The Return Read online

  Cigars had made their appearance at midnight.

  ‘Go on,’ coaxed James, passing around a box of pure Havana cigars, ‘guaranteed to have been rolled between a virgin’s thighs!’

  Though they had heard it said a thousand times before, the men all roared with laughter.

  For conservative forty-six-year-old bankers like James, an evening such as this was perfect: safe, respectable and just as his parents would have enjoyed. In fact, it was no different from dinners that Mr and Mrs Cameron Senior had hosted. James once told Sonia that he remembered sitting on the landing peering through the banister rails and catching snippets of conversation that floated up from the dining room and the occasional burst of laughter as doors were opened and closed, his mother hurrying to and from the kitchen, delivering tureens of soup or casserole to her generously proportioned hostess trolley. His childhood spying on the staircase had always come to an end well before the guests left and the conviviality of it all lived on in his imagination. Sonia sometimes wondered if his parents had bickered over the debris of the evening, or how often his mother climbed wearily into bed at two in the morning beside a snoring husband.

  That previous week, it had not been until well after midnight that the guests had all departed. Faced with the depressing after-math of the dinner party, James had displayed a level of belligerence that had taken Sonia by surprise, given that it had been, as usual, his decision to fill their home with City colleagues and their shrill wives. It was not exactly her idea of fun either, dealing with glasses that were too fragile to go in the dishwasher, ashtrays full of smouldering dog-ends, tidemarks of soup now stuck to the bowls like green concrete, a tablecloth stained with splatters of claret, and white linen napkins covered with perfect lipstick kiss marks. Someone had spilled coffee onto the carpet and not mentioned it, and there was a splash of red wine on a pale armchair.

  ‘What’s the point of having a cleaner if we still have to scrub the dishes?’ exploded James as he attacked a particularly resistant pan and sent a tidal wave of water flying over the edge of the sink. Even if his guests had limited the amount they had drunk, James had not.

  ‘She only works during the week,’ said Sonia, mopping up the lake of greasy water, which lapped against James’s feet. ‘You know that.’

  James knew full well that the cleaner did not come on Friday nights, but it did not stop him from asking the same question every time he found himself at the sink doing battle with stubborn stains.

  ‘Bloody dinner parties,’ he swore, carrying in a third tray laden with glasses. ‘Why do we give them?’

  ‘Because we get invited to them and you like them,’ Sonia replied quietly.

  ‘It just goes round in bloody circles, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Look, we don’t have to give another one for ages. We’re owed lots of invitations.’

  Sonia knew not to pursue this line of conversation. It would be much better to button her lip.

  By one o’clock, the plates were filed in perfect order, facing right in the dishwasher like a row of soldiers. They had had their usual argument about whether or not the sauce should be rinsed off the plates before stacking them. James had won. The smart Worcestershire china already gleamed inside the now humming machine. The pans were spotless too and James and Sonia had nothing more to say to each other.

  Retiring to bed in Granada was so different. She loved the solitude of this narrow bed and being alone with her own reflections. There was such peace in this. The only sounds she could hear were reassuring: a moped buzzing in the street below, a muffled conversation amplified by the acoustics of the narrow street and the faintly rasping breath of her oldest friend.

  In spite of the light that still streamed in from the lamppost outside and even now a subtle brightening of the sky, suggestive of dawn breaking, her mind finally shut down, like a candle extinguished. She slept.

  Chapter Three

  ONLY A FEW hours later the women were woken by the insistent pulse of an alarm.

  ‘Rise and shine,’ said Sonia with mock cheerfulness, peering at the bedside clock. ‘Almost time to go.’

  ‘It’s only eight,’ groaned Maggie.

  ‘You haven’t changed your watch,’ replied Sonia. ‘It’s nine and we’re meant to be there at ten.’

  Maggie pulled her sheet up over her head while Sonia got up, showered and dried herself with a rough, threadbare towel. By nine twenty she was dressed. She had come to Granada for a purpose.

  ‘Come on, Maggie, let’s not be late,’ she said coaxingly. ‘I’m going to nip down for some coffee while you get dressed.’

  While she breakfasted on a limp croissant and tepid coffee, Sonia studied the map of Granada and located their destination. The dance school was not far away, but they would have to concentrate on taking the correct turnings.

  As she sipped her coffee, Sonia mused on how things evolved. It had all begun with a film. Without that, the dancing would never have happened. It was like a board game - she had not known where the next move would take her.

  One of the few things that James occasionally agreed to do on a weekday was to go to their local cinema, even if he was usually asleep well before the film’s denouement.The local south London picture house resolutely refused to show blockbusters, but had enough local clientele wanting to see high-brow, art-house films, to half fill it most nights. It was only a mile or so from where they lived, but the atmosphere was much edgier this side of Clapham Common: Caribbean takeaways, kebab houses and tapas bars competed with Chinese, Indian and Thai restaurants, all a contrast with the glassy metropolitan restaurants closer to their home.

