Natural Turn

by Alan Turing, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The class was on Tuesdays at seven, over Tanner's Carpets, in a room that had been the carpet shop's stockroom until Yvonne Pocock took the lease and had the floor done. It was not a sprung floor. It was a laminate called Nordic Oak, laid on foam over the old boards, and it smelt very faintly, when the radiators came on, of the latex backing on the rolls downstairs. Fourteen pounds a head, cash or the card machine, which did not work on Tuesdays because of the signal.

There were six couples and Yvonne. Ray Haskins and Clive Ambrose were the fourth couple from the window, which was where they had stood the first week, in February, and nobody else had stood there since.

"Natural turn," said Yvonne, "from the top. Gentlemen, forward on the right. And—"

She pressed the button on the CD player with her heel. It was a slow waltz, thirty bars to the minute, a woman singing about a carousel in a language that might have been Dutch. Ray stepped forward on the right foot, and Clive stepped back on the left, and they went round the corner by the fire door in what Ray believed to be a natural turn, and Clive knew to be a natural turn danced behind the music, and further behind at every bar.

He did not say so. He had said so in March, and in April, and Ray had said that he was counting, he was counting out loud, and he was. One, two, three. One, two, three. It was perfectly regular. It was only that Ray's one came a shade after the music's, and then, because he waited to hear the music before he went on, a shade after that, so that the two of them, the man counting and the woman singing, went round the room like two strings tuned a hair apart, and Clive heard it the way he heard everything of that kind, as a slow throb, once every few seconds, that would not stop until somebody moved a pin.

He had tuned pianos for forty-one years: schools, chapels, the Wyvern Theatre, a great many front rooms in Old Town and Rodbourne, and once a white baby grand in a house in Wroughton that had been bought for the look of it and never played. You tuned a unison by listening for the beat between the two strings, and turning the pin until the beat slowed, and slowed, and stopped. You could not do it by looking. You could not do it by wanting. You could only do it with the hammer on the pin and your ear on the beat, and a light hand.

Yvonne stopped the music at the end of the side of the room.

"Raymond," she said. "That was very nice. You were dancing very nicely to a different record."

The couple by the window laughed, a little, the way people laugh when it might be them next. Ray did not. He looked down at his own feet, in the black shoes with the suede soles that Yvonne had sold him out of a box for forty-five pounds, and then at the CD player, as though it had cheated.

"I'm on the one," he said.

"You're on the one," said Yvonne. "The music's not."

---

At home Clive put the kettle on and took a chair from the table and sat it in the middle of the kitchen floor, facing the cooker.

"What's that for?"

"It's the band," said Clive.

He put the metronome on the chair. It was the old Maelzel his father had given him in 1971, in a wooden case shaped like a pyramid, and it went with a dry tock that Ray said sounded like a man knocking to be let in. Clive set the weight to ninety, which was thirty bars of three, and wound it, and let it go.

"Now walk," he said. "Just walk. Don't count. Step when it ticks."

Ray walked. He walked from the back door to the fridge and turned round and walked back. He was a big man, broad in the back, sixty-nine; he had stood on the line at the Honda plant on the South Marston road for twenty-two years fitting door trims, one a minute near enough, and he walked as he had worked, steadily and well and at his own speed. The metronome went tock, and Ray put his foot down, and there was a gap between the two which Clive could hear and Ray could not, about the length of a breath taken in.

"You're waiting for it," Clive said.

"I'm listening for it."

"You're waiting till you've heard it, and then you step. So you're always after. You want to step as it comes, not when it's come."

"How do I know when it's coming if I haven't heard it?"

"Because it came last time."

Ray stood by the fridge and considered this, with his hands in his cardigan pockets. The metronome went on knocking. He took one hand out of the pocket and put it, flat, on the top of the fridge, which was humming, and stood with it there, as if to steady it.

"You do it, then," he said.

Clive did it. He walked from the fridge to the back door on the tock, without counting, and the gap was not there, because it was never there for Clive, and Ray watched him with his head on one side.

