Dancing in the Dark (21 page)

Why did she run?

I climb into bed and lie beneath a linen sheet, its turned-down border hand embroidered with blue and white flowers, and try not to think of those two small boys attempting to ease their mother's passage out of life. No wonder Fergus is . . . is what, exactly? Reluctant to put down roots, to commit to someone, to the present? I wonder whether he has talked of this before, and why I find it so easy to tell him things. Perhaps it's because we are more alike than we realize. At some point during the evening he'd said I ought to be trying to discover more about both my parents. But I know it's pointless. Luna has rarely talked to me about the past and now I doubt that she ever will. How much of that is my own fault? She abandoned me, so when she finally came tiptoeing back into my life, I abandoned her. Tit for tat.

There's a sound and I hold my breath, straining to hear. Is it the settling house, a creaking branch, the supperless cat? Is it Fergus, making a move on me, hoping to surprise me into succumbing to his blandishments? Because I'm not going to pretend I haven't noticed that he fancies me. Just as I fancy him. I know I stand teetering on the edge of a cliff, at the foot of a ladder, and all the warning signs are marked ‘LOVE'. I stare at the black shape of the half-open door, longing for him to come in.

Just let him try it, I think. Short shrift is what he'll get. ‘Short shrift.' I breathe the words into the empty air and hear the sound again. A voice, a moan. It
is
Fergus, but not with seduction on his mind, more like the beginnings of a bad dream. I can sympathize. I've had them myself.

I get up and walk the short distance between our two rooms. It's very late, but there are still faint bursts of music from the cafés along the shore. At the door of his room, I stand for a moment. In the moon-coloured light, I can see him lying on top of his sheets, limbs cast to the four corners of the bed. He's wearing cotton boxers and sweating, his body gleaming with it. Sturdy, rather than elegant. A deep chest, narrow hips. The tattoo on his shoulder is just a dim blur. Tiptoeing further into the room, leaning closer, I can see that it is not a toucan but another kind of bird, long-legged, a flamingo perhaps, or a stork. As I watch, he gives a little shriek, twitches, reaches for something with one of his curled hands and grips it tightly, although there's nothing there. Shrieks again.

I don't know what to do. You're not supposed to wake sleepwalkers – but he's not sleepwalking. He looks delicate, almost fragile – and after what he's told me this evening, I suppose he is.

Tentatively, I take one of his hands and stroke it, then move up from the palm to the wrist, from the wrist to the elbow, gently, gently. After a while, he calms down.

I'm about to lay his arm carefully back on the sheet when he says, ‘Don't stop. That feels good.' He's obviously been awake for a while.

‘You fraud!' I say indignantly.

‘Why are you here?' he asks.

‘You were keeping me awake.' I drop his arm heavily on to his chest and step away from the bed.

‘Maybe you should stay.'

I want to but . . . ‘Why should I do that?'

‘In case I have another bad dream. I'd hate to wake you up again.'

‘I'll be sure to shut my door so I can't hear you.' As I leave him, I am smiling.

Theodora, a whisper in the night. The feel of those rough hands caressing him, a tingle in the spine. Nothing sexy about it, wouldn't have touched him if she'd known that he had woken the moment she came into the room, senses alert, the habit picked up quickly in Mexico in case the
muchachos
sent someone to visit him, the usual calling card a stiletto in the heart, a machete down on the wrist.

He struggles into a sitting position. He can see a piece of moon at the edge of the window, hear the sigh of waves down on the beach. Getting up, he leans from the window into the warm darkness. Black cypresses puncture the landscape. It's quiet up here, but there are lights still on in the town, ugly concrete blocks, just as he'd expected, villas, red roofs bleached by the moon, white walls charcoaled with, what, geraniums, hibiscus, plumbago, bougainvillaea? He's no idea which is what but he's read enough books about places like this to know they'll be one or another. A cloud seeps across the moon, which is yellow here, not silver. He could go and swim in the pool, there's enough residual light, skinny dipping, water sinuous round his limbs, herbs seasoning the night, but he'd wake her up again. Or find her there already, drawing herself up, glowering from under those black eyebrows, ill met by moonlight, proud Theodora. She'll think he is trying to come on to her – which, no point denying it, he wants to do. Wants? A mealy-mouthed word.
Aches
to do. But she doesn't. Isn't it always the way, the shadow falling between the idea and the reality?

