by Kate Eberlen
It was one of the reasons she’d been keen to confound her mother’s expectations.
‘I found girls who did it, but none of them were willing to speak to me about it. I mean, why would they? So, I thought I’d do the research myself . . . I created a profile and was inundated with men who wanted to meet me.’
‘You don’t say?’ said Oscar.
‘I chose the least creepy-looking one. He seemed pretty normal, to be honest. But I had no idea how to handle it. Somehow, I thought I’d be the one in control.’
‘Obviously . . . with your vast experience of relationships,’ Oscar teased.
‘I know, I know. It was a crazy idea.’
‘Well, no harm done, anyway,’ said Oscar, leaning back in his chair and holding the menu as far away as his arm would allow. Too vain to admit to needing glasses, Letty thought; it would indicate the onset of middle age, and for a man coming up to forty, he looked much younger.
‘What are you going to have?’ he asked.
Sometimes Letty wondered if her family had a secret rota, where each of them visited to take her out for lunch at the weekend and make sure that she was eating.
‘The chicken Caesar salad?’ she said.
‘Are you sure? I’m having a burger.’
‘Oh, good. I’ll share your chips,’ she said, knowing it would please him.
Oscar was full of the new off-Broadway musical he’d brought over from America for a six-week run in a theatre that had suddenly become vacant. The musical had received such good reviews that he was now transferring to another West End theatre.
She watched as he talked while eating his food, barely stopping to chew, waving each chip to emphasize a point he was making.
Letty took a chip, dipped it in the tomato sauce, and took a small bite from the end.
‘Oh, and . . .’ said Oscar, mouth still full. ‘We’re getting married!’
‘Congratulations!’
Oscar and his partner Raj had been together a long time. Everyone liked Raj. Raj was a good thing.
‘Raj asked,’ Oscar said, ‘totally out of the blue. We were having a TV and Doritos night in. Sad, but true. They were talking about unusual proposals, you know – bungee jumping, getting the chef to put a ring in the dessert, that kind of thing . . .’
‘Bungee jumping?’ Letty interrupted.
‘. . . so Raj said, “I’ve been trying to think of an imaginative way of asking you.” So I’m like, “What?” through this enormous mouthful of tortilla chip. So he says. “I’d like us to get married.” I said, “For real?” and he was like, “Yes.” So I was like, “Bugger the Doritos.” We went to the Ivy.’
‘How brilliant.’
‘I mean, not the most romantic proposal . . .’
But that made it a better story, Letty thought, and one that Oscar clearly enjoyed telling. She wondered if they’d really been eating Doritos, or whether that was a little flourish he’d added.
‘We can’t decide whether to do a big thing, or just get married then have a party.’
‘You’ve been engaged for less than twenty-four hours . . .’
‘I hate the word engaged,’ Oscar said. ‘Sounds like a public convenience. I prefer betrothed. Much more fairy tale.’
‘But that means promised, normally by someone else,’ Letty said.
‘OK, Miss Pedantic. Suggestions?’
‘Pledged?’
‘Furniture polish.’
‘How many times are you going to have to say the actual word anyway? You can just say you’re getting married.’
‘True,’ Oscar said. ‘And what about you? Apart from Sugar Daddy, obvs?’
‘Promise you won’t tell anyone about that?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Not Frances, not Raj, not anyone?’
‘No one,’ Oscar said solemnly. ‘Not that there is anything to tell. I wish there was. Some sex at least. Honestly, Letty . . .’
‘What?’
‘You had a bad experience with Josh. Very bad. Doesn’t mean you have to run away to a convent.’
Oscar knew her well. It was exactly the idea of a monastic existence that had attracted her to Oxford, with its libraries with windows like churches and medieval colleges secluded from the outside world.
‘I haven’t met anyone who I feel anything for,’ Letty defended herself. ‘I’m not closed to the possibility.’
