Let's Dance Page 5

  ‘There was a bit of a fight in here, dinner time,’ said the man who had greeted him and watched, hungrily, as he peeled potatoes.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said George, not inviting further particulars. There were often squabbles. It was dangerous to be a one-eyed man in the country of the blind, perilous to be in possession of his own particular source of peace. He knew he had to watch it.

  He should never have talked to Derek. Have let Derek take him to the old furniture place to sell stuff, as if he was a fellow thief. Have let Derek find out, from his own, unguarded, tongue, what there was to envy.

  ‘We’ve lost the letters,’ Serena said next morning.

  ‘George took them,’ said Isabel for the tenth time.

  ‘I want them back.’

  ‘You can’t have them back. Never mind, you’ve written some more.’

  Which she had. Two, three letters a day. Or pieces of paper stuck into envelopes that bore addresses Isabel could not read and doubted if any postman could, either. Isabel was not going to point this out. Letters were therapy and Serena was entitled to whatever secret life she wished to lead behind those scratched glasses.

  ‘I want to go to town now.’

  ‘Come on, then.’

  ‘I’m driving, aren’t I?’

  ‘No, Mummy, you know you can’t. Be a good girl.’

  It horrified Isabel the way she had so quickly got into the habit of talking to her mother as if her mother were a child. It seemed to rob them both of dignity. Mother was a petulant child this morning. Isabel had been craving a child of her own for the last few years, her body had been crying out for such a burden, but not a child like this.

  Isabel’s car, which Serena loved and envied, to the extent that Isabel locked it out of sight in the ramshackle garage, was the vital link between town and home. There had been three or four fairly successful forays to the shops: today they would try the market. Isabel had grown accustomed to the rutted track, knew how to avoid the worst of the holes without dipping over into the fields, even enjoyed the challenge. There was nothing between this small, powerful bullet of movement and the sky, nothing at the end of the track but the church and the graveyard, the farm and the cottage and then five miles more to civilization. A party, Isabel thought again, suddenly longing for company. She shivered slightly. However many times she had visited her mother here, she had never done more than nod at the neighbours. Makers of hay and tillers of the earth, nothing in common with either of her parents. She shivered again. How exclusive they had been.

  ‘Are you warm enough, Mum?’

  ‘What?’

  Of course she was warm enough. Serena wore an ancient fur coat, a hat suitable for a wedding, with a scarf tied beneath it, huge earrings, shiny black boots. She needed no help with washing and dressing, although the end result was alarming. Her eyebrows were painted black; the remainder of her face pale with thick powder. She was docile in the car as long as music was played.

  They both watched with pleasure and curiosity as countryside gave way to the outskirts of town, the sight of people inspiring Serena to point and squawk as if she had never seen people before, while the presence of populace made Isabel homesick. The pointing and gesturing was fine inside the privacy of the car, less so when she guided Serena into the marketplace. Years before there had been some pleasure in shopping with her mother. Isabel looked forward to it, failed to comprehend how different it could be now.

  ‘I want lots of things!’ Serena yelled.

  ‘Shh, not so loud. What sorts of things? We need soap and tights and fruit…’

  ‘Things!’ Serena yelled again, waving her arms about, hitting a man in the chest. He staggered to one side and swore. She darted to a stall, where autumn apples lay in polished splendour next to glowing oranges and bright bananas. The day was grey: the colour of the fruit, artfully assembled in serried rows, beckoned invitingly. Mother wanted the grapefruit at the back, scrabbled at the display, clawed and pawed until the careful symmetry was destroyed and oranges bounced on the cobbled floor of the market square, apples fell in dull successive thumps, plums softer in their quiet bruising. The woman behind the stall was shouting before Isabel pulled Serena away, amazed at the strength she needed to shift her from this orgy of desecration. The shouting made Serena pause; the restraint made her wild until she stopped as suddenly as she had begun. She stood back, looked at the plump owner of the spilled fruit, pointed at the double chins and cawed with laughter. It was a loud, abrasive sound, cutting into the silence.

