by Angela Huth
‘One thing, can I ask you?’ she was saying. ‘It’s David. He’s grown so fond of the donkeys. Storm particularly. I wonder if you’d let me buy him? We’d be a good home. I’d pay you anything, anything.’
She sounded quietly desperate. Jo scratched his head. The desire to touch her had not diminished in all the confusion caused by her question.
‘It wouldn’t be a matter of money,’ he said, to give himself time.
‘I could send a trailer for him tomorrow morning.’ She sounded oddly practical.
Jo stared at her. He thought of her small silent son David – his unhappiness without Storm. He thought of his own future without Storm. Well, he could always train one of the others to lead, he supposed. And somewhere in the jumble of conflicting feelings, Jo realised that if Ida owned Storm she would have a reminder, perhaps, of their days on the beach.
‘That’d be all right, then,’ he said at last. ‘I’d like young David to have him.’
They made arrangements for transport. Jo refused any money. When he finally managed to persuade Ida that to give her the donkey would be his pleasure, she turned to go. Raising her fish-like hand to her mouth, she blew him a kiss in the semi-darkness. Then the fingers flew away in an arc, and disappeared beneath her cloak. Jo could think of nothing to say, and in silence watched her leave.
Some time later, when he had finished the bridle, he went to Storm’s stable. The animal made a small welcoming noise. Jo remembered the night of his birth: a wicked night, thunder, lightning, rain through the roof, the lot. Now, running his hand down the black line of Storm’s spine, came disquieting thoughts of the emptiness of tomorrow. But soon, because he had an orderly mind in which optimism swiftly followed upon melancholy, he began to imagine the summer ahead: the record crowds, the happy children, the sounds of sea and laughter – all the pleasures that Jo had learned come every year in the donkey business.
Sudden Dancer
‘There’s not much point, far as I can see,’ said Joan Cake, ‘keeping on going to these things. With someone who can’t dance, that is.’
‘You enjoy yourself,’ said Henry.
‘I’d enjoy myself more if I could dance with my husband.’
‘You enjoy the outings.’
‘It’s not the same.
‘I couldn’t get my feet to dance, no matter what.’ Henry sighed.
He and Joan sat together on the late bus home, their bodies rolling slightly, used to the journey. They were splattered with rain. From the hem and neck of Joan’s mackintosh sprouted frills of pink net. Her hair, piled up in meringue-like curls, was covered with a transparent plastic hat. Her mouth was down.
‘I don’t like to remind you,’ she said with a small sniff, ‘but when you’ve been champion at something, once, you don’t like to have to retire before you’re ready. You don’t like to have retirement forced upon you.’
‘You dance with plenty of others,’ pointed out her husband. ‘You’re never wanting for partners.’
He took her arm, as the bus drew up at the stop. He liked to think the descent from the bus might deflect her train of thought.
‘Not the same as having someone you can always rely on,’ retorted Joan, stepping recklessly into a puddle and soaking the toes that pudged through the straps of her golden sandals. ‘The last waltz, this evening. There was no one to do the last waltz with me, was there?’
‘I knew that’s what was getting you down.’ Henry was sympathetic. ‘Still, you had a lovely foxtrot, just before, you said.’
Home, glittering mackintoshes hung side by side in the narrow hall, Joan smoothed the skirt of her bulbous pink dress.
‘Only three months till the Christmas Ball,’ she said. ‘That should be a big do, if it’s anything like last year.’
‘Certain to be,’ agreed Henry, dread in his heart.
Joan straightened herself, punching the rhinestones on her bosom.
‘If we never went to anther dance, it wouldn’t make a mite of a difference to you,’ she shouted. ‘I shall have to think about a new dress.’ She knew the last suggestion, at least, would provoke her mild husband: he hated the very idea of anything new in the way of dresses.
‘That one’s very nice,’ he said, sadly scanning the mass of pink. ‘It’s always been my favourite.’
‘Huh! Not for a Christmas party.’
