The other girls in the dressing room were quietly sympathetic that evening. Everyone in the company had assumed that Ella would be cast as one of the four cygnets. No-one could understand why she had not been chosen. Ella told nobody the reason. It seemed like some primordial shame and cast a shadow over the whole of her future with the Royal Ballet. It made her feel ill. She went home exhausted and lay on the bed. Her limbs felt like lead. She did not have the strength or will to dispose of the gelignite that night. Before she fell into a black abyss of dreamless sleep she had a hypnagogic vision of a head floating in front of her and mouthing unspeakable things.
Chapter Forty
Ella went through the next morning’s class on automatic pilot. After rehearsal she joined Manuela in one of the three cars that took the invited company members to the home of the minister of trade and industry.
Inside the elegant ground-floor Kensington flat, Ella found her surroundings to be petrified in some way, as if overlaid with that golden lacquer that blocks the pores and suffocates the victim. The wealth felt crushing and exhausting, as if the opulence squeezed all the life out of her and left her breathless. She hated it: the beautifully laid table; the subservient Filipina home-helpers; the fresh lilies in the silver jug; the long stiff embossed cream curtains at the windows. Fifteen other dancers from the company were there. She and Manuela sat primly together on a sofa whose pastel-coloured bolsters and hard cushions were stitched and trimmed with gold cord binding. Nothing was out of place. Nothing was comfortable. With expressionless faces, the maids circulated holding trays of canapés. The guests clustered around the company stars.
Manuela leaned over and brushed a crumb off Ella’s chin. She whispered: ‘It’s like being on a life support machine and someone’s just switched off the ventilator.’
‘How do you do? I’m Johnny Caspers.’ A star-struck young Jewish man of about twenty-four introduced himself to the two girls. ‘I’m a banker who wishes he was an artist. My real passion is opera but I do my bit for the ballet as well.’
The girls stood up and shook hands.
‘This is how half the girls get husbands,’ whispered Manuela. ‘Merchant bankers. They’re always snooping around.’
Just then the minister, tufts of grey hair sprouting from either side of his bald head, made his way over to greet the new guests. His pink hand grasped a mushroom vol-au-vent from a passing tray.
‘Are you all right after what happened the other day?’ Caspers enquired as the minister shook hands with Ella and Manuela. ‘Dreadful business.’ He turned to the girls. ‘John was the victim of a bombing incident.’
The minister shook his head reassuringly:
‘Everything’s fine, thank you. It was quite minor – took the paint off the front door, but that’s all. Muriel wasn’t at home, luckily. I suppose something like that was to be expected. But it’s a new departure. It’s made Muriel a bit nervous. And it means I have to have protection everywhere I go, which is a bit of a bind. Special Branch are here now.’ He nodded over at two men sitting slightly apart from everyone with full plates in their laps.
One of the Special Branch officers caught the minister’s eye and came over holding his plate and wiping his mouth with a napkin. He lowered his voice:
‘Sorry to intrude, sir. Just to let you know that Nigel is off sick and we’ve had to take somebody off undercover work to drive your car. His name is Alan Forbes. He’ll only be with you for an hour or so this afternoon. I’m apologising in advance about his long hair. Don’t want you to think we’re reduced to employing hippies. He needs long hair for his undercover work. We’ll need to leave in about ten minutes if that’s OK, sir?’
‘Thank you.’ The minister looked at his watch and moved away to greet prima ballerina Lynn Seymour who had arrived late. Ella realised with a shock whose house she was in. She remembered Jerry Haynes in the car going home from the cinema whooping with glee at the news of the bombing. She turned to Manuela: ‘I think I’m going. I’ve done my bit. The cars aren’t waiting for us. We’ve got to make our own way home.’
‘OK. I’m going to stay on. See if I can find a rich, stage-door Johnny. I’ll see you on Monday night for Les Noces.’ Manuela moved off to make polite conversation with the balletomanes.
