Dancing in the Dark (15 page)

‘You haven't the faintest idea about my childhood,' I say slowly.

‘So tell me.'

I shake my head.

‘I know about your mother from the Cartwrights – what about your father, the military man?'

‘I . . . don't know.'

‘Oh?' Questions crowd into his eyes.

‘He's supposed to have died when I was a child.'

‘Supposed?' He quirks an eyebrow at me, and I have to admit that put it like that, it sounds fairly bizarre.

I think of John Vincent Cairns in his cricket flannels, of the Siamese cat and the woman in the garden. My mother's lies. Fergus doesn't need to know any more than I've already told him. ‘It's too complicated to go into. I don't want to talk about it.'

‘One day, Theodora, I shall make you. When we're in Corfu, perhaps?'

I wrinkle my forehead. ‘I don't remember saying I would come.' I concentrate on the excellent
bouillabaisse
.

He dabbles in his fingerbowl, squeezes the lemon slice it contains. Two tables away, a middle-aged couple is eating in a relentless kind of way, not looking at or speaking to each other. They must have loved each other once.

‘When are you planning to go?' I ask, just for something to say.

‘As soon as I've found a place to rent. I have feelers out. Maybe in a couple of weeks? A month?'

If I
were
to go, I could do that. A month would give me time to sort things out, separate the urgent from the postponable. Between them, Marnie and Trina could hold the fort while I'm gone, Marnie probably glad to come in an extra day or two, earn some holiday money. I think of warm nights, waking up each day at dawn with the pleasure of not having a single thing to do, no demands on me of any kind. Time to regroup.

Carpe diem
, I tell myself. Go For It. I open my mouth to tell him that maybe I'll join him, after all, but the waiter arrives, puts one hand behind his back and with the other picks up the bottle of wine and refills our glasses.

When he's gone, Fergus clinks his glass against mine. ‘So . . . you said there's no man in your life right now?'

‘Yes. No.'

‘So there's nobody to tell you how beautiful you are?'

Who could resist? I laugh. ‘I hope you don't expect me to dimple prettily and gaze admiringly at your abs.'

‘I couldn't tell my abs from my elbow.'

The press speculation has died down now, but I haven't forgotten his reputation. ‘I also hope you don't think there's a blank space in my life that you could fill.'

He stares at me thoughtfully. Sighs gustily. Portrait of a man pretending he's disappointed.

‘What about what you're working on now?' I ask. ‘A book, obviously, but what's the setting?'

He looks evasive and I wonder if I've crossed some unacceptable line by asking. ‘I'm still at the research stage,' he says. ‘Which means I read a lot, think a lot. Look things up, make myself receptive, try to determine who the protagonists are, where to take them.'

‘Any ideas?'

‘Ideas are easy. It's finding one which can sustain me through the years it takes to write a book which is difficult. I'm finding it harder than usual to toss ideas around.'

‘Isn't tossing ideas around something you do with someone else around?'

‘Usually, yes, but I have this great relationship with myself,' he says. ‘I mean, we can actually talk, have really meaningful conversations, me and myself. You must have had the same experience.'

‘All the time.' I try to laugh, and suddenly, my throat is closing again, tears are juicy behind my eyelids, the room is blurring.

He looks at me with concern.‘Are you all right, Theodora?'

I swallow hard. This is all getting out of hand. If I could come up with a single reason why he might be interested, I'd tell him about James Bellamy's visit, my mother's refusal to help me. Maybe even try to describe for him those long barren years when I had no idea where she was, what she was doing. But I can't. ‘Absolutely fine,' I say.

For some reason I can't quite define, the rapport between us is evaporating. ‘How about dinner again sometime next week?' he says.

The invitation is given so offhandedly that I think he must be asking for form's sake only. On top of that, the burden of his possible expectations is too weighty for me to handle. ‘Uh . . . I'm pretty booked up at the moment. Can I take a rain check?'

Cautious now, just checking, he says, ‘But Corfu is not rejected out of hand?'

‘It
is
,
Fergus.'

‘Nonetheless, I shall call you on the off-chance, soon as I know anything.'

It's late by the time we've finished our coffee. Leaving the restaurant, he asks how I'm going to get home.

