Dancing in the Dark Read Free

wasn’t awful with Gary, just deadly dull.”
    “It wouldn’t be dull with me.”
    So it was a proposal. I stuffed my hands in my dressing-gown pockets to hide my agitation and sat down. Why did he have to spoil things? We’d made it plain to each other from the start that there was to be no commitment.
    I liked him—no, more than that, I was very fond of him.
    He was good to be with, extraordinarily handsome in a rugged open-air way. We got on famously, always had loads to talk about, and were great together in bed. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with him or with anybody else. I’d struggled hard to get where I was and wanted to get further, without having a husband questioning my every decision, interfering.
    I remembered Gary’s astonishment when I said I wanted to take an A level. We’d been married two years. “What on earth d’you want that for?” I recalled his round pleasant face, his round moist eyes. We’d first gone out together at school and had married at eighteen. I’d realised, far too late, that he’d been my escape route from home.
    Why did I want an A level? Perhaps to prove to myself that I wasn’t as stupid as my teachers had claimed, for self-respect, to gain the enjoyment from books that I’d only briefly experienced before my father had put a brutal stop to it.
    “I’d like to get a better job,” is what I said to Gary. I was bored rigid working at Peterssen’s packing chocolates. “I’d like to learn to type as well, use a computer.”
    Gary had laughed. “What good will all that stuff be when we have kids?”
    We were living in Kirkby with his widowed mother, not far from my parents. Although we’d put our name down for a council house, one would not be forthcoming until we had a family -not just one child but two or three. I visualised the future, trailing to the shops with a baby, more kids hanging on to the pram, getting a part-time job in another factory because Gary’s wages as a storeman would never be enough to live on. It was why we’d never even considered buying a place of our own.
    Two years later we were divorced. A bewildered Gary wanted to know what he’d done wrong. “Nothing,” I told him. I regretted hurting him, but he was devoid of ambition, content to spend the rest of his life in a deadend job wondering where the next penny would come from.
    My father was disgusted, my mother horrified: a Catholic, getting divorced! Even so, Mum did her utmost to persuade me to come back home. My younger sister, Trudy, had found her own escape route via Colin Daley and had also married at eighteen, though Colin had been a better bet than Gary. After ten years they were still happily together.
    Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me back to Kirkby and my family. Instead, I rented a bedsit. I had my English A level by then, and until I bought my flat, nothing in life had given me more pleasure than the certificate to say I’d achieved a grade C. Armed with a dictionary, I’d made myself read the books I’d been set, struggled for hours to understand them in the bedroom at my motherin-law’s, while downstairs Gary watched football and game-shows on television. It seemed no time before the words started to make sense, as if I’d always known them, as if they’d been stored in my head waiting to be used. I shall never forget the day I finished reading Pride and Prejudice. I’d understood it. I’d enjoyed it. It was like discovering you could sing or play the piano.
    Once settled in the bedsit, I took courses in typing and computing at night school, left Peterssen’s, and began to wonder if it had all been worth it as I drifted from one deadend office job to another—until three years ago, when I became a receptionist/typist with Stock Masterton, an estate agent’s in the city centre. Of course, I had to tell George Masterton I’d worked in a factory until I was twenty-four, but he had been impressed. “Ah, a self-made woman. I like