Dancing in the Dark (27 page)

‘Nothing.'

‘Hmm. I wonder what she's trying to hide. Or who she's trying to protect.'

‘It
is
the obvious assumption, isn't it?' I look round at the gently stirring leaves, smell the resinous aroma of the cedar shingles. Thirty years ago, Luna would still have been a teenager. A nicely brought-up Catholic girl, she must have been terrified to discover that she was pregnant. How long had it taken her to formulate a plan of action, where had she gone once the semester was over? Had someone helped her, and if so, who?

‘Wish I could be more help.' Getting up, he walks back to the screen door and holds it half-open, beckoning me with his head at the same time. ‘Another drink?'

‘Oh,' I say. ‘Why the hell not.'

‘Come in and have a look around.'

The door leads into a burst of light, sun reflecting off water through tall pointed windows. A cathedral ceiling arches overhead, pierced by a fieldstone chimney breast. Knee-height bookcases run right round the room and provide seats for the many windows. Such wall space as remains is covered with huge abstract paintings, swirls of gorgeously violent colour. There is only one room, a large open space which serves as living room, dining area and kitchen. The place is unkempt; piles of books jostle with newspapers and magazines, there are empty coffee cups on the floor, dust lies thickly over what furniture surfaces can be seen. Nonetheless, it looks like a loved and lived-in place.

I kneel on one of the window-seat cushions and look out at the dancing water behind the house. ‘Where do you paint?'

‘There's a shack out back,' he says. ‘Want to see?'

Below the house the ground slopes gently down to a narrow creek which runs into the lake. Sunlight dapples the ground through the trees. Another eccentric building stands on the other side of the house, a sort of cross between an aircraft hanger and a filling station.

‘More of your architectural work,' I say as we step through aluminium sliding doors into the studio.

‘All made from stuff picked up at the salvage yard,' he says. ‘Cost about the same as a car port.'

‘Very impressive.'

Trees have been cleared in front of the back wall to let the light in. There are counters for his paints, a couple of wooden easels, a pile of driftwood in one corner, a bed-base made out of planks set on bricks with a foam rubber mattress covered in a Mexican serape. Surplus scaffolding has been fixed to the walls at intervals, and holds canvasses, for the most part. Otherwise the space is empty.

A car pulls up. ‘There's Larry, he just slipped down to the store to get some more raspberry vinegar for the salad dressing or some other damn thing. He's very anxious to talk with you. Probably hoping to get some free advice on our backyard.'

Vernon's rugged face lights up as we walk out to greet a handsome, slightly raddled man a few years younger than Vern himself. ‘Nice to meet you,' I say. Larry has a big Hey-I-just-won-a-million-dollars! kind of smile. His eyes lock with Vernon's and I'm aware of the sexual currents between them. They've been together for twenty years and each still looks as though someone just switched on a lamp when he sees his partner. I envy them.

Vern pours wine from what looks like a hospital specimen jar. ‘Theo wants us to help her to trace her father,' he announces.

Larry looks puzzled. ‘Call me stupid, but why would we know any more than she does?'

‘We don't,' Vernon explains briefly. ‘Seems to me,' he continues, ‘that it's an inalienable right to know who your parents are; otherwise how can you ever know who
you
are?'

‘That's way too philosophical for me,' says Larry. ‘In my case, I'd much rather
not
know who my parents are. A dental nurse and a realtor?' He shudders delicately. ‘Too gross.'

I wonder where Fergus is, whether he thinks of me, whether we could ever have reached the same level of loving familiarity that these two have. I'm dejected, cast down by the hopelessness of the task I've set myself. Coming here has been a waste of time, nothing more than an exercise in making me feel I was doing something. The more I probe, the frailer seems my own identity, the further it recedes.

And then I remember the abbot's face. I clear my throat. ‘There's a possibility he might have had something to do with St Joseph's Academy.' I explain why.

‘You mean that Catholic boys' school, in Vermont?' asks Larry. ‘I'll tell you, those holy guys give me the creeps.'

‘Too butch for you, darlin'?'

