The Burning Air (20 page)

40

FAR BARN
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2013

T
HERE WAS NO sign of Rowan’s car outside Far Barn, just that ridiculous black minibus that Sophie insisted on driving everywhere. While Tara fumbled and dropped her keys, I yawned my way through Jake’s complaints about the backseat. He wouldn’t have that problem on the return journey.

The children were out of the way when we got there; it was just Will and Sophie sitting on opposite sides of the room, a bottle of wine on the coffee table between them like a mediator. We’d barely got comfortable ourselves when from overhead came a thunder of footsteps followed by an awesome retch and a splash. Rowan was there already and was, to Tara and Sophie’s great consternation, insensibly drunk. All he’d done was to start a meager little bonfire outside, presumably to scorch the ground for the real bonfire the following night, talk some nonsense, and then tread ash all through the house on his way upstairs, but from the way the sisters were talking you would think he had run naked through the house wielding a machete. One of the advantages of the MacBride children’s cosseted upbringing was that it took little to distress them.

While the others were opening bottles I crept upstairs to where he lay snoring, gut hanging out of his trousers. I did a quick search of his room. There were books and clothes and the promised photograph albums but nothing in the way of the diaries. Had he had a change of heart? No—only yesterday he had told Tara that he intended to spend the weekend reading Lydia’s journals. I kept my cool. The barn was large and the weekend was long. Panic now and it had all been for nothing.

Conversation downstairs had a thrilling banality, the dullest of practical exchanges laden with meaning. The more I knew about the pattern of our weekend, the better I could choose my moment. (Of course, this would also be determined by when exactly the next day I could access the diaries, but that one unknown element made it all the more necessary to arm myself with related information.)

When Sophie went upstairs to check on her father, Tara said to Will, “Who’s out tomorrow night? Which cars are we taking?”

“It depends how many kids we’re bringing. No way Sophie’s going to take Edie there, but I think Charlie might be coming. We took Toby when
he
was four, so . . . anyway, Sophie will probably stay behind with one or both of them, so we can do it in two cars. Why?”

“Just wondered how many designated drivers we’d need,” replied Tara. “It’s a shame that Soph misses out. I mean, part of the reason for coming down was to give her a bit of a break, wasn’t it? Are you sure she couldn’t be persuaded to let someone babysit?”

“Are you offering?” Will raised his eyebrows.

“Any other year I would. But Matt’s never been to the festival before, and someone needs to keep a rein on Jake.”

“Well,” said Will. “It was a nice idea.”

•   •   •

There was naturally a moment of apprehension when Kerry turned up. Felix’s eyes followed her around the room as though she would disappear if he blinked. She had decided to play the whole thing as a kind of mute. Jake and Will expressed their obvious attraction to her in opposite ways: Jake staring slack-jawed, Will barely looking at her. Sophie’s and Tara’s reactions were harder to gauge beneath fake, bright smiles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2013

Far Barn was thick with childhood, spent and active. Tara’s, Felix’s, and Sophie’s young years were ubiquitously memorialized; every picture, book, object, had attached to it an anecdote of their idyllic upbringing. The place seemed to be literally crawling with children. The baby that had been a bug on Sophie’s shoulder was mobile now and constantly underfoot. She stared at me with blue eyes that were an heirloom from her grandmother. The entire family revolved around her. Her warring brothers united to dote on her. Her grandfather couldn’t pass her by without ruffling her hair, and even Jake stopped surreptitiously taking pictures of Kerry’s breasts with his mobile phone for long enough to spoon mush into her mouth, although he drew the line at changing her nappy. Kerry, of course, was captivated. The child made me uneasy. It was not natural for someone that small and unformed to have so much power over so many people.

Jake was a little smart-arse at the breakfast table. I think the fact that he literally owed his existence to me made cheek from him harder to bear than it would otherwise have been. I had not yet decided whether to play that card. It would be a shame to waste it, but I could not see quite where it would fit into my revelations. Like so much else, it depended on what I found.

The family made it difficult to search the house. If the boys weren’t playing sardines in tottering wardrobes, Rowan was rifling through drawers, checking pockets, and feeling radiators. I took Rowan’s car key, but the only books in his dusty Range Rover were ancient motoring atlases. I needed to enlist Kerry’s help, but time alone with my wife was as elusive as the grail of the diaries.

