A Company of Swans Read online

  But now, survivors of nine years under the whip of Madame’s tongue, they were all good friends.

  ‘She’s got someone with her,’ said Phyllis, tying her shoes. ‘A foreigner. Russian, I think. Funny-looking bloke!’

  Harriet changed hurriedly. In her white practice dress, her long brown hair scraped back from her face and coiled high under a bandeau, she was transformed in a way which would have disconcerted the ladies of Trumpington. The neat and elegant head; the long, almost unnaturally slender throat; the delicate arms all signalled an unmistakable message – that here in this place Professor Morton’s quiet daughter was where she belonged.

  The girls entered, curtseyed to Madame – formidable as always in her black pleated dress, a chiffon bandeau tied round her dyed orange hair – and took their places at the barre.

  ‘This is Monsieur Dubrov,’ Madame announced. ‘He will watch the class.’

  She stabbed with her dreaded cane at the cowed accompanist, who began to play a phrase from Delibes. The girls straightened, lifted their heads . . .

  ‘Demi-plié . . . grand plié . . . tendu devant. . . pull up, everybody . . . dégagé . . . demi-plié in fourth . . . close.’

  The relentless, repetitive work began and Harriet, emptying her mind of everything except the need to place her feet perfectly, to stretch her back to its limit, did not even realise that while she worked she was for once completely happy.

  Beside the petite and formidable figure of Madame stood Dubrov, his wild grey curls circling a central dome of pinkly shining scalp, his blue eyes alert. He had seen what he wanted to see in the first three minutes; but this portly, slightly absurd man – who had never danced a step – could not resist, even here in this provincial room, tracing one perfect gesture which had its origin in Cecchetti’s class of perfection in St Petersburg or – even in the fat girl – the épaulement that was the glory of the Maryinsky. How Sonia had done it with these English amateurs he did not know, but she had done it.

  ‘You will work alone now,’ ordered Madame after a while. ‘The enchaînment we practised on Thursday and led her old friend downstairs. Five minutes later they were installed in her cluttered sitting-room, stirring raspberry jam into glasses of tea.

  ‘Well, you are quite right,’ said Dubrov. ‘It is the little brown one I want. A lyrical port de bras, nice straight knees and, as you say, the ballon . . . an intelligent dancer and God knows it’s rarely enough one sees a body intelligently used.’ But it was more than that, he thought, remembering the way each phrase of the music had seemed literally to pass across the child’s rapt, utterly responsive face. ‘Of course her technique is still—’

  ‘I’ve told you, you cannot have her,’ interrupted Madame. ‘So don’t waste my time. Her father is the Merlin Professor of Classical Studies; her aunt comes here as if there was a bad smell in the place. Harriet was not even allowed to take part in a charity performance for the police orphans. Imagine it, the orphans of policemen, is there anything more respectable than that?’ She inserted a Balkan Sobranie into a long jet holder and leaned back in her chair. ‘The child was so disappointed that I swallowed my pride and went to plead with the aunt. Mon Dieu, that house – it was like a grave! After an hour she offered me a glass of water and a biscuit – one biscuit, completely naked, with little holes in it for drainage.’

  Madame had changed into French in order to do justice to the horrors of the Mortons’ hospitality. Now she shook her head, seeing through the clouds of smoke she was blowing out of her imperious nose the twelve-year-old Harriet standing in the wings of the draughty, improvised stage of the drill hall, watching the other girls dance. All day Harriet had helped: pinning up Phyllis’s butterfly costume, ironing the infants’ tarlatans, fixing Lily’s headdress for her solo as Princess of Araby . . . And then just stood quietly in the wings and watched. Madame had repeatedly heard Harriet described as ‘clever’. In her own view, the girl was something rarer and more interesting: good.

  ‘No,’ she said now, ‘you must absolutely forget my poor Harriet.’

  ‘Surely to travel is part of every young girl’s education?’ murmured Dubrov.

