Let's Dance Page 10

  Serena tottered to her feet, colour returning, looking for her handbag.

  ‘I’ll keep that safe, Ma. Are you going to bed?’

  A slow, unsmiling nod for her daughter and an enormous wan grin for Andrew. Nausea made the old lady bewildered and tired.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Isabel said fiercely. ‘Being sick is so confusing for her because she never knows why.’ She blew her nose on a piece of kitchen roll. ‘Will you follow her, Andrew? Make sure she gets to the top of the stairs, but don’t interfere. She wouldn’t like that, even from you.’

  Andrew walked softly down the corridor, watching Serena’s progress. Into the dining room, touching each chair one by one, trailing her fingers along the surface of the table. Moving slightly faster into the living room, opening her desk, looking inside it, closing it again, giving her armchair a pat, as if reassuring a friend. Nodding to the sofa and the piano, moving at a fixed rate between them all, so that even stumbling over the edge of the Indian carpet seemed part of a ritual. Up the stairs, waving good-night to the pictures on the uneven walls. She did not hear his footfall behind her, moved like a ghost, retreating with gratitude and grace into her own world.

  ‘I should like,’ Isabel announced when Andrew returned to the kitchen to find her sorting items from the handbag, some already washed, some amazingly dry, ‘to get extremely drunk.’

  Andrew stood next to her, reaching for the paper towel and automatically wiping dry a powder compact, a lipstick case and a plastic purse. His eye fell on a medley of stained envelopes, covered in neat writing, next to a chequebook.

  ‘Are those yours or hers?’ he asked.

  ‘Hers. We write in the same way, almost exactly. I can forge her signature, which is proving useful when it comes to paying the bills. I tried to copy her writing when I was at school. I wanted mine to be just the same.’

  The lining of the handbag hung into the sink, saturated, old, worn and torn. Isabel washed her hands as thoroughly as a surgeon, far longer than necessary, in water so hot it made Andrew wince.

  ‘Do you suppose that means I shall be like her one day? Like she is now? With half a mind? Incapable of forming my own words? Waiting in vain for everyone else to translate?’

  He turned her from the water and put his arms round her. Holding her wet hands free, she wept into his shoulder.

  ‘I wanted to be like her,’ she mumbled. ‘Not like Mab.’

  He did not know what she meant. There was no romance in this embrace, he concluded miserably. There were things he wanted to say, questions he wanted to ask, but he could not find the words.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Isabel had wanted to tell Andrew why she did not want to be like Aunt Mab, but she did not because she could not. ‘Those with power,’ Mab explained, ‘cannot bear to lose it. Face it, child, life’s a bitch. It’s easier for mere observers like me to relinquish hold. I was the war artist, you see, painting camouflage, hiding behind it. Never a front-line hero. So I don’t want a hero’s farewell.’

  Bonfires and Christmas, the occasions of colour which made memory eclipse into clarity. Good old Mab had died in grey November. She had been gifted in the giving of solace: receiving it was never her style.

  ‘Heroine, Mab. The female of hero is heroine. You ought to get it right.’

  ‘Don’t be pedantic. Heroines are entirely different animals. They have trembling chins. I’m dying: indulge me.’

  Her big, spatulate hands were clawing at the blankets in order to make them tidy, while Isabel looked on. As Mab pointed out in plain words not then understood, life at twenty-one and death at seventy did not suit. Mr Burley and his sister-in-law died within months of one another: cancer for her, industrial accident for him. He therefore remained handsome until the end, losing nothing with age, gaining a certain asceticism to his features. She remained as plain as ever; even her terminal gauntness quite anonymous. Mab was Mab, like a slab of rock.

  ‘How are you, dear? How kind of you to come and see me. Tell me news.’

  Always these manners, this ability to welcome, make the visitor feel special. Fascinated by the hideous conundrum of what it must be like to have no future, Isabel could not discuss the present. Or believe Mab’s interest in her own, youthful life.

  Mab smiled comfortingly. ‘Look, poor child, you’ve got plenty to endure and I don’t want fuss at nearly three score years and ten, do I?’ she stated from her tidy bed. ‘I’ve had enough of the commas. This is just a full stop. I don’t want any of your exclamation marks.’

