by Eva Ibbotson
Rom was overjoyed, for he had an intense and imaginative passion for land, and Isobel, though she still yearned for Stavely itself, was satisfied, for Paradise was a perfect Palladian house, pillared and porticoed, built by an earlier and wealthy Mrs Brandon who had not cared for her daughter-in-law Unless poor Henry married an outstanding woman – and this was not likely – Isobel knew she could soon make Paradise the social centre of the estate.
Three months later the General died of a heart attack, sitting in a chair with a bundle of Toussia’s letters in his hand. When the funeral was over they looked for the will he said he had made, but it was nowhere to be found. Curiously the solicitor he had called in had gone abroad, and his clerk knew nothing of a later document. It was thus that the old will was declared valid – the will made before Rom was born – in which every stick and stone on the estate was left to Henry.
Why did Rom do nothing to save himself, people asked later? Why didn’t he insist on an enquiry or bring pressure to bear on his brother to make an equitable division?
It was pride, of course, the fierce pride of the gifted and strong who will take nothing from anyone; perhaps also the knowledge that if Henry had practised any kind of fraud the mills of God would grind him more surely than Rom could hope to do. But there was something else, something that Henry saw with a puzzled fury – a kind of exaltation, a glittering excitement at being stripped thus to the bone. To begin again somewhere else, to pit himself against the world, to make a fortune and a place for Isobel that owed nothing to privilege and class was a challenge to which Rom’s passionate nature rose with a kind of joy.
‘We’ll start again somewhere quite different – somewhere in the New World. I shall build you a house fifteen times as grand as Stavely, you’ll see!’
‘Oh, Rom – in that wretched Amazon of yours!’
‘No.’ But he smiled, for one cannot entirely choose one’s obsessions and since his ninth birthday his had been that vast, wild place of mazed rivers and impenetrable jungle. ‘There’s a fortune to be made there, but you would hate the climate. In North America – California, perhaps. Or Canada – wherever you please!’
He stretched out his hands to her, for he no more doubted her than he doubted his own right arm, but she shook her head. Isobel had seen her mother humbled when the great Lexbury estate was broken up. She was afraid – and she wanted Stavely.
Thus it was Isobel who succeeded where Henry had failed; it was she who broke Rom. A month after the General’s death, she withdrew from her engagement. That night Rom found her in the Orangery with Henry and knew what she would do.
The next day he was gone and nobody at Stavely ever heard from him again.
Crossing the courtyard behind the house with the coati at his heels, Rom’s way was barred by Lorenzo, his butler and general factotum, beaming with pleasure and surrounded by a cluster of indoor servants who had left their preparations for tomorrow’s party for the ballet company in order to share their master’s impending joy.
‘It has come, Coronel!’ said Lorenzo, throwing out an annunciatory arm. ‘Roderigo has sent word from São Gabriel and Furo has gone to fetch it in the truck.’
There was no need for Rom to ask what had come. Follina was connected by a rough road, passable by motor in the dry season, to Manaus, where he had his main office and warehouse. Another, much shorter track led to the tiny village of São Gabriel on the Negro, where he had built a floating jetty, storehouses and a rubber-smoking shed; it was there, rather than at his private landing stage, that goods for Follina were unloaded.
But though Rom could pioneer a dozen new enterprises, could import grand pianos from Germany, American motor cars, carpets from Isfahan, nothing excited his men so much as the arrival of the washing basket from Truscott and Musgrave in Piccadilly containing his freshly laundered shirts.
To add to the stories of ludicrous and extravagant behaviour among the rubber barons had not been his intention. Mrs Lehmann, who washed her carriage horses in champagne, or young Wetherby, who walked a jaguar with a diamond collar through the streets, had Rom’s utmost contempt. Yet unwittingly he had created a legend which outclassed them all. The travels of his laundry to and from London’s most exclusive valeting service were spoken of in Rio and Liverpool, in Paris and Madrid.