He is drawn by the secret caves behind her glass-clear gaze, by the quirk of her mouth as she sieves his sentences for meanings, the way she leans forward, eager as a lighted match, when he offers words on the platter of his wide vocabulary,
moufflon
, she echoes,
dendrophile,
egging him on, waiting for revelation.

Leaning on the window sill, he thinks of the words he would smell and polish, were he in love with Theodora.

The next morning, I'm up early. I go quietly out of the house and take the stony path down the edge of the bluff above the beach. The sun is low on the horizon, splashing the sea with gold. The promise of heat rocks on the water and the air smells of sage and thyme and wood smoke. If tourists use this beach – and I see evidence that they do: cigarette stubs, a flattened plastic bottle, a scrap of newspaper – they haven't yet arrived. I drop my towel on the sand. I'd drop my swimsuit too, if I weren't afraid that Fergus will follow me down. Aphrodite arising from the foam with her buttocks on display is one thing, a naked Theo Cairns is quite another.

The water is sweet and crisp. In a fast crawl, I swim three-quarters of a mile out to sea before turning back. A hundred yards offshore, I turn on to my back and look up at the house. It sits back from the edge of the low cliffs, protected from its neighbours by an olive grove on one side, a patch of meadow on the other, gnarled trees standing deep in lush grass.

Fergus is on the terrace and I wave, not sure if he can see me. He waves back. He's a good companion. He's more than that. If I'd stayed in his room last night, hopped in beside him, would it have been good between us? I don't need to ask the question.

In a minute I'll swim back to the beach and climb the path, brush beneath the generous falls of pink geranium, the clumps of iris, past the lemon tree with its white-painted trunk, and round the back of the house, ignoring the faint whiff of sewage, the implacable smell of goat, though so far I have seen none, only their droppings. We'll have breakfast together: yoghurt, honey, figs, the coarse Corfiot bread. We'll do nothing in particular; maybe walk down to the town and shop in the market, have a lemonade somewhere, if we can find a tourist-free café. We can stroll through the narrow backstreets, light a candle in one of the square-towered churches, eat something at an outdoor café, seafood, or grilled fish, lamb, whatever.

There's an ache somewhere close to my heart. How different it would be if I were here with a lover. I wish I were in love. At least, I think I do. I never have been. Harvey, to my shame, was expedience. Who does that leave me? Jenny, whom yes, I love, but with whom I am not
in
love. Terry, who has always folded me into her warm embrace when I most needed it. My mother, whom I no longer know.

What is love? A construct, that's all. The word which describes that delicate flutter in the heart. That thump in the blood. That heat between the thighs. I suppose that were I able to define it, it would imply a private universe of two: me and one other. If it were, say, for the sake of argument, Fergus, we'd hold hands, we'd kiss in the shadow of a white wall, our finger ends would spark as we moved, we'd exchange looks full of tumbled sheets and lingering pleasure, memories of the night before and the days to come, anticipation and recollection burning along our bodies.

But we are not in love, and that's all there is to it.

W
earing a battered straw hat, she walks through the meadow at the side of the house, knee-deep in grass which is studded with wild flowers. Yesterday she had taken his hand. ‘Come and see, Fergus, it's like perpetual spring. Look at this: jonquils, anemones, cyclamen.' She'd parted the stems of grass. ‘Look, such beautiful leaves.' Red stems, dark green leaves patterned in grey. ‘There's even a patch of bee-orchids. Amazing, isn't it?'

‘Fantastic.' He barely knows a daffodil from a dandelion. ‘Lovely.'

He'd never seen her so animated, so softly erotic. Now, she picks a bunch of wild flowers and puts it into a blue pottery jug in the middle of the table where they sit drinking coffee. Crumbly white cheese on a blue plate, crimson lubricity of a quartered fig, liquid topaz of dribbled honey. One strap of her blue top hangs down the tanned polish of her shoulder.

‘Tell me their names again,' he says, to hear the love in her voice as she recites them: campanula, willowherb, honesty, buttercup.

