The Burning Air (3 page)

The room itself looked unsettling, unfamiliar, as though it had been ransacked, but in fact there was no mess and it took Sophie a few seconds to realize that that was precisely the problem, that all the clutter and character of Lydia’s occupancy had been removed. There in the corner were all her photographs and paintings, stacked facedown, topped with the little velvet box that held her MBE.

Rowan may have been her father, but it was a mother’s impulse that made her pull the eiderdown back over his shoulders to tuck him in. There was something shiny on the pillow next to him, the size and shape of a jar of instant coffee; she leaned closer then recoiled as she recognized the small silver urn containing her mother’s ashes. It was the first time she had seen it since the funeral. She touched it with a forefinger and was, ridiculously, surprised to find it cold. It was ash, not flesh. Nevertheless, she arranged the urn in the middle of the pillow then smoothed the bedclothes over it.

Rowan’s present condition and his earlier distress now made sense. Perhaps it was still too soon. Perhaps it would always be too soon. What did the ritual of scattering the ashes achieve, anyway? It wouldn’t bring Lydia back. Let him sleep with his wife one last night in the place they had always been happiest. Let him cling to her dust for the rest of this life if the prospect of parting with it reduced him to this.

4

I
F FAR BARN made few technological concessions to the twenty-first century, it barely acknowledged many of the breakthroughs of the late twentieth. There was no television. There was a telephone for emergencies, an old-fashioned kind with a curly wire and grubby pushbuttons. Mobile phones were useless here. The barn was deep in a valley, and thanks to Lydia’s extensive campaigning not to have a mobile telephone mast erected at the top of a nearby hill, signal reception was a five-minute drive or a fifteen-minute walk across open country in any direction. There was also an old record player with a single tape deck and unreliable FM receiver. Its casing had room below for LPs, stacked on their sides, a collection of vinyl that came to an abrupt end in the early 1980s. Sophie blew dust off an old Fleetwood Mac album and inexpertly dropped the stylus halfway through the opening track.

“I can’t bear to see him like that.”

“I think you’re getting it all a bit out of perspective,” said Will. “He’s had a bit too much to drink, that’s all. It happens all the time.”

But it
didn’t,
not to Rowan, and although Will had not spoken unkindly his words immediately put her on the defensive. She was angry at Will for failing to sympathize, angrier still at herself for expecting him to.

She simply shrugged, took the proffered glass of wine with a low murmur of thanks. “God, you’re covered in ash. What was he
doing
out there?” A thought suddenly occurred to her. Had the little urn on the pillow been empty? “Oh no, he wasn’t . . . Mum’s . . . ?”

“That’s what I thought too, but don’t worry, no. Apparently he was setting tomorrow’s bonfire. I couldn’t get much sense out of him, but—hang on, where’s Edie? The travel cot’s still in the boot.”

“She’s in our bed. We can put the cot up in the morning.”

It was as though a bad wind had blown through the building.

“How long are you going to keep this up?” he said, but his voice had dripped dry of the recrimination that would have soaked the question months ago. What Sophie feared was not so much his touch as her reaction to it. In sleep she might drop the guard she fought to maintain by day. He folded his arms and locked his eyes on hers. The impasse broke only when twin shafts of white light swept down the lane and in through the windows.

Sophie felt relief chase the wine through her veins. “Tara or Felix?” she wondered aloud.

There was the slam of car doors, then a bunch of keys was dropped onto the doorstep and a female voice said, “Oh, for fuck’s
sake
.”

“Tara” they said in unison, and the crack was papered over, for the moment.

“It’s open,” called Sophie. She embraced Tara, then held her at arm’s length. Tara had dropped a few pounds, although it was hard to tell how much weight she had lost under all those layers: she always dressed as though for a yoga class, in loose clothes made of hemp or bamboo. Sophie’s jeans and gilet that had oozed weekend chic in Saxby suddenly made her feel prim.

“You look
great
!” she said.

“I know!” said Tara, dropping her bags to tick off a list on newly slender fingers. “We’ve all given up wheat, dairy, caffeine, and refined sugar!” Behind her, Matt and Jake exchanged the briefest of looks that spoke of secret pizza and Coke binges.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” said Sophie. “Everything’s all pasta this and bread that. You won’t be able to eat anything.”

“I think we can relax it for three days,” said Matt. “Hi, Soph, good to see you.” She kissed his cheek, then Jake’s, astonished to see how her nephew had grown in just the last few weeks. Was he ever going to stop? At nearly fourteen, he was as tall as Matt, and was that
stubble
on his upper lip?

“All right, Sophie?” He had dropped the “Auntie” from her name years ago. He rubbed his legs. “My knees are literally going to snap off. That’s not a back seat, it’s a shelf.”

Sophie looked out the window. Next to their tank, Matt’s sports car was a silver bullet.

