Let's Dance Page 6

  The resurgence of fascination intrigued him. Isabel Burley had been nothing more than a promiscuous bitch who had wounded him and others. Gone through half the promising men in town and chucked them away. He had thought he would no longer mind in the least about that, and had arrived prepared to treat her with the distant courtesy of the professional he had become. He would have suffered no pain at all if he had not dwelt in those empty rooms first and she did not look first so impressive and then so … diminished. While Serena, bruised but plump and glowing, looked as if she was already guzzling on her daughter’s vitality.

  ‘What did you do to her?’ George was asking, his voice dangerous.

  Isabel did not look at him. ‘I didn’t do anything, George. She did. She tried to grab the wheel and took the car off the road. I managed to get it back. No harm done.’

  Then she noticed Andrew. I am always the last to be noticed, Andrew thought.

  ‘This chap says he’s come to look at the furniture,’ George muttered, dismissing him as Isabel’s responsibility.

  ‘How lovely,’ Serena trilled, assuming the role of grand hostess. ‘You must come to our party.’ She was extending her hand and Andrew wondered if he was supposed to kiss it. ‘Do sit down, won’t you? I think it’s time for tea.’

  ‘I think it’s time for brandy,’ said Isabel. ‘Hallo, Andrew. You haven’t changed a bit. You remember Andrew Cornell, Mother, don’t you?’

  It was a pointless question, but Andrew remembered Serena as a gracious, welcoming mother, smiling the extra-wide smile he saw now and which Isabel was coming to recognize as reserved purely for men. They were all smiling at each other. Except George.

  ‘What’s all this about furniture?’ Isabel asked, breaking up the tableau. George shuffled. He took a clean handkerchief out of his pocket, wandered to the sink, ran it under cold water and took it back to where Serena had retreated to a chair. He placed it lovingly against the lump on her forehead, pressing the cool handkerchief to her skin, keeping her head steady by a gentle touch on the back of her neck. The action was practical, a reminder to those present of their priorities. It was also curiously intimate. It made Andrew shiver. Serena moaned. Isabel sighed. Andrew realized he had not yet opened his mouth to either of them.

  ‘Your brother Robert,’ he began. ‘Worried about the insurance. I can come back another time.’

  ‘Trust Robert,’ Isabel said. ‘Full of long-distance ideas. Come into the living room. We all spend far too much time in this kitchen.’

  You need help, he told himself, following the graceful curve of her back down the dark corridor towards the fading light of the living room. You need help in the way I have needed help. You have lost your pride. Somehow that reflection neutralized everything and made him calm again.

  ‘George does the fires,’ she was saying chattily, rallying herself into some pretence of an ordinary social animal, albeit one who would never have her mother’s grace. The fire was laid with old-fashioned skill, he noticed. Newspapers, kindling wood, firelighters, arranged in order with coal on top. He now observed with horror that the marble surround of the fireplace had been painted white. The paper crackled in the hearth at the touch of a match. He wanted to laugh at the sight, wondered if she remembered other times in this room by the light of the dying fire, with everyone else in bed.

  ‘So what have you done for the last few years?’ he asked, over-heartily.

  ‘Oh, don’t ask. This and that.’ Spending that inheritance of hers, he thought with a shade of jealousy. He leant forward, curiosity overcoming shyness.

  ‘And why are you doing this now?’

  ‘Because someone must. She needs me. I need her. I mustn’t give up. I’ve never done anything else worthwhile, you see. So I mustn’t fail either. I’m sure I can make her better. Anyway, what does that brother of mine want?’

  ‘He probably wants to make sure that the furniture remains intact, or at least properly recorded and insured. Photographed, perhaps. Your mother won’t be able to stay here for ever,’ Andrew said carefully. What did she mean she needed her mother? How the hell could something as stunning as this still need her mother?

