I liked Letty Thompson from the start. She had a responsive air about her, one that suggested she was an intellectually curious woman. I could see it in her blue eyes, in the half-amused way they studied whatever came to their attention. She reminds me of someone, I thought. But try as I might, I couldn’t summon up the identity of the small shadow that, in my mind, accompanied Letty Thompson.
“Do you live in Burford?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, I do now,” she said. She told me she had retired five years earlier to Burford—where she’d grown up—after spending her working life in London. “The thing I love about living in Burford,” she said, “is that you can walk through the town and always meet someone you know.”
“And someone you don’t know,” I replied. “Like me.”
She laughed. “Well, now that we know one another, would you like me to walk you up the High Street and help you find that lemon curd?”
“I’d love it,” I said.
For the next hour or so, I walked through the village with Letty Thompson as my guide. Up the High Street we went, then on to Sheep Street and Priory Lane, circling back to the High Street. And as we walked we talked. Although Letty gave no hint of being bored with village life, I could tell she was eager to meet new people.
Letty told me about her life in London as a young single woman—“spinster” is the word she used—and later, as an older single woman. She told me about the dressmaker’s shop where she had designed and sewn dresses for well-to-do ladies after giving up her hope of becoming an artist. She’d taken up painting again, she told me, since retiring to Burford.
“Watercolors,” she said. “Landscapes and animals, mostly. I rather fancy painting the birds hereabout.”
“In other words, you might be described as Burford’s answer to Audubon.”
“Yes, one could say that. Although perhaps just a bit more accomplished than your Audubon,” she said wryly. I laughed, silently admiring the quickness of her wit. It was one of the things I most admired about the Brits, their sly but sharp humor.
Suddenly Letty stopped walking. She turned to face me. “Would you like to see some most interesting paintings?” she asked. “They’re in a little gallery just near here. Quite captivating if you like the look of primitive art.” The artist’s name was Joan Gillchrest, Letty told me. “She’s seventy-five and lives in Cornwall, in a small fishing town called Mousehole. She’s painted a long while. And with some success, too.”
We turned off the main street onto Bear Court, a narrow, cobblestoned lane, then stopped before a small shop with the sign WREN GALLERY. Peering into the window, our heads close together, I caught the scent of Letty’s perfume. It was fresh and light and smelled like orange blossoms floating on top of a sea breeze. It suited her, I thought.
“Let’s go in, shall we?” Letty said, leading the way.
The paintings were wonderful. Charming and sophisticated, they were like something out of a child’s book: tiny bold blocks of color painted without perspective onto the flat canvas. It was as though Brueghel and Grandma Moses had collaborated to bring to life the village of Mousehole. Tiny painted villagers marched by, leading their dogs along a frozen canal. Women wearing hats and mufflers stopped to talk by a seawall, gesturing as they exchanged the news of the day. Men in long dark coats and caps stood at the canal’s edge, where boats were trapped like fish frozen in the icy waters.
As we stood there in the Wren Gallery, we saw spring come to the village, too: flowers bloomed, cats stretched in the sun, and crabbers sailed in bright red boats straight from the bathtubs of my childhood. Like Alice in Wonderland, I had fallen into a strange, captivating country: Mousehole. Even the name held the promise of remarkable adventures.
What made it more exciting, though, was that Letty Thompson had fallen with me into this Wonderland. Together we raced from painting to painting, pointing out a black dog here, a skating figure there, the slumped posture of a sausage-shaped dog on a leash, the tilt of a head in conversation, the single stroke of a brush that summed up a cloud or a wave.
Neither of us wanted the other to miss anything. And somewhere in the sharing and the laughing, Letty and I moved past the superficial barriers of age and background. Of time, too: I could see the young woman Letty had been and, beneath that, the adventuresome, fun-loving girl.
It was then I knew the identity of the shadow trailing Letty. It was my grade school chum, Ducky Harris, with whom I’d shared everything. It was Ducky who shared my preadolescent passion for swimming and tap dancing, for scouring thrift shops in search of exotic beaded evening purses, for putting on plays in Eve Blum’s club basement.
