Dancing in the Dark by Susan Moody Page B

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.
    Story of my life.
    I hear her voice in my head.
Your father was so amazing, so charismatic, so unlike anyone else I’ve ever met
.
He could have been anything
. . . I’ll bet he could. A one-night stand. The milkman. A drug addict, a scoutmaster, a child molester, a murderer. Or the husband of her best friend, the
father
of her best friend, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Oh God, I never asked for more because I thought I knew.
    I start to call Terry, and remember they’re on holiday. I ring Hugo, and there is no answer. Leaving the house, I walk between the gnarled fruit trees in the orchard. Most of them are barely productive, but I love their shapes, like ancient people who have lived a lifetime of duty and are now finally allowing themselves to rest. I’ve never understood the mania for espaliering trees to increase their production. It’s the same kind of torture as that inflicted on battery hens; it ignores their essential tree-ness and reduces them to mere producers of fruit.
    He could have been anything
. . . Anything, anyone, except what I’ve always believed him to be.
    In my bog-garden, I start to dig, thrusting my fork as hard as I can into the damp earth, lifting it ferociously, turning it over, frenziedly shaking the soil off the roots of the meadow grass which I am gradually replacing with plants I have nurtured in my greenhouses, have cherished and fed. In the damp scent of earth is a kind of elemental ecstasy. I plunge my hands into the living soil, squeeze it tightly between my palms. An earthworm oozes slowly past my fingers, unaware of me or my troubles. A green-and-yellow spider skitters on spindly legs across the turned clods of earth. Something flashes in the water of my pond. This is real, I tell myself fiercely, this is true, whatever else is false. I need to mourn my loss and am all the more wounded that I cannot do so because what I mourn has never existed.
    When I go back inside, the house is still. Absolutely silent. No reassuring twitter from the fridge, no drip from a tap or creak from the stairs. Nothing. The rooms are full of emptiness, though no emptier than I feel. This has always been my refuge. Now, it feels more like a prison.

SEVEN
    â€˜S o what did you think?’ Carolyn asks.
    â€˜About what?’ Cradling the phone between ear and shoulder, Fergus braces his feet against the floor of the houseboat as the wake of a coal-barge travelling up-river smacks against the hull.
    â€˜About Theo, of course. Did the two of you get on?’
    â€˜We’re both civilized people,’ he says. ‘Even if we’d loathed each other’s guts, we were never going to start throwing stones at each other.’
    â€˜So you
did
get on.’
    â€˜I don’t really know.’ They hadn’t
not
got on, which wasn’t quite the same thing.
    â€˜Are you going to see her again?’
    â€˜I very much doubt it.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Partly because I’m not her type.’ Why the hell did he fling out that invitation to Corfu, especially since he hadn’t even begun to start making arrangements to go himself? The last thing he needs hanging round while he tries to work is some repressed female, spinster of this parish, divorcée, not that any of the above come anywhere close to the kind of woman he imagines Theodora might be, seems to be,
is
. ‘But mostly because she’s not mine.’
    â€˜Charlie said she wouldn’t be.’
    â€˜Charlie was right.’
    â€˜We’re very disappointed, Fergus.’
    â€˜Please let Charlie know how touched I am