‘It's not just the dreary black frocks they wear. It's the way they look at you, as if they'd bat you out of the way without even thinking about it. And all in the name of God, which makes it even worse. Remember that head honcho we met a couple of years ago, Vern? Cruelty on a stick.' He dances lightly across the room and refills our glasses. ‘Matter of fact, wasn't there a rumour that he more or less drove one of those kids at St Mag's to suicide?'

‘Drowned herself in the lake, wasn't that the story? For love of one of his protégés?'

‘That's it.' Larry shakes his head. ‘The bastard.'

‘I had a commission down there once,' says Barnes. ‘Jeez, more than thirty years ago.'

‘Way before I was even born,' Larry says.

Vernon laughs. ‘I'd hate to see the portrait in
your
attic.'

Larry bats his thick eyelashes. ‘Oh, you
men
! You're so
mean
.'

Vernon looks at me. ‘Given the lack of any information whatsoever, your mother must have put a lot of thought into how best to cover her tracks. In fact, she must've planned it from the first moment she realized she was up the spout.'

‘Must have been someone her family might have disapproved of,' Larry says.‘You get someone's darlin' girl-child pregnant, kiddo, the family's going to disapprove if it was the pope himself.'

‘
Especially
if it was the pope himself,' says Larry.

‘If you want
my
opinion,' Vern says. ‘It's what I said earlier, she's trying to protect someone.'

‘She had me in India,' I say. ‘If nobody knew when I was born, it'd be easy for her to lie a little, wouldn't it?' I look from one of them to the other. ‘Especially out there, where people might have been less rigid about the registering of births and filling-in of documents. My mother could easily have fabricated most of my significant details. I might not even be the age I think I am. When she met up with her friends again, she only had to say that I was big for my age, or small for a five-year-old,
and who was ever going to question her further?'

I am even more profoundly depressed by this.

‘At least she got away. That other poor kid didn't.'

‘How do you drive someone to kill themselves?' I ask.

‘Way I heard it, you convince them that nobody loves them, especially the boy in question. Then you point out that they could ruin the boy's career if there was a scandal. And you repeat this over and over again. It's called brain-washing.'

‘And the gossip says Dom Francis was responsible?'

‘That's the word on the street.'

As I'm leaving, Larry says. ‘You said you'd be in Boston tomorrow. Me, too. Let's do lunch.'

‘OK.'

‘I'll take you to my favourite of all restaurants and we can go shopping afterwards.'

‘Shopping?' I say.

‘You have
heard
of it, doll, haven't you?'

‘Retail therapy doesn't do a thing for me, Larry.'

‘I'll hold your hand. Where are you staying?'

I give him the name of my hotel.

‘That dress is so
fabulous
against your skin, doll. You should never ever wear anything but red.' Larry peeks inside one of the carrier bags dangling from the end of my arms, at the hideously costly dress I've just bought at his urging.

‘Campbell's tomato soup isn't really how I see myself,' I say. ‘I feel like a red pepper or something.'

‘A red-hot
chili
pepper, honey. Trust me: the guys'll be queuing up for a chance just to look at you.'

‘So, where to next?'

As well as the dress, I'm weighed down with a completely impractical jacket of champagne-coloured suede, which Larry said I simply had to buy or he'd kill himself right there on the shop floor. Undies, too. Green satin, the exact colour of holly leaves in spring, trimmed with pewter lace, with a matching set in scarlet. Along with that there's an evening dress in brilliant green, the bodice exquisitely beaded in a design of leaves leading to a single glorious pink rose, with shoes to match. ‘I don't know when you think I'm going to wear all this,' I complain.

‘Cometh the frock, sweetie, cometh the man,' says Larry. ‘Though not the one over the other, I
do
hope.'

‘I know it's an alien concept to you,' I say, ‘But I'm perfectly all right on my own. I don't need anyone else.'

‘Who do you think you're kidding?' He nods at a guy coming towards us in tight leather trousers and a grandaddy shirt, a preppy blond haircut emphasising the strong line of his manly jaw. ‘Hi, how are you?'

‘Hi.' The guy pauses.

‘Lookin' good,' says Larry, flashing a big smile.

‘Feelin' good.' The guy stares at the two of us. ‘How're you going?'

