Dancing in the Dark (36 page)

‘I'm so sorry, Theodora,' she whispers.

I put my arms round her. I am taller than she. I hold her tightly, the way a mother might hug a child. I smell her, breathing in the good scent of her hair, her skin. And the very faintest tang of her mortality. I am aware of her body against mine; I paste the present feel of my mother on to the past. In the days, the years ahead, it will be my task to conflate the two. It will take time. Perhaps the rest of my life. I have to learn that nobody, no parent, can ever achieve a perfect score; no child should expect that. ‘You can't be anywhere near as sorry as I am.'

Her cheek is against mine. Mine against hers.

‘I promise I won't tell,' I say. ‘I won't seek him out. I won't destroy him.'

‘My darling daughter,' she says.

Finally I release her. ‘How much longer have you got, Mother? Tell me the truth.' I reach forward and push a lock of her hair back behind her ear. Our roles are already changing back to the way they used to be.

‘I told you before. It's under control. If, when, it's a while from now.'

Not long, then. But time enough for healing. Time to be friends.

Headlights move along the unmade lane between the house and the beach. A car pulls up outside and my mother's face lights up like a lamp. We hear footsteps along the path, the sound of a key in the lock, the closing of the front door. ‘Hi,' someone calls.

‘Hugo,' we both say. We turn to the door as he comes in, stooping slightly against the low ceiling.

He stands there, looking at us. His face is gentle. He gazes at my mother and she smiles back at him, like a young girl, the way she must have when he first saw her in her yellow swimsuit, a beam of sunshine, lighting up his life. I'd thought his love for my mother had meant a wasted life, but perhaps it hasn't been. Any more than her love for my father has been.

Hugo comes across the room. ‘Lucia,' he says, and his voice is so tender that I want to weep. He is part of my past. And, I think, of my future. I understand then that I am not wanted on their voyage, but only because I'm not taking the same journey as they are. These two will be together now, for as long as it takes, and I shall be included.

Hugo turns to me. ‘I thought I'd better drive down here, in case either of you needed me.'

‘I think we're managing,' my mother says. She takes his hand and pats it.

‘I'll find a hotel in the town,' I say. I am looking at a man whose dreams have finally come true.

‘There's room here for you.'

‘I need to leave early in the morning.' I put an arm around each of them. ‘But I'll see you very soon.'

Before I leave, I take the Da Vinci postcard from the mantelpiece and put it in my pocket.

On the train, I think about my Vernon Barnes portrait. Once it was crucial to my well-being but now it means less than nothing to me. There is someone, however, who wants it and I can see exactly how to turn that to my advantage. One day soon I will take Trina and the portrait over to Shepcombe Manor and negotiate with Constance Bellamy. Trina's training in return for my picture, because Lady Bellamy is a fine gardener. Only a few weeks ago, such a proposal would have been unthinkable, but now I feel no emotion whatsoever at losing the portrait. If Lady Bellamy has any sense at all, she'll jump at it.

From Charing Cross, I call Fergus. ‘I'm back in London,' I say. ‘Can I come to you?'

‘Only if you promise never to leave me again.'

‘I promise,' I say.

Outside the station, I take the postcard out of my pocket. It's all I will ever have of my father. But the Vernon Barnes portrait, this postcard, have both lost their point. Slowly I pull it into smaller and smaller pieces until they are too tiny for tearing. Finally, I locate a trash can and drop them into it.

Then I join the queue and wait for a taxi to carry me into the future.

H
e stands by the window, recalling a summer day more than thirty years ago, this same garden, scarcely changed since then. Clipped hedges, white benches, a girl in a wide-brimmed straw hat and a white dress. The girl he has never been able to forget. When she looked up at him from the garden that afternoon, he'd known at once what her decision would be. He remembers exactly how his heart had cracked with loss – and, yes, shamefully, with relief.

