The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘No, David, I really ought to see you. There’s … er … various things I need to explain and … Look, why not come down here as you suggested and I’ll cook dinner for us all?’

  ‘All?’ He sounded wary. She had managed to explain about the divorce, included it matter-of-factly in one of her letters—almost as an aside. He had never brought it up, never mentioned it at all. Did he imagine now there was someone else?

  ‘Only Chris’s boyfriend. They’re more or less inseparable. He’ll be going up to meet her.’

  ‘B … But won’t I be in the way? I mean, your daughter’s first night back and …’

  Morna was worried about that herself, nervous about a foursome. Chris had never seen her with any man but Neil. ‘Tell you what—she should be back before six. Why don’t you come at seven thirty? Then I’ll have had a little time with her on my own.’ Time enough to explain who David was—employer, odd acquaintance. ‘We can eat at eight and …’

  ‘But are you sure it’s no trouble?’

  ‘No, I’d enjoy it.’

  She already felt excited—not just her daughter back, but David in her house as guest and friend. She sprinted upstairs for purse and car keys, drove to the supermarket, her elation only ebbing as she stood dithering in the aisles, wondering what to cook. How on earth could she please the three of them, turn out something suited to them all? Chris had recently become a vegetarian and ate nothing much but salads, anyway. Martin dismissed salads as rabbit fodder, demanded solid stodgy food—chips with ketchup, suet puddings with custard—which seemed entirely wrong for David. If he were eating at all, it would probably be a diet like St Abban’s—herbs and water or a thin potage of lentils. Perhaps she’d make some pasta dish—that was fairly basic—but Martin disliked what he called messed-up food, preferred straight steak or chops. It was Friday, though, and supposing David ate only fish on Fridays? The church had long since dropped its rule of abstinence, but he might still observe it, hark back to some earlier age when standards were less lax. She walked towards the fish counter. She could make Chris a separate salad while the rest of them ate halibut or trout or … No—Martin hated fish, except fish fingers, and she was damned if she’d serve those and turn a celebration dinner into kids’ tea.

  She stood blocking the aisle with her trolley, running through her cook books in her mind. Cook books didn’t cater for guests as disparate as hers. Perhaps it would be simplest to prepare three separate meals—salad for Chris, fish for her and David, steak and chips for Martin with all the trimmings.

  She returned with loaded baskets, worrying now that she had done a Neil and bought too much—not just sole and T-bone, but wine, strawberries, four different cheeses, three sorts of bread. She stood staring at the pile of food swamping the kitchen table. St Abban would regard it as belly worship, self-indulgent greed. There were even problems with the table setting. If she used her best bone china, Chris would object. When Martin had first come round, she had been jumpy and on edge.

  ‘Don’t fuss, Mum. I don’t want things too fancy. He’s not used to it. They eat in the kitchen.’

  Neil had pulled himself out of the kitchen and now his daughter was returning to it.

  ‘No one has fish knives, Mum. It’s phoney.’

  The fish knives and forks had been a wedding present from her mother’s sister, Maud. Real ivory handles, silver filigree blades. Works of art. Neil had treasured them. Fish knives were part of his promotion—from office boy to assistant account executive to director of his own agency. She wondered if they had fish knives in Los Angeles.

  She took two out from their velvet-lined mahogany box, laid them on the table, snatched them up again, replacing them with ordinary stainless steel; then removed that in its turn, whisked off the damask cloth, folded it in the drawer, started again from scratch. She got out her oldest place mats, swapped the crystal glasses for plain no-nonsense tumblers, banged the ketchup bottle down by Martin’s place. No wonder saints were wary of material things, stuck to a habit or a uniform, ate beans or bread-and-water off bare boards, built even their monasteries to a standard plan. Whatever crockery or house or clothes you chose expressed some value, outraged some canon, involved you in some statement about dress or taste or status.

