Wake: A Novel (32 page)
Authors: Anna Hope
For two or three bars the man she is with does nothing. Then, just when she is thinking that he is going to stay that way all night, he pulls her a little tighter, leading her off, spinning her out across the floor. He leads well; his hold is firm, and his shoulders are open and relaxed as they turn around the room to this oddly accented beat.
The band stays with the strange, pulsing count for a long time, until its strangeness and hesitancy start to seem natural, a living thing, a fractured heartbeat. They stay on the beat until a lone trumpeter stands and starts to play over the top.
Inside, everything is surprisingly lush and surprisingly Chinese; indecipherable signs are painted onto hanging panes of glass, and storks and pagodas repeat in patterns over the walls. It should be crass but it’s surprisingly pleasant. Evelyn sees a sign for the ladies’ cloakroom and goes inside, even though she doesn’t really need the loo, but then she has to wait, in a torturous queue, while girls primp and preen themselves all down the long mirrored wall. When a stall finally comes free she locks herself inside, takes her brush from her bag, and pulls it through her hair. She wants to turn around and leave. This is no place for her. She should never have come.
Out of the stall, she faces herself reluctantly in the mirror, pulling at the dress so that it doesn’t gape around her chest. Why, oh why, is she wearing it? Because she had nothing else, that’s why. But if she moves, if she dances, then it
will
gape. That much is fairly clear. Perhaps she shouldn’t dance, then? She’s probably forgotten how anyway. And she certainly doesn’t know how to dance to anything new. She’ll probably only embarrass herself. She should never have come.
She should never have come.
She hands her coat to the cloakroom attendant and takes the stub, then goes through the double doors into a vast hall, packed with swirling dancers. Large colored lanterns hang suspended from the ceiling, filling the room with their pink and blue and yellow light. In the middle of the polished dance floor is a funny sort of miniature mountain, water pouring down its sides, and over on the far side of the room, under what appears to be an approximation of a Chinese temple, is the band: twenty or thirty musicians in white suits.
So this is what a dance hall looks like.
All around the dance floor are tables. Evelyn decides that she will walk once around them, checking to see if Robin is sitting at one, and if she has not seen him by the time that she has done a circuit, she will turn around and leave.
She passes a little cabin selling drinks to her right. She joins the small queue, waits her turn, then, “Gin and orange, please,” she says to the uniformed girl behind the bar.
The girl rolls her eyes. “No
alcohol
,” she says, pointing to a sign dangling below her.
NO ALCOHOL WILL BE SERVED. BY ORDER OF THE MANAGEMENT.
“Well,” says Evelyn, eyebrow raised. “What do you suggest instead?”
“Tea, or fruit cup.”
“Shouldn’t fruit cup have gin in it?”
The girl stares at her.
“I’ll have a fruit cup then, please.”
“Twopence,” says the girl, sloshing the drink into a cup from a large vat to her right.
Evelyn takes her fruit cup over to a table and puts it down briefly so that she can light her cigarette. She is standing close to the band, near the conductor as he comes out onto the stage, and as he lifts his baton and the band starts to play, she begins walking around the dance floor, keeping her gaze as light as possible, trying not to miss any of the tables, trying not to appear as though she is looking; but Robin is nowhere to be seen.
When she has traveled halfway around the room, the thought occurs to her that he may well not have come. It has been days since they made this arrangement. He may have forgotten. Is it only her arrogance that supposes that he will be here—that he will be waiting? Does she even want to see him at all? She stops, turning to lean against the barrier and look out over the floor. There must be four or five hundred couples moving out there, and yet, despite this, the move and shuffle of their feet is light; despite this, she can still hear the single trumpeter over the top, playing his solo, while the band keeps up a fractured, pulsing rhythm underneath.
The man is an extraordinary dancer. As Hettie spins in his arms to this halting, sad music, with his palm splayed on her back and the steady, sure step of him keeping time, she can feel herself, her skin, her blood, right to the smallest part. And the parts of her feel different, charged, rearranged.
She is not the same as she was.
It is Ed. It is as though some of his brokenness has entered her. It is Fred, and standing with him in the silence and the sun. It is the thought of those women in France. It is the sadness of this waltz.
But though she can feel all of this sadness, something is holding her up; it is this man. It is in the way he holds her, in the steady but constant distance between them—a distance he doesn’t seem to want or need to cross. The way he makes her know from his movements that he wants to dance with her, and that dancing is enough.
The trumpeter stops, his last note lingering in the air, and the music is slowing now, coming to a close.
“Thank you.” The man brings her gently to a stop. “That was a very fine sixpence indeed.”
She wants to ask to dance with him again; she wants to tell him that she would happily dance with him all night, wants to ask him how it is that he can dance so beautifully when he—
But the man has seen something over her shoulder. His face has changed, and color touches his cheek. He releases her with a funny little bow. “Excuse me,” he says.
