Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

‘No. She is inexperienced, but the feeling will come.’

Dubrov was silent, wondering if the door had been locked on purpose and waiting — praying — for the abuse, the tantrums, the talk of retirement and Cremorra with which he knew so well how to deal.

But she was quiet, almost docile, and remained so for the rest of Nutcracker’s initial run, and knowing her as he did, he was afraid that something had been damaged inside her in a way that he could not soothe or talk away.

And he was right, for three days later, at the première of Giselle , Simonova hurt her back.

It was an inexplicable injury. The Act One pas de deux in which it occurred was as familiar to her as breathing and Maximov, as everyone agreed, was blameless. Yet as he came up behind her to lift her, turn her and set her down in arabesque her body sagged, she gave a despairing cry — and fell, to lie prone and unmoving on the floor.

The orchestra stuttered into silence; the audience hissed their consternation and as Maximov bent over the ballerina in anguish and Dubrov ran in from the wings, the curtain came down on a great dancer — and a great career.

An hour later, Simonova lay very white and very still in her bed at the Metropole.

‘Well, Sashka, it’s over,’ she whispered to the man who had loved her for twenty years. ‘But it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?’

There had been three doctors in the audience and though their diagnoses had differed, there was one thing on which they had all agreed, and in the injured woman’s presence — that she would never dance again.

‘It was very good, doushenka. It was the best,’ he said, and sat holding her hand until she fell into a chloral-induced sleep.

But Dubrov did not sleep. Instead, he surveyed the future. There was no question now of going on to Caracas or Lima. As soon as she was well enough to travel, she must be taken back to Europe — to Leblanc in Paris, the most famous orthopaedic surgeon in the world. If it really was a haemorrhage into the spinal canal, as one of the doctors had suggested, there was probably little that could be done, but she must have every chance. Which left the rest of their time in Manaus… He couldn’t run Nutcracker for a whole fortnight, nor could he afford to shut the theatre and lose all the takings. So Masha Repin must have Giselle…

In the small hours, in the still stifling heat, Simonova woke in pain and her mind turned to the past — to Russia and the snow.

‘Do you remember those drives from the theatre in your sledge?’ she whispered. ‘Sitting all wrapped up in my sables, squashing the poor violets on my muff?’

‘Yes, I remember. The frost made your eyelashes longer. You were so vain about that.’

‘And the street-lamps making that lilac mist… There is nowhere else in the world where they do that — only in Petersburg.’

‘We could go back,’ he said with sudden hope. ‘I still have the apartment.’

Ill as she was, she fought him. ‘No! Not after the way they treated me at the Maryinsky. Never!’

It will be Cremorra, then, thought Dubrov; there is no escape — and half in jest, mocking his own misery, he moved over to a pile of books on the bureau and pulled out a brightly coloured volume which he had hoped never actually to read.

‘Yes!’ said Simonova eagerly. ‘Read it aloud to me. I can’t sleep anyway, and I must learn. I must prepare myself. At first of course I’ll only be able to watch from the verandah, but when my back is better, ah, you’ll see! We’ll be so happy!’

The book was in English, as books on vegetable gardening are apt to be, and as the humid oppressive night wore on Dubrov read to her about the fan training of espalier plums, about the successive trench sowing of broad beans and the preparation of decayed vegetable matter to make a mulch.

‘What is it, this mulch?’ came Simonova’s hoarse voice from the bed.

Dubrov consulted the book. ‘It is something to put on the roots to stop them drying out. There is also a verb: to mulch…’

He looked up. Simonova, who had not cried out once when they lifted her battered body on to the stretcher, who had not shed one tear when the doctors pronounced their implacable verdict, was weeping.

‘I do not want to mulch!’ cried the ballerina — and burst into uncontrollable sobs.

Cedric Fitzackerly, anxious to get rid of the tiresome old Professor for whom he no longer had the slightest use, duly sent a cable to Manaus requesting that Edward Finch-Dutton be given every assistance in securing the return of Harriet Morton, a fugitive and a minor, to her native land.

The telegram carrying an awesome Foreign Office signature duly arrived on the desk of the Prefect of Police, where young Captain Carlos put it into the ‘In’ tray and hoped it would go away.

To have been left in charge of the police station was an honour, but it was one which put the Captain — scarcely out of his teens — under considerable strain. De Silva had taken three-quarters of the city’s military police along with him on his mission; they had been gone nearly a week, no one knew where, and young Carlos (whose title of Captain was a courtesy one borrowed for the occasion) lived in dread of an occurrence with which he would find it impossible to deal.

‘Here he comes again,’ said Sergeant Barra — a huge muscular cabaclo with a broken nose — looking up from the children’s comic he had been laboriously trying to read.

Captain Carlos put down the mirror in which he had been studying the progress of his incipient moustache and sighed.

‘I suppose we’d better let him in.’

Edward Finch-Dutton, still clutching his butterfly net, was admitted as he had been yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Though his Portuguese had not reached even the phrase-book stage which would enable him to complain that there was a fly in his soup, he had — by endless repetition of Harriet’s name, the word ‘England’ and what he believed to be Morse code noises — managed to make the Captain understand that he was enquiring whether a cable had arrived for him from his native land.

‘Nao,’ said Carlos, shaking his head as he had done on all the previous days. ‘Nada. Nothing. No.’

This had always been enough to send the Englishman away with a disconsolate air, but today it failed. Edward, still suffering from the shock of Harriet’s depravity, and from a touch of fever as he tottered from the Sports Club into the jungle on collecting forays and back again, suddenly lost control. There was no one to whom he could turn; Verney was still away, the consul was in São Paulo and he had not dared to mention his connection with Harriet to Harry Parker. Now his frustration boiled over and he began to shout and bang his fist on the table.

‘I don’t believe you. You’re lying! It must have come! Have a look, damn you — go through those papers there and look!’

He pointed at the pile of documents in the tray. Reluctantly the Captain pulled it towards him and shuffled a few of the envelopes.

‘Go on! Go right through the lot. Let me see for myself.’

Half-way down the pile Nemesis overtook poor Captain Carlos.

‘There! That one in the yellow envelope. Read it!’

The Captain picked up the cable and stared at it. ‘Eenglish,’ he said gloomily.

‘Then give it to me,’ said Edward, reaching across the desk.

This the Captain was naturally reluctant to do. At the same time it was clear that this irritating foreigner would now have to be dealt with, and even before de Silva’s return. He compromised.

‘Get Leo up from the cells,’ he said to the Sergeant.