Let's Dance (4 page)

The riches, such as they were, consisted of Aunt Mab's inheritance, received with bewildered gratitude over a decade before, to the fury of Mab's nephew Robert, who received nothing. Aunt Mab had been a schoolteacher who knew very well how to invest her stipend, so the fruits of her prudence and her pretty cottage had been enough for Isabel to buy a London flat and thus avoid the need to earn more than a modest living. Isabel always served her notice, but she preferred jobs she could leave. What others spent on mortgages, she spent on clothes. Her brother Robert said it was amazing she had never tried drugs, since she was extravagant and they were not fattening. The riches were not of the endless sort, but they were sufficient to set her apart from striving contemporaries. What was left of her inheritance, Robert said, was all for pissing downwind, like the fool she was. This was not entirely true: Isabel had invested carefully, and although she knew where the bottom of the barrel was, she was never going to scrape it.

Men loved Isabel, who had been brought up never to be a nuisance and rarely was. Despite the feeling of inadequacy that made her twist her mouth in front of a mirror in the morning, telling herself over and over, ‘I am not silly, I am not silly,' a practice learned from a self-help manual and rendering at least one lover paralysed with laughter, she could never quite encompass the truth of her own denials. Isabel Burley was not,
after all, a fool, but she had two inhibiting agents to that hidden, mental chemistry which was not brilliance, but certainly intelligence. Firstly, education had centred around dancing class, whatever Aunt Mab had done to redeem the lack in school holidays; and secondly, she loved her mother in an unconsolable way. She had always hoped to emulate Serena when she finally grew up; she had never lived up to the image.

The ability to drink men under the table was only one of the characteristics they admired; another was her constant availability. She was good at delivering men back to their own doorsteps, or taking them to hers, where they lay, impotent and groaning, for twenty-four hours and she, sweet thing, did not mind. Later they would translate this experience into the memory of a good time, remember her with affection, while not quite recalling anything she said. ‘I love Isabel Burley,' was not a sentiment shouted from rooftops. She dispensed enough kindness to deserve greater loyalty, but she did it without either thought or finesse.

As for the friendship of women, that was difficult. There were waifs and broken-hearted strays, but otherwise women could not see Isabel as either safe or unenviable.

‘I
love you, Issy … You know how much I love you.'

‘No, I don't know. If you loved me, you'd be married to me and not to someone else.'

It was Joe who caused the problems by being really
mad about her. Married, of course, engaged initially on the first sight of Bella in leotard. He had a couple of nights out on the town with Issy, simply to relieve tension, which it did, before she sent him home to his nuptials. Despite his marital bed, Joe could not get her out of his mind and after six months came back howling at the windows of her posh flat for all the heart he had found there once. She had let him in, and two years of passionate vacillation followed.

‘How could I leave her? She would never manage without me …'

On the evening of the night when Isabel received the phone call about her mother and the fire, Isabel had bitten Joe, on the thigh. The bite was ugly, and a perfect reverse pattern of Isabel's teeth. It drew minimal blood, although the scratches to his chest and the head wound from the edge of a jug, thrown across the room with considerable force, bled furiously. This occurred in the interval between after-work hours and going home, the traditional time for a married man to call upon his mistress. By ten that night, Isabel was contemplating the wreckage of her blood-stained bedclothes and her whole, loveless existence. It was not the first time her occasional propensity to violence had horrified her as much as what she had become and what little she had ever achieved. Bimbo. Airhead. Cheap. Everything her mother had never been, let alone what Aunt Mab would have wanted for her. She was in a state of self-hating chaos. Her love for her mother, Robert's endless chastisement, and the reservoir
of guilt which always lapped against her backbone, made her a soft enough touch already.

Life had never thrown Isabel in close conjunction with any form of mental ailment except that encountered in the street. In the midst of her desultory packing, she remembered briefly what she had once known with uncomfortable clarity, namely that Serena had never approved of her, was one of the majority who considered her a fool. She put the realization back inside a box and into the attic store room of her thoughts.

