Dancing Backwards (12 page)

Vi, in her room, opened the doors and went out on to the balcony. She breathed in the clean air to expunge the lingering scent of Les Garson’s villainous aftershave. The mercurial sea had turned a brooding green. Above it, as far as sight could reach to, stretched a taut white sky. With any luck, she thought, we shall have a storm.

Back inside, she opened the library copy of Shakespeare at
Antony and Cleopatra
and found the line she was looking for:
Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish.

The clock on the church tower of All Saints, along the road towards the Portobello, struck the half hour.

‘Oh Christ,’ Bruno said. ‘I’m meant to be meeting La Carfield for lunch.’

Tessa Carfield, who had been a year or so above Bruno at the LSE, was a partner in a headhunting firm and had found him his job with the British Council. ‘I’d better fly or I’ll be late and then she’ll moan like buggery.’

Seeing him off at the door, Vi met the postman with Edwin’s card. In the afternoon she took Cleopatra to Kensington Gardens.

A warmth had sprung up between Vi and Mr DellaCosta’s
fudge-coloured whippet. Vi had got in the way of liberating the dog from her post at the stall and taking her for an afternoon run in the park. Cleopatra chased grey squirrels, not too successfully, and sniffed the bottoms of other dogs while Vi stood about, mindlessly gazing, or sat on benches beside chatting women, discontented au pairs, lovers necking and dozing old men. Usually the two of them walked down to the lake where Cleopatra pursued and then retreated from the vicious, over-fed swans.

She was chopping vegetables, still in a reverie, when Bruno returned. ‘That looks good.’ He kissed the back of her neck—where babies are kissed, as he’d said once.

‘Ratatouille, or will be, courtesy of Mr DellaCosta. He’s given us some chrysanthemums. I wish I liked chrysanths better. There’s not much else by way of flowers at this time of year.’

Bruno said, ‘It’s the smell you don’t like. It’s funereal.’

‘But also the colours. I ought to like them. But I don’t. How was lunch?’

‘Fine.’

‘Someone rang from Tessa’s office. Were you very late?’

‘She was. She’d got the time wrong.’

Vi, chopping garlic, felt a small cold spot in her stomach. ‘How do you mean?’

‘She’d written the time wrong in her diary.’

Over supper Bruno said, ‘You not hungry, my pet?’

Vi said she wasn’t really and thought she might go and lie down.

At night the flat made strange clicking noises as the poorly fitted joinery of the house conversion eased itself back on to old accustomed planes. That night, Vi, who had always slept well, lay awake listening to the noises of the shifting house and the traffic outside. Bruno, by her side, was breathing heavily.
She slid from the bed, stole into the sitting room where she found her notebook and shut herself in the bathroom, wrapped against the draught in an old dressing gown rescued from Edwin.

Towards Christmas, Edwin visited them. He wanted to discuss the future of
Ariel
of which Bruno was now the official editor. Edwin, who had a new poetry collection coming out, seemed to have lost his old enthusiasm for the magazine and even spoke of selling it.

Bruno occasionally asked Vi’s opinion about a poem but since Edwin’s abandoning of the role of editor no poem of hers ever appeared.

On the last day of his visit, when Bruno was at work, Vi introduced Edwin to Mr DellaCosta and they took Cleopatra for a walk in Kensington Park. London was experiencing a cold snap and Vi wore a hat knitted in the colours of the rainbow, bought in the Portobello Road. Edwin borrowed the matching scarf and wound it round his head and ears like a turban. Neither had gloves and they walked in the freezing air, making dragon’s breath and blowing ineffectively on their fingers.

Their cheeks and noses grew visibly pinker as they stood watching Cleopatra snuffle about in the roots of a horse chestnut. It put Vi in mind of the morning she had woken in Edwin’s bed to see the pale fawnish backs of the unfurling horse chestnut leaves outside.

Perhaps it was this which made her say, ‘Ed, are you really OK in Oxford?’

‘As much as I ever am. How about you here?’

‘I think so. Mostly.’

‘Are you writing—don’t say if you’d rather not.’

‘I am, I think.’ Vi placed a superstitious hand on the horse chestnut’s venerable grey bark. ‘Actually, it was Cleopatra that
got me going. And then the coincidence of your card.’ She told him about the poem she had written in the night.

‘Well, the night’s a good time for working. Safe. Are there others?’

‘There seem to be.’

‘What does Bruno think?’

‘I’ve not mentioned them.’

‘Ah well.’

