The Summer We Danced

No, nothing much had changed about Miss Mimi at all, except her hair was totally white and there were more wrinkles on her peaches-and-cream complexion. She wore pink seamed dance tights, those little heeled ballet shoes that only dance teachers ever wear, a hot-pink leg warmer over each ankle and a leotard with a crossover skirt that folded over like a tulip in front but dipped as low as the backs of her knees behind. The whole outfit was topped off with a silky kimono with bright, gypsy colours on a black background, edged with a long black fringe. Despite her age, I could imagine her throwing her wrap off, jumping on to the small stage at the end of the hall and showing the class how she’d high-kicked her way through two seasons in Paris and one in Las Vegas.

‘It’s so good to see you again,’ I said, smiling at her. I hadn’t realised how up in the air my life had felt, how it had seemed as if everything was shifting underneath my feet, until I’d come across something—someone—dear to me, who’d remained stubborn and rock-like against the rapids of change. And if there was anyone in this world who could do that, it was this woman.

‘Now, now, Philippa …’ Miss Mimi chided, but I could hear the affection in her tone. ‘You always were a bit of an emotional girl.’

I looked at her, surprised. Had I been?

I frowned, trying to think back to those days. I really couldn’t remember. And it seemed like a lifetime ago, anyway, almost as if that time had been lived by another person. During my marriage to Ed I hadn’t had the luxury of being the emotional one. One diva in the household was enough.

My role as his wife had been to stay calm, stay grounded, to keep things smooth and organised. So much so that I’d actually ended up working as Ed’s assistant, doing admin for him and the band. It wasn’t a job I’d ever planned on doing, but I’d enjoyed it. I’d been part PA, part PR person, part roadie. I’d liaised with venues about bookings, sweet-talked anyone Ed had cheesed off (which happened a lot) and generally did anything that needed to be done.

In my mind, I’d been part of the family business, like a wife doing accounts for her builder husband. The only thing I hadn’t anticipated was that the family—and the business—would move on quite happily without me, leaving me with skills that weren’t easily quantifiable in the job market. I’d discovered that when you turned up at an interview and announced your previous career was ‘rock musician’s dogsbody’, people didn’t really know what to do with you.

My current job was about as soul-destroying as they got. When I’d moved back I’d just got the first job I could find, filling shelves in a big supermarket on the outskirts of Swanham. They’d been looking for seasonal workers in the run-up to Christmas, and it served a need while I worked out what to do next.

Miss Mimi began to make her way over to a cassette player that was so old it could have auditioned for a part in Ashes to Ashes.

‘What happened to Peter?’ I asked. He’d been a shy little man who taught piano lessons at Pippa’s school and had accompanied most of Miss Mimi’s classes back in the nineties. My friend Nancy and I had always speculated about him being desperately in love with Miss Mimi, and we’d giggled uncontrollably when we’d seen his eyes following her as she taught, never needing to look at the piano keys. I didn’t want to think of an empty cold space at the piano stool. Or a new grave in the churchyard.

‘Oh, I let him off the adult classes,’ Miss Mimi said airily. ‘He likes to get home in time to watch Coronation Street on a Friday.’

‘Oh. Good.’ I breathed out a sigh of relief. ‘Miss Mimi?’

‘Yes?’

‘I was meaning to ask … Do you think I’ll be okay in this class? I mean, it is a beginners’ one, isn’t it? I haven’t done any tap before.’

‘My darling,’ Miss Mimi said, in that theatrical voice that I remembered and loved, ‘you will be absolutely fine. It’s not exactly a beginners’ class, more intermediate, but very beginner-friendly. You’ll do wonderfully with your dance background. It’s like speaking another language, you see? Once you’ve learned one, it’s easier to pick up another.’

The sound of a car door slamming outside made me jump. I looked nervously at the entrance. It had been okay when it had just been me and Miss Mimi, but now it became very real that Other People were coming. Other people who were going to see me dance. My stomach went cold and my hands began to shake.

I scuttled off to the back of the hall, where some chairs were laid out in a row and proceeded to busy myself taking off my layers and slowly putting on my tap shoes. I stayed at the back of the hall until the lesson began, hardly daring to look up to see who else was here. When I did, I caught a glimpse of an older lady, a few more women around my own age and two younger girls who looked as if they’d only just graduated from the under-eighteens classes.

