Too Beautiful to Dance Read online

  Catherine ignored the question and continued crossly, ‘At least I know how to make the best of a bad job. There’s always some consolation, there has to be. I’m sure he gave you, didn’t he, a really decent whack . . .’

  ‘Stop fishing, Catherine. It’s none of your business. Anyway, nothing’s sorted out as yet. There’s no formal agreement, the apartment isn’t even sold yet.’

  ‘Doesn’t stop me asking. I just need to know you’re all right, I do worry . . .’

  ‘No, you bloody well don’t. You want to know exactly how much money I squeezed out of him and all the gory details. Don’t forget how long I’ve known you, too.’

  Catherine grinned, unperturbed. ‘Well, you should have every penny, really, considering. You don’t want to think of her . . .’

  Sara opened her eyes wide, and looked at Catherine sharply. ‘No, I don’t want to think of her.’

  ‘Aren’t you the tiniest bit curious? To know how long, that kind of thing? Why when we all thought you had the ideal . . . it was such a shock . . .’

  ‘For someone who claims to be on my side, you sometimes trample upon my sensibilities with less than fairy footsteps.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She made a little moue with her red lipsticked mouth, her eyes still beady with the desire to root out more information. ‘Shift up.’ Catherine moved towards her and parked her elegantly clad bottom on the wall next to Sara, regarding the cottage with narrowed eyes. ‘It’s so—’

  ‘Small? Run-down?’

  ‘All of the above. It’s as if you are deliberately putting yourself into exile. You don’t know anyone here, what on earth is the attraction? A holiday cottage, I could understand, but to live here? All the time? Surely, with Matt’s money, you could have bought something much more . . . oh, I don’t know, pretty. Welcoming. I miss you. We all miss you. Noone can understand why you took off like that. Why not a cottage in Dorset? Or Kent? I mean, they count as the country, and at least they’re within shouting distance of London and you could pop up to see us whenever you wanted. What on earth are you going to do for pleasure? Anyway, don’t you want to live somewhere which is much more in keeping? Just because Matt’s gone doesn’t mean . . .’

  ‘In keeping with what?’

  ‘In keeping with your former standard of life.’

  ‘It wasn’t my life,’ Sara said, patiently.

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. It was Matt’s life. The apartment never felt like my home. But Matt was so enthusiastic, I just went along with him – after all, it was his money, he deserved it after so much bloody hard work and you know how good he is at persuading people to do what he wants. It was always pointless to disagree once he’d got the bit between his teeth.’ She shook her head, ruefully. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t dig my heels in more after we first looked round – this sounds rather mad, but the apartment didn’t want me, either. It had awful vibes.’ She laughed. ‘I’ve only just fully admitted that to myself. I found it cold, unwelcoming. I tried to convince myself that it was far more practical, much easier to lock up and leave if we ever got the time to travel or take longer holidays, much more convenient after our decrepit old houses.’ She smiled bitterly into her wine glass, her mouth turning down at the corners. ‘Buying the apartment was supposed to be our fresh start. Put all the troubled years behind us.’

  ‘After life in Brixton among the crack dealers.’

  ‘Exactly. And with the girls practically off to university, Matt promised he was going to start stepping back from the business, make a gradual exit, so we could travel, maybe even buy a house in France.’

  ‘Do you think he was having a breakdown?’

  ‘Why?’ Shocked, Sara looked across at Catherine, who shrugged, taking a sip of wine. The deep red of her lipstick left the trace of a smile upon the glass. ‘It must have been something like that, surely. It’s so out of character. He was the last person I would ever have expected to— It must have been a moment of madness. Why would he?’ She paused, regarding Sara intently, her eyes narrowed.

  Sara knew exactly what she was thinking. Trapped within that pause, like the beating wings of a moth, was an accusation Catherine would never actually acknowledge, even to herself. That it was somehow – although this was, surely, irrational – Sara’s fault. Her fault. That she had ‘let herself go’, taken her marriage for granted, not smartened herself up to keep pace with Matt’s rising star, a man who was fighting and winning the ageing process and seemed to become better-looking as the years passed. Had she committed – in Catherine’s eyes – the cardinal sin of ageing, without frantic resistance? Did a lifetime together count for nothing compared to smooth, elastic skin and eyes uncreased by age?

