The Burning Air (11 page)

19

AUGUST 1999

T
HE LUSH, VULGAR smells of high summer competed with fumes from the traffic that congested the green, but in Lydia MacBride’s study the air was cool and still. At first I took the book on her desk for a Bible; big, brown, leather-bound. A gold buckle hanging open at its waist revealed itself on close examination to be a four-digit combination lock. When I opened it and saw not the expected printed pages but handwriting I knew that what I held was holier than any sacred text. It seemed to pulse in my hands as though it, not me, was the live thing.

Three days before the operation and he tells me he doesn’t want the surgery. The new eye won’t fool anyone, he says, he’ll still have the scar, so what’s the point? Two years seeing the best doctors in England, his injury finally healed well enough for the eye to be fitted, all that money on consultancy charges, the research, all those trips to London, driving round and around
the Old Street roundabout, the A-Z balanced on my lap. All for a custom-made fibreglass eye that cost a fortune—it would be a years’ school fees, for some—and he doesn’t want it.

When he told me, I didn’t say anything but when he had gone to school I locked myself in the bathroom and screamed into a towel. I don’t show my anger anywhere but on these pages. As far as Felix and the rest of the family are concerned, he has my support. What I really want to do is shake him and ask him if he knows how much this has all cost me, in terms of patience, in terms of time and, yes, in terms of money. I know we can afford it—at times like this, when large sums need to be found quickly, I no longer feel guilty about the way his education is funded.

My skin was pricked all over by a million tiny needles. Did this mean my mother was
right
?

No, more than the money it is the rejection—of my help, of me. He doesn’t let me in anymore; he’s so closed, so sullen and sarcastic where he used to be cheeky and playful. Tara has also withdrawn, spending all her time in her room or with her friends. Sophie is under strain too and that I’m afraid is my fault. Rowan and I decided to shield the younger children, but I told her everything. She is mature for her age but I shouldn’t have used her as my confidante.

I didn’t see what was so inappropriate about Sophie acting as her mother’s confidante—it seemed rather odd, this concept of the mother-child relationship being a one-way street—and found nothing to explain or qualify. In fact, the diary was bafflingly vague throughout. No further allusions were made to Felix’s method of entry into the Cath. This did not read like the diaries I was used to, Frank and Pepys and Byron, which were written to be read. This journal was a rambling interior of a fine but undisciplined mind, pages of unstructured emotion that, devoid of context, contrived to exclude the reader.

I returned to the first page I had read, which remained the most relevant. My mother would know what to make of the writing, but how should I get it to her? My instinct was to tear the page out or at least to score it close to the spine so that its removal was hard to detect—but that would alert Lydia to the fact that someone had read her words. And as amusing as it was to think of her accusing her children of spying on her, it might somehow lead to my own detection too early in the process; it was not worth the risk.

Few people had decent home printers or photocopiers then. I took the book to the local library. On the street, the sense of justice and entitlement I had felt in the house evaporated and I felt edgy and guilty, as though I had kidnapped a baby.

The Xerox machine in the public library was a huge, space-age gadget that took scans of documents and was connected to a computer. I asked the dreadlocked librarian whether the machine kept a record of photocopied pages and was relieved when he shook his head. A smooth, warm double-page spread of photocopied handwriting slid into the tray.

In Lydia’s study, I replaced the diary exactly as I had found it, down to the angle of the pen.

My mother was in bed when I got home, under the covers despite the heat and wearing an expression I had come to know and dread: part challenge, part preemptive disappointment. I had folded the page in half and handed it over like a birthday card.

“Lydia MacBride keeps a diary,” I said.

She opened it, read it, glanced up at me with a smile, read it again. The eagerness on her face was so raw I was almost embarrassed for her.

“Oh, clever brilliant darling!” She threw back the bedclothes as though finally something had warmed her from the inside. I felt a corresponding internal heat, as though some hot liquid was slowly being poured into me, canceling the chill guilt of my incompetence, and knew that I must do whatever it took to preserve this feeling.

“This will be the first page of our dossier. On its own it isn’t quite proof enough, but I’m sure you’ll find something more concrete in the others.”

“The others?”

“The other diaries, Darcy. People who keep journals don’t just do it once. They do it all the time, their whole lives. You did check that there were more, didn’t you?”

I hadn’t. But there
were
more. In fact, when I went back, a couple of weeks later, the diaries were the first thing I saw. They had been hiding in plain sight, lined up behind the scrollwork on the top of the cherrywood bookcase so that they literally looked like part of the furniture.

I climbed onto the desk to get a better look. There were perhaps a dozen identical volumes; whichever one I had read was indistinguishable from its neighbors. I picked up the one on the end and saw, as I had feared, that these were all locked. I tried all the children’s birthdays (digging out their birth certificates was half a day’s work in itself), the MacBrides’ wedding anniversary (ringed with a mawkish love heart on their wall planner), and the obvious combinations like 1234, but got nothing.

