The Ballroom Class (17 page)

Lauren’s own version of the Angelica Andrews story began to unfold in glorious daytime-TV-scope as she stared out of the window and watched the 8.50 bus drop a load of pensioners off at the flat-roofed library opposite. A lost love, maybe. A boy she’d pined for while she was at school, and lost touch with when her dancing career whisked her away to the bright lights of a big city. She probably had to choose between them, Lauren decided: career or the love of her life. And now she was back, older and wiser, no longer Angie, but Angelica, arranging classes in the hope that he might walk in and sweep her off her feet  . . .

The intercom buzzed from the nurses’ rooms, and Nurse Jones’s Brummie voice sliced through the soft background strings of her imagination. ‘Lauren? Any sign of that tea?’

Lauren put the files back into Dr Carthy’s basket. ‘On my way,’ she said, as Sue mimed a sarcastic Hitler moustache under her nose and opened the front door for the first pre-work walk-ins.

Angelica arrived for her appointment at ten to ten. Lauren watched through the big glass window as she walked along the street, her toes neatly pointed, back straight, but her head was bowed and she seemed preoccupied. So much that when Mr Watters, leaving after his blood-pressure check, opened the door so she could walk in first, Angelica almost forgot to thank him.

Lauren’s curiosity turned a few degrees towards concern at the sight of Angelica’s tired expression.

‘Hello, Angelica,’ she said, with a sunny smile.

It was a bit odd, seeing her in the surgery, out of her usual memorial-hall setting, a bit like seeing someone from a soap opera in the supermarket. She seemed more coloured-in than everyone else around her: her black hair was just as glossy and slicked back as it was for class, and though she wasn’t wearing her full-on dancing ensemble, her clothes were chic and sort of French-looking – a creamy cashmere jumper under her red swing coat, and a neat wool skirt.

The sort of thing you’d wear for a posh lunch in London, imagined Lauren, then mentally slapped herself.

Angelica blinked in surprise to see Lauren there. But she quickly recovered, and returned Lauren’s smile.

‘Hello!’ she said. ‘How’s that foxtrot coming along?’

‘Oh, not bad.’

‘Are you practising?’

‘Er  . . .’ Lauren was very bad at lying.

Angelica wagged a finger. ‘It only comes with practice. You just need to know the steps so you don’t have to think about them. Like driving!’

‘That’s what my dad says,’ said Lauren, glumly. ‘But he’s had forty years to learn. He and my mum can even do that complicated foxtrot. They were showing me the other night.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Angelica. ‘We must get them to demonstrate.’

Kathleen sailed past behind them and snorted out loud. ‘Lauren? Foxtrot? I don’t think so. Cowtrot, more like. Eh? Eh? Sue? Our Big Bird, dancing?’

Sue said something Lauren didn’t catch, but it ended in ‘. . .  bless her heart’, and sent Kathleen into cackles.

‘Actually, Lauren’s one of the best in the class,’ said Angelica, as Lauren winced.

But Kathleen was cackling her way back to the dispensary.

‘You’re coming along very well,’ said Angelica, holding Lauren’s gaze with her own bright blue eyes, until Lauren felt an odd sense of belief that she was. ‘You’ve got a lovely line. Comes with being tall. We’ll have you swirling around that reception like Cinderella, just you wait.’

‘Sleeping Beauty,’ said Lauren, automatically, but now transfixed by a vision of herself and Chris, waltzing around in stardust.

‘Whatever you want,’ beamed Angelica, and Lauren wondered if this was what it felt like at those evangelical prayer meeting things, where they convinced you that you didn’t need your wheelchair. ‘When that music starts, you’re going to look like any princess you name.’

Lauren sighed happily, then had a more realistic thought of Chris and his two left feet, and sighed again less happily.

She shook herself. Angelica wasn’t there to talk about her dancing. In fact, what was she there for? There were no notes on the computer about what she’d made the appointment for.

Lauren, she told herself, in her mother’s stern voice, don’t be such a
nose
.