It is strange to be back here after so many years. To remember his youthful self, ignorance and determination equally strong in him, the promises which had lain ahead, the path he has had to tread in order to reach his expected destination. He is almost there now, at last, ready to take up the burden if it should fall upon him, content enough if it does not. He has fulfilled his destiny, spread the Word, done all the good of which he is so far capable. As Dom Francis said, all those years ago, it was unthinkable that a single lapse should jeopardize so much. God Himself knows that he has spent his life ignoring the hypocrisy, trying to make up for that momentary fall from grace.

Where is Lucia now? There is a place in his soul where she still exists. Every time he celebrates the Mass, he wonders if she might be among the congregation. He looks for her sometimes. Occasionally he even thinks he has seen her, sitting at the back of some cathedral, lighting a candle, walking round a corner, through an archway, on the other side of a window. In Venezuela, in the great Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City, even in Rome. It's not her, of course, but a distillation of his own longings. If he were to meet her now, he would probably not even recognize her.

Under his robes, his heart knocks with resurrected grief. Is she happy? Does she have the loving husband she deserves, the children she wanted? The children he would have given her if she had asked.

It is all as clear to him today as it was then. The June picnic. St Margaret's girls, St Joseph's boys, staff from both colleges. They'd taken buses to the lake. There'd been laughter, music, barbecue smoke drifting between the trees. Sweetcorn sizzling on the grill, yellow kernels browning. Hot dogs. Spare ribs glistening with sauce. Potato salad and coleslaw. They were all so young, so certain that the future was rosy. Theirs to conquer.

She was wearing a yellow bathing costume. She moved like a flash of gold between the trees as she dived into the lake. For the first time in his life he had known carnal desire, felt the unbearable tug of sexual longing. Unappeasable, unquenchable. Love, like a gift from God. Love, transfiguring, altering the shape of everything. A force no more resistible than a volcano or a tidal wave. One moment, he was one person and the next, someone entirely different. Later, she'd told him it had been like that for her, too.

The temptation to throw aside all his ambition for the sake of that sinful sweetness had been overwhelming. If the choice had been left to him, could he have resisted? Because of that, he'd left the decision to her. She had been strong for both of them.

Can one man change the world?

He will, given the chance. Already, approaches are being made. There is so much work to do and he will do it well. Not just well, but gloriously. A clean sweep. A clear direction to those who falter. The winds of change are sweeping through the corridors of the Vatican. It is necessary, if Mother Church is to recover from the mortal blows at present assailing Her on every side. Why had they ever thought it could be kept hidden? That it wouldn't eventually catch up with them? Abused children grow up into damaged adults. They clamour for their revenge – and who can blame them? Even though the abusers are only a tiny minority, in one sense they are not even the most guilty. It is the bishops who knowingly moved them on to a new parish, a different diocese, tacitly gave them the opportunity to offend again. And then again. Saving face was everything.

We must acknowledge our shortcomings, he thinks. We must be seen to have rooted out the abusers. No excuses, no cover-ups. If we refuse to make a clean breast of things, the laity will grow ever more mistrustful. We live in an increasingly secular world. Even the faithful no longer blindly accept the rules laid down for them. Everything is questioned – and quite right too, for only by moving with the times will the Church survive.

If he were in charge, the first task he'd undertake would be to rid the Church of the abusers, the – call them what they are: paedophiles, pederasts, ephebophiles, whatever name they want to give to their cravings – either by suspension or by forced resignation, certainly by exposure. If they would only admit guilt now, not only would it render Mother Church more human in the eyes of the laity, he believes it will make her stronger, not weaker.

But he must never forget that he too has sinned. He is as guilty as anyone else.

London last week, New York this, Brazil next weekend. He has taken time from his busy schedule to drive up here, spend a last night at the Academy. He's talked with Dom Francis. They have spoken of that long-ago sin. He did not mention the fact that he still thinks of Lucia with regret and longing, that he often wonders what happened to her, that he hopes she is happy. The abbot had shrugged, and they moved on to other, safer topics, as though she had never existed.