By the time the maid had found her coat and Ella had said goodbye it was also time for the minister to leave. She followed him out. Revolving doors opened from the lobby of the apartment block onto the street. The minister’s two Special Branch minders glanced quickly up and down to check the street. One went out in front of the minister and one behind. The first minder held the car door open for him and then went to the back-up car waiting immediately behind. The first car moved smoothly away down Victoria Grove. It passed Ella as she walked down the street, and she caught a clear view of the driver’s square jaw as he looked up to check his rear mirror. His long brown hair was tied back. The police driver was Jerry Haynes. An enormous turbine shaft seemed to rotate in her chest and squeeze the air out of her. She turned her face away and began to walk in the opposite direction; Jerry Haynes a police agent, an infiltrator, a spy. Underwater thunder boomed in her ears.
On Kensington High Street Ella hailed a taxi and ordered it to take her to Bethnal Green. She held on to the leather handgrip, trying not to be sick as it raced through the streets. It was four o’clock when she reached the house. Her first instinct was to contact Donny. She ran inside. The house was empty. She dashed upstairs to see if the gelignite was still there. It was. A shocking volt of giddiness went through her head accompanied by violent nausea. She rushed to move the gelignite to Mark’s room and to wipe any fingerprints off with a cloth. After hesitating for a while she telephoned the number of Donny’s lodgings in Aberdeen. He was not there. She jumped up and looked in a haphazard way around the flat to see if there was anything else that the police might find that could link Donny to the robberies or the gelignite. In a fit of panic she tore up their wedding photographs. Then she decided to move the gelignite again and took it downstairs to the communal kitchen and put it in a carrier bag under the table. She would have to wait until dark to dispose of it. Every now and then her heart beat erratically and seemed to drop right down to her womb. She made herself a cup of tea and went back upstairs to the flat. She remembered Jerry Haynes’s persistent questions about Donny. Now she understood that he must have been digging for information.
It was five o’clock and she was lying flat on the bed when the distant buzz of the doorbell sounded from downstairs. Ella flew down, in the unrealistic hope that Donny was making one of his unexpected returns.
She opened the door. Jerry Haynes stood there in jeans and a cotton denim jacket, with the wind blowing strands of hair across his mouth. He grinned and stepped forward to come into the house:
‘I heard about the raid and thought I’d keep my head down for a few days. Then I thought I must come and see if you and Donny are OK.’
Ella blocked his way.
‘It’s not safe,’ she blurted out. ‘You can’t come in. Mark’s not here.’
‘What’s happened?’ Jerry looked taken aback. He shifted from foot to foot on the doorstep. ‘Where’s Donny? Is he around?’
‘Have you got your car here?’ she asked, frantic for a diversion.
He nodded.
‘Can you help? Can we go straight away? Donny is at Fort Halstead in Kent. I’ve just spoken to him on the phone. He needs a car. They’re planning to do something with explosives at the government installations there. He wanted me to find you. He needs someone to drive … maybe the getaway car or something. I don’t know.’ Her imagination failed her. ‘I don’t know why. He said to try and get there before dark. We must leave straight away. He just telephoned. He’s waiting. Please, can we go? I need to get there before dark. Don’t come in the house. There’s not time.’ She was gasping for breath as she spoke. There was a feeling that her throat had been scraped dry of moisture with a knife. ‘Can we go?’ she croaked. ‘Can we
go straight away? Is that OK?’
Jerry looked hesitant. There was a puzzled expression in his brown eyes.
‘I suppose so. Who else is down there?’
‘Several of the others, I think. I don’t know. Everyone that’s involved. All of them.’
She snatched up her bag from the hall table and followed him out to the green Simca parked in the road. All Ella wanted to do was to get him as far away from the house as possible. She would think of something else to do while they were on their way.
*
In the car Ella remained silent.
‘Can you look in the glove compartment for the road atlas?’ said Jerry. ‘It will have Fort Halstead marked on it. I’m not sure of the route.’
