Let's Dance

by Frances Fyfield

  The graveyard was like a stage set of what a graveyard should be before dark: damp, lifeless, peculiarly verdant, even in winter. The black slate of memorial stones shone with the perspiration of damp. Isabel changed direction to amble down avenues of graves, fascinated by the grim tranquillity of this car park of the dead and the manner in which they were commemorated. No Mums and Dads here; all inscriptions conventional and respectful, but small control over violent pink granite, a headstone shaped like an aeroplane, a weeping angel holding a guitar. Something in the hedge caught her eye. Lurking beneath the holly was a phone. At first she thought it was a deliberate joke, part of the mementoes, a piece of wit left in case Grandad in the adjacent plot should wish to phone home when he was feeling better. Then she recognized the phone from the living room of their own ravaged house. Stuck with a label, an old phone, nothing newfangled about it, thrown into the hedge by a passing thief and looking forlorn. Isabel touched it, gingerly, left it where it was. Moved on to the graves of Mab and her father, quickly looking over her shoulder. Nothing; an innocent afternoon in the middle of the week when no one but she was visiting the avenues of the deceased.

  Someone had improved on the tidiness of her father’s grave. Sprigs of holly from the hedge sat in a tin on the neatened gravel, giving the thing a festive air; the letters of his name were free of the misty cobwebs that adorned Mab’s less fulsome inscription. Isabel stared at the holly leaves, waxy and shiny, sharp. The holly bears a berry … as red as any blood … The lines of the Christmas carol stirring in her mind, making her want to hum the rest of the words she could never remember. Her father had a fine singing voice, she could recall the sound. He would sing at parties; once he had serenaded her on her eighteenth birthday in front of fifty guests and all she had felt was embarrassment. A strict and loving man, resented, ignored, adored; far too demonstrative for a teenager obsessed by masculinity of the more youthful kind, hellbent still on them and the approval of that distant, amused mother. Isabel had never credited him with his own personality: he was provider, ruler, more absent than present, loved madly on the first day he came home before his attempts to exert control made him irritating. Darling, distinguished Dad, a slippy kind of memory, perhaps because his wife never discussed him.

  Isabel was saddened by her ignorance of him, puzzled and alarmed by the recent attentions to his grave. Someone had tended it before; she had known that and had failed to question it when she had given the same attention to Mab’s miserable patch. There could be a sort of contract cleaning service for graves, as far as she knew, although it seemed a strange service to be provided by strangers. She no longer remembered what she had thought about the disparity before, other than it creating another notch on the guilt scale for not thinking about it at all.

  Grazed nerves made for vivid imagery. Kneeling on the edge of Father’s plinth, she could imagine a disembodied arm extending from Mab’s grave, sticking up out of the earth, twisting and busily plucking at the weeds. Tidy, organized Mab, unable to tolerate mess for long. It was, after all, Mab who had rooted the family here; she may even have found them the house, or maybe they had dumped themselves so close because she had been vital to the arrangements. Isabel was surprised by how little she knew of any of this. How little she would ever know now. How strange and sad it was that it was her mother whom she had sought to emulate when, all the time, Mab was the one worth copying.

  She stood up in sudden disgust. Maudlin, macabre and escapist. The dead were dead: they did not mutter in their graves. Nor talk to themselves, as she did, nor suffer the chattering teeth that afflicted her as she ran back to her car, flung herself inside for the flimsy protection it afforded, pitched the thing back up the track as if it were a jeep and the holes in the road did not matter.

  A light appeared in the window of the neighbours who lived next to the church and faced the parking space. A curtain twitched. Look at the way she had parked her car, that girl; look at the way she drove it. She was just like her mother, both of them nutty as fruitcakes.

  ‘What does she think she’s doing?’ Sal said to George. ‘She took off like all hell was behind her. Seen a ghost or something? Only for a minute I thought she was about to come through the window. Like her mother nearly did the other year.’

  ‘She wouldn’t do that. Not normally.’

  ‘You all right, George? Sure you don’t want another bit of cake?’

