The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  Morna didn’t answer. Her own memories of the retreat house were rather different. And yet she had first met David there and that made it holy, in a way. If Bea were off her hands, she could sell her own house, buy something smaller, simpler, without Neil’s imprint on it, where David would fit in.

  ‘Someone’s always praying at every moment of every day. That makes a difference. You can … feel it, in the atmosphere. I need prayers, Morna.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ Morna sank back in her chair. If her pure and pious mother needed prayers, what hope was there for her—a pagan and a fornicator? She grinned, remembering David’s take-off of the abbot at his school, smacking his lips over words like fornication, while damning any boy who dared so much as think about it. She was free to be with David now, free to fornicate. She kicked her other shoe off, wiggled both her feet. Freedom felt intoxicating.

  ‘What about dogs?’ she asked, trying to return to earth. She couldn’t see Joy in a convent. Her mother’s dog was neither meek, chaste, abstemious, nor community-minded.

  ‘They don’t encourage them, but I’ve been taking Joy with me every time I go, so the nuns get used to her, and Father Clarke’s promised to speak to Reverend Mother. He’s going to say I’ve had her thirteen years and she’s very well behaved.’

  Joy woke up when she heard her name, yapped, scratched her underparts, pawed at the upholstery. Bea tipped the last of the Ovaltine into her saucer, held it on her knee for Joy to lap.

  ‘Anyway, there’s something else. I want to do a bit for Chris. After all, she is my only grandchild. If I sell this house, I could give her and Martin part of the proceeds, help them buy their own place, get them off to a decent start instead of camping in some squalid bedsit or student hostel or whatever it is they’re planning.’

  Morna got up, removed the empty saucer, squeezed her mother’s hand. Bea had her priorities right—giving thought to where Chris and Martin would live, instead of dreaming up idyllic little love nests for herself. The hand was cold, twisted with arthritis, the blue veins raised and swollen. She could see it, suddenly, clasped in her father’s hand at the Nuptial Mass, smooth and straight and flawless then; a young girl’s hand emerging from its sleeve of ivory satin. She wanted to weep for the change in it—the now marked and freckled skin, the bony wrist, the wedding-ring worn thin as if it had failed and sickened after the bereavement. Yet what was the use of empty sentiment? It was pure hypocrisy if she didn’t back it up with some real action, say ‘Don’t go. Move in with me. I’ll do the cooking, provide the company, drive you where you want.’

  The words refused to come. She could have said them to David, but not to her own mother. And if she tried to please them both, neither would be happy. She was thinking too much of David, far too much. He had become like one of those bouncy Russian dolls with rounded weighted bottoms instead of legs, which bobbed up again in her mind however many time she knocked him down. Except David had legs, long amazing legs which … Her mother was speaking still. Morna forced herself to concentrate.

  ‘I’ll have to keep enough to pay my way—for when I’m older, I mean, and not able to help out, but their rates are very reasonable. They don’t aim to make a profit, you see, just keep out of debt. I shouldn’t think they’d mind a dog, would you? Joy’s no trouble, after all.’

  Morna stared down at the snuffling, twitching dog, greying at the muzzle, growing old with Bea. ‘I think I’d better talk to Reverend Mother, check there’ll be no problems—not just with Joy—all round.’ The dutiful daughter, still with an eye on her own interest, wanting to be certain her mother was fully off her hands, with no chance of a return. She leaned down and hugged her mother, a Judas hug. Bea felt slighter than she ever had before, or was that only compared with David’s bulk? It seemed suddenly unfair that the two of them should be competing for her loyalties. How could David not win with all his strengths?

  Yet Bea had brought her up, alone, with no husband, no support; had taken over Chris when she was shocked by the divorce, had put her always first. Even now, she was probably planning to live at Hilden Cross only to release some money for her granddaughter, avoid being a nuisance to her daughter. When Sister Ruth returned from hospital, would they even need Bea any more? She might become a nuisance, an embarrassment, someone with no purpose who had now also lost her home. Bea’s house had always been important to her, something chosen by her husband, which bore his stamp, perpetuated his memory. She had refused to move when she was widowed, keeping up the place almost as a shrine to him. Yet now she was ready to let it go—for Chris’s sake.