‘I'm not going back tonight,' I say. ‘The last train's already left.'

‘In that case . . . I was thinking of dropping in to a jazz club. Want to come?'

‘Uh . . .' Jazz? It isn't really my thing. But I'd like to restore the free-and-easiness between us
.
‘Love to,' I say, sounding more enthusiastic than I feel.

The place is crowded. We squeeze in near the back, listen for a while to someone playing the trumpet. The heat is intense. Fergus murmurs something about beers and pushes through the crowd towards the bar. The trumpet soars, wire brushes scramble across the surface of metal cymbals, snare drums growl. A few people are not so much dancing as moving, joined frontally at the hip, an excuse to have sex without the bother of taking off their clothes. I think of my mythical father, who has no existence except the one Luna has conjured up for him. Did he play jazz on his piano? Did he even
have
a piano?

Fergus returns with two misted glasses and offers me one. ‘You look
distraite
,' he says.

‘I am, a bit.'

‘Even here with me?'

‘Unbelievable as it may be, even then.' The red lights in the ceiling throw an unearthly light on the flat beautiful planes of his face. This is what he would look like if we found ourselves in Hell. What did my father look like? I still see him with the blond hair, the full mouth, in front of the garden my mother had told me he'd designed, but all of that is gone now. Someone pushes into me and I put my hand on Fergus's arm.

He puts his fingers over my hand and pulls me close to him. The music thumps through our conjoined bodies. I don't want to break the spell, but eventually, I stir, I sigh. ‘I think I'd better go.'

‘I'll come with you.'

‘No. It's OK. I'll get a cab.' I begin to push my way towards the door,

‘You can crash at my place, if you like,' Fergus says behind me.

What, the love nest? No thanks. ‘I've got a flat in Soho,' I say. ‘I'll stay there. Catch an early train in the morning.'

‘I'll see you home.'

‘It's not necessary.'

‘I'd like to.'

‘You're not going to ask if you can come up for coffee, are you?' I say, as we get into a taxi in the street outside.

‘And all that that entails . . . no, Theodora, I'm not going to ask. Not that I wouldn't like to.'

We sit side by side, not speaking, our arms pressed together. I don't move away until the taxi stops outside my block of flats.

‘No,' says Fergus, as though he's just finished his previous remark. ‘I'll wait until
you
ask
me
.'

‘That was a great evening.'

‘How about giving me your telephone number, in case I need to get in touch when I know about Corfu?'

I smile. I enlarge my dimples until they feel like craters in my cheek. Dear God, I am actually flirting with him. ‘I'm in the phone book,' I say and walk across the pavement, bat out the security numbers, push at the door when it clicks open, all without a backward look, though I believe I could draw him on the night air, trace the line of his jaw in the sky.

C
rap. Balls. Hogwash. How else to describe the nearly fifty pages he has produced in the past weeks? A pot of words flung in the public's face – except at this rate there isn't going to be a public. How can he ever have thought they were worth despoiling paper for? He is recycling, not creating.
The most original voice of his generation
? What a laugh. He's reproduced almost the same dilemmas, the same themes and characters as in his previous book. Not quite, but, reading the pages, discovering the parallels, he can see it coming. He's stopped being original. The energy, the muscularity, just isn't there any longer. A few good phrases wink and wave at him out of the maze of sentences, but the rest could be hieroglyphs for all the meaning it contains.

Like Irishness, Mexicanism is all too easy to parody and, to a large extent, that's what he's done. Caricatured. Cartooned. It is not what Fergus Costello's readers expect. The river laps against the sides of his houseboat as he flips through the pages again, every sharp-edged piece of paper a blade between the ribs of his talent. His
former
talent, his effervescing promise, razored in the crucible of a hellish childhood, even if someone once said a writer's childhood is his bank balance. Transformed into achievement, six books so far and little likelihood of a seventh. Maybe five per cent of it is worth keeping. The rest can be trashed. He bundles the pages into the wastepaper basket. Fuck it. How long can he keep on stalling? Agent sitting there with thumbs downturned. Editor finding more productive fish to fry. That guy in New York, huge advances for his second book, thirty years of procrastination and when it finally came out, it was rubbish.

