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Three
When Ginger Rogers first appeared, I leaned across and gave Honey a nudge. ‘See? Told you there’d be pretty dresses. And that’s only her nightie. Wait until you see what she wears for an evening out!’
Honey stared at the screen, duly impressed. ‘Mummy? Can I have a bedroom like that?’ she asked, eyeing up the improbably large and improbably white movie-set hotel room Ginger was sleeping in, complete with a sumptuous bed with a padded satin headboard.
‘Oh, Lord …’ Candy muttered. ‘It’d be like having Vegas come to Islington! I’d keep getting worried that Liberace would pop out from behind the furnishings and flash me his perfect gnashers.’
I chuckled to myself. No, all that glistening white definitely wouldn’t merge well with the Laura-Ashley-meets-Habitat vibe she had going on in her house.
When it got to the bit I’d been waiting for, I hugged the cushion tighter to myself. This was it. The famous rendition of ‘Cheek to Cheek’, where Fred and Ginger glided across a vast dance space. They flowed through the beats of the music, moving together like one person. When the routine came to an end and they stared into each other’s eyes, I couldn’t help letting out a sigh. I knew it was all make-believe, but just for a moment I let myself forget that and imagine what it would be like to dance with a man like that, someone who looked at me as if I was the most captivating creature on the planet. It would be like being in heaven …
‘You’ve always loved Fred and Ginger, haven’t you?’ Candy asked, jerking me out of my little fantasy, which was probably for the best.
‘Always,’ I echoed, my eyes still glued to the screen. ‘Although, I have to confess, while everyone goes wild about Fred and what a genius he was, it’s Ginger I like the best.’
‘Really?’
I turned to look at her. ‘Really. Not just the dancing. There’s something about her. She’s so … confident, self-contained, always ready with a quick line and a sassy look. I wish I could be that way.’
Candy gave me a warm smile. ‘You are!’
I nodded, because I didn’t know how else to respond, but I knew it was a lie. I wasn’t that way, not really. I’m capable and organised, which often gets mistaken for confidence, but it wasn’t the same thing. Not by a long shot.
‘Anyway,’ I added, crossing my arms and deciding to deflect the conversation on to something safer. ‘I think I’m getting a little fed up with Ginger nowadays.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
I stared hard at the screen. ‘Well, just look at her. Parading around like that, looking gorgeous and thin as a twig. It’s more than a little sickening.’
‘That’s just the post-Christmas remorse talking,’ Candy said matter-of-factly. ‘You’ll be fine once you’ve been down the gym a few times, dropped a few pounds.’
I waited a full ten seconds before answering. ‘It’s not just a few pounds, Cand …’ I said, casting her a sideways glance.
Candy must have sensed something in my tone, because she picked up the remote, paused the film and shuffled round to face me.
‘I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been, by a long way.’
There. I’d said it. Out loud and not just inside my head. I looked at Candy, feeling my heart skip lightly and unevenly inside my chest and waited for her to say or do something to make me feel better. Candy had always been good at that.
‘I think you look lovely whatever your size. You’ve got amazing eyes and when you smile your whole face lights up. No amount of extra weight is going to spoil those things. Anyway, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, and that’s where you’re most beautiful.’
I leaned over and gave my sister a hug. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And you’re right. I shouldn’t worry about my size. I should just feel confident whatever my weight.’
That’s what New Year, new-improved Pippa would do, wasn’t it? She was the sort of girl who’d dress to emphasise her assets, rather than hide them in a dark tent of a top. She’d walk confidently down the street, knowing she looked good, even while she carefully overhauled her eating habits and improved her lifestyle in the way the January magazine features suggested. Time to get with the programme, Pippa. No more moaning about your wobbly bits while wolfing down custard creams …
‘It’s not just about the weight, though. I feel like crap because I’m eating crap. I want to be fit and healthy too, feel good about myself.’
‘You’ve still got that gym membership, haven’t you?’ Candy asked.
I nodded reluctantly. I’d transferred it to a branch of the same club in Swanham, the nearest big town, even though I couldn’t really afford it, knowing I had to do something, but the card had been gathering dust in my purse since the autumn.
‘I know I should use it, but every time I get dressed in a T-shirt and jogging bottoms, I take one look at myself in the mirror and then strip it all off again.’
