Dancing in the Dark (10 page)

‘I ought to explain.' Bellamy has risen to his feet and is pacing about. ‘My father was . . . well, he was an alcoholic.' He looks at the tumbler in his hand and sets it down on the nearest surface. ‘And a gambler. The races, the betting shops, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, Aspinall's . . . In those days, drugs weren't as easily available or he'd have been on those as well. My mother tried to help him, sent him to dry out at various clinics, enrolled him in AA programmes, that sort of thing. It was hopeless. Even as a boy I could have told her that. He didn't want to be helped. He was in love with his own addictions. He didn't want to lose them because then what would he do? If he ever took a long hard look at himself, he might have disliked what he saw as much as . . . as much as we did.'

‘We?'

‘My sister and I.'

I nod, not knowing what to say.

‘I suppose,' he goes on, ‘that if he was going to go to hell in a handbasket, he wanted it to be a handbasket of his own choosing.'

I stare up at the portrait on my wall. So he isn't about to follow some virile pursuit after all. He is off to the gaming tables or the drinking club, the racecourse or the gambling den. That brooding gaze is not the Byronic enigma I've always believed it to be, but the addict's itch for his craving.

‘He had the social cachet, you see,' Bellamy is saying. ‘The name, the breeding. The place in society. All she had was the money.' He too looks up at the painting. ‘We never realized when we were children how much he sneered at her. Despised her. It wasn't until we were older that it all made sense.' He turns to me. ‘It's almost a cliché, isn't it? The American heiress brought in to shore up the crumbling fortunes of the English aristocracy. Extremely minor, in our case. She fell head over heels in love with him – God knows why. In return for his title—'

‘And him,' I put in. He might no longer be my father, he might be a complete stranger to me. Nonetheless, I still feel protective of him.

‘She paid for the restoration of the house. Laid down the gardens. Dealt with the bills. My father was far too much of a gentleman to actually work for a living.' Another contemptuous curl of the lip. ‘Poor Connie; it wasn't for years that she realized he'd only married her for her money.'

I've looked at the woman sitting in her garden so many times over the years and never really wondered who she is. I've never seen her as belonging there, have assumed she is simply a shape to set off the formality of the garden. I've noted her hands – gardener's hands, like mine – holding the edge of her broad straw hat. Long ago I'd identified the splash of red lying beside her on the bench as the red-handled trowel she's obviously laid down in order to sit for the painter. To me, she was not important. It was the man who mattered.

Bellamy seems to be losing the thread of his story. ‘So where did my painting come from?' I ask.

‘She commissioned Vernon Barnes to paint the two portraits . . .' He breaks off. ‘Know anything about Barnes?'

‘Nothing at all.'

‘He's another Yank, grew up with my mother, often summered with her in New England. When she decided to have the portraits painted, he was the obvious choice.'

‘I'd never even heard his name until Mrs Crawfurd mentioned it.'

‘He's pretty well known. Started out as a portrait painter, then changed to Abstract Impressionism. Getting on a bit now, but he still has a studio in New Hampshire, up near the Canadian border.'

I stand up. Beneath my grubby T-shirt, my heart beats like a dynamo. I put a hand on the back of an armchair, needing something solid beneath my fingers. ‘Why,' I ask again, knowing the question is futile, ‘was I told that the person you're saying is Thomas Bellamy, was John Cairns?'

‘I can't explain that. Didn't Liz Crawfurd tell me you were given the picture as a child?'

‘Yes – it was a gift from my mother.' Which she stored somewhere most of the time, so although I grew up with it, I didn't see it very often, which made it all the more precious to me. It arrived at the Cartwrights' house just before I married.

‘Then she's the one you should ask.' Back on track, Bellamy is not to be deflected from his saga of family wrongs. ‘When Mother finally refused to fund my father any longer, he began to steal from her. Money first. Then jewellery. He tried to forge her signature on cheques and would have gone to jail if she hadn't refused to press charges. After that he took anything saleable he could get his hands on. This picture was one of them. It went missing years ago. I don't know why he didn't take both of them – perhaps even
he
balked at selling his own wife to some backstreet fence.'

