by Eva Ibbotson
Edward was in the bar drinking with Harry Parker and a few of the regulars, when a servant came with a message to say that Mr Verney would be pleased if Dr Finch-Dutton would join him in his box at the theatre at eight o’clock.
‘I say,’ said Harry Parker, ‘that’s a real honour. Verney nearly always watches alone.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t bring my tails,’ said Edward, fingering his black tie anxiously.
‘If you’re with Verney you could go in plus-fours,’ said Harry Parker. ‘There’s nothing you can’t carry off when you’re with him.’
Edward had seen the Opera House during his fruitless search for a hotel, but the sheer opulence of the foyer and the clothes and jewels of the patrons here in this place amazed him.
‘Ah, there you are!’ Rom detached himself from a group of friends and came forward. ‘Look, we only have a few moments. Better come up to my box, where we can talk quietly.’ And as they went, he continued, ‘Your girl is here. She’s known as Natasha Alexandrovna, but there is no doubt she is the girl you’re looking for; I’ve checked with Dubrov. Only you must be very careful: your coming here could make things extremely awkward for her.’
‘For her?’ said Edward, dumbfounded, and stumbled on a marble step.
‘Naturally, for her. One hint that she is being pursued by a man and her position in the Company might be seriously jeopardised. Followers are strictly forbidden and Madame Simonova is an absolute stickler.’
‘But I’m not pursuing her! I’m trying to save her!’ cried Edward.
‘Better not put it like that to the Company. Or to anyone in the audience. I’m afraid Professor Morton is under a misapprehension regarding—’ He broke off. ‘Ah, here come the Sternovs!’ and he led Edward towards his friends. ‘Allow me to introduce Dr Finch-Dutton, just out from England. Count and Countess Sternov and the Countess Sophie.’
By the time they were seated in Verney’s box, Edward’s head was spinning. The Countess had taken him aside to confide that her sixteen-year-old daughter was ballet-mad and quite heartbroken because an inequality of the toes prevented her from being accepted by the Dubrov Company. A young Englishwoman, Mrs Bennett, had congratulated him on being allowed to see these dedicated and unapproachable dancers perform. Was it possible that the Professor really was mistaken about the status of ballet girls in polite society, thought Edward, unaware that Rom’s friends would have done a great deal more for him than utter a few white lies.
But now the conductor entered, the house lights dimmed and all thoughts vanished from Edward’s mind except one. After the long, exhausting journey, the sorrow and wrath she had caused him, he was going to see Harriet again.
Or was he?
The curtain went up on a farmyard and a ballet of chickens of whom Harriet was not one . . . A funny lady who was really a man came and chided her daughter for dancing with a handsome farmer . . . It was all rather jolly and the tunes were nice.
And now a lot of village girls came on and danced with the heroine. Pretty girls in white dresses, each with a different-coloured apron and scarf around her throat.
‘Well, what do you think of your friend?’ whispered Rom. ‘They are very pleased with her work in the Company.’
Edward frowned with concentration. Harriet must be on stage then – and indeed there were so many village maidens that one of them was bound really to be her. He leaned forward, peering intently at the twisting, shifting patterns made by the girls with their twirling skirts. There was a thin girl with brown hair at the end on the right, but there was another one at the front and a third just vanishing behind a hay-cart.
‘It is a bit difficult to pick her out, actually. I’m not used to dancing,’ he said helplessly.
Rom shot him a look of contempt and handed him the opera glasses. But the glasses only made things worse. One got a head here and an arm there and then they were gone. Edward tracked now this girl, now that, before handing back the glasses with a disconsolate shake of the head.
‘She’s the one with the dark red kerchief,’ said Rom maliciously.
‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course! I see now,’ said Edward gratefully.
And for the rest of the evening, Rom had the satisfaction of seeing the moron who had professed an interest in Harriet devoutly pursuing Olga Narukov across the stage.