I had planned to stay in the shadows at the back of the hall and slip into the last row once everyone had got going and my scheme was working well until I stood up and walked to where the group of five women were standing. I’d dashed to the dance store in Swanham that afternoon and bought the cheapest pair of tap shoes I could find. Apart from trying them on in the shop, it was the first time I’d actually worn them and certainly the first time I’d ever walked in them on a hard surface. The metal plates under the toes made moving in them feel odd, and they made a hell of a lot of noise. Everyone turned round to look at me.

‘We have a new member tonight,’ Miss Mimi said loudly. ‘Philippa used to be one of my pupils long ago, but she’s never done tap before, so we’re going to have to go easy on her.’

If anyone turned round to give me an encouraging smile, I didn’t see them; I was too busy staring at the floor and I kept my head down until Miss Mimi snapped her fingers, regaining everyone’s attention and went straight into a warm-up.

We all shuffled into two lines facing the full-length mirrors that were fixed to the walls down one side of the hall, below the high windows. I was standing so my reflection was split and distorted, cut in half where one mirror met the next. I didn’t know if it made me look fatter or thinner, because I refused to look at anything but my feet and I only looked at them if I absolutely had to.

The warm-up started easily enough, tapping with the toe of one foot a number of times and then the heel, before switching to the other, and then they started doing shuffles. I might not have done any tap before, but I at least knew what a shuffle was—pretty much what I’d done as a child when I’d tried my own version of tap dancing with my mother’s cloppiest shoes on. I struck the ball of my foot lightly on the floor on an out movement, then again as I picked it back up again.

After we’d repeated it a few times, the dancer in me, the one that was slowly awakening, noticed that the rest of the class put a very slight emphasis on the second tap, so I started to do the same. Okay … I was starting to get the hang of this!

And so it continued through the warm-up of short, simple exercises. I didn’t always get everything right, and I was frequently half a count behind everyone else, but I started to relax. Not perfect yet, but that didn’t matter. It would be no fun if it wasn’t a challenge. I might very well be outside of my comfort zone but I was camped on the fringes, not on an entirely different continent.

However, once we started to get into the class proper, it wasn’t just my shins and calves that started to hurt, but my brain. Too much information too fast! Everyone else was stringing the simple steps they’d done in the warm-up into more complicated sequences, and I discovered that, while I could envisage the steps in my head, the messages my brain was sending to my feet were just too slow. It was most frustrating, especially as once upon a time I’d been able to hold whole strings of complex movements in my head, regurgitating them effortlessly when needed. Whole dances. Whole shows, even.

Miss Mimi was right. This was like learning a new language, and I was having to search around hard for each and every syllable, clumsily building the words and faltering over many of them. Learning modern or contemporary after learning ballet hadn’t been too bad; they shared many steps, even if the techniques were different—a bit like learning Italian if you already knew Spanish. In comparison, tap was like being thrown into the deep end of Cantonese.

Beginner-friendly class? My foot!

Things improved slightly when we moved to travelling from the corner across the diagonal of the hall. Miss Mimi told me to leave out the turns and just concentrate on the basic steps, which involved ball changes and hops, things I was familiar with from modern, thank goodness, but the downside was that we had to do it in pairs. That meant I couldn’t just stay flailing around anonymously at the back. I was the new girl, so of course everyone was going to check me out. I started to feel just the littlest bit queasy.

I hung back to the end of the queue, hovering near another pair.

‘Hi,’ a woman who was maybe a year or two older than me said brightly. ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’

I nodded.

She smiled. ‘You’re doing quite well for a total newbie. Should have seen me my first lesson! I couldn’t even face the right direction, let alone do any of the steps!’

I couldn’t believe that. Everyone in the class looked so sharp and in time.

‘I’m Donna,’ the woman said and nodded at her companion, ‘and this is Victoria.’

‘Pippa,’ I replied. ‘Have you both been doing this long?’

Donna snorted. ‘About three years, but this one here—’ she nodded at Victoria ‘—has practically been in dance shoes since birth, haven’t you?’

