Dancing Backwards

by Salley Vickers

  ‘I didn’t like to leave it there and that was all there was to hand,’ Annie explained. ‘The bath hat’s not mine. It belongs to Mandy.’

  ‘Where are your Australians?’

  The Australians were off on one of their jaunts, potholing this weekend, Annie thought.

  Vi said, ‘Annie, what would you like me to do?’ She couldn’t say more. She didn’t want to say ‘it’ but it was not clear whether the scrap would have been a girl or a boy.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Annie said and burst into tears.

  It turned out that in fact Annie had taken an abortifacient administered by Michelangelo. Or rather administered by some doctor he had put Annie in touch with. The dinner of mussels, Annie disclosed, had taken place the previous evening when Michelangelo had taken her out to break it to her that it was all off.

  ‘I knew I was right to mistrust him, Annie. What was he playing at, a last supper?’

  ‘It wasn’t him, it was his wife.’

  Vi, who knew this was shame at Michelangelo’s dereliction rather than loyalty, did not try to argue. ‘Was this so-called doctor qualified?’

  ‘He had some letters after his name.’

  ‘Anyone can put letters after their name. I can if it comes to that. Where did you see him?’

  Annie said she had seen the doctor somewhere in Victoria, but she couldn’t say exactly where. They had gone by taxi at Michelangelo’s expense.

  ‘Big deal. He buggered off afterwards sharp enough. You must see a proper doctor, Annie.’

  But the stubbornness with which Annie had met the conception of the child seemed not to have left her with its passing. ‘I don’t want to see anyone. I’m hardly bleeding at all now.’

  Vi rang Bruno to say that she would be staying over at Annie’s. She spent the night in Mandy’s bed, which seemed to be host to an alarming number of soft toys.

  ‘I had to pile the teddy bears on the chest of drawers,’ she told Annie the following morning when she brought her tea and toast on a tray. ‘I couldn’t dream of sleeping with them all ranged along the bed.’

  Annie was feeling better and said that she had decided in the night that the baby should be buried.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Well, his father’s Catholic.’

  ‘Annie, I think we must stop considering the child’s father. Where would you like to do this? I doubt we can do it in a church.’

  In the end, late at night, under the ungentle yellow illumination of the streetlights, they buried Annie’s aborted child on Chelsea Embankment, by the statue of Sir Thomas More. Annie had chosen the tough old saint for the baby’s namesake. She suggested a nearby bed of wallflowers for the burial but Vi objected.

  ‘They’ll want to weed and then someone might dig him up, Annie. Under the laurel bush is safer. Anyway laurels are evergreen.’

  Vi dug as deep a hole as she could manage with a trowel she had bought specially from the gardening department at Peter Jones and they laid the scrap, wrapped in one of Annie’s silk scarves, in the earth beneath the dark-leaved shrub. Annie had been wearing the scarf, she said, the evening she and Michelangelo had walked along the Embankment, the same night that she was convinced she had conceived. They had passed Sir Thomas and his golden face, Annie remembered, had gleamed, which she found meaningful.

  It was only after all this had been accomplished, when Vi and Annie were recovering back at Annie’s flat over a glass of brandy, that Vi thought to ask, ‘Did I give you Bruno’s number?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You rang me there. How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘I didn’t. I rang you in Cambridge,’ Annie said. ‘Edwin gave me your London number. By the way, Vi, I suppose what we did tonight wasn’t strictly legal.’

  18

  Perhaps it was the message to Annie but Vi decided that she would after all sample the dance lesson in the Tudor Room. She went back to her cabin to change into the silver shoes. Nothing could be more ‘suitable’.

  Renato had been in to do the room. There was a welcome absence of synthetic lemon and a note on the desk: Madam, I have put your rings in the safe. Plese ask me for number. Renato.

  Vi looked at her hands. Long-fingered and bony. It was a while since they had been bare of rings. Well, the rings could stay in the safe for now. She could rely on Renato to make sure she did not forget them.

