A Company of Swans (33 page)

"Yes." Henry's hoarse croak came with incredible gallantry from the bed. He did want to travel on; he longed, as a matter of fact, for alligators and boa constrictors. It was only the dark and his mother's anger that Henry feared. Only it was going to be a little bit difficult. Even sitting up seemed to make his head go round and round.

"It's an outrage!" stormed Sister Concepcion, returning to the refectory. "The child hasn't even been out of bed! I shall call Dr. Gonzales."

But even Dr. Gonzales, when he came, could not make Isobel change her mind. It was, she told herself, Henry's own heritage that she was trying to save; it was because of Henry and Stavely that she must find Rom at once and get rid of the hussy who had, after all, managed to make herself known to him. To be soft now, decided Isobel, turning away from the white face and dark-ringed eyes of her small son, would be to do Henry no service. Even now some dreadful school or institution might be making an offer for Stavely and those wretched trustees would accept anything to get their money.

So Henry was dressed, his things packed—and presently he sat on his bed waiting for the cab that was to take them to the harbor. His legs, thinner than ever, dangled from the high white bed and every so often he coughed—a racking, prolonged cough that shook his small frame—but he sat as straight as a ramrod and when his mother said, as she did from time to time, "You feel better now, don't you, Henry?" he answered, "Yes, thank you," in as convincing a voice as he could manage. And sometimes he was rewarded by her smile.

The cab arrived. Sister Concepcion bustled in, her face creased with concern, and kissed Henry who clung to her in a way which Isobel thought excessive. Sister Annunciata picked up Henry's case.

"Thank you," said Isobel to the nuns, holding out her hand. "You have been very kind and I am grateful. When I get back to England, I will make a donation to your Order."

Sister Margharita murmured a suitable acknowledgement, while Henry slipped off the side of the bed and stood up. This turned out to be more difficult than he had expected, but it was possible. And it had to be possible, too, to walk to the door. One simply put out one foot and then the other… I can do it, said Henry to himself. But he couldn't—not quite. Far more weakened by his illness than he realized, he swayed as the room spun around and would have fallen, but that Sister Concepcion caught him in her motherly arms and carried him out to the cab.

Isobel, walking ahead, had seen nothing.

Those who believe that nuns are gentle soft-voiced souls who speak ill of no one, would have been surprised could they have heard Sister Concepcion and her two helpers in the Convent of the Sacred Heart after the evening meal. But by that time Isobel and her son had steamed out of harbor and were once more en route for the Golden City.

Chapter Seventeen

"I must say I think they have it all wrong, the people who say that to part is to die a little. It seems to me," said Harriet, "that to part is to die really quite a lot. I mean, thirty-six hours without you…"

She stood on the terrace wearing the extraordinarily becoming blue dress that Marie-Claude had bought, waiting for Furo to bring around the black car in order to drive her to Manaus. For the Company was leaving the following day, due to embark on the Lafayette on Friday evening ready to sail at dawn, and she was going to say goodbye to Madame Simonova and spend a last night with her friends at the Metropole.

Rom stood beside her, troubled for no reason he could understand. She holds my shadow, he thought, quoting the phrase his Indians used to describe someone who had them in their power. Once it had seemed to him that this country was the "incomparable remedy." Now it was this quiet, unspectacular girl, whose loss would utterly diminish him.

But why should he lose her?

"Do you want me to go back with the Company?" Harriet had asked a few days earlier. "Would that be… the right thing to do?"

"Want you to go back? Want you to? God, Harriet, do you have to ask me that?" Rom had replied. "Do you want to go with them?"

"No, I don't. I would like to stay… if it is convenient."

"Convenient? Sometimes I think you're a little mad. Perhaps you should come upstairs," he had said furiously. "I don't seem to be able to make you understand anything when you're on your feet."

Since then she had abandoned herself to a degree of creative loving which exceeded anything he had ever imagined, her passionate physical response balanced by a respect for his work that gave him both rest and stimulus. But for her solitary practice sessions each morning at her makeshift bane, he would have sworn that she was utterly content.

"I wish I could have gone with you," he said yet again. "I hate you to go alone."