  Isabel looked round and frowned, suddenly determined. ‘I don’t see why not. It’s her home. Moving her would be incredibly cruel and besides, how can it be done? She would never see the necessity. As for the furniture, Robert’s welcome to it in the end, but it has to stay put for now. She finds her way around because of the furniture. Like a series of signposts, you see. The furniture orientates her in time and space, somehow. Do you know, I’ve never really noticed it?’

  Ah, he thought, relieved, we are still poles apart. Not notice furniture? Remain immune to things chosen with loving taste in the days when they were affordable? She was what he had half hoped she would be, a silly woman.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ she said suddenly, leaning forward towards the light of the fire, depersonalizing the conversation, one ear cocked towards the kitchen. ‘You know about these things. What makes all this old wood so special?’

  ‘Age,’ he said pompously. ‘Age makes everything special.’

  She looked at him, amused by his intensity. ‘I’ll show you upstairs,’ she said.

  Later he was in his own small house, mercifully free of envy, taking refuge in the things he liked to touch, making an inventory of his friends. Visualizing mother and daughter sitting by that fire, the beautiful and the damned. You cannot be a good daughter, Isabel. You are not the stuff of which good daughters are made. You cannot be a good daughter because you cannot make your mother better.

  He remembered how his father’s dependence had distorted everything, and he hoped that mother and daughter would be happier.

  The kitchen was a cocoon; the house in a time warp; and Isabel was not happy. What had she done to earn such disapproval? Food spat out at supper, the façade of manners gone. Isabel had done nothing to deserve this. Yes, she had left George with Mother, which pleased them both, raced back to the dismal supermarket on the outskirts of town, loaded a poor selection of supplies into the smart car with the crumpled fender, raced home, careful over the fields. Telling herself, I must make this work, I must forget about everything else in order to make this work. Why did Andrew Cornell, and everyone else, drop me so abruptly all those years ago? Too busy to wonder if it still hurt, quickly deciding it did not. Andrew, and James Reilly, and John Eliot. One after another. Damn them all.

  Stopping at the gates of the house, Isabel tried to see it the way George might see it, visualizing instead the picture of her mother, rocked in his burly arms. Trying to perceive the elegance of the carefully collected contents of this house in the way Andrew might see them, failing there too. Doubting everyone, herself most of all. Feeling alien, stupid, weepy, even before Mother spat out the food. Then there was a phone call from Robert. Mother answered, with that articulacy of hers which came with evening. No one could see the harridan of the market stalls. Isabel did not want people to see that. She did not really want anyone to know what her mother could be like. She listened to her mother complaining to Robert about the bump on her head, poor darling. Found herself too listless to respond to his scolding: how could she be so careless? Come and see, she told him with her new mildness; come and see for yourself. Was she such a failure that she had grown to this age purely to be so comprehensively blamed?

  Bedtime. Peace for the wicked. Go first, Mother. Please go first and leave me alone. Shouting at her, none of this cooing nonsense for a nasty, naughty, wilful little girl, the brat that she was.

  ‘Go away, you silly old woman! Go to bed!’

  Simply orders. And then the final act in the day’s drama. Going upstairs past her mother’s door, with no desire to kiss and make friends, hearing the sound of hopeless sobbing. It rose and fell, this muffled sound of grief, a cadence of sublime misery like the cat at half throttle stuck somewhere inside a cupboard, screaming for release. The sound paused, coughed into silence, continued quavering and helpless.<
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  The heavy door of her mother’s room was shut, yielded to a shove. The tester bed which Andrew Cornell had valued with his eyes and admired with well-disguised soul, stood rumpled and unoccupied. Serena resented any interference with her room: she kept it clean herself. The draught slammed the door shut behind her daughter: the sound continued, deafening to the conscience, in reality subdued. There was a row of dolls and teddy bears over the bed, which Isabel would swear she had never seen before until she recognized some of them as her own.

  Serena stood by the open window, plump, forlorn, clad in her embroidered nightdress, curlers in her hair, sobbing as if the world had ended. Her body beneath Isabel’s spontaneous embrace glowed like a furnace; only the extremities were cold.

