As a child, FIONA HARPER was constantly teased for two things: having her nose in a book and living in a dream world. Things haven’t changed much since then, but at least she’s found a career that puts her runaway imagination to use.

Fiona lives in London, but her other favourite places to be are the Scottish Highlands and the English countryside on a summer’s afternoon. The Summer We Danced follows the success of The Little Shop of Hopes and Dreams and The Doris Day Vintage Film Club.

Fiona loves to hear from readers and you can contact her through fiona@fionaharper.com, find her on Facebook page (Fiona Harper Romance Author) or tweet her @FiHarperAuthor.

For Carol, with much love.

Thank you for your care and warmth, for your grace and creativity.

It’s been a blessing to have you in my life.

Acknowledgements

I have a lot of people to thank for their help with this book, especially as a lot of the research was very hands-on (or should I say “feet on”?).

Firstly I’d like to thank my lovely editor Anna Baggaley, for always always nudging me to go deeper. Every book is better for it. Thank you also to the rest of the wonderful team at Harlequin and for all their hard work in getting this book into readers’ hands. I really appreciate all that you do and your tireless enthusiasm.

Much gratitude too to my agent, Lizzy Kremer, who is always the voice of encouragement and sanity when I need it most.

I couldn’t have written this book without the help of the teachers and fellow pupils who made learning to tap dance so fun. I want to mention not just Hannah and Emily, who got me tapping for the first time in my life at Sara Phillips School of Dancing, but all the ladies in the adult tap class there, who were always so graceful and elegant while I was flailing away at the back of the class. (They say write what you know, and the scenes where Pippa is lost and tying her feet in knots were definitely based on personal experience!) Many thanks especially to Sam, who always had time to break down a step for me while we were waiting for our next turn across the floor.

Huge thanks also to everyone at the Thursday night classes at the Churchill Theatre, especially our amazing teacher, Lexi Bradburn of Sole Rebel Tap. I’m not giving it up, so you’re stuck with me, even now the book is finished! I’d also like to express my gratitude to Teresa Tandy from Cocarola for teaching me how to foxtrot, even if I did keep forgetting I should let her lead and what to do about corners.

A massive thank you to my great writer friends: Donna Alward, Heidi Rice, Susan Wilson, Daisy Cummins and Iona Grey. Thanks for listening to me moan on when things aren’t going right, celebrating with me when they are and providing laughter and lots of wine no matter what!

An extra special hug to my sister Kirsteen Coupar, who gives sage advice when it comes to writing tangles and can make me laugh harder than any other person on the planet. Thank you also to my lovely friends Nicola Ingle and Rachel Carter for your encouragement and friendship. It’s a blessing to know both of you.

Last but definitely not least, I have to thank my husband who didn’t moan a bit when I kept flitting off to dance classes almost every night of the week, and my daughters who didn’t make fun of me when they found me tapping away in the kitchen following YouTube videos instead of cooking their dinner. (Or occasionally trying to do both at once!) I love you all loads. You give me the joy I need to keep me dancing.

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Copyright

One

I inhaled deeply as I raised myself on to my toes with the poise and concentration of an Olympic diver. I swayed precariously, but steadied myself, knowing that everything—everything—depended on me keeping perfectly still for the next few seconds.

I waited, eyes half-scrunched closed, even though they were fixed on the digital numbers flickering rapidly between my big toes.

Any moment …

Any moment now the display would stop jumping around and deliver its verdict. My heart was thudding so hard I could swear the noise was bouncing off the tiled walls of my bathroom.

And then, just as I thought it was never going to happen, it did.

I stared down at the pale-green digits lighting up my bathroom scales in horror.

‘No way!’

I knew Christmas had been bad. I knew that, despite my promises to myself to have just a few naughty things, as the festivities had progressed my cravings had gained momentum, eventually sweeping me away on a relentless tide I’d been helpless to resist. (I’d never been a strong swimmer.)

The green digits flashed at me, blinking their accusation. I jumped backwards off the scales. The stupid thing was malfunctioning, that was all. Probably just sulking because I’d neglected it for most of November and all of December, a bit like Roberta did after I’d been away.

My cat always put on a show of being mortally offended if I dared leave her alone overnight, giving me the cold shoulder for at least half an hour before she finally leapt on to my lap, kneading my thighs with deliberately unsheathed claws and purring like an old-fashioned petrol lawnmower.

Not that I expected my bathroom scales to purr back at me when they’d had a chance to calm down. However, a little love in the form of a decent number wasn’t too much to ask, was it? After all, we’d be bosom buddies again in no time, especially now January’s cold light was intent on revealing my every lump and bump.

I glanced in the mirror, something I’d studiously avoided doing over the festive season. My cheeks were definitely chubbier, making the pixie cut I’d had back in the summer—the I’m-divorced-and-I’m-embracing-my-new-life cut—seem like a moment of insanity rather than a declaration of freedom. I ignored the healthy gloss on my short, almostblack hair, the way the cut made my eyes look huge, and focused instead on the fact my cheekbones had definitely been swallowed up by the sheer volume of mince pies I’d consumed.

Ugh. Disgusting.

I’d had a good excuse, though. I’d thought the second Christmas without Ed—the first since our divorce had been finalised—would be easier. Less lonely. And maybe it would have been, if he hadn’t been posting pictures on Facebook of his fabulous Caribbean Christmas with the Tart.

Now, before you start lecturing, I know I should have blocked him, but I needed to see those pictures, to remind myself of reality, to remind myself I should stop snivelling about the way life had turned out and be glad it was the Tart who had to deal with his smelly socks, unrealistic demands, and toxic under-the-duvet fumes now. Even a thatched bungalow on an Antiguan beach couldn’t make that stench romantic.

I was better off without him.

I had to be, because he wasn’t coming back.

Anyway, as Big Ben had chimed last night I’d toasted Roberta with a large glass of Baileys and vowed that today would be my turning point. This would be the year of the new, improved Pippa. The Pippa who could finally get into a pair of skinny jeans without herniating something. The Pippa who was going to rise phoenix-like and resplendent from the ashes of her marriage and transform into a glorious being.

I pondered that for a few moments but then made the mistake of looking down and discovered I could no longer see my toes past my rather wobbly midriff. I prodded the bulge with a finger and it rippled.

That’s the downside of stripping down to your underwear to weigh yourself. What you save in precious ounces, you gain back in reality. No longer could I ignore the fact I didn’t just have a muffin top, but a whole Victoria sponge sitting round my middle.

Maybe a phoenix was the wrong image—the wrong logo—for my marvellous rebirth. Maybe a butterfly would be a better fit. Because I clearly had the whole roly-poly cocoon thing going on.

While I’d been thinking, the bathroom scales had turned themselves off in a huff. I jabbed the button again with my big toe and waited for the display to do its usual warm-up dance and settle back to zero.

I’d try again. Just to double-check. After all, the battery might be going.

Once again I shifted my weight on to my toes, because I knew that leaning forward would cause the scales to dip up to half a pound. I rose to the right spot, the point of balance where I was far enough forward to see the jostling numbers go down a little, but not so far that I toppled over and faceplanted into the bathroom wall.

Oh, yay! Lower this time … Not even in the teens, but closer to—

Hang on. No.

Don’t do that! Stop climbing!

‘No, no, no, no, no!’

The scales had returned to exactly the same number they’d been at the first time. A number they had never dared show before. Not just double figures, but higher. The one that was unlucky for some, and definitely not good news for me.

I couldn’t even comfort myself I was the national average dress size any more. I’d waved goodbye to that number in my rear-view mirror some time around mid-December.

‘Traitor,’ I whispered as I stepped off the scales and threw my pyjamas back on. Before the display went dark, the offending numbers seemed to linger just a little longer than normal, mocking me.

‘That’s it!’ I muttered as I tied up my dressing gown. ‘I’ll give you one more chance tomorrow, but after that I’m off to Argos for a replacement and you’re going down the dump!’

The scales sat there, unblinking in their innocence, as I stomped from the bathroom.

Two

After that lovely little episode, I really didn’t want to leave the house. I’d have much rather hidden myself away under my fleecy blanket on the sofa and watched one of the DVDs Roberta had bought me for Christmas than have family round for a big New Year’s Day lunch.

Okay, okay … I knew the cat hadn’t actually opened up an Amazon account and ordered me a couple of Hollywood’s golden oldies, but there’d been precious little else under the tree this year, just a lovely scarf from my older sister, Candace.

It probably didn’t help that I’d put the scraggy little fir in exactly the same spot Mum and Dad had always had a tree when the cottage had been our family home. Present-day reality was competing hard with memories of so many happy Christmases here, filled with both laughter and bickering. Now Mum and Dad were gone the house seemed far too quiet, even if I chattered away to Roberta as I tried to reacclimatise to seeing the cottage not as just ‘Mum and Dad’s’ but as my new home.

I sighed. When I’d dreamed of how my life would turn out when I’d been younger, this was so not what I’d been expecting. I’d always had some half-conscious idea that by the grand old age of thirty-seven my life would be like a John Lewis Christmas ad—perfect and stylish, grown-up and full of warmth. But instead of the loving husband and cheekily cute children I’d imagined, I was all on my own, only a cat and a few presents I’d wrapped myself in cheap Rudolph paper to keep me company. I’d even had to fill my own stocking (mostly with chocolate, save for a wrinkled satsuma I’d nicked from the fruit bowl) and put it at the end of my own bed.

I stared at the gaping hole under my Christmas tree. It seemed to grow bigger and darker the more I looked at it.

Ed had always been terrible with money but good with presents. There’d been an explosion of badly-wrapped parcels under our tree when we’d been married. Things he’d splashed out on that we probably couldn’t afford, not on a musician’s pay, anyway. I allowed myself to miss that, at least, even if I’d forbidden myself from missing the man himself any more.

My ex had been the lead singer of a band called The Shamed, who’d had one big hit and a couple of not-so-huge ones back in the early noughties. They’d been making an okay living, though, doing gigs all over the UK, especially on the university circuit.

But then a contestant on X Factor had covered one of their songs, leading to a flurry of iTunes sales and things had started to change. Ed, who’d never let common sense get in the way of his career planning, had started dreaming of bigger record deals and arena tours. He’d even boasted about pinching Take That’s comeback crown. So when the opportunity to do a late-night reality show on a minor-league cable station had come his way it had been too much to resist.

He’d spent almost three months locked up in a house that looked like a mini-version of Ikea—without the nice meatballs—battling it out with other D-list celebs for the grand prize of … well, not a ton of money, that was for sure … but, for the lure of resurrecting his profile and the band’s career.

And it had worked, thanks to an infatuation with a glamour model almost half his age. The story had made the front pages of the tabloids and internet gossip columns. Thanks to his new-found notoriety, the band had signed with a new record company and were planning a greatest hits album. Ed had got everything he’d ever wanted. It didn’t seem fair.

I sighed. That was it. I couldn’t stand staring at the tree any longer. It was coming down this evening when my sister and her family had gone home. I had to leave the past behind, stop dwelling on what couldn’t be changed and move forward.

Speaking of moving forward, it was probably time I got both myself and the house ready …

I spotted Roberta, stretched lazily out on the sofa with her eyes half-closed, and felt a stab of jealousy, but I still rubbed her tummy before I jogged up to my bedroom to get dressed.

I opened my wardrobe and sighed. I didn’t even bother perusing the left end of the rail, clothes from before the divorce: colourful, pretty and way, way too small. Instead I stared at the right-hand side of my wardrobe, where there were flowing fabrics, dark tones and a healthy amount of elastic. My ‘wardrobe of doom’, as I’d christened it because, basically, anything from it would be a good fashion choice for the Grim Reaper.

I pulled a pair of charcoal trousers from a hanger and reached for one of my ubiquitous black tops, then ran downstairs to do some last-minute tidying.

Just as I stuffed a pair of socks I’d found behind the sofa into the sideboard, the doorbell rang. I headed for the door, and on a last-moment impulse, I grabbed the scarf Candy had given me for Christmas and looped it round my neck. It provided just the right splash of colour to my black-and-grey combo, the soft pinks and neutral tones complementing it perfectly. How did she do that? If I didn’t know better I’d swear my sister had rigged the house we’d inherited from our parents with secret video cameras.

I pasted on a wide, I’m-happy-to-see-you smile, and swung the door open so enthusiastically that the wreath tied to the knocker bounced a couple of times. Standing on the step was Candy, flanked by her husband, Mike, and my niece and nephews.

My sister threw her arms around me. ‘Happy New Year!’ she said, squeezing hard, then pulled back to look at me. ‘You look nice today. Love the scarf,’ she added, with a knowing glint in her eye.

Candy, as usual, was dressed down but elegant in shades of taupe and grey, chunky silver jewellery on her fingers and at her throat. You’d never guess that she’d had three kids in the last eight years. She didn’t look any bigger than she had back in her twenties. Sometimes I tried to get cross that she’d sucked up all the skinny genes before I’d been born, but I could never manage it. Besides, as I kept chanting to myself every time I looked in the mirror, you don’t need to be skinny to be happy, right?

‘Happy New Year,’ I replied, maybe not quite as brightly. I attempted to hug my nephews—Callum, eight, and Noah, four—but they raced past my legs and into the house, probably in search of Roberta, who, most sensibly, had hidden herself in the airing cupboard as soon as she’d heard the doorbell ring.