And it was Ducky who taught me how to lighten my hair by dousing it with lemon juice and sitting in the sun. And it was from Ducky that I learned it was okay to wear navy blue with green. The two of us even had matching outfits—red beanies and white smarty-pants shorts—that we wore each Saturday to our tap-and-tumbling classes at the YWCA. For some reason—I wasn’t sure why—Letty made me feel the way Ducky had: profoundly alive.
After an hour or so of Mousehole-watching, Letty and I decided to take tea at the Golden Pheasant Hotel. Seated in front of a window overlooking the street, we watched the townspeople go by. We talked without constraint, the two of us, the way travelers often do when they meet someone they like but know they’ll never see again.
After asking me about my trip, Letty told me she regretted not having traveled more. “I always wanted to go to China,” she said. “When I was a little girl I read about the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, and, oh, just the names caused quite the stir in me. Then there were the books later—what I call the Pearl Buck influence—that made it all seem so romantic.” She laughed. “I was always sure if I went to China I’d meet an exciting foreigner who’d sweep me off my feet.”
I told her that I thought Paris was my China; that for as long as I could remember Paris was the city I’d dreamed of making my home. “Maybe that’s why Paris—even on my very first visit—always seemed familiar to me,” I said. I described visiting Père-Lachaise to search, always unsuccessfully, for Proust’s grave. “Maybe I don’t want to find it,” I said, as much to myself as to Letty. “Maybe I like the idea of having unfinished business in Paris.”
Letty poured more tea into our cups. “I wonder if the tea in China tastes different,” she said, lifting the white porcelain cup to her lips.
I laughed. “Oh, Letty, wouldn’t it be fun if you could pop over to Paris when I’m there. It’s not that difficult now, you know. And you could stay with me.”
“Yes, being with you would be grand,” she said, leaving it at that.
Later, when Letty and I walked down the High Street, our arms linked, to purchase the almost-forgotten lemon curd, we stopped again at the pristine rows of lavender outside the Church of St. John the Baptist. It was almost time for me to board the bus back to Oxford.
I began saying good-bye to Letty when suddenly she bent over and broke off a stalk of the purple flowers. “There’s lavender,” she said, handing me the blooms. “That’s for remembrance.”
Impulsively, I kissed Letty on the cheek. “I could never forget you,” I said. Then to lighten up the moment, I added, “We may not have Paris, but we’ll always have Mousehole,” and we both laughed.
Later that night as I sat in my rooms writing in my journal and spooning lemon curd onto a biscuit, I read the white paper wrapped round the lid of the jar: “Specially prepared for Aubrey Newman at Christmas Court. 94, High Street, Burford, Oxfordshire.” Carefully, I flattened the paper and pressed it, like a flower, between the pages of my notebook.
I thought of Letty, of her remark about how she loved living in a town where you could walk about and “always meet someone you know.” In some ways, it was the opposite of what lay behind this trip—my wish to break away from being a known entity. And yet in London, from time to time, I’d felt the tug of familiarity and the wish to belong somewhere.
It was
a cold night and I sat wrapped in a quilt listening to the wind outside. Distracted, I got up and walked to my window. There, gathered in an adjoining courtyard, were a dozen or so young people, some wearing frock coats and others in costumes that had an Elizabethan look about them.
Despite the cold they seemed to be rehearsing something in a small amphitheater at the next college. I could see them gesturing theatrically as they entered and exited with great flourish, but even after opening my window I could not make out the words above the wind.
For a long while I stood watching at my window. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I decided, finally. That’s what they’re rehearsing.
I closed the window, and walked across the room to the view I loved most. I could see the majestic dome of the Radcliffe Camera and St. Mary’s spire, both lit from below. The lights from the rooms surrounding Brasenose formed changing patterns on the emerald-green grass below. As people turned off their lights to retire for the night, pieces of the pattern disappeared. Then, as late-night concertgoers returned to their rooms, switching on the lamps inside, other patterns took their place.