He had intended to take Harriet to Manaus himself and make good his promise to Simonova to bring her to say goodbye, but Alvarez—his work at Ombidos completed—was calling at Sao Gabriel on his way home, and to Alvarez Rom owed a debt that must be paid. There was no question of Harriet being in danger. Edward had been seen standing on the deck of the Gregory as she steamed away from Belem, and it was most unlikely that a man who had made such an idiot of himself once would return to the attack. Moreover de Silva was back in Manaus and well able to control the antics of his men.

Why, then, this unease?

"You've given me too much money," protested Harriet. "Even if I buy presents for absolutely everybody, I can't spend it."

"It is not for buying presents for absolutely everybody," he said sternly. "It's for you."

She shook her head and reached for his hand, counting the knuckles carefully, checking them off one by one with her fingertips to make sure that everything was as it should be and that she would not forget—in the day and night she was to be away—the configuration of his little fingernail or the exact place where a vein to which she was particularly devoted changed its course.

"I got to one thousand and forty-three seeds last night," she said. "In the bath. So it's absolutely all right."

"Of course it's all right," he said roughly. "All the passengers have to be on board by eight o'clock, so you'll be back in time for a splendid supper. I'm putting a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on ice—no doubt you will merely get hiccups again, but we must persevere."

But now they were back, his Indians. He had shooed them away twice before, explaining that Harriet was only going to Manaus and would be back tomorrow, but here again were old José, Andrelinho with his crippled boy, Manuelo with his wife, his baby… and that old witch, Manuelo's mother-in-law, who now wore her boa of anaconda skins over Harriet's brown foulard…

The missionaries had taught them to wave—prolonged goodbyes were one of their accomplishments, but there were too many of them today and Maliki and Rainu were sniveling. And now Lorenzo, who was an educated man and should have known better, came forward with a gift for Harriet which he placed in her hand—and which made Rom turn on him angrily with a few low words in his own dialect.

"Is there something wrong?" asked Harriet, troubled, looking up from the tiny, perfectly carved wooden canoe with paddles the size of splintered matchsticks and an intricate pattern of blue and scarlet painted across its bows. "Should I not take it?"

Rom shook his head. "It's all right." But as Harriet thanked Lorenzo, his sense of wretchedness increased. The gift was one traditionally given to ensure safety for those traveling far away across water—and Harriet wasn't even going in the Amethyst, Lorenzo knew that perfectly well. What the devil had got into them all?

The car arrived. Furo got out and held open the door and Harriet turned to Rom. "Could you be so kind as to remember that I love you absolutely?" she said quietly, almost matter-of-factly. "Could you be so kind as to remember that?"

He bent down then to kiss not her mouth, but her fingers, holding them in a strangely formal gesture to his lips.

"Yes," he said. "I could remember that. Were I to forget it, Harriet, it would go very ill with me."

Long after the car was out of sight and he had returned to the house, his Indians still stood on the steps, waving and waving and waving…

The theater was dark and silent, the seats already shrouded. It would be a month before another company made its way to Manaus—a Cossack choir from Georgia.

Would they be the last? Harriet wondered, picking her way across the deserted stage. Was Rom right and would this marvelous and fantastical theater be given over to the mice? Would bats hang from the chandeliers and moths devour the silken hangings? But if it was so—if Mrs. Lehmann's carriage horses had drunk their last champagne and the grandly dressed audience would no longer sweep across the great mosaic square—it had still been a splendid and worthwhile dream to build a theater here in this place… and one day, surely, it would open its doors again, music would stream from the pit and men, perhaps still unborn, would wait with bated breath for the gold glimmer of the footlights that meant curtain rise.

Down in the wardrobe she found a lone stage-hand who at first greeted her with respect, not recognizing in the elegantly dressed girl the little dancer in her shabby clothes—and then as she smiled, he asked her to sit on the last of the skips so that he could close it, as he had asked her to do three months ago in the Century Theater when the adventure began.

Then she went back to the stage-door where Furo was waiting and was driven to the Metropole where she went, first of all, to say goodbye to Simonova.

During the fortnight since Harriet had last seen her, Simonova's thinness had become spectacular: now she lay like a death's head on the single pillow. Dubrov for once was absent, supervising the loading of the scenery.

"So," said the ballerina as Harriet approached and curtseyed. "You are happy. One can see that."

"Yes, Madame. Extremely happy. But I wish that you—"

"Oh, never mind, never mind," said Simonova irritably. "Let them clap Masha Repin. Myself, I will be thankful if I can even walk again."

