The Burning Air (16 page)

30

MAY 2012

T
HE REGISTRAR GAVE little preamble, said something about how the success of a marriage was not about gazing into each other’s eyes but looking toward the same horizon. I could not have put it better myself.

My bride was a Klimt painting made flesh in her sequined gold shift, her hair a soft dark hood. She had even swapped her cheap gypsy hoops for similar circles of tasteful hammered brass. She spoke her vows with careful, deliberate diction. After the ceremony we had a sushi lunch. It took Kerry three glasses of Champagne before she could muster the courage to eat the sashimi and then it was done with much laughter and clumsiness.

“Mrs. Kerry Rider,” she said, admiring her left hand. “It suits me.”

“The name, or the ring?”

“Both.”

Technically, of course, she wasn’t Kerry Rider—she had just pledged her life to Darcy Kellaway—but she knew the name my mother had given me was something I saved for only the gravest of occasions. I did not press the subject: the last thing I wanted was for her to change her own name. When the time came for her to move in on Felix, there must be no outward signs of our connection. I knew from experience with Tara how much concentration it took always to pay with cash or my company account card, never keeping anything that spoke my real name in my pocket or wallet, hiding my driver’s license in the boot of the car. I watched Kerry inexpertly stabbing a rice ball with a chopstick, eyes crossed with concentration. I would be asking enough of her as it was.

“Thank you,” she said, suddenly. “I never thought I’d have a wedding day. A lot of men wouldn’t want me, you know.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Because I’m damaged goods, aren’t I? My past’s a right old mess.” Champagne and happiness had led her to drop her guard; her vulnerability was actually charming.

“So’s mine. That’s why we’re a good match. That’s why it bodes well for the future.”

“And you really don’t mind that I can’t have children?”

“I take back what I just said about you understanding me.” I cloaked the truth in jest, then grew serious for my lie. “I only mind that
you
mind.”

It was still early afternoon when I carried her on sea legs over the threshold of my flat. Consummation was swift and urgent in the newly matrimonial bed. She rolled on top of me so that her hair was a stole over her shoulders and mine. I reached up to tuck it behind her ears and trace with my thumb the perfect contour of her cheekbone. “Matt?” she said. “Maybe now we’re married . . .” Her breath was crisp with Champagne and her words were liquid, but when I raised my eyebrows she broke off eye contact with me; alcohol could only embolden her so far.

“Go on, spit it out,” I said. She shifted, sending a shiver down the length of me.

“Why don’t we just let it all go?” she said into my chest.

“Let what go?” I said with patience that did not feel sustainable.

“All this MacBrides stuff. Look how nice life is when we don’t talk about them, when it’s just us. You haven’t mentioned them all day and it’s been so much better. Why don’t you just leave it? You know what they say; the best revenge is living well. We live well, don’t we? So why don’t you channel all your energy into that? Into making a family with me? Do you know how easy it would be for a couple like us to adopt a baby?” Now that the cork was out of the bottle, the words kept pouring. “It’s easy if you’ve got money. We wouldn’t have to wait for years for my court order to run out, or take on a kid, we could get a new
baby
. We can afford to do it abroad, can’t we? There’s
millions
of babies out in places like Pakistan or Mexico.” I kept quiet and gave her a chance to stop talking. “I saw a thing the other day about Chinese girls whose parents just abandon them. They’re crying out for people like us.” I was rigid with anger at her ingratitude. After all I had done for her. After everything I had
given
her. Eventually she sensed the tension and began to falter.

“I’d do all the work, all the looking-after. It wouldn’t be any extra stress on you. It’s not as if I do anything all day . . .”

I hooked a finger into each of her earrings. She realized what I was doing a half-second before I pulled. Her screaming was disorienting but I managed to throw her off me before too much blood could spill. The bed linen was ruined, a messy parody of the virgin bride’s bloodstained sheets. I was too angry and hurt to look at Kerry properly, but I gave her a towel to clean up the worst of it and called a taxi to take her to the A&E department of Northwick Park Hospital. I pulled on some sweats and waited in the sitting room while she made herself decent.

