Fiona Harper - The Summer We Danced

I pulled my mobile out of my pocket. I didn’t know what kind of phones were in the office, but if they were the kind that needed to be plugged in, they were going to be about as useful as the ancient caged-in heaters that hung from the walls of the main hall.

When we got to the office, though, I had a shock. In the back of my mind I’d been expecting a cosy little nook, the walls filled with photographs of Mimi’s glory days and memorabilia, maybe an old armchair with a shawl draped over it in the corner, opposite an old leather-topped desk. What I saw was indeed small, but not at all cosy.

Papers and folders were balanced precariously on every available surface and lay in piles on the floor. The photos and keepsakes might have been around somewhere, but they were buried by the unending stacks of clutter. I took one look and went straight back out to the main hall.

‘Hi,’ I said, smiling at the girls, who were all looking a little bit worried as they huddled together on the floor, their bags at their feet. ‘I’m Pippa. A long time ago I came here and did dance lessons just like you.’

A girl with a perfect blonde bun and a pinched expression looked me up and down, then wrinkled her nose. I knew what she was thinking: How on earth did one of us turn into that great tub of lard? I ignored her and carried on. New Pippa didn’t react to things like that. She was comfortable in her own skin, however large it was.

‘Anyway, as you can tell, there’s no heating and no lights, so we’re going to have to call your mums and dads and get them to come and get you early. Who knows their home phone number?’

Five or six of them put up their hands. The rest just looked worried.

‘Never mind,’ I said as Miss Mimi rejoined us, ‘we’ll work something out.’ And I began tapping a number into my mobile as one of the girls recited it to me.

In the next ten minutes we managed to dispatch almost all of the girls. Some had parents who passed the message on and a couple more took turns in doing lifts, so managed to drive away with two or three. That left two students sitting on the hall floor, fidgeting with their coat zips.

And then there was one.

‘Ursula’s mum never gets the time right,’ Miss Mimi explained as the penultimate girl skipped out the door. ‘Either she’s twenty minutes late or twenty minutes early for pick up. Thank goodness it was the latter today!’

She turned to the remaining girl. ‘Who’s picking you up today, Lucy? Dad or Grandma?’

‘Dad,’ Lucy replied quietly, her eyes as huge as the over-sized buttons on her school coat. ‘I stayed at Gran and Grandad’s last night. They dropped me off.’ She glanced at a small wheeled case with lots of glitter and a fluffy cat in a tutu on the front that sat beside her.

‘Do you know his mobile number?’ I asked.

Lucy nodded, then reached into her bag and pulled out a purse. Inside were a few coppers, a broken hair clip and a scrap of paper. She took the paper out and handed it to Miss Mimi. ‘Dad makes me keep this in my bag,’ she explained.

Mimi passed it to me. ‘See if you can get hold of him, will you, dear?’

I noted the neat handwriting. There was a mobile number on it, labelled ‘Daddy’, in a grown-up hand. ‘Why didn’t you say you had this when I asked earlier?’ I asked gently.

Lucy looked surprised I’d asked. ‘You said home phone numbers.’

I nodded. Yep. I had said that. It reminded me how much I didn’t know about the way kids’ brains worked, despite the amount of time I spent around my nephews and niece. Now I thought about it, it was exactly the same kind of thing Honey would say.

‘So I did,’ I said to the girl. ‘Well remembered.’

Pride flashed across her expression and I couldn’t help smiling even wider. ‘Well, I’ll just try and get your dad now …’

Unfortunately, it went straight to voicemail. I left a message, explaining the situation, then turned to Miss Mimi.

The older woman sighed. ‘I suppose I’m going to have to phone up the rest of this morning’s students, aren’t I?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘ We’re going to phone the rest of your Saturday pupils.’

‘No, no, Philippa … You run along. I’ll be fine.’

It seemed I hadn’t noticed how stubborn and independent Miss Mimi could be when I’d been younger either. Now, usually I was a good girl, the sort to do as I was told by my elders and betters, but I think Miss Mimi was starting to rub off on me again. ‘It’ll be quicker with two of us,’ I said.

Miss Mimi didn’t say anything, but her expression hinted she wasn’t about to budge an inch. However, I’d been a pupil of hers for more than ten years as a child. I knew which strings to pull. ‘The quicker you contact the parents,’ I continued, ‘the quicker you can get this fixed and the quicker the classes will be up and running again. You wouldn’t want the children to be disappointed, would you?’

‘Come on, then, Lucy,’ Miss Mimi said, not taking her steady gaze off me. ‘You might as well come to the office with Philippa and me rather than sitting here on your own in a draughty old hall.’

Lucy shot a nervous glance at her case.

‘Leave that there,’ Mimi said, as she headed for the corridor once more. ‘It’ll be fine.’

Lucy bit her lip and looked at Miss Mimi’s back as she disappeared through the doorway. ‘Daddy says I’m not supposed to leave my bag all over the place.’

I smiled at her. ‘Then we’d better do what Daddy says. I’ll tell you what, we’ll put it in the kitchen. It’ll be safe there.’

It was going to have to be. Because there was no way we were going to fit one more thing in that office!

I stood with my hands on my hips and surveyed the chaos. Lucy, having left her case in the kitchen, stood close behind me, almost touching but not quite. I had a feeling she was a bit thrown by the morning’s events, and would probably have liked a friendly hug, but I had no idea if that was the right thing to do or not. Weren’t there all sorts of rules these days, to stop people being ‘inappropriate’?

‘Where are your lists of student telephone numbers?’ I asked Miss Mimi, who seemed completely oblivious to the mountains of clutter.

‘I’ve no idea where Sherri keeps them on that thing of her dad’s she brought in.’ She shook her head. ‘I should’ve stuck to doing it the way Dinah did, but Sherri said a computer would be better.’

‘What ever happened to Dinah?’ I asked, remembering the woman who’d been Miss Mimi’s administrator the whole time I’d been at the dance school, a stern lady with horn-rimmed glasses who’d never smiled. I’d never once dared be late with my envelope containing the cheque for my fees.

‘Oh, she got married and moved to Portugal,’ Miss Mimi said, as if it was nothing.

Wow. I hadn’t seen that coming. Dinah must have been fifty, if she was a day, and the sort of sturdily built, hairs-on-the-chin kind of gal that I’d assumed would be a spinster forever. It gave me a small glimmer of hope.

‘And Sherri’s your new administrator?’ I asked.

Miss Mimi laughed. ‘Goodness, no! She’s one of the older girls who volunteered to come and help me with the office a few hours a week.’

Ah. Suddenly the piles of paper, the text-speak emails and the clip-art-happy posters in the vestibule all started to make sense.

‘I did try to hire someone when Dinah left, but no one seemed to want to take it on.’

I took a sweeping look around the office. To be honest, if I’d turned up here for a job interview, I’d have run a mile in the other direction too, and I’d been used to touring with a rock band.