A man's heart is not like a man's soul. The soul can be disciplined, trained the way you wish it to grow, like the topiary in the garden below. Like the peach trees espaliered against the wall in Rome, a sight which always disturbs him. The heart is different. The heart is wilful. At his age, in his position, he should no longer have room in it for Lucia. It was on these hills, beside these lakes, that they had made love and nothing had ever been sweeter nor ever would be. It was a sin of which he cannot repent.

A bell tolls. Dom Francis will be fetching him soon to conduct the Mass. It was the abbot who had arranged that final meeting with her. ‘You have to make a choice, John,' he said. ‘And once made, you must never falter. Look to the future, not the past. You think now that you want the happiness of an ordinary man, but you must never forget that you are not an ordinary man. You have been chosen, set apart.'

‘My heart is breaking,' Lucia said, as they walked in the garden. ‘I shall never love again.'

‘You don't know that.'

‘Oh, John, I do.'

And he believed her. ‘Lucia
. . .
' She looked so beaten down. A small creature, wounded to the core. She had laid her fluid dancer's hands on her stomach, as though trying to contain her pain. He'd seen in her face the woman she would become in the future. He had wanted to be her future. ‘I'll do whatever you ask of me.' So craven. So weak.

‘I give you back to God,' she had said savagely. Her long fingers had pushed at his chest. ‘He may forgive us, but I shall never forgive Him.'

The words had shocked him.

How might it have been if he had not accepted her decision, if he'd gone with her, after all? All the ordinary joys, home, family, children. It is the children he regrets most. A son, tall, a basketball player like himself. A daughter, dark-haired, like Lucia, with his eyes, his mouth. Last night he'd played the abbot's grand piano, Chopin nocturnes, Debussy, sung Schubert lieder,
röslein, röslein
to the sterile air, the way he used to sing to Lucia, imagining that in another life he might have sung for his daughter.

There'd been a young woman in London, a few days ago. He was processing out of the Cathedral, walking between the crowds. When he stopped in front of her, she had looked up at him and his heart almost stopped beating. If he and Lucia had had a daughter, he had thought, this, this is what she would have looked like. Lucia's hair. His own mother's strange Icelandic eyes. He'd thought back to this garden, the woman in the white dress, a green ribbon lying across her shoulder. The way they had been together, body embraced by body, the sweet, sweet
. . .
Oh, God, the young taste of her, the joy.

He rests his head against the window. His shoulders shake. As always when he grows agitated, his thoughts return to the little farmhouse outside Rome, and the garden he is building there, green and bowered, leafy, scented. Herbs and roses. Olives and oranges. Increasingly, his garden has become his refuge. So different from the fruiting trees outside his window in Vatican City, tortured apples, distorted apricots, espaliered and cordoned like so many crucified victims.

How often he has been transported since he was last here at St Joseph's, lifted out of himself as he raises the Cup, as he accepts God's will. He shouldn't think this, could never confess it, but increasingly it seems as though nothing, nothing can compare with the ecstasy he'd found with Lucia. From our vices, God makes whips to scourge us . . . He'd learned that as a young priest in Boston, and never realized the truth of it until Lucia walked out of his life forever.

Behind him, the door opens. Footsteps move across the carpet. He turns. And is shocked by the look of the abbot's face. The change, even from yesterday, is profound, as though the black wings of death are about to bear the man away at any moment.

‘How long, Francis?' he asks.

The abbot shrugs. Carefully, to avoid the pain. ‘Only God can know that.'

‘Months? Weeks? Days?' He knows it cannot be years.

‘Weeks, if I'm lucky. Days, if not.' The abbot's hand is on his shoulder. ‘You made the right choice, John.'

‘Did I?' He looks at the garden below. ‘Did I really?'

‘You must always believe that.'

He doesn't answer. A fifty-eight-year-old man, among the very youngest of the cardinals, destined for glory. Even now, he cannot be certain that if she were to come to him, he wouldn't trade all of it for the touch of her hand, her lips on his.