Whatever would the two husbands say, she meant, and the other wives of Paper Street, and Beryl and Ron? Going to Bingo was one thing and quite accepted. Going dancing at fifty-four was a different kettle of fish altogether. Before their marriages they had often gone dancing: they had been taken to dance-halls on Saturday nights by the men they later married, and by other men. Every June, all four of them went dancing once or twice in Southend, even though the husbands increasingly complained that it made them feel ridiculous. But what Poppy had in mind now wasn’t the Grand Palais in Southend or the humbler floors of thirty years ago, or embarrassed husbands, or youths treading over your feet: what Poppy had in mind was afternoon dancing in a place in the West End, without the husbands or anyone else knowing a thing about it. ‘Teatime foxtrots,’ Poppy said. ‘The Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms. All the rage, they are.’ And in the end Alice agreed.
They went quite regularly to the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms, almost every Tuesday. They dressed up as they used to dress up years ago; with discretion they applied rouge and eye-shadow. Alice put on a peach-coloured corset in an effort to trim down her figure a bit, and curled the hair that had once been fair and now was grey. It looked a bit frizzy when she curled it now, the way it had never done when she was a girl, but although the sight of it sometimes depressed her she accepted the middle-aged frizziness because there was nothing she could do about it. Poppy’s hair had become rather thin on the top of her head, but she didn’t seem to notice and Alice naturally didn’t mention the fact. In middle age Poppy always kept her grey hair dyed a brightish shade of chestnut, and when Alice once read in a magazine that excessive dying eventually caused a degree of baldness she didn’t mention it either, fearing that in Poppy’s case the damage was already done. On their dancing afternoons they put on headscarves and pulled their coats carefully about them, to hide the finery beneath. Poppy wore spectacles with gold-coloured trim on the orange frames, her special-occasion spectacles she called them. They always walked quickly away from Paper Street.
In the dance-rooms they had tea on the balcony as soon as they arrived, at about a quarter to three. There was a lot of scarlet plush on the balcony, and scarlet lights. There were little round tables with paper covers on them, for convenience. When they’d had tea and Danish pastries, and a few slices of Swiss roll, they descended one of the staircases that led to the dance-floor and stood chatting by a pillar. Sometimes men came up to them and asked if one or other would like to dance. They didn’t mind if men came up or not, or at least they didn’t mind particularly. What they enjoyed was the band, usually Leo Ritz and his Band, and looking at the other dancers and the scarlet plush and having tea. Years ago they’d have danced together, just for the fun of it, but somehow they felt too old for that, at fifty-four. An elderly man with rather long grey hair once danced too intimately with Alice and she’d had to ask him to release her. Another time a middle-aged man, not quite sober, kept following them about, trying to buy them Coca-Cola. He was from Birmingham, he told them; he was in London on business and had had lunch with people who were making a cartoon film for his firm. He described the film so that they could look out for it on their television screens: it was an advertisement for wallpaper paste, which was what his firm manufactured. They were glad when this man didn’t appear the following Tuesday.
Other men were nicer. There was one who said his name was Sidney, who was lonely because his wife had left him for a younger man; and another who was delicate, a Mr Hawke. There was a silent, bald-headed man whom they both liked dancing with because he was so good at it, and there was Grantly Palmer, who was said to have won awards for dancing in the West Indies.
Grantly Palmer was a Jamaican, a man whom neither of them had agreed to dance with when he’d first asked them because of his colour. He worked as a barman in a club, he told them later, and because of that he rarely had the opportunity to dance at night. He’d often thought of changing his job since dancing meant so much to him, but bar work was all he knew. In the end they became quite friendly with Grantly Palmer, so much so that whenever they entered the dance-rooms he’d hurry up to them smiling, neat as a new pin. He’d dance with one and then the other. Tea had to wait, and when eventually they sat down to it he sat with them and insisted on paying. He was always attentive, pressing Swiss roll on both of them and getting them cigarettes from the coin machine. He talked about the club where he worked, the Rumba Rendezvous in Notting Hill Gate, and often tried to persuade them to give it a try. They giggled quite girlishly at that, wondering what their husbands would say about their attending the Rumba Rendezvous, a West Indian Club. Their husbands would have been astonished enough if they knew they went afternoon tea-dancing in the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms.