Following Cleopatra’s lead they strolled towards the lake, where the ducks and geese were shoving each other, greedily angling for bread or whatever else that was edible they could get their beaks on. Cleopatra made a few sallies and then stood stock-still, staring at the milling fowl, apparently hypnotised.

‘You know, I’m afraid she is rather a stupid dog,’ Edwin said. ‘Not a bit like her namesake.’

‘We don’t know that the original wasn’t stupid,’ Vi said. ‘We only have Shakespeare’s version.’

‘No, there’s Plutarch too. I’ve got my sixth formers reading him at school. The North translation anyway.’

‘Ed, what was Bruno like at school? I never hear much about his past, nothing at all, in fact.’

‘As you’d expect, stroppy, definitely not stupid. Remember, he only arrived when we were in the sixth form.’

‘How would I remember that? Neither of you talks about it. I don’t even know much about his family, except that he seems to dislike them. What were they like?’

But Edwin said that he had never met Bruno’s family, nor, so far as he could recall, had Bruno ever discussed them. They had been too taken up with French existentialism and alcohol.

‘So he drank then?’

‘Oh God yes. We always met in the pub.’

‘A bit different now!’

‘He’s a convert. Converts always tip into their opposite.’

Vi stood, looking out over the wintry lake at the herring gulls, sailing in their ease on the far reaches of the silvery water. It might be no bad thing to be a gull. She said, ‘I don’t know if I should say this’ and told him about Bruno’s lunch with Tessa Carfield.

‘People do lie about being late.’

‘Yes. But the other thing is I looked in his diary.’

‘Aha.’

‘I shouldn’t have done, of course, but I had such a strong instinct.’ The best thing about Edwin was that, even implicitly, he never reproved. ‘He’d written 12.30 in his diary. I know this sounds bonkers, but I’m pretty sure they were supposed to meet at one and to save face he changed the time. He did the same to me once—changed the time we had agreed to meet and then wrote it in his diary.’

‘To prove that he was right?’

‘Or me wrong.’

Edwin frowned. ‘Have you raised this with him?’

‘I don’t like to. It’ll put him in a mood.’

‘Don’t you think you should?’

‘But I may be wrong,’ Vi said. ‘I probably am. I can be vague.’

‘You know you aren’t really,’ Edwin said.

They returned Cleopatra to Mr DellaCosta who presented Vi with some figs, a bag of over-ripe tomatoes, a bunch of parsley and the tail end of a rope of garlic. ‘The trouble is,’ said Vi, ‘I can’t ask to buy anything now because he always gives it to me for nothing. Even the good stuff. Not like Mr Jarvis.’

That evening, she cooked tomato sauce for spaghetti, their old favourite, while Edwin went out to Victoria Wines in search of Valpolicella. They had already drunk most of a bottle when Bruno came home.

‘You’ve got tomato on your cheek.’ Vi wiped her face with her sleeve. ‘Now you’ve got sauce on your jumper.’

Over the spaghetti, Edwin and Bruno discussed what to do with
Ariel
. Vi’s own contribution to the magazine had practically dwindled to that of copy editor. This mostly meant checking the poets’ punctuation, a delicate task since some were quite unclear about their punctuation, and indeed might never have learned its rules, while others held eccentric, if not quite untenable, and fiercely defended views. Bruno said nothing during the conversation about her poems, or his own, but divulged to Edwin that he planned to borrow a cottage from Tessa Carfield in order to finish his book on sorcery. Tessa had a cousin in publishing to whom, when it was written, she had said she would direct the book.

At about ten o’clock Bruno announced, ‘Some of us have to work tomorrow—I’m off for a bath.’

Vi, who wanted to talk more to Edwin, said, ‘I’ll come soon.’

Twenty minutes later Bruno put his head round the door. ‘Are you coming to bed?’

‘In a bit,’ Vi said.

Bruno left, not quite closing the door. Edwin got up, closed it, opened another bottle of wine and refilled their glasses.

‘Ed…’

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know, really…’

‘I do,’ Edwin suggested.

‘You’re frightened of him.’

Vi had a sensation of being slapped across the face. ‘Am I?’

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’ She was annoyed: to be frightened seemed humiliating. ‘Bruno can be kindness itself.’ She was conscious that this was a desperate comment.

‘No one kinder—provided you meet him on his own terms.’

‘What do you mean?’

Edwin shrugged.

‘Ed?’

‘There is a “kindness” which shuts up leopards for their protection in narrow cages.’

There was something almost thrilling in this. ‘I’m hardly a leopard.’

‘You know best.’

‘Why d’you say that I am?’ Now that the idea had been raised she did not like its being dropped too readily.

