Mitzi crunched through her salad, her mind spinning. Rob’s eyes seemed to drill a tiny but direct tunnel straight into her subconscious. She felt she should have learned something tremendously important, yet had no idea what it could be. What on earth was in that tea?
He glanced at her. ‘Sorry, I’ve been spouting a load of crap and I’ll shut up now,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you. Did you study journalism?’
‘No, English. I worked for a while as a subeditor, but I prefer writing. There was a huge layoff of staff and I was one of them. But I was so pleased to be free of the place that I didn’t look for another job, I just set up as a freelancer.’
‘That’s brave.’
‘My mother thought it was idiotic! Sometimes I think so too. But my father died last April and since then I’ve felt life is too short to spend it doing things you hate. Right now, everything seems a little aimless and I never know whether I’ll—’ She stopped herself: not a good idea to tell her landlord she was always convinced her income would dry up in two months’ time.
If he noticed, he didn’t pursue it. ‘You know, you may not feel there’s a direction, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’
‘That’s a nice thought.’
‘What else do you enjoy?’
‘Sketching. Nice food. Reading, galleries, seeing Harry on stage – when he has anything to act in. I missed his latest play. What about you? How long have you had this place?’
‘I bought it as a wreck about seven years ago – it was nothing but a few bricks and a spiders’ conference centre. I started doing it up at weekends, by way of a nice distracting “project”. Then when I took the sabbatical I thought I’d try living in it and renting out the flat, instead of vice versa, while I see which way things are going to go.’
Mitzi let him pile more salad onto her plate. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to turn all this into four hundred words. You’re much too interesting for your own good!’
‘Could I see it before it goes into print? Is that allowed?’
‘Mostly not, but…’ Mitzi thought fast. John would flay his journalists alive for sending copy to an interviewee in advance. But was this a ruse to stay in touch? Why not? ‘Well, it’s not exactly political dynamite, and I’d like to get things right,’ she considered. ‘I could email it to you tomorrow or Tuesday?’
‘I’m just curious. I promise I won’t start rewriting it. But I don’t do email – that computer is dead in the water, so to speak, and my phone is a mere phone.’
‘Um… I could read it to you on the phone?’ Mitzi was looking at his hands: thick palms, long, straight fingers, calloused from holding a garden fork. The hands of an artist, a thinker, a gardener.
‘It’s a deal.’ Rob reached out a hand to shake hers – a jokey gesture, but she felt a gentle current of connection slip between them.
The image of him waving goodbye from the cottage door seemed fixed behind her eyes while she cycled home, a small bundle of the lime blossom tea bags that he’d pressed upon her jigging about in her basket. She should be used to this side of her work – meeting someone, talking to them, glimpsing their world, saying goodbye. But the world she’d entered today was the same as hers, expanded and idealised. It was not just because she lived in Rob’s flat that she felt she’d stepped into her own house and turned away from it.
Lost in thought, she made slow progress back to town. She seemed to have travelled a great distance since that morning.
9
Later, when Mitzi settled down at her desk to begin her article, Rob and his house still hovered in her mind – the woodsmoke, the dusty books, a tang of walnut oil, fresh basil and honeyed, perfumed tea. She typed:
‘If you go to Branswell on Saturday you’re in for a big surprise. If you go to Branswell on Saturday you’d better go in disguise….’
A soft swishing noise pulled her away from the words. Outside, a large white swan was flapping towards the house. Mitzi opened the window and let her soar in to land in a heap on the kilim. She was stunned afresh by the creature’s beauty, and her heart turned over as the swan settled into its box and prepared for sleep. Without its dazzling whiteness, the rustle of feathers, the occasional quiet clatter of its beak, the front room would seem bleak and sterile. Odette, whether as swan or woman, cheered her up simply by existing.
She wanted to write about choosing spices instead of sausages, about the scent of fresh herbs and winter fires, the shape of a perfect vase, or the colours of a frosty morning in the woods. Instead, she sat there writing jolly dross. Evening was approaching. She’d leave it for now and check over her final version in the morning, she decided, pouring a glass of wine and hunting down her sketchpad beneath the receipts spike.
