Let's Dance Read online

  Cornell senior snorted into his coffee mug and kicked the rostrum where Andrew sat.

  ‘Just as you don’t really approve of the good doctor. Or filthy commerce, or earning a living. What do you approve of, Andy?’

  Better to shrug, pretend he was not paying attention, distract Father with something else, to stop an early-evening conversation, at that time of day when Dad needed a drink, from escalating into the kind of destructive exchange of words that was more a swapping of insults than a row which achieved something. Not even a clearing of the air, since the air between them was always thick with misunderstanding, beyond the curing of either of them. Andrew did indeed struggle with the unpicturesque partnership of Doc Reilly and his own dear old Dad. It had begun over the years while Father graduated from wheelchair to sticks: from fallen glory to wily strength. He and the Doc were a pair of small-town, clever rogues in a constant process of graduation to something worse. If they had lived in a Wild West town, Dad would have been an undertaker and they would have carved up business between them. Doc Reilly, for instance, did not abide by any code of confidentiality when one of his patients was dying, especially a patient who might possibly have a house to sell and furniture for the picking. The auction room in which they sat contained three sets of deceaseds’ effects, all of them erstwhile visitors to Doc’s surgery, asking for him in particular, and while most of the stuff was reasonable rubbish, some of it was always far better. Andrew could see his father now, hovering over Serena Burley’s ugly house and exquisite furniture like a fat vulture unable to wait for the victim to be entirely without movement, too impatient for the last sign of breath. Nearly dead was as good as dead.

  ‘Too early for fog,’ John grumbled.

  He did not even look like a Steptoe; that was the problem. He looked like an old gent.

  It was a rich little conurbation in which they lived, prosperous market town on the one hand, ugly on the other, full of Midlands contempt for anything fancy. The ugly end had made John Cornell his money after he had built the two cheap estates in the sixties, houses that still changed hands with monotonous regularity. Were people so easily fooled, both then and now, when houses were so lacking in quality but full of gimmicks, Andrew wondered? He was equally amazed at his father’s level of business cunning, which diversified his empire entirely as fashion dictated, but always slightly ahead of it. Cornell had once pandered to the overwhelming desire for something new, while never forgetting the dual gods of nostalgia and greed. First, the new houses with an old look, then old furniture made palatable.

  ‘We’ve got a good lot of stuff coming in this week. There’ll be more after Christmas.’

  Because the elderly died in winter. Andrew had spent almost eight years of his life nursing his father after a car smash which had never curtailed the drinking or dulled the old man’s wits. Doc Reilly said that this was how the boy had learned his love of a good antique. Both of them had resented it. John was not made kinder by disablement and the youthful Andrew had been poised for flight, which now felt too late for the prematurely middle-aged man he had become. He had never possessed an ounce of his father’s wildness, weighted as he was with the absence of his father’s conscience.

  ‘What kind of a reserve price do we put on Mrs Jones’s sideboard?’

  ‘I don’t know. A lot, I would. It’s handsome, like she was, once. It won’t go first time round unless a dealer buys it.’

  Strange the way his father leered over furniture the way he lusted after women and yet, in a public way, was so capable of appearing to treat both with respect. A façade, while his son felt a frisson of pure affection when his blunt fingers ran over polished wood, sorrow when he examined something damaged. Andrew would feel the fracture in a fine chair leg with all the sensitivity of a vet with a favourite lame horse, the Doc said, while with women he was useless: tongue-tied and shy. A clod of a boy, his father confided; a man to waste all his hormones stroking inanimate objects.

  John Cornell lumbered to his feet, leant heavily on his stick and made for the door of the disused church that served as an auction room. He had never had time for the clergy, but he had to admit the buggers could build. The door alone would stop a tank, and if his son’s docility was going to deny him the satisfaction of shouting, then he might as well leave.

  Andrew was fingering a blue vase. Put it back in the cabinet where small items, some they had bought, some for sale on commission, remained.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you think you should have asked a few more questions about this?’

