Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom Read online

  ‘Oh no,’ said Lady Stott. ‘Don’t you dare, Bounce!’

  ‘An excellent notion, young man,’ said Sir Percy. ‘I’ll lay that choice in front of the wee madam as soon as she decides to come home tonight and we’ll see what happens.’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the kind!’ said his wife. ‘What on earth would we tell Julian?’

  ‘Why do you need to tell him anything?’ I said. ‘If he knows nothing of Miss Stott’s dancing, why should he ever find out?’

  Lady Stott searched my face for a while, thinking furiously, then all the fight went out of her.

  ‘Because it won’t work,’ she said. ‘If Bounce threatens to take the house away she’ll just let it go and keep dancing and then Julian will have to find out, won’t he?’

  ‘But what makes you think she’ll choose dancing over the house?’ I said.

  Lady Stott groaned and put her face in her hands. When she spoke her voice was muffled. ‘Because I’ve tried already,’ she said. ‘As soon as I heard about Len Munn and the fox fur and all of it I went straight to Tweetie and told her. She just laughed in my face.’

  ‘Oh, Eunice,’ said Sir Percy, kicking his little footstool away and struggling to his feet. ‘Oh, my hennie. Don’t you fret yourself.’

  ‘How did you hear about that, Lady Stott?’ I asked, as Sir Percy brushed past me.

  ‘Oh, Bounce,’ she wailed, throwing her short little arms as far as they would go around her husband.

  ‘Oh, Eunice,’ he crooned, throwing his slightly longer arms as far as they would go around the considerable bulk of his wife.

  Alec and I withdrew, first to the hall but then, when we realised that we could still hear them, to Tweetie’s bedroom, finding it by trial and error.

  The new costume was still with Miss Thwaite, but on a hook on the back of her door there hung a soft velvet bag, containing her shoes, stockings, bracelets and, crucially, her headband.

  We subjected the thing to close scrutiny, running our fingers around it to feel for sharp protrusions and even, gingerly, trying it on. There was nothing to be learned: it was a simple band of stitched silver cloth, edged in spangled droplets, two inches wide and rather thick as though lined with some kind of cushioning or stiffening.

  ‘Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue,’ I said. ‘Foxy said headdress when she meant hankie.’

  ‘But she said “my headdress”,’ Alec reminded me. ‘No one’s tongue slips and says “my headdress” instead of “Leo’s handkerchief”.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘And on the subject of the hankie: we need to brief Barrow. Tell him to keep a close eye on Roly in the men’s cloakroom. And press upon Roly himself that he shouldn’t leave his things unattended.’

  ‘So, it’s back to the bally Locarno again, is it?’ Alec said.

  I considered it for a moment: duty and thoroughness and how much Sir Percy was paying.

  ‘Let’s ring him,’ I said.

  But Alec was made of stouter stuff and insisted. So it was that we spent the rest of the day in the shabby armchairs of the withdrawing room, briefing and warning and grilling and testing each of the dancers whenever they took a minute’s break from their feverish last-ditch practising.

  That and listening to Victor Silvester coaching Grant and Barrow until I could have screamed and suspected that, on my deathbed, I would still be hearing his voice shouting: ‘In line, in line, outside! Toe, toe, heel!’ and the tip of his cane striking the floor.

  18

  Alec faced an evening and morning sans valet with perfect equanimity and so it behoved me to do the same about Grant, especially since I complained so loud and long when she was with me. When I arrived at the Locarno on Friday, however, I wished I was less dishevelled, for not only the competing couples but many of the ticket-holders come to view the spectacle were dressed up to the nines in true Glasgow fashion, prinked and polished like ponies on their way to a gymkhana and painted with not only rouge and lipstick and lash black but with blue above the eyes and red tips to their fingers.

  I had celebrated being free of Grant’s attentions by washing my face, paddling on some cold cream once it was dry and letting the fresh air at it for once. Now, though, I felt like a milkman’s dray delivering at the gymkhana tea-tent. I prayed she would not see me or, at least, would be too busy to lose her temper if she did. Alec looked exactly the same as ever, his suit brushed, his shoes shined, his face shaved and his hair nicely smoothed back in wings, a perfect middle way between the rough curls of a working man like Jamesie and the oily slick of Mr Silvester.

