Grave Dancing
A Sunday essay about the permanence of partial memory…
“I shall dance on your grave, Serena”.
I think that’s what he said.
It was a late night movie, or TV drama — most likely part of a British anthology from the 70s or early 80s. The sort that starred Denham Elliott.
The plot, as I remember, was a multi-millionaire who had a much younger wife; trophy — maybe she was caught having an affair with the driver, or something, perhaps even a plot to take the old boy for his money. But anyway, he found out, and he trapped her in a room within his mansion, and got an audio engineer to play ear-piercing sounds that would have dogs in vets for weeks.
As the woman squirmed and writhed on the ground in her cocktail dress, the husband pressed a button from the control room so she could hear his voice. That’s when he muttered the line at the top. If it wasn’t Serena, it was Selina. But he was clear about the grave. And the dancing. She had her hands over her ears and her face was a collapsing grimace.
In a postscript, a limo pulls up to the cemetery and a pair of smart shoes and suit pants are shown. There’s a click on a portable cassette tape player, and some light jazz plays. A soft shoe shuffle across the grave, then cue credits.
I saw this when I was about six or seven years old. And that memory is rock solid, but no amount of Googling or asking the AI will assist me further.
The idea, at some point, was to be able to watch it again — but isn’t it better not being able to solve everything?
What matters most is I remember this much. And I remember exactly where I was. At my grandparents’ house on a Saturday night. My ‘Pop’ didn’t really connect with us a whole lot — but he loved watching movies and TV. I like to think that’s how he and I bonded. The Roald Dahl Tales of Unexpected, the Hammer Horror, the generic Sunday Horrors and especially the creature features.
He’d let us stay up and watch whatever he was watching. Well, that’s how we framed it at the time. The reality of course, there was one TV, there was only two channels and it wasn’t so much a bending of the rules as it was a lack of interest in bending an ear to chat, in bending a knee to get on our level.
Just as I can’t remember the title, or any further details of the grave-dancing horror, I can’t remember whether my grandfather even noticed that I was there watching with him.
