Death of a Dancer

by Anthony Litton

  The fifth was startlingly, almost shockingly, modern and would, he knew, not be out of place in the repertoire of the edgiest of modern dance companies. Dressed simply in a style that was the fashion of the day, she moved across the stage in a series of seemingly disconnected steps in shoes obviously soled and heeled with metal studs. These gave each of her steps a hard, crisp edge, totally in keeping with rigid almost brittle, movements that somehow carried the watchers into the tough, unforgiving, almost brutal world, conjured up by the clashing, discordant music. Uncannily, and in complete contrast to her earlier vulnerability, she was totally at one in this strange, cruel world. Far from being cowed, she conveyed not only ‘oneness’ with the harsh environment, but also her mastery of it. Calderwood saw, as he watched her almost strut across the stage, that, besides being a consummate dancer, she also possessed great acting talent.

  It was the sixth performance, however, that had caught the breath in all their throats. In each of the preceding five, the little dancer had been totally absorbed in the demands of the dance. When fire was needed, she projected fire, when a soft gentleness was called for, she provided it with heartbreaking simplicity and deceptive ease; whatever was needed, she provided, with a total unawareness of the camera catching her every move, her every expression.

  All that changed in the sixth and final dance from which, they realised, both the disfigured photographs originated.

  She was dressed in the simple white shift shot through with the faintest of silvery tints, that both concealed and enhanced her slim figure with each exquisite movement. Her hair swirled around her head, framing itself into a halo of black-fire and, unlike the previous dances, every step, every movement of her body, was done without her once taking her eyes from the camera. The dance itself possessed an innocent sensuality, but so underscored was it by an ageless eroticism evoked in all her movements and in every expression, that it could – should – be a dance performed for a lover.

  Calderwood suddenly realised that that was exactly what it was. She didn’t need to imagine anyone; it was clear that she was physically looking at him; clear that whoever was behind the camera, was her lover; but the crucial question still remained unanswered – who was he?

  Chapter 30

  Gwilym was thoroughly enjoying himself, and happily expected to enjoy himself even more in the following few minutes. He and Desmond had joined Mollie and Eleanor for afternoon tea and she had just asked her son for a favour.

  ‘So what do you think, dear?’ she was asking her silent son. ‘The funds brought in would boost the charity just when we need it most! Could you put something on, if not for Christmas, then for Easter?’

  Gwilym, knowing how his partner detested working with amateurs, turned gleefully to watch his face as he either refused outright or wriggled a bit and then said ‘no’.

  ‘Good idea, Mum, I’d be delighted to do something,’ Desmond replied immediately, completely ruining his partner’s enjoyment; which, of course, had been his intention, as his smile to Gwilym made very clear.

  Bastard, the Welshman thought glumly, his fun spoilt.

  ‘And of course, Gwilym would love to help too, wouldn’t you, Gwilym?’ Desmond added, guilelessly.

  ‘Absolutely,’ his partner agreed, now cornered himself.

  ‘Marvellous! Thank you both so much!’ Eleanor smiled. She’d been by no means certain that her volatile son would agree, so she moved swiftly on before he could change his mind. ‘Now, Mollie’s got some news for you both,’ she said, handing them each a second coffee.

  The two men had been intrigued when Eleanor had phoned earlier and, saying Mollie was up again for a short visit, asked them to come over to The Plovers later. Duly summoned, they’d come over and, having enjoyed a leisurely afternoon tea chatting about local events and mutual acquaintances, they now turned their attention to their elderly friend.

  ‘I’m moving back into the village,’ Mollie said, beaming happily.

  ‘That’s wonderful, Mollie! When? Why? Where will you live?’ asked Desmond getting up and hugging her small, plump form, as he and Gwilym both congratulated her.

  ‘When – soon, your mother has kindly offered to put me up until I can move in. And as for why, well, there are two reasons, really. Jolyon has just been appointed ambassador to one of the ’Stans in central Asia and is leaving soon, and the twins are now both almost grown up and have just gone up to university.’

