Dancing in the Dark (26 page)

‘I don't think it's her secret to keep.'

‘It's a wise child that knows its own father, as they say.'

‘Do you know yours?'

He parts his narrow lips. ‘Of course.'

‘And isn't that knowledge part of what makes you who you are?'

‘I would like to think that what I am is what I have made myself – with God's help.'

‘Nonetheless, you've never had to worry about your own identity, so you may not be able to understand how very disconcerting it is to discover that you don't know where you come from.'

Another long pause. Another bend of the head. ‘Tell me, Theodora Cairns,' he says eventually, ‘what would you do if you acquired the information you seek? Would you accept the knowledge gained as sufficient in itself, or would you want more?'

‘I guess I'd like to meet up with him, if only to see what kind of a man he was. Except that, according to my mother, he's—' I am going to say ‘dead' but Dom Francis doesn't give me the chance.

‘You think you have the right to trespass into this man's life?'

‘I don't know why not.'

He thrusts his head forward, like a snake. ‘You would actually try to make yourself known to him?'

‘Why not?' My voice is so tart it sets my teeth on edge.

He frowns again, two fine lines appearing between the stretched skin above his nose. ‘Has it occurred to you that he may have another life, a life in which he is not your father, a life which could be
profoundly
disturbed if you intruded? Perhaps you should do so. Perhaps you should remember that all actions have consequences.' I am suddenly aware of power, and of danger.

‘Indeed they do. And
I'm
the consequence of an action taken thirty years ago, possibly by one of your students.'

I watch the skin on his face wrinkle and return to smoothness. ‘I can tell you categorically that you are mistaken,' he states flatly.

And as he says this, a number of things become shiveringly clear. First, that the abbot knows exactly who my father is. Second, that my father is indeed alive. Thirdly, that the abbot would burn in hell before he'd tell me anything that would help me track him down. And finally, that until I showed up, he had no idea that the liaison with my mother had produced a child.

He comes to some decision and stands up. ‘I'm sorry I can't be of more help,' he says, not sorry at all, glad, if anything that, as far as he is aware, I am leaving with no more information than I'd arrived with.

‘It was good of you to see me at such short notice.' I too can be gracious.

He comes round his desk, fleshless as a skeleton, and opens the door of his room. He bends his head towards me. ‘If I think of anything that might help your search, I'll let you know.'

‘Thank you.' I hope he'll be going to confession very soon, if only to admit to the lie he's just uttered.

When I reappear downstairs, Norman Bates jumps up from his desk, smiling that shy
Psycho
smile of his. ‘Any help?'

‘Not a lot.'

‘I am sorry you've come all the way from England and ended up with nothing.'

‘I wouldn't say nothing. But a lot less than I hoped.'

‘Oh, well.' He grins so sweetly that I start wondering if his mother is OK. He walks me to the door. I stop in front of an oil painting which shows a jolly-looking man in black robes. Behind him is a garden I recognize. As I recognize the artist's style. The garden is formal, hedged in box, with the same white bench and plashing fountain. And, as in my painting, beyond the confines of the formal garden, the artist has mixed realism with magic: incongruous among Vermont hills is a palm tree from which are suspended scarlet coconuts; on the painted sea is the wreck of a two-masted schooner, and goats frolic among the fronds of a luxuriant pearl-hung jungle in which, when I look closer, I discern a kind of goat-skin-clad figure that is recognizably Robinson Crusoe.

‘Is this a Barnes?' I ask, although it's not really a question.

‘Yes, an early one.'

‘How early?'

He peers at the canvas. So do I. And seeing the year on the frame, realize that Luna was here at the time. I'm immediately interested. Could Vernon Barnes possibly have known her back then? Can that have been how she got hold of the portrait which she'd passed off as my father? ‘Oddly enough,' I say slowly, ‘I own a Barnes myself.'

‘Is that right? It's probably worth a fortune now.'

‘So I've been told.' I'm still staring up at the portrait, wondering why Barnes should have used exactly the same garden in this painting as in the one of Capt. Thomas Bellamy Bt.