  ‘They do not seem unduly concerned about Harriet’s education,’ commented Madame drily. ‘She is to marry a young man with an Adam’s apple – a cutter-up of dead animals, one understands. But I must say, I myself would hesitate to let a daughter of mine travel up the Amazon in your disreputable corps de ballet and endure Simonova’s tantrums. What are you after, Sasha; it’s a mad idea!’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ The blue eyes were dreamy. He passed a pudgy but beautifully manicured hand over his forehead and sighed. Born of a wealthy land-owning family which had dominion over two thousand serfs somewhere on the Upper Volga, Dubrov might well have led the contented life of his forebears, riding round his estates with his borzois at his heel and seasonally despatching the bears and boars and wolves with which his forests were plentifully stocked. Instead, at the age of fifteen he visited his godmother in St Petersburg and had the misfortune to see the sapphire curtains of the Maryinsky part on the première of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. Carlotta Brianzi had danced Aurora, Maria Petipa was the Lilac Fairy – and that was that. For the last twenty years, first in his homeland and latterly in Europe, Dubrov had served the art that he adored.

  That this romantic little man should become obsessed with one of the truly legendary names on the map of the world was inevitable. A thousand miles up the River Amazon, in the midst of impenetrable forest, the wealth of the ‘rubber barons’ had brought forth a city which was the very stuff of dreams. A Kubla Khan city of spacious squares and rococo mansions, of imposing fountains and mosaic pavements . . . A city with electric light and tramways, and shops whose clothes matched those of Paris and New York. And the crown of this city, which they called Manaus, was its Opera House: the Teatro Amazonas, said to be the most opulent and lovely theatre in the world.

  It was to this theatre that Dubrov proposed to bring a visiting ballet company led by the veteran ballerina he had the misfortune to love; it was to recruit young dancers for the corps de ballet that he had visited his old friend Sonia Lavarre.

  ‘Manaus,’ murmured Madame. ‘Caruso sang there, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. In ninety-six. And Sarah Bernhardt acted there . . . So what more fitting than that the Dubrov Ballet Company should dance!’

  ‘Hmm. The fee must be good, if Simonova has agreed to go.’ But her face belied her words. She had worked with Simonova in Russia and knew her to be an incomparable artist.

  He shrugged. ‘There is more money in those few hundred miles of the Amazon than in all of Europe put together. They paid Adelina Patti a thousand dollars to appear for one night! Everybody who has gone out there and managed to acquire a piece of land has made a killing with the rubber trees; Spaniards, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Germans. The English too. The richest man of all out there is English, so they say.’

  ‘So why do you come to me for dancers? Why are all the young girls not queueing up to go out there with you?’

  Dubrov sighed into his glass of tea. ‘Diaghilev has all the best dancers. The rest are with Pavlova.’ He glanced at her sideways from beneath his Santa Claus eyebrows. ‘And of course there are a few who don’t like the idea of the insects and the diseases and so on,’ he admitted. He threw out a dismissive hand and returned to his present preoccupation. ‘I could take the blonde with the curls, I suppose, but I can get girls like that from an agency. It’s the little brown one I want. Let me talk to her myself; perhaps I can persuade her.’

  ‘How obstinate you are, my poor Sasha! Still, it will be interesting for all the girls to hear of your plans. I shall stop the class early and Harriet can listen with the others. It is always instructive to watch Harriet listen.’

  So the advanced class was stopped early and the girls came down. Phyllis had removed her bandeau to let her curls tumble round her face, but Harriet came as she was and as she sank on to a footstool, Dubrov
nodded, for she had that unteachable thing that nevertheless comes only after years of teaching: that harmonious placing of the limbs and head that they call line. And obstinately, unreasonably – for she would be only one of twenty or more girls – he wanted her.

  Like all men of his class, Dubrov had had an English governess and spoke the language fluently. Yet beneath his words, as he began to describe the journey he would make, there beat the grave exotic rhythm that enables the Slavs to make poetry even of a laundry list.

  ‘We shall embark at Liverpool,’ he said, addressing all the girls yet speaking only to one, ‘on a white ship of great comfort and luxury; a ship with salons and recreation rooms and even a library . . . a veritable hotel on which we shall steam westwards across the Atlantic with its white birds and great green waves.’

