The Burning Air (4 page)

“Felix!”

“I promise you, you’ve never seen anything like them,” said Felix. “They’re—”

“Strangely, I’m not particularly keen to imagine your girlfriend’s breasts,” said Sophie, folding her arms across her own chest, very aware that milk had only temporarily restored to her the full breasts of her twenties. Not that Will saw them in that context anymore, not since long before Edie was born. She breathed through the reflexive surge of anger until she felt calm, then surprised herself by throwing the empty wine bottle into the recycling bin so hard that it smashed.

Back in the sitting room, Felix tossed a beer each to Jake and Matt, then stretched out next to Kerry. Her jacket was back on, and her appearance less provocative, but the shift in the atmosphere had not been so easily remedied. Tara was staring through a fine veil of hair. The men were ignoring her now, Matt and Jake in conversation. Will was ostentatiously ignoring Kerry, as he did all attractive young women. The tension a stranger can introduce is different from the kind that can exist between people who know one another well. It is less elastic, more likely to shatter than stretch.

Felix curled an arm around his mute, beautiful girlfriend. Unusually it was the eager expression on his face rather than the features of it that showed his vulnerability. Kerry made no reciprocal gesture and Sophie was struck again by the conviction that such an uneven match could only end in Felix getting terribly hurt. For the first time since Lydia’s death Sophie was glad that her mother was not around to see what might unfold.

5

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2013

E
DIE HAD SERVED her purpose as a human bolster in the night: now she functioned as a human alarm clock, seizing a fistful of her mother’s hair and hooking a fat little finger up her nose. Sophie gathered her daughter, still in her sleeping bag, into her arms and got out of bed. The open bathroom door and the synthetic citrus scent of disinfectant told her that Rowan was already up and the previous night’s mess dealt with.

Tara was in the sitting room, doing halfhearted sun salutations on the Indian rug. Rowan was at the kitchen table, a pot of tea on the go, looking fresher than he deserved to.

“Edie!” he said brightly. “Come and say good morning to Grandpa!” He bounced the baby on his lap.

“Dad, are you OK?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

He was using his headmaster’s voice, which meant that this conversation would go the way he wanted it to—in this case, no further. Fine. It was with relief that she let the subject go. There were enough difficult conversations to be had as it was.

Rowan stroked Edie’s cheek. “She’s so like you were at her age, Sophie. It’s like having you back again.”

“I’m right here,” she said, but she knew exactly what he meant.

Outside, dawn was tentatively uncloaking the gray garden, the naked orchard of knuckle-dragging fruit trees, the piles of leaves, the lawn turned to mud. Although Sophie had spent all her childhood summers here, when she thought about the garden it was always in this state, stripped for winter, brown and bare. It was as wild and sprawling as their courtyard garden at home was cultivated. It sloped gently upward and a foot-high dry stone wall separated it from a scattering of crumbling outbuildings that were all that remained from the estate’s days as a working farm. A hundred yards over the prow of the hill stood a derelict laborer’s cottage. Only its shell survived, each strong wind robbing the roof of a few more of its remaining tiles. Ugly steel shutters at the doors and windows kept the children out.

The farmhouse itself—a tiny, two-roomed shack—had been three centuries old when it was pulled down by Lydia’s grandfather. This had been in the 1950s and before the conservation movement had reached their part of Devon. The old foundations had finally been dug out just five years ago, with the intention of leveling the land and building a cabin on the site to create an overspill barn for the growing family. Planning permission had never been granted and the right-hand side of the garden remained a maze of deep dykes and ditches, which the boys had commandeered for a mysterious, noisy war game known as Death in the Trenches. Next door Tara’s exhalations developed an air of conclusion, prompting Sophie to consider that this might be the last time all weekend she had her father to herself. It seemed important that they discuss Lydia’s ashes alone, a legacy of the childhood in which she had frequently been old enough to be party to information that her siblings were deemed too young to understand. She turned her back to the window.

“Dad, about Mum’s ashes,” she said. “We don’t have to scatter them this weekend if you don’t want to.”

The usual grief that arced across Rowan’s face upon hearing Lydia mentioned was this time corrupted with something else that Sophie could not identify.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Forget it, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“No, it’s time,” he said.

“OK.” She gestured to the garden. “The obvious place is out here, I suppose. We could plant a tree, maybe? Or even another orchard. Or we don’t have to plant anything, we could just say a few words and . . .
when
should we do it? I don’t know, Dad, what do you think?”

“Mooorniiiing!” Tara bounded into the kitchen. “I’m starving. Shall we get breakfast on?” Her exuberance closed the possibility of serious discussion.

