The Return by Victoria Hislop

limbs had been patiently reassembled and pressed back into the plastic pot, their conversation resumed. It covered the usual ground: what Jack had been doing in the past couple of weeks, what the doctor had said about his arthritis, how long he would have to wait for a hip replacement, how he had been to Hampton Court on a recent outing along with some of the other people who went to the day-care centre, and a description of a funeral he had been to of an old National Service acquaintance. The latter seemed to have been the highlight of the month, the funeral wakes in village halls around the country providing welcome reunions for those who still survived, with hours of reminiscence and a slap-up tea.
     
    Sonia gazed at her father as she listened to his cheerful tales. Seated in his electronically adjustable chair, a gift from her and James for his seventy-fifth birthday, he looked comfortable but out of place in this environment that had as much character as a station waiting room. Everything looked makeshift except for the incongruous Edwardian furniture, which he had refused to part with when he moved here from his previous house. These hefty pieces of dark mahogany were a link for him with the last place he had lived with Sonia’s mother, and though they were totally impractical - a sideboard that monopolised the living room and a bureau that was so wide it blocked half the window in his already sombre bedroom - he would no more have parted with them than he would the forest of spider plants that cluttered their dusty surfaces.
     
    Once her father had given her the headlines of his life in the past few weeks, it was Sonia’s turn. She always found it hard. The machinations of the PR world would be incomprehensible to someone who had worked as a teacher all his life, so she kept talk of work to a minimum and tended to make it sound as though she was in advertising, which was a much easier world for an outsider to grasp. Her social life would have been equally alien to him. On that last visit, though, she had told him about the dance class she had begun to attend and his enthusiasm took her by surprise.
     
    ‘What dances are you doing exactly? Who are your instructors? What sort of shoes do you wear?’ he quizzed her.
     
    Sonia expressed surprise that her father knew so much.
     
    ‘Your mother and I used to dance a lot in our courtship and in our early married life,’ he told her. ‘In the fifties everyone did! It was as though we were all celebrating the end of the war.’
     
    ‘How often did you go?’
     
    ‘Oh, at least twice a week. Always on Saturdays and then usually another night or two.’
     
    He smiled at his daughter. Jack loved it when she came to visit and knew it must be quite hard for her to fit these trips into her busy schedule. What he was always keen to avoid, though, was to talk too much about the past. It must be tiresome for children to have to listen to their parents reminiscing about days gone by and he had always been wary of it.
     
    ‘But they always say that the best things in life are free, don’t they?’ he added, smiling at her, hoping that even with her lovely house and expensive car that she still knew that.
     
    Sonia nodded. ‘I just can’t believe I never really knew,’ she said.
     
    ‘Well, I suppose we stopped soon after you were born.’
     
    Although her mother had died when Sonia was sixteen, she was amazed that she had never known anything about this aspect of their lives. Like most children, she had not spent much time wondering what her mother and father did before she was there and her curiosity had never been much aroused.
     
    ‘Don’t you remember all the dancing you did yourself when you were little?’ he asked. ‘You used to go every Saturday afternoon. Look!’
     
    Jack had rummaged in the bureau and found some pictures. On top of the pile was a photograph of Sonia, pale and self-conscious in a white, ribbon-trimmed tutu, standing by the