Читать книгу The Summer We Danced - Фиона Харпер - Страница 10

Elmhurst was a pretty little place, full of red-brick cottages covered in local flint with high gables and leaded windows. It was a big enough village to have some life—a local pub, a main street with shops and a post office, a primary school and two churches—but still quaint enough that it had become a desirable location for well-to-do Londoners who wanted a bit of the country life without straying too far from a tube stop or a Starbucks.

In the centre of the village was a green with a wrought-iron town sign and a war memorial that always, always had a wreath of pristine poppies underneath it, and at the other end of the green was a duck pond where Candy and I had fished for minnows with plastic nets and jam jars when we were kids.

The oldest houses clustered around the main street, but the village had grown over the last century to include bungalows and a few oast-house conversions and two small estates of new-build houses in local stone.

If you ambled down the main street past The Two Doves and kept going, you’d reach the cricket pitch, complete with its vintage wooden scoreboard and pavilion, and past that, tucked away, out of sight down a side road, was a little church hall. It had once belonged to St Christopher’s C of E church, but the main building had been flattened by a stray doodlebug during World War II. In the early seventies the last of the rubble had been cleared and it had been paved over, turning the footprint of the church into a large car park for the hall.

It was a beautiful little building, almost a miniature version of the church it had once served: red brick that had now weathered to a rusty brown and tall mullioned windows with decorative arches. It even had a little belltower perched on top of the slate tiles. Once the church had gone, the village had used it for clubs and classes, bingo nights and jumble sales, but when a new, modern church had been built on the other side of the village, complete with a smart new community centre, the number of people crossing its threshold had dwindled. That is, until Mimi D’Angelo had come along.

Initially, she’d hired the hall for two nights a week to start her dance school, after retiring from a career as a dancer at the grand old age of twenty-nine. While Elmhurst was only a small village, it was close to the much bigger town of Swanham, where the local kids went to secondary school, and news of Miss Mimi’s first-rate school began to spread by word of mouth. Very soon, scores of little girls (and the occasional little boy) had thronged to her lessons.

They didn’t seem to be put off by the fact that Miss Mimi, as she was always known, was as strict as she was flamboyant. Somehow, she’d always made each pupil feel as if they had untapped potential, and her great stories of her colourful professional life and sense of the dramatic made for interesting lessons, that was for sure.

By the early eighties, Miss Mimi’s school had taken over exclusive use of the hall and she’d finally become queen of her own terpsichorean kingdom. She’d put up posters and noticeboards, added permanent barres to the painted brick walls and put hanging baskets and flower pots outside the entrance to offset the glossy scarlet double doors.

I sat outside St Christopher’s Hall on a windy January Friday night, the engine of my Mini running. I could hardly believe it was still here, the place that had been the setting for the most important moments of my formative years: my greatest triumphs, in the form of shows and exam grades, my first job, helping Miss Mimi with the Babies class on Saturday mornings, and even my first soggy teenage kiss with Simon Lane after a Christmas disco.

I looked at the red doors. They weren’t so glossy now and the paint was peeling at the bottom. The flower pots were still there, but only the stalks of a few dry brown weeds poked over the tops. There was moss growing in the gutters and a couple of slates had come loose on the roof. St Christopher’s Hall was like the widow of a rich man down on her luck; her structure and proportions were still elegant, but she was looking a little ragged and worn around the edges.

Could I go back in there? Did I even want to?

I’d arrived early. A few more cars were pulling into the car park, but nobody got out. Probably parents waiting for kids who were in the class before adult tap. I could sneak away. Nobody would even know I’d been here. I readied my feet on the clutch and prepared to release the handbrake, but then I stopped. I owed it to Candy—and probably to myself—to at least try one class, didn’t I, even if my stomach was churning like a washing machine with a full load?

A crowd of long-legged girls with coats and boots on over their leotards and tights burst from the double doors and ran to different cars. Ah. So the previous class must end at seven forty-five, not eight. Miss Mimi had done that sometimes when it had been a long day of teaching, given herself little gaps in the timetable to just have a cup of tea and get off her feet. Although it probably wouldn’t be Miss Mimi teaching now, would it, even if the school bore her name? She’d probably passed the school on to one of her star pupils, someone who’d gone on to dance in West End shows or on cruise ships, but who was now getting older and wanted to settle down to a job with a fixed location and slightly more sociable hours.

My email enquiry about the class hadn’t even been answered by Miss Mimi, but by someone called Sherri, who had appalling grammar, didn’t know what capital letters were and replied to every email as if she was posting on Twitter.

I felt a twinge of sadness at the thought of not seeing my old teacher again, but it made the decision of whether to go in or not easier. I wouldn’t be letting anyone down. If I didn’t come back next week, no one would care. They probably wouldn’t even notice.

With that thought in my head, I reached for the door handle, grabbed my holdall and stepped into the chilly winter night. If I went inside before anyone else, I’d be able to get myself ready quietly at the back, and I’d be able to chat to the teacher a little first, let her know I was a complete tap virgin and ask if she could go easy on me.

The wind was really biting tonight, ruffling up my pixie cut and making my hair stand on end. I made a dash for the double doors and shoved them closed behind me.

A tsunami of nostalgia washed over me as I stood in the little vestibule that led to the main hall. I’d spent half my childhood and teenage years in this hall. It had become a home from home.

The old horsehair mat was there, still worn in places, and so was the cork noticeboard where Miss Mimi had always posted exam schedules and results, timetables and the allimportant uniform requirements, although now someone had obviously learned how to insert clip-art in Word, because instead of the photocopied notices of typed announcements or quick notes written in Miss Mimi’s elegant and looping handwriting, there were colour-printed A4 sheets, decorated with just about every dancing-related cartoon one could imagine.

I smiled as I looked around, especially when I saw the plaque on the ladies’ loo hadn’t changed. It was still a line drawing of an elegant fifties woman etched on dusky pink plastic, holding her large-brimmed hat as her ‘new look’ skirt swirled around her shapely calves. The men’s sign was equally as pleasing, featuring a man with Brylcreemed hair and a tweedy suit with turn-ups.

‘Hello, Audrey … Hello, Cary …’ I whispered. I’d christened them with those names at the age of eleven when my obsession with old black-and-white films had begun. ‘It’s lovely to see you again.’

I was still smiling absent-mindedly when I pushed my way through the second set of double doors into the hall.