Dancing Backwards (4 page)

Vi woke to the chugging engines and saw it was time to go down for dinner. The information in her cruise folder warned that it was ‘formal’ tonight. Well, she had her black evening dress. That looked OK with Ted’s pearls.

She pulled the dress over her head, caught a thread in an earring, took it off again to untangle the earring, decided to take off her knickers which were spoiling the line, brushed her hair into shape, extracted Ted’s grey pearls from the suitcase and added a silver belt and the silver slippers that Annie had given her for the voyage. Good old Annie. She still had that eye.

For all her hurry, Vi was late for dinner and when she arrived there were ten already at the table. One of the newcomers, an elderly woman in a long beaded navy suit, had collared Captain Ryle, who looked across regretfully at Vi. The woman introduced herself as Miss Foot and apologised for not joining them the evening before but explained that she had felt the need to acclimatise.

The other pair missing from the previous evening turned out to be part of the programme of entertainment laid on for the passengers: a New York theatre critic and a writer of popular historical fiction called Kimberley Crane. Minor celebrities were
invited to travel on the ship, all expenses paid, in return for a session of book signing in the ship’s bookshop.

Vi had heard of the theatre critic who was known by his pen name ‘The Critic at the Hearth’ and was famed for his savage reviews which closed down Broadway shows overnight. He was a little, bird-like man with round tortoiseshell glasses and mild hazel eyes. Kimberley Crane, the novelist, was a statuesque woman wearing a white fishtail dress which showed off impressive breasts. She was explaining, when Vi arrived, how the evening before she and the critic had been summoned to the Captain’s bridge for cocktails and had subsequently been unable to find their way to the Alexandria.

‘You should have seen us. We were like babes lost in the wood.’

‘What did you do for food?’ Valerie Garson asked.

‘We made do,’ said the critic, with a benign-seeming smile. (There was a widespread fear among his New York acquaintances that he might one day publish his reminiscences.) ‘We amused ourselves with some crumbs of pizza dropped by the woodland birds.’

‘He did,’ said Kimberley. ‘I can’t touch gluten.’

Martha asked Vi how her day had been and the captain gave her a conspiratorial look and passed her the basket of bread rolls.

Les said, ‘I spotted you dancing with that handsome young man. Don’t you worry, Val here’ll tell you not much gets past me.’

The captain looked crestfallen and to spare his feelings Vi explained. ‘My steward is a ballroom dance fan. He was keen for me to try it out so I went to the tea dance to please him.’

‘My wife was a wonderful ballroom dancer.’ The captain spoke wistfully.

Vi, seeing where this was heading, said hastily, ‘I’m really no good at dancing. I only went to please Renato.’

‘Extraordinary,’ said the critic. ‘I do hope my steward won’t insist.’

The sommelier, who introduced himself as Pedro, came to take her order and recommended the Rioja. Vi ordered a large glass. ‘My steward’s very keen on the
Titanic
,’ she said to the critic. ‘The show, I mean, not the ship.’ She remembered that this had been the target of one of his most scathing pieces.

Conversation drifted generally to other topics. The critic and Martha took up the recent changes of foreign policy in the US, Kimberley and Valerie begin to debate the pros and cons of breast reduction and Les said that he preferred his women natural and what was wrong with a bit of tit? Greg and Heather, in the absence of any outside interest, spoke among themselves of their son’s latest accomplishments and Miss Foot asked the captain if he was acquainted with the work of Rudolph Steiner, of whose philosophy, she confided, she had been a life-long disciple. The captain was patently out of his depth but he was too far away for Vi to rescue him. She turned, rather thankfully, to Baz.

‘What was it you were doing at the LSE if that isn’t too nosy?’

‘I’m an anthropologist.’

‘Not economics, then?’

‘Not at all. African religion is my field. My speciality is traditional healers, “witch doctors” to you. The LSE happens to be rather good on witch doctors.’

‘How funny,’ she said. ‘Someone I knew is, or was, interested in witch doctors, sorry, traditional healers, I should say.’

‘No?’

‘Yes. He was at the LSE too.’

‘I admit to being surprised. Rather big-headedly, I get to thinking I am the only witch-doctor doctor. We tend to be kind of thin on the ground.’

‘I should imagine. What is it you study especially?’

‘My healers are the Sangomas, the traditional healers of southern Africa. I guess you could say they work as psychiatrists. But they practise as physicians too. Herbs, mostly, but also, for example, they prescribe lion’s fat to give courage.’

‘The person I knew was interested in Voodoo, sorry, I mean Vodun, but I was never quite sure whether he was telling tall stories,’ Vi said, thinking she wouldn’t mind some lion’s fat.