  Whatever Catherine said, however vociferously she denounced what Matt had done, the moth’s wings of this accusation beat behind her eyes. You are amusing, you are entertaining, intelligent company, you look well for your age, you have supported him through all the dramatic ups and downs of his career, you are the mother of the two children he adores – but you have let yourself become comfortably old. And that is not what men want, however intelligent they may be. It is your fault, your fault.

  Catherine, of course, pleaded not guilty to any such folly, although she currently had no man to please. She was in the process, at almost fifty, of being nipped, tucked, peeled like a banana and stretched into a facsimile of youth. At occasional unkind moments in a harsh light, Sara thought she was beginning to look a little drag-queen with her unnaturally unlined eyes and perfectly smooth forehead. Like a sheet of blank paper, Sara thought, devoid of expression.

  I’m not sure I want you here, she thought suddenly. This is my new place, my new life. You want to pick over the past, and place it in context, and make truths of something I cannot begin to understand or rationalize. For the moment, I just want to be. I want to pull on a pair of old jeans and cultivate my garden. I don’t want to carry over my past life to this place or care about what you deem important. Here is new, and innocent. I’m not ‘Poor Sara’ here. Why can’t you see that? That’s why I wanted it so badly. Because it was untouched, there were no fingerprints of the past. And now you are raising ghosts.

  ‘Let’s go inside.’ She drained her glass, and, standing up, she took a step towards the front door. Catherine remained seated.

  ‘You can’t hide from what’s happened,’ she said, frustration making her cruel. ‘You’ll have to face it one day.’

  Will I? Sara thought. Actually, she decided in that moment, I don’t think I will. I think I am going to wilfully bury my head in the sand and do exactly what I want to do, and refuse to allow myself any attempt to make sense of what has happened and just see what happens.

  ‘Hector.’ At her voice, he raised his head, his ears lifting in what he hoped was a fetching, come-hither manner. It worked. ‘Dinnertime,’ she said. At the familiar words, he bounded to his feet and shimmied sideways up to her, thrusting his head against her thigh. His besotted eyes fixed on hers, smiling his ridiculous lopsided Labrador grin, the soft dark skin of his mouth curling up over his sharp white teeth.

  ‘Dingbat,’ she said fondly, her hand resting on his broad, warm head. ‘Noodle.’ He trotted on ahead of her, thick tail wagging, through the front door, and down the narrow passageway which led to the tiny kitchen at the back of the house, where his bowl lived next to his wicker basket. He had swiftly learnt the geography of the house, and the moment he’d flopped down at her feet on his blanket the very first night, the cottage had become home. His, at the moment, was the only company she craved. Within his calm deep brown eyes lay her sanity.

  It was, she had to admit, a dreadful kitchen, long and thin, and more like a lean-to than an actual room, with a corrugated-iron roof. Rain sounded like an aerial bombardment. Catherine had reserved her greatest disapprobation for the kitchen, as Sara had shown her round. ‘You can’t cook in here,’ she said, horrified.

  ‘Why not? There’s a cooker –’ Sara gestured at the
truly ancient Baby Belling stove resting on a rickety white cupboard with a cracked glass door ‘– and I brought the microwave from home.’ It stood on the work surface at the side of the sink, its sleek steel lines gleaming incongruously against the 1960s beige Formica cupboards.

  ‘Ha ha. It’s insanitary. That’s not an oven, it’s a –’ she peered at its small metal label closely ‘– Good God, I haven’t seen one of those in years.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ Sara said, rattled. ‘I’m not going to have to live with all this for long. I’m going to apply for planning permission to extend . . . next time you come down you won’t recognize the place.’ In her mind’s eye she could see the kitchen she wanted, three times as big, with part of the roof glass, like an atrium, and French windows leading out onto the small wilderness garden at the back, facing the lane.

