Echoes of the Dance (21 page)

‘We've talked quite a bit about your injury,' Mim was saying, ‘but we haven't really faced the fact that you might never dance with a top professional company again.'

Daisy dropped her eyes before such a brutal truth, fingering her postcard, and Roly winced at Mim's straight speaking.

‘I think I can only say these things because I've been there myself.' Mim's eyes were fixed on Daisy's face. ‘I don't think we can pretend that your career can just be picked up where it left off and so the best thing is to look at the alternatives.'

Daisy swallowed, licking dry lips. ‘It's not that I want to kid myself,' she said, ‘but it's as if I can't seem to think straight at all at the moment. Nothing seems . . . real.'

‘But that's because you're in love, my darling, isn't it? Everything dissolves in the face of terrible, terrible love.'

‘Is love terrible?' Daisy stared at Mim with such anxiety that Roly longed to defend her in some way from the answer he knew Mim would give.

‘Being in
love
is nearly always terrible,' she answered truthfully, ‘unless both lovers are always giving to each other – not pulling in opposite directions – so that the love flows freely between them. That way there is no anxiety or fear, no need to score points, each is equal. Generally, this is not the case. You know the saying “There is one who kisses and one who extends the cheek”? That's much more the norm, wouldn't you say? I have known cases where people actually confuse the pain of rejection or betrayal with love. You only have to listen to Ella Fitzgerald singing those blues to begin to believe that suffering is sexy. It isn't.'

‘I know that,' protested Daisy. ‘I don't do that. It's just . . . I just can't help it. I want to be with him.'

‘Oh, my darling, of course you do. We all do. We want to cook them delicious food and have their babies. Clever old Mother Nature has got us well under her thumb, you see. She plays hell with our hormones and makes us blind and insensate to anything but the beloved. I was just the same with Alistair. Oh, how I adored him.'

‘Alistair?' Daisy was distracted momentarily from the shock of Mim's blunt observations. ‘Who is Alistair?'

‘He is my ex-husband. Oh God, how I loved that man.'

‘Your ex-
husband
? I had no idea that you'd been married. Nobody ever said anything about it.'

‘Probably nobody actually noticed,' said Roly drily. ‘It didn't last long. The poor fellow hadn't realized that he was marrying an entire stage school.'

Mim grinned. ‘The poor darling. The trouble was that I didn't concentrate on him properly. The sex was terrific but there were other more important things in my life than bed. It was wrong of me to marry him but he was so persistent and I thought I could have it all.'

‘But what happened?' Daisy's eyes were round with disbelief. ‘When did it start to go wrong?'

‘Halfway through the honeymoon,' said Roly, ‘when he was told that it would have to be cut short because Mim was going to Bristol to preside over the examination session at the local ballet schools. She didn't break it to him until the day before because she didn't want to upset him.'

‘Oh dear.' Mim was laughing guiltily. ‘I used to be on the RAD's board of examiners in those days, you see, and I simply couldn't have let them down. He didn't understand at all and I wasn't terribly sympathetic. My work was always so important to me and I wasn't clever about managing him.'

‘But what happened?'

‘He was very attractive and there were always other women who wanted to comfort him. He liked that: feeling a little sorry for himself and casting me as a heartless career woman. Well, I was. I had so many people to love. My staff and all the children were my family, I suppose, and poor Alistair simply couldn't cope. He went off with an older woman who adored him and made him feel all the things I didn't. He postured about for a while, smirking insufferably and implying that she could appreciate him properly. I was only too grateful to her.
Such
a relief, I can't tell you!'

‘But that doesn't mean that love can't work for other people.'

‘No, darling, it doesn't, but it does mean that you need to think about it very carefully.'

‘But if I can't
have
a dancing career . . . ?'

‘Perhaps not the one you had, no, but have you ever thought of choreography?'

Daisy frowned, considering the idea, clearly taken aback. ‘No.' She shook her head but her eyes were thoughtful.

