Dancing Backwards (9 page)

Vi’s hands were cold from her stay on deck, and back in her cabin she shook the rings from her fingers. They slid off easily and she scooped them into a little glittering heap on the desk by the notebooks while she ran a bath.

Most of the suites were equipped only with showers but Vi had requested one of the few with baths. She had always had a preference for soaking. She got into the bath now and lay back, relishing the almost too hot water in which her limbs were immersed. She inspected them now. Her legs were still in pretty good shape. Not that there was anyone to enjoy them nowadays.

‘Does Edwin know?’ Bruno asked.

Vi’s legs were wrapped around his back and she was smoking. It wasn’t easy to smoke lying under Bruno’s bulk but neither of them was willing to move. She attempted to lock her ankles together while she stretched out for a receptacle for her toppling ash but Bruno’s back was too broad and their knit-together bodies toppled over. ‘Ouch. You’re squashing me. I don’t think so.’

‘Why haven’t you told him?’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Why not? Here, have this saucer.’

‘Bruno, you know why.’

Bruno had rented a damp flat at the top of a house in a street off London’s Portobello Road, where Vi had begun to visit him most weekends. He had found work organising lecture programmes for the British Council while he wrote a book based on his research on Vodun sorcerers.

He lectured Vi on the topic while in bed. She was, as she remarked, a captive audience.

‘Vodun is an entirely benign religion, remarkably like Catholicism, which is why the missionaries were so successful. The element of sorcery is minor. Hollywood loves it, of course.’

Vi’s mother had been born a Catholic and therefore religion had been one of the many taboo subjects with her father. ‘How is it like Catholicism?’

‘Both have one supreme being, both have saints, that is to say venerable beings whose lives have purified their souls so that they enter the heavenly sphere and have influence on the lives of the living, and of course they eat meat and drink blood as part of their sacred ritual.’

‘But Christians don’t drink real blood,’ Vi objected. This seemed to annoy Bruno so she dropped the subject.

When they finally disentangled and got out of bed dark was gathering outside and the streetlights were beginning to glow orange. She began to prepare supper. ‘We’re out of butter. I’ll pop out and get some.’

‘We don’t need butter.’

‘Why not?’

‘Butter’s bad for you. It’ll make you fat.’

Vi said, ‘I don’t think I’ll get fat, I never do, or not so far, and you can’t make a white sauce without butter. Anyway, we need wine.’

She returned from the Polish grocer’s on the corner with butter, a mammoth jar of pickled cucumbers and a bottle of red wine. ‘I do like Vlodek, he’s so gloomy. Did you know he’d lost his left foot from gangrene?’ She was unwrapping thin brown tissue from the bottle of wine which was Rumanian, or of some other indecipherable Eastern European origin.

Bruno said, ‘You drink too much.’

Vi, who had been wondering whether this was so, at once turned defiant. ‘I don’t.’

‘It’s living with Edwin. You should be careful—it will affect your liver. In any case, you shouldn’t drink that rotgut.’

Vi opened the wine, rather ineptly as Bruno’s corkscrew was past its best, and downed a couple of glasses in the kitchen while ostensibly grating cheese. There were no wine glasses, so she drank from a tumbler which meant that by the time she served the macaroni cheese she had drunk nearly half the bottle. Perhaps it was the familiar sensation of being slightly drunk, but for the first time she was aware of missing Edwin.

She had told Edwin she was visiting Annie, who was having ‘man trouble’. This was indeed the case. The usually efficient Annie was pregnant by an Italian shoe buyer from Milan, who had no intention of leaving his wealthy wife.

The phone rang and Bruno answered it. ‘Edwin,
amigo
! I was just thinking about you.’

The phone receiver made a reciprocal amicable mumble.

‘Nothing special. Whiling away the time with an old chum.’ Bruno winked at Vi, who got up and went out of the room. She was making the bed when Bruno came in.

‘He wants to come and stay next weekend.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I may have a friend staying.’

‘I think he might be missing you,’ Vi said, not quite recognising
who was doing the missing. ‘You’re his oldest friend, Bruno. Let him come and see you. I’ll stay put in Cambridge.’

But in fact, the following weekend she did visit Annie.

