‘Well, it was all over by then anyway, because of Mum’s illness.’
‘Of course it was,’ said Maggie, slightly embarrassed. ‘I forgot about that.’
‘When I last went to see him,’ continued Sonia, ‘he was so enthusiastic about my salsa lessons it almost made up for James’s cynicism.’
Sonia’s visits to her elderly father were usually timed for when James was having a golf day. It seemed a good opportunity, given that the two men had very little to say to each other. Unlike James’s parents, a visit to whom involved a three-hour drive out of London, the packing of green Wellington boots, occasionally evening wear and an obligatory overnight stay, Sonia’s father lived a mere thirty-minute drive away, in the outer suburbs of Croydon.
It was always with a pang of guilt that she rang his doorbell, one of a set of twenty outside the characterless block of nineteen fifties flats. Each visit, it seemed to take even longer before the buzzer went and the outer door, which let visitors into the pale green, uncarpeted communal hallway, opened. It was then a disinfectant-scented climb up to the second storey of this building, and by that time Jack Haynes would be standing at his open doorway ready to welcome his only daughter in.
Sonia recalled that last visit and how the seventy-eight year old’s round face had creased into a smile as she came into sight. She had embraced his stout frame and kissed the top of his liver-spotted head, making sure she did not disturb the few remaining strands of silver hair, which he had carefully combed back across his pate.
‘Sonia!’ he said warmly. ‘How lovely to see you.’
‘Hello, Dad.’ She hugged him tighter.
A tray with cups and saucers, a jug of milk and a small plate of Rich Tea biscuits was already set out on a low table in the living room, and Jack insisted that Sonia took a seat while he went into the kitchen to fetch the teapot, which rattled noisily as he carried it through and set it down. Pale liquid slopped from the spout and splashed the rug but she knew not to ask him whether he needed any help. Such a ritual as this preserved the dignity of old age.
As her father held the tea strainer above the cup and the brown liquid streamed through, Sonia began the usual line of questioning.
‘So how—’
Her question was interrupted by the rumble of a train going past, only a few feet from the back wall, causing enough of a vibration to send a small cactus plant on the window-ledge crashing to the floor.
‘Oh, what a nuisance,’ said the elderly man, struggling to his feet. ‘I’m sure these trains are getting more frequent, you know.’
Once the dustpan and brush had been fetched and the scattering of gravel, dry soil and spiny cactus limbs had been patiently reassembled and pressed back into the plastic pot, their conversation resumed. It covered the usual ground: what Jack had been doing in the past couple of weeks, what the doctor had said about his arthritis, how long he would have to wait for a hip replacement, how he had been to Hampton Court on a recent outing along with some of the other people who went to the day-care centre, and a description of a funeral he had been to of an old National Service acquaintance. The latter seemed to have been the highlight of the month, the funeral wakes in village halls around the country providing welcome reunions for those who still survived, with hours of reminiscence and a slap-up tea.
Sonia gazed at her father as she listened to his cheerful tales. Seated in his electronically adjustable chair, a gift from her and James for his seventy-fifth birthday, he looked comfortable but out of place in this environment that had as much character as a station waiting room. Everything looked makeshift except for the incongruous Edwardian furniture, which he had refused to part with when he moved here from his previous house. These hefty pieces of dark mahogany were a link for him with the last place he had lived with Sonia’s mother, and though they were totally impractical - a sideboard that monopolised the living room and a bureau that was so wide it blocked half the window in his already sombre bedroom - he would no more have parted with them than he would the forest of spider plants that cluttered their dusty surfaces.
Once her father had given her the headlines of his life in the past few weeks, it was Sonia’s turn. She always found it hard. The machinations of the PR world would be incomprehensible to someone who had worked as a teacher all his life, so she kept talk of work to a minimum and tended to make it sound as though she was in advertising, which was a much easier world for an outsider to grasp. Her social life would have been equally alien to him. On that last visit, though, she had told him about the dance class she had begun to attend and his enthusiasm took her by surprise.
‘What dances are you doing exactly? Who are your instructors? What sort of shoes do you wear?’ he quizzed her.
Sonia expressed surprise that her father knew so much.
‘Your mother and I used to dance a lot in our courtship and in our early married life,’ he told her. ‘In the fifties everyone did! It was as though we were all celebrating the end of the war.’
‘How often did you go?’
‘Oh, at least twice a week. Always on Saturdays and then usually another night or two.’
He smiled at his daughter. Jack loved it when she came to visit and knew it must be quite hard for her to fit these trips into her busy schedule. What he was always keen to avoid, though, was to talk too much about the past. It must be tiresome for children to have to listen to their parents reminiscing about days gone by and he had always been wary of it.
‘But they always say that the best things in life are free, don’t they?’ he added, smiling at her, hoping that even with her lovely house and expensive car that she still knew that.
Sonia nodded. ‘I just can’t believe I never really knew,’ she said.
‘Well, I suppose we stopped soon after you were born.’
Although her mother had died when Sonia was sixteen, she was amazed that she had never known anything about this aspect of their lives. Like most children, she had not spent much time wondering what her mother and father did before she was there and her curiosity had never been much aroused.
‘Don’t you remember all the dancing you did yourself when you were little?’ he asked. ‘You used to go every Saturday afternoon. Look!’
