Echoes of the Dance (2 page)

It was hot: the clear air laden with the rich and exciting scent of the golden flowers. Roly breathed in deeply, joy unexpectedly expanding inside him as he felt the sun's warmth like a blessing on his shoulders. It was at times like these that he remembered the real reason for returning to Cornwall: a determination to cast off guilt and anxiety, or at least to put such destructive powers into proportion, whilst accepting these moments of peace. The dogs were with him again, bringing the ball, jostling to be the first to chase it. It was wet and slimy in his hand as he took it from Bevis's mouth to fling it higher up the path but, even as he grimaced and wiped his hand on his old cords, he laughed to see how they bounded away with their tails waving and paws scrabbling to grip the rocks. Uncle Bernard had picked up the scent of a rabbit and was pursuing his own course, nose to ground, and Roly paused to look around him: the piled granite outcrops of Brown Willy and Rough Tor filled the horizon ahead whilst, below him, hardy villages and farms were rooted into the land; small, scattered fortresses of stone and slate.

A jet plane screamed above his head, trailing vapour, so that the high blue board of the sky looked as if it had been scrawled upon by chalk, shaded thick in places. He watched it dwindle into the west, where smooth white clouds were heaped like pillows and he could see the distant sparkle of the sea. Calling to Uncle Bernard, he began to climb.

It was after a rather late lunch that Roly suddenly remembered that he'd promised to make a telephone call to his ex-wife. He sat back in his chair with a reluctant sigh, folding the newspaper he'd been reading, and then stood up and began to clear the table. He never bothered to use the dishwasher when he was alone and it took very few minutes to stack his lunch things on the draining-board. He knew very well that his decision to wash up immediately was merely a delaying tactic but he turned the tap on and reached for the detergent just the same. He had no wish to speak to Monica; no desire to discuss and review the lack of ambition she attributed to their son, Nat.

‘It's not that he lacks ambition,' Roly had pointed out on numerous occasions, ‘it's simply that he lacks
your
particular kind of ambition. He rejects your values.'

‘Just because you've decided to bury yourself in the wilds of Cornwall . . .'

‘No, no! I haven't buried myself at all. I lived in London for years, spending part of the time down here. Now I've reversed that. And I'm very happy, Monica. Would you say that you are happy? And, if you're not, why do you feel able to judge what's best for Nat? He seems to be perfectly content. I've seen some of the gardens he's working on and the pleasure he brings to people. Admit it: if he worked for
Ground Force
, and you could brag to your friends that he was gardening on television, you'd be proud of him.'

These conversations usually ended in acrimonious deadlock and Roly was bored with the endless variations on the same theme. He knew, however, that Monica needed to be in touch with him, required excuses to telephone and to demand that they should meet. His own guilt, his sense of failure, made it impossible to deny her.

‘She left you,' Mim would remind him. ‘At the first sign of trouble she was off.'

‘Oh, shut up,' he'd answer irritably. ‘It's just not that simple . . .' And Mim would shrug, unmoved as always by these flashes of temper; always reasonable.

Perhaps it was because they'd relied on each other so much as children that Mim understood him so completely. Just as he'd supported her through the turbulent teenage years when she'd insisted with single-minded implacability that she wanted nothing but to be a dancer, so she had stood by him when things had gone so terribly wrong: when his heavy drinking spiralled downwards into alcoholism and he'd lost his confidence, lost his clients and lost his wife and child . . . Not that Monica was much loss as far as Mim was concerned – they'd never liked each other – but losing the small Nat had been a terrible blow to both of them.

Roly dried the last of the plates, hung the cloth on the Esse rail to dry and wandered over to the French doors that opened into the wilderness spaces of the garden behind the house. Here, as a boy, he had pottered with his mother during the last months of her long illness: here, when he was small, they'd sat beneath the arching boughs of the flowering cherry tree, watching the fish in the big ponds, and here he had first seen the heron in the garden. Until that spring, more than fifty years ago, the overhanging branches had protected the ponds and the heron was only to be seen along the river, but then winter storms had brought down two trees and opened up the wilderness so that the heron could land safely.

