Our Dancing Days

Our Dancing Days
Lucy English

Lucy English’s third novel is set in a Suffolk commune in the Seventies where, beneath the blissful summer surface, the young inhabitants are caught in a downward spiral ending in tragedy.When Don, an aristocratic young Notting Hill poet, inherits a stately home in the depths of the Suffolk countryside from an elderly relative, he decides to move there taking with him an artist, Tessa and her best friend, Deedee. A menage a trois develops and as they form a commune and begin to grow their own vegetables, they live together in rural harmony. It is only when they decide to enlarge their group, bringing in strangers encountered at fairs and in pubs – the mesmerising and charismatic Jack, a single mother Helen and her troublesome six-year-old daughter, Beauty – that the balance is upset, tensions emerge and the friction builds to its horrific climax.

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_e730dc1d-9dc0-59af-823f-2f270b4919e2)

Fourth Estate

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

Copyright © Lucy English 2000

First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Fourth Estate

‘Each Moment’ by the Incredible String Band. Words by Robin Williamson. Reproduced by kind permission of IMP Ltd. Lyrics from ‘Astral Weeks’ by Van Morrison.

The right of Lucy English to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9781841152424

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007485390

Version: 2016-03-23

EPIGRAPH (#ulink_65ae318f-5b57-52f6-8334-859e52089951)

This was our dancing day

So even those with nothing to celebrate

Shook off their unfathomable gloom

And were lost with us in that meadow.

From ‘Albion’ in Spirit Level, a book of poems by Andrew Bell

CONTENTS

Cover (#u2a71a908-7370-5d07-bc62-f83e34a6693e)

Title Page (#u42097603-eb15-52f0-b59b-1cb330fe3cb1)

Copyright (#ulink_8284f8d4-04b0-55c5-980e-ea27d209c4e7)

Epigraph (#ulink_b1979928-74ba-56af-9885-d13ae67c9fd0)

Chapter One (#ulink_ad1b1856-45a2-5b5a-b7ba-1ba0b6e5556f)

Chapter Two (#ulink_c439431b-d2f0-575b-992d-a6c8798df0a6)

Chapter Three (#ulink_23c3eb24-ed55-5ef5-acd5-1c4b3b1620ce)

Chapter Four (#ulink_04e657e9-7f89-5a12-9f76-eec54c05e5b7)

Chapter Five (#ulink_949a1976-6d9f-5f9a-9724-780eb5cd514d)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)