On the podium in one corner of the Beachside Hotel’s lounge bar, Joe Murray, wearing a pair of denims and a white T-shirt that declared, ‘I’m a disco throwback,’ mopped his brow and surveyed the scene before him.

Multi-coloured lights twisted and twirled at ceiling level. Hooked into his disco, they picked up and gyrated to the beat of A Hole In My Shoe, and reflected from the many shining pates on the dance floor, lending the scene the surreal atmosphere of an underground 60s club. The bizarre lyrics of Traffic’s verse added to the sense of unreality.

‘Most of these people will remember this first time round,’ Joe observed, and wiped the sweat from his brow again.’

‘Nineteen sixty-seven, the summer of love,’ said Sheila Riley, fanning herself with a beer mat.

‘Before my loving time,’ said Joe, sweating pouring from under his hairline. ‘I was only fourteen.’ He looked over the dancers again. ‘It’s hotter than the Lazy Luncheonette’s kitchen in here. I don’t know where they get the energy to dance from.’

‘You mean you don’t know where they get the energy from to dance,’ Sheila corrected him.

Joe narrowed his eyes on Sheila and tutted. ‘That doesn’t make any more sense than the way I said it.’

‘It wouldn’t, would it?’ Sheila put down the beer mat and dug into her handbag. She came out with a handheld, battery operated fan, switched it on and wafted it before her face.

Like Joe, she was razor thin and short of stature. An attractive woman in her younger days, the ravages of time were taking their toll. The shower of blonde hair showed its first streaks of grey, the corners of the eyes exhibited their first creases, and the breasts, small but firm for so many years, had lost some of their pride.

Not that she was unattractive. At the age of 54 she could still turn heads on grab-a-granny nights, but they usually turned slower because most of their owners were in the first throes of arthritis.

‘It’s a good do, though, Joe,’ she approved. ‘A good start to the weekend.’

Joe clucked again and took a swallow of ice-cold lager. His grumpy features twisted into a malevolent grimace. ‘Lager. Baby beer. Give me a pint of Guinness any day.’

‘You can have a pint of Guinness,’ Sheila pointed out.

‘Too hot for Guinness,’ Joe grumbled. Just as suddenly, he picked up on her previous announcement. ‘And it should be a good do. Do you know how much the manageress charged us for the hire of the dining room? She said along with the additional bar staff and all the cleaning up, not to mention the extra electricity they’d use running my disco gear, she would have to charge me a ‘substantial fee.’’ He described speech marks in the air with his fingers as he pronounced the last two words. ‘Substantial fee? I’m sure I bought my first house for less.’

Sheila frowned. ‘Club funds pay for it, Joe. It’s not as if the money comes out of your own pocket.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m a businessman, aren’t I,’ Joe reminded her, ‘and business is there to make a profit. Even the club. I know we put the money back in for the members, but we have to show a profit, and you don’t make a profit by spending on unplanned … er …’ He struggled to find a simile and couldn’t. ‘Spending,’ he concluded.

Sheila let out a weary sigh. ‘What are we going to do with you, Joe? We came here to enjoy ourselves for weekend. Stop whining about money and let your hair down.’

Joe glanced out across the crowd of third-agers on the dance floor to remind himself of their balding heads. He ran a hand through his own curly mop. ‘Well at least I’ve still got some hair to let down.’

‘It’s just a shame you don’t get out of that café often enough to spend some of the fortune you have stashed away.’ Sheila wafted her fan again. ‘Where is Brenda? I need her by my side if I’m really going to rattle your cage.’

Joe’s eyes left the dance floor and checked out the bar area where he quickly picked out Brenda Jump. She was difficult to miss. Dressed in a vivid scarlet skirt and matching blouse with an orange, silk scarf at her neck, she looked like an advertisement for luminous paint.

‘She’s at the bar,’ he reported, ‘buttonholing that new guy.’

Sheila peered across the room. ‘Oh. Eddie Roberts. Poor man.’

‘Yeah, poor man,’ agreed Joe. ‘Brenda hitting on him like that.’

Sheila pursed her lips primly. ‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it. He’s a widower. He doesn’t have a soul in the world.’

Joe tutted sadly. ‘And just when he thinks things can’t get any worse, Brenda sets her sights on him.’ He drank the remainder of his lager. ‘I’ll go rescue him. You want another drink?’

Sheila nodded. ‘Just a glass of lemonade, please, Joe. With ice.’

