The Gown

by Jennifer Robson

  What else could she do but take his hand and let him lead her to the dance floor? It was a dream, a dream she’d never have conjured on her own, this moment when he set his hand at her back, his hand that was so wide she could feel the heat of it from her shoulders to her waist, and she let her hand rest on his shoulder as he pulled them into the mass of dancers, two more fish in a rushing stream, and he was still smiling at her, his teeth so white and straight, a film star come to life in her arms.

  The band was playing a fox-trot, the melody unfamiliar, and she wasn’t sure, at first, how she would manage to keep up. It had been so long since she danced. But he was a wonderful dancer, so assured in his movements that he could make even the clumsiest partner appear elegant, and after a few measures her fears melted away.

  They danced across the floor and back again, and though she knew she ought to try to make conversation, even if only to talk about the infernally warm weather, her voice remained trapped in her throat. She felt the muscles of his shoulder flexing beneath her touch, marveled at the way her other hand was engulfed in his strong, warm grasp.

  Their movements slowed, the music faded away, and she realized the dance had come to an end. It had been a lovely interlude, but—

  “Surely you aren’t going to abandon me now?” he asked, and before she could say anything they were moving again. It was “Fools Rush In,” one of her favorites.

  “I love this song,” he said, bending his head to her ear. “It must have been early ’41 when I first heard it. One of the chaps in my company unearthed a gramophone and a stack of records from God only knows where, and this was one of them. We’d sit in our smelly old tent in the middle of the desert and listen to the records, night after night after night. I remember how I wondered if I’d ever have the chance to dance with a pretty girl in a ballroom again. And here I am.”

  “You were in North Africa during the war?” she ventured.

  “I was. Wounded at Tobruk, but they patched me up well enough. Sicily and Italy after that.”

  “Are you still in the army?”

  “In a manner of speaking, though I’m not really supposed to talk about it. All rather hush-hush, I’m afraid.”

  “Of course,” she agreed. “Loose lips and all that.”

  “See? I knew you’d understand.”

  She braced herself for him to ask her a question or two in return, but he seemed content to simply listen to the music and dance. When the band played the final bars of the song, she held her breath, hoping it would be another fox-trot, or even a waltz. She still remembered how to waltz.

  But it was a jitterbug, a dance that half the ballrooms in London still banned, and even if she’d been completely certain of all the steps she wouldn’t have dared to dance it with a stranger.

  “Do you mind if we leave this to the younger crowd?” he asked. “I don’t much relish making a fool out of myself in front of half of London.” Taking her near hand, he tucked it into the crook of his arm. “Why don’t we get a drink before returning to our tables? In a quiet part of the room? Somewhere we can talk?” His expression, as he gazed down at her, implied that talking with her was likely to be the highlight of his evening.

  He led her around the room, to the smaller of the bars under the mezzanine, and they joined the short queue. “Do you mind lemonade? I gather that’s all they have on offer tonight.”

  “That’s fine. I’m not really used to anything stronger,” she admitted.

  “My mother would approve. She’s always twittering on about young women and their lack of decorum. Would you believe she insists that trousers are the real problem? That was the moment, she maintains, when our civilization turned toward disaster.”

  He paid for their lemonades with a five-pound note, told the barman to keep an entire shilling from the change as his tip, and carried their glasses to a small table in a relatively dark and quiet corner. He even pulled out her chair and waited for her to sit before joining her.

  She took a sip of the lemonade and tried to think of something to say. “Thank you for the lemonade,” was the best she could do. Even worse, she found herself softening her accent. Not much, not enough to sound as if she were aping her betters. But enough to shrink the distance between Mayfair and Barking by a few miles.

  It was a stupid thing to do, for he’d heard her friends talking, and only Carmen, who was actually the daughter of a barrister in Cambridge, had an accent that would pass in polite society. The rest of them, Miriam excepted, spoke like ordinary people, with ordinary accents.

