Odette, striking human form again around 5pm, ran her fingers over the beading, her mouth open with joy. ‘This is so beautiful! When you say this design is done?’
‘It’s a vintage thing, based on the 1920s.’
‘Is not like our dresses in Russia, is funny shape…’
‘Try it on and see how it looks.’
Moments later, Odette came back from the bathroom with the dress shimmering in the lamplight, its embellishments reflecting back from her eyes. She was going to be difficult, very difficult, for Harry to resist. ‘Let’s just take in the shoulders a tiny bit,’ Mitzi said, and set to work with the safety pins, trying not to give away to Odette quite how extraordinary she looked. Perhaps it would be safer – for everyone – if she had no idea of the power of her own beauty.
‘When you go out?’ Odette wanted to know.
‘About seven. I think Harry’s coming by then for you too. I’m going to have a bath…’
‘And I have time to read!’ Odette declared, bounding across to the armchair.
Running her bath, Mitzi threw some rose-scented oil into the water. She basked for ten minutes and washed her hair. In her dressing gown, she stood by the wardrobe wondering what to wear. She settled on a blue dress that matched her eyes. She probably shouldn’t have been dressing up for her thank-you dinner with Rob Winter – it was just an ill-motivated habit. From the living room, silence. When she glanced round the door, Odette was still in the leather chair, bare feet tucked up under her, motionless but for her eyes, which were drinking in words with a joy reserved by others for vintage champagne.
‘This amazing person,’ said Odette, without looking up. ‘This man, Tolstoy. I have never seen a book like this before.’
‘Nor have I,’ Mitzi admitted. ‘I should read it again too, but only in English.’
‘I teach you Russian,’ Odette beamed. ‘And you teach me English.’
‘Sounds good,’ Mitzi said, part of her imagining evenings with the mysteries of Cyrillic unfolding in front of her, or explaining the past imperfect tense to Odette – and another part wondering just how long Odette might be considering staying here.
The bell rang at two minutes past seven. Mitzi opened the bay window and waved down to Rob on the front step. ‘I’ll just be a moment!’ she called. All of a sudden, she no longer minded leaving Odette to her own devices with Harry.
‘Shh,’ she whispered to Odette. ‘It’s Rob – he doesn’t know you’re here… I’m sure Harry will be along soon, so have a good time and do be careful.’
‘What you tell Rob?’ asked Odette.
‘Nothing. Don’t worry…’
Outside, Rob was leaning on his propped-up bike, gazing up at the window, his face all but hidden by a dark woollen hat and a red scarf wrapped several times around his neck and chin. ‘Just feels so funny to be back here,’ he said, while Mitzi set about unchaining her own bicycle. ‘I’ve always left everything to Cygnford Estates. Don’t worry, I’m not going to nose about to see if you’ve wrecked the place.’
Mitzi fumbled with her bike key. Was this perhaps one of her sillier ideas – agreeing to a dinner date with her landlord, when she’d repaired a window without telling him and had acquired an unofficial lodger with no identity papers or…
‘Where would you like to go?’ he was asking her, as if that was all that mattered. As far as he knew, it probably was. ‘How about that French place opposite the green?’ He made no further remark about the flat, and Mitzi, pushing off from the curb, changed the subject and chattered about her newspaper. She found herself staring at his back as he rode ahead. The sight was soothing, reassuring, rather like the effect of the lime blossom tea. She watched his feet moving round on the pedals, felt her own assume their rhythm and was conscious of passing cars, bare trees and groups of strolling people nearby in the chilly air: a wintery world in which the motion of wheels and the presence of a friend were the only specific sensations.
Odette, lost in Tolstoy, remembered just in time that she, too, had to prepare to go out.
She pulled on the white dress that Mitzi had bought for her, taking care not to move the safety pins, then combed her hair for five minutes, working out the last traces of feathers and the tangles usually induced by the force of her transformation. Her face in the mirror was odd yet familiar, herself yet not herself, and pale as ice compared to Mitzi’s healthy colour.