  ‘Getting up to all sorts then!’ smiled Desmond.

  ‘I certainly hope so!’ rejoined Mollie, a firm believer in experiencing everything that life had to offer. ‘They’re the right age for it. Cassandra’s one is certainly planning to do so when she goes up next year,’ she added, being privy to her granddaughter’s plans to an extent her mother most certainly wasn’t.

  ‘They’ll certainly have the energy for it,’ laughed Gwilym, recalling his and Desmond’s early days, when they could party all night and yet still work incredibly hard during the day, building up their theatrical business.

  ‘Indeed!’ Mollie laughed, recalling her own youth. ‘Mind you, some of that energy will be spent working in their part-time jobs.’

  ‘Jobs?’ queried Desmond, taken aback. He well knew that the family were more than wealthy enough to give her grandsons very handsome allowances.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mollie replied with a decisive nod. ‘We were very clear that they’d not be allowed to be a pair of rich kids, steeped in money when many of their potential friends were almost flat broke. Well, Jolyon and I were, Caroline, less so, but then she’d know little better,’ she added, with a wicked little smile, enjoying the swipe at her daughter-in-law. ‘We’ve seen too many go that way. It’s always been the same. Where children are pampered too young, allowed to idle about on too much money, there’s usually trouble. That friend of yours you were talking about earlier, is a case in point,’ she added.

  ‘Who?’ Desmond asked, bewildered. ‘Oh – Estelle, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, the Honourable Mrs Rupert Carradine, or Miss DeLancy as she was. You remember, the stories, Eleanor, surely?’ she added, turning to her friend for confirmation.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Eleanor responded, ‘perhaps vaguely,’ she added, smiling at her friend’s look of outrage.

  ‘Eleanor, I despair of you, I really do! What’s the point of knowing everything about virtually everyone in the whole county and then not talking about it!’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew her!’ Gwilym said, in surprise, joining in the laughter at Mollie’s heartfelt sally.

  ‘I didn’t, only in passing,’ she responded. ‘It was the Carradine family I knew. They were very much against the marriage. There was a period, in fact, when it looked that it might not go ahead at all.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, before she married Rupert, the year before the scandal, fortunately for her, there were strong rumours that she and one of her cousins had become very close; too close, to put it no higher; and after the marriage, too, come to that,’ she added.

  ‘Which cousin?’ asked Desmond, entranced.

  ‘I don’t know, but it was certainly gossiped about at the time.’

  Bugger! thought Desmond. I wish I’d known that the other day.

  Chapter 31

  ‘Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Bernard is the second reason we’re moving back up here. He wants to retire!’ Mollie said in mock indignation.

  ‘Good Lord! I thought he’d go on for ever!’ Gwilym said in surprise.

  ‘So did he, so did we, but he’s been told that the eye trouble he’s been having on and off for a couple of years, is set to get worse and he’ll be virtually blind within a year or so,’ she said, real sadness in her voice.

  Having been driven by Mollie’s elderly chauffeur on a few occasions, Desmond wondered if the affliction hadn’t already occurred some years previously; sensibly, however, he kept quiet.

  ‘As you know,’ Mollie continued, ‘his daughter lives near here and she’s insisted he
go and live with her. He’s flatly refused, but does want to see as much of his three grandchildren as he can, before his sight goes completely.’

  ‘So where will he live?’ asked Desmond, concerned. He’d known the elderly man for over forty years and, despite his driving, was very fond of him.

  ‘Why, with me and Evelyn, of course!’ responded Mollie in genuine surprise. ‘It would kill him to go and live with someone else, be beholden to them for the roof over his head,’ she added, oblivious, Desmond thought, to the fact that the old man would be equally beholden to her. As oblivious, he knew, as the old man himself would be. Neither he nor Gwilym had ever worked out the dynamic that existed between the three elderly people. Notionally, Bernard, as her chauffeur, and Evelyn, as her companion, were both servants of Mollie’s, but somehow the trio had always seemed more like old friends.