Grantly Palmer was a man of forty-two who had never married, who lived alone in a room in Maida Vale. He was a born bachelor, he told the two wives, and would not have appreciated home life, with children and all that it otherwise implied. In his youth he had played the pins, he informed them with an elaborate, white smile, meaning by this that he’d had romantic associations. He would laugh loudly when he said it. He’d been naughty in his time, he said.
Whenever he talked like that, with his eyes blazing excitedly and his teeth flashing, Alice couldn’t help thinking that Grantly Palmer was a holy terror just like Poppy had been and still in a way was, the male equivalent. She once said this to Poppy and immediately regretted it, fearing that Poppy would take offence at being likened to a black man, but Poppy hadn’t minded at all. Poppy had puffed at a tipped Embassy and had made Alice blush all over her neck by saying that in her opinion Grantly Palmer fancied her. ‘Skin and bone he’d think me,’ Poppy said. ‘Blacks like a girl they can get their teeth into.’ They were on the upper deck of a bus at the time and Poppy had laughed shrilly into her cigarette smoke, causing people to glance amusedly at her. She peered through her gold-trimmed spectacles at the people who looked at her, smiling at them. ‘My friend has a fella in love with her,’ she said to the conductor, shouting after him as he clattered down the stairs. ‘A holy terror she says he is.’
He was cheeky, Alice said, the way he always insisted on walking off the dance-floor hand in hand with you, the way he’d pinch your arm sometimes. But her complaints were half-hearted because the liberties Grantly Palmer took were never offensive: it wasn’t at all the same as having a drunk pulling you too close to him and slobbering into your hair. ‘You’ll lose him, Alice,’ Poppy cried now and again in shrill mock-alarm as they watched him paying attentions to some woman who was new to the dance-rooms. Once he’d referred to such a person, asking them if they’d noticed her, a stout woman in pink, an unmarried shorthand typist he said she was. ‘My, my,’ he said in his Jamaican drawl, shaking his head. ‘My, my.’ They never saw the unmarried shorthand typist again, but Poppy said he’d definitely been implying something, that he’d probably enticed her to his room in Maida Vale. ‘Making you jealous,’ Poppy said.
The men whom Alice and Poppy had married weren’t at all like Grantly Palmer. They were quiet men, rather similar in appearance and certainly similar in outlook. Both were of medium build, getting rather bald in their fifties, Alice’s Lenny with a moustache, Poppy’s Albert without. They were keen supporters of Crystal Palace Football Club, and neither of them, according to Poppy, knew anything about women. The air-raid warden had known about women, Poppy said, and so did Grantly Palmer. ‘He wants you to go out with him,’ she said to Alice. ‘You can see it in his eyes.’ One afternoon when he was dancing with Alice he asked her if she’d consider having a drink on her own with him, some evening when she wasn’t doing anything better. She shook her head when he said that, and he didn’t ever bring the subject up again. ‘He’s mad for you,’ Poppy said when she heard of this invitation. ‘He’s head over heels, love.’ But Alice laughed, unable to believe that Grantly Palmer could possibly be mad for a corseted grandmother of fifty-four with unmanageable grey hair.
Without much warning,
Poppy died. During a summer holiday at Mrs Roope’s Prospect Hotel she’d complained of pains, though not much, because that was not her way. ‘First day back you’ll see Dr Pace,’ Albert commanded. Two months later she died one night, without waking up.
After the death Alice was at a loss. For almost fifty years Poppy had been her friend. The affection between them had increased as they’d watched one another age and as their companionship yielded more memories they could share. Their children – Alice’s Beryl and Ron, and Poppy’s Mervyn – had played together. There’d been the business of Mervyn’s emigration to Canada, and Alice’s comforting of Poppy because of it. There’d been the marriage of Ron and then of Beryl, and Poppy’s expression of Alice’s unspoken thought, that Ron’s Hilda wasn’t good enough for him, too bossy for any man really, and Poppy’s approval of Beryl’s Tony, an approval that Alice shared.
Alice had missed her children when they’d gone, just as Poppy had missed Mervyn. ‘Oh Lord, I know, dear!’ Poppy cried when Alice wept the day after Beryl’s wedding. Beryl had lived at home until then, as Ron had until his marriage. It was a help, being able to talk to Poppy about it, and Poppy so accurately understanding what Alice felt.
