It is five months after that memorable Saturday in November 1980. I am here in my suite at the rather rundown hotel I own in Coketown. It has been a weird evening and I am now trying to write down a detailed recollection of the November Saturday afternoon to see if doing so can make more sense of the events of this evening. There have either been a set of unlikely coincidences or two people have been deliberately misleading me tonight.
On that November morning I had a meeting with my solicitor and architect to discuss my options with the hotel. It was time to either redevelop it, sell it or totally renovate it. We were finalising the planning permission application and planning tactics. I had left the meeting for ten minutes to allow my advisers to reach a compromise proposal which both were happy with. As I passed through reception on my way to my office, I could hear a man and a woman politely arguing in the bar area. The woman was angry, and the man was seemingly trying to placate her. They both had posh accents by Coketown standards.
On my return, I glanced across and spotted a woman in the bar asking for a white wine from Jim, the bartender. She looked a little discontented, but otherwise was certainly the most pleasantly distracting sight of the day. She had long black hair tied in a ponytail and wore glasses. She was wearing a red jacket over a white blouse. Her red skirt reached just below the knee, and she wore flat shoes. She was about my height with most of it in her legs. Forty years ago, I would have forgotten about the meeting and gone straight over to her, but alas while I look good for my age, I am no longer a young man. The likelihood of persuading her to flirt with me was next to non-existent, and besides which the two men would be charging me an arm and a leg for every six minutes of time I spent with her.
Thirty minutes later, my advisers had agreed with me and each other the best route forwards. I was going to have to think about how to smooth things along with the planning department and the committee. It is a Labour council, and I am constituency chairman of the Conservative party here so some care would need to be taken. The meeting had been about ensuring that my proposal offered some chance of employment for local workers that any refusal would be seen by the moderate councillors as petty. Besides which most regarded me as their opponent rather than the enemy.
I was meeting with my nephew Ronald at 6.00 to belatedly celebrate his 18th birthday which had been the previous weekend and the fact that he has had an offer to go to Manchester University to read Economics yesterday. The grades required are ones which he and his parents believe are eminently achievable. He's a cheeky bugger with no respect for his elders and thinks his generation invented sex. Despite that we do get on well together and can tease each other. He had asked for a course of dancing lessons as he had finally realised that women do not like having their feet stepped on.
I had four hours to kill, the rain was pissing down outside and so I prepared to spend the afternoon in the hotel. I walked into the TV lounge at the hotel to watch the racing o to pass the time. To my surprise I saw the young lady standing there watching a 1930s musical on BBC 2. I saw that she was gently swaying and tapping her feet to the music. I approached her and asked, "Shall we dance?"
She looked at me and then said, "Why not? It's my only chance today."
I am an excellent dancer and one of the reasons is that I make my partners believe that they are better dancers than they are. For a sixty-year-old I am in good nick. Only five seven but no paunch and I still have my hair, if rather greyer than it used to be.
As the music stopped I bowed, kissed her hand, and sat down with her on a sofa. I decided to forego the racing as I prefer chasing the fillies to watching them.
I have always looked for sex and friendship in my relationships to women rather than marriage. I was born in 1920 and joined the RAF when war broke out. A lot of my friends died during the Battle of Britain, and I did not expect to survive. I lived by the motto of my old Latin teacher who had told me when I joined up to Carpe Diem -- seize the day. Well, in my case it was more like seize the dames.
I am told that over 40 per cent of the bomber command air crew died in the war and even though I was not regularly flying missions from 1942 onwards having first moved into training and then promoted, the deaths around me affected my attitude to life. I got used to people around me dying and enjoyed taking my love on the easy plan. I also got too used to finding the girlfriends and wives of other men being willing to have sex with me to risk being betrayed myself.
I took the dance as a substitute for a formal introduction and asked, "What is such a charming young lady doing by herself in a second-rate hotel in Coketown on a wet Saturday afternoon?"
"I've been abandoned by my boyfriend while he goes and watches a football match after having a pint in the nearest pub to the ground. He expected me to come with him in this weather."
"That does seem rather selfish of him. The only consolation I can offer is that the match will not be a good one. The pitch will be a mud bath and the skill displayed rudimentary. Forgive me, but you don't sound like a local."
"I'm not. Originally from Cheltenham and now live in the Midlands."
"Does your boyfriend come from here originally? Supporting the Rovers is a recognised incurable local curse, although rarely fatal."
"No." She paused and said, "He just wants to get the feel of the area."
"If you want you can go dancing with him this evening at the Castle Hotel over the road."
She pouted, "No such luck. We are going to a concert at the town hall."
"Is your young man a glutton for punishment? While the orchestra contains some dear friends they are taking on a piece tonight which requires more skill than they possess and even when well performed is a bore."
She laughed at that. "I rather suspected that myself."
"Are you staying here?"
"Yes, separate rooms of course. He is a gentleman."
"Indeed." Bloody fool in my view.
"Anyway, he won't be back until 6 at the earliest and I have an afternoon to fill and no dancing tonight."
I recognised my cue when dealing with unhappy girlfriends and wives and nothing ventured, nothing gained. I enjoy flirting and I had nothing else to do for the next few hours.
"I too am at a loose end until then myself. I'm due to meet my nephew Ronald to belatedly celebrate his 18th birthday and an offer of a place at Manchester. I am also going to start teaching him to dance."