  Down in the Tudor Room women and one or two bold—or easily managed—men were assembling in versions of ‘suitable shoes’. George and Marie arrived lugging a CD player, George in jeans and plimsolls and Marie in a body-hugging wraparound skirt. They were to learn today, George announced, the cha-cha-cha.

  ‘Mrs Hetherington. You came!’

  ‘I did, Dino.’ She gave the name a particular articulation so that he would know she was not planning to unmask him.

  ‘I am so glad.’

  The pleasures of giving pleasure are often underestimated and Vi was pleased to have so easily pleased the boy. It was such a simple matter, learning a few dance steps. And really, it wasn’t difficult, forward, back, and three steps sideways—she had the knack in no time.

  ‘Are we all ready then, ladies and gentlemen? Time to put your hard work into practice. Find a partner, please and remember how it goes, one, two and cha cha cha!’

  The voice of Sammy Davis Junior issued meltingly from the CD player. Des took Vi’s hand. ‘Follow me.’ He squeezed her fingers gently.

  The rhythm flowed easily down through her legs on to her front foot—forward, then back, and finally on to the balls of her feet as she stepped sideways for the ‘cha-cha-cha’.

  ‘That was brilliant, Mrs Hetherington.’

  ‘You flatter me, Dino,’ said Vi, secretly flattered. ‘But it was fun.’

  ‘No, you are good. A natural dancer. You have rhythm.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because I am a poet.’ She had not intended to say this and she found to her annoyance that she was blushing.

  ‘“It is part of a poor spirit to undervalue himself and blush.” That’s George Herbert, in case you don’t know,’ Edwin said. ‘By “poor” he means modest, not inferior. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”’

  Vi, back from Annie’s, had made the long walk home from the station. When she got in, Edwin was lying on the sofa that had done service as Bruno’s bed. A three-quarters empty bottle of Teacher’s was balancing perilously on a pile of essay papers on the carpet beside him.

  The kitchen was a mess of unwashed plates, mugs, saucepans, spilled Nescafé grounds, uncooked rice grains, bits of eggshell and an inexpertly opened baked beans tin. All the glasses were smeared with what looked like tomato sauce. In the brief moment it took to rinse a glass clean, Vi saw, quite clearly, the expression in Bruno’s eyes as she had come from the kitchen that other time.

  Back in the sitting room, she poured herself a whisky. ‘You knew all the time.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I thought…’ But she didn’t know what she had thought. She felt her face going red again.

  ‘You thought I was blind. Blind as a bat.’ Edwin was at the stage of drunkenness when speech becomes unnaturally precise.

  ‘I thought you’d mind, Ed.’

  ‘She thought I would mind, She thought I was blind,’ Edward carolled. ‘I minded your not telling me more. One hell of a lot more. One—hell—of—a—lot.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Edwin leaned down and with insane care poured most of what was left of the whisky into his already full glass. ‘I am not quite drunk as a lord,’ he announced. ‘Ten lords a-leaping, nine ladies dancing—eight…? What’s eight?’

  ‘You’ve cut yourself.’ There was a grubby bloodied plaster coming adrift on his right forefinger.

  ‘I cut it opening a—can—of—beans.’

  ‘You must have used the wrong tin opener.’

  ‘I used the wrong tin opener!’ Edwin suddenly shouted. ‘Listen everyone, I used the wrong fucking tin opener!’
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  Vi said, ‘Ed, maybe we should go to bed.’

  ‘Good idea. Why don’t you come with me.’

  ‘To bed?’

  ‘Why not? You do it with everyone else.’

  ‘Ed, please.’

  ‘No, I mean it, Vi. If you can go to bed with my oldest friend why not with me?’

  There was no help for it. Vi led Edwin by the hand to his bedroom and assisted him in undressing, which took some doing as he stopped at intervals to deliver his views on life and Walter Pater, who, he declared, had been unjustly neglected. Vi held her patience until he started a homily on Platonic love. ‘I want to explain this…’

  ‘Do you really want me to get into bed with you, Ed?’

  Edwin made as if to walk, buckled and then crashed with his whole weight across the foot of the bed. In his vest and underpants, he looked shockingly pale against the white sheets. ‘Only to sleep. I didn’t mean anything else.’