‘These esoteric religions generate tall stories. After all, who can check them? The Catholic missionaries of course exploited this like crazy. But I’m intrigued. Who was your friend?’

‘No one you would know,’ Vi said. ‘It was ages ago.’

After dinner, Greg and Heather hurried away to monitor the peacefully slumbering Patrick. Kimberley Crane announced that if that was what having kids did to you she was glad she hadn’t any and she didn’t know about anyone else but she for one was heading for the bar.

Vi went up on deck but it was chilly and the boards were wet with sea spray and slippery. Not quite knowing what to do with herself, she looked in at the Golden Hinde where she found Ken and Jen.

Jen grabbed her arm. ‘Did you know Kimberley Crane was on board?’

‘As a matter of fact she’s at my dinner table.’

‘Oh my God, she’s my hero!’

‘Heroine,’ Ken corrected. He was holding a pint of lager and, swaying slightly with the motion of the ship, looked a little tipsy.

‘No, Ken. Hero. Vi, can you get me to talk to her?’

Vi said, ‘I can try. But I only met her myself this evening.’

Kimberley Crane was standing by the bar in the thick of admirers. She clearly hadn’t any idea who Vi was when she
made her way through the throng to introduce Jen who looked quite bashful and said, ‘I simply
adore
your books, Miss Crane.’

Vi left Jen to fight her corner with the other fans and tried in vain to attract the barman’s attention. She was rescued by Ken, who bought her a brandy and steered her through the crush.

‘Thank you, Ken. At my age, you tend to become invisible.’

‘I reckon you’re visible enough, Vi.’

‘Thank you, again.’

‘Old as you feel.’

Vi, who frequently felt as old as the hills, agreed. The ship lurched a little and he held the crook of her arm while she steadied herself.

‘Easy does it. Do you mind the swell, Vi?’

‘Actually, Ken, I quite like it.’

‘Jen doesn’t,’ Ken said. ‘Lucky I brought her seasickness tablets. She’s a terrible sailor.’ He looked admiringly over at his wife who was at the bar talking excitedly to the other Kimberley Crane fans. ‘She’d forget her head, Jen, if I weren’t there to remind her.’

Kimberley Crane was still at the bar when the critic wandered by later that evening. ‘You know,’ she swayed a little on her heels, steadying herself on his narrow shoulder, ‘my agent thinks I’ve got a play in me.’

‘Extraordinary how many seem to have,’ said the critic, stepping aside adroitly to help himself from a bowl of crisps on the bar.

‘I’d adore to run something past you. I have this idea about a play about rape victims.’

‘How fascinating,’ said the critic. He nibbled at a crisp.

‘You know, the trauma of rape is quite indescribable.’

‘But nevertheless you propose to describe it?’

‘What I thought—my God this ship is moving, I need something in my stomach, can you pass the potato chips?’

‘Certainly,’ said the critic, handing her an almost empty bowl.

‘I thought maybe of getting some real rape victims to participate—Jesus, I hope to God it’s not going to be like this all the way. I mean, a kind of therapy session but dramatised on stage. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Surprisingly well.’

‘It would go down big in New York.’

‘You believe so?’

The ship lunged and deprived of the critic’s support Kimberley clutched the bar with both hands. ‘You see, people like you and me, you know, we’re creative.’

‘How kind,’ said the critic, finishing off the second bowl of crisps. ‘Did you catch the Welsh harpist playing in the Rose of York today? I believe she is called Vivian. Not a name one naturally associates with Wales.’

Vi returned from the Golden Hinde to her cabin where she found two small squares of chocolate, positioned at a scrupulously judged diagonal on the turned-down bed. Beside them was a reminder to put her clock back by one hour. Too tired to undress, she lay down fully clothed and ate the chocolates. Her mind had returned to Edwin.

Their correspondence had been punctiliously polite. She had initiated it, nervous of how a letter from her might be received. And for a long time there had been nothing from him and she had supposed that he had moved or didn’t want to hear from her—either, or both, being possible. Or perhaps he had died? People did die. Not only her mother, and Ted, but quite a few of those she had known well had gone into the dark. (Her mind flashed, as it always did when thoughts of death arose, to her sons.) Months after she had stopped scrutinising the post, an airmail letter arrived and the neat italic handwriting told her, before she looked inside, whom it was from. Who else, other than old-fashioned doctors, would still be using a fountain pen?

Edwin’s letter was friendly if guarded. It contained news, of a public kind, about his work, which he reported as going ‘quite well’. She had heard that his latest collection,
The Dust Gatherers
, had been short-listed for the Galliner Prize, one of the top
awards for poetry in the US. She alluded to this in her reply, offering congratulations. In the same letter she had enclosed her email address. His reply to hers made no mention of the Galliner but explained that he didn’t use email or even possess a computer.