As Rom had expected, he experienced no difficulty in setting up the luncheon which was to put Edward in his place once and for all. In every ballerina there smoulders the conviction that she is also a great actress; Rom’s plan had only to be outlined and Simonova was already planning her costume and instructing her underlings, and by the time he returned to the theatre at noon with a case of Chateauneuf du Pape as a thank-offering, the transformation from glamorous ballerina to fierce duenna was already complete.
‘The girls know what they have to do,’ she said, ‘and everything is ready. My clothes are good, you think?’
‘Indeed I do.’ Simonova wore black to the throat; a black hat with a veil shielded her face and a jet-handled parasol lay on the chair. He bent for a moment over her hand. ‘I am truly grateful, Madame. Not everyone would go to such trouble for a girl in the corps.’
Simonova shrugged. ‘She is a good child . . . though she does not have Natasha’s ears,’ she murmured mysteriously, and swept out into the corridor, where she could be heard yelling instructions at the girls.
Rom had called at the Club earlier to brief Edward. ‘It’s a great honour you understand, this invitation? In fact, I know of no one else who has been allowed to lunch with Madame and the girls.’ And he went on to caution Edward to be extremely careful in his use of language and not to mention that he was staying at the Sports Club, which would certainly be considered flighty.
‘I myself,’ said Rom with perfect accuracy, ‘never mention my connection with the Club to any lady of my acquaintance.’
At a quarter to one, therefore, Edward – in his new light-weight suit – made his way towards the theatre. He had imagined his first meeting with Harriet a hundred times. He had visualised her abandoned in a hovel, backstage in a scandalously short skirt, or driving with a rich protector in a carriage. But he had not imagined her crossing the Opera Square in crocodile with twenty other girls, wearing a straw hat and long-sleeved foulard dress, in the wake of a formidable woman in black and a portly gentleman in a frock-coat.
Edward approached, raised his hat.
‘Ah. You are Dr Dunch-Fitton,’ stated Simonova. The procession came to a halt while she raked him with her charcoal eyes. ‘Mr Verney has asked that you may join us at luncheon, but it is out of the question that my girls can be seen walking through the town accompanied by a man. You may meet us at the Restaurant Guida in ten minutes. In the private room, naturally.’
And leaving the flabbergasted Edward standing, the row of girls with their parasols held aloft passed with downcast eyes across the square.
In the restaurant, Verney’s instructions had been obeyed to the letter. A private room, totally screened from the rest of the patrons, had been prepared; white cloths and virginal white flowers decorated the tables; a portrait of Carmen expiring at the feet of her matador had been replaced by a Madonna and Child.
The girls filed in under Simonova’s eye. Edward, arriving confused and perspiring, was permitted to sit on her left with Harriet on his right. Marie-Claude and Kirstin sat opposite; the Russian girls stretched away on either side.
The first course arrived: platters of hot prawns in a steaming aromatic sauce. Edward, who was hungry, leaned forward.
‘We will say Grace,’ said Simonova.
Everybody rose. There followed nearly ten minutes of an old Russian thanksgiving prayer during which Lydia, giggling into her handkerchief at the ballerina’s unusual embellishments to the sombre and simple words, was kicked into silence by Olga. Then they all sat down and Edward glanced hopefully at the prawns.
‘And now you, Harriet.’
So everyone rose again and Harriet folded
her hands. ‘Oculi omnium in te respiciunt, Domine,’ she began – and thus it was that the first words Edward heard the abandoned girl pronounce were those which preceded every meal at High Table in St Philip’s.
Harriet had been badly frightened at the thought of this encounter, but the incredible way the Company had rallied to her support – and above all, Rom’s quick pressure on her hand as they set off – had given her the courage to play her part and when they were all seated at last she turned to Edward and said composedly, ‘I trust you found my father well?’
‘No, Harriet, I did not. I found him deeply distressed by your conduct. How could you run away like that?’
‘Run away?’ Simonova’s lynx-like ears caught the phrase and she fixed her hooded eyes on Edward. ‘Natasha Alexandrovna did not run away. She was called!’
