by Eva Ibbotson
At which point, most understandably, she sneezed.
Rom might allow himself to enjoy his box alone during the performance, detesting the whispers and chatter that accompanied so much theatre-going, but in the interval he did his social duty and, making his way to the refreshment lounge, was soon the centre of a group of friends – being stared at through lorgnettes by ladies who thrived on gossip about his affairs. Mrs Lehmann, permanently chagrined since he had made it clear that her obese and insufferable daughter was not destined to become mistress of Follina, nevertheless came up to tell him that he had done well to bring the Dubrov Company to Manaus. The Curtis twins, their hair up for the first time, edged closer to the exotic Mr Verney, with whom, since he had procured lemonade for them at the Consulate fête, they were officially in love, and were reproved by their tight-lipped mama.
‘I should have thought you would know better than to make eyes at a man who all but murdered a fellow countryman!’
‘He didn’t murder Mr Carruthers,’ said Mary. ‘He just threw him in the river.’
‘Mr Carruthers had been ill-treating his Indians horribly,’ said Alice. ‘He tied them to ant-heaps and—’
‘That’s quite enough,’ hissed Mrs Curtis, dragging her daughters past the group surrounding Verney. No doubt they would all be going on to the party at Follina on the following day, breaking the Sabbath. An orgy it would be, with every kind of carry-on. She herself would not dream of setting foot in the place, even if he should once deign to invite her! Everyone knew about his morals: opera singers and actresses! Even now he had probably picked out some girl on the stage who would stay behind when the others left and turn up next morning in the Amethyst with bags under her eyes and a pocket full of jewels. Disgusting, it was – absolutely disgusting!
‘What did you think of the little blonde . . . you know, the fourth from the end?’ asked de Silva, speaking hurriedly, for his wife would return at any moment from the ladies’ cloakroom.
‘Charming,’ said Rom, smiling at his friend. ‘Though I think we should reserve judgement until tomorrow.’
‘Yes,’ de Silva sighed. What must it be like to know that any girl you wanted could be had for the asking? What was it about Rom? Other men were almost as wealthy, though few matched him for sheer nerve. Was it that corsair look of his, or the stories of his physical endurance – those mad journeys alone in the Firefly? Or just that he didn’t really care one way or another?
Count Sternov arrived, bear-like and entranced, and the conversation changed to Russian.
‘She is incomparable, Simonova!’ said the Count. ‘Incomparable! Sofka thinks her interpretation is finer than Kchessinskaya’s, don’t you, coucoushka?’
The Countess, splendid in a brocade kaftan and lopsided tiara, nodded. ‘Kchessinskaya is more girlish, more frightened – but Simonova has the grandeur, the pathos . . . and boshti moy, those extended arabesques!’
‘Ah, but will she manage the fouettés? She is no longer young.’
‘She will manage them,’ declared the Countess.
Young Mrs Bennett, in her blue silk gown, passed them and smiled shyly at Mr Verney. He was far too grand and important to speak to her, of course; Jock was only an accountant in the timber-exporting firm of which Verney was director. But to her surprise, Verney not only bowed but came forward to address her, for he had remembered the shy little boy with the blond curls who had been everywhere with his mother.
‘I was wondering if you and your husband would like to come to the party I’m giving at Follina tomorrow? It will be rather noisy, I expect, but you would be very welcome.’
‘Oh!’ Her big blue eyes, so like Peter’s, lit up with pleasure. ‘Thank you very much! I’ll go and tell my husband.’
A party at Follina – an invitation for which the Lehmanns and the Roderiguez and that stuffy Mrs Curtis would have given their eyes! She hurried away, and for a few hours the small ghost who haunted her, waking and sleeping, was laid to rest.
But Nemesis now awaited Verney as he stood relaxed and at ease with his glass of champagne. The Mayor arrived and informed him that the Baltic princesses had requested he be presented to them.
‘Ah, a summons!’ Rom put down his glass, but as he prepared to follow the Mayor he turned and asked casually, ‘Did anyone notice the little girl in the corps that sneezed? Third from the left as they came on?’
De Silva shook his head; so did the Count and Countess and the other men standing by.
