Let's Dance Read Online Free PDF

centred around dancing class, whatever Aunt Mab had done to redeem the lack in school holidays; and secondly, she loved her mother in an unconsolable way. She had always hoped to emulate Serena when she finally grew up; she had never lived up to the image.
    The ability to drink men under the table was only one of the characteristics they admired; another was her constant availability. She was good at delivering men back to their own doorsteps, or taking them to hers, where they lay, impotent and groaning, for twenty-four hours and she, sweet thing, did not mind. Later they would translate this experience into the memory of a good time, remember her with affection, while not quite recalling anything she said. ‘I love Isabel Burley,’ was not a sentiment shouted from rooftops. She dispensed enough kindness to deserve greater loyalty, but she did it without either thought or finesse.
    As for the friendship of women, that was difficult. There were waifs and broken-hearted strays, but otherwise women could not see Isabel as either safe or unenviable.
    â€˜I love you, Issy … You know how much I love you.’
    â€˜No, I don’t know. If you loved me, you’d be married to me and not to someone else.’
    It was Joe who caused the problems by being reallymad about her. Married, of course, engaged initially on the first sight of Bella in leotard. He had a couple of nights out on the town with Issy, simply to relieve tension, which it did, before she sent him home to his nuptials. Despite his marital bed, Joe could not get her out of his mind and after six months came back howling at the windows of her posh flat for all the heart he had found there once. She had let him in, and two years of passionate vacillation followed.
    â€˜How could I leave her? She would never manage without me …’
    On the evening of the night when Isabel received the phone call about her mother and the fire, Isabel had bitten Joe, on the thigh. The bite was ugly, and a perfect reverse pattern of Isabel’s teeth. It drew minimal blood, although the scratches to his chest and the head wound from the edge of a jug, thrown across the room with considerable force, bled furiously. This occurred in the interval between after-work hours and going home, the traditional time for a married man to call upon his mistress. By ten that night, Isabel was contemplating the wreckage of her blood-stained bedclothes and her whole, loveless existence. It was not the first time her occasional propensity to violence had horrified her as much as what she had become and what little she had ever achieved. Bimbo. Airhead. Cheap. Everything her mother had never been, let alone what Aunt Mab would have wanted for her. She was in a state of self-hating chaos. Her love for her mother, Robert’s endless chastisement, and the reservoirof guilt which always lapped against her backbone, made her a soft enough touch already.
    Life had never thrown Isabel in close conjunction with any form of mental ailment except that encountered in the street. In the midst of her desultory packing, she remembered briefly what she had once known with uncomfortable clarity, namely that Serena had never approved of her, was one of the majority who considered her a fool. She put the realization back inside a box and into the attic store room of her thoughts.
    The thought of Mother’s flesh, roasted rare, black on the outside, pink in the middle, tipped an unwary balance poised on the cliff of a wasted life. By midnight, going home to look after Serena seemed the only thing left to do. And the only thing that might redeem her pride. It was her mother who was the one who might give love and want it back and it was for both the privileges, the getting and the giving, that she went home.
    â€˜L ove you, Mum. Now, what are we going to do about your hair?’ Isabel had entered a world far distant from the anonymity of London and it was difficult to call it familiar.