Mike, who was carrying both a cool bag and a cardboard box full of food and drink, leaned in to kiss me on the cheek as he passed by me on his way to the kitchen, and my niece Honey (six going on sixteen) presented her cheek for me to peck as she swept past in her pink satin dress and tiara.

I closed the door and followed Mike and Candy through into the kitchen—still the well-constructed but rather orange pine units my dad had installed in the eighties—and found them unpacking enough food for a small army. Candy had made a huge lasagne and a sliced-tomato salad, and she was giving brisk instructions to Mike to turn the oven on to warm the nibbles and ciabatta. All I’d had to do was provide some wine and tiramisu, the one dessert I was capable of making without disaster.

I knew Candy’s famous lasagne was full of pancetta, cream and three kinds of Italian cheese, and I promised myself I’d only have half a portion. Which I did. It was the second helping and the generous plate of tiramisu that really blew all my good intentions out of the water.

After lunch, Mike suggested taking the kids over the village green to blow off some steam. He picked up a football and the boys cheered but Honey folded her arms and looked down at her glistening party dress, which she had insisted on putting on in honour of a visit to her favourite (and only) auntie. ‘Don’t worry, sweetie,’ Candy said, smoothing down her daughter’s dark hair. ‘You can stay behind with me and Pippa if you like.’

Honey liked, so when the whirlwind of male energy had gathered up its coats and gloves, wellies and footballs and slammed the door behind itself, Honey skipped off to see if I’d missed any of the chocolate decorations on the Christmas tree (fat chance!), while Candy got us both a nice glass of red.

We walked into the living room, where Honey had already dived under the tree to begin her search. Once again, just the sight of the blowsy floral wallpaper, the tree in the corner, all Mum’s Christmas decorations hanging just where she would have put them, hit me in the chest.

‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ Candy said quietly beside me. ‘Them not being here. I mean, I know it’s been five years, but this is actually the first Christmas we’ve had here since …’

‘Since Dad died,’ I finished for her. We both stood there for a few seconds and then Candy wandered over to the fireplace, which had always been my favourite bit of the room. It was a Victorian cast-iron one and I’d actually made the effort to sweep out the grate and light a proper fire there this morning, exactly as my mum would have done.

I plopped down at one end of the large, squashy sofa and picked up one of her tapestried cushions, hugging it to my middle. I was becoming an expert in using soft furnishings to disguise the bulges that appeared every time I sat down.

‘At least Christmas in the village is lovely,’ Candy continued. ‘What with all the lights and the carol singing and the primary school nativity. I didn’t realise how lucky I was to have grown up with it until I’d moved away. And it must have been a great way to bump into old friends! Who have you run into since you’ve been back?’

‘Erm,’ I muttered. ‘I think a lot of people have moved away.’

An outright lie. Or, at the very least, a guess. The truth was that I had no idea who still lived here and who didn’t, because apart from going to work, I’d pretty much kept myself to myself.

If I’d been able to afford it, I’d have gone somewhere completely new. Maybe even a different country. But I hadn’t had much choice. Once our divorce was final, Ed and I had decided to put the flat we’d owned in North London on the market. Ed had already moved out—gone to live with the Tart—and I hadn’t wanted to stay behind alone in the home we’d once shared, surrounded by a lot of empty space and stale memories, so I’d come back to the village of Elmhurst, slap-bang in the commuter belt of north-west Kent, the place where I’d grown up and gone to school, where I’d learned to drive and had fallen in love for the first time.

Candy walked across the room and perused the sad little row of five Christmas cards standing guard on the mantle. When she got to the largest and most glitzy one, she paused, frowned, then picked it up and turned round to look at me.

‘Ed sent you a Christmas card? I can’t believe it!’ She stared down at it, read it again, her expression darkening.

‘Don’t be like that,’ I said, hugging my cushion gently. ‘He was just trying to be nice.’

Candy humphed loudly.

‘Just because he fell in love with … her … doesn’t mean he stopped caring about me,’ I said. ‘I know he feels terrible about how things worked out.’

This time Candy didn’t just humph, she snorted. ‘Tell me you’re not still in love with him.’

I looked away. ‘I’m not. I mean, not in the same way.’

She just stared at me. ‘After everything he did to you on that stupid TV show! You need to move on, Pip.’

‘I know,’ I said, nodding, and then I said it again, more firmly this time. ‘I’m trying. But think about how you’d feel if this happened to you and Mike … Even if you were hurt … devastated, even … you couldn’t just flick a switch and feel nothing. It takes time.’ I felt the tears begin to sting in my nostrils. ‘You need to give me more time.’

Candy put the card back on the mantelpiece and folded her arms. I could tell she wanted to go all Big Sister on me and throw it in the fire, but she resisted. I loved her just a little bit more than I already did when she changed the subject.

‘Did the last tenants leave it in an okay state?’ she asked as she plopped on to the other end of the sofa. ‘I know you had to move in quite quickly.’

I nodded. ‘They were a lovely family. It’s probably dirtier now than it was when they left.’

Candy, not wishing to incriminate herself, didn’t comment.

‘Thanks again,’ I said, ‘for agreeing to let me move in here. I won’t stay here forever. Just until I work out what I’m doing next.’

‘You needed somewhere to go once you sold the flat, and we had an empty house. It’s what families do for each other.’ She frowned. ‘And I’m really sorry.’

‘What on earth for? You’ve been more than generous. You won’t even accept the full rent from me.’

She sighed as she stared at the Christmas tree, which wobbled slightly as her daughter manoeuvred under its bottom branches. ‘For leaving you here all alone this Christmas. I didn’t realise how hard it must have been for you until just now.’

‘It was okay,’ I said, although it really hadn’t been, but none of it had been Candy’s fault.

‘You know what Mike’s mum and dad are like,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘A total nightmare. I don’t know how they stayed married for twenty years before going their separate ways. We have to have a strict rota for his parents and their respective partners for Christmases, and we’ve learned the hard way that veering from it only causes upset.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said again. ‘I was fine on my own.’

Candy sighed. ‘To be totally honest, I’d have much rather spent it with you. We trundled off down to Mike’s dad’s farmhouse, where his step-mum cooked a vegetarian nut thing that the kids refused to eat and, frankly, I didn’t blame them. It tasted like manure.’

I chuckled into my big wine glass.

‘I feel as if I should make it up to you.’

Ah, that was what the overcatering and the three bottles of prosecco had been about. Candy was feeling guilty.

I called for Honey, who was still convinced there was a reward for an intrepid and tenacious treasure hunter, and her pink satin bottom reversed from under the drooping branches of the Christmas tree. I smiled at her. ‘Pass me that little red present bag, will you, darling?’

Honey did as she was asked, then clambered on to the sofa and sat down, half on me and half on the cushion next door, and looked longingly inside the bag. ‘Is that for me?’

I smiled, remembering the bootful of colourful packages I’d delivered to her house the week before Christmas. ‘I think you’ve had plenty of presents from me already, don’t you?’

Honey batted her eyelids innocently.

‘No presents for you, I’m afraid,’ I told her. ‘It’s mine. Just a DVD, and I was thinking that if your mum really wanted to make it up to me for deserting me at Christmas—’ I paused to give Candy a meaningful look ‘—she could watch it with me. It’s miserable watching your favourite films on your own.’

Honey perked up instantly and peered into the bag. ‘Dessert?’ she asked, a longing tone in her voice. Surprising, since she’d already wolfed down a massive bowl of my tiramisu.

I laughed. ‘No, I meant “desert” not “dessert”! It means that …’ I faltered as Candy started to snicker beside me. ‘Oh, never mind what it means …’ I said, giving my sister a sharp look. ‘What it boils down to is there’s nothing to eat in there.’

Honey’s face fell.

‘Sorry, chicken. But what we do have is one of the most iconic Hollywood musicals ever made.’

Honey’s expression brightened considerably. ‘Frozen?’ she asked, with hushed reverence.

‘Top Hat,’ I corrected her firmly. ‘The songs are way better.’

The look of disbelief Honey gave me could only have come from a princess-in-training who spent hours each week in her bedroom in the midst of a swirling, imaginary snowstorm, perfecting the dramatic high notes of ‘Let It Go’.

Okay, maybe I wasn’t going to win this argument, even if I was clearly in the right. However, I had another ace up my sleeve. ‘The dresses are just as pretty,’ I added. ‘You wait and see.’

Honey looked sceptical, but she always loved the idea of doing ‘grown-up stuff’ with her mum and Auntie Pippa, so she wedged herself between Candy and I, folded her arms and stared at the blank television set, ready to be proved wrong.

Three

When Ginger Rogers first appeared, I leaned across and gave Honey a nudge. ‘See? Told you there’d be pretty dresses. And that’s only her nightie. Wait until you see what she wears for an evening out!’

Honey stared at the screen, duly impressed. ‘Mummy? Can I have a bedroom like that?’ she asked, eyeing up the improbably large and improbably white movie-set hotel room Ginger was sleeping in, complete with a sumptuous bed with a padded satin headboard.

‘Oh, Lord …’ Candy muttered. ‘It’d be like having Vegas come to Islington! I’d keep getting worried that Liberace would pop out from behind the furnishings and flash me his perfect gnashers.’

I chuckled to myself. No, all that glistening white definitely wouldn’t merge well with the Laura-Ashley-meets-Habitat vibe she had going on in her house.

When it got to the bit I’d been waiting for, I hugged the cushion tighter to myself. This was it. The famous rendition of ‘Cheek to Cheek’, where Fred and Ginger glided across a vast dance space. They flowed through the beats of the music, moving together like one person. When the routine came to an end and they stared into each other’s eyes, I couldn’t help letting out a sigh. I knew it was all make-believe, but just for a moment I let myself forget that and imagine what it would be like to dance with a man like that, someone who looked at me as if I was the most captivating creature on the planet. It would be like being in heaven …

‘You’ve always loved Fred and Ginger, haven’t you?’ Candy asked, jerking me out of my little fantasy, which was probably for the best.

‘Always,’ I echoed, my eyes still glued to the screen. ‘Although, I have to confess, while everyone goes wild about Fred and what a genius he was, it’s Ginger I like the best.’

‘Really?’

I turned to look at her. ‘Really. Not just the dancing. There’s something about her. She’s so … confident, self-contained, always ready with a quick line and a sassy look. I wish I could be that way.’

Candy gave me a warm smile. ‘You are!’

I nodded, because I didn’t know how else to respond, but I knew it was a lie. I wasn’t that way, not really. I’m capable and organised, which often gets mistaken for confidence, but it wasn’t the same thing. Not by a long shot.

‘Anyway,’ I added, crossing my arms and deciding to deflect the conversation on to something safer. ‘I think I’m getting a little fed up with Ginger nowadays.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

I stared hard at the screen. ‘Well, just look at her. Parading around like that, looking gorgeous and thin as a twig. It’s more than a little sickening.’

‘That’s just the post-Christmas remorse talking,’ Candy said matter-of-factly. ‘You’ll be fine once you’ve been down the gym a few times, dropped a few pounds.’

I waited a full ten seconds before answering. ‘It’s not just a few pounds, Cand …’ I said, casting her a sideways glance.

Candy must have sensed something in my tone, because she picked up the remote, paused the film and shuffled round to face me.

‘I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been, by a long way.’

There. I’d said it. Out loud and not just inside my head. I looked at Candy, feeling my heart skip lightly and unevenly inside my chest and waited for her to say or do something to make me feel better. Candy had always been good at that.

‘I think you look lovely whatever your size. You’ve got amazing eyes and when you smile your whole face lights up. No amount of extra weight is going to spoil those things. Anyway, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, and that’s where you’re most beautiful.’

I leaned over and gave my sister a hug. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And you’re right. I shouldn’t worry about my size. I should just feel confident whatever my weight.’

That’s what New Year, new-improved Pippa would do, wasn’t it? She was the sort of girl who’d dress to emphasise her assets, rather than hide them in a dark tent of a top. She’d walk confidently down the street, knowing she looked good, even while she carefully overhauled her eating habits and improved her lifestyle in the way the January magazine features suggested. Time to get with the programme, Pippa. No more moaning about your wobbly bits while wolfing down custard creams …

‘It’s not just about the weight, though. I feel like crap because I’m eating crap. I want to be fit and healthy too, feel good about myself.’

‘You’ve still got that gym membership, haven’t you?’ Candy asked.

I nodded reluctantly. I’d transferred it to a branch of the same club in Swanham, the nearest big town, even though I couldn’t really afford it, knowing I had to do something, but the card had been gathering dust in my purse since the autumn.

‘I know I should use it, but every time I get dressed in a T-shirt and jogging bottoms, I take one look at myself in the mirror and then strip it all off again.’

Candy gave me the once-over. ‘You look fine,’ she said in the same tone of voice she used when trying to convince Noah that broccoli was nice. ‘Who hasn’t put on a little extra over Christmas?’

I searched her frame for even the hint of a bulge, but couldn’t detect one. I shook my head. ‘It’s the women at my gym,’ I confessed. ‘Half of them look like Barbie dolls, even the ones older than me! They’ve got tiny little grape-like bum cheeks inside their skin-tight yoga bottoms, and they all wear those strappy little crop tops that show off their taut abs … And then I waddle in wearing my size eighteen Marks and Sparks trackie bottoms and one of Ed’s old Pink Floyd T-shirts that I didn’t give back …’

It’s the biggest and baggiest thing I’ve been able to find. I hadn’t kept it because it smelt of him or anything. In reality it had been mine for years. I’d nicked it to sleep in when it had been like a tent on me, but now it was the only T-shirt I had that fit.

