The Return Read Online Free PDF Page A

occasional black tie birthday party or a corporate event for James’s bank, where there might be a small square of parquet flooring and a DJ who played a few desultory disco hits from the nineteen eighties. It was not the real thing. The thought that there was somewhere she could take dance lessons less than ten minutes’ drive from where she lived kept coming back to her. Perhaps she would pluck up the courage to go one day.
     
    That day came sooner than she had imagined. It was a few months later. They had planned to see a film and James had rung on her mobile just as she was arriving at the cinema to say that he was stuck in the office. Across the way, the neon lights of the dance school winked at her.
     
    The hall was as seedy on the inside as it appeared on the outside. Paint peeled from the ceiling and there was a waist-height tide-mark all the way round the room as though it had once filled up with water like a giant fish tank. This might have explained the unmistakable smell of damp. Six bare light bulbs hung down from the ceiling on irregular lengths of flex, and a few posters advertising Spanish fiestas were intended to cheer up the walls. Their tattiness only reinforced the general sense of decay. Sonia’s nerve almost failed her, but one of the instructors spotted her in the doorway. She was given a warm welcome, and was just in time for the start of a lesson.
     
    She found that she soon picked up the rhythm. Before the end of the evening she discovered that the movement could turn into something as subtle as a twitch of the hips rather than a meticulously counted sequence of steps. Two hours later she emerged, flushed, into the chilly evening air.
     
    For some reason that she could not have articulated to anyone, Sonia felt exhilarated. Even the music had filled her to the very top of her being. She was brimming - that was the only way she could describe it to herself - and without hesitation she signed up for a course. Each week the dancing thrilled her more. Sometimes she could hardly contain her exuberance. For an hour or so after it had finished, the mood of the dance class remained with her. There was an enchantment about dancing. Even a few minutes of it could leave her in a state of near-ecstasy.
     
    She loved everything about her Tuesday evening engagement with Juan Carlos, the stubby Cuban with the shiny, pointy-toed dancing boots. She loved the rhythm and the momentum and the way the music reminded her of sunshine and warm places.
     
    Whenever the instructor needed to, he would demonstrate the complex steps with his even tinier wife, Marisa, and whilst they did so their dozen or so pupils stood in silent, admiring rapture. It was the deftness of their steps and the ease with which they moved that reminded this small motley audience why they showed up each week. The truth was that, most of the time, women were dancing with women. The older of the only two men, Charles, had clearly been a good dancer in his youth. Now in his late sixties, his footwork was still feather light and he moved his partner firmly but with faultless rhythm. He never missed a beat and never failed to pick up the instructions they were given. Whenever Sonia danced with him, she knew that he dreamed of his wife who, she had gathered from a brief conversation, had died just over three years before. He was brave, sprightly, sweet.
     
    The other, a recently divorced and slightly overweight man in his forties, had taken up dancing as a way of meeting women. In spite of the healthy ratio of women to men, he was already finding this class to be a disappointment as there was no one here who was going to take the slightest interest. Each week he asked a different woman out for a drink with him and, one by one, they declined. It might have been something to do with the way he sweated profusely even during the slow dances. The girls were much happier dancing with each other than finding themselves cheek to cheek with desperation and