Dancing in the Dark (11 page)

Story of my life.

I hear her voice in my head.
Your father was so amazing, so charismatic, so unlike anyone else I've ever met
.
He could have been anything
. . . I'll bet he could. A one-night stand. The milkman. A drug addict, a scoutmaster, a child molester, a murderer. Or the husband of her best friend, the
father
of her best friend, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Oh God, I never asked for more because I thought I knew.

I start to call Terry, and remember they're on holiday. I ring Hugo, and there is no answer. Leaving the house, I walk between the gnarled fruit trees in the orchard. Most of them are barely productive, but I love their shapes, like ancient people who have lived a lifetime of duty and are now finally allowing themselves to rest. I've never understood the mania for espaliering trees to increase their production. It's the same kind of torture as that inflicted on battery hens; it ignores their essential tree-ness and reduces them to mere producers of fruit.

He could have been anything
. . . Anything, anyone, except what I've always believed him to be.

In my bog-garden, I start to dig, thrusting my fork as hard as I can into the damp earth, lifting it ferociously, turning it over, frenziedly shaking the soil off the roots of the meadow grass which I am gradually replacing with plants I have nurtured in my greenhouses, have cherished and fed. In the damp scent of earth is a kind of elemental ecstasy. I plunge my hands into the living soil, squeeze it tightly between my palms. An earthworm oozes slowly past my fingers, unaware of me or my troubles. A green-and-yellow spider skitters on spindly legs across the turned clods of earth. Something flashes in the water of my pond. This is real, I tell myself fiercely, this is true, whatever else is false. I need to mourn my loss and am all the more wounded that I cannot do so because what I mourn has never existed.

When I go back inside, the house is still. Absolutely silent. No reassuring twitter from the fridge, no drip from a tap or creak from the stairs. Nothing. The rooms are full of emptiness, though no emptier than I feel. This has always been my refuge. Now, it feels more like a prison.

‘S
o what did you think?' Carolyn asks.

‘About what?' Cradling the phone between ear and shoulder, Fergus braces his feet against the floor of the houseboat as the wake of a coal-barge travelling up-river smacks against the hull.

‘About Theo, of course. Did the two of you get on?'

‘We're both civilized people,' he says. ‘Even if we'd loathed each other's guts, we were never going to start throwing stones at each other.'

‘So you
did
get on.'

‘I don't really know.' They hadn't
not
got on, which wasn't quite the same thing.

‘Are you going to see her again?'

‘I very much doubt it.'

‘Why not?'

‘Partly because I'm not her type.' Why the hell did he fling out that invitation to Corfu, especially since he hadn't even begun to start making arrangements to go himself? The last thing he needs hanging round while he tries to work is some repressed female, spinster of this parish, divorcée, not that any of the above come anywhere close to the kind of woman he imagines Theodora might be, seems to be,
is
. ‘But mostly because she's not mine.'

‘Charlie said she wouldn't be.'

‘Charlie was right.'

‘We're very disappointed, Fergus.'

‘Please let Charlie know how touched I am by your joint concern.'

‘I personally thought it could fly. I hate being wrong.'

‘I'm truly sorry, but I can't fall in love to order, you know.'

‘Couldn't you try?'

‘Caro, does it occur to you that Theodora might be in love with someone else?'

‘I don't believe it.'

‘She's a normal healthy female; why shouldn't she be? In her line of work, she probably meets bronzed young gods – or even middle-aged ones – every day of the week.'

‘We'd have known about it. Jenny would, she'd have told us.'

‘Maybe Theodora asked her not to.'

‘I don't believe it.' Big sigh. ‘Oh dear, we're all longing for her to get married again.'

‘Maybe she's like me, not the marrying kind.'

‘I don't believe it. About either of you.'

‘What was the last husband like?' He keeps his tone super-casual.

‘I told you all about him before, didn't I?'

‘Tell me again.'