  Morna’s palms were clammy suddenly. She wiped them on her skirt. Something sharp and jagged seemed to be pressing on her larynx. She tried to clear her throat, make her voice work. ‘Y … You could always live with me, you know. I mean, I’d … like that, Mummy. It would be company for both of us and …’ The words tailed off, but at least she had got them out.

  Bea was silent, no emotion whatsoever showing on her face. Morna hardly dared to look at her. One simple ‘yes’ and she would have to give up David. With another man, a different sort of mother, she might have invited both of them to share her life and home, but with Bea and David it simply wouldn’t work. She couldn’t see David ploughing through his Sulpicius Severus or Acta Silvestri with her mother’s constant chattering, Joy’s barking, Chris and Martin’s radios competing with each other. And how could she ever creep into his bed with Bea sleeping just along the passage?

  She pulled at a button on her suit, twisted it round and round, locked her hands together to stop them fidgeting. Bea had still said nothing. ‘M … Mummy, did you hear?’

  ‘Yes, I did, dear. I’m very touched, very touched indeed that you should want me.’ Bea removed her glasses, rubbed them up, put them back again. ‘But no. You’ve got your own life.’

  ‘There’s … room in it for you, though.’

  ‘I know. That’s nice. That’s very nice, Morna, darling. But I’m enjoying it at Hilden Cross, you see. I feel I can be … useful there. I’ve already had some really lovely letters from people who’ve noticed the improvements. Do you realise, the cook they had was never really trained?’

  Morna thought back to the eggless batter pudding, the synthetic cream. ‘It doesn’t surprise me, no.’

  ‘It wasn’t her fault, poor dear. She was an elderly nun who somehow got drafted to the kitchen because there was no one else. I’ve been giving her a hand myself and now I’ve found this girl who comes in from the village. She’s been wasted all these months; just peeling vegetables and scouring pans. But she’s a natural cook with a marvellous knack for pastry, so with a bit of swapping round of jobs, we’ve managed to …’

  Morna noted the ‘we’, a regal ‘we’—Bea and Reverend Mother, Bea and Father Holdsworth. Well—it had done her mother good, made her feel important, maybe even improved the batter pudding. Best of all, it spelled her own release—at least for a year or two. She could always review the situation later, when her mother was older and might need her more, but for the moment she had her all-important respite—now—when she craved for it and when David was ardent and available. She drained her Ovaltine, relished the sweet and frothy taste of freedom.

  Bea got up to take her cup. ‘I don’t want to rush you, dear, but shouldn’t you be getting back? I’m worried about that babe. No one’ll even hear him with all that racket.’

  Fez was dead to the world when Morna returned, lulled to sleep by hard rock. The whole party had relaxed—girls with their shoes off, the lights turned low, the buffet table a wreckage of crumbs and crumpled serviettes. Morna checked that there were no crises before creeping back upstairs, feeling still more of an intruder. She sat on the bed, poured herself a glass of wine. She had commandeered one of the bottles from the party—a sparkling white from Waitrose—cheap, but full of fizz. She needed bubbles to celebrate. She wasn’t like her daughter, content with a low-key party with no centre to it, no real celebration, no announcement of the enga
gement, champagne toast. She wished she could make her own announcement. ‘David and I are …’ What, though? Not engaged, not even formally committed to each other. Yet their bond was real and solid, went right back to their childhood—shared Faith, shared restrictions.

