Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

The Professor — arriving in an extremely unpleasant mood, for he had been interrupted while giving what he regarded as one of his most brilliant lectures — found Louisa’s icy hand being chafed by the Tea Circle’s president while other ladies offered sal volatile, tea and commiseration in voices from which they found it impossible to remove an undercurrent of glee.

‘What has happened, Louisa?’ he enquired sternly — and the ladies, responding to his manhood, withdrew into a corner.

Louisa held out Mrs Fairfield’s note and the Professor paled. ‘I don’t understand this. Can Harriet have deliberately deceived us — or has she been abducted?’

‘She has deliberately deceived us, Bernard! I have spoken to Mrs Fairfield on “the instrument” and the note they received with all that tarradiddle about Harrogate was definitely in Harriet’s writing. Betsy knows it well.’

‘Have you informed the police?’

‘No, Bernard, please, not the police. The scandal… Surely there has to be some way of hushing it up? We must think. I suppose someone could have forced her to write that letter, but I don’t feel it was that — she has been so strange lately. Oh, Bernard, I know! I’m sure I know!’ Louisa sat up suddenly and the smelling-salts clattered to the floor. ‘She has run away to that ballet company! She must have done. Do you remember how weirdly she spoke at that dinner-party? About it being the thing she had wanted all her life? That dreadful Russian who came to Madame Lavarre’s…’

‘Try not to be ridiculous, Louisa! My daughter would never disobey my specific orders.’ But his daughter clearly had done so and cracking his pale knuckles, he said, ‘I agree we must hush this up if we can. My position in the University if it got about… Of course, there may be a perfectly simple explanation…’

‘The white slave traffic,’ said Miss Transom, rendered authoritarian by the blessed absence of her mother.

‘I’ve always thought the girl was no better than she should be,’ hissed Millicent Braithwaite in a stage-whisper. She had not forgiven Harriet for making them look foolish at Stavely. For hours they had blundered about in that maze and then found her with a little red-haired boy and both of them laughing their heads off.

‘We must go to see Madame Lavarre at once,’ said the Professor. ‘She will know the whereabouts of that Russian scoundrel.’

‘If it is not too late!’

‘Now remember,’ said the Professor sternly, pointing his finger at the ladies, ‘no word of this must get about. Not one single word!’

‘Of course not, Professor,’ said Mrs Belper soothingly. ‘You can rely on us.’ And so Herculean were the efforts of the ladies to restrain themselves that it was a good twenty-four hours before the milkman, whom Louisa had not tipped in twenty years, was in a position to inform the man who kept the paper shop in Petty Cury that stuffy Professor Morton’s daughter had run away to become a belly-dancer in a ‘house of ill-fame’ in Buenos Aires — and serve the old so-and-so right!

Madame Lavarre — when Professor and Miss Morton were announced — smiled the happy, relaxed smile of a well-fed cougar. She had had a note from Dubrov and knew that the Mortons were too late.

‘No, I know nothing about Harriet, I am afraid,’ she said. ‘Since you have said that she may not come to my classes any more, I have not seen her.’

‘We have reason to think that she may have tried to join the ballet company of that Russian who came to see you — the man who was going up the Amazon. You will oblige me by giving me his name.’

‘Certainly.’ Madame smiled and puffed a cloud of Balkan Sobranie into the Professor’s face. ‘His name is Dubrov. Sasha Dubrov. We are very old friends. In St Petersburg we have often been skating together on the Neva and also riding horses, although of course I could not do very much sport because at the Imperial Ballet School they did not permit it in case of injury to the legs.’

‘His address, please,’ fumed the Professor. ‘You will instantly give me his address!’

‘But certainly: 33 Mikhailovskaya. It is a beautiful apartment — the bathroom is particularly fine and in five minutes one can reach the Winter Palace and also the statue of Peter the Great, though I regard this as not absolutely the best work of Etienne Falconet; there is something a little bit exaggerated in the proportions and—’

‘His address in London is what I want, Madame. Don’t trifle with me!’

‘I regret, Professor, that I do not know—’

‘The woman’s lying!’ shrieked Aunt Louisa — at which point Madame summoned her servant and the Mortons were shown the door.

‘Oh, heavens, Bernard, what shall we do?’ Louisa was so distraught that she omitted to pick up from the pavement a pocket comb with only one tooth missing which, after a good scrubbing, would have done for the spare room.

But back at Scroope Terrace the valiant Hermione Belper waved a newspaper she had just fetched from her home.

‘There!’ she said triumphantly. ‘I thought I’d seen something about a ballet company going up the Amazon. They’re at the Century Theatre, in Blooms-bury.’

The Professor took it from her hand.

‘We must leave for London immediately,’ he announced. ‘This newspaper is five days old and anything might have happened since then.’ His decisiveness sent a flutter of approval through the ladies. ‘If we hurry, we can catch the five fifty-four.’

‘But, Bernard, that could mean a night in a hotel. The expense!’ cried Louisa.

‘Damn the expense!’ said the Professor, and if anyone had doubted that he loved his daughter they could doubt no longer. ‘If this escapade should reach the ears of the Master, with the Senate elections coming up…’

‘Or Edward,’ said Louisa faintly. ‘If Edward came to hear of it…’

And an hour later the Mortons were on the train.

Stage-doorkeepers in general are not renowned for their loving kindness or the enthusiasm with which they greet unauthorised visitors, but even among that well-known band of misanthropes ‘old Bill’ at the Century stood out for the particularly poor view he took of human nature. Even before he had lost an eye in the relief of Khartoum in ’85, his nature had hardly been sanguine, and now — with the aid of a scruffy and paranoid mongrel called Griff, who bit first and asked questions afterwards — he ensured that those who worked in his theatre were seldom unnecessarily disturbed.

‘What d’yer want?’ was his greeting to the Mortons as he stuck out his grizzled head from the window of his cubby-hole.

‘We have come to see Mr Dubrov,’ announced the Professor. ‘The matter is extremely urgent.’

‘Well, he ain’t here. No one’s here at this time of night.’

It seemed unlikely that he was lying; as the Mortons had walked round it, the Century Theatre had been silent and dark.

‘We have come to make enquiries about a girl who may have joined the Company,’ began Louisa, ‘as a dancer.’

‘Shut up!’

Bill was addressing his dog, but without rancour, for in growling even more hideously than usual and baring his yellow teeth, Griff was only confirming Bill’s own view — that as far as people in general went, this toffee-nosed couple were bottom of the heap.

‘She is an English girl,’ persisted Louisa. ‘There cannot be many English girls in such a company.’

‘Not any,’ said Bill laconically. ‘All Russian. All got Russian names. Got to have. No one’ll stand for English names, not in ballet.’

‘But there must have been a girl who spoke English? You must have heard the girls speak?’

‘Me?’ said Bill, ‘Why should I hear them speak? I haven’t got time to stand around chattering. Got me work to do, I have.’