The Burning Air (17 page)

33

S
IX MONTHS AFTER I gate-crashed Tara’s yoga class I was formally introduced as her new boyfriend to the MacBrides over Sunday lunch at Cathedral Terrace.

“Do you want to come for lunch at home next weekend?” she asked.

“I thought I was going to be here anyway?”

She laughed. “By
home
I mean the house I grew up in. It’s on Cathedral Terrace, you know, those houses on the edge of the Green. We all go back there a couple of Sundays a month.”

“All?” I said, hardly daring to hope. “Are you threatening to introduce me to your family, Tara MacBride?”

“It’s about time, isn’t it?” she said, throwing me a smile I caught and returned. I had almost given up on this longed-for invitation; despite what I had said to Kerry, closeness to Tara was slow coming and hard-earned.

The only progress prior to this had been meeting Jake. Tara had introduced me as her “friend” but he knew exactly what that meant. There was an obvious parallel with his life and mine at that age, a single mother and her son living in a small flat in Saxby, but there the comparison ended. Jake was surrounded by friends, cousins, teammates, even girlfriends. He was as socialized as I had been isolated, as physical as I had been weak, and, I had to admit a few minutes into our first conversation, as ignorant as I had been studious. He was one big physical impulse; from fidgeting to eating to playing sports, he was never still. He lived in his body, whereas I had been in denial of mine. Had it not been for my background in sports science we would have had nothing to say to each other; fortunately he was interested in intelligent nutrition that would give him the edge over the other children on the field. After Jake’s brief stint as a drug-dealer’s protégé, Tara refused to differentiate between protein shakes and anabolic steroids, and I smuggled sports drinks and fuel bars into Jake’s pockets. “You’re so cool, Matt,” he said to me. He did not contrive to hide his admiration for me, or any of his enthusiasms. I could see how, ironically, it would have been Jake’s wholesome, naive quality that would have carried him to the fringes of youth criminality; it would have made him so attractive to the boys who were looking for someone to exploit.

Immediately after the invitation to Sunday lunch was made, I was so thrilled that I would have access again to those diaries that I didn’t consider the family who stood between us. As Sunday grew nearer, excitement was eclipsed by a dread that I would be discovered. In reverse order, I was concerned about Sophie recognizing me, then her parents, and my chief worry was that Felix might have some kind of dramatic flashback and suddenly identify me as his attacker.

I studied my face from every conceivable angle, searching for a feature that would give away the boy I had been. I deliberately passed mirrors by, then rounded on my own reflection at the last minute to see if I could snare a glimpse of my former self. It never happened, but I could not trust my own judgment. I needed a second opinion.

Reentering the Paddy Power betting shop was surreal. The once-shiny facade was dulled and dripping with pigeon shit. A makeup artist had painted wrinkles onto the face of the woman behind the window. The furniture inside had shrunk and so had the men. He was short and shriveled; the sports jacket that had once strained to contain him now hung like a too-big blazer on a schoolboy. His eyes darted between two races on televisions suspended from the ceiling. I sidled up to the counter next to him.

“What do you fancy for the 2:17 at Goodwood?” I asked. Kenneth looked at me with less interest than he had shown the screens.

“Oh, now you’re asking,” he said. “The going’s hard today, so . . .” and he reeled off a list of horses with preposterous names.

“Thanks,” I said. I placed myself right in his eye line, giving him one last chance to identify his surrogate son. This time he did look at my face, his eyes tracing the triangle of eyes, nose and mouth. I smiled, all the while studying him, alert for a flicker of recognition. I saw only puzzlement.

“Everything all right, then?” he said, in the patronizing tone he used to use with my mother. I knew he had no idea who I was.

“Everything’s great,” I said, and left the shop without placing a bet.

•   •   •

I arrived with Tara and Jake to find Rowan and Lydia waiting for us on the top step of the house. Hellos were said and my trembling hand was shaken. In the entrance hall, Will extended a hairy, lean forearm and said, “Hello, old boy,” in an exaggerated Wodehouseian accent that I suspected wasn’t far from his true voice. I had the same feeling I used to get with Vass: that here was a walking instruction manual on how to be a certain type of man. But where Vass had kindled in me the glow of superiority, Will provoked its opposite. Sophie flicked on a fake smile that disappeared when she thought I wasn’t looking. A little boy with white-blond hair head-butted me on the knee.

“Oh, Leo,” said Lydia. “Give the poor man a chance to cross the threshold. Do you like children, Matt?”

I gave her a perfect, even smile. “I do,” I said. “But I couldn’t eat a whole one.”

They all laughed as they let the wolf into their fold. I despised them for being so easy to fool, but part of me was disappointed that they could not project my current likeness onto my childhood self. It made me feel that the shadow I had cast across their family was light and shallow, engulfed by the one they had cast across mine.

