Dancing Backwards

‘Excuse me?’

‘The cleaner you’re using. I’m sorry, but it is making my eyes sting.’

‘Excuse me, Mrs Hetherington, but I must clean the cabin.’

‘Couldn’t you just dust it or wipe it over with a damp cloth?’

Renato looked opaque. He left the room stinking to high heaven and to escape the fumes Vi went outside on to the balcony.

And there was the sea, reminding her that nothing that happens matters much in the great sum of things. And yet, she thought, how can we help minding?

She walked back into the cabin. On the zealously cleansed desk, Renato had stacked her books in neat piles. Beside them he had placed, in a parallel pile, her notebooks. She had not opened the notebooks in years. Goodness knows what had induced her to bring them. Except, of course, she did know. Edwin.

What would it be like seeing Edwin again after all these years? Was she excited? Scared? She wasn’t sure. She had set out on something stronger than a whim. It was an impulse, but with an attendant caution that had led to her making the crossing by sea. But for what? Time, she supposed. Time to consider. Time for reflection. Although you would think she had had all the time in the world for that.

She tried to recall when she and Edwin had last met—but the years had evaporated to a mist. Had they even said goodbye? She wasn’t sure of that either.

3 (#ulink_b1452f91-27b9-51d8-9383-4070bc5daf27)

The first time Des saw Mrs Hetherington she was sitting a little way off so that he couldn’t see her hands. Des liked to see the hands because this gave him valuable information. Nail polish or no nail polish, rocks or no rocks. You could gather quite a lot from such clues. She attracted notice because she had that air of being a little apart, with her attention not on the room and the other passengers, as was the case with most of the single women who came for tea, but directed only at the sea.

‘Any idea who she is?’ he asked Boris. ‘The skinny one in the corner over there.’

Boris was Ukrainian, one of the many Eastern Europeans who had been joining the staff of the shipping lines in droves. They were unpopular among their colleagues. Having acquired stamina under regimes founded by Stalin, they were willing to work longer hours than those raised on more easygoing political systems. There was a general feeling that if the redundancies which were threatened struck, they would take advantage.

Boris adjusted one of the immaculate white gloves worn by the waiters serving tea. ‘Mrs Hetherington, Deck Twelve, single occupancy. I think she is not with anyone. But your guess is as good as mine.’

The Eastern Europeans’ command of English idiom, which they appeared to pick up with demonic cleverness, was another ground for complaint, particularly with the British staff who were naturally suspicious of any ability with other languages.

Des, however, was Italian, at least on his father’s side.

‘She dance?’

Boris raised bored aristocratic eyebrows. Long ago, his family had owned serfs, and vast tracts of woodland where wolves had loped. In the family annals it was alleged that on nights when the moon was full an ancestor of Boris’s had loped alongside the wolves.

Des made his way over to the thin woman’s table and noted that she already had a pot of tea. ‘Can I ask the waiter to get you anything to eat, Mrs Hetherington? A pastry maybe? Some sandwiches?’

‘You know my name!’ She had flushed.

‘It is our business to get to know our guests, madam.’

‘Of course.’ She looked bothered. ‘I don’t think I want to eat anything, thanks. I seem to have done nothing but eat since I came on board.’

‘You can afford to. You are so slim.’ Plenty of rocks and no wedding band but a big diamond on the ring finger of the left hand.

‘I came to watch the dancing.’

‘But you are looking at the sea.’

She seemed to like this approach better. ‘Until there is dancing I would rather look at the sea than at cake.’

‘You dance?’ No nail polish either.

‘No.’

‘But you like to watch it?’

‘My steward wanted me to.’

‘Your steward?’ The guy must be a smooth worker if she had formed a crush on him already.

‘I offended him so I’m being polite and following his suggestion, you see.’

‘I see,’ Des said. Maybe the woman was a little touched. ‘Well, enjoy yourself with the sea, Mrs Hetherington. There’s plenty of it.’

