Just holding the dress again made her feet ache to dance as she had done then, when she was twenty-five and had no idea about anything.
This isn’t what you’re looking for, she reminded herself sternly, and laid the ballroom gown carefully over the small sofa.
The next dress was from the same time, but it was for Latin, and cut tighter and higher to show off the quick, flirtatious leg movements. Angelica murmured adoringly as she stroked the shimmering scarlet satin, fringed along the slanted hem with long jet beads. It finished right up, almost on her hip, and instead of sleeves, it had scarlet armlets that emphasised her slender arms when she wound them round Tony’s neck, or flexed them in the showy Latin poses.
Everyone said she and Tony were made for Latin; both dark, and stormy, with long limbs and snaky hips. Not that they were bad at the ballroom dances – she had the necessary grace to make the formal European dances look effortless – but the fiery Latin rhythms inspired a kind of magical lustre to their steps, as though their shoes were singeing the floor as they passed.
Then again, the Latin dances were all about sex, she thought. And she and Tony were all about sex. None of those dirty glances and seductive stroking were faked with them, not like some of their competitors. At first Angelica had pitied the girls who had to feign grand passion with partners who were more Liberace than Valentino off the floor, but in the end, she had to admit that, like the deep tans everyone sported, keeping things artificial was by far the safest way.
She lifted out another short, thigh-skimming samba confection: gold, this time, with silvery flowers appliqu
è
d on the bodice, and virtually no back to it at all, just silvery chains. Tony had a silver shirt to match it, peacock that he was. They’d won a national title when she’d worn this dress – or ‘what little there was of it’, as her father had apparently commented when she’d sent the photos home. She’d only found that out last year, when her mother had been rambling in her memories, and Angelica had relived those years again, at her side.
Angelica’s breath stopped in her chest as she held it in her shaking hands. Feeling the fabric, instead of looking at flat photographs, made it all vivid, as if the emotions were soaked into the material along with the old sweat and smoke and body oil and the smell of the Empress Ballroom, Blackpool. She felt the agony in her calves and toes, and the exhilaration and the triumph of that final, flexed pose that said, ‘we’ve won’.
If she’d known then it was going to be her final dance with Tony, she would never have sent it to the cleaners. She’d have kept it, just as it was, with his fingerprints and aftershave and quick breaths still on it.
She carried on delving into the box, and laid out one dress after another over the sofa, until it was piled with net and sequins and trailing chiffon floats, most in glowing shades of red – tomato, scarlet, lipstick crimson. The box was huge, but still held only seven of her sumptuous, complicated dresses. Angelica knew there were at least ten more in storage, thousands of pounds’ worth. She always had more dresses than anyone else, and they were always more twinkling, more beaded, more unusual. Then again, she’d always eaten less than anyone else, gone out less than anyone else, and spent virtually every penny she made on her gowns and shoes.
Everything else, she knew, someone would buy for her. But Angelica made it a rule that she, and only she, paid for the gorgeous clothes she danced in.
The dress at the bottom of the box was the one she was looking for: her favourite tango dress.
Well, she corrected herself, stroking the sequins on the thin shoulder straps, her second favourite,
competition tango
dress.
Her favourite tango dress was the one she wore to dance the Argentine tango with Tony, and that was their own dance, their private dance that wasn’t for judging, that they danced in the milongas, the hot tango salons. It was more like foreplay, and fighting, than a dance. And that dress was the one he loved: simple and tight and sexy, with none of the gaudy embellishments you needed to shine under the unforgiving spotlights and the judges’ critical eyes.
This, though, was the formal dress she’d worn for the exhibition tangos they danced in ballrooms round the country, as well as for one or two smaller competitions. It wasn’t very forgiving, to put it mildly, and even back then, when she could count each velvety rib, any sign of PMS-bloat meant Angelica didn’t bother trying to squeeze into the tight, back-laced bodice. It was cut on the bias, from coal-black satin, with a long, narrow skirt, slit up the thigh to allow for the sinuous strides that characterised the ballroom tango. Angelica had insisted that her dressmaker – a patient woman who lived in Tooting and was used to the feverish demands of half-starved dancers – lined it with blood-red satin, so it would flash as she slid and twisted her body into the dramatic turns.