Vi and Edwin travelled down on the train together and parted at King’s Cross. Annie had moved into a new flat near World’s End, just off the King’s Road, which she was sharing with her latest set of Australians. ‘I wouldn’t dream of sharing with any other nationality now, Vi. Certainly not the Brits. They use up all the toilet paper and then never replace it. Aussies are born flatmates.’

Annie’s current Australians were off somewhere, apparently parachuting, so Annie and Vi had the place to themselves. Vi made a Hungarian goulash, as Annie, from living with Australians, was opposed to vegetarianism of any kind. ‘It’s fatal for one’s teeth, Vi. One of my flatmates is a dental hygienist. Mandy says that teeth simply must have red meat or they drop out in old age.’

Vi opened a bottle of wine, hoping that this would produce no homilies from Annie. ‘Are you drinking?’

‘I’ll say!’

‘How did this happen, Annie?’

Annie explained that the shoe buyer was Catholic and had principles about contraception.

‘But not adultery, it seems?’

‘I don’t think the Pope minds adultery.’

‘I think he must do, Annie.’

‘Well, not as much as murdering children.’

‘I don’t know that you can call contraception “murder”.’

Annie said that in any case she had decided to have the kid. Michelangelo had agreed to support it. At least, his wife would.

‘Goodness. Does she know?’

Annie said she thought not but that Michelangelo had a
personal allowance from his wife, which he had offered to share with her for the child.

‘I must say that sounds a dodgy arrangement. Is he really called Michelangelo?’

‘Michelangelo was a great painter, Vi. I would have thought you knew that.’

‘Yes, of course I do. A sculptor too. But it doesn’t sound quite right on a Milanese shoe buyer. Are you sure you want to go ahead with this, Annie?’

But Annie, usually so mindful of her material prospects, seemed to have succumbed to the ancient stealthy spirit of childbearing, which can take the most unlikely souls in thrall.

They spent the rest of the weekend happily trawling the King’s Road where the new-style boutiques, which had sprung up like mushrooms, had names so fanciful it was a job for the sign writers to compress them into the space of their tiny frontages. The boutiques were painted in psychedelic colours and from them issued strains of weird Eastern-sounding music and the dubious scent of joss sticks. The assistants of both sexes were long-haired and moody, high-handed to the point of rudeness to their customers, who responded by dropping the garments they didn’t pinch on to the floors of the newly democratic communal changing rooms, to be trampled on by other hectic shoppers.

Vi and Annie visited ‘Mad Meg Merrilies Marvellous Mittens’, where gloves of no kind were to be found, also ‘The Daughters of Jephthah’, where Annie tried on a long red velvet smock with gold lace, tacked rather than sewn on, at the hem. ‘What do you think?’

Vi said she thought it made her look Pre-Raphaelite.

‘Yes, of course, that’s the idea. But do I look pregnant?’

‘I should think anyone would, wearing that.’

‘Oh you are hopeless, Vi. Try on these trousers. They won’t fit me for long but you could lend them until.’

At Annie’s insistence, Vi tried on a pair of blue velvet flares, very tight over the bottom. The zip was already coming away; a result of the rough handling from other customers. ‘I don’t think they suit me.’

Annie nevertheless stuffed the trousers into her bag.

It was more or less assumed by the entrepreneurs who had set up these shops that at least fifty per cent of the stock would be stolen and the mark-up for those wealthy, foolish or morally behind the times enough to pay for the shoddy goods reflected this. Annie asked one of the bored male assistants, wearing a tie-dyed caftan, if they had any gold tights to match the gold on the velvet dress, which she got out of the bag, where it was stashed, to show him. She was annoyed to hear that gold tights were out of stock and bagged away some silver mesh ones ‘in lieu’.

Vi had to dissuade her from adding a set of Indian temple bells. ‘They might have made a noise, Annie. They would have given you away.’

‘So what? I’m pregnant, I can plead diminished responsibility. Who was Jephthah anyway and who were his daughters when they were at home?’

By this time, they were eating apple pie and ice cream in one of the smart coffee houses which were opening up on the King’s Road. Annie had warned that due to her cravings she was prepared to kill for apple pie.