  She half wanted him to go, half to stay. Her old man had never been keen on George. It was a trifle embarrassing to have him stay so long, sit about talking as if he were waiting for something. He was nice enough, always had been, but awkward company. Sal was puzzled, but since he seemed so ignorant of the burglary that had brought Isabel to the door, and then the police with questions about what she had not seen, he was less than rewarding.

  ‘No thanks, Missus. It was lovely.’

  ‘Look, there she is, Mrs Burley, being brought back home. That’s three afternoons this week someone’s taken her out and brought her back. Gets shorter each time, though. I’m glad someone does that. I don’t think her daughter looks fit to look after her.’

  ‘No,’ said George. ‘I’m not sure about that either.’

  Sal was a mixture of window-hopping curiosity and a curious lack of observation, aided by hardness of hearing and the constant companionship of her television set. George often wondered why people who lived in the middle of woods and fields still found their greatest acquaintance with nature in wildlife programmes. As long as he had visited here, for post and cake, Sal had always been indoors, wore the pallor of a woman who never went for a walk.

  ‘Don’t you want to take the letters, George?’

  ‘No, leave ‘em. Nothing important, I’ll be bound.’

  She didn’t question why he hid his car round the back instead of parking on the road. George was grateful for that.

  ‘Going to snow,’ said Sal, affecting a country wisdom learned from the weather forecast. ‘You can tell by the sky.’

  ‘I hope not,’ George remarked.

  Indeed he hoped not. He was becoming afraid of the cold.

  Passing the church Andrew Cornell realized that he still had the habit of prayer, learned by rote early on and preserved entirely for addressing an amorphous and anonymous God on the subject of the weather. Such as, why are you allowing it to snow? Please don’t. Offering some form of atonement to the deity if he would listen. Perhaps the deity realized that, although the blossoming skies and first flakes of white might curtail his errand of mercy as he made his way to Serena Burley’s house with a television in the back of his car, the errand was not actually done from the purest of motives. What motivates a man to feel concern for a woman unless it be lust of a kind? No, it was not disinterested kindness. He simply did not like a day to pass without seeing Isabel’s face. Even though she sent him away, denying his attempts to lighten the load, even though that face was as pinched as a shrivelled berry, the rest of her as spare as a winter twig, and what she exuded was a bitter sap. He wanted to help because he wanted at least a sight of the girl he thought he could perceive beyond the smothering blanket of her responsibilities. No, he conceded, it was not selfless; otherwise he would not also want her to look back and see him.

  The snow was light and damp, uncertain snow, the same as the last week of purgatorial English weather, teasing with bitter cold, daring a citizen to go about his business. The solace of these days for children was the prospect of Christmas; for Andrew, long conversations with his father. What that man knew astounded and sometimes disturbed him. Made him realize that his own habit of secrecy was an inherited feature. We should have been spies, his father said. The things we have in common, son, are a matter of blood and cannot be avoided. Father was wise, in his way; a man to be trusted, enjoyed, but not always liked for his perspicacity.

  There was the same form of greeting from Serena, ecstatic, fluttering, but fading into a fixed smile and a constant patting of his arm, as if to ensure he was solid fle
sh. A contrast to Isabel’s greeting, friendly enough, relieved even, but not sufficient to make him feel his presence had been sorely missed. The television was produced, with magnetic effect on Serena. Andrew fixed it in the living room: cops and robbers blared from the screen, loud, dramatic music. He noticed a new fireguard around the fire, ash spreading on the replacement rug, dust on the mantelpiece. Serena sat, apparently content, blinking at the screen through unwashed glasses.

  ‘Why didn’t I think of replacing the telly?’ Isabel asked, wrong-footed again. ‘Should have done that first, shouldn’t I? Why am I so stupid?’

  Don’t think about it, he murmured: I had one spare.

  They took up independent residence in the kitchen. There had been a nursing chair by the fire he had admired before, now relegated to a corner. Crumbs on the table, dishes in the sink, the dog restive for attention. Isabel watched Andrew taking in the details, felt herself afflicted by a sense of inadequacy.