‘I know gyms are supposed to make you feel better about yourself,’ I said, reaching for a Quality Street. ‘But mine makes me want to slit my wrists.’

‘Time for a new gym, then,’ Candy said, ever practical.

I nodded, even though I was pretty sure the same cookie-cutter gym bunnies would populate the next one too.

Candy must have caught something in my expression, because then she added, ‘Or time for a new way to burn off the calories.’

‘I’m not going running like you do,’ I said with a chuckle. ‘With the size of my boobs bouncing around, I’d give myself a head injury …’

‘Oh, my goodness! Stop!’ Candy said, laughing. She jerked her head towards the screen, where Fred and Ginger were having a cross-purposed conversation on a balcony. ‘I mean that! Dancing!’

I turned my head and looked at the couple on the screen. ‘They’re not dancing, they’re arguing.’

Candy gave me the kind of look only a big sister can give a little sister. ‘Don’t be awkward. You know what I mean.’

Of course I did. But I wasn’t going to let Candy know that. I studied Ginger Rogers, still wearing the iconic satin-and-ostrich-feather dress she’d designed herself for the scene. ‘I can’t do that. I’d look like a heifer in that dress, for a start. I mean, white, for goodness’ sake! Don’t you know that’s the most unflattering colour ever?’

Candy merely replied calmly, ‘I thought you told me once that dress was actually sky blue.’

I bumbled around for a good reply to that one. Which was difficult, seeing as Candy was right. ‘That’s beside the point.’

‘Well, the point is that I’m saying you should try dancing as a form of exercise. You know you’d enjoy it.’

I folded my arms and stared at the screen. ‘I’ve never done any ballroom.’

‘It doesn’t have to be ballroom. You were brilliant at dancing when we were younger! Me? I had two left feet.’

I really didn’t want to feel the warm glow that flared inside me at Candy’s compliment; I was too busy being irritated with her. Which was odd, because I realised I wasn’t sure why. She just seemed to have hit a nerve.

‘I was passable,’ I muttered.

I hadn’t thought about dancing for a long time. Not in years. But all of a sudden I remembered being back at dance school, loving the sense of joy that had filled me every time I’d stepped through the studio doors, how I’d lost myself in the movements, loving the feeling of not just learning them but mastering them.

I had been good. Candy had been right about that. For a while I’d even considered going to performing arts college and training as a professional dancer, but then, well, things hadn’t worked out that way, had they?

What would it be like to do it again? What would it be like to feel that wonderful sensation, as if I was flying, as if the steps themselves were living things, moving and breathing through me?

I glanced back at the television, then picked up the remote and scooted back to the bit where Fred and Ginger were tapping in a large white set that was supposed to be a bandstand in a London park and watched them, really watched them.

‘Learning to tap dance is on my bucket list,’ I confessed.

A large smile slowly grew across Candy’s face. ‘Well, there you are, then. You could even go back to Miss Mimi’s School of Dancing, see if she does adult classes …’

‘Oh, my word! She can’t still be going, can she? She must be eighty if she’s a day!’

Candy let out a grudging laugh. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she outlived us all. Do you remember that time, before I’d managed to convince Dad that dancing wasn’t my thing, that she made me do a whole class with one of my geography textbooks on my head, because she said I had “horrible” posture?’

I couldn’t help laughing. That book had slid off Candy’s glossy hair and hit various parts of her body on the way down more times than she could count. By the time we’d got home she’d looked as if she’d been doing boxing, not ballet.

‘I don’t know, Cand … Miss Mimi’s? Really? Surely there’s some funky young dance studio I could go to instead these days?’

‘Probably,’ Candy said, nodding. ‘Although I’d guess there’d be a startling amount of tiny bottoms and Lycra in one of those too.’

Ah. There was that. Back to square one.

I shook my head. ‘I can’t do that,’ I told her. ‘People will see me.’

‘Don’t be daft. People see you every day.’

No, they don’t, I thought. Not really. Only in the fringes of their vision, because in my world Ed had always been the one everyone wanted to watch, and now that Ed wasn’t part of my life any more, I was starting to wonder if I’d disappeared completely.

‘Tell me you’ll think about it?’ she urged.

‘Maybe,’ I said, but mainly just to shut her up so I could watch the rest of the film in peace.

Four

Elmhurst was a pretty little place, full of red-brick cottages covered in local flint with high gables and leaded windows. It was a big enough village to have some life—a local pub, a main street with shops and a post office, a primary school and two churches—but still quaint enough that it had become a desirable location for well-to-do Londoners who wanted a bit of the country life without straying too far from a tube stop or a Starbucks.

In the centre of the village was a green with a wrought-iron town sign and a war memorial that always, always had a wreath of pristine poppies underneath it, and at the other end of the green was a duck pond where Candy and I had fished for minnows with plastic nets and jam jars when we were kids.

The oldest houses clustered around the main street, but the village had grown over the last century to include bungalows and a few oast-house conversions and two small estates of new-build houses in local stone.

If you ambled down the main street past The Two Doves and kept going, you’d reach the cricket pitch, complete with its vintage wooden scoreboard and pavilion, and past that, tucked away, out of sight down a side road, was a little church hall. It had once belonged to St Christopher’s C of E church, but the main building had been flattened by a stray doodlebug during World War II. In the early seventies the last of the rubble had been cleared and it had been paved over, turning the footprint of the church into a large car park for the hall.

It was a beautiful little building, almost a miniature version of the church it had once served: red brick that had now weathered to a rusty brown and tall mullioned windows with decorative arches. It even had a little belltower perched on top of the slate tiles. Once the church had gone, the village had used it for clubs and classes, bingo nights and jumble sales, but when a new, modern church had been built on the other side of the village, complete with a smart new community centre, the number of people crossing its threshold had dwindled. That is, until Mimi D’Angelo had come along.

Initially, she’d hired the hall for two nights a week to start her dance school, after retiring from a career as a dancer at the grand old age of twenty-nine. While Elmhurst was only a small village, it was close to the much bigger town of Swanham, where the local kids went to secondary school, and news of Miss Mimi’s first-rate school began to spread by word of mouth. Very soon, scores of little girls (and the occasional little boy) had thronged to her lessons.

They didn’t seem to be put off by the fact that Miss Mimi, as she was always known, was as strict as she was flamboyant. Somehow, she’d always made each pupil feel as if they had untapped potential, and her great stories of her colourful professional life and sense of the dramatic made for interesting lessons, that was for sure.

By the early eighties, Miss Mimi’s school had taken over exclusive use of the hall and she’d finally become queen of her own terpsichorean kingdom. She’d put up posters and noticeboards, added permanent barres to the painted brick walls and put hanging baskets and flower pots outside the entrance to offset the glossy scarlet double doors.

I sat outside St Christopher’s Hall on a windy January Friday night, the engine of my Mini running. I could hardly believe it was still here, the place that had been the setting for the most important moments of my formative years: my greatest triumphs, in the form of shows and exam grades, my first job, helping Miss Mimi with the Babies class on Saturday mornings, and even my first soggy teenage kiss with Simon Lane after a Christmas disco.

I looked at the red doors. They weren’t so glossy now and the paint was peeling at the bottom. The flower pots were still there, but only the stalks of a few dry brown weeds poked over the tops. There was moss growing in the gutters and a couple of slates had come loose on the roof. St Christopher’s Hall was like the widow of a rich man down on her luck; her structure and proportions were still elegant, but she was looking a little ragged and worn around the edges.

Could I go back in there? Did I even want to?

I’d arrived early. A few more cars were pulling into the car park, but nobody got out. Probably parents waiting for kids who were in the class before adult tap. I could sneak away. Nobody would even know I’d been here. I readied my feet on the clutch and prepared to release the handbrake, but then I stopped. I owed it to Candy—and probably to myself—to at least try one class, didn’t I, even if my stomach was churning like a washing machine with a full load?

A crowd of long-legged girls with coats and boots on over their leotards and tights burst from the double doors and ran to different cars. Ah. So the previous class must end at seven forty-five, not eight. Miss Mimi had done that sometimes when it had been a long day of teaching, given herself little gaps in the timetable to just have a cup of tea and get off her feet. Although it probably wouldn’t be Miss Mimi teaching now, would it, even if the school bore her name? She’d probably passed the school on to one of her star pupils, someone who’d gone on to dance in West End shows or on cruise ships, but who was now getting older and wanted to settle down to a job with a fixed location and slightly more sociable hours.

My email enquiry about the class hadn’t even been answered by Miss Mimi, but by someone called Sherri, who had appalling grammar, didn’t know what capital letters were and replied to every email as if she was posting on Twitter.

I felt a twinge of sadness at the thought of not seeing my old teacher again, but it made the decision of whether to go in or not easier. I wouldn’t be letting anyone down. If I didn’t come back next week, no one would care. They probably wouldn’t even notice.

With that thought in my head, I reached for the door handle, grabbed my holdall and stepped into the chilly winter night. If I went inside before anyone else, I’d be able to get myself ready quietly at the back, and I’d be able to chat to the teacher a little first, let her know I was a complete tap virgin and ask if she could go easy on me.

The wind was really biting tonight, ruffling up my pixie cut and making my hair stand on end. I made a dash for the double doors and shoved them closed behind me.

A tsunami of nostalgia washed over me as I stood in the little vestibule that led to the main hall. I’d spent half my childhood and teenage years in this hall. It had become a home from home.

The old horsehair mat was there, still worn in places, and so was the cork noticeboard where Miss Mimi had always posted exam schedules and results, timetables and the allimportant uniform requirements, although now someone had obviously learned how to insert clip-art in Word, because instead of the photocopied notices of typed announcements or quick notes written in Miss Mimi’s elegant and looping handwriting, there were colour-printed A4 sheets, decorated with just about every dancing-related cartoon one could imagine.

I smiled as I looked around, especially when I saw the plaque on the ladies’ loo hadn’t changed. It was still a line drawing of an elegant fifties woman etched on dusky pink plastic, holding her large-brimmed hat as her ‘new look’ skirt swirled around her shapely calves. The men’s sign was equally as pleasing, featuring a man with Brylcreemed hair and a tweedy suit with turn-ups.

‘Hello, Audrey … Hello, Cary …’ I whispered. I’d christened them with those names at the age of eleven when my obsession with old black-and-white films had begun. ‘It’s lovely to see you again.’

I was still smiling absent-mindedly when I pushed my way through the second set of double doors into the hall.

Five

‘Philippa Hayes!’

I jumped at the use of my full name, the one I’d gone back to using after I’d stopped being Mrs Ed Elliot, and still wasn’t quite used to again. There were only two people in this world who had said that name in that same tone. The first had been my mother and the second was …

No. It couldn’t be? Could it?

A moment later an old lady started crossing the hall towards me. Actually, it would have been more accurate to say she swept across the room, arms outstretched, her outrageously long false eyelashes almost touching her drawn-on eyebrows as her eyes widened in surprise.

‘Miss Mimi?’ I croaked, as I was engulfed by a cloud of Chanel No.5.

‘Who else did you think would be here?’ she asked. ‘Gene Kelly?’

I laughed. Of course Miss Mimi was still here, still teaching! How could I ever have imagined otherwise?

‘Now,’ Miss Mimi said, looking me up and down, ‘let me take a look at you …’

I wasn’t sure I was ready for that, despite my current determination to reinvent myself. ‘I know … I’m a little on the cuddly side, but that’s why I’m here really—’

‘Nonsense!’ Miss Mimi said, cutting me off. ‘It’s just puppy fat, you always were prone to a little of that.’

Aw, it was lovely of her to say that but the truth was I had about as much puppy fat as the whole of Battersea Dogs’ Home. However, I didn’t correct her, because a) I was supposed to be embracing my curvaliciousness and b) I wasn’t sure she’d understand. For as long as I’d known Miss Mimi, she’d been a petite five foot two, with a perfect dancer’s physique. She wasn’t lanky like a fashion model but trim and toned and strong, even now, it seemed. I looked her up and down, taking my turn to study and observe.

No, nothing much had changed about Miss Mimi at all, except her hair was totally white and there were more wrinkles on her peaches-and-cream complexion. She wore pink seamed dance tights, those little heeled ballet shoes that only dance teachers ever wear, a hot-pink leg warmer over each ankle and a leotard with a crossover skirt that folded over like a tulip in front but dipped as low as the backs of her knees behind. The whole outfit was topped off with a silky kimono with bright, gypsy colours on a black background, edged with a long black fringe. Despite her age, I could imagine her throwing her wrap off, jumping on to the small stage at the end of the hall and showing the class how she’d high-kicked her way through two seasons in Paris and one in Las Vegas.

‘It’s so good to see you again,’ I said, smiling at her. I hadn’t realised how up in the air my life had felt, how it had seemed as if everything was shifting underneath my feet, until I’d come across something—someone—dear to me, who’d remained stubborn and rock-like against the rapids of change. And if there was anyone in this world who could do that, it was this woman.

‘Now, now, Philippa …’ Miss Mimi chided, but I could hear the affection in her tone. ‘You always were a bit of an emotional girl.’

I looked at her, surprised. Had I been?

