The Ballroom Class (15 page)

‘I know, Ross!’ gabbled Katie, embarrassed. ‘Hello! We haven’t met – I just never get time to collect Hannah, you know how it is with office hours and—’

‘Oh, I do know,’ said Mrs Armstrong, but Katie felt she had to go on, for Ross, not her.

‘I mean, I’d love to pick her up more than I do, but I just can’t leave the office that early. Hannah adores school, though, doesn’t she, Ross? She’s always talking about how much she loves the painting, and the trips to the park. I think she’s going to be a big reader, as well, because she loves her bedtime stories, which I’m in charge of  . . .’

Mrs Armstrong’s smile spread into a sort of understanding look. They were really kind, teacher’s eyes, thought Katie, used to cheering children up, and finding something positive to say.

She scrambled herself together, conscious that everyone was staring at her. ‘I love reading her bedtime stories,’ she finished lamely.

‘Hannah’s a little star,’ said Mrs Armstrong, and Katie felt the invisible pat on the head but was grateful. ‘She’s doing very well.’

‘Everything OK?’ asked Angelica, shimmering up silently behind them. ‘Lauren, you were really getting that! Your arms were spot-on, very elegant. Well done!’

‘Seriously? Ooh, thanks,’ said Lauren, her cheeks turning pink. ‘Have you taught learners worse than us before?’

‘More than you can imagine,’ said Angelica.

‘Angelica’s not just a teacher, Laurie,’ said Bridget, casting a quick apologetic glance towards her. ‘She used to be an international ballroom champion – she’s our only proper local celebrity!’

‘Really?’ said Lauren – a bit too incredulously. ‘Wow. You’re famous?’

Angelica batted away the compliment, but again, Katie saw a brief glimmer of pride light up her face, tinged with something more bittersweet.

‘Just amongst people who go dancing,’ she said. ‘Next week, same time?’

There was a chorus of agreement, and then Greg jingled his car keys impatiently, and before anyone could ask any more questions, suddenly they were all leaving.

7

It was a mild night for September, and Angelica walked home slowly from the Memorial Hall, her dancing shoes in her large bag (too large, according to her osteopath, who despaired for her knotted joints). She could have driven, but it wasn’t far to Sydney Street and she liked to fit in exercise where she could. Angelica had never been one for gyms and diets. She wasn’t sure she’d want to be a professional competitor these days, with all that training and nutrition and physio business.

In her day, she thought, as she walked past new-build houses that stood where the Art Deco bus station once accommodated several generations of Longhampton’s bored adolescents, nerves had been what kept you thin. Nerves, and cigarettes, and not having enough money left over once you’d paid for everything else.

In that respect, Tony Canero had been one of the greatest diet aids known to woman. If they weren’t dancing as if tomorrow was the last-ever competition, they were making love equally furiously in his bedsit in Vauxhall, or she was tormenting herself wondering where he was, whether his fickle, appreciative eyes would light upon a better dancer in the studio, a more experienced girl, a smarter girl who didn’t come from provincial terraces like these. Angelica had worked hard on her dancing, but she’d worked even harder on herself.

She supposed, looking back now, that was something else she and Tony had in common – their magic on the dancefloor took them miles away from the boring lives they’d been born into. But he didn’t have the same need as she did, to prove something. It was always easier for men. They really
could
have it all, and for years and years; they never had to choose between their different selves, the way women did.

Angelica’s brisk pace took her away from the High Street, down towards the sludgy river, and in five minutes she’d turned down Sydney Street, mentally swinging like Gene Kelly from the lamp-posts as she walked past them, as she always had.

The truth was, she didn’t know where Tony was, or if he was still dancing. She’d even managed to stop wondering, for a few years now. Caring for her mother through those final days had drained her of more emotion than she thought she had left, and besides, Angelica wasn’t into looking back. Looking back was for when there was nothing to look forward to.