  So that was where the aversion originated. Isabel shot up in bed. Lay down again, aching for the selfless common sense of Mab. Three in the morning, thinking of all those suppressed dreams that were not really dreams but episodes. Listening in the meantime to the creaking of floorboards as someone passed the door on tiptoe. Ghosts. Not Aunt Mab’s ghost, far too silent, and besides, Mab’s ghost belonged in another house.

  When Mab had walked, she rattled. She carried about her person innumerable bits and pieces. She was a spinster, the keeper of other people’s keys, carrier of enormous handbags and more secrets than a handbag could ever contain. Sublime in her kindness, embarrassing in her excess. Pulsating with unheard wisdom, booming with her big voice. Don’t cry, said Mab, please don’t cry. Big girls don’t.

  Isabel woke into a morning of sweet light, hazy with mist, the kind of day when she could imagine she was on the edge of the sea. There was a fireplace in each of the bedrooms, chimneys long since blocked off, leaving the mantelpieces for decoration. For a moment she thought she was back in Mab’s cottage, expected to see the rows of Mab’s ornaments. Cups, figurines, bottles and shells, things gleaned from beaches and junk shops for pence, ugly things, curios and objects of beauty all mixed in together. Mab liked Bristol blue: there were vases and jugs in that pure colour all over her house, the only things which Serena did not scorn. They had come to Serena when Mab died, but Isabel could not remember where they were or if they still existed. It was a minor puzzle for a fine and silent morning, something to be attended to later. In the distance, carried on the stillness, there was the rare sound of church bells, tolling for life with doleful joy.

  Sundays had little significance, but Isabel had a sudden sentimental longing for the sort of church Mab had favoured along with a token belief in Christian doctrine as a sort of insurance policy. ‘You never know, my dear … it might be true. Even if it does make good people better and bad people worse. Try it: you can always spit it out later.’ Mab’s true belief had been of the pantheistic kind; ashes to ashes, she said, with the laughing rider that when she died she might become what she had never been in life, a flower.

  Downstairs Isabel passed the telephone that never rang, and the dining room, where the window had been flung open. She pulled on a jacket and stepped out into the milk of morning, disorientated by the diffuse light which made her vow to clean the windows. How far she had come to accept this solitude, even while fearing it and filling it with tasks. Halfway down the track towards church, she began humming. Hymn tunes remain stuck inside the head like a virus in the body, Mab maintained; always ready to reinfect with enthusiasm. Towards the end of the track Isabel thought of Mab’s grave, detoured into the cemetery out of curiosity rather than guilt. Years since she had been here; so many she could hardly remember where it was; years since Serena had mentioned either her sister or her husband, buried next door to each other for no other reason than the existence of a space.

  Was that all? Isabel wondered. Father and sister-in-law were firm friends. Or did her handsome father merely owe Mab a debt of gratitude for all the care she had taken of his children while he and Serena swanned abroad and Mab scooped up little Isabel and stout Robert from their various school gates at the end of term, embarrassing them in the process because her car was always so old and her voice so loud? What a snobby little bitch I must have been, Isabel thought, but I learned a certain lack of inhibition from Mab. She was the one who told me sex was not that imp
ortant, only what it produced. Get on with it, if I were you, Mab advised, proffering contraceptive prescriptions: get rid of the mystery.

  Edward Burley’s grave was pristine, the plinth filled with weeded gravel and the headstone free of mud. There was a miniature shrub at each end and the whole thing looked as if it had been dusted. Mab’s grave was a mess by contrast, a flat piece of dew-damp hayfield with the parameters of the grave itself scarcely defined, and some shocking dandelions crowding the stonemason’s record of when she had lived and died. The disparity between the graves made Isabel feel Mab had been insulted.

