THE PROPOSITION by Judith Ivory

Author:Judith Ivory [Ivory, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-16T23:38:11.760000+00:00

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Chapter 16

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After almost five weeks of instruction, Mr. Tremore had all but mastered the structure of proper English and was well on his way to reshaping his diction to an impressive degree. One lesson, though, Winnie delayed as long as possible. She might have avoided it completely, but since he was going to a ball, he had to learn to dance something beyond a jig around the kitchen.

She always taught her girls in the upstairs music room, a little room originally for the purpose of small gatherings of instruments and dinner guests that had occasionally, when her mother was alive and in the house, turned into extemporaneous dancing. Now it was a bare room, except for a big, black grand piano with a lot of broken strings and hardened pads. The bulky piano stood scooted back in a corner, unused and slowly falling apart. Other than this, the hardwood floor was wide-open and spacious, if a little dusty. All in all, though hardly the size of a ballroom, there was still plenty of area across which to move.

Dancing lessons were not usually a chore to Winnie. She loved to dance, and teaching foreign ladies or the gauche daughters of lawyers how to do it was her best opportunity to indulge herself in the entertainment. It was normally a favorite lesson. She brought in her gramophone, setting it on the closed piano lid, then cranked it up and ran full-volume the recordings she'd made of a trio playing Strauss.

With Mr. Tremore, she started the music, then went to position him. "Here now. You stand not exactly in front," she said, "but a little bit off, so our legs can go—" In between. She couldn't say it.

Then she didn't need to; he already knew. He took her hand into his and put himself automatically at the proper angle. She grasped the upper portion of his arm, the one he put round her waist. He knew to do that, too. She stood there for a moment in the marvel of it. The embrace of a dance—her own arm resting up his to the edge of his stone-hard shoulder, his palm flat to the small of her back.

She had to reverse her usual instructions. She told him, "You step forward, taking me with you to the count of three…"

She had to step backward, the opposite direction she usually went, onto the opposite foot. He tightened his grip, moved her, and suddenly everything seemed upside down. She slipped, missed the step. She thought something rolled underfoot. Like a stone loose on the floor, though she couldn't imagine where that would come from. So perhaps it was simply that she was her usual off-kilter self with him.

Before she could put anything right, something more went wrong. On the piano beside them, the gramophone found a scratch, and the needle stuck. "Oh, bosh," she said.

She took herself out of his arms to hunt through her stack of cylinders for a better recording. Oddly, a sound intruded into the silence of the room, and she looked up…

As Mr.

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