"You'd better lead," said Clive. "Next time. Just to try it."

"No."

"Just to try."

"I'm not," said Ray, "going backwards round Swindon."

He said it pleasantly, and stopped the metronome with one finger on the top of the rod, the way he had seen Clive do it, and took the cups down from the cupboard. Clive turned the chair round and put it back at the table. Neither of them said anything else about it. They had been together thirty-one years, and had found in that time that most things that were worth saying could be said once.

---

The medal test was on the third Saturday in October. Yvonne put up the list on the noticeboard by the toilets, between the leaflet about the Zumba and the one about a lost tortoise. Bronze, Standard: waltz and quickstep. Fifteen pounds a candidate, to include the certificate. Nine couples entered, and two little girls doing their Social Dance, and a Mr and Mrs Kerslake who had been doing it for eleven years and were going in for the Gold Star again, which they did every year, and passed, and went in for again.

On the form there were two columns. The first said Candidate, and the second said Partner, and against each there was a box with M and L in it, and a note at the bottom: Please circle the part danced.

Clive filled it in at the kitchen table with the biro from the telephone. Haskins, R. M. Ambrose, C. L. He circled the letters neatly, and gave it to Yvonne on the Tuesday with thirty pounds in an envelope, and she put it in her bag without looking at it, and said that she had left the M and the L on because the Association had not yet sent the new forms and she was not printing them herself at eleven pence a sheet.

The Tuesday after that, Ray said that he had to go and see his sister about the guttering, and went out at half past six in the car.

His sister lived in Penhill, and did not have any trouble with her guttering, and was not expecting him. He drove past the end of her road and on down the Cricklade Road to Tanner's Carpets, and parked at the back, where the vans went, and went up the outside staircase at a quarter to seven, when there was no class. Yvonne was waiting. She had the lights on at one end only, and the heater on, and she had taken her shoes off and was putting on another pair.

"Forty pounds," she said. "For the hour. You know that."

"I know that."

"Clive doesn't know you're here."

"No," said Ray.

She did not ask anything else. She had been teaching for thirty years, since before the stockroom, in church halls and the Conservative Club and a school gym in Moredon with the climbing frames folded back against the walls, and in that time she had taught a great many people a great many things for forty pounds an hour without needing to know the reason. She was five foot two. She put her heels on and came up to Ray's collarbone.

"Lady's steps," she said, "right. Give me your left hand. No, your other left. Put it on my shoulder. Not like that, you're not holding on to a bus. Rest it. Now my hand goes here."

She put her right hand flat on his back, below the shoulder blade, where there was a soft place in the cardigan. Then she took his right hand in her left and raised it, and held it, and stood waiting for him to look at her. He looked at her.

"Not at me. Lady looks out. Head to the left. Further. As if somebody's said your name over there."

He turned his head to the left, as far as it would go. Now he could see the window and the dark, and the edge of the Nordic Oak, and the light on the fire door at the far end, and he could not see behind him at all. Behind him was the whole of the room.

"It's backwards," said Yvonne, "the first half of every turn. You can't see where you're going. I can. You don't need to. That's what I'm for. When I come forward, you go back, and you go back as I come, not after, because you'll feel me coming before I get there. Here." She pressed with the heel of her right hand, very slightly. "That's me thinking about it. Did you feel that?"

"Yes."

"That's the one. That's your one. Not the music. Me." She reached out with her foot for the CD player, in the dark, and found it. "From the top. Natural turn. And—"

He stepped back on his left foot, on to nothing he could see.

It was not like walking. It was like going down a staircase in a dark house, in the night, with your hand on the wall, when you have been told the number of the stairs and have to believe it. He went back three times and came round, and on the fourth step she went back and he went forward, and saw the window and the van park, and then he was going backwards again, and the van park went past the edge of his eye and was gone. Twice he went stiff and stood on her foot. The third time he did not. The woman went on singing about her carousel. At the end of the room, where the fire door was, Yvonne turned him through the corner with her hand on his back, quite firmly, and he did not see the fire door at all, and did not walk into it, and that was all there was to it, apart from the hour.