Ella kept the road map on her lap. She was in a sickened daze. They drove through Bromley. Saturday afternoon shoppers milled around on the pavement and traffic choked the air with grey fumes. On Monday, she remembered, she would have to dance in Les Noces. She misread the map, confusing Catford with Bromley and then missed the signpost to the A224. Jerry retraced the route. She could hear an odd zinging in her ears and her heart thumped.
Then suddenly London was behind them and they were driving through open countryside. On her left the hillside seemed abnormally close. Ella could see every tussock, hump of earth and blade of grass. Jerry was saying something about ‘the bastards deserving whatever they get’.
‘Yes. The bastards.’ She mumbled but her mouth was dry and it came out in a whisper. She looked sideways at him, then out of the window. A hawk hovered in empty sky ahead of them. Woodland closed in and the winding road forced Jerry to slow down. Thin tree trunks flickered past like the barred gateway to some enchanted region of sunlit green and gold. Part of Ella became detached and flew through the trees, dipping and dancing over the tree-tops.
Jerry was laughing a triumphant laugh. He seemed to be brimful of enthusiasm for what lay ahead.
‘It’s a brilliant idea to target Fort Halstead. A government defence institution. Whe-hey. That will get them really rattled. They never know who’s going to be hit next: judges, the military, politicians, big business. Don’t you know the names of the others? That worries me a bit. You have to know who to trust. Who are they? Donny will definitely be there, will he?’
‘Yes. He’s there,’ she said, the lies crawling on her lips like bees.
He put his foot on the accelerator. He asked her whether Donny ever used another name; whether he had a passport in another name; whether he would try and leave the country after this.
‘I always thought Donny was probably the leader in all this.’
When Ella turned to look at him her vision fractured into a double astigmatism and asymmetry of vision. Suddenly the inside of the car pulled itself sideways into an elongated trapezoidal shape. She could see Jerry a long distance away, very small, as if he were at the end of a tunnel, but he was something else, a fox maybe. Then his face loomed back into normality next to her and she could see a fleck of spit in the corner of his mouth as he chatted.
‘I always wanted to be more involved. Can you check the road map for me? We’re somewhere near Rushmore Hill.’
They saw a sign to Fort Halstead.
‘Where exactly are we to meet Donny and the others?’ asked Jerry.
There was a band of pain across her chest. She thought her ribs would burst. Outside birds shrieked like a flock of schoolgirls. In front of her eyes the print on the road map swarmed off the page to become a thousand miniature bees circling her head. There was a deep humming in her ears and the sensation of tiny drummers beating under her skin. The right side of her vision billowed out like a ship’s sail. She blinked several times to correct it. When she dared look round again at Jerry’s face she noted with curiosity that he seemed to have several eyes all different shades of brown, two or three in his head and three or four others circling around his face. One eye was the colour of a Highland peat burn and another the colour of a stag’s eye.
‘Turn left here. Right here. Fort Halstead is up here.’
‘Could you open your window,’ she heard a voice saying. ‘It’s a bit hot in here.’
He wound down his window as they raced along. ‘You are a good driver.’ It was her voice again from far away. ‘Where did you learn to drive like that?’
Ella’s passenger seat was overshadowed by the trees on her side of the road. As he cornered a bend she was suddenly plunged into the dark. He was saying something. The head that turned towards her was the head of a calf with a quizzical look in its liquid brown eyes.
The image of the Japanese swordsman waiting to strike floated in front of her. Out of nowhere she was lunging at Jerry from the dark side of the car. Instinct made him put up his hands to defend himself. He lost control of the wheel. He tried to regain purchase on the wheel and found other powerful hands wrenching it from his grasp, turning it this way and that. The surrounding hedgerow, bushes and trees came loose from their moorings and rotated in a circle around the car. The white markings on the road leaped upwards towards him. Ella saw Jerry’s head flip back, then jerk violently forward. The crown of his head impacted the windscreen and went through it just as the screech of the car bonnet on the road and the explosion of buckling metal shattered her ear-drums. Everything went black.