She paused, suddenly feeling all the despair of being wasted: all afternoon setting her hair, ironing her dress, doing her face, and for what? For a disappointing evening dancing with dull old men, and now this late-night confrontation with a husband who did not know the meaning of the word appreciation.
‘I wish you could try,’ she said.
Henry coughed. He longed to go to bed. After a dance, this was always a long ordeal, what with the ungluing of the false eyelashes, and the stuffing of tissue paper between each layer of the pink net. He tried to be patient.
‘There are some things a person can’t bring himself to do,’ he said. ‘But I do try in other ways, don’t I? To make up?’
Joan laughed nastily.
‘Lots of things you think I want. Bringing in the coal – I’d bring in the coal. Beating the doormat – I’d beat the doormat. Clearing out the bird – I’d … None of the things I really want. All I want is just the one thing. I’ll put the kettle on.’ She turned and stomped off down the passage to the kitchen.
Confused by the outburst, Henry followed Joan, watched from the door while she slammed mugs down on the table. The rhinestones on her bodice glittered at him like a swarm of angry red eyes, as she pirouetted to the fridge for milk and foxtrotted towards the sugar.
‘One day, perhaps, you’ll give some serious thought to what I’m saying.’
‘Oh, I will,’ said Henry, and the great mercy was that as his wife cha-cha’d towards the kettle, an idea came to him.
On the walls of the studio Fred Astaire danced with Ginger Rogers: huge, blown-up photographs, a little muzzy, for the cameras of those days were not quite up to the speed of their twirling. Henry stood in the middle of the bare floor marvelling at the sight of them. His hand closed more tightly on the small paper bag that held his lunch. He listened to the thirties music that oozed from a small grille high up in one of the walls. He half-closed his eyes, felt himself spinning as fluently as Fred Astaire … Wonderful. Joan, light in his arms, smiling up at him.
When Henry looked down, eyes fully open, he saw he had raised one leg, slightly, but had not moved an inch. Fearful that he should be caught in so foolish a position in the middle of the floor, he hastened to a chair at the side of the room and took out his sandwich. A moment later Madame Lucille entered. Madame Lucille was well into her sixties, but you could see at once she had been a famous dancer in her time – the bouncy walk that set the muscles of her calves twinkling up and down.
She made an impressive entrance for Henry alone, coming right up to him before she spoke. She had white-blonde hair and powdered wrinkles. Her multi-coloured dress clung everywhere.
‘Mr Cake?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr Cake.’
‘No trouble.’
Madame Lucille’s eyes jumped with great disdain to Henry’s sandwich.
‘Have you come here for your lunch, Mr Cake? Or to learn how to dance?’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry. You see, it’s my lunch hour. I thought a quick bite …’
‘I’m afraid we cannot entertain eating and drinking in the studios, Mr Cake, though I’ll close my eyes to it this once.’
‘Thank you.’
He slid the sandwich into the pocket of his mackintosh, and laid the mackintosh on the chair.
‘You’ll have to make your appointments after work. On your way home. I’m open till seven.’
‘I’m not sure I could work that in –’
‘It’s up to you. Now, shall we begin?’
Madame Lucille offered Mr Cake her hand, led him into the centre of
the studio.
‘What stage is it you’re at, Mr Cake? As a dancer?’
‘Oh, quite a beginner, I should say.’
‘Then we shall start at the beginning.’
Henry felt a freezing sensation in his legs. The flesh of his hand that Madame Lucille clasped in her warm little fingers had turned entirely to bone. Anything to put off the moment when she would urge him to move …
‘But my wife, she’s a champion,’ he said. ‘She won cups all over the Midlands before we married.’
‘My. Did she?’
‘That’s the trouble, really, with her being the champion. I didn’t think it would be, but it turned out to be.’
‘So you’re here secretly – a few lessons – to surprise her?’
‘How did you know?’
Madame Lucille smiled. ‘Thirty years of secret plotting husbands, Mr Cake. I can tell the look in their eyes. I’m the heroine of many confidences. I’ve sent so many on their waltzing way, happy. Thirty years.’
