The Stillness the Dancing Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

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  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/wendyperriam

  Contents

  Wendy Perriam

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chatper Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Wendy Perriam

  The Stillness The Dancing

  Wendy Perriam

  Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

  Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

  Dedication

  For Ron

  who scorns suburban baubles,

  is embarrassed by effusions

  and doesn’t like whisky.

  How else can I thank you?

  T.S. Eliot

  ‘East Coker’

  Chapter One

  Morna checked her watch. Less than half a minute, including fore-play. The still puffed-up male pigeon had already clambered off its mate, leaving it free to forage again. It seemed relieved, had simply endured the copulation, crouching tense and pinioned while the male bird perched on top of it, fluttering and tipping.

  Morna threw more seed, ducked away from the thrash of wings as the pigeons swooped, every beak jab-jabbing, total concentration on the food. There seemed no pleasure in it, more a fierce rush and frenzy, bodies barging into each other, tails brushing heads, heads used as battering rams. The birds were running in tiny circles on their pink mincing feet, beaks open, orange bead-eyes swivelling and searching. A few intrepid sparrows, dwarfed by larger beaks and bodies, snatched mouthfuls where they could. A herring gull wheeled down, stood alone with wings outstretched, apart from all the rest. Morna edged a little closer. She had never seen a gull before in her mother’s garden. It looked out of place, a gatecrasher, needed pounding waves and surf-flecked sand to frame it, not prissy rockery, pocket-hankie lawn. It scorned the crust she threw, soared away, white wings merging with white cloud.

  She turned back to the pigeons, who were still scavenging, but less intently now, their circles larger and more leisurely as they mopped up the stray grains. Two were paler than the others, streaked and splotched with white; the rest dull grey with a gleam of green and purple on their necks. Strange that her mother should be fond of pigeons when they were all the things she disapproved of—drab, common, dirty and over-sexed—at least the males. Yet Bea bought seed for them in hundredweight sacks, fed them every morning, six o’clock in summer, eight in winter.

  Morna glanced at her watch again. Half past nine. She wondered if the birds realised she was late and were judging her as her mother might have done—were Bea not at this moment stretched out on an operating slab. The surgeon would be just inserting his scalpel, Bea unrecognisable without make-up, clothes, teeth. Morna had never seen her naked and rarely naked-faced. Bea was always coiffed, rouged, powdered, smartly dressed. Earrings in the house, gloves and hat outside. Morna tried to picture her in a hospital gown, tied at the back with strings like a baby’s nightdress, bloodstained now, perhaps. She took a step towards the house as if to grab her car keys, drive pell-mell to the hospital and snatch the body up, bring it back unscathed. Her mother had endured enough without this operation, this new scar. Yet Bea had seemed unruffled when she took her in the previous afternoon, left her with a pile of magazines, a quart of orange juice, returned to her mother’s house.

  ‘Someone has to feed the birds.’

  Bea’s last words. If she died under anaesthetic, would her daughter have to scatter seed for ever, until she died herself, or feel guilt if she declined?

  The puffed-up pigeon was still pursuing the same female, a thin and scraggy bird which kept trying to elude it, dodging away, running in the opposite direction. Morna watched. She had translated a paper once on the copulation of birds. The majority of species had no external reproductive organs, so mating was quite a feat. There were problems of contact, overbalancing. She had been translating from the German and the terms were tricky. (Die Mündung, die Papille, die Fortpflanzung.) Most female birds were non-responsive, needed elaborate courtship displays to activate their hormones, rouse their interest. She was much the same herself. Except that even with the courtship, she had often remained unmoved. She watched the pigeon try a different mate, strutting and self-satisfied, neck throbbing with its hoarse and throaty love-song. That female was equally reluctant, made its escape in a comic hurried run.

  Easier for pigeons. No one criticised them, made them feel inadequate, used words like frigid or non-orgasmic, urged them to see therapists or mug up manuals on technique. It was only two seconds, anyway. Over two hours with Neil. She tried to picture her ex-husband with wings. It would have been less uncomfortable. He had always pressed down on her, eleven stone of him grinding her into the bed springs. Neil was nowhere in her mother’s house. Bea didn’t recognise divorce, so once he had left, she removed both his photos and his memory, expunged him from her mind and conversation. Her daughter was bereaved as she herself had been, thirty odd years ago. Bea was right. Divorce had felt like a death. Neil had left at forty, the age she was herself now. Her birthday had come and gone and nothing changed. But Neil was a vain man. Forty probably hurt. Was that why he had found a new-model wife, thirteen years his junior and responsive to display, to throaty love-songs?

