The Ballroom Class

by Lucy Dillon

  CONTENTS

  The Ballroom Class

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  The Ballroom Class

  Lucy Dillon

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette Livre UK company

  Copyright © Lucy Dillon 2008

  The right of Lucy Dillon to be identified as the Author

  of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

  in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without

  the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in

  any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and

  without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 9781444712438

  Book ISBN 9780340933954

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For my mother, and her lovely dancer’s legs,

  that I wish I’d inherited.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Mrs Cowper, for the first tap lessons, and to Diana Wykes, for turning four left feet into something approaching two matching pairs.

  I’m indebted to Carolyn Mays and Isobel Akenhead for their help and encouragement, and to Lizzy Kremer, for pretty much everything, really. Most of all, thanks to my own Fred Astaire, who made the ultimate sacrifice and learned to cha-cha. Greater love hath no man.

  Angelica Andrews, British Open Ballroom Dancing Champion 1974, 76–78, British Ten-Dance Champion 1977, and European Ballroom finalist more times than she cared to remember, did not do rusty keys or locks.

  Even without her beaded dance dresses and flicked cat’s eye liner, Angelica wasn’t the sort of lady who needed to open any door for herself. A man usually got there first, rushing to get it, so she could sweep through. However, there was no man around today, and the key she was grappling with didn’t just open a peeling door, it opened her entire monochrome childhood, before she could dance, before she was beautiful, before she was even ‘Angelica’.

  This wasn’t something she wanted company for, so she gritted her teeth in solitary majesty and jiggled the rusty lock to the Longhampton Memorial Hall.

  ‘Damn!’ she hissed, as one crimson nail split with the effort. According to Mrs Higham, who might well have been one of the Memorial Hall’s original 1921 board of trustees, there was ‘a knack’ to it. The ‘knack’ itself was not explained to her. Mrs Higham handed over the key with an air of suspicion, despite the fact that not only had Angelica got full permission to teach a class the following evening, but she distinctly remembered Mrs Higham from her own lessons there, fifty years ago, when she came to collect her bat-eared daughter, Vanessa. Mrs Higham had seemed pretty suspicious, even then.

  ‘I see you’re back, Angela,’ she’d said, as Angelica signed the book, with a grim satisfaction that suggested she’d been waiting thirty years to say it.

  Angelica made sure she signed Angelica Andrews, not Angela Clarke. She was back, but she wasn’t that back.

  With a final shove that put a fine layer of dirt on her wool jacket, she pushed open the Hall’s heavy front door and stepped into the tiled vestibule. Nothing had changed. She’d been here a few times since she moved back to Longhampton, for Friday night dances, but then the place had been filled with bodies, modern bodies fixing it firmly in the present. Now she was here alone, it felt like stepping back in time, with her own past drumming its fingers, waiting for her in the ballroom inside, some of it in crisp black and white, some in high eighties’ gloss.

  Angelica’s eyes closed, and she breathed in a smell that sent her rushing back into the sixties, the fifties: beeswax polish and wood panelling, and decades of dust tramped in from the streets. There’d always been something about the Memorial Hall that made Angelica feel you could slip back in time, if you turned down the lights and put on the right kind of slow waltz music.

  Like now, she thought, letting her ears pick up the faint clanks of the ancient plumbing. You could almost feel the brush of satin skirts swishing past in the dark, each creak of the wooden rafters a gentleman’s excuse me echoing back from the drab thirties.

  Angelica opened her eyes, and looked slowly round at the oak plaques commemorating Longhampton’s war dead, the carved finials, and painted friezes of Morris dancers and ballroom ladies in gossamer dresses, now faded like old pressed flowers. The glass panes in the doors that joined the vestibule to the main ballroom were cobwebby, and though the place was obviously still in use, from the stacked chairs and fire safety notices, the hall seemed asleep without music. In her head, she could hear blaring horns, and perky dance-band strings, and the echoing shuffle of drums played with brushes.

  It gave her a tingle of memory, almost like déjà vu, but not quite. She had been here before. It was an eerie feeling – her past coming back to life, after all those years of pretending it never happened.

  Music did that. Angelica had always thought it was so easy to touch your fingers to ghosts when you danced to music recorded years before you were born. When you were moving to the music you were sharing that thrill with shy men and hopeful women who’d done exactly the same thing, in the same place, on the same warm summer evenings and crisp early autumn days like this one. The world might move on, but the steps and rituals, and the lead and follow of the dance, stayed exactly the same.

  She sat down on the bench where she’d tied on her red ballet slippers as an eager six-year-old, and reached into her bag for the red leather heeled lace-ups she wore to teach in, battered and butter-soft. Even now, Angelica didn’t want to step onto that sprung floor in everyday courts.