  The side street into which they emerged after the film matched the hauntingly gloomy Almodóvar film they had watched. As they walked along Sonia noticed something that she hadn’t seen before - a brightly illuminated, flashing, Las Vegas-vulgar sign: ‘SALSA! RUMBA!’ it shrieked in neon. In the dimly lit street, there was something reassuringly cheerful about the sign.

  As they approached, they could hear music and see a suggestion of movement behind the frosted windows.They must have walked past this building on their way to the cinema but not even given it a second look. In the intervening two hours, the prosaic-looking nineteen fifties hall, squeezed into the space where a bomb had fallen during the Blitz, had come to life.

  As they passed, Sonia had taken in a smaller, illuminated sign:

  Tuesday - Beginners

  Friday - Intermediate

  Saturday - All Levels

  From inside came a scarcely audible but alluring Latin American beat. Even the faint suggestion of rhythm exerted a strong pull on her. The clipped sound of James’s heels retreating down the street confirmed to her that he had not even noticed it.

  Coming home from the office a few weeks later, she had, as usual, to force open the front door and push aside the embankment of paper that lay behind it. Leaflets clogged up the hallway as irritatingly as slush on winter roadsides - every type of take-away and home delivery imaginable, catalogues for DIY shops that she had no intention of visiting, offers of carpet cleaning at half price, English lessons that she did not need. But there was one leaflet that she could not throw into the recycling bin. On one side was a photo of the neon sign that had winked at her all those weeks ago and the words:‘Salsa! Rumba!’ On the reverse, were days and times for lessons and at the bottom of the page, rather endearingly, the following words: ‘Lern to dance. Dance to live. Live to dance.’

  As a little girl she had been taken to weekly ballet lessons and later on to tap dancing. She had given up dance school as a teenager but was always there until the bitter end at any school disco. Since they married, James had made it clear that dancing was not his ‘thing’ so the opportunity rarely arose. Now there was just the occasional black tie birthday party or a corporate event for James’s bank, where there might be a small square of parquet flooring and a DJ who played a few desultory disco hits from the nineteen eighties. It was not the real thing. The thought t
hat there was somewhere she could take dance lessons less than ten minutes’ drive from where she lived kept coming back to her. Perhaps she would pluck up the courage to go one day.

  That day came sooner than she had imagined. It was a few months later. They had planned to see a film and James had rung on her mobile just as she was arriving at the cinema to say that he was stuck in the office. Across the way, the neon lights of the dance school winked at her.

  The hall was as seedy on the inside as it appeared on the outside. Paint peeled from the ceiling and there was a waist-height tide-mark all the way round the room as though it had once filled up with water like a giant fish tank. This might have explained the unmistakable smell of damp. Six bare light bulbs hung down from the ceiling on irregular lengths of flex, and a few posters advertising Spanish fiestas were intended to cheer up the walls. Their tattiness only reinforced the general sense of decay. Sonia’s nerve almost failed her, but one of the instructors spotted her in the doorway. She was given a warm welcome, and was just in time for the start of a lesson.

  She found that she soon picked up the rhythm. Before the end of the evening she discovered that the movement could turn into something as subtle as a twitch of the hips rather than a meticulously counted sequence of steps. Two hours later she emerged, flushed, into the chilly evening air.

  For some reason that she could not have articulated to anyone, Sonia felt exhilarated. Even the music had filled her to the very top of her being. She was brimming - that was the only way she could describe it to herself - and without hesitation she signed up for a course. Each week the dancing thrilled her more. Sometimes she could hardly contain her exuberance. For an hour or so after it had finished, the mood of the dance class remained with her. There was an enchantment about dancing. Even a few minutes of it could leave her in a state of near-ecstasy.

  She loved everything about her Tuesday evening engagement with Juan Carlos, the stubby Cuban with the shiny, pointy-toed dancing boots. She loved the rhythm and the momentum and the way the music reminded her of sunshine and warm places.

  Whenever the instructor needed to, he would demonstrate the complex steps with his even tinier wife, Marisa, and whilst they did so their dozen or so pupils stood in silent, admiring rapture. It was the deftness of their steps and the ease with which they moved that reminded this small motley audience why they showed up each week. The truth was that, most of the time, women were dancing with women. The older of the only two men, Charles, had clearly been a good dancer in his youth. Now in his late sixties, his footwork was still feather light and he moved his partner firmly but with faultless rhythm. He never missed a beat and never failed to pick up the instructions they were given. Whenever Sonia danced with him, she knew that he dreamed of his wife who, she had gathered from a brief conversation, had died just over three years before. He was brave, sprightly, sweet.

  The other, a recently divorced and slightly overweight man in his forties, had taken up dancing as a way of meeting women. In spite of the healthy ratio of women to men, he was already finding this class to be a disappointment as there was no one here who was going to take the slightest interest. Each week he asked a different woman out for a drink with him and, one by one, they declined. It might have been something to do with the way he sweated profusely even during the slow dances. The girls were much happier dancing with each other than finding themselves cheek to cheek with desperation and a large perspiring frame.

