The Fire Child (3 page)

Lunchtime

‘Verdejo, sir?’

David Kerthen nodded at the waiter. Why not drink? It was Friday lunchtime, and he was already en route home, for once ending work early, instead of at ten in the evening. So today he could drink. By the time the plane landed at Newquay he would have sobered up. There was barely any chance of being caught by the police on the A30 anyway. The Cornish police could often be spectacularly inept.

The drink might, also, allow him to forget. Last night, for the third night in a row, he’d dreamt of Carnhallow. This time he’d dreamt of Nina wandering the rooms, alone, and naked.

She used to do that a lot: walk naked about the house. She found it erotic, as he found it erotic: the contrast of her pale skin with the monastic stone or the Azeri rugs.

Sipping his Verdejo, David remembered the night they came back from their honeymoon. She’d stripped and they’d danced: she was naked and he was in his suit and the champagne was ferociously cold. They’d rolled back the carpets in the New Hall to make the dancing easier, he had put an arm around her slender waist, one hand clasped in another. And then she’d slipped from that grasp, running away from him, shadowed and arousing, disappearing into the darker corridors, a blur of youthful nudity.

The memories killed him. Their early happiness had been overgenerous. The sex was always too compulsive. It still gave him bad dreams, charged with a tragic desire or a child-like neediness, followed by regret.

He checked his watch: 1.30. Oliver was late. Their table was half empty, yet the dark, plutocratic Japanese restaurant was conspicuously full.

Unbuttoning his suit jacket, David looked around, taking the mood of Mayfair, checking the oil of London. The wealth of modern London was gamey: the city was marbled with success. You could smell the opulence, and it wasn’t always nice. But it was heady, and it was necessary. Because David was a beneficiary of London’s commercial triumph. As a fashionable QC he got a regular table at Nobu, a sleek office in the serene Georgian streets of Marylebone and, best of all, a half-million-pound salary, with which he could restore Carnhallow.

But they certainly made him work for it. The hours were grim. How long could he keep it up? Ten years? Fifteen?

Right now he needed more alcohol. So he sipped the Verdejo, alone.

David didn’t like being alone at lunch. It reminded him of the days after Nina’s fall. The dismal, solitary meals in the old Dining Room, with his mother self-exiled to her granny flat, refusing to talk. David winced internally as he recalled the eagerness with which he had returned to work after the funeral. Leaving his mother and the housekeeper to look after Jamie in the week. He had, in effect, run away. Because he simply couldn’t face the way all the different emotions had combined into a symphony of remorse. London had been his escape.

Draining the wine glass, David gestured for a refill. As he did, he noticed Oliver, striding to the table.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I had a meeting that dragged. At least we are fashionably late?’

‘Yep, a week after they lost their Michelin star.’

Oliver smiled, pulled out a seat. ‘It doesn’t, ah, seem to have affected business much.’

‘Have a glass, you look as if you need it.’

‘I do, I do. Sss! Why did I join the civil service? I thought I would be serving the country, but it turns out I am serving a cabal of halfwits.
Politicians
. Can we have the black cod?’

The waiter was attending, fingers poised over tablet.

David knew the menu by heart. ‘Inaniwa pasta with lobster, bluefin tuna tataki. And that cabbage thing, with miso.’

The waiter nodded.

Oliver said, ‘We really have been friends for too long. You know exactly what I want. Like a bloody wife.’ He raised a glass, ceremonially.

David was happy to join in, to toast their friendship. Oliver was the only friend he still kept from Westminster School, and he treasured the sheer
longevity
of their relationship. They’d been so close for so long they now shared a form of private language. Like one of those obscure languages spoken by two people in New Guinea. If one of them died, an entire tongue would be lost, with all its secret histories, its metaphors and memories.

The third member of their trio was already dead. Edmund. Another lawyer. Gay. The three of them had formed a gang at school. A trio of conspirators.

So here they were, twenty-three years later, sharing their ancient schoolyard jokes. And talking about Rachel.

‘It’s just that,’ Oliver sat back, his round face slightly flushed from the toil of eating a three-hundred-pound lunch. ‘Well, I didn’t expect it to get so far, so fast.’

‘But you got us together.’

‘Well, I know I introduced you, yes. And I also knew that you’d like her.’

‘And how did you know that?’

‘She’s smart. She’s petite. She’s very ornamental.’ Oliver dabbed his lips with a napkin. ‘I think God designed her for you.’

‘So why the surprise?’

Oliver shrugged. ‘I rather presumed that you would do your normal thing.’

‘Which is?’

‘Sleep with her, get a little bored, move on to the next.’

David sighed. ‘Christ. You make me sound terrible. Am I really that bad?’

‘You’re not evil, just annoyingly successful with women. I’m jealous, that’s all.’

‘Well, stop. I only do it on medical advice. They say multiple partners reduce rates of prostate cancer.’