‘So far as I know there was only one daughter, or only one you get to hear of,’ Vi said. ‘And the trouble was that she didn’t stay at home. Jephthah promised to sacrifice to the Lord whatever he saw first if he was granted victory in battle, and the first thing he saw was his daughter who ran out to greet him.’

‘I suppose the old bastard kept his promise.’ Annie licked her spoon mournfully.

Vi said she seemed to remember that the girl had insisted on it.

‘If you believe that you’ll believe anything,’ Annie declared. ‘Can you lend me half a crown, Vi? I’m desperate for more of that apple pie.’

On the Sunday evening Vi and Edwin met up at King’s Cross and they travelled back to Cambridge together. Vi asked after his weekend.

‘Fine. Bruno wanted to show me his poetry.’

‘Oh. How are the witch doctors?’

‘He didn’t say. I think he’s concentrating on the poems. How was Annie?’

Vi, who had not heard anything from Bruno about his poetry since he had left Cambridge, said that Annie had seemed unnaturally maternal. She did not mention the red smock or the trousers, which she had left behind with Annie who was expecting a visit from Michelangelo. She did, however, refer to Jephthah. Edwin said that the story was the subject of a Handel oratorio. He said very little else for the rest of the journey and both immersed themselves in the Sunday papers.

They walked from the station through drizzling rain, along Hills Road and turning, at the Catholic church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, down Lensfield Road. Going past the Polar Research Institute, Vi tried to play their usual game, which was to put words into the mouth of Scott, whose bust over the door commemorated the selfless explorer who had walked voluntarily to his own extinction. But nothing apt or amusing came to her with Edwin walking beside her, seemingly oblivious.

When they got in, Edwin poured himself a glass of Teacher’s.

‘Vi, how would you feel if Bruno joined us in the editing of
Ariel
?’

‘Why? Can I have one of those?’

‘Sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I think it might help him. He’s at a bit of a loss with his poems.’

‘What would it mean?’

‘Only my going down to see him in London from time to time. I know you won’t want him here.’

‘I don’t mind him coming here,’ Vi said, drinking the whisky and feeling strangely angry at Edwin’s oversight. ‘I’ve got over that.’

The water was cooling and Vi heaved herself out of the bath, wrapped herself in one of the soft white towels and climbed, swaddled, into bed. She’d done this since she was a child. Usually it induced a profound and satisfying sleep.

Edwin and Bruno were still in her mind as if they had never left it. But that was the mind for you. Once in nothing ever really left it again.

To let the cat out of the bag:
the punishment for the most serious misdemeanours in the Royal Navy was flogging. This was admin-istered using a whip called a ‘cat o’ nine tails’. The ‘cat’ was kept in a leather or baize bag.

Vi woke in a fright. She lay still, uncertain where she was. Then the ship’s horn let out a steady bittern’s boom.

She was lying naked, sweating into a clammy bath towel. The room’s thermostat had been turned full up, perhaps by Renato, but she had neglected to open the doors to the balcony so the temperature had risen to an oppressive heat. She opened the door to a welcome flood of cold air and then went outside, wet with sweat, in her towel.

She had had a bad dream.

First, there was merely a miasma of vague dread. Then elements of the plot seeped back and clarified. She had killed somebody. And she had been arguing, with an unpersuadable presence, that it was not murder. It had been what in the dream she persisted in calling ‘accidental murder’, as though that were an explanation or an accepted legal term. She had buried, she seemed to think, the body in a thicket but now they were going to clear the land and her secret was about to be uncovered.

Still damp from the anxious dream, she unwrapped the towel and stood naked on the balcony, letting the cold air define her body.

Baz Lincoln had also passed a perturbed night. He and his wife, Martha, had been rowing. As is the way with couples,
their quarrels always ran along similar lines and boiled down to the fact that Martha was older than Baz and other women gave signs, more or less visibly, that they were ready to rescue him from what must surely be a youthful error and present source of regret. This, as Baz was tired as hell of pointing out, was hardly his fault. But fault has little, or nothing, to do with rows, which are generated by a clash of world views, which those who hold them expect, against all experience, to be compatible and which only occasionally, indeed rather rarely, coincide.

