The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [31]
‘Are you sure? It’s pretty strong. Not a lady’s drink…’
‘She isn’t a lady,’ Myra told him sweetly. ‘Go get it.’
He was back within a few seconds, brandishing a bottle.
‘What is it, anyway?’ she asked him when he removed the top.
‘It’s genuine American bourbon,’ he told her proudly.
‘Give me the bottle,’ Myra demanded, pouring a good measure into one of the glasses.
‘Hey, not so much,’ Clem objected. ‘That stuff’s lethal. It fries your brains. It’s not for girls,’ he protested, but it was too late.
Myra handed him back the bottle and walked towards Diane, carrying their drinks.
‘Goodness, it’s hot, isn’t it?’ she commented as she handed Diane one glass whilst taking a drink from the other one.
‘Yes. Yes, it is,’ Diane agreed, lifting her own glass to her lips.
‘Drink up,’ Myra urged, ‘then we can have a dance together, seein’ as how you don’t want to stay here.’ She could see that Diane was looking for somewhere to put her glass. ‘You’ll have to finish it,’ she told her quickly. ‘There’s nowhere safe to leave it, not with this crowd. Someone’s sure to pinch it.’
She didn’t really want to dance with Myra, Diane admitted, but in view of Myra’s attempt to pacify her, she didn’t feel able to refuse. Myra had already finished her drink and was waiting for her so Diane hurriedly swallowed her own.
‘That didn’t taste like shandy,’ she told Myra.
‘Didn’t it?’ Myra gave a dismissive shrug. ‘Maybe Clem misunderstood. Shandy was what I told him to get. Mine was OK. Come on, let’s go and dance.’ She grabbed hold of Diane’s wrist, almost pulling her on to the dance floor.
Heavens, but she felt dizzy, Diane admitted. Her head was spinning. It must be the heat and the noise. She really felt quite odd; not herself at all.
Myra looked uncertainly at Diane. All she had wanted to do was get her to loosen up a bit, and relax, but instead, Diane was swaying unsteadily on the dance floor and there was a unfocused look in her eyes. People were beginning to stare pointedly at her but Diane was oblivious to their disapproval. She had lifted her hand to her forehead as she stopped dancing and simply stood in the middle of the dance floor. Myra began to panic. Why on earth was she behaving like this? She hadn’t poured that much spirit into Diane’s drink, she reassured herself. It wasn’t her fault if Diane couldn’t take her drink, was it? She couldn’t have been expected to know that! As she struggled to wriggle out of any blame, she felt a tap on her shoulder.
‘You dancing, gorgeous?’
She whirled round, her eyes widening in recognition, only too happy to push her guilt about Diane to one side as she smiled up into the eyes of the man from Lyons’ Corner House.
‘I might be,’ she told him coquettishly. ‘It depends how good you are.’
‘Oh, I’m very good, honey. In fact, I’m better than good, I’m the best,’ he told her.
‘Says you,’ Myra returned.
‘Well, there’s only one way you’re going to find out if I’m right, isn’t there?’ he told her boldly, as he stepped towards her, taking her acceptance for granted. Right on cue the music changed to a slow smoochy number. Myra hid her feeling of triumph as he pulled her into his body, one hand caressing her back whilst the other made its way down to the curve of her behind, making it plain how attracted to her he was.
‘So what’s your name then?’ she asked him.
There was something about all Americans, but this one in particular that made her long to be different, and increased her frustrated resentment of her own life and marriage. They came from a different world – a better world – and it was one she herself longed to be part of. She had seen it in films at the cinema: sophisticated elegant women living lives she could so easily see herself living. She had grown to feel so envious of those women; and, through them, of all American women. She hungered for a life in which she hailed New York ‘cabs’ and drank ‘martinis’, a life in which she shopped on Fifth Avenue, and went to shows on Broadway. She had studied