Dancing Backwards

by Salley Vickers

  When Vi looked scared, Mrs Viney said, ‘You wrote so well on the Shandean influence on European thought in your entrance exam, Victoria.’

  Vi’s spirit never quite recovered from this, even when she learned that Mrs Viney was generally disappointed in her current students and frequently confused them with past students, with whom she had been just as disappointed once but who shone in memory with retrospective glory. The discouragement with Mrs Viney was only one of several. Cambridge is notoriously cold since wind blows more or less unimpeded across from the bleak Ural Mountains. The poorer women’s colleges were stingy with their heating and students were obliged to post shillings into their gas meters to light their hopelessly inadequate gas fires. Vi’s grant covered only part of her fees and living expenses and the money was not made up by her father. Rather than ask for what she suspected would not be forthcoming, Vi scrimped and did without extra food and heat in her room and consequently was always catching cold.

  But the physical chill was not the worst of it. She missed her school friends, who, if they had gone to university, had gone to jollier-sounding places like Sussex or Newcastle. Her best friend, Annie Packer, had not gone to university at all. To Vi’s admiration, and some envy, Annie had been taken on as a trainee buyer at Marshall and Snelgrove. The job suited Annie who had aspirations to become a model. She was also unusually informed about Marshall and Snelgrove’s stock since she had been in the way of supplementing her school wardrobe by regular shoplifting from their dress department.

  As a new undergraduate Vi did what she believed was expected of her: she bought a bike at the police auction, though she never got round to collecting it from the bike shop to which she took it for repairs; she joined societies and made a few, not very congenial, friends. In the first term, she went out with a boy from Selwyn called Derek, who was a member of the English History Society. They hadn’t much to say to each other and Vi found Derek’s sexual advances, at a late night showing of La Dolce Vita, annoying rather than enticing. She auditioned for a production of Topol, where she was cast in a minor role, which was subsequently cut when the show ran overtime. After that, she joined a dull Sunday choir and drank dutifully with the others at the pub. But she found the whole experience of being away from home confusing and missed Annie, who was sharing a flat in Earls Court with three high-spirited Australians from Adelaide.

  There was a tap at the door and a beaming Renato came through to the balcony. ‘Mrs Hetheringon, I bring…’ He proudly presented on a salver half a grapefruit, cut into efficient segments.

  ‘Thank you, Renato.’

  ‘You finish the rest of your breakfast? I take away this tray?’

  ‘Please.’

  Deftly shouldering the tray with one hand, Renato produced from his pocket a token.

  ‘Free offer to use the spa. It is meant only for Decks Thirteen and Fourteen but my friend there he give me some and so I say, This for Mrs Hetherington.’

  ‘Thank you, Renato. That is very kind.’

  ‘You like the spa, Mrs Hetherington. Very good for ladies.’

  ‘I am sure I shall like it.’

  ‘Very peaceful. Let me know when to do your room, Mrs Hetherington.’

  ‘Thank you, Renato, I shall.’

  ‘Remember, put the notice on the door.’

  ‘I will try to remember.’

  A postcard from Annie, a hand-tinted sepia print of the Eiffel Tower, coloured like marzipan, was stuck into a page of the notebook. The aged brown sellotape peeled away easily. Having a ball, the card read. Fab frocks this year. Skirts knickers-high.

  Vi had followed Annie’s advice and chopped her own skirts so short that she was unable to go home for fear of her father’s retorts. There was a blurred photograph of her wearing one, with Annie looking like Mary Quant with bobbed hair and black tights (probably nicked).

  There was another tap at the door. ‘Mrs Hetherington, it’s me.’ Renato, with a brand new idea. ‘I forget to say. If you have any laundry or dry cleaning it must go before twelve o’clock.’

  ‘Thank you, Renato.’

  ‘You know where the laundry bag is?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘In the bottom drawer. Two bags: one, blue, for laundry, the white one for dry cleaning.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You like I take it now?’

