The Summer We Danced

He dug into his pocket, pulled out his phone and stared at it in confusion. ‘Didn’t hear the stupid thing. Had it on silent for something last night and forgot to turn the ringer on again.’ He turned and gave me a quizzical look. ‘We’ve cancelled the classes?’

‘I mean, Miss Mimi cancelled them. I’m just helping out.’ We crossed the vestibule and I frowned. ‘What I don’t understand is how the doors got locked,’ I said as we entered the hall.

Miss Mimi paused from marking what looked like a jazz routine and turned to face us. ‘Oh, I did that, dear,’ she said, nodding at the door, ‘while you were making some of those phone calls. I thought it’d be a good idea to stop just anybody wandering in.’

I stared at her. I wanted to reply, but I literally had no words in my mouth. Had she always been scatty and disorganised like this, or was this something new?

‘Hello, Daddy,’ Lucy said, her brows low over her eyes, but there was no jubilant rushing into the arms of her father. She turned to me and said politely, ‘I need to get my bag from the kitchen.’

‘I’ll get it for you, if you like,’ I told her and set off to do just that. When I entered the corridor I found I had a little shadow. Lucy had followed me. We went to fetch her bag together in silence, but it wasn’t an awkward silence, and Lucy didn’t seem to be one of those chatty little things like Honey was. She seemed quite happy tagging silently along after me, reminding me more of my cat than my niece. Roberta would follow me round the house and sit in whichever room I was in, just for the company, not because she needed me, or anything as demeaning as that, and Lucy had this same sense of self-sufficiency about her.

When we came out the kitchen we bumped into Miss Mimi and Tom in the corridor.

‘And you’re sure you checked the fuses?’ he was saying.

‘I had a look last night,’ I said. ‘They’re pretty old, but they seemed okay to me.’

Tom turned sharply to look at me. ‘You did?’

‘Yes,’ I said, half a smile on my face. ‘I’m not seventeen any more, you know, Mr Tom Boyd. My worldly knowledge now extends beyond nail varnish, boy bands and reading Smash Hits! inside out every week.’

His laugh was more grunt than chuckle. ‘You never were one of those girls,’ he said as he flipped the cover of the fuse box open, without even the need for a chair to stand on. ‘I’ve got a torch in my car,’ he announced, and before I could offer the use of my phone for such purposes, he strode off back into the hall and off in the direction of the car park.

No, I hadn’t been ‘one of those girls’ when I’d known Tom before. The kind of girl he’d been interested in. The kind who could always do her hair perfectly or put mascara on without blinding herself with the brush. I’d just been slightly geeky, rather shy, dance-mad Pippa. Firmly in the ‘friend zone’.

I let out a long and loud sigh.

No matter. That had been a long time ago. Things had changed. I had changed.

For one thing, I was no longer in any danger of facial disfigurement every time I put make-up on; that had to be something worth celebrating. And if Tom Boyd had been out of my league when I’d been seventeen, he was even more so now I was more than double that age. And double the size. I wasn’t making that mistake again. I’d punched above my weight with Ed and look where that had got me.

Tom returned, hardly casting a glance at me as he focused on shining the bright beam of his torch on to the fuse box. He changed the angle of the light, made a few humming and ha-ing noises.

‘What’s the verdict, Thomas?’ Miss Mimi asked, and I had the urge to laugh. I felt as if we were in one of those melodramatic medical soaps of yesteryear, all clustered round a difficult patient. If Tom had turned and asked for a scalpel, I had no doubt I’d have reached into my bag and placed an emery board into his outstretched hand.

He grunted. He seemed to do that rather a lot. Something the old, carefree Tom would never have done. Burst into a peal of uproarious laughter? Yes. Grin that grin of his that had made my heart beat faster and my toes tingle? Certainly. But make a noise that made him sound like his dour Scottish father? Not a chance.

He switched the torch off. ‘Let’s talk in the hall, where we can see what we’re doing.’

We all trooped out into the hall again, which was getting dingier by the second. Grey clouds had gathered overhead and the first speckles of dank January rain were clinging to the tall windows.

Tom shrugged. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ he asked Miss Mimi.

‘Oh, the good news,’ she replied. ‘I do so like good news.’

‘The fuses look okay to me.’