By the time the glass was empty, dusk had set in. Odette roused herself and waddled off towards the bathroom. Mitzi barely saw her go; she was still trying to capture on the page Rob’s face, his kind eyes with their crinkle lines, the cheekbones – oddly, she realised they reminded her of Odette’s. Perhaps he had some Slavic roots?
Mixing with the drag of her pencil on the pad, there came the sound of Odette’s footsteps pacing about, and of cupboard doors opening and closing. When she appeared, she was in an Indian cotton dress that Mitzi had not worn for years.
‘This dress looks so beautiful!’ Odette bounded colt-like across the room and sat down beside Mitzi. ‘These colours, pink, purple, gold thread.’
‘It’s nice,’ Mitzi agreed. ‘But you’ll freeze. We’re going to have to buy you some proper clothes if you’re going to stay in Cygnford. And you have to wear something lovely for the ball.’
‘This? Cold?’ Odette gave a peal of laughter. ‘You come to Siberia… Mitzi, you draw?’ She glanced towards the sketchpad. ‘May I look?’
‘Oh no, no… they’re dreadful.’ Mitzi covered her work. She didn’t want Odette to know she had been sketching the landlord.
Odette’s gaze was straying to the window, where the chestnut branches were catching shadows in the evening air.
Mitzi drew the curtains. ‘Is that better?’
‘How you know?’ Odette stared after her as Mitzi poured a second glass of wine for herself and some apple juice for her guest.
‘I met a very extraordinary man today. He knew your story, though I didn’t tell him why I wanted to hear it. He mentioned the owl.’
‘He follow me, the owl. I not know how, but he find me. Mitzi, I am scared.’
Mitzi handed her the glass. The girl’s hand brushed against her own, icy. ‘Odette, there are owls here,’ she began. ‘This might be any old owl. Why do you think it’s him?’
‘If he find me, I not escape. I lose my prince because he trick us. I have last chance to find man who love me and who makes vow. If he find me, he will stop me.’
‘Odette,’ Mitzi ventured, ‘is the Baron – your real father?’
The swan girl’s eyes widened in bewilderment. ‘My father dies more than hundred years ago,’ she said quietly. ‘Baron is neighbour, big enemy, he and father hate each other. Why you think Baron my father?’
‘In the story,’ Mitzi began, afraid of putting her other foot in her mouth too, ‘it says that you stopped the prince from killing him.’
‘Stories.’ Odette shrugged. ‘Stories are not real.’
‘Wouldn’t it have broken the spell if he’d killed the owl? Can the owl be killed? Or is he… immune?’
Odette bit her lip. ‘I do not know,’ she said. ‘I imagine he is immune, but this is not certain…’
‘Let me show you something.’ Rob’s books were eclectic in range. Mitzi stood on a chair to reach the top shelf and found what she wanted: British Birds, a full-colour volume in which the difference between a mute and a Bewick’s swan was made clear, as well as the differences between barn, screech, snowy and tawny owls and, hopefully, the mysterious creature lurking outside.
‘See him?’
Odette examined the pictures, then pointed. ‘This one.’
> ‘A tawny. That’s English. Wouldn’t your Russian Baron turn himself into a Russian species?’
Odette shook her head. ‘He come to England, he become English owl. Not like me, I always same swan. Mitzi, owl means I am prisoner!’
‘Odette, you’re not a prisoner – can’t you see? That is an ordinary, common-or-garden English tawny owl that hoots at night and eats small rodents. It has nothing to do with you and until you stop believing it has, you’re going to think you’re in its power.’
‘Because of Baron I turn into swan every day for more than a hundred and sixty years,’ Odette stated. ‘What you say is not for me. Is for you: about what you believe, not about what I must do.’
‘You’re too clever to be a swan half the time.’ Mitzi felt discombobulated. Rob might analyse the story on its psychological level, but its heroine didn’t know it had one. For all his insights, he hadn’t left Mitzi equipped to deal with a fairy tale character sitting in her living room taking everything at face value.
‘Odette, why does he keep you? What does he want?’