  Here he paused for a moment, recalling that Maximov, his premier danseur, had managed to be seasick on a five-minute ferry crossing of the Neva, but rallied to describe the beneficial effects on the Company of the ozone, the excellent food, the long rest as they lay back on deck-chairs sipping beef-tea . . . ‘But when at last we reach the port of Belem in Brazil, our real adventure will only just be beginning. For the ship will enter the mouth of the greatest river in the world – the Amazon – and for a thousand miles we shall steam up this waterway which is so mighty that they call it the Rio Mare . . . the River Sea.’

  He spoke on, untroubled by considerations of accuracy, for the flora and fauna of Brazil were quite unknown to him, and as he spoke Harriet closed her eyes – and saw . . .

  She saw a white ship steaming in silence along the mazed waterways of the River Sea . . . She saw a shimmering world in which trees grew from the dusky water only to find themselves embraced by ferns and fronds and brilliantly coloured orchids. She saw an alligator slide from a gleaming sand-bar into the leaf-stained shallows . . . and the grey skeleton of a deodar, its roots asphyxiated by the water, aflame with scarlet ibis . . .

  Standing in the bows of the ship as it steamed through this enchanted world, Harriet saw a raven-haired woman, pensive and beautiful: La Simonova, the Maryinsky’s brightest jewel and beside her, manly and protective, the leonine premier danseur, Maximov . . . She saw, streaming away from them on either side like a formation of wild geese in flight, the white-clad dancers who would be Simonova’s snowflakes and cygnets and sylphides . . . and saw a golden-eyed jaguar peer from the trellis of green in wonder at the sight.

  Dubrov had reached the ‘wedding of the waters’, the place where the leaf-brown waters of the Amazon flowed distinct and separate beside the black waters of the Negro. It was up this Stygian river that he now took them and there – shining, dazzling, its wonder reflected in Harriet’s suddenly opened eyes – was the green and gold dome of the Opera House soaring over the roofs of the city.

  ‘We shall be giving Swan Lake, Fille Mal Gardée and Casse Noisette,’ said Dubrov. ‘Also Giselle – and The Dying Swan if Pavlova does not sue.’ He paused to wipe his forehead and Harriet saw the homesick Europeans, the famous ‘rubber barons’, leaving their riverside palaces clad in their opera cloaks, their richly attired wives beside them, saw them converge in boats from the river’s tributaries, in carriages, in litters carried through the jungle, on to the Opera House ablaze with light. . . heard their gasps of wonder as the curtain rose on Tchaikovsky’s coolly sumptuous woodland glade – while outside the howler monkeys howled and the brilliantly plumaged parakeets flew past.

  Dubrov paused to light a cigar and threw a quick glance at Harriet. Even with her eyelashes she listens, he thought – and went on to speak of the ‘Arabian Nights’ lifestyle of the audience for whom they would dance. ‘There is a woman who has her carriage horses washed down in champagne,’ he said, ‘and a man who sends back his shirts to London to be laundered,’ – and here Madame smiled, for as she had expected a small frown mark had appeared between Harriet’s eyebrows.

  Harriet did not think it necessary to wash carriage horses in champagne or to send one’s laundry five thousand miles to be washed.

  Dubrov now was nearing the end of his discourse. Lightly, almost dismissively, he touched on the triumph, the innumerable curtain calls which would follow their performances of the old ballets blancs, chosen particularly to appeal to those exiled from their own culture; then with a last flourish he brought the Company back to England, laden with jewels and silverware, with ocelot and jaguar skins – to loud acclaim and an almost certain engagement at the Alhambra, Leicester Square.

  ‘You may go now,’ said Madame when Dubrov had been thanked, and as the girls slipped out Phyllis could be heard saying, ‘I wouldn’t fancy going out there, would you? Not with all those creepy-crawlies!’

  ‘And the Indians having a gobble at you, I shouldn’t wonder,’ added Lily.

  But when Harriet prepared to follow her companions, Madame barred her way. ‘You will remain behind, Harriet,’ she commanded. And as Harriet turned and waited by the door, her hands respectfully folded, she went on, ‘Monsieur Dubrov came here to recruit dancers for the tour he has just described to you. He has seen your work and would be willing to offer you a contract.’

