Dancing in the Dark (6 page)

‘Can I give you a hand with those?'

I nearly drop a slab on to my foot. I carefully ease it down to the ground then shade my eyes to peer in the direction of the voice. Standing in the undergrowth, backlit by sunshine and the brilliance of sun-edged leaves, is either the Great God Pan or an extremely fanciable youth. Tall, well-built, longish blond hair tied back in a ponytail.

‘And you are?' I say.

‘Harry Lovage. Son of Bob.'

‘I didn't know he had one.' Bob Lovage, my contractor, is a good-looking bloke, if you like them weathered.

‘He does, and it's me. Let me take that.' He lopes down the chip-wood lane between the overhanging bushes and effortlessly picks up the slab leaning against my leg. ‘Where do you want it?'

‘Just settle it there, please.' I point, pressing my hands into the small of my aching back.

Efficiently he eases it down, adjusts it, tamps it into place with his boot. ‘That should do it.' He straightens up and looks around him. ‘This is nice.'

‘There was already a hazel coppice down here, and a may tree,' I say. ‘I've just added to it over the years.'

‘I love the smell of may. When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me it was the smell of summer. I've never forgotten that.' He smiles at me. ‘You can't rush a garden.'

‘Very true.'

‘Dad told me you'd probably be down here.'

‘How's his back?' I'm not a personal-hygiene fanatic, but I am suddenly very conscious of the rings of sweat under my arms.

‘Worse. He's hoping you'll take me on in his place. I'm free until October.'

‘What happens in October?'

‘I start my final year at uni.'

‘Where are you?'

‘Sheffield.' He grins. ‘Oxford seemed a bit too close to home. I didn't want to reel out of the pub and find the old man glaring at me.'

‘Any experience with landscaping?'

‘Quite a bit. Helping Dad in the hols and so on.'

‘OK, Harry. I've got about thirty minutes more work here and then we'll go in, have a cuppa or a drink and I'll show you what we've got on in the next few weeks.'

‘Can I give you a hand?'

I prefer to work on my own, thinking about the next project, but it's been a long afternoon and I'm tired of heaving things around. ‘Are you quiet?'

‘When need be.'

There are no obvious signs that he has a personal CD player strapped to his body. Nor does he look as though he is about to start doing card-tricks or somersaults in a bid to attract my attention. ‘OK, thanks.'

With his help, most of the path is laid by the time I call a halt. When I've cleaned myself up, the two of us settle down in my office and go through the schedules. ‘It's more or less full-time between now and October,' I say apologetically. ‘Is that OK?'

‘Great. Just as long as I can get back home most days, so I can spend some time with Dad. He doesn't like being on his own.'

‘What about your mother?'

‘She's not around.'

Seeing the way his mouth closes over the words, I don't pry any further. But I feel ashamed as I watch him drive away in his father's truck. Although I've worked closely with Bob over the past few years, I've never asked him a single personal question.

I walk out to the water garden I've built to one side of the house, and sit down on a stone bench. People with gardens seldom give themselves time to sit and enjoy the beauty they have created, which is why I have benches placed at strategic points all over my grounds.

It's peaceful here, specifically designed for contemplation. Fish, like slices of orange and lemon, slide between the water lilies. A dragonfly darts. I gaze into the pool and remember Luna's white hands, fluid as honey as she danced, the scent of jasmine, hot summer nights, the voices of men playing cards in another room, cicadas beating the air. I remember, too, white spires, the black mouth of an arched doorway, a dark interior full of candles. Was it in Córdoba? Mexico City? Florence? There were always men in black robes and white surplices, their faces sour. Sometimes, seeing them, Luna would turn away at the door into the church and walk hurriedly away. More usually, with our heads covered in lace, we watched the officiating priest in white-and-gold-embroidered robes conducting the Mass. When he held out his arms on either side of his body, his robes hung straight down, like a beautiful waterfall. There was a purple ring on his finger that kept catching the light. I wanted to ask Luna if this was the same priest we'd seen before, in another cathedral somewhere, or if it was just that this one was wearing the same kind of robes as the other. But she was always looking straight ahead, her hands pressed against her chest as though she were trying to staunch a wound. Her eyes were wet, and I didn't dare interrupt whatever it was she was thinking of.

