If Only

by Kate Eberlen

  ‘What do you think?’ she asks Letty in the interval.

  ‘Loving it!’ says Letty. ‘I don’t envy the swans though. It’s not just the dancing, it’s the standing in rows, not moving a feather between steps. Must be sheer agony on the legs.’

  ‘Do you ever imagine yourself up there?’ Frances asks, then winces inwardly at the tactlessness of her question.

  Letty thinks before answering in her own considered way.

  ‘When I was thirteen, the only thing I wanted in life was to be one of them. But I never would have been good enough.’

  ‘Don’t you think?’ Frances says vaguely, unwilling to agree or disagree.

  ‘I didn’t have it,’ Letty said. ‘You can practise as much as you want, but you have to sparkle on stage. And I didn’t, did I? Honestly? So, in a way, now it’s more relief than regret.’

  She says this as if she has just thought of it, but Frances wonders whether she always knew she wouldn’t make the grade. Frances says nothing. She’s not going to protest falsely. Letty’s dancing was lovely, precise like everything she does, but too careful, always somehow contained in her body. She never took flight.

  ‘I’m sorry I stopped dancing though,’ Letty goes on. ‘Because dancing was good for me. I was never going to be a prima ballerina, but dancing was part of me, and I denied it. I think I should find a class again.’

  There are so many things she doesn’t know about Letty, things that she never dared to raise with her because she was frightened of making things worse. She always thought Letty’s problems stemmed from having to give up ballet. It was why they avoided the subject, as if ballet had become an unmentionable secret, whereas they probably should have talked much more about it.

  ‘I danced with someone in Rome,’ Letty suddenly says. ‘Not ballet. Waltz. We waltzed round Piazza Navona . . .’

  Her daughter gives her a shy little sideways smile, but her eyes are sparkling.

  For God’s sake, Frances tells herself, do not say the wrong thing. And yet say something! Keep this unusual sharing of information going. Do not balls it up!

  ‘What a lovely image!’ she manages.

  Letty blushes.

  ‘Yes, I was literally swept off my feet,’ she says.

  ‘Can I ask who by?’ Frances ventures.

  Wrong. Too soon. The sparkle switches off and Letty refuses eye contact.

  ‘Just someone I met at the school,’ she says. ‘He’s a ballroom dancer. His mother has a school in Blackpool so he grew up dancing.’

  Frances longs for more. Age? Looks? Gay? Straight? What were the exact steps leading up to this unusual event?

  But Letty is now staring up at the screen where the third act is about to begin, and Frances knows if she asks any more now, she will be shushed.

  The set is so opulent that the crowd break into a spontaneous round of applause as the curtain rises. The dancing is dynamic, scintillating, and yet, whilst Frances smiles and admires, she is not transported to a state of forgetting where or who she is, as sometimes happens to her when she is watching ballet, because part of her brain is fixated on getting more out of Letty about what happened in Rome. Who is this dancer? Is he the reason for her abrupt return?

  LETTY

  Letty watches as the prince is duped into swearing love for the sorcerer’s daughter Odile, whom he believes to be the swan princess Odette.

  It’s getting dark now, and the temperature has dropped a little, but the square is buzzing with the kind of energy you get in an Italian piazza, where it’s a way of life for people to spend evenings outdoors. It only takes a few days of good weather for London to feel like a Mediterranean city too.

  ‘Do you want a sad ending or a happy one?’ Frances whispers, as the curtain comes up on the bleak lakeside scene of the final act.

  It’s not as ridiculous a question as it sounds, because Swan Lake can either have a happy ending where true love triumphs and the sorcerer dies, or a sad one, as in most English versions, where the lovers sacrifice their lives for their love, but the final bars of music hint at reunion in the afterlife. In this new production, the ending is unremittingly tragic, with Odette throwing herself to her death, and the prince surviving to live in guilt at his betrayal.

  Letty was hoping for a happy ending, because the performances were so believable; she was totally invested in the story and longed for their love to survive.

