Dancing Backwards (14 page)

At the lift, however, she stopped and then turned back to the salon. Ken and Martha were huggermugger, engaged in what you could tell at a glance was an enthralling conversation. Vi, unwilling to break in, stood there until Martha, sensing, as women do, eyes on her back, turned round.

‘Sorry, but I forgot there was something I wanted to ask you, Ken.’

‘We’ve discovered that we’re the ship’s ghetto,’ Ken announced. His face, Vi observed, was flushed.

‘We’ve been comparing notes about our families’ lives,’ Martha said. She was looking slightly awkward.

‘And deaths. Our parents were four that Hitler missed. Lucky for them.’

‘And us,’ Martha added, with a hint of reproval. She moved just a fraction away from Ken’s arm which was resting easily along the back of her chair.

‘Well,’ Vi said, ‘compared to that I have a very trivial question. What was it you told me about people’s eyes, Ken, when you helped me with my email?’

‘Eyes right he’s not all right, you mean?’

‘That’s it.’

‘It goes like this: when you try to tap your memory, your eyes involuntarily shift to the left. If you’re tapping into your imagination—or making up a story, or telling porky pies—then they move to the right.’

‘And that’s tried and tested, is it?’

‘Well, I won’t say it would stand up in a court of law.’

There was a vase of pink and yellow carnations on the desk in Vi’s room and propped against it a note:
Madam I have undo the bed. No ring. Very sory. Renato
.

She went out on to the balcony. The ship, for all its tonnage, was rocking like a toy boat in a baby ogre’s bath. There was a sudden tremendous crack overhead and the sky blazed in a brilliant awning of light—behind it there followed a deep violet glow. She breathed in the powerful smell of the sea, whose moods and ancient vicissitudes no one has yet learned to control. There was something marvellous about standing there in bare feet, bare-shouldered in her silver dress to the heavy-shouldered wind, unobserved by anyone or thing but the uncaring darkness. She would stand there. Stand there in the weather. Perhaps she would be struck by lightning?

‘Congratulations,’ Tessa Carfield had said.

She was hosting her Midsummer’s Eve party. Vi had not wanted to go to this. She did not shine at parties and had never warmed to Tessa Carfield. She was there on sufferance because Bruno had accused her of jealousy.

‘How can you be jealous of Tessa Carfield? She has an arse like a juggernaut.’

‘I simply suggested that you were spending rather a lot of time at her cottage.’ Bruno’s habit of rating women according to the size of their bottoms was one of the things she had left without comment too long. To do so now would provoke an almighty row.

‘It’s my work, Vi. You, as we see, manage to get your work done with no trouble. I have to find some place of asylum for mine.’

‘Fine.’ The notion of ‘asylum’ was not reassuring but she was by now too wary to question it.

Bruno said, ‘I can’t deal with your possessiveness,’ and ignored her for the evening.

And now she was reporting for duty, as agreed, and he hadn’t even arrived. She had talked for a while to a tall, grey-haired solicitor called Edward, whose wife, he explained, had multiple sclerosis. He fetched her a drink and told her about Peter Brook’s production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
which was causing a stir at the Roundhouse. ‘Do go. The fairies swing on trapezes and make extraordinary sounds through plastic tubes. Look, here’s my card. Give me a ring. I’m angel-ing the show so I can get you a couple of tickets any time.’

But he had left early to get back to his wife and now Vi was left stranded without support with an unmediated Tessa Carfield.

‘Congratulations on what?’ Vi hoped this didn’t sound too rude. Tessa Carfield was always very polite. Too polite, on balance.

‘On your prize.’

‘What’s this? What’s this? What prize?’ Bruno had arrived and come up behind them and was digging his chin, in a way he supposed amusing, into Vi’s shoulder.

Before Vi could say, ‘Hello, Bruno’ and steer him away Tessa Carfield had gathered momentum. ‘I’ve just heard the news from Duncan.’ Duncan Bredon was a poet, widely tipped for the Oxford Poetry Chair. ‘Duncan was one of the judges. He told me in strict confidence, of course, knowing what close friends we all are.’

‘I don’t know how you could have done this,’ Bruno said for what might have been the sixth time.