Will and Matt greeted each other in the usual way, a loose uneasy sequence of handshake, hug, and punch. Both men were dark-haired, but Matt was stocky like a boxer while Will was as wiry as a marathon runner. Side by side, they looked like doctored photographs of a notional average man, one slightly stretched horizontally and the other vertically.

“Can I interest you in a beer, old boy?” said Will.

“I wouldn’t say no, old boy.”

“Can
I
have one?” said Jake. Sophie turned to Tara, who shrugged a loose approval, or gestured that this battle was long lost, it was hard to tell.

“Sure,” said Sophie. “Just outside the back door.”

“I might have some wine after all,” said Tara. She combed her scalp with her fingers, trying to make her hair look tousled, part of her lifelong campaign against a tidy fall of straight fair hair that never needed color or styling. Sophie smiled to find herself smoothing down her own hair. Having achieved the desired degree of dishevelment, Tara flopped onto the long maroon Chesterfield. Matt joined her, lying parallel. Sophie and Will occupied separate armchairs. The contrast between the two couples was obvious to Sophie. Would Tara pick up on it? She and Matt seemed more of a couple than they did although—no,
because
—they weren’t shackled together by four children. They didn’t even live together, although Tara, when discussing it, had begun to append a “yet” to that statement.”

There was some idle catch-up about the kids, the shape the weekend was to take, the forecast fog and what time Felix was going to arrive. Matt and Will, who had established a jovial rivalry in the kitchen, revealed to each other the recipes they were going to cook for supper on Saturday night. Matt had brought his own chef’s knives down from London, as he couldn’t work with the ones here in the barn. Will went one better, producing something that looked like a little chrome fire extinguisher.

“What the fuck’s
that
?” said Matt, leaping back as a jet of blue and orange flame shot several feet across the kitchen.

“Blowtorch,” said Will. “Crème brûlée. You can’t get the right finish under the grill. It’s a professional one. I go straight to the wholesaler now, it’s the only way to get the quality.”

“You could power a rocket with that,” said Matt, examining the torch and releasing another jet.

“Makes you feel like Zeus, doesn’t it?” said Will. Matt set the blowtorch down on the worktop and looked forlornly at the pestle and mortar he had brought down.

“I think this is the metrosexual version of mud wrestling,” said Tara, rolling her eyes. “Can you see Dad and Uncle Richard discussing the perils of making cheese soufflé in a range?”

“Ha! Hardly,” said Sophie, and then to Will, “I want that somewhere the boys can’t reach it. Or even see it.”

Matt started describing the process of preparing langoustines in garlic and tomatoes to Will in mouthwatering detail.

“Every time he makes one of his
MasterChef
creations, he spends an entire week’s food budget on the ingredients,” murmured Tara.

“I don’t even want to
know
how much he spent on that flame thing. And whenever they create one of these five-course banquets, I end up cooking a parallel supper that the children actually want to eat,” said Sophie.

Overhead, there was a sudden creaking of beams followed by a few heavy footfalls, and the sound of Rowan throwing up, repeatedly. Sophie hoped he was in his own bathroom—hoped he had made it to a bathroom at all.

“Is that one of the kids?” asked Tara.

“Dad’s drunk.”

“Dad?”
Sophie was vindicated that Tara’s level of consternation matched her own, and shot Will a triumphant look that missed its target. “I didn’t even know he was here. His car’s not outside. Are you sure he’s drunk?”

“Yes. He’s had a whole bottle of port and started a bonfire.”

“What’s he burned?”

“Newspapers. He says he’s preparing the ground for tomorrow’s fire.”

The vomiting ended with a series of bilious retches.

“Jesus,” said Matt, his voice straddling disgust and awe. “He’s really going for it, isn’t he?”

The conversation drifted away from food. Another bottle was uncorked. An ancient box of Trivial Pursuit was pulled out of a drawer but not opened. The grandfather clock doled out portions of the night.

“I wonder where they’ve got to,” said Tara.

“They?” said Sophie.

“Felix said he was bringing a girl.”

“
Did
he?” said Will, at the same time that Sophie said “Felix has got a girlfriend? First I’ve heard of it. Does Dad know?”

“I don’t know if Dad knows. I didn’t know
you
didn’t know. Still, he must be quite taken with her if he’s bringing her down here.”

“First girlfriend, at the tender age of twenty-nine,” said Will. Sophie and Tara glared at him.

“Below the belt, Will,” said Tara. “You know he’s funny about his scar.”

Will held up his palms in conciliation, and rolled his eyes at Matt in the vain hope of finding an ally. Matt studied the small print on his beer bottle: he still regarded MacBride familial bickering as a spectator sport rather than one he could participate in.

“I wonder if she’s like the rest of his friends,” said Tara.