I did not have to pretend not to recognize the place: the house had evolved sufficiently for my curiosity and disorientation to be real. The grandchildren had claimed it as their own: toys were everywhere. Even their crude paintings were on the wall, replacing those their mothers and uncle had created years before. The kitchen had been refurbished, granite and chrome updating the pine units, and extended so that a new dining area with a glass roof took up much of the courtyard garden, which was cluttered with ride-on toys. A basketball hoop was attached to the back wall that gave onto Cathedral Passage.

We had wine in the dining room while Sophie and Lydia bustled around the kitchen. I couldn’t sit still, and got up to examine a glass-fronted drinks cabinet that contained only brandy, perhaps a dozen bottles of the stuff, from Rémy Martin and Courvoisier to Hennessy Black.

“Will’s pride and joy,” said Tara, sidling up to me. “For God’s sake don’t ask him about them, you’ll never get him to shut up.”

I was about to ask Tara why Will’s pride and joy should be stored at his in-laws’ house, but the brandy buff himself came in wearing a striped apron, his cheeks rosy. “Grub’s up,” he said. At the heaped and steaming table, Rowan interviewed me for the second time.

“Have we met before?” he asked. My blood froze. “You’re not one of my old boys, are you?”

“No,” I said. “No, I’m definitely not one of your old boys.”

“Well thank goodness for that. I pride myself on never forgetting a single one of my pupils’ names, after they’re in my care. I thought I was losing my touch.
So
. Tara tells us you’re an entrepreneur.” An expression of suppressed snobbery rippled across each of their faces. “What exactly is the nature of your enterprise?”

“Fitness, nutrition, beauty, that sort of thing.” In the context of lunch at Cathedral Terrace, I saw my career through my mother’s eyes, and could not muster my usual pride.

“I never got that myself,” said Felix. “I mean games, yes, but exercise without the sporting element? It always struck me as a little odd.” I think he suddenly saw how rude he was being. “I mean, I’m sure there’s a market for it.”

“There is,” I said. “A bloody good one.” I fought the ridiculous urge to stand up and recite the first book of
Paradise Lost
or discuss the foreign policy of James I.

“Tara says you spend a lot of time on the road,” said Will. “I don’t know how you stick it. My office is sending me to London every Monday and Tuesday for the foreseeable. I stay in the same hotel every Monday night. I don’t even bother unpacking my suitcase some weeks. I feel like what’s-his-name from
Death of a Salesman
.”

“Willy Loman,” I said, Darcy briefly raising his ugly head. Rowan gave me a sharp look, not of recognition, but surprise.

“You shouldn’t complain, not in a recession,” said Lydia.

“True, true,” said Will. “That’s the other thing, Matt: how do you stand the insecurity?”

“Actually, I thrive off it, and the rewards make it all worthwhile.” I saw from their faces that that had come out all wrong. My wealth seemed to have turned against me, making me less, not more of a man in their eyes. I felt stung, as I suppose one would at a betrayal from a close friend. I felt the early-warning prickle of extreme thirst for the first time in years, and drained my cup to prevent a coughing fit. I pushed back my seat, and remembered just in time to ask, “Excuse me, where’s the loo?”

“First-floor landing, first door,” said Tara through a mouthful of roast potato.

The desk that had been in Sophie’s room now served as a telephone table in the tiled hallway. The wood was soft with age. There was a sharpened pencil, black with
THE LOMOND HOTEL
written on it. On impulse, I used its point to gouge my given initial on the desk. The staircase seemed narrower, doubtless because I was so much broader. My heart was kicking at my ribs as I regarded the study door, all that stood between me and Lydia’s diaries. The handle turned without resistance to reveal a little boy’s bedroom, with a Thomas the Tank Engine duvet, a globe night-light, and a huge poster of a spaceship on the wall.

“Wrong one!” said Sophie, coming up behind me, in an echo of her interruption of a decade before. The toddler on her shoulder had a wet patch on the groin of his trousers and a smell hinted of worse to come. She softened a little. “It’s easily done. All the doors are the same, and all these corridors and staircases. Even I get it wrong sometimes, and I’ve lived here for thirty-five years.”

The brandy bottles and bubbles suddenly made sickening sense.

“
You
still live here? You
all
live here?”

“God, no! It’s enough of a squeeze with just us. And it’s about to get squeezier,” she said, patting her stomach. “Mum and Dad live in an apartment in the school, have done ever since Dad was made head and I was expecting Toby. All their stuff was carted out of this house and into the flat, all our crap was shipped in, and the cycle begins again. Do excuse me,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the soiled child, and closed the bedroom door behind her.

In the bathroom I ran my wrists under the cold tap, willing my pulse to return to its resting rate. The diaries may as well have been in the vaults of the Bank of England if they were walled inside the Cath. I pressed my head against the cool bathroom mirror, bullied my panic into submission. It would be fine: I could do this. This was my life’s work; there were bound to be setbacks. The diaries would come to me eventually. I had to believe that. In the meantime, I would concentrate on the other branch of my campaign. I had more than enough to work with.

