The Ballroom Class by Lucy Dillon

Author:Lucy Dillon
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Chick-Lit Romance
ISBN: 9780340977545
Publisher: Hodder
Published: 2008-10-15T23:00:00+00:00

18

Angelica was sorting through her music collection, trying to find songs that would make the waltz come more easily to Chris and Lauren. Some music did, in her experience. If the rhythm was right, and the lyrics chimed in with your own mood, putting into words what you were hunting around to express, then your feet did the hard work by themselves while your mind was swept away by the song.

She didn’t like teaching engaged couples, as a rule, not even wealthy American ones whose parents had come to her waving wads of cash and begging for private coaching. There was simply too much riding on that one dance. Every secret doubt and tension went into the hour’s lesson, and every stumble was An Omen. More than one couple had come for three lessons, then mysteriously never reappeared for the final ones. Tears, accusations, unflattering comparisons with mothers/fathers – Angelica had heard them all, and there was only so much she felt able to advise.

Her own romantic history was so closely bound up in her dancing partnerships that they were impossible to untangle – which was, she now thought, where she’d gone wrong.

She looked at the CD in her hand: Victor Silvester. That took her back. Right back to the beginning with starchy old Bernard, and his white tie and tails. Where would I be if I’d stuck with Bernard, she wondered. A semi in Bromley, probably, with grandchildren, and terrible feet.

Angelica got up and went to open the second of her mother’s albums, now stacked on the sitting-room bookshelf: the amateur years in London, while she and Bernard worked their way up the competition ladder.

He was a nice chap, Bernard, she thought, as she turned the stiff black pages. Jug ears, poor lamb, but a lovely line. She’d been paired up with him by her first London teacher, Jarvis Carmichael, because Bernard ‘came from the provinces too’. Jarvis was snotty, but they’d worked really hard to show him that hometowns didn’t mean anything.

Angelica smiled sadly at the photographs. Bernard was a very old-school ballroom dancer. Waltz was their best dance, closely followed by the quickstep and foxtrot – the dances where Bernard could imagine he was Vernon Castle, basically. He was a bit of an obsessive about Vernon Castle. You couldn’t see in the black and white photographs where the collar gave him a rash, but his hair gleamed with Brylcreem. So did hers for that matter.

In those days, Angelica had been quite old-school too, not to mention baby faced. Her dresses were stiff-petticoated, spangled confections with tiny nipped-in waists, and her make-up would have put Diana Ross to shame: thick winged eyeliner and pale shell-pink lips that made her look like Cleopatra in a fuchsia tulle evening gown. Of course, you had to wear make-up that could be seen from the seats for competition, but it helped that, back then, Angelica was trowelling on just the same amount of eyeliner to go to the shops.

They made a stylish

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