The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘B … But you haven’t got your exam yet. And you’re saving all your money and you said …’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Anyway, we don’t have to marry straight away. We can have a long engagement.’

  Long engagement sounded like a lead—tying you to someone so you couldn’t stray. Martin didn’t trust her. Why should he? She had already strayed, betrayed him. Perhaps a lead would help. If she met another Pierre, she could always say ‘j’ai un fiancè’, instead of just ‘ami’, flash the diamond to prove it.

  ‘You mean have a ring and everything?’ A ring was like a love-bite, branding and possession, bragging to the world.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t afford that yet—not a decent one. But we could get engaged in secret.’

  Chris stared at her ring finger—bare. The possession without the bragging. That would be safer, easier to break if … She ought to be flattered, really. Half his fellow divers would rather die than get engaged. She owed him something anyway.

  ‘Okay, then.’

  He was unzipping his jeans again. The engagement had excited him.

  ‘Lie on your front,’ he said.

  ‘No, wait, Martin. I want to ask you something, too. Not just quid pro quo but …’ Chris stopped. He hated her using words he didn’t understand, but there wasn’t an equivalent and a footnote would be worse.

  ‘I was going to ask you, anyway, but now it’s more important. You know my Dad?’ You couldn’t call Neil ‘Dad’—it was too downmarket.

  ‘Christ! Not all that again. I thought we’d settled Christmas.’ His thing was going limp, sort of sagging at half-mast.

  ‘Yeah, we have, but I think I ought to see him. I mean, if we’re getting engaged, shouldn’t we inform him, ask his permission? He’s quite old-fashioned about things like that.’ Her father had never been old-fashioned. She was improvising as she went along. But why should Martin win, ban her from her father when she had waited five years two months for an invitation? It was hardly her fault if some depraved French layabout had had it in for her, taken advantage of a foreign girl. She could almost see the rotter—not dark and gorgeous like Pierre, but dark and swarthy—newspapers tied around his feet like those tramps who slept on Charing Cross embankment, a fag drooling from his toothless mouth, the reek of Cognac. No, he couldn’t afford Cognac if … She giggled.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Martin scowled and dragged his pants back on, as if she were laughing at his fallen manhood.

  ‘Nothing.’ She forced the tramp out, her father in. ‘I could go after Christmas. I’m free then. Well, I’ve got to get a job until I start at university, but there’s no great rush for that. It would be the perfect time to go, in fact, when I’ve finished at school but not fixed up anywhere else. Then I can square things with my father, get his blessing, so to speak.’

  ‘I thought we’d said we’d keep the engagement secret?’

  ‘Yeah, course, but Daddy doesn’t count, not all those miles away. He’s good at secrets, anyway.’ She had never told Neil a secret in her life, but there had to be a first time.

  ‘But what about your Mum? She was invited too, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Mm, but she’d never stay at Daddy’s. She’d rather die. If she comes at all, which she doesn’t even want to, she’d probably book in at some motel. They’re very cheap out there. Fiona’s father told me. You can find quite decent places for only …’

  ‘Can’t we go, then—together? If it’s so damned cheap, I could borrow some cash from Tony and …’

  ‘No, it’s the fares which cost a bomb. Five hundred pounds to LA and back—and that’s third class or tourist or whatever they call it.’

  Martin jabbed his foot against the skirting. ‘I can’t understand your Dad. Why should he shell out five hundred quid for an ex-wife who doesn’t even …?’

  ‘Oh, guilt, I expect.’ People did anything for guilt. ‘Anyway, I don’t suppose he pays for it directly. He’s been working on some airline account and Mum said a couple of free tickets now and then is just one of the perks, especially in the winter when the planes are half empty.’

  Martin didn’t answer. It was so easy to offend him. His own father had never been further than Dungeness in the South and Whitby in the North, and got nothing free except mail order catalogues or Co-op trading stamps before they stopped them. So what? Her own father’s father had been much the same—still was, in fact. Martin could outgrow him; fight his way to the top and take her with him. Her own world was so restricted—an all-girls school with a prissy uniform and a staff-room full of spinsters, and Sundays eating sponge cake with her Grandma. Once Martin had his diving school, they could jet around the world, book in to any motel they pleased. But meanwhile she ought to take the only chance she had, and quite honestly, she would rather see her father than the Taj Mahal or the Bridge of Sighs or …

  ‘How long would you be gone, Chris?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘Not like bloody France?’