  ‘He’s going to live with his daughter, but only for a week or two, until we all move,’ Mollie continued. ‘There’s a small cottage in the gardens and we’ll convert the ground floor for him. He says it’ll give him time to get to know the garden layout. He’s got plans of being the gardener when he has to stop driving, though God help the plants!’ she laughed. ‘And what makes it absolutely perfect,’ she added happily, ‘is that I’ll be moving back to my old home, The Cedars!’ she added, her broad smile showing her pleasure.

  ‘Good Lord! Are the Dennisons selling up?’ asked Desmond in surprise. ‘They seemed well settled when we were chatting at their party.’

  ‘They were,’ interposed Eleanor, smiling, ‘until Gwendolyn’s health deteriorated and General Dennison was able to get most of her dogs re-homed. So, in his words, “now we’ve got rid of those blasted canines”, they can downsize, and move nearer to their eldest son and daughter-in-law. But they’re not selling, dear,’ she added after a moment’s pause. ‘They only leased it.’

  ‘Who from?’ asked Desmond, casually.

  ‘The Fidelis Group,’ she added, after another moment’s pause.

  ‘Fidelis! That’s the same lot who leased me the pub last year!’ ejaculated Gwilym in surprise.

  ‘So it is,’ agreed his partner, equally taken aback. ‘I wonder if they own much more in the village? Ian will not be pleased if they do; it would get right up his nose!’ he added, smiling happily at the thought of his much disliked cousin’s annoyance. He stopped suddenly, as a more worrying thought struck him and he turned to his mother. ‘How do you feel Mum, about an outsider owning such important parts of the village?’ he asked, knowing Eleanor’s lifelong work in and for the two villages that, along with almost 10,000 acres, had belonged to her family for nearly 600 years. She and his father, had, he knew, bought what property they could afford, as and when it came onto the market, but it had usually been the smaller, less expensive cottages.

  ‘I’d feel very concerned, darling, naturally,’ she replied, ‘but, you see – I own Fidelis.’

  Chapter 32

  ‘You!’ ejaculated Gwilym.

  ‘Good God!’ The pub and The Cedars alone, must be worth a fortune!’ said Desmond.

  ‘They’re certainly worth considerably more than when your father and I bought them,’ agreed Eleanor, calmly and with immense satisfaction.

  ‘But I thought you and Dad had only bought a few small houses over the years, certainly nothing on this scale! And the others are in your own names, so why put these into an anonymous holding company?’

  ‘Not that it’s anything to do with us,’ murmured Gwilym.

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ Desmond murmured in turn, having briefly hovered over using the phrase ‘be buggered if it isn’t’.

  ‘I am intrigued, though, why you didn’t mention it when we heard that the pub was likely to go under,’ his partner probed gently. ‘Was it so we’d not be influenced into taking it, just to help the village?’ he continued, knowing Eleanor almost as well as did her own son.

  She nodded. ‘Precisely that, Gwilym. I was desperately worried, of course, about it closing, and the village losing such a central feature, but you both seemed so settled in your London life that I didn’t want to intrude, particularly knowing how fond you’d always been of the old place.’

  The Welshman nodded. He’d lived in the Rose and Sceptre as a boy when his parents were the licensees, which they’d eventually been for well over thirty-five years, until his father had died ten years previously. His mother had then returned to her native Wales; much, it had to be said, to Desmond’s delight as he couldn’t stand the woman, who he privately called ‘the Welsh witch’.

  ‘As you know, since your parents retired, there’d been several tenants, some good, some indifferent, but, unlike them, none were up to the job of running such a unique place,’ Eleanor added.

  The two men nodded. The Rose and Sceptre – or as some of the oldest locals stubbornly called it, The Dog and Witch, for reasons lost in antiquity – was a challenge to run profitably. Partly it was because of its age and, like much else in the village, being a listed building, it was expensive to maintain. Additionally, the village’s very isolation and small size meant that the business relied heavily on people being willing to travel fair distances to enjoy its offerings; of which there’d been precious few since Gwilym’s parents, who’d well understood that basic fact of running such a business.

