by Eva Ibbotson
‘I employed a new girl today,’ he said. ‘The one I told you about in Cambridge. Sonia’s pupil. She ran away to come to us, so no doubt I shall be arrested soon for luring away a minor.’
‘Is she good?’
The fear again . . . but behind the panic of being overtaken, something else – the curiosity, the eagerness about the thing itself: the dance and its future.
‘How could she be good? She is an amateur.’
‘But Sonia taught her, you say?’ They had been friends of a sort, she and Sonia who, a few years older, was already in the corps when Simonova joined the company. Together, infuriated by the antics of a visiting ‘star’, they had unloosed an ancient, wheezing pug-dog on to the stage during a ballet called Trees . . .
‘Yes, but three times a week. Oh, you know how the British are about the arts – the gentility, the snobbery. It’s a pity, for if they chose they could make marvellous dancers of their girls. Perhaps one day . . .’
‘Why did you want her then?’
Dubrov, about to embark on the quality he had detected in Harriet – a totality and absorption – changed his mind. Simonova had started on a routine that was all too familiar – the lavish application of cold cream, the knee bandage, the wax ear-plugs to eliminate the noises of the traffic – which in about three minutes from now would result in his being chastely kissed on the forehead and dismissed.
‘She has ears like Natasha’s,’ he said.
The ballerina spun round. ‘Like Natasha’s? In War and Peace? But Tolstoy doesn’t describe her ears.’
Dubrov shrugged. ‘I don’t need Tolstoy to tell me what her ears were like.’
It worked. The jealousy on her face was instantaneous and owed nothing to her profession. ‘You are an idiot.’ She put the ear-plugs back in the drawer, wiped off the cream with a piece of gauze.
‘Chort!’ she said. ‘I’m tired. Let’s go to bed.’
Harriet had always longed to be allowed to work. Now her wish was granted a hundredfold. There were constant disasters as this most unfledged of swans, this newest of snowflakes staggered across the stage. But though Harriet made mistakes, she did not make them twice.
The girls, without exception, were helpful. They themselves had only just learned to work in unison, but they counted for her, pushed her, pulled her and retrieved her from inhospitable corners of the stage. Even Olga Narukov – a spitfire from the borders of Afghanistan who thought nothing of felling a dancer who displeased her with a kick like a mule’s – kept her temper with Harriet, for the newcomer’s grit and humility were curiously disarming.
‘Follow the girl in front!’ Grisha yelled at Harriet when her musicality threatened to lead her astray. ‘Just follow the girl in front!’
The girl in front, when the corps was arranged by height, was the French girl Marie-Claude, and there could be no one more worthy of being followed.
The creation of brown-eyed blondes has long been regarded as one of God’s better ideas. Marie-Claude’s eyes were huge and velvety, her lashes like scimitars, her upturned mouth voluptuously curved. To this largesse had been added waist-length golden, curling hair which, had she chosen to sit on a rock brushing it, must have sent every sailor within miles plunging to his doom.
Marie-Claude, however, did not so choose. She was entirely faithful to her fiancé, a young chef who worked in a hotel in Montpellier, and though occasionally willing (if the price was right) to emerge from a seashell at the Trocadero or sit on a swing in some night-club clad only in her hair, she did so strictly to earn money for the restaurant which she and Vincent, as soon as they had saved enough, were proposing to open in the hills above Nice.
It was Marie-Claude and the Swedish girl, Kirstin, who found space for Harriet in the tiny room they shared in a hostel in Gray’s Inn Road. It was already crammed full with their two truckle-beds, but the good-natured warden put a mattress on the floor for Harriet. The confusion and clutter were indescribable but to Harriet – used to the solitude and icy hygiene of her bedroom in Scroope Terrace – everything was a delight.
From her new room-mates Harriet learned a great deal about the Company. That the Russian girls were on summer leave from their dancing academies in Kiev and Odessa and would return to their native land in the autumn. That Simonova detested Maximov, who had once dropped her in the grand pas de deux at the end of Sleeping Beauty. That Masha Repin, the brilliant young Pole, was reputed to be sticking pins into a wax model of Simonova so that she could take over Giselle . . .