‘All of us were called,’ said Kirstin. Her gentle sad face and soft blue eyes were making an excellent impression on Edward. ‘Many of us struggled, but God was too strong.’
‘It is a vocation,’ pronouced Simonova. ‘Nuns and dancers, we are sisters. We give up everything: friends, family, love . . .’ Her eyes slid sideways to Dubrov. ‘Particularly love!’
Edward, temporarily nonplussed, tried again. ‘Yes, but dash it—’
Simonova raised a peremptory hand. ‘Please, Dr Funch-Dutton – no language before my girls! I am like the Abbess of a sisterhood. Tatiana!’ she suddenly called sharply down the table. ‘Where are your elbows?’
‘Yes, but. . . I mean, poor Professor Morton,’ stammered Edward. ‘The anxiety . . . and naturally I myself felt—’
‘Yes, yes, you feel; it is understandable. When Teresa of Avila left her home there must have been many who suffered. Yes, there are always tears when a pure young soul offers herself to higher things: the Dance, the Church – it is all one. Consider St Francis of Assisi—’
But here Dubrov pressed her foot in warning, remembering – as she would presently – that the gentle saint had signalled his conversion by removing all his clothes and setting off naked for the hills.
The entrée was brought. Fresh mineral water was poured into the glasses.
‘You like being here, then?’ asked Edward, turning once more to Harriet and noting with a pang that even after all she had done, her ears still peeped out from between the soft strands of her hair just as they had done in King’s College Chapel.
‘I like it in one sense,’ said Harriet carefully. ‘It is such a privilege to be under Madame’s tutelage. But naturally I miss the freedom of Cambridge.’ She glanced sideways under her lashes to see if she had gone too far, but Edward’s face was devoid of incredulity.
‘The freedom?’
‘Well, in Cambridge my Aunt Louisa sometimes allowed me to walk alone on the Backs and I was occasionally permitted to go to tea with my friends. Here nothing like that is possible. We are chaperoned and watched night and day. But I feel I must accept these restrictions, knowing they are for my own good.’
‘But Harriet. . . I mean, you are coming back, aren’t you?’ said Edward, his long face falling. Aware that the situation was out of hand, that his intention to carry her back – covered in shame and contrition – had somehow misfired, he fumbled for words. ‘I thought . . . I mean, I was going to take you to the May Ball and all that.’
At this point Marie-Claude, who had been unusually silent, intervened. Harriet could be relied upon not to lose her nerve while the young man was pompous and self-important, but if he turned pathetic anything might happen.
Pushing her golden curls firmly behind her ears, Marie-Claude addressed Edward. She addressed him exclusively and she addressed him in French, rightly concluding that a man expensively educated at a British public school would understand about as much of what she said as a backward two-year-old, and the effect on Edward was considerable. Though aware that people born abroad could sometimes speak their native language, to hear this beautiful girl pour forth sentence after sonorous, unhesitating sentence when he himself had suffered such torments over his French exercises, filled him with awe. Moreover, such words as he did understand – bois, for example, and campagne – seemed to indicate that her discourse concerned the beauties of nature, than which no topic could be more suitable. And indeed he was quite right, for it was of the outside amenities of the auberge above Nice that Marie-Claude spoke: of the grove of pine trees where Vincent intended to put tables in the summer and the freshness of the country produce he would use to prepare his famous dishes.
The meal ended, as it had begun, with Grace and then Edward was dismissed by Simonova.
‘Now, Dr Dinch-Futton, tomorrow is a special day of quiet for the girls while we prepare for The Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky is for us a sacred composer and there can be no frivolity. But as Mr Verney has assured us of your good character, you may see Harriet for half an hour between four thirty and five – in the presence of a chaperone, of course.’
And before Edward could think of anything suitable to say, gloves had been donned, parasols unfurled and two-by-two the girls set off across the square.
His luncheon with the Company left Edward deeply confused. He went to the post office to send a cable to the Mortons and tried at least five different variations before settling for: HARRIET SAFE FURTHER NEWS FOLLOWS. This at least would set their minds at rest and give him time to think. For of course Harriet must be returned to her father’s house – only it was not easy to see how.