  Grant and Barrow were not the only of our servants to desert us that day. When we drew up on Sauchiehall Street it was to find our tame street urchins already employed guarding another motorcar and unwilling to add my Cowley to their beat.

  ‘Aw, we daren’t, missus,’ said the boy. ‘We’ve been told to keep a right good eye on this one and we’re gonny. They’re in the pub the now but they’re going to the dancing later.’

  ‘How much is he paying you?’ I asked, rootling around in my bag for the shillings I had planned to give them today.

  ‘He’s not paying us,’ said the child. ‘We’re doing it out of the goodness of our hearts.’

  ‘For a friend of yours?’ asked Alec. It was hard to imagine this pair having a friend of such exalted style – the motorcar was a Phantom and a very new one.

  ‘A better friend than an enemy,’ said the child and his sister nodded soberly. It made no sense to me but I did not stop to argue, merely handed the shillings over anyway as a bonus for past service and told myself that the Cowley would come to no harm.

  ‘Wonder who it belongs to,’ said Alec. ‘There was the couple from Inverness who sounded rather grand, but they’d hardly stop in for a pint of beer beforehand.’

  We could not discuss it any further however, because as soon as we stepped towards the door of the Locarno we were swept up in a great surging crowd of spectators, all clutching their tickets aloft and all jostling to get to a ringside seat before the fun commenced. When Alec and I were spotted by Lorrison – resplendent today in whitish tie and greenish tails – and were taken in ahead of all those around us, a loud chorus of jeers and whistles accompanied us on our way.

  ‘Special guests,’ Lorrison shouted over his shoulder. ‘Honoured guests of Mr Silvester himself. So youse can shut up and stop moaning.’

  Inside, the Locarno was quite transformed, like a church for a wedding, with urns of flowers and ribbon banners hanging in swags from lamp to lamp along the corridor walls. Of course, the flowers were hideous – gladioli and lilies of elephantine proportion – and the banners were art-silk so shiny that they dazzled as one looked at them. Still, the overall effect was festive and added to the sense of bubbling excitement produced by the crowd surging along the corridor and the hubbub from the ballroom beyond. Lorrison elbowed his way between the bodies and managed to get us through the double doors at top speed. Neither did he break stride as he set out across the floor to empty seats on the other side but I was struck by untypical bashfulness at the thought of plodding across that gleaming floor in my coat and hat under the gaze of more and more spectators every minute, for the seats were rapidly filling. Alec seemed no more keen to make the trip, for he had stopped dead at my side and looked at me with an expression of alarm. Lorrison, our protector, was now a good five yards away and unappealing as it was to contemplate the walk at his heels, it was far worse a prospect without him. Accordingly, we scuttled after him and caught up just as he was turning, with a flourish belonging to a collection of manners he had assumed for the day. All around us there was a ripple of comment as the audience asked themselves who we were and why – I could not help hearing this – I had made so little effort to dress properly.

  Alec was unremarkable, for the Glasgow citizenry en masse did not run to dinner jackets, much less to tails, and what few men there were in the little gilt seats had done no more than change to clean collars and choose their gaudiest
ties. The women, though, under their cloth coats, wore an extraordinary assortment of finery: tea gowns with opera gloves, ball gowns with leather lace-up shoes, even one or two cocktail dresses looking very peculiar without the jewels one is used to seeing with them. One girl in her twenties had a frock of black and silver fringes and wore nothing with them but a gold cross on a chain and wool stockings. They had, I decided, simply worn the best they owned without worrying about what they did not. It was touching in its way although, if one were heartless, rather amusing.

  The speeches to be got through were rather less so. Mr Lorrison, bellowing into a speaking trumpet, introduced all six members of the dance band collectively, individually and then collectively again, before beginning on the judges. Two of them got the merest of nods, but he fell over himself lauding Mr Silvester, droning on and on about his school, his medals and the transformation he had wrought in the world of dancing. The little woman I had taken to be his assistant was introduced as Alice Astoria, a fellow judge, but it seemed she had no comparable cartload of solid achievements, since the speech waxed on her elegance and poise and the way she graced the Locarno ‘like a flower’, which made me think only of a daisy on a dung heap. Judging by the way Miss Astoria’s face tightened, exactly as a daisy closes when the sun goes down, the same allusion might well have occurred to her.

