Wooden chairs and tables had been pushed and stacked to one side, and the would-be ballerinas were bouncing on their toes and heels in the middle of the room. They wore leotards and tutus like a tin of Quality Street. Their teacher, Miss Drew, stood tall amongst them in a flowery dress, hair tied into a grey bun and glasses hung on her huge chest. She organised her troops with a powerful, high-pitched voice.
‘Swans,’ she commanded, ‘a semi-circular loop around the perimeter of the hall.’ She twirled her finger in the air like a baton. ‘The edge of the hall. Yes, you too, Emily. Sugar Plums, would you … I know you’re a Sugar Plum, Alison … Would you construct a straight line to the front of the room.’ Her finger drew maps of this arrangement and she waited as various girls tip-toed into position. ‘A straight line. Would Miss Pevensie call that straight, Jessica? I thought not. Now, where is Anna-Marie?… Lorraine! Just put it away, Lorraine! I don’t care where you found it, just put it away!… Fine, dear, you tell your mother!… Anna-Marie in the middle.’
With her hair tied back and stretching her scalp, I hadn’t spotted Anna-Marie at first, but there she was, moving into the centre of the room. And there she waited, calm among the itching, scratching, nose-picking rabble. She had one foot placed in front of the other and her hands behind her back. She was elegant like a cat; her eyes closed as if asleep.
The light-shade sent its shadow revolving across the room, whilst the afternoon sun burst silently through the dusty windows. But it was not so much the sun as the effect of its light that grabbed my attention: the room glowed like coloured oils, dazzling and bright; the surface both smooth and rough to the touch.
Miss Drew waited until a shadowy silence had fallen upon her class before sitting, upright, at the piano. Her bayonet-eye jabbed at the dancers one final time as she counted: ‘One, two, three, four. One, two …’
Goodness me, that piano was out of tune: a milk float full of broken spanners crashing into the room. I covered my ears and, watching the fat little girls shuffling around the room, I wanted to cover my eyes. The more skilful threw legs in the air; others waved their arms about as if greeting distant friends.
In this sea of confusion, Anna-Marie was a desert island of golden beaches and gentle palms. Her arms crossed upon her chest, her hands resting on opposite shoulders, she began to nod as if accepting that some never-ending argument had been settled, finally and beyond doubt, to the agreement of all. Her face wore the expression of a child wandering through dreams, at one with a universe that could not be questioned. As chaos crashed and clashed around her in a clockwise direction, she began to move: slowly, carefully, and with a startling grace. It wasn’t ballet but she danced with a weightlessness beyond the other girls bumping into one another like a waddle of drunken ducklings.
The music became less alarming as Miss Drew found her rhythm. She didn’t do much in the way of actual teaching, barely looking up from her piano keys. Her pleasure came, I thought, only from her music. And as she began to mix trickling ripples with booming waves of sound, her dancers might just as well have been playing hopscotch.
The speed increased, Miss Drew punching the keys, and Anna-Marie responded. Her arms rose into the air, swaying in some heavenly breeze. She stepped backwards and forwards, each step simple and precise like the insides of a watch. Her head tilted back as if meeting the golden light of the sky. I was enchanted: my eyes, my mouth, my heart wide open.
And then something strange happened. Among all the rough material, as quavers bickered with crotchets like some playground fight-fight-fight and the chords quarrelled trying to hack each other from behind, Miss Drew began to weave notes of golden silk. As hammer hammered on wire, soft and loud, and churning bass notes drove her on, the music became, I don’t know, bigger somehow. Important. It began to stir feelings, and memories too, like Wellingtoned feet stirring banks of autumn leaves, making me sad and happy at the same time: memories of my father, and thoughts of my mother.
I don’t know how. After all, it was only music.
The other girls, dumpy little trolls, disappeared, and, whilst Miss Drew, I imagined, performed for cheering crowds at the Albert Hall, Anna-Marie danced for an audience of one. A secret melody took her by surprise, capturing her, and now she moved like sorcery, the prisoner of some silver spell that led her on in the dance. Her soul shone like eyes as her feet moved across the floor like Miss Drew’s fingers dancing across the keys.
