The Bookshop on the Corner (16 page)

Inside the barn, it was incredibly hot, simply from the crush of bodies, and didn't smell of cow at all; instead it smelled of deodorant, aftershave, and heavily applied perfume; beer; and pipe tobacco.

It was also incredibly noisy. In the corner was a four-piece band—a violin, a bodhrán, a whistle, and an accordion—playing music at a thousand miles an hour. On one side was a roughly set-up bar made of wooden barrels and trestle tables, where teenage bar staff dispensed pints of the local 80 Shilling Ale at lightning speed and hurled huge gin and tonics and glasses of wine across the counter with abandon. All the cash was simply dumped in a large pot. The line at the bar was crowded. In the other half of the room, people were . . . well, at first Nina wasn't exactly sure what they were doing. It didn't seem to make sense until she started concentrating. The men were hurling the women around at breakneck speed, and it took her a moment to realize that they were dancing. It looked absolutely brutal.

“Wow,” she said. It was a lot to take in. There were obviously far more men than women, but when she looked at the women who were there, she immediately realized she was notably underdressed. They had high hairstyles and proper evening gowns, some stiff and long; lots of black lace pulled tightly over muscular upper bodies; and makeup applied with a heavy hand. They were all in high heels.

In comparison, Nina wasn't dressed for a party at all. But in fact, knowing that she wasn't trying to make an impression (which could sometimes make her feel very anxious at events), she felt light and easy in the hot, perfumed room, and didn't mind even when Surinder glanced at her and said, “Wow, you look like a proper country girl,” which Nina realized was obviously a compliment of some kind.

They sipped their drinks and chatted to the boys, even though their eyes were on stalks and their heads swiveling as the girls in their scented finery pranced past. Nina was perfectly happy just to listen and take in their discussion of fertilizer brands, tractor parts, meat to market, and a clutch of other concepts she didn't understand.

After a couple of drinks, the boys were ready to dance. Nina and Surinder declined several times, partly because they weren't out on the prowl like the boys were (well, Nina wasn't; Surinder was feeling torn), and partly because they didn't have the first clue what to do.

From a distance, the dancing still looked fearsome. The girls were being flung about by the boys, and every so often somebody would crash into a trestle table or topple to the floor. It was all good-natured fun, though, and nobody did anything but laugh, as the noise levels continued to rise and the amount of floor space taken up by the wildly reeling dancers got larger and larger. High heels were starting to be thrown off here and there.

Lennox, Nina noticed, stayed resolutely on the side of the dance floor. She tried smiling at him and was about to ask him how the lambs were getting along when he hailed a man he knew across the floor, an older gentleman wearing unflattering tartan trousers. They immediately plunged deep into conversation.

The boys had begun talking about feed compounds, and slightly emboldened by the very strong gin and tonics, Nina wandered over to join them.

“Hi!” she said. “I wanted to ask how the lambs were getting along.”

Both men stared at her, quite rudely.

“Yes, fine,” said Lennox dismissively, then turned back to his
friend. Nina felt stung. She'd been up all night helping this guy, and first he didn't want them to come to the dance, and now he was completely ignoring her.

“Not dancing?” she asked, rather cheekily. His brow furrowed.

“No thanks,” he said shortly. The other man stared into the distance.

“I wasn't asking,” said Nina, annoyed and embarrassed. “I just wondered, that's all.”

“No,” said Lennox shortly. “Not for me.”

The silence became embarrassing and Nina was thinking about beating a retreat when, thankfully, a young man came up and asked her rather nervously if she would like to dance. She was about to politely refuse when, to her surprise, she spotted Surinder waltzing toward the dance floor in another chap's arms.

“What. Are. You. Doing?” Nina hissed after her.

“Come on!” shouted Surinder. “For goodness' sake. We're not here for long! Might as well have a shot.”

Nina shook her head. “You're crazy,” she said, before realizing that the young chap who'd asked her, whose name was Archie, was looking crestfallen and obviously feeling a bit of an idiot. She was conscious that all his friends were lined up watching them from the other side of the room, so with a glance to her left, where Lennox had dived back into conversation with his friend, she extended her hand.

“Of course, I'd love to,” she said loudly, while Archie flushed the same color as his hair. As he led her to the floor—or what felt to Nina a bit like a gladiatorial arena—she whispered, “You're going to have to tell me what to do. I don't know what's going on.”

At this Archie looked less terrified, and puffed up his chest a little bit.

“Don't you worry yourself,” he said. “You're with me now! Just follow me.”

To begin with, Nina couldn't follow anyone. It was a little like being on a ride at a fairground where you had to scream if you wanted to go faster. There was a lot of yelling and shouting, and some competitive arm swinging from the men, and at first it seemed to be nothing but a melee: a game of rugby on a dance floor.

Then, as Archie patiently showed her the repeated moves, she gradually came to recognize the sequence of dips, twirls, and claps, and before she knew it, he was flying her around as she twisted and turned. She found herself caught up in the music and laughing with excitement, but just as she had figured it out, the band stopped playing and she had to finish, breathless and disappointed.

