Dancing in the Dark (4 page)

‘Too much work.'

‘Well, don't forget to make time for your friends.'

‘Jen . . . as if.'

‘But in any case, we'll see you on Sunday, won't we?'

‘Sunday?'

‘Caro and Charlie's lunch party, Theo. You'd better not miss it.'

Charlie is Jenny's brother. ‘Sorry, sweetie, it's jet-lag,' I say. ‘I've only been back a couple of hours. Of
course
I'll be there. I've got a new frock and everything.'

Putting down the phone, I'm suddenly despondent. It's not something I'd ever talk about, but I want a child, too. More than I dare let myself imagine. I want the chance to be the most wonderful mother in the world, and sometimes I'm terrified by the possibility that it will never come. I'm already over thirty. Occasionally, in my head, I can almost see those children I don't have. One thing is certain. They would be the very centre of my world, and would know it. They would always feel secure. I would never leave them, disappear for ten years of their lives, hand them over for someone else to look after. Never.

Upstairs, I strip off my clothes and gaze briefly at my reflection in the long cheval glass. I'm in pretty good shape. And while the people from Revlon or L'Oréal aren't likely to run after me imploring me to be the face of their latest range, neither does anyone cross themselves when I walk down the street. In other words, I'm fairly average looking.

For once, even my black hair looks good. There's not much I can do about my heavy eyebrows but my eyes have always been unusual. Icelandic eyes, my mother calls them, inherited from my paternal grandmother. With shorter hair, they seem even more remarkable.

Lying in a Floris-scented bath, I sip cold wine while my muscles slowly unknot. It's raining again. Water gurgles in the gutters, streams down the drainpipes into the empty water butts, dashes wetly against the windows. There is a distant rumble of thunder.

My thoughts drift. Though I'm unwilling to count chickens which may never hatch, I allow myself a brief moment of cautious satisfaction. The trip to New York was very rewarding. My business, begun five years ago on a shoestring, is really starting to take off. There are full order books, a gradually swelling bank balance, a growing reputation.

I reach over the side of the bath for my cordless phone and dial Luna's flat in Rome. Although I let it ring for minutes on end, and then redial in case I got it wrong the first time, there's no answer. I don't know why I expect there to be. Long ago my mother had abandoned me and I'd learned to live my own life. I recall how I used to cry myself to sleep every night, wondering where she was, what she was doing, who she was with and whether she loved him more than she loved me. Because as I grew older, it became increasingly clear to me that she must have traded me for a man. I never imagined that she might be dead; the set of her back as she walked away from me at the airport was too determined, she'd planned this betrayal for months, must have; otherwise how could she have enrolled me at St Ursula's, or made arrangements with Jenny's mother, Terry?

Strange that she should have returned to Rome, after all these years. I've often wondered whether she remembers her paranoia, her insistence that someone was after her. These days, she and I lead separate lives. As we should. Which is fine by me. She has her career to follow and I am much too old now to need a maternal bosom to weep on, or a motherly kiss goodnight. Besides, she abandoned me for ten years. I will never be able to forgive her for that, even though she had been right about St Ursula's. I learned to love the safety of my school uniform, the gentle voices of the sisters, the rules, the expectations we were supposed to live up to. Above all, I adored the complete predictability of school-life.

From time to time, I would imagine I'd glimpsed Luna from the edge of my eye or seen her turning the corner at the end of the street. I'd fancy I saw her standing at the end of the school playing fields where they merged into woods, or walking rapidly away from the gates on Saturday afternoons, when we were allowed to visit the town or stroll on the Downs. But I never went after her, to see if it really was her. And gradually, as the years went by, I didn't even think about following; I was afraid that it
would
be her.

Suddenly I'm sniffing back tears. Which is ridiculous, when I have nothing to cry about. I'm probably working too hard. I need to take Prozac, take a holiday. Take a lover.

I consider the possibility of a holiday, a proper one, without any responsibilities. But it's impossible. I can't afford to take the time off. I reach an arm over the edge of the bath, grope around and find the wine bottle, refill my glass.