Ever since his return from Mexico, he's been suffering from a total failure of nerve. A character based on Lennart Wells had seemed a great idea at the time, a strong idea, a journey to the heart of darkness, a raft-ride down the Mississippi, descent into the inferno, mouth of death, jaws of hell. He'd planned it all before he went. Done the research. Read everything he could find, gulping books down like beer on a sweltering day. Drunk with anticipation. Already enraptured by places he'd never seen. Telling the names like rosary beads, incantations of hope. Popocatapétl, Iztaccíhautl, Chihuahua, Tepoztlán – fabulous, magical, mythical names! Chicken
mole
and
chiles en nogada,
Mayan ruins and mariachi bands and chapels covered in gold leaf. Diego Rivera's murals in Mexico City and poor Frida Kahlo's peasant costumes at the Blue House.

Originally, he'd wanted to explore the reasons behind Wells's sudden departure. Why he'd taken off. What had been so compelling that a man could stand up from the breakfast table one morning and go, just like that, slicing the umbilical connection between present and future, without so much as a farewell tear? What did it feel like to set off in search of a home elsewhere? Like men born into women's bodies, fully conscious of their maleness, hands beating at the fence of bone and flesh, let me out, I don't belong here. The same must have been true for Gauguin, for Wells.

He'd begun with that, with the Marie Celeste mystery of the pushed-back chair, the pot of tea on the table, a half-eaten slice of toast still lying on a plate, marmalade smears, damp towels on the bathroom floor, Wells's (not Wells, obviously, but some strong-syllabled name like that – say, for the moment, Fargo) dirty little habits plain for all to see, tissue full of cum by the bed, loo unflushed. Why would you do that, why would you just go? Maybe Wells carried around his own marlin skeleton, Papa Hemingway with the shotgun in his mouth, despairing at his shared humanity, Brendan's pale bruised face on a filthy cushion, marks up and down his arms, thin blue fingernails the colour of hyacinths,
that sanguine flower inscribed with woe
, ah, Christ, Brendan, leave me alone,
rest, rest, perturbed spirit,
another marlin skeleton.

He reaches down and takes the pages from the basket, spreads them on his desk. No two ways about it: this is bullshit. Dog shit. Twenty-pound note wrapped round a dog turd, jiffy envelope addressed to his da in Dublin. It felt good at the time, but he still shouldn't have done it.

Corfu – and a name leaps like a grasshopper into his mind. The man with a house there. Parker. Ian Parker. Parker, recently encountered at some gallery opening, paunchy in pinstripes, jaws overfull of flesh beneath the barber's shave, haw-hawing away, swift to reclaim acquaintance, met him at university, knew even then you were destined for greatness, old fruit, hah-hah, punch to the shoulder, reminiscence about those meadow-haunted punting-picnic Oxford summers which bear about as much relation to reality as a silicone-implanted boob. Fergus finds an address book. He's poised like a rocket, fizzing, frantic to go. He sees a white house, a bare table, square windows opening on the sea. He sees the muse, pale-eyed and beautiful, languid against the rolling waves, an unbifurcated siren. Impatience batters at him like the Greeks at the gates of Troy. Hurry, hurry, inspiration waits in the rock of the sea, the smell of thyme on the hillsides, he needs to be on his way.

He calls Ian Parker's number. Dulcet tones of operator lead to a secretary and onwards to the excelsior of a Personal Assistant, articulation rich as a Fabergé egg. ‘He's in conference?' voice rising upwards into query, as though she isn't quite sure. ‘I can try him, if you like?'

I do like, yes, indeed. ‘If that wouldn't be too much trouble. It's Fergus Costello.'

‘Who?'

‘Fergus Costello.'

Tumblers clicking, numbers falling. Should she know the name, does this man run shipping empires, IT networks, smuggle people, run guns, is he FTSE, NASDAQ, NYSE, Nikkei? ‘One moment, please.'

Then Ian comes on the line. ‘Fergus, you old dog, what can I do for you?'

Pleasantries tennis-ball between them. Then to the kernel, the marrow of the thing. ‘Last time we met, you mentioned you owned a place on Corfu.'