Candy gave me the once-over. ‘You look fine,’ she said in the same tone of voice she used when trying to convince Noah that broccoli was nice. ‘Who hasn’t put on a little extra over Christmas?’
I searched her frame for even the hint of a bulge, but couldn’t detect one. I shook my head. ‘It’s the women at my gym,’ I confessed. ‘Half of them look like Barbie dolls, even the ones older than me! They’ve got tiny little grape-like bum cheeks inside their skin-tight yoga bottoms, and they all wear those strappy little crop tops that show off their taut abs … And then I waddle in wearing my size eighteen Marks and Sparks trackie bottoms and one of Ed’s old Pink Floyd T-shirts that I didn’t give back …’
It’s the biggest and baggiest thing I’ve been able to find. I hadn’t kept it because it smelt of him or anything. In reality it had been mine for years. I’d nicked it to sleep in when it had been like a tent on me, but now it was the only T-shirt I had that fit.
‘I know gyms are supposed to make you feel better about yourself,’ I said, reaching for a Quality Street. ‘But mine makes me want to slit my wrists.’
‘Time for a new gym, then,’ Candy said, ever practical.
I nodded, even though I was pretty sure the same cookie-cutter gym bunnies would populate the next one too.
Candy must have caught something in my expression, because then she added, ‘Or time for a new way to burn off the calories.’
‘I’m not going running like you do,’ I said with a chuckle. ‘With the size of my boobs bouncing around, I’d give myself a head injury …’
‘Oh, my goodness! Stop!’ Candy said, laughing. She jerked her head towards the screen, where Fred and Ginger were having a cross-purposed conversation on a balcony. ‘I mean that! Dancing!’
I turned my head and looked at the couple on the screen. ‘They’re not dancing, they’re arguing.’
Candy gave me the kind of look only a big sister can give a little sister. ‘Don’t be awkward. You know what I mean.’
Of course I did. But I wasn’t going to let Candy know that. I studied Ginger Rogers, still wearing the iconic satin-and-ostrich-feather dress she’d designed herself for the scene. ‘I can’t do that. I’d look like a heifer in that dress, for a start. I mean, white, for goodness’ sake! Don’t you know that’s the most unflattering colour ever?’
Candy merely replied calmly, ‘I thought you told me once that dress was actually sky blue.’
I bumbled around for a good reply to that one. Which was difficult, seeing as Candy was right. ‘That’s beside the point.’
‘Well, the point is that I’m saying you should try dancing as a form of exercise. You know you’d enjoy it.’
I folded my arms and stared at the screen. ‘I’ve never done any ballroom.’
‘It doesn’t have to be ballroom. You were brilliant at dancing when we were younger! Me? I had two left feet.’
I really didn’t want to feel the warm glow that flared inside me at Candy’s compliment; I was too busy being irritated with her. Which was odd, because I realised I wasn’t sure why. She just seemed to have hit a nerve.
‘I was passable,’ I muttered.
I hadn’t thought about dancing for a long time. Not in years. But all of a sudden I remembered being back at dance school, loving the sense of joy that had filled me every time I’d stepped through the studio doors, how I’d lost myself in the movements, loving the feeling of not just learning them but mastering them.
I had been good. Candy had been right about that. For a while I’d even considered going to performing arts college and training as a professional dancer, but then, well, things hadn’t worked out that way, had they?
What would it be like to do it again? What would it be like to feel that wonderful sensation, as if I was flying, as if the steps themselves were living things, moving and breathing through me?
I glanced back at the television, then picked up the remote and scooted back to the bit where Fred and Ginger were tapping in a large white set that was supposed to be a bandstand in a London park and watched them, really watched them.
‘Learning to tap dance is on my bucket list,’ I confessed.
A large smile slowly grew across Candy’s face. ‘Well, there you are, then. You could even go back to Miss Mimi’s School of Dancing, see if she does adult classes …’
‘Oh, my word! She can’t still be going, can she? She must be eighty if she’s a day!’
Candy let out a grudging laugh. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she outlived us all. Do you remember that time, before I’d managed to convince Dad that dancing wasn’t my thing, that she made me do a whole class with one of my geography textbooks on my head, because she said I had “horrible” posture?’
