A Company of Swans (14 page)

Implacable, with their characteristic look of having just stepped down from a cut-price sarcophagus, the Mortons stood before him.

"I would never be able to get leave," said Edward.

That, however, was not necessarily true. He only had two practicals in the summer term; Henderson would do those for him and the head of his department was a great believer in field work—in getting what he called "nose to nose with the insect."

The images came faster. The Goliath beetle, six inches from mouth to sternum… the "88" butterfly, a brilliant airborne hieroglyphic for which private collectors would give their ears… Harriet lying on a pillow, her hair spread out; her limp body acquiescent as he carried her to safety up the gangplank of the ship… And Peripatus—ah, Peripatus! Edward's blue eyes grew soft as he thought of this seemingly insignificant creature, half-worm, half-insect, the world's oldest living fossil, crawling—as it had crawled since the dawn of time—through the unchanging debris of the rain-forest floor.

Torn beyond endurance, he gazed into the tank where Henderson's lone parsnip continued to respire silently in the cause of science. "Look at my fate," the captive vegetable seemed to be saying. "Free yourself. Show yourself a hero. Be a man." Making a final stand, Edward turned back to the Professor. "And there is the fare," said Edward, "I cannot possibly afford the fare."

A grimace, a convulsion of the thin lips, a kind of spasm—and then the Merlin Professor looked straight at Edward and said, "I will pay the fare."

Chapter Six

"I look like a twig," said Harriet a little sadly, gazing into the flyblown mirror of the room she shared with her friends in the Hotel Metropole.

Marie-Claude and Kirstin did not attempt to deny it.

"I would like to know what exactly she is like, this Aunt Louisa of yours," said Marie-Claude. "How can someone actually enter into a shop and buy such a dress?"

It was the day after the opening night of Swan Lake and the girls were preparing for the party at Follina.

"Brown suits Harriet," said Kirstin kindly.

"Oh, yes. Brown velvet in the winter with frogging, perhaps," agreed Marie-Claude. "But brown foulard … and the sleeves." She laid a bunch of artificial flowers against Harriet's throat and shook her head. "Better not to draw attention…"

She herself was dressed like a dancer—that is to say, like the image of a dancer that the world delights in: a three-quarter-length white dress, satin slippers, a wreath of rosebuds in the loose and curling golden hair.

"I'll stand at the back and hold my glass; no one will notice me," said Harriet, whose ideas of party-going were conditioned by the dread occasions with which the Master of St. Philip's celebrated events of academic importance.

"You will do nothing of the kind, 'ariette," said Marie-Claude, slipping Vincent's engagement ring firmly onto her finger. "This man is not only an Englishman but the most important—"

"An Englishman? The chairman of the Opera House trustees? Goodness!" Harriet was amazed. "I'd imagined a kind old Brazilian with a paunch and a huge waxed mustache."

"Whether he has a mustache or not, I cannot say," said Marie-Claude, a little offended. "Vincent's mustache is very big and personally I do not find a man attractive without mustaches. But Mr. Verney is spoken of as formidably intelligent and since you are the daughter of a professor—"

"Mr. Verney?" said Harriet, and there was something in her voice which made both girls look at her hard. "Is that what he is called? Are you sure?"

"Certainly I am sure," said Marie-Claude, exasperated by the unworldliness of her friend. Harriet had pestered everyone ceaselessly for the names of the flowers, the birds, even the insects they had encountered ever since they left England, yet she had not even troubled to find out the name of the most influential man in Manaus.

But Harriet was lost in remembrance, her hairbrush dangling from her hand.

"I'm Henry St. John Verney Brandon," Henry had said to her, turning his small face upward, trusting her with that all-important thing: his name. And another image… the unpleasant Mr. Grunthome with his liver-spotted pate and rapacious hands, droning on beside the Van Dyck portrait of Henrietta Verney who had brought her beauty and her fortune to the house of Brandon.

It didn't have to mean anything—the name was not uncommon. Yet if Henry's "secret boy" was some distant connection of the family brought up for some reason at Stavely… ? If against all odds she had found him and could plead Henry's case, what happiness that would be!