Neither of the girls was ambitious: of ‘the dance’ they asked only that it give them a living, and the fabled city of Manaus might have been Newcastle or Turin: it was somewhere they could work and be paid.
‘Though there is a great deal of money to be made out there,’ pointed out the practical Marie-Claude. ‘Vincent’s cousin works as a chef to an important man in Rio and he sends back enormous sums to Montpellier.’
Kirstin had been put to dancing by her father – a ballet master who worked in Scandinavia and London – and Marie-Claude by her half-English mother, an opera dancer who had been undulating between two camels in an open-air production of Aïda when a young farmer from the Languedoc decided to remove and marry her. Though only two years older than Harriet, their attitude towards the English girl was that of two worldly and experienced aunts.
‘It must be incredible, being so beautiful,’ said Harriet now, overawed by the sight of Marie-Claude in her shift preparing for bed.
‘Not at all,’ said the French girl dismissively. ‘Until I met Vincent it was extremely disagreeable. From the age of six I had to go everywhere with a hat-pin – a very long one from my Tante Berthe’s Sunday hat. Even so, it wasn’t always so simple. For example, when I was fifteen there was an old gentleman who used to wait for me outside school and offer to give a thousand francs to the Red Cross if I would let him see me brush my hair. Obviously, simply to jab a hat-pin into such an old gentleman would not have been correct. It is, after all, a very good cause – the Red Cross. But now I have Vincent and everything is—’ she broke off to look aghast at the voluminous flannel nightdress which Harriet was pulling over her head – ‘’arriette, what is that that you have there?’ she enquired, her excellent English fracturing under the shock.
‘It’s all I have,’ said Harriet ruefully. ‘My Aunt Louisa chose it.’
Marie-Claude deliberated. ‘Perhaps if you undid the top button . . . and pushed up the sleeves, comme ça?
‘But I’m only going to bed.’
Kirstin, who had been rubbing methylated spirit into her slender feet, pushed back her straight pale hair and exchanged a glance with Marie-Claude.
‘Only?’ said Marie-Claude, speaking for them both.
But long after the other two were asleep, Harriet, the top button of her nightdress obediently undone, sat up on her mattress recalling the day. She had escaped but she was not yet safe; a knock at the door could mean a policeman, recapture and the misery of a life which, now she had tasted freedom, she felt she could not endure again. Yet presently she found her fingers involuntarily marking out the steps in the snowflake waltz they had gone through at the last rehearsal, using instinctively the curious shorthand – a kind of deaf-and-dumb language – that dancers employ . . . And waking at dawn, she rose and in the deserted dining-room of the hostel, among the stacked chairs, she practised.
She practised on the top of the number 15 bus going to the theatre, marking the steps with the tips of her toes beneath the seat; she practised in the tea-shop to which the others dragged her, hanging on to the edge of the table until her doughnut came. She danced with her bruised and bleeding feet, with her fingers, inside her head . . . and on the third day Dubrov, encountering her as she walked backwards up the iron stairs to the dressing-room in order to ease the aching muscles of her calves, smiled happily. He liked that; he liked it very much.
There was everything to learn: how to put on makeup, how to allow space at rehearsal between herse
lf and the others which later the costumes would fill. . . How to anoint and darn and squeeze and thump the ballet shoes, which seemed to be as often on the girls’ hands as on their feet.
But it was class that made Harriet into a dancer. Class, that unfailing daily torture to which dancers come on every morning of their lives. Class in freezing rehearsal rooms, in foyers, on board ocean liners carrying them across the sea. Class with streaming colds, class after their lovers have jilted them, on days when women would give anything to be spared . . . Class for the prima ballerina assoluta as for the youngest member of the corps.
It was in class that Harriet saw what it cost Lubotsky, the ageing character dancer, to get his muscles to warm up – yet saw too the marvellous authority he still carried. It was in class that she saw Maximov – the darling of the gallery – sweating, exhausted, crying out with the pain of a wrenched muscle . . . saw the grace and spirituality emanating from little Olga Narukov who ten minutes earlier had pinched a boy from the corps so as to draw blood.
And if Harriet watched the others, there were those who watched her. For even in class there are those who dance the notes and those who dance the music and, ‘A pity, yes, definitely a pity,’ said Grisha with increasing emphasis when Dubrov enquired after his latest swan.
