The Ballroom Class (31 page)

‘Didn’t you listen to anything he said? We have to talk  . . .’ Katie stopped and swallowed. This wasn’t coming out right. ‘You can’t just ignore it! We need to discuss it. It’s not as simple as . . .’

Ross turned, and her words trailed away. His eyes were guarded, but she could see an ocean of hurt in them.

He spoke very quietly, but with a precision that told her he was exerting massive self-control. ‘You’ve just told me you don’t love me any more. That you’re only here because of the children I look after for you. That’s a lot to take in.’ He unzipped his bag, and picked up some unironed laundry from the pile, stuffing it inside. ‘You’ve obviously been thinking about this a lot. I had no idea. I mean, I knew things weren’t great, but I thought they were improving. With the dancing  . . . I thought we were starting to have fun again. Stupid me.’

‘Are you moving out?’ she demanded, panicking. That would make it real. That would leave her to explain it to Hannah, and Jack. Leaving the mean stuff to Mummy, as usual.

‘No. I’m not moving out,’ he said, then paused, biting his lip.

For the first time in years, literally, Katie had no idea what Ross was going to say next.

He hadn’t burst into tears, as she’d expected, or raged, or vanished to lick his wounds. He was still here, suddenly a much more masculine presence in her house, and he was angry in an adult, controlled way. She was the one who was quivering with nerves and fighting the urge to bawl her eyes out.

‘I’ll be sleeping in here tonight, obviously,’ he added.

‘No, no, you have our bed,’ she insisted, wanting to give something, anything. ‘It’s only fair, since it’s my  . . .’ She trailed off.

‘Your fault?’ Something like anger flashed in Ross’s dark eyes. ‘Your fault you’ve brought this to a head? Or your fault for making this marriage unbearable? I don’t
want
to sleep in our bed any more. It’s not
our
bed. Just leave me alone.’

‘We can’t go to bed like this,’ protested Katie, ‘not with everything just hanging. Surely Peter said we should talk this through  . . .’

‘Oh, that’s right – check what the
rules
are for screwing up someone’s life,’ said Ross, sarcastically. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit late for you to start following Peter’s advice now?’ He started rolling Hannah’s favourite frilly white socks into tiny balls, and clamped his mouth shut in a tight line.

A car came and went in the street outside, and he said nothing.

Katie didn’t want to leave the room. It would move everything on, somehow.

‘Well, what?’ she demanded, unable to bear it. ‘Didn’t Peter say
anything
about what we should do?’

‘If you must know he told me to work out what
I
wanted, before I just bent to your wishes, like normal.’

‘And what do you want?’ Katie held her breath, as Ross stared at Hannah’s socks, like baby mice in his hands.

The silence stretched and tightened between them.

Eventually, he said, ‘I don’t know. But there’s no point upsetting the kids until I do, so I’ll go away on this trip you’ve so thoughtfully planned with Jack and Hannah.’ His voice cracked, as he returned to his packing. ‘Then you can give your undivided attention to
work
, and when I come back, we’ll talk about how we’re going to sort things out. Now, can you please just fuck off and leave me alone?’

He looked up, and Katie could see tears in Ross’s eyes, although he was struggling to keep his composure and his jaw was rigid with the effort. There was a sort of distance around him, as if he’d withdrawn something from her that she’d never realised was there until it had gone.

She stepped forward to hug him, but he stepped back. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he whispered, almost inaudibly.

The sight of him standing there with Hannah’s tiny socks in his hands was too much for Katie to bear. She backed away, closed the door and went downstairs to pour herself a glass of wine.

I should feel relieved, she thought, sitting on her velvet couch and running her hand mechanically along its soft pile. The old numbness had been replaced with a new, heavier weight in her heart. I’ve taken the first step, and that’s the hardest. I’ve got things moving.