  ‘The final pas de deux was wonderful, but the ending was a bit of a let-down,’ Frances pronounces, standing up and stretching after being seated on stone for such a long time. ‘I like my fairy tales to have happy endings. Honestly, Letty, I’m beginning to think I’m a terrible old romantic under my cynic’s clothing.’

  ‘I suppose the producer was trying to make it as realistic as possible.’ Letty tries to work out the reasoning behind it. ‘In real life, it wouldn’t have a happy ending, would it?’

  ‘In real life, a princess wouldn’t be turned into a bloody swan, would she?’ Frances points out.

  Letty laughs.

  ‘Shall we walk along the river?’ she suggests, as the crowd head towards the tube. She doesn’t feel like getting into a packed train when it’s still such a lovely evening.

  The balmy temperature of the air makes strangers smile at each other in the street, as if acknowledging their mutual good fortune at being out in this wonderful city at this time of night with no need for a jacket or umbrella. It’s as if the personality of London has opened up.

  ‘It was a summer just like this when I met your father,’ Frances muses, as they wander across Charing Cross footbridge towards the South Bank, the river slopping along beneath them.

  Frances used to present herself to the world with such attitude that, even though she was physically small, nobody would have dreamt of messing with her, Letty thinks. Now, it’s as if she’s allowing her vulnerability to show, even in the way she walks.

  ‘It was so hot nobody could sleep, so we’d just wander round Oxford after the show, talking and talking. We seemed to have so much to say in those days, so much we wanted to do . . .’ Frances sighs.

  ‘Did you fall in love with him straight away?’ Letty asks.

  Frances thinks about it.

  ‘I fancied him rotten,’ she says. ‘He was so good-looking, and of course he was charming and radical, although I sometimes wonder whether his politics really went much further than wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. But I don’t know if I really fell in love with him until we danced . . .’

  ‘Danced?’

  ‘I don’t mean like you. Not properly dance, but Ivo could do LeRoc and he was the best slow dancer ever.

  Letty’s not sure she wants to hear any more details, but perhaps it will be good for Frances to talk.

  ‘Our last summer at Oxford,’ Frances continues, ‘there was a May Ball in his college. Tickets cost a fortune, but I’d been waitressing Saturday nights, so we thought, why not? We’ll never be students at Oxford again, will we?’

  Letty has never heard this before.

  ‘It probably wouldn’t seem like much to the festival generation today,’ Frances recalls, ‘but for me then, a working-class lass from Preston, it was like stepping into The Great Gatsby. There was an actual fairground with dodgems, a carousel, the lot, and a live band, but we weren’t that interested in jumping up and down in a marquee, so we walked round the college walls, me in a hired ballgown, an apple-green chiffon number, I seem to remember, Ivo in a white tuxedo, planning our future. What we would do . . . how many kids we would have . . .’

  ‘You planned children?’ Letty asks. She’s always assumed that Oscar was an accident.

  ‘We already knew I was pregnant. We hadn’t planned that, obviously, but isn’t that the difference when you’re in love? I mean, it’s not just having sex, is it? It’s that you want to have his children.’

  Letty says nothing.

  ‘Two kids, a boy and a girl. So we got that right in the end, didn’t we?’ Frances gives Letty’s ar
m a little squeeze.

  ‘Afterwards, there was a disco in the cloisters. Most people had crashed out by then. We were the only couple left in the quad, and I remember so clearly it was “Dance Away”, and it felt like Bryan Ferry was actually in the cloister singing it just for us,’ Frances says. ‘God! That’s a song I’d take to a desert island . . .’

  Letty suddenly realizes where this is heading. Frances is so clever. She knows that waltzing round the Piazza Navona isn’t something that just happens. She has offered her own intimate story of dancing because she wants Letty’s in return.

  Why not tell her? Letty thinks. What’s the point of keeping it to herself? Didn’t she promise no more secrets from now on? She stops walking and says quietly, ‘I fell in love in Rome.’

  As the words escape, her chest seems to inflate with a rush of excitement at allowing herself to speak about Alf.

  ‘With the dancer?’ Frances asks.

  Letty smiles.

  ‘Yes, of course with the dancer! His name is Alf.’

