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Dancing Backwards

Salley Vickers

FOURTH ESTATE • London

for Rosie & Co. a birthday book

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

e e cummings

Table of Contents

FIRST DAY

Chock-a-Block: full to capacity or overloaded. If two blocks of a ship’s rigging are so tight together that they cannot be tightened further they are said to be chock-a-block.

‘What on earth have I done?’ Violet Hetherington asked herself.

She was standing in one of several queues in the dock at Southampton. The queues, by now spilling out of the cattle shed marked ‘Departures’, to board the Queen Caroline were long and none were moving. ‘It’s best to get to the docks late,’ her friend Annie had advised. ‘If you get there too early you can grow roots hanging about. ’ Annie, married to a diplomat and full of advice, was a seasoned traveller. But on this occasion her advice was mistaken.

After a while an announcement came through the loudspeakers: there had been a ‘breakdown in the computer system’. In the face of this setback the atmosphere among the waiting passengers darkened. Some attempted patience, some brave souls even tried to rise to jollity but for the most part the mood became rebellious. The world was going to the dogs and they had paid good money—many were inclined to feel through the nose—for this voyage.

Vi’s own instinct was to turn tail. She felt in her bag for her phone and discovered that it was missing. This was a good deal more annoying than the length of the queues. It confirmed an uneasy sense that the whole idea of this voyage was one of her mistakes. She hated any form of group activity and here she was, thrown to the lions, and entirely of her own doing. And now there was the nuisance of the phone. Either she had left the wretched thing behind or she had lost it at some point on the journey to the port. She couldn’t ring the minicab company to check because the number—along with all her other numbers—was stored in her phone. The very error that her elder son Harry was always counselling her to avoid.