But when she went to bed, she couldn’t sleep, despite the second and third glass of wine. In the darkness, while her subconscious usually listened out for Jack’s baby squawks of distress, she strained her ears for sounds of Ross crying,

18

Angelica was sorting through her music collection, trying to find songs that would make the waltz come more easily to Chris and Lauren. Some music did, in her experience. If the rhythm was right, and the lyrics chimed in with your own mood, putting into words what you were hunting around to express, then your feet did the hard work by themselves while your mind was swept away by the song.

She didn’t like teaching engaged couples, as a rule, not even wealthy American ones whose parents had come to her waving wads of cash and begging for private coaching. There was simply too much riding on that one dance. Every secret doubt and tension went into the hour’s lesson, and every stumble was An Omen. More than one couple had come for three lessons, then mysteriously never reappeared for the final ones. Tears, accusations, unflattering comparisons with mothers/fathers – Angelica had heard them all, and there was only so much she felt able to advise.

Her own romantic history was so closely bound up in her dancing partnerships that they were impossible to untangle – which was, she now thought, where she’d gone wrong.

She looked at the CD in her hand: Victor Silvester. That took her back. Right back to the beginning with starchy old Bernard, and his white tie and tails. Where would I be if I’d stuck with Bernard, she wondered. A semi in Bromley, probably, with grandchildren, and terrible feet.

Angelica got up and went to open the second of her mother’s albums, now stacked on the sitting-room bookshelf: the amateur years in London, while she and Bernard worked their way up the competition ladder.

He was a nice chap, Bernard, she thought, as she turned the stiff black pages. Jug ears, poor lamb, but a lovely line. She’d been paired up with him by her first London teacher, Jarvis Carmichael, because Bernard ‘came from the provinces too’. Jarvis was snotty, but they’d worked really hard to show him that hometowns didn’t mean anything.

Angelica smiled sadly at the photographs. Bernard was a very old-school ballroom dancer. Waltz was their best dance, closely followed by the quickstep and foxtrot – the dances where Bernard could imagine he was Vernon Castle, basically. He was a bit of an obsessive about Vernon Castle. You couldn’t see in the black and white photographs where the collar gave him a rash, but his hair gleamed with Brylcreem. So did hers for that matter.

In those days, Angelica had been quite old-school too, not to mention baby faced. Her dresses were stiff-petticoated, spangled confections with tiny nipped-in waists, and her make-up would have put Diana Ross to shame: thick winged eyeliner and pale shell-pink lips that made her look like Cleopatra in a fuchsia tulle evening gown. Of course, you had to wear make-up that could be seen from the seats for competition, but it helped that, back then, Angelica was trowelling on just the same amount of eyeliner to go to the shops.

They made a stylish couple, she and Bernard, and they certainly won their fair share of competitions, but something wasn’t there. Looking at the photographs now – photos she hadn’t seen in thirty years or more – Angelica could see it quite clearly: Bernard had a sort of restrained stillness, the dignified poise that made a great ballroom dancer, but there was a restless movement about her, even when they were standing, feet neatly positioned, for formal portraits. She needed to move. And move on her own, not be guided around.

It wasn’t such a great surprise then, when she met Tony Canero and he swept her off her feet. Literally, in fact, in her first cha-cha lesson, in a Soho studio recommended to her by one of her new London friends, in a lift that she later found out was illegal in competitions but sent all the blood rushing round her body in a way she’d never thought possible. Tony and his amazing sense of rhythm were already getting talked about in the circles she moved in – and not just on the dancefloor, either. When he and Angelica touched their hands together, the steps weren’t play-acting flirtation any more. Each brush, and glance, and flick of the hip was a silent conversation.

From that one lesson, Angelica was hooked. On Latin and on Tony.

Bernard ‘didn’t care for Latin’. It was too wild, and required too much ‘hip action’. The closest they got was the Ballroom Tango: a stiff, stalking affair, in which he whipped her from side to side while she glared furiously over his shoulder. By this stage, she and Bernard weren’t getting on too well, so the tango became one of their better dances, since it revolved around avoiding each other’s gaze, holding one another so there was very little body contact and generally looking piqued.

