“Told you,” Abby said, when I came out. She spun me round, retied the sash in a bigger bow. “Let’s go wow the boys.”
We ran downstairs calling, “Look what we found!” and by the time we got down to the sitting room the sander was off and the guys were waiting for us. “Oh, look at you!” Justin cried. “Our little jazz baby!”
“Perfect,” Daniel said, smiling at me. “It’s perfect.”
Rafe swung one leg over the piano stool and swept a finger up the keys in a great, expert flourish. Then he started to play, something lazy and tempting with a sideways swing to it. Abby laughed. She gave the bow of my sash another tug, tightening it; then she went to the piano and started to sing.
“Of all the boys I’ve known and I’ve known some, until I first met you I was lonesome…”
I had heard Abby sing before, but only to herself when she thought no one was listening, never like this. That voice: it was the kind you don’t hear these days, a magnificent, full-blown contralto straight out of old war films, a voice for smoky nightclubs and marcel-waved hair, red lipstick and a blue saxophone. Justin put the sander down, clicked his heels together neatly and bowed. “May I have the honor of this dance?” he asked, and held out his hand to me.
For a second I wasn’t sure. What if Lexie had had two left feet, what if she hadn’t had two left feet and my new clumsiness gave me away, what if he held me too close and felt the battery pack hard under the bandage… But I always loved dancing and it seemed like forever since I had danced or wanted to, so long ago I couldn’t remember the last time. Abby winked at me without missing a note and Rafe threw in an extra little riff, and I caught Justin’s hand and let him pull me out of the doorway.
He knew what he was doing: smooth steps and his hand steady in mine as he spun me in slow circles around the room, floorboards soft and warm and dusty under my feet. And I hadn’t lost the knack, after all, I wasn’t stepping on Justin’s feet or tripping over my own; my body swayed with his sure and agile as if I had never walked into a chair in my life, I couldn’t have put a foot wrong if I had tried. Ribs of sunlight flashing across my eyes, Daniel leaning against the wall and smiling with a crumple of sandpaper forgotten in his hand, my skirt whirling up like a bell as Justin swung me away from him and then in again. “And so I rack my brain trying to explain all the things that you do to me…” Smell of polish, and the sawdust spinning lazy curls through the long columns of light. Abby with one palm lifting and her head thrown back, throat exposed and the song tossed up through the empty rooms and battered ceilings to the whole blazing sunset sky.
For a second it came back to me, when I had last danced like this: me and Rob, on the roof of the extension below my flat, the night before everything went horribly wrong. Somehow it didn’t even hurt. It was so far away; I was buttoned tight and untouchable in my blue dress and that was a sweet sad thing that had happened to some other girl, a long time ago. Rafe was picking up the rhythm and Abby was swaying faster, snapping her fingers: “I could say bella, bella, even say wunderbar, each language only helps me tell you how grand you are…” Justin caught me by the waist and spun me off the floor in a great flying circle, his face flushed and laughing close to mine. The wide bare room tossed Abby’s voice back and forth as if there were someone harmonizing in every corner and our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage.
"Well well well,” Frank said, that night. "You know what today is, right?”
I had no idea. Half my mind was still back at Whitethorn House. After dinner Rafe had dug out a tattered, yellowish songbook from inside the piano stool and kept going with the inter-war theme, Abby was singing along from the spare room-“Oh, Johnny, how you can love”-while she went back to rummaging and Daniel and Justin did the washing up, and the rhythm of it had bounced in my heels, sweet and saucy and tempting, all the way down the lawn and out the back gate. For a second I had actually considered just staying home, leaving Frank and Sam and the mystery pair of eyes to their own devices for one evening. It wasn’t like I was getting anything useful done out here. The night had turned cloudy, needle-fine drizzle was spattering onto the communal jacket, and I didn’t like having the torch on while I was on the phone; I couldn’t see six inches in front of my face. A whole coven of knife-happy stalkers could have been doing the Macarena around the cottage and I would never have known.
