‘I’m not,’ said one old buffer lighting a cigar.
‘It is held that we are all one,’ the wife pressed on, and her opponent eyed her thoughtfully. Perhaps he was thinking her rather beautiful, as I was just then. He said, ‘You would have only one class only on the trains, I suppose?’
‘Classes on trains are neither here nor there,’ said Lydia, and the man eyed her for a further interval. He was trying to work up some sort of conclusion.
‘We all have to stick together,’ he said slowly. ‘But we are not all one.’
The group began to break up; Lydia turned to me.
I said, ‘Have you seen Bernadette?’
‘She’s around somewhere,’ she said, waving vaguely in the direction of the dark churchyard.
She did not seem to care for the job of chaperone, which surely did fall to the mother of a girl. I followed a line of white lights to the low railing that separated hotel from churchyard. The air was soft and thick and hot, and full of the chirping of crickets. I walked once around the church, which had a low yellow light burning inside it, and coming round to the far side, I saw a couple lying on the grass. They embraced while lying on their sides in a sort of horizontal dance hold. The woman was looking at me, so I said ‘Good evening’, and she replied politely, just as though she were not practically in the middle of the sex act. I stepped back over the railings, then back into the ballroom, where a speciality dance was in progress; what they called a ‘spot dance’, with a small number of couples showing off in a circle of admirers. Ann Poole was in there, so the Pooles had not gone home, in spite of Dougie’s condition. Ann danced with a regimental type – his shoes were exceptionally shiny, at any rate. Claudine Askwith was also there, also equipped with what appeared to be a young officer.
It was then that I saw Bernadette. She was dancing with the R.K. She seemed to keep pushing him away to contemplate him, and after every contemplation, she would whirl him around, then pull him tightly towards her, as though highly satisfied with the result of her examination. I wondered how differently this would look if they were in love. I believed it would look more or less the same. I could see nothing but a world of trouble waiting for the girl, and so, when the music stopped, I walked directly over to Bernadette and took her by the arm, peeling her away from the R.K., who was beginning to make a salaam of some sort towards me.
I said to Bernadette, ‘I have to speak to you urgently.’
‘What?’
‘In the garden.’
Quite surprisingly, she did follow me out, and Lydia was there on the lawn. ‘We’re going home now,’ I said to the two of them.
‘We are not,’ said Bernadette. ‘Why are we?’
‘Because the dance has ended.’
‘No it hasn’t.’
‘For you, it has.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Bernadette.
‘It is slightly,’ said Lydia, folding her arms and eyeing me. Well, they were in it together. Bernadette made a move back towards the dance floor.
‘We’re going!’ I shouted after her, at which she veered off towards the black tree. She picked a Chinese lantern off the tree branch as though it had been an apple, and spun around hurling it towards me. The little candle inside flew out through the top and made a falling arc of light, a small shooting star, before extinguishing itself on the grass. I was hit by the paper concertina and a spray of hot wax.
Tempting though it was to land her a clout, I knew that was out of the question – had been since she was nine or ten. I stood red-faced, pointing to the French windows. Lydia took her, holding on to her arm; I followed, and as we grimly skirted the dance floor, the band struck up. On the hotel driveway, two tongas were waiting. Bernadette was shouting about how we must be ‘screwy’ if we thought we could stop her seeing whoever she wanted to see; and how she hated all the ‘flat tyres’ she met at the ‘lethal’ supper dances at the De Grey Rooms, and the ‘grungy’ tea dances at Terry’s Emporium, these being the social highlights of York life that she had sampled and found wanting.
We got her into the tonga anyway, whereupon she fell silent, as the prisoners do when you put them in the Black Maria. She knew the game was up – at least for now. It was only when I took my seat in the tonga that I saw, through the window, William Askwith standing outside the front door of the hotel. He had resumed his hostly position, and was inspecting his pocket watch, albeit with face blank as usual. Who was he waiting for, now that the dance was almost over? As our tonga rolled away over the gravel, another was approaching. Both vehicles were going at a lick, and so I only had a fleeting glimpse of a large head slowly turning.