‘I didn’t hear anyone sneeze,’ said Sternov. ‘I don’t see how one could with all that row’
‘Odd,’ said Rom.
Very odd, he thought, following the Mayor to the President’s box. For it seemed to him that that small sneeze was what Act Two had rather been about.
Act Three is entirely swan-less. Prince Siegfried’s parents give a great ball to which the princesses of many lands are invited, in the hope that one of them will catch his eye. The hope is vain. They dance for him, but the Prince says no to all of them. Then the evil Rothbart brings in his daughter, whom he has enchanted so as to resemble Odette. Dazzled by her virtuosity (the thirty-two fouettés!) and believing her to be Odette, the Prince promises to marry her and it is at this moment – and a very poignant moment it is – that the ‘real’ Odette appears at the window, a despairing shape fluttering in anguish to show the Prince that she has been betrayed.
It is in the last act that the swans reappear and they do so rising rather effectively from a bed of mist. At least, they do if the dry ice works, but dry ice on the Amazon is apt to be capricious. Thus some swans rose out of the mist; others, notably the swan that had sneezed, seemed likely to remain permanently immersed in it. Yet when the stage cleared and her serious face and graceful arms emerged, it appeared to Rom that she was very much improved in spirits. The little pucker between her eyes had gone and the rest of her feathers seemed to be secure. And considerably relieved, he lowered his glasses and prepared to watch Simonova dance her farewell pas de deux of forgiveness and reconciliation with Maximov before vanishing – this time for ever – into the lake.
The curtain fell on an ovation. Simonova was recalled again and again. Bouquets were showered on her: the bouquet ordered by the Opera House trustees, the bouquet of Count Sternov, of the Mayor . . . A large water-lily thrown by an admirer hit her in the chest like a cannon-ball and she did not flinch. The gallery yelled for Maximov . . .
‘A triumph, ma chère,’ said Dubrov, waiting in the wings with her wrap.
‘Not bad, eh?’ she agreed. ‘Fifteen curtain calls! I was thinking, Sashka – let’s announce my retirement at the end of the tour, what do you think? Right now it might be rather a disappointment for them.’
Swans do not take curtain calls. Harriet, back in the dressing-room, smiled like a Botticelli angel and said wonderingly, ‘I’m alive. I’m still alive!’ And then, ‘Do you think anybody heard me sneeze?’
‘Nobody heard you sneeze,’ said Marie-Claude, who knew a great deal but not quite everything. ‘And now please hurry, because tomorrow there is to be a very splendid party and I want some sleep.’
5
For ten days after Harriet’s departure, Aunt Louisa and the Professor went about their business unconcerned over her whereabouts. It was naturally assumed that she was having a pleasant time with Mrs Fairfield and meeting the right people and Edward, though he missed her, had discovered a flea with a totally unexpected bristle on the third tergite and was much occupied in working out the implications of this breakthrough.
This peaceful state of affairs was shattered on the last day of April, when a concerned and friendly note arrived for Aunt Louisa from Mrs Fairfield. She and Betsy had been so sorry, she wrote, that Harriet had had to postpone her visit, but if the Professor’s cousin was now recovered and they were returned from Harrogate, it would give them great pleasure if Harriet could come up for Betsy’s dance. It was quite a small affair, nothing grand, but Betsy would be so very pleased to see her frien
d . . .
Aunt Louisa, reading the letter which came by the afternoon post, did not scream or faint. She controlled herself with masterly skill, but she went to ‘the instrument’ and telephoned the lodge of St Phillip’s to ask the porter to find Professor Morton and request him to come home – something she had never done before in her life. After that, and perhaps unwisely, she telephoned her friend Mrs Hermione Belper at Trumpington Villa.
The Professor – arriving in an extremely unpleasant mood, for he had been interrupted while giving what he regarded as one of his most brilliant lectures – found Louisa’s icy hand being chafed by the Tea Circle’s president while other ladies offered sal volatile, tea and commiseration in voices from which they found it impossible to remove an undercurrent of glee.
‘What has happened, Louisa?’ he enquired sternly – and the ladies, responding to his manhood, withdrew into a corner.