She adopted the friendly but professional expression they were all meant to show to patients, and waved a hand towards the chairs. ‘Do you want to take a seat? Dr Carthy’s running a little late.’

‘Thank you,’ said Angelica.

It was a busy morning, with two patients over-running their appointments with ‘oh, while I’m here’ queries, which meant everyone else was made late, and Lauren had her work cut out keeping the waiting room from boiling over into full-on mutiny. She was helping one of the regular old dears choose a new thriller off the book stall when Angelica swept out in a mist of perfume, and for the rest of the morning, Lauren was too rushed off her feet to wonder any more about why she’d been in.

9

Angelica’s ladybird-red coat made a bright splash against the drab concrete of the precinct as she walked through the middle of town. She pulled the collar up against the swirl of freezing air that barrelled between the high walls, direct from the frozen North. A couple of old ladies pushing tartan shoppers turned to peer at her as she passed, which confirmed her suspicion that bright-coloured clothing in Longhampton was still viewed with something bordering on suspicion.

Angelica was pleased that she still didn’t care.

She’d always brightened herself up with red, even when she was a little girl. Looking at the first album last night had brought back a memory she could almost taste of her red summer Clarks sandals – you needed a splash of something bright growing up in the relentless grey, grey, grey of Longhampton in the sixties. The only town in the country that couldn’t be bothered to raise its own Merseybeat knock-offs. Angelica had always had a bit of colour about her. A bit of something different.

Not that it had endeared her to her schoolmates. ‘Olive Oyl,’ they’d called her, on account of her long dark plaits, tied up with a red ribbon. And on account of her skinny legs too, probably, and her pale face. Angelica didn’t care, even then. She knew she didn’t fit in in Longhampton, and she knew she wasn’t going to hang around to be hammered into the dull life open to girls of her age: babies, a till job, more babies, then grandchildren.

She turned the corner, where a Tesco Metro now stood instead of Dixon’s the Fine Jewellers, and found herself slowing down at the old girls’ entrance of her old school. It was bricked up, and a new plastic sign announced it as Longhampton Community School, rather than All Saints’ Grammar, but otherwise, it was as it was back in 1961: a turreted monolith of a school, with high pointed windows, separate entrances for girls and boys, and a dominating need to shuffle everyone in line, until they were all exactly the same, trotting out of the other end like academic soldiers.

Or Tiller girls, she thought, then smiled at the memory of some of her classmates. They thought they were tough, those Evelyns and Pennys, but they wouldn’t have lasted ten back-breaking minutes in a bitchy three-times-a-night chorus line.

To her surprise, Angelica realised the trickle of nostalgia breaking through was actual pleasure that the school hadn’t been knocked down. It proved she’d once been here, and left, and come back her own person.

She stared up at the windows, her eyes searching out her last form room, where she’d gazed out over the terraced roofs of the town from her desk by the window, willing the days away until she could leave, and travel beyond their corrugated limits.

It had been shamefully easy to leave her mum and dad, once the offer of the job in London had come up. The pay wasn’t great, but she’d be able to get some real lessons, and proper experience, more to the point. Her mum, of course, had encouraged her even with tears in her eyes; ‘You have to go, Angie,’ she’d insisted, proud and miserable at the same time. ‘You’ll be able to have lessons with the best teachers, and you won’t get that round here.’

It had been her mum who’d sent her to the ballet class in the Memorial Hall, and bought her the red ballet shoes she’d begged for. Pauline was one of Longhampton’s mighty army of ballroom dancers, although even at twelve Angelica knew it was more enthusiasm than skill that propelled her parents round the sprung Memorial Hall floor. Her bosom, Pauline explained, got in the way, which made Angelica grateful for her own flat chest, but she was happier to have inherited her mum’s small feet.

Funnily enough, though, when a friend of a dancing friend tipped her off about the audition to dance in a West End show called
Not Now, Napoleon!
, it was Angelica’s dad who slipped her the train fare. He wasn’t exactly a doting father, but then which dads were back then? Angelica couldn’t help feeling that he wanted her to go to London, so he could have Pauline back to himself, rather than because he wanted her to embark on a glamorous life of dance. ‘You’ve always done us proud!’ her mother had sobbed on the platform, as Angelica leaned out of the train window, tearless.