  ‘Of course I will, if you want,’ said Vi, who was always, sometimes disastrously, willing to oblige.

  She went into the sitting room, collected their glasses and the bottle of Teacher’s, went to the kitchen, rinsed the glasses, poured the residue of the whisky down the sink, went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and then, still going slowly, undressed and put on her nightdress.

  She returned to Edwin’s room with a jug of water and a clean glass and got into bed. Once there, it felt surprisingly normal. Edwin had managed to get himself under the sheet and his eyes were closed. But as she wriggled down, as un-obtrusively as possible, beside his long form he rolled towards her and held her to him tight. She could feel, next to her own chest, the knocking of his heart.

  ‘Thank you for this,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK. It’s nice for me too. I think you’d better have some water.’

  ‘I’d rather have whisky.’

  ‘I’ve poured it down the sink.’

  ‘Cow. Unmitigated cowishness.’

  ‘Have some water, Ed. Come on, drink up.’

  ‘What’s eight?’

  ‘Drink.’

  He drank. ‘What’s eight? I think I should be told.’

  ‘Eight maids a-milking, isn’t it? Shut up now and go to sleep.’

  Even with a strong attraction, it is almost always impossible to sleep well beside an unfamiliar body and they spent an interrupted night, rolling away from each other and then together again, like porcupines. When Vi woke the next morning she was alone in the bed. She lay observing through the window the tender greening leaves of the horse chestnut tree opposite and listening to sparrows scratching maniacally under the roof. It was the beginning of spring, so they would be busy making nests.

  Presently, Edwin appeared in his dressing gown with a tray. ‘Service with a smile.’

  ‘Crikey. I should sleep with you more often.’

  ‘There’s digestive biscuits too,’ Edwin said, and got back into bed. The soles of his feet, hardened from his habit of going barefoot, scraped comfortingly against hers.

  Side by side, they drank tea and ate biscuits, until, brushing away the crumbs, Vi grasped the nettle. ‘So tell me how you knew.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t say.’ He sounded quite casual now. ‘How does one “know” things? Everyone knows everything, really. We just hide it from ourselves.’

  ‘I’m really sorry, Ed. I didn’t mean to hide. It was that I didn’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘Why did you imagine I’d be hurt?’

  ‘Weren’t you, though?’

  Edwin got out of bed and put on his dressing gown again. ‘I’m going to make coffee. You’d better get a move on or you’ll be late for work.’

  That evening it was almost like the old days. Vi cooked mushroom risotto, Edwin opened a bottle of Valpolicella and they talked—apparently easily again.

  ‘Vi, what happened? You loathed Bruno, or said you did. You offered to move out.’

  ‘I don’t know, Ed. I can’t explain.’

  ‘Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that fitted the situation.’

  ‘It’s really none of my business,’ Edwin said. ‘Sorry to pry.’

  ‘Look,’ Vi said. ‘It went like this. I came home one day from work, with some leeks from Mr Jarvis, as a matter of fact. Bruno was in the sitting room when I came home and I was annoyed to see him.’

  ‘Why annoyed?’

  ‘I don’t know. He annoyed me. I went to wash the leeks in the kitchen, there was celery too, now I remember. When I came out of the kitchen, with my hands all wet from the vegetables, he was standing there. Just standing, looking at me. He asked why I didn’t like him.’

  ‘And did you say?’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Because you didn’t want to?’

  ‘I just couldn’t.’

  ‘So you went to bed with him instead?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said again. ‘It sort of happened. Suddenly, there we were, neither of us with clothes on. I know that sounds feeble.’

  ‘No,’ Edwin said, ‘it sounds true. Sex is a great puzzlement.’

  ‘But I don’t know that it was sex, exactly.’

  ‘I can’t see what else you could put it down to,’ Edwin said, opening another bottle of wine.

  But I was right, it wasn’t sex, Vi thought, stripping off in her cabin, for the dancing lesson had made her sweat. She dropped her clothes wantonly on the floor, performed a cha-cha-cha and went into the bathroom for a shower.

