‘I’m so glad that Gam’s coming home,’ said Moth, relieved that Libby had changed the subject. ‘It’ll be marvellous to have real food again.’
There were, she had discovered, limits to her appetite for things on toast, things with chips, crispy pancake rolls (Libby’s favourite) and even beef chop-suey.
But although their great-aunt was determined to get back on her feet, she was declared housebound for the first few weeks and had to be content with hopping round on crutches. She had become, it seemed to Moth, smaller and frailer, as though the fracture had breached her defence against growing old; but her spirit was obstinately defiant.
‘Thank you, but no,’ she said firmly when the Health Visitor mentioned Meals on Wheels. ‘They are for the elderly and handicapped. I still have all my faculties and two energetic nieces. I’m sure we can manage.’
And manage they did, though Libby grumbled at having to do the washing-up every evening and accused her great-aunt – though not in her hearing – of being too proud to accept help.
They were under pressure at school too, with the threat of O levels brandished at nearly every lesson and the approach of the all-important audition.
‘Not that it’ll do you any good,’ said Miss Pearson briskly when Jane, who was unexpectedly in the final audition, brought a note from her parents asking for extra classes. ‘You’re not going to dazzle them with some sudden burst of talent you’ve picked up at the last minute. What they’re looking for is long-term potential, qualities that will blossom under their special training and, above all, the right kind of physique. You’ve either got it or you haven’t, and you’ll be at your best if you just try and relax.’
Moth was tempted to ask Miss Pearson about her foot, which was increasingly painful after pointe-work, but she told herself that this was normal – surely she’d read of dancers bravely going on with bleeding toes. She would know soon enough anyway if something was seriously wrong because Marsha, who had auditioned the previous year and was now happily doing stage dancing, had told them what to expect.
‘They divide you up into . . . I think it was three groups – about twenty in each – and then you do a simple class. Pliés, fondus, battements, the usual sort of thing. And they watch you like hawks.’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘There were four of them; one was the principal and I suppose the others were teachers. They ask you to do frogs to show your turn out and they push your legs to see if the hip joint is free. That’s all. I kept thinking how can my whole future depend on something so ordinary as a simple, everyday class.’
‘And that’s it?’ In one of her favourite fantasies, Moth liked to see herself giving such an inspired display that she was offered a place on the spot.
‘Well that’s all I did.’ Marsha would have liked to have made more of her story, and perhaps scare that spoilt Jane. ‘We were asked to wait while they compared notes, and then they called out the names of those they wanted to stay on. I wasn’t one of them, so I don’t know what happened next.’
‘I shall cry,’ said Jane, who expected to be chosen, ‘I know I shall cry if they don’t call out my name.’
And sure enough she did.
She was not the only one, though Moth was determined not to show her feelings. It had all been as Marsha said: a simple class taken by a brisk young teacher who gave them a brief reassuring smile before leading them into Pliés, etc. Then they changed shoes for pointe work.
The studio with its mirrors and barres was like all the others Moth had practised in over the years, and the other . . . students they were called now, only a step away from the confident, purposeful adults who had jostled past them in the entrance hall, off to rehearse with Merle, Wayne, Julian, Marguerite . . . the other students looked calm and serious, though inside they were probably as tense and nervous as Moth was.
‘Wonder what they’re saying?’ said Tom, more to pass the time than because he expected an answer.
‘They were writing things down,’ said Libby, who had kept an eye on the auditioners. ‘And they found us funny. Two of them were whispering – like we’re not allowed to – and trying hard not to laugh.’
‘I don’t feel like laughing,’ wailed Jane. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
Tom, unhelpfully, suggested the fire-bucket, and the girls had just decided to go in search of the loo when one of the auditioners returned and they froze like statues.
The names were called alphabetically, so Tom came first.
‘Tom Blundell-Smith.’ He grinned with relief.