Miss Mimi’s smile was radiant. I waited for her to ask the obvious question, but she didn’t say anything. After a few seconds, in which Tom was equally loquacious, I decided to put us all out of our misery. ‘And the bad?’

Tom shot me a wry glance. ‘The fuses look okay to me.’

‘Very funny,’ I said, frowning. Hmm. There must be just a tad of the old Tom left in there after all. Kind of darker and more twisted, but still in there. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘That something more complicated than a blown fuse is causing your electrical problems,’ he said, directing his answer to Miss Mimi.

‘How do you know?’ I asked, folding my arms across my chest. ‘You a trained electrician or something?’

‘Actually, I am.’

Oh.

Well, that shut me up.

What had happened to all his big dreams, all his plans for his future?

‘I thought you said you wanted to be a stand-up comedian,’ I replied hoarsely.

There was a shift in his eyes at my words, but which emotion was blending into which, I couldn’t tell, and just as I thought the name of one of them might be on the tip of my tongue, everything shut down, leaving his expression as blank and dull as this empty grey hall we were standing in.

‘We all planned stupid things when we were younger,’ he said, and then he paused as if he was remembering something. The moment stretched and his frown deepened. ‘I thought you were going to be the next Ruthie Henshall or Darcey Bussell?’ He raised his eyebrows, more in challenge than in curiosity.

I looked down at the floor and couldn’t help focusing on the lardy middle I was desperately trying to hide with my roomy dark top. It was blatantly obvious I hadn’t followed that path.

‘Like you said,’ I said, lifting my head a little, but not quite looking in his direction, ‘we all had stupid dreams back then.’ And, since that seemed to have killed the conversation dead, I decided to change topics. ‘You followed in your dad’s footsteps? Joined his building firm?’

Tom nodded. ‘He’d always wanted me to have a trade to fall back on.’

‘Do you still work with him?’

‘I went out on my own by the time I was twenty-five, started my own firm with a business partner.’ He allowed himself a dark smile, the only kind he seemed capable of these days. ‘Wanted to show the old man I could do better than him.’

Now that sounded like the Tom I’d used to know. Cocky. Self-assured. Never one to be told what to do.

‘Anyway,’ he said abruptly, turning back to Miss Mimi. ‘The first thing I’d suggest is contacting your electricity company and checking if they’re aware of any issues with the building or a disruption in service in the area. If that comes back clear, then I’ll come in and give the place a thorough once-over, see what’s up.’

‘Oh, thank you!’ Miss Mimi reached up on tiptoe and kissed his slightly stubbly cheek. For a split-second, he looked just as he might have done when he’d been sixteen and on the receiving end of such affection and he managed to both smile and cringe at once, but by the time Mimi pulled away, his expression was back in its slightly gruff neutral setting.

‘Do you think you’ll be able to come back this weekend?’ I asked, aware that Miss Mimi was probably losing money she couldn’t afford by cancelling all these classes. One day was bad enough. The last thing she needed was for the situation to extend into next week.

Tom rubbed his chin with his hand. ‘Well, Lucy and I are supposed to be spending the weekend together …’

‘I don’t mind!’ Lucy said, making us all jump a little. She’d been so good and so quiet I’d forgotten she was still there. ‘I like it here.’

Tom gave her an exasperated look. ‘We were going to go go-karting, but … Well, ring if something crops up and I’ll see what I can do.’ He turned to his daughter. ‘Come on, scamp.’

Lucy rolled her eyes. ‘Scamp is a dog’s name. I am not a dog.’

‘Well, whoever you are, get your stuff together, because it’s time to go or we’ll miss it altogether, and I’ve had it booked up for weeks.’

With that Tom headed for the door. His daughter let out a heavy sigh, picked up her bag by its strap and followed him out the door, dragging the bag’s sparkly pinkness along the floor behind her.

‘You should run along too, Philippa. You’ve spent enough time helping me out already.’

I turned to Miss Mimi and saw the gentle smile on her features. She wasn’t worried in the slightest about this, had some kind of inner sense that everything would just work out, fall into place. Unfortunately, I had no such sense. I knew how life could pull the rug from underneath you just when you least expected it and I had a nasty gnawing feeling when I thought about Mimi going back into that office.