Cyril Clarke always looked a bit peeved at that, and Angelica knew it was because her dancing lessons were cutting into his pools money.

Still, he got pride of place back in the house in June 1966, when Angela Clarke left All Saints’ Grammar after her O-levels, too tall by an inch to be a ballerina, but just the right height to dance in the London shows with three-foot feathers on her head and sparkles on her thighs. In her free time, she followed her mum’s passion, ballroom. What seemed dowdy and a little faded in Longhampton was so different in London, like taking the gauze layer away from a photo album; the costumes were brighter and more daring, the partners didn’t grope you, and the music blared until her ears ached with pleasure, performed by live bands of dinner-suited musicians. And as her mother hoped, she took extra lessons whenever she could, constantly improving herself, polishing up the glamorous new Angelica.

She wrote letters home, telling her mum the dancing gossip, and sent snaps of herself in all the nightclubs, and brought her special ballroom shoes at Christmas. It was a great time to be young in London, and an even better time to be young and dancer-thin, as her Olive Oyl legs fitted Biba fashion perfectly. Her dad wasn’t impressed by the kipper ties she bought him in Carnaby Street; in fact, he’d been almost offended. ‘I’m not one of your nancy-boy friends!’ he’d bellowed, as the highpoint of his Christmas Day 1969, and after that Angelica stopped bothering.

The bell rang for lunchtime in the school, the same shrill ring now that Angelica remembered from forty years ago, and she jumped. Teenagers started to spill out of the doors, their uniform a scruffy parody of the rigid navy and yellow she remembered, and she began walking again, before she realised how young they looked and how old she felt.

Angelica felt little jabs of nostalgia as she walked around the town centre. Her memories were like bumper cars at the fair; she could be hurrying through the precinct, with its modern shops, and then suddenly be jerked back to her childhood by a faded old chemist’s sign above a modern awning, then bumped forward into more recent, sadder thoughts. She’d been reliving the past a lot recently: going through her mother’s paperwork, slipping the browning photographs back into their paper corners, pulling old letters out of their envelopes and sorting out the boxes that had come from the attic. It sounded like a quick job, until you factored in the hours of suspended remembering it set in motion. Every box seemed to give her another week of broken sleep, as the new things she was learning, and the old things she thought she’d forgotten jostled their way back into her dreams.

That’s why she’d called in to see Dr Carthy, for the discreet something she needed these days to help her sleep, as well as something to take the ache off her worn-out knees. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept through a night without some help.

Angelica crossed the main road towards the abbey, where the smarter Victorian terraces started. Their white-painted and respectable fronts rose up above gardens of box-trees and honeysuckle, or, more commonly, newly concreted drives. Doctors’ surgeries now, or dentists, or nursing homes. Maybe Mum would have preferred to stay here, she thought. Angelica had the uneasy feeling that her mother never really settled well in London, no matter what she said. Never got to know anyone properly and then when her hip got bad she couldn’t even come along to the tea dances any more.

Angelica’s brisk steps slowed as the sadness of that final year welled back up, and she had to stop, resting against the sturdy brick wall of someone’s garden.

‘You’ve been an angel,’ her mum had said nearly every day, sitting in her chair by the window, growing smaller and more faint by the week. Angelica had put the CD player of big-band tunes within reach of the arthritic fingers, then turned her easy chair to face the canal, which you could see from the back of her house in Islington. Though it wasn’t a river, like the one that ran through Longhampton, it was something for her to look at. There were usually some ducks. ‘You’re a good girl to look after your old mum like this.’

‘What else would I do?’ Angelica had said, every time, impatiently at first, then more sadly. ‘If you hadn’t sent me to ballet, I wouldn’t have been a dancer, and I wouldn’t have gone to America, and I wouldn’t have married Jerry, and I wouldn’t have this house to have you in. You looked after me, Mum. It’s my turn to look after you.’