‘Oh.’ Henry inwardly marvelled, already happier at the prospect that he might be added to her list of successes.
‘Right. So, let’s get down to it, shall we? We begin like this. By relaxing.’ Her fingers loosened a little on his hand. ‘What I’m going to do is to ask you to shut your eyes, to hold up your head, as if you were sniffing something nice, like spring in the air, and then let yourself feel the blood flowing right down through your body and into your feet.’
And just how does blood flow through bone, Henry wondered. He watched as Madame Lucille, close beside him, shut her eyes and sniffed. She seemed to be all puffed up, somehow, in a way that he could not imagine he would be able to imitate. She opened her eyes and looked at his feet. He felt his toes wince in the privacy of his shoes.
‘So many beginners are frightened of their feet, Mr Cake. The first thing to learn is: they’re nothing to be afraid of. You must learn to feel they’re a part of you, at one with you. Not things you take off, like shoes.’
Madame Lucille had put into words something that Henry had suffered all the years of his marriage to Joan: fear of his feet. Now that the words had been said out loud he gave a small sigh of relief. The merest trace of courage quickened his stiff-boned body. He should have sought Madame Lucille’s help years ago …
‘Now, on with the dance,’ she was saying. ‘I think we’ll start with the waltz.’
‘My wife loves a waltz,’ said Henry. ‘The Blue Danube.’
That’s a fast waltz, Mr Cake. Lesson eight or nine, depending on progress. If you can be just a little bit patient…’
She took his hand again, and pointed her toe.
‘Still raining?’ asked Joan, when Henry arrived home.
‘Pouring.’
‘I haven’t been out, what with my hair.’
She patted the rollers. Henry had never been quite able to accustom himself to the sight of his wife in rollers, but knowing they were necessary to the dazzling pyramid she concocted for nights out, it was a feeling he kept to himself.
‘Anything untoward?’
Henry gave a small inward jump. Surely his face betrayed no trace of guilt?
‘That’s a funny word, for you.’
‘I heard it on the radio. It appealed to me. You know I like to adopt new words. You know what I am for extending my vocabulary.’
Henry laughed.
‘I love your sense of self-education,’ he said.
‘It’s you who should have more sense of self-education. In some areas, I mean. The arts. Who cares about gas?’ All their married life, Joan had scorned Henry’s job with the Gas Board. ‘There are some things any man who calls himself a man should know how to do.’
Henry sighed. ‘Come on, Joan.’
‘I’ve pressed your suit,’ she said, lips pursed.
‘What for?’
‘Tonight.’
‘What’s happening tonight?’
‘The do up at the Winter Gardens. Live band.’
‘But I thought there was nothing else on this week?’
‘Maybe it slipped my mind to tell you.’ She paused. ‘I could always go on my own, of course, if you didn’t fancy coming.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Henry snorted. She had never made such an outrageous suggestion before in her life.
‘I dare say I’d be all right. I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Well, I would. Letting my wife out alone at a glittering function.’
‘My age, I don’t suppose I’d be fighting off the rapists.’ She watched her husband stiffen. ‘It’s all over by midnight.’
‘There’s no question of it.’
‘It’s quite inhibiting, sometimes, knowing you’re there all the evening just watching.’
‘But I don’t watch with disapproval, do I? I’m happy to see you enjoying yourself. You know that.’
‘You’re always watching. I can feel your eyes right through my back.’
‘I’m sorry. There’s not much else I can do. Not much I have in common with dancing people … They all go there just to dance.’ Something in his voice diverted Joan’s attack.
‘I’ll take the entrance money out of the housekeeping if you like,’ she said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, love,’ said Henry. ‘I have the money.’
Some hours later Joan came downstairs in a foaming mass of lime tulle.
‘You must be mad, thinking I’d let you out alone looking like that,’ said Henry. Joan flipped his cheek with her lime glove.
