‘She doesn’t say much,’ said Eve.

  ‘Did you go to the dancing, Alice?’ June spoke loudly. Alice nodded her head. ‘Oh, aye.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her in months,’ June said and I understood then that it was a rare thing for them to meet on purpose in the lounge with the pictures of past residents smiling at them from their frames on the walls.

  I asked them to come to the centre of the room and stand by a chair. As the daughter helped her mother and the man in the dressing gown pushed his frame I rubbed my arms, looked at their serious faces and wondered how I would get them to dance without falling or hurting themselves.

  ‘It’s freezing in here,’ I said.

  ‘The heater’s on,’ said June.

  ‘This room’s like us. Takes a while to get going,’ the man with the paper said.

  I realised they were as nervous as me. I looked at them all, facing me, their fragile hands resting on the backs of their chairs, the man’s dressing gown tied tight around his waist, June’s chin tilted. The beat before curtain up. Five, six, seven, eight.

  ‘We’ll do some pliés with port de bras,’ I said. ‘That’s leg bends and arms.’

  I put some music on.

  ‘But first we’ll sort out your feet.’

  I showed them how to stand in first position, keeping their heels together and turning out their toes. ‘Heads up, chins up, tuck your tummies in, tuck your bums in. My teacher used to call your bum a tail. She was more polite than me.’

  ‘Nobody’s polite here,’ June said.

  I checked on June’s feet and I was right, she was as turned out as any eager eleven-year-old. All of them were taller than they’d been before, even the women with willowed spines.

  ‘One hand on your chair, the other hand here, in bras bas,’ I told them. I shaped my arm into a curve and held it low, my hand just in front of my thighs.

  ‘Keep your shoulders down, pull them away from your ears, don’t think about your stresses and strains. John, is it John? Don’t grip the chair, relax that hand.’ The man with the newspaper told me he would fall over if he didn’t grip the chair so I told him to grip it less.

  ‘My mum is not allowed to fall,’ the daughter, Senga, told me.

  ‘She won’t fall, will you Agnes? That’s us in bras bas. Now we’ll take the arm up to first position, and down again.’ I showed them how to move their arms from first to second position and from first to fifth, how to move with grace from fifth, through second and back to bras bas.

  It was the most soothing thing I’d done in months. They went with it. I recalled the phrases and instructions my teachers had said to me. I lightly touched their shoulders and elbows and wrists, pulled gently on fingers to shape hands and remembered gentle fingers on my own hands and the way, in class, I would try to alter my balance and my body in the tiny directions the teacher had prompted. If I was strict, I couldn’t help it, it was the only way I knew to teach.

  When I told them to go with the music, to stretch their fingers to the very edges of the phrasing, I did the same myself. I was eighteen again, striving for perfection, besotted with the smell of leather shoes and Lycra. I don’t know where they were, my class, but I saw a fineness in their faces that hadn’t been there before. I know we all see what we want to see, but it was there.

  I walked down the row of chairs and told them to change direction and face me at the other end of the room. The man in the dressing gown was slow to turn, and so was Agnes the elderly mother.

  ‘You can dance by sitting on a chair,’ I said, but they stayed standing and after demi-pliés and port de bras using the other arm, we worked on forward and back bends and relevés. They struggled for balance but managed it, rising from first position onto their tiptoes and back down again.

  ‘Pull in, pull in,’ I said. ‘Smile, you’re dancing!’

  John untied his laces and threw his shoes to the side of the room. So did June. So did Eve.

  ‘Are you all right, Mum?’ Senga said.

  ‘Wheesht! I’m dancing!’ Agnes shouted.

  I turned up the volume on my music player and Camille Saint-Saëns’s ‘The Swan’ soared between us as we stretched a leg from first position to the front and from first to the side and then made gentle quarter-circles through the positions. ‘Slide your toes along the floor, and close and pull in.’

  ‘What is this we’re doing?’ Eve asked.