He was here now, dammit! Roly made as if to bang on the window but, as usual, some instinct stayed his hand. Instead he stood as immobile as the tall, elegant figure that had alighted on the branching willow some distance beyond the pond: so beautiful, so predatory. Roly moved slightly so as to get a better look and the heron rose at once, soaring with unhurried beats of his great wings, long legs trailing. He would drift downstream now, to the small colony where he and his mate nested year after year.

Turning back into the room, Roly settled himself in the wicker chair and reached reluctantly for the telephone.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I'm thinking of coming down,' said Monica – and Roly's heart sank. He readjusted his grip on the telephone, trying to keep calm.

‘It's difficult just at the moment,' he said. ‘Mim will be home at the weekend and she's invited one of her ex-pupils to stay.'

‘Don't worry,' – Monica's pinched voice implied that this was exactly the reaction she'd expected from him: an excuse – ‘I'm not asking you to put me up.'

Roly resisted the temptation to justify his remark and remained unhelpfully silent.

‘I shall stay with Nat,' she said.

‘Good,' he answered cheerfully. ‘That'll be nice for both of you. In that case you'll see for yourself how he is and you won't need the usual sitrep now. How's Jonathan?'

‘Busy.' Her tone was sharp but with a subtle hint of wistfulness. ‘I hardly see him. He's started work on this accountancy textbook. And the wretched clients are always wanting something.'

‘And to think that you wanted that for Nat.' He couldn't resist he little snipe. ‘He's very contented with life. Still, you'll see that for yourself.'

‘I only want his happiness, Roly.' Suddenly she was quiet, dignified. ‘It's all I've ever wanted.'

He deliberately hardened his heart against the instinctive compassion that she would immediately exploit as weakness.

‘I wonder what it is that makes us all feel that happiness is some kind of divine right,' he answered lightly. ‘After all, we only have to look around us to see that it's such a difficult state to achieve. Contentment, possibly, but happiness . . . ? Do you remember those lines by Alexander Pope? “Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never Is – but always To be blessed.”' He chuckled. ‘A bit of a cynic, would you say?'

‘I've never understood poetry,' she answered rather coldly. ‘I don't think it's cynical to hope that one's child will be happy.'

Roly sighed silently and rolled his eyes.

‘Of course not,' he said. ‘But it depends on how you define it, doesn't it? Clearly Nat's idea of happiness wasn't bound up in being a junior partner in Jonathan's accountancy firm. Anyway, let's not go along that path. When shall you be down?'

‘I shall have to check with Nat. Some time next week, if he can put me up. I'll come over and see you all.'

The wistful note was back in her voice: that familiar intimation that nobody behaved quite fairly towards her and that, in some indefinable way, life owed her.

‘That'll be good,' he said. ‘We'll wait to hear from you. Must go: the dogs are asking to go out. See you soon.'

He put the telephone back on the windowsill and looked guiltily at the dogs: they lay stretched out, peacefully asleep after their long walk. With Monica – as with the heron – his feelings always tugged in direct opposition: guilt combined with the need to appease her fought against an instinctive requirement to resist her implacable will.

‘Deep inside Monica there's an emptiness,' Mim had said once. ‘It's terrible. We feel a compulsion to fill it with presents, kindness, ourselves even. And Monica absorbs all of it and wants more because, however much you give, it will never be enough. She's insatiable. Be very careful, Roly.'

He'd tried to laugh it off – it sounded rather dramatic – but part of him knew it to be a truth. Mim had shrugged – she never nagged or hammered home a point – and had gone away as light and graceful as she always was, even after the accident. She had such elegance and style, nothing grasping or possessive about her, driven only by a striving for perfection in her work. She was like their mother: imaginative, impulsive and gifted with the kind of spiritual quality that had made Mim such an outstanding ballet dancer and had drawn people to their mother, Claire.