  ‘Alf,’ Frances repeats. ‘I like that.’

  ‘He’s really a wonderful person, and when I’m with him I feel amazing, somehow. Like normally, I’m trying to hide or disappear, but with him it’s like I’m present, engaging with the world . . . if that makes any sense?’

  Frances nods enthusiastically.

  ‘When I was waltzing with him, it was so brilliant I was actually telling myself to remember exactly how it felt, because I knew it was the best moment of my life!’

  Glancing sideways at Frances’s face, she sees her mother look so pleased Letty can hardly bear to let her down with the real-life ending to her fairy tale.

  ‘Thing is. It was never meant to be,’ she says, choking on the words, as if saying them out loud has made the ending of their story inevitable.

  ‘Isn’t that a touch melodramatic?’ Frances asks.

  ‘It’s over. I ran away.’

  ‘Wait a minute – did he hurt you?’

  ‘No! Why do you always think it’s the man’s fault? It’s my fault. You have no idea what I’m like or how stupid I’ve been!’

  ‘I know you have a tendency to think things are your fault when they’re absolutely not,’ says Frances. Her hand stretches towards Letty, but Letty rejects it, turning sharply away.

  ‘It was nothing like that,’ she says.

  Frances sighs.

  ‘So, what does Alf do in Rome?’

  ‘He went home too,’ Letty says.

  ‘And you don’t have any plans to see him?’

  ‘No! I’ve told you!’

  ‘Are you sure, darling?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure!’

  Why did she ever get manipulated into mentioning Alf? Now Frances is never going to let it go.

  ‘You see, I had this . . .’ Letty searches for a way of closing the conversation down. ‘This thing with another man . . .’

  ‘You were only there three weeks!’ says Frances.

  ‘Not in Rome!’ Letty tries to clarify. ‘It’s complicated! Please don’t ask for details. I’m ashamed enough.’

  ‘Jesus, Letty, why can’t you just have a normal relationship for once?’ Frances blurts.

  Letty feels her lower lip quivering. She stands holding the railing, her eyes blurring with tears as she stares at the lights of the London Eye twinkling in the inky water below.

  She can sense her mother’s hand hovering a few inches from her back, but she shrinks away, as if one comforting touch would shatter her into a thousand pieces.

  FRANCES

  It’s so hot Frances cannot sleep. The window is open, but there seems to be no difference between the temperature inside and out. She switches on the fan, and then off again as the whirr annoys her.

  The air is sticky as treacle, her thoughts held in its viscous grip. She cannot let go the image of Letty staring down into the river.

  The swan princess throws herself in the lake because she cannot be rescued by the prince’s love.

  Is that what was going through Letty’s mind?

  Is that why she suggested going down to the river? Was it some kind of a cry for help that once again Frances failed to hear, as she rattled on about the summer of ’76, when she should have been thinking about the more recent hot summer of 2013.

  She remembers sitting beside the hospital bed the night Letty was taken in. The drip in Letty’s arm. Letty’s foot poking out from under the sheet, the heart with a knife through it, so at odds with the Winnie-the-Pooh mural on the wall behind. Still young enough to be in the children’s ward, but with a bloody tattoo.

  Frances remembers the looks the nurses gave her. What sort of mother was she? Her daughter was dangerously dehydrated and underweight. She had been talked out of jumping into the river by a passer-by.

  How could she not have noticed? How could a stranger who had never seen Letty in her life have known she was in danger when Frances had not?

  Frances tried so hard to be a good mother, but she never got it right with Letty. She read all the books about difficult teenagers, knew it was important to let them make their own mistakes. She tried to give her independence. Perhaps too much. Perhaps that was the problem? But whenever she tried to get more involved, ask about her life, she could feel Letty’s irritation, her posture stiffening as the defences went up.

  Nothing has changed. In the cab home last night, Letty shifted as far away as it was possible to be without hanging out of the window. The driver was banging on about the weather. It took all Frances’s strength to stop herself telling him to shut the fuck up, even though silence would have been worse.