After Poppy’s death the silence she’d prevented when Alice’s children had grown up fell with a vengeance. It icily surrounded Alice and she found it hard to adapt herself to a life that was greyer and quieter, to days going by without Poppy dropping in or she herself dropping in on Poppy, without the cups of Maxwell House coffee they’d had together, and the cups of tea, and the biscuits and raspberry-jam sandwich cake, which Poppy had been fond of. Once, awake in the middle of the night, she found herself thinking that if Lenny had died she mightn’t have missed him so much. She hated that thought and tried, unsuccessfully, to dispel it from her mind. It was because she and Poppy had told one another everything, she kept saying to herself, the way you couldn’t really tell Lenny. But all this sounded rather lame, and when she said to herself instead that it was because she and Poppy had known one another all their lives it didn’t sound much better: she and Lenny had known one another all their lives, too. For six months after the death she didn’t go to Bingo, unable to face going on her own. It didn’t even occur to her to go afternoon dancing.
The first summer after the death, Alice and Lenny and Albert went as usual to the Prospect Hotel in Southend. There seemed to the two men to be no good reason why they shouldn’t, although when they arrived there Albert was suddenly silent and Alice could see that he was more upset than he’d imagined he would be. But after a day he was quite himself again, and when it wasn’t necessary to cheer him up any more she began to feel miserable herself. It wasn’t so much because of the death, but because she felt superfluous without Poppy. She realized gradually, and the two men realized even more gradually, that on previous holidays there had been no conversation that was general to all four of them: the men had talked to each other and so had their wives. The men did their best now to include Alice, but it was difficult and awkward.
She took to going for walks by herself, along the front and down the piers, out to the sea and back again. It was then, that summer at Southend, that Alice began to think about Grantly Palmer. It had never occurred to her before that he didn’t even know that Poppy had died, even though they’d all three been such good friends on Tuesday afternoons at the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms. She wondered what he thought, if he’d been puzzled by their sudden absence, or if he still attended the dance-rooms himself. One night in the Prospect Hotel, listening to the throaty breathing of her husband, she suddenly and quite urgently wanted to tell Grantly Palmer about Poppy’s death. She suddenly felt that it was his due, that she’d been unkind not ever to have informed him. Poppy would wish him to know, she said to herself; it was bad that she’d let down her friend in this small way. In the middle of that night, while still listening to Lenny’s breathing, she resolved to return to the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms and found herself wondering if Leo Ritz and his Band would still be playing there.
‘Breakfasts’ve gone down a bit,’ Albert said on the way back to London, and Lenny reminded him that Mrs Roope had had a bit of family trouble. ‘Dropped Charlie Cooke, I see,’ Lenny said, referring to a Crystal Palace player. He handed Albert the Daily Mirror, open at the sports page. ‘Dare say they’ll be back to normal next year,’ Albert said, still referring to the breakfasts.
In Paper Street, a week after their return, she put on her peach-coloured corset and the dress she’d worn the first time they’d gone afternoon dancing – blue-green satin, with a small array of sequins at the shoulders and the breast. It felt more silent than ever in the house in Paper Street, because in the past Poppy used to chat and giggle in just the same way as she had as a girl, lavishly spraying scent on herself, a habit she’d always had also. Alice closed the door of Number 41 behind her and walked quickly in Paper Street, feeling guiltier than she had when the guilt could be shared. She’d tell some lie if someone she knew said she was looking smart. She’d probably say she was going to Bingo, which was what they’d both said once when Mrs Tedman had looked them up and down, as though suspecting the finery beneath. You could see that Mrs Tedman hadn’t believed that they were going to Bingo, but Poppy said it didn’t matter what Mrs Tedman thought. It was all a bit frightening without Poppy, but then everything was something else without Poppy, dull or silent or frightening. Alice caught a bus, and at a quarter to three she entered the dance-rooms.
‘Well, well!’ Grantly Palmer said, smiling his bright smile. ‘Well, well, stranger lady!’
‘Hullo, Mr Palmer.’
‘Oh, child, child!’
‘Hullo, Grantly.’