  ‘Oh, no. That was a job.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t … I mean, I couldn’t bear to think …’

  She shook her head. Yanks were lousy in bed. Emma had told her that. She was still undressed, pressed herself against Martin’s hard and hairless chest. ‘Who’d look at me in California? They’re all beautiful out there and if they’re not, they rip themselves apart and start again. Hey, shall I get my breasts done—come back with a D-cup?’

  Martin growled. ‘No, I like them as they are. They don’t get in the way.’

  He cupped them, tipped her head back, and she felt him rising again through his holey scarlet pants.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Welcome to LA!’

  Chris stared at the short, smiling, blinding blonde who had rushed towards them with a curly haired four-year-old clinging on to one hand and a huge bouquet of flowers brandished in the other.

  ‘Hi! You must be Chrissie. Great to meet you.’ The flowers changed hands. Chris was suddenly swamped in roses and carnations, choked by their scent and the reek of L’Air du Temps. She backed away.

  ‘I’m Bunny. I knew you right away from your pictures. And this is Dean. Say hallo, Dean.’

  Dean said nothing, grabbed his mother’s leg and hid his face in it. It was an impressive leg, clad in real suede jeans in dusky-pink with a glimpse of well-tanned ankle above high-heeled open sandals with gold thongs. There was more gold in the dangling chains, jangling bracelets, rings on every finger.

  ‘And there’s your Mom! She looks exactly like her picture, only prettier.’ Bunny darted over to Morna, shook hands across the luggage trolley, gold a-jingle, thousand-watt smile.

  ‘I’m so glad we could finally meet. Did you have a good flight?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Eleven hours, isn’t it? You must be dead. Have you been over here before? Oh no—Neil said it was your first-ever trip. Well, you’re going to love it—I promise you. Is this all your stuff?’ She heaved a case up, dislodging the dyed mink blouson jacket flung across her shoulders, pink to match the jeans.

  Chris glowered. It must take thirty or forty minks to make a jacket like that—living breathing animals with feelings of their own. Would Bunny like to be made into a coat, cut up into little pieces, dyed a different colour? She was dyed, that was obvious. Her hair was that outrageous shade of platinum which could only have come from a bottle and which hurt your eyes. Okay, so she had a stunning figure, but it had probably been sculpted by a surgeon. Emma said she had read about a woman in Los Angeles who’d had twenty-six separate operations. She had started with a nose job, but once her nose was perfect she wanted perfect teeth to match it, and then perfect breasts, a trimmer waist, tauter buttocks …

  Chris watched the buttocks curvet through the automatic doors, followed at a distance, screwing up her eyes as she stepped from the air-conditioned chill of the airport to the sweltering heat outside.

  ‘This is the hottest day we’ve had so far.’ Bunny was boasting, as if she had fixed the weather herself—p
art of the welcome, like the flowers. So why wear fur jackets in eighty-two degrees? Bunny had slipped it off now, exposing a flounced top which ended in a sort of bow thing just above her navel. She had probably had a navel job, as well, and wanted them to admire the surgeon’s art. Dean was pretty gorgeous, too—the sort of cute kid Chris had never been herself, with a cloud of golden curls which looked as if they had come straight off the set of a sunshine breakfast commercial, and a grin to melt your heart if you weren’t actually his older, plainer half-sister. He was wearing scaled-down denim jeans with lots of fancy pockets and overstitching, and a pair of miniature cowboy boots in highly polished leather, with a belt to match.