  Eventually, however, Lorrison moved on to introducing the competing couples and there was a rustle of anticipation around the packed ballroom which I could not deny sharing. They were brought out from the cloakroom corridor in order of descending odds, beginning with a couple of rather plain puddings who even I could see were unlikely to go home with a trophy and for whom there was only a polite smattering as well as a few muffled titters. The next were no better, consisting of an enormously tall fellow with a lot of knees and elbows, giving him the look of an umbrella outwitted by a high wind. It did not help that his partner was fully a foot shorter and round withal, her skinny legs protruding from the bottom of a short, bouffant red frock and making her rather too reminiscent of a toffee apple with two sticks.

  Then matters began to improve. The next few couples were clearly not going to win. Some of them were past their prime, rather creaky and arthritic-looking, with a good deal of brocade on the ladies’ gowns and an old-fashioned cut to the gentlemen’s tails. These did however have an air of tremendous confidence, moving together like two parts of the same creature, even when they were only parading across the floor.

  The other group in this middle lot were at the opposite end of their careers, raw and unformed, very much still two separate beings trying to find a way to step in time. They would have done well to study the elderly pairs for tips, but instead with the insouciance of youth they ignored the treasure before their eyes, the way the elderly gentlemen inclined a chivalrous head towards their partners and the way the ladies tilted their chins just so to give an air of whimsy to their stately progress across the floor. The young are ever so; unable to believe that the decrepitude before it was ever firm young flesh or that they themselves will ever crumble.

  Lorrison gave a marked pause after the end of these young hopefuls and old faithfuls and I felt the audience lift into a higher gear in some ineffable way.

  ‘Couple number eleven, Alana and Alonzo Arabia,’ he announced and the crowd, who had been clapping perfectly politely for everyone, now applauded with some fervour as a pair of terrifically glamorous black-haired individuals came stalking on to the floor dressed as though for a flamenco.

  ‘From Inverness?’ muttered Alec in my ear, sounding rather incredulous. And to be fair, it was hard to imagine such a pencil-thin moustache, like two anchovies laid on a boiled egg, or such bright gold earrings, so gold they might be brass, appearing on the streets of that town without a great deal of comment.

  When the applause had quietened, Lorrison piped up again.

  ‘And introducing couple number seven, lucky number seven, Miss Delicia Grace and Monsieur Pierre Barreaux.’

  The audience was a-flutter. One supposed that hardened dance fans knew the names of the likely professionals and the sudden introduction of a new pair had thrown them. I noticed with wry interest that Grant had embellished her original choice of Christian name, probably in the changing room and probably in response to Alana Arabia, for she has an unslakable thirst for the theatrical and does not care to be bettered at it.

  When Grant and Barrow finally appeared, after an unconscionable pause to build expectations, even I felt a little gasp escape me. Barrow of course looked much the same as usual, for a valet-cum-butler spends his days dressed for the ballroom in most particulars, although he had added some revoltingly shiny dancing slippers and there was a suspicious winking down the front of his waistcoat which hinted at jewelled buttons. Grant, though, was quite simply staggering. Her frock was a pale pearly pink, gleaming gold in the folds, and it clung to her like a second skin. There was plenty of her first skin on show too, since the pink and gold affair was essentially backless and surely nearer to frontless than the Locarno had often seen before. She looked beautiful; I had no idea that my maid, under her serge, possessed such a pair of milky white shoulders and such a long white neck. A neck made for diamonds and decorated this minute by a good lot of them. I sat up sharply.

  ‘She’s wearing my mother’s jewels,’ I said. I sat back. ‘And looking better in them than I ever have.’

  Alec snorted. ‘How old is Miss Grant?’ he said. ‘I had no idea that we had had a swan in our midst all this time. Barrow looks quite smitten.’