‘He was OK. A bit of a control freak. You'd never believe it, looking at Theo now, but she used to sit there, listening while he pontificated, as though she had no mind of her own, did whatever she was told to do, eat this, drink that, buy your clothes at this shop, your shoes at that one. Here's fifty quid because you've been a good little girl, don't spend it all at once. It was quite embarrassing.'

‘I can imagine.'

‘Actually, he was a pompous toad, to put it bluntly. The sort of man who would order for her in a restaurant without asking what she wanted.'

‘And she lasted five years with him?'

‘I think she was trying to find out who she was. As soon as she did, she left.'

‘How did he take that?'

‘Badly. Charlie met him at some do or other a few months back and he was still going on about it. Hurt pride, though, rather than hurt feelings. He's still coming to terms with the fact that he honoured her with his name and then she had the temerity to reject him. But since she's not your sort, you won't be interested in any of that.'

‘Quite right.' He can hear her thoughts rasping against the inside of her skull. ‘How's the book coming along?' she asks eventually.

‘It's not.'

‘If it's any help, you could always go up to the croft.'

He can hear the little boys behind her, and the undulating voice of the Swedish
au pair telling them to be quiet while their mother is on the phone. ‘Do you mean that little place Charlie's parents have up in Scotland? That's not a bad idea. I loved it there.'

‘I'm pretty sure it's empty at the moment. I could check with Terry.'

He remembers it as rudimentary. Miles from anywhere. When they were younger, he'd been up there with Charlie several times, more or less living off the land. Out of tins. Drinking from the loch. Once, stewing a rabbit Charlie had winged on the road. Drunk as lords, half the time, beating their T-shirts between two stones when they'd finally become so filthy that they stood upright on their own, delighting in their own story-book resourcefulness, detergent stain smoking across the clear water, fish-eyes bulging down among the reeds at the sudden nacreous smudging of their element.

‘On the other hand, I'm not sure isolated is what I need at the moment. It was about as isolated as I could cope with in the Sierra Madre, believe me.'

Way beyond isolated. Detached from any world he'd ever known. Alienated. A five-mile trek downhill through the jungle to the nearest telephone, poverty so grinding that it made his bones ache. The jeeps which would roar to a stop right at his feet, the
muchachos
eyeing him impenetrably from under their hat-brims, hands on guns, not threatening him, not yet, just making it clear that for his health's sake he better tread carefully, keep quiet, notice nothing.

‘You told me once that writers will do anything rather than actually write,' says Caro.

‘True.'

‘You also told me that when there's nothing else to do, in the end you have to write, however much you'd rather not.'

‘Also true.'

‘Well, then.'

He thinks of her as she was when he first knew her, the blonde hair short and boyish, the earnest compassion of her, the palpable sense she emitted of certainty that nothing would go wrong. ‘If you want me to be brutally honest – the brutality being directed at myself, not you – I think I'm afraid to be on my own.'

‘Why is that?'

‘Difficult to say. Unfinished business, perhaps.'

‘Your brother, do you mean?'

‘Possibly.' He considers the matter. ‘Or maybe my father.'

‘Fergus, that's business which will
never
be finished. You can't expect it to. It's tragic, it's terrible, I've no doubt it haunts you and will do so until you die yourself. So absorb it. Let it become part of you, rather than a boulder you carry round with you.'

‘I wish I could. Better men have come from the same places I have, and made far more use of it. Trouble is, read any recent Irish memoir you care to name and you begin to see that I'm a cliché.'

‘Nonsense, you're a one-off, Fergus.'

‘I'd like to think so.'

‘Maybe I'm being terribly simplistic, but it can't hurt you to go to Scotland. You might find that the peace up there will help you.'

‘I'll give it some thought.'

‘Fergus! How are you?' The falsely bonhomous voice of his agent.

‘Fine, thanks.'

‘And the book?'

‘Coming along,' he lies.

‘I had lunch with Claire yesterday, and she's longing to see it.'

‘Don't worry, Evan. She'll have something soon.'

‘When's the deadline?' Evan asks, as though he doesn't have the exact date squarely in front of him.