  If she was going to step into the past, she wanted to do it in the right shoes.

  She looked up at the joining doors, as she pushed her feet into the lace-ups. A fresh shiver of anticipation ran over her tanned skin. If she pushed the doors open now, would the ghosts of her old life be dancing there, waiting for her, in a chorus-line of disapproval?

  Mrs Trellys, the first ballet teacher, with her walking stick, and her stories of nearly going to Russia to train with the Kirov, and her sharp words about little girls with rrrrrround shoulders.

  Sweet but dull Bernard, her first prope
r ballroom partner, awkward in his father’s dinner jacket, with his hair slicked back and his ears pink with nerves, still hoping she’d changed her mind.

  Her mum and dad, now reunited in that great ballroom in the sky where only classic waltzes were played, and her mum’s roller-set never wilted before the last dance.

  Angelica swallowed, suddenly tense.

  Would Tony be there? With his seductive Spanish eyes and too-tight-for-competition trousers? Holding out his hand, requesting her pleasure in that old-fashioned way that looked gallant to everyone else, but unbearably exciting and tormenting to her?

  She closed her eyes, and let the wave of longing and regret and still-sharp disappointment roll over her. She’d kept those feelings at arms’ length for years, just like she’d kept most strong feelings safely battened down beneath her fixed ballroom smile, but now she was back in Longhampton, they had returned with all the disorientating intensity of a bereavement.

  God alone knew where Tony was. But in her imagination, he was always thirty-four, hair as jet-black as his polished dancing shoes, and they were always three quick steps away from a fight or falling, kissing wildly, into bed.

  Angelica shook away the memory, and got to her feet. With a deep breath, she pushed open the doors, solid dark wood with sixteen small panes halfway up, enough to glimpse the dancers when you were putting your shoes on, and to get your own pulse racing and your feet itching to join in. Just enough glass to see if your man was dancing with someone else, or if the floor was emptied by some show-off couple strutting their new steps.

  Her footsteps echoed on the wonderful wooden floor. Sprung maple, just like the finest ballrooms she’d danced in, an unexpected jewel of sophistication in the nondescript town. Angelica lifted her gaze up to the rafters, taking in the elaborate friezes, washed out and peeling in places, but still ambitious and proud. It was still as magical as it was in her memory, more so for having survived. When she was a little girl, living round the corner in Sydney Street, her mother had often told her about how the Memorial Hall had sprung up like a glorious mushroom behind Longhampton’s lacklustre High Street, and though Angelica found it hard to lay her mother’s descriptions over the concrete she tramped along, even then she wanted to believe in a glamour she couldn’t actually see.

  Since way before the turn of the century, according to Pauline, Longhampton had been the place to go for a dance on a Friday, being the old market town and the centre of social activity for the outlying farms and villages. It had a market hall that was used for whatever dancing could be arranged, and its own band. Of course, losing nearly all the town’s men to the Western Front had put a stop to that, but after the war had ground to a numb halt, the people of Longhampton, who weren’t badly off in those days, thanks to the cider mills, had scraped together enough money to build a Memorial Hall, instead of a gloomy statue to the husbands and sons who’d spun round the floor in happier years. The ramshackle old market hall was demolished, and the lovely Memorial Hall was built in its place, with stained-glass windows that spilled fruit-jelly-coloured pools of light on to the polished floor, and wrought-iron radiators like stacked Nice biscuits along the walls.

  The sprung floor was donated by Lady Eliza Cartwright, for whom Angelica’s great-aunt Martha had cooked. Lady Eliza’s husband, Sir Cedric, had been a keen Scottish reeler who even reeled with staff at Christmas parties, but he was killed on the first day of Ypres, and Lady Eliza, widowed with three young girls, ‘turned white overnight’, as Martha liked to recall gloomily, when she’d had a sherry or two. She sold his handmade shotguns, gave the money to the fund, and threw herself into leading the committee of widowed volunteers, stumbling through their grief with over-busy diaries. Lady Cartwright was one of the dancing ladies in the subscription stained-glass window right by the door, her blonde hair flying as she swung round as the mother of the Three Muses, with little Clementine, Ada and Felicity making up the foursome. She was still there eighty years later, her pale arms entwined with her children’s.

  Angelica stepped across the floor to gaze up at the Cartwrights. They were still exactly as she remembered, though now dulled by age and dust and old smoke. She had used Ada’s right foot when she was learning to pirouette, concentrating on it, spinning, then catching it again with her eyes for balance. In a way, it made her feel as if Ada was joining in the lesson, despite the fact that ‘that poor scrap of a girl’ (Martha again) died in the flu epidemic in 1919, up in St Mary’s hospital, when the windows were still sketches on the draughtsman’s board.