  ‘So you can imagine when you spoke to me about possibly returning here to live, it seemed like a miracle!’ Eleanor continued.

  The two men were silent for a moment, as they reflected on their reasons for leaving a life they’d long loved in London. The death of Eleanor’s husband a few weeks previously and Gwilym’s recovery from a severe nervous breakdown, his second, had unsettled them both. The sudden vacancy of the pub seemed a sign to both of them and, surprisingly easily, they’d made their decision to come home. This was despite Desmond’s flat assertion as a not quite twenty-year-old, that the only way he’d return permanently was in a box for burial in the family plot.

  ‘As for why we put some into an anonymous trust, it was because Ian was turning a little spiteful,’ his mother added.

  ‘He’s always been spiteful; he’s a dreadful little oik and an appalling squire for the villages,’ added Desmond, never a fan of his cousin. Mollie nodded, she herself had taken a dislike to Ian Blaine, Eleanor’s nephew, when he was a small boy and had never found any reason to change her opinion.

  ‘Yes, and when he found your father and I were buying up some of the property that he was selling off, he flatly refused to let us make even an offer, whenever he’d needed to sell off yet more of the estate,’ Eleanor replied, rare anger in her voice.

  ‘He shouldn’t be selling any,’ Desmond remarked. ‘Not without the Trust’s say so and even then, only within whatever the terms of its remit are.’

  Eleanor nodded, ‘I agree, but, as you know, the Trust was badly drawn up and is little or no curb on him; that’s why I resigned as a trustee. I felt it best to have no part in its affairs; that it would be better to do what I could from a distance and have no involvement with it,’ she ended.

  ‘No involvement? I thought Joeby Carter took your place?’ remarked Desmond innocently, well aware that the elderly farmer had been a crony and firm ally of his mother for many years and had never been known to do anything of which she disapproved.

  Eleanor, other than shooting him an amused glance, ignored the remark. ‘As we’re speaking of Fidelis, there’s one more thing you should both know. As you’d expect, my ordinary will splits everything equally between you, Desmond and your sister. I have, however, excluded Fidelis, which is the largest part of my estate, from this. Don’t look so uncomfortable, Desmond. I’ve no plans to go, just yet!’ she added humorously, as she saw her son’s momentary flash of panic. ‘It does no harm, however, to be prepared. As I say, Fidelis is excluded from that provision – and is left entirely to you two.’

  ‘Us! Why us?’ asked Gwilym, thunderstruck.

  ‘For two reasons, Gwilym. The first, obviously, is that I wa
nted to leave something in my will which showed how much you, yourself, meant to Richard and me. The second is that we couldn’t have bought some of the more expensive properties, or some of the land purchases, without the allowance that you gave us. I told you both at the time that we didn’t need it. On one level that was true; our shops and investments, plus the remainder of the money my father left me, were more than sufficient for our day to day needs. What we didn’t have was money to purchase outright, desirable and expensive properties important to the village, like The Cedars, The Rose and others.’

  ‘Was there anything that came up that you weren’t able to afford?’ Desmond asked quietly.

  ‘No, nothing,’ she replied, knowing full well what he would say next had there been. ‘There were two or three that we didn’t have the full purchase price for in cash, but it was a simple matter to raise mortgages against some of our other properties as security, so that was fine,’ she added lightly.

  ‘That money was to make life easier for you both, so you could both start to wind down a bit. We should have known better!’ Desmond sighed. ‘If you tell us which mortgages are still outstanding, we’ll pay them off,’ he added, matter of factly. ‘After all,’ he continued humorously, heading off his mother’s protest, ‘it’s the least we can do. It’s protecting the value of our inheritance!’

  *

  Calderwood was tired. Despite it approaching midnight, he’d been home, in his large, modern flat, for scarcely thirty minutes. Meticulously neat, he’d spent a few of those minutes tidying his bathroom after a shower and he was just settling down with a large drink and a much anticipated DVD of the ballet La Bayadère, when his official mobile rang.