by Allie Burns
He was back on the dance floor, already in a stiff waltz, with Toots. He shrugged at Natalie as he turned, as if to say, What’s a man to do?, and when Toots turned to face her she batted her eyelashes slowly, and raised her eyebrows before tilting her face up towards Jack’s.
*
The night air pricked her warm skin. Outside of the dance hall Natalie paused at the edge of the pier, taking in the inky darkness and the waves slapping the wooden pillars that rose out of the sea. She was sure she could see the electric lights of France on the horizon. So peaceful. The gentle sea breeze pulled at the strands of her hair and stroked her face. She wondered who that wind had last touched before it left continental land and raced across the sea towards their little island. Was she the first to feel it in England?
Closing her eyes, she drew in a deep breath. I met a film star. She spoke to me. What would Lord Lacey, aspiring thespian, think of that? And I danced with Jack. We turned heads. Well, he turned heads. Hadn’t Lacey said she’d likely left it too late for romance? I could be imagining it all, he is younger than me, quite a bit younger, but… even Toots hadn’t spoiled it, not really. Jack had said she’d intercepted him, left him no choice but to dance with her. He’d even apologised to Natalie, but he hadn’t had the chance to put it right.
Betsy had asked to go home and Jack had escorted her back. He’d winked at Natalie over his shoulder as he’d left. Just like their embrace that night at the college; it probably didn’t mean a thing.
Delphi – as if hearing her thoughts – joined her at the railings, cupped Natalie’s hand with her own.
‘Glad you came?’
‘Yes, yes I am.’
The wind lifted Delphi’s blond hair from her collar. She held her head back to drink in the sea air, unaware of the husbands who walked by gawping at this movie-star-like figure, or the wives who tugged on their arms like bell-ringers, calling them back to reality. Sid, Natalie noticed, saw it all.
‘I know you’ve been suffering with your fits since we arrived, but I think we should forge on with our plans. Tonight has given me an idea.’
‘And was that idea in the bottom of my brother’s blue eyes?’ Delphi’s own eyes were wide as she offered Natalie her open package of chips.
‘That wasn’t what I meant. I mean Betsy actually. She gave me an idea. Arthur says we can’t teach the holidaymakers, that that’s men’s work. But what about the workers? He didn’t say that we couldn’t help them?’
Delphi bit the head off a chip.
‘Working together is something we’ve always talked and dreamed of. Let’s give it a whirl, I say.’
*
Sid had joined them and the conversation changed tracks until Delphi spotted a photograph of Prunella on her chips’ newspaper wrapping.
‘I miss my fitness classes, you know,’ Delphi said wistfully. ‘Those classes help me tune in to the rhythm of life and I’m feeling lost without it.’
Delphi floated her arms and skipped away from her into the open space. The bandstand was empty now and she set down the chips to dance under its dome, holding her skirt as if it were made of tulle as she turned and twirled, rising and falling towards the boards.
‘What is she talking about?’ Sid had held back while the two of them chatted. ‘What’s the rhythm of life?’
‘Don’t ask me.’ Natalie folded her arms. ‘Jack calls her Isadora Duncan when she gets like this.’ She shook her head but she couldn’t stop watching her friend, so lost in the moment, so serene and content.
‘I wish I could let my thoughts empty out of my head,’ Sid said quietly, so quietly that it took her a moment to realise that he was inviting her into his trust.
‘Too much haunting your mind, I suppose?’ She kept looking forwards, not wanting to frighten him off.
‘What I can still see in here…’ he pointed to the spot above his eyes ‘…it pins me to my armchair some days, even now. It can take every scrap of life I have in me to shave and fasten my tie. Whisky helps; it blurs it all somehow.’
‘I don’t suppose you can ever expect to forget. We just learn to live alongside our troubles,’ she said.
‘The day this happened…’ he gestured to his shoulder ‘…a good friend of mine drowned in the mud in Passchendaele. Right next to me. He was a cheery fellow, Corporal Simpson. I won’t ever forget him. I was so badly injured that there wasn’t a thing I could do for him. I tried to drag him with me but in the end I had to leave him there. Poor chap.’