Lydia’s sewing kit proved its versatility for the second time; a thin, curved needle, possibly part of a sewing machine, that slid under the numbers and beckoned itself around. To begin with I wiggled it pointlessly, but I soon fell into a kind of trance; I was absolutely still apart from my fingers, the tips of which quickly grew red, bulbous, and sore. The thought of my mother’s face if I was successful kept me going; after an hour I was covered in sweat from the exhausting concentration required. By the time the last catch sprang open, I was panting.

The disappointment was crushing. The diary on my lap was from 1987, years before our lives had crossed and entirely irrelevant to me. When she wasn’t wondering at the beauty of the children she had created, or extolling her deep pride at being made a magistrate, she wrote a bewildering amount about food she had cooked and food she had eaten. Occasionally, she stuck a recipe, torn from a magazine, onto the page.

No challenging or dry academic text had prepared me for the tedium of Lydia MacBride’s diaries. She teased me with false starts and red herrings; the word “confession” leaped off the page like a caught fish only to degenerate into a tedious avowal of a minor misdemeanor.

Cathedral Terrace

September 23, 1999

I have just come from a funeral service that made me feel I wanted to go to confession. Diana Font. Only 50: breast cancer. She is the first of my peers to die, and once I would have
called her my best friend. Shock and sorrow were the initial reactions but hot on the heels of those was guilt.
Diana was the only other girl from my school to go up to Cambridge and, after graduation, the first of our set to get her own flat, on the Whiteladies Road in Bristol. The rest of us, living in various digs, all thought her terribly grand, although not quite as grand as she thought herself to be. She fancied herself as a matchmaker, and held frequent supper parties where she would inevitably sit me next to some dullard and herself alongside a bright young man she hoped to ensnare. One New Year’s Eve she paired me with an overweight bore I had met the previous time. I couldn’t bear the thought of it, and swapped the place cards so that I was sitting next to someone called Rowan MacBride, who arrived late, unfastening his bicycle clips. Diana was too busy fussing with cocktail shakers and a hostess trolley to notice the switch. By the time she realized, we were all seated and she could not change the arrangement without looking churlish. It wasn’t until I saw the devastation on her face that I understood she’d been serious about him, and I felt desperately guilty. But what could I do? It was love by the main course. It is one of the only secrets I can ever remember keeping from Rowan. At first, I was embarrassed by my subterfuge and by the time I was secure in him, it was a habit.

Strange how the guilt resides even when regret does not. How good it feels to get that off my chest! I forget how it is with writing, the power of it to give perspective. Often, to let the genie out of the bottle is not to grant it life but to see it dissolve into mist. I suppose that sooner or later everything I have ever done will end up here, this fragmentary memoir, this scrapbook of a life.

Lydia’s oversensitive conscience gave me hope with one hand and despair with the other: hope, because any fraudulence regarding my scholarship
would
eventually be committed to paper. Despair, because what if it was going to take another thirty years?

I read her last line again and again, trying to extract from it a promise that there were other confessions to come, like lemon ink over a flame.

20

W
HILE PRACTICE GOT my safecracking technique down from half a day to half an hour, Lydia did not make it easy for me. The volumes were in no kind of order, and not externally differentiated, and I often picked the same lock twice. It was months before I hit on the idea of marking the volumes I had already read by making tiny scratches on the binding, and soon afterward I hit upon the 1998 diary. I read it from cover to cover but there was no mention of Felix’s entry to the school apart from a long, rambling passage about how grown up Lydia’s baby boy was and how smart he looked in his school uniform. My mother interpreted the omission almost as a confession in itself. “Why hasn’t she written about it?” she said, poring over the now-ragged page I had copied.

“It’s not that kind of diary. She doesn’t write it in order. I found an entry written this year about meeting her husband in the seventies. She’s all over the place. That’s why I have to read all of them. She goes backward and forward.”

“You’d think she’d have the grace to cross-reference and index it all. You can tell she’s not a true scholar.” There was a strange flicker about my mother’s lips that erupted into a loud “Ha!” By the time I identified it as laughter, it was over. “It’s suspicious, don’t you think?” she asked, drawing her knees up under her chin. “It’s conspicuous by its absence. You don’t just gloss over something as momentous as sending your children to one of the best schools in the country. If it had happened to us, I would have
begun
a diary, I would have written a
book
about it. What do you think, Darcy? Is it because his acceptance was a foregone conclusion? Because they’re too clever to incriminate themselves, even in a secret diary?”