It had always been a joke, the business of Christian names between the three of them. ‘Alice and Poppy!’ he’d said the first time they’d had tea together. ‘My, my, what charmin’ names!’ They’d just begun to use his own Christian name when Poppy had died. Funny name, Grantly,’ Poppy had remarked on the bus after he’d first told them, but soon it had become impossible to think of him as anything else.
‘Where’s Poppy, dear?’
‘Poppy died, Grantly.’
She told him all about it, about last year’s holiday at Southend and the development of the illness and then the funeral. ‘My God!’ he said, staring into her eyes. ‘My God, Alice.’
The band was playing ‘Lullaby of Broadway’: middle-aged women, in twos or on their own, stood about, sizing up the men who approached them, in the same expert way as she and Poppy had sized men up in their time. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Grantly Palmer said.
They had tea and Swiss-roll slices and Danish pastries. They talked about Poppy. ‘Was she happy?’ he asked. And Alice said her friend had been happy enough.
In silence on the balcony they watched the dancers rotating below them. He wasn’t going to dance with her, she thought, because Poppy had died, because the occasion was a solemn one. She was aware of disappointment. Poppy had been dead for more than a year, after all.
‘It’s a horrible thing,’ he said. ‘A friend dying. In the prime of her life.’
‘I miss her.’
‘Of course, Alice.’
He reached across the tea-table and seized one of her hands. He held it for a moment and then let it go. It was a gesture that reminded her of being a girl. On television men touched girls’ hands in that way. How nice, she suddenly thought, the chap called Ashley was in Gone with the Wind. She’d seen the film with Poppy, revived a few years back, Leslie Howard playing Ashley.
He went away and returned with another pot of tea and a plate of Swiss-roll slices. Leo Ritz and his Band were playing ‘September Love’.
‘I thought I’d never lay eyes on you again, Alice.’
He regarded her solemnly. He didn’t smile when he said that the very first time he’d met her he’d considered her a very nice person. He was wearing a suit made of fine, black corduroy. His two grey hands were gripping his teacup, nursing it. br />
‘I came back to tell you about Poppy, Grantly.’
‘I kept on hoping you’d come back. I kept on thinking about you.’ He nodded, lending emphasis to this statement. Without drinking from it, he placed his teacup on the table and pulled his chair in a bit, nearer to hers. She could feel some part of his legs, an ankle-bone it felt like. Then she felt one of his hands, beneath the table, touching her right knee and then touching the left one.
She didn’t move. She gazed ahead of her, feeling through the material of her dress the warmth of his flesh. The first time they’d had tea with him he’d told a joke about three Jamaican clergymen on a desert island and she and Poppy had laughed their heads off. Even when it had become clear to Poppy and herself that what he was after was sex and not love, Poppy had still insisted that she should chance her arm with him. It was as though Poppy wanted her to go out with Grantly Palmer because she herself had gone out with the air-raid warden.
His hand remained on her left knee. She imagined it there, the thin grey hand on the blue satin material of her dress. It moved, pushing back the satin, the palm caressing, the tip of the thumb pressing into her thigh.
She withdrew her leg, smiling to cover the unfriendliness of this decision. She could feel warmth all over her neck and her cheeks and around her eyes. She could feel her eyes beginning to water. On her back and high up on her forehead, beneath the grey frizz of her hair, she felt the moisture of perspiration.
He looked away from her. ‘I always liked you, Alice,’ he said. ‘You know? I liked you better than Poppy, even though I liked Poppy too.’
It was different, a man putting his hand on your knee: it was different altogether from the natural intimacy of dancing, when anything might have been accidental. She wanted to go away now; she didn’t want him to ask her to dance with him. She imagined him with the pink woman, fondling her knees under a table before taking her to Maida Vale. She saw herself in the room in Maida Vale, a room in which there were lilies growing in pots, although she couldn’t remember that he’d ever said he had lilies. There was a thing like a bedspread hanging on one of the walls, brightly coloured, red and blue and yellow. There was a gas-fire glowing and a standard lamp such as she’d seen in the British Home Stores, and a bed with a similar brightly coloured cloth covering it, and a table and two upright chairs, and a tattered green screen behind which there’d be a sink and a cooking stove. In the room he came to her and took her coat off and then undid the buttons of her dress. He lifted her petticoat over her head and unhooked her peach-coloured corset and her brassière.