They had caught the last tube and were walking down Kensington Park Road from Notting Hill. Vi had taken off her shoes. If asked why, she was planning to say it was because they hurt her, but it was a measure of the disgrace she was in that Bruno had so far made no comment but walked on wearing, she knew without looking, a face of unflagging resentment. In fact, she had taken off her shoes because she needed some sort of physical discomfort to distract her from this other awful pain.

‘How could you enter for a poetry prize and not tell me? Unless it was that you didn’t want me to compete.’

This was dreadful. She did not say, You couldn’t have entered, or been entered (for it was not her idea after all but the publisher’s), you’ve not published a collection of poems, because now, suddenly, the greater terror was not what she might have done to him but that he might recognise that he was not a poet and never could be one.

‘I hadn’t realised you were so competitive,’ he continued.

They carried on down the hill in single file, tears like acid channelling Vi’s cheeks. Bruno had withdrawn into one of his unnerving silences. They passed the Corinthian-columned orange church, which announced on a neat green notice that a private service of exorcism was available on request. Vi could not bear it a second longer.

‘I don’t give a monkey’s fuck about the prize. I didn’t enter it myself, the publishers did, and I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d mind and I never thought I would win. I didn’t know myself until this morning. And you’ve been out all day. I was going to tell you this evening if that bloody cow hadn’t stuck her barge arse in.’

In a blind fury she flung her shoes into the road.

Bruno walked into the road and picked them up. He began to walk back to the pavement, slowly and deliberately, almost into the way of an oncoming car, which swerved wildly as the driver, understandably furious, hooted repeatedly.

‘Bruno, for God’s sake what are you doing…?’

He returned to the pavement as if sleep-walking, his face white and grim, and handed her the shoes. ‘I can’t live with this, Vi. I need space.’

Vi felt frightened. ‘What does that mean?’

‘What do you think it means? I need to go away to be by myself.’

‘Where?’

‘I can go to Tessa’s cottage. She’s not going to be using it for a while.’

Vi wanted to say, Don’t leave me, Bruno. I am scared. I can’t seem to manage things as I did. Instead she said, ‘Oh. Well then, that’s fine.’

‘I have to do this, Vi. Otherwise, it’s going to kill me.’

‘Of course I don’t want to kill you, Bruno.’

Why not? asked the voice.

‘I don’t think you know what you do to me.’

‘OK,’ she roared, ‘I don’t. I don’t know at all what I do, or am supposed to have done. Have some space by all means. You can have your fucking space.’ She hurled the shoes one by one back into the middle of the road.

Bruno stopped dead. ‘Go and pick those up.’

‘No.’

‘Pick them up.’

‘They’re my shoes and I can do what the hell I bloody well like with them.’

‘I’m not walking home with you in bare feet.’

‘Why not?’

‘You look like a tramp or a gypsy.’

‘What’s wrong with gypsies? It’s dark anyway.’ As if that mattered.

‘I don’t wish to walk down the street, even in the dark, with someone in your condition. And, so this is clear, I want to live with a civilised woman who knows how to behave. Not a wild cat.’

‘Like Tessa Carfield, I suppose?’

‘I knew you were jealous.’ Vi hit him. ‘And violent.’

Vi took off the silver dress and stood in her knickers on the balcony. Then she took off the knickers and stood there naked. Despite the thunder and lightning, there was no rain. She wished there would be rain so she could be drenched through. She felt that to be thoroughly drenched by rain would help.

After a bit, she went inside and extracted from the pile on the desk a book with a torn brown dust jacket.

Dragonish
by H.V. St John. Under her name in smaller type she read: ‘Winner of the Warner Hepplewhite Prize’. She opened the book and looked at the dedication:
For Edwin: Love Always
.

‘Ed?’

‘Vi, what time is it?’

‘I don’t know. Two, maybe.’

‘What’s up?’

‘Could I come to stay?’

‘Of course. When are you coming?’

‘How about right now?’

Vi walked to Paddington Station and caught the milk train to Oxford. From the station she walked down past the Randolph Hotel, where she encountered a tousled young couple in evening dress, the girl carrying a single red rose. At the Martyrs’ Memorial, nowadays a useful point of contact for bicycle thieves and drug dealers, she stood, looking at the spiky memento of the place where Cranmer and his colleagues had been burned to death for protesting, remembering how Bruno had filled his flat with roses for her arrival.

