Fiona Harper - The Summer We Danced

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.