by Kate Eberlen
When Sadie made her entrance, she looked at Alf as if he should be expecting her, and he wondered if he’d invited her the previous evening. Sadie’s mum Leanne usually came along to the Christmas party because she was friends with Donna, but Sadie hadn’t appeared in years.
She was wearing a backless fringed red dress, red satin high-heeled shoes and a Santa hat on her head. Sadie really was Blackpool’s current queen of Latin, he thought, as he watched her doing a cha cha cha with his grandad to ‘Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer’.
When ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ came on, Alf led his mum onto the floor. They had danced to this one ever since he was a small boy and he’d had to go under her arm instead of her going under his. He didn’t realize till the final twirl that Gary was filming them. Creating memories, as Donna would say, a phrase that irritated Alf, because it was like she was doing stuff in order to look back on it sometime in the future, rather than just experiencing it when it was happening. He didn’t want to live his life with regrets, like she did.
He wondered what his mum would do the next year, with only the old men to dance with. They were great for a waltz or a slow foxtrot, but watching them jive, all pink and sweaty, Alf sometimes thought they should keep a defibrillator on the wall by the fire extinguisher.
When ‘Fairytale Of New York’ began to play, it was his grandparents who took to the floor; the music starting slow, gradually increasing in speed until the chorus, which was perfect for a Viennese waltz where you needed breathers between all the twirling. From the back, with her slim body and good legs, Cheryl could have passed for a woman in her twenties. The song was long, but they kept going for the full five minutes. At the end, the whole room stood up and clapped as Cheryl pretended to collapse, but she’d hardly broken a sweat.
‘Hope I’ll look as good as that when I’m her age!’ Sadie was standing next to him. ‘Don’t know what she’s on, but they ought to bottle it.’
‘Pilates,’ Alf told her. ‘She swears by it.’
Cheryl was also on HRT, but he wasn’t supposed to know that.
‘So, do I actually have to ask you to dance?’ Sadie said.
‘Didn’t know if you wanted to,’ he said.
‘I’m the youngest, you’re the second youngest, and after that your mum and Gary are the only ones here who aren’t pensioners.’
Alf kind of wished that the song playing wasn’t ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’. But it was good for jiving and jive was his best dance. He didn’t want a repeat of the previous evening’s rumba. When they finished, the applause was as loud as it had been for Cheryl and Chris.
‘So what do you think?’ Sadie asked, when they stepped outside to get some cold air.
‘About what?’ he asked.
‘Show’s over, you and Aimee are finished . . . we’re “Two young stars we’ll be seeing more of in the future”.’
It was the caption under the photo that had appeared in that day’s local paper. The reviewer had said Grease was the best school production he’d ever seen. Donna had bought three copies: one for Cheryl and Chris, one for her to keep, and another to stick in a frame in the glass trophy cabinet.
‘You want to partner up again?’ Alf was surprised.
‘Well, duh!’ said Sadie.
He hadn’t planned what he would do with all his weekends and evenings in the New Year. Last night’s alcohol was still in his bloodstream, befuddling his thoughts.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.
‘Well, don’t think too long,’ Sadie said, clearly put out by his ambivalence. ‘Offer ends on 31st December.’
She sounded like one of those competitions before the adverts on X Factor. Do you want a chance to win a cash prize and tickets for the tour? Do not call if you’re watching this on catch-up.
Inside, he could hear Gary and the Stag Beetles starting their set with ‘She Loves You’. They always played while people were getting their food from the buffet because it was surprisingly difficult to dance to Beatles songs – apart from ‘Twist And Shout’, and there were too many hip replacements in the room for that.
As they walked back into the hall, first Donna, then Leanne rushed up to hug them. Then Cheryl was there too.
‘Lovely seeing you two together again,’ his gran said. In her pink dress with huge net skirt, ash-blonde hair piled on her head, she looked a bit like the fairy godmother in a pantomime giving them her blessing.
Had a plan been drawn up that he wasn’t party to? Alf wondered. Or had he missed something?
