After the Dance

mind this as she thought that he was making his way in the business. The first time he had tried to seduce her she had been very cold, so cold that she had managed to put him off. It had been in a wood where he had taken her in his new car: she could remember the brown autumnal leaves, and the river flowing through the glen with a desolate sound. He had been very persuasive using all the common arguments such as that it was good for one to have sex. He had been very handsome with his fair hair and fine blue eyes but she had not succumbed. She thought that innocence was important and felt that if she had given in she would have carried for a long time a load of guilt. In fact the sequence which showed the girl riding through the mountain stream had reminded her of the episode. He had been very passionate and also persuasive. He used to take her to parties and she had been so much in love or so infatuated that she had defied her parents and come into the house in the early hours of the morning, still remembering the dancing round the record player in the grey streamers of cigarette smoke. Once she had come in at four o’clock in the morning, only to find her mother, toothless, still awake and waiting for her. ‘After all we have done for you,’ hissed her mother through a mouth without dentures, ‘and you are just a common prostitute.’ As a matter of fact it hadn’t been like that at all. The party had been exciting and they had all danced to the music of the latest pop songs. She could still remember them with a certain bitterness. Not that she was the kind of person who was very interested in pop songs; she was more interested in classical music and conversation. But coming back in the whiteness of the morning under the million stars had been an experience, for during most of her life she had gone to bed at eleven at the latest, drawing the curtains carefully before removing her clothes.

In any case the whole romance had finished when she discovered that the man to whom she had been engaged had been seeing another girl all the time, a very common girl who really liked pop songs and worked in a supermarket. She had found it shattering that he should have preferred this girl to her. In fact this was the most painful part of the whole episode, that the girl should have such a cheap mind, and that her mother had been right all along. ‘It was lucky for you that you found out in time,’ her mother would say to her. For a long time she didn’t feel like going out but she had to since she was teaching and otherwise people would talk. So she had put on a brave face and pretended that the whole thing had been trivial but for weeks she would burst out crying for no particular reason. After all he had been very entertaining and they had gone to so many different places. What struck her most was that afterwards she would analyse the whole relationship and realise that without her knowing it he had been incredibly selfish. For instance he would only go to places which he himself suggested, football matches for instance because he was interested in football or pubs because he liked to drink. She would have much preferred to visit museums and art galleries but he didn’t like that so she had remained silent about her preferences. If once in a while they did go to an art gallery he would fidget and make rude remarks about the paintings. One thing she did discover during their relationship. At the beginning of it she liked representational paintings, at the end she preferred surrealist ones.

Before she started going out with him she had idealistic illusions about love and marriage. She wanted to have children, but legitimately. She imagined herself staying at home looking after the garden and watching her children playing among the flowers while he earned their living. But in fact he let the shop go to ruin and lived extravagantly because his mother would do anything for him and never saw any of his faults. His mother was a woman with blue rinsed hair who played cards a lot.

So that episode had ended ingloriously and the worst of it was that her ideas about love and marriage had been irretrievably soured. If ever a man showed any intention of taking her out she would analyse his motives quite coolly and in the end decide that she would prefer to be on her own. All the passion had been drained out of her. Most of the time after school she stayed in the house and prepared her lessons for the following day. She transferred all her love to her pupils who were all young children. And of course her parents were growing old. Her father had a stroke one day after he had been out working in the garden on a very hot summer’s day. Her mother had great difficulty tending him since she didn’t want to send him to hospital and eventually she herself had fallen ill. Her father had died first and then her mother and then she was left alone.

After the initial grief which had lasted for a long time she had felt free. She thought that with the money which she had carefully saved she would go to places that she had only read about but which she felt that she ought to visit. There would be no one peering over her shoulder, no one wondering when she would come home at night, she could come and go as she pleased. She had always wanted to go to Greece because she couldn’t believe that places such as Parnassus had ever existed or that