Dancing in the Dark Read Free Page A

away, or what I did.’ I dabbed at my eyes while Hugo tactfully looked away.
    â€˜You did nothing, Theo. Absolutely nothing,’ he said, wiping his mouth on his napkin. ‘Just remember that she loves you more than anything in the world.’
    I didn’t see or hear from her again for more than ten years.

TWO
    T he dream is frequent, the place familiar. I am alone in a garden bounded on three sides by yew hedges, on the fourth by the many-windowed stone frontage of a house. Elaborate parterres surround beds of white pebbles or, sometimes, white flowers. Always, the thick, aggressive smell of box fills the air. As I stare up at the house, I am aware that someone I can’t see is looking down at me. Spying on me. A man. Sinister. Malevolent. Always dressed in black. In the dream, I’ve never met him, but I know who he is.
    There is no way into this garden, no way out. What lies behind those blank windows? What lies?
    For weeks, England has been sweltering through a heatwave. Hosepipes have been banned, drought officially declared. Every day, the newspapers publish images of dried-up riverbeds, parched fields, cracked earth. Pundits pronounce on the dangers of global warming and the rising incidence of melanoma. Sales of sun-block rocket. Gardens die.
    I’ve been away for three weeks, visiting clients in the States. Now, I let myself into my silent house. It’s early evening and the musty unused air still holds the day’s breathless heat. Dropping my bags, I push open the French windows and step outside. Although I am prepared for damage, what I see is even worse than I’d feared. My herbaceous borders are dry and dishevelled. Flowers hang listlessly from sagging yellow stalks. There are ominous patches of bare soil, which will mean gaps next spring. Brown-edged roses droop; leaves wilt. The meadow-grass in the orchard, once the refuge of crickets and grasshoppers, larks and field mice, lies flat, veldt-coloured against the dry earth. There’s no need to visit the bog-garden I’ve been working on for the past year; it’s all too easy to visualize the scummy rim of the pond, the stink of stagnant water, dead fish floating.
    I feel physically sick. At least Marnie, my part-time secretary, has watered the tubs outside the French windows; I can see that the containers of white pelargoniums, the pots of herbs, are green and healthy. But everywhere else, the water-butts are long empty. Unless we get some rain, it will take me weeks to bring the garden round.
    And suddenly, as though I’ve personally conjured it out of nowhere, a drop lands on my shoulder. Followed by another. Amazed, disbelieving, I look up at the sky. A swell of dark cloud is rolling in from the west. The weather is breaking at last. More beads of water fall, heavier this time, and almost immediately become a deluge. Raindrops whack and drum against the path, bounce up and fall back. Within seconds, the stone flags are streaming with water. Rain plunges steadily from the sky.
    Eyes closed, I raise my face and let it stream over my head. In minutes, my silk blouse is soaked. I slip off my sandals and stand barefoot on the path, relishing the wet until at last, as the temperature drops, I run shivering back into the house.
    So far this has been a lousy day. Hot, sweaty weather, the heaviest day of my period, one of those crazy I-hate-the-world New York cab drivers who got me to Kennedy with only just enough time to check in. Not that it mattered because after we’d boarded the aircraft, one of those spuriously reassuring airline voices announced that there would be a short delay while the engineers rectified a minor technical fault. Don’t even
think
about stapling those wings back on, I wanted to shout. Load us on to a different plane, and let some other poor bastards plunge to their deaths over Greenland. But of course I said nothing. I just sat there, in the stifling heat, with a splitting headache and