One More Dance
The Room Next Door
In the dream, Peter heard the warning too late.
The boards shifted under him. Earth struck his mouth, and someone was shouting close by, although he could no longer see anyone. He tried to get his knees beneath him. There was no room. He could feel the weight across his back.
He woke with both hands braced against the bedstead.
It took time to recognize the washstand, the coat on the door, the pale square of his Glasgow window. His nightshirt clung to him. Somewhere below, a cart passed over the stones.
Without thinking, he tapped twice on the wall.
Then he remembered.
Will had been only a year older but had made full use of it. Their bedrooms adjoined, and two knocks had meant everything from Are you awake? to Mother’s coming. Sometimes they had whispered through the wall until she called for quiet.
Now Peter could hear the clock in the kitchen.
He had learned of Will’s death while still in France. A letter from his mother had caught up with him at last. He remembered reading the same lines over until another soldier asked whether he wanted his tea.
Back in Glasgow in 1919, the reality sinking in, he felt Will’s absence in every room.
By spring, he was finding some day work, a small restoration here and there. Nights were harder; some nights he didn’t sleep, on others he woke in a sweat. If there was noise in the street, a pop, a can bouncing in the wind, he wouldn’t settle.
Sam noticed the tiredness, though he disliked being asked about it. She also noticed when he laughed and sometimes repeated a ridiculous story simply because it had worked the first time.
She had begun talking about London.
Girls she knew had gone south. Their letters mentioned dressmaking work, dance halls, evenings that ended long after Glasgow’s familiar streets had emptied.
“I’ve spent enough time waiting,” she told him. “I want to go and dance and live.”
He understood. Smoke settled on the windowsills. Trams crowded the main roads, and after a fight outside a nearby public house she had begun taking the longer route home. Yet there were people here he loved, and leaving meant asking his mother to say goodbye again.
Then Aunt Margaret wrote from Cripplegate. A Clerkenwell workshop needed a man who could finish plated goods. She could arrange an introduction.
Peter read the letter twice.
“How soon?” he asked.
Sam looked up. A smile starting to grow.
“How soon could we go?”
Southbound
His mother helped him pack.
From her sewing tin she brought a spare button from Will’s 5th Dragoon Guards uniform. She folded it into flannel and put it beside his shirts.
“You have that.”
Then came a penny dated 1896, saved because it bore the year Peter was born.
“You’ll be left with nothing,” he said.
“I shall have your address. Write it clearly.”
“We’ll get back as often as we can,” he said, his mother smiled.
He kissed her and held on longer than he had intended.
Sam was waiting at the station with a suitcase, a hatbox, and the address of a London dressmaker who had agreed to see her.
On the train, Peter opened the Glasgow locket she had given him before he went to war. Her photograph was still tucked beneath the curved cover.
“You’ve brought her, then.”
“Always.”
Sam leaned across to inspect her younger face.
“We’ll have to do something about that hair.”
Margaret found Peter lodgings nearby and gave Sam her spare room. Within a fortnight, both were working.
Mr. Bell’s workshop smelled of metal polish and hot solder. Peter knew how much pressure a plated surface would bear, where to ease his hand, when a mark needed another man’s repair. Bell began leaving difficult pieces for him.
After months of uncertain work, a full week’s wages felt substantial. Peter sent some home. Sam saved toward a sewing machine and took an interest in every well-dressed woman who passed her.
London had soot, cramped rooms, and sharp elbows of its own. Their first outings involved getting lost.
Sam enjoyed that more than Peter did.
“You can’t be late,” she told him with a grin, “when you don’t know where you’re going.”
The dreams came with him. One night, woken by a bang, he dressed before dawn and walked until the shops began opening.
But there were mornings when he woke to the sound of breakfast being prepared, surprised that the night had passed.
One evening, he took Will’s button out beside his work cloth. The raised design was dulled where fingers had handled it. He remembered his brother fastening his tunic before the small bedroom mirror, making room for Peter’s face beside his.
