There was a muffled groan. No one had anything against Erik Zveginzov. It was just that Assessments were the most dreaded event in the school calendar.
‘As you all know,’ Mrs Lavington went on, ‘Mr Zveginzov is an international star with a fearsomely busy schedule. It was quite a task to persuade him to come at all, and for that we have to thank Miss Minning and her almost, one might say, magical powers of persuasion.’
Mel’s fingers sought the nearest bit of Alice, and gave her a significant pinch.
In the changing room after Assembly, as Mel and Alice were getting dressed for ballet along with the rest of their class, the air was thick with talk of the Assessments. The awful thing about them was that, every year, the pupils who didn’t pass were asked to leave.
‘More people will get the boot this time,’ said the girl next to Mel, a collection of hairgrips clamped between her teeth. ‘A fifth former told me ours is the year they really sort the Darceys from the dodos. ’Cos in September the best ones’ll go into Minning’s class, and they don’t want too many stragglers.’
‘The sooner they cut out the dead wood the better, in my opinion,’ drawled another voice. This was Tabitha Fanthorpe, self-proclaimed owner of the Best Feet in the Class (and Possibly the World). Tabitha found ballet easy (she said), and was – Mel had to admit – infuriatingly good at it.
Standing at the barre a few minutes later while their teacher marked out a plié exercise, Mel found herself feeling hot and cold all over. She had wanted to get into Miss Minning’s class ever since her first week at Crumblewood, when she had seen Miss Minning floating (she was sure of it) down the corridor.
True, it was a frightening prospect. But people went into Miss Minning’s class hardly able to turn a single pirouette, and came out sailing round three or four times, easy breezy.
There were rumours that she taught you how to jump and not come down.
There were rumours that you learnt not just how to balance on one leg – but on no legs, too.
There were also rumours that for the first six months Miss Minning made you sit facing a wall, learning concentration.
The most curious thing of all, though, was that once somebody joined Miss Minning’s class, you could never get them to talk about it, however much of a chatterbox they’d been beforehand.
And Mel was a sucker for a mystery. What went on in Miss Minning’s classes? She just had to know. Which meant she just had to pass this Assessment.
That night after lights out, Mel and Alice crept to the window of the bedroom they shared and hauled up the sash. With a rumble, they heard their friends in the room next door, Fran and Trudi, doing the same. They always said good night this way.
‘By the way, I heard Mrs Lavington talking to that Zveginzov bloke on the phone,’ whispered Fran, as loudly as she dared. ‘Our Assessment’s fixed for the day after tomorrow.’
‘So soon!’ wailed Alice.
Mel didn’t say a word. She turned back into the room to look at herself in the mirror. And sighed.
The thing was, Mel wasn’t what you’d call natural ballerina material. She wasn’t petite like Alice, or willowy like Fran. She had big hands and feet. She had knees that were verging on the knobbly. Even her hair wouldn’t behave – it sprung from her head in tight little curls, and was about as sleek as a sheep’s woolly jumper. But she loved dancing more than anything else in the world. If she had to give it up . . . it would feel like giving up breathing.
‘What if it’s me this year?’ Mel whispered a few minutes later, when Alice had shut the window and they were climbing into bed. ‘“Melanie Gristwood, you are the weakest link – goodbye!” I mean, look at me. Hands like wet halibut, gangly as a drunk giraffe. I’d throw me out!’
‘No, no,’ insisted Alice. ‘I’d throw me out.’
‘You? Ha!’ said Mel. ‘Take a look at yourself, Alice. You’ve got flat turn out, you can get your legs round your earholes, and your natural style of movement is wafting.’
Alice frowned. ‘Thanks very much.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Mel. And she yanked the duvet up to her chin.
Thwunk! The studio door swung open. Miss Minning and Erik Zveginzov entered, gliding and striding respectively. At the barre, a line of pupils standing in first position pulled up their knees even tighter, tucked their bottoms under and tried, largely unsuccessfully, not to look nervous.
Miss Minning and Mr Zveginzov installed themselves in chairs. Miss Minning had a clipboard. Mr Zveginzov had muscles that Mel found quite mesmerizing.
‘Prepare: one-and-a two-and-a three . . .’ intoned the class teacher, Miss Everett, and Mel snapped her attention back to the exercise. As she lifted her arm into first position, she noticed her fingers trembling.
