Dancing Backwards (3 page)

The first time Des saw Mrs Hetherington she was sitting a little way off so that he couldn’t see her hands. Des liked to see the hands because this gave him valuable information. Nail polish or no nail polish, rocks or no rocks. You could gather quite a lot from such clues. She attracted notice because she had that air of being a little apart, with her attention not on the room and the other passengers, as was the case with most of the single women who came for tea, but directed only at the sea.

‘Any idea who she is?’ he asked Boris. ‘The skinny one in the corner over there.’

Boris was Ukrainian, one of the many Eastern Europeans who had been joining the staff of the shipping lines in droves. They were unpopular among their colleagues. Having acquired stamina under regimes founded by Stalin, they were willing to work longer hours than those raised on more easygoing political systems. There was a general feeling that if the redundancies which were threatened struck, they would take advantage.

Boris adjusted one of the immaculate white gloves worn by the waiters serving tea. ‘Mrs Hetherington, Deck Twelve, single
occupancy. I think she is not with anyone. But your guess is as good as mine.’

The Eastern Europeans’ command of English idiom, which they appeared to pick up with demonic cleverness, was another ground for complaint, particularly with the British staff who were naturally suspicious of any ability with other languages.

Des, however, was Italian, at least on his father’s side.

‘She dance?’

Boris raised bored aristocratic eyebrows. Long ago, his family had owned serfs, and vast tracts of woodland where wolves had loped. In the family annals it was alleged that on nights when the moon was full an ancestor of Boris’s had loped alongside the wolves.

Des made his way over to the thin woman’s table and noted that she already had a pot of tea. ‘Can I ask the waiter to get you anything to eat, Mrs Hetherington? A pastry maybe? Some sandwiches?’

‘You know my name!’ She had flushed.

‘It is our business to get to know our guests, madam.’

‘Of course.’ She looked bothered. ‘I don’t think I want to eat anything, thanks. I seem to have done nothing but eat since I came on board.’

‘You can afford to. You are so slim.’ Plenty of rocks and no wedding band but a big diamond on the ring finger of the left hand.

‘I came to watch the dancing.’

‘But you are looking at the sea.’

She seemed to like this approach better. ‘Until there is dancing I would rather look at the sea than at cake.’

‘You dance?’ No nail polish either.

‘No.’

‘But you like to watch it?’

‘My steward wanted me to.’

‘Your steward?’ The guy must be a smooth worker if she had formed a crush on him already.

‘I offended him so I’m being polite and following his suggestion, you see.’

‘I see,’ Des said. Maybe the woman was a little touched. ‘Well, enjoy yourself with the sea, Mrs Hetherington. There’s plenty of it.’

Five days a week the ship’s band played for the tea dance in the King Edward Lounge hosted by pair of professional dancers, Marie and George, whose photographs (George in tails, Marie in glittering-bodiced costumes, winning prizes in competitions as far apart as Eastbourne and Barcelona) were available for sale at the rostrum. The pair had been hired by the
Caroline
to give presentation dances at the regular evening balls and to run the five-times-a-week dance lessons (‘11 to 12 noon in the Tudor Room, bring suitable shoes’). The tea dances allowed a further opportunity for passengers to try out the steps they had learned at the classes. In order to accommodate the large numbers of single female passengers additional male dance hosts were employed.

Des had begun to learn to dance at the age of six at Miss Butler’s Dance School. His mother, at the age of not quite fifteen, had visited southern Italy with a school coach party. One of the tyres had burst, near a trattoria run by the driver’s cousin. While the driver had been hard at it changing the burst tyre, the party had enjoyed a long lunch. They were having their fortunes told in the coffee grounds by the driver’s cousin’s wife, when young Trisha Claybourne took a glass of wine out to the toiling driver who had just completed his task. He had expressed gratitude for the wine in the discreet interior of his coach.

Trisha, who was slightly built, had not recognised the consequence of this encounter, and for a while had assumed that she was annoyingly putting on weight. By the time the penny dropped, there was no remedying the situation. Nor was it possible to track down the coach driver. Trisha didn’t even know his name. When pressed she thought it might have been Dino but she wasn’t sure.

