KOMET

"ON WITH THE DANCE" is a continuation of the 'Upstairs, Downstairs' series of novels and carries the Bellamys and their servants into the early post-World War I years. 

The novel begins in July 1919, on the day that the Victory Parade is scheduled to take place in London. Richard Bellamy, now a member of the House of Lords, had recently returned from France with his new wife Virginia (and her 2 young children; like Richard, she had been a widow for several years following the death of her first husband, a naval officer, early in the war), where they honeymooned and took in both the Paris Peace Conference and Versailles, where the peace treaty formally ending World War I had been signed on June 28th.

Since his remarriage, Richard is no longer living at 165 Eaton Place and is looking for a new house near Hyde Park with Virginia. He meets after the Parade has run its course, with James, his son, who is as morose and restless as ever. Though the war has been over for 8 months and James has fully recovered from the wounds he sustained at Passchendaele, he has been aimless and with little enthusiasm for getting his life on a firm track so that he can begin to move forward and settle himself. Georgina (his cousin by marriage - the 2 had hovered on the edge of falling into a full-scale wartime romance given the smoldering attraction each had for the other; however, since the Armistice and the various shocks - personal, social, and economic - taking place in Britain as everyone tried to adapt themselves to a peacetime world - their passion had ebbed and died, though both remained as close friends) tries to cajol James into enjoying the fireworks outside. But James' enthusiasm has apparently been used up through his earlier participation that day in the Victory Parade. 

The staff at Eaton Place has a new footman and under-parlour maid. Edward, now discharged from the Army, and his wife Daisy had left the employ of the Bellamys several months earlier to eke out a living for themselves. Both pay a visit to their former colleagues 'downstairs', trying to display a new air of confidence, that in truth, neither has. Edward's job as a door-to-door salesman isn't getting him any closer to establishing for himself, Daisy, and their unborn child the type of success he craves for himself. 

The novel goes on to take the reader into the lives of both the Bellamys and servants over the next 4 years. And what a whirlwind those years prove to be! Years full of happiness, heartbreak, and anguish. Again I couldn't help but marvel over how a novel with 156 pages could be so engaging and compelling.