now, and after that I’m going to call the Inland Revenue and revoke your right to act as my agent.”

Rikesh responded in the voice of an automaton. “I really would strongly advise against you managing your own accounts . . .” Then he snapped back into the wideboy I knew. “Fucksake, Matt, what’s brought
this
on?”

“Actually Rikesh, I haven’t been happy with your services for some time now.”

He spluttered. “My services? My
services
are faultless. My
services
are the only reason you haven’t been investigated by the Inland Revenue a dozen times over the last few years. My
services
are the reason you’ve halved your tax bill by channeling your income through your wife. And I haven’t even put your rates up for three years even though every quarter you file a more erratic set of accounts and every quarter I pick my way through it until it all makes sense.”

“I’d be grateful if you could send back all the paperwork you have as well as my final bill,” I replied. I could hear his breathing, rapid and shallow.

“Fine. You know what? Whatever. I don’t know what’s going on, Matt, but I hope you get the help you need.”

I slept badly that night. Short of breaking into Cathedral Terrace—and there was no way I had waited so long and built myself up only to end it so crudely; I could have done
that
half a lifetime ago—there was nothing I could do to stop the envelope from getting to Sophie. In my wish-fulfillment dreams I experienced the visceral pleasure of seeing her face when she opened the envelope. They were so vivid they kept waking me up. I was only half-asleep at five a.m. when my telephone rang. It was Tara, telling me through tears that Sophie had given birth to a little girl at three in the morning. Fifteen minutes later, at the other end of the hospital, Lydia had died.