Hester's Story (3 page)

‘She asked me about Christmas, why we don’t celebrate it. I changed the subject, of course. Then she asked me why I hadn’t married and I just lost my temper and sent her away. Awful of me, really.’

Ruby didn’t comment. It would be hard for her, Hester realised, to say anything without mentioning the longest night, 21 December, which was the anniversary that neither of them ever referred to. They managed very well for the most part and the past remained the past, but the dreams were something over which Hester had no control.

For night after night, her sleep would be untroubled, but then, prompted by who knew what, the nightmares would come back; the ones from which she woke with tears still wet on her face. Could you cry in your sleep? Evidently you could. Whatever effort you made to put a terrible experience behind you, however hard you sealed it off in a compartment labelled
do not talk about, ever; do not acknowledge existence of ever
, what you were trying to forget was still there. She had arranged to hold the Festival at this time of year precisely so that she could have all her waking
thoughts taken up with that, and now here came the news of Adam’s death to throw her plans into confusion. He had been in New York. Hester had no proof of course, but she was quite sure that he spent every year from November till January in the States precisely so as to be somewhere far away when the anniversary occurred, and thus less likely to think of her.

Hester shook her head. ‘Let’s not dwell on it, Ruby. There’s work to be done. It’s going to be a good season, I think. We’ve got a wonderful company coming.’

She stood up and reached for a list which had been half-hidden behind Siggy’s curved back and read aloud to Ruby. ‘Carradine Ballet Company: Hugo Carradine, Claudia Drake, Silver McConnell, Andy French, Nick Neary, Ilene Evans, and Alison Drake (Ms Drake’s daughter).’

When she’d read the names out, Hester smiled at Ruby, doing her best to appear normal, wanting more than anything for things to go back to where they were. She had no desire to mention her feelings. If I talk about the Festival, she thought, then Ruby will humour me. She’ll know I don’t want to talk about Adam. She took a deep breath.

‘It’s going to be interesting,’ she said, ‘to see how Claudia Drake will react to being in the same company as Silver McConnell. Claudia’s very temperamental, they say, and she’s forever in the newspapers. The photographers adore her. But Silver is by all accounts the new sensation. She’s just done Odette/Odile – the best for years, the critics said. They compared her to me. My
Swan Lake
in 1959. Do you remember that?’

‘Of course,’ said Ruby. ‘How could I forget the most famous
Swan Lake
of the last fifty years?’

‘You’re biased, Ruby! But thank you. In any case,
Hugo Carradine was lucky to get Silver McConnell. As I told Jemima Whatsit, it’s probably only because we have such a short run that she was able to accept the part. We’ve got a very starry lot all round this time. Nick Neary’s the one who made such a sensation in
La Bayadère
last year, do you remember?’

‘The beautiful creature? Yes, I remember him. Too pretty for his own good. He’ll be conceited, I shouldn’t wonder. They don’t have to work so hard if they’re handsome.’

‘He’s a good dancer, though. Very energetic, and technically excellent too.’

‘It’s going to be a tremendous success, this year, I’m sure. There’s quite a lot to get ready in Wardrobe before their costumes arrive. I’d better go and make a start on it, if you’re sure you’re all right.’

‘You go on, Ruby. I’m perfectly all right. I’ll stay here for a while.’

Ruby was at her happiest when she was up in Wardrobe. She’d always had what Hester thought of as magic hands. She could take a piece of fabric and turn it, at will it seemed, into almost anything. She could mend a tear completely invisibly. Stains disappeared from garments as though they’d never existed, and her iron nosed its way into ruffles, flounces, and the most difficult of shirts and left nothing but perfection in its wake. Now she organised the wardrobe for every visiting company and looked after the smooth running of the house as well, with Joan and Emmie coming in every day to do the cooking and cleaning.