  ‘That was three weeks ago, son. And he seemed a harmless enough fellow: friend of Derek’s. Been in before with the odd bit and piece. Puts his cash in his sock.’

  ‘Yes, I know, you said. A few small items over a few weeks. Nothing he would ever own himself. How do we know where he got them?’

  ‘Nothing very valuable. Why worry about fifty quid’s worth? Friend of Derek’s. Bound to be OK.’

  ‘For Christ sake, since when was being a friend of Derek a recommendation from the Queen?’

  ‘You know what, son? You’ve got homophobia, that’s your problem.’

  He was halfway to the door, nonchalant about getting the boy to react after all. Good to see him there, stiff with righteous rage.

  ‘Dad … Another thing …’

  ‘What now?’ He loved this door, so difficult to shift, a challenge.

  ‘You won’t get your hands on Serena’s stuff for a while, you know. Her daughter’s come home to look after her. Your lovely old Mrs Burley could go on for ever.’

  Triumph indeed. John Cornell’s shoulders shook with the kind of mirth that could only be created by knowing more than someone else. It was a source of solace he had perfected in illness. He changed tack, looked at his son sorrowfully.

  ‘I know, son, I know. Don’t ever think you’re first with the news. And her brother’s asked us to do a valuation. When you’ve time, that is.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘You heard. It’s only me with licence to go deaf, you know. Not you, at your age.’

  He went, the door left open behind him, the suggestion of scorn and restrained laughter heavy in the air. Inside this church there was no odour of sanctity, and much of desecration. Andrew Cornell sat at the rostrum, once a pulpit, staring at a room full of old furniture. He did not bother his head with thoughts of where his life had gone wrong, how on earth it had diverted itself up this avenue of exploitation and discontent. He thought about Isabel Burley, imagined her beauty against his plainness, then thought with less intensity about her mother, and what an inestimable pleasure it must be to lose one’s memory, provided it included the forgetting of all those times one had been either coward or fool.

  Do you love me, dear parent?

  Home is where the heart is. The homes of Isabel’s childhood had been in other houses, before Father’s affluence and Mother’s wish had landed them in this place. Father had lived for present splendour and ignored his pension plan. He had died on his one last trip abroad after Isabel had left this house. Her memory of him was blurred.

  Do you like me?

  It seemed an urgent question to ask as they sat by the fire, but she could not bring herself to put it into words. ‘Do you love me, Mother? Do you? Did you ever?’ She did not ask it: it was impertinent, she knew, but in the face of Serena’s studied indifference it seemed a worthwhile query. Isabel wanted a reward for what she was doing; wanted her mother, forgetful as she was, to remember that her daughter’s presence in this remote house might have involved some kind of sacrifice, might even have been seen as noble enough to be worth someone saying, Thank you, well done, that child. But no one had, Mother least of all.

  Over the first week Isabel had met the butcher, baker, vicar, George and Janice. The latter two seemed to resent her presence, Janice to the tune of downing tools altogether, while others took it for granted with amazing speed, as if they were suddenly relieved of a
burden themselves. Isabel had come to realize that there had been an informal but efficient network that looked after her mother’s interests and that, frankly, the whole gang was sick and tired of the task, except daft George. Serena’s wider circle of party-going friends seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps it was the fear inspired by people who were ill to the point of madness, as if they were contagious, and this made Isabel indignant, deflected her thoughts. She could not yet begin to understand that aversion. Her mother was simply a case of warped magnificence, not in the same category as anyone else.

  ‘Who are you writing to, Mum?’ Isabel was careful; tried to be sensitive. Mother’s desk was private and she was never going to try to look inside it. Privacy was sacred: she must not invade it. A pause, a guttural reply. ‘People. Lots of people.’

  ‘Do you remember writing to me?’

  ‘Oh no, darling, I never wrote to you. Did I?’

  The image slipped out of focus.

