A Company of Swans

by Eva Ibbotson

  ‘There must be something we can do,’ said Louisa, ‘without making it public that she has gone.’

  The Mortons had not slept well and now sat at breakfast in their dining-room, removing with bony fingers the tops of their slightly sulphurous boiled eggs.

  The Professor did not answer. While the possibility had existed that Harriet was in danger his rage had been modified by anxiety. Now sheer choler made it difficult for him to speak.

  ‘You don’t think . . . I mean, if she is so desperately keen to be a dancer, should one . . . simply wash one’s hands of her?’ asked Louisa.

  The Professor put down his napkin. ‘Are you suggesting that I permit my daughter – my daughter – deliberately to flout my wishes? Do you want me to be the laughing-stock of the University? Harriet is under age; she will be brought back and she will be punished.’

  ‘Yes, dear. Of course. You are perfectly right. Only how?’

  There was a pause, then the Professor gave a bark of inspiration.

  ‘Edward!’ he pronounced. ‘Edward must show himself in his true colours.’

  Identical furrows appeared on the long pale foreheads of the Mortons as they considered the true colours of Edward Finch-Dutton.

  ‘You mean—’

  ‘I mean,’ said the Professor, ‘that he must go in pursuit of Harriet and bring her back. He is young. I myself,’ he lied, ‘would have welcomed such an opportunity at his age.’

  ‘But, Bernard, surely that could not be considered respectable? If he were to return with Harriet, everyone would think . . . The gossip would be unendurable. She would be ruined.’

  ‘She is ruined already,’ said the Professor savagely. ‘In my eyes she has put herself beyond the pale. But it shouldn’t be impossible to think of something.’

  ‘Mrs Fairfield would be willing to say that Harriet has been with them all the time in London – I am sure of it; she hinted as much on “the instrument”. So that if we met the ship and brought her back to Cambridge, everyone would simply think we had been fetching her from her friend,’ said Louisa, mercifully unaware of the rumours even now flying round the city.

  ‘And Edward would only need to say he had been on an entomological expedition,’ put in the Professor. ‘Those natural scientists think nothing of wasting months in pointless field trips. But there is not a moment to lose – she already has nearly a week’s start and who knows where that scoundrel might take her next – Rio de Janeiro, even New York . . . We have no evidence that he means to bring her back to England. Edward must leave at once.’

  ‘Let us go to him,’ said Louisa.

  This was not a suggestion she would normally have made, and as they passed down long laboratory corridors and into rooms where Edward might have been – but wasn’t – she was continually affronted by sights which she would have preferred to be spared. Young men in running shorts pedalled on stationary bicycles while pointers inscribed the furious zig-zag of their heartbeats on smoked drums . . . An appallingly identifiable yellow liquid bubbled fiendishly through a system of flasks, filter funnels and rubber tubing . . . In a glass-fronted altitude chamber, a bearded research assistant was slowly turning blue.

  Term was over, but Edward was in the teaching lab sorting out demonstration slides. However, one glimpse of the Mortons advancing with set faces caused the colour to drain from his face.

  ‘Harriet!’ he said. ‘She is ill? She has had an accident?’

  The Professor looked round the lab to make sure that it was empty before saying, ‘It might be better if she had.’

  Five minutes later, Edward, still holding the slide of a liver fluke he had been putting away when disaster struck, leaned against Henderson’s parsnip tank, a broken man. Harriet had done this thing! Harriet whom he worshipped, whom he had selected from all the girls he knew for her gentleness and docility . . . Harriet had run away, had defied her father and was even now perhaps kicking up her legs in some hot theatre while greasy dagos watched her and licked their lips.

  ‘I don’t know what to say .. .’ He put down the slide on the bench and stood shaking his head. ‘It’s a blow. . . the Mater . . .’ Stunned and wretched, Edward saw years of careful planning brought suddenly to nought. The proposal at the May Ball; a visit to Goring-on-Thames to introduce Harriet to his mother . . . the little house in Madingley or Grantchester. ‘She has put herself beyond the reach of a decent man.’

  ‘No, Edward,’ said Louisa, ‘it may not be too late. She has been headstrong and foolish, but you may still be able to save here. Not to forgive her, perhaps – we do not ask that of you – but to restore her to safety and the parental home. We think,’ she continued, coming down to earth, ‘that we could hush things up so that no one need know of her flight.’

