A Company of Swans (7 page)

What Marcus Aurelius had begun by causing Harriet to question the meaning of the word "good," Henry with his trust and optimism completed. She determined to escape and to do so competently, and casting about for ways and means she remembered a girl called Betsy Fairfield who had been briefly at school with her in Cambridge, but now lived in London.

Betsy was pretty and a little silly and exceedingly good-natured. Harriet had written some essays for her and lent her some history notes and a friendship had developed. Now Betsy, who was a few months older than Harriet, was "doing the season"; she was already going to balls and was to be presented at court. Her mother was an easygoing, kindly society lady who had been kind to Harriet.

The afternoon after the visit to Stavely, accordingly, Harriet—finding herself alone—unhooked what Aunt Louisa still referred to as "the instrument" from the dark brown wall of the hallway, asked for Betsy's number and was eventually put through to her friend.

"Betsy, this is Harriet."

"Harriet? How lovely!" Shrieks of perfectly genuine if transient enthusiasm emitted from the cheerful Betsy. "How are you?"

"I'm all right. Listen, Betsy, I want you to do me a very great favor. Will you?"

"Yes, of course I will. Goodness, I always remember that essay you wrote for me about the Corn Laws. And the one about the 'bedchamber question.' I got an 'A' in both—the only time ever!"

"Well, listen; I want you to get your mother to write a note to my Aunt Louisa, asking me to stay. I'd like her to write it straight away and I want her to ask me for three weeks. Do you think she would?"

"Of course she would! Will you really come? That would be absolutely marvelous! You can help me with my court curtsey; you were always so good at dancing. Poor Hetty's got water on the knee and we don't know whether—"

It was a while before Harriet could interrupt the spate of words in order to say, "And Betsy, when your mother's written the note could you telephone me yourself to arrange the journey? Ask for me personally? Would you do that? I promise not to be a nuisance."

"Goodness, you won't be a nuisance. Mother really likes you; she's often said—" But at this point Betsy recollected what her mother had said about Professor Morton's treatment of his daughter and the conversation was terminated.

Betsy was as good as her word and her mother wrote a charming note to Louisa requesting Harriet's presence in London. That Mrs. Fairfield's uncle was a viscount helped to determine the issue; that and the fact that since the night of the unfortunate dinner party, Harriet had not really been herself. Betsy rang up the day after the note arrived and when they had spoken, Harriet informed Aunt Louisa that the Fairfields would meet the 10:37 from Cambridge on Thursday morning. She packed her own suitcase and her aunt, reflecting on the fact that they would be saving on Harriet's food for three weeks, actually suggested to the Professor that he might care to give his daughter a guinea, so that she would not be entirely dependent on her friend—and this he did. And so, at a quarter-past ten on Thursday morning, Harriet was assisted into a "Ladies Only" carriage at Cambridge Station and put in charge of the guard.

That there was no one to meet her at King's Cross was not surprising, since she had told Betsy that she would be arriving on the following day. Harriet gave up her ticket and posted two letters she had written in the privacy of her bedroom. One was to her aunt announcing her safe arrival at the Fairfields'; the other was to the Fairfields and was full of apologies and regrets. Her father's cousin had been taken seriously ill in Harrogate and they were all leaving immediately for the north… She hoped so much to be able to join them later but at the moment, as they would understand, her aunt did not feel that she could spare her… She would post this letter on her way through London and remained their disappointed but affectionate Harriet.

This done, she stood bravely in line for a cab and when her turn came, gave the driver the address of the Century Theater in Bloomsbury.

There were seventeen swans, an uneven number and a pity, but the mother of a girl Dubrov had engaged from the Lumley School of Dance in Regent Street had gone to Dr. Mudie's Library and looked up the Amazon in Chamber's Encyclopaedia—and that had been that.

Now, in the dirty, draughty and near-derelict theater in Bloomsbury he had hired for the last week prior to the Company's departure, Dubrov was watching his maitre de ballet rehearsing the corps in Act Two of Swan Lake. The moonlit act… the white act… the act in which the ravishing Swan Queen, Odette, is discovered by Prince Siegfried among her protecting and encircling swans…

The Swan Queen, however, was at the dentist and the premier danseur, Maximov, who played the Prince, was not on call until four o'clock. It was the swans that were at issue and here all was far from well. For from the swans in Swan Lake the choreographer demands not individuality or self-expression but a relentless and perfect unison. Above all, these doomed and feathered creatures are supposed to move as one.

