A Swans - Eva Ibbotson

She was already dressed in her glittering white tutu.

Beneath the shining little crown her gaunt face, trapped and desperate, was that of an old woman.

“I will announce it after the performance, dousha .”

He did not waste breath telling her to relax, to be quiet. There was nothing to be done about her terror; she went on stage each time as if she was going to her death. All he could do was to be there, pray that the hundred instructions he had given to his underlings would be carried out and let her rage at him.

“That cow Legnani! The first thing I shall do when I am retired is to go to Milan and slap her face!”

He sighed. Legnani, one of the world’s great ballerinas, had been the first to introduce the thirty-two fouettés which make Act Three of Swan Lake so fiendishly difficult to dance, and Simonova’s vendetta against her was unending.

She stopped pacing, came over, clutched him with feverish arms. “But this is the last tour, isn’t it, Sashka? Soon it will be over for good? Soon now we shall go and live in Cremorra and grow—”

But at that moment—fortunately for Dubrov, who was in no state to discuss the cultivation of vegetables—her final call came.

For Simonova, fine and experienced dancer that she was, the terror ended the moment that she went on stage. Alas, the same could not be said for Harriet.

Rom was not a balletomane. From his mother he had inherited a passion for the human voice and though he had refused all the other dignities that people tried to thrust on him, he had accepted the chairmanship of the Opera House trustees. To Rom fell the task or cajoling reluctant prima donnas from Europe; of arranging the entertainment for the cast. It was he who had taken six actors from a Spanish company to Follina to be nursed when they were stricken with yellow fever. But it was opera that held his heart and as the curtain went up on Prince Siegfried’s birthday revels, the plight of this young man—Maximov in silver tights and straining cod-piece—left him relatively unmoved. Act One is something of a prologue. The Prince is bidden by his parents to marry, but feels disinclined. Pretty girls come up to dance with him and he supports their arabesques with the resigned look of a conscientious meat porter steadying a side of beef. His mother gives him a cross-bow… the eerie music of the swan motif is heard and the Prince decides to go hunting. The curtain falls.

The second act is different. A moonlit glade… romantic trees… a lake… And presently, Simonova gliding on—fluttering her arms, still freeing herself from the water. A fine dancer—Rom had heard her spoken of on a visit to Paris and she deserved her praise. The Prince appears and sees her… he is amazed. She tells him in absurd but effective mime that she is an enchanted princess, doomed to take the shape of a swan for ever unless a prince will truly love her. I will love you, signals Maximov; I will… They go off together…

And now to muffled “Ohs” and “Ahs” from the audience, there entered the swans. In his box the Prefect of Police, de Silva, leaned forward avidly, to be jerked back by the iron hand of his wife. The Mayor, squeezed like a small black currant between the bun-like figures of the Baltic princesses, smiled happily.

And Rom picked up his high-precision Zeiss opera glasses and fixed them on the stage.

As a youth, Rom had never doubted that he would be faithful to Isobel. The whole strange concept of a Christian marriage with its oaths, its unreasonable expectation that one man and one woman can find in each other all that the human heart desires, had found an echo in his ardent and romantic soul. When Isobel betrayed him, he put away these thoughts—and the kindness of Madeleine de la Tour had been for him a bridge to another and equally ancient tradition: that of woman as an amused and amusing source of pleasure. Of women, since he had come to the Amazon, Rom asked that they should be beautiful, willing—and know the score. And perfectly fulfilling these demands were the girls of the theater who touched down here—bringing their experience, their flair and talent for the game of dalliance. Gabriella d’Aosta, a singer in the chorus of La Traviata , with her black curls and great boudoir eyes… Little Millie Trant from Milwaukee, who had played the part of the maid in a mindless American farce—a delicious girl who had extracted more jewelry from him than he had ever bestowed on a human female and been worth every carat… And the russet-haired, barefoot dancer, the poor man’s Isadora Duncan, whose high-mindedness had ended so delightfully after dark.

So now, though with considerably less excitement than in his former days, Rom raked his opera glasses down the line of swans.

In every chorus line there is one beauty and there now, fourth from the left and dancing with competent precision, she was. A blonde, surprising in a troupe of Russian girls, with big velvety eyes, a lovely mouth and perfectly rounded limbs. But as Rom followed her along the line of swans—nice girls, perfectly in step, doing rather fetching emboîtés— something peculiar happened. His extremely expensive opera glasses seemed to take on a life of their own, moving again and again to the left of the lovely creature he was pursuing in order to home in on the serious, entirely ordinary face of the girl beside her: a brown-haired, grave-eyed girl, the third from the left.

Only why? She danced with grace and musicality, but that was certainly not what had drawn him. Rather there seemed to emanate from her some extreme emotion: one that drew from him an instinctive feeling of protection and concern.

The swans had come to rest upstage, facing the audience, leaning their heads on their arms. The head of the serious brown-haired girl leaned very tenderly—she cared about the fate of her Queen—but Rom, watching her, saw now a faint but unmistakable trembling of her chin. She was frightened, very frightened indeed, and in an unexpected burst of empathy he saw what she was seeing—the infinite yawning gap of the auditorium with its blurred rows of potential executioners.

Her debut, then? Unlikely—Russian ballet girls were always put on the stage early… yet he felt it must be so. He tried to imagine her receiving a sudden summons in some dark, snowbound apartment in St. Petersburg or bidding her family goodbye in a wooden house in Kiev, but none of the images fitted nor did a glance at the programme help. She might be Tatiana Volkoffsky, or Lydia Pigorsky or Natasha Alexandrovna—and she might not.

The idiot huntsmen appeared and threatened to shoot the swans and it was with considerable relief that Rom saw Simonova return and stand protectively in front of them, banishing the huntsmen with a great sweep of her arms. The third swan from the left, with her troubled eyes, had quite enough to put up with without getting shot.

Though he dutifully continued to study the blonde in the waltz that followed, Rom found himself returning rather more often than he intended to the girl beside her, checking up on her progress as might a good shepherd with a slightly wounded lamb. She was doing well; he could feel her confidence growing. She had, it occurred to him, rather a lovely throat.

But now the stage cleared, the slow, sweet strains of the solo violin rose from the orchestra—and there began the great pas de deux of love and plighted troth that for many people is Swan Lake .

Simonova had willed herself into youth. As Maximov—no meat porter now, but a manly and noble Prince—raised her from the ground, she pirouetted slowly beneath his arm… leaned against him in ara besque penchée… developpéd forward to throw herself back with total trust against his chest. He lifted her high above his head, put her down again to revolve slowly en pointe , her free foot fluttering in little battements . When he held her it was by the wrists, leaving her hands free for their poignant, wing-like draping.