‘I'm not parting with it.' My voice is rising towards shrillness.

‘I'll pay any sum you care to name to bring the bastard back where he should have been and never was – at her side.'

‘Wouldn't that be a bit hypocritical?'

‘It means nothing to me, but everything to her.'

‘Where's your father now?'

He waves a hand. ‘Long dead. Cirrhosis of the liver. She nursed him herself to the end. My sister and I were away at school most of that time; we barely remember seeing him, after his years abroad.' Another movement of his full mouth, so like that of the man in the painting. ‘Sounds like a cheap novel, doesn't it?'

‘When did he die?'

He looks almost apologetic. ‘About thirty-five years ago. So you see, he couldn't have been your father, could he? You wouldn't have been born for another – what, four or five years, at the earliest.'

There is a whirring in my head, as though a bee has gone berserk inside my skull. My lungs are packing up. ‘I . . .' Deep breath. ‘I can see that.'

‘I don't care about the bloody thing,' he says. ‘It's just that it would give my mother so much pleasure.' He shakes his head. ‘It always astonishes me that she's gone on loving him all these years, in spite of everything.'

‘It's mine,' I say loudly. ‘And it's going to stay that way.'

‘Fair enough. I can't force you to do something you don't want to do.'

‘Too right.'

‘Just think about it, Miss Cairns. That's all I ask.'

‘I'll think about it,' I say. ‘The answer will still be no. By the way, what's the cat called?'

‘Cat?'

‘The one under the piano.'

He studies the Siamese's insolent blue gaze for a moment. ‘It was probably Gin Seng. We still have his great-great-grandson, also called Gin Seng.'

Gin Seng? Luna told me the cat's name was Frankie, after Frank Sinatra, because of its blue eyes, and of course I assumed she knew. I feel like a gullible fool.

Bellamy stands at the front door, already reaching for his cigarettes. ‘Look, why don't you come over to Shepcombe some time? It's not that long a drive. You might understand more then. And of course you'd get to see the gardens – if you haven't already.'

‘I've been there,' I say. ‘I've met your mother several times.'

It seems extraordinary that the Honorable Constance, well-known garden designer, has been hanging on my wall for years, even if only as a figure in the background. She's tall, angular, extremely snooty, beautifully groomed. A type that makes me uneasy, makes me conscious of the earth still under my fingernails, the bramble-scratches up and down my arms. She has an American drawl and a way of looking at you as though you're an invading bug.

As soon as Bellamy's gone, his big car spewing out blue smoke as he backs out of the gate, I rush back inside the house. In the cloakroom, I double up over the pedestal and vomit, retching acrid yellow bile into the bowl. I clasp my hands round my body, holding myself together while the room closes in on me, wall advancing to meet wall, floor rising to the descending ceiling. I'll be crushed if I don't get out, out – then I am scrabbling at the door handle, gasping for breath, let me
out
, slamming the door back on its hinges and stumbling into the narrow spaces of the hall, where I lean against the wall, face sweaty, head hanging, mouth bitter.

After a while, when the waves of dread have receded a little and my chest has loosened up, I stand in front of the empty hearth and look up at the portrait. Luna's lies pierce me.
Oh, darling, you should have heard him playing the piano,
she would say,
it was beautiful. Chopin, Mozart, Debussy, yes, John seriously considered becoming a professional pianist, he could have been anything, singing, oh, such a beautiful voice, Schubert lieder, Strauss, Handel,
‘röslein, röslein, röslein röt'. She sang softly, and I would glimpse a younger, happier Luna long since lost inside the sheath of her sadness.
His beautiful voice, he couldn't go anywhere without being asked to sing. Yes, he could have been anything, played tennis at championship level, Wimbledon, Roland Garros, that's why he's wearing white in the picture,
and when I said, but those are cricket flannels, she had continued, seamless as a cloak of invisibility,
Tennis, cricket, you name it, darling, he was so handsome in his white clothes, and a hero, of course, an officer and a gentleman. His men adored him, they would have followed him to the ends of the earth. He loved gardens – he created that one in the picture and, of course, he loved cats, we'd have one ourselves if only we were able to settle down somewhere.
And sometimes when she hugged me, I'd feel tears on her cheeks.
I'm so sorry, my darling,
she would say
, so sorry that it worked out the way it did, that he died without ever knowing about his little girl, his precious gift from God. I never got the chance to tell him I was pregnant with you – oh, if only he'd never gone out that evening, just down to the post office with a letter, if only it hadn't been raining or the man in the other car hadn't been drinking, the accident would never have happened
and I would be left with a vision of a black road, slick with rain, a drunken monster at the wheel of an oncoming car, the squeal of brakes, a tyre spinning off into the darkness, the sound of breaking glass, blood sticky on the tarmac, rain falling, falling, washing away my father's blood along with his life . . .