  “Won’t your friends mind?” she asked, and this time her voice was her own. But he didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow.

  “My friends? No, they won’t be bothered. I’m here with my sister and some of her pals. She’s the one who insisted on wearing a fur. Silly old thing.”

  Ann wasn’t sure if he was referring to his sister or her fur. “She’s very pretty.”

  “She is,” he agreed, “and a handful. That’s how I get myself dragged out to these places. Not,” he added with another gleaming smile, “that I regret it in the slightest. You never know who you’ll meet when you do something new.”

  It seemed like a compliment, but she couldn’t be sure, and it wouldn’t do to get too starry-eyed over the man. “It’s been ages since I did anything like this. But Miriam, one of my friends here, she insisted. She said if I didn’t go, she wouldn’t either. So here I am,” she said, cringing inwardly at how feeble that last statement sounded.

  “And are you glad?” he asked, his eyes intent upon her.

  “I am. I’m having such a lovely time.”

  “I should very much like to see you again,” he said, and there was just a touch of diffidence in his tone. As if he felt uncertain of her answer. “I hope that doesn’t seem too forward of me.”

  “No, it doesn’t. That would be very nice.”

  Nice. Of course it would be nice, but was it sensible? Was it even sane? Surely he must be aware of the gulf between them. Surely he had to know.

  “May I ask for your telephone number? I can give you mine. Let me find my card . . .”

  “I don’t have one,” she said. She didn’t know anyone with their own telephone. Well, apart from him. “I don’t have a card either. I—”

  “Well, I can’t let you vanish into the night. If I give you my card, will you ring me up tomorrow? Promise you will.”

  This wasn’t happening. This could not be happening. “I promise,” she said, and took the card from his outstretched hand.

  “Splendid. I suppose I’d better get back to my sister. I’ve a feeling she’ll insist we go on to at least three more clubs before she’s ready to call it a night. That girl will dance until dawn if I let her.”

  He drained the last of his lemonade, winced a little, and stood. “Oh—I almost forgot to ask. What’s your name?”

  “It’s Ann. Ann Hughes.”

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Hughes. Captain Jeremy Thickett-Milne, though I do hope you’ll consent to calling me Jeremy.”

  And then he kissed her hand.

  Ann had never expected to be the girl in the fairy tale. She didn’t believe in them, for a start, and she wasn’t certain she believed in this. She shouldn’t allow herself to believe.

  But did it matter? What was the harm in having supper with him? He did seem nice, and perhaps he was the sort of man who honestly wouldn’t care that she was the daughter of a motor mechanic and lived in a council house in Essex. That she lived from pay packet to pay packet and spent her days making clothes for women like his sister. Perhaps he was simply a nice man who found her appealing and wanted to get to know her better.

  Her free hand, the one that wasn’t tucked against his elbow, clutched at the card he had given her, its corners digging into the perspiring skin of her palm. She had his telephone number. She would ring him up, and they would arrange to have supper together, and she would let herself believe for another day or two. And then, after he
came to his senses and realized his mistake, she would set aside the memory of this lovely night, leave it by the wayside of her life, and continue on alone.

  Chapter Eleven

  Miriam

  She wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone at their table, with the possible exception of Ann, but tonight was the first time Miriam had ever been out dancing. She’d been so young when she had begun her apprenticeship at Lesage, and the curfew at her lodgings had always been so strict, that she’d never dared to stay out past supper. And then, once the Occupation had begun, her life had shrunk to secrets and shadows and the grim business of survival. Dancing had belonged to another world. Another, saner, universe.

  Her colleagues at Hartnell, however, looked upon her as if she were the embodiment of sophisticated European glamour. As if she’d spent her youth gulping down tumblers of absinthe in dubious jazz bars in Pigalle and dancing alongside Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère.