The thought of Mother's flesh, roasted rare, black on the outside, pink in the middle, tipped an unwary balance poised on the cliff of a wasted life. By midnight, going home to look after Serena seemed the only thing left to do. And the only thing that might redeem her pride. It was her mother who was the one who might give love and want it back and it was for both the privileges, the getting and the giving, that she went home.

‘L
ove you, Mum. Now, what are we going to do about your hair?' Isabel had entered a world far distant from the anonymity of London and it was difficult to call it familiar. Yet ten days later the place she thought of as home had reclaimed her, made her forget how anxious she had been to leave it in the first place: how nothing between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one had ever worked; how miserable she had been. All she could recall now was her arrival. No sign of Serena.
No greeting. Instead a clash of sound from the tape deck in the long living room, reverberating and echoing over the whole house, shivering the timbers in a series of violent discords. Mother shouting above it, ‘I don't need you, I need words!' thumping the wall to make the kind of row that drowned thought. Isabel had paused, then rushed towards the noise, which stopped before she reached it. Serena's eyes, defiant, met hers.

‘The words are over there,' she had begun, looking towards the desk, before a big beatific smile dawned in that stretched, ugly-attractive face and she had sprung towards her daughter with an energy that defied her years. Her hair was dull and her make-up odd: thick, pale foundation, brilliant blue paste over the eyelids. There were subtle changes in the month since Isabel's last, fleeting, visit. Now she was here to stay. Make things better; do something properly.

‘Darling! You're so thin! My lovely child!'

There was the strange sensation of being greeted by a duchess. A hostess who hid the fact she was expecting this guest and had been anticipating the arrival for some time.

Isabel had melted into her embrace, drowned herself in it. ‘Shh,' she had said, ‘shh, Mummy. It's all right now.' Saying the words and making the gestures she wanted for herself.

‘I do love you,' Serena had said. ‘I do, I do.'

Had she ever said that before? Isabel could not remember, only knew how sweet it was to hear.

‘I know you do. What a big hug! You never used to like hugging.'

They had swayed together, Serena's soft bosom surrendering the smell of lavender, her arms surprisingly strong.

‘You never used to like music so much, either, sweetheart. What's got into you?'

Serena had withdrawn slightly, to arms' length. Enough distance to look into Isabel's face, caress her cheek, pinch it playfully, but in a way which hurt a little. Isabel had a dim memory of scratches over her buttocks from a lover. Affection carried scars. She had not flinched. The analogy of a lover continued, with her mother's delicate hands on her own slim hips, the swelling stomach of the older woman pushing forward with great insistency, spreading against her own waist, the voice urgent with whispered confidence.

‘Darling, you've come home at last. Let me tell you things …'

T
oday, the wind blew.

‘Let me tell you something,' George said to the dog as they plodded back across the fields. ‘Number one is that there's far worse things than being on your own. Serena and I know that, don't we? Believe me. And there's worse things a dog can do than run sheep, or a man chase women, but I'm glad you've lost the habit.'

The dog squatted, strained with total concentration. George looked at her with concern: trouble with bowels was a sign of age in a retriever, so he'd heard.
Serena should stop feeding her pap. He thought how he would break up into little pieces if anything happened to this old bitch, and not only because she was the formal
raison d'être
for his being in Mrs Burley's house. There would be far less reason for him to be there on a daily basis if there was no dog to walk: he could hardly take out that vicious little ginger cat which needed no guardian and already ate, slept and ran where it pleased.

‘The worst thing you can ever be,' George told the dog as they resumed progress uphill, ‘is too crowded. Penned up with a hundred other people, never left by yourself for a minute. Not when you squat, not when you sleep, not when you eat. I didn't know what hell was, but I'm telling you now, that's exactly what it is. And if that's hell, this is heaven.'