The New Year’s Eve gala at the Tower Ballroom was as much a fixture of the family calendar as Christmas dinner with all the trimmings at Cheryl’s. The tiered ballroom, with a big net of balloons suspended above the dance floor, never failed to impress. These days most of Blackpool’s competitions took place in the Winter Gardens, but he didn’t think there would be many people in the world’s dancing community who would deny that the Tower Ballroom deserved the accolade of best ballroom in the world.
Everyone who went to the gala knew the popular sequence dances. There was nothing quite like the feeling of doing the Emmerdale waltz around the huge space with two hundred other couples all doing exactly the same steps.
The family always took two tables, and it was like being with Blackpool royalty as people came over to pay their respects to Cheryl and Chris. This year was the fiftieth anniversary of their first time dancing there. Donna had made Cheryl an ice-blue silk ballroom dress for the occasion, and she had a sparkling tiara in her hair.
For the past few years Aimee had come along, but now she had a boyfriend who didn’t dance and she’d gone down to London to see the fireworks with him. Alf couldn’t imagine how you’d get seriously involved with someone who couldn’t dance at all. Dancing was so much a part of him; he didn’t know what sex would be like if someone had no sense of rhythm or timing.
Gary couldn’t dance when Donna had met him, but even he had mastered a passable waltz and had learned all the sequence dances. This year, he was having a go at the Tango Serida, which Alf, dancing with Cheryl, found it hard enough to remember the steps to – although Cheryl was pushing him through it, despite her mantra that the man should always lead. The third time through the sequence, he noticed Sadie dancing with her mum on the other side of the room. Sadie was in a short gold sequinned dress. She looked hot. And she was staring at him.
So that’s what she’d meant by 31st December. Alf glanced at the clock. Two hours to midnight. What was he, Cinderella? In his panic, he did a chassé instead of a rock step, felt Cheryl’s disapproval stiffen through her hold.
He wanted to please his gran and his mum, and it was only for six months, so why not give them the pleasure of seeing him partner up with Sadie again, after all they’d done for him? And yet, and yet . . . if he had all those evenings and weekends free, he could earn enough money to see him through his year of travelling, and still maybe have some left over for London, if he got into the dance school he’d applied for.
After he’d taken Cheryl back to her seat, he went across to Sadie.
‘So what’s your New Year’s resolution?’ Sadie asked, clinking her glass of Prosecco against his orange juice.
Not to put things off in the hope that they’d go away, Alf thought.
‘What’s yours?’ he asked. It wasn’t midnight yet.
‘Do what I’ve been wanting to do for a long time,’ she said.
‘What’s that then?’
As soon as he said it, he suddenly knew what she was going to do, and he wished himself anywhere else because it just made everything more complicated.
Sadie put her glass down and kissed him full on the mouth.
Count to four, Alf thought, and break.
‘Look, not sure how to say this . . .’ Alf told her. ‘But my answer’s thanks, but no thanks.’
The way Sadie’s face could change from light to dark was chilling, and for a moment he was fearful she’d want revenge. That meant he�
��d made the right decision, he reassured himself.
‘I mean, I think you’re great and everything . . . It’s just, you know, I’m looking to the future now, not the past.’
22
January 2017
LETTY
It wasn’t the prospect of studying in a room as cold as a fridge, nor even the upcoming exams, that made Letty reluctant to return to Oxford in January. It was more the feeling that her time with Marina was running out.
Marina had been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation which, when you googled it, was the medical term for heart failure. When Letty had returned home for the Christmas vacation, she’d found her grandmother slower and less commanding.
Frances and Ivo cooked the traditional family dinner on Christmas Eve, with Rollo supplying the special fennel sausages from Camisa on Old Compton Street, along with pretty tins of amaretti biscuits. Ivo got the presepio crib down from the loft, and at midnight, Marina herself placed the tiny baby Jesus in the manger. Everyone behaved so normally that Letty wondered if she was the only one thinking that maybe this would be the last Christmas they would all spend together. It made her all the more irritated that Frances couldn’t just back down when, on Christmas Day, she and Marina had their traditional Christmas row – this time about the pudding – with Frances shouting, ‘Trifle means jelly!’