  She stared around the kitchen. She had never noticed before how much Neil had put his stamp on it, even while purporting to follow her superior taste in furnishings and furniture. He had insisted on all the machines. Machines declared prosperity, success. Everything her mother or the nuns had done patiently and laboriously by hand—making coffee, chopping onions, washing clothes or dishes—she did swiftly, courtesy of Neil’s machines. He had left them all behind. She was never sure whether through simple generosity, or guilt, or because it was too expensive or too complicated to ship them to the States. Now it was Martin who used his video recorder, Chris who played about with his computer, and she herself went on pressing switches, dialling programmes, saving herself time when time weighed heavy on her.

  What would David think of the house, with its luxuries, its gloss, too big and showy for two women on their own? Neil had certainly been generous—left her everything, when other wives were stripped and plucked. He even paid the mortgage and the rates still, had arranged the settlement as if he were still the householder, who had gone away for no more than a short spell. She had offered to move somewhere smaller, find a flat or maisonette, but he seemed strangely loath to cut all ties with his first middle-class exclusive property, the first proof of his success, the bricks-and-mortar evidence that he had outgrown his lowly origins. He appeared to want to keep the place as a sort of monument, a milestone on his way to even better things. Yet it made it harder for her in a way—at least emotionally—more difficult to accept that the real and more important ties were broken.

  ‘You’re really very lucky,’ friends had said.

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘lucky,’ hoping at least that the endless whirr and chunter of machines would drown out the howling in her head.

  She washed the salads, peeled the vegetables, prepared the fish and meat; then flicked around the house with a duster, seeing it through David’s eyes, not Neil’s—a snob suburban villa with too much of everything. She walked upstairs to the so-called master bedroom. The master was there still, had chosen the bed himself, insisted on kingsize. ‘To match me,’ he’d said, grabbing her hand and clamping it round his … his … She had never known what to call it, not even in the privacy of her own mind. The nuns’ Shorter Catholic Dictionary had emphatically excluded the male organ and all its more familiar forms. Neil had solved the problem for her, christened it Big Sam. Big Sam ruled, O.K. He was Neil’s spoiled and darling child who must never be denied, always petted and indulged. Morna found him ugly, red-faced, greedy and demanding. Yet if he ever dwindled, things were worse—a Small Sam could ruin a whole day. Any threat to Neil’s virility and he would sulk or storm, lose his temper over trivialities, blame his wife. Perhaps she was to blame. She had read once that some men were so sensitive to their partner’s mood, that a woman could make them lose their erection just by willing it. She had willed it—often—turned over when she saw Sam swelling, tried to pretend she was already asleep, even thought murderous thoughts about castration.

  If Neil had been less insistent, she might have found some pleasure in it. But sex was a second career for him. He brought the same ambition to it, the same ruthless dedication. Once, she had started adding up all the hours and hours she must have spent on top of him, or under him, or side by side, or kneeling, during their fourteen years of marriage, and realised that if she had spent that time at a language school instead, she could have mastered five or six new languages by now, plus all their literatures—translated the entire collected works of Racine and Corneille, turned Aeschylus into German or rendered Pliny in Serbo-Croat.

  Yet, despite such diligence, she had received no diplomas or doctorates in bedroom studies, won no medals, set no records. She, who had been the convent schoo
l’s star pupil and one of the brightest in her year at university, was E-stream when it came to sex. It wasn’t really Neil’s fault. He was as generous in sex as in everything else. Perhaps that was the trouble, though. She didn’t want the things he urged on her—his wet, hurting, biting, insisting mouth, Big Sam penetrating orifices the nuns had never even permitted to exist.

  In the Sixth Form, Reverend Mother herself had taken what was labelled ‘Life Instruction’. She talked about ‘The World’, which meant anything outside the four walls of St Margaret’s, warning them almost daily of its dangers; imploring them to beware especially of the letter D—D for Devil. The Devil lay waiting in the World offering Drugs, Drink, Dancing and Depravity. Sex as such was never mentioned, though there was a digression about Hands which were apparently as dangerous as the Devil, though Reverend Mother never explained quite how. She told them that they could kiss their fiancés once they were formally engaged, but only the type of kiss they would be prepared to give if their own mothers and Our Blessed Mother herself were both present in the room with them as chaperones. One of the problems with Neil had been the constant feeling that Bea and the Blessed Virgin were indeed sitting side by side on the velour topped bedroom stool, watching Big Sam going through his paces.