  Over the following weeks, Sonia acknowledged that Tuesday was her favourite of all days, and her class the one unmissable commitment in her diary. What started as a distraction, grew into a passion. Salsa CDs littered the boot of her car, and on her journeys to work she mind-danced as she drove. Each week, she returned warm and flushed from the exhilaration of her lesson. On the occasions when he was already in, James would greet her with a patronising comment, bursting the balloon of her euphoria.

  ‘Good time at your dancing class?’ he enquired, glancing up from his newspaper. ‘How were all the little girls in their tutus?’

  James’s tone, though it pretended to be teasing, had a distinctively sarcastic undertone. Sonia tried not to be provoked, but felt obliged to deflect his criticism.

  ‘It’s just like a step class. Don’t you remember? I used to go to them all the time a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Mmm . . . vaguely,’ came the voice behind the newspaper. ‘Can’t see why you have to go every week, though.’

  One day she mentioned this new interest of hers to her oldest school friend, Maggie. The two girls had been inseparable for the seven years they were at grammar school together, and two decades on they were still almost as close, meeting several times a year for an evening in a wine bar. Maggie was full of enthusiasm for Sonia’s dancing. Could she come too? Would Sonia take her? Sonia was only too pleased. It could only make it more fun.

  The bond between them had been forged when they were eleven and never broken. Initially all that had brought them together was the simple fact that they had gained places at the same grammar school in Chislehurst, wore the same navy blazer that chafed at their necks and stiff flannel skirts that crackled round their knees. On the very first day of school they had been thrown together in the fourth row by the proximity of their surnames in the register: pale, little Sonia Haynes and tall, chatty Margaret Jones.

  From that day, they observed and admired the many differences in each other. Sonia envied Maggie’s relaxed attitude to her schoolwork and Maggie looked admiringly at her friend’s meticulous notes and neat annotated set texts. Maggie thought Sonia’s colour TV the most amazing thing in the universe, but Sonia would have swapped it any day for the platform shoes her friend was allowed to wear. Sonia wished she had liberal parents like Maggie’s, who let her stay out until midnight, while Maggie knew that she would have wanted to come home earlier if there was a dog curled up by a glowing fire. Whatever one of them had, to the other it seemed desirable.

  In every way, their lives could not have been more contrasted: Sonia was an only child and her mother was already in a wheelchair by the time she started secondary school. The atmosphere in her tidy semi-detached house was subdued. Maggie, on the other hand, lived in a ramshackle house with four siblings and easy-going parents who never seemed to mind if she was in or out.

  In their all-girls school, academic work absorbed little of their energy. Feuds, discos and boyfriends were their main preoccupations, and confessions and confidences were the oxygen of friendship. When Sonia’s mother was finally beaten by the multiple sclerosis that had been slowly destroying her for years, Maggie was the person Sonia cried with. Maggie more or less moved in with her and both Sonia and her father appreciated her presence. She lifted the terrible gloom of their grief. This happened in the girls’ lower sixth. In the following year, Maggie had her own crisis. She became pregnant. Her parents took the news badly and for the second time Maggie went to live with Sonia for a few weeks until they got used to the idea.

  In spite of this closeness, they went very separate ways when they left school. Maggie’s baby was born not long after - no one ever knew the name of the father, perhaps not even Maggie herself - and eventually she supported herself by teaching pottery part time in a couple of colleges and at night classes. Her daughter, Candy, was now seventeen, and had just started at art school. In a good light, with their big hoop earrings and quasi-bohemian style of dress, they could easily be mistaken for sisters. In a harsher one, some would look at Maggie and wonder why a woman her age was still dressing in Topshop. Though her long dark curls were almost identical to her daughter’s, years of smoking had indented her sun-tanned face with lines that revealed her true age. They lived together on the borders of Clapham and Brixton, close to a row of pound shops and the best Indian vegetarian restaurants this side of Delhi.

  Sonia’s lifestyle, a career in PR, an expensively upholstered home, and James were all very alien to Maggie, who had never hidden her concerns about her friend marrying such a ‘stu
ffed shirt’.

  Their lives might have gone in very different directions, but geographically they had remained close, their south of the river homes being only a few miles apart. For nearly twenty years they had diligently remembered each other’s birthdays and nourished their friendship with lengthy evenings over a few bottles of wine, when they told each other every detail of their lives until it was closing time, and then parted, not to be in touch again for weeks or even months.

  For the first half of her introductory salsa class in Clapham, Maggie sat out and watched. All the time she was tapping out the beat with her foot and rocking gently on her hips, never for a moment taking her eyes off the instructors’ feet as they demonstrated that night’s steps. Juan Carlos had the music turned up loud that night, and the insistent beat seemed to make the floorboards themselves vibrate. After the five-minute break, when everyone sipped water from their bottles and Sonia introduced her old friend to the other dancers, Maggie was ready to try the steps. A few of the regulars were sceptical that someone who had not been to the class before could join halfway through a term and expect to catch up; they feared that their own progress would be delayed.