  Isabel felt an overwhelming sadness. Where was the creature of power and beauty, bending to kiss her in a waft of perfume before leaving to go somewhere else? The writer of the great wad of exciting letters, sent from all over the world, displayed with pride to friends as the product of the fairest hand on earth?

  ‘Mum, I think we should have a party. What do you think?’

  There was no reply. The darkness outside was complete. Serena sat in her armchair by the fire, a writing pad on the table in front of her, one hand shielding what she wrote, her eyes squinting through her glasses at the page in the light of the standard lamp behind her. Her fountain pen scratched across the paper with a sound which had begun to irritate, like the distant sound of a dripping tap. Isabel noticed how her mother’s glasses were scratched and dirty: the sight made her feel deficient. Ten days here, busy with reorganization and novelty, bathed in the glow of her own virtue and she had not noticed that her mother’s spectacles were less than useless. Or that what her mother wrote in these evenings and afternoons was likely to be scribble.

  ‘A party, Mum! What do you think?’

  Serena sighed and put down the pen.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A party!’ Isabel found herself yelling. Ashamed of it, she lowered her voice. ‘A party, Mum, for your friends. You know.’

  Realization dawned on Serena’s face. ‘A party? You mean a party?’

  Isabel found herself shouting again. She was looking at the paper Mother covered with writing, remembering the wonderful letters received at school, her own window on foreign worlds, the borrowed sophistication she had felt on receiving them, thinking at the same time of the letter she had written to Joe this week, the craven apology and all the anger dead. Do you love me? Does anyone to whom I have surrendered myself love me?

  ‘I said, a party! I meant a party!!’

  Mother smiled, then shook her head.

  ‘Lovely. But we couldn’t have a party without George. And George wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘What does George matter?’

  ‘George wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘I’d like it.’

  The eyes behind the scratched glass looked preter-naturally calm and magnified into an owlish wisdom. The face was transfixed into a wide smile of artificial politeness as she picked up her pen again and spoke with dismissive precision out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘You’d like it? But you don’t matter at all.’

  Isabel counted to ten, slowly. It was not the first of the insults, only the neatest and, even in the euphoria inherent in the knowledge of doing good, being for once in her life Virtuous with a capital V, she had noticed them all. She dismissed them as she guessed she was meant to dismiss them, as part of Mother’s little insecurities. Less than that, in fact, simply a form of teasing, meaning nothing, surely, characteristic of the way her mother had always teased. The wounds and the hugs were synchronized.

  ‘Love you,’ Serena said, without looking up from her writing, murmuring with the sighing distinction that only occurred in the evenings. ‘Love you lots. Do you love me?’

  Isabel did not reply. Then, ‘We need some more coal for the fire,’ she said.

  ‘George got the coal in earlier. He brought it from the new place where the coal lives now. Bucket by the back door.’

  George did everything. He was polite, coyly deferential to Isabel, and did not flaunt his indispensability. He scuttled away when he saw her, but he still did everything. It was he who understood this domain, he upon whom Serena relied.

  No. She needs me.

  The kitchen smelled, of stove and dishcloth and chips and warm dog. Beyond that door, the evening was bleak. Winter glowered. She did not like leaves drifting against the back door, the constant domination of the vast garden, the mud which clung to shoes and the silence of the stars at night. Hush, child: things done in the name of love are well worth doing. Loving and being loved; that was life. By the time she came back from the kitchen with the bucket of coal, the living room was full of sound. Mother’s tape deck was turned up high and Mother’s plump body blocked the fire, swaying to the sound. She clutched her skirts to reveal her stockings and wiggled her hips.

  ‘Did you say party?’ she asked. Beamed.

  ‘Pretend you’re a man,’ she said. ‘Let’s dance.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Home, sweet home. People are looking at me.

  George felt the cold sweat of panic. Not the rage of his claustrophobia, the panic of guilty conscience.

  I wanted a friend, he told himself; someone to talk to, but people like Derek can only be enemies. Who loves ya, George?