Be brilliant, be brilliant . . . Mel urged herself silently, over and over. But she found that the harder she tried, the more seemed to go wrong. She wobbled in fondus, and when it came to frappés her brain turned to spaghetti – she just couldn’t get the exercise right.
It didn’t help that Tabitha Fanthorpe was standing directly behind her, and spent the whole of grands battements kicking Mel up the bottom.
‘Oi!’ hissed Mel. ‘Cut it out, will you?’
‘This class is too crowded,’ Tabitha hissed back. ‘The sooner you go, Gristwood, the better.’
‘It was awful! A total, utter disaster!’
‘It wasn’t that bad.’
‘Did you see my adage? I fell over.’
‘Everyone knows there’s a wonky floorboard in that corner.’
‘It wasn’t a wonky floorboard. It was a wonky me.’
Mel and Alice were in the dinner queue, shuffling slowly past framed photographs of Crumblewood’s illustrious ex-pupils. Mel could hardly bear to look at all those proud Prince Siegfrieds and smiling Lilac Fairies.
‘I can’t believe they don’t tell us the results for a fortnight,’ groaned Mel. ‘It’s cruel. It’s torture.’
‘Are you going to moan all the time?’ asked Alice. ‘For two whole weeks?’
‘Definitely,’ said Mel.
‘Then it is torture,’ said Alice.
‘You know what, Mel?’ said Alice ten minutes later, when they were sitting with their trays. ‘I think you should take matters into your own hands.’
‘What d’you mean?’
Alice’s normally serious little face was bright with excitement. She leaned forward. ‘I dare you to go into Miss Minning’s rooms and see if you can find your Assessment report.’
‘You . . . you wouldn’t!’ Mel was shocked.
‘I just did.’
Dares were serious things. Mel and Alice awarded points for them, and kept a running score. Refusal meant points deducted.
Mel gulped. ‘But . . . what if she caught me?’
Alice smiled sweetly. ‘If you really think you’re going to get chucked out, what do you have to lose?’
That night, Crumblewood College sat hunched like a giant stone toad in the inky darkness. Only the dimmest of night-lights glowed in its corridors. Somewhere, an owl hooted and behind closed bedroom doors, two hundred pupils stirred and turned over in their sleep.
The two-hundred-and-first, one Melanie Gristwood, stopped in her tracks, her bare feet chilly on the cold lino floor. Inside her chest, her heart was pounding like it wanted to get out.
She had reached the bottom of a stone spiral staircase. Above her lay the tower rooms where Miss Minning lived. Taking one deep, shuddering breath and angling her torch-beam down on to the steps, Mel began to climb.
The staircase made three whole revolutions before a door appeared. It was wooden, and pointed at the top liked a church window. It was also ajar.
The slice of room Mel could see through the crack showed her the edge of a desk, piled neatly with books. ‘Study,’ said Mel to herself with relief (she had feared coming upon Miss Minning in her bed). There was no light on. Since the idea of Miss Minning sitting there in the dark was just too scary,
Mel decided that the room was empty. Gingerly, she pushed the door further open and stole inside.
Assessment reports – where would they be? Mel shone her torch on the desktop, and noticed that in amongst the books there was a single stack of paper. The top sheet had a little writing on it – just a line or two. Stealthily, Mel approached, and bent to read it.
‘Melanie Gristwood –’ she read. ‘A remarkable, unusual talent. Would improve vastly if she had more confidence. My class.’
The words floated before Mel’s eyes. A warm feeling spread through her, like runny honey trickling deliciously down her insides.
That was all the paper said. Mel didn’t dare disturb it to see what was written on the sheets underneath. It was only later that it struck Mel as an astonishing coincidence that her report, and her report alone should be lying there in full view. Almost . . . but what a silly thought! Almost as if she had been expected.
Now, though, with nothing more on her mind than relief that she had not been seen, Mel tiptoed back down the staircase. As she did so, a slender figure in a silk kimono dressing gown leaned out of the doorway to watch her go. Then, with a secret smile, Miss Minning turned back into her room, and softly closed the door.