Oliver laughed, and ate the last morsel of poussin yasai zuke. He shook his head. ‘But, ah, Rachel Daly turned out to be
different
. Of all the women you’ve bedded.
Rachel Daly.
And you married her within a month.’

David sat back, swirling his Verdejo. ‘Eight weeks, actually. But it was a bit quick.’

‘Putting it mildly.’

‘But I really
did
fall for her, Oliver. Is that so implausible? And she got on so well with Jamie. It felt entirely right.’ David scanned his friend’s face for a hidden meaning. ‘Are you implying it was too soon – after Nina?’

‘No,’ Oliver shook his head, emphatically, maybe awkwardly. ‘No no no. Of course not. It’s more that Rachel is so, well, different to your usual girlfriends.’

‘You mean she’s working class.’

‘No, I mean she’s underclass. You do know where she came from?’

‘The rookeries of Plumstead. The favelas of Tooting Bec. What does it matter?’

‘It doesn’t, not really. It’s more that it’s such a
leap
. She’s so very different to Nina. I mean she looks similar, that elfin face, that gamine quality you always go for, but in every other way—’

‘But that’s the point.’ David leaned forward. ‘That’s one of the reasons I fell in love with Rachel, so quickly. She’s
different.
’ He was talking slightly too loudly now, his talk fuelled by wine. But he didn’t care. ‘All those nice girls from Notting Hill, from Paris and Manhattan – Rachel is superbly different to all that. She’s had experiences I can’t imagine. She has opinions I never hear, she has ideas I could never expect, she is also a
survivor
, she’s been through serious shit, yet come out of it intact, intelligent, funny.’ He paused. ‘And, yes, she is sexy.’

The table was silenced. David wanted to say
: She’s almost as sexy as Nina, she’s the only woman I’ve met who might actually one day compare to Nina
, but he didn’t. Because he didn’t want to think about Nina. Instead he ordered two Tokays.

Oliver smiled affably. ‘I suppose you and Rachel have also got things in common.’

‘You mean both our fathers were bastards, and we’re both clearly and ridiculously impulsive.’

‘No, I was thinking that – you’re both a little fucked up.’

‘Ah.’ David laughed. ‘Yes. Possibly the case. But damaged girls are better in bed.’

‘Sweet.’

‘Though the same surely applies to men. Maybe that’s why I was good at womanizing. I’ve got issues.’ David looked across the restaurant at a young family. At a laughing child, happy with his parents. His words came as a reflex. ‘God, I miss Jamie.’

Oliver offered a sympathetic smile. David summoned the waiter, and asked for the bill. Their wine glasses glittered subtly in the low restaurant light.

Oliver sat back. ‘Is it worse, missing kids? Worse than missing girlfriends, or partners? I wouldn’t know.’

David shook his head. ‘Trust me. It’s worse. And the worst of it is, there’s nothing you can do. Even when you do have a nice time with your kids, it makes you regret how you should have done more of the same in the past. Having a kid is like an industrial revolution of the emotions. Suddenly you can mass produce worry, and guilt.’

‘Well, at least you’ll see him tonight.’

David brightened. ‘I will. It’s the weekend. Thank God.’

The lunch over, they wandered out into a bright, soft afternoon, into London at its most benign: the plane trees of Piccadilly caging the city sunlight in softening green. Shaking hands, and slapping backs, Oliver walked off to St James and David headed the other way, tipsily grabbing a cab to his office in Marylebone, picking up his weekend case, and then taking the same taxi, for Heathrow.

But as the traffic stalled through Hammersmith, the good buzz of the booze began to ebb. The bad thoughts came back, the wearying yet unavoidable anxieties.

Jamie. His beloved son.

It wasn’t just that he missed Jamie: it was the fact that the boy was behaving strangely, again. Not as badly as the first terrible months after Nina’s funeral, but there was definitely something amiss. And it was seriously dismaying. David had hoped that bringing Rachel to Carnhallow would mark a new chapter in their lives, would definitively draw an emotional line under it all, let them move into the brighter light of the future, but that hadn’t happened. Jamie was, if anything, regressing. The latest of his letters, to his mother – which David had found in his son’s room just last week – was particularly disturbing.

A quiet panic made David loosen his tie, as if he was being physically choked in the back of the taxi. If only he could tell someone he might at least feel unburdened. But he couldn’t tell anyone, not his new wife, not his oldest friends, not even Oliver – as the lunch had proved. Edmund was the only one who’d known it all. And now Edmund was gone, and David was alone. David was the only one who knew the truth.

Except, perhaps, for Jamie himself.

And there again was the source of David’s ongoing torment. How much did his son know? What had she told him? What had the boy seen, or heard?

David looked out at the endless traffic. It had now come to a complete stop. Like blood frozen in the veins.