  Edward was silent, still, shaking his long head sadly from side to side. Images of Harriet floated through his mind: the demure brown head; the clear and docile brow; the small ears peeping – rather wistfully, he had always thought – through her hair. Harriet’s soft voice, her slow smile . . .

  ‘How?’ he said at last. ‘How could it be hushed up?’

  The Professor fixed him with a steely look. ‘We want you to go after her, Edward. To bring her back. If you do this, we can avoid a scandal.’ He explained about the Fairfields, while Edward stared at him dumbfounded.

  ‘You want me to go to Manaus? But that’s impossible! It’s quite impossible. No one could ask it of me.’

  ‘We would not expect you to marry her any longer, Edward,’ said Louisa, laying her skeletal hand on his arm. ‘Nor even to forgive her. Only to save her from her folly . . . and to save her family.’

  ‘To show yourself a man,’ stated the Professor.

  ‘No.’ Edward was resolute. Yet as he stood there, images of Harriet continued to jostle each other in his brain. The way she had laughed when that little baby had set off in its nappies across the sacrosanct Fellows’ Lawn at King’s. The way she had pulled down a branch of white lilac behind St Benet’s Church and let the rain-drops run down her face. And now perhaps she was ill with some jungle fever . . . or abandoned. ‘Edward,’ she would say when she saw him. ‘Oh, Edward, you have come!’

  ‘And in any case,’ he said, ‘I have my work.’

  But that was a mistake. Images of Harriet were replaced by others more lurid, more feverish and, to a professional entomologist, reekingly desirable. The Brazilian rhinoceros beetle which stretched the length of a man’s hand . . . the Morpho butterfly, like an iridescent blue dinner-plate, beating its way through the leaf canopy . . . fireflies by whose light it was possible to read. To say nothing of the wholly virgin territory of the Amazonian flea . . .

  Implacable, with their characteristic look of having just stepped down from a cut-price sarcophagus, the Mortons stood before him.

  ‘I would never be able to get leave,’ said Edward.

  That, however, was not necessarily true. He only had two practicals in the summer term; Henderson would do those for him and the head of his department was a great believer in field work – in getting what he called ‘nose to nose with the insect’.

  The images came faster. The Goliath beetle, six inches from mouth to sternum . . . the ‘88’ butterfly, a brilliant airborne hieroglyphic for which private collectors would give their ears . . . Harriet lying on a pillow, her hair spread out; her limp body acquiescent as he carried her to safety up the gangplank of the ship . . . And Peripatus – ah, Peripatus! Edward’s blue eyes grew soft as he thought of this seemingly insignificant creature, half-worm, half-insect, the world’s oldest living fossil, crawling – as it had crawled since the dawn of time – through the unchanging debris of the rain-forest floor.

  Torn beyond endurance, he gazed into the tank where Henderson’s lone parsnip continued to respire silently in the cause of science. ‘Look at my fate,’ the captive vegetable seemed to be saying. ‘Free yourself. Show yourself a hero. Be a man.’ Making a final stand, Edward turned back to the Professor. ‘And there is the
fare,’ said Edward, ‘I cannot possibly afford the fare.’

  A grimace, a convulsion of the thin lips, a kind of spasm – and then the Merlin Professor looked straight at Edward and said, ‘I will pay the fare.’

  6

  ‘I look like a twig,’ said Harriet a little sadly, gazing into the fly-blown mirror of the room she shared with her friends in the Hotel Metropole.

  Marie-Claude and Kirstin did not attempt to deny it.

  ‘I would like to know what exactly she is like, this Aunt Louisa of yours,’ said Marie-Claude. ‘How can someone actually enter into a shop and buy such a dress?’

  It was the day after the opening night of Swan Lake and the girls were preparing for the party at Follina.

  ‘Brown suits Harriet,’ said Kirstin kindly.

  ‘Oh, yes. Brown velvet in the winter with frogging, perhaps,’ agreed Marie-Claude. ‘But brown foulard . . . and the sleeves.’ She laid a bunch of artificial flowers against Harriet’s throat and shook her head. ‘Better not to draw attention . . .’