Hester closed her eyes as Ruby leaned over and kissed her cheek. She wasn’t a demonstrative woman and whenever she made an affectionate gesture, Hester was pleasantly surprised and pleased. There aren’t very many people I love in the world, she reflected. There’s
Dinah, who’s been such a loyal and lovely friend for so long, and Edmund and Ruby. They love me too, I think. Whenever she brought them to mind, Hester felt as though she’d found a small patch of warmth in a world that seemed to her increasingly chilly. Such a pity that Dinah lived in New Zealand and that their relationship had to be conducted mostly by letter. She chided herself for not including Kaspar Beilin among her nearest and dearest. Darling Kaspar, with his white-blond hair and extravagantly camp style had been her dancing partner for years. Fielding and Beilin were a pair always spoken of together. Since his retirement, a few years after her own, he’d taken up residence in San Francisco and Hester couldn’t help dreading what so many of her acquaintances were fearful of these days: AIDS. She shivered and closed her eyes. Make an effort, she told herself. You can’t worry about Kaspar now. There is too much to do here with the Festival about to begin. And now there’s Adam’s death as well. Hester was used to his not being a part of her life, but dead? It was as though a cold hand had gripped her heart.

Ruby smiled at Hester as she was about to leave the room, saying, ‘I’ll be back in time for dinner. With George, if I can get him to stop what he’s doing in the lighting box. Will we see you then? Are you quite sure you won’t …’ Ruby paused to find the right word. ‘Brood on things?’

‘No, I won’t. I’ll be fine. I’ll just lie down on the
chaise-longue
for a while before dinner. Gather my thoughts.’

Ruby closed the door behind her. Once she was alone, Hester reflected for the thousandth time on how lucky she was to have Ruby here with her, just as she had been for the past thirty-four years. Ruby understood her. She knew better than to jolly Hester along.
She knew how important it was for someone to have time to think about things. Ruby was part of the family. What had she said to the journalist?
The Wychwood family
.

*

The members of the Carradine Company would be here in a few days. Hugo Carradine was an attractive young man, and Hester knew he was overjoyed at the commission. He was talented and successful and well-thought of, with a reputation, even at his age, as a bit of a perfectionist. Dancers, it seemed, were rather in awe of him and he was reputed not to take any nonsense from anyone. Well, there was nothing wrong with that. Hester admitted that she was a perfectionist herself and couldn’t really understand anyone who was satisfied with second best. Still, winning in an open competition hinges on such small things. She would never tell anyone that what gave Hugo her casting vote on a panel that was divided between him and another was his choice of music:
Sarabande in F minor
by Edmund Norland. Of course, he may have known that Hester and the composer had been good friends for many years. That wasn’t a secret, and if he’d done his research, he’d have found it out. What he couldn’t possibly have known, Hester thought, is what that piece means to me, or the circumstances in which it was written.

She remembered the day Edmund had played her the opening melody, how he’d sat at the piano and said
I’ve written something for you. Listen, Hester. All the sumptuous laziness of the East. Doesn’t it make you feel better just to hear it? No more Northern gloom for you from now on
. She smiled.

But it wasn’t only that, she told herself. Hugo was the best choreographer we saw. And I liked him better
than any of the others, even without that private reason. I liked him at once, from the first moment I saw him. His smile was so open, and his warmth and love of the dance so evident in everything he said that I knew he was the sort of person I would enjoy welcoming to Wychwood House. There must be something wrong with me, Hester thought. Even after the shock I’ve had, I’m still looking forward to all of them arriving. The house is too quiet. It will be good to have it full of dancers again. Full of music and laughter.

Wychwood House had once belonged to a Victorian mill-owner. It was a handsome, square building of grey stone with magnificent wrought-iron gates set into solid stone gateposts; a house with a confident façade and an air of being rooted firmly in the landscape, almost a part of nature. It hadn’t always looked like that. When Hester had first seen it, as a very young girl, it was shabby and neglected and the local children used to call it the Witch’s House.

It’s different now, she thought. Between March and November, three young men from the village came in twice a week to keep the garden looking perfect. Flowerbeds filled with roses bordered the path from the house to the theatre. George loved old-fashioned roses and he was the person who oversaw all the work that went on in the grounds. Hester herself had mixed feelings about flowers of all kinds and roses in particular, though she would never have admitted it. Each individual bloom was pretty of course, but only for a little while before it became overblown and brown around the edges of the petals. Flowers had such a short life and were so quickly less than perfect. Hester preferred shrubs and evergreen trees, and often thought the flowerbeds looked best in winter when the
plants had been pruned and nothing but sharp little twigs stuck up out of the black earth.