And, although it felt a bit bad to admit this, I’d actually quite enjoyed this morning so far. I’d got so used to just being in my house or stacking shelves at the supermarket, I’d forgotten how nice it was to talk to someone, and it had felt good to be useful. My mood was better now than it had been in weeks.

I looked down at my phone. ‘Who do you pay your electric bill to? I can find their number before I go, if you like? Save you some time and trouble.’

A frown cast a shadow over Mimi’s previously sunny expression. ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s South East Electric,’ she said breezily. ‘Or was it Kent Power? I really can’t recall. Anyway, it’s the one with the dog in their adverts on the telly.’

That might have been helpful if I didn’t already know that the dog—who had featured in ads more than ten years ago—had been for a company that served the West Country. The only other option now was to rummage through the piles of paper in the office to find a recent bill, and that could take hours.

I looked at Miss Mimi. She was old and thin, if fit. Not much meat on her bones. Not like me; I had plenty of insulation. And it was freezing in here, even more so now the rain had dampened the wind. ‘I’ll help you look for a bill.’

‘Oh, no,’ Miss Mimi responded, looking slightly horrified. ‘I’m sure a lovely young woman like you has far better things to do with her time on a Saturday than help an old duffer like me.’

I thought about my empty house, about Roberta, who was probably still stretched out on the sofa, fast asleep, and the pile of DVDs stacked up next to the television. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I really don’t.’

Ten

I picked up a pile of paper, saw it was an invoice for ballet lessons for spring term four years ago, and set it down on a stack I’d been making on the desk, then I picked up the next one: a flyer for a Christmas show and turned to put that one down too, only to discover that the invoice was now gone.

‘Miss Mimi? Have you seen that invoice I just put down there?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Mimi said, popping up from behind the filing cabinet. ‘I’ve added it to my pile I’ve made for my best-ever students—over here.’ And she indicated a separate group of papers that she’d made on the floor near the door.

I was tempted to cry. We’d been at this two hours already and I thought we’d got a system going. I’d been sorting papers into promotion, newsletters, stuff to do with rent and utilities, invoices and financial accounts, but it seemed that Miss Mimi had come up with one of her own and had been emptying my piles and making new ones, everything jumbled back in together.

‘Wonderful,’ I said. There was no point in having an argument about it, no matter how frustrated I was. It was Miss Mimi’s dance school, after all. She could do whatever the heck she wanted with her paperwork. However, it did mean that it was going to make the present task all the more complicated.

‘Maybe you should think about running an ad for an admin assistant.’ We weren’t even halfway through yet. Paperwork clearly wasn’t Miss Mimi’s strong suit. Nor Sherri’s, I suspected.

We carried on hunting and about half an hour later I discovered an electricity bill—dated last September—tucked inside a dancewear catalogue that had been under a lost property box full of lone socks, ballet shoes and even underwear. That boggled my mind. How on earth could you go home and not realise you didn’t have your knickers on? And, more worrying, how did you end up losing them in the first place?

I pulled the bill out and waved it up in the air for Miss Mimi to see. ‘Got it! Shall I call them?’

Miss Mimi slumped gratefully into a chair. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, dear.’

After fifteen minutes on hold it turned out there was a very simple reason Miss Mimi had no electricity.

I shot a nervous glance at her. She was leafing through a pile of flyers for the dance shows she used to put on every year, smiling now and then at the memories floating up off the faded paper. She had no idea, did she?

‘Just a moment, please,’ I told the customer service bod on the other end of the line. ‘It’s the bill,’ I told Miss Mimi in a stage whisper. ‘It hasn’t been paid.’

Miss Mimi’s eyebrows raised in surprise. I’d been right. No idea.

‘She says we can pay it now, if you like, and power will be back on before Monday.’ I swallowed before I asked the next question, fearing I already knew the answer. ‘Do you have a credit card?’

Miss Mimi wrinkled her nose. ‘Don’t hold truck with those things.’

‘I’ll put it on mine if you like and you can pay me back.’

‘Oh, no, dear. I couldn’t do that!’

I exhaled softly. ‘It’s the only way to get the power back on before the middle of next week. You don’t want to have to cancel any more classes, do you?’

