by Anna Hope
The doors open and the punters flood the floor. Part of her recoils. She doesn’t want this delicate feeling trampled on, not just yet.
But the floor is already packed. Though the band has not yet started, some people are dancing, and small eddies of movement show where people are doing their own little rags. Hettie’s eyes light on a tall, fair man, wearing evening dress, standing alone. He eyes scan the crowd, looking for someone. Then, as if he has felt her staring, the man turns his head her way. When she looks again he is crossing the floor toward the Pen. An elbow digs her in her ribs. “There you go, Het,” says Di beside her. “Now you’re away.”
The man is heading straight for her. A slight hesitancy interrupts his stride, a small roll, as though he has one leg longer than the other.
False leg.
The man comes to a halt just in front of where she stands.
“Hello,” he says. He has an open face. A friendly smile. He reaches out and touches the metal gate with a finger, seeming to test it for strength. “Bit barbaric, this, isn’t it?” He gives it a little rattle. “Why do they need to keep you locked up, then? Are you dangerous?”
She raises the ghost of a smile. She has heard the jokes already—heard them all.
“Do they ever let you out?”
“Sixpence,” she says, pointing to the booth. “Over there.”
“So I can release you for sixpence? That’s cheap at the price.”
The man turns, but then, as though something has just occurred to him, he turns back, hands in his pockets, a quizzical look on his face. “That is,” he says, “if I may?”
Is he laughing at her? She cannot tell. “Of course,” she says. “That’s my job.”
As he goes away from her, she sees again the slight pause, the tiny hesitancy in his stride that gives him away. He hides it well, she thinks, that leg; if you didn’t know how to look you might not be able tell.
“He’s nice,” says Di leaning in. “How’d you manage to score that?”
Hettie shrugs. She can tell Di’s trying to be nice. She’s been nice to her ever since Hettie arrived earlier and just shook her head when Di asked her how it had gone last night. She hadn’t pushed it, either, when Hettie had to explain that she hadn’t brought the dress with her—that she’d gone down to the Broadway for the silence instead.
Di frowns now, putting her hand on Hettie’s arm. “Are you sure you’re all right, Het? You’re ever so quiet tonight.”
The fair-haired man is back in a minute with his docket. “There we go.” He holds it out to her. “They say I’ve to give this to you.”
Hettie takes it from him, puts it into her pouch, and lets herself out of the little gate. They stand, facing each other, he with his hands in his pockets, she with her arms behind her back. He makes no move toward her. They stand this way for a long moment, until she grows hot and cross. “Don’t you want to dance?” she says eventually.
“Dance?” He raises his eyebrows. “Is that what you do? You just looked so forlorn, sitting there, that I thought I ought to set you free.”
She glares at him.
“Sorry,” he says, smiling. “Only joking.” He takes his hands out of his pockets. “What’s the next dance, then?”
“It’s always a waltz. First and last.”
Behind the man, she can see that the band has finished tuning up. The performers are straightening their ties, adjusting their music, and sitting forward in their seats. The conductor comes out from the wings to cheers and scattered applause.
“First and last,” says the man, nodding, as this were important, somehow, to note. “And how long are you free for?”
“Just one dance.”
“And then what happens? Do you turn into a pumpkin? Or do I?”
“Then I go back in there.” Hettie points to the Pen, where Di has been hired now, too, and where just three girls are left.
“Ah,” he makes a small grimace. “I see.”
All around them, couples are taking their places on the floor, and the raucous hubbub is dying, giving way to something else—an excited, expectant hush.
“Well, then,” says the man, opening his arms. “I suppose I’d better make this count.”
She lifts her arms and their palms touch, very lightly. His right arm circles her waist. “I hear the band is very good,” he says.
She wonders how he will manage, dancing, with that leg.
The conductor lifts his baton, and the music begins. The band plays a low, pulsing beat. One two three, one two three. It is not an ordinary waltz. It is slower than usual, and the accent falls oddly; it sounds mournful, a little strange. A hesitation waltz. All around them there’s the swish of cloth and the sound of feet on wood as couples start to move.
For two or three bars the man she is with does nothing. Then, just when she is thinking that he is going to stay that way all night, he pulls her a little tighter, leading her off, spinning her out across the floor. He leads well; his hold is firm, and his shoulders are open and relaxed as they turn around the room to this oddly accented beat.
The band stays with the strange, pulsing count for a long time, until its strangeness and hesitancy start to seem natural, a living thing, a fractured heartbeat. They stay on the beat until a lone trumpeter stands and starts to play over the top.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Inside, everything is surprisingly lush and surprisingly Chinese; indecipherable signs are painted onto hanging panes of glass, and storks and pagodas repeat in patterns over the walls. It should be crass but it’s surprisingly pleasant. Evelyn sees a sign for the ladies’ cloakroom and goes inside, even though she doesn’t really need the loo, but then she has to wait, in a torturous queue, while girls primp and preen themselves all down the long mirrored wall. When a stall finally comes free she locks herself inside, takes her brush from her bag, and pulls it through her hair. She wants to turn around and leave. This is no place for her. She should never have come.