Joe was about to step off the podium when the progress of the music permeated his ears. ‘It doesn’t have long to go, Sheila. Next track is the Monkees,  I’m A Believer.’

She looked anxiously the laptop computer’s screen display, an apparently endless list of tunes. ‘Where is it?’

Joe had already stepped off the podium. ‘Track seven, seven, one,’ he called back.

At least he thought it was 771. Unlike so many of the club members, whose ages ranged from 50 to 85, his mind was as sharp as ever, but if the numbers were not prefixed by a ‘£’ sign, he sometimes struggled to recall them.

He skirted the dance floor nodding to one or two people. Captain Tanner looked resplendent in his grey flannels and blazer, dancing ridiculously with Sylvia Goodson, Alec and Julia Staines were smooching … To A Hole In My Shoe? As he passed around the edge of the floor the widow Barker gave him the glad eye. He returned a grumpy smile and looked away. The woman was dressed in an outrageous, lime green trouser suit that perfectly captured the 70s theme of the weekend, but which thanks to her short, dumpy figure, made her appear as a grotesque leprechaun wiggling its bottom in pale imitation of a jitterbug barely paying lip service to the musical tempo.

Although he would never admit it to anyone, as a founder member and chairman of the Sanford Third Age Club, it was a matter of some pride that his discos were the highlight of the week. Usually they were held in the top room of the Jolly Carter, back home in Sanford, but this was a special. The annual, club weekend outing and there was no better way to get it off to a good start than the disco. A 60s night. Perfect for the purpose since most of the members first went to discos in the 60s. And tomorrow night it was a live concert by an Abba tribute band in Scarborough. The 100 or so people who had come along for the weekend were like Joe, preferring their music, their beer, their partners from that magical era between the beginning of the end of the Beatles and the birth of punk rock.

Arriving at the bar, he stood behind Brenda and signalled for service.

‘The club is just wonderful, Eddie,’ he overheard Brenda say as she waved an arm at the dance floor. ‘Many of our members joined as couples, but we’ve had our share of engagements and marriages between members who were like you; left alone after bereavement or divorce.’

Brenda was Sheila’s bosom buddy, but possessed of more bosom than Sheila, and had no qualms about showing off her finest asset. Aside from her large bust, she was every bit as slim and trim as Sheila, and like her best friend, she worked for Joe at his café back home in Sanford. But where Sheila employed a degree of tact and discretion in her daily life, both words had obviously been left out of Brenda’s lexicon. Her dress sense was not the only thing about her that was loud.

Joe nudged her in the back. Without turning round, she looked over her shoulder and smiled. ‘Oh hello, Joe.’

‘You want a drink?’ he asked. ‘Only Sheila was looking for you.’

‘Port and lemon, please, and I’ll be over in a minute.’ She turned quickly back to Eddie Roberts. ‘Eddie, you know Joe, don’t you? Club chairman. Runs the café on Doncaster Road.’

Eddie gave Joe a wan smile.

‘How’s it going?’ Joe greeted the club’s newest member. Ignoring them, he leaned into the bar and ordered his drinks. A glass of lager, a port and lemon and a glass of lemonade. With ice.’

Mark Pringle, son of the hotel’s proprietor, doubling up as the bar manager, frowned. ‘You want ice in the lager?’

‘No, I don’t want ice in the lager. I want ice in the lemonade.’ He glanced sideways at Brenda. ‘You’d better drop some in the port and lemon, too. Cool her off a bit.’

Mark shuffled off to pull the lager, Joe watched him, and as his eyes drifted back, they fell on a framed certificate, bearing a small photograph of Mark.

NYSAA, it read in bold lettering above Mark’s name and picture.

‘New York Servants And Ars…’

‘Did you say something, Joe?’ Brenda asked, looking over her shoulder.

‘No. Nothing. Just commenting on the bar staff.’ He noticed a clipboard at Brenda’s elbow, two sheets of A4 attached to, and a wad of theatre tickets under the clip.

‘We have some really great evenings, you know,’ Brenda was saying to Eddie. ‘There’s the weekly disco at the Jolly Carter, occasional shopping trips to places like York and Chester and Sheffield, and last year we went to Stratford for a Shakespeare festival.’

‘Yeah and that was a bloody disaster, wasn’t it?’ Joe complained as Mark Pringle returned.

‘Some of us,’ Brenda said haughtily, ‘enjoyed it.’