Des grew up calling his mother ‘Aunty’, her brother ‘Uncle Steve’, and his grandparents ‘Mum and Dad’. His grandmother loved him with a passion. Her first child, Melanie, had committed suicide. It was not something she ever discussed with her husband, and for Trisha and Steve, who came later, her anxiety was so great that it paralysed the full expression of her feeling for her own offspring. It was she who, noticing that her little ‘son’ had a natural sense of rhythm and an ear for music, decided that he should learn to dance.

Children have a way of feeling the reality of any situation and long before the truth of his parentage was made known to him Des felt out of place among the Claybournes. Only at Miss Butler’s school did he not seem to feel a fish out of water. He began to win medals at competitions and passed all his dance exams as expertly as he failed his school ones.

He was seventeen when he decided to leave home and, perhaps because she was the person he was least close to, it was to his Aunty Trish that he confided his plan. ‘I’m going to work in a night club in Rome—don’t tell Mum yet!

Trisha had given a yelp of laughter and said, ‘That’s all right. Anyway, I’m your mum. What you think’s your “Mum” is your grandma. Did you never guess?’

He hadn’t guessed. And now there was no one to whom he could confess that the news made him cry.

Aunty Trish, who had so confusingly turned out to be Des’s
mother, went on to tell him about his father. Des had taken this as a chance to change his name. On the basis of his mother’s, now even hazier, recollection of the coach driver, Des became ‘Dino’ and with the change of name went, as is often the way, a change in character.

He picked up Italian easily and became quite extroverted, even a bit of a flirt. In Rome, he found a dance partner, Sam, a determined brunette from Bradford, and for a while they performed a dance double act round the clubs. But Sam nursed ambitions to settle down. She finally ran off with a Roman priest who had left the Church over the loss of the Latin Mass.

Without Sam’s purposeful character to drive him, Des drifted, making a living with seasonal hotel work, where his manner made him popular. One slack evening, chatting to a customer, he learned about crewing on the ships.

‘It’s a great deal,’ his confidante told him, ‘everything found, food, accommodation, the lot. And the best thing is if you’re out of the country for a year you pay no tax. I’ve saved up the deposit for a flat.’

Des wrote to several shipping lines’ offices asking about bar work. His handwriting was neat and his bar references correct if not enthusiastic. In the end, it was his dancing accomplishments which landed him a job.

‘There are rules, mind.’ The well-groomed woman who interviewed him spoke with tired authority. ‘The passengers—we call them “guests”—will want you to sleep with them. If you do, and we find out, you are put off the ship at the next port.’

‘What age are the “guests” then mainly?’

The woman looked at Des as if there were no depths of behaviour to which she did not expect him to sink.

‘Mostly old with no men. There are younger ones too, but
they more easily find other people to sleep with. It’s the old ones who cause trouble.’

‘Don’t worry. I won’t have any trouble.’

‘Are you gay? We have trouble with men too.’ His interlocutor turned an appraising, skilfully made-up eye on Des.

‘I don’t sleep with people I don’t like.’

Disbelief registered in the perfect scimitar eyebrows. ‘Like them or not, we throw you off.’

‘I understand.’

‘And tips. They will offer you tips. You take tips only if they add it to their account so it goes through our books officially. No cash tips or you are off the ship before yesterday. Understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘Good. Report on Monday week, please. Here is the list of things you must get for yourself. Underwear is not provided.’

Des, no longer sure how he should address his family, wrote a postcard:
Dear All, Glad to say have got a berth on a round the world cruise liner, Queen Caroline, as a dance host. Should be fun! Will keep you posted. Cheers, Des.

By now, Trisha had been married and divorced and was back living at home. She read the card and tossed it across the kitchen table to her mother.

‘Looks like our Des’s fallen on his feet.’ Her frankness, the day Des shared his plans for leaving home, had been her sole effort towards maternity.

Her mother read the postcard and then turned it over to inspect the picture of the liner, like a child’s white toy on an improbably blue sea.

