Let's Dance (2 page)

And that was the fact of it. So much of what Serena did made sense. To Serena and also to George. They shared a common and secret logic which did not require even the effort of mutual tolerance. George, Serena and, to some extent, Janice, conspired to maintain a façade and to keep Mrs Burley where she belonged, and, although Janice did not know it, to preserve George in relative safety.

He was back in the kitchen. There was a fuel-burning stove of indeterminate age at one end, with a sweet nursing chair in front of it, the sink at the other end and a badly done, uphill sloping quarry-tiled floor uniting the two. There was also a refrigerator, an electric cooker and a series of old kitchen units littered against the walls, a couple of deep, walk-in cupboards built into the fabric of huge sandstone walls and a series of doors which had once puzzled him until he knew better. One led to a pantry, a miserable little
room, full of fuse boxes, a washing machine, what still passed for a freezer and shelves full of stores, all dusty and deficient, the place a masterpiece of bad design. Something called Fablon, a kind of stick-on polythene, coated the pantry shelves, curled at the edges, making fingers stick and grime collect. Looking out from the pantry window there was a spinney, beginning with a small bank on which he had seen the ferret play last summer, both of them enchanted with the sunlight.

The wood had been cut back and now took revenge by crawling forwards in a thicket of sycamore. Nearest the window were the purple autumn crocuses which he could call his own, the bulbs he had planted signalling a new ownership of this wild territory. George watched the ginger cat crawl among them, pause where he had planted out the Christmas tree the winter before, willing permanence on both its withered branches and his tenure in this blessed house. The cat strove to survive, just as he did. Serena said it would grow up to be handsome, which was more than anyone would ever say about him. George had done his growing in another world, and in this one acquired a new skin and an identity which, for the first time ever, pleased him.

T
he other door, aside from the one that led into the corridor, an avenue that bore signs of Serena's eclectic taste, led down to the cellar. In saner moments Mrs Burley had told him about people keeping food down there before the advent of the refrigerator, why didn't he go and look? He had looked, closely, once or twice
and never again. Janice said there was a cheese press made out of half a ton of stone, because it had once been a dairy. Stone shelves, a back cellar full of junk, a little window covered with dank weed, a place where things were put and left for ever. Until Serena had a party, magicked glasses, knives, forks, out of there. Oh, really? There had been no parties here in three years: George would have hated a crowd. It was the look of the steps down which so appalled him. They were stone, but so worn that each of them lisped into the centre, lethally slippery, the outward edge forming a wavy line, glistening with damp. It was the thought of how many people, how many hundreds of thousands of footsteps, had created that effect by constant traffic that had unnerved him. George did not like darkness, or servitude.

The dog got up out of her basket, cautiously enthusiastic. She seemed, like her mistress, to lose the capacity for barking in the afternoon, made a noise only for those she liked.

‘Fine bloody watchdog you are,' he grumbled. ‘C'mon,
ol'
girl. You and me against the world. C'mon.'

She moved her fat rump, thudded her tail, looked up beseechingly. Cold, outside.

‘Walkies,' he said. ‘You'll feel better for it after.'

They went out the back. Past the pump that no longer worked, over the fence into the park, her paws clipping on the remnant of concrete by the stable yard. There was a fine powdering of frost on the grass: the
cattle had been taken indoors, so the land was theirs. In the distance was the treadmill of the town. He raised a fist to it.

In all of the vexed, fifty-odd years of his life, George had never been this happy. He needed this status quo, and without giving it much thought was determined it should remain exactly as it was.

