Dancing in the Dark (16 page)

‘Indeed, yes.'

‘Is it, do you let it out? Or, if not, do you know of someone who does?'

‘Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Costello?' haw-haws Ian. ‘Going to write another of your damned thick square books?'

‘Ha ha!' A craven response. ‘Actually, yes.'

‘If I can assist the Muse in any way . . .' says Ian.

Meaning what, exactly? Will I have to ask again? But no, the Parker is noseying his way towards completion. ‘Want to go out there, old son? The memsahib and I'd be delighted to have the place lived in. What with one thing and another, we never seem to spend more than a few days there. As a matter of fact, we're thinking of selling the place, but you're welcome to use it, long as you like.' And on into exposition, a shop nearby, fresh milk, bread van, Spiros the gardener, Maria to come in and clean the place, look after you, yada, yada, yada.

It's that easy. Chest tight, breath palpitant, lemon-haunted dreams coming true. ‘This is really generous of you, Ian. Name your price.'

‘No, no. Be my guest.'

‘I'd be more than happy to pay my way.'

‘No, no, I insist. Consider it my contribution to the literature of our age. Anyway, it's you who'll be doing me the favour, Fergus, keep the place lived in, scare away the spiders, all that.' Diffident pause. ‘If you
really
insist, you could mention me, us, Daff and me, in the acknowledgements, please the wife, know what I mean, always fancied a slice of literary immortality, used to think I might write myself, haw-ha-hee.'

‘The acknowledgement will be of the most fulsome,' Fergus says. Already his creative muscles are flexing and twitching, ready for a workout, ready to run a marathon. ‘I can't tell you how grateful I am. Worth a drink or two, Ian. How about the end of the week, Friday?'

‘Love to, but for my sins, I'm off to HK day after tomorrow, on to KL and then PNG, back via the US.'

‘That's just initially, I take it.'

Digestive pause. ‘Oh, hee-haw-ha, get you now. Glad you're doing so well, Daff and I always watch you on the TV.'

‘Would you mind if someone joined me out there for a few days?'

‘Oh-ho, is this what I think it is?'

How the feck would I know what an eejit like you thinks?
‘Just a friend.' Old boy, old egg, old fruit. ‘Another writer. We're . . . uh . . . working on a project together.'

‘Still the eternal bachelor, ha ha.'

‘I'm . . . like I said, Ian, I'm in your debt for this.'

‘Let's hope I never have to call it in, ha ha.' Phones ringing behind him, personal assistant mellifluous in the background, ‘Got to go, Fergus. Look, we'll organize something when we're all back, yes? I'll get my girl to send on the details and information about the house. Be a day or three, up to the eyeballs at the moment. You're not thinking of taking off tomorrow, are you?'

‘No, no.' Yesterday would be nearer the mark. Or the day before that.

After he's put the phone down, Fergus makes himself a mug of coffee and asks Directory Enquiries for Theo Cairns, somewhere in Hampshire. He has no idea of the address, but the operator finds it without difficulty. Dialling the number, all he gets is the answering machine. He rings several times in order to listen to Theodora's voice, low-pitched and brisk, more businesslike than she is in the flesh, telling him that she is not at home and inviting him to leave a message after the beep. He doesn't.

The fourth time, he slams the receiver back on to its stand. What the hell is the matter with him, obsessing about a woman he hardly knows and whom he is fairly certain he won't be getting to know any better? Granted, obsession is part of the way he operates, both as person and as writer, but Theodora Cairns is hardly the right object. He thinks of her sad eyes, like sunlit snow, like a frost-patterned window with a lamp behind. At Caro's party, she was wearing a floating dress of ivory silk randomly embroidered with flowers, flamboyant yellow-and-purple tulips, crimson camellias, sprays of forget-me-nots, pink rosebuds. Beautiful. But not as beautiful as she.

The yawning blank of his computer screen stares at him from the table, reproachful and hungry, but he ignores it. Instead, he goes through his shelves, looking for one of her books on gardening, and settles down on the futon he uses as both sofa and guest-bed. Reading, the classic displacement activity. And yet it is almost the most important part of the job, letting the mind roam free, accruing scraps, a tideline of flotsam washing gently on to the coastal plain of creativity.