  Not wishing to prove them wrong, she told herself that she belonged. That sitting at this table by the edge of a crowded dance floor, her ears assaulted by the thrum and thump of restless feet and raucous music, her lungs clogged by a fug of smoke and perspiration and cheap perfume, was second nature to her, and the sort of thing she’d done all the time when she had lived in Paris.

  It had come as something of a relief, when they’d arrived at the Astoria, to see there were scores of tables around the edge of the ballroom and that she would not, as Ann had said, be called upon to hold up the wall with the other girls who weren’t dancing. She’d accepted the vile English cigarette Jessie had offered her, although it had burned her throat and made her feel a little queasy, and the lemonade she’d sipped had been warm and unpleasantly tannic. Yet she was enjoying herself all the same.

  It was interesting to sit with the others and try to make sense of this strange place where anyone might come and dance, as long as he or she had the money to pay the admission fee. Most were ordinary people like her friends from Hartnell, treating themselves to a night out and determined to make the most of their investment. A few, however, were like the people at the adjacent table. Wealthy and indolent and so convinced of their own superiority that their disdain for everyone else fairly dripped from the tips of their manicured fingers.

  She’d noticed them straightaway. Their accents, all drawling vowels and clipped consonants, were so rarefied that even she could discern a difference in the way they spoke. And there was a languor in the way the women moved, as if dancing a waltz with an attractive man, or raising a glass of lemonade to their lips, were praiseworthy feats of endurance.

  They seemed to complain about everything, too, their voices rising easily above the enveloping clamor of bystanders and dancers and music.

  “What do you mean there’s no champagne?” whined one of the women. “You know I only drink champagne when I’m dancing. Gin goes straight to my head.”

  “There’s no pleasing you, is there?” This from a dark-haired man at the far side of the table. He handed the girl a small metal flask, which she proceeded to empty into her glass of lemonade. Miriam’s eyes fairly watered at the sight of it.

  The other man in the group of aristocrats, the one who had just delivered the disappointing glasses of lemonade to his companions, was tall and fair and conventionally handsome in a very English way. He’d been standing next to the table, his gaze flickering around the ballroom, and she had seen him looking in their direction more than once.

  All the same, it was a surprise when he approached their table and stopped in front of Ann. Earlier, her friend had been kind enough to let one of the women in his group know when her fur wrap had fallen on the floor. Presumably he had come over to offer his thanks. That was the only reason Miriam could imagine for him to speak with any of them.

  He held out his hand. He said something in a low voice, and he smiled at Ann. He was asking her to dance. She hesitated; of course she did, for it was unimaginable that a man like him would ask one of them to dance. France or England, the gulf between classes was just as unbridgeable.

  “Go on,” Ruthie urged, and the other girls all nodded their agreement. Ann looked to Miriam, but what was she to do? Tell her to refuse? He was only asking for a dance, after all. So she shrugged, and Ann nodded, and she let the man, the stranger, lead her onto the dance floor and out of sight.

  Miriam didn’t see them again for that dance, nor for the one that followed, nor the one after that. There were hundreds of dancers, of course, so she wasn’t worried. Not yet. And Ann had left her handbag behind. She would certainly never leave without retrieving it first.

  The band began to play again, a softer, sweeter song, and Miriam swept her gaze over the dancers once more. There—there Ann was, coming toward them from the far end of the room, arm in arm with the charming aristocrat. She’d never looked prettier, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with happiness.

  Close up, Miriam was struck again by how handsome he was. His manners could not be faulted either.

  “I beg your pardon, ladies, for making off with Miss Hughes,” he said, and bestowed an imploring smile on each of them. “Do forgive me.” He released Ann’s hand and took a step back. “Promise me you’ll ring me up?”

  “I promise,” Ann echoed.

  “I do hope you enjoy the rest of your evening. Thank you again.” With that, he turned away and went to rejoin his friends.

  While the others questioned Ann, their excitement fizzing over into giggles and squeals, Miriam angled her head so she might better eavesdrop on the discussion the stranger was having with his friends. One of them, the woman whose fur Ann had rescued, did not trouble to hide her annoyance.