Everyone else seemed to begin with F . . . Foster . . . Forsyth . . . Fraser . . . Those at the end of the alphabet looked despairing.
‘Elizabeth Graham.’ Moth looked down. She would be next, if chosen . . .
‘Jennifer Graham.’
It was like musical chairs. She had survived for the moment, but only a handful of the last thirty would finally win.
Moth knew on the way home that she hadn’t made it. While Libby and Tom kept up their spirits by being rude about the other hopefuls, Moth was silent. It was no use pretending; she knew. Knew that she wouldn’t be going to Talgarth Road, wouldn’t be learning the repertoire, covering rehearsals, waiting for the chance – because someone was suddenly sick or injured – that would magically put her on stage in the back row of the corps de ballet. None of that would happen. She wouldn’t ever be a little swan – and she’d often linked hands with imaginary cygnets to that jaunty little tune – or ever dance at Covent Garden.
Her eyes pricked at the unfairness of it all: she had been deceived by dreams that had spurred her into practising, by teachers who had encouraged her when they ought to have known . . . Her anger and resentment became an anguish that made her feel sick. Noise, lights, movement stabbed at her head, yelling in triumph as they made her wince. Getting home seemed an almost impossible goal, and once there she went straight to her room and fell on the bed, burying her head beneath the welcome darkness of the pillow.
Libby told her worried great-aunt: ‘Moth doesn’t want any supper. She’s got a bit of a headache.’
The pain was gone the next morning but Moth couldn’t face going to school. What was the point? It was all over, everything she’d been aiming for all her life, and it no longer even seemed important. She lay there feeling numb, drained, remembering the hours she had spent practising, wondering how many classes she had done over the years . . . She couldn’t recall a time when she hadn’t danced – and apparently it had all been for nothing.
When Libby breezed in to ask how she felt, Moth burrowed under the clothes and said she still felt sick . . . not well enough to go today . . . not well enough to go ever again, she wanted to say.
‘OK, I’ll tell Gam. Do you want anything – orange juice, cornflakes?’ Libby thought she was shamming.
‘No thanks.’
Later Moth heard the front door slam and felt relieved that Libby had gone. I shall take everything down, she thought, looking fretfully round the room. All those ridiculous reminders of being a dancer, they had betrayed her, fired her enthusiasm for a way of life that was now to be denied her. They had tempted and tantalized her, only to snatch away the prize as she had reached out for it.
She heard the downstairs clock strike the half hour and then the silence resumed. It felt unnatural to be doing nothing in the time that properly belonged to school. She pictured them in class, having a verb test, getting their history essays back – she was sorry to miss that, as she was secretly proud of hers – but there was nothing there to tell her what to do with the rest of her life now that she couldn’t dance.
She got up, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, and unearthed an old sweater with frayed elbows. It felt comforting and don’t-carish, though it didn’t do anything for the cold deep inside her.
Her great-aunt was still in bed, but she heard Moth moving around and called to her.
Moth drifted into her bedroom.
‘Libby said you were
n’t well. Are you feeling better?’
Moth shrugged her shoulders. ‘S’pose so.’
Moth, who was incandescent when she was happy, drooped like a flower out of water. She’s so transparent, her great-aunt thought, so easily cast down. She was afraid of saying the wrong thing, but she sensed Moth needed to talk.
‘Tell me what happened yesterday. Did something go wrong?’
Moth’s mouth trembled and she burst out: ‘It’s so unfair! Why let me go on dancing all this time if I haven’t got the right kind of feet. Why didn’t someone say so, ages ago?’
‘Is that what the school said?’
‘More or less. I was so pleased when I got through to the second round. I thought it was going to be all right. We had to do a few dance sequences and then we were examined by a doctor. He asked lots of questions and took lots of measurements, and then he looked at my feet and asked if I ever had any pain with them. My right foot does hurt sometimes, though I tried not to admit it, and then he said something about having a high extended instep. I asked him if that was bad, and he said that it would see me through life all right, but if I became a dancer I would be asking it to take a tremendous amount of strain, especially with pointe work, and I could end up crippled. He tried to explain but I didn’t really take in what he was saying . . . I just knew that I wouldn’t get a place . . . that it didn’t matter how hard I’d worked . . .’
