Victoria Clayton - A Girl’s Guide to Kissing Frogs

After several gruelling hours, Sebastian had grabbed my arm, shoved me into a taxi and swept me off to Dulwich. I had had little time to admire the beauty of the house. Sebastian had removed my coat and pointed to the sofa. Sex burns up a lot of calories. Throughout the lovemaking I thought about the dish of pommes frites the weeping impresario had left untouched. I could have eaten the lot without putting on an ounce. When Sebastian had satisfied himself, he helped me into my coat, conducted me to the front door and closed it firmly behind me. It was two o’clock in the morning and not a cab in sight. I had spent a grim three-quarters of an hour in a telephone box which stank of pee until I found a minicab to take me home.

‘You can stay the night,’ said Sebastian. I must have looked amazed for he added, ‘You won’t disturb me. You can sleep on the sofa.’

‘Thank you,’ I said humbly, well aware that this was largesse almost without precedent.

He looked at his watch again. ‘Scoot.’

I scooted. The canteen was full. I had to eat my apple and cheese – there were no yoghurts left – standing up.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Lizzie came over to join me.

‘In Lenoir’s office, fucking, probably,’ said Bella, who was sitting at a table nearby. Her companions laughed with detectable hostility. Since I had become Sebastian’s mistress, and especially since I had been given the role of Giselle, my friendships had evaporated with a speed that would have alarmed me had I not seen it happen to others in the same circumstances. Should I become tremendously successful they would come crowding back. Meanwhile I was in an unhappy limbo, no longer one of the crowd nor yet one of the gods. It was wretched but there was nothing I could do about it.

I ignored the sniggers and assumed an air of calm superiority. ‘I’ve been breaking in a pair of shoes actually.’

‘Really?’ Bella spoke scornfully. ‘Then why have you got paper polos stuck all over your back?’

I waited, hidden from the audience, inside the wooden construction that was painted outside to represent the cottage where Giselle lived with her mother. Behind me in the wings, the corps, dressed like me as village maidens, were stretching and flexing, preparing themselves for their next entrance. My heart beat so hard it seemed to vibrate against the boned bodice of my tutu and my bare arms broke into goose pimples. Tears of excitement filled my eyes. Now I knew that the tremendous, relentless effort to fashion my body into the perfect instrument – the aching muscles, the strains, the sprains, the bruises, the bloody toes, the starving, the rotten pay, the rivalries, jealousies and disappointments – had been worth it. From the age of six when I had been told to run round the village hall pretending to be a butterfly, my life had been directed towards this aim, to express with my body beauty, fear, love, grief, joy, hope, despair, evil, apotheosis.

The percussion struck the notes that mimicked the knocking of Count Albrecht on the cottage door. The stage hand who was waiting with his hand on the latch to open it for me wished me luck. I heard him as though in a dream. Already I was a peasant girl in a state of tremulous expectation, sighing for her mysterious lover whose wooing had transformed her humdrum rural existence into a life of transcendent bliss. I burned to see him, to feel his arms about my waist, to look into his eyes, to marvel at his beauty, to express my gratitude for his love, to share with him a glorious vision of future happiness as man and wife. The music slowed, anticipating Giselle’s entrance. The door opened, I counted the beats, drew in my breath, rose to demi-pointe , and launched myself into a world of sound, light, colour and intoxication.

2

Daylight crept through the gap in the curtains that hung round my bed. Out of the confusion of sleep emerged one clear idea, a craving for a glass of water. My eyes and mouth were dry and my skin felt splittingly tight. I barely had time to register these discomforts before a flame of pain in my left foot banished all other sensations. I opened my eyes and lay still, concentrating on not tensing the muscles in my left leg, hoping to lull my foot to a tolerable ache. Siggy, the darling, stirred, stretched and rolled on to his back, snoring faintly.

After five minutes or so the searing seemed to cool a little. I stared at the canopy of gold sateen above my head. The sateen had cost less than a pound a metre and was meant for lining things, but when gathered into a sunburst of pleats with a lustrous crumpled fabric rose in the centre to hide the stitching, you really couldn’t tell how cheap it was.

When I was eight my mother had taken my sister and me to Newcastle to see The Sleeping Beauty . The moment the lord chamberlain in his full-bottomed wig had come mincing on to the stage in high-heeled red shoes, I had been ravished from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet by the beauty of that sparkling, starry, fairytale world. I had made a secret resolution, so thrilling I had hardly dared to acknowledge it even to myself, that I was going to be a famous ballerina.

A little later in the performance I had also resolved to have a red and gold bed like Princess Aurora’s. This was much easier to achieve. I had spent many enjoyable hours with a hammer, nails, scissors, glue and a needle and thread. The crimson velvet curtains that hung round my four-poster had once separated the stage of the Chancery Lane Playhouse from its audience before the theatre closed for good. The gilt cord, stitched into triple loops at each outside corner of the tester and ornamented with gold tassels, had trimmed the palanquin of King Shahryar in Scheherazade . However tired I was, however discouraged by a less than perfect performance, however tormented by Sebastian’s demands, my beautiful bed embraced me, soothed me and cheered me. Every night, unless the weather was really sweltering, I drew the curtains all the way round so that Siggy and I were warm and safe inside our little red room with the critical, competitive world shut out.

I stroked Siggy’s chin gently. He stirred and stuck out the tip of his tongue. He was incontestably my favourite bed companion. But why was I at home? Why was I not even now basking in the perquisites of director’s moll, lying on the hard little sofa in the unheated drawing room at Dulwich, my already shattered frame having been probed, impaled, bounced on and generally misused? Then I remembered the extraordinary events of the day before.

At first Fortune had seemed to be on my side. I had been spared the customary two hours of répétition after lunch. Madame had decided to devote the afternoon to rehearsing the corps since they had, she asserted, ‘ze elegance of a ’erd of cattle. You ’op about as zo you are being prodded in ze rump by ze cow’and. Togezer!’

A free afternoon was a rare luxury. I had gone back to the flat I shared with Sorel and Nancy, also dancers in the LBC, to wash my tights – frequent washing was the only way to get rid of wrinkles which were so obvious on the stage – and break in an extra pair of pointe shoes. A virgin pair clacks as loudly on the stage as the husks of coconuts imitating a trotting horse. The second act of Giselle calls for feather-light landings. I had already broken in three pairs for that evening’s performance but, with the state my foot was in after that unlucky sissone , I thought it might be wise to have a fourth. Once the box – the hard section your toes fit into – becomes soft through wear your foot isn’t supported properly. I was worried but not despairing about the injury sustained that morning. Dancers spend practically all their professional lives in pain. Often our feet are soaked in blood. They have to be wrapped in bandages and lashings of antibiotic ointment. The rest of our bodies are tortured by strained muscles and ligaments and the overuse of joints. Perhaps the undeniable romance of suffering for one’s art helps to make the agony bearable.