Odette had seen Mitzi brightening her cheeks with blusher and enlarging her eyes with liner pencil and knew that these accessories were in a drawer by the basin. She opened it and looked through the boxes, brushes and colours, wondering where to begin.
Ten minutes later the effect was definite, if not quite what she had expected; at least it was better than her unnatural pallor, the result of more than a hundred and sixty years in which her skin had never been exposed to sunlight. She felt better, more confident; when Harry rang the bell she bounded down the stairs, filled with hope.
‘Hey there.’ Harry stared, nonplussed, at his companion for the evening.
‘Harry, great pleasure to see you!’
He picked up her hand and kissed it. Odette was transformed. Carmine cheeks? Silver eyeshadow? Who would have thought that such a natural, charming, unsophisticated girl would slap on the warpaint like that? But of course, she was like him: an eccentric, a free-thinker, born simply to be herself. She was wearing a white, beaded, low-waisted cocktail dress, twenties-style, with an old red coat that was a couple of sizes too big, slung on top for warmth. He recognised it as one of Mitzi’s. Odette hadn’t fastened it and her throat rose from the dress’s white and gold neckline, long, slender and pale, like a swan’s.
He held the taxi door open for her, imagining her without the dress. The idea brought him a surprising stab of guilt as well as the intended excitement. This gorgeous, daffy girl was beautiful, yet unaware of it. She was sexy, yet he’d guess she scarcely knew what the word meant. She was different. She was… innocent. And Harry realised, while the taxi pulled away, that he was having trouble with certain words and their meaning himself.
In the restaurant next to the green where, in summer, Cygnford would play cricket, Mitzi was eating fish, sipping cold French wine and listening to Rob talk about the day he walked out of his City job.
‘I’ll never forget it. All that agonising, and suddenly it was over and I never had to go there again.’
‘You just walked out? After that long?’
‘Crazy… After I’d been thinking I hadn’t planned enough, I needed more security first, I just couldn’t take it any more. I must have gone a little nuts.’
‘I don’t think it’s crazy,’ Mitzi said. ‘It worked out fine, didn’t it? You did your doctorate and you’ve ended up on a lovely academic sabbatical!’
‘I’m a lucky ducky.’ He smiled across the glasses at her. ‘You were brave yourself, going freelance so young. Don’t you mind living and working alone?’
‘It’s funny,’ Mitzi challenged him. ‘If a man lives and works alone, everyone thinks he’s strong and self-sufficient. If it’s a woman, everyone thinks she must be lonely and neurotic.’
‘But I never thought that,’ he protested.
‘I enjoy having some space to myself.’ Mitzi sipped her wine, unobtrusively kicking her own ankle. The restaurant had dark wooden round tables, each bearing a small vase of blue and yellow primulas, and prints of Matisse cut-outs adorned the walls. A Carole King recording was swinging along in the background. The whole should have added up to a relaxed place to be with someone whose company you enjoyed, but she felt coiled with stress, thanks to the cumulative effects of John the editor, Odette the swan and the effort of maintaining her composure when she would have preferred to run into a field and scream her lungs out, rather than risk falling head over heels for her own landlord.
Afraid of talking too much, she encouraged Rob to talk instead. He’d obliged, but even so he was now three quarters through his risotto, while Mitzi, who had mainly been
listening, could find little appetite; most of her lemon sole was still on her plate. Rob seemed to be considering his next move. Then he leaned forward to stare straight into her eyes.
‘I’m confused,’ he said. ‘It’s great, sitting here talking; and I so much like being with you – but you seem rather tense. Is something the matter? I wish you’d tell me.’
Mitzi put down her glass. Rob’s gaze was so intent that he reminded her of the ophthalmologist she had once had to visit after walking into a tree in the Dorset garden. A deep light in his eyes tugged at her heart and larynx.