  ‘It was my mother wrote those letters, you know,’ she told him, not wasting time. She was beyond making polite conversation and this was the first thing she could think of, however irrelevant, to offer as an oblique excuse for the sloppiness that was evident all around her.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  He no longer did. It no longer mattered. He wanted to tell her about Derek, ask her if this little man, last seen sweetly silent with a wired-up jaw in a hospital ward, resembled one of the burglars; wondered if the hint of revenge for the theft of objects to which she had been so clearly indifferent would make any difference to her desperate malaise. He decided not.

  ‘I hate her,’ Isabel said. ‘That’s what’s making all this so difficult. I would be brave enough, competent enough, if I didn’t have that at my back.’

  He reached over the table and took her hand in his. There was a perceptible flinching, but she did not pull away, smiled at him briefly and apologetically.

  ‘You could go,’ he said. ‘Just go. Someone would pick up the pieces; someone always does.’

  ‘No. It may seem mad, but I can’t just go.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can’t help you if you won’t let me.’

  ‘You help a lot, Andrew. I don’t know what we would have done …’

  ‘Only it occurred to me that if you could perhaps see the woman she was, the one she used to be – and I don’t mean a woman who might have written malicious letters when her mind was unhinged by the menopause – well, you might find it easier.’ He was flustered.

  She let her hand remain as was. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Discover what she was like. Go through her things. Try and remember what it was you loved about her. Look at her all over again. She was magnificent: my father says so, everyone says so, I knew so, so did you. If you’re so determined to stay, you need … justification. If you haven’t got a vocation, you either look after someone out of love, or a relic of that love. You can’t do it without respecting her for something. Seeing something. Does that make sense?’

  Not really, he could tell by her face, and even to his own ears his words were pretentious and silly. What could he know?

  ‘Explore this house. I would,’ he said softly. ‘How closely have you really looked? Look for clues. Attics?’

  She shook her head. ‘Small. Empty.’

  ‘Cellars?’

  ‘Cold and cluttered. Things get shoved down there because it’s easy.’

  Something stirred in her even as she shrugged. The same curiosity that had stirred earlier in the day. The challenge of a task. Finding something more in the mother who had betrayed her, spat on her devotion, then and now. Looking for something that would justify the veneration for Mother which she had carried around for a lifetime. Looking for redemption for them both.

  Andrew looked out of the window uneasily. The snow was falling thick and fast, hectic globs of white, fighting each other. Tomorrow was auction day: he could not afford to be marooned out here, although the thought was in other ways far from unpleasant. There were duties, as well as hopeless causes. She caught the direction of the glance, translated the anxiety.

  ‘Oh damn. Is it settling? Look, you’d better go. Don’t worry about us. We’ve got enough of everything.’

  She wanted to say, come back soon. Talk to me about something else. Tell me about your father and the way we were, alleviate my inward-looking life by allowing me to listen to more than these footsteps. She liked him; inside the barrier which had erected itself, she liked him plenty, but there was no room for such a suggestion, because she could not feel herself worth liking. Silly and sullied; his attention made her less excited than afraid of what he saw and what he might find. A body which had currently lost possession of whatever it had been that passed for a purpose in life, or a soul. Not a lot to offer anyone. Which made it a mixture of sadness and relief to see him go.

  The snow brought warmth, acted as a draught-excluder. She could feel the weight of it grow on the roof and gather round the windows, a shroud for her own abandonment. It lent a peculiar sense of safety; no burglars would begin to traverse this. The house would become anonymous beneath this blanket, so would she. Snow calmed the nerves, took away choices. It was easier to be this kind of prisoner when the snow fell with such gentle finality. Closing them in with greater inevitability than they did themselves, blurring everything except resolve.

  Mother complied, snoozing in front of the fire, paper round her feet, head dropped on her chest, the television set chirping news of snow drifts before going on to drama of a less believable kind. Good.