  She picked up her book, a Life of St Cuthbert which David had recommended as a contrast to St Abban, tried to concentrate. She was working through his reading list—scholarly studies on the date-of-Easter controversy, or the Desert Fathers’ influence on Celtic monasticism. None of it was easy, especially with music pounding through the floor, the words of the lyric tangling with the print—hot uncensored words. She lay back on the pillows, let her hand stray towards her breasts. ‘Shameless’, David was saying. She liked the word, especially compared with Neil’s censorious ‘frigid’. David had changed her simply by being shy and inexperienced himself. She had remained the teacher, playing Neil’s old rôle. Neil had become an invisible third party in their bed, exciting her in memory as he never had in fact. Things she had objected to with him, she had been trying out with David and enjoying. Was it just perversity, or because everything felt different—not better—often worse from the point of view of mere technique, but somehow sacred, special? For David, she was never just a body or a hole, as she had so often seemed to Neil, but an individual person with a soul as well as genitals. Sometimes David treated her as if her soul were actually located between her legs, worshipped her like a madonna even while profaning her. It was hard to describe. He made love to the whole of her with the whole of himself and that included mind, brain, spirit and … and … There was still no word for what Neil had called Big Sam. She had been too shy to christen it, and David himself spent longer railing against its inadequacies than rewarding it with pet names. They needed more time. He was still nervous of her, frightened of himself, too used to being alone and womanless.

  Morna could feel her nipples hard. The chaperone and babysitter had no business to be exciting herself, especially when her charge had started whimpering. She got up and checked his nappy, settled him more comfortably. Two months ago she would have censored Sarah for her casual careless pregnancy, used words like irresponsible. Now such words applied to her as well. The first time she had gone to bed with David, she hadn’t even thought of taking precautions. Her mind was too full of other fears. He had brought the subject up himself the following morning, when he woke beside her and found Big David big.

  ‘It’s … er … okay,’ she had said, as embarrassed now as he was. ‘It’s what Holy Mother Church used to call the safe period—still does, I suppose, unless you’ve got one of those progressive parish priests who say ‘‘follow your own conscience’’ and really mean ‘‘take the Pill.’’’

  ‘You’re … not on it, I suppose—the Pill, I mean?’

  ‘No. Why should I be?’

  He still assumed she was a sort of scarlet woman. It both annoyed her and excited her. Strange how you fulfilled other people’s expectations, became what they decided. With Neil she had dwindled into a boring married woman; with David she was avid mistress. When he proved clumsy and inept, she truly didn’t mind, not because she was noble or ignored her own let-down or frustration, but because it enhanced her own position, made her the one without the problems. David was sharp enough to see that. What he didn’t see was that it also made him vulnerable, and lovable, less threatening than Neil ever had been. David left her to take the decisions and the initiative, in contraception as well as in bed. That wasn’t easy when the nearest chemist shop or clinic was a storm-tossed sea away.

  ‘Are we still … er … safe?’ he had asked a few days later, throwing back the cover on their sofa bed.

  ‘No, we’re not. Getting rather dangerous, in fact.’

  They had decided on a week or two of celibacy, making jokes about how St Abban would have approved, amused to realise they were following the Church’s teaching not through conviction, but through circumstance. Morna thought back to the fertility rites of Lupercalia—eggs, rabbits, lecherous Pan—and there they were sleeping in separate beds again in fear of that fertility. After seven days, David crept upstairs to her room.

  ‘It must be safe now.’

  ‘Not quite. Just a few more days.’

  ‘I feel pretty dangerous myself. Which do you think is worse in the eyes of the Church, rape or abortion?’

  ‘Abortion, no question.’

  ‘What if it’s both, though?’

  ‘It won’t be. I’m going to banish you, this instant—up to your neck in icy water and then a flagellation with prickly gorse twigs as soon as you get out.’

  David groaned. ‘I know how Abban felt now.’

  The abstinence had been like an exotic game—increasing the excitement, creating a tension which made the mere touch of a hand both dangerous and provocative. The first day she was safe again, David woke her at five o’clock in the morning, came two minutes later, inside her—just—kept apologising, did the same thing in the evening. Half those kids downstairs were probably more experienced than he was, would scoff at his brief and artless efforts, mock their slapdash and old-fashioned contraception when they were all coolly on the Pill, their rough and ready bed when they were saving for whole bedroom suites. It would be nice to lie with David in a king-size bed with freshly laundered sheets, proper bedclothes, bedside lamps instead of just a torch, central heating set at 75o. She had to admit she did enjoy her comforts, now she had them back.

  She got up to check the baby again, refill her glass of wine. Fez was sleeping now, making little snuffling noises similar to Joy’s. If David stayed around, he would become a sort of grandparent when Chris and Martin had children of their own. She didn’t want that rôle for him, even less so for herself. She had to grow younger, not older, so she was more of a match for him. Forty-one already sounded ancient compared with his just-thirty-six. She had better stay at forty-one, until he had caught up with her, then they’d both go backwards.