Every part of him is concentrated on something just behind her head. She knows without turning that it is a woman; that it is the woman he has come here to meet.
Of course he has come here to meet someone. Of course.
Hettie bites her disappointment down and turns to see.
A woman stands, in a red dress, on the far edge of the dance floor. She is leaning on the barrier, staring out and smoking a cigarette. She has wavy brown hair cut short to her chin. She is not too small and not too tall, and she is beautiful. Not beautiful in the manner of those women who want people to stare; this woman looks as though she would be happy if no one were to look at her at all. The woman reminds Hettie of someone, though she cannot think of whom.
The woman has not yet seen him looking at her, and so the man’s face is still unguarded, and his eyes are free to roam. Hettie watches him. Perhaps, she thinks, this woman will sense that she is being stared at, and will turn to meet this man’s gaze.
She wonders if this woman thinks of this man the way he so obviously thinks of her. She knows, without even thinking it properly, without even really forming the thought, that this man loves this woman. And she knows, too, that this man is a good man; that he is a good man to love.
Hettie steps away from the man, moving back toward the Pen, so that when the woman turns she will not be in the way of her view.
The woman turns…
Accounts differ as to the selection process of the body of the Unknown Warrior. For the purposes of this book, I have stayed close to Brigadier General L. J. Wyatt’s contemporary account, quoted extensively in Michael Gavaghan’s
The Story of the British Unknown Warrior.
This states that there were four bodies taken from each of the main areas of British involvement on the Western Front—the Somme, Aisne, Arras, and Ypres—and that the bodies were taken from the battlefields themselves, not simply from cemeteries, as is sometimes suggested. The idea that the chosen body originated from the fields around Arras is my own.
For my parents, Tony and Pamela Hope
I read widely while researching and writing
Wake,
but returned to several books many times:
For insight into post–World War I British society: Juliet Nicolson’s
The Great Silence: 1918–1920
and Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s wonderful
The Long Week-End: A Social History of Britain, 1918–1939.
For the impact of the war on women of Evelyn’s generation:
Singled Out
by Virginia Nicholson.
For contemporary accounts of the war and its aftermath:
Women of the Aftermath
by Helen Zenna Smith,
The Virago Book of Women and the Great War,
Vera Brittain’s
Testament of Youth,
and Mary Borden’s stunning
The Forbidden Zone,
which, even though it didn’t directly influence the text, makes for essential reading for anyone interested in women’s experiences of World War I.
For the conditions for soldiers on the Western Front, Paul Fussell’s
The Great War and Modern Memory
and
Death’s Men
by Denis Winter, a desperately moving account of the reality of life for Kitchener’s soldiers.
For monuments and mourning: Jay Winter’s
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning,
and Geoff Dyer’s brilliant
The Missing of the Somme.
Marek Kohn’s
Dope Girls
is a fantastic book and deserves to be better known. It taught me about the phenomenon of the dance instructress and gave me the background and inspiration I needed for the characters of Hettie and Di.
Michael Gavaghan’s
The Story of the British Unknown Warrior
and Neil Hanson’s
The Unknown Soldier
were both invaluable to me.
Further thanks are due:
To my fantastic agent, Caroline Wood, and everyone at Felicity Bryan Associates.
To Jane Lawson, a great editor, and my ideal reader.
To Susan Kamil, for her insightful notes on the text.
To the teams at Transworld and Random House U.S.
To Thea Bennett, Martha Close, Pippa Griffin, Keith Jarrett, Olya Knezevic, Philip Makatrewicz, Josh Raymond, David Savill, Matthew Weait, Ginevra White, and Cynthia Wilson, a.k.a. the Unwriteables, a phenomenal bunch of writers, for inspiration, friendship, and support.
To Philip Makatrewicz and Toby Dantzic, who very kindly read this manuscript and offered invaluable help at a critical period in its gestation.
To Christine Bacon, for giving me a break when I needed it most.
To Allan Mallinson, for clarifying military matters.
To Cherry Buckwell, Jennie Grant, Hazel Sainsbury, Beth Weightman, Lou Rhodes, and Emma Darwall-Smith.
To Sandy Chapman.
To my lovely, loopy family—Dan, Emily, and Sophie—and all the extended crew.
It would take another book to acknowledge all the things I am grateful to my parents for, but for now:
To Tony Hope, for his kindness, his generosity, and for giving me my love of books.
To Pamela Hope, who read to me before I could read myself and was the indefatigable and enthusiastic reader of so many different versions of this book.
And finally to Dave—for your utter support, your joyous love, for building the shed, and for telling me to get on with it. You’re the best.
Thank you.
A
NNA
H
OPE
was born in Manchester. She was educated at Oxford University, attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and has a master’s degree in creative writing from Birkbeck College, University of London. She lives in London.
Wake
is her first novel.
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