At the foot of the memorial, a couple of tramps were huddled in thin sleeping bags, as much victims, perhaps, of their own convictions as the martyrs. She was observing them, with a fellow feeling, when one woke and beerily requested money for a cup of tea. Vi gave him five pounds on condition that he spent it on drink. Then she set off up the Banbury Road.

Birds in the well-tended Oxford gardens, ecstatically celebrating the heartless summer, harbingered her progress up the long walk to Squitchy Lane where Edwin had rented a flat. She rang the bell and waited, steeled for there to be no answer. And then Edwin was at the door in a shabby dressing gown. Somehow, all his dressing gowns managed to look shabby.

‘Hello. Coffee’s up.’

‘I don’t know what else you would have expected,’ he said as they drank the coffee in his kitchen. It was not too clean, with the kind of grease that is ingrained and depressing. Not a patch on Church Rate Walk. ‘Bruno believes he is a poet and you go and win a prize for poetry. It’s a catastrophe for him.’

‘And me.’

‘Only if you let it be.’

‘He’s gone off to Tessa Carfield’s cottage to write about his horrible sorcerers. I can’t bear those creepy sorcerers.’

‘He won’t enjoy it. Bruno hates to be alone.’

That was true. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Oh, you know, we were at school together. He needs an audience, if only for his moods.’

When Edwin had left for work, with a copy of
The Duchess of Malfi
which he was teaching his sixth formers, Vi walked back into town down the Woodstock Road, more verdant than its counterpart, the Banbury Road. Passing a narrow street, she saw some students drinking from cans of lager, singing ‘The times they are a-changing’ and throwing cigarettes to each other across the road. One dropped a tobacco tin from an upper window to a friend below. The carnival atmosphere suggested that the exam results were out and they were celebrating, still on the far side of worldly responsibility.

Vi walked on past the Martyrs’ Memorial. What ever could it be like to be bound to a stake waiting for an intolerable heat to render to ashes your living flesh and bone? Her tramp had left the other asleep in his skimpy tartan bag. She hoped her one was off buying drink.

Reaching Christ Church Meadow, she took off her shoes and went barefoot over the still dampish grass. The shoeless late-night walk with Bruno had been a successful punishment and a large blister had formed on the ball of her right foot. She found a patch free of fresh cowpats and lay down on her back, smelling the inimitable scent of living grass.

Above her smarting eyes wheeled a cacophony of rooks, their ragged wings etched sharply against the virginal blue sky. A little way off, cattle lying in gleaming shapely heaps cast cool
compact shadows in the uncompromising June sunlight. There is something peculiar, she thought, about the way a shadow is and isn’t the thing it is a reflection of.

After a while she fell asleep, worn out by the early start and the crying. She dreamed of Bruno but when she woke she could not recall any fragment of the dream.

First rate:
until steam-power took over, British navy ships were rated according to the number of heavy cannon they carried. A ship of a hundred cannon or more was known as a First Rate Line-of-battle ship.

Although Vi had been awake since dawn, she felt no inclination to sleep. Putting on trousers, a sweater and plimsolls, she let herself out of her room and walked down the now familiar red-carpeted stairs.

Outside the Atlantic was thrashing the ship for its life, throwing up spectacular plumes of spray which, blowing on to the deck, were leaving the boards wet and perilous. Good. Perilous was what her spirit craved. Remembering the strange night stroll with the critic, she recalled his desire to become immersed in the ocean—or his expressed desire, since for all she knew this was a pose. No, not a pose. He wasn’t posing with her then, maybe a mood of the moment.

She knew these moods of the moment. But there were more enduring strains: repeated discouragements which grow to tidal waves of devastation, more lasting in their consequences. While the perdurable body had, to an astonishing extent, the knack of repairing itself, the same recuperative capacities seemed not to have been granted to the heart and mind.

Reaching a sheltered area, she stopped for a cigarette and found she had left the packet behind in her room.

(‘Large things are bearable,’ Edwin had said, when he came
home that evening after she had taken flight to his flat in Oxford. ‘It’s the small things which break us.’

‘Is this a small thing, Ed?’ she had asked him, pitifully.

‘An accumulation of small things, I would say.’)

Vi was regretting the forgotten cigarettes when Miss Foot, in a mackintosh cape and sou’wester, came round the corner clinging to the handrail. She stopped and stood, rain running from her sou’wester, catching her breath.