  The words were blurred at first, then clear. ‘I want to die, Issy. I want to die. I don’t want to be like this. I want to die. I want to die and set everyone free.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. Shhh. You’ll get cold.’

  ‘Cold, dead. What does it matter? I should be dead.’

  ‘I never left you, Mumsy. I shan’t leave you now. Don’t fret. Come to bed.’

  ‘I’m sorry, love. I’m sorry. I can’t help what I do. I go crazy when I’m frightened. So frightened …’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  She did not know, but she understood grief. Serena succumbed, put her thumb in her mouth and allowed herself to be rocked to sleep. The lump on her forehead was pale and shiny. Her size seemed unutterably pathetic: so did the curlers in her hair. Her face was still slack with tears: her daughter’s, puffed with love.

  My mother loves me. Everything is worthwhile. She keeps my old teddy bears in her room. We truly love each other.

  Isabel went downstairs again, carrying the cat dragged from under the bed. You go outside, cat, she told it, feeling slightly cheerful in an odd kind of way. She had made her mother better: there was no anger any more, only sorrow; there was nothing to forgive, simply love in buckets . She shook the cat. I thought you were out already, I put the milk out for you, I remember now. Isabel was feeling capable, fiercely protective, wise, even peaceful. There was no such thing as perfect peace. Peace was for the brave. Neither she nor the cat had done enough to deserve an easy life. They had to reconcile themselves to difficulties.

  She could not tell at first what the thing outside the door was. It was russet in colour, lighter than her own hair and she saw it through the opaque glass of the back door, lapping at the saucer of milk she had left. Isabel did not begrudge the milk: nor was she all that partial to the cat which littered the kitchen almost daily with signs of savagery, but she was suddenly enraged at the impertinence of the alien usurper, all sinuous arrogance blurred by the glass in the frosted pane before she opened the door and shouted at it. Shouted into the dark emptiness of the middle of the night.

  ‘Go away!’ Then, less self-consciously, ‘Piss off!’

  How long had it taken her to realize that shouting was permissible here, even encouraged by the fact there was no one to be disturbed? Two weeks? Time was already immaterial.

  She was too much a townswoman to know the difference between stoat and ferret, or to know the nature of either. If she had, she would not have startled it into such spitting and hissing, its low snarl at odds with its sinister beauty, little white teeth bared, eyes huge. The ferret advanced towards her: she slammed the door shut, watching through the glass as it shook itself delicately and then returned to the milk.

  ‘Coward!’ Isabel said loudly, addressing herself. If she left it the victor this fastidious thing would return every night. Seizing the broom she opened the door again, shoved it towards the milk saucer, hitting the thief with energy, wanting to watch it run, yelling at it until, with spitting fury and a snarl, the creature launched itself at the bristles, biting and scratching in a whirl of teeth and fur. Isabel crashed the door closed again, stood trembling on the safe side of the glass, unable to move. The creature hurled itself at the door, then settled back to wash.

  There was a sensation of acute loneliness in watching that elegant little beast preen with such nonchalance. Isabel could feel teeth snapping at her face. She was unscathed and unscarred, simply feeling foolish, but if that creature had leapt towards her eyes or fastened on her wrist, no one would have heard the screams. She was the one with the fear, it had none, while upstairs there slept a human being who would never provide help in an emergency.

  This was the way she had committed herself to live, for as long as it took. The protector, never the protected. She was numbingly, blindingly, tired.

  She was going to be brave. Resolute, indispensable. She was loved.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘She’s been there a month. What do they do all day?’ John Cornell asked his son. ‘I mean, what does a lovely young lady do every day with only an old woman for company?’

  ‘I don’t know. How should I know? What does anyone do all day? What did we do all day when I was locked in with you?’

  ‘You had a job of work, that’s the difference. Somewhere else to go. What does it take to look after one old granny? They don’t eat much.’

  ‘I think it’s more like looking after a child.’

  ‘Was I like a child?’ Father was teasing. Andrew looked at him and saw a grin of monkey cunning. He had a long memory.

