The Burning Air (8 page)

DARCY

12

M
Y MOTHER HAD few possessions: the books, a sparse wardrobe of clothes we shared, and a set of Russian
matryoshka
dolls, the only leftovers from her own childhood, from her half-life before me. The dolls lived on our mantelpiece in place of the family photographs that ordinary people keep in this spot. I doubt that they were worth anything much, but with their painted jewel-box colors they seemed as valuable to me as any silver-framed heirloom. I loved the richness of detail, the tiny brushstrokes of brocade on their shawls, the individual eyelashes, the little swirling flowers of their headscarves.

They were for looking at, not for playing with. I never saw my mother touch them, but she must have because their arrangement would occasionally change. Usually they would be lined up in descending order of height, with the big-hipped mother doll on the left and the tiny skittle of the baby on the right. The dolls’ eyes were slightly cast to one side so that in this arrangement every
matryoshka
seemed obliquely to smile at her smaller self.

I remember them not in a row but stacked one within the other, seven separate but same selves. I picture them this way not because that is how I last saw them but because something about this formation speaks to me of myself. The outer shell contains everyone I have ever been, a series of identities formed at those points in time when, through no fault of my own, life has become intolerable and I have had to shut down, start again, assume the next in my progression of identities. Inside the polished exterior I present to the world now is the shell of myself at twenty-two, at seventeen, at fourteen, and of course at twelve, the year I applied to the Saxby Cathedral School and first encountered the MacBride family.

The school was, and is, known locally as the Cath. It is a strange mix of traditional and progressive, fee-paying but with widely advertised scholarships; uniform-wearing but coeducational, and its four-centuries-old walls house science and computer laboratories equivalent to any university. It had always loomed large in our lives, much as its buildings and land and the cathedral that gave it its name dominated the town. Saxby has city status, but it is one of the smallest in England, smaller than many towns, cinched by a ring road that it then had yet to breach, a modern version of the ancient city walls that still remain here and there, chunks of medieval masonry between the Carphone Warehouse and Starbucks.

My mother loved the Cathedral Quarter. Its vast sloping greens, the uniform honeycomb stone of its buildings, and its ancient, academic architecture of secret quadrangles and cloisters reminded her of the place she had been first at her happiest, and later at her unhappiest. The cathedral bells were my lullaby and my morning alarm. I remember walking with her around the boundary of the school, my hand in hers, the discrepancy between our strides and the fact that we were out of doors suggesting that I was very young indeed. This school, she promised, would be my salvation as I had been hers, my attendance there the only thing that could justify my leaving her for such a large part of every day. A child as unique and special as I was deserved, needed, a unique and special environment. The Cath had a prep school that accepted children from nursery age, but the upper school’s intake began at thirteen, and a single annual scholarship was awarded to one child of this age whose family could not afford to pay for their education. I was eleven when the first official approaches began.

At that time our rooms were on the top floor of a house on the end of the Old Saxby Road that was ripe for gentrification. The houses on our street were rented to students, immigrants, and those whose rent was paid by social security. The people in the rooms below ours came and went. Whatever their ages and ethnicities, they were always uneducated and incurious like Orwell’s proles; she called them the “nothing people,” and I was forbidden to talk to them. My mother vacuumed the common areas of the building every day, paying as much attention to the patches of carpet that were black with overuse as she did to the corners where the wool was still a soft royal blue. On alternate weeks she washed the walls and the skirting boards. Few people ever climbed the top two flights of stairs to admire our spotless landing. Those callers we did receive tended not to be social. Health visitors, education inspectors, doctors, and the occasional bobby, new to his beat, who’d found me in the city center during school hours and picked me up for truanting.

School for me was a narrow room with a narrow frosted window, a single bed and a desk at which I read and wrote and recited and criticized and compared and translated and conjugated and memorized. Theoretically this room was also my bedroom, but usually I shared Mother’s bed, as she believed that it was not good for me to sleep where I studied. She believed that if both were done in the same space then the opposing necessities of sleep and work would bleed into each other until both were compromised.

It was one of many princples that shaped my childhood. She was as strict with my nutritional diet as she was with my intellectual one, believing that too much food slowed the body down and led to living through the body instead of the mind.

“We’re above all that flesh-and-blood nonsense,” she often said. “Our aim is to live entirely in the mind. Only weak and stupid people live through their bodies. We are superior to all that. We are
cerebral
people. The body is sex and shit and birth and mucus. What good can ever come of all that?”

She was intolerant of vanity. We had no mirror. Clothes came from the charity shop, and once every six weeks or so she would hack my hair off at the chin in the same crude pageboy style that she wore, although mine was an even dull black while hers was threaded with silver. I knew enough from my excursions into Saxby city center to realize that I looked different from other children my age, and while the subtleties of fashion were lost on me, it was clear that one aspect of my appearance had to change.