‘I felt that I must come out and witness the spectacle in all its glory. I have no balcony, you see.’

‘Me too,’ said Vi. ‘Though I’m lucky, I do have a balcony.’ For some reason, she did not seem to mind the arrival of Miss Foot.

‘I expect you’ve earned one, my dear.’

‘Oh, I don’t imagine so,’ said Vi hastily. ‘It’s my husband’s money. My late husband, I should say. I gave most of what he left me away to our sons but I kept enough for this voyage.’ How strange that she should be confiding this to Miss Foot.

‘I meant in a previous life.’

‘Oh.’

‘Perhaps you don’t believe in other lives?’

Vi considered. Miss Foot was not Kimberley Crane. ‘Not really.’

‘Nevertheless you experience them. I expect you think I’m a batty old woman.’

Vi not knowing how to answer this took the coward’s way and laughed.

‘People do,’ Miss Foot continued. ‘They suppose I am off my rocker but I don’t mind. That’s the trick, you see. Provided one doesn’t mind what people think one is free. Or comparatively free, don’t you agree?’

‘I do,’ said Vi, endeavouring to make up for the laughter. ‘Most definitely.’

‘I can tell you have had a past life. A troublesome, even a troubled one. But I believe that it is about to change.’

‘Goodness.’

‘Goodness has something to do with it, yes. You attract the destructive but you also attract the good. It is a question of discrimination, of distinguishing between the two conditions. They can, as I am sure you are aware by now, look alike.’

‘I see.’

‘But do you, my dear?’

The dim lights under the shelter cast a disconcerting halo about Miss Foot’s flat undistinguished face.

Vi said, ‘What you say about my life having been troubled is quite correct.’

‘There you are,’ said Miss Foot as if an important point had been settled. ‘But that will pass, is passing. I hope you don’t mind my approaching you. I had half a mind to do so earlier but I followed my instinct and waited. And now, you see, here you are. The world always responds if we listen.’

‘Thank you for approaching me,’ said Vi, unlike the world unsure how she should respond.

‘No need for thanks. The benefit is mutual. Real benefit always is. One can never know how things may turn around.’

‘No,’ said Vi. ‘That is true.’

She was wondering whether it would be nosy to ask Miss Foot why she was on the ship when her companion said, ‘I am travelling to New York to visit my sister. We’ve not met for fifty years. She has cancer and would like to see me again. I shall try to help her but I fear she is resistant to help. That is the true sin against the Holy Ghost—the refusal of grace and mercy.’

‘Yes,’ said Vi. ‘I think you might be right about that.’

‘She is intense,’ Miss Foot went on. ‘But intensity is not an index of spiritual depth.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘I would not be surprised, though naturally I shall not say this, if it were not the intensity that led to the cancer. Misdirected it can be malign.’

‘I am sure.’

‘Well, I’ll be off to my bed. I am reading
Moby Dick
. I felt I should acquaint myself a little more with the Americans in preparation for this trip. The writing is very energetic—the Americans are energetic, I admire them for that—but it could do with some editing. There is far too much about harpoons.’

‘Yes,’ said Vi. ‘I agree with you about that too.’

‘Well, goodnight, dear.’

Vi made her way round to the port side of the ship, where the force of the wind was less fierce and the deck a little dryer. Before she drew near enough to be sure, she had guessed the identity of the figure smoking under the shelter.

‘Dino?’

‘Mrs Hetherington!’

‘I was just thinking about you,’ she said.

Vi, alone in the flat, with no job, no Bruno, Annie in Brisbane, where things were apparently going well with her gynaecologist, and Edwin in Oxford till the end of term, was unbearably lonely. Her solitary state was brought home to her by Mr DellaCosta, who noticed the reduction in her fruit and veg purchases.

‘You on your own, darling?’ he asked one day.

Vi explained that Bruno was away working.

‘He don’t want to leave a lovely girl like you on her own too long.’

The next time she saw Mr DellaCosta he presented her with
a bunch of fat spears of asparagus. ‘That’s what my ma give my daddy when he look to stray. You give him some of that, sweetheart. Your man come back to you, you see.’

Vi ate the asparagus alone. She had had no word from Bruno and could only suppose that for the time being he did not want to come back.

