Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

Act One is something of a prologue. The Prince is bidden by his parents to marry, but feels disinclined. Pretty girls come up to dance with him and he supports their arabesques with the resigned look of a conscientious meat porter steadying a side of beef. His mother gives him a cross-bow… the eerie music of the swan motif is heard and the Prince decides to go hunting. The curtain falls.

The second act is different. A moonlit glade… romantic trees… a lake… And presently, Simonova gliding on — fluttering her arms, still freeing herself from the water. A fine dancer — Rom had heard her spoken of on a visit to Paris and she deserved her praise. The Prince appears and sees her… he is amazed. She tells him in absurd but effective mime that she is an enchanted princess, doomed to take the shape of a swan for ever unless a prince will truly love her. I will love you, signals Maximov; I will… They go off together…

And now to muffled ‘Ohs’ and ‘Ahs’ from the audience, there entered the swans. In his box the Prefect of Police, de Silva, leaned forward avidly, to be jerked back by the iron hand of his wife. The Mayor, squeezed like a small black currant between the bun-like figures of the Baltic princesses, smiled happily.

And Rom picked up his high-precision Zeiss opera glasses and fixed them on the stage.

As a youth, Rom had never doubted that he would be faithful to Isobel. The whole strange concept of a Christian marriage with its oaths, its unreasonable expectation that one man and one woman can find in each other all that the human heart desires, had found an echo in his ardent and romantic soul. When Isobel betrayed him, he put away these thoughts — and the kindness of Madeleine de la Tour had been for him a bridge to another and equally ancient tradition: that of woman as an amused and amusing source of pleasure. Of women, since he had come to the Amazon, Rom asked that they should be beautiful, willing — and know the score. And perfectly fulfilling these demands were the girls of the theatre who touched down here — bringing their experience, their flair and talent for the game of dalliance. Gabriella d’Aosta, a singer in the chorus of La Traviata , with her black curls and great boudoir eyes… Little Millie Trant from Milwaukee, who had played the part of the maid in a mindless American farce — a delicious girl who had extracted more jewellery from him than he had ever bestowed on a human female and been worth every carat… And the russet-haired, barefoot dancer, the poor man’s Isadora Duncan, whose high-mindedness had ended so delightfully after dark.

So now, though with considerably less excitement than in his former days, Rom raked his opera glasses down the line of swans.

In every chorus line there is one beauty and there now, fourth from the left and dancing with competent precision, she was. A blonde, surprising in a troupe of Russian girls, with big velvety eyes, a lovely mouth and perfectly rounded limbs. But as Rom followed her along the line of swans — nice girls, perfectly in step, doing rather fetching emboîtés — something peculiar happened. His extremely expensive opera glasses seemed to take on a life of their own, moving again and again to the left of the lovely creature he was pursuing in order to home in on the serious, entirely ordinary face of the girl beside her: a brown-haired, grave-eyed girl, the third from the left.

Only why? She danced with grace and musicality, but that was certainly not what had drawn him. Rather there seemed to emanate from her some extreme emotion: one that drew from him an instinctive feeling of protection and concern.

The swans had come to rest upstage, facing the audience, leaning their heads on their arms. The head of the serious brown-haired girl leaned very tenderly — she cared about the fate of her Queen — but Rom, watching her, saw now a faint but unmistakable trembling of her chin. She was frightened, very frightened indeed, and in an unexpected burst of empathy he saw what she was seeing — the infinite yawning gap of the auditorium with its blurred rows of potential executioners.

Her debut, then? Unlikely — Russian ballet girls were always put on the stage early… yet he felt it must be so. He tried to imagine her receiving a sudden summons in some dark, snowbound apartment in St Petersburg or bidding her family goodbye in a wooden house in Kiev, but none of the images fitted, nor did a glance at the programme help. She might be Tatiana Volkoffsky, or Lydia Pigorsky or Natasha Alexandrovna — and she might not.

The idiot huntsmen appeared and threatened to shoot the swans and it was with considerable relief that Rom saw Simonova return and stand protectively in front of them, banishing the huntsmen with a great sweep of her arms. The third swan from the left, with her troubled eyes, had quite enough to put up with without getting shot.

Though he dutifully continued to study the blonde in the waltz that followed, Rom found himself returning rather more often than he intended to the girl beside her, checking up on her progress as might a good shepherd with a slightly wounded lamb. She was doing well; he could feel her confidence growing. She had, it occurred to him, rather a lovely throat.

But now the stage cleared, the slow, sweet strains of the solo violin rose from the orchestra — and there began the great pas de deux of love and plighted troth that for many people is Swan Lake.

Simonova had willed herself into youth. As Maximov — no meat porter now, but a manly and noble Prince — raised her from the ground, she pirouetted slowly beneath his arm… leaned against him in arabesque penchée… developpéd forward to throw herself back with total trust against his chest. He lifted her high above his head, put her down again to revolve slowly en pointe , her free foot fluttering in little battements. When he held her it was by the wrists, leaving her hands free for their poignant, wing-like draping.

Thunderous applause greeted the end of the adage and the swans returned. To Rom it seemed that his little brown-haired swan was feeling distinctly better and he might have felt free once more to pursue ‘the beauty’ had he not seen at that moment a new and real danger that threatened her. A single feather had come loose from the circlet round her head and, still held at its base, trembled disconcertingly over one of her eyes.

The unfairness of this shocked Rom. She had begun to conquer her fear; she was dancing beautifully — and now this! Following her as she hopped and circled about the stage, he saw how manfully she attempted to avert disaster. Again and again her lower lip came out as she tried to blow away the offending feather, but without success.

The music was increasing in speed; the evil sorcerer, Rothbart, was making himself felt and Siegfried was hurtling about between the swans, seeking his Queen… He found her and now as dawn broke, they danced their farewell while the swans stood sadly by, their arms crossed over their breasts.

Not much longer to go , Rom said to her silently. Hang on. But as she stood there, a gust of air from the passing soloists completed the fell deed; the feather dislodged itself, fluttered upwards, descended again… and settled on her small and serious nose.

At which point, most understandably, she sneezed.

Rom might allow himself to enjoy his box alone during the performance, detesting the whispers and chatter that accompanied so much theatre-going, but in the interval he did his social duty and, making his way to the refreshment lounge, was soon the centre of a group of friends — being stared at through lorgnettes by ladies who thrived on gossip about his affairs. Mrs Lehmann, permanently chagrined since he had made it clear that her obese and insufferable daughter was not destined to become mistress of Follina, nevertheless came up to tell him that he had done well to bring the Dubrov Company to Manaus. The Curtis twins, their hair up for the first time, edged closer to the exotic Mr Verney, with whom, since he had procured lemonade for them at the Consulate fête, they were officially in love, and were reproved by their tight-lipped mama.