‘From one or two things you've told me when you were working with Tony, I've been thinking about it quite a lot. Do you remember, in class, you often found it difficult to follow the
enchaînement
? You often got into trouble over it. Once you said to me, “I thought that something else ought to go after the
pas de chat
” – a
pas de bourrée
or a
glissade
, I can't remember – and I realized that you were making up your own sequence of steps in your head and not concentrating on what your teachers were asking you to do.'

‘I did that with Tony,' Daisy agreed, ‘but then choreography works like that, doesn't it? Bouncing ideas off one another?'

‘Of course it does but, listening to you, I had the impression that you often had very clear ideas of your own.'

‘Yes, that's true, but even so . . .'

‘You know Andy's leaving us? Why don't you come back to us for a while? You could help us in a thousand ways, you'd be so wonderful with the children, and you could choreograph something special for the Charity Matinée. We'd all assist you, of course, but I'd leave it entirely to you to come up with something new.'

Silence: then Daisy began to laugh disbelievingly. ‘The
Charity Matinée
? But that's incredibly prestigious. I . . . I couldn't begin to . . . You can't mean it?'

‘It demonstrates my trust and absolute faith in you, darling Daisy. Will you think about it? I need to know soon.'

Daisy stared at her with dazed eyes. ‘I don't know what to say.'

‘Then don't speak now.' Mim got up. ‘We'll go to Camelford to get some shopping but I have to do a few things first. Can you give me half an hour?'

She went away from them, up the stairs, and presently Roly put his hand on Daisy's shoulder.

‘I have it on good authority that, at moments like these, communication with the Great Outdoors is therapeutic,' he said. ‘Shall we take the dogs up on the hill?'

PART TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The cottage was for sale: the estate agent's post was wedged into the peaty earth of the narrow border, sheltered by the low wall that fronted the lane, and the board was framed by the leaves of the rowan tree whose white blossoms were faded now and drifted down to the grassy verges. Kate, on her way to supper with Nat and Janna, braked sharply and sat staring at the small stone house. Its outward appearance had not changed much since she'd first seen it thirty years ago: the outbuildings had been renovated – work she'd been unable to afford – and the cottage had been given a new slate roof but the whole effect remained one of stability and character. The grey stone walls seemed to have grown out of the earth along with the ancient apple trees and the aquilegias; the robin, hopping upon the flagged path, was surely a descendant of the little family that nested each year in the ivy that clung tenaciously to the holly trees in the hawthorn hedge.

Kate leaned forward, staring up at the board as if it were a portent: a message for which she'd been hoping. How strange that this particular cottage should come on to the market now, at this particular moment when her life was in a state of confusion and grief, when she was considering putting her own house up for sale, though she had no idea where she should go. Thirty years ago she'd fallen in love with this cottage and plunged headlong into the purchase of it with that supreme confidence that comes with the knowledge of absolute rightness. Even now she could remember that first reaction to it and was surprised to discover that she was experiencing those same feelings again: delight, excitement, a sense of a new direction in her life.

Back then the cottage had been a place of shelter through the unhappy months of the breakdown of her marriage: a secure base for her children after the years of moving between the naval bases. Here, away from prying eyes and gossip, she and Alex had made love: such loving as she had never known before. There had been so much to talk about to him, so much to share . . . even now she couldn't understand why their relationship had foundered so disastrously.

The tractor, rumbling round the bend in the lane, caught her unawares; she hastened to pull into the gateway to let it pass and then drove on towards Horrabridge where Nat and Janna were waiting for her.

‘You'll never guess,' she said, hugging them and accepting a glass of wine, unable to wait a moment before telling them. ‘My old cottage is for sale. I simply can't believe it. It was the first place I ever owned . . .'

The words came tumbling out – the coincidence, the memories – and she laughed and shook her head in turn, unable to contain this wild, new excitement.

Janna caught her infectious exhilaration all in a second. ‘Your old home? Where you brought up your boys?'

She entered completely into Kate's delight, easily able to identify with her amazement at the coincidence, as ready as Kate was to believe in signs and portents. To Janna, a home, any home, was a sanctuary and this must be a very special place, she could quite see that.