  Chris shrugged off her plain blue anorak, smoothed her crumpled skirt. She felt stupid clutching a sodding great bouquet as if she were an opera singer, but without the glamour or the voice to match. People were already staring. She looked past them to the road, glanced up at the dingy airport buildings criss-crossed with scaffolding as if they had braces on their teeth; down again to the traffic jam of taxis. No skyscrapers, no palms, no Pacific Ocean. What was that chap’s name in the Keats poem, the one who gazed at the Pacific with eagle eyes? Stout Cortez, wasn’t it? She had forgotten how it went now, but he and his men had been pretty damn impressed. She had imagined she would feel the same, step off the aircraft and come face to face with a wild and crashing seascape. She squinted at the sky—or what was left of it—Cambridge blue, but mainly swallowed up in steel and concrete.

  ‘It doesn’t look like California,’ she muttered.

  Bunny laughed, displaying improbably pearly teeth.

  When they’d first landed, it had been even worse—just grey concrete all around them like a prison. She thought perhaps the pilot had made an error, brought them down somewhere drab and unexotic like Chicago, or even doubled back to Britain and was taxying into Liverpool or Glasgow. They had all piled into a bus and then out again into a gloomy Customs building with dingy beige lino and mustard-coloured walls, and stood in a queue for hours to be questioned by bad-tempered officials, then hung around again to get their luggage. She hadn’t minded at the time because she was still over the moon about seeing her father, kept imagining how he would bound towards them, clasp her in his arms, whisper, ‘My darling, my own darling daughter’. All right, that was crap—pure worst-of-Hollywood—but he might at least have come.

  Bunny was still laughing. Her laugh was like her jewellery—jangling and overdone. ‘What about our weather, though? That’s Californian, isn’t it? I hear it’s snowing back in London.’

  ‘I like snow.’ Chris turned her back. Okay, so it was rude, but what about her father? Wasn’t it equally bad-mannered to send the new-model wife to meet them on her own, when his only daughter (thank God Dean was a boy) had flown what felt like half a million miles for no other reason than to see him. It must be even worse for her mother. In fact, she was feeling pretty lousy now about the way she had more or less dragooned her into coming; really put the screws on, mooning around the house saying she would never see her father in her life again if she didn’t take this chance, but refusing to make the trip unless her mother did as well. Morna had absolutely refused at first, used words like monstrous and grotesque, raised her voice, sounded close to tears, but she had gone on and on pestering and wailing until at last she got her way. She hadn’t meant to bully—it was just some stupid fear of facing her father on her own, plus some stupid hope that if he saw his first wife again, they might all get back together. Now she realised how fatuous that had been. Bunny was a fact, not some abstract inconvenience you could spirit away if it didn’t fit your scheme. And her mother looked quite awful—pale and sort of cowed, yet trying valiantly to be the perfect guest, asking polite and formal questions like was it always as warm as this in winter and when would Dean start school. (Dean, for Christ’s sake! What a name.)

  ‘He’s at school already, aren’t you, honey-pie? He’s really smart. He could read when he was only three. Okay, you guys, you wait here with the bags and I’ll go get the car.’

  Guys. Honey-pie. Chris screwed up her face against the sun. It should have been dark. They had left Heathrow at lunchtime and it was still only teatime and yet hours and hours had passed—hours and hours of watching imbecilic movies and eating plastic food. It had been exciting at the time. She had laughed at the movies, scoffed the chicken and the trifle, joked with the stewardess about the picnic tea at breakfast—every meal and hour bringing her closer to her father. And then he hadn’t come. Couldn’t be bothered to miss a footling meeting or cancel an appointment. Perhaps she wouldn’t see him at all. Twenty-one days with Bunny’s five-thousand dollar smile, while he wheeled and dealed in his glass-and-concrete skyscraper and then failed to see them off because an important client (miles more important than a mere forgotten daughter) had just flown in from Texas and if Bunny Sweetheart would take them in her Pontiac …

  It had driven up now, yards of it, all scarlet metal fore and aft, sort of showing off and scalloped, but nowhere much to sit. She squashed in the back with Dean and half the luggage and Bunny’s fur which she tried to squirm away from, while her mother took the front seat. The two wives side by side. Horrible. There was a tiny toy rabbit dangling over the dashboard—a Bunny in a dress. Dean was staring at her with his huge cornflower blue eyes—Bunny’s eyes—his lashes as long and thick as hers but without the spiked mascara.