  She herself was dressed like a dancer – that is to say, like the image of a dancer that the world delights in: a three-quarter-length white dress, satin slippers, a wreath of rosebuds in the loose and curling golden hair.

  ‘I’ll stand at the back and hold my glass; no one will notice me,’ said Harriet, whose ideas of party-going were conditioned by the dread occasions with which the Master of St Philip’s celebrated events of academic importance.

  ‘You will do nothing of the kind, ’arriette,’ said Marie-Claude, slipping Vincent’s engagement ring firmly on to her finger. ‘This man is not only an Englishman but the most important—’

  ‘An Englishman? The chairman of the Opera House trustees? Goodness!’ Harrietwas amazed. ‘I’d imagined a kind old Brazilian with a paunch and a huge waxed moustache.’

  ‘Whether he has a moustache or not, I cannot say,’ said Marie-Claude, a little offended. ‘Vincent’s moustache is very big and personally I do not find a man attractive without moustaches. But Mr Verney is spoken of as formidably intelligent and since you are the daughter of a professor—’

  ‘Mr Verney?’ said Harriet, and there was something in her voice which made both girls look at her hard. ‘Is that what he is called? Are you sure?’

  ‘Certainly I am sure,’ said Marie-Claude, exasperated by the unworldliness of her friend. Harriet had pestered everyone ceaselessly for the names of the flowers, the birds, even the insects they had encountered ever since they left England, yet she had not even troubled to find out the name of the most influential man in Manaus.

  But Harriet was lost in remembrance, her hairbrush dangling from her hand.

  ‘I’m Henry St John Verney Brandon,’ Henry had said to her, turning his small face upwards, trusting her with that all-important thing: his name. And another image . . . the unpleasant Mr Grunthorpe with his liver-spotted pate and rapacious hands, droning on beside the Van Dyck portrait of Henrietta Verney, who had brought her beauty and her fortune to the house of Brandon.

  It didn’t have to mean anything – the name was not uncommon. Yet if Henry’s ‘secret boy’ was some distant connection of the family brought up for some reason at Stavely . . . ? If against all odds she had found him and could plead Henry’s case, what happiness that would be!

  No, I’m being absurd, thought Harriet; it’s merely coincidence. But she found herself suddenly looking forward to the evening ahead and – relinquishing the hairbrush to Marie-Claude – submitted with docility to having two side plaits swept on to the crown of her head and wearing the rest loose down her back to reveal what both the other girls regarded as tolerable: her ears.

  Though she knew her host was rich, the first sight of the Amethyst waiting at the docks in the afternoon sunshine to take the cast to Follina took her aback – not on account of the schooner’s size, but because of her beauty. She was surprised too to find that a second boat was waiting to convey to the party not only the members of the orchestra but also the technical staff, who were so often forgotten.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Simonova condescendingly, walking up the gangway in trailing orange chiffon and accepting as her due the attentions of Verney’s staff, for had she not spent many summers on the Black Sea in a similar yacht owned by the Grand Duke Michael? She exclaimed ecstatically at the beauty of the river scene and firmly went below, followed by the other principals and most of the corps, to recline in the luxurious cabins with their bowls of fruit, boxes of chocolates and magazines.

  ‘You of course will stay on deck and completely disarrange your toilette while we travel?’ suggested Marie-Claude and Harriet, grinning at her friend, admitted that this was so. So she hung over the rails, watching the changing patterns of the islands which lay like jagged ribbons across the smooth, leaf-stained water, until they turned from the dark Negro into her tributary, the Maura.

  ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, ‘it is so light!’ And the boatman standing near her with a rope coiled ready in his hand nodded and smiled, understanding not her words but her tone.

  The sails were furled now. Under engine, the Amethyst came in quietly beside the jetty – and Harriet, drawing in breath, saw what Rom had seen only in his mind’s eye the day he first glimpsed Follina: a low pink-washed, colonnaded house at the end of an avenue of blossoming blue trees – and a garden whose scents and sense of sanctuary reached out like a benison to those who came.

  ‘The place has style,’ admitted Marie-Claude, emerging immaculate and ravishing from below. ‘But I hope we are not expected to walk to the house.’