I frowned, trying to think back to those days. I really couldn’t remember. And it seemed like a lifetime ago, anyway, almost as if that time had been lived by another person. During my marriage to Ed I hadn’t had the luxury of being the emotional one. One diva in the household was enough.

My role as his wife had been to stay calm, stay grounded, to keep things smooth and organised. So much so that I’d actually ended up working as Ed’s assistant, doing admin for him and the band. It wasn’t a job I’d ever planned on doing, but I’d enjoyed it. I’d been part PA, part PR person, part roadie. I’d liaised with venues about bookings, sweet-talked anyone Ed had cheesed off (which happened a lot) and generally did anything that needed to be done.

In my mind, I’d been part of the family business, like a wife doing accounts for her builder husband. The only thing I hadn’t anticipated was that the family—and the business—would move on quite happily without me, leaving me with skills that weren’t easily quantifiable in the job market. I’d discovered that when you turned up at an interview and announced your previous career was ‘rock musician’s dogsbody’, people didn’t really know what to do with you.

My current job was about as soul-destroying as they got. When I’d moved back I’d just got the first job I could find, filling shelves in a big supermarket on the outskirts of Swanham. They’d been looking for seasonal workers in the run-up to Christmas, and it served a need while I worked out what to do next.

Miss Mimi began to make her way over to a cassette player that was so old it could have auditioned for a part in Ashes to Ashes.

‘What happened to Peter?’ I asked. He’d been a shy little man who taught piano lessons at Pippa’s school and had accompanied most of Miss Mimi’s classes back in the nineties. My friend Nancy and I had always speculated about him being desperately in love with Miss Mimi, and we’d giggled uncontrollably when we’d seen his eyes following her as she taught, never needing to look at the piano keys. I didn’t want to think of an empty cold space at the piano stool. Or a new grave in the churchyard.

‘Oh, I let him off the adult classes,’ Miss Mimi said airily. ‘He likes to get home in time to watch Coronation Street on a Friday.’

‘Oh. Good.’ I breathed out a sigh of relief. ‘Miss Mimi?’

‘Yes?’

‘I was meaning to ask … Do you think I’ll be okay in this class? I mean, it is a beginners’ one, isn’t it? I haven’t done any tap before.’

‘My darling,’ Miss Mimi said, in that theatrical voice that I remembered and loved, ‘you will be absolutely fine. It’s not exactly a beginners’ class, more intermediate, but very beginner-friendly. You’ll do wonderfully with your dance background. It’s like speaking another language, you see? Once you’ve learned one, it’s easier to pick up another.’

The sound of a car door slamming outside made me jump. I looked nervously at the entrance. It had been okay when it had just been me and Miss Mimi, but now it became very real that Other People were coming. Other people who were going to see me dance. My stomach went cold and my hands began to shake.

I scuttled off to the back of the hall, where some chairs were laid out in a row and proceeded to busy myself taking off my layers and slowly putting on my tap shoes. I stayed at the back of the hall until the lesson began, hardly daring to look up to see who else was here. When I did, I caught a glimpse of an older lady, a few more women around my own age and two younger girls who looked as if they’d only just graduated from the under-eighteens classes.

I had planned to stay in the shadows at the back of the hall and slip into the last row once everyone had got going and my scheme was working well until I stood up and walked to where the group of five women were standing. I’d dashed to the dance store in Swanham that afternoon and bought the cheapest pair of tap shoes I could find. Apart from trying them on in the shop, it was the first time I’d actually worn them and certainly the first time I’d ever walked in them on a hard surface. The metal plates under the toes made moving in them feel odd, and they made a hell of a lot of noise. Everyone turned round to look at me.

‘We have a new member tonight,’ Miss Mimi said loudly. ‘Philippa used to be one of my pupils long ago, but she’s never done tap before, so we’re going to have to go easy on her.’

If anyone turned round to give me an encouraging smile, I didn’t see them; I was too busy staring at the floor and I kept my head down until Miss Mimi snapped her fingers, regaining everyone’s attention and went straight into a warm-up.

We all shuffled into two lines facing the full-length mirrors that were fixed to the walls down one side of the hall, below the high windows. I was standing so my reflection was split and distorted, cut in half where one mirror met the next. I didn’t know if it made me look fatter or thinner, because I refused to look at anything but my feet and I only looked at them if I absolutely had to.

The warm-up started easily enough, tapping with the toe of one foot a number of times and then the heel, before switching to the other, and then they started doing shuffles. I might not have done any tap before, but I at least knew what a shuffle was—pretty much what I’d done as a child when I’d tried my own version of tap dancing with my mother’s cloppiest shoes on. I struck the ball of my foot lightly on the floor on an out movement, then again as I picked it back up again.

After we’d repeated it a few times, the dancer in me, the one that was slowly awakening, noticed that the rest of the class put a very slight emphasis on the second tap, so I started to do the same. Okay … I was starting to get the hang of this!

And so it continued through the warm-up of short, simple exercises. I didn’t always get everything right, and I was frequently half a count behind everyone else, but I started to relax. Not perfect yet, but that didn’t matter. It would be no fun if it wasn’t a challenge. I might very well be outside of my comfort zone but I was camped on the fringes, not on an entirely different continent.

However, once we started to get into the class proper, it wasn’t just my shins and calves that started to hurt, but my brain. Too much information too fast! Everyone else was stringing the simple steps they’d done in the warm-up into more complicated sequences, and I discovered that, while I could envisage the steps in my head, the messages my brain was sending to my feet were just too slow. It was most frustrating, especially as once upon a time I’d been able to hold whole strings of complex movements in my head, regurgitating them effortlessly when needed. Whole dances. Whole shows, even.

Miss Mimi was right. This was like learning a new language, and I was having to search around hard for each and every syllable, clumsily building the words and faltering over many of them. Learning modern or contemporary after learning ballet hadn’t been too bad; they shared many steps, even if the techniques were different—a bit like learning Italian if you already knew Spanish. In comparison, tap was like being thrown into the deep end of Cantonese.

Beginner-friendly class? My foot!

Things improved slightly when we moved to travelling from the corner across the diagonal of the hall. Miss Mimi told me to leave out the turns and just concentrate on the basic steps, which involved ball changes and hops, things I was familiar with from modern, thank goodness, but the downside was that we had to do it in pairs. That meant I couldn’t just stay flailing around anonymously at the back. I was the new girl, so of course everyone was going to check me out. I started to feel just the littlest bit queasy.

I hung back to the end of the queue, hovering near another pair.

‘Hi,’ a woman who was maybe a year or two older than me said brightly. ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’

I nodded.

She smiled. ‘You’re doing quite well for a total newbie. Should have seen me my first lesson! I couldn’t even face the right direction, let alone do any of the steps!’

I couldn’t believe that. Everyone in the class looked so sharp and in time.

‘I’m Donna,’ the woman said and nodded at her companion, ‘and this is Victoria.’

‘Pippa,’ I replied. ‘Have you both been doing this long?’

Donna snorted. ‘About three years, but this one here—’ she nodded at Victoria ‘—has practically been in dance shoes since birth, haven’t you?’

The girl, somewhere in her late teens, I guessed, blushed and nodded. ‘I want to go to dance college, but Mum and Dad say I’ve got to finish my A Levels first. I make up for it by doing every class I can in the meantime.’

‘Even putting up with us old fogies on a Friday night when she could be out with her boyfriend,’ Donna said, laughing. ‘She can dance rings round the rest of us.’

I’d already noticed. Victoria held herself like a ballerina and her steps were clean and precise. She wasn’t one of those showy dancers, all eyes and teeth and high kicks in your face, but one of those delicate, ethereal sorts, the kind that looked so beautiful when they moved you just had to gaze and hold your breath. I would have been intimidated by her if she hadn’t reminded me of a fawn, all big eyes and shy lashes.

‘Uh-oh,’ Donna said, chuckling. ‘We’re up.’

Uh-oh was right. It was our turn. What was a riff again? And how many beats did it have? Four? Five? I didn’t have much time to remember, because suddenly we were moving and I just had to jog along behind them, trying to tap here and there, just to keep up. When we ran out of space dancing along the diagonal, we turned and headed up the long side of the hall to wait our turn at the opposite corner.

‘What brought you along?’ Donna asked as we filed in behind an older, rather portly lady and a blonde, whose high ponytail swung behind her as she walked. Even standing at the back corner of the room she was ‘on’, every move made with the knowledge she might have an audience.

I inhaled. I hadn’t really been prepared for chit-chat this evening, assuming we wouldn’t have time to talk, let alone the breath. How much of the truth did I want to tell? And how much did these people know already? The Elmhurst grapevine might have been working hard since I’d returned.

‘Well, I used to come here as a kid,’ I said, ‘but then I grew up and moved away, got married, all that kind of stuff.’ I paused to let out a heavy sigh. ‘And then I got not married, moved back home and now I feel like I’m back at square one, apart from with more wrinkles and less coordination.’

Donna gave me an understanding smile. ‘Snap,’ she said. ‘Tap was my post-divorce thing too. I started as a way of showing him—and probably myself—that I had more fun without him and ended up discovering it was true.’

We made another run at the riffs from the corner, and this time I even managed a couple of slow four-beat ones before I got hopelessly out of time and had to just lollop along behind Donna and Victoria. As we filed up the edge of the room back to our original spot, Donna pointed out a couple of the other class members. ‘The older one? That’s Dolly. She and Miss Mimi have been friends since they were chorus girls together in the West End. She moved to Elmhurst after her husband died.’

I watched the older woman with interest. Dolly couldn’t have looked more different from Miss Mimi if she’d tried. While Mimi was still petite and slim, Dolly had hardened and thickened with age, until she looked remarkably like that actress—Hattie what’s-her-name—who’d starred in the Carry On films.

‘You don’t want to get on the wrong side of her,’ Donna warned. ‘Her bite is definitely every bit as scary as her bark.’

I leaned over a little to catch a look at the woman who was tapping away beside Dolly, almost in her shadow. Donna followed her gaze. ‘Ruth,’ she said. ‘Been coming about a year, but I can’t tell you any more than that. She hardly ever opens her mouth.’

I took a good look at the woman. She was blonde, about mid-forties, and her make-up and hair was done very nicely, her clothes neat and very precise. She was tall and very slim and her arms hung off her rounded-in shoulders like sleeves from a coat hanger. With every move she made, she seemed to be apologising for taking up space.

She couldn’t be more different from the perky twenty-something blonde standing next to her, who looked as if she was ready to jump up and do a solo, given half the chance.

‘That’s Amanda. Don’t mind her. She makes a lot of noise, likes to blow her own trumpet, but she’s basically harmless. So that’s us …’ Donna said matter-of-factly, then turned as someone slipped in the door and headed for the chairs at the back. ‘Tell a lie,’ she added. ‘It seems we have a latecomer …’

I had half an eye on Donna and half an eye on the combination of shuffle hops and ball changes with a ‘break’ (whatever that was) that Miss Mimi was teaching us. However, when the latecomer finished putting on her tap shoes and stood up, my mouth dropped open.

Was that … was it really? No! It couldn’t be!

Nancy?

Nancy Mears—my partner in crime from twenty years ago at Miss Mimi’s! I wondered if I’d got it wrong, if it was really her, but when she joined in with Dolly and Ruth, spotting her turns perfectly, I knew I hadn’t been mistaken.

Oh, my goodness!

I tried to catch her eye as she took her turn and walked up the long edge of the hall to start again in the opposite corner, but she didn’t glance in my direction.

‘Come on, Philippa!’ Miss Mimi said with a chuckle, and I realised I was standing alone in the corner and that Donna and Victoria had already shot off across the floor without me. I forgot all about Nancy and charged after them.

I had no chance to catch up with her through the rest of the class, either, because the pace picked up and the steps got more complicated. It took every brain cell I had to even try and make it look as if I was keeping up.

There was even one moment when Miss Mimi yelled, ‘Time steps!’ and the whole class moved as one synchronous unit, looking amazing, and I was just left standing in my place, looking gormless with my mouth hanging open.

Donna, who I was quickly becoming dependent on, came over and tried to break it down for me. I managed the shuffle hop at the beginning, but kept ending up on the wrong leg. I was just about to ask her where I was messing up, but there was a flicker above our heads, then without warning the lights went off and we were all left standing in the middle of the hall in pitch darkness.

Six

‘Everybody stay where they are!’ Miss Mimi called out, reminding me of how she’d shepherded the three- and four-year-olds around in the Babies ballet class. ‘I expect it’s just a bulb that’s gone.’

Donna squinted up at the ceiling in the darkness. ‘I think it might be more than that … I mean, all the lights are out.’

‘And the music’s gone off,’ Amanda added.

I made my way gingerly to where I thought I’d left my bag and patted around on the plastic chairs until I found it, then I pulled my phone out and turned on the torch facility. Once I’d illuminated the small area where we’d left our belongings, Donna and Amanda did the same.

‘What do you think it is?’ Victoria asked in her soft voice. ‘A power cut?’

‘Hang on,’ Donna said and stood on a chair so she could peer through one of the windows that looked on to the street. ‘It’s definitely not a power cut. The street lights are on.’

‘Probably the fuse, Mimi,’ Dolly shouted as Donna, Amanda and I headed back to the rest of the group. ‘Where’s yer box, girl?’