‘I keep an uncultivated patch at home, in my own garden,' she says. ‘I like to let it have its head, so it's only touched once a year, when a man comes in to scythe it. I tried to do it myself, the first year, but the scythe was too heavy and I couldn't get the rhythm of it at all.'

‘How much ground do you have?' He pictures her in a sun bonnet, the far-from-grim Reaperess, flushed with sun. He pictures Grace Fargo, knee-deep in grasses.

‘An acre, at the moment. But I'm hoping to increase it.'

‘An acre . . .' It seems excessive, immodest. He owns nothing but a houseboat, and the nearest he's come to a garden was a flowerpot which once held a bushful of tiny pink roses. ‘One of these days I'll have to come down and inspect it.'

‘Yes, you will.'

Not much conviction there. Don't expect a hand-engraved invitation any time soon. She glances at him. Uh-oh. Already he's learned to be wary of that look. Mouth firm, grey eyes determined. ‘May I ask you a personal question?' Why does she bother to make the request, since she intends to ask it even if he says ‘no'?

‘As long as you're prepared not to have it answered.' He touches a patch of sunburn on his arm. Five days of Corfu sun and when he looks in the bathroom mirror a blue-eyed Mexican flamenco-dancer stares back, skin coppery-red, black hair flaming round his skull.

‘Why haven't you got a woman, a wife, a partner?' she asks. Lifts a piece of fig to her red mouth, encloses it.

‘You asked me that at Terry's party.'

‘And you said it was because women didn't like the gypsy in your soul, or something equally evasive.'

‘It's not evasive, it's the truth.' The past few days of early pearly mornings will go down as among the most magical of his life. Even though the words aren't coming yet, not yet, he can feel them marshalling, stepping into line, ready to march on to the page as soon as the time comes to switch on the laptop.

‘The truth is that you've never actually fallen in love with anyone, isn't it?' she persists, inquisitorial as a Stasi interrogator. ‘Because if you had, you'd be willing to settle down for her sake, at least a little.'

‘The world well lost for love, is that what you mean?' Is she implying that if he were more grounded, more dug into stability, she might consider him?

‘Sort of.'

‘There's a possibility you don't seem to have considered. Suppose someone fell in love with me.'

‘Yes?' She fiddles with her hair, pulls up her strap. ‘So?'

‘In that case, why shouldn't
she
give up everything to follow me to the ends of the earth? Why does it have to be
me
doing the changing, rather than her?'

She's obviously never thought of that. ‘Good point.'

‘Have
you
ever been in love?'

She hesitates. ‘Not really. Not yet.'

‘For the sake of argument, let's say that you have. Let's further say that, hypothetically, I'm the lucky guy,' he says.

A blush spreads beneath the tan. Her blue strap slowly falls down again. She puts her hand to her hair, presses a finger to her lips. Picks up her coffee cup. ‘All right,' she says. ‘It's ridiculous, of course, but let's say that, just as an example.'

‘My point, Theodora . . .' Pretty Theodora with her sun-kissed shoulders and the lascivious fall of her strap, groin responding, life of its own, jasus, if only she . . . Back off, he tells himself, she's a needless complication in your life at the moment. ‘My point is, if that were the case, would
you
be able to change, to keep starting over, keep putting down tender little roots only to pull them up again when the fancy took me to move on?'

‘I . . . uh . . . I . . .'

‘No, is the word you're searching for. But why not? You'd expect me – if it
were
me – to stay put, but you don't seem to believe that maybe it could be the other way round and you – if it were
you
– should move on.'

‘You're right . . .'

‘Of course, the interesting thing would be to see what happens when two people with diametrically opposed philosophies, like, for instance, in this extremely unlikely scenario, you and me, when such people try to make a life together.' He's talking in order to have an excuse to go on watching her.

She blinks at him, clear eyes startling against her tan. She licks honey from her fingers and he watches the slide of it down her throat, keeping his face neutral. If she were to suspect the white heat of his thoughts, she'd be away out of there quicker than a bat out of hell. ‘I don't know, Fergus. I never thought about the other side of the coin. That there'd have to be give, as well as take.'