‘D’you think he’ll be safe?’ She was frightened he might drown but dared not let her only daughter see how badly she missed the boy she had raised as her own.

‘Oh, Des’ll be all right. I don’t expect we’ll hear much of him from now on.’

Trisha, taking revenge on her mother for her preoccupation with her lost daughter, had given nothing to her own son other than her knack of sensing what mattered to people, and thus where they were most vulnerable.

Vi would never have set foot in the King Edward Lounge if it hadn’t been for Renato. She had wandered back to her room before lunch and found him busily spraying the TV screen. When she wiped her eyes and blew her nose he had turned sulky.

It is foolhardy to quarrel with someone in a position to make one’s daily life uncomfortable. Vi, taking stock, asked, ‘Where was it you said there was dancing, Renato? I might take a look after lunch.’

Renato brightened and made a token wipe over the TV screen with a damp cloth. ‘Deck Seven, same one as the spa. You come back doing the cha-cha-cha. You see, the cha-cha-cha not difficult for a lady like you.’

Of the many tyrannies which constrain us, Vi thought, it is extraordinary how pervasive are those that persuade us to follow other people’s notions of what we want rather than our own desires. It was easier to give in to Renato than to resist. But that had been her life’s strategy; it was no one’s fault but her own.

She settled herself in an out-of-the-way table by a window in the King Edward Lounge. A waiter with unnaturally blue eyes came over and rapidly recited the repertoire of available teas. She ordered a pot of Darjeeling and rejected the offer of sandwiches and pastries.

At the other end of the room, the band was assembling and she watched as a man with thinning hair extracted a trumpet from its case. Stooped over, his back straining the seams of his jacket, he looked a discouraged figure. Once, she thought, he had probably had musical ambitions and now he was reduced to playing in a third-rate band.

The waiter, whose badge disclosed that he was called Boris, brought her tea and asked her name.

‘Do you need it for the bill?’ His eyes were such an extraordinary blue that she wondered if they could be contact lenses.

‘I ask to be polite, madam. There is no charge, of course.’

Vi decided they were not lenses and, rather unwillingly, gave her name. Not that it was hers anyway. When all was said and done it belonged to Ted.

Ted. How he would have enjoyed drinking tea in the King Edward Lounge. All the years they were married she had been aware, even when she pushed it to the back of her mind, that he longed for her to say something like ‘Let’s go on a cruise together’—or ‘Let’s sell up and go and live in Corfu’. Anything to show that she saw their life together as that of a couple.

But you cannot make yourself a couple, or anything real, by willing it.

Other members of the band had arrived and were unpacking their instruments. The sax player, a young man with a shaved head and a wealth of necklaces, was joshing the trumpeter and she could hear from his tone that the trumpeter was answering back with good-tempered banter. Maybe she was quite wrong and he was perfectly content with his lot. How could you ever know what it was to be another person? We are all such solipsists, she thought, trapped in the mesh of our own desires. And even these we hardly know and rarely understand.

A slight, dark-skinned man, whose name she saw was Dino,
now came across the floor and addressed her by name. He must have learned it from the waiter with the dangerous eyes. Well, she supposed they were only doing their job. This man’s eyes were a gentle brown. And there was something in his face, a trace of what…? A melancholy quality, not cruel anyway.

‘
One
two three, one two three, it’s the all-time favourite’s all-time favourite, you’ve got it, ye-es the waltz!
One
two three, nice an’ easy now…’

George’s voice, furred with an adult lifetime of Players untipped, propelled the would-be dancers round the floor. ‘Gentleman, steer those lovely legs before you, don’t trip over them for thinking what you’d like her to do with them!
One
two three,
one
two three, ladies, don’t forget what Ginger Rogers said, now, you have to do it backwards and on high heels!
One
two three,
one
two three, nice an’ easy, that’s the way…’

‘You’re called Dino then? Is that Italian?’ The woman Des was dancing with had an angrily curious face.

‘Nice an’ easy there, gentlemen, there we go.’

Des produced his amiable smile. ‘That’s me, Mrs Rotherhyde.’