I inhaled the air, deeply, as if to take it all in and make it a part of me.
But perhaps what I really wanted was to make me a part of it: of Oxford and its history, of this windy starry night, of these rooms in Brasenose College that for this brief time belonged to me.
That night I dreamed. One of those crazy, mixed-up dreams that if you were going to your analyst the next day, you’d spend the whole hour talking about—partly because you wanted to understand what your unconscious was telling you and partly because you wanted to experience again the feelings unlocked by the dream.
It is a sunny Saturday morning and Ducky Harris and I are walking along Clay Street, a small alley near the YWCA that is home to several wholesale florists. Suddenly Ducky bends over to pick up a discarded snapdragon stalk. When she stands up I notice she has on a hat, a green plaid tam-o’-shanter, one just like Grandmother wore when we went Christmas shopping downtown at Hutzler’s department store.
But Ducky doesn’t look like Grandmother. She also doesn’t look like Ducky. She looks like some movie star I’d seen on the posters outside the old Century movie house.
She says something to me, the red-haired woman who’s wearing Grandmother’s tam-o’-shanter. I try to make out exactly what the words are, but there’s just too much unconscious dream static in the way. I can see her mouth moving, forming words, but the sound disappears before reaching me.
Then suddenly I could hear her. “Hello, it’s me,” she said, smiling. “I’m still here.”
11
THE DANCING PROFESSOR
Dear Alice,
I think what I will remember long after I’ve forgotten rural England’s economic history & patterns of settlement may be the lesson taught by Barry, an instructor in ballroom dancing. Not only did I learn the quickstep & cha-cha from Barry, but, more important, I relearned something I had forgotten: the pure joy of letting go & just having fun. Alice, try not to forget this again. Further down the road you may need this knowledge much more than English history.
Love, Alice
One night at dinner Albert asked if anyone in the group would like to take a lesson in ballroom dancing. Immediately a groan went up from one end of the table. Oxford was filled with concerts and plays and lectures, so why, the groan suggested, would anyone be interested in ballroom dancing? Particularly, as someone pointed out, when a Chopin concert was being offered at a nearby hall.
Often it was fun to go to one of the concerts or plays that seemed to take place in every church or hall in Oxford. But occasionally I liked to break away from the group and see what I could find on my own.
Sometimes I was lucky. The night, for instance, I watched a movie—The Bodyguard—with a group of American college students. They were spending the summer at Oxford, taking courses and quartered in a dorm on the other side of Brasenose in the New Quad—so named because of its recent arrival on the Oxford landscape: circa 1878. I met the students on my way back from a visit with a friend quartered in the New Quad. After approaching them to ask where I could buy a soft drink, we began talking about what they were studying and what I was studying. Before long, pizzas arrived and the whole lot of us were watching a movie in a large room furnished with worn armchairs and sofas. I looked around at the boys sprawled barefooted across the sofas, taking huge bites out of pepperoni pizzas, and the girls sobbing softly when Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston were forced to part. It reminded me of home; I felt deliciously comfortable.
Sometimes, though, I wasn’t so lucky. There was that night when I bumped into a couple from Baltimore who were in Oxford for one night. I knew them vaguely—we’d met at a large party given by mutual friends—and when they suggested dinner at a pub, it sounded like a good idea. Three hours later, after listening to a minute-by-minute rundown of every detail of their week-long tour of the Cotswolds, I yearned to be put out of my misery.
On the night that Albert suggested we try ballroom dancing, I had nothing planned. Several people, mostly couples, were quite enthusiastic about the idea. They asked me to join them.
“It’ll be fun,” Ellen said. “And, besides, I could use the physical contact.”
My answer was immediate and not entirely honest. “Oh, I’m too tired for dancing,” I said, although I wasn’t. “I think I’ll just take a short walk and then read a bit.”
