Such Visitors by Angela Huth

arc, and disappeared beneath her cloak. Jo could think of nothing to say, and in silence watched her leave.
    Some time later, when he had finished the bridle, he went to Storm’s stable. The animal made a small welcoming noise. Jo remembered the night of his birth: a wicked night, thunder, lightning, rain through the roof, the lot. Now, running his hand down the black line of Storm’s spine, came disquieting thoughts of the emptiness of tomorrow. But soon, because he had an orderly mind in which optimism swiftly followed upon melancholy, he began to imagine the summer ahead: the record crowds, the happy children, the sounds of sea and laughter – all the pleasures that Jo had learned come every year in the donkey business.

Sudden Dancer

    â€˜There’s not much point, far as I can see,’ said Joan Cake, ‘keeping on going to these things. With someone who can’t dance, that is.’
    â€˜You enjoy yourself,’ said Henry.
    â€˜I’d enjoy myself more if I could dance with my husband.’
    â€˜You enjoy the outings.’
    â€˜It’s not the same.
    â€˜I couldn’t get my feet to dance, no matter what.’ Henry sighed.
    He and Joan sat together on the late bus home, their bodies rolling slightly, used to the journey. They were splattered with rain. From the hem and neck of Joan’s mackintosh sprouted frills of pink net. Her hair, piled up in meringue-like curls, was covered with a transparent plastic hat. Her mouth was down.
    â€˜I don’t like to remind you,’ she said with a small sniff, ‘but when you’ve been champion at something, once, you don’t like to have to retire before you’re ready. You don’t like to have retirement forced upon you.’
    â€˜You dance with plenty of others,’ pointed out her husband. ‘You’re never wanting for partners.’
    He took her arm, as the bus drew up at the stop. He liked to think the descent from the bus might deflect her train of thought.
    â€˜Not the same as having someone you can always rely on,’ retorted Joan, stepping recklessly into a puddle and soaking the toes that pudged through the straps of her golden sandals. ‘The last waltz, this evening. There was no one to do the last waltz with me, was there?’
    â€˜I knew that’s what was getting you down.’ Henry was sympathetic. ‘Still, you had a lovely foxtrot, just before, you said.’
    Home, glittering mackintoshes hung side by side in the narrow hall, Joan smoothed the skirt of her bulbous pink dress.
    â€˜Only three months till the Christmas Ball,’ she said. ‘That should be a big do, if it’s anything like last year.’
    â€˜Certain to be,’ agreed Henry, dread in his heart.
    Joan straightened herself, punching the rhinestones on her bosom.
    â€˜If we never went to anther dance, it wouldn’t make a mite of a difference to you,’ she shouted. ‘I shall have to think about a new dress.’ She knew the last suggestion, at least, would provoke her mild husband: he hated the very idea of anything new in the way of dresses.
    â€˜That one’s very nice,’ he said, sadly scanning the mass of pink. ‘It’s always been my favourite.’
    â€˜Huh! Not for a Christmas party.’
    She paused, suddenly feeling all the despair of being wasted: all afternoon setting her hair, ironing her dress, doing her face, and for what? For a disappointing evening dancing with dull old men, and now this late-night confrontation with a husband who did not know the meaning of the word appreciation.
    â€˜I wish you could
try,’
she said.
    Henry coughed. He longed to go to bed. After a dance, this was always a long ordeal, what with the ungluing of the false eyelashes, and the stuffing of tissue paper between each layer of the pink net. He tried to be patient.
    â€˜There are some things a person can’t bring himself to do,’ he said.