  ‘Fat!’ Serena screamed between her laughter. ‘Fat, fat! Oh yes, very fat!’

  There was no right reaction. A child can be slapped for bad behaviour. Slapped and made to cry in public, but not a seventy-five-year-old woman. Isabel placed herself between her gesturing mother and the stall, blushing with shame, murmuring apologies, picking up the fruit. A plum squashed beneath her heel: money changed hands as the woman, too, realized that she could not shriek at senior citizens, or at least not for long.

  Behind her daughter Serena clicked her tongue and stamped her feet impatiently, as if she were cold and there was nothing more important. ‘Hurry up, hurry up,’ she was chanting. ‘Hurry up. Got to get things.’

  The stallholder watched, fury transformed into contemptuous pity. The outburst had a calming effect on Serena. Fear, Isabel told herself, seeking an explanation to suppress her own anger. Surely that was all it was when Mother was faced with crowds of people, colour and choice becoming mingled into one mad abstract canvas, violent in impact. The aggression of frustration.

  ‘What was all that about, Mum?’ Her voice cooed. She hated her voice for having to make that cooing sound: she loathed the stallholder for the final benediction of her pity. Mother was marching on, carving a path for herself. She was gazing into the faces of shoppers, smiling widely at each with startled recognition, as if they were long-lost acquaintances, greeted with delight. People avoided her gaze as Mrs Burley sailed down the central aisle of stalls, giving away smiles like presents, Isabel following like a bag carrier, suffused with misery, catching up without wanting to catch up.

  ‘Why did you do that to that stall, Mum?’ It was a pointless question for a piece of petulance already forgotten.

  Serena stopped. She took her hands out of the pockets of her coat, looked at them slowly. Made fists of them, then let the fingers uncurl, one by one, counting under her breath.

  ‘One, two three … I wanted five thingies, Issy. Only I don’t know what they are.’

  ‘You wrote them down, darling.’

  Serena looked puzzled, then definite, shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, you did. In your pocket?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I don’t do that.’

  Was that what all that fury was about? A forgotten list in her cramped script? Was that all?

  Isabel cooed like a pigeon. ‘Don’t worry, I can remember what it was you wanted.’

  Serena looked at her with the same pity she had herself received from the stallholder, the glance given to a lunatic.

  ‘Of course you don’t know what I want. You can’t possibly have any idea. I want to go home, is what I want. I want George. Now.’

  The voice had risen a pitch. Serena rubbed her eyes, smeared the blackened eyebrows, making her look like a clown.

  So they set off towards the multi-storey car park, Serena giggling and pointing again, forgetting the imperative of haste. A ludicrous progress, akin to a pair of drunks, Serena clutching then pulling away, as the mood struck, Isabel embarrassed to restrain her. At one point Serena darted away to stroke the blond hair of a teenage boy: he reacted as if she had slapped him. Isabel hated him, too. Then Serena homed in on a posse of women, engaged them in earnest conversation until they fled in various directions. Then she sabotaged a group of children: she stood by the exit of Tesco, pulling faces, crossing her eyes, putting her fingers in her ears. The youngest child did not object, the eldest giggled with shifty embarrassment. By the
time they were back at the car, Isabel had learned to keep a firm hold on her mother’s arm and maintain an adamant, insincere flow of loud chat. Serena refused to get into the car, claiming it was not hers, hers was bigger. Persuaded, finally, she slumped into a sulk in the passenger seat until Isabel remembered the music. Pausing to pay at the booth, Isabel aware, for the fiftieth time, of the now familiar glance of pity from the attendant.

  ‘When are we going to have this party?’ Serena asked, suddenly sane again.

  ‘Never. Not ever.’

  There was a pain throbbing at Isabel’s temples: she wanted either to weep or to sleep. It was wrong to feel thus, the opposite of virtuous or forgiving. Wrong to feel this dreadful shame.

  They were turning into the homeward stretch at the beginning of the fields by the church, Mother twitching and humming and finally unearthing from her pocket the shopping list which she greeted with a crow of pleasure. She wanted to go back, she announced.