“
Please
can I have a brace on my teeth?” I’d plead after I’d glanced into a shop window and seen a bucktoothed urchin in an Oxfam sweater blinking back at me.

“Your teeth are perfectly healthy.”

“Other kids my age have braces.”

“Other children your age are also walking around dressed as gangsters or prostitutes. They don’t see any conflict between being walking hoardings for sportswear and eating junk food until their blubber hangs out of their denims. It’s so important that you don’t define yourself by your appearance now, not before your character is formed. Anyone who judges you on the arrangement of your teeth is not someone whose approval you need. It is your intellect, the words you leave behind you, that make you who you are.”

The tears would always come then. “
You
had a brace when you were a teenager!”

She stroked my cheek. “Yes, I did. I was a beautiful young woman, and look where it got me.” And then she would fix me with a stare that brooked no debate and an inhospitable silence. My mother had a repertoire of silences that put most people’s entire vocabulary to shame. The subtle differences between the companionable calm in which we spent most of our days, and the punishing frost that came when I was lazy or slow, were perceptible only to me.

I could hardly blame her for these taciturn rages. Other mothers, lesser women, might have turned the circumstances of my birth against me, but not her. I never felt anything but love and gratitude, and she never put me to bed without breaking her silence.

“You saved me,” she would say, stroking my hair as I fell asleep in the pillows that smelled of us. “As soon as I knew about you, you were a tiny candle in the darkness, only your flame never gutters, does it, but burns brighter all the time. You will be
brilliant
, Darcy. When my life was . . . stolen, like that, I thought that was the end of it, that I would never be brilliant, that I would never make my mark. And then, when I saw you, I understood at once. We can achieve it all through you, Darcy. A fine mind, nurtured from birth by someone who loves you and then, when you’re ready, formal education, a world-class school and one of the great universities. I don’t want you to be my equal, but my
better.
”

•   •   •

I was twelve when we made it through the initial selection process to the interview stage of the scholarship award. My place at the Cath was presented to me as a fait accompli, and the culmination of her life’s work. But in pushing me toward that school, and the family who were as much a part of it as the keystones of its Great Hall, my mother was matchmaking me with her own murderer.

13

DECEMBER 1996

O
N THE DAY of the interview, Kenneth came to collect me. I was supposed to call him Uncle Kenneth, but he wasn’t actually my uncle or even my mother’s, just some kind of distant cousin on her side, also estranged from the family. Somewhere in England were an ex-wife and two grown-up children. He had placed one bet too many and a home had been lost, children removed from their school in a perfect storm of bitterness and shame. He frequently pledged never to lose us, his second family. He could not see that we were never really his to lose. We belonged only to each other.

Kenneth oversaw those aspects of my education that Mother could not. His science was decent and he was an inspirational tutor of mathematics. His entire life was about practical application of the driest of theories, using complex algebraic formulae to calculate the true odds behind the bookmakers’ figures. Even his home, a basement flat in the city center, was determined by geometry, it being equidistant from the town’s three betting shops with Saxby itself a center point between the racecourses of Cheltenham, Goodwood, and Taunton.

Kenneth was wearing the tweedy green blazer he called a sports jacket and a dark-red tie. I was suddenly conscious of my charity-shop slacks and boxy shirt that were the most formal clothes I owned.

“Do I look all right?” I said.

“‘Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim,’” said my mother (I don’t know what other mothers did when they were nervous; mine quoted Jane Austen). “It’s not a fashion show, and anyway there’s a chance it could work to our advantage. Apparently they often give it to children from materially poor backgrounds. A child who’d grown up in
care
got it a few years ago. And soon you’ll be in uniform, just think! You’ll wear that uniform with twice the pride of the other children. To the people of the town, it will speak of privilege and birthright and wealth. And to the other pupils and the teachers you will be a
gifted child
, one who walks the corridors on merit rather than simply through inherited wealth. And
we
will know”—she looped her hand around to include all three of us—“that you will be restored to the kind of people you come from, an intellectual elite.”

My mother was clever, telling me the story of my birth before I was old enough to understand it. By the time the subtext filtered through to me, my subconscious had been assimilating it for years, and I was less distressed than if it had been broken as news. I vowed never to raise the matter with her directly, and forced myself not to think about it either, sure that if I locked it down securely enough, no password would release it.

Within the laureled railings the place was familiar yet the perspective was not. I felt as though I had stepped into a famous painting. Inside, the entrance hall was dominated by two staircases which curved like the wings of a giant angel preparing to fly or embrace. The wooden panels of its walls were gilded with the names of boys (and, since the mid-1980s, girls) who had captained sports teams or been heads of their house. I stood for a moment and saw myself climbing those stairs, book under my arm, my clothes replaced by the smart, bottle-green livery of the Cath. I let myself imagine my name painted onto the walls. Games Captain? Head of House? Head Prefect? Unfamiliar with the hierarchies of achievement, I did not know which was the greatest honor. Beside me, I felt Kenneth fidget.

