Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

Harriet did not move. She was reliving two moments in her life which resembled this: the moment when she had been called into Mrs Fenwick’s study to be told that her father was taking her away from school; and the moment when she had brought home a stray puppy and Aunt Louisa had pushed it down the front steps to let it run, frightened and unheeding, into the traffic. This moment, with the feeling of being caught in a nightmare from which she could not wake, was the third.

At the same time, she was thinking. The gentlemen had to be kept quiet. Harry Parker had to be placated so that he would keep Marie-Claude’s secret. Marie-Claude had to make her escape.

‘Get behind the screen, Marie-Claude. Stay there until the cake has gone — then go quickly while everyone is in the banqueting room. If you’re caught, tell Monsieur Pierre that you came to protect me — to plead with me not to do it — but that I wouldn’t listen.’ She gave a crooked smile. ‘Say that I was too depraved…’

‘You’re going to do it, then?’ Marie-Claude stared at her friend. ‘You’re going to do what I do?’

Eagerly she picked up the stockings, the garters, ready to help Harriet dress.

‘No, I can’t do what you do. But I can do… something.’

‘Are you ready?’ Harry Parker’s voice came from outside the door.

‘Just a minute,’ called Harriet. ‘My friend is nearly ready.’

She took off her dress… her shoes… her stockings. Aunt Louisa’s meanness had had its effect even on Harriet’s underclothes. Her broderie anglaise petticoat was much too short — it came only to her calves — and she wore a narrow bust bodice of the same white material laced at the front.

‘Like that you are going?’ said Marie-Claude incredulously. And seeing Harriet’s face, ‘No, I cannot let you do it!’

‘Laissez-moi , Marie-Claude,’ said Harriet wearily — and climbed into the cake.

The table had been cleared, the port brought. Blue smoke from the men’s cigars wreathed the chandeliers.

‘Gentlemen!’ said Harry Parker, stepping forward with a self-satisfied smile. ‘The dessert!’

There was a blast of trumpets, the huge double doors were thrown open and there appeared, pushed in by four men in crimson livery, an enormous and sumptuously decorated cake.

‘Oh, God,’ thought Rom, sitting beside Alvarez at the centre table. ‘Not that old bromide!’

He had made the required speech with the expected eulogies and jokes, had set himself to amuse and enter-tain the Minister; but beneath the veneer of good manners he was savage with frustration and contempt. This idle, venal man would do nothing to help his countrymen; he would not set foot outside Manaus with its comforts and the flattery that was showered on him there.

And now this tired music-hall rubbish…

Edward, sitting at the foot of one of the side tables, had already drunk a great deal more than usual. Now, aware that something was about to happen that did not happen after dinner at St Philip’s, he leaned forward eagerly with an excited flush on his long face — and Rom, noticing him for the first time, threw him a scornful glance.

A tall chef in a white hat entered, followed by two assistants carrying a silver platter with a long-handled knife. On the dais, the six-piece orchestra broke into the music from La Belle Hélène.

And out of the cake there burst a girl!

Except that ‘burst’ was not quite the word… It was the slight air of puzzlement, the cessation of voices which might otherwise have been expected to go on talking through an event of this kind, which made Rom turn from Alvarez and look over the silver epergne which concealed him to see what was going on.

And certainly the figure which had emerged from the sea of tissue justified the mystification of the diners. Dressed like their little sisters bound for the bath, her arms folded in incorrigible modesty across her chest, the girl’s dark eyes were wide with fear and from her limbs there came a faint but uncontrollable trembling.

A man in a blond toupee broke into laughter. The leader of the orchestra raised his eyebrows at Parker, whose ferrety face as he recognised the professor’s daughter twitched with despair. Disaster clearly was upon them.

Then, from behind the silver epergne, there came the sound of clapping. Enthusiastic, thoroughly supportive clapping, evincing pleasure at the spectacle to come. Verney’s lead was always followed and Alvarez, who had clamped his monocle to his eye at first sight of the girl, had already joined in. Now the others followed suit; there were good-humoured cheers, fists thumped the table.

It was all that was needed. Harriet’s terror receded. She could make out no faces in the blue-wreathed, overheated room, but she sensed that the applause was kindly and now she climbed on to the rim of the cake, leaped lightly down on to the floor — and began to dance.

She danced naturally and with a perfect innocence, making no attempt whatever to match the gestures of Marie-Claude, but to the men watching her she purveyed an extraordinary sense of happiness, of fun. It was the delight of a young girl allowed to stay up for a party that Harriet shared with her audience — the excitement, the wonder of being awake in this glittering grown-up world — and the leader of the orchestra, getting her measure, quietened his players so that the showy, exuberant music revealed its charm and tenderness.

‘Who is she?’

Alvarez’ aside to Rom had none of the languor that had characterised his utterances hitherto. The dissipated, puffy face looked younger, almost vunerable, as he followed the girl’s movements with his eyes.

‘One of the dancers from the Dubrov Ballet.’ Rom’s own expression, as he watched and waited, gave nothing away — yet he was amazed by her performance. Though he had seen in the first instant that Harriet was pursuing some appallingly difficult task which she had set herself, it had taken all his control not to seize her by force and carry her from the room. But now, as she danced, he found himself — along with all the other sated, experienced men — following her movements with a forgotten thirst for innocence, for those dreams of a selfless life and a noble love that are the gift of youth. Without one step that could not be seen in any dancing class, without one ‘revealing’ gesture, Harriet held her watchers spellbound, fastened by an invisible thread to her soft limbs, her tender eyes and loosened hair.

Only a few bars now to the end of the Offenbach and she moved closer, looking beneath the folds of the damask for the footstool. It was difficult, the next bit… Marie-Claude had practised it a great many times; there was only a small space between the diners, but she had to do it — she mustn’t be afraid.

And now she had done it! Jumped in a graceful, soaring leap on to the table!

They had not expected that. There was a hiss of surprise, and glares of disapproval at the drunken Englishman on a side table who cried out and might have disturbed the concentration of the little dancer as she stood, pensive and relieved, testing the damask with her bare toe.

‘It is necessary to be more legato on tables,’ Marie-Claude had said. Moreover the table was narrow, the pink blurs that were the gentlemen’s faces disconcertingly close. Harriet let the first, languorous bars of The Odalisque go by before she knew what to do. Then she smiled… stretched her arms slowly above here head… began, most musically, to yawn… and to cover the yawn with splayed and slender fingers.

And for the men who by now would have been horrified had she as much as lifted her petticoat by a few inches, Harriet danced the irresistible, slow and delicious onset of sleep as it overcame the excited — now overtired — girl she had been down there on the floor. She let her head droop forward… brought up her folded hands to make a cushion for her cheek. She rallied to perform a few quick pirouettes, as if she could not yet bear to let the bright day go… and faltered, overcome once more by weariness.