  It’s light when Frances finally falls asleep. She wakes up with a start, knowing what she has to do. Then sinks back into the pillow, trying to figure out if it’s a crazy idea.

  Everything seems to be exaggerated in this heat, as if they’re living in the pages of A Passage to India, where events can be magnified and made into something they might not be.

  She needs space to think rationally, away from the empty house and its silent dramas. But she can’t risk leaving Letty alone.

  Maybe it’s about time Ivo took some responsibility.

  Without allowing herself a chance to change her mind, Frances picks up her phone.

  ‘For God’s sake! It’s five o’clock in the morning!’ Ivo mutters.

  There’s a petty part of Frances that’s pleased she’s woken him up and hopes she’s woken his mistress too.

  ‘I’m going away for a few days and I need you to come and stay with Letty because I’m worried about her. She’s not eating. She cries often. She seems . . . somewhere else, somehow . . .’

  ‘Somewhere else? For God’s sake, Frances, don’t you think you worry too much?’

  Frances feels as if her blood has gone from hot to boiling point.

  ‘What is the point of saying that?’ she shouts into the phone. ‘What does it even mean? I’m telling you Letty’s in distress. She needs help. I don’t know how to help her. What’s not to worry about?’

  ‘She’s twenty-one!’

  ‘God, you are so gutless.’ Frances spits the words down the phone. ‘The fact that Letty disapproves of your behaviour doesn’t absolve you of responsibility towards her! And don’t tell yourself that really it’s me that’s the problem, so it’s OK to do nothing. This isn’t about me.’

  ‘For once,’ Ivo says.

  Frances wants to tell him to fuck off. But she knows that is exactly what he is trying to get her to do, so that he feels justified in putting down the phone.

  ‘Listen, Ivo,’ she says, trying to sound icily calm. ‘You have a daughter with a history of eating disorder and depressive illness – which isn’t your fault, I’m not saying that. But what you do have to do is acknowledge it. It’s all very well going on a march to protest NHS cuts, but you need to share the burden of care . . .’

  ‘That’s not fair! I used to do everything with her!’ Ivo protests. ‘It’s Letty who doesn’t want to se
e me.’

  ‘You used to do the nice things, like brunch in Hampstead and matinees at the Everyman. And skating, of course . . .’

  ‘That’s below the belt, even for you, Frances!’

  ‘Below the belt? I haven’t even started!’

  ‘Don’t shout!’

  It’s what he says when cornered, and it’s so middle class, as if somehow it’s more important to appear polite than to address the issue.

  ‘I’ll ask Oscar then.’ Frances puts down the phone.

  After a couple of minutes Ivo calls back.

  ‘OK. I’ll come over. Where are you going anyway?’

  ‘None of your fucking business.’

  For a moment, she feels better for swearing at him, but the sense of release is fleeting, as her mind returns to the memory of Letty staring down into the river.

  39

  ALF

  ‘There’s nowhere better than Blackpool on a day like this,’ says Cal, as he and Alf walk along the promenade.

  Alf thinks of the little boat chugging across the beautiful blue water of the Bay of Naples towards the sparkling Maronti beach. But he knows what Cal means. During these days of constant sunshine, Blackpool beach looks golden and the sea is almost as blue as the Mediterranean, even if it will take a while for it to warm up to a temperature that Alf can tolerate for anything more than a quick dip. The weather is so unusually hot that visitors walk around with permanent smiles on their faces. Children play happily, shrieking with the joy of making sandcastles and eating ice cream, rather than whining that they are freezing as they shelter from the rain in the amusement arcades. The evenings are light and warm enough for people to walk about in shirtsleeves. The pizzeria where he used to work has put tables on the pavement outside, and the pubs are serving pitchers of summer cocktails with strawberries floating on top. If Alf had a pound for the number of times he’s heard the words ‘nowhere better’ he’d be a rich man. There’s a pride in the way it’s said, as if people always believed that Blackpool had this potential, and finally, after enduring many chilly, drizzly summers, their faith has been rewarded. In the evenings, the sun setting over the sea, tinting the water myriad shades of pink and blue, is as breathtaking and unique as any sunset anywhere.