I changed the bed sheets and lay back on clean cotton to watch the static screen of my bedroom window. I stared at treetops and rooftops until daylight softened into a violet dusk that was abruptly dispersed by the vulgar pop of an orange streetlight. I was pinned to the bed by shock, stunned by the way Kerry had withdrawn her support, swift as a magician whipping a cloth from under the set table, and just as illusive. If she was not on my side, who would be? If she was not my ally, what was her worth to me?

I was still in my trance when her key turned in the door. By then it was no longer our wedding night. She stood in the darkened doorway of the bedroom. Even in the streetlamp’s glow I could see that her earlobes were dressed with gauze and her neck was streaked with what looked like rusty water.

“I’m so sorry,” she said before I could get a word in. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Of
course
we’ll carry on. Please don’t leave me, please don’t throw me out.” Her apology melted my anger. I waited a beat, in case there was more. “Please, Matt. I love you. I’d do
anything
for you.”

She crawled onto the bed and collapsed into my arms.

“It’s OK,” I said, stroking her hair, now lightly infused with the stale, antiseptic smell of the NHS. “I know it won’t happen again.”

31

MAY 2012

“
N
O JAKE TONIGHT?” I asked, uncapping two bottles of beer and handing one to Tara.

“He’s at my parents’ again,” she replied. Her earlobes were perfect petals with one single pink pinprick in the center. “He’s seen me hurt by men in the past, and that hurts him, so now I have a policy of not introducing him to anyone until I know it’s going to be serious.” She said this in a neutral tone, making it impossible for me to deduce whether I potentially fell into that category or not. Intimacy was elusive, perhaps inevitably, given that I was limited in what I could share with her. Tara was more cautious than I had originally guessed, giving back only what I offered first.

I let my fingertips trail, as though idly, over her bookshelves, alert for the leather brick of the diary. I knocked something off a ledge and had to jump to intercept it.

“Good save,” said Tara. I looked down at my catch. It was a hexagonal wooden shield with a gold plaque in its center, an award given to Tara and Jake for raising money for a charity that supported young people with sickle cell anemia.

“That’s how Jake remembers his dad,” she said. “He had sickle cell.”

“Had?”

She looked at the trophy. “He died while I was pregnant.” I thought of the clinch I’d seen them in. He hadn’t looked anemic then; he’d looked bursting with red-hot blood. “We didn’t know each other that long.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. I no more wanted Tara’s diseased school boyfriend entering the narrative of my life than I did Conor Watson and his unborn predecessor, but was curious to see whether this vulnerability had passed down a generation.

“I don’t know much about sickle cell. Is Jake . . . ?”

She shook her head. “No, you can’t get it unless both your parents carry the gene, and it’s almost unheard of in Caucasian families. Jake’s in rude health.
Too
rude, sometimes,” she said with a rueful smile. “Still, the Cath—sorry, that’s the big school up near the cathedral—is already sorting him out. He started the prep last year and he’ll go up to the big school when he’s thirteen.” I put the award back on its perch and picked up the diary instead, just to have something to do with my hands; anything that involved the Cath obviously had my full attention. “We all went there,” she continued. “I had all these lefty ideals about him going to state school, which was fine when he was little and I was teaching there and I could keep an eye on him, but funnily enough I found my principles changed rather when he went to the local comp; it was all a bit much for him and he got himself terribly bullied at first, because he talks like we all do, rather than the other kids there. And then in the second term he sort of fell under the influence of this vile year-ten boy. It started when Jake let him shave a Nike swoosh into his hair, which was bad enough in itself, but the next thing he was talking like some godawful rapper, then he came home smelling of cigarettes, and before I knew it they were getting him to carry their bloody marijuana for them. That was all they wanted him for, just to be their little mule, because they were nowhere to be seen when the police picked him up.” Her voice wobbled a little. “So my parents and Will and Sophie got involved, and to cut a long story short, Jake’s a public schoolboy now.” She shot me a defensive look, as though she expected me to judge or challenge her. Perhaps I would have, if this had been a revelation, but all it did was confirm what I already knew about the way the MacBrides closed ranks to protect their own. “I suppose I was trying to prove some kind of point, although I don’t know what, and I don’t know why I thought I could use Jake to do it. Mother of the Year, that’s me. Anyway, the Cath’ll be the making of him. He needs structure and discipline, he needs a bloody
uniform
. I tell you what, the quickest way to turn a liberal into a Tory is to give her a teenage boy to bring up.”