The girl, somewhere in her late teens, I guessed, blushed and nodded. ‘I want to go to dance college, but Mum and Dad say I’ve got to finish my A Levels first. I make up for it by doing every class I can in the meantime.’

‘Even putting up with us old fogies on a Friday night when she could be out with her boyfriend,’ Donna said, laughing. ‘She can dance rings round the rest of us.’

I’d already noticed. Victoria held herself like a ballerina and her steps were clean and precise. She wasn’t one of those showy dancers, all eyes and teeth and high kicks in your face, but one of those delicate, ethereal sorts, the kind that looked so beautiful when they moved you just had to gaze and hold your breath. I would have been intimidated by her if she hadn’t reminded me of a fawn, all big eyes and shy lashes.

‘Uh-oh,’ Donna said, chuckling. ‘We’re up.’

Uh-oh was right. It was our turn. What was a riff again? And how many beats did it have? Four? Five? I didn’t have much time to remember, because suddenly we were moving and I just had to jog along behind them, trying to tap here and there, just to keep up. When we ran out of space dancing along the diagonal, we turned and headed up the long side of the hall to wait our turn at the opposite corner.

‘What brought you along?’ Donna asked as we filed in behind an older, rather portly lady and a blonde, whose high ponytail swung behind her as she walked. Even standing at the back corner of the room she was ‘on’, every move made with the knowledge she might have an audience.

I inhaled. I hadn’t really been prepared for chit-chat this evening, assuming we wouldn’t have time to talk, let alone the breath. How much of the truth did I want to tell? And how much did these people know already? The Elmhurst grapevine might have been working hard since I’d returned.

‘Well, I used to come here as a kid,’ I said, ‘but then I grew up and moved away, got married, all that kind of stuff.’ I paused to let out a heavy sigh. ‘And then I got not married, moved back home and now I feel like I’m back at square one, apart from with more wrinkles and less coordination.’

Donna gave me an understanding smile. ‘Snap,’ she said. ‘Tap was my post-divorce thing too. I started as a way of showing him—and probably myself—that I had more fun without him and ended up discovering it was true.’

We made another run at the riffs from the corner, and this time I even managed a couple of slow four-beat ones before I got hopelessly out of time and had to just lollop along behind Donna and Victoria. As we filed up the edge of the room back to our original spot, Donna pointed out a couple of the other class members. ‘The older one? That’s Dolly. She and Miss Mimi have been friends since they were chorus girls together in the West End. She moved to Elmhurst after her husband died.’

I watched the older woman with interest. Dolly couldn’t have looked more different from Miss Mimi if she’d tried. While Mimi was still petite and slim, Dolly had hardened and thickened with age, until she looked remarkably like that actress—Hattie what’s-her-name—who’d starred in the Carry On films.

‘You don’t want to get on the wrong side of her,’ Donna warned. ‘Her bite is definitely every bit as scary as her bark.’

I leaned over a little to catch a look at the woman who was tapping away beside Dolly, almost in her shadow. Donna followed her gaze. ‘Ruth,’ she said. ‘Been coming about a year, but I can’t tell you any more than that. She hardly ever opens her mouth.’

I took a good look at the woman. She was blonde, about mid-forties, and her make-up and hair was done very nicely, her clothes neat and very precise. She was tall and very slim and her arms hung off her rounded-in shoulders like sleeves from a coat hanger. With every move she made, she seemed to be apologising for taking up space.

She couldn’t be more different from the perky twenty-something blonde standing next to her, who looked as if she was ready to jump up and do a solo, given half the chance.

‘That’s Amanda. Don’t mind her. She makes a lot of noise, likes to blow her own trumpet, but she’s basically harmless. So that’s us …’ Donna said matter-of-factly, then turned as someone slipped in the door and headed for the chairs at the back. ‘Tell a lie,’ she added. ‘It seems we have a latecomer …’

I had half an eye on Donna and half an eye on the combination of shuffle hops and ball changes with a ‘break’ (whatever that was) that Miss Mimi was teaching us. However, when the latecomer finished putting on her tap shoes and stood up, my mouth dropped open.

Was that … was it really? No! It couldn’t be!

Nancy?

Nancy Mears—my partner in crime from twenty years ago at Miss Mimi’s! I wondered if I’d got it wrong, if it was really her, but when she joined in with Dolly and Ruth, spotting her turns perfectly, I knew I hadn’t been mistaken.