Despite the rain clouds, it's still light outside. I look at my watch and see that it's five o'clock. Magic time. The hour when I used to think about my mother. When I hoped that she was thinking of me.

I'm getting sleepy. Gardens float behind my eyes. So many gardens. One in France, full – the way I remember it – of blue roses. An elaborate topiary garden in Maine. Italian gardens, all shrubs and statuary. Gardens the size of handkerchiefs, rolling acres, Zen gardens, Mediterranean gardens, imaginary ones. And my own. My beloved acre of earth, where I can express myself in any way I choose, where I can look into the future, plant for posterity, put in an acorn and know with a gentle sense of content that I shall never see the mighty oak it will become.

I recall another garden, and Luna, with her scarves and her beads and her floaty dresses, dancing in the damp green dusk, with five ropes of artificial pearls around her neck and her hennaed hair tied up in a white cotton veil. Wooden chimes thonked flatly between the hissing leaves, and the bird which hung in a cage from the upstairs balcony sang a few sad notes behind the bars of its bamboo cage. Eight years old, I was crouched on the flat roof, watching her glimmer like a moth in the warm darkness. Loving her. Wishing with all the strength I had that she would put down roots somewhere and be still.

It's one of the reasons I don't like doing things on the spur of the moment. I've seen at close range the kind of havoc that giving in to impulse can wreak. Because there can't have been anything but impulse behind the restless way in which she was always moving on, dragging me behind her. The fact is that there are women who missed out on the maternal instinct, women who should never have had children, and Luna is one of them. Nothing wrong with that – unless you happen to be the child who should never have been had. I used to worry about it. Not any more. The best way to describe our relationship these days is to call it fragile, like a house of cards is fragile, or a rose on the verge of dropping its petals. From a distance, it may look solid enough, but breathe too heavily and it disintegrates.

We're civil to each other, of course. She refuses to come and stay with me, or allow me to visit her in Rome, but very occasionally we meet in London for lunch. I'm only too aware of how little I matter to her.

Trouble is, in spite of the way she left me, all those years ago, she still means the world to me. And who wants to settle for civility when what they really crave is love? But these are old wounds, and by now they are well scarred. Really they are. I'm not bothered any more. Half asleep, I ease out of the bath and reach for one of the thick towels piled on the shelf above the bath and drape it round myself. I love towels, the bigger the better.

And, hey, I'm light-years away from the confused child I was once. Only rarely do I mull over memories which by now have grown as soft and faded as well-washed linen.

O
nce a week, I help to landscape an urban garden, working with a team of enthusiastic adolescents from an inner-city school in Swindon. The idea grew out of a sixth-form science project where the students were set the problem of designing an ergonomically sound compost box which wouldn't need constant attention. Invited to judge the results, I was offered a glass of warm sherry in the head teacher's office and, one thing leading to another, found myself involved in the transformation of a forbidding piece of derelict land at the back of the school premises into a delightful and innovative garden.

Benches have been built by the woodwork class from donated or reclaimed timber, there is a pond where the kids taking Biology can observe the habits of frogs and newts – not top of my own personal must-do list, I have to say, though I have nothing against the occasional tadpole. There is even a little fountain which the Metallurgy class knocked up out of recycled tin cans.

The garden has produced a real sense of community. OAPs sit on the benches on their way to the shops or their yoga class. Young mums take a few minutes out to contemplate something which doesn't need feeding or changing. Even the odd businessman can be seen there at lunchtime, going through the
Financial Times
with a sandwich in a paper bag beside him. Someone is always dropping by with a cutting from their own garden, or a plant in a pot which they've got cheap at the market. One kid brought in a couple of goldfish he'd won at the fair and now there are a dozen of them. Local shops donate compost or loan tools. The garden is a symbol of community and hope in an area with very little else going for it.

‘It's amazing that we've only been vandalized once,' Mick Haigh, the teacher overseeing the project, tells me, as we take a well-earned break. ‘And that was right at the beginning, when we'd just got started.'