‘Sometimes, you know, I dream you’re Henry Cake Astaire. Off we go, and when we get there you whirl me round all evening, keeping up the compliments in my ear!’
‘Ah,’ replied Henry, the bony feeling stiffening his limbs again. ‘I’ve filled the log basket, laid the breakfast.’
In Joan’s eyes he saw a sneer that pierced his heart. ‘Come on, Fred,’ she said.
To Henry, one dance hall was much like another. Each glittering function, as he had learned to call it, was identical in its crowd of elderly, over-dressed dancers dizzying their way about the floor to the old tunes of a tired band. He failed to see the glamour that enchanted his wife. Her eyes, as usual on arrival, swept about the place with an anticipation out of all proportion to the occasion, so thought Henry, privately. He suggested a drink.
‘I haven’t come here to drink,’ snapped Joan.
‘No need to look so frantic,’ returned Henry.
Two nights out running and he found his normal reserves of understanding severely tried.
‘I’m not looking frantic! And I wish you’d sit down somewhere, Henry. Nowhere near the dance floor.’
Her eyes swerved from her husband to a middle-aged man with crinkly hair who was approaching.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Henry. ‘Here’s Romeo.’
‘May I have the pleasure?’ the man asked Joan, for all the world as if Henry did not exist.
‘Why, Jock,’ smiled Joan warmly, ‘I do believe we meet again.’
Henry watched them glide away, merge with the dancers, sway easily together, their feet in perfect harmony. He watched the crinkle-haired man, Jock, look down on his wife’s careful curls, and smile. He remembered Madame Lucille’s words at the end of that first, difficult lesson. He was plainly not a born dancer, she said. But with a lot of practice, maybe …
Henry took her advice and changed to longer lessons after work. At first, his progress was definitely slow. But in the fifth week he felt for the first time some small sense of achievement, when Madame Lucille accorded him her first praise.
‘There’s really a breakthrough, this evening, Mr Cake,’ she said. ‘We’re really getting somewhere, now, don’t you feel?’
‘If you say so.’
‘How about one more turn?’ She fluttered her lashes.
‘No. Really. I must be getting back. My wife’ll be wondering.’
‘Of course. Well, there’s Thursday to look forward to, isn’t there? I thought we might try a quickstep,
Thursday. I think we should try to race ahead a little if you’re going to be ready for the Christmas Ball.’
The Christmas Ball. Just seven weeks to go, the evening Henry had planned for his surprise. He hurried home, noticing with alarm the time. It went so quickly, dancing.
He arrived almost an hour late, somewhat flustered. At first, it didn’t seem as if Joan had noticed.
‘Do you know what a sissoo is?’ she asked.
‘No. Why? Should I?’ He wondered if it was a guilty man.
‘It’s a valuable Indian timber tree.’
‘Is it really? That’s most interesting.’
Joan dug a fierce needle into a froth of chiffon, a pink that hurt Henry’s eyes.
‘I learned that today. Some magazine. I like to pick things up.’
‘That’s good.’ Henry sighed. He could see the way things were going.
‘I like to try, you see. To extend my accomplishments. Which is more than can be said for some of us.’ She paused, took a pin from her mouth, leaned across the table, crushing the silk. ‘And why are we so late tonight, Henry Cake?’
Henry glanced at the clock on the wall to give himself time.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The traffic. Terrible jams.’
‘Forty-five minutes to be precise. Am I to believe there have been traffic jams every Tuesday and Thursday for the last five weeks, Henry?’
‘Very curious, I must say – ’
‘Very curious indeed. Very curious, too, that you’re such a bad liar. If you’d been more clever you wouldn’t have met her on such regular nights. You’d have jumbled them up – ’
‘Met who?’
‘Whoever she is. I don’t know.’
Joan dug her needle more fiercely into the material. Henry heard himself laughing.
‘You mean, you think I’m meeting a woman, having an association, just because of a few traffic jams? Oh, Joan. Oh, love. Would I ever? Have I ever looked at another woman?’