A Swans: Eva Ibbotson

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 specialized 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 toward a large plate on which a coffee blancmange, just turned out of its mold, 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 crepe 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 re-live 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”:

I asked no other thing.

No other was denied.

I offered Being for it;

The mighty merchant smiled.

Brazil? He twirled a button

Without a glance my way

“But Madam, is there nothing else,

That we can show today?”

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 smoldering coals—kicked too hard by the underpaid parlormaid—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 neighbor 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 honor. 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.”

A scene! A scene at the dinner table. Overwhelmed by this ultimate in disasters, Louisa bowed her head over her plate.

“You will drop this subject immediately, Harriet,” barked the Professor. “You are embarrassing our guests.”

“No. I won’t drop it.” Harriet had become very pale, but her voice was steady. “You have always thought dancing was frivolous and silly, but it isn’t—it’s the most marvelous thing in the world. You can say things when you dance that you can’t say any other way. People have danced for the glory of God since the beginning of time. David danced before the Ark of the Covenant… And this journey… this adventure…” She turned imploringly to Edward. “ You must know what a wonder it would be?”

“Oh, no , Harriet! No, the Amazon is a most unsuitable place for a woman. For anyone !” From the plethora of dangerous diseases and potentially lethal animals, poor Edward—meaning only to scotch this dreadful topic once and for all—now had the misfortune to select the candiru . “There is a fish there,” he said earnestly, “which swims into people’s orifices when they are bathing and by means of backward pointing spines becomes impossible to dislodge…”