It was a beautiful summer day. The car lay at an angle on its roof near a ditch with its back wheels still spinning. Steam seeped from under the edges of the mangled bonnet. Ella did not know how long she had been hanging upside down before she managed to disentangle herself and clamber out through the window of the crushed door on her side. Tiny cubes of opaque glass from the shattered windscreen lay on the ground like apple blossom. Some of the glass had sprayed on to her clothes. She brushed it off and walked round to the other side of the car. Her legs were shaking. Jerry’s side of the car was so crushed that she did not see how he could be in there.
She sat on the grass verge next to the ditch letting the soft breeze caress her face. A dry retch brought the taste of vomit to the back of her throat. Her left temple throbbed with a nagging pain. Twenty feet away a dog was sniffing at a round object on the other side of the road. At first she could not discern what it was. There was blood on the ground beneath it and one or two flies buzzing around. She thought they must have hit a dog or some other animal. Then she recognised the strands of long brown hair and averted her eyes from the sight. Emptied of all strength, she remained seated on the muddy grass four yards away from the wreckage. Nothing happened. Nobody passed.
After a while Ella realised that fate was offering her another chance. She hauled herself to her feet and started to walk away from the car. To her left stood a peaceful row of detached country houses with gardens set back from the road. On the other side fields of barley and rye grew, protected by hedgerows. The tremendous strength that her body had gained from years of physical training now stood her in good stead. She walked for twenty minutes without seeing anyone.
She came to a bus stop and sat in an unfamiliar bus shelter that smelled of urine and was covered in graffiti. A single-decker country bus came along with ‘Westerham’ written on the front. She boarded it. They came to a crossroads and the driver took a right turn. When two police cars, sirens blaring, raced past them in the opposite direction, Ella turned her face from the window and leaned back in her seat to remain out of sight.
Chapter Forty-One
‘I wasn’t expecting you again so soon.’ Alice wiped her hands on her apron.
‘I thought I’d come back. Donny’s working in Scotland.’
Ella exchanged pleasantries with her mother. She felt hollow inside and her legs ached. She wandered into the kitchen and helped herself to some biscuits, then went back into the front room and lay curled up on the sofa in front of the television. Alice brought her daughter a cup of tea. Ella stared at the over-bright figures on the screen. They made her head hurt. Her mother always had the colour contrast too bright. After about twenty minutes she fell into a
heavy sleep. When she opened her eyes again it was eleven o’clock at night.
‘You must be tired, sleeping like that.’
‘I am. Think I’ll go to bed now.’
In the middle of the night she woke with a huge gasp as if she had breathed in all the air in the world.
In the morning she saw that her left temple was swollen and bruised. She brushed her hair in such a way as to cover it. When she came down to breakfast she said:
‘I’m leaving the Royal Ballet. I might go to Surinam for a bit and then join another company.’
‘What do you want to go there for?’ Alice looked up puzzled from the brass toasting fork she was polishing.
‘I thought I’d like to see some of Dad’s family again.’
Alice stopped her work and stood with the rag in one hand.
‘I suppose you know what you’re doing. What does Donny say?’
‘He wants to work on the fishing boats for a while. He won’t mind.’
‘I washed your tights out last night. There was blood on them and a big hole in one leg. How did you do that?’
‘I must have caught them on something.’
The next day Ella took the train from Dover back to London. That night she found a brick in the garden, wrapped the gelignite and the brick in a tea-towel and zipped the package into an old leather shoulder bag. She felt terminally weary. She took the underground to Blackfriars, stood in the middle of Blackfriars Bridge, leaned over the parapet and let the bag drop into the seething tarry waters of the Thames.
*
The next time Donny telephoned from Aberdeen he seemed a very long way away. She could feel them floating apart on a sea of withheld information. She told him that she had got rid of the gelignite.
‘Good,’ said Donny. ‘That’s the end of all that shit.’
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