  ‘Your lack of experience would of course be a disadvantage,’ interposed Dubrov quickly. ‘Your salary would naturally be less than that of a fully trained dancer.’

  It was this haggling, this evidence that she was not simply dreaming, that effected the extraordinary change they now saw in the girl.

  ‘You are offering me a job?’ she said slowly. ‘You would take me?’

  ‘There is no need to sound so surprised,’ snapped Madame. ‘Any pupil in my advanced class has reached a professional standard entirely adequate for the corps de ballet of a South American touring company.’

  Harriet continued to stand perfectly still by the door of the room. She had brought up her folded hands to her face as women do in prayer, and her eyes had widened, lightened – shot now with those flecks of amber and gold which had seemed to vanish after her mother’s death.

  ‘I shall not be allowed to go,’ she said, addressing Dubrov in her soft, carefully modulated voice. ‘There is no possible way that I can get permission; and I am only eighteen so that if I run away, I shall be pursued and retrieved and that will make trouble for others. But I shall never forget that you wanted me. Never, as long as I live, shall I forget that.’

  And then this primly reared girl with her stiff academic background came forward and took Dubrov’s hand and kissed it.

  Then she gave Madame her réverénce and would have left the room, but Dubrov seized her arm and said, ‘Wait! Take this . . . there may after all be a miracle.’ And as she took the card with his address, he added, ‘You will find me there or at the Century Theatre until April the 25th. If you can reach me before then, I will take you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Harriet; then she curtseyed once more and was gone.

  Edward Finch-Dutton was dissecting the efferent nervous system of a large and somewhat pickled dogfish. The deeply dead elasmobranch lay in a large dish with a waxed bottom, pins spearing the flaps of its rough and spotted skin. The familiar smell of formalin which permeated the laboratory beat its way not unpleasantly into Edward’s capacious and somewhat equine nostrils. He had already sliced away the roof of the cranium and now, firmly and competently – his large freckled hands doing his bidding perfectly – he snipped away at the irrelevant flotsam of muscle, skin and connective tissue to reveal, with calm assurance, the creature’s brain.

  ‘The prosencephalon,’ he pronounced, pointing with his seeker at the smooth globular mass, and the first-year students surrounding him in the Cambridge Zoology laboratory nodded intelligently.

  ‘The olfactory lobes,’ continued Edward, ‘the thalamencephalon. And note, please, the pineal gland.’

  The students noted it, for with Dr Finch-Dutton’s dissections the pineal gland could be noted, which was not always so with lesser demonstrators. Eagerly they peered and scribbled in their notebooks, for thei
r own specimens awaited them, set out on the long benches of the lab.

  So assured was Edward, so predictable the state of things in the cartilaginous fishes, that as he proceeded downwards towards the medulla oblongata, squirting away intrusive blood clots with his water bottle, he was free to pursue his own thoughts. And his thoughts, on this day when he was to dine at her house, were all of Harriet.

  Edward had not intended to marry for a considerable period of time. Having obtained his Fellowship it was obviously sensible to wait, for he agreed with the Master of St Philip’s that eight or even ten years of celibacy was not too great a price to pay for the security of an academic life.

  Yet he intended to lead Harriet to the altar a great deal sooner than that. True, he would see very little of her: St Philip’s rules about women in the College were particularly strict, but it would be good to know that she was waiting for him somewhere in a suitable house on the edge of the town. Her quiet and gentle presence, the intelligent way she listened would be deeply comforting to a man who had set himself, as he had done, the onerous task of definitively classifying the Aphaniptera. In five years – no, perhaps that was rash – in eight years, when he had published at least a dozen papers and his ascent of the promotional ladder was secure, he would let her have a baby. Not just because women never seemed to know what to do without little babies, but because he himself, coming from an old and distinguished family, would like to have an heir.

  He laid down his scissors, picked up his forceps, began to prise up the left eyeball – and paused to look at Jenkins, a sixteen-stone rugger Blue from Pontypridd. Jenkins was much given to fainting and eyeballs, so Edward had found, were always difficult.