Now, the sun beats down on my head while an aeroplane drones its way westward. Ever since Liz Crawfurd's visit I have been agitated. My certainties have been undermined. I should be happy or, if not happy, then at least content. So why do I feel only despair?

W
hat's the best word, wonders Fergus Costello, what's the
mot juste
? Would it be melancholia? Despondency? He walks away from the Notting Hill underground, the pavement hot under the soles of his shoes. What about malaise? Whatever it is, he's got it. And it isn't helped by the fact that even on a Sunday, London is noisy, dirty, heavy with traffic and litter. He thinks of the calm spaces he's experienced in the past few years: Australian bush, Canadian wilderness, a green courtyard in Spain.

He pushes past a gaggle of minimally clad teenage girls displaying concave stomachs and pierced belly buttons. Music blares from a door, the mindless oom-pah of the bass line thrumming along his bone marrow. A blast of rancid fat covers him in droplets of invisible grease as he passes a chippy offering battered sausages, samosas and spring rolls.

A big black guy, half-recognizing him, flashes a smile, teeth hanging like a line of laundry from the douche-red of his gums. ‘Hey, wossup, man?' whirling past into the jumble of the crowded street. The Knight of the Dolorous Countenance, that's me, he thinks. Tilting at windmills in search of something long since vanished. Isn't it Sidney Smith who offers twenty-two recipes against melancholy? Sugar plums are in there, somewhere. Which reminds him. He stops at a newsagent to buy a box of chocolates – ‘
Sorry, dear, we're right out of sugar plums
' – for Caro's boys.

Turning into her hedge-lined white street, he thinks,
What's gone wrong? Here I am, thirty-eight, closing on thirty-nine. I have everything I set out to gain and yet, for two pins, I could crumble into the gutter and caterwaul, howl, ululate.

Is it the next book, stuck somewhere in his subconscious and refusing to show itself? Is it the solitariness catching up with him?

Or is it Brendan, come back to haunt him after all these years, Brendan last seen with his blue-white skin lying flat on his bones, a pile of newspapers clotted and stained with human waste, his head resting, dear God, on a cushion that was putrid with snot and vomit, clammed with it, his hollow yellow face pressed into the stink of other men's breath? Brendan gone at last to the Land of Promise, and Father Vincent at the funeral, scrawny neck emerging from stiff white collar, floggings furnace-hot at the back of his eyes,
Well, Fergus, we did all right by yez, I'm thinking
, lips pulled back over wolfish teeth, and himself, hate and rage rising in him like pus, lungeing for the man's throat, screaming,
Bugger, sodomite, sadist, all fucking right?

Ye're at the Oxford University, aren't yez, and wasn't it us who got ye there?
Yes, Father, with your hands and your canes and your fleshy pricks – yes, you got me there with the Latin and the poetry, Synge and Yeats and the rest of the sodding Anglo-Irish fraternity, and the whimpers of little boys, the plump pillows of spread buttocks, the worm-shine of their tears. Yes, you got me there.

Ah, Jesus . . .

Adrenalin-pumped, he presses the bell beside the smartly painted navy-blue door. Will the anger ever leave him or has it scarred him for life, like someone who's drunk Drano and painfully survived the corrosion of his entrails?

‘I'm growing old,' he says aloud as it opens to reveal Caro, long and elegant in designer jeans and a cropped white top.

‘Rubbish.' She reaches up to kiss his cheek.

He smells her familiar scent. Sanity and
Miss Dior.
The same as it has always been, ever since she was the girl sharing the bedsit below his, years and years ago, a medical student intending to specialize in paediatrics. He'd loved her, back then, in a hopeless kind of way, knowing that she was already half engaged to Charlie Cartwright, and in any case the last thing he wanted was anything at all that suggested settling down, mortgages and careers, all the things Charlie had embraced with relish because it never occurred to him not to. So many evenings, the sea-taste of tears on his cheeks as he drooled out the squalor of his rearing, the death of his brother. She is the only one he has ever told. He's gone on loving her, in an intensely fraternal way, standing as best man at their wedding and then as godfather to Ricky, their first child.