‘Oh, pfff,’ Mimi said, and without actually being able to see her properly, I knew she’d just made an expansive hand gesture. ‘Who needs electricity, anyway? Our feet are rhythm enough and I’m sure there are some candles backstage from the Christmas show a few years ago. We can dance away in the candlelight until the moon rises.’ She sighed. ‘Ah, that reminds me of a night I spent in Paris once …’

‘The fuse box might be better?’ I said quickly. Not only did I remember how cluttered it had used to get behind the little stage at the far end of the hall, but I knew from helping to arrange many of Ed’s gigs over the years that if something happened to any of them during their candlelight dance—God forbid Dolly or Mimi fell over and broke a hip—Mimi better have pretty good public liability insurance. ‘Do you know where it is?’

Miss Mimi, however, quickly swiped Amanda’s phone and headed towards the stage area. Dolly shook her head and marched up to Donna, Amanda and I. ‘Can one of you girls shine your thingamajig this way?’ she asked, pointing towards the door which led to a row of small rooms that nestled behind the stage area.

‘I can,’ I said.

Donna moved to go with me but then stopped. ‘I’d come with you, but I think someone with a light better stay here and keep an eye on our fearless leader,’ she said, nodding in the direction of the stage, where Mimi was trying to part the thick brown velvet curtains and not having much luck in the murky light.

I nodded and followed Dolly through the door into a short narrow corridor. To the left there was a door that led to the storage area behind the stage, to the right a small kitchen and at the end of the corridor there was Miss Mimi’s office. I knew that because the laminated sign stuck to it with Blu-Tack said so in large curly letters, and from the profusion of ballet shoes and dancing figures round the edges, I suspected it had the same designer as the posters out in the vestibule.

‘What’s that up there?’ Dolly asked, peering into the darkness. I pointed my phone so the light shone where the walls, painted in a rather sickly shade of pale green, met the ceiling. Sure enough, amongst the ceiling stains and peeling paint there was something that looked like a fuse box. ‘You any good with those things?’ Dolly asked, eyeing it up suspiciously.

‘Not bad,’ I said, putting my hands on my hips. That was the good thing about having a husband who didn’t give a hoot about DIY; if I’d wanted anything done around our flat I’d really had to Do It Myself. I allowed myself a small moment of schadenfreude as I imagined the drama that might occur now Ed had to cope for himself in that department. I doubted the Tart knew how to change a light bulb, let alone hang wallpaper.

‘We need a chair or something, though,’ I added after a think. ‘I’ll go back into the hall and fetch one. Do you want to stay here or would you rather come with me?’

Dolly made a dismissive noise. ‘I’m not scared of the dark, love,’ she said, a proud tone in her voice. ‘Lived through the blackouts of the war years, so I’m sure I’ll survive thirty seconds on my own in a poky little corridor.’

I smiled to myself in the darkness. I could see what Donna had meant about Dolly. Even so, I had a feeling I was really going to like her.

I returned to the hall and signalled to Donna with my phone-slash-torch. Thankfully, she and Miss Mimi were sitting on the edge of the stage. It seemed as if Donna had managed to dissuade her from rummaging around in decades’ worth of junk behind the curtain. For now, at least.

‘We found the fuse box,’ I called out. ‘I just need a chair to stand on so I can reach it.’

‘You be careful, Philippa, dear,’ Miss Mimi called back. ‘I remember how clumsy you used to be as a teenager—when you weren’t dancing, that is.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I replied and laid hold of the back of one of the plastic chairs that lined the hall and dragged it back through the door to where Dolly was standing.

‘Right,’ I said as I placed the chair under the fuse box. The ceiling wasn’t that high. I ought to be able to reach. ‘Can you shine this up there …’ I asked, handing my phone to Dolly ‘… and I’ll pop up and see if the switch has tripped.’

Dolly eyed the phone as if it was a hand grenade with the pin out, but she did as I asked and held the light steady.

I opened the tiny cupboard and found a metal box with a hinged door. However, where I’d hoped to find a nice row of circuit breakers, I found six old-fashioned fuses, the hard plastic sort which held a thin strip of wire. ‘I’m not familiar with this kind of set-up,’ I told Dolly. ‘It’s really old. Probably hasn’t been changed for fifty years at least.’

Dolly passed me my phone and I held it up to the row of chunky fuses, inspecting each one in turn. None of them seemed to be burned or broken. ‘I’m not sure what the problem is.’ I sighed. ‘I think Miss Mimi is going to have to call a proper electrician in.’

‘Ah, well,’ Dolly said philosophically. ‘At least you tried. I do like a girl who’s got her head screwed on right.’

I smiled to myself in the dark. Partly because Dolly was the only person who’d referred to me as a girl in at least a decade, partly because that was the nicest thing someone (other than Candy) had said to me in months.

When we returned to the hall, I walked up to the stage where Ruth, Victoria and Amanda were also now sitting. Nancy was standing off to the side, texting furiously on her phone. ‘I don’t think it’s the fuses,’ I said. ‘And if it is, I think you need someone who knows more about electrics than me to have a look at it.’

Amanda checked the display on her phone. ‘We’ve only got five minutes left now anyway and my battery’s about to die.’

Miss Mimi sighed. ‘I suppose we’ll have to call it a night. Sorry, everyone … I was going to get some of you long-timers doing wings.’

At this, Ruth, whose face I could see in the glow from Amanda’s phone, looked horrified, as Amanda simultaneously said, ‘I love wings!’

‘In that case,’ Donna said, hopping down from the edge of the stage, ‘I’m glad the power went out. There’s no point trying to get both your legs going in opposite directions if there isn’t a man involved along the line somewhere.’

There was a gasp of shocked laughter from the group.

‘Well, there isn’t,’ Donna said. ‘So it looks as if we’re going to retire to the pub early tonight.’

We all headed over to where our belongings were at the end of the hall and gathered them up quickly before anyone else’s battery failed and we had to scrabble around in the dark. Once we’d all changed our shoes and put our coats on we headed for the exit. At least standing in the vestibule with the doors open we had the benefit of the street lights surrounding the car park.

Nancy had ended up standing next to me, clutching her camel-coloured coat with its fur collar round her and staring into the distance.

‘Hi,’ I said smiling. ‘I had no idea you’d be here. It’s wonderful to see you again.’

Maybe the shadows from the street lights made the angles on Nancy’s face appear sharper than they really were, but when she turned to look at me there didn’t seem to be any trace of warmth in her expression.

‘Oh, hello. I’d heard you were back.’

The way she looked at me made me feel like a dead butterfly pinned and held securely on a collector’s board.

She knew.

She knew all about Ed and me. She knew all about the TV show.

This was what I’d been afraid of. This was why I’d carefully avoided all the lovely Christmas social gatherings in Elmhurst over the last couple of weeks. Because I’d been scared that even though this was my home, the place where I was supposed to belong, everyone would look at me differently now, that they’d smile at me when I went into the post office then whisper about me once I’d left. That every time they looked at me they’d be running those humiliating scenes of Ed and the Tart together on the reality show in their heads and judging me. Or worse, pitying me.

‘What do you say, Pippa?’ Donna asked as we waited for Miss Mimi to lock up. ‘We always end our Friday night tap session with a quick tipple at the Doves and you’re more than welcome to join us.’

I looked from Donna, back to Nancy and then round the rest of the group, all looking at me with expectant faces.

‘Sorry,’ I said, giving them a weak smile. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I really do have to get back.’ And then, before anyone could argue with me, I turned and dashed for my Mini.

Seven

I couldn’t stop thinking about Miss Mimi all that night. Every time I woke up, I kept seeing her soft, wrinkly face in the light from the car park street lights, full of determination and fire.

But there’d been something else there too—a weariness, hidden down behind the feisty smile—and I couldn’t help worrying about her. It was stupid, really. I mean, she was eighty-two and stronger and fitter than some women of my age.

When I woke up the next morning, I sat up and tickled Roberta under her chin. She’d crept up on to the bed during the night as she often did and had tucked herself into the hollow made as I slept on my side. She looked up at me and I looked down at her.

‘I know this is daft,’ I began, ‘but I really think I need to just pop down to the dance school this morning, check that Miss Mimi’s okay and see if there’s anything I can do.’ I paused for a moment. ‘Good idea or bad idea?’

Roberta kept staring at me.

‘Great! Knew you’d say that.’

I jumped out of bed and went to find something comfy—and warm—to wear. Who knew if the heaters were back on again? That hall could be horribly draughty.

I decided that it was probably better to get down there as early as possible, so I didn’t bother with toast, only a cup of tea, which I tipped into a travel mug, thinking I’d just slip along to the Apple Tree Cafe when I was finished and get something healthy, like a pot of bircher muesli or some porridge. Not a pastry. Definitely not a pastry.

When I edged the hall doors open I could hear piano music and the timbre of Miss Mimi’s voice, still clear and strong after all these years. I hesitated in the vestibule, wondering if I should just turn around and sneak away, but something kept me there. The same something caused me to push open the inner doors and slip inside the hall. I owed her this, because I’d let her down once before when she’d been relying on me.

‘Philippa!’ Miss Mimi exclaimed and paused her instructions on doing the perfect plié to sweep across the room towards me, a vision in orange and pink, her long gold chains clinking musically as she walked. ‘How can I help you, dear?’

‘Actually, I thought I’d pop by to see if you needed any help,’ I said.

Miss Mimi beamed at me and reached out a papery hand to pat my cheek. ‘You were always such a kind girl,’ she said, warmth lighting up her eyes, ‘but we’re all perfectly fine, aren’t we, girls?’

The dozen or so eight-year-olds lining up against the barres and mirrors against the far wall nodded, their eyes wide, but I saw the way their lean little bodies were quaking under their thin crossover cardigans and how some were even trying to clench down on chattering teeth. It was then that I realised, despite my coat and big woolly jumper, that the hall was perishing. The only person who didn’t seem to notice it was Miss Mimi, whose arms were bare from the elbow down and who was wearing only a colourful sheer wrap over the top of her leotard and skirt.

I touched my cheek, suddenly remembering the iciness of her fingers there. The information had arrived late, the sensation momentarily overridden by the warmth of her smile.

I looked up to the ceiling. The old-fashioned globe lights that hung down on metal poles were unlit and every time the wind hit the windows at the far end of the hall, they rattled noisily.

‘Miss Mimi, did the electricity come back on?’

She waved her hand dismissively. ‘Oh, I’m sure it will sort itself out soon enough.’

I looked over to the other side of the room. The little girls had given up pretending they were holding their places on the barre and were now hugging themselves. Two or three of them had huddled together in a group.

I stared intently at Miss Mimi, trying to work out how to respond, and then the strangest thing happened. She kind of went out of focus and went back in again, and when she was sharp and clear once more it was like I was seeing a completely different person. I realised I hadn’t properly looked at her since we’d met again.

Oh, I’d taken in the changes of twenty years, noted the new lines on her face, the thinner limbs, but it became clear that I’d been looking at my old dance teacher through the lens of my teenage self, the Pippa who’d worshipped her mentor, who’d thought she was eccentric and charismatic and wonderful.

Of course, Miss Mimi was all those things still. It was just that thirty-seven-year-old me could see other things too, things that only living with a man who thought he was Peter Pan could teach a person. It shocked me that I hadn’t seen the similarity between them before, that magical ability to reshape reality into their own design, to ignore the things they didn’t want to see.

‘Miss Mimi,’ I said softly. ‘You can’t teach in here without electricity. It’s freezing.’

‘Pff,’ Mimi replied, looking very French, as she had a tendency to do when she thought she knew best. ‘You should have been backstage at the Palladium in December. It was twice as cold as this back in the fifties. A dancer has to learn to be hardy, to deal with all conditions.’

‘But these aren’t dancers,’ I said softly. ‘These are little girls, and I doubt their parents will appreciate it when they come home from ballet with hypothermia.’

Miss Mimi stared back at me, her gaze strong and determined, but then I saw something shift behind her eyes, a subtle ‘click’ of agreement. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

She walked away from me and over to her students. ‘Girls! We’re going to stop for today. You may get your clothes back on and come back and sit on the floor in front of the stage.’

All twelve of them scurried off to the little dressing room at the back of the hall.

‘Do you have phone numbers for their parents?’ I asked. ‘We might as well get hold of them and tell them to come back early.’

‘Oh, Sherri keeps all that sorted for me,’ Mimi said breezily. ‘I’m sure it’ll all be in the office somewhere.’

I pulled my mobile out of my pocket. I didn’t know what kind of phones were in the office, but if they were the kind that needed to be plugged in, they were going to be about as useful as the ancient caged-in heaters that hung from the walls of the main hall.

When we got to the office, though, I had a shock. In the back of my mind I’d been expecting a cosy little nook, the walls filled with photographs of Mimi’s glory days and memorabilia, maybe an old armchair with a shawl draped over it in the corner, opposite an old leather-topped desk. What I saw was indeed small, but not at all cosy.

Papers and folders were balanced precariously on every available surface and lay in piles on the floor. The photos and keepsakes might have been around somewhere, but they were buried by the unending stacks of clutter. I took one look and went straight back out to the main hall.

‘Hi,’ I said, smiling at the girls, who were all looking a little bit worried as they huddled together on the floor, their bags at their feet. ‘I’m Pippa. A long time ago I came here and did dance lessons just like you.’