  Cleaning things had become automatic in her life. Becoming a housekeeper made Isabel mop and polish with a certain relish, as one of few activities which gave her any sense of achievement, gave framework to the day. It was natural to kneel and tackle Mab’s grave with bare, cold hands, scratching at the weeds like a hen, pulling up the grass, patting the soil until at last the thing looked gravelike, identifiable as a small and decent monument. The church bells had ceased while Isabel worked, immune to the sound of cars which heralded the arrival of the congregation and the silence that followed as the church swallowed them up. Finally Isabel regarded the grave critically. She doubted if unsentimental Mab would have ever demanded this task of her. She would have touched her niece on the shoulder and reminded her that the spirit had fled.

  Mabel, mentor, teacher and useful person, long dead, would have wanted her to go to church instead of wasting time, simply because it was more helpful to belong to a community than not, and because, once in a while, it was perfectly splendid to belt out a hymn without having to worry about the fact you really couldn’t sing at all. Mab would have marched in there while Isabel, approaching the kind of edifice she had always taken for granted as offering something to others, felt a certain shyness. It was not the presence of God that deterred her, only the presence of people.

  The porch was warm sandstone with a stone seat set into the walls on either side. The door was heavy oak, with a round, iron handle, cold to the touch and clumsy to work. The ring operated a noisy latch which rose and fell with a resounding clatter, announcing the latecomer like a pistol shot. Isabel stumbled towards the smell of humanity. The congregation were at the stage of prayer, bent forward with knees on tapestry footstools made by people like Mab, all of them following the invitation of the vicar to examine their consciences before the next hymn. They were open to distraction. Two dozen heads, some with hats, swivelled in her direction and in one second she saw herself as she imagined they would see her. Stuck in a shaft of sunlight, wearing jeans, boots, black jacket streaked with dirt like her face and hands. At best, a dreamer, at worst, the madwoman’s daughter. Half of the faces turned back: the other half continued to stare in shuffling silence. Someone coughed, a prayer book was dropped, then silence resumed. Isabel ran.

  They reminded her of something, these eyes staring out of darkness: resurrected the most abiding of all adolescent memories, which had nothing to do with church, and everything to do with rejection. The association was only warmth, dim light and all those eyes. She could see herself, those years before, frequenting the disco she had held semi-sacred in her teens, far more sacred than church had ever been. Rolling into town, feeling blue because Andrew Cornell never phoned back and he was the last of an impressive succession of boys and men who seemed to dump her. Well, three at least in the last year alone. What did it take to hold on to one? Brains? A better job than her unambitious role of secretary? Should she have been what Mab called a blue-stocking? She had not known. Mother was distant, Mab on her downward spiral, the house in mourning and all she had to cling to was her own selfish energy and what she had assumed was considerable popularity. A gaggle of local friends, daughters and sons from the better end of town, home from university, drifting as she drifted, liking her, greeting her with whoops of welcome in the normal run of events, but not on that day. The disco was somewhere to go for the unemancipated young. Isabel, dressed up in defiance of gloom, the way Mab encouraged, standing at the door in clothes that sparkled, meeting first the darkness and then the hostile silence, seen by them all, unable to see herself.

  Until Doc Reilly’s son swaggered to the front and the music stopped. ‘Get lost, Isabel Burley. We don’t want you here.’

  He was childish, pompous, and his words stung. Girlfriends, busy with drinks, hiding their expressions with curtains of hair; other faces either pitying or enjoying scorn. Isabel grinning, sticking one hip forward, striking a pose in her tight skirt, making a joke of it.

  ‘What’s the matter? I got the plague, or something?’

  ‘Fuck off, Isabel. Just fuck off.’

  No one had ever given a reason for this banishment. The defection of friends had been more hurtful than the death of near relatives, more corrosive to adolescent vanity. People dying was not her fault, but the public loathing of her contemporaries was the petty indictment which sent her out into the wider world soon after, with Serena’s fervent blessing and Mab’s money. And she still did not know why.

  So what? A long time ago. Perhaps one of her boyfriends had been jealous; she was free with favours. Perhaps one of the girls had spread rumours with all the moral outrage of the young. From the distance of a dozen years, she could see how old-fashioned and parochial they had been, how insignificant her own offence might have been, although the wound felt mortal at the time and still ached when she probed it. Too late to wonder now. The road leading to the house was dry underfoot: lonely in a friendly way, receptive to her own voice repeating, I must not be silly, I must not be silly, although it was far from silly to be wary of the scrutiny of crowds. People and piranha fish have much in common, said Mab.

