The Summer We Danced

I stepped forward, but Nancy acted as if she hadn’t seen me. And maybe she hadn’t. She seemed to be deep in thought as she sat down on one of the chairs and changed into her tap shoes, then walked across to the barre on the other side of the room and started doing a few warm-up exercises.

You tried, a little voice in my head said. Leave it at that.

But I knew that was the coward’s way out. I couldn’t stay holed up in my house with just my cat for company forever, could I? And what better place to start than with someone who’d known me before my notorious fifteen minutes in the tabloid limelight? With someone who’d actually once liked me?

After a moment of hesitation, I followed her. Ugh. I was going to be standing right in front of the mirrors, but I supposed that couldn’t be helped.

‘Hi,’ I said, then grasped around for something else to say. ‘You’ve hardly changed at all.’ Not exactly eloquent, but at least it got the ball rolling.

She still had the same long, thick, dark hair, the good bone structure. She’d never been one of those teenagers who’d looked scruffy, her make-up had always been flawless and her clothes neat, and that had followed her into adulthood, although, clearly, she had a better clothes budget now. I wasn’t very good at identifying designers, but I knew expensive when I saw it.

‘Thank you,’ she replied, and went back to studying her reflection in the mirror as she stretched out her calf muscles. She didn’t return the compliment. She also didn’t say anything else.

I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘How are you doing?’

Nancy smiled again, and I noticed her teeth, too perfect in their regimental alignment, almost too white. The lights of the hall reflected off them, highlighting their glossy sharpness. ‘Oh, you know,’ she replied with an airy laugh. ‘Paul and I live in Langdon Park now. The house was a bit of a wreck when we got it, but we’re slowly licking it into shape.’

‘Wow,’ I said, not even having to pretend to be impressed. Langdon Park. While not a stately home, it was one of the lovely old manor houses in the area, the kind that well-off Londoners liked to snap up for a rural retreat if they could.

And where was I? Back living at my parents’ house with its eighties dado rails and avocado bathroom suite. No husband. No kids. No accomplishments at all to speak of. I wanted to crawl away and pretend I hadn’t started this conversation, but I had. There was no choice but to tough it out. I swallowed and carried on.

‘Paul must be doing well at …’ I trailed off, belatedly realising I couldn’t remember what Nancy’s husband did. The last time we’d exchanged Christmas cards must have been more than a decade ago.

‘He’s a wine broker,’ she said.

Had someone left the door open? Because the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees.

‘And how about the kids?’

Nancy’s smile bloomed into the real thing. ‘Oh, Lilly’s off to Oxford next year, we hope, and Callum’s auditioning for Oliver! in the West End next week. We’re all very proud.’

I nodded. She had it, didn’t she? Nancy had my John Lewis Christmas ad life. Thankfully, I was saved from hearing any more about it because Miss Mimi glided into the room.

‘Good evening, ladies,’ she said loudly and theatrically. She clipped musically towards us in her high-heeled tap shoes, wearing a tailored black dress with an orange-and-red scarf tied at the back of her head so the ends trailed from under her cloud of silvery grey hair. I reckoned if you squinted hard and imagined Mimi fifty years younger, she might just pass for Jean Harlow.

Everyone scooted into line, the confident ones—Amanda, Nancy, Dolly and Victoria—in the front, which left me, Ruth (who’d arrived so silently I hadn’t even heard her) and Donna in the back. If there was one thing I remembered about Miss Mimi’s classes, whatever the dance style, it was that she liked everyone present and correct when it was time to start.

‘Right, warm-up!’ she called and we started off using toes and heel to tap simple steps, doing little travelling things from side to side, rotating our ankles and stretching our lower leg muscles.

I’m going to do it, I thought to myself as I glued my eyes to Miss Mimi’s feet and attempted to replicate everything she did. It was humiliating to be the only person getting everything wrong. I was standing out like a sore thumb. This time, I’m going to get one step right, even if it kills me.

I was fine in the early parts of the class, where we built up small step combinations, because we’d go through everything slowly first. I could just about keep up then, as long as I made sure my brain was whirring furiously, but once Miss Mimi put the music on and we did it double time, all I could do was at least try to travel in the right direction and match the rhythm of the others’ steps, and once we started travelling from the corner I got hopelessly lost. I just tried to hang at the back as much as possible, wishing fervently that I really did have the power to make myself invisible. The whole exercise would have been a whole lot less embarrassing if I could.

‘Don’t sweat it,’ Donna said in a low voice from beside me after yet another failed attempt at some shuffle-hop thing. ‘It’ll come if you let it. The key is to not think too hard about it.’

I nodded, even though I had no idea what Donna meant. How could I stop thinking? If I didn’t even try I’d make an even bigger idiot of myself than I already was.

We moved to the corner again to do riffs. Miss Mimi let me do the easiest kind, with only four beats, but even then I was always half a breath behind.

Why was this so hard? Dancing had once been so easy for me. It had given me a joy and sense of self that nothing else had. I drifted off, even as I was trying to do the steps—it didn’t matter, really, because I was going to get them wrong no matter how hard I tried—and remembered what it had once felt like to just lose myself in the movement, to be so consumed with it I’d entered a different place, lived entirely in the moment.

And then something really weird happened. Suddenly I was doing it—heel-toe, toe-heel—rhythmic and easy as that, for a few seconds anyway, and then as I tried to work out how I’d managed it, I lost it again.

I didn’t care. I done five riffs. Five! I jogged over to where Donna was waiting in line, feeling as if I was flying. Stupid, I know. It was only a tap step, and a pretty easy one at that, but my hope had swelled in that instant, like an inflatable dinghy whose cord had been pulled. This was the first thing that had gone right for me on a personal level in a long time, and if New Pippa could actually learn to tap dance, there might be no limits to what she could do.

Donna grinned back at me when I reached the other side and held her hand up for a high five. I looked at it for a couple of seconds then gave it a gentle tap with my fingers.

‘Told you,’ she said, smiling. ‘Don’t you worry. We’ll make a Ginger Rogers of you yet.’

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