But she wondered if that was true. Trust was something that built over time, but since Josh, she never let anyone near enough to try to put down foundations. Sometimes she wondered if the bit of her brain that dealt with human interaction had simply been destroyed by what had happened.
Oscar was looking at her bowl. There were a few croutons concealed under the last couple of iceberg leaves, but she had eaten all the chicken.
‘Pudding?’ he asked.
‘Why don’t we share one?’
She could almost hear Oscar reporting back to Frances, ‘We shared chips and dessert!’
The profiteroles arrived with two forks. As soon as Oscar launched back into wedding plans he forgot to keep track, and when the plate was empty, he stared at it enquiringly.
‘You are eating, Letty?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I mean during the week?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not just lettuce?’
‘The effect of eating too much lettuce,’ Letty quoted Beatrix Potter, ‘can be soporific!’
They finished the sentence together.
‘Such a long word for a children’s book,’ Letty said. ‘I don’t think I’ve used it once in my entire life, but I’ve never forgotten what it means. People think that children acquire language easily, but when you imagine the incredible complexity of the neuron links for me to go from being three and asking you what soporific meant, until today . . .’
Oscar was staring at her.
‘Is this the sort of thing you think about?’ he asked.
‘Don’t you?’
‘No. I’m essentially a shallow and trivial person and you, Letty, are essentially a clever and serious person. All the same, you really should get out more.’
19
October
ALF
Auditions were being held in the school hall. Alf could hear Mr Noakes on the piano playing ‘There Are Worse Things I Could Do’ to accompany the girls auditioning for Rizzo. It was a difficult song, he realized; requiring power for the defiant bits, but also a softer, poignant quality.
The song he’d chosen didn’t involve layers of meaning, but his mouth was still dry and his legs like jelly. Alf looked at himself in the cracked mirror of the boys’ toilets. You needed the nerves to give the performance, but you never got used to them.
Alf ran the cold tap, splashed water on his face, then pulled a comb through his wet hair, slicking back the curls from his forehead. He took a deep breath and did a Danny Zuko thumbs-up at himself.
Mr Marriot, his English teacher, was sitting at a table in the hall alongside the newly qualified teacher, Miss Jones, who’d joined the department after doing her teaching practice at the school. The two other judges were Nathan and Bryony, the head boy and girl. John, another prefect who was good with tech stuff, was filming the auditions.
Mr Noakes, the music teacher, was sitting at the piano.
‘Hello!’ said Bryony. ‘Who are you?’
She’d been Alf’s girlfriend before the summer holidays, but she was clearly channelling Britain’s Got Talent for the video.
‘Alf,’ he said, grinning at her.
‘And you’re auditioning for?’
‘Danny.’
‘And you’re going to show us?’
‘“Greased Lightning”.’
‘OK. Should be interesting.’
Alf heard Mr Marriott saying to the new teacher, behind his hand, ‘This boy’s very special.’
Alf loved the feeling when people who didn’t know him first saw him dance.
When he fi
nished with a full knee slide towards the judging table, everyone in the room, apart from the Pink Ladies, applauded.
‘Judges, what do you think?’ Bryony said.
‘It’s a yes from me,’ said Mr Marriot.
‘And from me,’ said Miss Jones.
‘It’s a yes from me,’ said Nathan.
Bryony paused to give it a bit of drama for the video.
‘Alf, you’ve got four yeses!’ she said.
‘We’d like to see you with a potential Sandy,’ Mr Marriot added. ‘So could you and Sadie take ten minutes, then come back and show us “Summer Nights”?’
Alf kept smiling, but inside the nerves had started churning again.
He had been sure Sadie would be going for Rizzo, not Sandy. Alf couldn’t see it. The final scene with the skin-tight black leathers, yes, but fresh-faced, virginal Sandy would be a stretch. Alf couldn’t remember ever seeing Sadie without make-up, even the first time she’d come to his mother’s Ballroom and Latin Little Stars class. Donna had spotted her and partnered them up. He could still remember Sadie’s first words as she’d twizzled over to stand by his side.
