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.
Without much warning, Poppy died. During a summer holiday at Mrs Roope’s Prospect Hotel she’d complained of pains, though not much, because that was not her way. ‘First day back you’ll see Dr Pace,’ Albert commanded. Two months later she died one night, without waking up.
After the death Alice was at a loss. For almost fifty years Poppy had been her friend. The affection between them had increased as they’d watched one another age and as their companionship yielded more memories they could share. Their children – Alice’s Beryl and Ron, and Poppy’s Mervyn – had played together. There’d been the business of Mervyn’s emigration to Canada, and Alice’s comforting of Poppy because of it. There’d been the marriage of Ron and then of Beryl, and Poppy’s expression of Alice’s unspoken thought, that Ron’s Hilda wasn’t good enough for him, too bossy for any man really, and Poppy’s approval of Beryl’s Tony, an approval that Alice shared.
Alice had missed her children when they’d gone, just as Poppy had missed Mervyn. ‘Oh Lord, I know, dear!’ Poppy cried when Alice wept the day after Beryl’s wedding. Beryl had lived at home until then, as Ron had until his marriage. It was a help, being able to talk to Poppy about it, and Poppy so accurately understanding what Alice felt.
After Poppy’s death the silence she’d prevented when Alice’s children had grown up fell with a vengeance. It icily surrounded Alice and she found it hard to adapt herself to a life that was greyer and quieter, to days going by without Poppy dropping in or she herself dropping in on Poppy, without the cups of Maxwell House coffee they’d had together, and the cups of tea, and the biscuits and raspberry-jam sandwich cake, which Poppy had been fond of. Once, awake in the middle of the night, she found herself thinking that if Lenny had died she mightn’t have missed him so much. She hated that thought and tried, unsuccessfully, to dispel it from her mind. It was because she and Poppy had told one another everything, she kept saying to herself, the way you couldn’t really tell Lenny. But all this sounded rather lame, and when she said to herself instead that it was because she and Poppy had known one another all their lives it didn’t sound much better: she and Lenny had known one another all their lives, too. For six months after the death she didn’t go to Bingo, unable to face going on her own. It didn’t even occur to her to go afternoon dancing.
The first summer after the death, Alice and Lenny and Albert went as usual to the Prospect Hotel in Southend. There seemed to the two men to be no good reason why they shouldn’t, although when they arrived there Albert was suddenly silent and Alice could see that he was more upset than he’d imagined he would be. But after a day he was quite himself again, and when it wasn’t necessary to cheer him up any more she began to feel miserable herself. It wasn’t so much because of the death, but because she felt superfluous without Poppy. She realized gradually, and the two men realized even more gradually, that on previous holidays there had been no conversation that was general to all four of them: the men had talked to each other and so had their wives. The men did their best now to include Alice, but it was difficult and awkward.
She took to going for walks by herself, along the front and down the piers, out to the sea and back again. It was then, that summer at Southend, that Alice began to think about Grantly Palmer. It had never occurred to her before that he didn’t even know that Poppy had died, even though they’d all three been such good friends on Tuesday afternoons at the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms. She wondered what he thought, if he’d been puzzled by their sudden absence, or if he still attended the dance-rooms himself. One night in the Prospect Hotel, listening to the throaty breathing of her husband, she suddenly and quite urgently wanted to tell Grantly Palmer about Poppy’s death. She suddenly felt that it was his due, that she’d been unkind not ever to have informed him. Poppy would wish him to know, she said to herself; it was bad that she’d let down her friend in this small way. In the middle of that night, while still listening to Lenny’s breathing, she resolved to return to the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms and found herself wondering if Leo Ritz and his Band would still be playing there.