‘He calls you “pet” and “lamb”, doesn’t he?’

Vi flushed. ‘They’re terms of affection.’

‘They hardly seem to fit.’

‘I like lambs.’

‘Who doesn’t? But if you don’t mind me saying so you are not much like one. Not at all lamb-like.’ He looked at her unblinkingly with his odd eyes.

There was a pause in which Vi had a sense that something might happen. What did happen was that Bruno reappeared at the living room door.

‘What’s going on here, a meeting of minds?’

‘We’ve been discussing
Ariel
, me and Ed.’

‘Edwin and I. Are you going to bed, Edwin?’

Edwin waited, apparently to see if Bruno had more, and then said, ‘Any second now, Bruno.’

Bruno stared at the two of them. Vi said nothing. She was calculating whether or not he had overheard.

‘Well, well,’ Bruno said finally. ‘Well, well, well.’

‘I’m going to do the washing up,’ Vi said, hoping that her feeling of panic was not apparent to either man.

Two nights later, Bruno rolled towards her in the darkness. ‘Shall we get married, pet?’

‘Goodness.’

‘That’s not a very gracious response.’

Be careful, said a voice.

‘I’m just taken aback.’

‘I wanted to marry you the moment I saw you.’

‘Why?’

‘When I was a boy I had a secret companion who went everywhere with me. I knew you the moment I set eyes on you.’

‘What was this companion called?’

You’re not going to believe this, said the voice.

‘Guess.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Violet. A violet by a mossy stone…’

Oh really! said the voice.

Vi said, ‘But I annoy you. I’m always annoying you.’

A police car shrieked past close by. Then there was one of the odd silences which can fall suddenly, even in London.

‘You’re a nuisance.’ Bruno patted her bottom. ‘But you have a nice arse. Never fuck a woman with a big arse.’

Vi squirmed around so that he was lying behind her and pushed her bottom into his belly. ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow.’

You’d better, said the voice.

Dark purplish clouds were amassing high in the sky, as if, but not in fact, reflecting the darkening water. Vi found Annie’s shoes in the wardrobe and went down to the King Edward Lounge. Fewer people than usual had collected for tea but among them she saw Baz and Martha, holding hands.

Baz beckoned. ‘Come and join us for tea.’

‘I’m here for the dancing.’

‘Brave lady!’

‘I learned the cha-cha-cha this morning so I’m keen to put it into practice.’

Martha said, ‘I wouldn’t mind a dance.’

Baz pulled a face.

‘Balthazar Lincoln, you always do that. You danced at our wedding. I have pictures.’

‘That was a million years ago.’

Vi said, ‘I picked it up quite easily and if you know the steps already…’

‘Martha was the three-times jive champion of Kansas City when I met her.’

‘Me and Bobby Crawshaw.’

‘I’m a horrible disappointment after Bobby Crawshaw. Her mother told her we had rhythm.’

‘Baz! She never did.’

‘She thought it though. You can’t deny it.’

Martha said there was no doing anything with him and Baz said she might as well accept that he was a lost cause and have done.

‘Lost cause for what?’ Martha smiled admiringly at her husband.

‘Dancing anyway,’ Vi said. She was pleased she could still be pleased to see a couple happy and this made her like them more. ‘I should dump him, Martha. That’s my dance teacher, Dino, coming over. He’ll dance with you. He dances like Fred Astaire.’

‘That I can
not
resist.’

‘Look, he’s even Fred Astaire’s shape.’

Vi, watching Martha, in the arms of Dino, being swung expertly around the tilting floor, said, ‘Baz, do you remember I mentioned someone I knew who had studied African religion?’

‘Sure. May I pour you some tea?’

‘Thanks. Milk, please, no sugar. He had a—a purse, I suppose you’d call it, made out of a bat’s wing and feathers of some sort, I don’t know what exactly. He said it had the power to keep the soul of anyone who loved the owner.’

‘I’ve not heard of that one. It sounds like one of the dodgier elements of Vodun.’

‘Yes, it was supposed to be Voodoo, sorry, I mean Vodun.’

‘It’s not my area. But there are, or were, some spooky aspects to Vodun. Of course, this always gets grossly exaggerated in the popular imagination.’

‘How does it work, would you say?’

‘Suggestion.’ Baz helped himself to a cucumber sandwich. ‘The power of suggestion. A much underrated power. You know, I never get over my love of cucumber sandwiches. I think of
them as quintessentially English but none of my London colleagues ever ate them except at our house. Martha says they would have much preferred her brownies.’

