Only on horseback and in the mazurka was Denisov’s short stature not noticeable and he looked the dashing fellow he felt himself to be.
LEO TOLSTOY, War and Peace
As a student, whenever I came home I would read the births, marriages and deaths columns of the local paper. There was always a whole page of weddings, with photographs. The brides were often taller and bigger than the grooms, but maybe that was because they were in frothy white with their hair up, festooned with flowers and lace whereas the men wore morning suits of newsprint grey, and still favoured lank shoulder-length cuts. They always struck the same pose and had the same expression, as if copying the figures on top of their cake. ‘Turn towards each other,’ the photographer would have commanded, ‘but look at the camera. And smile! It’s your wedding day remember? Hold hands, no, not like that …’ They might be seventeen or eighteen and were learning how a husband and wife should stand.
I always found people I knew, not just in those columns but among the small ads as well. Names caught my eye because they were those of the slow dancers. Barry Wise now advertised reproduction antiques, Martin Love announced that he was taking over his father’s scrap-metal yard and little Danny English had passed his catering qualifications and was rejigging the menu at the Lion and Lamb. Andy Bellman had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly, Kevin Birleigh was caught shoplifting women’s underwear and Terry Elm had been killed while playing an old game – driving at night with no lights across a junction. I would find the names of the slow dancers in the cemeteries too – illness and accident and those who had done what they could to break out of a quiet life.
At fourteen I had even less in common with these boys than with the disco gang I was working so hard to be part of. We didn’t have anything to say and when we passed in the street or at school, they smirked and I blushed. But I fell in love at the village-hall discos because they could dance. Unlike the clever excruciated boys who were my friends, they knew how to be boys.
Although girls talked about boys, we danced for ourselves and each other. Boys loomed out of the shadows during the opening bars of the first slow dance, which might be the Chi-Lites’ ‘Have You Seen Her?’ with its repeated ponderous intro acting as subtitles to what passed between us and the boys who were crossing the floor: ‘Aaaaaah! … Hhhhmmmm …’ We simpered and wilted – there would be no stamping or clapping now.
The girls tried to look both occupied and available – whispering but opening out from their knots and circles. As a boy crossed the floor, he grew either taller or smaller. He was either desirable or not. It had nothing to do with personality and not much to do with the detail of his looks.
If the wrong boy’s hands were parked on the wrong girl’s lower back, he would stand rigidly apart and commence to manoeuvre her round in a circle regardless of tempo. Or he would push his luck, grab her bottom and pull her in, and she would jerk away and dance with her hands on his shoulders, keeping him back. They gazed at the floor between their feet or over one another’s shoulders at their friends but did not give up – at least they were dancing.
The right boy with the right girl would not have to think about how to approach the dance. It just happened, you just were, and all the thoughts you’d had about this moment, how you intended to be or intended him to be, were gone. You didn’t think at all because this wasn’t dancing but being moved, and you felt the heat and pressure of his body against you and the heat and pressure inside you, another kind of electrification that was not about music at all.