Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

Still, today at least Lilian would be occupied. He himself did not care for ballet, but as he climbed into his carriage and was conveyed to his office on the quayside, Jock Bennett blessed the Dubrov Ballet Company from the bottom of his heart.

Unlike Jock Bennett, the six-foot-tall and massively bearded Count Sternov was a passionate balletomane and since dawn had roamed through the long, low house — which he had had built in imitation of his parents’ dacha on the Volga — in a state of exaltation.

‘I shall never forget her first Giselle — never, he said to the Countess. ‘The year before she left Russia. That unsupported adage in the last act!’

‘That was the time they found Dalguruky in the back of the box making love to the governess, do you remember?’

The Countess was in her dressing-gown. She seldom dressed before the afternoon, the heat did not suit her and her cris des nerfs were famous, but today she was happy. Today it would end as it had so often ended in St Petersburg, discussing the finer points of a cabriole in a lighted theatre… and the next day was the party for the cast at Follina, that fantastic riverside palazzo where everything that mattered out here took place. And there will be girls, thought the Count happily — young, lovely Russian girls…

The girls were uppermost in the mind of Colonel de Silva, the Prefect of Police, glancing at the clock in his office to see if it was time to go home and change. His scrawny domineering wife could stop him talking to them, stop him sending them flowers; she could drag him back to his carriage with her hand dug into his arm the second the curtain went down, but she couldn’t stop him seeing them — their legs, their thighs, their throats — thought the grateful Colonel, rescinding the death warrant of a bandit who had turned out to be a distant relative. Opera was better for bosoms and hips, but in ballet one saw more.

By the afternoon a veritable armada of small craft had begun to converge on the city. From the far shore of the River Negro, some ten miles across, came Dr Zugheimer and his wife, sitting erect in the bows of the Louisa , already in their evening clothes. The bespectacled Herr Doktor, a paternalistic employer who had put his seringueiros into uniform, thirsted for Lohengrin or Parsifal , but no one missed an opening night at the Teatro Amazonas and the blue eyes of his plump wife — who spent her lonely mornings struggling to turn the pulpy mangoes and guavas of the tropics into the firm and bread-crumbed Knödel of her native land, shone with excitement. Opera, ballet or farce… what did it matter? Tonight there would be gossip, companionship, laughter.

A launch chartered by the Amazonian Timber Company at Boa Vista disgorged twenty of their employees, who made their way into the town carrying their evening clothes under their arms. The mission boat belonging to the Silesian Brothers at Santa Maria brought Father Joseph and Father Anselm, who knew that all art was for the glory of God and had made sure of excellent seats in the stalls.

The cafés were now filling up. A party of lady schoolteachers from a select seminary in Santarém, offered the choice of sleeping in the street or in Madam Anita’s brothel, sensibly chose the brothel. The captain of the Oriana escorted two massive, middle-aged Baltic princesses (on a round trip from Lisbon) down the gangway and into the car sent by the Mayor.

And now the lights were going up. Lights beneath the frieze of gods and goddesses on the Opera House facade; lights in the tall street-lamps lining the square. Lights in the blue and green art nouveau foyer; in the candelabra between the Carrera marble columns of the upstairs promenade… Lights limning the tiers of white and golden boxes; pouring down from the great eight-pointed chandelier on de Angeli’s frescoed ceiling with its swirling muses of Poetry, Music and Art…

Light, now, sparkling and dancing on the tiaras of the women as they entered; on the diamond and sapphire choker of Mrs John P. Lehmann, on Colonel de Silva’s Brazilian star…

The seats were filling up; row upon row of bejewelled bosoms, of bemedalled chests. The stout Baltic princesses entered the canopied box reserved for the President and stood, dowdy and gracious, bestowing kind waves. In the orchestra pit, the musicians were ready.

But the performance could not begin yet; all the citizens of Manaus were aware of that. For the box next to that of the President was still empty — the box that belonged to Mr Verney, the chairman of the Opera House trustees. Until Rom Verney came from Follina the curtain would stay lowered — and knowing this, the audience settled down to wait.

Verney woke early, as he always did, on the morning of the gala; he stretched in the great jaruna wood bed and pushed aside the cloud of white mosquito netting to go to the French windows and look out on his garden.

There was no garden like it in all of Amazonia. Only the gardens of the Moghul emperors — of Akbar and his heirs — had the same vision, the same panache. Only those despots — like this wealthiest of all the rubber barons — had the tenacity and labour to make real their dreams.

On the terrace below him, orchids and hibiscus and the dizzying scarlet flame-flowers which the humming birds loved to visit rioted in flamboyant exuberance from their urns, but elsewhere he had maintained a savage discipline on the fast-growing plants. In the avenue of jacarandas, shiveringly blue, which stretched to the distant river, each tree grew distinct and unimpeded. Beneath the catalpas in his arboretum he had planted only the white, star-petalled clerodendron, so that the trees seemed to grow from a drift of scented snow.

By the aviary which his Indians, somewhat to his dismay, had built for him when he was absent on a journey, Manuelo was already sweeping the paths. Two other Indians worked by the pool with its golden water-lilies, scraping derris root into the water against mosquitoes. Old Iquita, Manuelo’s mother-in-law, wearing a frilled petticoat left behind by an opera singer whose favours he had enjoyed, and a boa of anaconda skins, was poking her forked stick into a flower bed, busy with her self-appointed task of keeping his garden free from snakes. From the patch of forest behind the house, deliberately left untouched, where his Indians built their village, came the faint, disembodied sound of Dame Nellie Melba singing the ‘Bell Song’ from Lakmé. However many records he bought them, this remained their favourite.

He showered, slipped on a khaki shirt and trousers and made his way downstairs — a most un-English-looking Englishman, lithe and dark-skinned, his black hair (though he was not yet thirty) exotically streaked with silver — to be waylaid as he crossed the terrace by the first of the many animals to whom he offered the hospitality of his home: a coatimundi with a great bushy tail who jumped off a chair and demanded to be stroked.

Moving on down the steps, Verney made his way between banks of glossy-leaved gardenias, through a trellised arcade of jasmine and passion flowers, towards the orchard where he grew mangoes and plantains and avocados to feed his workers. He missed nothing — a new patch of fungus, an infinitesimal split in the stem of a pineapple, a procession of ants endeavouring to set up a colony in his coffee bushes — all were instantly observed and silently assessed. And the little-nosed bear trotted along behind him, for this morning inspection of the estate was something which the coati regarded as very much his affair.

As he came to the bridge over one of the many igarapes that flowed through his land, an aged blue and yellow macaw flopped from an acacia branch on to his shoulder and screamed at the coati in jealous rage. The river was close by now, with his boats: the schooner Amethyst , which he used to convey guests to and from Manaus; the Daisy May , a converted gun-boat he had stripped almost to the hull to carry his botanical specimens… And the first boat he had ever owned, the little Firefly , rakish and indestructible, beside the dug-outs of his Indians.