Dancing Lessons Read online

  I feel a little stir of remorse at seeing Miss Pitt-Grainger’s rage, directed at Annie, the nicest of the staff here, but I value my life too much to confess. “Oh dear,” I say, and Miss Pitt-Grainger’s head snaps towards me. “Er, maybeyoutookit-withyou?”

  She gives me an alligator snort and I’m surprised she even heard what I said. But she explodes. “Mrs. Samphire! My short-term memory is excellent, as everyone knows. I left my pencil right here. And you know it!”

  Uh-oh. This is serious business, and I start to back out of the room. My eyes meet Annie’s and she rolls hers at me, which makes me feel better and I try not to smile. For Miss Pitt-Grainger can abide no frivolity and particularly loathes Heathcliff, the only other English person here and who is given to salacious little witticisms with all the ladies, even me. Of course I won’t bother to tell her how many times I have gone into the empty lounge and picked up her crossword and filled in a clue or two. Or occasionally changed what she had, to something quite nonsensical, just to annoy her. Serves her right for using a pencil with an eraser. And for abandoning her things to go and get ice for her mid-morning gin and tonic. She hasn’t caught on to my messing with her stuff yet, or maybe she just thinks it’s her age, despite what she claims, but the pencil thing is another matter. Pens too. I admit I swipe them when I see them. Can’t help it. Have been known to ease them out of handbags and pockets. A nice little cache since I’ve been here, but so cleverly hidden that I’m sure no one can find them. Or have they? If they have, surely Matron would know? Plus the girls who clean, Cherry and Maisie, and who are the chief talebearers to Matron, know that I have a drawer full of all these new pens and pencils, still in their packaging. I sometimes open the drawer right there in front of them and hand them brand new pens and pencils as gifts for their children, so why would I want to take other people’s?

  I leave Miss Pitt-Grainger with her rant and another “Imsureitwillturnup,” which only makes her glare at me anew.

  “It had better,” she says. “Or I’ll have to think that I’m staying in a place where people steal things. Something that never happened before—”

  Before what? I’m too scared to hear the rest of it so I make a fast getaway and head for my room to download the loot, which is burning up my pocket. Why O why O why, I ask myself. Miss Pitt-Grainger’s anger has shaken me because she’s made the taking of a half-used pencil into such a major thing.

  I can’t help worrying since I’m already in everyone’s black book. My daughter is ashamed of me. The residents hate me. Matron wants to turn me out. My house is destroyed. I have no one to turn to. So, after sitting on my bed and thinking for a while, I’ve decided that I’d better turn myself into a model citizen. From now on. Seriously.

  I will take a vow and, see, I am writing it down in my journal, a real vow, signed and sealed—there, my fingerprint even, in black marker—TO USE ONLY MY OWN PENS AND PENCILS FROM NOW ON.

  To show that I am serious, I am going to make a point of taking the new ones out of their packaging. There! I have lined them up in the drawer. More than one layer. But the worry is still there, and I’m thinking it would be prudent for me to start returning some of my borrowed loot until the current charges against me blow over, just in case. Not to their owners, of course not, as if I could remember, but to nooks and crannies throughout the house, which is old and has many, down the sides of sofas and under cushions, in dark unswept corners, so they’ll look nice and cobwebby as if they have lain there for ages, even out in the canna lily beds, inside Matron’s car, her office even, all places where, over time, they will be found. No evidence left to convict me. Unless Matron has bought a fingerprinting kit, which I wouldn’t put past her. A good plan, I think. And I am proud of myself, for I have never been good at planning.