  ‘Just like a child,’ Andrew said smoothly. ‘But you also had a working brain and you couldn’t move half the time. That had distinct advantages.’

  ‘Good old days, son. You should have left me to it.’

  The auction room was ready to go. People filtered through the porch, paid for the catalogues Andrew had copied that afternoon, wandered between the rows of beds, chairs, tables, speaking to each other in hushed tones, as if this place were still a church. Ah, the reverence of buyers without the refuge of shops. Andrew tried to count how many of them would buy because they loved an object, or because they thought it was a bargain which might turn into an investment, or because it was useful, and how many simply adored the business of poking around among dead people’s things. He was never ashamed of his own propensity to do just that: it was only sensible where objects endured beyond lives. He respected auction-house customers: even the collectors, looking for one cup or figurine, crowing with delight over a teapot without a lid; he did not mind the weirdos who simply came in from the cold; he liked young couples with optimistic faces, tentative buyers, to whom bidding would mean a pounding of the heart and terrible suspense. Lesser in his affections were the dealers who waited for the best and squabbled with one another. How much his father might have aided and abetted these foxy men Andrew did not know. His father was too bent to stand up in the pulpit. Andrew was the auctioneer. And he was exceptionally good at it.

  ‘Right. Let’s get going. Six o’clock. Where’s Derek?’

  ‘Just come in, little bugger. He likes to cut it fine.’

  Andrew felt he could smell Derek. Derek, waif and stray of the parish, was the kind of general helper his father would always find in his limping travels round bar counters. He could spot the man in need of cash payment, who would lift furniture, obey orders and not ask questions. Bright, personable and sly; that was Derek, a foil for the other porter, big, thick, reliable Harry. Andrew felt a twinge of guilt. Harry’s cousin Bob had been laid off with a bad back. Soon Harry would have a bad back, too.

  Two hundred and three lots: Andrew, rising to full height, all shyness, all painful awkwardness, gone, speaking with a voice some called handsome, clear and authoritative. Shy Andrew Cornell, who could not have told a joke to a girl at a party, even when she wasn’t listening, told them easily to an audience of dozens.

  ‘… Lot number five, ladies and gentlemen. A large framed print of a woman with blue skin in an ornate plastic frame, provenance, Boots, 1956. The telephone bids have been rolling in from Japan … Who’ll start me at one pound?’

  Isabel sidled in at the back. She did not know what she wanted, company perhaps. There had also been
the reluctant thought that maybe she ought to persuade her mother to use a commode. Perish the thought of such a prospect, but the weather grew colder while the distance between bedroom and bathroom remained just as long. She hated the creaking of floorboards in the night, imagined an old-fashioned commode made of mahogany, so that it could sit at ease in her mother’s room, like any other chair, looking as good as a seat with a potty inside it could look. A poo chair. Isabel’s long hair hung down her back, glistening with rain. A commode seemed to be a disgraceful thing to buy so publicly: she was beginning to change her mind about the whole thing.

  The figure of Andrew on the rostrum, his lean frame enhanced with the elegance of authority, caught her attention and filled her with amazement. He had never been a talker, but a man who yearned to talk. The audience laughed with him: she laughed too at his comic descriptions, and found her own laughter an unfamiliar sound. Maybe she could wait until the end, ask him about better commodes. No, maybe she would not wait. Not even to listen to that pleasant, persuasive voice. Minimum of sixty lots per hour, the man on the door had told her; bidding open for lot thirty, now. More than an hour to go and the place so swollen, so gummed with people and things, so quiet between the laughter and the sound of the gavel, she did not want to explore. There were people here who might have known her from a long time ago, school friends with babies, people like that. An hour was the maximum to be away from Mother and, with Robert and his family coming tomorrow, she had her tasks. Preparing herself for the question he would ask and she had taken to asking herself, never getting an answer: what did she do all day?

  Andrew watched her arrive and watched her go. He registered every face in this room, caught each imperceptible nod, remembered each name: that was his skill, and there was room in between to feel grateful that she had at least seen him, once, at his best. What would he bid for Isabel Burley?