It was Claire who had seen the potential in the big barn by the ford. John Carradine had saved it, with the stable and the few acres surrounding it, from the sale of his father's farm. His plan had been to knock it down and build a smart little house for his pretty new wife but Claire had been shocked.

‘Knock it down, Johnnie?' she'd cried in horror. ‘But it's so beautiful. Can't we simply live in it?'

She'd dragged him through the huge doorway, her imagination already seething with ideas, and rather reluctantly he'd gone along with her suggestions: putting in the kitchen at one end, with steps down into a big central dining area that led down in turn to the great slate fireplace at the further end. She'd refused to employ an architect, preferring to spend hours discussing her ideas with the local builder. It had been a long battle with the puzzled workmen but she'd persevered – charming them, inspiring them – and the result was everything she'd dreamed of: a big living space, full of light, but warm and friendly. Her London friends came in a never-ending stream, to sit round the massive rectangular table or on deeply cushioned sofas before the big log fire, and they repaid her hospitality by working in the wild area behind the house: damming the stream to make the big ponds, planting bulbs and shrubs.

Roly had heard the story many times; he could remember ‘the chums' – as his parents called them – arriving, sometimes by car, sometimes having to be collected from the train at Bodmin. If they wondered why Claire had given up a promising stage career to settle on the edge of a wild Cornish moor with a young veterinary surgeon they'd ceased to mention it by the time Roly was old enough to understand.

He settled himself more comfortably in the wicker chair, remembering the way she was then.

If he half-closes his eyes he can see her dancing over the flagged floor with baby Miriam in her arms; he can hear her voice – ‘Begin the Beguine'; ‘These Foolish Things'. Mim leans out from her mother's arms, willing her to go faster, to twirl around, and Roly laughs as he watches them, his crayoning forgotten. He twists round in the Windsor chair to see them as they go waltzing past. Father's fat Clumber spaniel, Claude, barks encouragingly as Mim screams with delight at the movement. The wireless is tuned to the Light Programme and the dance music goes on and on, seamlessly swinging from one tune to the next. Mother sinks down at last, out of breath, her face flushed with exertion, but Mim's mouth turns down at the corners.

‘Dance!' she cries imperiously. ‘More dance!'

‘Tyrant,' says Mother, laughing at Mim. ‘I can't manage another step. You must dance on your own if you want to dance,' and she sets Mim down upon the floor, where she stands for a moment, getting her balance, her eyes wide as she listens to the music. Then she is off, staggering a little but turning and hopping, arms held high, her face rapt with the joy of it.

‘Don't you want to dance?' Mother leans across the table to him, her fair hair falling all about her face, and he shakes his head.

He doesn't want to dance but he wishes that he could make a picture of her just as she is looking at him now, with her hair anyhow and her eyes glowing. He wants to capture that look and keep it for ever. Instinctively he reaches for his crayon but she smiles and turns away, laughing at Mim's antics, so that he has to try to remember exactly how it was with her face and hair, and the shining look that seems to come from inside her.

Roly jumped awake as Bevis nudged gently at his knee.

‘Good grief!' he muttered. ‘Sorry, old boy. Was I nodding?'

Floss was watching him from her rug and he felt a pang of sympathy for her. What must it feel like to be suddenly taken from your home and put amongst strangers? It was a fine balance, making fostered dogs feel welcome but not allowing them to bond with him or with his own dogs: they needed to be ready to move on to new homes. He bent to fondle her ears and she sat up, tail wagging hopefully. He glanced at his watch: another hour at least until Mim was due to telephone.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘We'll take a walk up to the farm and see if they have any cream.'

He picked up Floss's lead, lifted Uncle Bernard from his drawer, and they all went out together into the warm spring sunshine.