  ‘She’s forty,’ I said. ‘Barrow is safe enough and you shouldn’t get any ideas either, for she has a gentleman in Northumberland, a publican, with first refusal. The poor man has been writing to her for ten years and dropping hints like anvils.’

  ‘Sshh,’ said Alec, for Boris was tinkling his piano keys again and Lorrison was clearing his throat.

  ‘And now,’ he said, ‘put your hands together for last year’s winners and the reigning champions! Ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish Professional Ballroom and Latin trophy-holders for another two hours only! Couple number three, Miss Beryl Bonnar and Mr Beau Montaigne.’

  The spectators, reaching fever pitch one supposed, not only clapped but also cheered and drummed their feet. There were a few hip hip hip hurrahs too and the noise as Bert and Beryl actually appeared was deafening.

  ‘Tweetie has pulled out!’ I screamed into Alec’s ear, through the din. ‘She must have or she’d have been before Beryl.’

  ‘Just like Grant to carry on anyway!’ screamed Alec back at me, then he turned to watch the entrance of the champions.

  Beryl, workaday Beryl in her pinafore, had been transformed. She was not as dashing as Alana and thankfully not as naked as Grant, but she glowed as though lit from within. Her frock was every little girl’s dream, sugar pink and white, and as frothy as a bottle of warm champagne. Her hair was elaborately dressed in a style which must have taken hours. In fact, I thought I detected the hand of Grant in the architectural masterwork that had been wrought on her head. It was just the sort of thing Grant loves and does not get to perpetrate on me any more since fashions have changed and I have become bold enough to forbid her.

  ‘Bert looks terrified,’ Alec said.

  I flicked a glance at him but only for a moment. I simply could not tear my eyes away from Beryl. She looked, I had decided, like an empress, utterly transfixing.

  Lorrison cleared his throat again.

  ‘Oh, my Lord,’ I said, understanding. ‘Tweetie is here, Alec. Beryl let her go last.’

  ‘Why?’ said Alec, a mere man, unschooled in the wiles of womankind.

  ‘To upstage her,’ I said. ‘Wait and see.’

  ‘And finally,’ said Lorrison. ‘Couple number four, Miss Tweetie Bird and Mr Roland Wentworth.’ There was no fol-de-rol, no string of titles and trophies and the applause, while enthusiastic enough, had no cheers or stamping. Poor Tweetie knew it too. She paused in the doorway with Roly
hovering behind her and shot a look of pure venom at Beryl, who was clapping politely.

  Tweetie glittered and dazzled as she stood there, despite the scowl. The headband was worn not low and straight across her forehead but high at the front and down to her nape at the back, so that it made one think of the Statue of Liberty, but apart from that curious detail she was quite lovely. If she had come before Grant and Beryl, she would have caused a sensation.

  I should have expected her to realise as much and be upset but, after that one glare, the other dancers and certainly the spectators ceased to exist for her. She fixed her gaze on the far wall and stalked across the floor with great purpose and concentration.

  I caught Grant’s eye and saw her shrug, meaning that she had watched and seen nothing. Barrow patted his breast pocket, which I took to mean that he had kept watch over Roly’s belongings and that no one had tampered with anything.

  ‘Ladies and,’ began Lorrison again. Then his voice died in his throat.

  The street door had opened and four men stood there. They had such an air of authority that for a second I wondered if they might be policemen, if perhaps the Stotts had thrown caution – or at least Julian – to the wind and put the entire matter in the hands of the law.

  ‘Have the Stotts engaged another firm to come and help us?’ asked Alec. ‘Or are they with Silvester, do you think?’

  They did seem at home here, very sure of their welcome. In fact, as Alec spoke, four spectators, two men and two women, rose out of their front row seats and shuffled away, letting the four latecomers take their place.

  I shook my head. Two of the men looked like – there is no other word for it – thugs. I could not imagine why two such lumpen creatures, rough-hewn and dour-faced, had come to see ballroom dancing. The other two were not quite so remarkable. One was neat, slight and bored-looking and I rather thought from the way he kept himself turned slightly towards the fourth of the group, that he was accompanying this last man, that the last man was where we should direct our gaze.