That red lining was her way of bringing a little of the teasing, hot-breathed Argentine tango she and Tony danced in private to the rigid formality of the competition style: the Europeans in their dinner suits and polite tea dances might have smoothed the raw edges, formalising the steps until it was a sleek, polite parody of Latin seduction, but the secret crimson splashes were her sign to Tony that she knew what was beating at the heart of their ricochet head-turns and straight armholds.
She sighed, feeling the mesh against her palm. She half wanted to try them on, knowing she wasn’t so much bigger now than she was in her best dancing days, but she was scared to, of seeing how much had changed in her face.
The right dress made such a difference. Not just to the dance, but to everything. The magic of those sequins and stones and cleverly cut skirts: they bestowed a fairy-godmother touch of glamour, a VIP pass into a Technicolor world where everyone’s eyes were on you. You couldn’t be your normal everyday self in a tiny scrap of satin, held on by flesh-toned angelskin fabric so it seemed, from the audience, that only air and the speed of your steps was keeping it up. You couldn’t shuffle, or stoop, when hundred of sequins glittered with every move you made, and yards of chiffon swirled around your feet. You weren’t just Cyd Charisse or Ginger Rogers in your mind, you actually looked like Ginger Rogers, and the music playing for you was just the same as was played for her. The dress and the dance and the music, all together, meant you could turn a daydream into something real, for those three minutes on the floor, his hands holding yours, your knees brushing his thigh. You could be a dream woman, and your partner could be the man of your most romantic fantasies.
Angelica’s plan was to lend Katie one of her ballroom dresses to try on. She knew it would make the world of difference to the way Katie saw herself, and she hoped it would help her understand that dancing the woman’s steps didn’t mean the end of feminism as she knew it.
Angelica felt sorry for Katie. She was the only woman she’d ever taught who hadn’t turned up for the second class in her most gorgeous party dress, just for the chance to wear it out. Every week, the same plain black dress, the same awkward posture.
Katie could be a much better dancer than she realised – Angelica knew it, even if Katie didn’t. She was athletic, and though she wasn’t the quickest at picking up steps, she didn’t forget them, or get confused when the music changed. What was really holding Katie back, thought Angelica, picturing her self-conscious cha-cha, was her inability to let herself go, and to trust her partner to lead her properly. She wouldn’t even relax with experienced leads like Frank or Baxter; Angelica watched her resisting them until they gave up. She was so focused on being Katie, that she just couldn’t relax enough to play the waltzing princess, or the unbridled hot-to-trot Latina.
Lauren, on the other hand . . . Angelica smiled, just thinking about her. She was a natural because dressing up and playing was something she actively enjoyed. When Angelica watched Lauren in class, she saw her blue eyes were miles away, and she knew Lauren was letting her own imaginary love scene play out in her mind, sweeping round the floor with her lovely long arms and legs in perfect instinctive lines.
And Jo was good too, because she knew how to hold herself. It was a curious thing, a dancing cliché that Angelica had learned over time was true, but bigger girls really did have much more grace on the floor than their skinnier friends. Being constantly aware of their bodies meant they carried themselves carefully and lightly. Jo had hips that moved, and she danced like someone whose inhibitions had long gone from romping around with kids; she wasn’t afraid to get things wrong, or look silly, and Angelica could tell from watching Frank’s face, or Ross’s, that she was a pleasure to dance with because of that.
She looked down at the tango dress in her hands. Its old sequins glimmered in the soft light of the table lamp, as if they longed to be spangled by a glitterball again, shimmering like serpent’s scales as the dress whisked about.