My porthole became a microscope. I didn’t know whether Miss Drew was aware of Anna-Marie, perhaps not, but I saw everything. Everything: the demerara freckles on her shoulders; the fine hairs on her arms; the mole behind her ear; the dimples in her knees; the bruise on her neck, a blue-black island in a milky sea. She leapt and, for an instant, gravity released her from its grip. She climbed and conquered the space about her.
And I thought of what Anna-Marie had said: ‘Your grip on reality seems so tenuous.’ No, no, not that. I mean all that stuff about tigers and the smell of flowers; and I wondered if maybe she was wrong because this dance was about something other than dancing. Something more. It was about, I don’t know, hope. About sadness too, yes, but about the hope, like she’d said to Mr Merridew, that tomorrow would be better than yesterday. Her dance told its story as clearly as if her feet tripped across a page, like Norman’s white wasteland, her toes dipped in ink; or painted a picture so real that the tiger threatened to tear free of the canvas and sink its cavernous jaws into her pale skin.
And then something else happened. Until that moment, Alice, the real Alice, had seemed to me only like a distant dream, a thought unthought, a memory forgotten, but to Anna-Marie she had become something more, something real and solid. I knew it was true because she no longer danced alone: twin dancers like reflections in a looking glass; everything opposite, everything the same. Two tiny ballerinas like Christmas fairies. Two swans fixed to the surface of the lake, but who was real and who the reflection?
What a thing to see: colour, real colour, light, white light, the way the light fell upon the spinning sisters, shape and motion, with everything that wasn’t beautiful removed. Anna-Marie’s headband had fallen away and the afternoon sun set her hair on fire, and ablaze, in that penetrating light, I saw her revealed.
I was ashamed to see her so.
I wanted it to stop.
I wanted the light to burn my eyes.
Finally, as Miss Drew crashed into a final chord, Anna-Marie collapsed alone in the centre of the room. As the dying notes shook the walls setting the old joists and beams trembling, the other girls reappeared still shuffling around the room like two dozen blind mice. Having circled the room about fifty times, they were tired and, as Miss Drew briskly dismissed them, they shambled out, leaving Anna-Marie in the middle of the room, her chest and shoulders heaving.
Miss Drew got to her feet and, fingers trembling, began shuffling sheet music into a leather brief case.
‘Anna-Marie?’
Anna-Marie looked up. Strands of hair sparkled sticking to the sweat that coated her forehead.
‘Yes, Miss Drew?’
‘Very nice, dear, but next time I fear we should try some actual ballet, don’t you?’
Anna-Marie smiled like a saint.
‘Yes, Miss Drew.’
And from that day on when I dream, if I dream, I don’t dream of Mr Merridew and things best kept beneath stones; I dream of Anna-Marie and Alice, locked together, spiralling like constellations across the night sky, scattering silver in their wake.
17
This one day I came home from school and was shoving my bag into the understairs cupboard when the telephone rang. I jumped as if someone had lit a firework in my back pocket. Most times Kat left it unplugged—‘It’s not as if anyone even knows who we are’—but she’d also been searching for the part-time work that, she said, was all that lay between us and ‘the poor house’. It seemed like she’d forgotten to unplug it after her last thumb through the Yellow Pages.
The ringing
continued as I stepped into the kitchen and even as I kicked off my shoes. I was about to go and face the telephone squatting alone on its little table when I heard Kat trotting down the stairs. I was about to call out but she’d already reached the receiver and lifted it with a loud click.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Amberley 49312,’ and then, ‘Oh, Doctor Todd, it’s you.’ She sounded kind of funny when she said it, like her collar was done up too tight. ‘Yes, Clive, of course … Have you? No, it’s not been ringing this end … Yes, I will. I’ll get the line checked. Of course … Yes, I did get them. Of course. They were lovely. They are lovely … Yes, they’re right here,’ and she waved vaguely in the direction of the empty telephone table. ‘A lovely scent. It was very thoughtful of you, Doctor … Clive, but you really … No, you really shouldn’t’ve …’ Kat took a shuddery kind of breath and listened for a moment before swapping the receiver from one hand to the other and folding her hair back behind her ear. She started listening again. ‘I do appreciate everything, Clive, of course I do, but as I’ve said before it’s Peter.