  She found the bedroom vulgar. Neil had insisted on mirrors and a real fur rug. Instead of the antique mahogany downstairs, they had fitted mirrored cupboards floor to ceiling, reflecting and quadrupling that smug expanse of bed. She sat down on the edge of it, remembering. Four big Big Sams, four wives shrinking from them. And now she had the perversity to miss him—not just Neil, Sam too.

  She glanced at her watch—already almost five—time to change. She wouldn’t have changed for Chris, nor Chris and Martin, but David had never seen her in a dress. She opened the cupboards her side. Neil’s side was empty. She had never allowed her things to stray from the thin brass rail which divided his from hers. He had chosen most of her clothes and in the five years since he had left, she had bought almost nothing new. No point.

  She took out Neil’s favourite dress—clingy scarlet with a low neck—put it back again. David was colleague and ascetic, nothing more. She fingered the brown—safe, boring, and too thick for early September. She could see Bea’s old teddy-bear reflected in the mirrors, watching her boss-eyed from his chair. Bea had bequeathed him to her when she first went off to boarding school at seven. She had cried so often into his fur, she had worn it half away. He had left school with her, moved to university, been ragged by a crowd of students, introduced to Neil; even smuggled into her case on honeymoon, remained ten days under the creaking lurching bed.

  On their first anniversary, Neil had been turning out his near-new suits, flung half of them into a cardboard box.

  ‘Darling, if that little Cub Scout calls, give him these for jumble.’

  Bea had brought her up never to waste. Brown paper from parcels was smoothed out, used again; string never cut but patiently untied. Thrift was a virtue, practised also by the nuns. Neil squandered everything, enjoyed it. Was that why she had married him—the first thing not on ration, the first person who didn’t count the change? Even so, it hurt to hand over expensive handmade suits, hear them classed as jumble. Morna helped the Cub Scout shift the box, noticed a shabby paw protruding from the pinstripes.

  Neil was in the office. She only phoned him in emergencies. She stood shaking in the hall while his secretary tried various extensions.

  ‘How could you, Neil? You know what Bear …’

  ‘But he’s falling apart—and filthy dirty, Morna, covered in germs.’

  She thought of the germs swarming on Big Sam—not only germs, but devils. Bear was holy. He had been blessed by the Pope when she took him to Rome on her first school pilgrimage in 1953. He had made his First Communion the same day as she had, his balding stomach concealed in white flounces, his veil falling over one glass eye.

  Neil had rung off, arrived home that evening with a broad smile and an even larger parcel. She knew what it would be, cringed before she had even eased the string off. (She still saved string, in spite of Neil.) She stared at the thick gold plush, the satin bow, the expensive gross vulgarity of a new bear two foot tall with everything but a soul and history.

  ‘Thanks,’ she muttered, almost under her breath.

  That night in bed was the first time she refused him.

  Morna slammed the wardrobe door, wished she could shut Neil out as easily. She was shamefully aware how often he kept striding through her mind, or turning up in unexpected places, upsetting her, confusing her, keeping her in thrall still. In one way, it was easy to explain. Neil had been her first and only lover, had become her God and guru, the assured dogmatic Saviour who had reversed all the nuns’ values and beliefs. He had thrown her a towrope, shouted ‘Follow me!’ Captain God. The trouble was the rope had snapped and he had cruised away to brighter warmer waters, leaving her tossing and pitching in his wake. It was her own fault, in a sense, if she refused to steer her own course after five whole years without him. In some ways, she had done so—with her job, her daughter’s upbringing—but one scared and childish part of her kept clinging to that pathetic piece of rope, expecting Neil to pick it up again, pull her into safety.