  “You just disappeared with her. It’s like you forgot we were even here.”

  “I didn’t forget, Tabby girl,” he replied placidly. “And I’m back now. What say you to the 400 Club for a spell? The cocktails will be a far sight nicer than they are here.”

  “Fine. But I insist you stay with us from now on. Darling Caro had no one to dance with at all after you went off with that shopgirl.”

  “I’ll stay. Promise I will.”

  Miriam stole a glance at Ann. Her friend’s eyes were following the man as he departed, a wondering and faintly dreamy expression on her face. She hoped Ann hadn’t heard the other woman’s nasty comment.

  “Good—now they’re out of the way. Tell us everything,” Ethel insisted.

  “There isn’t much to say. He asked me to dance, and after two songs they started up with the jitterbug, and neither of us knew the steps. So he bought us some lemonade and we sat and talked for a bit. He seemed very nice.”

  “Very posh is how he seemed,” Doris said. “Did you see what those girls were wearing? And the jewelry they had on?”

  “I know,” Ann admitted. “I’m still not sure . . . I mean, why me?”

  “Because you look very pretty tonight,” Miriam said abruptly. The time for doubts was tomorrow, not now. “He saw you and said to himself, ‘I want to dance with that pretty girl.’ It is as simple as that.”

  “Are you going to see him again?” asked Doris.

  “I don’t know. He asked me to ring him up. He said he wanted to see me again.” She set a business card upon the table, its corners bent from where it had been clutched in her hand. “But I don’t know. I don’t think I should go.”

  “Why ever not?” Carmen asked. “There’s no harm in having supper with the man.”

  “I suppose not. Except I don’t have anything to wear. This frock is the only really nice thing I have.”

  “Then you must wear my suit,” Miriam said. “My good suit that I had made in Paris. We are much the same size.”

  “I couldn’t. I—”

  “Come on,” Carmen said, her patience fraying. “It’s a chance for you to kick up your heels and see how the other half lives. If he’d asked me I’d be off like a shot.”

  “But what if . . .”

  “What if he’s the sort that thinks a g
irl should pay for a night out one way or another?” Ruthie asked, oblivious to her friends’ shared expression of dismay. “Oh, honestly. I know you’re all thinking the same thing. And I’m only being practical.”

  “So? What should she do?” Ethel asked.

  “If he pushes you to go anywhere with him after, you say you can’t,” Ruthie reasoned. “You have to be at work the next morning, or your mum and dad are waiting up for you—I know, I know, but how’s he to know? And then you ask someone at the restaurant to call you a cab and you take it to the nearest Tube station. He won’t know where you’ve gone, and that’ll be an end of it.”

  Ann nodded, taking it all in, and then she turned to Miriam. “What do you think?”

  “I think a restaurant is safe enough, but I agree with Ruthie. Do not agree to go anywhere else with this man. Even if he suggests something like a nightclub. Not until you know him better.”

  “Did he say what he does for a living?” Doris asked.

  “He’s a captain in the army, but he can’t really talk about his work. He says it’s all rather hush-hush.”

  “Hmm. I don’t like the sound of that,” Ethel said.

  “Probably working in Whitehall. None of them are allowed to talk about it,” Carmen speculated.

  “See?” Doris asked, undeterred. “It’s probably something very secret and important.”

  It was time for a change of subject. “What is the time?” Miriam asked the group. “Is it not the case that Ann and I must leave by ten o’clock so we do not miss our train?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, of course. I suppose we must be going.” Ignoring the others’ cries of disappointment, they said their farewells and made their way upstairs to street level.

  “Do you mind that I suggested we leave?” Miriam asked as they stepped onto the sidewalk. It was so wonderfully cool outside, at least compared to the insufferably hot ballroom.

  “Not at all. If we’d stayed they’d have kept badgering me all evening. And I was more than ready to go. The music was starting to give me a headache.”