The Ballroom Class (18 page)

And they’d shared a look, and thoughts would pass unspoken between their eyes: Angelica never said she missed her dad, because she didn’t, and Pauline never mentioned Jerry, or the woman he’d married after the divorce brought Angelica back to England, or the long months when Angelica had fallen out of touch with everyone. The loneliness she never wanted to talk about. Her mum knew what to say, and what not to – a skill she’d picked up over forty years with Cyril.

Just once, though, when Mum was a bit doped-up on her painkillers, she’d forgotten, and it slipped out like a black beetle scuttling out of a plant pot.

‘Looking after me, like I looked after your little Rosie,’ she’d joked, and the pain flared up in Angelica’s face. She tried to summon up her dancing expression, the wide smile that masked raw feet and an aching back, but her mother had felt her hand twitch, and sensed a sorrow that she couldn’t quite make out in the bad light without her strong glasses.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, love,’ she’d said, contritely. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too,’ said Angelica, suddenly Angela again, plain Angela with no fake smile to hide behind.

They had sat, holding hands, not saying anything, but thinking of Pauline’s cold, empty house miles away from Islington’s self-conscious streets of antique shops and pavement cafés.

That was the thing about dancing, Angelica thought, shaking herself back to the present day. It gave you an escape from everyday life, but it filled up every corner until there was so little room for anything else. And your dancing life spilled into your real one, eating it up like a hungry caterpillar.

She tugged on the collar on her ladybird coat, and carried on walking, her heels clicking briskly on the pavement and her sleeping pills rattling in her handbag.

10

In Peter’s sparse community centre consulting room, Katie had taken as long as she could to rearrange herself, her bag, her cup of cold water, her packet of tissues, her chair and her notebook. She’d put off the evil moment for a good six minutes, but the large clock on the wall was very visible to Ross, and, more importantly, to Peter, who was keen to get going with their session. He had the patient look of a man who’d seen a lot of desperate time-wasting, and wasn’t about to start indulging it now.

‘So.’ He smiled patiently, but with a warmth that reached his eyes, unlike the phoney smile Katie had managed to plaster on to mask her nerves. Ross, she noted, wasn’t even bothering to pretend. ‘Shall we make a start? How you met. Who wants to go first?’

Ross turned his puppy-dog eyes towards Katie, expecting her to take the lead.
As
usual
, she thought. Doesn’t he ever think for himself?

Her incipient irritation must have showed, because Peter pounced, casually tipping his head towards Ross. ‘Why don’t you get the ball rolling? I’ve noticed you tend to let Katie take the initiative in discussions. That’s not a great habit to get into, if you want to keep a healthy balance in your relationship, so why don’t we turn that around now? Start us off.’

Good, thought Katie, ignoring the counsellor-speak. So I’m not the bad guy
all
the time here.

Ross cleared his throat with a dry splutter, his usual giveaway nervous tic, then said, ‘OK. Well, I met Katie in a pub near where I used to work, The Horse. It was a quiz night, and she was there with some girls.’

‘From the office,’ added Katie. ‘First time we’d been. I don’t spend a lot of time in pubs.’

‘Mind if I finish?’ asked Ross.

‘Sorry. Go on, sorry.’

‘I was there with a bunch of old mates from school – we went every week, but to be honest, we were there for the beer, rather than the quiz. I noticed the girls next to us were coming up with answers to everything. Well, one girl next to me.’ Ross’s tensed shoulders began to drop as he got into his story. He didn’t even need to look at the notes Peter had asked them to make.

‘They kept telling her to whisper, but Katie’s got quite a carrying voice,’ he went on. ‘And there was something about the way she spoke that just  . . . clicked with me. She sounded clever, and confident. Attractive. Anyway, the pub was packed, and the tables were really close together. She was sitting nearest us, so I kept leaning further and further back until we were almost touching, and  . . .’ He shrugged, a shy smile starting in the corner of his mouth. ‘I pretended it was a joke for the lads, the comedy eavesdropping, but I was just looking for an excuse to start a conversation, really.’