James Bellamy's visit has annihilated one of my very few certainties and the vacated space throbs like a wound. My John Cairns has vanished. Did he ever exist, and if so, in what form? Not as the father I've imagined so many times, seated at the piano – the Steinway – his slim fingers winding through
L'Apres-midi d'Une Faune
, while tobacco plants scent the evening air, or leading his home side to the top of the cricket county championships, or presiding over some dinner in his mess uniform, red and gold.

I never questioned her. Never asked for more detail than she gave. Could I have been expected to recognize that my mother was making him up, using clues from the painting to fabricate an entire dossier? Or did he indeed exist in some form close to what I'd been told, and the painting had merely provided her with a neat way to flesh my father out?

He was a handsome officer in the British army,
she told me,
oh so handsome. It was love at first sight; we got married just after I graduated from St Margaret's Junior College in Vermont, and I flew back to England with my white graduation dress and it doubled as my wedding-dress. My parents were furious and never spoke to me again, and his were dead, so we were entirely alone, we only had a few months together, oh John, how I miss him, I'll miss him until the day I die.

Colonel John Cairns. The man who never was. Over the years, through Luna's stories about him, he's become part of me. It is because of him that my own interest in horticulture took shape. It is part of how I identify myself. I'm Theodora Cairns, daughter of John. Everything I know about myself is bound up in that fact. In that portrait. And now . . . now some stranger has walked into my house to inform me that all my certainties are nothing more than figments of someone else's imagination. Losing my father, I've also lost myself.

Lies. All of it lies that I've lived with most of my life, never questioned, though of course I should have done, instead of allowing her stories to seduce me. I wanted to believe them. I needed the reassurance. I've even manufactured for myself a father who still exists, who talks to me, who approves of me, encourages me.

I boil with misery and loss. How long will it take me to prise the chunks of my past from the precarious cliff-face of my existence? Not that it matters. Thomas Bellamy, drunk and gambler, is an irrelevancy. The man in the painting may not be who I thought he was, but whatever else may be uncertain, John Cairns, whoever he might be, was my father.

Are you sure?

Perhaps even that basic fact is false.

I pour myself another whisky, look round my ordered sitting room, a deliberate contrast to the chaos in which I grew up. Her double betrayal – first her ten-year disappearance and now this terrible lie – is sharp as a sword. My Judas mother. My captivating, capricious, unapproachable, unprincipled mother. I grab the phone and dial her number in Rome.

I need to pour out my grief and anger. My sense of betrayal. My
hurt
. The phone rings and rings, on and on. She doesn't answer, of course. So I have no way of knowing whether she is out, or away, or simply lying on the sofa with a book, ignoring the telephone, as I've seen her do so often. I press in the numbers again and then again, sobbing, my shirt wet with slobber and tears, letting the phone ring until it is cut off by some automatic reflex.

About to try again, I remember that she is in Sweden. I run into the office, root through the wastepaper basket, can't find the invitation from Stockholm. But the name of the auditorium comes back to me. When I've obtained the number from Directory Enquiries, I dial it, ask for Lucia Cairns. A polite voice, sensing my agitation, explains that she has left, is visiting friends in Copenhagen, is going on to Berlin and then England. She is, in other words, unobtainable.