  Morna closed the garden door, walked through into the sitting room, her own younger face reflected back at her from mantelpiece and sideboard. All the photo frames were full of Morna—Bea’s exclusive Morna. Morna in shawls, rompers, frocks or fancy dre
ss; Morna hairless, toothless, shoeless, Neil-less. Legs and pigtails growing longer. Smile less certain. Grim school hat pulled down over blue confining uniform. Blue for the Blessed Virgin.

  Morna sat down at the table, sorted through her papers. At school she had had ambition—to cure lepers, save souls, sway super-powers, change people’s hearts and minds. To be a Florence Nightingale fused with Gandhi, with a dash of Bertrand Russell and Lord Reith. In fact, she worked part-time and intermittently. Translator sounded grand—almost as glamorous as interpreter. She had friends who were interpreters—simultaneous transmission at a packed United Nations, their fluent rendering picked up by satellite across the world. More likely jobs for her were low-grade advertising brochures plugging dog food or double glazing; long-winded articles on pig disease or bridge construction. She was lucky at the moment, working on something literary, in verse. She scored her biro through the first two lines. What had flowed before her breakfast coffee now sounded coy and stilted. Poetry was the most difficult of all. Did you retain the rhyme but force the sense and syntax, or sacrifice it in the cause of accuracy and then risk an uninspired rendering which was exact in letter only, not in spirit? Even in prose there were few exact equivalents. You could finish a job, post off the faithful English version of your client’s French or German, and know that it still lied. You had to be two people—first the foreign one, and then the English—thinking differently with different idioms, a different way of framing concepts, coining words. She tried a rhyme, crossed it out again. She was used to a touch of schizophrenia even in her private life. It still felt strange to be a divorcée and a convent girl, Bea’s daughter and Neil’s ex-wife.

  The wedding itself had been something of a strain—what the Catholic Church condemned as a mixed marriage. All her mother’s Catholic friends had prayed for Neil’s conversion. They had no idea that she, too, was an unbeliever, had lost her mother’s God and put Neil in His place. She hadn’t dared confess, had hidden the sham in ten yards of white tulle. A registry office would have killed her mother. At least she had been a virgin—technically. Fellatio didn’t count, so Neil assured her. She hadn’t even known the word. The nuns had compiled their own (shorter) dictionary omitting all the words they disapproved of, including ‘sex’ itself. Other, vaguer terms like ‘sins against the sixth and ninth commandments’ or ‘occasion for procreation’ had left her highly nervous. All through university she had remained intact, allowing men to kiss her, even fondle her, only to change her mind and rush away, shut herself up with her books. Neil was different, dominant, not a greenhorn student but an advertising executive. She had met him at a party in her final year. He had taken her to dinner, dazzled her with charm and Mouton Rothschild, insisted that she pay him back—in bed. The more she demurred, the more ardent he became. Virgins of twenty-one were rare, especially pretty ones. This was a challenge and his pride was on the line. So was her entire moral code. In the end he proposed. Later, she wondered if he would have done, had her standards been less strict. Did he only want her because he couldn’t have her, because she was the first girl proof against his blandishments?

  The cake was made, the dress bought, every last detail of the wedding fixed, when he finally seduced her. They were returning from a party in his red MG. He had drunk too much, missed a lorry by inches.

  ‘Do you think you ought to drive?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. He drew up in a layby. ‘I think I ought to fuck you.’

  She had flushed, as much from fear as from embarrassment. He sounded angry.

  ‘Look, darling, it’s only a week now. That’s not long and …’

  ‘Too fucking long.’

  He had unzipped his trousers and she stared at the swollen red-faced stranger rearing up beside her.

  ‘Suck it,’ he demanded. His words were slurred.

  She shrank away.

  ‘I said ‘suck it’.’

  ‘I can’t, Neil. I …’

  He had pulled her down, held her face over his crotch. She smelt a whiff of stale urine.

  ‘Open your mouth.’

  Her mouth wasn’t big enough. Every morning for eleven years she had opened it to receive the body of Christ. Christ was tiny, didn’t gag.

  ‘Put your heads well back, girls, and open your mouths wide.’ Reverend Mother had coached them before their first Communion. ‘Keep your eyes closed and your hands joined.’

  Morna shut her eyes. The tears ran under the lids, dripped into her mouth. You weren’t meant to cry when your fiancé made love to you. Love? He came in less than half a minute and she swallowed him. You didn’t spit God out. He kissed her then, the other way up, and the taste of whisky disguised the taste of semen. Later, he apologised.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she had said. How could she tell him how … how banal it had been. Eleven years of prohibition, dire warnings about damnation, fornication classed with murder, and then twenty seconds and a spurt of slimy dribble in her mouth. You could be damned for that, pitched into hell for all eternity.