A girl with a perfect blonde bun and a pinched expression looked me up and down, then wrinkled her nose. I knew what she was thinking: How on earth did one of us turn into that great tub of lard? I ignored her and carried on. New Pippa didn’t react to things like that. She was comfortable in her own skin, however large it was.

‘Anyway, as you can tell, there’s no heating and no lights, so we’re going to have to call your mums and dads and get them to come and get you early. Who knows their home phone number?’

Five or six of them put up their hands. The rest just looked worried.

‘Never mind,’ I said as Miss Mimi rejoined us, ‘we’ll work something out.’ And I began tapping a number into my mobile as one of the girls recited it to me.

In the next ten minutes we managed to dispatch almost all of the girls. Some had parents who passed the message on and a couple more took turns in doing lifts, so managed to drive away with two or three. That left two students sitting on the hall floor, fidgeting with their coat zips.

And then there was one.

‘Ursula’s mum never gets the time right,’ Miss Mimi explained as the penultimate girl skipped out the door. ‘Either she’s twenty minutes late or twenty minutes early for pick up. Thank goodness it was the latter today!’

She turned to the remaining girl. ‘Who’s picking you up today, Lucy? Dad or Grandma?’

‘Dad,’ Lucy replied quietly, her eyes as huge as the over-sized buttons on her school coat. ‘I stayed at Gran and Grandad’s last night. They dropped me off.’ She glanced at a small wheeled case with lots of glitter and a fluffy cat in a tutu on the front that sat beside her.

‘Do you know his mobile number?’ I asked.

Lucy nodded, then reached into her bag and pulled out a purse. Inside were a few coppers, a broken hair clip and a scrap of paper. She took the paper out and handed it to Miss Mimi. ‘Dad makes me keep this in my bag,’ she explained.

Mimi passed it to me. ‘See if you can get hold of him, will you, dear?’

I noted the neat handwriting. There was a mobile number on it, labelled ‘Daddy’, in a grown-up hand. ‘Why didn’t you say you had this when I asked earlier?’ I asked gently.

Lucy looked surprised I’d asked. ‘You said home phone numbers.’

I nodded. Yep. I had said that. It reminded me how much I didn’t know about the way kids’ brains worked, despite the amount of time I spent around my nephews and niece. Now I thought about it, it was exactly the same kind of thing Honey would say.

‘So I did,’ I said to the girl. ‘Well remembered.’

Pride flashed across her expression and I couldn’t help smiling even wider. ‘Well, I’ll just try and get your dad now …’

Unfortunately, it went straight to voicemail. I left a message, explaining the situation, then turned to Miss Mimi.

The older woman sighed. ‘I suppose I’m going to have to phone up the rest of this morning’s students, aren’t I?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re going to phone the rest of your Saturday pupils.’

‘No, no, Philippa … You run along. I’ll be fine.’

It seemed I hadn’t noticed how stubborn and independent Miss Mimi could be when I’d been younger either. Now, usually I was a good girl, the sort to do as I was told by my elders and betters, but I think Miss Mimi was starting to rub off on me again. ‘It’ll be quicker with two of us,’ I said.

Miss Mimi didn’t say anything, but her expression hinted she wasn’t about to budge an inch. However, I’d been a pupil of hers for more than ten years as a child. I knew which strings to pull. ‘The quicker you contact the parents,’ I continued, ‘the quicker you can get this fixed and the quicker the classes will be up and running again. You wouldn’t want the children to be disappointed, would you?’

‘Come on, then, Lucy,’ Miss Mimi said, not taking her steady gaze off me. ‘You might as well come to the office with Philippa and me rather than sitting here on your own in a draughty old hall.’

Lucy shot a nervous glance at her case.

‘Leave that there,’ Mimi said, as she headed for the corridor once more. ‘It’ll be fine.’

Lucy bit her lip and looked at Miss Mimi’s back as she disappeared through the doorway. ‘Daddy says I’m not supposed to leave my bag all over the place.’

I smiled at her. ‘Then we’d better do what Daddy says. I’ll tell you what, we’ll put it in the kitchen. It’ll be safe there.’

It was going to have to be. Because there was no way we were going to fit one more thing in that office!

Eight

I stood with my hands on my hips and surveyed the chaos. Lucy, having left her case in the kitchen, stood close behind me, almost touching but not quite. I had a feeling she was a bit thrown by the morning’s events, and would probably have liked a friendly hug, but I had no idea if that was the right thing to do or not. Weren’t there all sorts of rules these days, to stop people being ‘inappropriate’?

‘Where are your lists of student telephone numbers?’ I asked Miss Mimi, who seemed completely oblivious to the mountains of clutter.

‘I’ve no idea where Sherri keeps them on that thing of her dad’s she brought in.’ She shook her head. ‘I should’ve stuck to doing it the way Dinah did, but Sherri said a computer would be better.’

‘What ever happened to Dinah?’ I asked, remembering the woman who’d been Miss Mimi’s administrator the whole time I’d been at the dance school, a stern lady with horn-rimmed glasses who’d never smiled. I’d never once dared be late with my envelope containing the cheque for my fees.

‘Oh, she got married and moved to Portugal,’ Miss Mimi said, as if it was nothing.

Wow. I hadn’t seen that coming. Dinah must have been fifty, if she was a day, and the sort of sturdily built, hairs-on-the-chin kind of gal that I’d assumed would be a spinster forever. It gave me a small glimmer of hope.

‘And Sherri’s your new administrator?’ I asked.

Miss Mimi laughed. ‘Goodness, no! She’s one of the older girls who volunteered to come and help me with the office a few hours a week.’

Ah. Suddenly the piles of paper, the text-speak emails and the clip-art-happy posters in the vestibule all started to make sense.

‘I did try to hire someone when Dinah left, but no one seemed to want to take it on.’

I took a sweeping look around the office. To be honest, if I’d turned up here for a job interview, I’d have run a mile in the other direction too, and I’d been used to touring with a rock band.

Something occurred to me. ‘Erm … Miss Mimi? Where is the computer?’

She waved an elegant hand towards the corner of the room. ‘Over there, of course. On the desk.’

Desk? I wasn’t even sure I could see a desk. Still, I trod carefully through the narrow path through the piles of stuff, rounded the edge of the largest one and discovered that it was indeed a desk, and that it had a clear spot where a dirty old grey computer sat, complete with dirty grey keyboard, mouse and chunky monitor.

‘I don’t even know how to turn the thing on,’ Miss Mimi said.

I glanced at her. Was that a faint tone of pride in her voice?

Well, thankfully, I did know how to operate a computer, even one as ancient as this. I moved a small pile of Dancing Times magazines from the wooden chair tucked half under the desk, pulled it out and sat down.

It took an agonising amount of time to boot up. While I waited, I turned to smile at Lucy, who’d followed me through the mess and was standing just behind the chair. ‘That looks old,’ Lucy said, frowning. ‘I think I saw one like it in the Science Museum.’

‘Do you like science, then?’

Lucy made a face. ‘Not really. My dad took me. I think he wants me to like science and football and stuff like that, but I don’t.’

‘What do you like?’

Lucy gave me a ‘duh’ kind of look. ‘Ballet, of course,’ she said. ‘And modern and tap.’

‘I’m learning tap,’ I told her, ‘but I’ve only had one lesson so far.’

Lucy’s little feet moved fast on the wooden floorboards of the office, her school shoes shuffling and scuffing over the wood in demonstration.

‘You’re brilliant!’

Lucy shrugged. ‘I’ve been doing it my whole life practically.’

I stifled a smile. That was—what?—all of five years since she’d been old enough to waddle into one of Miss Mimi’s classes. I turned back to the computer screen, which now seemed to be winking into life. ‘All I can say is that I hope I’m as good as you one day.’

Lucy gave me a doubtful look, but I didn’t take offence. To the kid, I must have looked as ancient and creaky as the computer on the desk.

‘O-kay,’ I muttered as I scanned the handful of folder icons on the desktop and decided that the one titled ‘School’ was the most likely candidate. I clicked on it and began reading lists of file names.

Hmm. Nothing like ‘register’ or ‘students’. This was probably the result of letting a seventeen-year-old set up your computer system. In the end I just started opening random folders and ended up finding something in one labelled ‘Girls’ that looked as if it might be a database.

‘Okay,’ I told Mimi. ‘I’ve found the list of phone numbers. All we’ve got to do now is work out who’s coming to what class this morning.’ I started rummaging through the directory again, looking for a class list.

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Miss Mimi said, not missing a beat. ‘Next is Grade 2 Ballet, so that’s Lucinda Henderson, Megan Tremont, Freya Barry—’

‘Hold on!’ I said quickly. ‘Who was that first one again?’

‘Lucinda … Henderson.’

‘Okay …’ I clicked back to the database and hunted down the list. ‘Got her!’ I read the number out to Miss Mimi, who was standing by the office phone. ‘Give me the next name and I’ll call from my mobile.’

And that’s the way we worked through the list for the next forty-five minutes. When we’d made the final call, I pushed the chair back from the desk and rubbed the back of my neck. Lucy was cross-legged on the floor in a tiny space that only an eight-year-old could have sat down in and Miss Mimi was over the other side of the room, humming as she pottered around her piles of clutter.

I checked my watch. ‘Shouldn’t someone have come to pick you up by now?’ I asked Lucy.

Lucy looked back at me with large eyes and nodded. ‘I’ve only been living with my dad since October. He says he’s still getting used to my timetable.’

I frowned. ‘Is he often late?’

Lucy shook her head. She seemed happy to be talking, so I kept going. ‘Were you living with your mum before that?’ I asked, hoping I wasn’t venturing on to a sore subject.

She nodded. ‘She’s very good at her job and she’s got to go and work in America for a year, so I had to move to Elmhurst and live with my dad. Mummy said it was okay because Granny and Grandpa live nearby in case he messes up.’

Nice. I assumed it hadn’t been an amicable split, then.

‘You weren’t living here before that?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘No. We lived in London when I was very little but then Mummy and Daddy got divorced and I went to live in Edinburgh with Mummy. She had an important job there too.’

‘That must have been difficult—living so far away from your dad.’

‘He came to visit sometimes and I’d come back for school holidays,’ she said, ‘but Daddy had to work in the daytime so I’d go to Granny and Grandpa’s a lot.’

Poor kid, I thought. Sounds as if she hardly knew the man, although I had to concede that may not have been his fault. However, since he hadn’t bothered to turn up for his daughter on time I wasn’t feeling very inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. I held out my hand. ‘Come on, then. Let’s go and see if anyone’s looking for you.’

Lucy’s thin fingers slid into mine and I helped her to her feet. All three of us made our way back to the hall, but it was as cold and empty as it had been when we’d left it. Lucy’s eyes began to fill.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, squeezing her hand gently. ‘He can’t be too far away. ‘

I tried phoning her dad once more and I was just listening to it clicking into voicemail when there was a loud pounding on the outside doors, the sound of two heavy and rather determined fists coming down again and again.

‘Lucy? Lu-ceeee!’

I ran, pushing through the swinging doors that led to the vestibule and then to the main doors, where I found the heavy bolts that slid across the top of the doors and the one that went down into the floor drawn. I released them as fast as I could and came face to face with a rather wild-looking man.

‘Where’s my daughter?’ he half-yelled. ‘What the bloody hell is going on?’

And then he stopped and stared at me. ‘Flip?’ he said, his face completely transformed with shock.

I heard a rushing sound in my ears. ‘Tom?’ I croaked back.

Nine

Tom? Tom Boyd? For some reason I really hadn’t expected to bump into him back in Elmhurst. I don’t know why but I’d imagined him in a swanky Thames-side apartment, living the champagne lifestyle with a beautiful and elegant wife by his side.

I waited for the smile full of mischievous energy, the one he’d always worn as long as he’d been awake or not in double history, but his mouth remained open and then he closed it again and it became a thin, grim line.

I was having the weirdest sensation. On one hand, this man in front of me did actually look as if it could be Tom Boyd, twenty years older. The nose was still long with that little bump in the middle, the eyes the colour of freshly-peeled conkers, and even though there were speckles of grey at his temples and he wore it shorter than he’d used to, he still had the same wavy, dark hair.

But that was where the similarities ended.

The Tom Boyd I’d known had been the joker of the pack, the cool guy that all the guys had wanted to hang with and all the girls had wanted to kiss. And many of them had got their chance. Tom had been ringleader and rebel, the one most likely to get a ticking-off from Miss Mimi and the one most likely to climb the kitchen roof at the back of the hall, just because someone had dared him to.

This man didn’t look anything like that Tom.

But it had to be. Because he’d called me ‘Flip’. No one else had ever used that nickname for me, before or since.

At the time I hadn’t even been sure I’d liked it. I didn’t like the word; it sounded silly and juvenile. But I’d liked the way Tom had said it, with a twinkle in his eye and a dare on the tip of his tongue. It had reminded me of the glamorous actresses of Ginger Rogers’ era, who’d played women with nicknames like ‘Teddy’ or ‘Nan’: sassy and sexy and not afraid of anything, especially the man they had wrapped around their little finger.

‘What … what are you doing here?’ he stammered.

I stepped back and allowed him access. ‘It’s a long story. I moved back and …’ I trailed off, not really wanting to share my life story. It wasn’t really relevant and it would be better if I just got straight to the point. I cleared my throat and started again. ‘The long and the short of it is there’s a problem with the electrics and we’ve had to cancel classes this morning. Lucy’s fine,’ I added quickly. ‘I’ve been dialling your mobile but it’s been going straight to voicemail.’