‘Like I say, this is a question of power. He wants to be most powerful of all men and of all who know magic, and if he releases me, that means I have won and so his power has gone.’
‘And that’s it? Sheer bloody-mindedness?’
Odette was quiet for a few moments. Then she seemed to be forcing out some words: ‘It is more than this… but very, very hard to explain.’ The gleam in her eye was enough to puzzle Mitzi, and to cast one of those increasingly familiar cold rushes across her neck.
‘What happens if you do break the spell?’ she asked. ‘If you find the right man and he doesn’t mess it up?’
‘If a man swears to love me forever, and keeps his vow, I am free. But not so easy, you know.’
‘Yes, I do know.’
‘Your brother…’ said Odette, not looking at her.
‘Odette,’ Mitzi began, ‘please be careful with Harry. He’s attractive, I’m sure, but he’s no prince. He’s got his head in the clouds and he has no idea you’re anything but my lodger and possibly an illegal immigrant. I don’t know what he’d do if he found out…’
‘He would have fright. Imagine how he look – like this!’ Odette turned her eyes and mouth into immense saucer shapes, then broke into shouts of laughter.
Mitzi smiled despite herself. ‘Oh, Odette, what are we going to do with you?’
Odette shook herself slightly, as if smoothing her feathers, then stood to approach the bookshelves, her eyes shining. ‘Go ahead,’ said Mitzi. ‘Explore as much as you like.’
Odette pulled down book after book, flicking through the pages. ‘Very clever, to use paper cover… How I wish my English is better, to read them all.’
‘I can find you something in Russian,’ Mitzi offered, ‘though you’ll have to help me. We can download some Russian books and you can read them on my tablet.’
Odette’s bemusement reminded her that she needed to explain this – and having thought her guest’s eyes could not grow wider or more amazed, she soon found she was wrong. ‘Is magic,’ Odette breathed.
‘That’s rich, coming from you. Which writers do you like?’
‘Pushkin,’ said Odette at once. ‘Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz in translation, and I love novels of George Sand in translation – you know, is really a woman writer – something extraordinary! – and they say she was Chopin’s lover, according to Monsieur Liszt. And…’
As Odette rattled off a catalogue of literary celebrities from the 1840s, it dawned on Mitzi that she would never have heard of…
‘Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky? Pasternak? Great Russian writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You haven’t read them, have you?’
‘As good as Pushkin?’
‘Some would say even better.’
‘Oh, Mitzi! Please, show me?’
Mitzi pulled a chair to the computer for Odette. Web pages for the novels of Tolstoy emerged before their eyes, downloadable e-books in many languages, lists of ‘100 Greatest Russian Novels Of All Time’… and Odette’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Is all right,’ she told Mitzi. ‘I cry for joy. This miracle machine! Where I start?’
‘Show me which Cyrillic words translate as War and Peace,’ said Mitzi, ‘and I’ll download that one for you. It’s very long and it’ll take a while to read, but I think you’re going to love it.’
Moments later the download was complete and Mitzi was switching on her tablet to show Odette how to work it. Taking the machine, running one pale fingertip along the screen and inadvertently highlighting the words, Odette could have been handling a newborn kitten, such was her expression of rapture.
By the time Mitzi was too tired to stay awake any longer, Odette had mastered the tablet and was in the leather armchair, legs tucked under her, riveted to War and Peace in Russian. Her hair spread around her like a cloak and over the borrowed thin dress she had wrapped the crocheted blanket for extra warmth, at Mitzi’s insistence – though, sure enough, she seemed not to feel the cold.
‘I’m worn out,’ Mitzi admitted. ‘I have to go and sleep.’
Odette gave a nod, not lifting her eyes. ‘I read some more…’
The next morning, while Odette sat in her swan box preening her feathers, Mitzi plugged in the tablet to recharge it. The battery had run down almost to nothing; overnight, Odette – starved of the written word for more than a century – had devoured chunks of Tolstoy that would have taken Mitzi a week to read. Forcing herself back to work mode, she polished what she had written the day before. Then, gathering her courage, she dialled Rob Winter’s number, half hoping he’d be out.
‘Mitzi!’ came his voice, before she’d spoken one word. ‘How are you? How’s it going?’