  Vi threw in the towel. ‘I do have some cleaning. I’ll sort it out. And why not do the room now, Renato?’

  8

  Vi, reaching the stairs, found that she had picked up the token to the spa. Well, why not? It was free. She returned to her room and interrupted Renato happily hoovering with the TV on.

  ‘I’m getting my swimming things, Renato. I’m going to follow your advice and try the spa.’

  ‘Madam, look, the quickstep. You do this easy.’

  She was just being issued with a gown, a locker key and a towel by a glamorous Indian girl in a white overall when Jen showed up.

  ‘Hi there, Vi. Have you got a free token?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Our steward told us that no one is joining, too pricey, so they’re giving out these to tempt us in.’

  So much for Renato’s special favours. Vi undressed and got into her bathing costume, which no longer seemed to fit in any of the right places.

  ‘God, I wish I had your figure, Vi.’

  ‘I think you look a treat,’ Vi said, meaning it. Jen in a bikini patterned with vivid sunflowers was a tall, bronzed Amazon.

  ‘“She wore an itsy bitsy, teeny weeny, yellow polka dot bikini” I don’t think,’ Jen said. ‘Come on, let’s take the plunge.’

  The ‘spa’ was a small swimming bath filled with warm saline water and fitted with a variety of pumping devices set at various levels to massage different parts of the body. Vi tried all the massages in turn, swam twice round the pool and then discovered, at the far end, an underwater couch, made out of metal bars through which the water surged.

  Lying with the warm water gently thrashing her back, Vi’s feelings towards Renato relented. This was the second adventure he had sent her on and, like the dancing, it had turned out to be fun. She lay back, with the water kneading her shoulder blades, thinking about Edwin.

  Edwin’s seminars on poetry, attended by first- and second-year students in preparation for Part I of the University Tripos exams, were held in his rooms at Corpus Christi, above the sundial in Old Court, where the young firebrand Christopher Marlowe once lodged. Seminars were often taught by postgraduates such as Edwin, engaged in writing doctoral theses and usually woefully behind in their schedules and thus short of funds. Vi had gone to Edwin’s seminars, as she did to every university class, in a state of debilitating anxiety of which she was hardly aware since any condition suffered long enough becomes normal. Squashed up against other students, on a sofa shiny with use, in aged rooms whose walls, where visible between crammed bookcases, were yellowed with years of coal fires and nicotine, she made no attempt to contribute to the discussions. Convinced as she was of the meagreness of her understanding and her own insignificance, the whole business of being there at all had become a condition of chronic dread. She had nothing to say that would not sound, she knew, ridiculously unsophisticated.

  Each week, Edwin handed round copies of xeroxed poems for the class to analyse. At the very last seminar of the spring term, to her astonishment she recognised one. It had been a favourite of Miss Arnold’s who, still alight with the zeal of the novice, had given the poem to her sixth form to read over a half term.

  Vi was the only one in the class who had read the poem closely, if at all—and really more for what it might reveal about her teacher than for any improving mental exercise. One verse in particular had caught her attention.

  When love with one another so Interinanimates two souls, That abler soul which thence doth flow, Defects of loneliness controls.

  The word ‘interinanimates’ intr
igued her and stuck in her mind and while she didn’t quite understand the poet’s meaning she was taken by the sound of the words.

  ‘You have a good ear, Violet,’ Miss Arnold had said, when Vi, a little nervously, mentioned this. ‘You will get along well with Donne. He had one of the best ears of all time. Do you know what “ecstasy” means?’

  Vi, who supposed it was what happened when you took LSD, thought it prudent to say that she didn’t.

  ‘Good,’ said Miss Arnold, who approved of ignorance in her pupils. ‘Ecstasy is a mystical state in which the soul escapes the body to seek union with the divine. Donne, you see, has made a conceit (that’s also a form of pun, by the way) in suggesting that the entities which flow from his soul and his lover’s unite to create a third entity, a perfect whole or divinity. The divinity is sexual love not God. It is a characteristic piece of his sublime profanity.’