A long corridor was broken up by full-length windows of dimpled glass that cast boxes of light onto the parquet floor. The walls were lined with pews and seated maybe fifteen other candidates. Were they the sum of my competition? For all I knew they interviewed this many children every day for a week. I was the only one not in pristine school uniform, and most of them had both parents there. Many carried musical instruments and immediately I felt my disadvantage; it was the one thing that my mother and Kenneth could not teach me.

The parents swapped rumors about various scholarships, referring to the “circuit,” and from the conversations that took place above my head I gleaned that most were entering their children for multiple scholarships up and down the country. They talked about Winchester, Roedean, Marlborough, Wellington, Benenden—schools that I knew encompassed the breadth of England. I was astonished, not by the parents’ drive (that expression was as familiar as, and indivisible from, affection) but by the idea that they were prepared to send their children far away in pursuit of their education. My mother had told me time and again that it was Saxby or nowhere, that she could not bear to lose me at term times. It was already out of the question that she should move house; she could not even leave it to buy food.

A sixth-former, herself a winner of the scholarship, gave us a guided tour before the selection process began.

“This is where we do the exams,” she said with a theatrical shiver when we were inside the sweeping Great Hall with its portraits and busts.

I was one of the first to be called to interview and was led through double doors to a room with more paneling, deep-red carpets, and a wide desk behind which sat two men in long black gowns, and an elderly woman wearing a navy pillbox hat.

“Welcome to our school, Darcy,” said the fair-haired man in the middle. “I’m Rowan MacBride, the admissions tutor.” Even with hindsight I can’t honestly claim that I felt any sense of foreboding. “This is Dr. Bedford, our deputy headmaster, and this is Mrs. Mawson-Luxmore, widow of the late Judge Mawson-Luxmore, our benefactor. Now, Darcy, I think the first thing to do is to congratulate you on making it this far along the application process. We’ve had a particularly high standard of applicants this year.” He glanced down at his notes. “I’m all the more intrigued by your application as it tells me that your achievements come from being homeschooled. The local authority inspectors have been very impressed with the standard of your education, as are we if these essays are anything to go by. We’ll test your academic mettle after lunch, of course, but for now I’m interested in things you like to do in your spare time.”

“Oh,” I said. I was thrown; my mother did not believe in spare time. Perhaps by that they meant time away from my mother? In that case . . . I thought of the looping explorations I made of the city when Kenneth was in the bookie’s. “Well. I like to run.”

“Ah, track and field,” said Mr. MacBride. “I ran for the school myself at your age. What’s your preferred distance?”

“The longer the better.”

“Ah, cross-country. And what’s your best time?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We haven’t . . . I don’t really count it. Perhaps I could do a lap of the Great Hall for you?”

I hadn’t meant to make them laugh, but I don’t think they knew that, and afterward the interview went very well.

“Nearly done,” MacBride said. “We’ve established what you can offer the school. But why do
you
want
us
?”

All I told was the truth.

“It’s very important to my mother; she wants me to be a real success, academically. I’ve got a lot to live up to; she wants me to do better than her—she never got to finish . . .” Spent adrenaline, or relief that the day was drawing to a close, had loosened my tongue. My throat grew suddenly parched, my tongue seemed twice its size and instead of words, only a freakish noise, somewhere between a click and a cough, came out.

“Are you quite . . . ?” began Dr. Bedford before reaching forward to offer me a glass of water from the carafe on the desk. While I downed it, the adults’ eyes clicked together loaded with meaning I couldn’t understand. The lady in the pillbox hat made a note and showed it to the men. I croaked my way through a few questions about my favorite periods in history, my voice and composure returning slowly to normal. They thanked me for my time and wished me good luck in the examination.

Back in the corridor, Kenneth obsessively checked his watch like the White Rabbit.

“You’re driving me mad,” I said. “If there’s a race on, why don’t you just meet me back here at three, when it’s all finished?”

“I couldn’t possibly leave you here,” he said, but in his mind he was already placing his bets and I was relieved when he went.

They gave us all lunch in the long, chilly refectory. The other applicants and their parents exchanged rumors about the scholarship. A Chinese boy with a violin said that if you got in, they sent a big, stiff envelope full of forms, while a small, thin letter meant you hadn’t made the cut. Afterward we were ushered into the Great Hall, where sixteen chairs and tables laid with papers waited. I turned the page with a soaring sense of glee: practical criticism was Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, history was the Russian Revolution, and the mathematics and science were so easy that I chewed my pencil not through concentration but to stop myself laughing out loud.

Kenneth was late meeting me, as I had thought he might be. I used the spare time to go into the cathedral and pray for acceptance into the school. We did not go to church (although of course we kept the King James Bible as a literary text) and I was unaccustomed to the ritual, but I knelt as I saw others doing. When I closed my eyes, it was not the face of Christ or the Virgin I saw but that of my mother, and she was smiling.