Dancing in the Dark by Susan Moody Page A

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