  Over the lane, behind the tumbledown stone wall, spring shades of purple and moss green moorland, deep in bracken and brambles, rose steeply, before merging into lush pasture. This pastureland, dotted with impossibly white fluffy sheep, rolled over the crest of the hill and then fell away like the undulating folds of a blanket into a neat patchwork of stone-walled fields in the valley beyond. A timeless landscape, unchanged for centuries.

  The front two rooms of the cottage presented a major challenge, two tiny parlours with ugly mean little hearths. She’d have to find an architect, someone to help her work out a way of opening up the front of the house, knocking down the walls to create one big room. The small windows would have to be enlarged without ruining the façade of the cottage to maximize the incredible views over the cliffs with the water stretching away to the mist of the horizon, where the sea met the sky and became one.

  At first she had thought she might be frightened, overawed, by such a vast expanse of nature without fellow habitation around her, but when she stood in the front garden, one hand on the gate, as the estate agent put his key into the lock of the front door before her, she looked out across the sea and felt as if something deep inside her had connected and found a home. This was the right place.

  ‘Why should I have left him years ago?’ They were sitting, with their feet up on one of the remaining unopened boxes, deep into the second bottle of wine. Outside, the sky was midnight blue, edged with indigo.

  ‘Because you look more peaceful than I have seen you look for years. Not that I think this is a good idea,’ Catherine added hastily. ‘Why don’t you keep this place, as you are obviously determined to, as a holiday cottage, and then once you get the settlement you can buy a flat in London? I hate the thought of you pottering around down here, alone. You must let us help. Stop being so fucking brave,’ she said, leaning forward and touching Sara’s knee in a tipsy gesture of affection.

  Sara smiled. In her way Catherine meant well, she really did want her to be happy and it was understandable that she had been alarmed by her abrupt flight. It was also understandable that she wanted to pick over the drama of the situation, and store away for future use the nuggets of riveting information due a best friend, such as whether Matt had begged her to take him back, and how he had reacted to her decision to leave so suddenly. One of the reasons why she was such entertaining company was because she always knew everything about everyone. You could always trust Catherine to come out with the question normal people would think too indelicate to ask, but desperately wanted to know. As a young girl, she’d revelled in drama and liked to place herself at the very centre of whatever action was going on. It was no surprise, Sara reflected, that she had led such a turbulent life.

  ‘I’m not brave,’ she said. ‘I’m surviving.’

  I wonder, Sara pondered, turning over in bed an hour later, beneath her heavy quilt, if this peacefulness comes from the fact that, now, I have to live my life by my rules alone. I always thought that having no one else to consider or put first would be the most terrifying prospect. Instead, I am beginning to think it might be a life of quite infinite possibility.

  Chapter Two

  Richard was very obviously drunk. He slumped, half leaning against the wall in the hall, one hand resting on the dimmer switch as if he might suddenly plunge the entrance hallway into pitch darkness. In the other hand swung a glass of red wine, tipped at such an angle it was perilously close to spilling out on to the pale blond floorboards they had had bleached and varnished when they moved into the apartment, at great expense.

  You are not a happy man, Sara thought, as she walked past him, avoiding his eyes, pushing open one of the arched oak double doors to the main living area with a practised foot, holding in both hands a wide tray of artfully arranged canapés. Asparagus rolled in Parma ham, king prawns in filo pastry, tiny croutons topped with beluga caviar and smoked salmon blinis. None of which she had had to make herself, thank goodness, canapés, were such twiddly, time-consuming little things to create. They had been prepared by the catering firm she had booked months before, in preparation for Matt’s fiftieth birthday.