I couldn’t help laughing. That book had slid off Candy’s glossy hair and hit various parts of her body on the way down more times than she could count. By the time we’d got home she’d looked as if she’d been doing boxing, not ballet.
‘I don’t know, Cand … Miss Mimi’s? Really? Surely there’s some funky young dance studio I could go to instead these days?’
‘Probably,’ Candy said, nodding. ‘Although I’d guess there’d be a startling amount of tiny bottoms and Lycra in one of those too.’
Ah. There was that. Back to square one.
I shook my head. ‘I can’t do that,’ I told her. ‘People will see me.’
‘Don’t be daft. People see you every day.’
No, they don’t, I thought. Not really. Only in the fringes of their vision, because in my world Ed had always been the one everyone wanted to watch, and now that Ed wasn’t part of my life any more, I was starting to wonder if I’d disappeared completely.
‘Tell me you’ll think about it?’ she urged.
‘Maybe,’ I said, but mainly just to shut her up so I could watch the rest of the film in peace.
Four
Elmhurst was a pretty little place, full of red-brick cottages covered in local flint with high gables and leaded windows. It was a big enough village to have some life—a local pub, a main street with shops and a post office, a primary school and two churches—but still quaint enough that it had become a desirable location for well-to-do Londoners who wanted a bit of the country life without straying too far from a tube stop or a Starbucks.
In the centre of the village was a green with a wrought-iron town sign and a war memorial that always, always had a wreath of pristine poppies underneath it, and at the other end of the green was a duck pond where Candy and I had fished for minnows with plastic nets and jam jars when we were kids.
The oldest houses clustered around the main street, but the village had grown over the last century to include bungalows and a few oast-house conversions and two small estates of new-build houses in local stone.
If you ambled down the main street past The Two Doves and kept going, you’d reach the cricket pitch, complete with its vintage wooden scoreboard and pavilion, and past that, tucked away, out of sight down a side road, was a little church hall. It had once belonged to St Christopher’s C of E church, but the main building had been flattened by a stray doodlebug during World War II. In the early seventies the last of the rubble had been cleared and it had been paved over, turning the footprint of the church into a large car park for the hall.
It was a beautiful little building, almost a miniature version of the church it had once served: red brick that had now weathered to a rusty brown and tall mullioned windows with decorative arches. It even had a little belltower perched on top of the slate tiles. Once the church had gone, the village had used it for clubs and classes, bingo nights and jumble sales, but when a new, modern church had been built on the other side of the village, complete with a smart new community centre, the number of people crossing its threshold had dwindled. That is, until Mimi D’Angelo had come along.
Initially, she’d hired the hall for two nights a week to start her dance school, after retiring from a career as a dancer at the grand old age of twenty-nine. While Elmhurst was only a small village, it was close to the much bigger town of Swanham, where the local kids went to secondary school, and news of Miss Mimi’s first-rate school began to spread by word of mouth. Very soon, scores of little girls (and the occasional little boy) had thronged to her lessons.
They didn’t seem to be put off by the fact that Miss Mimi, as she was always known, was as strict as she was flamboyant. Somehow, she’d always made each pupil feel as if they had untapped potential, and her great stories of her colourful professional life and sense of the dramatic made for interesting lessons, that was for sure.
By the early eighties, Miss Mimi’s school had taken over exclusive use of the hall and she’d finally become queen of her own terpsichorean kingdom. She’d put up posters and noticeboards, added permanent barres to the painted brick walls and put hanging baskets and flower pots outside the entrance to offset the glossy scarlet double doors.
I sat outside St Christopher’s Hall on a windy January Friday night, the engine of my Mini running. I could hardly believe it was still here, the place that had been the setting for the most important moments of my formative years: my greatest triumphs, in the form of shows and exam grades, my first job, helping Miss Mimi with the Babies class on Saturday mornings, and even my first soggy teenage kiss with Simon Lane after a Christmas disco.
I looked at the red doors. They weren’t so glossy now and the paint was peeling at the bottom. The flower pots were still there, but only the stalks of a few dry brown weeds poked over the tops. There was moss growing in the gutters and a couple of slates had come loose on the roof. St Christopher’s Hall was like the widow of a rich man down on her luck; her structure and proportions were still elegant, but she was looking a little ragged and worn around the edges.