The second dance, she got the hang of right away, as the entire room danced in a circle for eight counts and back. Archie grinned at her widely as he spun her away from the circle, and when she came back, she found he had moved down one, and now a heavily bearded young chap was grinning at her just as brightly and preparing to twirl her around.

Emboldened by the heady atmosphere, the alcohol, the sense of being unimaginably far from home, of being somebody else, Nina threw herself into dancing with a will. She had always been dainty, and never quite confident enough to dance where anyone might see. Here, though, nobody cared or noticed. The emphasis wasn't on looking good or being sexy or standing out; it was about hurling yourself into it and dancing as if you didn't
have a care in the world, or a worry, or even a thought; it was dancing as catharsis, and Nina very quickly found that she absolutely loved it.

The atmosphere in the barn was making her dizzy; she could hear Surinder laughing loudly and bouncing off tables several couples away, but she felt as if she was moving in and out of the dance as a piece of something larger, barely an individual at all, as the music burned louder and hotter in her ears.

She joined in the huge round of applause as the dance ended, then curtsied deeply and drank, greedily, from the fresh bottle of local cider Archie passed to her.

“And now,” said the caller from the band, “it's time for the Dashing White Sergeant.”

Nina raised her eyebrows at Archie, who nodded enthusiastically. All around them a massive land grab was going on as people broke up other couples and partnerships.

“What's going on?”

“This one's in threes. We need another girl. Or another boy,” said Archie.

They glanced around. Everyone was divvied up already, and all the girls were gone. A row of large guys were standing at the back, obviously not wanting to dance and instead concentrating very hard on drinking their pints. Their faces were bright red.

Nina glanced around. There was no one else. Except . . . She looked for Lennox, but he was busy. Fine. She wasn't looking for him anyway, she told herself. Archie managed to round up Fat Tam, who'd been in the Land Rover with them, and they joined another lot who had two girls, to make a mixed group of six.

Archie briefly explained the dance to Nina. First of all they went around in a circle, then back in a circle. Then Nina, in the middle, had to dance with each of the boys beside her, and with
the boy in the middle of the other group. They had to perform a courtly sidestep, then whirl each other around by their waists, then move back and forward. Finally they moved under the raised hands of the other group and started again with the next three they met.

Nina frowned. It seemed complicated. But as she got started, she began to see the pattern, the simple beauty of the circles coming together, bowing to one another, then coming apart again. From above it would look like the petals of a flower opening.

Her light floral dress was ideal for twirling as she was whizzed around by the men, and her ballet flats were perfect. Her cheeks were pink, giving color to her normally pale face, and her hair bounced and spun around her head as she danced, completely unselfconscious for the first time in what felt like so long.

(Surinder, catching sight of her when they danced in the same circle, thought that if Scotland could do shy little Nina this much good, it might have rather more going for it than she'd thought.)

Near the end of the dance, Nina ducked under some other arms and came up to their new group, only to be confronted by the figure of Lennox straight ahead. The two girls dancing by his side—he was the figure in the middle, just as she was—were rather drunk, giggling and flirting with him, but he was completely oblivious, and, Nina noticed, he was a fine dancer, slipping in and out exactly on the beat, effortlessly swinging and catching the squealing girls. Controlled.

When it was her turn to dance toward him, she looked at him crossly.

“Thought you weren't dancing,” she said, although she regretted it almost immediately, annoyed with herself for looking
like she cared even the tiniest bit that this grumpy, stupid old farmer would happily dance with some blond floozy but not with her. Then, suddenly, he caught her by the waist and spun her around, and she realized that her feet had lifted quite off the ground. She felt like thistledown as she flew through the air, her hair a sheet behind her, her dress flowing, and she looked up at him as she landed, but he just picked her up again as if she was nothing, and she flew once more and landed back perfectly in the exact same spot, and there was nothing to do except smile, and curtsy, and move on, although Nina found she hesitated, just a tad, and tried to hold his eye, but he was gone, and she didn't see him again for the rest of the night.

Nina and Surinder sat in the back of the truck that someone had commandeered to drive them home. It trundled through the morning mist toward the village, pink and gold alighting on the fields, the dew turning everything to a glistening web. It was, Nina was astonished to see, after four by the time the last of the fiddles was packed away, and girls everywhere were looking through the hay for their shoes. She was exhausted, but happily, wonderfully, down-to-the-bone dancing-and-laughing exhausted.

She realized quite quickly that Surinder wanted to sit next to Fat Tam, so she moved into the body of the cab, where there was a pile of three hairy men all fast asleep.

“They're going straight back to work,” said Archie, who was still awake, his shirt unbuttoned, his friendly freckled face beaming at her. “Me too.”

“Really?”

“Aye. No sleeping in for farmers.”

They were approaching the cobbled road down to Lennox's farm. Archie looked at her.

“This is my stop,” said Nina. “Thank you. Thank you so much for a wonderful evening. I really, really needed it.”

Archie leaned forward. “Can I . . . could I maybe . . .”

“No,” said Nina. “Thank you. Tonight was exactly what I needed. But I think . . . I think that was maybe all. Though you are a wonderful dance teacher.”

He smiled. “Thanks.” He looked at her. “You're not from around here.”