‘And you did?’ prompted Peter.

‘Well, yeah. She caught me eavesdropping and had a right go at me, so the least I could do was offer to buy her a drink. Then we got talking and Katie did some kind of deal where they traded some current affairs answers for our pop music round, and  . . .’ The smile bloomed into a full-on goofy grin. ‘We swapped phone numbers too. And that’s how we met.’

‘Can you remember what she was wearing?’

‘Yes,’ said Ross immediately. ‘A red V-neck jumper and a pair of black trousers that made her legs look about a mile long. And red shoes, with pointy toes.’

Peter looked genially at Katie. ‘That’s quite a compliment, isn’t it, that that’s still so fresh in Ross’s mind?’

‘He’s a visual person,’ explained Katie, seeing where the discussion was going. ‘He’s meant to notice things like that.’

‘Can you remember what I was wearing?’ Ross demanded.

‘Jeans,’ she said, fairly confidently. Ross always wore jeans.

‘And?’

‘And  . . . a band T-shirt?’ she hazarded. In the old days, she’d been fascinated by all the obscure bands Ross loved but she’d never even heard of. He looked cool, with his trendy black-framed glasses, his Japanese jeans and tiny gadgets, but Ross didn’t have any of the snottiness that the ‘cool’ people at college had had. How could he, he’d said, pushing his long fringe out of his eyes, with a name like Ross? She’d loved the way he wanted to share his discoveries, not guard them. He’d even painstakingly copied CDs for her, trying to coax her off Jamiroquai and onto scratchy, yelpy groups he’d seen in sweaty Brixton clubs.

Katie caught herself melting inside at the memory of it. But it was a memory, that someone else might have told her about. When had he stopped being so sexy?

‘Which one?’ he asked.

Without thinking, she answered her own question with a vivid mental image: sitting at the kitchen table, the night before their first mortgage meeting with the bank. She was three months pregnant with Hannah. When they’d argued for the first time about the household budget. And she realised that Ross had no savings, but over four hundred CDs, half of them ludicrously expensive imports.

‘Which band T-shirt was I wearing?’ needled Ross.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she snapped, her brain still struggling with the basic truth that she could hardly be mad at him for something that had been there all along. The sudden rush of remembered anger was as vivid as the early rush of remembered desire had been, but this time it
was
personal. That same anger was still there. Still there, and growing, and the roots of it were in an anger with herself.

‘What does it matter? We’re talking eight years ago! Ross, I’m so stressed out these days, I can barely remember what I’m wearing
now
!’

Ross looked wounded.

‘So, how do you remember the evening, Katie?’ asked Peter, turning his attention to her.

She stiffened defensively. ‘Like that. More or less.’

‘Do you want to describe it to me?’

‘Erm  . . .’

No, not now I know it’s going to be marked out of ten for romantic value. And then there’s the other thing, the thing Ross hasn’t mentioned yet. The thing that’s going to make me look like a real bitch, even though it’s not relevant  . . .

They were both looking at her now: Ross with an intense expectation in his eyes, Peter with a non-committal encouragement.

Concentrate, Katie told herself. Just  . . . just tell them the relevant bits.

‘I’d agreed to go to the pub quiz with some girls from my old office, but I had no idea they were going to be so competitive. Ross was on the table next to us, with some trendy-looking guys  . . .’

Who in reality had made her feel simultaneously shy and desperate to impress.

‘And, um, as Ross says  . . .’

‘I want to hear what
you
say,’ Peter reminded her with his maddening calmness.

‘OK, well, Ross kept leaning nearer and nearer me, and someone made a big deal about him copying us, so I felt I had to say something. I did wonder  . . .’ She paused. ‘I did wonder if he was taking the mickey when he asked if I wanted a drink, because he wasn’t the sort of guy who’d normally  . . . I mean, I didn’t think I was the sort of girl who’d  . . .’