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘Shops.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shops. Yes! I know what I want. I want to go back.’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’ No cooing in the voice, merely desperation.

  ‘I want to drive the car!’

  Serena had refused the seat-belt and Isabel had failed to insist. She had no preparation for the lunge towards the steering wheel, Serena’s ringed hand catching her face, the temporary blindness of her hat in front of her eyes, the screams emerging from her own mouth as the car rocked, bucked, slewed from side to side on the track, romped off the road and into the field. They stalled to a juddering halt. Serena’s head hit the windscreen with a gentle crack. In the breathy, sobbing silence that followed, Isabel could feel the soft flesh of her chest pinioning her mother’s hard knuckle to the wheel. Beneath her left breast, the fingers began to move like tentacles.

  Serena began to whimper.

  They were out. They were out and Andrew was pleased; there was an enormous release from his own sense of not quite looking forward to this. There was an old car outside by the stable yard, back door unlocked, but no one in. Good. Andrew was tentative, but unashamed, of trespassing. The house remained as he remembered it, the outside obdurate, but a house which drew in strangers like a sponge drew water. He went into the kitchen. Same old stove, same old quarry tiles on the floor which sloped into the corridor that led through the centre of the house towards the relative grandeur of the black-and-white tiles spread back from the front door. He moved to his left, into the living room, remembered with startling clarity the fact that this was the first place he had kissed Isabel Burley, when she was twenty. How they had managed to make contact in the vastness of this room puzzled him for a whole minute. Maybe such things were best forgotten, as was the infrequency with which he had kissed women since. He shook himself, remembered he was here to look at furniture, not reminisce.

  He sat on the vast sofa with the broken springs. It was so deep, the springs could be avoided: it was for sprawling and snoozing, arguing and making up, this beast. He was a sentimental man: he saw the surface of the cover was not entirely clean, a feature he was almost ashamed to notice in this pale, distinguished place as he rested in it. Lay back against the pommel of the arm, cradling the left side of his face against the right palm of his hand. He moved his fingers over his face, testing the position of his eyes and bones as if he were his own lover exploring his features. She had felt him thus, examining the parameters of his face with the palms of her hands warming his cheekbones. Andrew drew his knees to his chest and opened his eyes. The skin of his palms and his face was suddenly soft. This was indeed a beautiful room, full of beautiful things.

  Windows on two sides washed the whole place with light. Three hundred square feet, he reckoned, mostly covered with Indian carpet, whitish, greenish, with some faint design, fringed, frayed, faded, valuable and friendly. Sunlight bleached fabric, warm with age, the Knole sofa, covered with damask, similarly worn and soft. To the left, Serena’s rolltop desk, a perfect, well-used piece, like this sofa, glorious wood nevertheless. On the other side, a fantastic rosewood credenza, a bureau, a chest, an assemblage of gossiping chairs by the west-facing window, each different, as if designed for an individual occupant. The chatelaine loved chairs, he remembered. One squat chair with a scrolled back, one gorgeous piece of curved tapestry which belonged in a lady’s bedroom, one low-slung bergère armchair. They were married into a group by their sense of expectancy and the plump cushions that invited guests. Old tapestry covers, like the kind found in church, he noticed, not uniform but united by colour. Where had Serena found them? There were curtains which were never drawn, but which drew the eye, a fire-place and, even with the chill on the room, with such comfort implicit in it, he wanted to remain. Carpet worth one thousand, chairs two, bureau three, and so on. He wished it was not so automatic to place a monetary value on things at the same time as admiring them.

  Splendid rooms, surely. These were the rooms that gave the house a reputation for beauty, he thought, crossly. While all the time it remained essentially an ugly house designed on a grand scale without much sense of proportion.

  He swung himself to his feet and moved across the hall to the dining room. Sat on a carver chair that had seen better days, as had the scratched and glowing walnut of the oval table. This room had the feeling of disuse; it needed flames in the hearth to encourage the latent warmth, a fire and a crowd, candles down the length of the table adorned at the moment with nothing more than two superb silver candlesticks and a vast grape ivy plant with dusty leaves. Andrew looked at his watch. Table worth at least a thousand, matching set of eight dining chairs considerably more. There were fingerprints and smear marks on the table, as if someone had stroked it.