He dug into his pocket, pulled out his phone and stared at it in confusion. ‘Didn’t hear the stupid thing. Had it on silent for something last night and forgot to turn the ringer on again.’ He turned and gave me a quizzical look. ‘We’ve cancelled the classes?’

‘I mean, Miss Mimi cancelled them. I’m just helping out.’ We crossed the vestibule and I frowned. ‘What I don’t understand is how the doors got locked,’ I said as we entered the hall.

Miss Mimi paused from marking what looked like a jazz routine and turned to face us. ‘Oh, I did that, dear,’ she said, nodding at the door, ‘while you were making some of those phone calls. I thought it’d be a good idea to stop just anybody wandering in.’

I stared at her. I wanted to reply, but I literally had no words in my mouth. Had she always been scatty and disorganised like this, or was this something new?

‘Hello, Daddy,’ Lucy said, her brows low over her eyes, but there was no jubilant rushing into the arms of her father. She turned to me and said politely, ‘I need to get my bag from the kitchen.’

‘I’ll get it for you, if you like,’ I told her and set off to do just that. When I entered the corridor I found I had a little shadow. Lucy had followed me. We went to fetch her bag together in silence, but it wasn’t an awkward silence, and Lucy didn’t seem to be one of those chatty little things like Honey was. She seemed quite happy tagging silently along after me, reminding me more of my cat than my niece. Roberta would follow me round the house and sit in whichever room I was in, just for the company, not because she needed me, or anything as demeaning as that, and Lucy had this same sense of self-sufficiency about her.

When we came out the kitchen we bumped into Miss Mimi and Tom in the corridor.

‘And you’re sure you checked the fuses?’ he was saying.

‘I had a look last night,’ I said. ‘They’re pretty old, but they seemed okay to me.’

Tom turned sharply to look at me. ‘You did?’

‘Yes,’ I said, half a smile on my face. ‘I’m not seventeen any more, you know, Mr Tom Boyd. My worldly knowledge now extends beyond nail varnish, boy bands and reading Smash Hits! inside out every week.’

His laugh was more grunt than chuckle. ‘You never were one of those girls,’ he said as he flipped the cover of the fuse box open, without even the need for a chair to stand on. ‘I’ve got a torch in my car,’ he announced, and before I could offer the use of my phone for such purposes, he strode off back into the hall and off in the direction of the car park.

No, I hadn’t been ‘one of those girls’ when I’d known Tom before. The kind of girl he’d been interested in. The kind who could always do her hair perfectly or put mascara on without blinding herself with the brush. I’d just been slightly geeky, rather shy, dance-mad Pippa. Firmly in the ‘friend zone’.

I let out a long and loud sigh.

No matter. That had been a long time ago. Things had changed. I had changed.

For one thing, I was no longer in any danger of facial disfigurement every time I put make-up on; that had to be something worth celebrating. And if Tom Boyd had been out of my league when I’d been seventeen, he was even more so now I was more than double that age. And double the size. I wasn’t making that mistake again. I’d punched above my weight with Ed and look where that had got me.

Tom returned, hardly casting a glance at me as he focused on shining the bright beam of his torch on to the fuse box. He changed the angle of the light, made a few humming and ha-ing noises.

‘What’s the verdict, Thomas?’ Miss Mimi asked, and I had the urge to laugh. I felt as if we were in one of those melodramatic medical soaps of yesteryear, all clustered round a difficult patient. If Tom had turned and asked for a scalpel, I had no doubt I’d have reached into my bag and placed an emery board into his outstretched hand.

He grunted. He seemed to do that rather a lot. Something the old, carefree Tom would never have done. Burst into a peal of uproarious laughter? Yes. Grin that grin of his that had made my heart beat faster and my toes tingle? Certainly. But make a noise that made him sound like his dour Scottish father? Not a chance.

He switched the torch off. ‘Let’s talk in the hall, where we can see what we’re doing.’

We all trooped out into the hall again, which was getting dingier by the second. Grey clouds had gathered overhead and the first speckles of dank January rain were clinging to the tall windows.

Tom shrugged. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ he asked Miss Mimi.

‘Oh, the good news,’ she replied. ‘I do so like good news.’

‘The fuses look okay to me.’

Miss Mimi’s smile was radiant. I waited for her to ask the obvious question, but she didn’t say anything. After a few seconds, in which Tom was equally loquacious, I decided to put us all out of our misery. ‘And the bad?’

Tom shot me a wry glance. ‘The fuses look okay to me.’

‘Very funny,’ I said, frowning. Hmm. There must be just a tad of the old Tom left in there after all. Kind of darker and more twisted, but still in there. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘That something more complicated than a blown fuse is causing your electrical problems,’ he said, directing his answer to Miss Mimi.

‘How do you know?’ I asked, folding my arms across my chest. ‘You a trained electrician or something?’

‘Actually, I am.’

Oh.

Well, that shut me up.

What had happened to all his big dreams, all his plans for his future?

‘I thought you said you wanted to be a stand-up comedian,’ I replied hoarsely.

There was a shift in his eyes at my words, but which emotion was blending into which, I couldn’t tell, and just as I thought the name of one of them might be on the tip of my tongue, everything shut down, leaving his expression as blank and dull as this empty grey hall we were standing in.

‘We all planned stupid things when we were younger,’ he said, and then he paused as if he was remembering something. The moment stretched and his frown deepened. ‘I thought you were going to be the next Ruthie Henshall or Darcey Bussell?’ He raised his eyebrows, more in challenge than in curiosity.

I looked down at the floor and couldn’t help focusing on the lardy middle I was desperately trying to hide with my roomy dark top. It was blatantly obvious I hadn’t followed that path.

‘Like you said,’ I said, lifting my head a little, but not quite looking in his direction, ‘we all had stupid dreams back then.’ And, since that seemed to have killed the conversation dead, I decided to change topics. ‘You followed in your dad’s footsteps? Joined his building firm?’

Tom nodded. ‘He’d always wanted me to have a trade to fall back on.’

‘Do you still work with him?’

‘I went out on my own by the time I was twenty-five, started my own firm with a business partner.’ He allowed himself a dark smile, the only kind he seemed capable of these days. ‘Wanted to show the old man I could do better than him.’

Now that sounded like the Tom I’d used to know. Cocky. Self-assured. Never one to be told what to do.

‘Anyway,’ he said abruptly, turning back to Miss Mimi. ‘The first thing I’d suggest is contacting your electricity company and checking if they’re aware of any issues with the building or a disruption in service in the area. If that comes back clear, then I’ll come in and give the place a thorough once-over, see what’s up.’

‘Oh, thank you!’ Miss Mimi reached up on tiptoe and kissed his slightly stubbly cheek. For a split-second, he looked just as he might have done when he’d been sixteen and on the receiving end of such affection and he managed to both smile and cringe at once, but by the time Mimi pulled away, his expression was back in its slightly gruff neutral setting.

‘Do you think you’ll be able to come back this weekend?’ I asked, aware that Miss Mimi was probably losing money she couldn’t afford by cancelling all these classes. One day was bad enough. The last thing she needed was for the situation to extend into next week.

Tom rubbed his chin with his hand. ‘Well, Lucy and I are supposed to be spending the weekend together …’

‘I don’t mind!’ Lucy said, making us all jump a little. She’d been so good and so quiet I’d forgotten she was still there. ‘I like it here.’

Tom gave her an exasperated look. ‘We were going to go go-karting, but … Well, ring if something crops up and I’ll see what I can do.’ He turned to his daughter. ‘Come on, scamp.’

Lucy rolled her eyes. ‘Scamp is a dog’s name. I am not a dog.’

‘Well, whoever you are, get your stuff together, because it’s time to go or we’ll miss it altogether, and I’ve had it booked up for weeks.’

With that Tom headed for the door. His daughter let out a heavy sigh, picked up her bag by its strap and followed him out the door, dragging the bag’s sparkly pinkness along the floor behind her.

‘You should run along too, Philippa. You’ve spent enough time helping me out already.’

I turned to Miss Mimi and saw the gentle smile on her features. She wasn’t worried in the slightest about this, had some kind of inner sense that everything would just work out, fall into place. Unfortunately, I had no such sense. I knew how life could pull the rug from underneath you just when you least expected it and I had a nasty gnawing feeling when I thought about Mimi going back into that office.

And, although it felt a bit bad to admit this, I’d actually quite enjoyed this morning so far. I’d got so used to just being in my house or stacking shelves at the supermarket, I’d forgotten how nice it was to talk to someone, and it had felt good to be useful. My mood was better now than it had been in weeks.

I looked down at my phone. ‘Who do you pay your electric bill to? I can find their number before I go, if you like? Save you some time and trouble.’

A frown cast a shadow over Mimi’s previously sunny expression. ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s South East Electric,’ she said breezily. ‘Or was it Kent Power? I really can’t recall. Anyway, it’s the one with the dog in their adverts on the telly.’

That might have been helpful if I didn’t already know that the dog—who had featured in ads more than ten years ago—had been for a company that served the West Country. The only other option now was to rummage through the piles of paper in the office to find a recent bill, and that could take hours.

I looked at Miss Mimi. She was old and thin, if fit. Not much meat on her bones. Not like me; I had plenty of insulation. And it was freezing in here, even more so now the rain had dampened the wind. ‘I’ll help you look for a bill.’

‘Oh, no,’ Miss Mimi responded, looking slightly horrified. ‘I’m sure a lovely young woman like you has far better things to do with her time on a Saturday than help an old duffer like me.’

I thought about my empty house, about Roberta, who was probably still stretched out on the sofa, fast asleep, and the pile of DVDs stacked up next to the television. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I really don’t.’

Ten

I picked up a pile of paper, saw it was an invoice for ballet lessons for spring term four years ago, and set it down on a stack I’d been making on the desk, then I picked up the next one: a flyer for a Christmas show and turned to put that one down too, only to discover that the invoice was now gone.

‘Miss Mimi? Have you seen that invoice I just put down there?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Mimi said, popping up from behind the filing cabinet. ‘I’ve added it to my pile I’ve made for my best-ever students—over here.’ And she indicated a separate group of papers that she’d made on the floor near the door.

I was tempted to cry. We’d been at this two hours already and I thought we’d got a system going. I’d been sorting papers into promotion, newsletters, stuff to do with rent and utilities, invoices and financial accounts, but it seemed that Miss Mimi had come up with one of her own and had been emptying my piles and making new ones, everything jumbled back in together.

‘Wonderful,’ I said. There was no point in having an argument about it, no matter how frustrated I was. It was Miss Mimi’s dance school, after all. She could do whatever the heck she wanted with her paperwork. However, it did mean that it was going to make the present task all the more complicated.

‘Maybe you should think about running an ad for an admin assistant.’ We weren’t even halfway through yet. Paperwork clearly wasn’t Miss Mimi’s strong suit. Nor Sherri’s, I suspected.

We carried on hunting and about half an hour later I discovered an electricity bill—dated last September—tucked inside a dancewear catalogue that had been under a lost property box full of lone socks, ballet shoes and even underwear. That boggled my mind. How on earth could you go home and not realise you didn’t have your knickers on? And, more worrying, how did you end up losing them in the first place?

I pulled the bill out and waved it up in the air for Miss Mimi to see. ‘Got it! Shall I call them?’

Miss Mimi slumped gratefully into a chair. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, dear.’

After fifteen minutes on hold it turned out there was a very simple reason Miss Mimi had no electricity.

I shot a nervous glance at her. She was leafing through a pile of flyers for the dance shows she used to put on every year, smiling now and then at the memories floating up off the faded paper. She had no idea, did she?

‘Just a moment, please,’ I told the customer service bod on the other end of the line. ‘It’s the bill,’ I told Miss Mimi in a stage whisper. ‘It hasn’t been paid.’

Miss Mimi’s eyebrows raised in surprise. I’d been right. No idea.

‘She says we can pay it now, if you like, and power will be back on before Monday.’ I swallowed before I asked the next question, fearing I already knew the answer. ‘Do you have a credit card?’

Miss Mimi wrinkled her nose. ‘Don’t hold truck with those things.’

‘I’ll put it on mine if you like and you can pay me back.’

‘Oh, no, dear. I couldn’t do that!’

I exhaled softly. ‘It’s the only way to get the power back on before the middle of next week. You don’t want to have to cancel any more classes, do you?’

With that, Miss Mimi crumbled. ‘Very well, then,’ she said, sighing. ‘Thank you, Philippa.’

I nodded and made a mental note that I was going to get Miss Mimi to use the shortened form of my name if it killed me. Now Mum was gone, nobody called me Philippa any more.

I resumed my discussions with the woman from the electric company and five minutes later everything was sorted. I rubbed my face with my hands and let out a weary breath.

The organiser inside me wanted to keep going at the office, to conquer this mountain of paper and plant a tiny little Union Jack in it, but my inner sloth was whispering—very sensibly, I might add—that I’d already been here for hours and it was cold and damp, and my inner gannet was chiming in and adding that I’d be much better off going to find something to eat, preferably involving bread and melted cheese.

After a moment or two of dithering, the argument went the way it usually did. I stood up in a purposeful manner and heaved my handbag over my shoulder. ‘Right. I’m taking you down to the Doves for a latte and a panini. No arguments.’