Five days a week the ship’s band played for the tea dance in the King Edward Lounge hosted by pair of professional dancers, Marie and George, whose photographs (George in tails, Marie in glittering-bodiced costumes, winning prizes in competitions as far apart as Eastbourne and Barcelona) were available for sale at the rostrum. The pair had been hired by the Caroline to give presentation dances at the regular evening balls and to run the five-times-a-week dance lessons (‘11 to 12 noon in the Tudor Room, bring suitable shoes’). The tea dances allowed a further opportunity for passengers to try out the steps they had learned at the classes. In order to accommodate the large numbers of single female passengers additional male dance hosts were employed.

Des had begun to learn to dance at the age of six at Miss Butler’s Dance School. His mother, at the age of not quite fifteen, had visited southern Italy with a school coach party. One of the tyres had burst, near a trattoria run by the driver’s cousin. While the driver had been hard at it changing the burst tyre, the party had enjoyed a long lunch. They were having their fortunes told in the coffee grounds by the driver’s cousin’s wife, when young Trisha Claybourne took a glass of wine out to the toiling driver who had just completed his task. He had expressed gratitude for the wine in the discreet interior of his coach.

Trisha, who was slightly built, had not recognised the consequence of this encounter, and for a while had assumed that she was annoyingly putting on weight. By the time the penny dropped, there was no remedying the situation. Nor was it possible to track down the coach driver. Trisha didn’t even know his name. When pressed she thought it might have been Dino but she wasn’t sure.

Des grew up calling his mother ‘Aunty’, her brother ‘Uncle Steve’, and his grandparents ‘Mum and Dad’. His grandmother loved him with a passion. Her first child, Melanie, had committed suicide. It was not something she ever discussed with her husband, and for Trisha and Steve, who came later, her anxiety was so great that it paralysed the full expression of her feeling for her own offspring. It was she who, noticing that her little ‘son’ had a natural sense of rhythm and an ear for music, decided that he should learn to dance.

Children have a way of feeling the reality of any situation and long before the truth of his parentage was made known to him Des felt out of place among the Claybournes. Only at Miss Butler’s school did he not seem to feel a fish out of water. He began to win medals at competitions and passed all his dance exams as expertly as he failed his school ones.

He was seventeen when he decided to leave home and, perhaps because she was the person he was least close to, it was to his Aunty Trish that he confided his plan. ‘I’m going to work in a night club in Rome—don’t tell Mum yet!

Trisha had given a yelp of laughter and said, ‘That’s all right. Anyway, I’m your mum. What you think’s your “Mum” is your grandma. Did you never guess?’

He hadn’t guessed. And now there was no one to whom he could confess that the news made him cry.

Aunty Trish, who had so confusingly turned out to be Des’s mother, went on to tell him about his father. Des had taken this as a chance to change his name. On the basis of his mother’s, now even hazier, recollection of the coach driver, Des became ‘Dino’ and with the change of name went, as is often the way, a change in character.

He picked up Italian easily and became quite extroverted, even a bit of a flirt. In Rome, he found a dance partner, Sam, a determined brunette from Bradford, and for a while they performed a dance double act round the clubs. But Sam nursed ambitions to settle down. She finally ran off with a Roman priest who had left the Church over the loss of the Latin Mass.

Without Sam’s purposeful character to drive him, Des drifted, making a living with seasonal hotel work, where his manner made him popular. One slack evening, chatting to a customer, he learned about crewing on the ships.

‘It’s a great deal,’ his confidante told him, ‘everything found, food, accommodation, the lot. And the best thing is if you’re out of the country for a year you pay no tax. I’ve saved up the deposit for a flat.’

Des wrote to several shipping lines’ offices asking about bar work. His handwriting was neat and his bar references correct if not enthusiastic. In the end, it was his dancing accomplishments which landed him a job.

‘There are rules, mind.’ The well-groomed woman who interviewed him spoke with tired authority. ‘The passengers—we call them “guests”—will want you to sleep with them. If you do, and we find out, you are put off the ship at the next port.’

‘What age are the “guests” then mainly?’

The woman looked at Des as if there were no depths of behaviour to which she did not expect him to sink.

‘Mostly old with no men. There are younger ones too, but they more easily find other people to sleep with. It’s the old ones who cause trouble.’