Mel gazed out at the warm September sunshine and smiled. It was funny how things had turned out last term. Who would’ve predicted that Tabitha Fanthorpe would fail her Assessment? ‘The word on the corridors,’ Alice had whispered at the time, ‘is that Minning reckons Tab’s smug and lazy. And no amount of talent makes up for that.’
Alice herself had survived to start this new term (phew!), and Fran and Trudi too. What Mel had found utterly mind-wobblingly amazing, though, was that of the four of them only she had been asked to join Miss Minning’s class.
It was little wonder that for the past few nights she’d barely had a wink’s sleep. Now Mel swallowed hard, turned away from the window and checked the corridor clock for the fifth time. Ten to three. Class was about to begin.
Her heart had started a crazy excited jig, and it felt as though her stomach was trying to turn itself inside out. This was the moment she’d been waiting for. Miss Minning’s secrets were about to be revealed. Mel took a deep breath. ‘Unusual talent,’ she recited to herself. ‘Would improve vastly if she had more confidence.’
Then, stretching out a hand, Mel pushed on the studio door and stepped inside.
The Rose of Puddle Fratrum
by Joan Aiken
RIGHT, THEN: IMAGINE this little village, not far back from the sea, in the chalk country. Puddle Fratrum is its name. One dusty, narrow street, winding along from the Haymakers’ Arms to Mrs Sherborne’s Bed and Breakfast (with french marigolds and bachelors’ buttons in the front garden): halfway between these two, at an acute bend, an old old, grey stone house, right on the pavement, but with a garden behind hidden from the prying eyes of strangers by a high wall. And the house itself – now here’s a queer thing – the house itself covered all over thick, doors, windows, and all, by a great climbing rose, fingering its way up to the gutters and over the stone-slabbed roof, sending out tendrils this way and that, round corners, over sills, through crevices, till the place looks not so much like a house, more like a mound of vegetation, a great green thorny thicket.
In front of it, a BBC man, standing and scratching his head.
Presently the BBC man, whose name was Rodney Cushing, walked along to the next building, which was a forge.
TOBIAS PROUT, BLACKSMITH AND FARRIER, said the sign, and there he was, white-haired, leather-aproned, with a pony’s bent knee gripped under his elbow, trying on a red-hot shoe for size.
Rodney waited until the fizzling and sizzling and smell of burnt coconut had died down, and then he asked, ‘Can you tell me if that was the ballerina’s house?’ – pointing at the rose-covered clump.
BBC men are used to anything, but Rodney was a bit startled when the blacksmith, never even answering, hurled the red-hot pony shoe at the stone wall of his forge (where it buckled into a figure-eight and sizzled some more), turned his back, and stomped to an inner room where he began angrily working his bellows and blowing up his forge fire.
Rodney, seeing no good was to be had from the blacksmith, walked along to the Haymakers’ Arms.
‘Can you tell me,’ he said to Mr Donn the landlord over a pint of old and mild, ‘can you tell me anything about the house with the rose growing over it?’
‘Arr,’ said the landlord.
‘Did it belong to a ballet dancer?’
‘Maybe so.’
‘Famous thirty years back?’
‘Arr.’
‘By name Rose Collard?’
‘Arr,’ said the landlord. ‘The Rose of Puddle Fratrum, they did use to call her. And known as far afield as Axminster and Poole.’
‘She was known all over the world.’
‘That may be. I can only speak for these parts.’
‘I’m trying to make a film about her life, for the BBC. I daresay plenty of people in the village remember her?’
‘Arr. Maybe.’
‘I was asking the blacksmith, but he didn’t answer.’
‘Deaf. Deaf as an adder.’
‘He didn’t seem deaf,’ Rodney said doubtfully.
‘None so deaf as them what won’t hear. All he hears is nightingales.’
‘Oh. How very curious. Which reminds me, can you put me up for the night?’
‘Not I,’ said the landlord gladly. ‘Old Mrs Sherborne’s fule enough for that, though; she’ll have ye.’
Mrs Sherborne, wrinkled and tart as a dried apricot, was slightly more prepared to be communicative about the Rose of Puddle Fratrum.
‘My second cousin by marriage, poor thing,’ she said, clapping down a plate with a meagre slice of Spam, two lettuce leaves, and half a tomato. ‘Slipped on a banana-peel, she did (‘twas said one of the scene-shifters dropped it on the stage); mortification set in, they had to take her leg off, that was the end of her career.’