  She dragged off her old skirt, changed into the brown. It was too thick, and hardly flattering—but it seemed stupid now to go to so much trouble. It was Chris she wanted to see, wished almost she could oust the men—Martin as well as David—be just mother and daughter again as they had been until this year, on their own, exclusive. Whatever its pain, the divorce had brought them closer, changed the whole pattern of their life. No more huge cooked breakfasts with the radio booming and Neil cowering the kitchen with his rush and noise; no more grandiose dinner parties—claret breathing on the sideboard, Pouilly Fuissé chilling in the fridge, slick-suited ad-men vaunting and wisecracking till the early hours. Instead, Chris brought girlfriends home from school—still the upmarket private school Neil had insisted on to deflect attention from his own skimpy education—Emilys and Sarahs, Charlottes and Fionas, sitting in the kitchen eating egg sandwiches without the crusts, jelly and ice cream. She had sat with them, pouring tea, cutting cake, chatting about guinea pigs or netball matches, helping with homework or new maths, plaiting hair. It was Fiona, not Chris, who first had a boyfriend. Morna stayed upstairs that day, while the two girls whispered and giggled on their own. When she came down to fill the teapot, they stopped abruptly and the silence felt as cold as if someone had left the door ajar in winter. Martin came much later, just a name at first, dropped casually into the conversation. It was two months more before she was actually allowed to meet him. After that, she rarely saw Chris without him. The Fionas and the Emmas disappeared.

  Morna finished dressing, started on her face. Chris should have arrived by now, hanging on to Martin’s arm, looking almost identical from the back, both in matching Levis, narrow-hipped, long-legged, both with cropped brown hair. It didn’t seem fair that Chris had turned out plain when she and Neil were both reasonably attractive. Or had been, anyway. Morna glanced at her four reflections in the mirrors. The figure which Neil had called voluptuous now needed constant watching to avoid less flattering adjectives; the hair he had praised as fiery had to be kindled from a bottle. How did David see her? Middle-aged and fading? Or pretty still? As a woman at all, or simply as a linguist whose gender was immaterial? She reapplied her lipstick, returned downstairs, stopped by the phone, willing it to ring. She longed to hear her daughter’s voice—‘I’m back, Mum!’ Chris had only called her Mum since Martin. The Fionas and the Carolines had Mummies.

  She picked up the receiver, dialled the Euroways Head Office. No delays. The boat had docked on time, the coach discharged its passengers at Victoria within a minute of the expected time. She rang Martin, knew nobody would answer, since he had gone to meet Chris, and his mother (Mum) worked late.

  It was half past six already. David would arrive in just an hour. She prayed Chri
s would turn up first. She had better start the cooking, anyway. That at least would stop her fretting.

  By eight o’clock, no one had arrived; the fretting turned to fear. The blood from the steak was carnage on the motorway, the glazed eye of the fish her daughter’s in the mortuary. Ironical to travel the seven hundred miles and more safely from Les. Lecques, only to crash on the last stretch down to Weybridge. Martin’s bike was old, and probably overloaded. She had warned him about the dangers of carrying too much luggage, but he’d only shrugged and said the bags were soft and squashy, would fit on easily. Martin shrugged off things too often. She glanced down at his steak, marbled with skid-marks of fat and still oozing gore, turned away nauseated. How could a sensitive vegetarian be in love with such a carnivore?

  Love was dangerous as well as motorbikes. If Chris married the wrong man, she could mess up her whole life. Neil should be there to vet the men, share the responsibility. She walked to the window, stared out at the garden. The gold was beginning to tarnish now; the day no longer shining young, but ageing, turning grey.

  She returned to the stove, checked on all the food. The fish looked very dead—white flesh shrinking from white bones. Chris’s bones scattered in the overtaking lane. Ridiculous. A hundred things could delay her on such a long and complex journey. She was overreacting, behaving like the standard hysterical mother. The word mother had never seemed more crucial. It was her daughter she had lived for after Neil had gone; her daughter who made her still a family, gave her a rôle and purpose.

  She sat at the table in Chris’s place, both hands gripping the wooden salad bowl. She had made the salad a work of art—tomato flowers, radish roses, slices of apple arranged like petals with celery stalks, green-pepper leaves. She always had to tempt her daughter to get her to eat enough, offer treats or titbits. Chris had lost her appetite along with her father. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she’d kept saying, pushing away cheese and asparagus crêpes or lemon soufflé. She herself had eaten more—felt hollow inside, needed to stuff the gap. Nothing tasted, nothing fattened. It was the only time she had lost weight without trying. She had put the weight back on now, yet the hollow was still there, beneath the flesh.