"But you will, you will! Professor Leblanc is the greatest specialist in the world."

"Ach, specialists, what do they know? I believe nothing." She turned her head restlessly on the pillow and pierced Harriet with her eyes. "It will not last, this love of yours, you know that?"

"Yes, I know. At least, it will for me but not for him. He is going back to the place in England where he was born and there is a woman there who…" But this did not seem to be a sentence that one finished.

"Yes, yes. It is always so. Dancers, singers… we are for pleasure, but it is others who become the châtelaines of great estates. So you must see that you get some jewels and you must work and work. Remember what Grisha always tells you about your shoulders—the left one in particular."

"Yes, Madame, I will. And I will never forget your Odette—or your Giselle—not if I live for a hundred years. Never, never will I forget them."

"And my Lise?" came Simonova's sharp voice from the bed. "My Lise in Fille—what was wrong with my Use?"

"Your Lise too." Harriet was close to tears. "To have been in your company even for such a short time has been the greatest privilege in the world."

"You are a good girl. Now I must rest for the journey, but first…" She seemed to be coming to some decision, a frown etching deep lines into the worn forehead. "Yes, I will do it. Go over there to that blue suitcase."

Harriet stepped round the stretcher lying ready to convey Madame to the boat and found the case.

"Lift the lid. There is a pair of ballet shoes on top—my last pair. The pair I wore when I had my accident. Take them out and bring them here to me."

Harriet did so and Simonova seized them in her bony hands, stroked the pink silk with one long finger as a mother traces the features of an infant in her arms. "See," she said tenderly, "they are hardly worn; I fell so soon. They should go to a museum perhaps—the last shoes of Galina Simonova—but who goes to museums? Take them. They are for you."

Harriet, unashamedly crying now, shook her head. "No, Madame, I can't! There must be someone who… matters more."

, "Masha Repin, perhaps," sneered the ballerina. "Or that pretty friend of yours who thinks only of restaurants. Take them. Take them quickly. And now go!"

It was a very long time before the three friends slept that night. Marie-Claude had a great deal to tell them, for Vincent had secured his auberge and she was to be married in December. "And it's because of you, 'arriette. You made it possible for Vincent to give the deposit and never, never will I forget what you have done."

As they talked sleepily in their beds it seemed that Kirstin, too, might soon hang up her dancing shoes, for there was a young man in a village on the Baltic not far from the town were she had been born—a childhood friend who for a long time had been willing to be something more. His father owned a fleet of trawlers which Leif would inherit and he had never been to the ballet in his life, which to Kirstin was very much in his favor. "I don't know," she said now. "It may not work out, but I think I will go back and see. It's such a pretty place—the red wooden houses, and the water…"

"So you see, it is you who must be a great dancer, 'arriette," said Marie-Claude, "so that we can bring our children to see you and tell them that with this divine prima ballerina assoluta we once shared a horrible room full of cockroaches in the city of Manaus." She sighed, seeing Harriet's face. "But of course it is this man you want for always—and no wonder," she said, motioning to a froth of pale green muslin on the chair: the dress she had bought at Verney's insistence when shopping for Harriet.

"Perhaps this earl's grand-daughter to whom he goes in England no longer loves him?" suggested Kirstin. "Perhaps she has met someone else?"

"And then when he has recovered from his broken heart, he can put you into a villa in some suitable district with your own carriage. In Paris it would be somewhere near the Bois… or in St. Cloud, perhaps, but in London I don't know…"

"St. John's Wood, I think," said Harriet, recalling the novels she had dipped into while doing her homework in the public library. "Somewhere near the Regent's Park Canal. A Gothic villa with a wisteria in the garden." Her eyes grew bright at the thought that she might after all have a future as a kept woman, awaiting Rom's visits twice a week in a violet tea-gown. No, that was greedy. Once a week. Once a fortnight, because the trains were dreadful from Stavely and the roads even worse. It was ridiculous of course. Isobel would not have met someone else—no one who had ever loved Rom could possibly stop—and a man married to a woman as beautiful as Isobel would scarcely trouble to travel to London to visit his mistress in St. John's Wood. Moreover Rom, once he married, would be faithful, Harriet was sure of that. But the daydream had done her good and trying to work out how many days she would see him if he came every other week for, say, five years… wondering if that was what the pomegranate seeds had meant… she fell asleep.