Or maybe it was because the stolen scholarship and campaign of persecution were little more than the fabrication of a paranoid and disintegrating mind. The disloyal thought had come to me so quickly it must have been nearer the surface than I had dared to admit. Instead of that answer I gave her more reassurance.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t give up.”

And nor did I. I continued to visit and continued to report back, although no discovery ever came close to expanding upon the promise of the original. I got so used to scanning those diaries for evidence that key words, such as “Felix” and “school,” leaped out at me from any text, the way your own name resonates when called by a stranger in public. It was, then, ironic that after all that time scanning the words for Felix’s name it was my own that leaped from the page at me and made the world lurch to a standstill.

Far Barn

2 November, 1997

Hallowe’en was a gruesomely appropriate day to put a face to the name Darcy Kellaway.

I was shopping in town with Rowan and Sophie when Rowan stopped to stare at a dun little face hidden under a hood. It was the teeth that gave it away; they really are astonishing, inhuman, sticking out like the Jabberwocky’s. They’re all you see.

“Is that . . . ?” I began but Rowan’s face was all the answer I needed. I began to quiver with rage. How could that dark, ugly little gnome steal the beauty from my golden boy? Some primal maternal instinct raged in my veins. We were next to the ancient arch on the precinct; I could have toppled it with one push.

“I’m going to say something,” I said.

“Leave it, Mummy,” said Sophie. “What good can it do?” But she too was shaking when she put her hand on my arm to guide me away.

Ever since that sighting, I have been plagued by an anger so consuming I can only compare it to the first months of sexual desire. I enjoy horrible uncharacteristic revenge fantasies in which Darcy Kellaway is brought before the bench and I use the full force of my power to pass the highest sentence possible. On other occasions it is Kellaway’s face that is ruined, that the notion of an eye for an eye manifests itself and somehow my son’s bright blue eye is restored. Or perhaps there are other Kellaways I could hurt, loved one for loved one. In my darkest daydreams I am the one springing forward, weapon in hand, meting out the vigilante justice for which I routinely condemn those who come before the bench.

The pain inflicted by her vicious description was so acute I knew I could not pass it on to my mother. I had closed the diary and was about to put it back on the shelf when, twenty feet below me, the front door opened.

“Surprise!” someone called. In shock I let the book drop to the floor.

“Hello?” came the voice.
“Hello?”
the voice was young, female—Sophie’s. What was she doing here? She was scheduled to be in Durham. I waited for her to go into the sitting room, then ran down the stairs and out the front door, which I didn’t bother to close behind me. I flew across two lanes of moving traffic, stuck to the edges of the green, not daring to look back.

I relaxed a little more with every day that passed, convinced that if Sophie had seen and recognized me the family would have sent their pet policeman around again. Still, it was weeks before I went back, even to look. Even from across the road I could see that the locks had been changed. New chrome glinted where once was dull brass and there were splinters in the encircling wood.

•   •   •

I found Kenneth in his favorite betting shop. He wasn’t expecting me, and when he saw me his face stretched in shock.

“What?” I said. It had been a few weeks since we saw each other.

“Are you eating properly?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m cooking every night.” I had not lied as such. I continued to cook for my mother but was cutting back on my own consumption. Strange upsurges of unfamiliar energies that felt like power had been troubling me lately and things were starting to change: hair where there used to be skin and clothes that seemed to have subtly altered their cut overnight. I had tried to pour everything I had into my work, but still the changes were coming. After the way I had let her down by failing to win the scholarship, I could not press this fresh disappointment on my mother, let alone turn to her for a solution. Instead, I followed her example of controlling what I ate to master my own body. If she noticed what was happening to me, she didn’t remark upon it, and by the time Kenneth addressed my state, in his usual oblique way, I had already lost half a stone.

“We’ll get a fish supper after this race,” he said. “I don’t want you going the same way as your mother.”

The race began, he was distracted by hooves thundering across a screen, and his attention was gone. When it was over, he scowled, then screwed up his betting slip and threw it like a snowball across the room.

“I won’t be going back to Cathedral Terrace again, you’ll be pleased to know,” I said. His expression brightened.

“High bloody time,” he said. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am. You’re lucky you got away with it for as long as you did. But how did she take the news?”

“Are you insane? I can’t
tell
her.”

“What are you going to do? Pretend to her that you’re still going back, still researching her imaginary project?”

I looked down at the counter and fiddled with one of those funny little half pens the bookies always had.

“Oh,
Darcy
.”

“What can I do?” I said. “It’s all that’s keeping her alive.”

But no one, no matter how willful, can live off hope alone. Every time I “returned from Cathedral Terrace” empty-handed, my mother diminished a little more. Over the next few months she grew frailer and frailer until she became like something from one of her beloved Victorian novels, a consumptive heroine, dreams dashed, a bloodied cough away from death.