Louisa held out Mrs Fairfield’s note and the Professor paled. ‘I don’t understand this. Can Harriet have deliberately deceived us – or has she been abducted?’
‘She has deliberately deceived us, Bernard! I have spoken to Mrs Fairfield on “the instrument” and the note they received with all that tarradiddle about Harrogate was definitely in Harriet’s writing. Betsy knows it well.’
‘Have you informed the police?’
‘No, Bernard, please, not the police. The scandal. . . Surely there has to be some way of hushing it up? We must think. I suppose someone could have forced her to write that letter, but I don’t feel it was that – she has been so strange lately. Oh, Bernard, I know! I’m sure I know!’ Louisa sat up suddenly and the smelling-salts clattered to the floor. ‘She has run away to that ballet company! She must have done. Do you remember how weirdly she spoke at that dinner-party? About it being the thing she had wanted all her life? That dreadful Russian who came to Madame Lavarre’s . . .’
‘Try not to be ridiculous, Louisa! My daughter would never disobey my specific orders.’ But his daughter clearly had done so and cracking his pale knuckles, he said, ‘I agree we must hush this up if we can. My position in the University if it got about. . . Of course, there may be a perfectly simple explanation . . .’
‘The white slave traffic,’ said Miss Transom, rendered authoritarian by the blessed absence of her mother.
‘I’ve always thought the girl was no better than she should be,’ hissed Millicent Braithwaite in a stage-whisper. She had not forgiven Harriet for making them look foolish at Stavely. For hours they had blundered about in that maze and then found her with a little red-haired boy and both of them laughing their heads off.
‘We must go to see Madame Lavarre at once,’ said the Professor. ‘She will know the whereabouts of that Russian scoundrel.’
‘If it is not too late!’
‘Now remember,’ said the Professor sternly, pointing his finger at the ladies, ‘no word of this must get about. Not one single word!’
‘Of course not, Professor,’ said Mrs Belper soothingly. ‘You can rely on us.’ And so Herculean were the efforts of the ladies to restrain themselves that it was a good twenty-four hours before the milkman, whom Louisa had not tipped in twenty years, was in a position to inform the man who kept the paper shop in Petty Cury that stuffy Professor Morton’s daughter had run away to become a belly-dancer in a ‘house of ill-fame’ in Buenos Aires – and serve the old so-and-so right!
Madame Lavarre – when Professor and Miss Morton were announced – smiled the happy, relaxed smile of a well-fed cougar. She had had a note from Dubrov and knew that the Mortons were too late.
‘No, I know nothing about Harriet, I am afraid,’ she said. ‘Since you have said that she may not come to my classes any more, I have not seen her.’
‘We have reason to think that she may have tried to join the ballet company of that Russian who came to see you – the man who was going up the Amazon. You will oblige me by giving me his name.’
‘Certainly.’ Madame smiled and puffed a cloud of Balkan Sobranie into the Professor’s face. ‘His name is Dubrov. Sasha Dubrov. We are very old friends. In St Petersburg we have often been skating together on the Neva and also riding horses, although of course I could not do very much sport because at the Imperial Ballet School they did not permit it in case of injury to the legs.’
‘His address, please,’ fumed the Professor. ‘You will instantly give me his address!’
‘But certainly: 33 Mikhailovskaya. It is a beautiful apartment – the bathroom is particularly fine and in five minutes one can reach the Winter Palace and also the statue of Peter the Great, though I regard this as not absolutely the best work of Etienne Falconet; there is something a little bit exaggerated in the proportions and—’
‘His address in London is what I want, Madame. Don’t trifle with me!’
‘I regret, Professor, that I do not know—’
‘The woman’s lying!’ shrieked Aunt Louisa – at which point Madame summoned her servant and the Mortons were shown the door.
‘Oh, heavens, Bernard, what shall we do?’ Louisa was so distraught that she omitted to pick up from the pavement a pocket comb with only one tooth missing which, after a good scrubbing, would have done for the spare room.
But back at Scroope Terrace the valiant Hermione Belper waved a newspaper she had just fetched from her home.
‘There!’ she said triumphantly. ‘I thought I’d seen something about a ballet company going up the Amazon. They’re at the Century Theatre, in Blooms-bury.’
