The Dancer Upstairs by Nicholas Shakespeare

She had returned from Miami with a slightly different profile, a little less nose, a little more chin. She left the car and crossed the road.
    â€œI haven’t seen enough of you!” Divorced from Marco, she had been two months back in the city.
    We kissed. Miami had given her a taste for tight pants, long fingernails and streaked hair.
    â€œI’ve been busy.”
    â€œHow pleased you must be. I saw the news on television. I didn’t realize until Sylvina told me he was the one.” She touched my arm, partly secretive; partly not. We asked Marina to keep quiet about my profession. When the girls at Laura’s previous dance school found out I was a policeman, they had teased her. So had the ballet mistress.
    Marina, squeezing my arm, said, “What will you do now?”
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe it’s time to go back to the law.”
    â€œSylvina will be thrilled!”
    â€œI suppose so.” That’s what I’d promised my wife. Once Ezequiel was caught, I would look for a better-paid job.
    â€œIs Sylvina all right?”
    â€œShe’s at the vet.”
    â€œWe’re looking forward to her talk on Wednesday. You know we’re meeting at your place?”
    â€œShe’s very excited about it.”
    â€œI can’t fault Marco. He’s been extremely generous, sending us copies of the novel. Which I still have to read.” The divorce, Marina wanted us to gather, had not been acrimonious.
    â€œAnd Laura,” she said. “Is she happy with her new teacher?”
    â€œOh, yes. A great success.”
    â€œWhen I heard how miserable she was with Madame Offenbach . . .”
    There was a commotion behind Marina. The ballet class filed out of the door in the green wall. Beautifully turned out, erect, with splayfooted steps they scattered towards the cars.
    Marina, recognizing a pampered girl in pink tights and a smart blue leotard, said: “There’s Samantha! Bye for now.”
    It was easy to tell my daughter apart. The other girls left talking to each other. She was by herself. Slightly heavier than the rest of them, and smaller, she was made taller by a head of hair which she pulled back in a way that gave a crushed look to her features. It was hair she could sit on, long and thick, the colour of freshly made coffee. The other girls in her class had the blonder hair of their mothers; and the lighter skin.
    Laura, seeing the grey Peugeot, walked towards me at a tilt. Conscious of her short neck, she held down her shoulders. Despite the warm night, she hid her body with leggings over her leotard. Sylvina was always after her to lose weight. “If you’re not careful, you’ll see your dinner in your behind,” and she would prepare a special fat-free chop which Laura devoured in a second.
    Continually struck by the girl’s resemblance to my sister, I asked on one occasion, “What’s wrong with her? She looks all right to me.”
    Sylvina flicked the white hands which once fascinated me. “Certainly she looks all right. Now.”
    My wife was the force behind the decision that Laura should take up ballet. This was what her friends did with their children. Through Laura, Sylvina could live out the dreams she had harboured for her younger self. She wanted Laura to be pretty, to walk nicely with ribbons in her hair, to be up there on stage as a Cinderella fairy. In other words, she wanted Laura to put on a tutu and forget where she came from.
    The matter was never brought up; it lay unexploded between us. I had once overheard Sylvina speaking to Marina on the telephone. I wouldn’t have listened had she not been talking in such an apologetic tone. “Samantha’s so lucky with her looks. Laura’s very dark, you see.”
    Quite why this should have cropped up then, I don’t know. It had never been an issue before. When I met my wife – at university in the late Sixties – it was a