  ‘Ballet dancing,’ June said.

  ‘It’s preparation for rond de jambe,’ I said. ‘Round the leg.’

  ‘Round the bend.’

  ‘Rond de John,’ John said, and I saw his pointed toes in his green socks.

  ‘I mind when this lounge was filled with dancing couples,’ Eve said. ‘Now everyone stays in their rooms.’

  I let them talk because it didn’t stop them dancing and their voices were soft and affable. When the music came to an end I told them to shake their arms and legs but some found that hard to do so I told them to stop.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I said to the man in the dressing gown.

  ‘Charlie Hughes,’ he said to me.

  ‘Are you hot? Do you want to take your dressing gown off?’

  He winked and shook his head. I couldn’t see his mouth because his beard was so thick. The woman who rarely spoke, Alice, held her hands out. When I took them she said, ‘I have warm hands. My hands are never warm.’ And they were. The dancing had warmed her up.

  I should have checked they were comfortable to stand without support but I didn’t. Nobody said they couldn’t. Charlie used his frame. For the last part of the class I cleared the chairs and asked two lines of dancers to travel towards each other and meet lightly at their fingertips then travel away. Promenade.

  ‘Walk softly, feel your weight transfer from one foot to the other,’ I said. ‘Touch your fingertips when you meet. What does it feel like?’

  Nobody answered, but they went with it. I chose some music we warmed up to on one of the ships. ‘Ah, Debussy,’ said Charlie. A dance captain had made me a playlist and I was grateful for it.

  ‘Travel towards each other as if you’re happy to see each other,’ I said. ‘How do you move? Where are your hands? Are you light? Are you heavy? What are you doing with your eyes? Now come back to your starting positions and promenade as if you’re brave. Change your movement slightly,’ I said. ‘Change the intention.’ I saw their footsteps become bolder and their chests puff. Eve came to Charlie while he stood still, narrowed his eyes and gripped his frame, his elbows at angles.

  ‘Now travel as if you’re lonely.’ Their movements changed again. I was June’s partner because she was on the end of the line and had no partner. We held eye contact, as I’d insisted we do, and when she walked towards me, lonely, I saw a glimmer of sadness that I was sure caught the mirror of mine.

  They asked me to stay for tea so I did. Eve put the radio back on. John took his newspaper, excused himself and sat away from us. June offered me a biscuit.

  ‘Was that all right?’ I asked her when the others were talking.

  ‘Aye, it was fine. It was different,’ she said. ‘Agnes there.’ She gestured towards the mother whose daughter was breaking a biscuit in half for her. ‘She’s been so, so low. I never thought she’d join in. But aye, it was different, it was good.’

  I’ve always liked praise. I took another biscuit and watched Charlie in his dressing gown say something to Alice. Their heads were bent towards one another, his yellow-white, hers grey.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked June.

  ‘Five years,’ she said. ‘They were threatening to build another block between me and my view and that would have finished me off, but they’re not now. I can sit by my window and do my crossword knowing that nothing will change. Well, the view changes every minute, that’s the beauty of it.’

  ‘I love the Campsie Fells,’ I said.

  She picked up her keys and looked at me. ‘Why are you here?’ she asked.

  She confused me.

  ‘I’m teaching dance.’

  ‘I’m not asking why you’re here teaching dance. Why are you here in Campsie, on your own? Don’t you have anyone? No family?’

  I knew what she meant now. I said, ‘I’m here to house sit,’ and we left it at that. I felt my answer disappointed her a little, as if her question had reached to the edge of the musical phrasing and touched me and I’d slammed it back. But it felt too complicated to say that I had wanted to take us out of our lives for a bit, to snuffle around, to search the village for something I could hardly name and if I could name it at all it would be one all-consuming word: Robbie.

  ‘You’re charging a fiver, are you?’ June said.

  ‘I was going to make this a trial class. For free.’

