At about ten o’clock Bruno announced, ‘Some of us have to work tomorrow—I’m off for a bath.’
Vi, who wanted to talk more to Edwin, said, ‘I’ll come soon.’
Twenty minutes later Bruno put his head round the door. ‘Are you coming to bed?’
‘In a bit,’ Vi said.
Bruno left, not quite closing the door. Edwin got up, closed it, opened another bottle of wine and refilled their glasses.
‘Ed…’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know, really…’
‘I do,’ Edwin suggested.
‘You’re frightened of him.’
Vi had a sensation of being slapped across the face. ‘Am I?’
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ She was annoyed: to be frightened seemed humiliating. ‘Bruno can be kindness itself.’ She was conscious that this was a desperate comment.
‘No one kinder—provided you meet him on his own terms.’
‘What do you mean?’
Edwin shrugged.
‘Ed?’
‘There is a “kindness” which shuts up leopards for their protection in narrow cages.’
There was something almost thrilling in this. ‘I’m hardly a leopard.’
‘You know best.’
‘Why d’you say that I am?’ Now that the idea had been raised she did not like its being dropped too readily.
‘He calls you “pet” and “lamb”, doesn’t he?’
Vi flushed. ‘They’re terms of affection.’
‘They hardly seem to fit.’
‘I like lambs.’
‘Who doesn’t? But if you don’t mind me saying so you are not much like one. Not at all lamb-like.’ He looked at her unblinkingly with his odd eyes.
There was a pause in which Vi had a sense that something might happen. What did happen was that Bruno reappeared at the living room door.
‘What’s going on here, a meeting of minds?’
‘We’ve been discussing Ariel, me and Ed.’
‘Edwin and I. Are you going to bed, Edwin?’
Edwin waited, apparently to see if Bruno had more, and then said, ‘Any second now, Bruno.’
Bruno stared at the two of them. Vi said nothing. She was calculating whether or not he had overheard.
‘Well, well,’ Bruno said finally. ‘Well, well, well.’
‘I’m going to do the washing up,’ Vi said, hoping that her feeling of panic was not apparent to either man.
Two nights later, Bruno rolled towards her in the darkness. ‘Shall we get married, pet?’
‘Goodness.’
‘That’s not a very gracious response.’
Be careful, said a voice.
‘I’m just taken aback.’
‘I wanted to marry you the moment I saw you.’
‘Why?’
‘When I was a boy I had a secret companion who went everywhere with me. I knew you the moment I set eyes on you.’
‘What was this companion called?’
You’re not going to believe this, said the voice.
‘Guess.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Violet. A violet by a mossy stone…’
Oh really! said the voice.
Vi said, ‘But I annoy you. I’m always annoying you.’
A police car shrieked past close by. Then there was one of the odd silences which can fall suddenly, even in London.
‘You’re a nuisance.’ Bruno patted her bottom. ‘But you have a nice arse. Never fuck a woman with a big arse.’
Vi squirmed around so that he was lying behind her and pushed her bottom into his belly. ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow.’
You’d better, said the voice.
21
Dark purplish clouds were amassing high in the sky, as if, but not in fact, reflecting the darkening water. Vi found Annie’s shoes in the wardrobe and went down to the King Edward Lounge. Fewer people than usual had collected for tea but among them she saw Baz and Martha, holding hands.
Baz beckoned. ‘Come and join us for tea.’
‘I’m here for the dancing.’
‘Brave lady!’
‘I learned the cha-cha-cha this morning so I’m keen to put it into practice.’
Martha said, ‘I wouldn’t mind a dance.’
Baz pulled a face.
‘Balthazar Lincoln, you always do that. You danced at our wedding. I have pictures.’
‘That was a million years ago.’
Vi said, ‘I picked it up quite easily and if you know the steps already…’
‘Martha was the three-times jive champion of Kansas City when I met her.’
‘Me and Bobby Crawshaw.’
‘I’m a horrible disappointment after Bobby Crawshaw. Her mother told her we had rhythm.’
‘Baz! She never did.’
‘She thought it though. You can’t deny it.’
Martha said there was no doing anything with him and Baz said she might as well accept that he was a lost cause and have done.
‘Lost cause for what?’ Martha smiled admiringly at her husband.
‘Dancing anyway,’ Vi said. She was pleased she could still be pleased to see a couple happy and this made her like them more. ‘I should dump him, Martha. That’s my dance teacher, Dino, coming over. He’ll dance with you. He dances like Fred Astaire.’
‘That I can not resist.’
‘Look, he’s even Fred Astaire’s shape.’
Vi, watching Martha, in the arms of Dino, being swung expertly around the tilting floor, said, ‘Baz, do you remember I mentioned someone I knew who had studied African religion?’
‘Sure. May I pour you some tea?’
‘Thanks. Milk, please, no sugar. He had a—a purse, I suppose you’d call it, made out of a bat’s wing and feathers of some sort, I don’t know what exactly. He said it had the power to keep the soul of anyone who loved the owner.’
‘I’ve not heard of that one. It sounds like one of the dodgier elements of Vodun.’
‘Yes, it was supposed to be Voodoo, sorry, I mean Vodun.’