‘But it tastes so . . . synthetic.’ Marina wrinkled her nose.
‘By which you mean common,’ Frances raged. ‘Champagne bloody socialists!’
It was a variation on the usual theme. Frances, the child of an unemployed docker, had been dropped into bohemian North London society which, for all its liberal declarations, was as judgemental and difficult to penetrate as the milieu of the toffs they purported to despise.
Frances, of course, had a hand in shaping the narrative herself.
‘Ask me anything about anything, as long as it begins with a letter from A to G!’ was one of her favourite throwaway lines at dinner parties, because when she was growing up, the only books in her house comprised the first third of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which her dad had been persuaded to buy in weekly instalments by a salesman who came to the door, but had run out of money to complete when he was made redundant from the Ribble docks.
But Frances was an executive in an advertising firm, and that was surely about the most capitalist industry she could be in, Letty thought. She enjoyed going to the theatre and ballet, and eating out in fine restaurants. At some point, surely she had to acknowledge that she had become middle class herself. Anyway, how could anyone get so worked up about jelly?
The problem was – had always been – two matriarchs sharing one territory. Both clever, both strong, both extremely competitive. Ironically, it was Marina who had insisted that Frances and Ivo come and live there originally. For Ivo, the house in Belsize Park Gardens was home, but Frances had always felt like a guest that Marina tolerated, even though for many years now, it had been her income that had kept the household running.
What Letty had never really seen before Marina’s stroke, was how much her father still behaved as his mother’s child. He rarely seemed to be at home these days, almost as if he was in denial.
‘I think you worry too much,’ he told Letty, when she raised her concerns. ‘Marina will outlive us all!’
Letty developed a routine of revising during the mornings, then eating with Marina, as they had when Letty was doing her A levels. Now Letty was the one who brought lunch to Marina. Her grandmother did not go out much and had given up bridge, claiming that it gave her a headache, although Letty wondered if it was because she seemed to be losing her short-term memory.
Her memories from the past, however, were pin sharp, and she was still a brilliant raconteuse. Sometimes, as Letty listened to her anecdotes she wondered if she should record them for future generations. But she shied away from asking her, fearing that Marina might find it a mawkish suggestion.
When she met Letty’s grandfather, Max, whom Letty remembered only as an old man arguing with other old men in a roomful of pipe smoke, Marina had been the hostess of a Soho restaurant which was frequented by artists, actors and intellectuals, the toast of ‘le tout London’.
When Marina gave up her job to be a mother, the house in Belsize Park had become a social hub, where Marina held court with the same mastery as she had in the restaurant.
One lunchtime in the first week of January, Letty’s phone buzzed with a number she did not recognize.
‘Happy New Year!’
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Spencer. From the train,’ he said.
‘Oh! Hello!’
Letty stood up and walked across the room towards the window. Without Marina’s care, the back garden was looking a mess.
‘How’s Gran?’ Spencer asked.
Watching the sun going down behind the skeleton of the oak tree, it took a moment for Letty to realize what he was asking.
‘She’s OK, thank you.’
There was a pause.
‘Look, I’ve done some research on La Traviata. Found a performance, but we’ll need to discuss.’
Letty’s immediate inclination was to say no. What could there be to discuss? she wondered.
‘How about cocktails at the Sky Garden, tomorrow evening?’ he was asking.
‘The Sky Garden?’ she repeated.
‘Top of the Walkie Talkie. In the city. I’ll see you there at seven, shall I?’
She had been out only once in her vacation, to Oscar and Raj’s New Year’s dinner, and it wasn’t like Spencer was pestering her. It was six weeks since Marina had been taken into hospital, six weeks in which Letty had hardly given him a thought.
‘OK then,’ she heard herself saying.
‘An admirer?’ Marina asked brightly.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Letty replied, not quite sure how to describe Spencer. ‘What does one wear for cocktails?’
