The Ballroom Class (21 page)

Angelica touched the photograph, remembering the feel of the suit against her skin. It was a real Joan Collins number: white crepe with padded shoulders and a peplum that showed off her still small waist. She’d wanted red, what with it being an outdoors blessing rather than a church ceremony, and both she and Jerry being well past that virgin bride moment, but he’d insisted on white, old romantic that he was. Men who could dance as well as he did tended to be romantics, or ladykillers. Jerry was a bit of both.

It was a lovely photograph. Jerry looked so distinguished in his tux. If she was channelling Joan Collins in her power suit, he definitely had a look of Blake Carrington with his perfectly coiffed grey hair and deep tan. Cyril should have been proud, she thought, that finally she’d achieved some sort of respectability and married a millionaire.

Angelica sighed. She knew in her head what married life in Florida had been like – she could remember the songs she’d taught those fiancés to dance to, and what sort of mineral water Jerry liked to keep poolside – but she couldn’t
feel
it any more. It hadn’t left an imprint on her, in the way she could still taste the fear beating in her throat while she put on her competition make-up. She’d passed through those warm, easy Florida years, and then, when they came to an end, she’d put her possessions into storage along with her tango dresses, and now it could almost have happened to someone else.

Maybe, she thought, it was because she didn’t carry any bitterness in her soul about it. When she’d found out about the other woman – another dancer, not much younger than her, from their bridge club – she’d accepted it with an acquiescence that surprised the lawyer Jerry insisted she hire. Partners weren’t for ever, she knew that from her career. Jerry was a good man, they’d had some good times, but Angelica was too much her own woman to be second best to anyone. She’d had enough of that with Tony, and she wasn’t going to start now.

So she agreed to his generous divorce settlement, refusing to haggle over the price of her freedom, and even kept in touch, after his new baby was born. Angelica said nothing, but privately reckoned Jerry paid a high enough price for his last gasp of youth: sleepless nights and milky vomit at a time when he should have been sipping mojitos on his porch and listening to Dean Martin. Still, that was his choice.

Pauline was careful never to mention the baby, for fear of hurting Angelica, but it wasn’t really the child that she was jealous of: it was the sense of belonging that the three of them would have. In the photograph Jerry sent of himself with Melissa and baby Jerrissa, they were all squashed up together in the frame, three parts of one whole. Frankly, it looked wrong to Angelica, but they were undeniably a family, and that was something she only realised she’d longed for, as her mother was dying.

You always rubbish the thing you want most, she thought sadly, looking at herself and Jerry posing expertly under the arch of gardenias. In the Tony days, it had been easier to dismiss families as a sentimental nonsense than it was to risk having that conversation that could wreck their ever-precarious balance of business and pleasure. She was never sure what was more important to Tony, Angelica the partner, or Angelica the lover, and the thought of finding out terrified her into a proud silence.

She propped the wedding photograph up on the mantelpiece and was about to put the album back into the box when on impulse she flipped through the remaining pages, just in case there was anything else there.

Right at the back, tucked into the folded spine of the album, was an envelope.

It was addressed to her in Pauline’s handwriting:
Angela – to be opened in the event of my death
, written in confident, sloping ink, which dated it to well before her mother’s arthritis had set in, leaving her handwriting like a child’s attempt to copy her old neat style. Pauline hadn’t been as confident in person as she was in her handwriting, preferring to leave most of her opinions to Cyril until he died.

That had been one of the nicer things about having her mother living in Islington, thought Angelica, as she slit open the envelope. Free of Cyril’s domineering views on everything from immigrants to white bread, and encouraged by Angelica’s own disregard for anyone else’s approval, Pauline had slowly started to display a healthy disapproval of cyclists who rode on the pavements, and moved on to milk cartons and folk who played their car radios so loud she could hear them in the front room.

It had been one of the little ways they’d grown closer towards the end, that shared outrage with other people’s thoughtlessness. One of them would start with a cross observation over breakfast, and then they’d let their irritation spiral to furious fulmination, until one of them would crack and giggle.

I’m so glad I brought Mum down to London, thought Angelica suddenly. I couldn’t bear to think of her alone here now, with just these albums for company. She unfolded the letter and was surprised to see that it ran to four closely written sides. What could her mother want to write about that she couldn’t just tell her? Was it legal stuff?

It can’t be that important, thought Angelica, though her thumping heart suspected otherwise. Why would it be right at the back of an album I might never have found? Surely if Mum meant to tell me anything important she’d have left it in the bank, or put it in her jewellery box or something?

Dear Angelica
, Pauline wrote.
I hope you will forgive me for what I am about to tell you, and understand that it is much easier for me to write this down than to explain in person. I have always been so proud of you, and what you have done with your life. You have brought me and your father so much happiness, and although perhaps it has not always seemed so, we have taken a great joy in you as our daughter.

Angelica felt tears prick in her eyes as she heard Pauline’s voice in her head. She
had
known how much pride her mum had taken in her; it was her dad who’d never shown any sort of interest in what she’d done.

But as she read on, she realised her mother’s unusually careful language was inching towards something she couldn’t speak aloud, and Angelica drew in a sudden, involuntary breath.

Although we could not have loved you any more if you were our own daughter, I must tell you that, in fact, we are not your birth parents.

Here the ink darkened, as if Pauline had put down her pen for a few minutes searching for the right words to start again.

We hoped and prayed for a little baby to complete our family for many years after we married, but we were disappointed. I had given up hope of ever having children, when a lady we knew from our ballroom club told us about a young friend of hers in a terrible situation. This poor girl was expecting a child that she was not able to bring up, for personal reasons, but she did not want to take it to an orphanage, as she could not bear to think of it being looked after by strangers.