No, I'm being absurd, thought Harriet; it's merely coincidence. But she found herself suddenly looking forward to the evening ahead and—relinquishing the hairbrush to Marie-Claude—submitted with docility to having two side plaits swept onto the crown of her head and wearing the rest loose down her back to reveal what both the other girls regarded as tolerable: her ears.

Though she knew her host was rich, the first sight of the Amethyst waiting at the docks in the afternoon sunshine to take the cast to Follina, took her aback—not on account of the schooner's size, but because of her beauty. She was surprised too to find that a second boat was waiting to convey to the party not only the members of the orchestra but also the technical staff, who were so often forgotten.

"Very nice," said Simonova condescendingly, walking up the gangway in trailing orange chiffon and accepting as her due the attentions of Verney's staff, for had she not spent many summers on the Black Sea in a similar yacht owned by the Grand Duke Michael? She exclaimed ecstatically at the beauty of the river scene and firmly went below, followed by the other principals and most of the corps, to recline in the luxurious cabins with their bowls of fruit, boxes of chocolates and magazines.

"You of course will stay on deck and completely disarrange your toilette while we travel?" suggested Marie-Claude and Harriet, grinning at her friend, admitted that this was so. So she hung over the rails, watching the changing patterns of the islands which lay like jagged ribbons across the smooth, leaf-stained water, until they turned from the dark Negro into her tributary, the Maura.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "it is so light!" And the boatman standing near her with a rope coiled ready in, his hand nodded and smiled, understanding not her words but her tone.

The sails were furled now. Under engine, the Antethyst came in quietly beside the jetty—and Harriet, drawing in breath, saw what Rom had seen only in his mind's eye the day he first glimpsed Follina: a low pink-washed, colonnaded house at the end of an avenue of blossoming blue trees—and a garden whose scents and sense of sanctuary reached out like a benison to those who came.

"The place has style," admitted Marie-Claude, emerging immaculate and ravishing from below. "But I hope we are not expected to walk to the house."

They were not. Three cars and a number of carriages waited to take them the half-mile to Verney's front door. Simonova, Maximov and Dubrov swept into the first of these; Kaufmann, the choleric conductor of the orchestra, got into the second; the others followed.

"I shall walk," said Harriet.

"In this heat?" Even the easy-going Kirstin was shocked.

"Do you wish to arrive entirely dissolved in perspiration?" reproved Marie-Claude.

"Please… I must," said Harriet, and they shrugged and climbed into one of the carriages and left her.

Rom surveyed his guests with an experienced air and was satisfied. Simonova, reclined on a couch on the terrace, was surrounded by admirers; the dancers and musicians wandered happily between the tables, helping themselves to iced fruit juice or champagne. Standing beside the statue of Aphrodite flanking the stone steps, Marie-Claude was regaling a group of dazed gentlemen with an account of the restaurant she was proposing to start with Vincent in the foothills above Nice. That this entrancing girl was bespoke and visibly virtuous had given Rom a pang of relief, a reaction he had not sought to explain or understand, preferring simply to enjoy the sight of de Silva, Harry Parker (who ran the Sports Club) and a host of others drinking thirstily at these forbidden waters.

During this hour before sundown, the house and the terrace were one. The lilting music from the Viennese trio he had installed in the salon wafted out through the French windows, the jasmine and wisteria climbing his walls laid their heavy, scented branches almost into the rooms themselves. The moment darkness fell he would relinquish his garden to the moths and night birds, close the windows and lead his guests to a dinner as formally served and elaborate as any banquet of state. But this present time was for wandering at will, for letting Follina work its spell, and he intervened only with the lightest of hands—introducing shy Mrs. Bennett to the glamorous Maximov; removing the misanthropic conductor, Kaufmann, to the library with its collection of operatic scores.

Yet though no one could have guessed it Rom, as he wandered among his guests, was fighting down disappointment. He had been absolutely certain that he would recognize the swan who had sneezed so poignantly at the end of Act Two; it seemed to him that the serious little face with its troubled brown eyes was entirely distinctive, but he had been mistaken. A casual question to Dubrov when the girls arrived elicited the information that all members of the corps had come. "No one could miss such an honor," Dubrov had assured him, adding that he himself had personally counted heads as the girls came aboard the Amethyst. Therefore she must be in the group of Russians with their dark homesick faces, for she was not with Marie-Claude nor the pale-haired Swedish girl receiving, with evident indifference, the compliments of the Mayor. Well, people looked different without their makeup, he reflected, and shrugging off the matter as of no importance, paused by Simonova's couch to add his homage to her circle of admirers.