Oh, my goodness!

I tried to catch her eye as she took her turn and walked up the long edge of the hall to start again in the opposite corner, but she didn’t glance in my direction.

‘Come on, Philippa!’ Miss Mimi said with a chuckle, and I realised I was standing alone in the corner and that Donna and Victoria had already shot off across the floor without me. I forgot all about Nancy and charged after them.

I had no chance to catch up with her through the rest of the class, either, because the pace picked up and the steps got more complicated. It took every brain cell I had to even try and make it look as if I was keeping up.

There was even one moment when Miss Mimi yelled, ‘Time steps!’ and the whole class moved as one synchronous unit, looking amazing, and I was just left standing in my place, looking gormless with my mouth hanging open.

Donna, who I was quickly becoming dependent on, came over and tried to break it down for me. I managed the shuffle hop at the beginning, but kept ending up on the wrong leg. I was just about to ask her where I was messing up, but there was a flicker above our heads, then without warning the lights went off and we were all left standing in the middle of the hall in pitch darkness.

Six

‘Everybody stay where they are!’ Miss Mimi called out, reminding me of how she’d shepherded the three- and four-year-olds around in the Babies ballet class. ‘I expect it’s just a bulb that’s gone.’

Donna squinted up at the ceiling in the darkness. ‘I think it might be more than that … I mean, all the lights are out.’

‘And the music’s gone off,’ Amanda added.

I made my way gingerly to where I thought I’d left my bag and patted around on the plastic chairs until I found it, then I pulled my phone out and turned on the torch facility. Once I’d illuminated the small area where we’d left our belongings, Donna and Amanda did the same.

‘What do you think it is?’ Victoria asked in her soft voice. ‘A power cut?’

‘Hang on,’ Donna said and stood on a chair so she could peer through one of the windows that looked on to the street. ‘It’s definitely not a power cut. The street lights are on.’

‘Probably the fuse, Mimi,’ Dolly shouted as Donna, Amanda and I headed back to the rest of the group. ‘Where’s yer box, girl?’

‘Oh, pfff,’ Mimi said, and without actually being able to see her properly, I knew she’d just made an expansive hand gesture. ‘Who needs electricity, anyway? Our feet are rhythm enough and I’m sure there are some candles backstage from the Christmas show a few years ago. We can dance away in the candlelight until the moon rises.’ She sighed. ‘Ah, that reminds me of a night I spent in Paris once …’

‘The fuse box might be better?’ I said quickly. Not only did I remember how cluttered it had used to get behind the little stage at the far end of the hall, but I knew from helping to arrange many of Ed’s gigs over the years that if something happened to any of them during their candlelight dance—God forbid Dolly or Mimi fell over and broke a hip—Mimi better have pretty good public liability insurance. ‘Do you know where it is?’

Miss Mimi, however, quickly swiped Amanda’s phone and headed towards the stage area. Dolly shook her head and marched up to Donna, Amanda and I. ‘Can one of you girls shine your thingamajig this way?’ she asked, pointing towards the door which led to a row of small rooms that nestled behind the stage area.

‘I can,’ I said.

Donna moved to go with me but then stopped. ‘I’d come with you, but I think someone with a light better stay here and keep an eye on our fearless leader,’ she said, nodding in the direction of the stage, where Mimi was trying to part the thick brown velvet curtains and not having much luck in the murky light.

I nodded and followed Dolly through the door into a short narrow corridor. To the left there was a door that led to the storage area behind the stage, to the right a small kitchen and at the end of the corridor there was Miss Mimi’s office. I knew that because the laminated sign stuck to it with Blu-Tack said so in large curly letters, and from the profusion of ballet shoes and dancing figures round the edges, I suspected it had the same designer as the posters out in the vestibule.

‘What’s that up there?’ Dolly asked, peering into the darkness. I pointed my phone so the light shone where the walls, painted in a rather sickly shade of pale green, met the ceiling. Sure enough, amongst the ceiling stains and peeling paint there was something that looked like a fuse box. ‘You any good with those things?’ Dolly asked, eyeing it up suspiciously.