In a fit of worse than usual despondency, she arranged to visit her father, who seemed almost offended at the prospect of having his evening interrupted by his only child.

‘I’m afraid I cannot have you spend the night, Honour. My daily’s on her annual leave and there is no one to make up the bed.’

He was the only person, since her mother’s death, who called Vi by her first name. It was perhaps his way of denouncing the woman who had so selfishly deserted him.

Vi did not say that she could quite well make up the bed herself. She had, in any case, no desire to spend the night. Her father had taken to using nylon sheets in insipid pastels, which he boasted of buying by mail order from Brentford Nylons on the Great West Road. Her old bedroom, which for a time had served as the spare, had begun to do duty as the repository of his bulk buying, which, she concluded, was another means of fending off guests, if it wasn’t a symptom of him going out of his mind. When she had visited last, the room had been stacked with rolls of bargain lavatory paper, catering-size boxes of soap powder and, more puzzling, jars of English mustard, pickled onions and salad cream. Also, quantities of 100-watt light bulbs, particularly bizarre since her father was fanatical about turning off electricity and for some years had lived in almost perpetual semi-darkness.

The morning after her doleful attempt at igniting familial affection she woke with a sense that she might also be in danger
of slipping towards some fatal point of disintegration. For all she could tell, she too might be quietly going out of her mind. It was this fear that prompted her to ring the agreeable-seeming man she had met at Tessa Carfield’s party. That it was the last occasion on which she and Bruno had been some sort of a couple was in her mind when she rang the firm of solicitors named on his card.

He answered the phone himself so it must have been a direct line. ‘I was just thinking about you. Funny how that sometimes happens and then the person you’re thinking of rings.’

Her first thought was that he had confused her with someone else. ‘Edward, it’s Violet St John.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Oh. I was ringing about
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.’

‘You would like tickets?’

‘If that’s really OK,’ Vi said, relieved to be so readily remem-bered.

‘Indeed it is,’ he had said. ‘How many would you like? It seems to have become incredibly popular so I doubt I could get hold of more than two.’

‘Oh, one’s enough, honestly. It’s just me.’

‘Let me have your number and I’ll call you back.’

He rang back almost at once. ‘I can get two tickets so if you really have no one you would rather bring I might come along myself, if I can get someone to look in to see to Margaret.’

‘No, there’s no one. That would be fine. Thank you.’

He named a day the following week adding, ‘If you fancy a bite afterwards there are some fairish places to eat in Primrose Hill.’

‘That would be very nice.’

‘Good. Shall I meet you there or would you like me to pick you up?’

Vi, too unused to being chauffeured to be at ease with this idea, said she would meet him at the Roundhouse before the start of the performance.

Two days later, a letter from Bruno arrived:

Dear Vi, If you would like to come down here I can now see you. There are trains from Paddington, via Newport. If you come, could you bring the catalogue for the exhibition we saw at the Horniman? It’s in the bookcase somewhere. I can meet your train if you let me have times. B.

Vi rang Edward’s office and got his secretary. She asked the secretary to give Mr Hetherington her apologies and explained that she had been ‘suddenly called away’, which struck her as the sort of language a solicitor would understand.

She packed her better summer clothes in some excitement and had her hair done and, in a reckless mood of anticipated happiness, her nails, bright red. She hunted for the catalogue from the Horniman exhibition and finding it flicked through to the picture of the bleak figure with the peg through its head. It stared blankly out at her and she was suddenly reminded of the little bat-wing purse Bruno had shown her that day they had quarrelled.

Slightly guiltily, she searched for the purse in Bruno’s desk and chest of drawers. But with no luck.

On the morning she was due to leave she woke at four, choreographing in her mind the meeting with Bruno: he would sweep her up into his arms, they would make love by the side of a mountain stream, he would apologise, confess his faults and they would live happily ever after. Maybe that was going a bit far…

When the phone rang at just past five a.m. she answered in trepidation in case it was Bruno calling to put her off. But it was not Bruno, it was Edwin.

‘Vi?’

‘Ed!’

‘Vi. Can you come.’

‘Where? Why?’

‘To Oxford. I need you.’

‘What’s up?’

‘I’m at the police station.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I’ll tell you when you get here. Get a taxi when you arrive and ask for the St Aldate’s police station.’