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The rain hadn’t let up once all day, very much to Iris’s annoyance. She so liked the springtime because it meant there were always new flowers blooming and the warming weather was the first reminder that her birthday would soon arrive. But this was not to be one of those sunny days she and Hurley could spend at the park. Rather, they’d been confined indoors—and on a weekend, too, when Iris didn’t even have lessons with her governess to look forward to.
“Hurley, I’m bored,” Iris lamented, not for the first time that afternoon. With her maths assignment done, she was free to play as she liked. And what she would have liked most was to be allowed to play outside. The constant rain had frustratingly prohibited the outdoors for the day, leaving Iris with pent up reserves of energy and no appealing outlet to spend it on.
“You have plenty at your disposal, my dear.”
Hurley hadn’t appeared to be bothered in the slightest. He’d been sat at his desk most of the day surrounded by tools and vials and loads of other sharp, shiny things that Iris wasn’t to touch. Some photograph-y print-y machine had trapped his focus of late, which she was rather intrigued by, but the chemicals involved meant she couldn’t assist. And so—and most crucially, in Iris’s opinion—there was no one to keep her company.
“But everything’s boring,” she countered while swinging her arms listlessly and shuffling around the sitting room without direction.
“You’ve finished the sums Miss Casion set you?”
“Yes, Hurley. I told you so already when you asked me that before.”
“Hm? Oh, yes, good…”
Iris flopped herself across the seat of Hurley’s armchair with a despairing grunt. She wriggled around until her legs were kicked up against the chair back and her head hung upside down off the edge of the seat. Her skirt and pinafore wilted over her knees while her pigtails drooped similarly towards the floor.
She sighed.
Hurley’s attention remained on his handiwork. He swapped out one metal file for another.
She sighed again. Louder.
Still nothing. The half-hearted monotony of raindrops on the windowpanes alone agitated the silence.
Sometimes Hurley could be so boring. He had been at his desk for ages. Iris theorised that there must be something about being grown up that made everything take that much longer to do. She was very nearly six, in fact, and had completed her work in no time at all, whereas Hurley was being ever so slow with his.
Iris wearily passed her gaze around the topsy-turvy room in search of inspiration. Her eyes eventually alighted on the large gramophone. Now there was a fun idea!
“Hurley,” Iris deliberately spoke softer so that Hurley was less likely to understand her and therefore more likely to agree before he could realise what he’d consented to. “May I put on the gramophone?”
“…Whatever you’d like, my dear.”
She happily tumbled off the chair and skipped over to the stack of music discs kept beneath where the player sat. She sorted through her options until she came to one in the middle of the pile with an illustration of a dancing couple in formal ballroom attire. The title and composer were both in German, and then in French were the words: La valse à trois temps. She recognised the word for ‘three,’ but she’d have to ask Hurley what the rest meant later.
Iris retrieved her step-stool to reach the turntable and placed the disc on the spindle. Then she wound the hand crank before gingerly setting the tone-arm to the outer grooves.
The brass horn projected only scratchy crackles for a few seconds until the needle caught the opening notes of a dreamy, humming orchestral arrangement.
Iris flitted around the sitting room, swaying her arms along with the rhythm. She remembered seeing couples dancing to the street musicians in Covent Garden, and she tried to copy their graceful movements. Her steps didn’t float as theirs had, but she didn’t much care. The sitting room became her own dance hall. She spun and hopped and frolicked about, fluttering the skirt of her pinafore like it was the grand gown worn by the pretty lady in the cover picture.
When the song ended, Iris ran to restart it. The opening crackles began and she turned back—only to find Hurley standing before her, away from his desk at last.
He bowed deeply with a flourish and held out his left hand. “Might I have the honour of this dance, my dear young madam?”
“Oh, yes!” Iris said excitedly. “Do you know how to dance, Hurley?”
“Indeed, I do,” he told her, walking them to an open space on the floor. “Although, it has been some years since I’ve last done this, so I ask that you do bear with me.”
“How many years?”
“Ah, before you were born.” Hurley’s mouth did that funny, lightning-flash smile of his, the one that never sat still on his face, but he quickly moved on. “Now, will you tell me what the timing of this melody is?”
Iris listened, then answered, “It’s in three-four, yes?”
“Absolutely correct, my dear. This is the timing for a waltz, and the steps are quite simple, done like so…”
Hurley demonstrated the basic pattern one step at a time while Iris watched his feet and slowly tried to mimic what he did. Before too long, she felt she had the hang of it, and Hurley restarted the song from the beginning.
The difference in their respective heights was a fair bit too substantial for the proper hold, Hurley explained, and so they made do with his right hand coming around to rest high up between her shoulder blades and her corresponding left hand placed at the crook of his elbow. He then took Iris’s free hand in his and at once fell into step with the swell of the orchestra.
Their stockinged feet plodded across the hardwood and carpet, more or less in time with the music. The slanting afternoon sunlight reached tenuously through the clouds to fill the sitting room with a pleasing glow, and the two of them glided around the perimeter and right back into Iris’s imaginary ballroom. Not that she took much notice, distracted as she was giggling over Hurley’s exaggerated counting, “right! two-three, left! two-three,” and so on, to keep them on track as they rounded the floor.
“Can you spin me?” Iris asked eagerly.
“Now, let me see if I can recall…” Hurley pulled back and walked through the motions as if he were the one being lead. “Ah, yes, here we are.”
He showed Iris through one of the basic patterns again, then raised their clasped hands for her to twirl like a top before stepping back in to sweep her away with enthusiasm.
“Again, Hurley! Again!” she demanded. Grinning, he obliged.
The tempo increased towards the end of the song as the orchestra built to a crescendo. Hurley lifted her up using the arm around her back and Iris held on with her legs about his waist as he danced around faster and faster. Iris was smiling so broadly her cheeks hurt and laughing so much she felt dizzy, although that could well have been from all the spinning.
At last, the music rumbled to a finish, and Hurley punctuated the last note by dropping them both down onto the settee in a heap of giddy panting. It took some time for them to catch their breath through all their laughter, but before long (and sooner than her guardian’s age would comfortably permit) Iris was sitting up and tugging at his arms.
“Let’s go again! Come on, Hurley!”
“I ought to wire you up and run the electric lights off you.” He groaned and fell into an immovable dead weight under her insistent hands. “We must allow the members of the orchestra a chance to recover themselves, don’t you think? Perhaps we may reconvene after a brief interval for teatime?”
Iris considered this an acceptable proposal and dashed off to let Mrs. Hudson know they’d be taking tea, humming the waltz to herself as she descended the steps. She wondered what other dances Hurley knew and if he’d teach her those as well.
With no disrespect to her governess, Hurley was still her most favourite to learn from. He could talk at length on very nearly any subject she put to him and was never, ever boring. She loved the way Hurley could make anything sound exciting, which was just as well, because Iris so wanted to learn absolutely everything.