  Not that he looked fifty. Sara glanced over at him, leaning elegantly, an elbow resting at shoulder height, against one of the marble pillars in the open-plan living room which stretched almost the entire length of the apartment, as she moved through their guests. She smiled as they took canapés off the tray with difficulty, between their fingers and thumbs, trying not to drop bits of food into their glasses. She saw Matt glance over at her, and knew he would be annoyed that she was handing out the canapés herself, when there was a team of waitresses standing idle in the kitchen. Although he was now sufficiently wealthy never to have to work again, he loathed the thought of being ripped off and was obsessional about getting value for money. He could never resist a deal. Sara teased him, saying it was part of his northern upbringing, that he always had to be the one who came out on top. Buying his new Range Rover (his fiftieth birthday present to himself, with all the bells and whistles such as satellite navigation and in-car DVD screens), he had spent hours on the Internet finding the lowest price. He had to feel he was in control. The winning, to Matt, was all. Many of the people he came up against in business found him abrasive and Sara was the only person who knew best how to deflect his temper. His staff lived in fear of his black moods and sudden rages, but then within moments the storm would have passed and he would be expansively charming once more. Sara alone knew his mercurial nature stemmed from the misery of his childhood, and forgave him.

  From the moment he had exploded into her life, plucking her out of her safe middle-class existence, she had sold her soul to this attractive, frustrating, complex man. As her mother said on her wedding day, life with Matt would be anything but boring.

  She did not want to drink any more this evening and handing out the food gave her an excuse. Never a particularly successful drinker, her head began to reel after two or three glasses of wine. The easiest way was to keep busy, to have something for your hands to do. Matt liked to drink, and over the years she had found it far easier to remain relatively sober to smooth down any ruffled edges. Drink brought out his chippiness, the belligerence simmering beneath the urbane exterior.

  As she glanced over at Matt, he took a long drag of his cigarette, blowing the smoke out over the head of the slim woman standing in front of him. Rachael was one of Sara’s friends, made when their daughters were together at primary school. Sara knew Matt found her dull. She was married to a banker in the City, a man Matt would refer to as a tosser ex-public schoolboy, a chortling buffer with a receding hairline and expanding waist, tonight in his ‘off work’ uniform of striped shirt, moss-green corduroy trousers and suede brogues.

  Matt caught her eye as he looked up, and grimaced, turning his mouth down at the corners, which meant in their language, help, I’m trapped. Sara raised her eyes to the ceiling, and he smiled.

  He was wearing a beautiful tailored black Armani jacket, a white collarless shirt and dark designer jeans. His dark hair, once jet black, was now flecked with charcoal. He kept it cut very short and standing up slightly from his forehead. It sui
ted him, as most things suited him. With his unlined olive skin and tall slim build, he could easily pass for a man ten years younger.

  New clients introduced to Sara would look from one to the other in surprise. How did a sleek, expensively groomed man like Matt fit with a wife like Sara? A comfortable-looking woman, attractive, but thickening around the middle, whose blonde hair, escaping from a careless bun, had been allowed to fade to a mix of pale grey and lemon grass, who tended to wear clothes for comfort, rather than style. Her eyes were beautiful, hazel with a rim around the iris of deep chocolate brown, but they were surrounded by the fine laughter lines of age, the skin beneath beginning to puff and bag. Both she and Matt now needed glasses for reading, but whereas Matt opted for a slim pair of oval rimless designer frames, she chose half-moon tortoise-shells, which hung, generally forgotten, on a chain around her neck.

  While many of Sara’s friends swore by Botox or even, like Catherine, had gone the whole hog and had a facelift, she had no desire to meddle with nature. She could see, of course she could, that they now looked remarkably unlined for their age, but she thought they no longer looked like themselves. They looked like beautiful dolls, permanently wide-eyed as if they had just sat on a pin. Was that to appear youthful, to have an expression of permanent surprise?

  It was not, however, entirely correct of her friends to say that Sara did not care at all about the ageing process. She didn’t like becoming plump, or lined, or having knees which emitted gunshot noises if she stood up too suddenly – she just had better things to do than try to hold back time by joining a gym or having endless, expensive beauty treatments. Besides, Matt never complained, or seemed to notice her rolls of flab. Their love-making was constant, reassuring and highly pleasurable. They also seemed to be alone amongst their married friends in that they actually talked to each other and enjoyed each other’s company. At no point could she remember ever having been bored when she was with him, or feeling that they had run out of things to say. Given a choice, she would rather be with Matt than anyone else.