CHARLOTTE LAMB - The Yuletide Child

‘Never has been?’ insisted Ross, and she shook her head.

‘No. Michael has girlfriends but I was never one of them.’

‘Were there other men in your life?’

‘Nobody special. There was never enough time. I had to work too hard and I was always tired.’

Ross drove her back to her flat in Islington, just a mile away from the theatre.

‘I won’t ask you in; it’s gone one o’clock, and I have to get some sleep,’ she said, sitting in his car outside the building.

‘Breakfast... when?’ He was very close. She knew he was going to kiss her; she was dying for the touch of his mouth. She couldn’t think about anything else. ‘Eight o’clock?’

‘Nine! I’ve got rehearsals at eleven,’ she thought aloud, knowing that tomorrow she was going to regret losing so much sleep. She needed a solid eight hours every night to restore her energy levels, so that she could keep up with her demanding schedule.

‘Skip them and spend the day with me.’

‘I can’t, Michael would kill me. We have to work at the barre every day to keep supple; muscles stiffen up so quickly if you don’t.’

‘When can you get away, then?’

‘Lunchtime. One o’clock. Then I’m supposed to have a rest, a nap before the evening performance. I don’t get much free time.’

‘Breakfast and then lunch,’ he said, framing her face between his hands and bending.

Their mouths clung; she felt heat deep inside her body. It was the first time in her entire life that she had ever wanted a man like that.

A week later they got engaged. The wedding was fixed for a month after that, although her father almost had kittens when she said she was planning to marry so quickly. Her mother would have been dead for two years that spring; it seemed longer. Dylan still missed her and wished she could talk to her about Ross, about getting married. Ingrid Adams had been fifty the year she’d died of cancer, after a mercifully short illness. Dylan’s father, Joe Adams, still hadn’t quite got over it, and was unable to cope with organising a wedding.

‘There isn’t time! You can’t arrange a wedding this soon!’ he said to her helplessly. ‘Why not wait a few months, give yourself time to think, time for us to organise everything?’

‘We don’t want to wait. We just want to get married!’

He looked at her sister, Jenny, throwing up his hands in despair. Jenny tried to argue her out of being in such a hurry, too, but gave up when she realized Dylan simply was not listening.

Michael was worse. Michael went crazy, white and shaking, his eyes black holes in his head. ‘You can’t do this to me—you can’t chuck everything away. For pity’s sake, Dylan, it’s just infatuation. Sleep with him, but don’t marry him. How can you go on with your career if you live at the back of beyond? You have to be in London to dance.’

‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ was all she could say, almost in tears herself, because she hated quarrelling with him. She felt guilty because what he had said was true. She wasn’t just getting married. She was giving up her career. She was walking away from Michael and everything they had built up together.

‘My contract ends this month; I’m not signing up again.’ Their season ended, too, at the same time; they would have gone into rehearsal for a month, then gone on a protracted tour of the States before returning in the autumn to open a new season here in London. Now Michael would be doing all that without her.

Michael grabbed her shoulders and shook her, hoarsely shouting. ‘I won’t let you do it! What about me? What am I supposed to do? I can’t dance without you.’

He made her nervous, but she lifted her chin to stare back at him defiantly. ‘I’m sorry, Michael. Don’t be so angry. I know it’s going to be a problem, but it will be a challenge, too—can’t you see that? You’ll find a new partner; they’ll queue up for the chance to dance with you, you know that. I’m not unique. You’ll find someone else, just as good, probably even better, and go on to even greater heights.’

His face was stormy, full of bitterness. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re a great dancer, arguably the best of our generation...you can’t throw it all away on this stupid, ordinary, boring guy. My God, Dylan—he’s nobody. He doesn’t even understand what you are, how wonderful you are. He knows nothing about ballet. He is destroying a great dancer without even knowing what a great dancer is!’

Helplessly she pleaded for him to understand, her voice shaking ‘Michael, try to see it from our side—he loves me: we love each other.’

‘Stop saying that—I just told you, it won’t last for ever, it never does. Use your brain, Dylan. What the hell is wrong with you? You’re possessed...out of your mind, crazy.’

She laughed nervously. ‘Maybe I am, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I am being driven, Michael. I can’t think of anything else but Ross. If I stayed on in the ballet I’d be worse than useless. It doesn’t seem important any more. I no longer want to dance.’

He looked as shocked as if she had hit him in the face. ‘You can’t be serious. I’d rather see you dead at my feet than let you stop dancing. The idea is unthinkable. You were born to dance, and I won’t let you stop, do you hear me? You aren’t going to do it!’

‘Yes, I am, Michael.’

It went on day after day, all the same arguments, the same pleas and angry protests, until her wedding day.

Michael’s bitterness and rage made life impossible in the theatre during that month but Dylan rode the storm somehow, her mind entirely set on the moment when she would become Ross’s wife. Michael was right—she was possessed, nothing else mattered to her, she was being carried away by an instinct older than time. She wanted to sleep in Ross’s bed every night, bear his children, spend her life with him. The life force had her in its grip and her career no longer mattered a damn. She found rehearsing tiring; the nightly performances passed in a vague dream. She was no longer part of the company. In her own mind she had already left, although her body went on performing.

She hadn’t believed Michael would come to the wedding, but he did, glowering darkly from his seat in the church. His friends, the company, all the dancers they had been to school with, were on his side, their eyes accusing her of treachery, betrayal. How could she do this to him? they silently asked, those eyes.

Afterwards, at the reception, he walked up to Dylan in her white dress and veil. She stiffened, afraid of what he might do next, but all he did was take her hands and kiss them lingeringly, the backs and then the pale pink palms.

‘I’m not saying goodbye. You’ll be back. You can’t exist away from us. When the madness passes, you’ll come back to me.’

‘Don’t hold your breath, Carossi!’ Ross snapped, tense as a drawn bow beside her, putting his arm around her waist and pulling her close to him.

Michael ignored him as if he was invisible. Dylan watched him walk away, sadness welling up inside her. Ever since they’d first met at ballet school they had been so close, almost one person instead of two; it was hard to say goodbye, harder to think of life without him.

She and Ross left for their honeymoon a few minutes later. They flew to Italy and spent two weeks at a small hotel in the Tuscan hills, making love day and night with a passion that excluded everyone and everything else, although they managed to spend a day at Venice and another at Florence. Dylan remembered both days like waking dreams: she and Ross wandered together, entranced, through the cities, looking at each other, not the beautiful buildings, the River Arno, the Grand Canal, the famous paintings, the statues in the narrow, old streets of both those ancient and exquisite cities. They were merely the background of the happiness Dylan and Ross shared, like painted designs on a stage backcloth.