  19

  Out on the balcony, in a towelling robe (monogrammed with the initials of the Queen Caroline against potential theft), Vi opened another of the old notebooks. A postcard and a blue aerogram from Australia fell out. Also a small gift card of a picture of some violets.

  Annie had implemented her plan to visit Australia and was in Perth staying with Mandy’s sister. Perth, Annie wrote, is a massive improvement on London. The surfing’s fab and the men are fantastic. Next stop Brisbane! She sounded extremely happy.

  The picture postcard of the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford was less fulsome: The teaching here is quite a challenge but I have a lively sixth form class. We are doing ‘Antony and Cleopatra’. Come and visit me soon. E.

  The recovered closeness with Edwin, the night of the revelation about Bruno, held together for a while. Vi continued to visit Bruno in London and once he came up to Cambridge to discuss Ariel, of which he was now officially co-editor, when Vi was down visiting Annie.

  Annie seemed to have got over the perfidious Michelangelo and was dating the gynaecologist from Brisbane who had dated Mandy.

  ‘Is that allowed?’ Vi asked.

  ‘Mandy chucked him.’

  ‘No, I mean weren’t you his patient?’

  Annie declared that she’d only rung him for advice and that he’d never laid a hand on her save in the way of lust.

  But although Vi and Edwin seemed to go on as before, something—neither wanted to admit it—had changed. Bruno telephoned her most evenings and asked what she had been doing. This was not always easy to explain. She felt awkward talking to Bruno in the presence of Edwin, though he never made any remark.

  Bruno, however, was curious about Edwin.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said one evening when he asked where Edwin was.

  ‘Didn’t he tell you?’

  ‘It’s not how me and Edwin are.’

  ‘Edwin and I.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not Edwin and me. It’s Edwin and I.’

  In May, when the buttercups were pronouncing to any who cared to try the experiment that they liked butter and the cow parsley had transformed the hedges and ditches to a cream haze—and the students were busy taking caffeine and ‘uppers’ in preparation for their exams—Edwin also followed up an old idea. He applied successfully for the post of Head of English at a large comprehensive in Oxford. Vi, when he told her, gave in her notice at the Fitzwilliam. She couldn’t imagine a life in Cambridge without Edwin.

&nb
sp; At the end of August, Vi parted from Samuel Palmer’s consoling sheep and she and Edwin packed up the flat. The fulsome greens of the lawns and the Backs were on the turn and the whole city had the last-ditch stand of the final stretch of an English summer.

  Vi and Edwin ate a picnic of leftovers from the fridge off the crates into which their few possessions had been crammed. The crates and boxes were a parting donation from Mr Jarvis, who also presented Vi with a bunch of blue, mauve and dark crimson asters. He had become uncharacteristically loquacious when he learned that Vi was moving and confided that she reminded him of his dead sister.

  ‘A somewhat barren compliment,’ was Edwin’s verdict when Vi showed him the flowers. He had met Mr Jarvis, who had lost all his natural teeth as a boy.

  Bruno had said, when she told him, ‘You must come and live with me.’ He seemed to think this was settled and somehow it therefore seemed to be.

  So now Ralph downstairs, who was taking one of his Deadly Sins to show at an exhibition and had promised to drive Vi and her crates of books down to London, was at the door with his Dormobile van. The night before, Vi and Edwin had drunk a valedictory bottle of Valpolicella and tried not to be maudlin. As a result, they were brisk with each other, which is never very satisfactory for partings.

  When, accompanied by Avarice, Vi arrived at Bruno’s flat, she found the place filled with red roses. No scent, or thorns, but that perhaps was to be churlish. She was touched that he was so manifestly glad to see her.

  Bruno greeted Ralph like a lost friend and insisted on pouring him a glass of champagne. Ralph said he had to be on his way and left most of his glass of champagne untouched.

  Although Vi was not easily bored and, as Bruno said, the nearby Portobello Market was enough like the market in Cambridge for her to feel at home, she was unused to being without an occupation. To her surprise, Bruno seemed dead against her looking for a job. ‘I can support you,’ he said and Vi, who was not yet experienced enough to know when to take someone at their word, was gratified that he seemed to want to look after her.