  The phone shrilled across her thoughts. Late for anyone to ring, unless it were a guest who’d been delayed at another party or the pub, checking if it were still all right to come. She picked it up before it woke the baby, winced at the raucous rendering of ‘Happy Birthday To You’ hollered down the line in a Californian accent—Neil and Bunny in duet, with Dean providing a backing of excited whoops and giggles. She waited for a pause, cut in.

  ‘It’s not Chris, it’s Morna. I’ll give her a shout and you’d better start again. How are you all?’

  A trio of ‘fine’s’, Bunny’s loudest. ‘Sorry, hon, we didn’t wake you, did we? It’s only afternoon out here. We’re all in our bikinis.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Dean objected.

  Bunny’s giggles sounded newly minted. ‘Well, Morna, hon, it must be really great to have your little girl grown up. Congratulations!’

  ‘Thanks.’ Morna flexed her toes. Two sets of congratulations in the space of just two hours. She was aware of Neil listening in, yet saying nothing, Dean on a third extension, maybe some friend or house guest on the last remaining phone. It made it difficult to say anything at all. She still felt embarrassed by her escape from California, the way she had repaid their hospitality by bolting blindly home. Bunny had already written her two anxious puzzled letters which had been waiting with her pile of other mail when she returned home from the island. Was Morna hon okay? Had the French job turned out fine? She had also sent a valentine—a lavish one in the shape of an old-fashioned wicker flower basket which opened up to reveal a heart in real red satin and said ‘Sharing my heart with a friend’. Dean had sent one, too, enclosed in the same envelope—a homemade card which showed a matchstick man and woman holding hands, with a purple fire engine zooming up behind them. Not a word from Neil, though.

  ‘N … Neil …?’ she said now.

  ‘Hi, there!’

  ‘H … How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Just rang to say ‘‘Hi’’ to the Birthday Girl. If you’d like to go and fetch her, and tell her her Da
d’s got a really exciting present on its way and …’

  ‘Yes … yes, of course. Hold on.’ Morna put the phone down, walked stiffly down the stairs, tried to tell herself that he wasn’t freezing her off, that long-distance calls cost money, that it was Chris’s birthday, not her own.

  ‘Chris! Chris—quickly, darling. It’s your father on the phone. Hurry now.’

  Chris gave a shriek of triumph, leapt up from the sofa, grabbed the phone in the hall. Morna watched her face, a mixture of excitement and embarrassment, pleasure and suprise. They must be singing ‘Happy Birthday’, since Chris was saying nothing, just grinning foolishly. Morna toiled back to the bedroom to replace the receiver there, listened in for a moment, feeling both guilty and excluded from the whole happy bubbly chat show—banter with Bunny, silly jokes with Dean, Chris’s adoring replies to her father’s platitudes. Why should she care? How could Neil upset her when she had seen through him in America, realised she was mourning an empty shell? She had David now, in any case, a whole new life ahead of her. The problem was the new life hadn’t started yet—not really. She was still trapped in the old one, still living in Neil’s home, still dependent on him. If she left to live with David, she would no longer be cushioned by Neil’s largesse. Could she really cope with all the bills herself? David’s meagre research grant would hardly pay a mortgage. Those few brief words with her ex-husband had brought back the spectre of divorce. About one in four marriages ended in the courts now; one in three in the States. Terrible to have another failure, her idyllic new relationship with David coming to grief over things like rents and rates.

  She forced herself to go downstairs again. She would start the clearing up, wash the dirty glasses. Better to keep busy than give way to stupid fears. She dodged into the kitchen, trying to avoid the entwined and dancing couples. A boy and girl who had been sitting on the table slipped down and slunk away at her approach. It was as if she were infectious, had a disease called adulthood, which was all too catching. Up to the fourth form, mothers had been welcome—solid useful people who made chocolate cake or drove you to the riding stables and always had money and clean hankies in their handbag. Now they were superfluous, embarrassing.