‘Just fine. You?'

‘Never better.' He smiles uncertainly and moves on.

‘Who was that?' I ask.

‘Haven't a clue, hon, but he was too pretty to pass up, don't you think?'

I laugh. His happy-go-luckiness is tempting, seductive. I wish I were more like that. Terry had said how sad Luna was, how hard she tried to be happy. I was close to becoming the same.

‘I want to go back to the dress department,' I say suddenly.

Even though I've reached a complete dead end with regard to my father, I'm feeling a lot better by the time I'm in the cab, heading for the airport. I haven't even maxed out my credit cards. Maybe there's something to this retail therapy stuff, after all.

Luckily the flight is half empty, and I'm able to have three seats to myself. I put up the arm rests and stretch out, try to sleep, but all I can think of is Luna. Nineteen years old, her parents dead, the stigma of an illegitimate child. She must have been terrified. Vernon Barnes had suggested she had lied for all these years in order to protect someone. Two questions nagged at me. Firstly, who was she protecting? And secondly, what was she protecting him or her from? Could it really be Dom Francis? And if so, why? There is a mystery here and I need to unravel it if I am ever to achieve peace.

I picture Luna in the dramatic evening dress I've just impulsively bought her, a simple sheath of black satin with cut-in panels of brilliant red, expensive and beautiful. It's years since I bought her a present. Even if she never wears it, I shall feel good because I bought it for her.

In that hotel dining room, she'd held out her arms to me, and I'd turned on my heel, though the yearning in her face had wrenched my heart.

Oh, Luna, Luna, mother, enchantress . . . I miss you so, the way we were, the way we could have been, I miss you, warm as a flower in your rosy scarves, cinnamon-skinned in moon-coloured silks, gorgeous with your pale black-rimmed eyes, magical, with a scarlet bloom behind your ear and your long hair shimmering at your waist. Without you, I wouldn't be the person I am. You shaped me with your careless disregard for the rules of the game – whatever game it was that you were playing. I have become your negative, the inverse of you. Where you are free, I am tied, where you are open, I am shut tight. Where you dance, I falter.

I cry all the way across the Atlantic. Once we were so close but then we became no more than adjacent countries in an atlas, next-door neighbours who don't speak, Siamese twins joined at the hip but facing opposite directions. I fashioned myself to be as unlike her as I could but as I learn more about her, we are gradually merging again, our colours running into each other.

How can I have allowed myself to be so hostile, so crippled with resentment? Perhaps the answer, for both of us, lies in the identity of my father. Yet, as we circle over London, I start to wonder whether I really care who he was or is, what difference it would make if I knew.

F
ergus books in at the Shelbourne, on St Stephen's Green, mostly because he can. The priciest of the pricey. Haunt of the gentry, of the lettered classes, of the Dublin literati. Of which he is now one. He stays there because it is a poke in the eye for the past, a snook cocked at poverty. Walking the grey pavements, brushing up against the lives of the people mobbing round him, he thinks that almost anywhere else on this earth would have been more congenial to him,
I do not want to be here,
childhood sitting like an ape on his back, misery swathed like a choking scarf about his head.

Not just because of his father, but Theodora, too. Which is why he
is
here. No point staying in Corfu without her, it's not the same. Never will be, the zest gone out of it. At long last love, is that the size of it? He's tried to keep her out of his head and his life, but she's there, whether he likes it or not. After she left, he packed up his stuff, paid Maria to clean the place, followed hard on Theodora's heels, though she doesn't know it. She's right, he shouldn't have left it so long before visiting the old man. It can't be put off any longer.

After breakfast, he sits in the lounge with a final, procrastinating coffee. Glances at the papers.
Telegraph, Guardian, Irish Times.
Same old same old. War, destruction, angst, gloom. Prime Minister this, President that, Queen the other, salacious details of mistresses murdering rich lovers, or rich lovers murdering mistresses, some poor yachtsman drowned with his two sons, a wee girl's body found murdered in a field, the Irish paper full of the visit of a Yankee Cardinal doing the rounds, drumming up support, Mass at St Patrick's, at Notre Dame, Westminster and San Marco, why does he bother, makes you fecking sick.