Could I go back in there? Did I even want to?
I’d arrived early. A few more cars were pulling into the car park, but nobody got out. Probably parents waiting for kids who were in the class before adult tap. I could sneak away. Nobody would even know I’d been here. I readied my feet on the clutch and prepared to release the handbrake, but then I stopped. I owed it to Candy—and probably to myself—to at least try one class, didn’t I, even if my stomach was churning like a washing machine with a full load?
A crowd of long-legged girls with coats and boots on over their leotards and tights burst from the double doors and ran to different cars. Ah. So the previous class must end at seven forty-five, not eight. Miss Mimi had done that sometimes when it had been a long day of teaching, given herself little gaps in the timetable to just have a cup of tea and get off her feet. Although it probably wouldn’t be Miss Mimi teaching now, would it, even if the school bore her name? She’d probably passed the school on to one of her star pupils, someone who’d gone on to dance in West End shows or on cruise ships, but who was now getting older and wanted to settle down to a job with a fixed location and slightly more sociable hours.
My email enquiry about the class hadn’t even been answered by Miss Mimi, but by someone called Sherri, who had appalling grammar, didn’t know what capital letters were and replied to every email as if she was posting on Twitter.
I felt a twinge of sadness at the thought of not seeing my old teacher again, but it made the decision of whether to go in or not easier. I wouldn’t be letting anyone down. If I didn’t come back next week, no one would care. They probably wouldn’t even notice.
With that thought in my head, I reached for the door handle, grabbed my holdall and stepped into the chilly winter night. If I went inside before anyone else, I’d be able to get myself ready quietly at the back, and I’d be able to chat to the teacher a little first, let her know I was a complete tap virgin and ask if she could go easy on me.
The wind was really biting tonight, ruffling up my pixie cut and making my hair stand on end. I made a dash for the double doors and shoved them closed behind me.
A tsunami of nostalgia washed over me as I stood in the little vestibule that led to the main hall. I’d spent half my childhood and teenage years in this hall. It had become a home from home.
The old horsehair mat was there, still worn in places, and so was the cork noticeboard where Miss Mimi had always posted exam schedules and results, timetables and the allimportant uniform requirements, although now someone had obviously learned how to insert clip-art in Word, because instead of the photocopied notices of typed announcements or quick notes written in Miss Mimi’s elegant and looping handwriting, there were colour-printed A4 sheets, decorated with just about every dancing-related cartoon one could imagine.
I smiled as I looked around, especially when I saw the plaque on the ladies’ loo hadn’t changed. It was still a line drawing of an elegant fifties woman etched on dusky pink plastic, holding her large-brimmed hat as her ‘new look’ skirt swirled around her shapely calves. The men’s sign was equally as pleasing, featuring a man with Brylcreemed hair and a tweedy suit with turn-ups.
‘Hello, Audrey … Hello, Cary …’ I whispered. I’d christened them with those names at the age of eleven when my obsession with old black-and-white films had begun. ‘It’s lovely to see you again.’
I was still smiling absent-mindedly when I pushed my way through the second set of double doors into the hall.
Five
‘Philippa Hayes!’
I jumped at the use of my full name, the one I’d gone back to using after I’d stopped being Mrs Ed Elliot, and still wasn’t quite used to again. There were only two people in this world who had said that name in that same tone. The first had been my mother and the second was …
No. It couldn’t be? Could it?
A moment later an old lady started crossing the hall towards me. Actually, it would have been more accurate to say she swept across the room, arms outstretched, her outrageously long false eyelashes almost touching her drawn-on eyebrows as her eyes widened in surprise.
‘Miss Mimi?’ I croaked, as I was engulfed by a cloud of Chanel No.5.
‘Who else did you think would be here?’ she asked. ‘Gene Kelly?’
I laughed. Of course Miss Mimi was still here, still teaching! How could I ever have imagined otherwise?
‘Now,’ Miss Mimi said, looking me up and down, ‘let me take a look at you …’
I wasn’t sure I was ready for that, despite my current determination to reinvent myself. ‘I know … I’m a little on the cuddly side, but that’s why I’m here really—’
‘Nonsense!’ Miss Mimi said, cutting me off. ‘It’s just puppy fat, you always were prone to a little of that.’