I swilled my beer around, held it in my mouth long enough for it to sting my gums.

“I don’t mean to be rude, Tara, but how can you afford that on a teacher’s salary?”

“The MacBrides have ways and means.” She tapped the side of her nose with her bottle. It echoed the gesture Felix had made in Cathedral Passage, but this time I had enough discipline to control the bubbling rage. “What have you got there?” she said, looking at my hand with an unsuspecting smile.

“I don’t know, I hadn’t looked,” I said. “Sorry, is it your diary or something?”

Tara took the book, transferred its weight from palm to palm and let the blank pages fan open.

“My mum gave it to me. She thinks it’d be good for me, uphold the family tradition. I can’t be arsed though. I mean, who keeps a diary these days? If you want people to read it, you blog, and if you want to go down memory lane, you just go on Facebook.”

“But your mum keeps one?” the effort of keeping my interrogation light was demanding, like a drunk person trying to appear sober.

“She’s Saxby’s answer to Samuel Pepys. She’s always written, from when I was little. All in books like this. She’s always threatening to write a warts-and-all memoir.” She giggled.

“What’s funny about that?” I said.

“Clearly you’ve never met my family,” she said. “My mum, skeletons in the cupboard? Hardly. She’s so . . .
good
. She’s so patient and forgiving. You’ve no idea what it’s like, having to live up to someone like that, especially when I’m so, y’know . . . Not that I’d have her any other way. The world would be a better place if everyone had a mother like mine.”

32

K
ERRY WAS IN the bedroom working on her hair. The warm female smell of her, mixed with the sweet chemical fizz of hair spray, diffused into steam that filled the corridor. She had changed her part so that it fell over her ears. It affected her whole posture, shoulders forward and spine round. I wished she wouldn’t slouch. It made the expensive clothes I had bought her look cheap.

I closed the office door behind me and made a call to Rikesh. I had a few things to run past him: an increased investment in Rory’s spa-hotel—I had given him a proposal a few weeks before—and I wanted to see if the company could justify renting a flat in Saxby, ostensibly so that I could be near the place. Rikesh green-lighted both ideas.

“It’s going to mean a lot of paperwork and some creative accounting but if you pull this off, you’ll be a very rich man. Richer, anyway. Any other big schemes or scams on the go? Remember what I always say, I’m like a defense lawyer; I can’t help you if you don’t tell me the truth.”

Rikesh was beginning to grate, but to disentangle myself from him would be a risky and complicated process that was probably best delayed until after I had dealt with the MacBrides.

“Well—there is one thing you probably ought to know, not that it makes any difference. I got married a couple of months ago.”

Rikesh sang the bass line and chorus to “Another One Bites the Dust.”

“Very funny,” I said.

“You won’t catch me getting married, not until prenuptial agreements become legally binding in this country anyway. There’s lots of ways of getting rid of girlfriends. There’s only two ways to get rid of a wife, innit? Just ask Henry the Eighth. I’m only joking. It doesn’t have to be all bad. Does she work, this wife of yours?”

“No.”

“Well, what did she do before she met you? Has she got office skills?”

The thought of Kerry sustaining any kind of career was laughable.

“She can’t even turn on a computer.”

“Ah, we can put her on your payroll anyway. Call her a PA, you can draw out more money from the company without paying higher-rate tax. Marriage does have
some
advantages.”

“Thanks, but I like to keep Kerry separate from my work.”

“Well, then, you shouldn’t have married her, should you? She can take half of whatever you’ve got now. This is what comes of acting without consulting Rikesh. Look, I’ll get her put on, it’s easy. I’ll send you the paperwork. She doesn’t have to get involved, just sign a couple of pieces of paper. You might as well exploit it.”

I put the phone down, angry at Rikesh’s overfamiliarity and his crude reduction of the situation. His words had hit home. Of course I had known that I was giving Kerry access to half my worth, but I had been so caught up in the gesture that I had overlooked the practicalities. Kerry would have done this without a ring; she would have done it for a warm bed. That’s the problem with having a vocation: the grand plan often overshadows the details.

I conceded that Rikesh was right in one respect. If I had made the gesture, I ought at least to get my money’s worth.

