A Company of Swans (3 page)

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 Theater 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 their 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 downward toward the medulla oblongata, squirting away intrusive blood dots 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 or 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 prize 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.

"Go and sit at the other end of the lab, Jenkins," he ordered now, and the huge muscular Welshman ambled off obediently to sit beside Dr. Henderson, a refugee from the crowded botany lab who was bubbling carbon dioxide through a tank in which an elderly parsnip silently respired.

Edward demonstrated the recti muscles of the eye and began on the tricky dissection of the cranial nerves. The best time to propose to Harriet, he had decided—and for them to become officially engaged—was at the St. Philip's May Ball. The Mortons' permission for him to take Harriet (in a suitably chaperoned party of course) was tantamount to an expectation of this sort. He had set aside an adequate sum of money for a ring and after the engagement would be able to work for at least two years without further interruptions before it was necessary to make preparations for their wedding. The thought of waltzing with Harriet brought a faint smile to his long and studious face. He had seen her first at a performance of the B minor Mass in King's College Chapel and been much taken by her stillness and concentration—been much taken too, it had to be admitted, by her delicate profile and the way one pointed ear peeped out between the strands of her loose hair. Or course it had been gratifying to find that she was the daughter of the Merlin Professor—it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise—but the knowledge that his feelings for her were basically disinterested gave him an enduring and justifiable satisfaction.

Half an hour later the students had dispersed and were bent over their own dissections while Edward, his hands behind his back, walked slowly between the benches, putting in a word here, an admonition there. Even Jenkins had recovered and was working busily.

"Please, Dr. Finch-Dutton, I don't know what this is?"

Edward flinched. It was a girl who had spoken—an unsuitably pretty brunette who worked with two other Girtonians on a separate bench. The girls were the plague of his life. He was almost certain that they taunted him deliberately, for his detestation of women students was as well-known and as strong as that of his future father-in-law. Last week's practical, when the class had dissected the reproductive system, had been a nightmare. Though he had particularly instructed Price to give the girls a female fish, the technician had failed in his duty as so often before and they had called him incessantly to demonstrate organs whose names it was quite atrociously embarrassing to pronounce in the presence of ladies.

But today there was no danger and having explained to the brunette, on whose slender neck a cluster of escaping curls most disconcertingly danced as she bent over her work, that she was in the presence of the trigeminal nerve, he retreated to the shelter of Henderson's parsnip.

At five, the practical concluded, he made his way along the corridor to his corner of the research lab where a neat row of black boxes—each containing a hundred perfectly mounted microscope slides of flattened fleas—awaited him. He had classified (mainly by means of the bristles edging the head capsule) some eighteen species, but this work would take a lifetime. Not that he regretted taking on the Aphaniptera… his supervisor had been perfectly right when he said that fleas were virgin territory… but before he placed the next slide under his binocular, Edward allowed himself a long and lusting look at the serried rows of butterflies pinned in cases on the wall above him. Fleas were Edward's bread and butter, but the Lepidoptera were his passion.

Punctually at six-thirty, he tidied up and bicycled back to his rooms. But before he prepared to shave and change into his dinner-jacket, he sent one of the college servants to the buttery for a pork pie. Edward had not yet dined at the Mortons', but he had twice taken luncheon there and knew that it was best to be prepared.

It was to be a rather special dinner party—the first time that Edward had been to dinner and the first chance for Marchmont (the new Classics lecturer) and his young wife to meet the Professor in the relaxed informality of his home.

So Louisa was taking trouble. In the dining-room grate, behind the iron grille of the fireguard, at least half-a-dozen coals were actually alight, constituting by the standards of Scroope Terrace a blazing fire. Moreover she had permitted the maids to replace the electric light bulbs which she had removed, for reasons of economy, from the central chandelier. The carpet, with its squares of brown and mustard, had been freshly brushed with tea-leaves, the Professor's portrait in cap and gown hung straight above the sideboard and though she had balked at the purchase of flowers so early in the year, the cup that her brother had won as an undergraduate in the Horatian oratory contest made, she thought now, an excellent epergne.

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.