‘You were all so brave. I thought a lot about what you said to me after the gala,’ she said, ‘about men paying the true price of war.’
‘I can’t speak for your brothers, but I can tell you I wasn’t brave then. I was scared; I still am.’
‘But aren’t we all? I feared the worst during the war and the worst went and happened, and then my father was taken by the Spanish influenza not long after the Armistice. I hadn’t even thought to fear that. It’s all left me afraid.’
‘Afraid of what?’
‘Life.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s like when a teacher calls for a volunteer and you put your head down and hope their gaze passes over you. I’m doing that with life, hoping it passes without causing a stir.’
‘There’s a lot to be said for surrounding ourselves with innocence.’ He smiled as Delphi twirled off the bandstand and in between them. Coming to a stop she linked arms with them both.
‘Was I really that bad?’
‘Not at all. It was unusual, wasn’t it, Sid?’
The three of them strode together back down the pier towards the hotel, linking arms either side of Delphi and laughing, as if their conversation hadn’t taken place at all. She had plenty to be grateful for and a plan to help Betsy, and tomorrow she would put it into action.
The sea breeze ran its fingers through her hair and she almost felt that at any moment she could let the past lift itself from her, like a huge cloak being blown out to sea and never seen again.
Chapter Nine
The back jack-knife
A very safe dive from a height of thirty to fifty feet. Springing backwards and entering forwards causes less fear than when jumping forwards.
On the wide-open space of the top deck, with the deckchairs cleared away, she stood before Betsy.
‘You haven’t changed your clothes?’ Natalie said.
Betsy took a break from mopping her brow to look at her work overalls.
‘Sorry, Natalie love. I haven’t got anything else I could wear…’
‘Never mind.’ Delphi gave Natalie a warning look from the bench.
‘You’re right,’ Natalie corrected herself. ‘It’s my fault; I didn’t say. A gymslip and a sturdy pair of plimsolls would be useful for next time.’
‘Where will I get something like that?’
‘Duttons the outfitters in town will have what you need.’
‘Duttons! I don’t think Arthur will be happy about me going on a spend-up…’
‘It will be worth it. You’ll be able to move more freely. And I wonder…I’m sure it will seem a little strange but would you mind calling me Miss Flacker? The formalities help to instil an ethos of discipline.’
‘Oh…of course. Miss Flacker it is.’ Betsy giggled for some reason, making her ears turn pink. She was mopping her forehead with a flannel a couple of times a minute and they hadn’t even started on any drills yet.
Barnie scampered down the steps, yawning as usual, smudges as dark as night beneath her eyes.
‘Punctuality is extremely important,’ Natalie began, but as Barnie shrank and looked as though she might just as quickly run the other way, she shifted her tone. These girls weren’t going to be as resilient as her students, not yet anyway. ‘But at least you are here and you make us up to a group – and an even number at that. So let us begin.’
She blew her whistle sharply. ‘Fall in!’ she called.
The two women looked to one another and shuffled on the spot.
‘Into a l
ine. Double quick.’
They jostled about. Arms by their sides. Faces set. Eyes wide.
‘I’m going to share with you the Swedish Ling method of gymnastics taught at women’s colleges across the country and then Delphi is going to take over.’
‘Gymnastics?’ Betsy shifted from one foot to the other.
‘There’s no need to look so terrified!’
Natalie began, running them through the familiar routine of light exercises, starting with the legs and working up the body to the arms. It was ambitious; she could see that now. Betsy couldn’t even reach her toes for the wedge of flesh around her middle. Barnie rubbed her eyes like a child and did nothing to stifle her yawns. If they did this regularly they’d soon be in shape, but neither of them had any stamina.
‘A good start,’ she told them at the end of the session. ‘Next we can think about teaching you to swim, dive, play water polo.’ They didn’t reply. ‘Very well; you can think it through. Dis-missed!’ She followed up with her whistle.
‘Right then, ladies, you’ve done your drills.’ Delphi rubbed her hands together. ‘It’s time to go to the beach for some frills.’
