I’m indebted to Carolyn Mays and Isobel Akenhead for their help and encouragement, and to Lizzy Kremer, for pretty much everything, really. Most of all, thanks to my own Fred Astaire, who made the ultimate sacrifice and learned to cha-cha. Greater love hath no man.

Angelica Andrews, British Open Ballroom Dancing Champion 1974, 76–78, British Ten-Dance Champion 1977, and European Ballroom finalist more times than she cared to remember, did not do rusty keys or locks.

Even without her beaded dance dresses and flicked cat’s eye liner, Angelica wasn’t the sort of lady who needed to open any door for herself. A man usually got there first, rushing to get it, so she could sweep through. However, there was no man around today, and the key she was grappling with didn’t just open a peeling door, it opened her entire monochrome childhood, before she could dance, before she was beautiful, before she was even ‘Angelica’.

This wasn’t something she wanted company for, so she gritted her teeth in solitary majesty and jiggled the rusty lock to the Longhampton Memorial Hall.

‘Damn!’ she hissed, as one crimson nail split with the effort. According to Mrs Higham, who might well have been one of the Memorial Hall’s original 1921 board of trustees, there was ‘a knack’ to it. The ‘knack’ itself was not explained to her. Mrs Higham handed over the key with an air of suspicion, despite the fact that not only had Angelica got full permission to teach a class the following evening, but she distinctly remembered Mrs Higham from her own lessons there, fifty years ago, when she came to collect her bat-eared daughter, Vanessa. Mrs Higham had seemed pretty suspicious, even then.

‘I see you’re back, Angela,’ she’d said, as Angelica signed the book, with a grim satisfaction that suggested she’d been waiting thirty years to say it.

Angelica made sure she signed Angelica Andrews, not Angela Clarke. She was back, but she wasn’t
that
back.

With a final shove that put a fine layer of dirt on her wool jacket, she pushed open the Hall’s heavy front door and stepped into the tiled vestibule. Nothing had changed. She’d been here a few times since she moved back to Longhampton, for Friday night dances, but then the place had been filled with bodies, modern bodies fixing it firmly in the present. Now she was here alone, it felt like stepping back in time, with her own past drumming its fingers, waiting for her in the ballroom inside, some of it in crisp black and white, some in high eighties’ gloss.

Angelica’s eyes closed, and she breathed in a smell that sent her rushing back into the sixties, the fifties: beeswax polish and wood panelling, and decades of dust tramped in from the streets. There’d always been something about the Memorial Hall that made Angelica feel you could slip back in time, if you turned down the lights and put on the right kind of slow waltz music.

Like now, she thought, letting her ears pick up the faint clanks of the ancient plumbing. You could almost feel the brush of satin skirts swishing past in the dark, each creak of the wooden rafters a gentleman’s excuse me echoing back from the drab thirties.

Angelica opened her eyes, and looked slowly round at the oak plaques commemorating Longhampton’s war dead, the carved finials, and painted friezes of Morris dancers and ballroom ladies in gossamer dresses, now faded like old pressed flowers. The glass panes in the doors that joined the vestibule to the main ballroom were cobwebby, and though the place was obviously still in use, from the stacked chairs and fire safety notices, the hall seemed asleep without music. In her head, she could hear blaring horns, and perky dance-band strings, and the echoing shuffle of drums played with brushes.

It gave her a tingle of memory, almost like déjà vu, but not quite. She
had
been here before. It was an eerie feeling – her past coming back to life, after all those years of pretending it never happened.

Music did that. Angelica had always thought it was so easy to touch your fingers to ghosts when you danced to music recorded years before you were born. When you were moving to the music you were sharing that thrill with shy men and hopeful women who’d done exactly the same thing, in the same place, on the same warm summer evenings and crisp early autumn days like this one. The world might move on, but the steps and rituals, and the lead and follow of the dance, stayed exactly the same.

She sat down on the bench where she’d tied on her red ballet slippers as an eager six-year-old, and reached into her bag for the red leather heeled lace-ups she wore to teach in, battered and butter-soft. Even now, Angelica didn’t want to step onto that sprung floor in everyday courts.

If she was going to step into the past, she wanted to do it in the right shoes.

She looked up at the joining doors, as she pushed her feet into the lace-ups. A fresh shiver of anticipation ran over her tanned skin. If she pushed the doors open now, would the ghosts of her old life be dancing there, waiting for her, in a chorus-line of disapproval?

Mrs Trellys, the first ballet teacher, with her walking stick, and her stories of
nearly
going to Russia to train with the Kirov, and her sharp words about little girls with rrrrrround shoulders.

Sweet but dull Bernard, her first proper ballroom partner, awkward in his father’s dinner jacket, with his hair slicked back and his ears pink with nerves, still hoping she’d changed her mind.

Her mum and dad, now reunited in that great ballroom in the sky where only classic waltzes were played, and her mum’s roller-set never wilted before the last dance.

Angelica swallowed, suddenly tense.

Would Tony be there? With his seductive Spanish eyes and too-tight-for-competition trousers? Holding out his hand, requesting her pleasure in that old-fashioned way that looked gallant to everyone else, but unbearably exciting and tormenting to her?

She closed her eyes, and let the wave of longing and regret and still-sharp disappointment roll over her. She’d kept those feelings at arms’ length for years, just like she’d kept most strong feelings safely battened down beneath her fixed ballroom smile, but now she was back in Longhampton, they had returned with all the disorientating intensity of a bereavement.

God alone knew where Tony was. But in her imagination, he was always thirty-four, hair as jet-black as his polished dancing shoes, and they were always three quick steps away from a fight or falling, kissing wildly, into bed.

Angelica shook away the memory, and got to her feet. With a deep breath, she pushed open the doors, solid dark wood with sixteen small panes halfway up, enough to glimpse the dancers when you were putting your shoes on, and to get your own pulse racing and your feet itching to join in. Just enough glass to see if your man was dancing with someone else, or if the floor was emptied by some show-off couple strutting their new steps.

Her footsteps echoed on the wonderful wooden floor. Sprung maple, just like the finest ballrooms she’d danced in, an unexpected jewel of sophistication in the nondescript town. Angelica lifted her gaze up to the rafters, taking in the elaborate friezes, washed out and peeling in places, but still ambitious and proud. It was still as magical as it was in her memory, more so for having survived. When she was a little girl, living round the corner in Sydney Street, her mother had often told her about how the Memorial Hall had sprung up like a glorious mushroom behind Longhampton’s lacklustre High Street, and though Angelica found it hard to lay her mother’s descriptions over the concrete she tramped along, even then she wanted to believe in a glamour she couldn’t actually see.

Since way before the turn of the century, according to Pauline, Longhampton had been the place to go for a dance on a Friday, being the old market town and the centre of social activity for the outlying farms and villages. It had a market hall that was used for whatever dancing could be arranged, and its own band. Of course, losing nearly all the town’s men to the Western Front had put a stop to that, but after the war had ground to a numb halt, the people of Longhampton, who weren’t badly off in those days, thanks to the cider mills, had scraped together enough money to build a Memorial Hall, instead of a gloomy statue to the husbands and sons who’d spun round the floor in happier years. The ramshackle old market hall was demolished, and the lovely Memorial Hall was built in its place, with stained-glass windows that spilled fruit-jelly-coloured pools of light on to the polished floor, and wrought-iron radiators like stacked Nice biscuits along the walls.

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