  People generally feel well-disposed to those they have helped and it was this exchange that had led to Miss Arnold’s suggesting that Vi try for Cambridge. Thereafter Vi thought of the turbulent seventeenth-century poet and preacher as an ally.

  Donne came to her aid again in Edwin’s class.

  ‘So,’ Edwin had said after a more than usually empty few minutes, ‘does anyone have any thoughts at all about this poem? What is, or what was, ecstasy?’ He glared at the class. His eyes, one blue and one a greenish hazel, were like those of a white cat Vi had had as a child, before her mother died and pets were banished for good from the household.

  There was a further silence. Motes of dust danced crazily in the sunlight over the drowsy heads of the students, who shifted uneasily on their bottoms and looked bored or sheepish according to their temperament. It was the last week of term and most of the room had spent it in serious late-night partying, enjoying less ethereal forms of ecstasy.

  ‘Forgive my interrupting your repose.’ Edwin’s hair, sticking up at the back where he had not combed it, made him look like a ruffled bird.

  Vi, who had been to no parties and was sensitive to embarrassment, said, very rapidly in case she lost the impetus, ‘Ecstasy is a mystical state in which the soul escapes the body to find union with the divine’ and blushed horribly.

  Edwin habitually taught the class perilously balanced on the arm of his desk chair and with his own legs twisted around the chair’s. He unscrambled his limbs enough to turn and stare at Vi with his odd eyes.

  ‘Since you seem to be the only person, other than myself, awake in the room, have you any other ideas to enliven the rest with?’

  Vi said, still speaking very fast, ‘He’s imagining a third, um, entity, born from their love, which will unite them so they are no longer alone. A child, really, except…’ Acute embarrassment made her stop short of saying that the poem was describing a poetic parallel to the sexual act.

  ‘A kind of metaphysical child. A bold conclusion when you press it, as some of us are willing to. Any idea who the poet is?’

  ‘John Donne,’ said Vi, longing for a complexion that did not ensure that every private emotion went on vivid display. ‘But I already knew it.’

  ‘Don’t apologise for knowing Donne,’ Edwin had said.

  When the class was over, he caught her at the door. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Honour St John. But I use my second name.’

  ‘Which is?’ he looked less like a bird of prey when he smiled.

  ‘Violet. My friends call me Vi.’

  ‘Violet suits you.’ Vi blushed still more ferociously.

  At the first seminar of the summer term, after Edwin had handed round the sheets of purple printed poems, he said, ‘Violet, could you kindly read aloud for us the first poem on the sheet?’

  At the end of the class he stopped her again as she was trying to sidle out. ‘You see. It wasn’t so bad.’

  ‘I didn’t read it very well.’

  ‘Hopkins is hardly a piece of cake.’ The odd eyes held hers. ‘You have a good ear.’

  ‘Miss Arnold said that.’

  ‘And Miss Arnold is…?’

  ‘My English teacher. At school. It was her idea I should come to Cambridge.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have come under your own steam?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not bright enough,’ Vi said, and began blushing again.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Edwin said. ‘You’re shy, not at all the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with being shy. I’m shy too, if it comes to that.’ Vi, who did not believe this for a second, felt grateful. ‘You like poetry.’ It appeared to be a statement not a question.

  ‘When I understand it.’

  ‘If you like it you will understand it. Apprehend it, I should say. Poems are like people: they should not be too well “understood”.’

  He walked her to the gate by St Benet’s church where blue and white bluebells were still gracing the old graveyard. ‘Come and have a drink with me some time and tell me which other poets you like.’

  ‘Bloody hell, I gave my thigh one hell of a bashing on those underwater bars.’ Jen emerged like a gleaming sea lion suddenly from the water. ‘They should watch that. I could sue. Is it nice there?’ She heaved herself up and rolled on to the couch beside Vi.

  ‘It is nice,’ Vi said. ‘I wouldn’t have come if my steward hadn’t bullied me.’