‘Not bad,’ I said, putting my hands on my hips. That was the good thing about having a husband who didn’t give a hoot about DIY; if I’d wanted anything done around our flat I’d really had to Do It Myself. I allowed myself a small moment of schadenfreude as I imagined the drama that might occur now Ed had to cope for himself in that department. I doubted the Tart knew how to change a light bulb, let alone hang wallpaper.

‘We need a chair or something, though,’ I added after a think. ‘I’ll go back into the hall and fetch one. Do you want to stay here or would you rather come with me?’

Dolly made a dismissive noise. ‘I’m not scared of the dark, love,’ she said, a proud tone in her voice. ‘Lived through the blackouts of the war years, so I’m sure I’ll survive thirty seconds on my own in a poky little corridor.’

I smiled to myself in the darkness. I could see what Donna had meant about Dolly. Even so, I had a feeling I was really going to like her.

I returned to the hall and signalled to Donna with my phone-slash-torch. Thankfully, she and Miss Mimi were sitting on the edge of the stage. It seemed as if Donna had managed to dissuade her from rummaging around in decades’ worth of junk behind the curtain. For now, at least.

‘We found the fuse box,’ I called out. ‘I just need a chair to stand on so I can reach it.’

‘You be careful, Philippa, dear,’ Miss Mimi called back. ‘I remember how clumsy you used to be as a teenager—when you weren’t dancing, that is.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I replied and laid hold of the back of one of the plastic chairs that lined the hall and dragged it back through the door to where Dolly was standing.

‘Right,’ I said as I placed the chair under the fuse box. The ceiling wasn’t that high. I ought to be able to reach. ‘Can you shine this up there …’ I asked, handing my phone to Dolly ‘… and I’ll pop up and see if the switch has tripped.’

Dolly eyed the phone as if it was a hand grenade with the pin out, but she did as I asked and held the light steady.

I opened the tiny cupboard and found a metal box with a hinged door. However, where I’d hoped to find a nice row of circuit breakers, I found six old-fashioned fuses, the hard plastic sort which held a thin strip of wire. ‘I’m not familiar with this kind of set-up,’ I told Dolly. ‘It’s really old. Probably hasn’t been changed for fifty years at least.’

Dolly passed me my phone and I held it up to the row of chunky fuses, inspecting each one in turn. None of them seemed to be burned or broken. ‘I’m not sure what the problem is.’ I sighed. ‘I think Miss Mimi is going to have to call a proper electrician in.’

‘Ah, well,’ Dolly said philosophically. ‘At least you tried. I do like a girl who’s got her head screwed on right.’

I smiled to myself in the dark. Partly because Dolly was the only person who’d referred to me as a girl in at least a decade, partly because that was the nicest thing someone (other than Candy) had said to me in months.

When we returned to the hall, I walked up to the stage where Ruth, Victoria and Amanda were also now sitting. Nancy was standing off to the side, texting furiously on her phone. ‘I don’t think it’s the fuses,’ I said. ‘And if it is, I think you need someone who knows more about electrics than me to have a look at it.’

Amanda checked the display on her phone. ‘We’ve only got five minutes left now anyway and my battery’s about to die.’

Miss Mimi sighed. ‘I suppose we’ll have to call it a night. Sorry, everyone … I was going to get some of you long-timers doing wings.’

At this, Ruth, whose face I could see in the glow from Amanda’s phone, looked horrified, as Amanda simultaneously said, ‘I love wings!’

‘In that case,’ Donna said, hopping down from the edge of the stage, ‘I’m glad the power went out. There’s no point trying to get both your legs going in opposite directions if there isn’t a man involved along the line somewhere.’

There was a gasp of shocked laughter from the group.

‘Well, there isn’t,’ Donna said. ‘So it looks as if we’re going to retire to the pub early tonight.’

We all headed over to where our belongings were at the end of the hall and gathered them up quickly before anyone else’s battery failed and we had to scrabble around in the dark. Once we’d all changed our shoes and put our coats on we headed for the exit. At least standing in the vestibule with the doors open we had the benefit of the street lights surrounding the car park.

Nancy had ended up standing next to me, clutching her camel-coloured coat with its fur collar round her and staring into the distance.

‘Hi,’ I said smiling. ‘I had no idea you’d be here. It’s wonderful to see you again.’