The Professor took it from her hand.
‘We must leave for London immediately,’ he announced. ‘This newspaper is five days old and anything might have happened since then.’ His decisiveness sent a flutter of approval through the ladies. ‘If we hurry, we can catch the five fifty-four.’
‘But, Bernard, that could mean a night in a hotel. The expense!’ cried Louisa.
‘Damn the expense!’ said the Professor, and if anyone had doubted that he loved his daughter they could doubt no longer. ‘If this escapade should reach the ears of the Master, with the Senate elections coming up . . .’
‘Or Edward,’ said Louisa faintly. ‘If Edward came to hear of it . . .’
And an hour later the Mortons were on the train.
Stage-doorkeepers in general are not renowned for their loving kindness or the enthusiasm with which they greet unauthorised visitors, but even among that well-known band of misanthropes ‘old Bill’ at the Century stood out for the particularly poor view he took of human nature. Even before he had lost an eye in the relief of Khartoum in ’85, his nature had hardly been sanguine, and now – with the aid of a scruffy and paranoid mongrel called Griff, who bit first and asked questions afterwards – he ensured that those who worked in his theatre were seldom unnecessarily disturbed.
‘What d’yer want?’ was his greeting to the Mortons as he stuck out his grizzled head from the window of his cubby-hole.
‘We have come to see Mr Dubrov,’ announced the Professor. ‘The matter is extremely urgent.’
‘Well, he ain’t here. No one’s here at this time of night.’
It seemed unlikely that he was lying; as the Mortons had walked round it, the Century Theatre had been silent and dark.
‘We have come to make enquiries about a girl who may have joined the Company,’ began Louisa, ‘as a dancer.’
‘Shut up!’
Bill was addressing his dog, but without rancour, for in growling even more hideously than usual and baring his yellow teeth, Griff was only confirming Bill’s own view – that as far as people in general went, this toffee-nosed couple were bottom of the heap.
‘She is an English girl,’ persisted Louisa. ‘There cannot be many English girls in such a company.’
‘Not any,’ said Bill laconically. ‘All Russian. All got Russian names. Got to have. No one’ll stand for English names, not in ballet.’
‘But there must have been a girl who spoke English? You must have heard the girls speak?’
/>
‘Me?’ said Bill, ‘Why should I hear them speak? I haven’t got time to stand around chattering. Got me work to do, I have.’
Bowing to the inevitable, the Professor felt in his pocket and extracted a half-crown, which he laid on the counter. ‘Wasn’t there just one girl who spoke to you? Said good morning, perhaps?’
Bill moved the coin slowly across the counter, but did not yet pocket it. Taking a tip could tie you . . .
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Come to think of it, there was one – a real smasher. Great goo-goo eyes, blonde hair and curves.’ He sketched the delectable Marie-Claude in the air with deliberate crudity.
Louisa shuddered. ‘That is not the girl we are looking for.’
‘Now look here, my man; I am the girl’s father and this is her aunt. If you know anything about her and conceal the fact, we shall have not the slightest hesitation in reporting you to the police.’
Bill lifted his eye-patch to scratch his forehead. Then slowly he slipped the half-crown into his pocket. It was doubtful if the old gaffer could do much, but there was never any point in getting mixed up with the police.
‘The girl we want is plain,’ said Louisa firmly. ‘With straight brown hair and brown eyes. A plain girl.’
‘Aye, there was a girl like that. Little thin thing. But she wasn’t plain.’ Bill remembered her well – had done so from the start. She had brought a large mutton bone for Griff all the way from the hostel where she was staying and talked proper sense to the dog. Griff had let her put the bone right into the bowl for him and that was rare enough. She was the one who stayed behind too, on the last night, helping the stage-hands get the stuff packed. ‘Nothing plain about her,’ he said, inexplicably furious with the pair. ‘Had the sweetest smile you’ve ever seen.’
‘Where is she, man? Hurry! Where is the Company staying?’
Over Bill’s face there now spread a look of unalloyed pleasure. Even his eye-patch seemed to lighten.
‘On the Atlantic Ocean, sir,’ he said. ‘They’ve been gone the best part of a week . . .’ and shut the hatch.