‘And one of us fell asleep during Hamlet’s big number,’ Joe reminded her, giving Eddie Roberts a wink. ‘Give me Inspector Morse anytime.’ Joe handed over the money for the drinks, and while waiting for his change, eyed the theatre tickets again. ‘Listen, Brenda, let me take those from you before they get covered in spilled booze.’

Brenda looked irritated. ‘I do not spill drink.’

‘I didn’t say you did …’

Joe trailed off. Something was not right. A Hole In My Shoe had finished and he recognised the introduction to Terry Scott’s My Bruvver.

‘Oh, sh …sugar. I told her to put on I’m A Believer. Pick up my change, will you, Brenda?’

Snatching the clipboard from under Brenda’s elbow, he tucked it under his arm, picked up the drinks and scurried back to the podium, crossing the dance floor this time, to the muted protests of one or two dancers.

‘Not good enough, Murray,’ said Captain Tanner. ‘Damned inefficient.’

‘Shut up you idiot, and get out of my way,’ snapped Joe.

He leapt onto the podium put the drinks and clipboard on the table behind Sheila and jabbed the laptop keyboard to stop the music.

Picking up the microphone, he apologised. ‘Sorry about that folks.’ His voice boomed around the room. ‘Technical difficulties.’ He ran the mousepad down the screen, selected the correct track and pressed the ‘enter’ key. Presently the sound of the Monkees came through the speakers. Joe turned angrily on Sheila. ‘Are you trying to make me look an idiot?’

Sheila sighed. ‘Oh I think you can manage that on your own, Joe.’ Sheila picked up her glass of lemonade and drank gratefully from it.

‘What?’

‘You said seven, seven, one and that’s what I played,’ she pointed out.

‘I meant …’ Joe checked the computer listing. ‘Seven, seven, two. Didn’t you read it first?’

‘No. I just pushed the numbers in.’

Joe shook his head sadly. ‘Saints preserve me from dim witted women and randy widows.’

Sheila took immediate offence. ‘Who’s a randy widow, I’ll have you know that since Peter died I’ve never ...’

‘Not you,’ interrupted Joe. ‘Brenda. She’s chatting that poor sod up at the bar and he has the kind of look on his face that you see on those prisoners going to the guillotine in the old movies. Pleading for mercy.’

Sheila gave a silly chuckle. ‘Poor Brenda. Poor Eddie.’ She fanned herself again. ‘You have to understand, Joe, when Colin died, he left Brenda financially secure but she had no children. She was alone in the world after thirty years of marriage and constant companionship. Widowhood is more difficult for her. That’s why she comes onto men.’ Sheila sighed and gazed wistfully through the panoramic windows. ‘I have my son and daughter, I have my brother-in-law and his wife, my sister and her husband. I have people around me and I don’t feel the need of a new partner.’

With a grimace, Joe sipped his fresh lager. Through the windows the last of midsummer sunlight had disappeared and the long spread of Filey beach was bathed in shadow. To the north, the cliffs still shone in red light, but where they tapered off to the Brig, the low lying rocks were all but invisible.

He turned back to the disco and the dancing couples making merry to the music of The Monkees.  Brenda had left the bar and was making her way around the floor. She had stopped and was chatting to Mavis Barker. A pair of widows, like vampires on the hunt for fresh blood, Joe thought.

He glanced at the bar and frowned. ‘Curious.’

Sheila had been in a mental void, tapping her fingers on the table in time to the rhythm of the music. When Joe spoke, she snapped back to the present. ‘What?’

Glass of lager in hand, Joe waved it in the direction of the bar where Eddie Roberts had detached himself from his seat and was in conversation with Sarah Pringle, the manageress.

‘That Eddie Roberts is talking to the Pringle woman,’ said Joe.

Sheila laughed. ‘There’s nothing odd about that, Joe. Mrs Pringle is quite a sociable woman when she’s not talking about the cost of running a hotel. As you would now if you; ever spoken to her about anything other than money.’

Joe’s malleable features transfigured themselves into a mask of irritation. ‘I know there’s nothing odd about him talking to her. After Brenda, talking to the dog would be a relief. No, it’s not that. It’s . . . well, look at his hand.’ Again he gestured.

It was such a surreptitious movement that only the sharpest of eyes would have noticed, but as he stood close to Sarah Pringle, Eddie Roberts’ handed something to her

‘Looks to me like he was handing money over,’ said Joe. He raised his eyebrow at Sheila. ‘What’s it for? Services she doesn’t advertise.’

Sheila tutted. ‘That’s just the way your mind works. I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.’