As I walked back to my rooms I wondered why I had dismissed the idea and why I’d felt the need to offer a phony excuse. Actually, I loved to dance. When I was sixteen, a girlfriend and I used to sneak out on weekends to a Latin American ballroom. Dressed and made-up to look like twenty-one—which was the age requirement at the ballroom—we’d sit at a table sipping 7Up, hoping that the silky-looking young men circling the room would ask us to dance.
Although I had no real idea of how to mambo, samba, or tango, I had learned, to my surprise, that I could follow anyone who did. I thought of it as a gift, this ability to follow such intricate steps without any instruction; a gift similar to playing the piano by ear.
I knew my mother would kill me if she found out about my dancing at the ballroom, but frankly I didn’t care. In these moments of dancing I saw myself as a sophisticated, independent woman destined for a life of adventure—probably as a writer living in some foreign land.
Secretly I prided myself on being a good dancer; it made me feel in control of my body. Sometimes, however, I suspected what I liked about dancing was the opposite: that when I was dancing I didn’t need to control my body. On the dance floor I simply closed my eyes and gave myself up to the exciting, pulsating music.
It was only at the Latin American Ballroom, among strangers, that I allowed myself such sensual freedom. At the school dances I stumbled over my partner’s feet, almost drowning out the music with a steady stream of apologies: Sorry. My fault. Excuse me. It was like leading a double life: in one, I was a bold, sensual woman, unafraid of my attraction to danger; in the other, an uncertain teenager, full of conflicts about the physical world of touch and feeling and intense longing.
Perhaps it was the memory of dancing at the Latin American Ballroom that made me suddenly decide I wanted to go dancing that night at Lincoln College.
I ran back to the porter’s lodge hoping that Albert would still be there. When I arrived, breathless, he and the group were just setting out. I fell into step next to Ellen, who, I noticed, had changed from pants into a dress and high heels.
She greeted me with an amused look. “I see that maybe I am not the only one in need of some physical contact,” she said, smiling.
When we reached Lincoln College, Albert led us into one of the buildings and through a maze of hallways and steps to a large, almost empty room where our dance instructor, Barry, awaited us.
There were folding chairs placed on the bare wood floors and in the corner an ancient record player was blaring out the Bee Gees version of “Stayin’ Alive.”
A few couples and two or three young men were already there, practicing the complicated steps in a way that suggested they did this a lot. One of the young men, particularly—a stocky fellow dancing alone—was really into it. The concentration on his face was like that of a surgeon about to make the first incision in the brain of a patient.
I don’t know what I expected, but somehow this stuffy bare room with its out-of-date sound system was not it.
Barry, however, was the greatest disappointment. Short, potbellied, and balding, Barry appeared to be in his early fifties. He wore a short-sleeved, wildly patterned Hawaiian shirt that stopped just beneath his pot belly. When he spoke, his accent was coarse and unpleasant. Despite all this, Barry exuded self-confidence. He seemed to see himself as Fred Astaire: dashing, debonair, and charming.
To my surprise Barry started us off with a lesson in the waltz. The married couples who’d come along had no trouble stumbling through their steps together; they after all had been partners for years and were used to one another’s mistakes. For those of us who were single it was more difficult. I felt especially timid and retired to a corner chair to watch.
It was interesting to observe the two married couples who’d chosen dancing over Chopin. They were really enjoying themselves, enjoying the physical pleasure of dancing. From my window at Brasenose I’d watch both of these couples walk across the quad to breakfast. They were always holding hands. I watched them now, laughing and touching on the dance floor, and couldn’t help but feel a surge of envy.
It was only then that I noticed Albert. Albert, who off the dance floor seemed quite reserved, was a sensational and exciting dancer. Tall and elegant, he turned into a different person when he was dancing.
By this time, everyone was having fun. Except me. I had accepted Albert’s invitation to dance, but for some reason felt extremely uncomfortable dancing with him. Within minutes I found myself reverting to my awkward high school personality. Excuse me. Was that your foot? Sorry. My fault. My cheeks burned with embarrassment and humiliation.
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