Yet, since she’d unlocked the front door of 34 Sydney Street, she’d had the nagging sense that she’d never be happy until she’d tied up her loose ends. Maybe it had begun before then: maybe that was why she’d volunteered to come back and sort through the cupboards and wardrobes herself, just as she’d vowed to start dejunking her own life. Already she was discovering things she’d never even guessed she didn’t know. Like, her father had been a Boy Scout master for a few years. Her mother had an ancient wedding dress in a bag in the attic that Angelica knew couldn’t be hers because it wasn’t the one she was wearing in her sombre wedding photograph. There wasn’t a lot of stuff left to sort through – heartbreakingly little, in fact – but the more she looked, the more she realised the years away had made strangers of her and her parents. They didn’t understand her life, but, Angelica realised, she barely knew theirs either. And now they weren’t there to ask.

She knew little more now than she’d known at sixteen. Cyril Clarke was forty-nine, ten years older than his wife, Pauline, when Angelica, or Angela, as she was christened, came along. Pauline was thirty-nine, quite some age for a first child, back in 1950.

‘You’re the baby we longed for – our very own angel,’ her mum used to tell her, her eyes filling up with happy tears, ‘and that’s why we called you Angela!’ Then she’d hug Angelica to her bosom, which was as generous and soft as Pauline herself, and try to get her to eat up her seconds, ‘for those skinny bird legs’.

Cyril was distant with his daughter, maybe, the teenage Angela surmised miserably, as a balance to Pauline’s adoration. He was quite Methodist like that. He gave her a manic work ethic and that was about it. She was glad she didn’t inherit his bristly moustache, or his habit of wearing trousers slightly too short, and though inheriting his parsimony might have made her hand-to-mouth early life easier, it also kept her awake at nights, worrying.

Even forty years on, Angelica still stepped quietly into the anaglypta-papered hall, as if Cyril might be disturbed in his obsessive building of crystal radios.

She used to say, without rancour, that she didn’t feel particularly close to either of her parents. It was only in the last few years of her mother’s life that they’d reached an understanding, but prior to that, it was as if she’d gone to the moon when she moved to London, for all three of them. Or, at least, that’s the front she’d maintained until she’d come across her mother’s albums.

When the doctors admitted there wasn’t much more they could do for Pauline’s condition, five years before, Angelica had insisted Pauline move down to her airy, comfortable house in Islington. It was selfish, as much as self-sacrificing, because there was no way she was moving back to Sydney Street, but she couldn’t bear the thought of her mother fading away unloved in a nursing home. She didn’t have long, after all. The offer had taken both her and Pauline by surprise, but Angelica realised she meant it, and Pauline had arrived with only three bags of possessions, and once they were safely in her room, she didn’t bother to unpack them. It was enough, she said, that they were there.

The months had been years, in the end, and Angelica found she was grateful for them. She only discovered the album in the bottom of the wardrobe much later, gathering her mother’s things together after the funeral. It was from the year Angelica turned professional, and featured page after page of photographs, carefully cut out from
Dancing Times
, and newspapers; Pauline had painstakingly collected reports of competitions and displays she’d given with Tony, with an interview about turning pro taking pride of place on the page, with the illustrative photo opposite. There they were, she and Tony, fixed for a dramatic second in mid-spin, their fingers splayed like starfish against the darkness, the lights bouncing off their ecstatic, fake-tanned faces.

The cuttings were interspersed with the occasional postcards she’d sent, the odd dashed-off letter on hotel notepaper. Her mother had kept them all, sticking them in with photo corners, and adding dates in white pencil on the black paper.

It had made Angelica’s breath stick in her throat, thinking of Pauline pasting each snippet into the thick pages, breathing heavily as she went, letting the journalists tell her the details about Angelica’s dazzling beaded frocks and liquid footwork that she wasn’t getting from Angelica herself. When she’d gone into the attic and found there were dozens of the same big, old-fashioned albums, starting with her first appearances in Mrs Trellys’s display performances, and ending with her retirement, a terrible sense of guilt and love overwhelmed Angelica, and she had to sit down and cry.

Why had her mother never told her about these albums? She’d rarely come along to competitions, though Angelica frequently offered her tickets and hotels. She never asked for programmes or photographs or anything. And yet she’d made records of competitions Angelica could barely remember herself. Why had she documented her life like a fan, instead of just being there?

