Our Dancing Days. Lucy English

      Tessa moved her feet in the bath water. Ripples ran up her body. She moved her feet again and more ripples ran over her. She was lean and muscular. She used her body as a means of transport. These days she rarely connected it with pleasure.

      Dee-Dee woke in the middle of their first night at St John’s.

      ‘Tessy, where’s the loo? I can’t remember, I’m dying for a piss.’

      ‘Oh, Dee … it’s on the other side and up some stairs.’

      ‘That’s miles away … I can’t find the torch … Tessy, there might be spiders …’

      ‘Shhhhh.’ But Don was fast asleep. They looked at him. He was lying on his back, both arms stretched out.

      ‘He’s exhausted,’ said Tessa, and they giggled.

      ‘Oh Tessy, don’t, I’ll wet myself.’

      ‘You’ll have to go outside.’

      ‘Somebody might see me.’

      ‘Dee-Dee you are a dope, we’re in the middle of nowhere.’

      ‘Will you come with me?’

      ‘If I must.’

      Wrapped up in one blanket, they stepped into the night.

      ‘Oh, look! Wow!’ The sky was filled with stars. There was a thin new moon and the constellations were clear, each star a pinprick of brilliance. The Milky Way reeled over the Hall.

      ‘It’s trippy!’ said Dee-Dee, breathless. ‘Oh, I must have this piss.’

      ‘Now I want to go too.’

      They squatted by the wall. Their two streams of urine merged into one and ran gurgling down a drain. They stayed there gazing at the heavens.

      ‘I got used to squatting in India,’ said Dee-Dee. ‘Everybody squats … the stars there were … cosmic. Jeremy tried to tell me the names but I’ve forgotten.’

      ‘I used to have a book about stars, that one like a W is Cassiopeia and that’s Taurus the bull, and that’s Hercules …’

      ‘I can’t see it.’

      ‘In the book there were pictures, it made it clearer.’

      They held hands under the blanket.

      ‘Don’s lovely, isn’t he?’ said Dee after a while.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Do you think it will be like this every night?’

      ‘Why not?’ and they laughed nervously.

      ‘Are you in love with him?’ asked Dee-Dee.

      ‘I don’t know, really … but I like him … are you?’

      ‘I don’t think so, but he’s special, you know.’

      ‘Well, we’ll share him then.’

      ‘Until?’

      ‘Until what?’

      Then a shooting star skidded across the sky and disappeared behind the barns.

      ‘Ohhhh!’ exclaimed Dee-Dee.

      ‘It’s a sign,’ said Tessa.

      Tessa drove to St John’s. It was a clear Sunday morning. There was much less traffic than the day before. The fields and villages flashed past without interruption. No shoppers, no energetic families. People were still in bed or reading the papers at breakfast. Yawning, stretching. Only much later would start the rush to the sea.

      A sunny day, slow-moving puffy clouds, hardly a breeze. It was going to be hot. Farmers were deciding to start the harvest. Combines heaved down the narrow roads of the Saints, their drivers shut away in airless glass. Modern harvesting is dusty, noisy, unpleasant. But around St John’s the fields were quiet; after all, it had been an unpredictable summer. The wheat was golden, its grains plump and ripe. It was doomed.

      Mirabelle was dressed and immaculate. She looked like she had been up for hours and her manner was just as brightly brittle. Tessa felt over-casual in old jeans and a white shirt. Mirabelle was in dusky pink with matching shoes and nails. Her lips were also pink. They framed her smiling teeth.

      ‘What a lovely day … I do love the sun … do you want coffee?’

      ‘Later perhaps.’

      ‘At eleven? Yes? I’ll bring it to you. Will you be in the same place?’

      ‘No …’ Tessa frowned at the Hall. The sun glinted on the church windows. St John’s appeared bold, defiant almost. ‘Does the walled garden still exist?’

      ‘The parterre?’

      ‘You could call it that … I’ll start there, it’s an interesting foreground.’

      ‘Bernard says the design is Tudor …’ she paused. ‘I’m afraid you might not see Bernard, he’s gone to Belgium. He’s after a clock … this is always happening. I hoped he’d be back for the holiday, but … well, there it is.’ She shook as if struck by a cold wind. ‘I might go out later … I think the gardener’s in, but he won’t disturb you.’

      The walled garden was set some distance from the house on the other side of the barns. It was the old kitchen garden and even in Geoffrey’s day Molly’s ageing Charlie cultivated it, and it had not succumbed to the brambles and nettles that took over the rest of the grounds. It was the first section of St John’s they tackled. Later, when other land was cleared, they laid out the walled garden as a Tudor knot, with herbs, salad crops and soft fruit, bordered by low box hedges. It was still how Tessa remembered it except the grass paths had been replaced by sterile gravel. There was a statue in the centre, a marble Victorian lady pretending to be Greek. Tessa sat by her, and looked towards the Hall, framed by the arch in the wall.

      That first summer, when Adam and his two Eves lived in Paradise. They knew little about gardening. Don sold his van to buy tools and they sowed beans too early and peas too late. Consequently they lived off bread and cheese and apples. But it was summer and it was glorious. They swam in the moat, sunbathed nude, walked everywhere and discovered empty churches and cautious farmers. They carried bagfuls of shopping three miles. They had bonfires every night, burning away dregs of years left behind by Geoffrey. They hacked at brambles, burnt those too, and in the walled garden dug up weeds and also things they had just planted.

      By the fire in the great hall in the evenings Don read Huxley’s Island.

      ‘Listen to this. He says here that everybody in Pala has to dig for two hours a day. Well, he’s right, isn’t he, digging’s so … physical, isn’t it? Digging’s the only work one should be doing, not sitting at a desk, where does that get you? It makes you senile.’

      ‘I’m knackered,’ said Tessa.

      ‘Of course you are, but don’t you see it’s doing you good. Winstanley had something to say about it, now where’s Winstanley?’

      Wherever Don was there was always a book. The great hall was filling up with dusty tomes rescued from other parts of the house. Winstanley was underneath Paradise Lost.

      ‘Listen to this … Tessa? Dee-Dee? Is she asleep? This is about the diggers: “Let everyone that intends to live in peace get themselves with diligent labour to till, digge and plow the common and barren land to get their bread with righteous moderate working among all moderate minded people. This prevents the evil of idleness.”