Eva Ibbotson: A Company of Swans

Punctually at six thirty, he tidied up and bicycled back to his rooms. But before he prepared to shave and change into his dinner-jacket, he sent one of the college servants to the buttery for a pork pie. Edward had not yet dined at the Mortons’, but he had twice taken luncheon there and knew that it was best to be prepared.

It was to be a rather special dinner-party — the first time that Edward had been to dinner and the first chance for Marchmont (the new Classics lecturer) and his young wife to meet the Professor in the relaxed informality of his home.

So Louisa was taking trouble. In the dining-room grate, behind the iron grille of the fireguard, at least half-a-dozen coals were actually alight, constituting by the standards of Scroope Terrace a blazing fire. Moreover she had permitted the maids to replace the electric light bulbs which she had removed, for reasons of economy, from the central chandelier. The carpet, with its squares of brown and mustard, had been freshly brushed with tea-leaves, the Professor’s portrait in cap and gown hung straight above the sideboard and though she had baulked at the purchase of flowers so early in the year, the cup that her brother had won as an undergraduate in the Horatian oratory contest made, she thought now, an excellent epergne.

Descending to the basement, she found in the kitchen a similar air of festive abandonment. To her everyday soup of turnips and bacon bones Cook had added chopped carrots, giving the broth a pleasant yellowish tint. A cold codling waited in liquid for its sauce tartare and the leg of mutton (a real bargain from an enterprising butcher who specialised in cheap meat from injured but perfectly healthy animals which had to be despatched in situ) was already sizzling in the range.

‘That seems to be all right, Cook. What about the dessert?’

Cook motioned her head towards a large plate on which a coffee blancmange, just turned out of its mould, still shivered faintly.

‘I’m going to stick glacé cherries round it,’ offered Cook.

‘I must say that seems a little excessive,’ said Louisa. She frowned, thinking. Still, it was a dinner-party. ‘All right, then — but halve them first.’

She made her way upstairs again and was just in time to encounter her niece coming in from her dancing class.

It was always difficult for Harriet to leave the friendly, interesting streets and re-enter the dark house where the temperature generally seemed to be several degrees lower than that outside. Today, with Dubrov’s words still sounding in her ears, she stood more forlornly than usual in the hallway, lost in her unattainable dreams — and justifiably annoyed her aunt.

‘For goodness sake, Harriet, don’t dawdle! Have you forgotten we have dinner guests? I want you changed and in the drawing-room by seven o’clock.’

‘Yes, Aunt Louisa.’

‘You are to wear the pink crêpe de chine. And you can put up your hair.’

In her attic Harriet slowly washed, changed into the hideous dress her aunt had bought in the January sales and embarked on the battle to put up the long, soft hair which only curved slightly at the tips and needed a battery of pins to keep it in the coronet of plaits which the Trumpington Ladies had deemed suitable. She would have given anything for a quiet evening in which to relive what had happened… anything not to face Edward with his pompous and proprietary manner and the underlying kindness which made it impossible to dislike him as one longed to do.

When she had finished she went over to the bookcase and took down a volume of poetry, turning the pages until she found what she was looking for: a poem simply called ‘Life’:

She stood for a long time looking at the verses in which Emily Dickinson had chronicled her heartbreak. Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood — it was just that so very often they were dead, and in a book.

Two hours later the dinner-party was in full swing, though this was perhaps not the phrase which would have occurred to pretty Mrs Marchmont, supping her soup with a slight air of disbelief. She had been warned about the Mortons’ dinner-parties, but she had not been warned enough.

At the head of the table, the Professor was explaining to Mr Marchmont the iniquity of the latest Senate ruling on the allocation of marks in the Classical Tripos. Edward was valiantly discussing the ‘dreadful price of everything’ with Aunt Louisa, while in the grate the handful of smouldering coals — kicked too hard by the underpaid parlourmaid — blackened and expired.

The soup was cleared. The cod, whose sauce tartare surprisingly had come out slightly blue, arrived.

‘Well, Harriet, and how did you fare today?’ asked the Professor, addressing his daughter for the first time.

‘All right, thank you, Father. I went to my dancing lesson.’

‘Ah, yes.’ The Professor, his duty done, would have turned back to his neighbour but Harriet, usually so silent, spoke to him once more.

‘A man came to see Madame Lavarre. A Russian. He’s going to take a ballet company up the Amazon to Manaus. To perform there.’

Edward, assessing his piece of fish, which did not, after all, appear to be a fillet, said, ‘A most interesting part of the world, one understands. With a quite extraordinary flora and fauna.’

Harriet looked at him gratefully. And possessed by what madness she did not know, she continued, ‘He offered me a job… as a dancer — for the length of the tour.’

Her remark affected those present profoundly, but in different ways. Her father laid down his fork as a flush spread over his sharp-featured face, Louisa opened her mouth and sat gaping at her niece, while Edward’s shirt-front — responding to his sudden exhalation of breath — gave off a sharp and sudden ‘pop’.

‘He offered you a job?’ said the Professor slowly. ‘You? My daughter!’ He stared incredulously at Harriet. ‘I have never in all my life heard of such an impertinence!’

‘No!’ Harriet, knowing how useless it was, could not resist at least trying to make him see. ‘It’s an honour. A real one. To be chosen — to be considered of professional standard. And it’s a good thing to do — to take art to people who are hungry for it. Properly, objectively good like in Marcus Aurelius.’

‘How dare you, Harriet? How dare you argue with me!’ His daughter’s invocation of the great Roman Stoic, clearly his own property, had dangerously fanned the flames of the Professor’s wrath. He glared at Louisa; she should have been firmer with the girl, taken her away from that unsuitable Academy years ago. Though actually Louisa had said often enough that she saw no point in wasting money on dancing lessons, and it was he who had said that Harriet could continue. Was it because he could still remember Sophie waltzing so gracefully beneath the lamplit trees in that Swiss hotel? If so, he had been suitably punished for his sentimentality.

‘Please, Father. Please, let me go!’ Harriet, whom one could usually silence with a look, seemed suddenly to have taken leave of her senses. ‘You didn’t let me stay on at school, you didn’t allow me to go to France with the Fergusons because they were agnostics… well, I understood that — yes, really, I understood. But this… they take a ballet mistress, it’s absolutely respectable and I would be back in the autumn.’ She had pushed away her plate and was gripping the edge of the table, the intensity of her longing turning the usually clear, grave face into an image from a pietà: a wild-eyed and beseeching Magdalene. ‘Please, Father,’ said Harriet, ‘I implore you to let me go.’