‘It’s all right. I promise it’s nothing to do with you. It’s – well, I’ve got to know a girl here who really confuses me. I’m trying to help her.’ She put her right heel over her left foot and pressed. What the heck was she doing and saying? Do not tell him she’s been staying. Do not tell him she has so much as set foot in Richardson Road…
‘Yes?’ Rob waited.
She cast about for inspiration. ‘It’s just that – well, it’s all because of this article I’ve been doing about Eastern Europeans who’ve been trafficked or abused in Cygnford, and she’s from – from somewhere out east – and people keep thinking she’ll be like them, but she really isn’t. She’s so unworldly, I can’t think of another word for it, unless it’s “innocent”. “Naïve” sounds wrong. It’s something more profound.’
‘You strike me as quite unworldly yourself,’ said Rob.
‘But in her case, it’s sometimes that she literally doesn’t know how things work. I’ve been showing her stuff – but everything, everything, is new for her. She’s adorable, she’s such fun, but I’m spending so much time worrying about her. And I feel guilty, blaming her. I don’t know what I can do to help her – other than giving her War and Peace to read, because she’s never read it before and she’s crazy about it.’
‘I believe you.’
‘Thank you…’
‘Not only that. I think you’re a wonderful, strong, brave woman and you do yourself down too much. How many people would ever be kind enough to give a stranger that much help, just because she’s there?’
Mitzi felt lost for words. She could glimpse a tempting panorama in which they were together and could share life by instinct, because they understood everything in the same way, streamlined and unspoken. She also knew that most such panoramas vanished as quickly as they’d appeared.
‘I get the feeling there’s a lot I don’t have to explain to you,’ she said, deciding to meet directness with directness.
‘Like what?’
‘Things about trying to put traumas behind you. Trying to turn yourself into the best person you can be, and it’s maybe easier said than done.’
‘And having a solicitous mother a long way off, a younger sibling with – well, directional difficulties – and having lost your father. I didn’t tell you earlier. I wanted to see if you’d guess.’
‘Tell me?’
‘My father died long ago and my mother moved away to live near her sister.’
‘And you have a younger brother?’
‘Sister. She’s four years younger and also not following the path Mum would like. She lives in an ashram in New York State.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Landscaping the gardens, for nothing, and getting close to God. But she’s happy, as your brother is, and we have to leave them to it. You see, we have more in common than you thought. And like I said, it’s all fairy tales, all of it, except to the people who want to believe in their own particular kind of magic.’
She saw his hand move, his fingers uncurling from the knife and extending across the table towards her own. Detached, she watched her own hand loosen from the wineglass and allow Rob’s to meet it. How peculiar their fingers looked, interlaced. How strange it felt: warm, soft and full of energy.
They walked back to Richardson Road, pushing their bikes, talking little. The temperature had dropped several degrees while they were in the restaurant and Mitzi’s nose and ears were beginning to hurt with cold. At the front gate they stood, trying not to catch one another’s eyes.
‘I’d ask you in for coffee, but it’s quite late and I haven’t tidied up,’ Mitzi gulped.
Rob leaned over his bicycle and kissed her cheek. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘and no worries – I should be getting back. There’s a frost starting already and the roads will turn icy. Next time, perhaps?’
‘Next time.’
Locking her bike, Mitzi watched him cycle away towards the crossroads. It was only a few minutes afterwards, when she looked about the empty flat, that it struck her she hadn’t expected to return alone – nor had she wanted to, but for the need to keep Odette out of Rob’s way. ‘Come on, my girl,’ she told herself. ‘Tea, book, bed.’ And she began to wonder how Odette and Harry were getting along at the ball.
12
Odette sat beside Harry in the taxi, watching the houses rushing by, thrilling with the speed of it. She was pleased to see her cavalier for the evening was wearing the black jacket, trousers and bow tie that reminded her of her father’s formal gatherings at home in the old days.