‘It’s not my area. But there are, or were, some spooky aspects to Vodun. Of course, this always gets grossly exaggerated in the popular imagination.’
‘How does it work, would you say?’
‘Suggestion.’ Baz helped himself to a cucumber sandwich. ‘The power of suggestion. A much underrated power. You know, I never get over my love of cucumber sandwiches. I think of them as quintessentially English but none of my London colleagues ever ate them except at our house. Martha says they would have much preferred her brownies.’
Vi didn’t quite know what was happening but she knew she was scared. Her heart was not exactly banging but it seemed to be giving out a low juddering moan, not unlike the sound which had issued from the chain on the bicycle that she jettisoned in Cambridge. It seemed also to be hurting in her chest. Extraordinary that the heart—if it was the heart—really did that.
‘They aren’t that good,’ she said miserably. She and Bruno were walking, more like marching, home from the park. Bruno had instigated a fitness regime which entailed walks after meals. ‘I didn’t say anything about it because I was sure they would turn them down and then you’d be cross.’ It was one of the notable things about him, his habit of getting cross on her behalf.
‘You should have told me.’
They were crossing Moscow Road by St Sophia’s, the Greek Orthodox church. Traffic had been diverted from the Bayswater Road and a stream of vehicles thundered past, among them a large truck carrying McVitie digestive biscuits. A vision of putting an end to all this by stepping out in front of the biscuit lorry flashed across Vi’s mind.
‘You should have told me,’ Bruno said again. ‘I am a poet too after all.’
‘Yes,’ Vi agreed. She didn’t see the relevance of this but what could be gained by questioning it? As people do when feeling hopeless, she repeated herself. ‘They aren’t that good, the poems.’
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I didn’t think, that’s all. It wasn’t directed against you. I just did it.’
‘But you should have done. You should have thought. What do you think I feel not knowing that you are to have your poems published by the publishing house where I’m to be published too?’
How could I know that? she thought. You never told me. And the editor is not a ‘personal friend’of yours, he’s an acquaintance of Tessa Carfield’s cousin.
‘I have to ask why you have done this.’ Now he had turned into an investigative journalist or policeman. ‘You of all people.’
‘Listen,’ she said again. ‘I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean to make you angry.’
‘I’m not angry.’
Clearly that was not the case. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, then.’
‘I’m not hurt.’
They had reached the flat and were up the stairs and in the kitchen before she spoke again. ‘I was going to talk to you about the book.’ She lit the gas, clumsily filling the kettle. ‘Bruno, please.’
‘Yes, Vi?’
‘Don’t be like this.’
‘How do you expect me to be?’
‘Not like this.’
‘I wasn’t aware that you had the right to dictate my responses.’
‘Of course not, but…’
‘Vi, you must act as you choose. But if you choose to act in certain ways there are going to be consequences.’ He seemed to have metamorphosed into counsel for the prosecution. ‘You’re an adult woman, you know that.’
Vi who did not feel at all adult at that moment—in fact quite the opposite—tried her hardest not to cry. Desperate to smoke but unable to lay her hands for the moment on the matches, she lit a cigarette from the gas ring so that her hair caught in the flame and flared up dangerously. Bruno stood there, watching her rinse it under the cold tap.
Sink or swim, remarked the voice.
‘Bruno…’
‘You smoke too much.’
‘Bruno…’
‘Yes?’ The prosecuting counsel had been promoted to a high court judge, about to pronounce sentence.
‘Please let’s not quarrel.’
The judge’s face wavered, decomposed and then reorganised itself into an interrogation officer, who looked into Vi’s face with terrifying calm. ‘I have no idea what you mean.’
‘I mean this.’
‘This is not a quarrel, Vi. It’s a statement of feeling.’
Bereft of words she stood there, water from her wet hair running into the tears which dripped from her chin.
‘Please don’t manipulate me, Vi,’ said the interrogation officer. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger. ‘You know how I dislike tears.’
‘But of course I’m upset to have upset you.’
Don’t grovel, said the voice.
‘Then why do it?’
‘Why do what?’ The kitchen smelled horribly of singed hair.
‘Upset me. You know what you are doing.’
She didn’t. Or rather she did, but she didn’t know why it mattered. No, that wasn’t true either. She understood that it mattered but for reasons that would not have mattered to her, and this frightened her. Ed was right.
‘I love you,’ she announced bleakly.
Fool! said the voice.
‘And I love you, Vi.’ Bruno’s face had shifted fractionally from interrogation officer to dispassionate surgeon.
Liars, both of you, remarked the voice.
‘So, if we love each other…?’ Vi had gone across and was squeezing his shoulder.
He placed a big enfolding hand over the crown of her head. ‘Poor hair…’
‘Do you still want us to marry?’
‘My violet by a mossy stone.’
Blinking idiot, you mean, the voice said. It sounded more weary than accusing.
22
As Vi was leaving the King Edward Lounge, Des caught her at the door. ‘You never danced, Mrs Hetherington.’
‘I’m sorry, Dino. I was talking to Doctor Lincoln.’
‘While I danced with his lovely wife.’