  14

  YOU’D THINK I HAD everything all planned out the day I left home, wouldn’t you? But it was a Friday afternoon like any other. For as long as I could remember, on Friday afternoons Aunt Zena sent me down to Mr. Lue’s grocery with a list of the next week’s requirements and payment for the previous week, since on Fridays there was no school after lunch. I wasn’t expected to carry anything home—I was, despite it all, being brought up as a young lady. So Mr. Lue would put everything together and the yard boy, Danny, would go on Saturday morning to collect it, carrying everything in a basket on his head. I loved these errands and looked forward to Friday afternoon with a passion, for it was the only time I was ever let out, so to speak. Not that the leash wasn’t tight, for I was warned not to speak to anyone on the way, and Aunt Zena actually timed me: I was expected to take one hour, no more or less. There was no time for dawdling, even if I wanted to. But with the three-pence she gave me for myself, I was always able to buy Paradise Plums and gumdrops, wrapped icy mints and sticks of black licorice, and sample each on my leisurely walk home. I always made sure I had enough left in my pockets, heavily rationed, to tide me over the week. For years, nothing happened on these walks, I said hello to people whose houses I passed, all of whom I knew, and they said hello to me. There was never any traffic on our country road, except for the red Royal Mail bus morning and evening, which I took to and from school, the parson’s buggy on Sunday, and the truck that delivered Mr. Lue’s provisions once a week. Not counting the market dray that left laden on a Wednesday night and returned on Saturday, or the farmers and market women on their donkeys.

  And of late, him, Charles Leacroft Samphire, sitting loosely astride his horse in the shade of the big almond tree where the road widened, just around the bend before Mr. Lue’s grocery and the church, looking bronze and handsome like all the Samphires, his feet in leather boots, his pants tight-fitting blue drill, his shirt white linen rolled up at the sleeves, no collar or tie but a bandana knotted around his throat, his leather hat pushed back on his head. That’s the way he always dressed, from the first time I saw him out of the corner of my eye. I managed to take him all in before dashing those very eyes to the ground, for looks could kill, I knew that. Dressed and looking like no one else I had ever seen, but in body, in that loose-limbed casual way he had, reminding me of my father.

  Of course the minute I saw him I stepped to the other side of the road. My face grew hot under my straw hat, then my entire body, as if fire ants were attacking me. I made the mistake of glancing at him and he raised his hat and smiled, but I didn’t smile back, for I would have been smiling at the devil, or so Aunt Zena would have said. Oh, I knew who he was all right, everyone knew Charley Samphire, or Sam, as they called him, especially fathers with grown daughters who kept their shotguns to hand. Or so Aunt Zena said. Sam was in fact my father’s relative, of a large clan that lived some miles away, but while the women of the family were regarded as decent, Sam and his brothers were not allowed to cross the threshold of our house. For what reason, I never knew, except that they were bad and wicked. Sam and his brothers were many years older than me; they were in the category of adult, so I never paid the stories much mind. Or Sam either, for that matter, on the few occasions I had glimpsed him in the past. Mostly at a distance, once at the wicked end of the common where Harvest Festival sales or Emancipation Day picnics were held, where the young men gathered to smoke and drink out of cream soda bottles filled with white rum, and ogle the shameless girls who promenaded arm in arm in twos and threes up and down past them. But that was a long time ago, before I had shot up almost to my father’s height and sprouted breasts and hair under my arms and other places too embarrassing to mention and Miss Celia had silently handed me one day What Every Girl Should Know.

  Well, did that book help? Of course not. I remained as green as a sweet-cup shell and as thick. I had no girls my age to share secrets with. I was never allowed to dawdle after school or keep friends and I never made any. “You sleep with dogs, you rise with fleas,” Aunt Zena would intone, as she timed my coming and going. I only realized later, of friends Aunt Zena could not speak for she had none.