She was remembering another occasion, long ago, when, deep in the forest, her prince had begged her to come to a ball where he would swear fidelity before the entire court. It was summertime, though, and Odette’s nightly transformation had become disturbed, triggered as it was by light. During the white midsummer nights of June, she often remained a swan almost until midnight. The full moon would rise alongside the setting sun, but she would see it only from her lakeside haunt. She waited on the shore, wings folded, shivering, watching the fiery malingerer sink, the sky around it turning from aquamarine to gold to lilac, moment by slow moment. She felt in her blood the interference of the Baron’s spell.
At last she could stand it no longer. She launched into the water and prepared for take-off. The lake surface lifted and scattered under her wings as she broke free into the air, soaring over the woods towards the hill crowned by her prince’s castle.
She wheeled down towards an arched window lit from within by the flickering of a thousand candles. From the great hall a melange of sound – laughter, music, dancing – escaped into the night that was no night. Her prince, arm in arm with a young woman in a black dress, was talking to a bearded man whose face she knew as if it were part of her own body.
She battered the window with her wings and cried out with all her strength, but either the court orchestra drowned the swan’s call or the Baron had ensured by enchantment that she would be neither seen nor heard. The prince’s whole form was turned towards the girl in black, his expression lost and powerless. Odette knew this woman was her manufactured double; and the prince had fallen under the spell, transfixed, obsessed. Feathers tore from her wings as she drummed harder and a diamond-shaped pane shattered, a splinter gashing her side. The nobility within ignored her from their haven of candlelight and warmth. She retreated into the forest, aching for the human expression of grief in tears she could not shed.
The prince came to find her, human again, too late. When the storm blew up, dawn had broken. Odette the swan rode on the rising waters as he drowned.
In the taxi, Odette pushed her memory away. That was all over; she had been granted another chance. Harry was no prince, but here, in her second new century, that seemed not to matter. The important thing now was apparently that they could talk to one another and that when he touched her wrist it tingled. She looked at his long body, fair hair and lively eyes and felt proud to be beside him, picturing them waltzing together later on. Perhaps they would be invited to lead the polonaise. In her mind she rehearsed steps she had not danced in company since her days as a princess – though she had never been above practising them alone by night, when the spring moon was high and shining. She’d deck her hut with clouds of pink bagulnik blossoms and imagine the candles, the orchestra, the dancing partners.
Bardingley Hall, a stately home turned adult education college in the countryside, bo
re little resemblance to a castle, but when Odette walked beside Harry up a long drive lined with flaming torches, surrounded by glamorously clad couples, her heart filled with satisfaction. She recognised the house’s architecture as sixteenth-century, familiar from drawn illustrations her governess had shown her in her father’s leather-bound books. Around the little complex of buildings there stretched deep expanses of parkland and, beyond those, the fields.
Waiting in a queue to leave their coats in a cloakroom, Odette was taken aback when she heard the music that was intended for dancing. She could see no musicians anywhere, just some huge black boxes through which thudded a sound unlike any musical instrument she knew, and much louder, too. Instead of the spacious, civilised aspect of the balls that her father used to hold, this one was packing people into the foyers in such numbers that there was little room to move.
‘Where orchestra?’ She had to shout to make herself heard.
‘There’ll be live bands later,’ he yelled back. ‘Too noisy?’
‘We find place more quiet?’
‘Let’s get a drink. You like cocktails, don’t you?’
Harry held her arm and steered her through the crowds, past a tall Christmas tree, along wood-panelled corridors where multicoloured streamers and tinsel dangled from the ceiling and great bouquets of lilies and irises stood in china urns in the corners. Soon they came to a room where several musicians – each of whom oddly wore a red hat trimmed with white fur and a pom-pom – were plucking and blowing on guitar, double bass and clarinet. To one side, an antique card table topped with green baize bore a silver punch bowl full of something aromatic. At the end of the room, an empty bay window seat seemed to beckon them. Harry filled two glasses to the brim and they settled there on plush cushions to listen to the music.
Odette Page 12