"Again!" said Grisha wearily, turning his white Picasso clown's face up to the heavens. "From the second entry. Remember heads down on the échappés and when you take hands it is to the front that you must face." He hummed, demonstrated, became—this comical wizened little man—for an instant a graceful swan. "Can you give me five bars before section 12?" He nodded to Irina Petrova and the ancient accompanist stubbed out her cigarette in the discarded pointe shoe she had been using as an ashtray and lowered her mottled hands onto the piano keys.

And there's still Act Three of Rile, thought Dubrov, watching out front—and Giselle and we've scarcely touched The Nutcracker, with five days to go. I must be mad, taking out four full-length ballets. But he hated the chopping and dismemberment that was so fashionable—plucking out an act here, a divertissement there… And his principals were good: not just Simonova and Maximov, but Lobotsky, his character dancer, and the young Polish girl whom Simonova feared but to whom she had ceded the Sugar Plum Fairy…

"Cross over!" yelled Grisha. "Both lines! And the legs are croisé behind you—all the legs!" His voice rose to a shriek. "You there at the end! What is your name—Kirstin… Where are you going?"

Where the slender sad-raced Swede was going, just as in earlier rehearsals, was upstage right, performing rather beautiful and mournful ports de bras as was invariably done at this point in the version of the ballet she had learned in Copenhagen. The petite and exquisite French girl, Marie-Claude, on the other hand, still carried a torch for the Paris Opera version (which cut five minutes out of the Act Two running time to give the citizens time to refresh themselves) and had bourréed off altogether during a previous run-through to be discovered alone and puzzled in a corridor. .

Even with the Russian girls who made up the bulk of the corps—marvelously drilled and strong-backed creatures who rightly knew that only in their country was the art of ballet seriously understood—all was not well. For the hallowed steps which Petipa and Ivanov had devised for Tchaikovsky's masterpiece in St. Petersburg had been wickedly tampered with by a rogue ballet master in Moscow and little Olga Narukov, finding herself en arabesque opposite a swan giving her all to her rands de jambe, had stamped her foot and declared her intention of returning to Ashkhabad.

The disconsolate Kirstin was comforted by the girl next to her and the rehearsal was resumed. An hour later—exhausted, hungry and dripping with perspiration—they will still practicing the fiendishly difficult pattern at the end of the act where the diagonal lines of swans cross over and dissolve to form, three groups: unequal groups, since the number seventeen is notoriously difficult to divide by three.

It was at this point that a stage-hand came up to Dubrov and said, "There's a young lady asking to see you. Said you said she could come."

"Oh?" Dubrov was puzzled. "Well, bring her along."

The man vanished and reappeared with a young girl in a blue coat and tarn o'shanter, carrying a small suitcase. A schoolgirl, it seemed to him, with worried eyes.

"I'm Harriet Morton," she said in her low, incorrigibly educated voice, "from Cambridge. You saw me at Madame Lavarre's. You said…" Her voice tailed away. She had made a mistake; of course he had not wanted her.

"Yes." Dubrov had recognized her now and smilingly put a hand on her arm. "Grisha!" he called. "Come here!"

The swans came to rest, the music stopped and Grisha, frowning at the interruption, came over to Dubrov.

"This is Harriet Morton," said the impresario. "Your eighteenth swan."

The ballet master stared at her. What was he supposed to do now, at the eleventh hour, with this English child?

"I have just rearranged everything for seventeen," he said sourly.

"Well, then, rearrange it back again," answered Dubrov.

Grisha raked her with his coal-black eyes. The height was right—she would fit in with the smaller girls and she didn't look stupid like some of the others. All the same…

"Which version of Lac is it that you have danced?" he inquired cautiously. "Of Swan Lake? The Petipa-Ivanov? The Sermontoff ?" and as she remained silent, "Not that abomination that Orloffsky has made in Krakov?"

Harriet swallowed. "I have not danced in any of them, Monsieur."

"Not in any of them?" The ballet master mopped his brow. "You are joking me?"

She shook her head.

"And Casse-Noisette? The last act—which production?"