  15

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE,
my only friends were books and pencil and paper. I was quick as a child and learnt to read at an early age. At first they were proud of me and encouraged my reading and writing. I can remember Miss Celia giving me spelling exercises every day and checking them off on my slate. All ticks, usually. She taught me to add, too. All before I went to school. Unlike the other children around, I had to speak proper English. I had no difficulty in school answering questions or responding when spoken to, but I would never volunteer speech, not even to other children. After my father left home, that time for good, I found it harder and harder to speak. I would try, but the words seemed to crawl under my tongue and bury themselves there, refusing to come out. My vocal cords tightened to the point of pain. Yet there was so much I wanted to say! Once I got old enough to discover I could put my thoughts on paper, I started to do so. I had only fragments of paper to write on. Soon I discovered that I could not leave these fragments carelessly, for someone would find them and I would be cross-examined. “What do you mean by ‘lonely, lonely, lonely,’ child? Do you think you are a poet or something? And who is ‘The Wickedest Person in the Whole World’? Yourself?” So I learnt not to leave words hanging around, and I started to hide my bits of paper. I no longer scribbled words in my exercise book, for they checked those from time to time with dire results. And since paper was hard to come by, not like today, I resorted to tearing blank pages out of books, saving brown wrapping paper, peeling off the insides of labels, opening old matchbooks, saving paper from packaging, anything that came to hand. I became a real paper rat. I scraped up pencils too, wherever I could, for I couldn’t stop scribbling, I was writing more and more, longer pieces. It wasn’t for the sake of writing so much as for the refuge these scribbled words provided, so I hid them securely, as tightly as a snail’s shell, my soul hidden inside. Until the day Aunt Zena discovered the cache. She read them all aloud to Miss Celia while I stood there, my face flaming, and then she tore them to bits, piece by piece, and threw them at my feet. I vowed after that not to commit anything to paper again. Not to keep anything in my heart. Not to show anything on my face. Not to say more than I needed to. Not that I stopped writing. But from that day on, other than my schoolwork, it was all written inside my head, waiting.

  16

  SINCE I’VE BEEN HERE at Ellesmere Lodge I’ve offered more than once to help Matron in the office. I have no doubt I could be useful there but it’s really because I want to learn how to use the computer. That idea came to me when I realized that writing in a journal wasn’t a safe thing to do and I remembered Mr. Levy explaining about his laptop to Heathcliff and telling him about passwords. I thought of asking Her to buy me a computer; I have never asked her for anything before, but I imagine it is too much money and she’s already spending so much on me. Suppose I can’t learn how to use it? But Mr. Levy is much older than me and there he is, typing away—he says he is writing his memoirs. Well, so am I, come to think of it. So now I have this itch. I really need to check out this computer thing, but I am too much in awe of Mr. Levy, who is a patrician old gentleman with snowy white hair and a lovely manner, to ask him anything. So it was to Matron again, making my offer, willing her to say yes and invite me in, but she smiled sweetly and said again in that smarmy way of hers, “Oh that is so nice of you. Mrs. Samphire. Thenk you. Very much. I will bear it in mind.” And that’s been the end of that. I didn’t expect anything, of course. Because I’m silent, and I don’t have the kind of background the rest of them have, she too thinks I’m stupid. Or maybe it was just the way I mumbled it so it came out in a rush, all nonsense sounding.

  I don’t think it’s because she’s afraid I’ll go through her files and ferret out her little secrets. Not at all. I’m sure she doesn’t think me capable of that. I have already done that, of course, the few times she’s left me alone in there, for I’m quick like that. Always have been. I like to know about the enemy. Which is how I found the picture when I was searching through Aunt Zena’s bureau one day when they were both entertaining visitors on the veranda. A picture of a man and Aunt Zena, wearing a wedding dress! Without a doubt, it was her, looking much younger and happier, a long, clinging white lace dress and a veil which in the photograph was so long it was draped on the ground all the way around the two of them almost in a full circle and her arm linked tightly into his. I didn’t have a chance to have a good look at him that day as I didn’t want to press my luck, but I later confirmed my first impression of a portly man with a broad, flat face and straight black hair, and skin darker than hers, like an Indian’s, the one on the cigar box that Miss Celia kept her sewing things in, not the other kind, and not unhandsome.

  That was a shock to me for she seemed such a solitary one, as tightly wound up and dangerous as barbed wire. I couldn’t imagine anyone getting close to her and wondered when this wedding was and what had happened to the husband. Maybe she cut him to pieces. I had no idea then she had ever been away from home, for although Miss Celia was her mother, she was very much the ruler of the kingdom. Of course I couldn’t ask and no one ever told me anything. As soon as I appeared the adults shut up or changed the subject if they were talking about anything the least bit interesting. So of course they turned me into a spy, creeping around and listening. But about Aunt Zena’s husband and married life, not a word did I ever hear. Until one day after I had gone to live with Ma D, Charlie Samphire’s mother, I had the brilliant idea of asking her, for she knew them.