"You're on the one," said Yvonne, at the end. She took her hand off his back. "Funny, that."

He paid her in cash, two twenties, and drove home by way of Penhill so as to have gone past his sister's, and told Clive that the guttering was fine.

---

On the Saturday the room was full of chairs. Yvonne had borrowed them from the Methodist hall, the stacking kind, orange, and set them round the walls two deep for the families. The examiner sat at a card table by the window, not far from where Ray and Clive usually stood, with a jug of water and a clipboard. She was a Mrs Dewar, from Chippenham, a tall woman in a navy suit with a pen on a cord round her neck, and she had the forms in front of her in a pile, face down, and turned them over one at a time.

The little girls went first, in pink, with their mothers holding their coats. Then a young couple from the Tuesday class, then a couple from Thursdays whom Ray and Clive did not know, then the Kerslakes, who danced the foxtrot as if they had been issued with it.

"Haskins and Ambrose," said Mrs Dewar.

They went out on to the floor. It was the first time either of them had stood on it with people sitting round the edge, and it looked much bigger than on a Tuesday, the way a room does when the furniture has been taken out for the removal men. Somebody's grandson in the second row was eating a packet of crisps. Mrs Dewar looked at the form, and then at them, and then at the form again, and made a small mark with the pen on the cord.

"Waltz first," she said. "In your own time, gentlemen."

Clive went to stand where he always stood, a little to Ray's right, and lifted his left hand to put it on Ray's shoulder.

Ray was not there. He had moved half a step round, so that he was standing on the other side, where Clive's right hand would have to go on his back. He had already lifted his own left hand, and was holding it there in the air, not like a man holding on to a bus.

Clive looked at it. Then he looked at Ray, who was not looking at him, but out to the left, at the orange chairs and the window, with his head turned as far as it would go, as if somebody had said his name over there.

Clive put his right hand flat on Ray's back, below the shoulder blade, where there was a soft place in the jacket. It was the first time. In eight months of Tuesdays it had always been Ray's hand on his back, and his own hand had always been on Ray's shoulder, and he found that he did not know what Ray's back would feel like from this side, and that it felt much as he had expected, only warmer. He took Ray's right hand in his left and raised it. He had never danced the man's steps with anyone. He had watched Ray do them two hundred times, from the inside, going backwards.

"And—" said Yvonne, from the CD player, and pressed the button with her heel.

It was the Dutch woman, the carousel. Clive heard where the one was before it arrived, as he always did. He thought about it with the heel of his right hand, very slightly. Ray went back.

He went back as it came, not after, and Clive came forward into the space where he had been, and they went down the long side of the room past the families in a natural turn that was a natural turn, three steps and three steps, rise and fall, while the woman sang. Clive could see everything: the chairs, the crisps, the fire door at the far end coming up, Yvonne by the CD player with her arms folded and her lips moving, counting. Ray could see the window. Clive felt the back under his hand go stiff once, at the corner, as the fire door came up behind it, and he did nothing about it except keep his hand where it was and turn, and the back came soft again, and the fire door went past it a foot away and was not walked into.

There was no beat. Clive listened for it all the way down the second long side, as he listened at a piano with the hammer on the pin, and could not find it. It was the first time in eight months that he had not heard it.

At the end of the side of the room the music faded, as Yvonne had set it to fade, and they came to a stop in hold in front of the card table, a little crooked. Neither of them moved out of it. Mrs Dewar was writing. The grandson had stopped eating his crisps. Ray still had his head turned to the left, out over the room, at nothing in particular, and he left it there for the length of one more bar of music that was not playing, and then he looked round.

"Quickstep," said Mrs Dewar, without looking up. "Same way round, gentlemen?"

Ray took his hand off Clive's shoulder and put it back again, flat, exactly where it had been.

"Same way round," he said.

Mrs Dewar turned the form over, crossed out both circles, and drew them again, one on each line, the other way round. Then she nodded to Yvonne. Yvonne pressed the button with her heel.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ab Alanō Turing per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alan Turing, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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