It was typical of Mum, she thought, never pushing herself forward in case Dad said something. Despite the fact that he and Mum still went dancing themselves, he had some hard words to say when she turned professional – it seemed to annoy him even more that she was making money out of his hobby. Angelica could picture the whole conversation now, although she knew it would be more of a terse monologue, interspersed with nodding. She guessed poor Mum would rather watch from the sidelines than risk annoying him.

Ten years ago, Angelica would have snorted at her mother’s weakness. Now she wasn’t so harsh.

All the albums were there on the table in the front room, waiting for her to open them properly. It was something she’d put off in the few months she’d been back. Those first few weeks had been spent doing little, apart from sleeping and thinking and sorting out boxes of boring papers, listening to dance music until she fell asleep. It was like being on a retreat; alone, for once, she had collapsed into inertia as the memories washed back, powerless to do anything but remember.

Looking at the albums now, Angelica was torn, still. Part of her was curious to see what she might have forgotten, to admire her slender, proud self in her slashed finery; another part of her didn’t want to be reminded of those times at all. There was something about the tension and darkness of the competition floor that felt half-nightmarish by itself, and she knew that those heart-racing moments would probably surge through her head again as soon as she went to bed. Not that the struggle showed on her face. As the photographs showed, Angelica seemed to be contemplating the love of her life in every shot.

I should go through them, she thought, taking off her coat and hanging it on a padded hanger. It’s the least I can do for Mum.

Angelica made herself a strong gin and tonic and began at the first album, her first ballet recital.

‘
Angela Clarke, of Longhampton, gave a charming performance of the solo from
Coppelia  . . .’

8

By ten to eight, Katie was at her desk, wearing her most dynamic suit, contact lenses in and coffee on the go, and the first flickers of a headache already crimping her brain.

It wasn’t totally a product of hardcore efficiency: this was the only suit that didn’t require a trip to the dry cleaners, and Jack’s teething had kept her up since four-thirty anyway, then Hannah had joined in with the yelling and all Ross had done was to start breakfast early. It had almost been a relief to get out of the madhouse by seven.

Just as well, though, she thought, finishing off the stale muffin she’d grabbed on the way out, because she was starting off the week in the worst possible way: a 9 a.m. progress meeting with her department boss, Eddie Harding.

The planning office buzzed with more politics than the actual council offices upstairs from them. Katie’s current problem was second-guessing how Eddie was going to move her off this key, promotion-enhancing urban regeneration study and give it to his golfing buddy, Nick.

Nick Felix had three years’ less experience than her, but crucially, he played golf and his father was a property developer. It was fairly obvious to everyone that Eddie was grooming him to take over quite a lot of the interesting stuff she actually enjoyed doing – finding dead areas that could be turned into something fresh and useful, working on housing and the odd renovation project – and shift her sideways into something boring like car parks. There were lots of areas that needed renovation in Longhampton, but there were also lots of car parks.

Katie knew it made her sound a bit geeky, but she was genuinely excited about the town redevelopment plans. They’d been on the back burner for years, what with funding and developers, but finally it all seemed to be moving. There would be new shops, new flats, with substantial grants for local amenities. Longhampton was so worn out and rain stained that any new building would brighten it up. Apart from the red-brick town hall, and a few offices, there wasn’t enough Victoriana left to lend the place much dignity and the best thing she could think of for the horrible post-war social housing and scuffed precinct was a wrecking ball.

She sipped her black coffee as she went systematically through the first file of paperwork. It made a change to have a quiet office to think in, and she moved swiftly through the technical jargon, stripping it back until a vivid picture emerged in her mind. Katie was good at visualising buildings and spaces. There were two sites currently proposed for the project, and her job was to co-ordinate feasibility assessment of one area, while Nick looked at the other. Katie’s was, as she could have predicted, located on the scabbier side of town, including some newish housing estates, the old cider factory and the tip. That would make for some lovely site visits, she thought, skimming the leasehold reports she’d asked her intern, Scott, to sort out.