With that, Miss Mimi crumbled. ‘Very well, then,’ she said, sighing. ‘Thank you, Philippa.’

I nodded and made a mental note that I was going to get Miss Mimi to use the shortened form of my name if it killed me. Now Mum was gone, nobody called me Philippa any more.

I resumed my discussions with the woman from the electric company and five minutes later everything was sorted. I rubbed my face with my hands and let out a weary breath.

The organiser inside me wanted to keep going at the office, to conquer this mountain of paper and plant a tiny little Union Jack in it, but my inner sloth was whispering—very sensibly, I might add—that I’d already been here for hours and it was cold and damp, and my inner gannet was chiming in and adding that I’d be much better off going to find something to eat, preferably involving bread and melted cheese.

After a moment or two of dithering, the argument went the way it usually did. I stood up in a purposeful manner and heaved my handbag over my shoulder. ‘Right. I’m taking you down to the Doves for a latte and a panini. No arguments.’

Miss Mimi opened her mouth to object, but I held up a hand. It seemed I was getting a handle on this ‘being feisty’ thing. ‘I said “no arguments”.’

Maybe the whole episode had worn Miss Mimi out more than I’d realised, because she didn’t even try to talk me round. Instead she said, ‘Well, that sounds lovely, cherie. I’d rather have a coffee and a sandwich, if you don’t mind, though.’

I headed for the door and started down the corridor, hiding a smile. ‘I don’t mind at all.’

However, after a couple of seconds I realised it was very quiet in the damp, dark corridor and noticed Miss Mimi hadn’t followed me. I hitched my bag up on my shoulder and retraced my steps.

I found her back in the office, looking rather pale. She had one hand braced against a bookcase, the other pressed to her chest. I dropped my bag and ran over. ‘Miss Mimi! Are you okay?’

She flapped a hand, tried on a smile which didn’t stick, but said nothing. She seemed to be having trouble drawing enough breath. ‘I-it’s fine,’ she eventually managed. ‘I get a little bit of vertigo now and then. It was all that bending over and standing up again looking for the bill … It just made me a little dizzy.’

I faltered, not sure if I should go and help her walk or not. Miss Mimi had never liked to make a fuss, not unless she’d planned and stage-managed the whole thing for her own benefit, of course. I ended up compromising by going and helping her with her coat, then leaving a hand under her elbow as we made our way outside.

‘You’re sure you’re okay?’ I asked again as Miss Mimi locked up the hall.

‘Right as rain!’ she replied, giving me a dazzling smile and pulling herself up straight, proving that a dancer’s posture never left her, not even in a crisis. ‘Stop looking at me like that! I told you … I’m fine.’

The grey tinge to her skin told me otherwise. ‘I really think it might be a good idea to see a doctor. I could take you into Swanham, to A&E, if you’d like …?’

Miss Mimi gave me the kind of sweet smile she used on truculent children who refused to point their toes properly when instructed. ‘Now, don’t go on, Philippa … Let’s have that coffee and if I’m still feeling peaky after I’ve had some food I’ll think about it. Besides, I’ve got something I want to discuss with you.’

‘You have?’

‘I have,’ she said, and tucked her arm through mine as she steered me down the narrow pavement in the direction of the pub. ‘I’ve been thinking that I don’t need to put an ad in the Swanham Times for a new administrator, because I’ve already found the perfect person—you!’

I did a double take. ‘Me?’

‘Why not? You did a marvellous job this morning. It’d only be part time, mind. What do you think?’

I blinked, trying to process this sudden twist in the conversation. ‘I think I’d be very interested,’ I said. Now Christmas was over, the supermarket was cutting my shifts and I’d been looking for something else to bring more cash in. Ed’s maintenance covered the basics but not much else.

More than that, despite the frustration, it felt good to be needed, and even better to be doing something I knew I was good at—organising things, creating order out of chaos.

‘I don’t have much experience of working in an office, though.’

Miss Mimi batted my response away with one large flap of her false eyelashes. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Anyway, let’s go and discuss it over one of those latte thingies …’

It was only when I got home later that afternoon that I realised she’d neatly sidestepped the issue of going to the doctor’s.

I arrived promptly at the dance school after lunch the following Monday. Miss Mimi and I had agreed that there was no time like the present. For the first time in … well, as long as I could remember … I was actually, truly excited about the day’s work ahead of me.