Sophie knew that the smell of a full English breakfast beckoning its way up the stairs would rouse the sleepers. She threw some rashers in a pan, melted a knob of butter for eggs. The grease worked its way into her skin and hair, but that smell would soon be overpowered by wood smoke.

Rowan watched Tara run a breadknife through a loaf of unsliced white and said, “I can’t believe that, in women of your generation and of your education, it’s still you who do all the cooking and the men who come downstairs and eat it.”

“Not true,” said Tara. “Will and Matt are doing some big supper thing later. And anyway, not
all
the women are downstairs cooking.”

Rowan looked blank.

“Felix has brought a girl with him,” said Sophie.

Shock stole the color from Rowan’s cheeks so that the full force of his hangover showed on his face. “But I thought . . . I thought it would all be
family,
” he said.

“Matt’s not technically family,” said Tara.

“That’s different. I
know
Matt. And I knew he was coming. This weekend is—I just didn’t bank on having to deal with a stranger.” He peered into his mug as though the answer lay in the tea leaves. “What’s she like, then, this . . . ?”

“Kerry,” said Sophie, cracking an egg into the pan. “She’s . . . quiet. Pretty.”

“She’s not
pretty,
” said Tara. “You’re pretty. She’s
stunning
. It’s like the Phantom of the Opera has pulled Helen of Troy.”

Rowan raised his eyebrows, whether at the news that Felix had a beautiful girlfriend or Tara’s uncharacteristic breaking of the omertà surrounding her brother’s looks, it was impossible to tell.

The cooking smells had worked their magic and suddenly the kitchen was full of pajamaed kids and hastily dressed adults fighting for a place at the table. Toby was engrossed in a tattered book about maritime disasters, open on a page about the
Mary Rose.

“Did you know that one theory about how the Tar Barrels began is that they’re connected with the beacons that warned the Spanish Armada was coming?” said Rowan.

“The
Mary Rose
wasn’t in the Armada,” said Toby. “She sank in 1545.”

“I knew that.” Rowan laughed. “I was testing you.”

“Well, I passed.”

“Tobes, it’s bad enough that Grandpa wants to be a teacher on holiday,” said Jake. “But it’s all kinds of wrong that you want to be at school.”

Rowan sat at the head, with Will opposite, everyone else cramming onto the long refectory benches so like the ones at school.

“All these children, it’s enough to instill misanthropy into the most open of hearts,” said Felix cheerfully, hoisting Charlie onto a bench. “Will, you’re a walking advertisement for the benefits of vasectomy.”

“I haven’t had a vasectomy.”

“Exactly.”

Will and Sophie’s children had, by chance, arranged themselves in age order. The color of their hair ran the spectrum from Edie’s white-blond to the dark sand of Toby’s mop, the fading blond a chronometer of childhood. It was as though the older her children got, the more they came to resemble Will. When she was pregnant for the first time, Will had told Sophie that it was a good thing he was dark, that if any of the MacBrides were to reproduce with another blond, their children might be invisible. Tara had already taken this pursuit of melanin to its logical extreme: Jake’s curls had been a rich dark gold when he was a child, and these days he wore his hair so short it was a shadow on his oak-colored skin. He sat next to Edie’s highchair, helping her guide her food into her mouth.

“He’s turning out so well,” said Sophie to Tara, so that Jake couldn’t hear. “Aren’t you glad now that Dad and Will bullied you into sending him to the Cath?”

Sophie immediately wished she’d phrased it better. “Bullying” was absolutely the wrong word for the intervention Rowan and Will had staged, rescuing Jake from drowning in the huge inner-city comprehensive where the children wore what they liked and drug pushers at the gates outnumbered the mothers. Tara, who had never quite outgrown a teenage socialist phase, had interpreted the arrangement and funding of a place for Jake at the Cath as a criticism of her parenting style. Of course, the real shame was not that they had the privilege, but that such privilege was not standard in state education. Lydia had often said that if all children could attend the Cath, the world’s problems would be solved in a generation. Sophie could see Tara’s point, of course, but what were you supposed to do? Sacrifice your children’s education to prove a point?

Trying to persuade Tara, Rowan had made a throwaway comment about boys of Jake’s color needing the best education they could get to arm them against a prejudiced world, accusations of racism had been flung and Sophie and Lydia had to step in and work hard to convince Tara that they were acting not out of snobbery but love. Tara had remained defensive about the subject, so now Sophie was amazed to see her sister smile.

“You know he’s made the first eleven?” Tara could not keep the pride from her voice.

“Under-sixteens, surely?” Sophie corrected her.

“No, they think he’s going to play for the school next summer.”