  A white van approached her from the direction of the house, moving slowly to avoid the potholes, as if the van were brand new instead of old, dented and dirty. She stood back into the field to let it pass, unalarmed by its presence. Walkers with dogs used this road, people took wrong turnings. The man behind the wheel acknowledged her presence with a slight ducking of a grey head, a smile and a wave. They bowed to one another with Sunday-morning courtesy, which Isabel, fresh from an abortive visit to church, felt she deserved as an alternative form of blessing.

  ‘Tea?’ Serena suggested in a voice like a stage butler, a voice straining above the sound of music from her radio. ‘Coffee? Whisky? Brandy?’ She beamed with self-approval. There were a dozen cups and saucers on the kitchen table, a trail of crumbs from the biscuit tin. Serena looked thoroughly stimulated by the morning’s events. Best china from the dining room. Two cups broken. There was a smell of cigarette smoke.

  ‘Been entertaining?’ Isabel asked. ‘Who was here, sweetheart? Children?’

  She was alarmed, but not dismayed, thought of the courtesy of the man in the van. Serena smirked. She was oddly dressed, a regular phenomenon which seemed especially strange in a woman once so particular about clothes, but, like the preference for plastic flowers, not without a logic. Clothing in layers, as if she intended to cope with any eventuality the day might offer by shedding and re-arranging an array of garments that could take her from Arctic to fireside. Lace-up shoes with little heels over thick, turquoise stockings, a petticoat hanging slightly below a russet corduroy skirt, a T-shirt evident below a black silk blouse, a scarf round her head, a maroon blazer and the whole ensemble finished by a light cape slung round her shoulders. Isabel had grown used to it in the same way she had grown used to a number of habits, learning as she went along to discern the difference between what was important and what was not. Clothes were not; love was.

  ‘Who was here?’ she repeated, wondering who would want to be here. Andrew perhaps. Wondering at the same time if her complete acclimatization to solitude and half conversation meant she would become unfit for anything else. Serena’s skittering across the floor in a pretence of being busy exaggerated a certain shifty demeanour.

  ‘Very nice men,’ she volunteered, distinctly. ‘They were lost. I showed them round. Made coff
ee. Couldn’t find the brandy.’

  ‘What men? What did they want?’

  A saucer crashed to the floor. Isabel gazed at it without interest. Little shivers of blue, red, gold leaf, ready to be crunched on the cold floor. What had happened to Mab’s Bristol blue? Robert would roar with outrage to see any form of destruction, even the careless kind, and the thought was not unpleasant. Two weeks and not a word: she could phone him this evening and tell him Mother was playing hoopla with antique crockery, tearing up first editions, playing Houdini with the silver … but then, what silver? Kings silver laid out in rows in a dining-room drawer once. Not any more. Who cared? She didn’t, much, except about Mab’s Bristol blue.

  ‘Were they nice men, Mummy?’

  She bent to pick up the saucer as if indeed it did not matter. What else was missing?

  ‘None of your business,’ Serena growled. ‘They were friends of mine. Friends of George.’

  ‘George doesn’t have any friends.’

  ‘Oh, yes he does. They’ve got a van.’ Serena’s face took on a wistful look.

  ‘Such nice, big men,’ she said. ‘They danced with me.’

  ‘Mother!’ Isabel shouted over the din of music. ‘Mother! What did you do with all those blue things that Mab gave you?’

  ‘What things? What, what, what?’ Then she leaned forward, bent over the table until her pale eyes, lit with concern, wavered within inches of Isabel’s own. She raised a hand as if to stroke, let it fall, shook her head.

  ‘Why are you so silly, darling? So silly.’

  There was no such thing as absolution.

  Do you love me, Mother? Mab did. And I often thought she was silly too.

  ‘God rest ye, merry gentlemen …’ His fingers drummed out the tune on the steering wheel.

  ‘Aw, shut up, Dick, will you? It’s nowhere near Christmas.’