Martha had vomited after drinking, one by one, the collection of shorts in the minibar, including, as a final act of desperation, the Tia Maria, which had not been replaced in months. She had fallen asleep while delivering a stream of lively invective and had begun to snore.

Baz, angry and without the consolations of alcohol or unconsciousness, had put on his tracksuit and gone out to clear his head. He was sampling the ‘Dawn Snack’—mugs of tea and Danish pastries—when he saw Violet Hetherington approaching. On the whole, he was relieved to see her.

‘Hi there, Vi. A fellow early bird.’

Vi filled her mug and tea bag with scalding water from the huge urn. ‘I had a nightmare and couldn’t get back to sleep. What are the pastries like?’

‘Horrible. Have one.’

‘Thanks, I’ll stick to tea.’

Dodging the dedicated dawn walkers, they strolled round to the ship’s bows and stood side by side looking out at a pale lemon-washed sky.

‘Beautiful,’ Baz said.

Vi, recognising misery disguised as aesthetic appreciation, said, ‘It’s funny how beauty can affect you as a reproach.’

‘What was your nightmare?’

‘I dreamed I had murdered somebody and they were about to find the body.’

‘And have you?’ He was leaning down and towards her, smiling the smile that so infuriated his wife.

‘Oh, I dare say. I should think if you were to count it would turn out that I’m a mass murderer.’

‘I know what you mean.’ His power of comprehension, Vi thought, was far more seductive than his smile. But it was probably no more controllable.

‘I seem to be dreaming a good deal here. It must have something to do with being at sea.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’ Baz smiled again, more distantly this time, as if remembering to get himself in check. ‘I hardly ever dream. Martha does.’

‘I have an idea that women do dream more. Or, anyway, remember their dreams more.’

‘Certainly my Sangoma women do. They set great store by dreams.’

‘I bet they pre-date Freud, don’t they?’

‘Oh sure. But many respectable theories of dreams anticipate the Herr Doktor. It was only a novel idea to the modern West. Africa has always understood such matters in its own way.’

Vi said, ‘I am going to see someone in New York I’ve not seen for years. Not since I was a young woman, a girl, really.’

‘You think this dream was about him?’ Baz’s eyes without his glasses were nakedly attentive.

‘I think maybe it’s about
that
. Meeting him again.’

‘To meet someone after a long time, that is scary—if they have mattered to you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you are brave then.’

‘Oh no,’ Vi protested. ‘I’m not at all brave. That’s the trouble.’

The yellow sky raced away from them heartlessly. Baz said, ‘Perhaps when you see your friend it will be different from what you expect. He may, well, cast light on things. From another angle.’

‘That’s true. We forget how we tend to see everything from our own perspective.’

‘I wish you’d tell that to Martha!’

Some conviction of his state of mind made Vi say, ‘You know, I almost miss quarrelling now there is no one to quarrel with.’ She hoped that this was not trespassing.

Baz looked at her with his intelligent brown eyes. ‘You are a clever lady. And now, I think I had better go and wake Martha up with a strong cup of coffee. Thank you for keeping me company on the dawn watch.’

He walked away and almost at once Vi began to miss him. Poor Martha. It would be a torment to be married to a man like that if you did not feel quite safe yourself. His magic was artless. In fact, she guessed that he was an unusually faithful man. But that was probably part of his appeal.

A neat Nepalese boy, his trousers sharp as a razor, was setting up striped canvas deckchairs. Vi took possession of one. Thanks to Baz, the dream tentacles had relaxed their grip a little. She lay back, lounging in the deckchair enjoying the weak sun bathing her face.

One of the ship’s stowaway sparrows hopped down and began to peck delicately at some crumbs of crisps at her feet and then flew up to the railing and began to utter small sweet sounds which etched her ears, gently rinsing them. She closed her eyes.

She was on her way to meet Bruno from Cambridge.

‘I will meet you,’ he had announced the previous weekend, ‘at one o’clock in the entrance of the Horniman Museum.’

The Horniman Museum is in an out-of-the-way part of south London and even if you know the geography it is not easy to find. By the time Vi had changed trains at London Bridge, caught the wrong bus and then walked after all, it was a minute or so past one o’clock when she reached her destination. It was a Friday, but she had taken a day’s leave so that she and Bruno could visit an exhibition of West African art that was showing at the museum.