J
anice did an evening shift after George had gone, four hours a day. She was a comfortable woman and a natural diplomat, a necessary talent for one who pursued a patient career in looking after the elderly, albeit one that was founded on her nervousness about doing anything else, except clean things, which was what she had once done here. Patience was certainly a virtue. What did these poor old dears have to do with jargon about being mentally challenged? She looked at Serena Burley over the rim of her spectacles and then averted her eyes. Serena would have responded better to a man: Serena lit up in the presence of the male sex, but for a woman Janice did better than most when it came to persuading her to eat. People who had not entirely lost their table manners, but were still aware enough to know they were doing something not quite right, were embarrassed to be watched, although Mrs Burley used mealtimes as a great attention-seeking exercise. It was as if she wished to prove her frugality by never admitting to hunger. She lived on chocolate, and the only thing she could cook, albeit with maximum labour, was fish and chips. As one who had cooked for two
fussy children and one bottomless pit of a husband for what seemed like endless years, Janice did not think this diet a sign of madness in itself, in fact it seemed a sign of sanity. All the same, these antics over a meal could be irritating to anyone else, who had failed to eradicate impatience as Janice had, leaving a vacuum filled with nothing but endless affection, loyalty governed by prudence and a fear for what she held dear.

‘Too hot,' Serena complained. ‘Ooh, far too hot. I can't eat this. Why is it so hot?'

It was not hot: Janice had ensured it was merely warm, so that Mrs Burley would do what she usually did, which was tear off chunks of fish and feed them under the table to the ever-waiting dog. It was
de rigueur
that half the meal would be given away: proof to herself, in some benighted way, that Mrs Burley was a civilized, delicate and far from greedy woman. Janice kept quiet, apart from saying, mmm, this is nice, by way of encouragement. A bit like running water making people want to pee. She did not like the thought of Mrs Burley's fingers, covered in dog saliva, putting chips into her own mouth, but there was nothing she could do about that and it was better than the old girl eating nothing at all. Janice supposed that owner and dog must be immune to each other's germs after all this time. It was the dog looked poorly. That was the daftest thing the daughter had done, buy that dog which had grown into a fat and indiscriminately friendly bitch, as pleased with male strangers as Serena was herself. Janice cleared the plates.

‘Would you like some ice-cream?'

‘Too cold,' said Serena. ‘Isn't it?'

The sky outside was black, that time of year when darkness began to rule and daylight in the evening faded into a memory. The days had been grey and cold, limiting the mean allowance of light to a few hours of indifferent illumination per diem. Would Mrs Burley still be here in the spring? Janice dreaded winter. The house had begun to unnerve her after dark: she had dreams about it. She looked with longing at the outline of her red car, blurred by the wavy lines of the glass on the kitchen door. Should have put it away in the dilapidated garage round the back, where the sight of it would not fill Serena with envy. She patted her pocket for the keys, which the old dear kept trying to pinch; still wanted to drive, poor old duck. Janice did four until eight, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and it was almost time to go, but Mrs Burley always began to talk when they were both on the downward run, and then she did not quite have the heart. Tonight she was going to be bold, strike for freedom ten minutes early. There was something oppressive, intense and mischievous about her charge this evening, and her own movements around the sink became brisk.

‘I've got one son and one daughter,' Serena began, ‘and they don't love me any more because of the words.'

‘Never, Mrs B.,' said Janice, making her chatter into a parody of cleaning-lady talk because Mrs Burley
liked it that way. ‘They love you a lot, but they got to work, you know. And they live a long way away.'

Janice did not believe that sons and daughters owed it to their elders to interrupt their lives and turn themselves to the ignominy of the kind of service that was her livelihood. Only those who did not know what it was like would ever expect that, and she would have killed herself rather than have her children do for her what she did. They could do it for someone else, but they were never going to do it for her. They were never going to see her eat with open jaws and suck her fingers as she gave chips to the dog. You had to have your compassion paid for to do this job.

‘Don't go,' said Serena. ‘Please don't go. I'm frightened.'

There's a ritual, see? Janice would tell her husband. A blackmail ritual, when she tries to stop me going, only it doesn't correspond with my hours.

‘Course you aren't frightened. You don't know the meaning of the word.'

‘What verb?' Serena was suddenly angry; terribly angry. Janice paused with her hand on the door latch, looking out to the comfort of her red car. In that, home soon. Sooner the better.