‘End of January.'

‘If you've got any problems with it, you know I'm here if you want to talk.'

‘I appreciate that. As a matter of fact, I'm thinking of taking off for Scotland for a couple of weeks to get really stuck in to it.'

‘So I can tell Claire it's all systems go?'

‘Absolutely.'

But in truth, it's all systems bunged. It's all systems sealing-waxed shut. Not supposed to be such a thing as a block, it's all down to boredom, laziness, no ability, no moral fibre – Father Vincent right about that at least, if nothing else. Hard to describe the gap between the strength and beauty of the luminous lines in his head and the flatness of them on the page. Hard to describe the discomfort of literary constipation, there are no little pills to sort this one out, nothing on the market to unplug, unblock, to give you go and keep you regular.

In the end, there's only you.

Theodora keeps intruding into his days. He hears her cool voice rejecting his Corfu suggestion. Thank God! How would he have been able to get out of it if she'd jumped at the idea, wanted to know when and where, times and dates, started buying bikinis, packing bags? He tries to push her away but finds himself running his mind's eye over the smooth olive of her skin, the curve of a shoulder under her dress, the shape of her arms. He thinks of the tender vulnerability on her face, the arrogant husband, never met but instantly recognizable, the chains hanging from her neck. Baggage indeed.

Why does he keep recalling the way her eyes sometimes glow, as though a candle has been placed behind them?

Even if he does get to Corfu, it won't be the way it once was, he tells himself, already prepared for disappointment, the world grown older now, paradise lost, throat-grabbed by vulgarity. Indeed, you can't go home again, not that he wants to, Jesus, no, but in Corfu he might recover the facility which currently escapes him. He sees his former fluency like a rain-cloud, heavy, significant, weighted with sentences, words escaping from the mass of it, dripping from it, tumbling earthwards, the gentle rain from heaven.

He could ask the Cartwrights if he could use their villa . . . but that means indebtedness. And now there is suddenly a resonance, an echo of a different possibility. Someone was talking about the place just recently, someone who has a holiday home there, someone he knows. He tries to net the name but it slips further away from him. No doubt it will return.

Badges of servitude, Theodora had said . . . it seems a sad epitaph for a marriage. He imagines her neck bending beneath the weight of golden chains. Did the grumpy husband realize their symbolism? Alice in Wonderland eating magic mushrooms until her neck sways like a snake above the trees, giraffe women, necks stretched by brass rings to precarious heights, remove them and their tender throats will droop like the pale stalks of crocuses, hang below their breasts, suffocate them. Badges of servitude. Crinolines, corsets, stiletto heels. A woman's place is underneath.
Kinde, kirche, küche.

Despite the difficulties, Lennart Wells's disappearance into the jungle of Mexico is still pincered to his writer's consciousness. But the book refuses to emerge from his consciousness. If it is going to happen, he will have to go at it slowly, instead of rushing in. Ease into it. Creep up on it. Salt on its tail. Softlee, softlee . . .

‘L
otus Flower Hotel.'

‘Oh, hi,' I say. ‘Is Lucia Cairns in her room?'

‘I'll see.' After a while, the receptionist informs me that she's not.

‘Do you have any idea when she'll be back?'

The receptionist doesn't, but she can take a message. I don't leave one.

Regis Harcourt telephones to tell me she's had yet another brilliant idea for her garden. Forget Sylvan, now she wants Minimalist. Needless to say, this involves trashing all the work I've already done for her and starting again.

‘I've been having second thoughts about all that greenery,' she tells me, her rapid speech bouncing off my eardrums like rubber bullets. ‘I'm thinking stark, I'm thinking austere, and that assistant of yours thought maybe something Zen and Japanesey might be more in keeping, given the size of the place and everything; makes sense to me, what do you think?'

‘Assistant?'

‘Said her name was Katrina.'

Trina must have come into the house to answer the phone while I was out somewhere. I scrabble among the files on the desk and find a scrap of paper which says, in sloping handwriting:
Reejus rang.