by Eva Ibbotson
Silently counting the bars that were bringing her nearer deliverance, Harriet moved down towards the centre of the table, for she knew that it was in front of the Minister that she must come to rest in her final pose. As she came past the man in the blond toupee, confused by her nearness, put out a hand as if to grab her ankle – and recoiled, blanching, as Alvarez spat out three words of insult in Portuguese.
She was there! The Minister’s high-backed chair was opposite, his medals gleamed beneath the chandelier – and as the music moved into its dying fall, she prepared to sink slowly, driftingly, romantically on to the cloth in front of him.
Except that the epergne was in the way!
A frown mark like a circumflex appeared for a moment between Harriet’s brows. Then a man’s hand – strong, tanned and shapely – came round the base of the massive silver object and with extraordinary strength pushed it away.
Now all was well; there was room – and as she sank down she turned her head to smile her thanks.
The men had been behind her all the way, but there was nothing they liked better, nor recalled more often afterwards, than the sudden, anguished squeak – half-mouse, half-fledgling – that escaped her when she saw the face of her benefactor.
Then she threw up her arms and at this signal the lights went out. When they came on again, the girl and the cake had gone.
The departure of the guests left Harry Parker bewildered but gratified. The eruption from the cake of the dark-haired professor’s daughter had apparently given great pleasure – and this despite the fact that as far as he could see she had done nothing of the kind that was normally reckoned to gratify gentlemen after such a dinner. There was no doubt, however, that the praise had been sincere and Alvarez, before he left in Verney’s car, had congratulated him with real emotion on the entertainment he had provided. Harriet herself had stayed only long enough to explain to him, in the anteroom, the reason for the substitution and to beg him to keep Marie-Claude’s secret and this Parker was perfectly willing to do. Monsieur Pierre was returning to Rio the next morning; the chef had seen no sign of Marie-Claude, who had successfully made her escape, and Parker would not have dreamed of upsetting the most beautiful girl who was ever likely to come his way.
But out in the grounds of the Club, poor Edward stumbled through the foliage in a state of total despair. Inexperienced, prurient and drunk, he alone had entirely missed the point of Harriet’s performance. He had just been through the most shattering experience of his life, he told himself. Harriet – sweet, good, obedient Harriet, brought up by Professor Morton to be everything a young girl should be – had burst from a cake . . . had danced on a table in her underclothes!
Had she always been wanton? Edward asked himself as he leaned his aching head against the trunk of a tree, uncaring of the ants, the termites, the poisonous spiders it might harbour. Was it just this damnable climate or had it gone on all the time? Had she crept out at night in Cambridge to come out of cakes in Trinity . . . out of seashells in Sidney Sussex . . . out of cornucopias in St Cat’s?
A gigantic moth flew into a lantern; it was new to science, but he let it pass. Peripatus itself could have lumbered across his feet and he would not have bent to pick it up.
He had meant to marry this girl whose ankles had been gaped at by three dozen gentlemen at dinner . . . He had meant to commit his life to her in Great St Mary’s and approach her reverently in a honeymoon hotel in Bognor Regis . . . He had meant to introduce her to the Mater!
What fools they had made of him in that ballet company – of Verney too, or was he in on the act? Probably they all erupted, even that skinny ballerina – from pies, from ice-cream cones . . . thought Edward dizzily.
After a while the events of the evening took their toll and he was violently sick. Then, tottering to the annexe, he lay down on his bed. Tomorrow he would cable the Mortons and tell them to what depravity Harriet had sunk. They must give him powers to have her restrained until she could be taken to the boat and returned to England. But would they want her back? Would a girl like that be acceptable in Scroope Terrace, soiling and corrupting the whole city? Would he himself be willing to accompany her?
Such little breasts she had . . . but very much there . . . thought Edward, drifting into sleep – and woke sweating to rise from his bed and take a cold shower: the first of many that he was to take as he contemplated the descent from cake to gutter of the girl he had once loved.