  ‘Nonsense. A fiver’s not enough,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t charge any more. Old people are poor.’

  They all heard that. Charlie laughed and Alice laughed.

  ‘You’ve got another mouth to feed. I think it should be pay what you can,’ June said.

  ‘Okay, pay what you can,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ I knew they didn’t have much money.

  She took a pint glass from the kitchen and held it in front of each dancer, collecting my money. I finished my cup of tea and gathered up my speaker and bag. June tipped the glass of notes and coins into my hand.

  ‘And how’s your wee girl?’ she asked, in a straight-out way.

  ‘She’s fine, she’s well. She’s at nursery. I’d better go and get her,’ I said, looking at the time on my phone and realising that I had only eleven minutes before I needed to pick her up.

  ‘I used to clean the primary school next door,’ June said. ‘I knew all the weans in Campsie.’

  After I left, I wondered how long they would sit in their socks in the lounge. I remember Senga telling her mother that they were going to Stobhill later for an appointment. I was saddened to think of Agnes being so, so low, and it struck me how plainly June had spoken about it, in a voice that wasn’t hushed, that they could all hear, as if they recognised that being so, so low could happen and did happen to them all. Sadness is a quiet thing, surely.

  8.

  Because the ships sailed their long voyages at night and often by the morning we were docked in a port, it was rare to stand on deck in daylight and see nothing but sea. We had no windows in our cabins anyway, no way of knowing if it was dark or light outside or if land was close by. Tiny cabins they were with tiny bunk beds. Two dancers to a cabin. We shared a wardrobe and a chest of drawers and we had a drawer each under the bunk beds. We slept with many partners in many beds. Everyone did. When our shows were done we drank the subsidised drinks in the crew bar and returned to our tiny cabins in the tiny hours of the morning. It was usual for me to see a new naked arm thrown from beneath my roommate’s covers. It was common to see girls and boys in pants and T-shirts walking barefoot down sleeping corridors.

  I loved the costumes we wore – the bikinis and headdresses and backpacks that held huge feathers. I loved the magicians, the husband-and-wife acts, the flamenco troupes who danced with their black shoes and black eyeliner and pulled-back hair, the tribute groups, and my solo – ‘Big Spender’ – that I performed under a spotlight while the dancers in my troupe changed costume and grabbed a breath.

  Those years sang. They still sing for me. I expected to have more. To think I was worried about the size of my body, if I would fit my costumes, determined to be the one the audience couldn’t take their eyes off, to kick higher, turn more sweetly than anyone else and make my movements look as effortless and easy as breathing. To miss my parents in London, and fret occasionally about my dad’s health, to be insecure about that vague wave of future I had to face when I got off the ship, to make sure I got another contract as soon as I could was all I had to worry about or all I chose to worry about. I didn’t know that those days and hours and moments could sustain a life.

  Robbie was a fitness instructor in the gym. I went to him because I’d heard that a girl could be disembarked for being overweight or underweight. If she didn’t fit her costume she didn’t look good and oh no they didn’t make the costumes for the girls, they got girls to fit the costumes. Those glittering bikinis and corsets made far more journeys on the sea and saw far more dark and spotlit nights than we did. One of the girls I danced with was eating tissues. Another wasn’t eating at all. I like my food. Always have.

  Robbie wore his uniform T-shirt and told me, as he was inducting a husband and wife, to come back at seven-thirty the next morning when the gym would be quiet. I did.

  He was mouthy, like me. Some would say cocky. I’d seen him in the crew bar. He liked to talk and joke. Never still. But he explained each piece of gym equipment with professional patience and watched me work it myself to make sure I’d understood his instructions. I slowed myself down in order to listen to him. I knew how to work gym equipment but I let him talk.

  ‘Do you run?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should try it for stamina. We have a running club in here. At midnight. We run 10K together.’

  ‘You run at midnight?’

  ‘We have to do it when the guests are asleep.’