When we were all getting ready for a wood-gathering expedition from which I could not convincingly excuse myself, I snatched thirty seconds alone with Kerry and made her go out in her flimsiest shoes, knowing she’d be forced to turn back. With the house almost empty, she’d have a better chance of looking for the diaries. I winced at the thought of the expensive suede being ruined, but internally wrote off the investment.

On our return I was first out of the boot room, kicking off my shoes and running up the stairs. Sophie was alone in her bedroom. I found Kerry in Rowan’s not scouring cupboards but cradling the baby on her lap. Four little Guys stared blankly ahead.

“Find anything?” I said, but the sarcasm was lost on her. “I take it you’ve been busy looking.”

She at least had the grace to look shamefaced.

“I did try to talk to Sophie about them, but I didn’t really know how to bring it up, and then she found her mum’s jumper and . . .” The baby gurgled.

“What are you wittering about?”

Kerry reached to pull open the drawer beneath a wardrobe and gestured to a spangled mass of wool pushed into one corner. “That. Sophie wants to keep it. Her mum knitted it when she was pregnant with Felix.”

I raised my hand in warning; Kerry offered me her cheek to protect the baby’s head, which only made it worse. I forced myself to breathe evenly.

“Kerry.
Kerry.
Don’t forget who she was. She’s not some cuddly granny in a fluffy jumper. She killed my mother. It’s imperative that we find those books this weekend; it’s Saturday lunchtime already and we still haven’t cracked it.”

“Yes. No. I know.”

“Thanks for nothing,” I said. The baby started to cry. “I’ll do it myself. Make it stop that noise. Can you take it away, so I can hear myself look?”

I plundered the room, looking under the bed, pulling drawers, even unrolling a rug. If the diaries had been there, I would have found them. An icy panic began to lap at my ankles. Just for a sense of achievement, on the way out of the room, I pulled the jumper onto one of the Guys, wrapped that in a moth-eaten blanket, carried the whole thing downstairs with the other three, and gave it pride of place on top of the bonfire.

•   •   •

Sophie’s paroxysm was awe-inspiring. This red-faced, tearstained harpy was a stranger who plunged her hands into the fire and threw accusations like stones. It was a rare glimpse of what the MacBrides were like when they lost control; even in grief, they had all been quiet and dignified. The only thing that stopped me fully relaxing and enjoying the spectacle was that Kerry was its subject. I was on edge, worried that she would respond and give us both away, but she doggedly adhered to her policy of silence.

The charred atmosphere filled the ground floor of the house long after Sophie had gone upstairs to wash and calm down. Around the kitchen table, Rowan, Will, and Tara spoke about Sophie’s mental health, telling me a secret story about postnatal depression and child abandonment that jarred with the smug, superior image Sophie showed the world. I made the right noises of sympathy and concern to hide my burgeoning anger; the confidence now only highlighted the exclusion that had preceded it. Tara had not, then, trusted me as much as I had thought.

•   •   •

Will banned everyone from the kitchen while we got to work. He poured cream into ramekins; I attacked the langoustines, calamari, and scallops until the air was thick with fish and fire and garlic. My dish took minutes to prepare and hours to simmer, and I stood at the stove, stirring occasionally, in a half trance. It was dark outside, Saturday afternoon was turning into Saturday night, the diaries were somewhere in the house and still I had not found them. They must be in one of the unlikely, dusty recesses of the barn; the garage, perhaps, or the greasy nooks of the kitchen and storehouse. Every minute that passed, I had less time to spend with the books. Once found, the work was of more than a moment. I would have to open them—now, I had no compunctions about excising the locks to save time—but then I’d have to skim-read an unknown number of volumes before preparing my presentation—and all this entirely undetected. Short of asking Rowan where they were, how was I to access them? The heat and the stress were making me dizzy and when Will began to test his new culinary toy, the air became intolerably hot and dry and I had to get out of that kitchen.