Jack had rummaged in the bureau and found some pictures. On top of the pile was a photograph of Sonia, pale and self-conscious in a white, ribbon-trimmed tutu, standing by the fire-place of her childhood home. Sonia was more interested in the others, which were of her parents at various dance events. One showed the pair of them, her father looking not unlike he did today though with more of his pale hair, and her mother, erect, elegant, her black hair slicked tightly into a firm bun. They were holding a trophy and on the reverse of the picture, in pencil, was written:‘1953:Tango, 1st.’There were several others, most of them taken at competitions.
Sonia held a picture in each hand. ‘Is this really Mum?’
In her memory, she was frail, semi-bedridden and silver-haired. Here she was vibrant, strong and, most arrestingly for Sonia, upright. It was hard to revise the image of her mother that she had had for so long.
‘We all danced properly in those days,’ Jack assured his daughter. ‘We were taught the right steps and we danced together, not like people do nowadays.’
These photos evoked such strong emotions for Jack and, as he gazed silently at this image of himself, memories of how he and Mary had not always performed according to the rule book returned to him. The rule of dancing is that the man leads, but for them this wasn’t always the case. Within the subtlety of their movements, whether it was tango, rumba or paso doble, Jack had known where Mary wanted to be led and from the slightest pressure she exerted on his arm, they had developed a way of communicating this. She was totally in control of their movement. Having danced almost as soon as she could walk, until the moment when her legs began to lose the power to carry her, it could not have been any other way.
Jack found another envelope stuffed with photographs. Each one featured himself and his wife in a stiff pose and on the back, the date and the dance for which they had won a prize.
‘What happened to all those beautiful gowns?’ Sonia could not resist asking.
‘I’m afraid they all went to a charity shop when she stopped dancing,’ Jack answered. ‘She couldn’t bear to have them in the wardrobe.’
Though Sonia was amazed to have uncovered such a significant part of her father’s life, and one that she had never been aware of, she knew without asking why they had really stopped dancing and why they had never talked about it. Her mother had developed multiple sclerosis during her pregnancy with Sonia, and within a short time was confined to a wheelchair.
Sonia would have liked to spend the rest of the day asking her father more, but could sense she might already have asked one question too many. He had already put the other photographs back in the envelope.
There was one stray picture that still lay face down on his coffee table and she turned it over before handing it back. It showed a group of children in hand-knitted cardigans. Two of them were sitting on top of a barrel and two others were leaning against it. They had stiff smiles. A group of tables in the background suggested it was taken outside a café and the cobbles suggested somewhere continental.
‘Who are these children?’ she asked.
‘Some of your mother’s family,’ he answered, not volunteering any further information.
It was time for Sonia to go. She and her father embraced.
‘’Bye, sweetheart, it’s been lovely to see you,’ he said, smiling. ‘Enjoy your dancing.’
As she had made her way home that afternoon, Sonia’s imagination had been filled with images of her parents gliding around the dance floor. Perhaps the discovery of their interest shed light on why she already could not imagine life without her dance lessons.
Sonia had been silent for a few minutes, chewing her way through lunch in the Granada café, tomato paste and crumbs spraying onto the table around her. When she looked up, her eye was caught by a series of cheaply produced oil paintings of women in long, extravagantly ruffled dresses. They were the clichéd image of Spain but every restaurant and café in the city subscribed to the myth.
‘Were you serious about wanting them to teach you flamenco?’ Sonia asked Maggie.
‘Yes, I was.’
‘But didn’t you think it looked tricky?’
‘I’d just like to learn the basics,’ said Maggie confidently.
‘Whatever those are,’ responded Sonia.
It seemed to her that there could be nothing ‘basic’ about flamenco. Surely it had an entire culture of its own, and she felt mildly irritated that Maggie had not recognised that.
‘Why are you so down on it?’ snapped Maggie.
‘I’m not down on it at all,’ replied Sonia. ‘I’m just not entirely sure it isn’t like being a Brit who comes on a cheap package holiday and asks whether he can learn how to be a bullfighter. It just doesn’t look as though it can be done.’
‘Fine. But if you don’t want to do it, it doesn’t stop me, does it?’
The two women were rarely out of tune like this and when it happened it took them both by surprise. Sonia could not explain to herself why she felt so irritated by Maggie’s attitude and by her assumption that she could penetrate the outer layer of this culture, but she felt it showed disrespect.
They finished eating in a silence that Maggie eventually broke.
‘Coffee?’ she asked, wanting to clear the air.
‘
Con leche
,’ responded Sonia with a smile. They could not sulk with each other for long.
As the mid-afternoon sunshine was fading to an ochre glow, Sonia and Maggie returned to their hotel. The streets were now deadly quiet; the traffic had vanished and the shops remained firmly closed. They too would follow the Spanish pattern and take to their beds for a few hours of afternoon siesta. Sonia had slept very little the previous night and was now beginning to feel jaded.
Though the curtains filtered only a fraction of the light, nothing would have stopped Sonia falling into a deep sleep that afternoon. The sound of cars honking their horns, the wail of a police siren and the banging of doors in the corridor would normally have been enough to wake her, but for several hours she was in a state of blissful unconsciousness.