Dancing Backwards by Salley Vickers Page A

her understanding and her own insignificance, the whole business of being there at all had become a condition of chronic dread. She had nothing to say that would not sound, she knew, ridiculously unsophisticated.
    Each week, Edwin handed round copies of xeroxed poems for the class to analyse. At the very last seminar of the spring term, to her astonishment she recognised one. It had been a favourite of Miss Arnold’s who, still alight with the zeal of the novice, had given the poem to her sixth form to read over a half term.
    Vi was the only one in the class who had read the poem closely, if at all—and really more for what it might reveal about her teacher than for any improving mental exercise. One verse in particular had caught her attention.
When love with one another so Interinanimates two souls, That abler soul which thence doth flow, Defects of loneliness controls.
    The word ‘interinanimates’ intrigued her and stuck in her mind and while she didn’t quite understand the poet’s meaning she was taken by the sound of the words.
    ‘You have a good ear, Violet,’ Miss Arnold had said, when Vi, a little nervously, mentioned this. ‘You will get along well with Donne. He had one of the best ears of all time. Do you know what “ecstasy” means?’
    Vi, who supposed it was what happened when you took LSD, thought it prudent to say that she didn’t.
    ‘Good,’ said Miss Arnold, who approved of ignorance in her pupils. ‘Ecstasy is a mystical state in which the soul escapes the body to seek union with the divine. Donne, you see, has made a conceit (that’s also a form of pun, by the way) in suggesting that the entities which flow from his soul and his lover’s unite to create a third entity, a perfect whole or divinity. The divinity is sexual love not God. It is a characteristic piece of his sublime profanity.’
    People generally feel well-disposed to those they have helped and it was this exchange that had led to Miss Arnold’s suggesting that Vi try for Cambridge. Thereafter Vi thought of the turbulent seventeenth-century poet and preacher as an ally.
    Donne came to her aid again in Edwin’s class.
    ‘So,’ Edwin had said after a more than usually empty few minutes, ‘does anyone have any thoughts at all about this poem? What is, or what was, ecstasy?’ He glared at the class. His eyes, one blue and one a greenish hazel, were like those of a white cat Vi had had as a child, before her mother died and pets were banished for good from the household.
    There was a further silence. Motes of dust danced crazily in the sunlight over the drowsy heads of the students, who shifted uneasily on their bottoms and looked bored or sheepish according to their temperament. It was the last week of term and most of the room had spent it in serious late-night partying, enjoying less ethereal forms of ecstasy.
    ‘Forgive my interrupting your repose.’ Edwin’s hair, sticking up at the back where he had not combed it, made him look like a ruffled bird.
    Vi, who had been to no parties and was sensitive to embarrassment, said, very rapidly in case she lost the impetus, ‘Ecstasy is a mystical state in which the soul escapes the body to find union with the divine’ and blushed horribly.
    Edwin habitually taught the class perilously balanced on the arm of his desk chair and with his own legs twisted around the chair’s. He unscrambled his limbs enough to turn and stare at Vi with his odd eyes.
    ‘Since you seem to be the only person, other than myself, awake in the room, have you any other ideas to enliven the rest with?’
    Vi said, still speaking very fast, ‘He’s imagining a third, um,entity, born from their love, which will unite them so they are no longer alone. A child, really, except…’ Acute embarrassment made her stop short of saying that the poem was describing a poetic parallel to the sexual act.
    ‘A kind of metaphysical child. A bold conclusion when you press it, as some of us are willing to. Any idea