‘That's Father Dominic Campbell, the last abbot but two,' Norman Bates is saying. He turns to me with his cute Tony Perkins smile. ‘Did you know that he lives not that far from here, up near the Canadian border? Barnes, I mean, not Father Dominic.'

‘Does he, indeed? Would you . . . would you by any chance have a phone number for him?'

‘Indeed.' He consults lists, writes down the number, hands it to me.

An idea is forming in my head. I look at my watch. ‘Listen, I'm a professional gardener. That's the same garden you have out the back, isn't it? Any chance I could take a look at it?'

He hesitates, looks at his desk, picks the cordless phone off its stand. ‘I guess so.'

I follow him round the building and through a narrow gap between the hedges. At last I smell the box, the tobacco plants, crunch across the white pebbles, hear the plash of the fountain. Stepping into the landscape of my painting, the landscape of my dreams, is surreal, like something out of
Alice in Wonderland
. How many times have I imagined myself in this very place?

I feel unaccountably sad. Finally, I turn. ‘Many thanks for your help.'

‘Have a good day now,' he says.

But I doubt that I will. If my conclusions are correct, then the man who is my father was almost certainly a St Joseph's college alumnus, someone who'd made his confession to Dom Francis, done his penance and been absolved of any further sin. While my mother had been left with me.

As I drive away down leafy Vermont highways, I have a strong conviction that Dom Francis is still sitting at his desk, weighing up pros and cons, working out the best way to proceed. Because proceed he most certainly will.

B
ack in my hotel, I call the number I've been given. The phone is picked up by Barnes himself. He has one of those nasal Bostonian accents which remind you of the late President John F. Kennedy. ‘Could we meet? I own one of your paintings,' I say.

‘Which one would that be?'

‘A man called Thomas Bellamy.'

‘Bellamy, Bellamy? Aha! Look, are you anywhere near here?'

‘I will be tomorrow.'

‘Come and have lunch with us. Around noon.' He gives me an address and rings off.

So, here I am, on what is certainly a wild goose chase, driving along a road cut out of the forest, which stretches endlessly before and behind me, unbroken by signs, gates or driveways. There is no traffic, either. No semis, no RVs, no vacationing senior citizens in matching petrol-green shell-suits, or college kids mooning from the windows of beat-up jalopies. Nothing.

I mull over what I've indirectly learned from Dom Francis. Even if I could get hold of a list of students who'd attended St Joseph's while my mother was at St Margaret's, it wouldn't be of any help, since I have no idea what name I'd be looking for – if indeed there is a name to find. The only thing I can be sure of is that it won't be either John or Vincent. And, as Dom Francis pointed out, she could have been involved with someone who had nothing to do with St Joseph's. But I don't believe that: I'm still convinced that he knew who I was talking about.

I've asked for directions at no fewer than four different filling stations but only the last one, five miles back, has been of any use. ‘Just keep on till you see a metal postbox,' the guy said, wiping his hands on an oily rag which only made them more oily. ‘Says five-four-seven-eight on it, clear as day.'

Indeed it does, when I finally find it. It seems strange that I've passed no mailboxes displaying any of the other numbers prior to 5478, but maybe it's a New Hampshire thing. I turn off the highway and bump up a wheel-rutted track between a close-packed growth of maple, pine and birch, until I reach a grassed clearing. I can see glimpses of lake between the trees to either side of the house in front of me, a Frank Gehry sort of building of strange angles and impossible roof-lines, with hints of field-stone here, glass sheeting there, cedar shingles and breeze block elsewhere, the whole given a forest-green trim.

Apart from the tick of hot metal cooling, the sigh of wind in the trees all round me and lake water lapping behind the house, there is no sound at all. Nothing to indicate the presence of other people in the vicinity: no voices, or music, no noise of radio or traffic, no distant speedboat buzz, none of the sounds we've learned to take for granted, even in the wilderness.

A porch sits in front of the house – and so, I suddenly became aware, does a man. Not only is he in an Adirondack chair painted the same forest-green as the trim, he also holds a shotgun pointed straight at me. My insides flutter with fear. I've seen my share of gangster movies but nothing can really prepare you for the unnerving reality of a gun barrel. It would take him no more than a nanosecond, long before I can fling myself to one side or another, to plug a hole straight through my heart.