It was not until two days before they sailed that Harriet saw the prima ballerina of the Company, for Simonova had been attending class privately with an old Russian émigré in Pimlico. She arrived for her first rehearsal with the corps on a grey drizzly morning, sweeping on to the stage in a ragged practice tutu set off by purple leg-warmers with holes in them. Her cheek was swollen from the ministrations of her dentist, her complexion was sallow; a muffler of the kind that old gentlemen wear when running along tow-paths during boat-races concealed her throat. Beneath her widow’s peak, with the centre parting that is the hallmark of the ballerina, her black eyes with their pouches of exhaustion, her high-bridged nose and thin mouth gave her the look of a distempered bird of prey.
To Harriet, all this was quite irrelevant. ‘She is a true artiste,’ Madame Lavarre had said and Harriet’s eyes shone with veneration.
Simonova raked the assembled girls and her eyes fell on Harriet.
Who is that?’ she demanded in her guttural and alarming voice.
Dubrov, who knew that she knew perfectly well who it was, introduced Harriet, who curtseyed deeply. For a moment they gazed at each other – the ardent, worshipping girl and the weary, autocratic woman. Then, ‘There is nothing in the least unusual about her ears,’ pronounced Simonova in Russian, to the mystification of those who spoke the language.
She went over to the piano, unwound her muffler, handed her medallion of St Demetrius to the accompanist – and raised her eyebrows at Grisha.
‘Act One, Giselle,’ he confirmed. ‘From the entry of the hunting party . . .’
Everyone had expected Simonova simply to mark her steps. This was a routine rehearsal to give the corps their positions in relation to hers; she would rehearse seriously with Maximov later.
But she did not. Simonova, on that grey and drizzly morning in a draughty tumbledown London theatre, danced. She danced fully, absolutely – danced as if she were back on the stage of the Maryinsky and the Tsar was in his blue and golden box. No, better than that – she danced as if she were alone in the world and had only this gift to pour into the heartbreaking emptiness.
And in the theatre for the first time there was real excitement; the mottled hands of grumpy old Irina Petrovna coaxed from the tinny piano some approximation to the delicious score, and Dubrov – who alone knew why she had done it – remembered not only that he loved this ageing, difficult woman, but why. . .
By midnight on Thursday the last of the props had been packed up and piled into the carts to go to Euston Station. The following morning, the sleepy girls followed the principals on to the train and late that afternoon, Harriet walked with unforgettable excitement up the gangway of the RMS Cardinal with her slim dark funnel and snow-white decks.
‘Come, let’s find our cabins,’ said Marie-Claude.
But Harriet could not tear herself away from the movement and bustle of the docks, from the tangle of cranes and masts, the cries of men loading the freight and hung, huge-eyed and entranced, over the side. Here, now swinging high over the deck and dropping into the hold, was the wicker skip that she had sat on the night before so that the stage-hands could fasten the straps . . . and here the tarpaulin they had tied round the Act Two flats for Fille.
It was fortunate that she did not observe another, impressively strapped wicker basket waiting on the quay – a basket which had been unloaded earlier and contained three dozen silk shirts bound for Truscott and Musgrave in Piccadilly. For of gentlemen who sent back their shirts to Britain to be laundered, Harriet did not and could not approve.
A man with a megaphone came by, instructing visitors to leave the ship; a single hoot from the slender funnel announced their imminent departure.
It was only when she saw the ever-widening strip of grey and dirty water between herself and the shore that Harriet realised she had done it. She was safe.
4
A soft breeze rustled the palm trees in front of the Palace of Justice; the flock of parakeets which had roosted on the equestrian statue of Pedro II flew noisily towards the river – and day broke across the Golden City. The cathedral bell tolled for Mass; the first tram clanked out of the depot. Maids in coloured bandannas emerged from the great houses in the Avenida Eduardo Ribero, bound for the arcaded fish-market. A procession of tiny orphans in black overalls crossed a cobbled square. One by one the shutters went up on the shops with their exotic, crazily priced wares from Europe: milliners and jewellers; delicatessens and patisseries . . .