Miss Mimi opened her mouth to object, but I held up a hand. It seemed I was getting a handle on this ‘being feisty’ thing. ‘I said “no arguments”.’

Maybe the whole episode had worn Miss Mimi out more than I’d realised, because she didn’t even try to talk me round. Instead she said, ‘Well, that sounds lovely, cherie. I’d rather have a coffee and a sandwich, if you don’t mind, though.’

I headed for the door and started down the corridor, hiding a smile. ‘I don’t mind at all.’

However, after a couple of seconds I realised it was very quiet in the damp, dark corridor and noticed Miss Mimi hadn’t followed me. I hitched my bag up on my shoulder and retraced my steps.

I found her back in the office, looking rather pale. She had one hand braced against a bookcase, the other pressed to her chest. I dropped my bag and ran over. ‘Miss Mimi! Are you okay?’

She flapped a hand, tried on a smile which didn’t stick, but said nothing. She seemed to be having trouble drawing enough breath. ‘I-it’s fine,’ she eventually managed. ‘I get a little bit of vertigo now and then. It was all that bending over and standing up again looking for the bill … It just made me a little dizzy.’

I faltered, not sure if I should go and help her walk or not. Miss Mimi had never liked to make a fuss, not unless she’d planned and stage-managed the whole thing for her own benefit, of course. I ended up compromising by going and helping her with her coat, then leaving a hand under her elbow as we made our way outside.

‘You’re sure you’re okay?’ I asked again as Miss Mimi locked up the hall.

‘Right as rain!’ she replied, giving me a dazzling smile and pulling herself up straight, proving that a dancer’s posture never left her, not even in a crisis. ‘Stop looking at me like that! I told you … I’m fine.’

The grey tinge to her skin told me otherwise. ‘I really think it might be a good idea to see a doctor. I could take you into Swanham, to A&E, if you’d like …?’

Miss Mimi gave me the kind of sweet smile she used on truculent children who refused to point their toes properly when instructed. ‘Now, don’t go on, Philippa … Let’s have that coffee and if I’m still feeling peaky after I’ve had some food I’ll think about it. Besides, I’ve got something I want to discuss with you.’

‘You have?’

‘I have,’ she said, and tucked her arm through mine as she steered me down the narrow pavement in the direction of the pub. ‘I’ve been thinking that I don’t need to put an ad in the Swanham Times for a new administrator, because I’ve already found the perfect person—you!’

I did a double take. ‘Me?’

‘Why not? You did a marvellous job this morning. It’d only be part time, mind. What do you think?’

I blinked, trying to process this sudden twist in the conversation. ‘I think I’d be very interested,’ I said. Now Christmas was over, the supermarket was cutting my shifts and I’d been looking for something else to bring more cash in. Ed’s maintenance covered the basics but not much else.

More than that, despite the frustration, it felt good to be needed, and even better to be doing something I knew I was good at—organising things, creating order out of chaos.

‘I don’t have much experience of working in an office, though.’

Miss Mimi batted my response away with one large flap of her false eyelashes. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Anyway, let’s go and discuss it over one of those latte thingies …’

It was only when I got home later that afternoon that I realised she’d neatly sidestepped the issue of going to the doctor’s.

I arrived promptly at the dance school after lunch the following Monday. Miss Mimi and I had agreed that there was no time like the present. For the first time in … well, as long as I could remember … I was actually, truly excited about the day’s work ahead of me.

My part-time job at the supermarket certainly didn’t push those buttons and working alongside Ed had been all about what Ed needed and what was good for the band, rather than a fulfilling career for me. Not that Ed had been selfish about it, demanding anything horrendous of me, and I’d been more than happy to help him reach his dreams. It hadn’t been until he’d moved on, however, that I’d realised there was a big, dark hole where my personal aspirations should have been.

I knew Miss Mimi’s School of Dancing wasn’t big business. I knew I wasn’t going to become a millionaire working there or win any Nobel prizes, but that didn’t bother me in the slightest. I’d be helping someone I cared about, doing something I was good at. I finally had a sense of purpose and it felt marvellous.

When I arrived at the hall I was relieved to see all the lights on and the temperature was warm enough that I automatically shrugged my coat off. Miss Mimi was rosy-cheeked and happily working out a routine for the Monday evening jazz class. (Was it really safe for someone her age to be kicking that high?) There was no hint of the frailness that had hung around her on Saturday. I could almost believe I’d imagined it.

I made my way down the corridor to the office. Once inside, I closed the door behind me and leant against it. I smiled as I looked around. Right, I thought. Where do I start?

My thoughts turned to the red electricity bill. Surely, the best thing to tackle first was the finances. Who knew what other payments might have been overlooked? And I needed to get an idea of how much money came in and out, so I could suggest a budget for any future big payments.

I hunted in one of the bookshelves, where I remembered seeing some handwritten accounts ledgers, and started to flick through them. They were thoroughly kept in a neat hand. Not Miss Mimi’s extravagant loops, that was for sure, and it didn’t look like Sherri’s enthusiastic round, squat writing either, which meant these must have been Dinah’s work. My theory was confirmed when I discovered I couldn’t find any books for the last two tax years, which was when Miss Mimi had said Dinah had moved to Portugal.

I put them back on the shelf and carried on my search. Surely, Miss Mimi had to have some kind of financial records since her full-time administrator had quit?

Ten minutes later I found what I was looking for. It wasn’t a proper accounts ledger, but a handful of large, hardback notebooks. Each page was labelled with a year and a month and then there was a list of fees that had come in and payments that had gone out, but I couldn’t find any corresponding bank statements. I guessed that looking for profit and loss statements or balance sheets would probably be a waste of time.

However, duplicate statements could be ordered from the bank, and even if I couldn’t find any tax returns or financial statements, Miss Mimi’s accountant should be able to supply them. The name of a local one-man firm was listed in the back of one of Dinah’s neat ledgers. I’d just fire off an email and see where that got me, and until a reply came I had my work cut out for me. I was going to clear this office of clutter if it was the last thing I did!

Eleven

When Friday came around again, I dutifully turned up for adult tap. I’d been tempted to stay home to avoid another dose of humiliation, but that was a bit hard to do when I’d spent all week working alongside Miss Mimi.

I crept in at the back again while the others were engrossed in a discussion about a dance competition show they’d all seen on the TV that week. I quietly put my tap shoes on while they talked. I’d seen the same programme, but I didn’t comment. Why would they be interested in anything I had to say? They didn’t know me from Adam.

I heard the door swing open again and a cool breeze curled into the hall, its tendrils reaching even me in the farthest corner. While I tied bows in my laces, I glanced behind me to discover that Nancy had arrived.

Part of me wanted to ignore her. The way she’d been with me the previous week had been really weird. I’d even told Candy about it, but she’d warned me I was becoming a hermit and it was making me paranoid. Of course, I’d told her not to be so stupid, but thinking back on our conversation, I was starting to wonder if she was right.

Every time I left the front door these days, I felt as if people were watching me. Judging me. And they couldn’t all be, could they? I mean, up until Ed’s spectacular fall from grace I was pretty sure most people didn’t even notice me when I walked down the street.

So maybe Candy was right. Maybe it was all in my head and I’d jumped to conclusions about Nancy last week. After all, while we hadn’t been the kind of friends who’d spent all our time round each other’s houses. When we’d been at Miss Mimi’s—which had been a lot—we’d been practically inseparable, and she had no reason to dislike me. We hadn’t even set eyes on each other for twenty years.

I stepped forward, but Nancy acted as if she hadn’t seen me. And maybe she hadn’t. She seemed to be deep in thought as she sat down on one of the chairs and changed into her tap shoes, then walked across to the barre on the other side of the room and started doing a few warm-up exercises.

You tried, a little voice in my head said. Leave it at that.

But I knew that was the coward’s way out. I couldn’t stay holed up in my house with just my cat for company forever, could I? And what better place to start than with someone who’d known me before my notorious fifteen minutes in the tabloid limelight? With someone who’d actually once liked me?

After a moment of hesitation, I followed her. Ugh. I was going to be standing right in front of the mirrors, but I supposed that couldn’t be helped.

‘Hi,’ I said, then grasped around for something else to say. ‘You’ve hardly changed at all.’ Not exactly eloquent, but at least it got the ball rolling.

She still had the same long, thick, dark hair, the good bone structure. She’d never been one of those teenagers who’d looked scruffy, her make-up had always been flawless and her clothes neat, and that had followed her into adulthood, although, clearly, she had a better clothes budget now. I wasn’t very good at identifying designers, but I knew expensive when I saw it.

‘Thank you,’ she replied, and went back to studying her reflection in the mirror as she stretched out her calf muscles. She didn’t return the compliment. She also didn’t say anything else.

I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘How are you doing?’

Nancy smiled again, and I noticed her teeth, too perfect in their regimental alignment, almost too white. The lights of the hall reflected off them, highlighting their glossy sharpness. ‘Oh, you know,’ she replied with an airy laugh. ‘Paul and I live in Langdon Park now. The house was a bit of a wreck when we got it, but we’re slowly licking it into shape.’

‘Wow,’ I said, not even having to pretend to be impressed. Langdon Park. While not a stately home, it was one of the lovely old manor houses in the area, the kind that well-off Londoners liked to snap up for a rural retreat if they could.

And where was I? Back living at my parents’ house with its eighties dado rails and avocado bathroom suite. No husband. No kids. No accomplishments at all to speak of. I wanted to crawl away and pretend I hadn’t started this conversation, but I had. There was no choice but to tough it out. I swallowed and carried on.

‘Paul must be doing well at …’ I trailed off, belatedly realising I couldn’t remember what Nancy’s husband did. The last time we’d exchanged Christmas cards must have been more than a decade ago.

‘He’s a wine broker,’ she said.

Had someone left the door open? Because the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees.

‘And how about the kids?’

Nancy’s smile bloomed into the real thing. ‘Oh, Lilly’s off to Oxford next year, we hope, and Callum’s auditioning for Oliver! in the West End next week. We’re all very proud.’

I nodded. She had it, didn’t she? Nancy had my John Lewis Christmas ad life. Thankfully, I was saved from hearing any more about it because Miss Mimi glided into the room.

‘Good evening, ladies,’ she said loudly and theatrically. She clipped musically towards us in her high-heeled tap shoes, wearing a tailored black dress with an orange-and-red scarf tied at the back of her head so the ends trailed from under her cloud of silvery grey hair. I reckoned if you squinted hard and imagined Mimi fifty years younger, she might just pass for Jean Harlow.

Everyone scooted into line, the confident ones—Amanda, Nancy, Dolly and Victoria—in the front, which left me, Ruth (who’d arrived so silently I hadn’t even heard her) and Donna in the back. If there was one thing I remembered about Miss Mimi’s classes, whatever the dance style, it was that she liked everyone present and correct when it was time to start.

‘Right, warm-up!’ she called and we started off using toes and heel to tap simple steps, doing little travelling things from side to side, rotating our ankles and stretching our lower leg muscles.

I’m going to do it, I thought to myself as I glued my eyes to Miss Mimi’s feet and attempted to replicate everything she did. It was humiliating to be the only person getting everything wrong. I was standing out like a sore thumb. This time, I’m going to get one step right, even if it kills me.

I was fine in the early parts of the class, where we built up small step combinations, because we’d go through everything slowly first. I could just about keep up then, as long as I made sure my brain was whirring furiously, but once Miss Mimi put the music on and we did it double time, all I could do was at least try to travel in the right direction and match the rhythm of the others’ steps, and once we started travelling from the corner I got hopelessly lost. I just tried to hang at the back as much as possible, wishing fervently that I really did have the power to make myself invisible. The whole exercise would have been a whole lot less embarrassing if I could.

‘Don’t sweat it,’ Donna said in a low voice from beside me after yet another failed attempt at some shuffle-hop thing. ‘It’ll come if you let it. The key is to not think too hard about it.’

I nodded, even though I had no idea what Donna meant. How could I stop thinking? If I didn’t even try I’d make an even bigger idiot of myself than I already was.

We moved to the corner again to do riffs. Miss Mimi let me do the easiest kind, with only four beats, but even then I was always half a breath behind.

Why was this so hard? Dancing had once been so easy for me. It had given me a joy and sense of self that nothing else had. I drifted off, even as I was trying to do the steps—it didn’t matter, really, because I was going to get them wrong no matter how hard I tried—and remembered what it had once felt like to just lose myself in the movement, to be so consumed with it I’d entered a different place, lived entirely in the moment.

And then something really weird happened. Suddenly I was doing it—heel-toe, toe-heel—rhythmic and easy as that, for a few seconds anyway, and then as I tried to work out how I’d managed it, I lost it again.

I didn’t care. I done five riffs. Five! I jogged over to where Donna was waiting in line, feeling as if I was flying. Stupid, I know. It was only a tap step, and a pretty easy one at that, but my hope had swelled in that instant, like an inflatable dinghy whose cord had been pulled. This was the first thing that had gone right for me on a personal level in a long time, and if New Pippa could actually learn to tap dance, there might be no limits to what she could do.

Donna grinned back at me when I reached the other side and held her hand up for a high five. I looked at it for a couple of seconds then gave it a gentle tap with my fingers.

‘Told you,’ she said, smiling. ‘Don’t you worry. We’ll make a Ginger Rogers of you yet.’

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