Vi didn’t quite know what was happening but she knew she was scared. Her heart was not exactly banging but it seemed to be giving out a low juddering moan, not unlike the sound which had issued from the chain on the bicycle that she jettisoned in Cambridge. It seemed also to be hurting in her chest. Extraordinary that the heart—if it was the heart—really did that.

‘They aren’t that good,’ she said miserably. She and Bruno were walking, more like marching, home from the park. Bruno had instigated a fitness regime which entailed walks after meals. ‘I didn’t say anything about it because I was sure they would turn them down and then you’d be cross.’ It was one of the notable things about him, his habit of getting cross on her behalf.

‘You should have told me.’

They were crossing Moscow Road by St Sophia’s, the Greek Orthodox church. Traffic had been diverted from the Bayswater Road and a stream of vehicles thundered past, among them a large truck carrying McVitie digestive biscuits. A vision of putting an end to all this by stepping out in front of the biscuit lorry flashed across Vi’s mind.

‘You should have told me,’ Bruno said again. ‘I am a poet too after all.’

‘Yes,’ Vi agreed. She didn’t see the relevance of this but what could be gained by questioning it? As people do when feeling hopeless, she repeated herself. ‘They aren’t that good, the poems.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is you didn’t discuss this
with me. I am a figure in this arena. As a simple act of courtesy—bear in mind that the editor is a personal friend—you should have discussed the matter accordingly.’ He seemed to have become someone who spoke like a nineteenth-century bureaucrat.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I didn’t think, that’s all. It wasn’t directed against you. I just did it.’

‘But you should have done. You should have thought. What do you think I feel not knowing that you are to have your poems published by the publishing house where I’m to be published too?’

How could I know that? she thought. You never told me. And the editor is not a ‘personal friend’of yours, he’s an acquaintance of Tessa Carfield’s cousin.

‘I have to ask why you have done this.’ Now he had turned into an investigative journalist or policeman. ‘You of all people.’

‘Listen,’ she said again. ‘I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean to make you angry.’

‘I’m not angry.’

Clearly that was not the case. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, then.’

‘I’m not hurt.’

They had reached the flat and were up the stairs and in the kitchen before she spoke again. ‘I was going to talk to you about the book.’ She lit the gas, clumsily filling the kettle. ‘Bruno, please.’

‘Yes, Vi?’

‘Don’t be like this.’

‘How do you expect me to be?’

‘Not like this.’

‘I wasn’t aware that you had the right to dictate my responses.’

‘Of course not, but…’

‘Vi, you must act as you choose. But if you choose to act in certain ways there are going to be consequences.’ He seemed to have metamorphosed into counsel for the prosecution. ‘You’re an adult woman, you know that.’

Vi who did not feel at all adult at that moment—in fact quite the opposite—tried her hardest not to cry. Desperate to smoke but unable to lay her hands for the moment on the matches, she lit a cigarette from the gas ring so that her hair caught in the flame and flared up dangerously. Bruno stood there, watching her rinse it under the cold tap.

Sink or swim, remarked the voice.

‘Bruno…’

‘You smoke too much.’

‘Bruno…’

‘Yes?’ The prosecuting counsel had been promoted to a high court judge, about to pronounce sentence.

‘Please let’s not quarrel.’

The judge’s face wavered, decomposed and then reorganised itself into an interrogation officer, who looked into Vi’s face with terrifying calm. ‘I have no idea what you mean.’

‘I mean this.’

‘This is not a quarrel, Vi. It’s a statement of feeling.’

Bereft of words she stood there, water from her wet hair running into the tears which dripped from her chin.

‘Please don’t manipulate me, Vi,’ said the interrogation officer. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger. ‘You know how I dislike tears.’

‘But of course I’m upset to have upset you.’

Don’t grovel, said the voice.

‘Then why do it?’

‘Why do what?’ The kitchen smelled horribly of singed hair.

‘Upset me. You know what you are doing.’

She didn’t. Or rather she did, but she didn’t know why it mattered. No, that wasn’t true either. She understood that it mattered but for reasons that would not have mattered to her, and this frightened her. Ed was right.

‘I love you,’ she announced bleakly.

Fool! said the voice.

‘And I love you, Vi.’ Bruno’s face had shifted fractionally from interrogation officer to dispassionate surgeon.

Liars, both of you, remarked the voice.

‘So, if we love each other…?’ Vi had gone across and was squeezing his shoulder.

He placed a big enfolding hand over the crown of her head. ‘Poor hair…’

‘Do you still want us to marry?’

‘My violet by a mossy stone.’

Blinking idiot, you mean, the voice said. It sounded more weary than accusing.