Down by the docks the men arrived and began to load the balls of black rubber which were piled on the quayside. The fast-dying breeze sent a gentle oriental music through the rigging of the luxurious yachts crowded along the floating landing-stage; from the crazily patched and painted dug-outs of the Indians on the harbour’s fringe came the smell of hot cooking-oil and coffee. A uniformed official unlocked the ornate gates of the yellow customs house and on RMS Cardinal, at rest after her five-week voyage from Liverpool, sailors were scrubbing the already immaculate white decks.
But though this day began like all others, it was no ordinary day. Tonight the Opera House which presided over Manaus like a great benevolent dowager would blaze with light. Tonight carriages and automobiles would sweep across the dizzying mosaic square in front of the theatre and disgorge brilliantly dressed women and bemedalled men beneath the floodlit pink and white facade. Tonight there would be receptions and dinners; every café would be full to overflowing; every hotel room had been secured months ago. For tonight the Dubrov Ballet Company was opening in Swan Lake, and for the homesick Europeans and the culture-hungry Brazilians there would be moonlit glades and Tchaikovsky’s immortal music and Simonova’s celebrated interpretation of Odette.
In the turreted stucco villa which she had christened ‘The Retreat’, young Mrs Bennett surveyed the blue silk gown which she had laid out on the bed, the matching shoes. The blue was right with her eyes, but should she wear the pearls or the sapphires? The sapphires would seem to be the obvious choice, but Mrs Lehmann’s sapphires were so much bigger and better and the Lehmanns had the box next to theirs. ‘The pearls, I think, Concepcion,’ she said to her maid, a cabacla – half-Indian, half-Portuguese – with caring eyes. And her husband Jock, coming to kiss her goodbye, smiled with relief for today at least he would not come home to find her weeping over Peter’s photograph or staring with red-rimmed eyes at a letter with its childish scrawl. Of course the boy was homesick, of course seven was young to be sent so far away. But what could one do? A British boy had to go to a decent school – and anyway, you couldn’t bring up a child in this climate.
Still, today at least Lilian would be occupied. He himself did not care for ballet, but as he climbed into his car
riage and was conveyed to his office on the quayside, Jock Bennett blessed the Dubrov Ballet Company from the bottom of his heart.
Unlike Jock Bennett, the six-foot-tall and massively bearded Count Sternov was a passionate balletomane and since dawn had roamed through the long, low house – which he had had built in imitation of his parents’ dacha on the Volga – in a state of exaltation.
‘I shall never forget her first Giselle – never, he said to the Countess. ‘The year before she left Russia. That unsupported adage in the last act!’
‘That was the time they found Dalguruky in the back of the box making love to the governess, do you remember?’
The Countess was in her dressing-gown. She seldom dressed before the afternoon, the heat did not suit her and her cris des nerfs were famous, but today she was happy. Today it would end as it had so often ended in St Petersburg, discussing the finer points of a cabriole in a lighted theatre . . . and the next day was the party for the cast at Follina, that fantastic riverside palazzo where everything that mattered out here took place. And there will be girls, thought the Count happily – young, lovely Russian girls . . .
The girls were uppermost in the mind of Colonel de Silva, the Prefect of Police, glancing at the clock in his office to see if it was time to go home and change. His scrawny domineering wife could stop him talking to them, stop him sending them flowers; she could drag him back to his carriage with her hand dug into his arm the second the curtain went down, but she couldn’t stop him seeing them – their legs, their thighs, their throats – thought the grateful Colonel, rescinding the death warrant of a bandit who had turned out to be a distant relative. Opera was better for bosoms and hips, but in ballet one saw more.
By the afternoon a veritable armada of small craft had begun to converge on the city. From the far shore of the River Negro, some ten miles across, came Dr Zugheimer and his wife, sitting erect in the bows of the Louisa, already in their evening clothes. The bespectacled Herr Doktor, a paternalistic employer who had put his seringueiros into uniform, thirsted for Lohengrin or Parsifal, but no one missed an opening night at the Teatro Amazonas and the blue eyes of his plump wife – who spent her lonely mornings struggling to turn the pulpy mangoes and guavas of the tropics into the firm and bread-crumbed Knödel of her native land, shone with excitement. Opera, ballet or farce . . . what did it matter? Tonight there would be gossip, companionship, laughter.