Out of the stall, she faces herself reluctantly in the mirror, pulling at the dress so that it doesn’t gape around her chest. Why, oh why, is she wearing it? Because she had nothing else, that’s why. But if she moves, if she dances, then it will gape. That much is fairly clear. Perhaps she shouldn’t dance, then? She’s probably forgotten how anyway. And she certainly doesn’t know how to dance to anything new. She’ll probably only embarrass herself. She should never have come. She should never have come.
She hands her coat to the cloakroom attendant and takes the stub, then goes through the double doors into a vast hall, packed with swirling dancers. Large colored lanterns hang suspended from the ceiling, filling the room with their pink and blue and yellow light. In the middle of the polished dance floor is a funny sort of miniature mountain, water pouring down its sides, and over on the far side of the room, under what appears to be an approximation of a Chinese temple, is the band: twenty or thirty musicians in white suits.
So this is what a dance hall looks like.
All around the dance floor are tables. Evelyn decides that she will walk once around them, checking to see if Robin is sitting at one, and if she has not seen him by the time that she has done a circuit, she will turn around and leave.
She passes a little cabin selling drinks to her right. She joins the small queue, waits her turn, then, “Gin and orange, please,” she says to the uniformed girl behind the bar.
The girl rolls her eyes. “No alcohol,” she says, pointing to a sign dangling below her. no alcohol will be served. by order of the management.
“Well,” says Evelyn, eyebrow raised. “What do you suggest instead?”
“Tea, or fruit cup.”
“Shouldn’t fruit cup have gin in it?”
The girl stares at her.
“I’ll have a fruit cup then, please.”
“Twopence,” says the girl sloshing
the drink into a cup from a large vat to her right.
Evelyn takes her fruit cup over to a table and puts it down briefly so that she can light her cigarette. She is standing close to the band, near the conductor as he comes out onto the stage, and as he lifts his baton and the band starts to play, she begins walking around the dance floor, keeping her gaze as light as possible, trying not to miss any of the tables, trying not to appear as though she is looking; but Robin is nowhere to be seen.
When she has traveled halfway around the room, the thought occurs to her that he may well not have come. It has been days since they made this arrangement. He may have forgotten. Is it only her arrogance that supposes that he will be here—that he will be waiting? Does she even want to see him at all? She stops, turning to lean against the barrier and look out over the floor. There must four or five hundred couples moving out there, and yet, despite this, the move and shuffle of their feet is light; despite this, she can still hear the single trumpeter over the top, playing his solo, while the band keeps up a fractured, pulsing rhythm underneath.
. . . . . . . . . . .
The man is an extraordinary dancer. As Hettie spins in his arms to this halting, sad music, with his palm splayed on her back and the steady, sure step of him keeping time, she can feel herself, her skin, her blood, right to the smallest part. And the parts of her feel different, charged, rearranged.
She is not the same as she was.
It is Ed. It is as though some of his brokenness has entered her. It is Fred, and standing with him in the silence and the sun. It is the thought of those women in France. It is the sadness of this waltz.
But though she can feel all of this sadness, something is holding her up; it is this man. It is in the way he holds her, in the steady but constant distance between them—a distance he doesn’t seem to want or need to cross. The way he makes her know from his movements that he wants to dance with her, and that dancing is enough.
The trumpeter stops, his last note lingering in the air, and the music is slowing now, coming to a close.
“Thank you.” The man brings her gently to a stop. “That was a very fine sixpence indeed.”
She wants to ask to dance with him again; she wants to tell him that she would happily dance with him all night; wants to ask him how it is that he can dance so beautifully when he ha—
But the man has seen something over her shoulder. His face has changed, and color touches his cheek. He releases her with a funny little bow. “Excuse me,” he says.
Every part of him is concentrated on something just behind her head. She knows without turning that it is a woman; that it is the woman he has come here to
meet.
Of course he has come here to meet someone. Of course.
Hettie bites her disappointment down and turns to see.
A woman stands, in a red dress, on the far edge of the dance floor. She is leaning on the barriers, staring out and smoking a cigarette. She has wavy brown hair cut short to her chin. She is not too small and not too tall, and she is beautiful. Not beautiful in the manner of those women who want people to stare; this woman looks as though she would be happy if no one were to look at her at all. The woman reminds Hettie of someone, though she cannot think of whom.
The woman has not yet seen him looking at her, and so the man’s face is still unguarded, and his eyes are free to roam. Hettie watches him. Soon, she thinks, this woman will sense that she is being stared at, and will turn to meet this man’s gaze.
She wonders if this woman thinks of this man the way he so obviously thinks of her. She knows, without even thinking it properly, without even really forming the thought, that this man loves this woman. And she knows, too, that this man is a good man; that he is a good man to love.
Hettie steps away from the man, moving back toward the Pen, so that when the woman turns she will not be in the way of her view.
The woman turns