13
The Minister for Amazonia had sent for Rom.
It was the morning after the banquet. Rom had spent the night at the Casa Branca and had not slept well. The presence of Edward Finch-Dutton at the dinner had been as unexpected as it was unfortunate, and the flushed face and drunken mutterings of Harriet’s erstwhile suitor as he staggered from the room made it clear that all his own efforts to reconcile Harriet’s family to her activities must now be set at naught.
But Harriet’s affairs must wait. He had come to do battle with Alvarez and arriving, punctual to the minute, at the Palace of Justice, he was shown into the room set aside for the Minister.
‘Come in, Verney.’
Alvarez, immaculately dressed as always, was sitting at a vast desk shuffling a pile of papers, but he rose and shook Rom’s hand.
‘I wanted to see you about the Ombidos report,’ he said. ‘I’ve read it again.’
‘Yes.’ Rom braced himself for a repetition of the excuses of the previous day.
‘And I have decided to go!’
Surprise and relief chased the shadows from Rom’s face.
‘You will go yourself?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘To Ombidos? Oh, but that’s splendid! You are the only person who can put things right up there.’
‘It means delaying my return to Rio and I am sending home my domestic staff. I want you to take me as far as Santa Maria in the Amethyst; I shall let it be known that we’re off on a fishing trip. Can you spare a few days?’
‘Of course.’
‘De Silva can meet me there in a government launch with a suitable escort. We’ll go by night and take them by surprise. Nominally it will be merely a courtesy visit, but if half of what you say is true, then the rest will follow.’
‘Would you like me to come all the way to Ombidos? I can bring a dozen of my own men and follow you.’
Alvarez smiled at the eagerness in Rom’s voice, but shook his head.
‘I know how you feel, but this is a job for my own countrymen. You have already made quite enough of a reputation as a rescuer of the oppressed. Now it is my turn for some of the glory!’
Rom was not fooled. Alvarez faced a dangerous journey and the hostility of his fellow politicians in Rio, for there were powerful men making money from Ombidos.
‘Could I ask you what made you change your mind about going?’
‘Yes, you could ask. And I will tell you.’ Alvarez sat down again behind the massive desk and motioned Rom to a chair. ‘It was that girl last night – the girl in the cake.’
‘What!’ Rom leaned forward, unable to believe his ears.
‘Yes, the girl in the cake,’ repeated Alvarez. ‘You can thank her that I’m risking my neck up that hellish river.’ He felt in his pocket, brought out a wallet and extracted a faded sepia photograph, which he handed to Rom. ‘Do you see the resemblance?’
The picture showed a young girl in a wedding-dress holding a bouquet of lilies. The portrait was conventional enough, but transcending the stiff pose, the studio props, was the expression on the thin face – a look both brave and eager, as though she could hardly wait for the adventure of her life to begin.
‘Yes,’ said Rom quietly. ‘The eyes, particularly.’ And then: ‘Your wife?’
Alvarez nodded. ‘Her name was Lucia. It was an arranged marriage; she came to me direct from her convent . . . there was some family connection. But straight away . . . on the first night. . . I realised that I had found what half the world is looking for.’ He took back the picture, letting it rest
in the palm of his hand. ‘She was no more beautiful than that girl last night was beautiful, but she was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence . . . they don’t talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good . . .’
Rom had taken a silver propelling pencil from the desk and was turning it over and over in his hands. ‘Go on, sir, if you will.’
‘I was very young in those days, and very idealistic. I thought Brazil would become the moral leader of the New World. There were a few of us who formed the Green Horizons Party – you may have heard of it. We planned to educate the Indians, build the finest schools and hospitals in the world . . . oh, all the usual dreams. They thought of me as a leader, but my fervour – even my ideas, many of them – came from my wife.’
‘I knew they had great hopes of you.’
‘Great hopes,’ repeated Alvarez. ‘We were going to get rid of yellow fever, set up irrigation schemes in Ceará . . . I was put in charge of a population survey in Pernambuco and Lucia went with me on most of my journeys. She insisted and I let her – selfish swine that I was – because I so hated us to be apart.’