I stood in the bedroom doorway, watched her run the straightening iron through her hair with a sizzle and a hiss. When she saw me over her shoulder in the mirror, her delight was quickly lost in apprehension, the way it seemed to be these days. I stroked her hot hair, taking care to keep away from the iron, which the digital display told me was at two hundred degrees. She set it down carefully and turned it off at the plug.

“I’ve made a decision,” I said. She swung around to face me, her face primed for bad news. “I’ve thought long and hard about this. I just know the only way to find out what I need to know is through those diaries. I’ve tried everything to get at them, and the only way is go through the family, but they’re completely closed. And also, it’s about
like for like
revenge. They split and destroy families, so that’s what we’ve got to do too. It has to go beyond just the diaries. We’re getting revenge on everything, taking down the whole family. There’s a duality to it, do you see? Two sides of the same coin.”

Her brow furrowed in consternation. I’d lapsed into Darcy-speak again, a fatal mistake with Kerry, who needed the plainest language possible—while I’d long stopped hoping for understanding from her, comprehension was necessary.

“Basically, the closer you are to someone, the deeper the wound.” I picked up her hair iron, still hot, pointed it like a sword, and took a step backward. “It’s like, I can’t hurt you from here”—in the next second, I took a full lunge close to her and held them millimeters from her skin—“but from this distance, I could do you some real damage.
Now
d’you get it?”

She shrank away from it until she took up almost no space at all.

“What are you going to do?” she whispered.

“I’m going to get at her children. I’m going to start with Tara, I’m going to make her fall in love with me, and then I’m going to let her know who I really am, at the same time that I tell them all what Lydia did to me.”

Kerry’s lip began to tremble. “But what about . . .”

“I know what you’re thinking. Hear me out. It’ll be completely separate from us; it won’t change things. It doesn’t affect us at all. I
married
you, didn’t I? I won’t
mean
it with Tara.”

“But you’re not going to
sleep
with her . . . ?”

“I’ll have to make it convincing. Come on, Kerry, have you forgotten what that family is like? It’s the perfect way to get access to those diaries
and
really ram home what they did to me.”

“I’m sure there’s another way we can get those books, Matt. Why can’t we just break into the house and get them?”

“Breaking into the house is a criminal offense. It could be used against us, it would make us into common criminals and we’re better than that, I’m better than that, the whole point of this is that they see I’m better than
they are
. I don’t want to break the law. Just their hearts.”

“And then what? Once we’ve told them? Do we get on with life as normal?” She looked away from me and started to run some stuff through her split ends.

“Not normal,” I said. “Better.”

I could see she wasn’t convinced, so I played the trump card that she had dealt me herself. “I’ll be different, on the other side of all this,” I said. “I won’t get so stressed, I’ll be much more open to doing new things. We might even try for that adoption.”

She froze with a thick black skein of hair between her palms. “You’re serious?”

“Why not? But this is the thing: until the MacBrides are dealt with, I won’t have the energy to devote to a child, will I?”

“No, yeah, all right,” said Kerry cautiously. She had spoiled what was coming next: I had intended to tell her what she was going to do with Felix but now that would have to wait while she became accustomed to the idea of me and Tara, and to the thought of a baby.

In the meantime, I laid some groundwork. I found a flat in Saxby; nothing fancy, just a studio on the outer edge of town. I bought a couple of things that might convincingly pass it off as Kerry’s—nothing special, nothing that would be above her standards, just some Ikea candlesticks and a canvas box print of Van Gogh’s
Almond Tree in Blossom
over the bed. It would, I was sure, act as a sweetener for her when the time came for her to play her own mirror role. Whenever she broached the adoption, I stalled her with the single word “afterward.”

In fact, I had to keep “afterward” vague, even to myself. The rest of my life was a glittering city just over the brow of a hill—but it remained abstract, amorphous. Not until I was close to the summit could I commit to making plans for life after the MacBrides.

•   •   •

In my London neighborhood, there was a place with a tuxedoed mannequin in the window that called itself a spy shop and sold cutting-edge espionage technology to private detectives and suspicious spouses: men who had never outgrown their James Bond phase. Using the company credit card, I bought a state-of-the-art pen-shaped pocket scanner that read documents line by line and copied them into facsimiles of the original. I carried it everywhere I went, so that the next time I saw those diaries—and there would be a next time—I would be ready.