‘Did she die? Did she retire? What happened to her?’
In his excitement and interest, Rodney swallowed Spam, lettuce, tomato, and all, at one gulp. Mrs Sherborne pressed her lips together and carried away his plate.
‘Came back home, went into a decline, never smiled again,’ she said, returning with two prunes and half a dollop of junket so thickly powdered over with nutmeg that it looked like sandstone. ‘Let the rose grow all over the front of her house, wouldn’t answer the door, wouldn’t see a soul. Some say she died. Some say she went abroad. Some say she’s still there and the nightingales fetch her food. (Wonderful lot of nightingales we do have hereabouts, all the year round.) But one thing they’re all agreed on.’
‘What’s that?’ The prunes and junket had gone the way of the Spam in one mouthful; shaking her head, Mrs Sherborne replaced them with two dry biscuits and a square centimetre of processed cheese wrapped in a seamless piece of foil that defied all attempts to discover its opening.
‘When she hurt her leg she was a-dancing in a ballet that was writ for her special. About a rose and a nightingale, it was. They say that for one scene they had to have the stage knee-deep in rose-petals – fresh every night, too! Dear, dear! Think of the cost!’
Mrs Sherborne looked sadly at the mangled remains of the cheese (Rodney had managed to haggle his way through the foil somehow) and carried it away.
‘Well, and so?’ Rodney asked, when she came back into the dark, damp little parlour with a small cup of warm water into which a minute quantity of Dark Tan shoe-polish had almost certainly been dissolved. ‘What about this ballet?’
‘’Twas under all the rose-petals the banana-peel had been dropped. That was how she came to slip on it. So when Rose Collard retired she laid a curse on the ballet – she came of a witch family, there’s always been a-plenty witches in these parts, as well as nightingales,’ Mrs Sherborne said, nodding dourly, and Rodney thought she might easily qualify for membership of the Puddle Fratrum and District Witches
’ Institute herself – ‘laid a curse on the ballet. “Let no company ever put it on again,” says she, a-sitting in her wheelchair, “or, sure as I sit here –”’
‘Sure as I sit here, what?’ asked Rodney eagerly.
‘I disremember exactly. The dancer as took Rose’s part would break her leg, or the stage’d collapse, or there’d be some other desprat mischance. Anyway, from that day to this, no one’s ever dared to do that ballet, not nowhere in the world.’
Rodney nodded gloomily. He already knew this. It had been extremely difficult even to get hold of a copy of the score and choreographic script. The Nightingale and the Rose had been based on a version of a story by Oscar Wilde. Music had been specially written by Augustus Irish, choreography by Danny Pashkinski, costumes and scenery designed by Rory el Moro. The original costumes were still laid away in mothballs in the Royal Museum of Ballet. Rodney was having nylon copies made for his film.
‘Well, you won’t be wanting nothing more, I don’t suppose,’ Mrs Sherborne said, as if Rod might be expected to demand steak tartare and praline ice. ‘Here’s the bath plug. I dare say you will wish to retire as the TV’s out of order. Put the plug back in the kitchen after you’ve had your bath.’
This was presumably to discourage Rodney from the sin of taking two baths in quick succession, but he had no wish to do so. The water was hardly warmer than the coffee. When he ran it into the tiny bath, a sideways trickle from the base of the tap flowed on to the floor, alarming an enormous spider so much that all the time Rodney was in the bath he could hear it scurrying agitatedly about the linoleum. A notice beside a huge canister of scouring powder said PLEASE LEAVE THIS BATH CLEAN, after which some guest with spirit still unbroken had added WHY USE IT OTHERWISE?
Shivering, Rodney dropped the bath plug in the kitchen sink and went to his room. But the bed had only one thin, damp blanket; he got dressed again, and leaned out of the window. Some nightingales were beginning to tune up in the distance. The summer night was cool and misty, with a great vague moon sailing over the dim silvered roofs of Puddle Fratrum. Due to the extreme curve in the village street, the corner of Mrs Sherborne’s back garden touched on another, enclosed by a high wall, which Rod was almost sure was that of the legendary Rose Collard.
Darcey Bussell Favourite Ballet Stories Page 14