‘What happened?’
Alvarez took out a monogrammed silk handkerchief and wiped his brow.
‘Cholera. It was in one of those villages in the survey. She knew, but she wouldn’t stay behind. God, what an illness . . . well, I have no need to tell you, you must have seen enough of it. She literally wasted away . . . just her eyes . . .’ He broke off, shook his head. ‘After that I didn’t care and when they deposed Dom Pedro I just drifted with the scum. I must have had a hundred women since and they have meant nothing.’ He shrugged. ‘I thought I had forgotten; after all, it was more than thirty years ago. And then last night there was this girl with just that look Lucia had.’
‘She would have wanted you to go to Ombidos?’ asked Rom. ‘Your wife?’
‘Yes.’ Alvarez carefully put back the photograph in his wallet. ‘And you know, I thought the other one would have wanted it too – the girl last night who danced on the table. Absurd, isn’t it!’ He looked sharply at Rom from under his oiled eyebrows and leaned forward to retrieve the propelling pencil from which Rom had just broken the lead. ‘Now, how soon can you have the Amethyst ready? I’d like to leave today.’
The first cable which Edward sent, announcing that Harriet had been found and was well, strangely produced less apparent pleasure than the second, which brought to Louisa’s eye – and to the eye of Hermione Belper, as she virtually snatched it from Louisa’s hand – a glimmer of something which could not really have been satisfaction but looked remarkably like it.
Mrs Belper had come from Trumpington Villa to inform her friend that Stavely Hall, which had been put on the market a month ago, was sold and to an unknown buyer. She had brought the piece in the East Anglian Times which related this event and featured a view of Stavely’s south front. But the interesting speculations this item of news aroused were quite set aside when the maid arrived with the cable which poor Edward had despatched the night after the dinner in the Club.
HARRIET SUNK TO UNSPEAKABLE DEPRAVITY STOP MUST REQUEST AUTHORISATION FOR HER DETENTION AND IMMEDIATE REPATRIATION STOP PLEASE CABLE PREFECT OF POLICE MANAUS STOP EDWARD.
‘Oh, heavens!’ said Louisa, putting her hand to her chest. ‘Yet it is only what we expected.’
‘What all of us must have expected from the start, dear Louisa, even if we didn’t like to say so.’
‘What will Bernard say? Oh, how the poor man has been plagued by that girl. The bad blood there must have been in her mother!’
‘She was a dreadfully flighty little thing; I remember her well. Always mooning over the piano.’
‘What do you suppose he means by “unspeakable depravity”, Hermione?’ said Louisa, grasping her friend’s arm. ‘Could there be some scandal that. . . that one simply cannot hush up? Something . . . medical?’
The Professor’s key in the lock put an end to this line of speculation. He entered the drawing-room and, without preamble, Louisa put the cable into his hand.
He read it once, read it again. ‘This tells me nothing that I did not already know,’ said the Professor heavily. ‘It was perfectly obvious that the first cable was just moonshine. No girl would defy her father and throw in her lot with those scoundrels unless she was thoroughly sick in her soul. And her body.’ His voice shook with anger. ‘Harriet had everything here: a good home, upright companions, financial security. It was you’ – he rounded on Louisa – ‘who told me to give her a guinea. Without that, she could not have done it.’
Louisa bowed her head. ‘Yes, Bernard. I admit it. I let my generosity overcome me – but see how I have been punished!’
The Professor took out his watch. ‘Too late to go up to London now; I shall take the first train in the morning. This is a matter for the Foreign Office. Cedric Fitzackerly will know what to do; he’s a Junior Secretary now.’
‘That was the student you actually approved of, wasn’t it?’ said Louisa. ‘The one that didn’t argue or fall asleep in tutorials?’