Aw, it was lovely of her to say that but the truth was I had about as much puppy fat as the whole of Battersea Dogs’ Home. However, I didn’t correct her, because a) I was supposed to be embracing my curvaliciousness and b) I wasn’t sure she’d understand. For as long as I’d known Miss Mimi, she’d been a petite five foot two, with a perfect dancer’s physique. She wasn’t lanky like a fashion model but trim and toned and strong, even now, it seemed. I looked her up and down, taking my turn to study and observe.
No, nothing much had changed about Miss Mimi at all, except her hair was totally white and there were more wrinkles on her peaches-and-cream complexion. She wore pink seamed dance tights, those little heeled ballet shoes that only dance teachers ever wear, a hot-pink leg warmer over each ankle and a leotard with a crossover skirt that folded over like a tulip in front but dipped as low as the backs of her knees behind. The whole outfit was topped off with a silky kimono with bright, gypsy colours on a black background, edged with a long black fringe. Despite her age, I could imagine her throwing her wrap off, jumping on to the small stage at the end of the hall and showing the class how she’d high-kicked her way through two seasons in Paris and one in Las Vegas.
‘It’s so good to see you again,’ I said, smiling at her. I hadn’t realised how up in the air my life had felt, how it had seemed as if everything was shifting underneath my feet, until I’d come across something—someone—dear to me, who’d remained stubborn and rock-like against the rapids of change. And if there was anyone in this world who could do that, it was this woman.
‘Now, now, Philippa …’ Miss Mimi chided, but I could hear the affection in her tone. ‘You always were a bit of an emotional girl.’
I looked at her, surprised. Had I been?
I frowned, trying to think back to those days. I really couldn’t remember. And it seemed like a lifetime ago, anyway, almost as if that time had been lived by another person. During my marriage to Ed I hadn’t had the luxury of being the emotional one. One diva in the household was enough.
My role as his wife had been to stay calm, stay grounded, to keep things smooth and organised. So much so that I’d actually ended up working as Ed’s assistant, doing admin for him and the band. It wasn’t a job I’d ever planned on doing, but I’d enjoyed it. I’d been part PA, part PR person, part roadie. I’d liaised with venues about bookings, sweet-talked anyone Ed had cheesed off (which happened a lot) and generally did anything that needed to be done.
In my mind, I’d been part of the family business, like a wife doing accounts for her builder husband. The only thing I hadn’t anticipated was that the family—and the business—would move on quite happily without me, leaving me with skills that weren’t easily quantifiable in the job market. I’d discovered that when you turned up at an interview and announced your previous career was ‘rock musician’s dogsbody’, people didn’t really know what to do with you.
My current job was about as soul-destroying as they got. When I’d moved back I’d just got the first job I could find, filling shelves in a big supermarket on the outskirts of Swanham. They’d been looking for seasonal workers in the run-up to Christmas, and it served a need while I worked out what to do next.
Miss Mimi began to make her way over to a cassette player that was so old it could have auditioned for a part in Ashes to Ashes.
‘What happened to Peter?’ I asked. He’d been a shy little man who taught piano lessons at Pippa’s school and had accompanied most of Miss Mimi’s classes back in the nineties. My friend Nancy and I had always speculated about him being desperately in love with Miss Mimi, and we’d giggled uncontrollably when we’d seen his eyes following her as she taught, never needing to look at the piano keys. I didn’t want to think of an empty cold space at the piano stool. Or a new grave in the churchyard.
‘Oh, I let him off the adult classes,’ Miss Mimi said airily. ‘He likes to get home in time to watch Coronation Street on a Friday.’
‘Oh. Good.’ I breathed out a sigh of relief. ‘Miss Mimi?’
‘Yes?’
‘I was meaning to ask … Do you think I’ll be okay in this class? I mean, it is a beginners’ one, isn’t it? I haven’t done any tap before.’
‘My darling,’ Miss Mimi said, in that theatrical voice that I remembered and loved, ‘you will be absolutely fine. It’s not exactly a beginners’ class, more intermediate, but very beginner-friendly. You’ll do wonderfully with your dance background. It’s like speaking another language, you see? Once you’ve learned one, it’s easier to pick up another.’