‘I will dance with you, but I won’t marry you.’
She must have been all of five years old.
They had danced together through the junior competitions, but Sadie had grown up more quickly than him. At twelve, her mum, Leanne, announced that they were thinking of finding Sadie a new partner, because Sadie preferred the Latin. They all knew the real reason was that she could have passed for fifteen, while Alf was still a weedy kid.
‘He will grow. His dad was tall,’ Donna had protested, but it turned out Sadie had already committed to a sixteen-year-old from a rival dance school in Manchester.
For a couple of years, Sadie and Kyle had smashed the competitions, but when Alf had grown a foot taller and found Aimee they’d taken over. That hadn’t gone down well.
At school, Sadie mostly acted like he didn’t exist. He sometimes wondered if she had registered that he was now six foot two, because she still kind of looked down on him.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said, when they left the hall and found an empty classroom to practise in. ‘We start on opposite sides of the stage, and then, in the bits where we’re describing what happened, we kind of dance it?’
They’d only choreographed about half by the time they were called back, so they had to improvise the rest. It was a bit of a shaky start, with Mr Noakes at the piano speaking the ‘tell-me-mores’ in a bored teacher’s voice between verses. Alf and Sadie could both hold a tune, but it wasn’t like they were proper singers. However, the last verse, where the voices harmonized, worked perfectly. There had always been chemistry between them when they performed.
By the time Alf got home, Leanne had already been on the phone to his mum, saying wasn’t it exciting how they were going to be together again?
Donna met him at the door. He could tell she had already been crying. He hadn’t told her about the audition because he didn’t want to worry her before he knew he’d got the part. Which was stupid. If he’d learned anything from the Billy Elliot audition, it was not to do something expecting to fail. And in this case, the competition wasn’t all the talented eleven-year-old boys in the country who could dance, but Luke who used to come to Donna’s tap classes but was too fat to do the routines without getting breathless, and Cal who couldn’t sing or dance, and only went along because he was Alf’s best mate and fancied one of the Pink Ladies.
His mum had immediately realized that rehearsing for the main role in Grease meant that he would have to give up competing in Ballroom and Latin, and that was another thing he hadn’t discussed with her.
It had actually been Aimee’s suggestion. She was at university in Leeds now, and all the rehearsing meant she was missing out on student life. They’d discussed it the previous weekend. Since neither of them wanted to turn professional, there didn’t seem that much point in continuing.
But it wasn’t as simple as that.
‘How do we tell Donna?’ Aimee had asked.
It was Alf’s mum who coached them, who made Aimee’s dresses, who enlisted Gary to drive them up and down the country to competitions at weekends, who invested all the money her classes brought in for them to compete abroad. The two of them went out onto the dance floor, but as Aimee often said – and it was one of the reasons Donna liked her so much – there were three of them in the partnership. ‘Aimee and Alf’ was a huge part of Donna’s life, and Donna was fragile at the best of times.
‘Maybe leave it till after Christmas?’ Aimee had suggested.
Now delaying it was impossible.
‘Sorry, Mum, I should have told you . . .’ Alf said.
‘Yes, you should.’
He hated it more when she went all clipped and huffy than when she was crying.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s your life.’ Donna turned away from him. ‘Just don’t ever come moaning to me when you realize what you’ve given up.’
‘When have I ever come moaning to you?’
‘There’s all these opportunities now that I never had . . .’
What she meant was the possibility of becoming a professional on Strictly Come Dancing, or Dancing with the Stars as it was called in other countries. Alf knew that Donna would have absolutely loved that. But he wasn’t interested. The way he saw it, you might get a hot pop star one year, but a not-so-hot soap matriarch the next. He was good at making middle-aged, even elderly women feel like princesses at his grandparents’ socials, but he didn’t want it to be his life, even if it was offered him, and it was only his mum assuming that.