  “Ah, Zena,” she said, in response to my question as to whether Zena had ever married. Ma D smiled a twisted little smile and paused in the middle of what she was doing, which was cutting out a piece of cloth, the scissors already slicing the material. It was beautiful silk material, salmon coloured, she was cutting to make a blouse for me. I stood across the table from her with my mouth open, torn between wanting to hear the story and keeping one eye on the scissors and praying her hand wouldn’t slip and ruin the material. But of course Ma D was a pro on both counts. Not that she told me very much then, I think she still regarded me as a child and not yet ready to be let into adult secrets. But at least she wasn’t as rude about it as the others.

  “Married,” she laughed. “Oh yes, she rather made a habit of it.”

  “What!” I’m sure my voice rose in disbelief.

  “Well, it depends on what you call marriage.” I leaned forward eagerly, but all Ma D added in a very dry voice was, “She’s been churched once.” And, though I waited to hear more, the fact that she had resumed cutting where she left off made me understand that no more would be forthcoming, at least for now. I didn’t press her for more, I was too shy to do so anyway, but what she had said left my head spinning, as I tried to figure out what it meant. Was there so much more to Aunt Zena than the little countrywoman I had grown with and never learned to love? The foremost mystery in my mind had always been that of my mother. Now I filed away Zena’s story as the second. What wouldn’t I give to know things?

  17

  OF COURSE NOW I think about it, I treated my own children the same way, for I never told them anything at all. Not a word did I say to them about their sister going to live with someone else. “Soon come back” was all I ever said. Not a word did I say about my black eyes and split lip and noises in the night. Not a word when their father left. Didn’t I of all people know the awfully destructive power of silence? Yet I silenced my own children with a look, forced their own words back inside them with a hand raised to strike. For I hit them, O yes, and don’t tell me anything now about child abuse and cruelty. What did people like us know? Though I can’t say I myself was physically beaten as a child, that didn’t stop the anger from pooling inside me, ready to burst on my children. Not all bruises show.

  I couldn’t take it out on him, could I? Women just didn’t do that. In his presence I was always too frightened to speak or make a move and once the moment of high anxiety passed, the pressure dropped and I could not build the anger up to boiling point again.

  I suppose I felt I had to pro
tect them, shield them from the worst of it, as if I could stop his straying. Every time he found a new girl he would go and get drunk and come home and take it out on me. It took me a long time to figure out the pattern. My first thoughts were always for the children and as soon as I heard him coming down the road, singing drunkenly, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, I would rush to shut the door to their room. When it first began, after Junior’s birth, we had only two bedrooms, and the children were all piled up together on the bed in theirs.

  It didn’t happen that often I suppose. After my initial shock and outrage, I learned to deal with it. For he never beat me when he was sober, nor did he ever touch the children. He was sometimes too drunk to stand up straight, most of the punches missed, and we usually ended up going round and round with him holding on to me for support while trying to hit me, banging into things, knocking over furniture, like we were in this crazy drunken dance, and I would finally waltz him off to bed. He never raised his voice to me at those times, it was all silently done, just him grunting as he aimed a punch or a kick. At first I cried out for him to stop, but that woke up the children. To this day I can still see Her stricken moonface at the bedroom door, so I bore it in silence.

  The next day he would wake up and behave as if nothing had happened, and I did the same, hiding the bruises on my body, preparing explanations for my black eye, my swollen lip in case anyone asked. But no one did. I hardly went anywhere outside the house and field anyway. When I did, people averted their eyes from me as they laughed with him. He was the one everyone knew and loved, for many miles around—after he got the car, for hundreds of miles no doubt. I hardly saw him: our roving ambassador. And there came a time when I was thankful that he roved.