Marina insisted that Letty try on some of her old dresses, which she kept in a shipping trunk at the foot of her bed. It was almost like being a little girl again, choosing costumes from the dressing-up box and parading in front of her grandmother. From the fifties, a deep green dress with a full skirt of watered silk, a tight lace bodice and three-quarter sleeves; from the sixties, a simple velvet little black dress with a boat neck; from the seventies, a lilac nylon number with long frilly sleeves. They all fitted perfectly, but they smelled of mothballs and they were far too fragile for a cold January evening.
Eventually Letty decided on her usual skinny black jeans and roll-neck sweater, worn under the black leather biker’s jacket that had been Frances’s Christmas gift. The shape of the jacket was traditional, with gold studs on the lapels, but the leather was as soft as butter and the designer label indicated that it had cost a fortune. Marina draped one of her old Hermès scarves in white, gold and green around her neck, and lent her a pair of long fake emerald earrings which, with Letty’s hair scraped back into a chignon, dangled from ear lobe to shoulder.
‘You look unreal!’ Spencer said.
He was drinking a Mojito. He ordered one for her. It tasted summery in the vast greenhouse space. Looking at London spread out below was like being in a plane coming in to land, Letty thought.
The view gave them something to talk about as he pointed out various buildings, informing her how much the floor space cost per square foot in each postcode.
‘Long story short,’ he finally said. ‘The opera you wanted to see is in New York. A place called the Met. It’s sold out until the end of March, but I got two tickets for the first of April, which is a Saturday.’
This was too bizarre, Letty thought – to be sitting at the top of a skyscraper with a man she barely knew, who appeared to be asking her to go on a date to New York to see his first opera. Was the date significant? Was this some kind of early April Fool’s prank? The answer should be a no-brainer.
‘It’s a big ask, I know,’ Spencer was saying.
His disingenuous
ness was rather charming.
As he ordered another round, Letty tried to see him as someone else might. He was good-looking, well dressed and smelled of expensive cologne. He was the sort of man Frances might cast to advertise a brand of razor.
If she had met him at a party, Letty thought, she would have no reason to be suspicious of him. But she hadn’t. She’d met him because he wanted to buy the services of a female student half his age, when he must have access to women he could date in the normal way.
Letty decided to confront the question. ‘When we met in Oxford . . . I mean, why?’
He laughed.
‘I could ask you the same.’
‘But I asked you first,’ Letty pointed out.
‘Let’s say I’m a bit like Rod Stewart,’ he said. ‘I’ve had two marriages. Ended up disliking them both and giving them each a house . . . you know that quote?’
Letty shook her head.
‘You get the idea, though? I thought, if I’m going to be shelling out, I’ll get what I want with no commitment.’
‘And is that what you want from me? Because I was never going to become your sugar baby—’
‘I knew that as soon as I saw you,’ he interrupted.
‘How?’
‘No make-up, leggings – I’m sorry, but leggings? And then you couldn’t get away quick enough . . .’
‘How long did you wait?’ Letty was curious.
‘About ten minutes. I honestly knew I had more chance of scoring with the waitress than I did with you.’
Letty didn’t know whether it was reassuring that he’d read her so accurately, or slightly unnerving.
‘So, Elle.’ He leaned towards her. ‘I can’t pretend I don’t find you attractive, but I’m not expecting anything more than a broadening of my cultural horizons. You’re the only person who’s ever made me interested in seeing an opera. And it took some effort to get these tickets. In case you’re wondering, I’ll book us separate rooms in the hotel.’
She had been wondering. If he was that rich, he probably didn’t even think about the expense.
It had always been her dream to go to the Met. She and Marina had seen most of the ‘Live from the Met’ transmissions at the Curzon cinema in Bloomsbury. The feeling of anticipation as the curtain went up, knowing that you were seeing a live performance beamed over by satellite, was thrilling, but the idea of being in the auditorium itself! Her exams would be over by then, she thought. Honour Moderations were said to be the longest exams in the world. If she survived those, surely she deserved a treat?