What he wanted to do was go to one of the dance schools where they taught musical theatre. Alf loved the feeling of freedom dancing gave him, and the unique exhilaration when an audience cheered. He did it for that more than the winning. He thought he’d enjoy being in a live show. With a new audience every day, it was always going to be different, and it would be fun to be part of a team. He thought it would combine what he’d liked about playing football with what he liked about dancing.
‘Mr Marriot says I need to get different types of dance on my CV,’ Alf told her. ‘I think he chose Grease to give me the opportunity . . .’
‘And Mr Marriot always knows best, obviously.’
His mother still resented Mr Marriot for suggesting Alf try out for Billy Elliot.
Donna breathed a huge sigh.
‘Sorry, Alf,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s difficult when someone’s your whole life.’
‘I’m not your whole life. You’ve got Gary, and the school and your friends . . .’
‘Yeah, but it’s not the same.’
She meant children. She and Gary had been trying for a baby for ages. Donna was only thirty-five, and she was still in great shape, but it hadn’t happened. From the whispered conversations he sometimes walked in on, and the hospital visits, he thought maybe they were doing IVF at the moment. It wasn’t the sort of thing Donna would talk about, for fear of putting a jinx on it, but maybe that was the reason for her mood swings.
‘It will happen, Mum.’
‘You think?’ she sniffed.
‘Positive.’
Alf’s confidence was totally meaningless because he really had no idea, but it seemed to give her comfort.
‘Sorry, Alf,’ she said again, wiping her eyes. ‘I only want what’s best for you.’
‘No, I’m sorry. I should have discussed it with you.’
‘It’s your life.’
Didn’t feel that way sometimes, but fair enough.
Mr Marriot decided that the final number, ‘You’re The One That I Want’, was the most important to get right, so the first two rehearsals were all about that.
The new teacher, Miss Jones, rehearsed the girls in the sports hall and he rehearsed the boys on the stage.
When you’d trained since you were four years old you picked up choreography first time, so even though they had far mor
e to do than the others, Alf and Sadie had their moves down immediately and even made up a few of their own. It meant spending more time alone with Sadie than Alf was comfortable with.
‘So, are you seeing anyone?’ Sadie wanted to know. She took a long pull on her cigarette.
They were standing in the courtyard where the teachers sometimes had a surreptitious ciggie.
‘Why?’ Alf asked.
‘Just trying to make conversation,’ she said.
Alf thought about Bryony. During the summer holidays he’d got a job renting out deckchairs on the beach, and she’d been serving ice creams at a nearby kiosk. It was when the conversation as they walked home was all about how many cartons of strawberry there were compared to vanilla, and the surprising popularity of mint choc chip, that he realized the relationship wasn’t really going anywhere. Then Bryony and her family went to Majorca for a fortnight. While she was there, she posted a photo of her and a guy called Jorge, arm in arm with the hashtag #LoveIsland?
As break-ups went, theirs was about as good as it got. He was sure Sadie knew all this.
‘Are you?’ Alf asked her.
‘Why?’
‘Just making conversation.’
Normally, Alf found it easy talking to girls, but with Sadie it always felt like a competition.
‘Thought I’d get it out of the way, because obviously we’re going to have to kiss,’ Sadie said, taking another drag and blowing the smoke at him. ‘How do you feel about that?’
He wanted to say that he’d prefer it if she didn’t smoke five minutes before, but he didn’t think that would go down too well.
‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ Alf said.
Cheap, but nevertheless a point to him.
When he was twelve, Sadie was the person he’d thought about kissing more than anyone in the world – after Flavia Cacace. But she’d been such a bitch in the intervening years; he thought maybe she was going to struggle more than he was with pretending to be hopelessly devoted.
20
November
LETTY
Fallen leaves crunched underfoot as Letty walked through the University Parks. A pale blanket of mist lay over the cricket pitch; the air, cold enough to chill her face, held a taint of rotting apples.