The crisp outside air was welcome for the first minute or so. After that, the sweat on my skin cooled unpleasantly, and I wandered over to the remnants of the bonfire. I took the big iron bar Rowan had been using as a poker and began to rake through the embers. The things that had burned in our main fire were reduced to almost nothing—a zipper and some strings of melted white plastic, a little stone circle that demarcated the smaller fire that Rowan had lit the night we arrived. I poked the pool of ashes aside and ran the tip of the poker along the rocks, enjoying the mineral click of iron on stone. I stirred the pool of ash; the floor of the fire seemed to be tiled with some kind of dull metal. I bent closer, blinking through the smoke. When I saw what I had exposed I leaped back as though I’d touched their surfaces.

They had been tarnished and dulled by flame but their shape had not been affected by the fire. There were several dozen little padlocks, all broken up. Here was all that remained of Lydia MacBride’s diaries. For years I had run hot and cold, been both confident and doubtful about these books and here was the ultimate confirmation. What they had contained was so incriminating, so disturbing, that Rowan had burned the lot and then drunk himself into oblivion.

Little charges of electricity went off inside my skull and in the pit of my belly. I felt hot and dry all over, as though there were no water in my body, only an angry ball of fire licking the inside of my skin. My eyes were even drier than my mouth, my lids rasping with each blink. I could have done with tears, but it was too late for that. The only weapon I had was my identity and Kerry’s, and what were we—who was I?—without the context of Lydia’s confession?

Even my sense of self seemed to be splintering, shards of the boy I had been piercing the man I had made, so that I could not tell who was in control, Darcy or Matt.

•   •   •

At supper, I must have spent half an hour chewing the same ring of squid. For once I was glad of their habit of traveling in a pack down memory lane, glad no one asked me to join in as they reminisced about childhood holidays and times shared with their mother, more slow steps in the constant process of her canonization.

I had eyes only for Rowan. Whenever his wife’s name was mentioned discomfort flickered on his face and I
knew
he knew her elusive secret. His spoken word was now the only possible substitute for her written one. In fact, it would be
better,
as I knew how it would pain and humiliate him to recount the truth before his children. The more inscrutable Rowan remained, the more determined I became. If only I could get him to say it. There must be
something
that would make him talk, but I was tired, and I was in shock, and I could not think what that thing might be.

•   •   •

I was the last awake. When I was sure the others were all asleep, I went back out into the garden. I looked up at the black mirrors of the back bedroom windows. I loosened the bulb in the sensor light so that I would not be floodlit and worked by the light of the breakdown lantern from the trunk of my car, balanced on the ground. I dug with my fingers like a mole, combing through earth and ash for surviving scraps of Lydia’s writing, shining the torch into the bare branches in vain, vain hope. What was I really expecting? A perfectly preserved page, setting out her guilt, miraculously untouched by the flames? At three in the morning I gave up and returned to the sitting room.

•   •   •

I drained the dregs of a Grenache and opened a Pinot Noir. Regret smothered me. I rued all the risks I had not taken. Why hadn’t I broken into the house, or forced my way into the apartment at the school? Why hadn’t I made a scene in the hospital? Between us, the morphine and I might have coaxed a confession from her. But no. I had fucked those opportunities up like I had fucked up the one golden chance life had ever given me. I felt twelve years old again, weak with disappointment and pathetic in the face of an undefiable authority.

I placed an empty glass upside down on the table, put my fingertips on its base, as though about to perform a séance. I wished more than anything that my mother could come back, just for half an hour, long enough for us to talk about everything that had happened since she had left me. She would have known what to do; she always did. It was only without her that I came up with these schemes that painted me into lonely corners. She wouldn’t even have to talk if I could just touch her. She could even, I thought, tears brimming, release me.

Overhead, Edie started to cry. Not loud enough to wake the sleeping, just a weak, repetitive bleat swiftly subdued by the soft soothing low of Sophie’s voice.

Mothermothermothermothermothermothermothermother.
My fingers slipped on the glass, and I swear it wasn’t my doing. It was as though my mother’s spirit tossed a lifeline of inspiration to my drowning brain. Threaten that child and Rowan would admit to anything. She was the beating heart of the family. To rip her from their breast would be the perfect revenge. Like for like. Family for family.