‘I can only … Yes, but I can only … One thing at a time. I’m sure you understand …
‘No, he’s fine, I think. Well, you know Peter: he doesn’t say much. But I don’t think he remembers … Dangerous? What do you …? Of course not. No, nothing like that … Of course I will. Yes, of course, if there’s any … Yes. Look, I’d better go. He could be home any minute, but, Clive, please no more roses. Promise me … Please promise … Okay, I promise I’ll call if you’ll promise no more flowers …
‘Yes, well, goodbye, then. Goodbye.’
The silence that remained, once she’d hung up the phone, throbbed. I stepped into the hallway as she wrapped the cable twice around her knuckle. ‘I’m not sure why we even need a phone,’ she muttered as she yanked it from the socket. She looked up startled to see me standing there before brushing past me on her way to the kitchen.
Even though the phone had been silenced, I struggled to pull my eyes away.
Why was Doctor Todd even calling us?
Anyway that’s what I was thinking about, sat on a clump of grass by the cemetery wall, when Anna-Marie came out of the church hall and waved.
‘Hi.’
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How was it?’
Anna-Marie wrinkled her nose and shrugged. ‘All right, I suppose,’ she said. I tried to say something else but nothing would come. She laughed, her school shirt sticky with sweat.
‘Good afternoon, children.’ The vicar, squinting through his glasses, those funny glasses with two halves, was striding along the path towards us, the top of his pink head shining in the sun. I recognised him from school assemblies. ‘Isn’t it hot?’ he cried. And then, ‘Are you waiting for someone?’
‘I’ve just had my ballet lesson.’
‘A-ha,’ said the vicar as if this wasn’t quite good enough. He was about to enquire further when Anna-Marie’s tight grip pulled us out of view around the back of the church and into the graveyard.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘did you find anything?’
I told her how I had searched the graveyard up and down and inside out for clues but found nothing.
‘I wonder,’ she said, muttering, ‘Well, if you want something doing …’ Tucking her P.E. bag under her arm, she folded back the dry grass that camouflaged the nearest headstone. ‘The problem,’ she accepted, ‘is that you only know the clues you’re looking for when you find them. It’s like in the books.’ She examined the faded words. ‘Nobody even realises a clue is a clue until about twenty pages after they’ve first seen it, as sure as “i” comes before “e”.’ She moved among the graves. ‘Except after “c” of course.’
Anna-Marie didn’t worry too much about the graves or the memories of the people within. ‘Honestly, Peter, you can take that look off your face. They’re past caring. It’s not the dead ones you want to worry about. When I’m dead and gone,’ she went, ‘you can leave me at the back of the church hall with the bins. Better still, chop me up and feed me to the ducks. Mind you, I’m pretty sure ducks are vegetarian.’ She read each inscription with interest but thought they were silly. ‘Of course they’re going to miss them,’ she sneered. ‘That’s hardly stunning information. It’s a waste of good stone,’ she snapped, like she was daring God to interrupt. ‘They might at least have put on something useful: the bus timetable, for instance, or how many miles it is to London.’
I stepped more cautiously. No grave ever had opened up under my feet; no worm-eaten hand ever had stretched out to drag me beneath the earth, and I knew those things were just stories. But I didn’t dare think they never happened at all. However small the chances of being sucked down into the hidden world of the dead, such things, if they did happen, were unlikely to end happily.
I was relieved though to find that many graves were marked by huge stone slabs making sure that the ghosts beneath stayed safely underground. Their words, the headstones’, were worn away by winters and summers, like great, grey flags of victory. Death, they said, always wins. And the big old graves didn’t attract the flowers and baubles of the newer ones. Perhaps the newer pretty graves, I thought, explained the lack of flowers on the bleak older ones.