He put the cloth away.
Sam arrived wearing a dress she had altered herself and a red wrap over her shoulders.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ve been sitting at a table all day.”
After Dark
They learned to dance at Hammersmith, among people who seemed determined to make full use of the evening.
Samantha looked great, she looked striking in red and moved easily with the music.
Peter was solid and dependable on the dance floor.
Together they were magic.
By 1921, she had bobbed her hair and made herself dresses that moved when she danced. She had friends who knew where to go after work and customers who talked while she pinned their hems. One invited them to the 43 Club in Gerrard Street.
Peter worried about the expense until Sam explained that their hostess was treating them.
“Then I’ll worry about my manners.”
“Much cheaper.”
The club was smaller than he had imagined, warm with bodies and tobacco smoke. Tables crowded the dance floor. A band was playing, and people leaned close to make themselves heard.
Sam unwound her red wrap.
He watched her greet their hostess, easy and bright, and remembered the girl who had waited outside the Glasgow picture house with rain running off her hat.
When she returned, she caught him looking.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That had better be a handsome sort of nothing.”
“It was.”
Later, he went to fetch their coats and found himself hoping the band would play once more.
They could not afford such evenings often. There were walks along the Embankment, cheaper dances, and trips to the pictures. Sometimes Peter was quiet and Sam grew impatient; sometimes he admitted he had scarcely slept, and they changed their plans.
Gradually, he began making plans himself.
At a second-hand stall, while Sam searched for buttons, he found a loose brass P among the odds and ends. He turned it over in his palm and added it to their purchase.
“Found your name?” she asked.
“Enough of it.”
That afternoon, she opened his locket again.
“I want a photograph of us.”
“You’ve got one.”
“Together, Peter. In London. With my present hair.”
His thumb rested against the little portrait. He could remember opening it with hands so cold that the catch had defeated him.
“I’m keeping this one.”
“Of course you are. We’ll keep both.”
She closed his fingers around it.
A Good Window
In the spring of 1922, Peter caught himself whistling at work.
It was a tune from the Palais. He stopped when Bell looked over, then began again once the man turned away.
He still missed Will. Some nights were bad. But the memories that came while he worked were changing. He could think of his brother stealing the last piece of bread or claiming that being born in 1895 entitled him to the better chair.
Sometimes he had a story ready when Sam arrived.
They had their photograph taken on a Saturday. The photographer arranged them carefully, but Sam moved closer just before the picture was made.
Afterward, they walked until they found a bench.
Peter had thought about asking her in a restaurant. He had considered waiting until he could show her the rooms he hoped to rent. Now she was beside him, examining a loose thread on her cuff, and he wanted to ask before he found another reason to postpone it.
“Sam.”
“Mm?”
“Will you marry me?”
Her hands became still.
“Yes.”
He let out a breath.
“You might have let me finish looking solemn.”
“I’ve seen it. I prefer the other face.”
She kissed him before he could answer.
They found two rooms with a window that pleased her and a landlord who agreed to repair the stair rail. Her sewing machine would stand where the light fell longest.
Margaret helped with the wedding dress. While searching her sewing tin, she brought out a little button bearing the name of St Giles without Cripplegate.
“Your grandmother kept this,” she told Peter. “I never did find out whose it was.”
He knew the church now. They had been going with Margaret on Sundays.
She gave Sam the button for her own sewing tin.
They married there that summer. His mother came from Glasgow and cried before the service had properly begun.
Will’s button rested inside Peter’s coat.
When Sam reached him, he saw the familiar lift of her chin and the smile she had been trying to contain. He took her hand.
That evening, in their own rooms, they fitted the small photograph into the locket. Sam kept the first portrait in an envelope while Peter fastened the catch over the two of them.
She went to find something to eat.
He put the envelope safely in the drawer beside Will’s button.
From the next room, Sam called his name.
Peter set down the locket and went to her.