Moth was crying now as the pain freshened. ‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ she sobbed, ‘if I hadn’t been good enough, if I hadn’t worked hard, but this isn’t my fault; it was all decided in advance – in a sense when I was born – and I never knew . . .’
She sat down on the bed and her great-aunt put her arms around her. ‘Moth, dear, I’m so sorry. What a terrible disappointment, and how awful for you to find out like that.’ She stroked Moth’s hair gently and Moth inhaled a faint scent of far away flowers. ‘No wonder you felt rotten last night. I wish I’d known. I hate to think of you going off to bed early by yourself. I wanted to come and see you, but I can’t manage the stairs with those wretched crutches. What a pair we are: both wounded warriors.’
‘I don’t know what to do,’ Moth confessed. ‘I’ve never thought of becoming anything but a dancer. There really isn’t anything else I want to be. Honestly, Gam, I’m not just being difficult.’
‘You feel that now, but you need time to adjust. Nobody knows what to do at first when they lose something important in their lives, but the answer will turn up, however impossible it seems now.’
‘I know one thing: I’m not going back to school.’
‘Well I don’t suppose it’ll matter for a few days. You may feel different next week.’
‘I won’t,’ Moth said firmly. ‘If I can’t dance, then I don’t want any more to do with dancing: no more classes, no more shows, nothing.’
Great-Aunt Marion didn’t argue; she saw that Moth was in no mood to listen to reason, but Moth’s mother was less understanding when she rang up that evening.
‘Don’t be silly, darling, of course you must go back to school. You must finish off the year at the Fortune, do your O levels, and then we can decide what to do next.’
‘I want to go to another school.’
‘All right, dear, but you can’t change just now with the exams only two or three months away. Try and be sensible.’
‘I’m not ever going to set foot in the Fortune again. I hate it. I hate all the teachers. It’s their silly fault this has happened. They should have known about my feet . . .’ Moth dissolved into angry tears.
‘Perhaps they should’ – Mrs Graham was trying to appease Moth – ‘but you are rather jumping to conclusions. After all, you haven’t heard definitely that you haven’t got a place.’
‘I haven’t, I haven’t . . .’ Moth shouted into the receiver. ‘Don’t be so stupid. They’ve got plenty of other girls to choose from, girls like Libby who’ve got the right kind of feet . . .’ Libby . . . She couldn’t bear to think of Libby being offered a place . . .
‘We’re not getting anywhere like this. You’re obviously in one of your difficult moods. I’d like to have a word with Marion – I hope you’re not taking it out on her.’
‘No, I’m not, because she’s not like you. She knows what dancing means to me and she can understand why I don’t want to go to school . . .’ Moth slammed the phone down and went off to her room as her great-aunt, looking concerned, hobbled into the hall.
Moth stuck to her decision not to go to school for the rest of the week. No one, not even Libby, said anything about it, and her great-aunt seemed positively to enjoy having Moth around the house. She did the shopping, some dusting and hoovering, and learned how to make pastry, surprising herself with a crisp steak and kidney pie that Libby, not one for flattery, pronounced terrific. It was as though she had had a severe illness – the kind children in old-fashioned books had – and was now convalescent. She knew that she couldn’t go on like this, but she was grateful for the chance to recover in her own way.
Then one afternoon the bell rang, and there on the doorstep was Miss Pearson. Moth looked at her as though she belonged to another life.
‘Well, aren’t you going to ask me in? You won’t come to me, so I thought perhaps Mahomet had better come to the mountain.’
Moth grinned sheepishly. ‘Did you want to see my great-aunt? She’s lying down at the moment.’
