Free Spirit of Progress by Steven Carroll

danced, because the moment required something like a dance. A little comedy, even. And it wasn’t a jubilantly triumphant dance, but a light quickstep. No, not triumphant, just the dance of someone giving himself leave to be carefree again. And then a little skip, because the moment required a skip. Like someone breaking out into a flourish or clicking his heels at an appropriate moment, not because the movement comes spontaneously but because it is expected and the moment wouldn’t be complete without it.
    As Tess pieces this all together (whether accurately or not, she’s not sure, for it has been a year), vaguely aware that the tram is nearing her stop, she concludes once more, as she did in the picture theatre sitting next to Sam, thatthat five or ten seconds of newsreel footage would have taken infinitely longer to film. That it was too good. Too apt. That these things don’t just happen. But, then again, maybe they did. Maybe the Dancing Man just popped up and disappeared in the time it took to film and watch it. But she suspects not. The lifting of the hat, the dance, the little skip, the snappy exit back into anonymity would have been performed again and again, she suspects, so that all the component movements were just as they ought to be, each one flowing into the other to create the choreographed spontaneity that the moment required.
    And afterwards, out on the street and squinting in the late winter light (that carried with it a hint of the coming spring), a street like the one in which the Dancing Man had performed his little jig, something else ended. The end that was always coming but which surprised them anyway. As they walked along the street it was the urgency in Sam’s steps that she noted. At first she couldn’t understand why she so noticed this urgency, or why she chose to call it urgency, until she realised that it was the step of someone who was walking away. Impatient to get away. Someone who was walking into a future that, for reasons that could never be changed, did not include her. She wanted the impossible. For everything to go on the way it always had. And as long as the war continued, as long as they lived in a closed city and nobody could leave, everything would go on as it always had. But the war was over now and everything would change. The Dancing Man told them so. It was over now and soon they would all scatter, and the impossible would give way to theinevitable. That, at least, was how she read and understood the urgency in Sam’s steps. And she remained convinced that she was right. The end of the affair was upon them. Its time had come. The world called to him and he was eager, impatient, to join it. And while his steps, she was convinced, were moving urgently forward, hers longed to turn back. And it wasn’t so much the differences in their natures, this looking forward and looking back, but the nature of the circumstances. Until then the possibility of leaving existed only in a world of speculation. But all that had changed. He was marching forward, she was looking back. He was leaving and she was never going to leave with him. Her life was here. Theirs was an affair, a love affair, but an affair, and while the war was on they had managed to give fate the slip. But not any more. The fact of the end would have to be faced. And for Tess, who had already resolved that she would choose the moment of their parting and control at least this much in an uncontrollable world, the sooner the better. And this was not, as she now sees it, a callous or cold-hearted decision, but a necessary one. She simply could not go on with the shadow of the end always hanging over them.
    And later that same afternoon, back in his room, she lay watching him boiling tea, restlessly, she judged, an air of unspoken thoughts hovering round him, and finally said what had to be said.
    ‘This is it, isn’t it?’
    He’d looked up from pouring the water, and, she imagined, toyed with asking what this ‘it’