She looked up, suddenly feeling hot. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘No?’ said Peter.

‘I mean,’ said Katie, gritting her teeth, ‘that Ross was a trendy designer type of guy and I  . . . wasn’t. I’m still not. OK?’

‘You thought I was taking the mickey?’ said Ross. ‘You’ve never told me that.’

‘No, well, why would I?’ Katie felt caught off-balance. She’d never actually let that thought slip into words before. ‘Anyway, we got chatting, and he talked me into giving them some answers, in return for some help with the music round.’

‘I did it so I could whisper in her ear,’ added Ross, obviously buoyed by Katie’s confession.

‘So, you were both amazed that the other could be interested in you. That’s  . . . interesting,’ said Peter, taking off his glasses.

Oh God, thought Katie, here comes the devastating remark.

But as far as she could see, it didn’t come.

‘So, after that, you started dating?’ he went on.

Ross and Katie looked at each other, and hesitated. She saw a vulnerability in his eyes that made her feel protective – another old feeling. It was a bit weird, thought Katie, seeing Ross sitting there with her, but never being quite sure what he was going to say for once. A bit like dancing, when he danced with Jo and bothered to stand up straight, so he looked like a different man. A new man.

What if he pulls himself together, so you fancy him again, and then he decides to leave because you’ve been such a bitch in here?
said a weaselly voice in her head, and she shook it away, speaking quickly, so the thought couldn’t settle.

‘Yes,’ she said, at the same time as he said, ‘It was complicated.’

‘Katie,’ Ross began, ‘that’s not completely  . . .’

‘He was wearing a Pixies T-shirt,’ she gabbled. ‘And Converse All-star trainers. He looked like he could be in a band, or an American sitcom, or something. His hair was so thick, and so soft I wanted to put my fingers in it—’

‘She had a fiancé!’ shouted Ross over the top of her. ‘And she didn’t tell me that until our fourth date!’

An awful silence filled the room.

Katie could feel her heart beating up in her throat, while her underarms prickled with sweat. Hot flushes of embarrassment swept through her.

That’s it, she thought. I’m never going to recover from this in Peter’s eyes. I’m already a cold-hearted cow, and now I’m a cheat. Well done, Ross, have another victim badge.

But it wasn’t like that, wailed a voice in her head. It wasn’t  . . .

She got a grip on herself, the way she did in meetings when Eddie tried to wind her up about maternity leave being women’s stealth holiday. Think. It could be worse, she told herself. At least Ross didn’t say that—

‘You didn’t tell
him
until our fourth date, either, did you?’ he added, suddenly.

Oh God. Katie froze.

‘Right, well, I can see how that would make the start of your relationship complicated,’ said Peter in his even, non-judgemental tone. ‘Tell me about that, Katie.’

Katie glared furiously at Ross. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t see what it has to do with our marriage.’

‘I think it has a lot to do with your marriage,’ observed Peter.

‘You can’t just ignore things,’ said Ross, sanctimoniously. ‘Get it out in the open, Katie. Admit that’s what you did. What’s the worst that could happen?’

Peter turned to him. ‘Of course, it must have been very flattering for you, having a woman dump her fiancé to date you. Hmm? We’ll come back to that.’

Ross’s mouth hung open, mid-platitude, but Peter had turned back to Katie.

‘Tell me about it,’ he insisted. ‘I think it’s important.’

Katie met his clear gaze with her own stubbornness, then, after ten seconds, realised she’d met a force even stubborner. Peter might give a good impression of a bearded muesli-eating do-gooder, but she could sense a will of iron beneath the Aran jumper.

And she was so tired. Too tired. So she closed her eyes, collected her thoughts carefully, like the sharp pieces of a broken plate, and said, ‘Steve and I had been going out since our first year of university. We got engaged when we graduated – his grandmother’s ring, very big deal. He had a good job in a law firm in Manchester, I’d started work, we were going to buy a house, but we hadn’t set a date  . . .’ She bit her lip.