My part-time job at the supermarket certainly didn’t push those buttons and working alongside Ed had been all about what Ed needed and what was good for the band, rather than a fulfilling career for me. Not that Ed had been selfish about it, demanding anything horrendous of me, and I’d been more than happy to help him reach his dreams. It hadn’t been until he’d moved on, however, that I’d realised there was a big, dark hole where my personal aspirations should have been.

I knew Miss Mimi’s School of Dancing wasn’t big business. I knew I wasn’t going to become a millionaire working there or win any Nobel prizes, but that didn’t bother me in the slightest. I’d be helping someone I cared about, doing something I was good at. I finally had a sense of purpose and it felt marvellous.

When I arrived at the hall I was relieved to see all the lights on and the temperature was warm enough that I automatically shrugged my coat off. Miss Mimi was rosy-cheeked and happily working out a routine for the Monday evening jazz class. (Was it really safe for someone her age to be kicking that high?) There was no hint of the frailness that had hung around her on Saturday. I could almost believe I’d imagined it.

I made my way down the corridor to the office. Once inside, I closed the door behind me and leant against it. I smiled as I looked around. Right, I thought. Where do I start?

My thoughts turned to the red electricity bill. Surely, the best thing to tackle first was the finances. Who knew what other payments might have been overlooked? And I needed to get an idea of how much money came in and out, so I could suggest a budget for any future big payments.

I hunted in one of the bookshelves, where I remembered seeing some handwritten accounts ledgers, and started to flick through them. They were thoroughly kept in a neat hand. Not Miss Mimi’s extravagant loops, that was for sure, and it didn’t look like Sherri’s enthusiastic round, squat writing either, which meant these must have been Dinah’s work. My theory was confirmed when I discovered I couldn’t find any books for the last two tax years, which was when Miss Mimi had said Dinah had moved to Portugal.

I put them back on the shelf and carried on my search. Surely, Miss Mimi had to have some kind of financial records since her full-time administrator had quit?

Ten minutes later I found what I was looking for. It wasn’t a proper accounts ledger, but a handful of large, hardback notebooks. Each page was labelled with a year and a month and then there was a list of fees that had come in and payments that had gone out, but I couldn’t find any corresponding bank statements. I guessed that looking for profit and loss statements or balance sheets would probably be a waste of time.

However, duplicate statements could be ordered from the bank, and even if I couldn’t find any tax returns or financial statements, Miss Mimi’s accountant should be able to supply them. The name of a local one-man firm was listed in the back of one of Dinah’s neat ledgers. I’d just fire off an email and see where that got me, and until a reply came I had my work cut out for me. I was going to clear this office of clutter if it was the last thing I did!

Eleven

When Friday came around again, I dutifully turned up for adult tap. I’d been tempted to stay home to avoid another dose of humiliation, but that was a bit hard to do when I’d spent all week working alongside Miss Mimi.

I crept in at the back again while the others were engrossed in a discussion about a dance competition show they’d all seen on the TV that week. I quietly put my tap shoes on while they talked. I’d seen the same programme, but I didn’t comment. Why would they be interested in anything I had to say? They didn’t know me from Adam.

I heard the door swing open again and a cool breeze curled into the hall, its tendrils reaching even me in the farthest corner. While I tied bows in my laces, I glanced behind me to discover that Nancy had arrived.

Part of me wanted to ignore her. The way she’d been with me the previous week had been really weird. I’d even told Candy about it, but she’d warned me I was becoming a hermit and it was making me paranoid. Of course, I’d told her not to be so stupid, but thinking back on our conversation, I was starting to wonder if she was right.

Every time I left the front door these days, I felt as if people were watching me. Judging me. And they couldn’t all be, could they? I mean, up until Ed’s spectacular fall from grace I was pretty sure most people didn’t even notice me when I walked down the street.

So maybe Candy was right. Maybe it was all in my head and I’d jumped to conclusions about Nancy last week. After all, while we hadn’t been the kind of friends who’d spent all our time round each other’s houses. When we’d been at Miss Mimi’s—which had been a lot—we’d been practically inseparable, and she had no reason to dislike me. We hadn’t even set eyes on each other for twenty years.