The sound of a car door slamming outside made me jump. I looked nervously at the entrance. It had been okay when it had just been me and Miss Mimi, but now it became very real that Other People were coming. Other people who were going to see me dance. My stomach went cold and my hands began to shake.
I scuttled off to the back of the hall, where some chairs were laid out in a row and proceeded to busy myself taking off my layers and slowly putting on my tap shoes. I stayed at the back of the hall until the lesson began, hardly daring to look up to see who else was here. When I did, I caught a glimpse of an older lady, a few more women around my own age and two younger girls who looked as if they’d only just graduated from the under-eighteens classes.
I had planned to stay in the shadows at the back of the hall and slip into the last row once everyone had got going and my scheme was working well until I stood up and walked to where the group of five women were standing. I’d dashed to the dance store in Swanham that afternoon and bought the cheapest pair of tap shoes I could find. Apart from trying them on in the shop, it was the first time I’d actually worn them and certainly the first time I’d ever walked in them on a hard surface. The metal plates under the toes made moving in them feel odd, and they made a hell of a lot of noise. Everyone turned round to look at me.
‘We have a new member tonight,’ Miss Mimi said loudly. ‘Philippa used to be one of my pupils long ago, but she’s never done tap before, so we’re going to have to go easy on her.’
If anyone turned round to give me an encouraging smile, I didn’t see them; I was too busy staring at the floor and I kept my head down until Miss Mimi snapped her fingers, regaining everyone’s attention and went straight into a warm-up.
We all shuffled into two lines facing the full-length mirrors that were fixed to the walls down one side of the hall, below the high windows. I was standing so my reflection was split and distorted, cut in half where one mirror met the next. I didn’t know if it made me look fatter or thinner, because I refused to look at anything but my feet and I only looked at them if I absolutely had to.
The warm-up started easily enough, tapping with the toe of one foot a number of times and then the heel, before switching to the other, and then they started doing shuffles. I might not have done any tap before, but I at least knew what a shuffle was—pretty much what I’d done as a child when I’d tried my own version of tap dancing with my mother’s cloppiest shoes on. I struck the ball of my foot lightly on the floor on an out movement, then again as I picked it back up again.
After we’d repeated it a few times, the dancer in me, the one that was slowly awakening, noticed that the rest of the class put a very slight emphasis on the second tap, so I started to do the same. Okay … I was starting to get the hang of this!
And so it continued through the warm-up of short, simple exercises. I didn’t always get everything right, and I was frequently half a count behind everyone else, but I started to relax. Not perfect yet, but that didn’t matter. It would be no fun if it wasn’t a challenge. I might very well be outside of my comfort zone but I was camped on the fringes, not on an entirely different continent.
However, once we started to get into the class proper, it wasn’t just my shins and calves that started to hurt, but my brain. Too much information too fast! Everyone else was stringing the simple steps they’d done in the warm-up into more complicated sequences, and I discovered that, while I could envisage the steps in my head, the messages my brain was sending to my feet were just too slow. It was most frustrating, especially as once upon a time I’d been able to hold whole strings of complex movements in my head, regurgitating them effortlessly when needed. Whole dances. Whole shows, even.
Miss Mimi was right. This was like learning a new language, and I was having to search around hard for each and every syllable, clumsily building the words and faltering over many of them. Learning modern or contemporary after learning ballet hadn’t been too bad; they shared many steps, even if the techniques were different—a bit like learning Italian if you already knew Spanish. In comparison, tap was like being thrown into the deep end of Cantonese.
Beginner-friendly class? My foot!
Things improved slightly when we moved to travelling from the corner across the diagonal of the hall. Miss Mimi told me to leave out the turns and just concentrate on the basic steps, which involved ball changes and hops, things I was familiar with from modern, thank goodness, but the downside was that we had to do it in pairs. That meant I couldn’t just stay flailing around anonymously at the back. I was the new girl, so of course everyone was going to check me out. I started to feel just the littlest bit queasy.
I hung back to the end of the queue, hovering near another pair.
‘Hi,’ a woman who was maybe a year or two older than me said brightly. ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’
I nodded.
She smiled. ‘You’re doing quite well for a total newbie. Should have seen me my first lesson! I couldn’t even face the right direction, let alone do any of the steps!’
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