  Through the twenties and early thirties, the widows and their daughters had had to dance together in the new hall, and for a while there’d been a vogue for ceilidhs, because it wasn’t so bad to take the man’s part in a dance that was more breathless exercise than romance. But as the sons grew tall enough to dance with, proper ballroom nights had started up again, and the glitterball, imported specially from Europe, sparkled over foxtrots and bustling quicksteps, especially when the smooth-talking GIs arrived at the base down the road during the next war.

  Then at the end of the fifties – and Angelica remembered this herself, partly from her father’s absolute horror – rock’n’roll filled the hall three nights a week, jostling for position with the die-hard ballroomers for alternate Friday nights.

  Longhampton’s deep-rooted passion for a swinging beat took a long time to wither; even when punk was raging in London, couples still trailed to the Memorial Hall in their C&A best to fleckerl and chassé of a Friday night. Fashion took so long to spread to the middle of nowhere, and there wasn’t that much else to do. Angelica was long gone by then, but Pauline wrote to her to tell her about the success the formation team were having locally, and how sequence dancing was all the rage again. It seemed like another life to Angelica, star of the professional ballroom, stepping out on pol ished floors all over the world, under the red and gold rococo splendour of the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, in cruise-ship lounges and night-club stages, spangled and glittering like a Fab ergé peacock, transformed into someone else as the music began.

  In those days, when anyone asked, Angelica usually said she was from London. And in a sense, that’s where Angelica was from. That’s where she became Angelica, shrugging off provincial Angela’s past like an old dress. Who wanted to know about Longhampton? She certainly didn’t.

  Now she was back, though, Angelica wasn’t so sure she could shrug things off so easily any more. Scanning the local paper one evening, in her mother’s quiet, empty house, she saw there was a social dance night two or three times a month, on a Friday. She guessed Strictly Come Dancing was to thank for that. Of course, she’d gone along to the social – how could she resist? – and it was surprising, given that no one was offering lessons, that the dancers there were so good, even by Angelica’s standards. Not competition standard, obviously, but that lovely proficient amateur level where you could have a chat and a dance and not worry about getting your toes mangled. The older generation, of course, not many youngsters.

  You’re older generation now, she reminded herself, with a wry smile. Nearly bus-pass age.

  Angelica could think that, because she knew she didn’t look it. Not by a long way.

  Once you started dancing, you always wanted to improve, she knew from experience, so she’d put up her own advert for lessons, ballroom and Latin, teaching in the very same hall where she’d learned to tap and plié herself, a little black crow in the line of chubby-legged Longhampton girls.

  And here she was. The first lesson tomorrow.

  Angelica took a broom and swept the dust off the wooden floor, smiling to herself as she remembered that gorgeous younger Angelica, all slicked-back hair, and false Dusty Springfield eyelashes. How horrified she’d be to think of herself back here, offering a dancing class to complete beginners, of all things, when she could be enjoying her alimony in Islington. Teaching people who didn’t even know she’d spent the best part of twenty years as half of one of Britain’s top professional co
uples. People who didn’t even remember Come Dancing, let alone her magnificent regular appearances on it, making the Tower Ballroom crackle with applause as she and Tony swept and glided like swallows in sequins.

  She shrugged and swept, stepping backwards in an unconscious lock step, her feet crossing neatly in their red shoes, trying not to let herself slip into the tempting showreel of Tony memories.

  Angelica paused at the stained-glass representation of a matron less picturesque than Lady Cartwright. Poor Mrs Dollis Fairley had always seemed wrapped in bandages rather than draped in Grecian garb – the Mummy, as they’d joked in tap class. Now Angelica was surprised to feel a flash of sympathy for her. For her heavy sadness.

  She was offering a class for the same reason she’d come back to Sydney Street in the first place. Now that Mum was buried next to Dad in the bleak cemetery on the outskirts of the town, there was no real reason to come back, and yet there was part of herself in Longhampton, part of her past that she’d never quite squared up to, and now she couldn’t put it off. It wasn’t to clear out her mother’s terraced house herself – she knew she could have got movers in to do that – it was to make up for all the years of running away.

  Besides, Angelica liked teaching, especially now she’d mellowed a bit. It was hard to deal with incompetent learners, and she wouldn’t put up with students who didn’t listen, or practise, or look for some starry-eyed glamour in themselves, but she enjoyed seeing that moment when the steps clicked in their heads, and a couple discovered they were wound into the music, moving together without thinking.

  After all, music was music – it had the same magic here as it did in the ballroom at the Ritz. The moment when suddenly lightened feet moved by themselves, and the dance and the music and the moment launched you round the floor like a boat’s sails catching the wind – that was lovely to see. It was almost more rewarding to watch beginners transform and improve under her instruction, than it was coaching the snappy, competitive pros she’d been teaching in London these past few years.