‘Shall we try again tomorrow?’ Natalie called after them.
‘Can I let you know?’ Betsy said catching Barnie’s eye. The two of them had scuttled ahead of Delphi to the steps before she could suggest a time.
‘Of course.’
She’d expected Betsy to be as enthusiastic as she was. She obviously wasn’t comfortable with how she looked, or felt, but Natalie couldn’t force her to do anything about it.
She waited up on the deck until the three girls emerged beneath her on the beach. They would have a more favourable view of her drills after they’d experienced wafting – Delphi’s new name for the movements she’d succumbed to on the pier’s bandstand. Delphi wafted across the shingle. One leg curled behind her, an arm above her head, she twirled and then jetéd forwards and backwards. Her head tilting to the curvature of her arms. The other two women giggling behind her, cocking their legs and prancing around.
It seemed to Natalie that wafting was a clothed, public version of the Women’s League’s airing, but the jazz music seemed only to play in Delphi’s head. She’d announced this morning that she would be wafting on the beach at sunset, rain or shine, for the rest of their stay.
She knew she ought to go and join them but the reaction of the holidaymakers stumbling across these strange women singing to themselves and dancing freely on the beach stopped her. She didn’t want to look like a crackpot too.
*
She’d gone back down to the office after a while, finished up with her filing for the day, and circled the Gazette for lodgings to view. If she was going to stay here for the summer she ought to move out of the Palm Court.
‘I lied to my Robert about my shift so I could go to that class.’ She heard Barnie – back from the beach – talking to the other turnstile girls when she opened the office door. Natalie slipped back inside and left the door ajar. ‘Truby King’s routines are all the challenge I need. I want a break, a bit of time to let my hair down. Those drills were murder…’
‘This makes me happy that I didn’t go,’ Yvonne replied, ‘not that I am surprised. I do not see what it is you have liked about that Natalie anyway.’
That Yvonne really knew how to hold on to a grudge.
‘I really thought she meant she’d teach me dancing.’ Betsy was there too. She’d expected more loyalty from her. Hadn’t Natalie been trying to help her? ‘Arthur laughed his head off when I told him I was going to learn to dance and do you know what? I thought, I’m going to show you, you horrible so-and-so. He calls me fat, he does. I know, the pot…but he’d split his sides at the sight of me stuffed into a gymslip. I felt like a little girl again, in trouble with the games mistress.’
Natalie stiffened. That wasn’t how she’d wanted Betsy to feel at all. Oh dear, poor Betsy.
‘We had fun with Miss Mulberry out on the beach though.’ Barnie spoke in awe.
‘It was a giggle,’ Betsy agreed. ‘But as soon as Arthur finds out I’m dancing on the beach that will be the end of me doing any physical activities.’
Natalie stepped out of the office with a cough, shutting the door behind her.
‘Ah, Natalie.’ Betsy’s smile was wobbly and Natalie did her best to reassure her everything was all right by smiling back. ‘We were just saying about Delphi dancing about down on the beach. Me and the girls were wondering, is she a professional dancer?’
‘She likes to dance, yes,’ Natalie told her. ‘She’s almost trained as a dance teacher, but she had to stop just before she qualified due to ill health.’
‘Shame.’ The others all agreed. ‘She looks so elegant. Not like me and Barnie! You’d never know there was a thing wrong with her, would you?’
‘Wafting she’s calling it.’ Natalie sniffed. ‘Says she’s dancing on the wings of the sea breeze.’
Betsy mouthed ‘wafting’ and nodded at Barnie.
‘It did feel a bit like that.’ Betsy added, ‘But I think we might have made a bit of a show of ourselves while we were at it.’
*
On her way out, at the shoulder-height exit turnstiles that led on to the beach, she came face to face with a little freckle-faced boy, clambering his way in, a red-headed girl behind him.
‘Game’s up,’ he muttered to the girl, who froze when she saw Natalie.
‘We’re closed now, I’m afraid,’ she said.
‘We’re here to see our mother.’ He showed her the stamp on his hand. Printed in black ink was St Darlstone Bathing Pool. It was a good replica of the official stamp. His sister thrust her fist forwards, but the letters’ edges were too squared.