  They were not. Three cars and a number of carriages waited to take them the half-mile to Verney’s front door. Simonova, Maximov and Dubrov swept into the first of these; Kaufmann, the choleric conductor of the orchestra, got into the second; the others followed.

  ‘I shall walk,’ said Harriet.

  ‘In this heat?’ Even the easygoing Kirstin was shocked.

  ‘Do you wish to arrive entirely dissolved in perspiration?’ reproved Marie-Claude.

  ‘Please . . . I must,’ said Harriet, and they shrugged and climbed into one of the carriages and left her.

  Rom surveyed his guests with an experienced air and was satisfied. Simonova, reclining on a couch on the terrace, was surrounded by admirers; the dancers and musicians wandered happily between the tables, helping themselves to iced fruit juice or champagne. Standing beside the statue of Aphrodite flanking the stone steps, Marie-Claude was regaling a group of dazed gentlemen with an account of the restaurant she was proposing to start with Vincent in the foothills above Nice. That this entrancing girl was bespoke and visibly virtuous had given Rom a pang of relief, a reaction he had not sought to explain or understand, preferring simply to enjoy the sight of de Silva, Harry Parker (who ran the Sports Club) and a host of others drinking thirstily at these forbidden waters.

  During this hour before sundown, the house and the terrace were one. The lilting music from the Viennese trio he had installed in the salon wafted out through the French windows, the jasmine and wisteria climbing his walls laid their heavy, scented branches almost into the rooms themselves. The moment darkness fell he would relinquish his garden to the moths and night birds, close the windows and lead his guests to a dinner as formally served and elaborate as any banquet of state. But this present time was for wandering at will, for letting Follina work its spell, and he intervened only with the lightest of hands – introducing shy Mrs Bennett to the glamorous Maximov; removing the misanthropic conductor, Kaufmann, to the library with its collection of operatic scores.

  Yet, though no one could have guessed it, Rom, as he wandered among his guests, was fighting down disappointment. He had been absolutely certain that he would recognise the swan who had sneezed so poignantly at the end of Act Two; it seemed to him that the serious little face with its troubled brown eyes was entirely distinctive, but he had been mistaken. A casual question to Dubrov when the girls arrived elicited the information that all members of the co
rps had come. ‘No one could miss such an honour,’ Dubrov had assured him, adding that he himself had personally counted heads as the girls came aboard the Amethyst. Therefore she must be in the group of Russians with their dark homesick faces, for she was not with Marie-Claude nor the pale-haired Swedish girl receiving, with evident indifference, the compliments of the Mayor. Well, people looked different without their make-up, he reflected, and shrugging off the matter as of no importance, paused by Simonova’s couch to add his homage to her circle of admirers.

  ‘Never!’ the ballerina was declaring, throwing out her long, thin hands. ‘Never, never, will I return to Russia! If they came to me crawling in the snow on their hands and knees all the way from Petersburg, I would not come!’

  She fanned herself with the ends of her chiffon scarf, and looked at her host from under kohl-tipped lashes. What a man! If only she had not been committed to her art – and of course to Dubrov, though that was more easily arranged . . . One must go where there is fire, Fokine had once said to her and this devastating man with his deep grey eyes and that look of Tamburlaine the Great was certainly fire. But it was impossible: a night with such a man and one could hardly manage three fouettés, let alone thirty-two . . .

  ‘Ah, Madame, what a loss for my country,’ sighed Count Sternov.

  ‘It is a loss,’ agreed the ballerina complacently. ‘But it is one for which they must take the blame. And in any case soon I am going to retire.’ She waited for the groans, the horrified denials . . . and when they came, proceeded. ‘Dubrov and I are going to live in the country in absolute simplicity with goats and grow vegetables. I have a great longing,’ she said, spreading tapering fingers which had never touched anything rougher than Maximov’s silvered tights, ‘to get my hands into the earth.’

  ‘You must allow me to show you over the kitchen gardens,’ said Verney, concealing the smile that had flickered at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Yes. Later,’ said Simonova. The plants she had seen on the way up to the house had seemed to her excessive, altogether too much there and looking in some cases as though they might contain insects, which were not in her scheme of things. And she leaned back more comfortably and allowed a servant to refill her glass with champagne.