A Swans - Eva Ibbotson

“I employed a new girl today,” he said. “The one I told you about in Cambridge. Sonia’s pupil. She ran away to come to us, so no doubt I shall be arrested soon for luring away a minor.”

“Is she good?”

The fear again… but behind the panic of being overtaken, something else—the curiosity, the eagerness about the thing itself: the dance and its future.

“How could she be good? She is an amateur.”

“But Sonia taught her, you say?” They had been friends of a sort, she and Sonia who, a few years older, was already in the corps when Simonova joined the company. Together, infuriated by the antics of a visiting “star,” they had unloosed an ancient, wheezing pug-dog on to the stage during a ballet called Trees …

“Yes, but three times a week. Oh, you know how the British are about the arts—the gentility, the snobbery. It’s a pity, for if they chose they could make marvelous dancers of their girls. Perhaps one day…”

“Why did you want her then?”

Dubrov, about to embark on the quality he had detected in Harriet—a totality and absorption—changed his mind. Simonova had started on a routine that was all too familiar—the lavish application of cold cream, the knee bandage, the wax ear-plugs to eliminate the noises of the traffic—which in about three minutes from now would result in his being chastely kissed on the forehead and dismissed.

“She has ears like Natasha’s,” he said.

The ballerina spun around. “Like Natasha’s ? In War and Peace ? But Tolstoy doesn’t describe her ears.”

Dubrov shrugged. “I don’t need Tolstoy to tell me what her ears were like.”

It worked. The jealousy on her face was instantaneous and owed nothing to her profession. “You are an idiot.” She put the ear-plugs back in the drawer, wiped off the cream with a piece of gauze.

“ Chort !” she said. “I’m tired. Let’s go to bed.”

Harriet had always longed to be allowed to work. Now her wish was granted a hundredfold. There were constant disasters as this most unfledged of swans, this newest of snowflakes staggered across the stage. But though Harriet made mistakes, she did not make them twice.

The girls, without exception, were helpful. They themselves had only just learned to work in unison, but they counted for her, pushed her, pulled her and retrieved her from inhospitable corners of the stage. Even Olga Narukov—a spitfire from the borders of Afghanistan who thought nothing of felling a dancer who displeased her with a kick like a mule’s—kept her temper with Harriet, for the newcomer’s grit and humility were curiously disarming.

“Follow the girl in front!” Grisha yelled at Harriet when her musicality threatened to lead her astray. “ Just follow the girl in front !”

The girl in front, when the corps was arranged by height, was the French girl Marie-Claude, and there could be no one more worthy of being followed.

The creation of brown-eyed blondes has long been regarded as one of God’s better ideas. Marie-Claude’s eyes were huge and velvety, her lashes like scimitars, her upturned mouth voluptuously curved. To this largesse had been added waist-length golden, curling hair which, had she chosen to sit on a rock brushing it, must have sent every sailor within miles plunging to his doom.

Marie-Claude, however, did not so choose. She was entirely faithful to her fiancé, a young chef who worked in an hotel in Montpellier, and though occasionally willing (if the price was right) to emerge from a seashell at the Trocadero or sit on a swing in some nightclub clad only in her hair, she did so strictly to earn money for the restaurant which she and Vincent, as soon as they had saved enough, were proposing to open in the hills above Nice.

It was Marie-Claude and the Swedish girl, Kirstin, who found space for Harriet in the tiny room they shared in a hostel in Gray’s Inn Road. It was already crammed full with their two truckle-beds, but the good-natured warden put a mattress on the floor for Harriet. The confusion and clutter were indescribable but to Harriet—used to the solitude and icy hygiene of her bedroom in Scroope Terrace—everything was a delight.

From her new roommates Harriet learned a great deal about the Company. That the Russian girls were on summer leave from their dancing academies in Kiev and Odessa and would return to their native land in the autumn. That Simonova detested Maximov, who had once dropped her in the grand pas de deux at the end of Sleeping Beauty . That Masha Repin, the brilliant young Pole, was reputed to be sticking pins into a wax model of Simonova so that she could take over Giselle …

Neither of the girls was ambitious: of “the dance” they asked only that it give them a living, and the fabled city of Manaus might have been Newcastle or Turin: it was somewhere they could work and be paid.

“Though there is a great deal of money to be made out there,” pointed out the practical Marie-Claude. “Vincent’s cousin works as a chef to an important man in Rio and he sends back enormous sums to Montpellier.”

Kirstin had been put to dancing by her father—a ballet master who worked in Scandinavia and London—and Marie-Claude by her half-English mother, an opera dancer who had been undulating between two camels in an open-air production of Aida when a young farmer from the Languedoc decided to remove and marry her. Though only two years older than Harriet, their attitude toward the English girl was that of two worldly and experienced aunts.

“It must be incredible, being so beautiful,” said Harriet now, overawed by the sight of Marie-Claude in her shift preparing for bed.

“Not at all,” said the French girl dismissively. “Until I met Vincent it was extremely disagreeable. From the age of six I had to go everywhere with a hat-pin—a very long one from my Tante Berthe’s Sunday hat. Even so, it wasn’t always so simple. For example, when I was fifteen there was an old gentleman who used to wait for me outside school and offer to give a thousand francs to the Red Cross if I would let him see me brush my hair. Obviously, simply to jab a hat-pin into such an old gentleman would not have been correct. It is, after all, a very good cause—the Red Cross. But now I have Vincent and everything is—.” She broke off to look aghast at the voluminous flannel nightdress which Harriet was pulling over her head. ” ‘arriette, what is that that you have there?” she inquired, her excellent English fracturing under the shock.

“It’s all I have,” said Harriet ruefully. “My Aunt Louisa chose it.”

Marie-Claude deliberated. “Perhaps if you undid the top button… and pushed up the sleeves, comme ça ?”

“But I’m only going to bed.”

Kirstin, who had been rubbing methylated spirit into her slender feet, pushed back her straight pale hair and exchanged a glance with Marie-Claude.

“Only?” said Marie-Claude, speaking for them both.

But long after the other two were asleep Harriet, the top button of her nightdress obediently undone, sat up on her mattress recalling the day. She had escaped but she was not yet safe; a knock at the door could mean a policeman, recapture and the misery of a life which, now she had tasted freedom, she felt she could not endure again. Yet presently she found her fingers involuntarily marking out the steps in the snowflake waltz they had gone through at the last rehearsal, using instinctively the curious shorthand—a kind of deaf-and-dumb language—that dancers employ… And waking at dawn, she rose and in the deserted dining room of the hostel, among the stacked chairs, she practiced.

She practiced on the top of the Number 15 bus going to the theater, marking the steps with the tips of her toes beneath the seat; she practiced in the tea-shop to which the others dragged her, hanging on to the edge of the table until her doughnut came. She danced with her bruised and bleeding feet, with her fingers, inside her head… and on the third day Dubrov, encountering her as she walked backward up the iron stairs to the dressing room in order to ease the aching muscles of her calves, smiled happily. He liked that; he liked it very much.