‘Still as beautiful as ever,' he says, stepping into the wide hall, handing over the bottle of champagne he's brought with him for the party. What would he have done if she'd ever responded to his muted advances? Run a mile. Run a marathon. Run to the flat edges of the world and dropped over, clung there by the very tips of his fingers until she'd gone away. ‘What are you on, the elixir of youth? You never seem to change.'

‘I wish I could say the same for you, Fergus.' She gives him a quick professional scan. ‘You look terrible, if you want to know the truth.'

‘Ignorance was bliss.'

‘Did you get another dose of malaria in Mexico?'

‘Surprisingly, no.'

‘Then what's wrong? And don't say nothing.'

He longs to lean against the mother-lode of her bosom and be soothed. ‘Just a little matter of my next book, that's all. Getting into it. Finding the theme, the connections.' He laughs lightly, unconvincingly, hoping the airiness of his tone will disguise his black fear. ‘Maybe I'm all written out.'

‘“
One of the most original voices of his generation
”,' she quotes. ‘I don't think so.'

He moves behind her into the big drawing room. The room has been knocked through so that one end looks on to the street while the other leads out to the garden, where he can see tables set up, umbrellas, a couple of people in white jackets bustling about, preparing for the party that is due to begin in a couple of hours. As Ricky's godfather, he's been invited early.

In the ordered room there are marble fireplaces, high ceilings, deep skirting boards, a sense of permanence. Things he's not before felt any urge for. Now, there's a scorpion-scrape at the base of his gut:
whatever it is,
I want some, too.

‘Wine? Gin? Whisky?' she says.

‘A glass of cold white wine would just touch the spot.'

‘Which spot would that be, Fergus?' She hands him a glass and raises her own.

He touches his hand to the area above his heart. ‘This one, maybe.'

‘It's high time you found yourself a nice girl, a girl to keep. A girl to marry.'

‘You know something, Caro, I'm beginning to agree with you. Not that I think of marriage as a cure for all ills.'

‘Quite the opposite.' She's laughing. ‘And talking of ills, the boys know you're coming and they're dying to see you.'

‘And I them.' He pats the bag he's brought with him. ‘Afraid I've got typical bachelor presents in here. Chocs, comic-books – and this rather gruesome drum from Columbia for my godson Ricky.'

‘What's gruesome about it?'

‘The guy who sold it to me said it was made of human skin.'

‘Fergus!'

‘He only told me after I'd paid for it. And in any case, it probably isn't true.'

Charlie comes into the room and stops. ‘Aha!' he says. ‘Fergus the Love Rat!'

Fergus groans. ‘Not you too,
please
. I've had the press camped on my doorstep for days now – not that the houseboat has a doorstep.'

‘Charlie, I told you not to mention it,' says Caro.

‘But is it true?' Charlie is eager.

‘Of course not. Do I look like a man who can get it up ten times a night?'

‘I don't know.' Caro puts her head on one side.

‘It's not the frequency which fascinates me,' Charlie says, ‘so much as the woman you're alleged to have been shagging. Aristocratic landed gentry? Not at all the sort I'd expect you to go for.'

‘She went for
me
,' insists Fergus. ‘She fancies herself as some kind of a writer and I was leading a course at one of those summer schools. I simply passed the time of day with the creature, and the next thing I know, she's in my bed, wearing something so flimsy you could have blown it off her with a sigh.'

‘And did you?'

‘What?'

‘Sigh.'

‘Actually, before I could even draw breath, she had her tongue down my . . . Look, I really don't want to go into this. All I can say is, don't believe anything you see in the newspapers. If anything, I'm the victim here, not her.'

‘Is it true the husband came after you with a shotgun?'

‘He threw a glass of wine over me at a book launch, if that's what you mean.'

‘And now two other women have come forward to say what a heartless beast you are,' Carolyn says.

‘Axe-grinders, the pair of them. One's a novelist who didn't like what I wrote about her latest book, and the other is a well-known self-publicist.'