Whatever would the two husbands say, she meant, and the other wives of Paper Street, and Beryl and Ron? Going to Bingo was one thing and quite accepted. Going dancing at fifty-four was a different kettle of fish altogether. Before their marriages they had often gone dancing: they had been taken to dance-halls on Saturday nights by the men they later married, and by other men. Every June, all four of them went dancing once or twice in Southend, even though the husbands increasingly complained that it made them feel ridiculous. But what Poppy had in mind now wasn’t the Grand Palais in Southend or the humbler floors of thirty years ago, or embarrassed husbands, or youths treading over your feet: what Poppy had in mind was afternoon dancing in a place in the West End, without the husbands or anyone else knowing a thing about it. ‘Teatime foxtrots,’ Poppy said. ‘The Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms. All the rage, they are.’ And in the end Alice agreed.
They went quite regularly to the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms, almost every Tuesday. They dressed up as they used to dress up years ago; with discretion they applied rouge and eye-shadow. Alice put on a peach-coloured corset in an effort to trim down her figure a bit, and curled the hair that had once been fair and now was grey. It looked a bit frizzy when she curled it now, the way it had never done when she was a girl, but although the sight of it sometimes depressed her she accepted the middle-aged frizziness because there was nothing she could do about it. Poppy’s hair had become rather thin on the top of her head, but she didn’t seem to notice and Alice naturally didn’t mention the fact. In middle age Poppy always kept her grey hair dyed a brightish shade of chestnut, and when Alice once read in a magazine that excessive dying eventually caused a degree of baldness she didn’t mention it either, fearing that in Poppy’s case the damage was already done. On their dancing afternoons they put on headscarves and pulled their coats carefully about them, to hide the finery beneath. Poppy wore spectacles with gold-coloured trim on the orange frames, her special-occasion spectacles she called them. They always walked quickly away from Paper Street.
In the dance-rooms they had tea on the balcony as soon as they arrived, at about a quarter to three. There was a lot of scarlet plush on the balcony, and scarlet lights. There were little round tables with paper covers on them, for convenience. When they’d had tea and Danish pastries, and a few slices of Swiss roll, they descended one of the staircases that led to the dance-floor and stood chatting by a pillar. Sometimes men came up to them and asked if one or other would like to dance. They didn’t mind if men came up or not, or at least they didn’t mind particularly. What they enjoyed was the band, usually Leo Ritz and his Band, and looking at the other dancers and the scarlet plush and having tea. Years ago they’d have danced together, just for the fun of it, but somehow they felt too old for that, at fifty-four. An elderly man with rather long grey hair once danced too intimately with Alice and she’d had to ask him to release her. Another time a middle-aged man, not quite sober, kept following them about, trying to buy them Coca-Cola. He was from Birmingham, he told them; he was in London on business and had had lunch with people who were making a cartoon film for his firm. He described the film so that they could look out for it on their television screens: it was an advertisement for wallpaper paste, which was what his firm manufactured. They were glad when this man didn’t appear the following Tuesday.
Other men were nicer. There was one who said his name was Sidney, who was lonely because his wife had left him for a younger man; and another who was delicate, a Mr Hawke. There was a silent, bald-headed man whom they both liked dancing with because he was so good at it, and there was Grantly Palmer, who was said to have won awards for dancing in the West Indies.
Grantly Palmer was a Jamaican, a man whom neither of them had agreed to dance with when he’d first asked them because of his colour. He worked as a barman in a club, he told them later, and because of that he rarely had the opportunity to dance at night. He’d often thought of changing his job since dancing meant so much to him, but bar work was all he knew. In the end they became quite friendly with Grantly Palmer, so much so that whenever they entered the dance-rooms he’d hurry up to them smiling, neat as a new pin. He’d dance with one and then the other. Tea had to wait, and when eventually they sat down to it he sat with them and insisted on paying. He was always attentive, pressing Swiss roll on both of them and getting them cigarettes from the coin machine. He talked about the club where he worked, the Rumba Rendezvous in Notting Hill Gate, and often tried to persuade them to give it a try. They giggled quite girlishly at that, wondering what their husbands would say about their attending the Rumba Rendezvous, a West Indian Club. Their husbands would have been astonished enough if they knew they went afternoon tea-dancing in the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms.
Grantly Palmer was a man of forty-two who had never married, who lived alone in a room in Maida Vale. He was a born bachelor, he told the two wives, and would not have appreciated home life, with children and all that it otherwise implied. In his youth he had played the pins, he informed them with an elaborate, white smile, meaning by this that he’d had romantic associations. He would laugh loudly when he said it. He’d been naughty in his time, he said.
Whenever he talked like that, with his eyes blazing excitedly and his teeth flashing, Alice couldn’t help thinking that Grantly Palmer was a holy terror just like Poppy had been and still in a way was, the male equivalent. She once said this to Poppy and immediately regretted it, fearing that Poppy would take offence at being likened to a black man, but Poppy hadn’t minded at all. Poppy had puffed at a tipped Embassy and had made Alice blush all over her neck by saying that in her opinion Grantly Palmer fancied her. ‘Skin and bone he’d think me,’ Poppy said. ‘Blacks like a girl they can get their teeth into.’ They were on the upper deck of a bus at the time and Poppy had laughed shrilly into her cigarette smoke, causing people to glance amusedly at her. She peered through her gold-trimmed spectacles at the people who looked at her, smiling at them. ‘My friend has a fella in love with her,’ she said to the conductor, shouting after him as he clattered down the stairs. ‘A holy terror she says he is.’
He was cheeky, Alice said, the way he always insisted on walking off the dance-floor hand in hand with you, the way he’d pinch your arm sometimes. But her complaints were half-hearted because the liberties Grantly Palmer took were never offensive: it wasn’t at all the same as having a drunk pulling you too close to him and slobbering into your hair. ‘You’ll lose him, Alice,’ Poppy cried now and again in shrill mock-alarm as they watched him paying attentions to some woman who was new to the dance-rooms. Once he’d referred to such a person, asking them if they’d noticed her, a stout woman in pink, an unmarried shorthand typist he said she was. ‘My, my,’ he said in his Jamaican drawl, shaking his head. ‘My, my.’ They never saw the unmarried shorthand typist again, but Poppy said he’d definitely been implying something, that he’d probably enticed her to his room in Maida Vale. ‘Making you jealous,’ Poppy said.
The men whom Alice and Poppy had married weren’t at all like Grantly Palmer. They were quiet men, rather similar in appearance and certainly similar in outlook. Both were of medium build, getting rather bald in their fifties, Alice’s Lenny with a moustache, Poppy’s Albert without. They were keen supporters of Crystal Palace Football Club, and neither of them, according to Poppy, knew anything about women. The air-raid warden had known about women, Poppy said, and so did Grantly Palmer. ‘He wants you to go out with him,’ she said to Alice. ‘You can see it in his eyes.’ One afternoon when he was dancing with Alice he asked her if she’d consider having a drink on her own with him, some evening when she wasn’t doing anything better. She shook her head when he said that, and he didn’t ever bring the subject up again. ‘He’s mad for you,’ Poppy said when she heard of this invitation. ‘He’s head over heels, love.’ But Alice laughed, unable to believe that Grantly Palmer could possibly be mad for a corseted grandmother of fifty-four with unmanageable grey hair.