  George knew he should not have left those letters in his room, not for a minute. Nothing could be left in the hostel rooms, unless it was old clothing no one else would want. Dirty socks, even underwear, walked away from the washing machine in the basement. The laces from George’s training shoes had gone. And so had the letters, probably for the sake of the first-class stamps. Inside prison walls there had been some code of manners. Here there was none. He could see Derek, laughing.

  But then anything, even a piece of paper, was currency to small, skinny Derek. George found the envelopes, less the stamps and the contents, in the waste bin under the kitchen sink, along with the remnants of Chinese takeaways and polystyrene containers for hamburgers. Derek might return the letters, but he would want to barter, and any material that he could glean from the letters, such as the address from where they were written, would already have been absorbed. George hoped against hope that Derek’s erratic concentration did not make any connection between the address in the letters and his own daily destination. He also hoped the information had not been shared. Derek had the morals and the curiosity of a cat. George had befriended him before realizing the pathetic mewing was the preliminary to a scratch.

  The prevailing smell in the kitchen was soap and nicotine. George did not drink or smoke, the others’ single largest expenditures, and he cooked proper food. They called him Miss Tiggy Winkle. He was the only one who brought inside what he called proper food, namely the raw materials, meat and vegetables, bread that failed to stick to the roof of the mouth, ingredients that required preparation. The length of time he took making his evening meal made him the object of some derision, deflected in part by the element of admiration maintained for anyone who persisted in eccentricities, and the fact that he left what he did not eat, including apple pies and cakes, which were more popular than stew made from scrag-end of lamb or vegetable soup. George earned himself peace and an element of anonymity with the deliberate leftovers of his solid, nutritious food. He flexed his muscles round the kitchen sink, just to let them see he was guarding his back.

  The kitchen was as far removed from Serena’s as any kitchen could be. Galvanized steel cupboards, an industrial cooker with eight stern gas rings, an oven big enough to roast an ox. Two sets of utilitarian formica-topped tables flanked by stacking chairs, set on a grey-and-white lino floor, always indifferently clean. Bright neon lights to illumina
te the spartan comfort and show up all the faces as they set about the business of eating. Attempts had been made towards homeliness, such as posters on the walls and two plastic plants, but the room remained, at best, like a school canteen, at worst, when the day was grey and the smell was bad, a miserable basement room, always warm.

  Warmth drew Derek here, away from the loneliness of his own room, which always smelled vaguely of bodily fluid – sperm, sweat, blood and urine – masked with disinfectant and deodorant, as did all upper three corridors of the hostel for otherwise homeless men, some en route between prison and the real world. The smell of sperm came first, like the wafted emissions from a factory making glue. The scent of fifteen loveless men was undisguisable, even when they showered, dressed and stole each other’s toiletries. It was an unreal rite of passage to the real world.

  ‘Hey up, George. How’ve you been?’

  ‘All right, thanks. And you?’

  ‘Oh, fine. I won the lottery again, did I tell you?’

  George was a freak: he shone with cleanliness in poor clothes, he kept his room anonymous and he did not cry in the night. Derek, a resident for six months now, had adored him. George did unheard-of things; he ran a self-serviced car, often up on bricks (someone must have given him that car: Serena had given him that car); he had somewhere to go every day, from where he returned, refreshed and fulfilled; he fried mushrooms which he collected himself because he knew how; and last week he made a pie, for nothing, out of blackberries. That made him rich and, in the hinterland of people with nothing to lose and no idea of what they stood to gain, enormously enviable. George had a secret. George was happy. That was something that had to be fixed. People liked George: that would have to be fixed, too. Derek, small and sweet, skinny little runt with a handsome face, everybody’s gofer, with just enough sense not to turn tricks in public loos in a small town like this, admired the stockiness of George and the muscles on his arms, fancied himself in love. All George wanted was to keep his bum clean, but he had been flattered and loved the easy flow of words and jokes. Derek had made him laugh.