Angelica had a moment’s doubt. Was it interfering to give it to Katie? Something was wrong between Katie and Ross, though Katie seemed to think no one could tell. She was better at disguising her unhappiness than he was. But years of scrutinising couples who were hiding furious quarrels behind the rictus grin of their show faces had given Angelica x-ray eyes for tension. Tony always said she could predict couples splitting even before they knew themselves.
Well, you had to, didn’t you? Angelica had reasoned. It wasn’t prurience, it was smart business sense. Good partners didn’t come on the market often, and when they did, it was all change for everyone.
No, something was definitely wrong between Ross and Katie and it made her sad, because they were a nice pair. Decent, she felt, unlike Jo’s Greg, whom she didn’t trust an inch. He was good looking, but a pushy lead, too forceful, refusing to slow down a little for Peggy, tutting when Trina messed up her steps in front of her, so Angelica would know it was Trina who’d messed up, not him.
Worry about one couple at a time, she told herself. And that’s if you’ve got the nerve to tell them how to fix their marriage – in this dress of all dresses?
She hugged the fabric to her chest, releasing another memory-tingling noseful of ballrooms and starch and hairspray. She closed her eyes to smell it better, and when she opened them, she realised there was one more dress in the box, screwed up in a ball so small it had got lost in the packing.
Angelica leaned forward and pulled it out: it was Tony’s favourite – the slinky black jersey practice dress, cut very simply, but with a deep v in the back which showed off her angular shoulder-blades. It had been thrown in the back of her wardrobe the last time she saw him, and it had stayed there, to be packed up for storage with her formal gowns when she moved to Florida with Jerry. New partner, new dresses, that was the rule.
She held it in her hands, feeling its heaviness, and imagined it on Katie, falling in drapey folds over her neat hips and slim waist. She had good legs, Katie, and with that boring blonde bob slicked back or held with some glitzy diamanté headpiece . . .
Maybe.
Angelica smiled, then sighed.
It would be something else she was bringing full circle. And that was the point of coming back to Longhampton.
29
Lauren woke early on Sunday morning, and her first thought, almost before her eyes were open, was about Bridget’s worry-lined face last night. She’d seemed old and anxious. Not her reliable, ageless mother, but a middle-aged woman with a huge problem.
That was closely followed by her wedding, and the realisation that matching white horses weren’t just a possibility – they were now totally out of the question.
Lauren lay motionless in her warm bed, and struggled yet again to work out how she felt, and what she should do.
There was no sound from her parents’ room next door, and she wondered if her mum was lying there too, unable to sleep for worrying.
Were they too old to remortgage? What if her parents had to sell the house to pay those bills? Move somewhere smaller?
She closed her eyes as her heart sped up and her chest tightened.
Deep breaths, she told herself, as Dr Bashir had trained them to say at the surgery if a patient started to come over too emotional at the desk. Deep breaths. Focus on the breath going in . . . and out. And in . . . and out.
It was fine going out, but as she breathed in, she saw her mother’s drawn and worried eyes, and that file of cold red bills, and the slashes of misery it would put through their happy, loving marriage when it came out that Mum had kept all this from Dad.
Then on the out breath, she saw the croquembouches and the beautiful fairy-tale dress, and the gold plates at the buffet, everything being swept away and replaced with – well, with what? Her dream wedding, the one she’d planned in her head since she was fourteen, gone, just like that. Never to be had again.
Her throat tightened just thinking about it and her eyes snapped open.
They fell immediately on a brochure for a local castle venue, one with a real maze where you could have your wedding pictures taken.
‘Come on, Lauren,’ she said aloud. ‘It’s going to be fine. I’ll tell Chris everything, and he’ll know what to do.’
She was still a bit annoyed with him after that face-off at the pub the previous night, but on balance, the thought of sinking into the comfort of Chris’s warm arms, and feeling his hands stroking her hair, tipped the scales in his favour. Plus, she reckoned, he’d be desperate to show how supportive he could be. She and Chris didn’t argue. Not for long anyway.