‘Imagine,' she marvelled, ‘falling in love with it all those years ago and then finding it again now, just when you've been wondering what to do and where to go. And all those memories of the twins growing up . . .'

‘I think it's been a holiday home for the last few years.' Nat was more prosaic. ‘I've noticed that through the winter it's often got that shut-up look about it and then at Easter and in the summer you see signs of life.'

‘I wonder if it's been changed inside.' Kate tried to imagine it. ‘I shall phone the agents in the morning. It's so odd that I should come that way this evening. I'd been for a walk up on King's Tor, you see . . .' She told the story again and then laughed with vexation. ‘Sorry. I'm being an absolute twit. Let's forget it. How are you both?'

Bundling away her excitement, containing it in a secret place where she might dwell on it later in private, Kate concentrated on the two of them. Janna had the air of a languorous cat: even the wild lion-hair, springing mane-like around her small head, looked sleek. Her lips curved contentedly upward, even as she leaned to pour the wine, as if she were possessed of some ineffable joy that couldn't be hid. This evening she wore a flame-coloured sarong, knotted round her narrow hips, and a black halter-top that barely concealed her tiny breasts. All her movements were languid and assured, yet there remained something vulnerable in the sharpness of her shoulder-blades and her bare, thin, fragile feet.

Kate, glancing at Nat, was aware of tension: there was no joy here. His eyes were inward-looking, his lips compressed, and the heaviness of his spirits was manifested in the tremendous effort he was making to join in with the conversation. Janna seemed unconscious of his gloom, wrapped as she was in her own happiness. Hearing Kate's story about the cottage had given it a kind of lustre, an added brilliance, and she was away into one of her own stories of being on the road. She perched on the arm of Nat's chair, leaning against his shoulder and, as she talked, Kate was shocked into a sharper awareness. There was an unconscious possessiveness in Janna's attitude; she touched Nat's hair and then his arm – such a light, brief caress but with a new, sweet confidence – as she told her light-hearted, amusing tale. And all the while her body language was telling a separate story of its own: its fluid, newly fulfilled grace communicating quite as clearly as any words.

She got up to go back into the kitchen – none of the familiar waif-like hesitation in her movements now; instead the serene certainty of the mistress of the house – and Nat reluctantly raised his eyes at last. He was clearly uncomfortable, unable to meet Kate's gaze openly or to speak out freely, and Kate remained silent out of confusion and politeness.

‘So,' he said dully, at last, ‘do you think you really might make an offer for the cottage?'

His words, apparently heaved up with an effort from his heavy heart and falling weightily into the silence, filled her with a foreboding that inhibited her and she was relieved when Janna called out that supper was ready.

Kate slept badly that night. Thoughts about the cottage distracted her from her anxieties about Janna and Nat but her head seethed with so many other images and ideas that, to begin with, she couldn't sleep at all. She'd resisted the temptation to drive home past the cottage – it would be foolish to go so far out of her way simply to stare at it again – but she simply couldn't prevent herself from thinking about it.

As she let herself into her own house she was seized with a sudden compunction, almost as if she were contemplating infidelity, and she looked around her big, warm kitchen with a kind of placating anxiety. She loved this house, of course she did, but she must try to be rational about it. Now that she was alone it was too big for her and she couldn't afford to maintain it. The cottage, on the other hand, would be perfect: small without being poky, economical to run, secluded but not remote. It seemed surprising, remembering it with the enthusiasm that she felt for it at this moment, that she'd ever been prepared to leave the cottage at all. It had been her brother, she reminded herself as she switched off lights and locked up, who'd broached the idea that they should pool their resources and share a house: her boys were growing up, she was beginning to take the dog-breeding more seriously so as to supplement her income, and Chris needed a base in the UK. This project offered both of them advantages they couldn't supply by themselves. Kate required extra space, both inside and out, and Chris, who was an electrical transmissions engineer and worked abroad a great deal, longed for a proper home to which he could return for holidays.