She had not expressed it exactly as the Professor would have wished, but substantially she was correct. Unlike the idle, womanising undergraduates it was his misfortune to teach, Fitzackerly had been attentive and polite, thanking the Professor at the end of every lecture and devoting his final-year dissertation to the Professor’s own views on the odes of Bacchylides, so that when the young man came to him for references it had been a pleasure to write something that would make those fellows in Whitehall sit up.
‘I shall go and telegraph Fitzackerly now and tell him to expect me. It’s too late to hush things up – matters have gone too far. Edward must be given every assistance by the authorities out there. Better even that Harriet should be locked up until the boat sails rather than—’ But here for a moment he was unable to continue. ‘We must not forget our debt to Edward. To travel back with a girl such as she has become involves a considerable sacrifice. If, that is, he means to bring her back himself.’
‘He has wasted a great many words on that cable,’ said Louisa. ‘There was no need to put MUST – it would have made quite good sense without it. Or PLEASE. To put PLEASE on a cable is quite unnecessary. No one expects it.’
But for once the Professor, usually sympathetic to Louisa’s passion for frugality, was impatient. ‘This is hardly the moment to think of such trivialities, Louisa. We had best give our minds to thinking of how Harriet can be punished when she returns.’
‘Do you mean to have her back here, then, Bernard? Would it not be better if she was sent to some kind of institution where they deal with . . . girls of that sort?’
‘When she has been returned, we shall decide what to do,’ said the Professor.
He then left for the post office and Hermione Belper also prepared to take her departure. A discussion of who had bought Stavely and what would happen to the Brandons would clearly have to wait for another day and, determined to be the first to spread the news of Harriet’s degradation through the city, she too hurried away.
‘Merde,’ said Marie-Claude, giving the traditional first-night greeting but without much hope that the expected good luck would follow. The première of Nutcracker was upon them and backstage the atmosphere was tense. Masha Repin was not popular. Her ambition was so violent, it had not yet acquired the cloak of good manners and while Maximov might dislike Simonova, he felt secure with her as he did not with the Polish girl. The tension filtered through even to the corps. Lydia, finding her head-dress too tight, burst into tears. A limping boy rubbing his calves showed that Olga, too, was not immune to the general stress – and the temperature stood at 101 degrees.
Harriet, reaching for her snowflake costume, was forestalled by Marie-Claude, who held it out, ready to help her slip it on.
‘Marie-Claude, you mustn’t! I can manage, honestly.’
During the two days since the banquet, Marie-Claude’s gratitude had b
een a heavy cross to bear. She insisted on tidying Harriet’s locker, fetched coffee for her during rehearsal breaks and commandeered her dancing shoes in order to shellac the linings and darn the toes.
‘But you have to take half the money,’ she had cried when Harriet returned from the Sports Club. ‘You ought to have all of it, you know that.’
Harriet’s refusal had been steadfast. ‘I don’t want it; it’s for the restaurant.’ And as Marie-Claude continued to look at her beseechingly: ‘I must have somewhere really special to sweep into with my admirers when I am a prima ballerina assoluta, you must see that!’
Her little joke had fallen flat; neither Kirstin nor Marie-Claude had smiled. Harriet’s work was becoming very good; she was beginning to be talked about.
Out front, Simonova sat very straight in Verney’s crimson-lined box on the bel étage. He had left his key for them before he went up-river and now Dubrov – letting things go hang backstage – was beside her and lending silent support. She was looking splendid and formidable in a jade green silk dress and turban and the ear-rings he had bought her after her first Giselle. Only her hands, clenching and unclenching on her lap, showed the ordeal this occasion was for her.
The curtain rose to sighs of appreciation from the audience. Stifling in evening clothes, living in a land without seasons, they were enchanted by the great Christmas tree, its spire reaching almost to the proscenium arch. The children arrived at Councillor Stahlbaum’s party; little Clara – played by Tatiana, the prettiest of the Russian girls – received her nutcracker. No tension, so far – Masha Repin as the Sugar Plum Fairy did not appear until the second act.