I knew at once that we could give that tiny baby a loving home. We met the girl, who was happy for us to adopt you as our own, and from the moment you were placed in my arms, you were our Angela. I wish I could describe to you the joy I felt, feeling your little hand curl around my finger, and seeing your lovely face looking up at me in your cot. You had so much hair for a little baby, like a day-old chick. Angela, that was the happiest moment of my whole life, a happiness I’d given up wishing for. You made us into a proper family at last.

Perhaps you will be wondering why I am only telling you this now, so many years later. Your father and I often discussed it, and he felt you should have been told before you left home. I know your dad and yourself had a difficult relationship while you were growing up, and that you sometimes felt he was not as affectionate as you would have liked. The truth is that he knew how much you meant to me and was afraid that one day you would find out, and want to leave us to find your birth parents. I am a very selfish woman, I know, but I think it would have broken my heart.

It is very hard to love someone as much as I loved you, and to know that, at any moment, they might be taken from you. My consolation was that your real mother – I find that very hard to write, Angela! – had two more children after you, and so enjoyed the same happiness your dad and I did.

Tears welled up in Angelica’s eyes, and the letter blurred in front of her. She put it down, and covered her eyes with her palms, unable to put her mother’s face out of her mind. She didn’t feel angry, just intensely sorry for her, having to keep that secret festering away in her heart so many years. How many times must she have started this letter, and then screwed up the paper, fearing that it would break the fragile links, of care rather than blood, that held her daughter to her? How often must she have looked at her and wondered if now was the right moment to say something? Or now? Or now?

There would never have been a good moment. But worse than that, there would never be
any
moment for Angelica to take her mother’s hands in her own and tell her that it didn’t make a shred of difference. Pauline was the only mother she’d known – how could she love her less?

Those quiet months of looking after her mother as she slowly faded had brought them both to an understanding they’d never have had otherwise. Taking care of someone who needed your strength, and cheerfulness, and kindness had taught Angelica a patience she’d never needed before, or knew she had in her. Ironically, she supposed, it had taught her about being a mother. Angelica thought then that she was making up for the years she’d spent away from Longhampton; in fact she was doing exactly what Pauline had done for her, as an unwanted baby. Those years of trying to please her unbending father, resenting the way her overtures were rejected, vanished with the simple acts of making her mother comfortable.

And she had felt needed. That’s what had moved her most.

‘I’m holding you back,’ her mother had murmured when she stayed in to keep her company, watching old MGM musicals on days when the sun sparkled on the canal. ‘You should be out, doing things.’

‘I’d rather be here with you,’ Angelica had said, and by the fourth time she said it, she really meant it.

She made herself pick up the letter again, uncertain if she wanted to read to the end or not. Would it make a difference – now – to know whose family she was part of? It wasn’t as if she needed to discover who she was. All her life she’d been independent, self-contained. Angelica wasn’t even sure if she wanted some stranger to be able to claim her. Coming back to Longhampton had been about stripping back the versions of herself until only Angela Clarke remained, and now it seemed she wasn’t even Angela; but at the same time, she was getting a clearer view of herself than she’d ever done before.

I am a changeling, after all, she thought suddenly. It wasn’t me just being selfish when I couldn’t see myself in Mum or Dad. Maybe they were seeing someone else they knew in me, and I never even realised.

Who was it they were seeing?

Curiosity got the better of her, and she read on to the end of the letter, past the apologies and explanations, and on to the bare facts of what other life Pauline had rescued her from. And when she turned the page, and read her real mother’s story, her tears blurred Pauline’s diffident handwriting, and dropped, blotting the old notepaper.

13

By the time Katie and Ross turned up for the third dancing class, it already felt like a habit. They hung up their coats on the same dolphin-shaped brass hook, exchanged the same polite smiles with Baxter and Peggy, who were already changed into their ‘proper’ dancing shoes, and listened to Trina’s acid commentary on her latest speed-dating antics in Newtons, Longhampton’s supposedly cosmopolitan wine bar.

‘Ooh, that place makes my flesh crawl!’ said Chloe, shaking her mass of curls so hard the velvet flower nearly fell out.

‘I know,’ agreed Lauren. ‘The only thing cheesier than the men in there is the music they play.’

‘No, I mean the
hygiene
.’ Chloe’s eyes widened. ‘The glasses are filthy! You could catch anything in there!’

Lauren had seen what some people could catch in Newtons, direct from the nurses’ mouth, but she didn’t think it was wise to say, not with Trina there.

Angelica seemed distracted when they arrived, but got them straight into a vigorous cha-cha introductory session ‘to get the blood flowing’, demonstrating the gyrating Latin steps with Ross, until they were all pink with exertion from the strutting and spinning.

‘At least it’s music we know,’ whined Trina, as Angelica absent-mindedly put ‘Lady Marmalade’ on for the second time.

‘What? Sorry  . . .’ Angelica ejected the CD. ‘Social foxtrot!’ Then she put her Frank Sinatra album on, pushing them through their social foxtrot steps over and over, until for the first time ever, Ross and Katie had almost managed a perfect box corner.

It wasn’t a big thing, but to Katie it was like walking on water. She and Ross were moving almost as one, to ‘Come Fly With Me’. OK, they were the basic steps and no fancy stuff, but it was starting to fit together. The smile of amazement was just spreading on to her face, when the parping brass solo came to an unexpected halt. The hall was left in silence, bar the shuffle of feet, and the sound of Lauren counting, ‘One, two, three, noooo!’ at Chris.

‘Stop, stop, stop!’ yelled Angelica, clapping her hands together. The sound echoed like gunshots in the high-ceilinged room.

Katie stumbled over Ross’s suddenly stationary foot, and swore under her breath as she fell into him.