Rom ran Follina entirely with a native staff. He found that his Indians could be taught to do anything except perhaps to count; certainly they washed and ironed entirely to his satisfaction. His shirts travelled to England to be laundered because of a promise he had made to a generous and lovely woman and it was her memory, now, that softened his face.
Had it not been for Madeleine de la Tour, Rom’s midnight flight from Stavely might have ended very differently. Arriving penniless in London, half-crazed with rage and pain, he had gone to the house of the only relative he knew his mother to possess: a distant cousin; Jacques de la Tour, who had a number of business interests and who Rom hoped might give him work.
Jacques was away on an extended tour of the East, but his wife Madeleine took Rom in. She took him in in all senses: into her house, her mind, her heart and – with marvellous flair and intelligence – into her bed. She soothed the appalling hurt that Isobel had dealt him; she civilised him and left him with a sense of gratitude that had never faded. In the end, sensing his need to start on his adventure, she insisted on lending him money for his fare to Brazil.
‘Only don’t turn into a savage, Romain,’ she had said, standing at Euston, brave as a grenadier – and much more beautiful – to see him go. ‘Be particularly careful of your shirts – the starch must be just so. No thumping them on flat stones, promise?’
‘I promise.’
Then the train went and she cried a little in the ladies’ room and went on to the Summer Exhibition at Burlington House in a splendid herbaceous border of a hat because she was as gallant as she was good and knew that English ladies must not make a fuss.
Rom never repaid the money that she lent him. He waited two years and then went down to the Minas Gerais, that strange mineral-rich region of Brazil famous for its ornate and treasure-stocked churches, to seek out a hunchbacked craftsman who wrought precious stones into jewellery for the processional Madonnas. And a few months later a messenger arrived in Grosvenor Place and delivered a package which Madeleine opened to find – wrapped round a laundry receipt from Truscott and Musgrave – a necklace. A diamond necklace, each stone set in an intricately wrought halo of platinum, which her sensible husband – after a gasp of incredulity – fastened without too many questions around her lovely throat.
It was in an immaculate dress shirt from his laundry basket that Rom, delayed by a blocked feed-pipe on the Amethyst, entered his box in the Teatro Amazonas and saw – without undue excitement – the curtain rise on Act One of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Harriet.
‘You cannot be going to be sick again, ’arriette,’ said Marie-Claude, exasperated, turning from the long mirror where the girls sat in their tutus whitening their arms, putting on false eyelashes, applying Cupid’s bows to their mouths.
‘I can—’ said Harriet, and fled.
Act One had been called, but Act One is no business of the swans and the girls still had half an hour to complete their toilettes. It was a half-hour which Harriet did not expect to live through.
‘For heaven’s sake, there are eighteen swans in this production. Also two big swans. Also those idiot cygnets with their pas de quatre,’ said Kirstin when Harriet returned, green and shivering. ‘You don’t matter! Why don’t you tell yourself that?’
‘I know I don’t matter,’ said Harriet – and indeed no one could have lived for eighteen years in Scroope Terrace and not known that. ‘If I get it right, I don’t matter. But if I get it wrong . . . all those people who trusted me . . . Monsieur Dubrov and everyone . . . making the company look silly.’
‘You won’t get it wrong. I’m in front of you most of the time an
d when it isn’t me, it’s Olga,’ said Marie-Claude, piling up her golden hair and jabbing pins through the circlet of feathers in a way which would have driven the wardrobe mistress into fits. ‘Merde,’ she said softly – and indeed the head-dresses had not travelled well. She turned and dabbed a spot of red into each corner of Harriet’s eyes. ‘There is no need to whiten yourself. You look like a ghost.’
‘I must say, Harriet, such fear is excessive,’ said Kirstin. ‘What would your Roman emperor say?’
But for once the thought of the great Marcus Aurelius did little for Harriet. The famous Stoic had experienced most of the troubles of mankind, but it was unlikely that he had ever made his debut before a thousand people as an enchanted swan.
If Dubrov’s newest swan was nervous to the point of prostration, his ballerina assoluta was hardly in a state of calm.