He finds himself absorbed. Theodora writes about gardens as though they are pictures, painting them on to the page for her readers. Her descriptions are luscious, mouth-watering, warm
.
He reads aloud an account of a garden in Italy, savouring her use of language, walking with her down mossed steps, past trickling fountains, ducking under hanging branches of figs or myrtles, leaves clutching at his cheek like eager hands, lost in a paradise garden.

How different from the cool, wisecracking persona she presents to the world. He understands that only too well, knows all about the protective layer of relentless cheerfulness strapped over disintegration, lostness bandaged with a quip, the wounds of desperation concealed behind a joke. Laugh, clown, laugh. If you amuse them, people assume you're happy. No one bothers to look below the surface to the abyss yawning beneath.

What would Theo be like in bed? Would that air of aloof reserve break down, would she be avid and eager? Sweat on her upper lip, the musk of her, hands in his hair, on his back, pulling him deeper inside. Or, even in passion, would she still maintain her special mystery?

Stop thinking of her, Costello, she's not for the likes of you.

‘I think I am falling in love,' he says aloud and feels suddenly afraid, because women like Theo Cairns are not easy, they need more than he is prepared to give, they refuse to settle for less.

Eager, impatient, he calls Theo's number again. Listening to the ring of the phone, he sees sails against a dazzling sky, the prim hooves of donkeys, silver-casketed saints. Be there, he wills,
be
there at the end of the line so I can tell you I'm in, I'm on, it's full steam ahead. An efficient voice this time, telling him Theo is away and not expected back for a while.

‘How long is a while?' he asks. Rain jigs and prances on the wooden roof just above his head. ‘Are we talking a day, a week, a month?'

‘A couple of days. May I say who's calling?'

Anxious that Theodora won't know he's been rebuffed by her absence, he says, ‘I'll call back.'

Phone replaced, he wonders if Theodora has left instructions that anyone with an Irish accent is not to be told of her whereabouts. Perhaps she was there all along, listening to him on an extension, and waving her hand, shaking her head, to indicate that she doesn't want to take his call.

Which leaves him with no alternative except to fill further pages with crap – and the world doesn't need any more of that. How has he come to this pass, thirty-nine years old and alone on a rainy Sunday afternoon, brain dead, idea-destitute, Sunday papers not even opened yet?

Can't keep moving forever, got to put down a root, tender and etiolated though it might be, got to hook on with trembling fingernail to the concept of staying put, got to let the restless earth spin without his pointed toes dancing on its rim.

Lennart Wells. Or Fargo. Far Go . . . good name,
great
name, appropriate for the circumstances. Call him Gerard (for the moment) Fargo. Fargo caught in a moment of sudden departure, abandoning his present, walking away without a backward glance. Had a friend who did that once, drove to the far edge of Ireland and never even closed the car door behind him as he tumbled out into a new life.

Theo Cairns. Theo in her garden . . . that's it, that's the thing! Excitement suddenly explosive, firework in the belly, start the book not with Fargo's abandoned breakfast but instead with Mrs Fargo, garden-loving Mrs Fargo, who sees the delphiniums and the dahlias but not the despair in her husband's eyes. Mrs Fargo, call her Griselda, Victoria, Charlotte, Jemima, call her Celeste even, with dirt under her fingernails and aphids in her hair. Mrs Fargo, raising flowers instead of babies, gone to visit mother, sister, cousin, returning home full of green thoughts, ensnared with blossom, to find the half-chewed toast, towels still damp with her husband's ablutions, bedroom ankle-deep in her husband's wet dreams, but no husband. Better? More of a story?

Sunday afternoon, sloping into Sunday evening. He picks up the phone and dials Theo's number again. Not back yet. He listens to her voice again. Wants her. Wants to tell her. Come back, he breathes into the dead phone, I need to plant my thoughts, my hopes in the receptive soil of your attention, water them, see if they germinate there.

Anal retentive, Charlie called her. Secrets. A different Theo underneath that buttoned-up voice. Imagines her unbuttoned.
A sweet disorder in the dress
. . . his own wantonness kindles.