“Tara, that’s unheard of, that’s
fantastic
!” Sophie whispered. “Especially when you think how angry he was a couple of years ago. You must be so proud.” They both glanced at Jake; if he was listening, he was hiding it well. His concentration was all on Edie, spooning food into her mouth and, frequently, her hair.

“I am, I am. I mean, I’m not deluding myself that that was his
entire
teenage rebellion, and I’m sure there’s more to come, but obviously the Cath’s knocked some of the feral off him. I’m sure one of the reasons he went a bit wobbly at the comp was that they only had games, like, once a week, and you can’t do that with boys, can you; they need to run off their energy or they start looking around for other ways to use it up.” She lowered her voice further. “And actually I think Matt’s done him the world of good, too. Not just because he’s stuck around but because he isn’t trying to be Jake’s dad. He gets that no one would ever be able to replace Louis, so he doesn’t even try.”

Jake gave up on Edie and produced his mobile phone from under the table. He might not have been able to receive a signal but he could still play
Plants vs. Zombies
until his thumbs seized up.

Will cleared his throat, but Matt beat him to it. “Come on, Jake, you know the rules,” he chided. “Not at the table.”

“Sorry,” said Jake, in a voice that went from bat squeak to basso profondo in a single word. Without pausing his game, he tucked in his knees and twisted around on his bottom to get off the bench.

“The idea was that you left the phone, not the table,” said Matt.

“It’s not my fault I’ve got no concentration span. My neural pathways have been rerouted by short-term stimuli. It’s a generational thing.” He went and sat down in the living room and continued to play.

“They teach you too much at that school,” said Matt, but he winked at Tara to soften the admonishment. Will craned to see Jake bent over his phone on the sitting-room sofa. For a moment Sophie thought he was going to march in and confiscate the thing; Will was used to giving Jake the kind of telling-off that only came from
real
love, the kind that makes you cruel to be kind. She looked at her husband and saw not anger but hurt and knew it was because Matt had usurped Will as Jake’s father figure. Sophie could not help but love Will for loving Jake. She watched his shoulders drop as he let it go, and she loved him for doing that, too.

Kerry—who still had yet to say a word—sidled into Jake’s space, directly opposite Sophie. She took the baby spoon and used its soft plastic edge to scrape the puree from Edie’s cheeks, leaving a little orange goatee that made Charlie laugh, before wiping Edie clean with a muslin cloth. Edie spat out the proffered mouthful and batted Kerry’s hand away. This was the point at which most people gave up, turned to Sophie, and said “I think she wants her mum,” but Kerry bent to Edie’s level and whispered something in baby talk that made Edie burst into delighted life. Kerry didn’t break eye contact as she continued to feed the baby and was rewarded with a particular giggle that Sophie had thought was reserved for her. Sophie had seen these women before, innate mothers, nurturing since they were given their first doll and with no ambition other than reproduction. She had never quite understood them, and they made her uneasy. At least she had tasted professional success, at least she had tried.

“She’s a good feeder, isn’t she?” said Kerry. “And she’s got such a lovely laugh.” The shock of Kerry’s voice temporarily robbed Sophie of her own. It was feminine in pitch but scraped and gruff like that of a heavy smoker. Sophie had expected an accent, but there were only the neutral vowels of somebody reasonably—if not privately—educated. She spoke slowly, as if each word had been selected and examined carefully before it was uttered.

“She’s a good girl all round,” said Sophie.

“You’ve got a babysitter for life, there, I reckon,” said Felix. He buttered Kerry a slice of toast. She nibbled at the crust as the rest of them began to clear their plates and shift in their seats. Before they all dispersed for the morning, someone had to bring up the subject of Lydia’s ashes. Sophie felt that the responsibility rested with her, even though it made her feel intensely uncomfortable, as though she were officially assuming the role of the new matriarch.

“I thought today we could . . .” She caught her father’s eye and lost her nerve. “Who’s up for building a bonfire? If we get started after breakfast we can get a really good blaze going by the time it gets dark.”

“Good plan,” said Felix. “I’m all for a bit of child labor. What about you, Edie? Are you going to muck in and earn your keep, or just lounge around in your nappy all day?”

Edie smiled through a new beard of butter and crumbs. She scanned the empty plates for leftovers and with admirable subtlety for a child of nine months, crawled her fingers toward Kerry’s toast. Smiling, Kerry tore the slice into little pieces and gave them to the baby, leaning in close to feed her. Edie put up her hand to Kerry’s face, grabbed a dangling lock of hair and tugged. I should have warned her about that, thought Sophie, who was used to seeing bunches of her own hair suddenly appear in her daughter’s hands, but she smiled to see that Edie was actually trying to tuck Kerry’s hair behind her ears, the way Sophie wore hers.