Our Dancing Days
Lucy English’s third novel is set in a Suffolk commune in the Seventies where, beneath the blissful summer surface, the young inhabitants are caught in a downward spiral ending in tragedy.When Don, an aristocratic young Notting Hill poet, inherits a stately home in the depths of the Suffolk countryside from an elderly relative, he decides to move there taking with him an artist, Tessa and her best friend, Deedee. A menage a trois develops and as they form a commune and begin to grow their own vegetables, they live together in rural harmony. It is only when they decide to enlarge their group, bringing in strangers encountered at fairs and in pubs – the mesmerising and charismatic Jack, a single mother Helen and her troublesome six-year-old daughter, Beauty – that the balance is upset, tensions emerge and the friction builds to its horrific climax.
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Copyright © Lucy English 2000
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Fourth Estate
‘Each Moment’ by the Incredible String Band. Words by Robin Williamson. Reproduced by kind permission of IMP Ltd. Lyrics from ‘Astral Weeks’ by Van Morrison.
The right of Lucy English to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Source ISBN: 9781841152424
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007485390
Version: 2016-03-23
This was our dancing day
So even those with nothing to celebrate
Shook off their unfathomable gloom
And were lost with us in that meadow.
From ‘Albion’ in Spirit Level, a book of poems by Andrew Bell
CONTENTS
Bristol is built on several hills. In Totterdown there is a street that seems to cling to the steepest edge of one on a high embankment above Temple Meads Station. Tessa’s studio was on the top floor of a house in this terrace. From here it wasn’t difficult to entertain the idea that one was floating above the city like the hot-air balloons do on a fine day, but it also wasn’t difficult to imagine the whole street of houses slipping over the embankment; the gardens already lay at perilous angles. It was with this feeling of landing in front of the 10.45 from platform 6 that caused Tessa to stop working and look out of her studio window.
The ten forty-five gathered speed and whirred past harmlessly, but Tessa still felt she had fallen beneath its wheels. She also knew why she felt like this. She had that morning received a letter from her ex. It had just stopped raining and there was a break in the clouds. Sunlight fell onto the other side of Bristol, emphasising the lumpy forms of the university building, the glass edges of the city office blocks, and, pointing up between, the spires of Christchurch and St Mary Redcliffe; Bristol’s skyline was urban but not unpleasant. She could also see the parklands of Ashton Court and the gardens of Brandon Hill, for it was May and the trees were blossoming and fresh.
Smudgy sunlight on pinkish stone, pastel blue between moving clouds, it’s definitely a watercolour, thought Tessa turning from her window and back to her art, but her canvas was dark and red and large with jagged forms like a gaping dragon or a charred accident.
She poked at her work with a brush dipped in vermilion, but only half-heartedly. ‘It’s not savage enough, it’s blunted and dead.’ Letters from Murray always had this effect on her. Tessa’s walls were laden with other brooding canvases; she sold approximately one of these a year. The rest of her work lay in folders, because Tessa was an illustrator; watercolours of gardens, country scenes, Bristol sites, for calendars, birthday cards and coffee-table books. It was Murray who owned the gallery in Bath where she had first exhibited fourteen years ago and they had been lovers for eight of them.
Murray Maclean now lived in Edinburgh reinventing his Scottish roots. He had opened another gallery there, mostly for young Scottish painters. He still had the gallery in Bath but he showed only an indifferent attitude towards it, like he showed towards other left-behind projects. And Tessa was another project, she knew that. His letter was like a public relations handout, with a list of all the artists who would be exhibiting that summer, what cafés he had visited and who would be coming up for the Festival. His letter was like him, smart and to the point. Murray was in his fifties now, tall and elegant with thick grey hair. At the end he said, ‘If you’re up for the Festival Claudia and I would love to see you, that is if she isn’t too busy buying clothes at Baby Gap.’