  He could venture this far, he decided, but he felt he could not go upstairs without someone to take him. Bedrooms were private places: people kept their secrets there rather than in desks. He could invade only the public domain, and even that was beginning to feel intrusive.

  ‘Excuse me, but what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  He turned to find himself looking at a small, faintly familiar and very belligerent red-headed man carrying a stick in one hand, resting the knob in the other palm, flanked by a dog. The voice of inquiry was challenging but polite, although the position of the stick and the square-legged stance of the man left Andrew fairly sure that the benefit of doubt he was being granted was only temporary. The stick was not for decoration. Beside the man, the dog looked redundant. Petal did not bark in the afternoon.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Andrew said pleasantly. ‘I came to see Mrs Burley or her daughter. Perhaps I should have waited outside, but the door was unlocked.’

  George clicked his tongue. ‘They’ve gone to the shops. What was it you wanted?’ He still held the stick, reluctant to relinquish authority.

  Andrew shrugged. ‘Nothing that can’t wait. Only Mrs Burley’s son asked us to look at the furniture, check the insurance. After that fire, you know.’ He produced a card.

  ‘Oh.’ George was disarmed, also curious. ‘She’s got some nice things, Mrs Burley.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, she has. Valuable things.’

  ‘They’re all old things,’ said George, dismissively. ‘Worth a bob or two, I expect, but not much. And she won’t be having any more fires. Not with me around.’

  George decided he did not dislike this harmless-looking man with thin legs under the suit: there was none of the air of understated threat with which George was so familiar, but still he wanted him out of the room.

  ‘I can fix you a cup of tea if you come into the kitchen. No one eats in here any more.’

  ‘And who are you?’ Andrew asked meekly, following him.

  ‘I’m George. I walk the dog and look after Serena. Mrs Burley.’ George said this with a note of defensive pride.

  ‘Who does the cleaning?’

  ‘Nobody much at the moment. Oh, Miss Burley moves things around, but Mrs Burley did most of it herself.
She’s not mad, you know.’

  The back door stood open, so they heard the car above the sound of the boiling kettle. Music blared as the doors opened, then ceased abruptly. There was the sound of one weary voice, one angry one. Serena was framed in the doorway, crushing her hat. There was a lump on her forehead; her mascara extended past it into her hairline; she staggered slightly. George leapt to her side, clucking anxiety. She gave him the full force of her smile.

  ‘Hello, my lovely. I hit my head, didn’t I?’

  Andrew did not know the format of this household, nor its hierarchy. He could only interpret the look George gave Serena as one of tender affection and the glance thrown in Isabel’s direction as one of murder, which Isabel, three steps behind and clearly struggling for self-control, failed to notice. Her face was blotched: she looked like someone suddenly familiar with defeat. And she was still beautiful. Andrew forgot to notice the complexities and palpable tension of this trio as he stared at Isabel, last seen, how long ago would it be, a dozen years or more, the memory largely ignored in the interim, as if it could ever go away. The long brown hair with the oriental sheen, tied at the nape of her elegant neck, the perfect, slender figure over which she had agonized even then, and the huge, deep-set eyes which defined her face. A house is only as good as what you put in it: Andrew’s father said that to customers. Isabel would give credit and dimension to the most unpromising of rooms. She could be hired to lean against furniture, like a model posed against an impossibly expensive car. Good bones: she would always look like an uncertain girl. The nose was a shade too long, he told himself; the mouth too wide. It would devalue her price at auction, but why was it that bidders did not stare after her in the street, and why had she ever let herself be touched by lesser persons than princes? Andrew could not fathom. She was edibly gorgeous, yet removed. Never looking at herself without anxiety. Never looking round and saying, What power I have.

  At the same time, he could not believe how he could have been so hurt by something as insubstantial as a letter. He was one person for whom the demise of the letter-writing habit in modern life was not a source of grief.