‘Good, thanks. Shall I read you the piece?’
‘Fire away.’
Mitzi read. Now the language flowed and all the information she wanted to include sat snug within the word limit.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Rob declared at the end. ‘It’s beautiful and you used all the quotes I hoped you’d choose. Will you let me buy you dinner to say thank you? Are you busy tomorrow?’
‘Um—’ Mitzi swallowed. The next day, Harry was taking Odette out. Mitzi was anxious about the possible outcome. On the other hand, she could do nothing about it. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘That’d be great.’
The swan had swung her large body across the room to the window and was staring out through the bright new glass. Mitzi pushed up the sash and Odette, still not used to taking off from heights, hesitated on the sill, spread her wings and launched herself. She reeled briefly, then gained equilibrium and headed upwards and out of sight.
Mitzi watched the bird vanish. She would go into town to work off her confusion and do some errands. At least the corporate journal had paid up and she was solvent again. She cycled to the marketplace and joined the crowds of Christmas shoppers. In the midst of this morass, she had to buy Odette some clothes for her big evening out and normal evenings in.
Among the market stalls, she browsed through woollen dresses and skirts with intricate floral patterns in many colours. Her mind felt like used cotton wool; she had to force herself into focus. Odette was the issue – human Odette, petite, jet-haired, snow-skinned. She bought an Indian dress like her own, but smaller and made of thicker material, bright red with black and gold embroidery. At a nearby stall she picked up three t-shirts, green, red and blue, some basic underwear, a warm white jersey with a zip and hood and a pair of skinny jeans, extra small. That would give Odette a basic wardrobe, but for—
‘Oh God,’ said Mitzi aloud. ‘Shoes.’ A passing woman turned and smiled at her. Mitzi walked towards the pedestrian mall, wondering whether she was beginning to unhinge.
She found a cheap shoe shop that had a 2-for-1 deal on ballet pumps, so took it up. Emerging with two pairs in size 3 – one black, one white – and socks to match, she remembered that she, too, had a dinner date. Did she have the fu
nds now to buy herself a new dress? No, that would be far too extravagant, and anyway, Rob simply wanted to take her out to say thank you for the article, which might look quite different in print once the subeditor had cut it, so there was no need to dress up.
‘Spare a little change, please,’ came a female voice from nearby: a pale woman, cheekbones protruding, thin hair scraped into a ponytail, was sitting on the ground near a set of bins and a cashpoint, a paper cup in front of her. Mitzi scooped her loose change into it.
She was about to head home when strange noises caught her ear: voices excited or anxious, running feet clattering over the cobbles, shouts echoing off the façades of the shops and colleges on Duke’s Parade. Mitzi dashed back to her bicycle and pedalled off to investigate.
10
The swan soared high over the spires of Cygnford. Overnight, in her human shape amid the study’s cardboard boxes, she had slept little; instead, she’d alternated between reading that astonishing book by Lev Tolstoy, and pondering the difference between herself as a young princess with a boudoir full of exquisite jewels and ball dresses, and herself today, trying to find her feet in a new town, longing for something even slightly nice to wear to this modern ball.
She circled, watching the swarms of people around the city centre, as tiny from the air as soldiering ants. They’d walk into shops under the arching Christmas angels, searching for gifts for their families; later they’d come out carrying large, shiny bags. She couldn’t do this.
Or could she?
Odette cruised over the town centre until she spotted a quiet portion of pavement, beside a small chapel. It was difficult for a swan to land except on water, or occasionally crashing through somebody’s window. She had mastered Mitzi’s flat, though sometimes the kilims slid on the floor under her weight, taking her with them; and leaping into the air from the windowsill was not ideal, but could be managed, with care. The paved ground was another matter. Still, nothing ventured… Odette lowered her wings a jot, letting herself glide gradually downwards. The grey slab of pavement approached and she extended her feet to take the weight, balancing with her wings to lessen the shock. The impact, when it came, was horrible, a sharp jolt of unyielding stone that sent a tide of pain through her joints, but after it subsided she found she was unharmed, safe and where she wanted to be.
Odette Page 10