Sophie hoped not. Since his mid-teens, Felix had lived entirely ironically, hanging out with a group who dressed anachronistically in smoking jackets or old heavy-metal tour T-shirts; held ironic Royal Wedding street parties; ate ironic meals; served fish finger sandwiches at dinner parties; and even went on ironic holidays to Butlins and Benidorm. The weekend would hold enough tension without some self-styled retro princess sneering at their beloved traditions and stonewalling their jokes.

“What
do
we know about her?” pressed Sophie. “What’s her name, for a start?”

“Literally, I don’t know anything more than I’ve told you,” said Tara. “I wonder what she’ll make of the old place.”

It was a MacBride theory that a person’s first reaction to the barn told you all you needed to know of their character. Will, the only boyfriend Sophie had brought to the barn, had explored the whole place in silent wonder before giving the verdict: “This would make an architect cry. I
love
it. But then I knew I would: it’s such a big part of you.” Tara often said that one of the reasons she and Matt had lasted was that on crossing the threshold for the first time he hadn’t admired it, criticized it, or analyzed it, but had dropped his bags and let out a long cheer just to test the acoustics.

Soon after midnight, Felix’s ancient orange Skoda (ironic) came to a noisy halt in front of the barn. Then the stable door opened and Felix was there, in a coat with mittens hanging from strings at the wrists and a deerstalker hat.

The first thing Sophie noticed about the girl was her hair: long, matte, dark, and thick. It hung in a curtain over most of her face but could not disguise exquisite features, all eyes and cheekbones, the one-in-a-million perfect proportions of the cover girl or movie star. She dressed that part too, in slim trousers, heels, a thin white vest under a tailored, dove-gray leather jacket. Was Sophie being oversensitive to imagine that the girl’s beauty ridiculed Felix’s own disfigurement? He was trying to look casual, as though he had stunningly beautiful girlfriends to stay in Devon all the time.

“Kerry, these are my sisters, Sophie and Tara, and this is Will, and this is Matt, and this is Jake. Everyone, this is Kerry.”

For a second or two Felix let slip his mask of irony; when he looked at Kerry it was with the pride and adoration of a bridegroom at the altar. It was the first genuine emotion Sophie had seen cross his face since Lydia’s funeral.

Kerry flicked the briefest of glances at each of them, then lowered her lids again and went back to staring at the floor. She did not speak, and neither did she look around her new surroundings. Sophie locked eyes with Tara for a second.
No
reaction to the barn was unheard of. There was already much to discuss.

Felix closed the door behind him and bent down to as if to kiss Sophie, but instead plucked the wineglass from her hand and drained it. “Good bouquet, strong nose, lovely vintage,” he said, back to his usual self. “Sit down, Kerry, I’ll get you a drink. Bloody
hell,
it’s hot in here.”

He shrugged off his jacket and Kerry removed her own. She wore no bra under her camisole, and Sophie felt herself blush on her behalf. Opposite her, Tara cringed while Matt and Will, both old enough to affect ignorance, began an earnest discussion about the best way to peel a king prawn while poor Jake shifted and pulled a cushion over his lap.

Kerry said nothing for the rest of the evening. She answered any questions directed her way with nothing more than a smile. She seemed genuine enough, but let Felix talk for her. Was it true, then, that cliché about beautiful people not bothering to develop a personality because their looks did all the work for them? When Felix went to the fridge, Sophie followed him on the pretext of recycling a wine bottle and pulled the door closed behind them.

“Well?” she said.

Felix was too drunk, or tired, or delighted, to bother hiding his smirk. “What do you reckon? I’m punching above my weight, I know, but . . . she’s
amazing,
isn’t she?”

“She seems very . . .” Sophie groped for the right word. Beautiful was too obvious, and wasn’t there an implicit insult there? Strange? Naive? Shy?
Rude?
“She seems . . .
sweet
. But does she speak?”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t exactly be at your most loquacious if you had to meet an entire family all at once.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. Will had been a little overawed at first, but then he had been very young. She couldn’t remember the first time Matt had met the family en masse, but she did recall that some of his predecessors had been dumb in the face of the MacBrides’ energy and solidarity.

“So, where did you meet her, what does she do, how long have you been together, what kind of background is she from? I want to know everything.”

“Christ, you’re
so
like Mum,” said Felix. “OK. In no particular order. She came into the shop about two months ago and we’ve been together since the night after that. She isn’t working at the moment. As for background, you vile snob, I don’t think she’s got much in the way of family. Not that I mind that, you lot are more than enough for one man to deal with.” Sophie smiled to herself; he’d paraphrased another theory she and Tara had come up with, an idea that they were drawn to people with sparse backgrounds because they were so easy to assimilate into the MacBrides. A competing clan might have proved an unstoppable force to the immovable object of their own unit. “She’s a riddle, wrapped inside an enigma, hidden inside a mystery . . . all lurking behind a fantastic pair of tits.”