I thought of the man who’d carved those letters generations ago. It was a small village and probably he’d’ve known the dead. Unless his heart was harder than the stone he must have glanced up at the sun or into the blue sky or, at least, listened to the crickets in the grass or the birds in the trees. Perhaps his mind was on his breakfast or a note from a pretty girl. Surely, as he worked the stone, hammer and chisel, deep and straight, his mind would have marvelled to think that one day they, and their message, would have faded so. I found myself wondering who in turn had carved his headstone. Who digs the gravedigger’s grave? That’s what Mr Merridew had said. I don’t know why it made me shudder.
I thought of my father’s grave and wondered whether he was lonely with no one visiting or arranging flowers for him. I hoped he understood.
‘We thought we knew all about Kat’s secrets,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘But we didn’t know about the nursery and we don’t know about the church: that’s not a coincidence.’
‘We’re like the Famous Five or something.’
‘What on earth are you wittering on about?’
‘We could be the Famous Five. You could be George—she’s a girl—and I could be … Well, I can’t remember the boys but I—’
‘This isn’t a game, you idiot.’ And before I could avoid them, Anna-Marie’s long fingers reached out, pinched and twisted my ear sinking me slowly to my knees. ‘This is a real mystery. Can’t you tell the difference? Besides,’ she said, finally releasing her grip, ‘I don’t play games. Honestly, it’s no wonder you couldn’t find any clues on your own.
‘Alice wouldn’t take any of your nonsense, you know,’ said Anna-Marie.
‘Alice?’ Rubbing my sore ear. ‘Why?’
‘Why?’ Anna-Marie snorted. ‘She’d be far too busy.’ She knelt before one of the graves and began to rearrange some purple flowers, tired and dry in a silver vase.
‘Busy doing what?’
‘I told you before,’ tutted Anna-Marie. ‘She’s a teacher. She works in this really big school, probably in London—or maybe Edinburgh—but all the children absolutely adore her. Her lessons are always so entertaining and the children learn so much they think their brains will burst with it but they don’t mind. And all the parents, when they come and see her on parents’ evening, bring flowers and stuff. She’s the best teacher the school’s ever had but she doesn’t let it go to her head. She works hard that’s why she’s so good.’
Anna-Marie had now removed the thin flowers from the vase and laid them before her across the grave, the purple separated from the brown, the near-living from the definitely dead.
‘But how do you know?’ I said. ‘About Alice, I mean.’
‘Most of all she loves her own children, of course,’ she said, ‘and h
er husband. He’s a farmer and he—’
‘A farmer?’ I said. ‘In London?’
‘Sssh. He works all day on the land and he’s big and strong and quiet and everyday he brings her a cup of tea and two biscuits when she gets up. Chocolate ones. And then she gets up and gets up her children. She’s got three boys, and a daughter who’s just as beautiful as she is.’
Anna-Marie returned the flowers to the vase and, having completed her task, she sat back and admired her handiwork. And then she went on: ‘At weekends she’s got this pony—Alice I mean—and she takes all the children to the stables and they ride around in circles one after the other and the horses swishing their tails and what-not. And after that they feed them apples and then she takes them all home to see her husband whose been tending the farm. And she cooks them all roast chicken with roast potatoes and veg and Yorkshire puddings.’
The graveyard was quiet but for the soft chortling of the birds, muffled by the warmth of the afternoon. A truck chundered to a halt with a load of barrels for The White Hart. I sat down beside Anna-Marie and listened to her soft voice.
‘And they live in this big farmhouse with two cars and two televisions—’
I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Two televisions’? I couldn’t help wondering if she wasn’t just making this all up.
‘Yes,’ said Anna-Marie, ‘why not?’ getting to her feet. ‘Two televisions.’ Brushing herself down. ‘And one of them in colour. And in the evening we’ll sit and listen to the Bay City Rollers and maybe watch something funny on both our televisions until it’s time for bed.’ She stretched and looked about her, fingers tumbling through her hair. ‘And then we’ll all kiss and cuddle good night and we’ll go on a seaside holiday once a year and then the same thing happens all over again the next day and …
‘Oh!’
‘What?’
Anna-Marie had stopped talking and was absolutely still—headstone still—staring across the graveyard.
‘What?’ I said again. ‘What is it?’
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