I knew that I only had about four hours before the boyfriend returned and my meeting with Ronald, so time's winged chariot was not on my side. Still, I had a chance of being closer to a firm young body of a beautiful woman than I could normally be without paying. I waited to see if she would take the bait.
My mention of teaching Ronald to dance prompted her to ask me where and I told her that there was a small dance studio in the hotel without mentioning its proximity to my bedroom. It only took five minutes to persuade her that she was entitled to a bit of harmless fun, that she might learn something and that it was better than any of the options on the TV that afternoon.
I tried to gauge what type of woman she was. There was a distinct sense of her being torn between feeling that she should say no thank you and that she might as well say yes. Irritation with the boyfriend and a sense that the afternoon would otherwise be very boring resulted in her accepting my invitation. No doubt she also took one look at me and thought that there was no danger. I had chosen my trustworthy English gentleman persona rather than the amorous lecher. More David Niven than Leslie Phillips.
The dance floor is in my flat on the top floor. It is usually used by me to give refresher courses on dancing to merry widows, the recently divorced and unhappy wives in their forties and early fifties. I have plenty of referrals and I am good at reminding people of what they had forgotten about skipping the light fantastic.
I have a modern sound system and mirrors on the walls. There is a chaise longue, a glass table, and a sofa towards the back of the room. There are two wardrobes, a clothes rack, two chests of drawers and a large desk. Importantly there is a screen next to the clothes rack behind which women can change their clothes and a fridge with bottles of white wine, gin, and tonic water next to the desk.
There are some sliding doors which lead to my bedroom where in the last ten years more than a few of my students have been enticed for refresher lessons of a more horizontal nature. Some of them have sent their daughters and daughters in law to me for instruction on dancing despite knowing my willingness to offer a wider range of services. I am not certain if I find this flattering or disturbing. Still this woman was significantly younger than most of my dance partners nowadays and a lot more attractive than the daughters sent my way.
I hung up both our jackets in one of the wardrobes and she put her glasses in their case. I knew she liked 1930s musical numbers and she had said that she liked rock and roll and swing dancing. Rock and Roll dancing with a partner resembles the more energetic dances of my youth and I had still been in my late thirties when it came in vogue. I liked it because, like swing, it got women used to the idea of having their legs wrapped around my waist.
I have a series of cassettes I have made for myself for use in dancing lessons as well as a large collection records. I suspected that the woman in front of me thought that she should be a good girl. I was hoping that she was not entirely certain about it.
In 1940 I was good looking and that allowed me to develop a certain charm and confidence. When women saw the uniform and I confirmed that I was a flyer, they knew that there was a good chance of me being dead the next day or that I had lost friends recently. It was quite easy to persuade them that it was their patriotic duty to give me a little comfort in the local hotels, on the village green, in a churchyard or behind the village hall.
It taught me that women enjoy sex if they can only forget that they are meant to feel guilty during it. I also eventually learnt that my best chance of them coming back for more was to satisfy them as well as myself. After the war I found that the lessons I had learnt still held true even if the emotional blackmail was no longer available. The quickest way to a woman's body was to make her laugh and get her body used to being close to mine. Dancing, good humour, a persuasive manner, and alcohol were my weapons of choice.
I eased her into the dancing. The first few involved reasonable amount of movement without being either too energetic or too clearly a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire. We held each other of course, but there was plenty of twirls so that she never had chance to worry about being too close to me for a prolonged time. I noticed that she liked glancing towards the mirrors to watch herself. After thirty minutes I proposed that we take five and have a glass of wine. She looked hesitant and then said that she was more relaxed and danced better after a glass of wine and it wouldn't hurt to have just one.
I poured her a glass of wine and hinted that it was a rare pleasure to have such a beautiful woman in his arms on the dance floor. She was in the mood for flattery and luckily my age, the fact that I was only an inch taller than her in her heels, and that I am not heavily built did not make her feel threatened by me. I gave her some notes and suggestions. I sensed that she was too self-conscious and felt that I would be benefitting her and her young man if I could get her to relax.
Over the next twenty-five minutes I sensed her loosening up. When the song "Cheek to Cheek" came on, she was happy to dance next to my body at all times and by the end of the dance her breasts were pressed into my chest, her eyes were closed, and she started breathing a little more heavily. I suddenly sensed her tensing. Clearly a good girl feeling guilty about starting to enjoy herself.
I asked if she wanted another rest. She accepted and while I refilled our glasses, I checked my watch and saw that there were still over three hours before her boyfriend was due back. Because we had danced before introducing ourselves somehow we had not got round to asking each other's names. I sat with her on the sofa and discussed her favourite songs and dances. She said that she wanted to be able to do the tango, but that Alan did not feel relaxed doing that dance. He was good at waltzes and the quickstep but was not that demonstrative. I now knew the boyfriend's name but not hers.
I wondered if I could push things towards increasing the chances of a little bit of slap and tickle.
"My dear lady, dancing allows us to imagine ourselves to be more than we are or explore what we could be or were. In my case dancing with you allows me to pretend that I am 20 again. The great thing is that the pretence starts to become the truth. I am a better dancer when I imagine myself to be Fred Astaire and my partner feels it."
She giggled at that and sipped her wine. "I would like to imagine myself as Ginger Rogers."