‘Why didn’t you put it on the posters, that this was my farewell appearance?’ she yelled at Dubrov. ‘I asked you to do it – and you promised. A simple thing like that and you can’t do it!’
She was already dressed in her glittering white tutu. Beneath the shining little crown her gaunt face, trapped and desperate, was that of an old woman.
‘I will announce it after the performance, dousha.’
He did not waste breath telling her to relax, to be quiet. There was nothing to be done about her terror; she went on stage each time as if she was going to her death. All he could do was to be there, pray that the hundred instructions he had given to his underlings would be carried out and let her rage at him.
‘That cow Legnani! The first thing I shall do when I am retired is to go to Milan and slap her face!’
He sighed. Legnani, one of the world’s great ballerinas, had been the first to introduce the thirty-two fouettés which make Act Three of Swan Lake so fiendishly difficult to dance, and Simonova’s vendetta against her was unending.
She stopped pacing, came over, clutched him with feverish arms. ‘But this is the last tour, isn’t it, Sashka? Soon it will be over for good? Soon now we shall go and live in Cremorra and grow—’
But at that moment – fortunately for Dubrov, who was in no state to discuss the cultivation of vegetables – her final call came.
For Simonova, fine and experienced dancer that she was, the terror ended the moment that she went on stage. Alas, the same could not be said for Harriet.
Rom was not a balletomane. From his mother he had inherited a passion for the human voice and though he had refused all the other dignities that people tried to thrust on him, he had accepted the chairmanship of the Opera House trustees. To Rom fell the task of cajoling reluctant prima donnas from Europe; of arranging the entertainment for the cast. It was he who had taken six actors from a Spanish company to Follina to be nursed when they were stricken with yellow fever. But it was opera that held his heart and as the curtain went up on Prince Siegfried’s birthday revels, the plight of this young man – Maximov in silver tights and straining cod-piece – left him relatively unmoved.
Act One is something of a prologue. The Prince is bidden by his parents to marry, but feels disinclined. Pretty girls come up to dance with him and he supports their arabesques with the resigned look of a conscientious meat porter steadying a side of beef. His mother gives him a cross-bow . . . the eerie music of the swan motif is heard and the Prince decides to go hunting. The curtain falls.
The second act is different. A moonlit glade . . . romantic trees . . . a lake . . . And presently, Simonova gliding on – fluttering her arms, still freeing herself from the water. A fine dancer – Rom had heard her spoken of on a visit to Paris and she deserved her praise. The Prince appears and sees her . . . he is amazed. She tells him in absurd but effective mime that she is an enchanted princess, doomed to take the shape of a swan for ever unless a prince will truly love her. I will love you, signals Maximov; I will . . . They go off together . . .
And now to muffled ‘Ohs’ and ‘Ahs’ from the audience, there entered the swans. In his box the Prefect of Police, de Silva, leaned forward avidly, to be jerked back by the iron hand of his wife. The Mayor, squeezed like a small black currant between the bun-like figures of the Baltic princesses, smiled happily.
And Rom picked up his high-precision Zeiss opera glasses and fixed them on the stage.
As a youth, Rom had never doubted that he would be faithful to Isobel. The whole strange concept of a Christian marriage with its oaths, its unreasonable expectation that one man and one woman can find in each other all that the human heart desires, had found an echo in his ardent and romantic soul. When Isobel betrayed him, he put away these thoughts – and the kindness of Madeleine de la Tour had been for him a bridge to another and equally ancient tradition: that of woman as an amused and amusing source of pleasure. Of women, since he had come to the Amazon, Rom asked that they should be beautiful, willing – and know the score. And perfectly fulfilling these demands were the girls of the theatre who touched down here – bringing their experience, their flair and talent for the game of dalliance. Gabriella d’Aosta, a singer in the chorus of La Traviata, with her black curls and great boudoir eyes . . . Little Millie Trant from Milwaukee, who had played the part of the maid in a mindless American farce – a delicious girl who had extracted more jewellery from him than he had ever bestowed on a human female and been worth every carat. . . And the russet-haired, barefoot dancer, the poor man’s Isadora Duncan, whose high-mindedness had ended so delightfully after dark.
