I mean both the first time that night and the first time ever. And it was the way it is at the very beginning, when you just can’t get enough of each other, when you can’t believe your luck, and the night goes by in a blissful blur of heat and exhausted sleep and gathering light.
I was sleeping on her side of the bed when she got up and went to the bathroom. I could hear the birds and see the white edge of dawn around the windows. I needed to sleep now, I really needed to sleep. I was worn to a frazzle. But I opened one eye when Lara came back and turned on the bedside lamp. ‘What?’ I said.
She touched my face. ‘Just checking.’ She smiled.
I rolled over to my side of the bed and closed my eyes.
‘Checking what?’ I said into the pillow.
That made her laugh.
‘Checking it’s you,’ she said.
A few people stared at us as we walked into the Autumn Grove Care Home. An old lady in a chair who had just been taken for a Sunday afternoon wheel around the park. Her middle-aged son and his two teenage children. A porter I didn’t recognise.
Then the woman on reception smiled and said hello, and they all looked away. But we got that all the time. My wife and I were one of those couples that people take a second look at, without ever really knowing why. But I knew why.
It was because we didn’t seem to fit.
Lara was so small and pretty, and she still had that dancer’s grace, that ease in her own body. Whereas I was so big and lumbering and, well, not exactly ugly, but my nose has been broken twice – once by a Friday-night drunk who threw a traffic bollard in my face, and the other time while we were rolling around on the pavement as I arrested him. It gave my face a bent, damaged look, as though there were a lot of miles on my clock and I was likely to fail my MOT. Actually, now I think about it, ugly is exactly the word.
But Lara had retained some indefinable air from her dancing days. People once paid money to see this woman perform, to see her dance, to see her shine. She would be forty years old on her next birthday, and she was a working mother with two teenage children, but she still had that showbiz glamour. Whereas I was stolid. I wasn’t like the other men she had known. I wasn’t like the one she went out with before me. Her previous boyfriend. I wasn’t a dashing young suitor racing back from Stratford after playing the Prince to rave reviews. I was from a different West End – chasing after glue sniffers and bag snatchers and mouthy drunks waving around traffic bollards so that PC Keith Rooney could give them a slap and tell them to stop being naughty. I was a big, uncomplicated man with a broken hooter who had no fear of the physical world. And that was what she liked about me. That meat-and-potatoes dependability – something that might have put off other girls. Women, I mean. She knew I would never stop loving her. She knew that it wouldn’t even occur to me, that I would always be sort of grateful, because she was so clearly out of my league. Men, especially, looked at us. And the look they gave said, Wow, if the bar is set so low… And then I would stare at them and they would turn away. Because they noticed something about me. It wasn’t a cop thing. It wasn’t my size. It wasn’t even the fact that I tried to carry myself like my father. They sensed they were stepping on sacred ground. Because she was everything to me. And so they took a step back.
It might have been different if her parents hadn’t died in a car crash when she was twelve years old. They were on their way to pick her up from the airport after a school ski trip – seven days of laughter falling over on some French mountain – on a road slick with rain, ploughing into the back of a lorry stopped in the fast lane with a flat tyre.
If they had lived…
But they didn’t.
And you never really appreciate the other side of glamour, the quiet comforts of home and family, until life has taken them all away from you.
‘Have you got my book?’ Lara’s grandmother said, as I helped her from her bed to her chair. When she said book she meant magazine, and by that she meant her favourite TV listings supplement.
‘Right here, Nan,’ Lara said, and she placed it on her lap, already opened at today’s page, with her selected TV programmes circled in red, like fences around her loneliness. Lara sat on the bed and smiled. ‘Anything good on this afternoon?’
‘An American in Paris,’ Nan said, her watery blue eyes gleaming behind her glasses.
Lara was interested. She wasn’t just being polite. ‘Gene Kelly and – who?’ she said.
‘Leslie Caron,’ said Nan, smoothing the TV listings page with her hands. ‘And music by Gershwin.’ She nodded emphatically. ‘I like him, Gershwin,’ she said, as if George Gershwin was a promising newcomer and her tip for the top.
Lara and Nan smiled at each other, their mouths almost watering at the thought of An American in Paris. It still mattered to my wife, the dancing. It never went away. The dancing never goes away. It had always been more than her livelihood. After she lost her first family, and before she got her second family, the dancing was her life. And she got that from Nan. She hadn’t just taken the young Lara to lessons
59 and auditions, the way her mother had. Nan had shown Lara that you could get lost in it – just lose yourself in the dancing, if that was what you wanted, or needed. And for years, that was exactly what she needed.
Twice a week she went to see Nan in the Autumn Grove. Usually not with me. She felt it should have been more often. I watched Lara settling the old lady in front of the TV, getting her a drink, holding the glass as she took a tiny, sparrow-like sip, and I saw how much my wife loved her. It wasn’t just the normal love that you feel for a grandmother. Nan had done so much. She was one of those special grandparents who brings up two generations. Nan had not brought Lara up all the way, but as much as anyone. As much as her parents, she always said.
What happened to Lara’s mother and father is surprisingly common. I have met a few people who lost both their parents in a car crash. Married couples travel in cars together all the time, and sometimes they die together. So it wasn’t just Lara. Although for many years I think it felt as though it was just her. Still does, on her bad days. She once said to me, dry-eyed and thoughtful, I don’t know what would have happened to me without my nan. She took me in. She loved me. She helped me on my way. She stopped me falling through the cracks.
Nan loved MGM musicals. Fred and Ginger putting on the Ritz. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds sparring. And when Lara went to live with her nan, it was the early eighties, the age of video rental. For the first time ever, you could watch Singin’ in the Rain or West Side Story or Oklahoma! whenever you felt like it.
And Nan and little Lara felt like it most of the time.
They loved Gene, Ginger, Fred, Debbie and the rest, but they loved Cyd Charisse above all. They loved her dancing with Gene Kelly in the great Broadway dream sequence in Singin’ in the Rain – Kelly on his knees before Cyd the gangsters’ moll in her green dress – and they loved Cyd with Fred Astaire in Bandwagon, dancing in a seedy, smoky bar, doing the kind of dancing that starts fights.
Although she had done her childish ballet and tap, that was where the dancing really began for her, those wet Sunday afternoons watching MGM musicals with Nan. Those