‘I know.' I look round at the oasis of shady trees and shrubs, the rough-built stone walls and crowded lily-pond. Several kids are working on the flowerbeds, even though the summer holidays have already begun. It is nearly a week since Liz Crawfurd dropped by my house.

‘It's good of you to spare the time to work with us,' he says. ‘Not many people bother about kids like these. It makes all the difference to have someone high-profile like yourself involved. The fact that Theo Cairns, off the TV—'

‘Oh, please, Mick. I was only on a couple of times.'

‘That's enough for most of them. Watching programmes about gardening is so much easier than doing it yourself. The point is, to this generation, television is the great god. You've been on it, ergo, you must be
Fame-
us. Having you on board lifts the project right off the ground, as it were. Nurseries all over the city are rushing in to give us free plants, compost, potting soil. It's great.'

‘Best of all would be if some of the kids, even
one
of them, developed an interest in gardening.'

‘Funny you should say that.' He wipes sweat from his high forehead. ‘Trina Hawkins came to see me the other day and asked if there was any chance of her doing work experience with you.' He gazes at me hopefully from behind his pebble-lensed horn-rims.

‘Which one's Trina Hawkins?'

He grins. ‘Guess.'

‘Oh, no . . .' I groan theatrically. ‘
Not
the blue dreads with all the piercings.'

‘Bullseye.'

‘What is she, sixteen?'

‘Almost seventeen.'

I think about it. ‘Look, Mick, I'll be frank: I work damned hard, and I value my privacy. Apart from anything else, when I'm alone is when I think out my projects and commissions.'

‘She's not at all what you'd expect – I think you'd find her quite a surprise.'

‘Is it the telly, or the gardening which attracts her?'

‘The gardening, no question.'

‘If I agreed – and she'd have to work hard, if I did – how's she going to get out to my place? It's miles from here.'

‘She could stay with her aunt in High Wycombe. There's a bus goes every hour which could drop her off at the end of your lane.'

‘I see you've obviously done your homework.'

‘Not me. Trina. She researched it all very thoroughly before she even suggested asking you. She's dead keen.'

A dead-keen almost-seventeen-year-old would-be gardener is already a surprise. ‘Let me think about it and get back to you. I need to work out where she'd fit in.'

‘She'll be horribly disappointed if you won't take her on. Her heart's absolutely set on it.'

‘Why do I suddenly feel as if I have no choice?'

He spreads his hands and grins again. ‘I can't imagine.'

The following Saturday, I'm sitting at my desk, working on a new plan for Regis Harcourt, the interior designer. She first called me up about five months ago and though she speaks so fast that half the time I can't understand a word she's saying, I gathered she felt that, by working together on her town garden, the two of us could raise our individual profiles by several notches.

‘I want lots and lots of green,' she gabbled, when I showed up at her London home for the first planning session. ‘Bushes and trees, and winding paths, and a fountain so I can hear the sound of trickling water, and maybe a pergola thing at the end, painted white with vines trailing all over it,
so
Mediterranean, and possibly a reflecting pool.'

‘A bit of a tall order for such a small area,' I said. ‘The space could get very crowded. And remember that lots of green means lots of maintenance. You'll have to spend hours pruning and trimming, just to keep things under control.'

‘I can do that.' She flexed her long, crimson-tipped fingers. The Gertrude Jekyll of West Hampstead. ‘And nothing but white flowers, what do you think, it could be wonderful, couldn't it? I'm definitely into monochrome at the moment.'

Since then, she's changed her mind twice. When I returned the call she'd made while I was in the States, she'd babbled enthusiastically, ‘I want a vista, Theo, I must have a vista! I've just sourced this amazing marble statue of Cupid and Psycho, I thought a plinth or something would look rather stunning at the end of a green avenue, can't you just see it?'

‘You're not going to get much of a vista in a fifteen-foot garden. You can certainly achieve a sense of space, but avenues are out. And,' I add, ‘isn't that Psyche, not Psycho?'