‘Oh, hi!' I say, nervously clearing my throat. ‘I'm—'

‘Since I just got a call from St Joe's, I got a pretty good idea who you must be.' He stands up. ‘And likewise, I guess you realize I'm Vern Barnes.'

‘I hope so,' I say. ‘Otherwise it means I'm out here in the woods with a maniac pointing a shotgun at me.'

‘I've been blasting squirrels.' Carefully he breaks the weapon and lays it down on the wooden floor of the porch. He is a very big man, six foot six or seven, in paint-stained jeans and a checked shirt open over a grey T-shirt. Grizzled: the word was invented to describe his weather-beaten face, wild grey hair, untamed eyebrows over piercing blue eyes. He advances towards the top of the three shallow steps up to the porch. ‘Miss Cairns, right?'

‘Right.'

‘Come on up.'

I step up on to the porch and collapse into a chair. ‘Jesus,' I say, letting out a gust of relief. ‘Do you have the slightest idea how scary it is to find yourself being faced down by a gun?'

‘Sorry.' He opens a screen door. ‘Get you a drink?'

‘A strong one, please.' I close my eyes and palpitate quietly for a second or two until he reappears with two glasses half-full of something that is definitely the right shade of brown.

‘Bourbon,' he says, handing me one. ‘You use water?'

‘Only for my pot-plants.' I swallow a large slug of the alcohol and almost immediately feel better. Blue sky blinks between the crowded leaves; sunshine casts bars of light on to the forest floor. ‘What a lovely place this is.'

‘Peaceful.'

‘Your house has an . . . interesting design.'

‘In other words, it's an eclectic hodgepodge of styles, don't you think?' He smiles. ‘Built the whole thing myself, without a blueprint or even a spirit level, would you believe?'

‘I would indeed.'

He scratches at a mosquito bite on his arm, then tilts his glass and knocks back what's left. ‘So, what did you want to discuss with me?'

‘It's just a shot in the dark, but . . .' I explain the question of my father's identity, and the faint link with the portrait of Thomas Bellamy he painted before I was even born. ‘The garden,' I say. ‘Was Bellamy at St Joseph's?'

‘Not as far as I know.'

‘But the garden in your painting is identical to the one there.' Even as I'm speaking I can see what a pointless journey this is. If there ever was a connection, Luna has covered her tracks far too efficiently.

He makes a rueful face. ‘Sheer laziness, I'm afraid. Back when Connie Franklin asked me to paint the portraits of her and her husband, I was about as respectable as I was ever going to get. Married, a couple of kids, established as a –' his face contorts in a grimace – ‘society portrait painter, for God's sake. Jesus, what a phrase. A self-fulfilling prophecy, really. Some big cheese in the merchant banking world that I'd played squash racquets with at Exeter and Harvard commissioned me to paint his wife and kids, to show he could afford to, and then everyone else wanted in on the act. Keeping up with the Rockefellers. Worst of it was, the more I charged them, the more they thought I was worth it. I won
prizes
, would you believe? How to dig yourself into a hole. Terrifying. I went along with it as long as I could, and then I just lit out for the territory. Never regretted it for an instant.' He waves a hand at the trees and the silence. ‘But when Connie – or the Honourable Constance, as she then was – when she asked me, for old time's sake . . . and she was prepared to pay handsomely for it . . .' He breathes in sharply through his nose. ‘Selling my soul to the devil, I suppose.'

‘And the garden?'

‘Oh, that. Like I said, laziness. I'd just painted a portrait of the current abbot – I'm going back a heck of a long time here – using that garden as a backdrop, and since Connie hadn't even begun the restoration of the gardens at that place she lives – Sheepsfleece or something – I just used the same one.'

It seems too mundane an explanation for the place which has haunted my dreams. ‘I see.'

‘Other than that, do I have any information which could help you?'

‘I guess you don't remember my mother. Not that there's any reason why you should.'

He shakes his head. ‘'Fraid not. I never really went for girls in bobby socks.' He cocks an untamed eyebrow at me. ‘You say she won't tell you anything?'