Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

Rom was in control again. She had spoken for scarcely two minutes, yet in that time he had torn from his heart every feeling she had aroused; every hope that loneliness was ended. Only his anger remained — the anger with which, since his mother’s death, Rom had responded to loss.

‘Let me get this clear, Harriet. When you stayed behind last night, it was to tell me what you have told me now? It was to plead for Henry Brandon?’

‘Yes.’ Separated by fear from the common-sense which might have saved them both, stupid with bewilderment, she could only repeat, ‘I wanted to help him, is that so terrible? What have I done?

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You have done nothing. On the contrary, you have fulfilled your mission excellently. And now please go back and tell your protégé that I will see him in hell before I raise a finger to save Stavely. Just tell him that.’ He stood for a moment looking down at the fruit on the table with the ghost of a smile. ‘How wise you were not to open it,’ he said, picking up the pomegranate. ‘Not a single seed eaten. No reason ever to return.’

He balanced the golden orb for a moment on his hand — then threw it with all his strength in a high arc over the wall. ‘Pedro will take you back in the car,’ he said — and without a goodbye, without a handshake, was gone.

Two days later the redoubtable Olga fell ill. Since their arrival Dubrov had relentlessly patrolled the Metropole dining-room, forbidding anyone to drink unboiled water on pain of instant dismissal; he had handed out quinine, had himself checked the mosquito netting in the girls’ bedrooms and confiscated all fruit bought from barrows in the street. Even so, several members of the company had complained of stomach pains and with three days of the first week’s run of Swan Lake still to go, Olga was definitely too ill to dance.

‘Seventeen swans again,’ said Grisha gloomily.

But more serious than the inconvenience of rearranging the choreography for the corps was the need to rehearse a new ‘Odette-at-the window’. For Olga had been the girl who, dressed as the Swan Queen in her white tutu and glittering crown, flutters at the window in such anguish to show the Prince that he has been tricked — that the girl he has just promised to marry is not the real Odette, but an usurper.

It is a short scene, scarcely three minutes in all — yet it is rare for anyone to leave the theatre without recalling the image of that beseeching, moonlit figure, exiled from happiness and love.

‘Kira is the nearest to you in size,’ said Dubrov to Simonova as she lay on the yellow silk couch of her dressing-room, fanning herself with a moulting ostrich fan.

‘Impossible! I will not be represented by a girl with square thighs.’

Dubrov sighed. ‘Lydia then. She is a little taller than you, but the colouring’s right.’

There was a pause while Simonova pulled up her kimono and studied her left knee. Then, ‘Give it to Harriet,’ said the ballerina.

‘Harriet?’ Dubrov looked up, surprised, from the knee he had automatically begun to massage. ‘I hadn’t thought of giving her anything extra — she is so new. But you’re right, she is the same height as you and the same build.’

‘She will know what to do,’ said Simonova. ‘A little too well, perhaps.’

‘Yes.’

Harriet had returned from her luncheon date with a blind, lost look that had made Dubrov want to shake the handsome and generous Mr Verney. Since then, saying nothing to anyone, she had worked if anything harder than before. It should have been a relief to be free of the child’s enthusiasms; Dubrov had suffered as much as anyone from Harriet’s determination to befriend the loathsome vultures that sat on the verandah of the hotel, holding out their black wings to dry after the rain, or the glad cries with which she announced the presence of a green and crimson frog who had taken refuge in the showers. But to see her become once more the quiet resigned girl she had been in Cambridge was hard.

‘What happened?’ Marie-Claude had demanded of Kirstin, returning to find Harriet white and silent, practising at the barre. And reproaching herself: ‘I should have stayed to see to her toilette.’

‘Oh, Marie-Claude, everything isn’t clothes. I saw how he looked at her when she came out of the stage-door. It was a misunderstanding, a quarrel — it must have been.’

Her summons to Dubrov’s office filled Harriet with alarm. Had he discovered after all that she had stood in for Marie-Claude?

‘You are to be the swan at the window instead of Olga,’ announced Dubrov, adding firmly, ‘It is an extremely small part and naturally there will be no increase in privileges. Or in pay.’

‘Oh!’ Her thin face lit up. Whatever happened there was still work. ‘But why me — surely one of the others…?’

‘It was Madame Simonova’s suggestion. Grisha will show you the movements after lunch. Then we shall rehearse once with the lights before the performance. You go on tonight, of course.’

‘Tonight! I can’t…’ she began to say, and stopped. For she could, as a matter of fact. This she could do.

Simonova herself attended the rehearsal, as did Dubrov and a surprising number of the cast. Harriet learned the steps quickly and indeed there was little enough to do except stand on her pointes and flutter her piteous arms. Nor was it possible for her to miss her cue, for it was the swan motif itself, with its haunting oboes, that heralded her brief entrance. In half an hour it was clear that Harriet would manage, and indeed there was no girl in the corps who could not have managed this unexacting task.

All the same, those who watched her were in their different ways, displeased.

‘Poor child! It is a mistake to be like that,’ said Simonova, flopping down on the bed when she was back in her room at the Metropole. ‘Of course, it is good for one’s dancing afterwards.’ She took off her shoes and dropped them on the floor. ‘What was the name of that hussar, do you remember? In the Rodenzky regiment? The year I met you.’

‘Count Zugarovitch,’ said Dubrov, coming to sit beside her on the bed. The young blue-eyed hussar had been killed in a duel soon afterwards and he could afford to be magnanimous.

‘Yes. It is because of him that I am unsurpassed in Giselle,’ said Simonova with her usual modesty. ‘Still, it is awful, this love.’ She laid her head with unaccustomed tenderness against his shoulder — a gesture which, though it was intended for the dead hussar, Dubrov proceeded to turn to good account.

Marie-Claude, accosting Harriet as she changed in the chorus dressing-room, was simply angry.

‘There is no need for you to act like that; it is only a rehearsal and the whole scene will be played behind gauzes and there is no extra pay.’

‘Like what?’ asked Harriet, bewildered.

‘As though you were really suffering. As though you were really outside and lost and frightened and looking in on happiness from which you were excluded et tout ça. It is not necessary ,’ raged Marie-Claude.

‘You are certainly a good actress, Harriet,’ said Kirstin. ‘You seemed absolutely anguished.’

‘Did I?’ Harriet was surprised. ‘It’s just that I know… what it is like. I know how it is to be at a window… outside… and to look in on a lighted room and not be able to make anybody hear.’

‘How can you know? You have not experienced it.’

Harriet hung Odette’s glittering crown on a peg above the mirror and reached for her comb. ‘Perhaps I am going to one day,’ she said. ‘There is a man in England who says that time is curved and that we can sometimes see—’