She loved the garden. She enjoyed walking in it and delighted in the wide sweep of moor and sky that you could see wherever you stood. She had made sure that benches were placed in those spots that gave the best views. Every morning, unless the weather was atrocious, she walked for at least half an hour, through the garden and out to the slopes behind the house. She followed this with an hour at the
barre
she’d had specially installed in her dressing room.

The house had ten bedrooms. Her own was along a corridor and set apart from the accommodation used by the visiting dancers. There was a public drawing room and the kitchen was shared by everyone when the Festival was on. The dining room was only used for the most formal occasions such as the New Year’s Eve dinner and the first night party. Ruby and George lived in a small cottage in the grounds. The passageway that led to the Arcadia Theatre went past the door of this room and she could always hear the dancers walking to and from their rehearsals.

Hester had her own sitting room and this room, where she spent most of her time, was known as the Office. The desk stood under the window and she kept the paperwork for both the Festival and her master classes in a mahogany tallboy. A filing cabinet would have looked wrong in a room which resembled in almost every particular dressing rooms she’d known while she was a ballerina. That’s why I’m comfortable here, she often thought. It’s completely familiar to me. There were no light bulbs around the mirror which hung on the wall near the door, and the smell of greasepaint had been replaced by the fragrance coming from an enormous bowl of pot-pourri, but otherwise it was what she had been used to for years.

She’d always insisted on having a
chaise-longue
in her dressing room and here in the Office she still liked to lie down whenever she needed to read or think. This
chaise
was new, and upholstered in dark red velvet, but the lacquered screen beside it, with its pattern of small boats on perfectly rippled water and conical snow-tipped mountains, was the same one she’d had since 1954. A cream silk shawl, fringed and printed with scarlet poppies, was draped over the other armchair.

The walls, papered in pale apricot, were crowded with framed photographs. There was the picture of her mother she had brought with her from France as a child, a few of Madame Olga, her first teacher, and better than a mother to her; several of her grandmother, darling
Grand-mère
, and many from productions in which she’d appeared. These were mostly of other dancers – her partners, her friends, and members of the
corps de ballet
. There was one exception. She’d hung the famous Cecil Wilding photograph of herself, the one known as
A Backward Glance
right next to the mirror. Every time she checked to see if her hair was tidy; every time she looked in the mirror to apply her lipstick before going out into the world, she compared how she was now (dark hair cut short in a near shoulder-length bob and highlighted with streaks of red, still excellent skin but, oh God, look at the tiny wrinkles appearing near her eyes!) with the person in the portrait: herself as Aurora in
Sleeping Beauty
. It was taken when she was seventeen. Her head was turned to one side, her hair (very long, in those days) was twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck and threaded with pink and white roses. Her hands were crossed gracefully just below her waist and rested on the stiffened skirts of her pale pink tutu. It was, Hester knew, every little girl’s dream of what a ballerina
should
look like, which was one of the reasons she loved it. She enjoyed the illusion that it represented.

She’d often thought it would be fun to put up another photo of herself right beside it, showing her sweating after a particularly hard class; hair scraped back and in need of a wash; darned tights; aching calves; torn and bloody feet after hours
en pointe
. But nobody wanted to see that. It was the truth, but who was interested in that when magic was so much prettier? Who wanted to admit that all the effortless grace, the leaping and the flying and the turning were the result of hours and hours of back-breaking work? No one. Everyone liked the illusion. Each time she passed the mirror on leaving the room, she still had the distinct feeling that she was making an entrance, leaving the space that was hers and entering a public stage. Seeing her portrait on the way out to take part in the life outside the Office reminded her of how much she’d loved performing and it gave her courage. She had, she reflected, needed to be brave all through her life, from the very earliest age.