So now, though with considerably less excitement than in his former days, Rom raked his opera glasses down the line of swans.
In every chorus line there is one beauty and there now, fourth from the left and dancing with competent precision, she was. A blonde, surprising in a troupe of Russian girls, with big velvety eyes, a lovely mouth and perfectly rounded limbs. But as Rom followed her along the line of swans – nice girls, perfectly in step, doing rather fetching emboîtés – something peculiar happened. His extremely expensive opera glasses seemed to take on a life of their own, moving again and again to the left of the lovely creature he was pursuing in order to home in on the serious, entirely ordinary face of the girl beside her: a brown-haired, grave-eyed girl, the third from the left.
Only why? She danced with grace and musicality, but that was certainly not what had drawn him. Rather there seemed to emanate from her some extreme emotion: one that drew from him an instinctive feeling of protection and concern.
The swans had come to rest upstage, facing the audience, leaning their heads on their arms. The head of the serious brown-haired girl leaned very tenderly – she cared about the fate of her Queen – but Rom, watching her, saw now a faint but unmistakable trembling of her chin. She was frightened, very frightened indeed, and in an unexpected burst of empathy he saw what she was seeing – the infinite yawning gap of the auditorium with its blurred rows of potential executioners.
Her debut, then? Unlikely – Russian ballet girls were always put on the stage early . . . yet he felt it must be so. He tried to imagine her receiving a sudden summons in some dark, snowbound apartment in St Petersburg or bidding her family goodbye in a wooden house in Kiev, but none of the images fitted, nor did a glance at the programme help. She might be Tatiana Volkoffsky, or Lydia Pigorsky or Natasha Alexandrovna – and she might not.
The idiot huntsmen appeared and threatened to shoot the swans and it was with considerable relief that Rom saw Simonova return and stand protectively in front of them, banishing the huntsmen with a great sweep of her arms. The third swan from the left, with her troubled eyes, had quite enough to put up with without getting shot.
Though he dutifully continued to study the blonde in the waltz that followed, Rom found himself returning rather more often than he intended to the girl beside her, checking up on her progress as might a good shepherd with a slightly wounded lamb. She was doing well; he could feel her confidence growing. She had, it occurred to him, rather a lovely throat.
But now the stage cleared, the slow, s
weet strains of the solo violin rose from the orchestra – and there began the great pas de deux of love and plighted troth that for many people is Swan Lake.
Simonova had willed herself into youth. As Maximov – no meat porter now, but a manly and noble Prince – raised her from the ground, she pirouetted slowly beneath his arm . . . leaned against him in arabesque penchée . . . developpéd forward to throw herself back with total trust against his chest. He lifted her high above his head, put her down again to revolve slowly en pointe, her free foot fluttering in little battements. When he held her it was by the wrists, leaving her hands free for their poignant, wing-like draping.
Thunderous applause greeted the end of the adage and the swans returned. To Rom it seemed that his little brown-haired swan was feeling distinctly better and he might have felt free once more to pursue ‘the beauty’ had he not seen at that moment a new and real danger that threatened her. A single feather had come loose from the circlet round her head and, still held at its base, trembled disconcertingly over one of her eyes.
The unfairness of this shocked Rom. She had begun to conquer her fear; she was dancing beautifully – and now this! Following her as she hopped and circled about the stage, he saw how manfully she attempted to avert disaster. Again and again her lower lip came out as she tried to blow away the offending feather, but without success.
The music was increasing in speed; the evil sorcerer, Rothbart, was making himself felt and Siegfried was hurtling about between the swans, seeking his Queen . . . He found her and now as dawn broke, they danced their farewell while the swans stood sadly by, their arms crossed over their breasts.
Not much longer to go, Rom said to her silently. Hang on. But as she stood there, a gust of air from the passing soloists completed the fell deed; the feather dislodged itself, fluttered upwards, descended again . . . and settled on her small and serious nose.