Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

But though Rom could pioneer a dozen new enterprises, could import grand pianos from Germany, American motor cars, carpets from Isfahan, nothing excited his men so much as the arrival of the washing basket from Truscott and Musgrave in Piccadilly containing his freshly laundered shirts.

To add to the stories of ludicrous and extravagant behaviour among the rubber barons had not been his intention. Mrs Lehmann, who washed her carriage horses in champagne, or young Wetherby, who walked a jaguar with a diamond collar through the streets, had Rom’s utmost contempt. Yet unwittingly he had created a legend which outclassed them all. The travels of his laundry to and from London’s most exclusive valeting service were spoken of in Rio and Liverpool, in Paris and Madrid.

Rom ran Follina entirely with a native staff. He found that his Indians could be taught to do anything except perhaps to count; certainly they washed and ironed entirely to his satisfaction. His shirts travelled to England to be laundered because of a promise he had made to a generous and lovely woman and it was her memory, now, that softened his face.

Had it not been for Madeleine de la Tour, Rom’s midnight flight from Stavely might have ended very differently. Arriving penniless in London, half-crazed with rage and pain, he had gone to the house of the only relative he knew his mother to possess: a distant cousin; Jacques de la Tour, who had a number of business interests and who Rom hoped might give him work.

Jacques was away on an extended tour of the East, but his wife Madeleine took Rom in. She took him in in all senses: into her house, her mind, her heart and — with marvellous flair and intelligence — into her bed. She soothed the appalling hurt that Isobel had dealt him; she civilised him and left him with a sense of gratitude that had never faded. In the end, sensing his need to start on his adventure, she insisted on lending him money for his fare to Brazil.

‘Only don’t turn into a savage, Romain,’ she had said, standing at Euston, brave as a grenadier — and much more beautiful — to see him go. ‘Be particularly careful of your shirts — the starch must be just so. No thumping them on flat stones, promise?’

‘I promise.’

Then the train went and she cried a little in the ladies’ room and went on to the Summer Exhibition at Burlington House in a splendid herbaceous border of a hat because she was as gallant as she was good and knew that English ladies must not make a fuss.

Rom never repaid the money that she lent him. He waited two years and then went down to the Minas Gerais, that strange mineral-rich region of Brazil famous for its ornate and treasure-stocked churches, to seek out a hunchbacked craftsman who wrought precious stones into jewellery for the processional Madonnas. And a few months later a messenger arrived in Grosvenor Place and delivered a package which Madeleine opened to find — wrapped round a laundry receipt from Truscott and Musgrave — a necklace. A diamond necklace, each stone set in an intricately wrought halo of platinum, which her sensible husband — after a gasp of incredulity — fastened without too many questions around her lovely throat.

It was in an immaculate dress shirt from his laundry basket that Rom, delayed by a blocked feed-pipe on the Amethyst , entered his box in the Teatro Amazonas and saw — without undue excitement — the curtain rise on Act One of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Harriet.

‘You cannot be going to be sick again, ’arriette,’ said Marie-Claude, exasperated, turning from the long mirror where the girls sat in their tutus whitening their arms, putting on false eyelashes, applying Cupid’s bows to their mouths.

‘I can—’ said Harriet, and fled.

Act One had been called, but Act One is no business of the swans and the girls still had half an hour to complete their toilettes. It was a half-hour which Harriet did not expect to live through.

‘For heaven’s sake, there are eighteen swans in this production. Also two big swans. Also those idiot cygnets with their pas de quatre,’ said Kirstin when Harriet returned, green and shivering. ‘You don’t matter! Why don’t you tell yourself that?’

‘I know I don’t matter,’ said Harriet — and indeed no one could have lived for eighteen years in Scroope Terrace and not known that. ‘If I get it right, I don’t matter. But if I get it wrong … all those people who trusted me… Monsieur Dubrov and everyone… making the company look silly.’

‘You won’t get it wrong. I’m in front of you most of the time and when it isn’t me, it’s Olga,’ said Marie-Claude, piling up her golden hair and jabbing pins through the circlet of feathers in a way which would have driven the wardrobe mistress into fits. ‘Merde,’ she said softly — and indeed the head-dresses had not travelled well. She turned and dabbed a spot of red into each corner of Harriet’s eyes. ‘There is no need to whiten yourself. You look like a ghost.’

‘I must say, Harriet, such fear is excessive,’ said Kirstin. ‘What would your Roman emperor say?’

But for once the thought of the great Marcus Aurelius did little for Harriet. The famous Stoic had experienced most of the troubles of mankind, but it was unlikely that he had ever made his debut before a thousand people as an enchanted swan.

If Dubrov’s newest swan was nervous to the point of prostration, his ballerina assoluta was hardly in a state of calm.

‘Why didn’t you put it on the posters, that this was my farewell appearance?’ she yelled at Dubrov. ‘I asked you to do it — and you promised. A simple thing like that and you can’t do it!’

She was already dressed in her glittering white tutu. Beneath the shining little crown her gaunt face, trapped and desperate, was that of an old woman.

‘I will announce it after the performance, dousha.’

He did not waste breath telling her to relax, to be quiet. There was nothing to be done about her terror; she went on stage each time as if she was going to her death. All he could do was to be there, pray that the hundred instructions he had given to his underlings would be carried out and let her rage at him.

‘That cow Legnani! The first thing I shall do when I am retired is to go to Milan and slap her face!’

He sighed. Legnani, one of the world’s great ballerinas, had been the first to introduce the thirty-two fouettés which make Act Three of Swan Lake so fiendishly difficult to dance, and Simonova’s vendetta against her was unending.

She stopped pacing, came over, clutched him with feverish arms. ‘But this is the last tour, isn’t it, Sashka? Soon it will be over for good? Soon now we shall go and live in Cremorra and grow—’

But at that moment — fortunately for Dubrov, who was in no state to discuss the cultivation of vegetables — her final call came.

For Simonova, fine and experienced dancer that she was, the terror ended the moment that she went on stage. Alas, the same could not be said for Harriet.

Rom was not a balletomane. From his mother he had inherited a passion for the human voice and though he had refused all the other dignities that people tried to thrust on him, he had accepted the chairmanship of the Opera House trustees. To Rom fell the task of cajoling reluctant prima donnas from Europe; of arranging the entertainment for the cast. It was he who had taken six actors from a Spanish company to Follina to be nursed when they were stricken with yellow fever. But it was opera that held his heart and as the curtain went up on Prince Siegfried’s birthday revels, the plight of this young man — Maximov in silver tights and straining cod-piece — left him relatively unmoved.