‘A bit cross, maybe. Never frightened, not you. Don't worry about it, love. See you soon.'

That was a ritual too, the use of simple words and simpler promises. She remembered closing the door on that sullen and disappointed face with its sharp features, big soft eyes hinting at the splendour of all that
former beauty, blowing kisses as she got in the driving seat and went hell for leather out of the rutted drive and on to the road across the fields. By the time she was halfway to the church, the music blared, making a cocoon of the car, making her relax too much. She missed one of the biggest potholes, bounced into another, felt a thump on the bottom of the still new car.

The wages of guilt. She was not only ten minutes under time, but fifteen and that included getting out of the house. She stopped by the church, got out to examine the car in the thin light of the winter sky, bending and squinting beneath it as if what she might see could make any difference. Really, daughter or son had no cause to come back and take on this old lady, but, supposing there was any money in the till, they should fill in the potholes in the road so that other people, on their wages, did not have to ruin their cars when they happened to be in a temper themselves. Then she relaxed, let her breath out: there was nothing she could do. Why rush home anyway? Home was where the heart was, but it meant more demands. Home was halfway sustained by Mrs Burley's cash: she could not afford to feel churlish, or wish for the end of this era.

S
o she stood by the graveyard in the dark, smoking the cigarette that was mandatory in the Burley household, forbidden in her own, watching the sky. Outside the sky was a different creature from the sky observed
longingly from the inside of window panes. It was lighter and brighter, full of comforting mystery, not really dark at all. Hope in October; must have been the crocuses out of the pantry window, made her think that way.

At the end of that lumpy drive over the fields, where the track met the car park next to the church, she faced a cottage. Nice couple with absent children moving about in there, and nothing else but her smoke and the dim knowledge that she should not, in this sudden delirium of free time, lean against the other car parked alongside. There was movement behind the cottage windows. Horrible curtains, she thought. Cheap.

She remembered, with a slight and guilty amusement, the relations between these worthy neighbours and Mrs Burley after the latter had written off their motor car in a head-on collision. Mrs Burley did not like giving way. End of Serena's driving licence; end of neighbourly goodwill, since she had not seen fit to apologize. Difficult to forgive someone who wrote off your car: she could see it now, all over their front lawn. She sniggered silently at the thought. Then there was a soft crunching of footsteps, which made her freeze without real fear. Bloody George. Appearing behind her as if she needed supporting.

‘You shouldn't smoke,' he said. ‘Bad for your health.'

‘So is sneaking up on people in the dark, you silly bugger. What you doing here?'

Only George, the harmless one who had given her
the creeps at first, until she found they got on fine, running the place comfortably between them, provided George was given the illusion of being in charge and also given his manly credit for being the only one who could possibly make Serena obey an order she did not already see the advantage of obeying.

‘Dunno. Coming back to the car. Don't it feel like midnight, and we haven't even reached the news on the radio?' There was a mute accusation in that, a reminder of the time, five minutes over eight, but twenty since she had left the house.

‘Serena told me her husband's buried in this graveyard. She told me a while back, so I planted this crocus. Thought I'd tend to it, so I went to see Sal at the end of the road, to get some water in case they needed it.'

Janice wondered how it was that George always got to know everyone's name. She must have been coming here a good many years, but George, in his three, knew the names for all the faces she had ever seen. It was not a mere semblance of control, she realized; it was complete.

‘Then I thought, you can't have weeds on a grave. I'll have to go on tending Edward's grave, I thought. Not that anything's growing, apart from the crocus. Funny, innit? You and me here. No one else.'

Glory be, thought Janice, listening with admiration and a faint sense of outrage: he's on first-name terms with the dead as well.

‘I bumped my car, George. Be an angel and have a
look at it for me, will you? I don't understand these things.'

He had turned away from her, not that he ever came close, hands in his pockets; harmless, a bolshie little man, short of leg, squat, powerful and utterly benign, keeping a good distance. ‘Look at them stars,' he said. ‘Better than my crocuses, and longer lasting.'