‘No, I’ve come to see you. I thought it might be easier to have a talk at home, where there’s no one to disturb us.’
Moth led her upstairs and into the drawing room, where Miss Pearson perched on the settee and came straight to the point. ‘I’m afraid the Royal Ballet school are not going to offer you a place because their osteopath feels that your feet aren’t strong enough to take the strain of a career in classical ballet. I think you already knew that, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Moth agreed miserably. She had known, and yet . . .
‘I’m sorry, because I know you’re disappointed and you’re one of the most promising dancers we’ve had in a long time. Technique has never been your strong point – you feel too much to have a reliable technique – but you’re blessed with an unusual creative appreciation of dancing.’
‘The others . . . ?’ Moth wanted to get it over.
‘Tom has been offered a place and so has Libby. Linden has been accepted for the teaching course, but you weren’t interested in that, were you?’
‘No.’ Moth couldn’t stop the tears coming . . . Libby who’d been her rival all along . . . who was so unaffected by life and always got what she wanted . . . Libby had fulfilled Moth’s dream and would go on and on . . .
Miss Pearson ignored Moth’s tears. ‘So what we have to decide now is what you are going to do next, and I’ve got one idea you might like to consider.’
‘I don’t want to be a teacher or do my A levels and go to university,’ Moth gulped. ‘And I don’t want anything more to do with dancing now that I can’t dance.’
‘Who said you can’t dance?’ Miss Pearson didn’t sound in the least sympathetic. ‘You can go on dancing if you’re really determined, and I came round here because I thought that was what you wanted. I didn’t know you’d changed your mind.’
‘I haven’t, but it’s been changed for me, hasn’t it?’
‘My dear Moth, like hundreds of other aspiring dancers you’ve failed to get into a course that would have qualified you at best to be a classical dancer. What you think of as the lucky ones will get a training that will make them more marketable as classical dancers, but their chance of getting into the company is very remote. All the White Lodge students are put in one class and new recruits to the company usually come from that class; only the odd girl from the other classes stands a ghost of a chance of being picked. You certainly wouldn’t have been, because you have neither the technique nor the temperament to stand up to the tough world of the company. Your gifts are only likely to flourish in very different soil.’
&
nbsp; Moth didn’t understand what she was getting at.
‘The best thing you’ve done so far was that little ballet about the mad girl. You threw yourself into it because you enjoy creating, and I think that’s the area we should concentrate on now.’
‘But I can’t just become a choreographer . . .’
‘No, of course not, but you stand a much greater chance of developing such a gift in a more fluid, experimental atmosphere, somewhere that welcomes ideas, that’s closer to the way ballet is going in the future than a major prestige company can afford to be.’
‘What sort of a place?’
‘A friend of mine who teaches at a School of Contemporary Dance was impressed by your ballet and asked whether you’d thought of auditioning for them. I told her that you’d set your heart on trying for the Royal, and that you’d have to find out for yourself that you weren’t right for them before you’d be prepared to consider anywhere else.’
‘You knew all along that I wouldn’t get in,’ said Moth accusingly.
‘I suspected it, yes, but it didn’t seem a tragedy because I knew there were other things open to you.’
‘But not the things I want. I quite like the contemporary dance classes, but not in preference to classical. I –’
‘I suspect you don’t really know much about it. You’ve been so set on one thing for so long that you’ve shut your eyes to everything else. If you’d ever seen the Martha Graham company or the London Contemporary Dance Theatre I don’t think you’d feel I was suggesting some kind of second-class consolation prize. Contemporary dance isn’t a poor second, Moth, it’s an exciting challenge, and the school I had in mind has a teacher who trained with Graham and is the only person over here teaching the authentic Graham style. But if you don’t want to know about it –’
‘I do.’ The world was right side up again. ‘It’s just that I thought I’d got to give up dancing . . . and I’ve been trying not to think about it.’
Darcey Bussell Favourite Ballet Stories Page 16