  He wiped the handles of a spinning bike and threw the paper towel into a bin. ‘I’ve seen you dance,’ he said. ‘You could handle 10K.’ He pronounced K like key. I had to listen carefully to his accent, watch his face, keep an eye on his lips.

  After our final show one night, when I’d showered and attended to the blisters on my feet, I went to the gym with my roommate. We looked through the door and saw them; men and women in shorts and T-shirts, running hard, music blaring, hands in fists, muscles spreading as their feet set down on the treadmills. I watched Robbie run, watched his cheeks hollow as he breathed, saw how fast he ran, how alive his face was, saw him raise his head and look straight into my eyes through the glass door. That was the moment. That was when I knew we were each other’s. I know it’s unbelievable but it’s true. I’ll tell Emily that. She’ll like that.

  I had to go inside.

  ‘Are you running with us?’

  ‘I’m just looking for…’ I didn’t know what else to say.

  He continued to run. The other runners ran too, feet pounding on. He kept eye contact and nodded.

  We found a way to be together and, because of his ebullience around other people, I was surprised by his stillness. I expected his hands to be as busy as his chat. I expected speed. But no.

  ‘You’re kind,’ I said.

  It was as if he’d uncovered himself for me and I knew, despite my youth, to be kind back. We were brave and stupid, taking risks with our hearts that we shouldn’t have. No. We were absolutely right to.

  Of course, after we’d slept together he showed off around me. But despite his self-assurance, he approached everything with a kind of formality and gentleness and a softness that I understood quite quickly to be love. I suppose you have to be in the right place to catch it, but I caught it and loved him back.

  ‘I stayed in London,’ he said, when I told him where I was from.

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘A village near Glasgow.’

  ‘Would you live in London again?’

  ‘With you I would.’ He was serious about me. I was in no doubt.

  I came to know the exquisite tenderness that a pas de deux demands when I was with Robbie, much more so than when I was going through the steps in class, so much so that I wished I could dance with a partner again and feel it this time. Aren’t all of us better at everything after a grand passion? The presenting of one body to another: a woman’s arched back – cambré – lifted to stop bare and plain before her partner’s open chest. Eyes that fix, lips that brush, a hand that catches a thigh, the heat where the tops of the legs meet, the cradling of a body, the celebration of a body, the embrace and love. A pas de deux was sex with love. As I said, I’d love to dance with a partner again.

  ‘Do you get homesick?’ I asked him. ‘Do you miss anyone?’

  ‘My brother,’ he said. ‘My parents passed away.’

  ‘That’s too young, surely?’

  ‘That’s how it goes,’ he said, and told me that his brother was working in Australia. He’d gone when Robbie took off on the ships.

  ‘Do you miss anyone?’ he asked me.

  ‘I feel a little guilty,’ I said. ‘My mum’s at home looking after my dad. I miss them both.’

  ‘It’s a long time away if you’re missing what you’ve left,’ Robbie said.

  ‘It’s easier now I’ve met you.’

  So we were in love quickly. That’s the truth. I said they were the best days and they were. I wish I’d known it at the time. I just presumed there would be more. To think, my body could dance for hours at a time, my back could bend, I could triple pirouette and not get dizzy, and I could fall in love so easily.

  9.

  The police came to my door to frighten me, I presume. It was the same policewoman from the car park and a different policeman.

  ‘We’ve identified the thief,’ the woman said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A local man. He’s done other break-ins. We’re gathering evidence.’

  ‘And we have witnesses,’ the policeman said.

  ‘What will happen?’

  ‘We’ll arrest and prosecute,’ the policewoman said. ‘If he pleads guilty you might not need to go to court.’

  ‘If he doesn’t?’

  ‘We could prosecute you for Abandonment.’

  I don’t think one should have followed the other. I think the policeman spoke too soon because there was a pause after which his colleague corrected him. ‘If he doesn’t plead guilty you’ll need to go to court to testify,’ she said.