  It was Neil himself who had cleared away the pitchforks, damped down the flames of hell, built her world anew for her with his own rational commonsense. He had taught her not to mortify the flesh but to pamper and indulge it, to squander cash on earth rather than save souls in purgatory. He had vanished now, but left his views behind, his comfortable agnostic way of life.

  Morna took a sip of coffee. The hand on the cup jangled with his eighteen-carat white gold bracelet; the other wore his Longines jewelled watch. She put her cup down, picked up the German verse. There were at least a few advantages in being on her own. She could work in peace, for one thing. Neil had hated competition. He was the achiever, the careerist; her rôle simply to admire. She was also free from his constant demands in bed—though she still felt guilty about using the word demands, still judged herself a failure. She had ‘dropped’ sex now, as simply as her daughter had dropped physics or geography at school. She was a daughter herself again, returned to the house she had grown up in, sleeping in a single bed while her own child, almost a woman, was away for the whole summer improving her French in Les Lecques. She glanced across at the postcard on the mantelpiece which had arrived just that morning, the first since Chris had left a week ago.

  ‘It’s not bad here. Madame is very strict but I like Monsieur. The kids stay up till nearly midnight. We visited a liqueur factory and were given half an inch to try. Hope Grandma is okay.’

  Morna hoped Monsieur was okay—not the type who took advantage of seventeen-year-old au pair girls. Chris already had a boyfriend, a steady one, but he was in Hayling Island, not Les Lecques. Problems there, as well. Morna chewed her pen, saw Martin’s long lean legs, restless, never still, his dark and wary eyes. She liked the lad in some ways, even quite admired him, but paired off with a precious only daughter …

  She scribbled three more lines, toning down the high-flown adjectives which worked better in the German than the English. One or two of the fancier ones were Chris’s. They had worked on the poem together just before Chris left. She was glad her daughter was good at languages—one of the few things they had in common. Morna had taught her French as a child, spoken it with her, bought her Elle and Marie-Claire instead of Honey. It had paid off. Chris had just sat her A levels—French, German, English—and had already been offered a place at both Bristol and St Andrews to read Modern Languages. She had one more term at school in which she would aim higher still, try for Cambridge. Neil had pushed for that—five thousand miles away. A self-made man himself, he relished the idea of his only daughter at Girton or even King’s.

  Morna shook her hair back, as if trying to shrug Neil off. It was difficult to work in her mother’s house. Bea, like her ex-husband, disapproved of working mothers. Thoughts kept intruding, anyway—thoughts of Chris, Neil, Martin, operations. She kept worrying about her mother. Was Bea all right? No complications, crises? She ought to phone the hospital. A different body would be on that slab now—her mother stitch
ed and sponged, back in bed. The phone was in the hall, without a chair. Morna slumped against the wall, heard the semolina voice dollop out its bland and soothing clichés.

  ‘Yes, it all went very well. Your mother’s come round from the anaesthetic now and is taking sips of water. She’s quite comfortable. In fact, we’re going to …’

  The surge of sweet relief was followed by a twinge of disappointment. Your mother refused surgery, suddenly leapt up from the operating table, and is now running naked on the hospital roof. Your mother jumped a plane to France and is touring the liqueur factory, drunk on Benedictine. Your mother is sitting up in heaven throwing manna to the birds.

  ‘Fine. I’ll be in tomorrow. Is half past three all right?’

  Twenty-nine and a quarter hours to fill. Morna straightened a saggy rose in a formal flower arrangement, plumped up a cushion on the sofa. Her mother’s house had changed little over forty years—the same antique furniture which had come from Edward’s family, the same faded but precious Persian rugs over highly polished parquet. Both she and her mother still lived in the homes bought and furnished by their husbands; kept them up when the men in question had died or disappeared. Both had been spared the financial blows at least. Edward had been well-to-do, left his widow with an investment income and a fully paid-up house—small but elegant. Neil had always admired Bea’s style. He was an ambitious type, keen to outgrow his own G-Plan and Formica parents who semi-lived in a semi-detached in Penge. Had he married her for her background, Morna often wondered. An ex-Marlborough squadron leader father-in-law killed on active service counted for more than a no one still alive. Her mother might talk about economy, but she spoke with the right accent, owned portraits and good furniture, genuine family pieces which combined age with breeding and which she would never dream of selling, even now, when inflation had reduced her income and she was forced to skimp on other things. Neil had eclipsed them all—lived in a mock-Italian villa in one of the classiest suburbs of Los Angeles with new wife, new child, new job, new car, new smile.