  ‘I know what you mean. Sometimes you have to be made to do things which turn out to be the best things you ever do.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Ken made me marry him. I didn’t want to, but he kept on at me, and then he shut me in a cupboard under his gran’s stairs and wouldn’t let me out till I promised to marry him. He told me it was full of spiders. I was scared of spiders so I said “yes”.’

  ‘Heavens.’

  ‘I had my fingers crossed and I wasn’t meaning to go through with it. But then, you know, I got to quite like the idea. Funny thing, life.’

  ‘Did you ever regret it?’

  ‘Who doesn’t? Goes with the territory. See, look, there’s going to be one hell of a bruise there. Ken’ll be mad at me. He says I can’t be trusted out on my own.’

  They showered and washed their hair and dried it with over-efficient blowers provided by the spa.

  ‘It’s like school,’ Jen said, towelling her back and shoulders vigorously. ‘Only the showers work better here and, goody, look, body lotion.’ She pumped a palmful of cream from a dispenser and rubbed it over her breasts. ‘Never really get rid of stretch marks, do you? Not that you seem to have any. What are you up to now?’

  ‘I might have an early lunch.’

  ‘I’m off to play Scrabble with Ken. It’s his turn to win.’

  ‘Do you take it in turns?’

  ‘Not officially. But I let him win every so often. Stops him getting narky. Know what I mean?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Vi. Even ‘narky’ Ken was so obviously a pushover for Jen.

  9

  Trouble had broken out in the Alexandria Grill. Walter, the German chef, who had fallen in love with Jean-Paul, a waiter from Toulouse, had caught Jean-Paul flirting with Pedro, the Spanish sommelier. Walter, who took a pride in being temperamental, had gone after Pedro with a steak hammer swearing to beat that fucking Spaniard’s fucking head in. Luckily, beyond a bad bruise to Pedro’s shin, caused by his leaping on to a counter in the course of escape, no real damage had been done. Pedro had withdrawn to his room where he had locked the door and was threatening legal action.

  Walter was indispensable to the restaurant and the crew purser, after issuing the chef with a curt reprimand, decided to order Pedro to his quarters sick. Meanwhile, a replacement wine waiter was needed. The head sommelier, who had heard that Dino had restaurant experience and a reputation for a good manner, suggested that he might take Pedro’s place until things had calmed down.

  Des was on his first luncheon duty when he saw Mrs Hetherington. ‘Can I get you anything to drink?’


  ‘What will you have to drink?’ Edwin asked.

  He and Vi were sitting in the RAF bar in the Eagle, the ancient inn on Benet Street. Above their heads, on the ceiling, inscribed in soot, candle smoke and lipstick, were the names and numbers of the men and planes of the RAF and the US Eighth Air Force lost in the last war. One evening, one of the fighter pilots, a P. E. Turner of Cherry Hinton, placed a chair on a table and climbed up to write the first sooty inscription on the ceiling with his cigarette lighter, thereby starting a trend.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Vi said. ‘I don’t drink much. Not beer, anyway.’

  ‘You don’t like beer?’

  ‘I can’t seem to.’ It was a stumbling-block in her social life that she had never cared for the most popular student drink.

  ‘So what will you have? Whisky? Gin and tonic? Wine?’

  ‘Oh, wine, please,’ said Vi, confused by choice. ‘I don’t like spirits much either.’

  ‘It will be my ruin, if other vices don’t carry me off first.’ He ordered a double Scotch and had finished it before a quarter of her glass was empty. ‘I see you have noticed my eyes.’

  Vi, who was in fact trying to look away from the rapidly emptied glass, blushed and said, ‘They are like the eyes of a cat I had once.’

  ‘I have no objections to being likened to a cat. What was yours called?’

  ‘Arthur.’

  ‘After the king?’

  ‘No. I don’t know why “Arthur”. I suppose I just liked the name.’

  ‘I am glad it was not the king. I can’t abide grail fanciers. You’re not a grail fancier, are you?’