34

I
DREW FROM MY desk drawer the black pencil imprinted with the Lomond Hotel crest and dialed the number.

“Will Woods, I’m just confirming my reservation for next Monday?” I said, trying not to overdo the impersonation. I heard the click of fingertips on a keyboard.

“We’ll look forward to seeing you then, sir,” said the receptionist.

“I wonder if you could give me a room overlooking the street, quite low down,” I said.

“Not a problem. Will that be all, sir?”

I put down the phone and fired up my computer.

The agency that had supplied me so well in my first years in London was still going, now with a slick new website and prices to match. I recognized none of the girls on their books. Briefly I flicked through my remembered images of the ones I had used, allocating graduation, marriage, or deportation as the reason for their retirements. First I narrowed the pool down to the aspirant actresses; there would be a certain amount of improvisation and dramatic license required to ensnare Will. As it turned out, that restriction barely skimmed off 10 percent of the girls. If all those who claimed to be drama students really were, RADA must be thronged with whores. Then I was unsure whether to hire a girl of Sophie’s type or her opposite. I had read that married men, if unfaithful, tended to go for women unlike their wives, but Will seemed the kind to have a type and I wondered whether a younger version of Sophie might be a better shot. I vacillated between icy blondes and dusky beauties, finally trusting to my own experience and the pleasurable novelty of contrast between Tara and Kerry. The girl’s working name was Annabel, but her dark olive complexion and almond eyes marked her out as an Aisha or a Layla or a Yasmin.

The Lomond was just off Piccadilly, its lobby overstuffed with overstuffed furniture, its dining room overstuffed with overstuffed Americans and decorated with antlers and watercolors of Highland scenes. I met Annabel in the snug bar at half past six.

“First things first,” I said. “I’m not the client.” I showed her a picture of Will on my phone. She was not quite experienced enough to hide her disappointment but brightened when I told her that, if she was successful, I would double her fee. I gave her her script and we ran over it a couple of times.

“What if he doesn’t go for it?” said Annabel.

I thought about telling her I would still ensure I got my money’s worth but didn’t want to disincentivize her. “Don’t worry. He will.”

Will entered the bar at seven, ordered a pint of beer, and stared into it without drinking. His top button was undone underneath his tie and he needed a shave.

I was hidden in a winged chair in the corner, able to watch everything through a mirror. The Lomond was the kind of place where a man is invisible behind his tumbler of whisky but a woman will turn every head. When Annabel walked in, for a second she looked so obviously what she was that I was afraid the barman would ask her to leave, but he met her request for a glass of Laurent Perrier and a double Bache Gabrielsen without demur. Will looked up at the drink but barely gave the girl a glance, even when she took the bar stool next to him.

I called Annabel’s phone, ringing off as the connection was made.

“Oh, no! What a shame! I was so looking forward to seeing you.” I was impressed: her disappointment was not obviously feigned. “I’ve just bought you a brandy and everything. Well, never mind. I’ll see you soon.”

She placed her phone on the bar and turned to Will.

“Do you like brandy?” she said.

“Oh, ah, oh . . .”

“It’s just that the person I bought it for isn’t coming now and I can’t stand the stuff.”

“I don’t think it’s . . .” He cast about the room as though looking for someone to rescue him. I pressed my spine harder against the back of the chair.

“Please, I’d like to.” Annabel slid the glass across the bar to him. Once his lips were on the glass there was an inevitability to it all. She ordered him another three brandies, half finished her own champagne. Her hand brushed his knee and she let it rest there. When he drew his room key out of his pocket to sign for the tab, I paid my own bill with cash and took up my place with my camera in the window of a Starbucks across the road.

Annabel took direction beautifully: she left the light on and the curtains open. She was clever, too, positioning herself to hide her own face while exposing as much as possible of him, the precise actress hitting her mark.

She was back downstairs by ten o’clock.

“Job done. He’s in a bit of a state, though,” she said, counting the notes without removing them from the envelope. “Started trying to justify it all the minute he’d come. He loves his wife, he would never do anything to hurt her, but he couldn’t believe his luck when I came on to him and it’s just been so hard since she’d been ill, postnatal depression, and he just gives and gives and yada yada yada . . . Some of them get turned on by guilt, it’s half the point. He’s not one of them. Can I see the pictures?”

I handed over the camera. “Nice piece of kit,” she said, then scrolled through the images and checked the trash folder to make sure that I hadn’t stored any that showed her face. Our taxis took us in opposite directions.

Back in the flat, I locked myself in the office and printed the photographs, black-and-white, ten-by-eight, and slid them into a stiff envelope. I addressed it to Sophie Woods at 34 Cathedral Terrace, Saxby, then tucked it in between slices of paperwork in a file so tedious that no snooper would be tempted to look inside. I thought of them as cash savings, safe in the bank but easy to access. The intention was to produce them with a flourish when I broke the rest of my news, but there was no telling, once I’d finally found those diaries, how fast I would have to move.