"Never!" the ballerina was declaring, throwing out her long, thin hands. "Never, never, will I return to Russia! If they came to me crawling in the snow on their hands and knees all the way from Petersburg, I would not come!"

She fanned herself with the ends of her chiffon scarf, and looked at her host from under kohl-tipped lashes. What a man! If only she had not been committed to her art—and of course to Dubrov, though that was more easily arranged… One must go where there is fire, Fokine had once said to her and this devastating man with his deep gray eyes and that look of Tamburlaine the Great was certainly fire. But it was impossible: a night with such a man and one could hardly manage three fouettés, let alone thirty-two…

"Ah, Madame, what a loss for my country," sighed Count Sternov.

"It is a loss," agreed the ballerina complacently. "But it is one for which they must take the blame. And in any case soon I am going to retire." She waited for the groans, the horrified denials… and when they came, proceeded. "Dubrov and I are going to live in the country in absolute simplicity with goats and grow vegetables. I have a great longing," she said, spreading tapered fingers which had never touched anything rougher than Maximov's silvered tights, "to get my hands into the earth."

"You must allow me to show you over the kitchen gardens," said Verney, concealing the smile that had flickered at the corners of his mouth.

"Yes. Later," said Simonova. The plants she had seen on the way up to the house had seemed to her excessive, altogether too much there and looking in some cases as though they might contain insects, which were not in her scheme of things. And she leaned back more comfortably and allowed a servant to refill her glass with champagne.

But Marie-Claude now detached herself from the besotted gentlemen surrounding her and said something to Dubrov, who turned to his host.

"Marie-Claude is a little concerned about our newest member of the corps. Apparently she decided to walk up from the jetty, but that was quite a time ago and she isn't here yet."

"She is English," explained Marie-Claude, turning her incredible eyes on Rom and repressing a sigh. If things had been different… even without mustaches… But they were not and resolutely she continued, "And it is impossible to keep her inside. You know how it is: the fresh air, et tout ça. And naturally one would not wish her to be eaten by a boa constrictor."

"English!" said Rom, amazed. "You have an English dancer?" No wonder he had been unable to visualize her in St. Petersburg or Kiev.

Dubrov nodded. "She only joined us just before we left, without any stage experience; she's done very well. Last night was her debut."

"Don't worry," said Rom. "I'm sure she's perfectly all right. But I shall send someone to fetch her."

This, however, he did not do. Briefing Lorenzo and his assistants, he slipped silently away and made his way down the steps.

She was not on the main avenue, not on any of the terraces, not in the arboretum, not by the pond…

He continued to search, not anxious but a little puzzled. Then from behind the patch of native forest he heard the great Caruso's voice.

"Your tiny hand is frozen… is frozen… is frozen…" sang the incomparable tenor, for the record—the first he had ever bought his Indians—was badly cracked.

Che gelida manina … a record valued even above the "Bell Song" from Lakmé, but seldom played now owing to its fragile state. They had a visitor, then, and one they wanted to honor. With an eagerness which surprised him, Rom made his way between the trees.

The village was bathed in the last rays of the afternoon sun. Hammocks were strung between the dappled trees; a monkey scratched himself on a thatched roof… a small armadillo they had tamed rooted in a patch of canna lillies.

In the circle around the horn of the gramophone sat the women with their children, together with the few men too old to be busy in the plantations or helping at the house. Someone knowing them less well would have assumed that this was just the usual evening concert, but Rom—seeing the fruit set out on painted plates and the cassia juice in gourds on the low carved stool-knew they were welcoming a valued guest.

Only what guest? And where?

At first he could see no one unusual. Then, searching the listening faces, he saw a girl he had at first taken to be one of the tribe, for she wore a dress such as the missionaries forced on their converts and she was holding a baby, cupping a hand around its head—Manuelo's three-day-old baby which they were taking to Father Antonio at dawn to be baptized.