  Isabel went upstairs into the realm of her mother’s bedroom, where she had rarely been except to check for excessive mess and lack of hygiene. On the whole Serena managed it well, changed her bed sheets with great ceremony and sufficient regularity, brought back down from there cups and ashtrays and most of the detritus she had taken in. Apart from barbed wire and such, Isabel reflected, but there had been nothing else beneath the mattress: one sly visit had ensured it. One must allow as much privacy as possible; the Alzheimer’s leaflet said so. She was the guardian of the manor, not the owner of her mother’s life, and she followed the advice.

  There was a huge Victorian wardrobe, walnut-veneered, a piece of furniture successive generations had found invaluable, unfortunate, grotesque, useful, arrogantly space-wasting – large enough to house a small car – and finally magnificent but not yet a work of expensive art. Andrew’s auction would sell it for more than it cost and less than it was worth, Isabel reflected with a smile of congratulation for new-found wisdom. But she was interested in the contents rather than the design. He would look at it from the opposite viewpoint. He thought she did not listen, but she did.

  Inside, the level of organization was astounding. Isabel began at the lowest drawer. The first two revealed silk underwear, vests, chemises, nightdresses of uncertain age, folded into creases that had become permanent. They were all scented with lavender bags, sprinkled with pot pourri which exploded against her nostrils with a stale, sweet smell. She remembered her mother’s clothes, the finest kind, simple to the point of being stark, deep navy blue, cream, camel, black, enlivened with crimson, white, searing pink. No patterns, no flowers, no glitzy buttons, but a love of stripes to offset the effect of long, lean lines. Suits, tailored in Singapore, worn to perfection on that statuesque figure which went in and out in all the right places, legs reaching waist via dimply knees, the line from then on leading to a fine set of shoulders and a face of laughing splendour beneath a hat.

  Hats were another thing. Hats for country and town. Hats of velour with crooked feathers. Delicious hats of yellow straw, trimmed with navy ribbon, fit for a garden party or a colonial lawn. A turban for a 1940s gown. In the hanging compartment of the friendly compactum were three evening dresses, shimmering, while on the other side there were three suits, suitable for all occasions. Heather tweed with pleated skirt, still fresh, smelling of mothballs, a swanky number in white and one in brilliant red
, which Isabel recalled her wearing. The bottom compartment held shoes. There were labels on the drawers, such as ‘Keep for further use’, or, ‘Coloured stockings to go with particular outfits’ and, by the shoes, a reminder, ‘More shoes in chest in cellar. Also his’.

  Most of these clothes, and even the shoes, would not fit Serena now. She had thickened round the middle; her feet had broadened. She wore, on a regular basis, a medley of the same few things in various combinations. The daily decision about what to put on first took longer and longer, as if she were persuading these remaining serviceable clothes to aspire to the elegance of another age.

  The dressing table revealed costume jewellery, again never worn now, but not extravagant. Large lapel pins, a dozen sets of earrings, diamanté, pearl – all paste. Plus another notice in smaller writing, ‘The rest of this in chest in cellar’.

  The cupboard by the bed contained a carrier bag full of old diaries and letters. The letters Isabel did not examine: the sight of letters made her shiver. The diaries she decided she must approach with caution. The pages were closely covered. A glance at one, fifteen years old, revealed nothing more than pages of reminders, businesslike records of obligations and appointments and that alone relieved the daughter who was beginning to feel like an intruder, although she had begun from the standpoint of considering her mother deserved no better.

  Isabel sat on the floor and allowed herself the long delayed luxury of tears, which she had forbidden herself in the last few days, afraid that tears would be the beginning of falling apart. It was not the reminders of former glory that affected her so much, but the painstaking way in which it was categorized. There were salient reminders of another life more varied than any Isabel herself had known, but what was more impressive was the effort to keep it in order. Serena’s memory must have been fading when she wrote these painstaking labels, trying to make an inventory of personal possessions before they, too, escaped into the fog. And for all that the tally was spartan. Serena was not a hoarder. She could have kept far more than this, written a dozen more labels, given more evidence of the spoiled life Isabel was convinced had been hers.