Dancing Backwards. Salley Vickers
Plenty of rocks and no wedding band but a big diamond on the ring finger of the left hand.
‘I came to watch the dancing.’
‘But you are looking at the sea.’
She seemed to like this approach better. ‘Until there is dancing I would rather look at the sea than at cake.’
‘You dance?’ No nail polish either.
‘No.’
‘But you like to watch it?’
‘My steward wanted me to.’
‘Your steward?’ The guy must be a smooth worker if she had formed a crush on him already.
‘I offended him so I’m being polite and following his suggestion, you see.’
‘I see,’ Des said. Maybe the woman was a little touched. ‘Well, enjoy yourself with the sea, Mrs Hetherington. There’s plenty of it.’
Five days a week the ship’s band played for the tea dance in the King Edward Lounge hosted by pair of professional dancers, Marie and George, whose photographs (George in tails, Marie in glittering-bodiced costumes, winning prizes in competitions as far apart as Eastbourne and Barcelona) were available for sale at the rostrum. The pair had been hired by the Caroline to give presentation dances at the regular evening balls and to run the five-times-a-week dance lessons (‘11 to 12 noon in the Tudor Room, bring suitable shoes’). The tea dances allowed a further opportunity for passengers to try out the steps they had learned at the classes. In order to accommodate the large numbers of single female passengers additional male dance hosts were employed.
Des had begun to learn to dance at the age of six at Miss Butler’s Dance School. His mother, at the age of not quite fifteen, had visited southern Italy with a school coach party. One of the tyres had burst, near a trattoria run by the driver’s cousin. While the driver had been hard at it changing the burst tyre, the party had enjoyed a long lunch. They were having their fortunes told in the coffee grounds by the driver’s cousin’s wife, when young Trisha Claybourne took a glass of wine out to the toiling driver who had just completed his task. He had expressed gratitude for the wine in the discreet interior of his coach.
Trisha, who was slightly built, had not recognised the consequence of this encounter, and for a while had assumed that she was annoyingly putting on weight. By the time the penny dropped, there was no remedying the situation. Nor was it possible to track down the coach driver. Trisha didn’t even know his name. When pressed she thought it might have been Dino but she wasn’t sure.
Des grew up calling his mother ‘Aunty’, her brother ‘Uncle Steve’, and his grandparents ‘Mum and Dad’. His grandmother loved him with a passion. Her first child, Melanie, had committed suicide. It was not something she ever discussed with her husband, and for Trisha and Steve, who came later, her anxiety was so great that it paralysed the full expression of her feeling for her own offspring. It was she who, noticing that her little ‘son’ had a natural sense of rhythm and an ear for music, decided that he should learn to dance.
Children have a way of feeling the reality of any situation and long before the truth of his parentage was made known to him Des felt out of place among the Claybournes. Only at Miss Butler’s school did he not seem to feel a fish out of water. He began to win medals at competitions and passed all his dance exams as expertly as he failed his school ones.
He was seventeen when he decided to leave home and, perhaps because she was the person he was least close to, it was to his Aunty Trish that he confided his plan. ‘I’m going to work in a night club in Rome—don’t tell Mum yet!
Trisha had given a yelp of laughter and said, ‘That’s all right. Anyway, I’m your mum. What you think’s your “Mum” is your grandma. Did you never guess?’
He hadn’t guessed. And now there was no one to whom he could confess that the news made him cry.
Aunty Trish, who had so confusingly turned out to be Des’s mother, went on to tell him about his father. Des had taken this as a chance to change his name. On the basis of his mother’s, now even hazier, recollection of the coach driver, Des became ‘Dino’ and with the change of name went, as is often the way, a change in character.
He picked up Italian easily and became quite extroverted, even a bit of a flirt. In Rome, he found a dance partner, Sam, a determined brunette from Bradford, and for a while they performed a dance double act round the clubs. But Sam nursed ambitions to settle down. She finally ran off with a Roman priest who had left the Church over the loss of the Latin Mass.
Without Sam’s purposeful character to drive him, Des drifted, making a living with seasonal hotel work, where his manner made him popular. One slack evening, chatting to a customer, he learned about crewing on the ships.
‘It’s a great deal,’ his confidante told him, ‘everything found, food, accommodation, the lot. And the best thing is if you’re out of the country for a year you pay no tax. I’ve saved up the deposit for a flat.’
Des wrote to several shipping lines’ offices asking about bar work. His handwriting was neat and his bar references correct if not enthusiastic. In the end, it was his dancing accomplishments which landed him a job.
‘There are rules, mind.’ The well-groomed woman who interviewed him spoke with tired authority. ‘The passengers—we call them “guests”—will want you to sleep with them. If you do, and we find out, you are put off the ship at the next port.’
‘What age are the “guests” then mainly?’
The woman looked at Des as if there were no depths of behaviour to which she did not expect him to sink.
‘Mostly old with no men. There are younger ones too, but they more easily find other people to sleep with. It’s the old ones who cause trouble.’
‘Don’t worry. I won’t have any trouble.’
‘Are you gay? We have trouble with men too.’ His interlocutor turned an appraising, skilfully made-up eye on Des.
‘I don’t sleep with people I don’t like.’
Disbelief registered in the perfect scimitar eyebrows. ‘Like them or not, we throw you off.’
‘I understand.’
‘And tips. They will offer you tips. You take tips only if they add it to their account so it goes through our books officially. No cash tips or you are off the ship before yesterday. Understand?’
‘I understand.’
‘Good. Report on Monday week, please. Here is the list of things you must get for yourself. Underwear is not provided.’
Des, no longer sure how he should address his family, wrote a postcard: Dear All, Glad to say have got a berth on a round the world cruise liner, Queen Caroline, as a dance host. Should be fun! Will keep you posted. Cheers, Des.
By now, Trisha had been married and divorced and was back living at home. She read the card and tossed it across the kitchen table to her mother.
‘Looks like our Des’s fallen on his feet.’ Her frankness, the day Des shared his plans for leaving home, had been her sole effort towards maternity.
Her mother read the postcard and then turned it over to inspect the picture of the liner, like a child’s white toy on an improbably blue sea.
‘D’you think he’ll be safe?’ She was frightened he might drown but dared not let her only daughter see how badly she missed the boy she had raised as her own.
‘Oh, Des’ll be all right. I don’t expect we’ll hear much of him from now on.’
Trisha, taking revenge on her mother for her preoccupation with her lost daughter, had given nothing to her own son other than her knack of sensing what mattered to people, and thus where they were most vulnerable.