‘How did you do that?’ she asked.
‘Mother done it when we came in.’ He puffed up his chest in defence.
‘Really? It just doesn’t look like the stamp to me.’
‘I done it with a potato, if you must know.’ He shrugged.
‘Very enterprising.’
‘George can’t swim,’ the girl chirped up. ‘But he wants to be a seaman like our father. Reckons he can learn by himself.’ Her brother punched her in the arm for giving his secrets away.
‘And who is your mother?’
‘Yvonne Penning.’
‘She says we’re not allowed to talk to you,’ George added.
‘I see, well I won’t tell her if you don’t. Now off you both go. It isn’t safe to be in the water unsupervised if you can’t swim.’
She went back to the hotel, the words she’d overheard the girls say at the turnstiles still swimming about in her head. In the end she gave in to her self-pity, hung ‘do not disturb’ from the handle and didn’t even come back out for dinner.
*
The sound of the office door handle’s rattle made her jump up to her feet. She placed the ledgers back in the drawer just as Jack came in with Arthur close behind him. Jack cast a look about the place and gave her a wink of appreciation. Their paths had barely crossed since the dance hall.
‘It’s been good of you to step in and make up for my wife’s shortcomings, Miss Flacker.’ Arthur held out his mackintosh for her to hang up. ‘Seems there are no ends to your talents.’
‘Could you fetch us both a cup of tea please, Natty?’ Jack attempted to coax a limp white cigarette into a straight line, but it sagged and the flint in his stout gold lighter was damp and did nothing more than phutter back at Jack’s thumb as he spun the grooved wheel around.
‘Of course,’ she said tersely, hanging Arthur’s coat on the hook on the office door, all the while fighting back the urge to ask him why he couldn’t have done that himself.
When she returned from the cafeteria with the tea she found the men looking at the red ledger book. Jack’s Navy Cut smouldered in the ashtray.
‘Your expenses are too high,’ said Arthur, ‘and the daily takings are down on last year.’ He blew on to his tea. She hovered behind Jack,
hoping they wouldn’t notice her there and dismiss her.
‘Now, if the takings stay down like this, you’ll be proving me right to my colleagues at the council,’ he told Jack. ‘They argued you’d be good for business. Do you have any ideas of how to boost the profits?’ Arthur asked as he took a sip of his tea. ‘Euuw, did you forget the sugar?’ He pushed the cup away. She wished she’d put salt in it if he was going to react like that. As she reached for the saucer he shouted. ‘No, no. For goodness’ sake girl.’
She set the cup back down with a clatter.
‘You never add the sugar after the milk. You’re crossing the path of love if you do. Means you might never marry.’
She and Jack exchanged a wry smile over his shoulder. Perhaps he needed the sugar, it might sweeten him up.
‘Could we increase the takings by putting the entrance price up?’ Jack scratched his head.
‘No! That’ll keep ’em away. Times are tight, Jack. Men are still out of work. And if we’re too dear they’ll go to Brighton or Margate where the bathing pool is cheaper. It’ll affect trade all over town.’
‘Oh,’ said Jack.
‘Can you try and draw more crowds to the monthly bathing belle contests? If you get more girls to enter, their families will come and watch them,’ Arthur said. ‘Miss Flacker here can sort it out. You’ve got the knack for controlling those girls.’
‘I can work with Jack on it, yes, and how about including some of our own workers? I banned them last time, but we’ve been doing classes and they could demonstrate what they’ve learned. We might recruit some more.’
He scrunched up his nose. ‘Seems like a distraction to me. Not much money in it.’
‘But a healthy workforce has to be a good thing. Reduces the wages you lose to sickness.’
‘What do you think?’ he asked Jack.
‘As long as it’s after work, why not?’
‘Mmm,’ Arthur said. ‘No. Keep our staff out of it. That French girl Yvonne is a hothead and causes a riot. And I don’t want my Betsy making a fool of herself. Get young Toots in though, now there’s a girl the punters like, and leaving her out of the last contest was a risky business.’