There was no sign of Bruno in the foyer. Just as well that she was there first. She had detected recently that waiting made him agitated.

Twenty minutes later, when she was beginning to wonder where he was, Bruno appeared. ‘What kept you?’ His face was pale and glistened slightly under the unflattering museum lights.

‘I’ve been here, waiting.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since one o’clock.’

Bruno said, ‘I said to meet at twelve. I waited nearly an hour for you.’

‘But I was here. It can’t have been more than five minutes at most I was late.’

‘We were meeting at twelve.’

‘Bruno, no, we were meeting at one.’

Bruno took a diary from his pocket, consulted it and wordlessly held out to her the page bearing that day’s date. She read
V 12 noon Horniman
.

She was sure as sure he had said one. In her mind, she could hear his voice. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Did you write it down in your diary?’

‘I don’t keep a diary.’

‘If you don’t keep a diary how can you expect to keep appointments?’

What ever could have happened that they were standing there wrangling over the merits of diary keeping? Miserably, she said, ‘I’ve never needed one. I have all my appointments in my head.’

‘Not those with me, apparently.’

‘Especially with you, Bruno.’

By now, Bruno holding her elbow and steering rather than guiding her, they had entered the exhibition and were standing before a case of ungainly little statuettes. The statues had strange distorted bodies, elongated or unnaturally foreshortened. Some were draped with shells and crowned with blackened thorns, or hung about with bits of bone, ropes of dried weed and in one case what might have been a shrivelled umbilicus. ‘What are they?’ she asked, as if she cared.

‘They’re empowerment figures, from the Bight of Benin, in West Africa. Here, have the catalogue.’

‘What are they empowered with?’

But Bruno did not answer. He was moving about morosely, his shoulders hunched, inspecting the contents of the cabinets with forensic attention.

Vi tried to keep up with him but discouraged by the cold-shouldering began to lag behind. She stopped before a single larger effigy with a wide expressionless face. From its thick neck a tiny bleached bird’s skull dangled; a wooden peg attached to a rope had been driven into the forehead between its eyes.

There was something terrible and forlorn about the figure’s gaze. Bruno was apparently directing every ounce of his concentration at the other exhibits but braving she didn’t quite know what she asked, ‘What are they for?’

‘Vi, please, I am concentrating.’

There was a photograph of the figure with the peg in its head in the catalogue. Vi read:
Some ‘bo’ figures are believed to act both as protection against the malevolent effects of sorcery and to promote a Vodun sorcerer’s own malevolent purposes. With sorcery, the dominant fear is of destruction by the power of revenge. The most feared form of this is transformation
.

‘But it is all moonshine, isn’t it?’ she enquired on the bus back to the station. ‘Isn’t it?’ she asked again, more anxiously, as he didn’t reply.

‘If that’s how you wish to see it.’

She had hoped he might have recovered his humour but silence hung impenetrably between them until they reached the flat. It was clear that she was in the doghouse.

‘Would you like to eat something?’ She was starving. They had eaten nothing for lunch and she had started early from Cambridge.

‘As you wish.’

Vi made cheese on toast with chutney. Bruno ate gloomily but devoured the toasted cheese in rapid mouthfuls. He responded to her fragments of conversation with a chilly politeness but otherwise volunteered no remark.

Unable to bear this any longer, Vi said, ‘Bruno, look, I’m sorry if I got the time wrong. It wasn’t on purpose.’

‘It’s disrespectful.’

‘Disrespectful?’

‘To miss appointments.’

She could hardly believe this. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Bruno…’

Half an hour later, she knocked on the bedroom door. ‘Bruno, do you want me to go?’ Her real self seemed to have gone into
hiding and an unfamiliar, pleading person was speaking in her place.

After a few minutes, Bruno came out holding a small leathery thing with feathers stuck around it. ‘Did I show you this?’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s from West Africa. It’s made from the wing of a bat. They say it will keep the soul of anyone who loves you.’

‘That’s a rather worrying idea.’

‘Shall I keep your soul in it?’

‘If you like.’ She was only pleased that they were talking again. ‘Shall we go to bed?’

They went to bed and then things were all right again, for a while.