Read Online Dancing Backwards by Salley Vickers - Free Book Online

flirting with Pedro, the Spanish sommelier. Walter, who took a pride in being temperamental, had gone after Pedro with a steak hammer swearing to beat that fucking Spaniard’s fucking head in. Luckily, beyond a bad bruise to Pedro’s shin, caused by his leaping on to a counter in the course of escape, no real damage had been done. Pedro had withdrawn to his room where he had locked the door and was threatening legal action.
    Walter was indispensable to the restaurant and the crew purser, after issuing the chef with a curt reprimand, decided to order Pedro to his quarters sick. Meanwhile, a replacement wine waiter was needed. The head sommelier, who had heard that Dino had restaurant experience and a reputation for a good manner, suggested that he might take Pedro’s place until things had calmed down.
    Des was on his first luncheon duty when he saw Mrs Hetherington. ‘Can I get you anything to drink?’
    ‘What will you have to drink?’ Edwin asked.
    He and Vi were sitting in the RAF bar in the Eagle, the ancient inn on Benet Street. Above their heads, on the ceiling,inscribed in soot, candle smoke and lipstick, were the names and numbers of the men and planes of the RAF and the US Eighth Air Force lost in the last war. One evening, one of the fighter pilots, a P. E. Turner of Cherry Hinton, placed a chair on a table and climbed up to write the first sooty inscription on the ceiling with his cigarette lighter, thereby starting a trend.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Vi said. ‘I don’t drink much. Not beer, anyway.’
    ‘You don’t like beer?’
    ‘I can’t seem to.’ It was a stumbling-block in her social life that she had never cared for the most popular student drink.
    ‘So what will you have? Whisky? Gin and tonic? Wine?’
    ‘Oh, wine, please,’ said Vi, confused by choice. ‘I don’t like spirits much either.’
    ‘It will be my ruin, if other vices don’t carry me off first.’ He ordered a double Scotch and had finished it before a quarter of her glass was empty. ‘I see you have noticed my eyes.’
    Vi, who was in fact trying to look away from the rapidly emptied glass, blushed and said, ‘They are like the eyes of a cat I had once.’
    ‘I have no objections to being likened to a cat. What was yours called?’
    ‘Arthur.’
    ‘After the king?’
    ‘No. I don’t know why “Arthur”. I suppose I just liked the name.’
    ‘I am glad it was not the king. I can’t abide grail fanciers. You’re not a grail fancier, are you?’
    ‘I don’t think so,’ said Vi, who had never thought about it. ‘This is nice.’ She sipped the white wine.
    ‘It’s a Chablis.’ He ordered one for himself. ‘Quite a good one for a pub. It won’t make you too drunk.’
    Vi, who thought it might be fun to get drunk, asked, ‘What do you do when you’re not teaching?’
    She had meant to ask what his thesis was on but he surprised her. ‘I write poetry.’
    ‘Goodness.’
    ‘I shall finish my thesis, which is not very sensational—an examination of the use of Ovid’s similes in Renaissance verse, very dull—and then try for a teaching post.’
    ‘In a university?’
    ‘A school. It’s harder work in term time but the holidays are longer and there’s nothing to do in them but write. What about you?’
    ‘What about me?’
    ‘What do you plan to do when you leave here?’
    ‘Oh goodness,’ Vi said. ‘I don’t know. Survive. If I get through Part I that will be enough to be going on with.’
    ‘Of course you’ll get through. You’ll get a first.’
    ‘Oh no, I couldn’t.’
    ‘I’ll show you how,’ Edwin said. ‘It’s not hard once you know the tricks. It’s just a matter of practice and keeping your nerve.’
    ‘I don’t seem to have much nerve.’
    He looked up at the ceiling commemorating the English and American youths, stationed in nearby Debden, Duxford or Fowlmere, who had sat night after nerveless night, ready to take their lives in their hands, and their Whitleys or Wellingtons