‘She told me to tell you that you’re a neat dancer. You’ll have had a much better time with her. She seemed to know all the steps.’
‘She is a very good dancer. But you will be a very good dancer too, Mrs Hetherington, with practice. Believe me, I know. I hope you will come to the ball tonight.’
‘When is it and where?’
‘In the Queen Victoria Salon, Deck Eight, nine till midnight. You may want heels, though maybe not if it gets any rougher.’
‘I’ll do my level best to rise to heels.’
When she returned to her room a bowl of crystallised ginger was on the desk, with a note propped against it: Madam, for see sickness.
As far as Vi was aware she had never in her life suffered from seasickness but she was grateful for the ginger. Her mother had liked ginger and consequently it was another thing her father would never have in the house. Vi had often bought her mother chocolate ginger for her birthday, August the second, the day after they were to dock in New York. She tried to open the doors to the balcony but they blew back in her face so that she had to lean all her weight against them to force them to open.
White spume was riding crazily along the tops of racing waves below and gobbets of foam were being thrown about pell-mell by a wind sweeping the face of the water with the long arm of an angry demon. She dragged over a chair to prop open the doors.
‘It’s your life,’ Edwin said. They were in the park. Cleopatra was sniffing round the roots of the horse chestnut down from which occasional conkers were plummeting softly to the grass. Edwin picked up a couple, still half encased in their pithy green armour. He peeled away the spiked overcoats and extracted the gleaming mahogany conkers, balancing them on his palm.
‘They’re like us,’ Vi said. ‘Immaculate and beautiful and shining in glory when they emerge but very quickly dulled.’
‘In my day these would have been baked in the oven to be strung on strings for lethal battles. Boys are no longer boys.’
‘The world is going to the dogs.’
‘Speaking of which, if fair was fair, which we know it never is, you would dedicate your book to Cleopatra, not to me.’
Cleopatra who had found a molehill was exploring it busily but not too effectively.
‘I would never have written a line but for you, Ed.’
‘You would so.’
‘No, you have to accept that. You and my mother made me write.’
‘Then you should dedicate the book to her.’
‘She’s dead,’ Vi said. She tossed a conker high into the bright autumnal sky and caught it in one hand. Conkers always reminded her of the silky heads of newborn babies. She tossed the conker up again, in an arc over her head, and caught it, like a novice juggler, not quite ambidextrously, in her left hand. ‘Anyway that would upset my father. He can’t bear for her to be mentioned.’
‘And this won’t upset Bruno?’
‘I can’t dedicate the book to Bruno.’
‘Is that why you are marrying him?’ He looked at her in his quizzical unblinking way.
‘I love him.’
Nonsense, said the voice.
‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Edwin said. ‘I am no expert and I am quite certain I don’t understand love, especially not love between a man and a woman. But who says you have to marry someone because you love them?’
‘Bruno’s seemed to want it.’
‘And that’s a good enough reason?’
Of course it isn’t, said the voice.
‘I can’t put it off now. It’s all planned.’
�
��What is planned? A brief registry office performance somewhere in the Marylebone Road, with me and Tessa Carfield as witnesses and lunch after. It’s hardly holy writ. I bet the lunch hasn’t even been booked.’ Vi whose job it was to arrange the wedding breakfast looked guilty. ‘It hasn’t been, has it?’
‘But you’ve come down specially.’
‘For God’s sake, Vi. I can go away again. You cannot make my presence in London a reason for marrying.’
Listen to him, said the voice.
‘I thought Bruno was your oldest friend,’ Vi said.
The wind was working up a plaintive howl. Vi opened her notebook and took out the small card with the picture of violets on it. ‘To my Violet by a mossy stone.’ She tore the card into very small pieces and threw them overboard. A shred of violet blew back on to the balcony. She took it inside and burned it in an ashtray. Then she read the poem which she had written, in Edwin’s dressing gown, in the draughty bathroom of that old flat. A flat now worth several hundred thousand pounds. She had driven past the house, done up in an extraordinary candy pink, quite recently. But even the vast shift in the flat’s monetary value did not come near to the distance she felt from the girl who had written the poem. She had no idea any longer whether the poem was any good. The best of it was the opening line that she had stolen from Shakespeare: Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish.
Antony, at the close of his life, contemplating his love for Cleopatra, who has deceived him, fatally; contemplating the mutability of love, the mutability of everything apprehended by human consciousness with its power to affect the shape of reality, its aptitude for perceiving the reflection of its own desire and not what is really there.
But what is really there? she called out, in the face of the demon wind, to the unanswering, unanswerable sea.
In the wardrobe, beneath the line of hanging frocks, stood a pair of shoes with heels a good six inches high. Vi put them on and appraised her lengthened image in the mirror. Annie would approve. It was thanks to Annie, who had insisted on supervising her packing, that she had packed them at all. There was also Annie’s old silver strapless ball gown, passed on to Vi when it no longer fitted Annie and never yet worn. That would do nicely with Ted’s diamond. But the diamond was in the safe where Renato had locked away her rings and she hadn’t bothered to ask him for the number. She rang the steward’s line and getting no response left a message.
Dancing Backwards Page 13