Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

‘Harriet, you must do the music,’ instructed Marie-Claude. ‘It’s the Offenbach first. Then when I’m on the table, it’s the slow bit from The Odalisque — I’ve marked it there… Then back to the Offenbach for my exit.’

Harriet nodded. Since her lunch with Verney she had waited patiently for the ache left by his rejection to fade. It had not done so, but now, as she had set herself to work, so she set herself to help her friend. And trained to sight-read in the Bach choir at Cambridge, she launched into a very respectable rendering of La Belle Hélène.

In the bottom of the ‘cake’ crouched Marie-Claude, wrapped in the golden mantle of her hair. Then — at precisely the point where the music soared to a crescendo of expectancy — she burst!

It was a splendid spectacle: sudden, dramatic, timed to a split-second. Even Kirstin, busy sewing a miniature scabbard for Tante Berthe’s hat-pin, gasped and Harriet was so overcome that she lost her place in the score. One moment there had been nothing and the next second there was Marie-Claude, her dimpled arms extended, her lightly rouged palms turned upwards and her smile held with undiminished vigour until even the most distantly placed of the diners must have feasted on its rich promise.

When she was certain that the gentlemen had looked their fill, Marie-Claude caught hold of the iron ring which the Metropole kindly supplied for those guests who travelled with their own hammocks and, swinging her legs high over the chair, jumped down on to the floor.

‘In the proper cake there will be a little wooden ledge,’ she explained and, indicating to Harriet a quickening of the tempo, began to dance.

The sight was unforgettable. In Cambridge the plump and brassy Lily at Madame Lavarre’s had occasionally given the girls a glimpse of what she did in her class for ‘stage’; and it had seemed saucy and titillating in the extreme but Lily, as Harriet now realised, was an infant. It was fortunate that Marie-Claude was familiar with the music to which she danced, for Harriet, gazing wide-eyed at her friend, was providing only the sketchiest of accompaniments.

Her ravishing smile unimpaired by her exertions, her hips apparently hinged only most lightly to her torso, Marie-Claude performed movements that Harriet had scarcely known existed. She smoothed down her own waist, she lifted her legs so high that it seemed as if the froth of lace must be torn most hideously asunder… She did incredible things with her hair — now covering her face with it; now tossing it away so that it whipped out behind her; now, as the music grew softer, winding strands of it round her wrists. She bent forward to let her crossed hands dabble in the dimples of her knees, then backward so that the solitary brilliant in her navel shone straight into the ‘eyes’ of the bolster that was Antonio Alvarez.

‘Ça va? she enquired as Harriet, hoarse and overcome, limped to the end of the passage. ‘That was about seven minutes, I think?’

‘Six and a half,’ said Kirstin, looking at the ormolu clock they had borrowed from the hotel lounge.

‘I understand now about Salome,’ said Harriet. ‘Why they gave her John the Baptist’s head, I mean. I used to think it was too much: a whole head just for a dance.’

Marie-Claude was not at all pleased with the compliment. ‘She was a gloomy lady. They are altogether an exceedingly depressive people, the old Hebrews, and veils are not at all fashionable. But I use some of the same effects when I get on the table. One has to be more legato on tables — especially out here, I suppose, with so many insects eating into the wood.’

Marie-Claude’s routine on the table, performed to a sugary but voluptuous tune from a French musical, was certainly less exuberant but its effect, as her smile became sleepier, her velvet eyes more specific in their promise, was staggering.

‘Then just for a moment, if he is not too drunk, I come and sit on the knees of the Minister,’ said Marie-Claude, sliding down to bestow a cursory hug on the bolster. ‘But before he can do anything, there is a fanfare on the trumpets and — bang — the lights go out! I have arranged a signal for this with Mr Parker — it is when I raise my right arm so it can happen earlier if there is any unpleasantness. And when they can see again, I am back in the cake blowing kisses and being wheeled away!’

They rehearsed several times and would have gone on longer had it not been for a mineral prospector from Iquitos who had been trying to have a siesta in the room beneath them and who came up to complain.

‘We’ll try it again tomorrow, but I think it will be all right, hein?’ enquired Marie-Claude.

Her friends reassured her. Harriet, however, was forced to express a reservation.

‘Only I’m afraid, Marie-Claude, that the gentlemen will get overexcited, whether you permit it or not. I don’t see how they can fail to!’

‘Ah, well,’ said Marie-Claude philosophically, ‘it is for the restaurant,’ — and removed her garters.

Rom disliked the Manaus Sports Club and visited it as rarely as possible. Built at the beginning of the rubber boom, it was a colonial-style mansion on the edge of the town which combined all the things he had disliked most in Europe: snobbery, reactionary politics and a leering ‘Oh là là’ attitude to women, who were excluded from virtually all its functions. The heavy red plush furniture was disastrous for the tropics; the food was indifferent. There were even two old gentlemen straight out of a Punch cartoon who sat in the bar reading aloud the obituary columns from the five-week-old Times.

The day after his return from Ombidos, however, Rom drove his Cadillac up the drive to discuss with Harry Parker the dinner for Alvarez in two days’ time. He had never hoped to avoid the occasion; Alvarez, a connoisseur of food and women, was also a connoisseur of plants and had visited Follina. The Minister had particularly asked for his presence and Rom had no intention of snubbing him. He had hoped, however, to be involved as little as possible. Now he had changed his mind.

‘Verney!’ said Harry Parker, coming out to greet him. ‘I heard you’d been away and I don’t mind telling you I was terrified in case you didn’t make it for Saturday! The thing is, we have agreed that someone ought to make a speech in the Minister’s honour, just a short one before the toasts. It must be in Portuguese, of course, and everyone suggested you.’

‘Yes, all right. I’ll do it.’

‘I say, that’s terribly decent of you,’ said Parker, surprised and greatly relieved. ‘Everyone’s coming! De Silva, the Mayor, Count Sternov… I’m putting you on the right of Alvarez with the Mayor opposite. I’ll show you the seating plan.’

They walked together past the tennis courts, the swimming-pool, the new one-storey wooden building which Parker had had built in the grounds to provide acommodation for visitors defeated by the Golden City’s inexplicably ghastly hotels. Rom cared little for Parker’s views, but he had to admit that the young man — brought out from England to run the club on ‘British’ lines — was doing a good job.

‘Actually there’s been a bit of a fuss,’ said Parker. ‘We’ve just heard that Alvarez travels everywhere with his own chef — got a delicate stomach or something. Some high-up French fellow… He intends to bring him here to supervise his own dishes for the banquet. You can imagine how my kitchen staff’s taken it! I hope there won’t be any bloodshed.’

He led Rom through into his office and showed him the plans.

‘That seems all right,’ said Rom. ‘I shall want to speak to Alvarez privately before the dinner. Tell him I want to brush up on his new honours before my speech. Can you clear the smoking-room and give us drinks in there?’