In his head, he sees it all so clearly. The table in Corfu waits for him. The blue square of window overlooking the sea. Dusk coming down as the words pile up beside his keyboard. At last, the drain cleared, the bowel unblocked.

He is growing weary of singularity, that's how it is. Thirty-nine, a burnt-out case. He doesn't have to be alone. There are women who would leave their hair unwashed for him, he knows that. There are friends who'd be glad to share a meal. There is a pub across the road, he could step inside, wrap himself in spurious warmth. Always afraid of that. Looming shadow of the Da. Reeling back across the road, later. Weaving between the cars, lurching down the gangplank to the concrete pontoon, stumbling on to his houseboat, muttering and cursing. The father in his blood, the passed-on ungainsayable DNA. Not a road he wishes to travel, afraid to meet the image of his da coming towards him, jug in hand, tainted genes, the dark at the end of the tunnel, and behind him, pale bones clacking, tufts of fair hair still sticking to his skull.

It's all coming out now, of course. Too late for Brendan, but more than time for the Church. Grave faces, a few token priests in jail, ‘
serious error of judgement
', compensation paid. Not that the whole vile concept is exclusive to the priests. Tell me how you compensate for a life ruined, a life lost.
If you tell, you'll go to hell.
Did they seriously think they'd get away with it? Must have done. Move them on, that was the ticket. Move them on before the complaints snowballed into scandal. Move them on, and then on again, and forget the suffering of the little Brendans, God rest their innocent souls.

And here comes Brendan again, with his yellow curls and bright blue eyes and the pure shape of his boy's body. And the Da, the father, what of him? What would he do if the man showed up on the doorstep, hand out like a mendicant, shameless and abject? How long since he last went over to see the old boy – four years, five? If he's still bellowing round the back streets of Dublin, by now he'll be little more than the ghost of a whisky bottle, a shamble of a man. To seek him, or any of them, out at this stage – him or Father Vincent or that subtle little Jesuit inquisitor, Father Mahoney – where would be the point? Forgiveness isn't on the cards, nor should be, getting away with murder, the gardens of youth blighted and not a damn thing done about it.

T
wo days after having dinner with Fergus in London, I drive up to Yorkshire to see a client who has engaged me to redesign his garden so as to make it more Event Friendly (his phrase, not mine). He is loutish, uncooperative, not a man I want to work with, and I tell him so. The journey back is hot and sticky and I'm drained by the sheer nervous taking-your-life-in-your-hands experience of motorway driving. There is a major pile-up which we wait out through nearly two hours of delay, and several of those inexplicable traffic jams which, when you finally clear them, appear to have no cause.

On top of that, my mind is still churning with hostility towards my mother. How can I make her see how important my father's identity is to me? What right does she have to withhold the information? How can I find out without her cooperation?

By the time I am turning down the lane which runs past my house, it is nearly seven o'clock in the evening. I'm looking forward to nothing so much as sitting down with a cup of coffee and unwinding. So I am not thrilled, when I walk into the office, to find Trina still there. Although she's removed most of the metalwork from her face, her hair is still blue.

‘Hi,' she says.

I drop my overnight bag by the door. ‘What are you doing here? Shouldn't you have gone home at five?'

She shrugs. ‘I been working in the garden, looking up plants. Didn't seem much point leaving early.'

Irritated, I want to point out that the place is also my home and I like it to myself after office hours. Instead I say, ‘Did you cope all right?'

‘Nothing to it. Wasn't anything urgent, except one letter, which I rang Marnie about and she told me what to say.' She sees the look on my face. ‘Don't worry. I didn't screw up or anything, no spelling mistakes, made a kind of squiggle at the end and typed underneath that the letter had been signed in your absence.'

‘Sounds like you've got it all under control.'

‘Just answering the phone, really.' She laughs. ‘Some old ratbag kept calling from Rome about every five minutes. In the end I told her to bug off.'

Luna, trying to get hold of me. ‘You
what
?' I shout.

‘Just kidding.'

Irrational annoyance boils inside me. ‘For God's sake, Trina, whether you're kidding or not, this is all getting to be a bit much.' I press a hand to my head. ‘And didn't I tell you to do something about your hair?'