The wind gusted strongly in their faces. George challenged himself not to walk slower in the face of such force and an uphill gradient: it was a discipline to walk at the same pace at all times. Get the heartbeat going, set a steady pace and keep it up for at least an hour, make a bit of a sweat, but not too much, and just keep going, enjoying the sensation of muscles at work. Once he had established a pace, then he could look around. See nothing but the fields, feel the mud beneath his boots, catch from the corner of his eye the fungus on that tree, the squirrel leaping from one bare branch to another, the fat blackbirds near the house. When the dog lumbered away in comic and futile pursuit of a rabbit, George almost doubled up with
pleasure. ‘You can't explain it to no one else,' he told her. ‘Not to no one who doesn't know what you mean already, why you should chase that thing, and I should be so happy. I doubt if Mrs Burley knows it either, but at least she never asks questions. You can't explain being happy, that's for sure.'

He had the dreamer's knack of forgetting. Out here, or in the garden with the dog who was the receptacle for all his secrets, George could think of his own home with less revulsion. Not a home, more of a billet, a bed-sit in a hostel for so-called hopeful cases, people from abnormal lives on their way to what passed for normality. He had lived there for four years, a halfway house in a new town which had become home. Get a job, they said, ha, ha, ha. Should be easy for a well-built man like you, factories around here not fussy about a record as long as you work: amazing, but it's still difficult to find someone willing to put in the hours and besides, you won't have much opportunity for your little game among all the heavy machinery. He had stuck it for a month, then gone berserk, run out of there screaming, sacked next day. We don't mind the record, the boss told his social worker, but he can't stand being crowded and we can't be doing with the disabled. Which George somehow dimly knew himself to be. Despite his physical strength.

‘And how did you get to be here?' That was Janice asking. He could laugh at the memory of her curiosity, the affront to her of something happening without her knowing.

‘Oh, I was just walking by. Saw Mrs Burley trying to trim that bush outside the gate. She couldn't do it, so I said, give us those shears, Missus, I'll do it for you.'

Something like that, a lifetime ago. He did not mention the lassitude of those long walks before Serena had found him. Long walks in the countryside reached in his battered car, the only solace he knew for despair. Those empty days before Serena had asked him in for tea and behaved as if she had known him for ever, no questions, no judgement, simply acceptance.

Greyer clouds rolled forward over an already grey sky, the beginning of the afternoon darkness, and George marvelled at how much of these mean days he was able to spend with the light on his back. His red hair was thin on top, his ears stuck out, but he refused the benefit of hat and gloves which Serena pressed on him. Makes me too hot, Missus. He swung his legs over the gate and marched round the back of the house. There was the familiar smell of homecoming, and also, in the sight of Isabel's jaunty little car, the sulphurous smell of a crowd, and the whiff of danger. He frowned. He was trying to extend towards Isabel Burley some of the vast affection he felt for her mother, but he could not. All right: he hated her and she disliked him. She was not a patch on her mother: she had no class, and she made him tremble with the old, familiar shame.

He could hear the murmur of voices from the living room. On the kitchen sideboard there were letters waiting for the postman, at least two letters a day. He
always took them, posted them in town. He had collected the post, too, from Sal at the end of the road, but now, he supposed, Isabel would object, once she noticed. Fear clutched at his lungs. Already he was relegated to the kitchen as if he had never gone beyond; Isabel's rule prevailed. He saw the erosion of his tasks and also saw, with contempt, that there was one envelope addressed in a clear hand, larger but similar to Serena's microscopic script. Her own were important letters, Serena said. He looked at them as he scooped them up in one large paw, ready to leave without a word, sick with a kind of envy. George wanted his house back. He was also waiting for an accusation from Isabel. She gave me those things, he would say. Gave them me. I never took them.

‘S
erena Burley has Alzheimer's disease,' John Cornell told his son, with a slight satisfaction he found difficult to hide. ‘She's on her own,' he added unnecessarily, ‘and going barmy. Now that isn't a good thing.'

‘She might not have Alzheimer's,' said his son, looking up from the catalogue. ‘Rumour has it she's been getting very strange and eccentric, that's all.'