"No production. I have never danced in Casse-Noisette."

Grisha sighed and became placatory. Obviously the girl was so nervous she had lost her wits. "In English it is called The Nutcracker. In this ballet you have been a snowflake?"

"No."

"Or an attendant to the Sugar Plum Fairy?" Grisha continued imploringly. He broke into the "Valse des Fleurs," revolved, swayed, became an icing-sugar rose.

Harriet shook her head once more and looked beseechingly at Dubrov. But the impresario, who seemed to be enjoying himself, was staring at the ceiling.

"But a Wili?" persisted Grisha desperately. "A Wili in Giselle?" And making a final bid, "A chicken, then? In Fille Mai Gardée, a little chicken?" A broken man, he executed a few rapid and chicken-like échappés.

Harriet lifted her head and in a voice she just managed to hold steady said, "I have never danced on any stage before."

A strangled sound came from Grisha. "Impossible," he managed to say. "It is impossible! In five days we leave."

She made no attempt to entreat or argue, but he saw her bring her small white teeth down on to her lower lip to stop it trembling, and then she bent down to pick up her case.

Grisha swore lustily in Russian. "You have your pointe shoes with you?"

"Yes."

"Then put them on. And hurry!"

"On the program you will appear as Natasha Alexandrovna," said Dubrov to Harriet as she sat opposite him in his office, a shawl over her practice dress. "Dancers cannot have English names."

"Natasha! Oh…" She leaned forward, her eyes alight and on her face the memory still of that terrifying, grueling, awful and marvelous hour she had just spent on stage.

"Why? Because of War and Peace?"

"Yes. I used… oh, to be Natasha, for years and years. It made me so angry with Prince Andrei."

"Angry!" Dubrov glared at her. "What are you saying? Prince Andrei is the finest portrayal of goodness in our entire literature."

"Goodness? How can it be good to get someone so ready for love and for life… so absolutely ready—and then just go away and leave them? Like setting them some kind of good conduct exam!"

"An exam which, however, she failed."

"How could she help failing!" Harriet leaned forward, flushed. "When you are so ready and longing, and the person you love just goes. He didn't have to go—it wasn't the war." She broke off, suddenly aghast at her impertinence; she had never spoken like this in Scroope Terrace. "I'm sorry."

Dubrov waved away her apology. "Not at all—Smetlikov, one of our critics, takes a very similar view. However, we must get down to business. You will attend class every morning at ten. The rest of the time you will work to learn the corps de ballet roles. There are five days to do this and of course the voyage. It is impossible. You will do it."

"Yes."

He looked up, to see again that extraordinary illumination of her face from within which had followed Grisha's order to put on her dancing shoes. To be told to do the impossible seemed to be all that she desired.

"The tour is extended. We shall go on to Lima and Caracas, so we will be away all summer." And as she nodded, "Have you somewhere to stay?"

She flushed. "Well, no, not actually. I was wondering if I could sleep in the dressing room just until we sail?"

"Impossible." He sighed. "I will speak to one of the girls—perhaps Marie-Claude or Kirstin will find room for you in their lodgings. You have money?"

"A little."

"Good." He put the tips of his plump fingers together and said reflectively, "Of course, if someone should come here and ask me if I am employing a girl called Natasha Alexandrovna in my corps de ballet, I shall have to say 'Yes.' But if they ask me if I am employing a girl called Harriet Morton, that is a different matter. Of such a girl I naturally know nothing!"

"Oh… Thank you!" She paused. "You see, my father… didn't exactly give me permission."

"Yes," said Dubrov heavily, "I gathered this. Perhaps you should tell me…"

Later, meeting Grisha in the corridor, he said, "Well, how is she, my little protegee?"

Grisha shrugged. "It is a pity. But there; it is only their horses that the British train properly. And now it's too late… I think?" He pondered and added, "Elle est'sérieuse."

Serious. Not lacking in humor, not pompous or self-important, but serious—giving the job the full weight of her being.

Dubrov nodded and passed on.

The principal dancers, unlike the rest of the Company who were in lodgings or hostels, were accommodated in the Queen's Hotel in Bloomsbury until their date of departure: a draughty place with dingy lace curtains and terrible food, but handy for the theater and where the proprietors were friendly and accustomed to the vagaries of their foreign guests.