‘And one two three, ladies you’re doing swell, knocking those gentlemen into a cocked hat, if Marie will forgive me expressing my prejudice in favour of the fairer sex…’

‘Arsehole!’ Marie breathed into George’s ear as he danced by with a woman in red patent heels.

Seeing they were reaching the edge of the area that passed for a dance-floor, Des whirled his partner expertly round and executed a neat double chassis.

‘Nice and easy does it, Mrs Rotherhyde. There you are, not many ladies could’ve followed me so well. There we go now.’ He couldn’t wait to get rid of her.

‘And bringing it on now to an end, ladies and gentlemen,
thank your partners, please as we get ready for the next number the all-time favourite, ye-es, it’s the foxtrot.’

‘So you’re Italian?’ Mrs Rotherhyde, catching her breath, suggested again. She was trying to delay his passage to a new partner. Usually he felt sorry for them when they tried this on, but not this one. This one, he could tell, was dangerous.

‘You do look kind of dark.’

Thanks, Mrs Rotherhyde. Slightly desperate now Des looked about for another partner. A woman came across the floor towards them.

‘Excuse me, were you wanting to dance…?’

‘I’m afraid I’m just leaving.’ It was the thin woman by the window apparently on her way out.

‘And taking your partners now for the foxtrot,’ George’s voice commanded.

‘Can I tempt you to a foxtrot, Mrs Hetherington?’

‘Oh he’s foxy, he is, that one!’ Mrs Rotherhyde’s mulberry lips glistened ominously.

The other woman looked at him. Expecting her to turn him down, Des was taken aback when she said, ‘All right, if you like I’ll have a bash.’

He could tell she had never danced a foxtrot in her life. But she moved well. Her body followed his easily and when the dance was over she smiled at him nicely and he felt able to go across to the little woman with the bad perm, whom he privately called ‘Miss Muffet’ on account of her height and her baby-doll clothes, and Miss Muffet had been surprisingly gracious, and did not try to hang on to him when the dance ended. Instead, she said quite cheerfully, ‘There’s others looking for a partner. I’ll sit here, my dear, and rest my old feet and watch you twinkle your toes.’

The band had started up again but Des paused for a moment to look out through the tall plate glass windows at the sea.

It had been something of a surprise to him how fascinated he had become with the constantly shifting colours and patterns made in the water. It soothed something in him to which he could not have put a name. As he stood, absorbed, two white birds wheeled down out of the sky. Mrs Hetherington, the woman he had danced with earlier, must have stayed on to watch the waltz because at that moment he saw her leaving the room and wondered if she had also seen the birds.

Vi, who had found dancing the foxtrot surprisingly agreeable, had lingered to watch the rumba. Perhaps worn out by the unaccustomed exercise, she went back to her cabin and fell asleep on the gold counterpane.

She dreamed that she was helping Harry climb to a high platform in a children’s playground. Harry’s feet, in his Clarks sandals, kept slipping and she was trying to place them securely on the rungs. She could feel his slender ankles and see the pale crepe of the sole which, dream-like, was visible on the palm of her hand. The rungs were wet and slimy and Harry began to slip and slide down through them. And suddenly the ladder was frighteningly high off the ground and swaying. And where had she left Daniel? He was a baby still and, wrapped in a jacket but nothing more, was sleeping, oh help, was it under the pile of rubbish they had made for a bonfire? She cried out and woke not knowing where in the world she was.

There was knocking at the door. Someone outside had been calling her. ‘Mrs Hetherington. Coo-ee. Coo-ee, Mrs Hetherington. Are you there?’

It was Renato wanting to know did she need anything.

‘No, thank you, Renato, I am dressing for dinner.’

‘How was the dancing, Mrs Hetherington?’

‘Very nice, thank you, Renato.’

‘I said you enjoy it, Mrs Hetherington. Have a nice dinner now.’

She drifted off again but Harry and Dan had walked on without her, through the valley of sleep—where those we have been close to, for good or ill, mingle—and had gone out into the adult world where things are done differently and her children no longer needed her.