‘Do you think I ought to put the whole thing to the British Consul?’ Edward had asked Verney. But it seemed the Consul was on leave in São Paulo and Verney advised most strongly against Edward taking the matter into his own hands. ‘Quite honestly, if you tried to force her to return with you they would think you were abducting her for your own purposes and you might well find yourself cooling your heels in the local gaol. Now you are here, why don’t you concentrate on your work? In any case, there’s no sailing for another week. I would be very happy to help with transport and in any other way I can.’
This was advice Edward was inclined to take. He had replenished his collection of fleas most effectively on the boat – there had been fleas on the crew, fleas on the passengers, fleas on the captain’s fox terrier . . . But he had glimpsed, here in Manaus, insects as fabulous as any he had dreamed of in Cambridge.
The annexe of the Sports Club, in which Edward slept, was a low wooden building edging on to the forest. On the morning after his luncheon with Harriet, he took his nets, his collecting bottles and his tins – and entered his heritage.
He had expected the morphos, the nymphalids, the humming-bird hawk moths – but their sheer size, their musculature, the power it needed to kill them, intoxicated him. In an hour, on the track leading from the back of the Club, he collected enough specimens to line the walls of his little research room at Cambridge and for the first time in his life he felt a catch of butterflies as weight. The heat was staggering and he was not only the hunter but the hunted as sand-flies, tabanids and piums feasted on his crimsoning skin. But Edward hardly noticed the discomfort. That butterfly with the red wing-eye – he had never seen that described anywhere . . . And to fill his cup of happiness to overflowing, there on a cluster of sloth droppings was what he could see, even with the naked eye, as an entirely new species of flea.
His meeting with Harriet the next day only confirmed what he had learned at luncheon: that she was as closely guarded as a religious postulant. Harriet had been polite and friendly, but it was clear that nothing less than brute force would get her to leave the Company and at the moment he could see no justification for applying it, nor any likelihood of success should he attempt it.
This being so, Edward felt free to accept the invitation from two German naturalists, who had arrived at the Club annexe on the previous night, to join them in an expedition to a valley above the Tamura Falls. Even without a sighting of that fabulous missing link, the ‘insect-worm’ Peripatus, he felt confident of adding to his collection in a way which would gratif
y the head of his department and make the whole journey worth-while.
‘So you see,’ said Rom, reporting to Harriet on the morning of Alvarez’ arrival, ‘everything is going splendidly. With luck he’ll be away until Tuesday at least and you can concentrate on supporting Madame Simonova through her ordeal!’ For the dreaded première of Nutcracker, with all that it implied, was almost upon them.
Harriet smiled. ‘Yes . . . I suppose it’s wrong to hope that Masha Repin doesn’t have too much of a success, but I can’t help hoping it just the same.’ She looked up at him, her eyes warm with gratitude. ‘You have been so kind. I still can’t believe that it can come right . . . that they will just let me dance. But at least you have shown me how not to be frightened.’
‘There’s a lot more to show you still,’ said Rom lightly. ‘I shall be tied up with business for the next two days.’ Even to Harriet, he could not speak of Ombidos and his determination to make Alvarez see what went on there. ‘But after that I intend to take you out in the Firefly. Just you, this time. If you will come?’
‘I will come,’ said Harriet.
12
The dinner for Antonio Alvarez was the grandest and most elaborate the Club had ever prepared. Harry Parker was everywhere, supervising the decorations, the arrangement of the vast silver epergne of knights in armour, the seating of the musicians. The arrival of Alvarez’ chef – with the pomp attending the appearance of a field marshal at manoeuvres – had been less of a disaster than expected. Monsieur Pierre, whose moustaches were the most impressive ever seen on the Amazon, had brought a case of gleaming instruments and taken possession of the kitchens; but his personality was such that within a few minutes the staff, who had been hostile and resentful, were scudding about at his bidding, and it was clear that the menu would be as impressive as his reputation.