It finally fell apart when Angelica announced she wanted to do the ten-dance competitions, dancing all ten of the ballroom and Latin styles. Not just waltz, foxtrot, quickstep, tango and the spinning, dizzying Viennese waltz, but the hot, party rhythms of cha-cha-cha, sexy rumba and samba, paso doble and swinging, finger-snapping jive. Not just new steps to learn, but new costumes, and new attitudes – new people for Angelica to be on the dancefloor. That, she’d realised, was her great talent: she could change like a chameleon with the music, always searching for a different, more exotic skin to slip into.

‘Why?’ Bernard had demanded, in shock. ‘What’s the point of doing ten dances not very well when you could do five properly?’

‘Because I want to learn new things,’ insisted Angelica, which was really her way of saying, ‘Because I want to learn new things with Tony.’

It upset a lot of people, she and Bernard splitting, not least their teacher who she suspected had some kind of accumulator bet on the European Amateur Championships.

It upset her parents, who didn’t really think Latin dancing was something nice girls did. Nice girls didn’t live on their own above a gay nightclub in the middle of London either, but they didn’t know she was doing that.

‘The dresses, Angie!’ her mother had pleaded, rolling her eyes in shock. ‘There’s nothing to them! Just fringe!’

Worse still, Tony was a professional, and if she danced with him, Angelica would have to turn professional too. ‘And we know what that means,’ said Cyril, even though Angelica was pretty sure he had absolutely no idea what it meant at all.

It also upset Bernard, who threw his final cards on the table, at their last waltz lesson.

‘I’ll marry you!’ he said, as if that would solve everything. ‘How about that?’

Angelica just smiled, not wanting to hurt his feelings, and as she left, she quietly gave the teacher the names of two girls she knew who were looking for a nice starter partner, no hanky panky or unorthodox step sequences.

Within a couple of hours of leaving Bernard and his stiff-backed world behind, she and Tony were having their first Paso Doble lesson, and she could make as many huge, dramatic shapes as she liked, without worrying about Bernard’s dodgy neck. Rather than keeping her face in a glacial expression of mild surprise, Tony goaded her to use it as part of the dance.

‘You’re the bull!’ he kept saying, his Spanish accent even more pronounced as he yelled over the furious accordion music. ‘Scare me! Be angry! Want me!’

Angelica did want him, with a passion that made her ache, even though she suspected he said this to every girl who came into his father’s tapas restaurant in Clapham, let alone into his arms on the dancefloor. But she knew at once how to get what she wanted: she prowled and flicked her skirt in the Flamenco style, and when he threw her over his arm in the chasse cape, she stretched her long neck back, feeling his strong arm holding her, and thought she’d never been so alive. There was no way now she was going back to just ballroom.

Tapas or not, Tony made a very convincing proud matador and she made an excellent Latin student, arching her supple back and flashing her long, slim legs as if she’d been born in Buenos Aires, not Longhampton. They were both dark, and dramatic, and when Tony touched Angelica, she felt every hair on her skin rise to meet his warm fingers. He had a slightly cruel mouth that could smile with lazy seduction, or close tight and hard with annoyance: he was, in short, a London version of all the Spanish bastards her friends had their hearts broken by on the Costa del Sol, but the difference with Tony was that he was a brilliant dancer. For that, Angelica could forgive him anything.

When the music started, the waiter and the part-time model vanished, and Tony and Angelica stepped onto the floor as if an imaginary spotlight was always trained on them, even in practice. Their inventive, natural style made every single eye follow them on a crowded competition floor, but beneath the flamboyance, their technique was flawless. And, clearly, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

Over the next six months, Angelica cut her long hair into a short crop (the better for dancing and showing off her cheekbones), lost ten pounds (the dresses made you very paranoid), developed muscles she never knew existed in her legs with all the lifts and poses, and, at Tony’s insistence, changed her name to Angelica and left Angela Clarke behind for ever. She chose Andrews as her new surname, out of proud independence, and a lurking suspicion that Angelica Canero might be a while in coming.