I continue, as you can tell, as an unreformed Luddite,
he wrote.
To everyone’s irritation, and the alarm of some, I don’t even own a cell phone. These things possess us, I feel, rather than the other way about.

The last gave a glint of the old Edwin and she had written back swiftly (perhaps, she judged afterwards, too swiftly, since he took noticeably longer to reply to this one) to say she wished she had his moral courage but, coached by her two sons, she had succumbed to technology. When his next letter arrived, it contained no reference to the sons but he did make an oblique enquiry about her work. ‘What are you doing these days? (I hate that question so please feel free to ignore it.)’

What
was
she doing these days? ‘I wish I knew,’ she said aloud, getting up from the bed to take off the pearls and the black frock, put on her nightdress and wedge open the doors to the sound of the ancient and blessedly unjudging sea.

Down in the crew bar Des bumped into Boris. ‘How did you get on with Mrs Hetherington? I saw you schmoozing her.’

‘Fine.’

‘You going to pull her?’

‘Fuck off,’ Des said.

Boris levelled at him an insolent blue gaze and laughing knowingly, moved off to conclude a deal he had going with one of the waiters in Beatrix who claimed to have access to a supply of Rolexes.

Des stayed at the bar drinking a couple of beers. He moved
off to see what was showing at the lower deck cinema. A romantic comedy, of the kind favoured by the female crew. Sandy, one of the bar tenders in the Golden Hinde, was in there watching the film. He had had a brief fling with her but she had begun to be pushy and demanding and he wanted to get some distance between them to give the affair time to die down. To avoid meeting her, he decided to go back to his cabin.

Crew members of the same sex and in similar posts were generally berthed together as cabin mates. But there was always some wheeling and dealing going on. Des had worked things so that he shared with one of the male hairdressers, who was having an affair with a masseuse who worked in the spa, who in turn shared with a yoga instructor, who was having an affair with the purser who, happily for everyone, had his own private quarters.

This meant that, by a knock-on effect, except on the evenings when the yoga teacher was in a bad mood, or had her period, Des had the cabin to himself.

He reached up and felt for a shortbread tin with a picture of two Scottie dogs on it, one white, one black. Leila Claybourne, in the days when he thought she was his mum, had used it to store the flapjacks she had liked to make for him and he had smuggled it into his luggage, along with his
Beano
albums, when he left home. She must have noticed it had gone and wondered if he had taken it. The tin now held a gold watch, a pair of jade cufflinks, a lighter, a couple of photos of himself as a child winning dance medals, a building society book and a notebook. When he had enough capital, his plan was to set up his own dance school, perhaps in the US where you had more of a chance to get on. The tax-free earnings from the four years at sea helped, but the extra input from his ‘private clients’ was a real boost. Opening the notebook, he wrote in a shorthand he had devised for the purpose.

‘H 12’ he wrote and then stopped and thought about the slight pale woman with the long legs he had danced with. She looked not unlike his own mother, whom he still preferred to think of as Aunty Trish. Like her, but most unlike her too. The eyes were quite different. But she was like Trish in being a loner, which had its dangers. Loners were lonely. He’d had a narrow escape the cruise before last, with a woman he’d had to prise off him as she knelt naked at his feet clasping him round the knees. It had been a hell of a worry that he’d not got out of her cabin undetected. She’d given him two hundred dollars, with a plea to visit her in her Manhattan apartment. It was possible that she would repent of this later and report the gift as a theft. They did this, once they had come to their senses, to get the insurance and it was important to work out in advance those who wouldn’t go on to report you as well. If you chose carefully, and followed your instincts, you’d know who was unlikely to follow this pattern since it would expose them too much. Still, it was a gamble. H 12 was a risk. On the other hand, there was that funny business about her steward. And she had after all danced with him.

There was a tap at the door and he opened it, to his dismay, to Sandy. ‘Oh, hi there.’

‘You avoiding me, then?’

‘Why would I be doing that?’

‘Boris said he saw you go into the movies. You must’ve seen me there.’

‘Boris is a cunt.’

‘Good-looking, though.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘So d’you fancy a beer or something?’

Sandy tried to peer round him where, conscious of the open biscuit tin lying on the floor by his bunk, he was blocking the doorway.

‘Not tonight, thanks.’

‘Got a headache, have you?’

‘No, I’m busy.’

‘Oh, what you got to be busy about?’ Sandy moved across to get a better look into the room.

‘This and that.’

‘Oh, right. So see you then?’

‘See you, Sandy.’