  ‘Know something?’ he said. It was the first time he had spoken. Chris shook her head.

  ‘You’re my sister.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she muttered.

  ‘Yes, you are. Mom said.’

  ‘Half-sister. That’s different.’

  Dean pouted, didn’t understand.

  ‘Look, darling—palm trees.’ Morna being tactful.

  Chris peered up at the date palms, more to please her mother than anything else. Not bad. At least the place looked right now, more like California, though not exactly beautiful—garish billboards, skyscrapers soaring past the palms, a great throb and honk of freeway with seven lanes of cars streaming in both directions, a glare on everything like a sticky shimmering film. The excitement began to trickle back again, shimmering itself. They were here, they had made it, half a world away, with a whole ocean and a continent between them and tiny England, a different time scale, different climate. Even the cars looked different—bigger altogether with extra swanky bits, bigger rumps and jaws, even bigger lights and mirrors. All the lights were coming on now. Darkness seemed to have fallen very suddenly, not just a gradual creeping dusk like four o’ clock back home, but more as if someone had got up and pulled the blinds down and then flicked a thousand thousand switches to turn on stars, headlamps, streetlamps, neon signs. She blinked against the flicker dazzle glare, the flashing letters, fluorescent sky. Even the freeway was only streaking light now—scarlet tail-lights stretching to infinity their side, white headlamps speeding towards them on the other. It was like two battle lines—red and white—the Wars of the Roses. No, that was school and she had done with school. In fact if she lived in the States, she’d have had a proper graduation with a gown and mortarboard and a high-school diploma dished out by the Principal.

  ‘How many cars do you have?’ Dean was asking her.

  ‘None,’ she said, turning back from the window. ‘Well, my mother’s got one, but …’

  ‘Don’t you know how to drive, honey? We better teach you.’ Bunny flung her a smile over her right shoulder.

  ‘She hasn’t got a licence,’ Morna cut in. ‘And certainly not an international one.’

  Bunny hooted loudly at a bumptious truck. ‘Don’t worry about that. We can take her to a parking lot or …’

  ‘My boyfriend’s got a motorbike,’ Chris said. ‘A Triumph Bonneville.’ She’d love to learn to drive. Perhaps she would have a word with Bunny on her own, tell her it was best to say nothing to her mother. Morna feared so many things—bikes, cars, muggers, rapists, diving. Bunny herself seemed fearless, switc
hing lanes, overtaking laggards, following complicated signs as if someone had plugged her into a computer terminal.

  ‘I used to have a motorcycle myself,’ she said. ‘A Harley Davidson Police Special.’

  ‘Wow! That’s a really big one, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure is! I hit a hundred once, right on this freeway when I was just about your age.’

  ‘A hundred?’

  ‘Yeah. I was real wild!’

  ‘I ‘ve got a bike,’ said Dean. ‘I’ve got three bikes. And a pedal car.’

  Chris grinned at him—he couldn’t be so bad if his mother had done a ton on a Police Special. She only wished her own mother seemed less strained. She could see just her back, but it looked stiff and sort of hostile and she hadn’t said a word for several minutes. She was probably semi-mesmerised by the endless chain of lights, the rhythmic drone of traffic. No green fields or mountains yet, no ocean. She had better speak herself, break the silence.

  ‘Is this still Los Angeles?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bunny. ‘Downtown LA is pretty small, but the suburbs go on for ever. There’s about thirteen million people living in the greater LA area and guess how many there were when the town was founded two hundred years ago?’

  ‘One!’ yelled Dean.

  ‘A hundred?’ ventured Chris. She was surprised that Bunny could quote statistics. If she were honest with herself, she couldn’t have said how many lived in Greater London and she was considered Oxbridge material—failed Oxbridge material. Cambridge had turned her down.

  ‘Forty-four,’ said Bunny, with a laugh. She made everything a giggle, even figures. ‘Do you realise California is the richest state in America, yet in 1846 they said it wasn’t worth a dollar?’