Hester's Story (7 page)

‘How dare you speak to me like that?’ Claudia was shouting right back. ‘Don’t you know that I run myself
ragged
trying to arrange things so that you’re not put out? Apologise. Apologise at once, or I shall send you to your room and you can stew there till Sunday for all I care.’

Alison mumbled into her plate:

‘I’m sorry I swore at you, but I mean it about the ballet. I
do
think it’s boring. I don’t see what’s wrong with saying that. You’re not exactly sympathetic about what I want to do.’

‘Well, darling,’ Claudia smiled, and Alison knew she thought the worst was over and that she’d won. ‘Midwifery, I ask you!’ She shuddered. ‘All that blood. I don’t think I could bear it. Couldn’t you find something more – I don’t know – more glamorous?’

Alison had been through this before. She decided not to tell her mother all over again that glamour wasn’t what she was after. Surely the beautiful Claudia Drake could understand that lesser mortals (i.e. other women and girls) weren’t exactly designed for the limelight. She changed the subject.

‘What am I supposed to do while you’re rehearsing? I don’t see why I have to come anyway.’

‘You know very well why. Aunt Mavis couldn’t have you. She’s been invited on a cruise. To Egypt.’

‘Your childcare arrangements are crap. Most people have lots of relations. Sisters and brothers and things.’

‘It’s hardly my fault that I’m an only child. Nor is it my fault that your father is totally inadequate and pathetic. Not to mention the fact that he decided to
live in America with his so-called wife, who’s a tart with no more brains than your average chicken.’

‘Dad
isn’t
. He
isn’t
pathetic. He rang up last night, didn’t he? He spoke to me for ages. You’re the pathetic one. And you don’t know how clever Jeanette is, or isn’t. She’s not his so-called wife, either. She’s his real wife.’

Claudia pulled a face. ‘Oh, per-lease! How clever do you have to be to get a man’s attention if you keep the top buttons of your blouse permanently undone and flaunt underwear that’s no more than a string and a prayer? Your father is a fool and a bastard and there’s nothing more to be said.’

Alison changed the subject. She usually did when it came to talking about her father. The whole matter was too painful to go into, and she tried to avoid it when she could.

‘I could stay here on my own. I’m fourteen. That’s easily old enough.’

Claudia looked at her pityingly. Alison stared right back, saying, ‘What about friends, then? You don’t seem to have many of those, do you? Not that
that’s
a surprise. And Granny probably died early just so’s she wouldn’t have to look after me.’

Alison knew that if Claudia were sitting beside her, she’d have hit her. She was breathing deeply: always a sure sign that she was trying not to lose her temper. Her voice, when she did speak, was carefully light and cheerful.

‘I have very many friends, as you know, but of course they’re performers like me, and so quite unable to help me out by having you to stay.’

How nice of her, Alison reflected sarcastically, not to say anything really nasty. She easily could have done. She could, for instance, have flung the question back:
why haven’t
you
got any friends who’ll have you to stay for a few days?
She’s not asking because she knows the answer. I’m new at that school, and anyway, who’s going to ask someone fat and shortsighted (
Speccy Four Eyes
. Couldn’t they think of anything more original to call her?) and unpopular to come and spend part of the holiday at their house?

Alison bit her lip, unwilling to show how miserable this knowledge made her. She hated people who moaned about everyone hating them, and in any case, they didn’t. Not really. Nobody cared enough about her to hate her, or to bully her. They just don’t include me in things, she told herself, and I don’t care. She knew this wasn’t true, but repeated it anyway in the hope that this would make her feel a bit better. She also knew she wasn’t really fat, but just rather taller and more well-built than the daughter of a skeletal mother ought to be. It was the contrast which always made her feel clumsy and heavy.

Alison wondered if her mother regretted keeping her. She could have let Dad take me, she thought. If she had, I’d be living with him and Jeanette in America and she’d be the one I never saw, instead of Dad.

Patrick Drake left them when Alison was five, and from the moment the door slammed behind him forever, Claudia had seen to it that he’d had as little as possible to do with his daughter. I can see what her game is, Alison thought now as she’d thought a thousand times. She’s punishing him. She really must have loved him and she’s obviously never forgiven him. No civilised divorce for my mum, oh no. She just thinks of him as a bastard who had the cheek to fall in love with someone else. Alison didn’t find it in the least surprising that someone had got sick to death of living with Claudia.

Quite apart from her general annoyingness, there was the matter of her schedule. She was on tour for
most of the year, and when she wasn’t she was at rehearsal or in class or having her photo taken and certainly would hardly ever have been at home looking after her baby or her husband. She’d employed a series of nannies and opted out almost entirely. You couldn’t blame Dad for falling in love with someone else. Jeanette was an American student in the class he taught at the Polytechnic, and even though she wasn’t as beautiful as Claudia, she was pretty enough, and kind and
there all the time
.

Since Patrick had left, Claudia had dragged Alison all over the world and put her in the charge of so many nannies that often Patrick couldn’t see her for months at a time. Alison grew furious whenever she thought about this. How did Mum dare? Until I went to boarding school, she used to take me along to places where home was a hotel room for weeks on end. Before her father moved to America, six years ago, Claudia could easily have asked him to look after Alison on several occasions, but she never did.

Tears came into her eyes and she blinked them away. It was all this thinking about Dad. She saw so little of him now. Because he lived abroad, he couldn’t visit often, and he was a rotten letter-writer. He used to send postcards with little poems on them and sometimes presents, but the gaps between letters became longer and longer.

Just before Christmas, Alison had sent him a card she had made herself. She liked the picture on the front, which showed her and Claudia up to their necks in snow, wearing bobble hats, with a Gothic castle in the background. She was less proud of the letter that she’d sent with the card, telling him about the Wychwood Festival in a way that made it quite clear she hated the idea. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so negative, she thought. He’ll probably think I’ve
become one of those girls who do nothing but moan all the time.

Claudia smiled. ‘There’s nothing to be done now, Alison, so you will just have to make the best of it, I’m afraid. And it’s not for long. I’m not mad about the countryside either, as you know, but it’ll be a treat to work with Hugo. Or I think it will. He’s such a hard taskmaster and he won’t make any exception for me. It’s days since I’ve seen him. He’s with his father for Christmas, of course.’ She sounded peeved about this, as though she thought that Hugo should have asked her to go with him, Alison thought. Serve her right.

Hugo Carradine had been her mother’s lover for two years. She was, Alison knew, more keen on him than she had been about some of her others, because she’d made a point of telling her all about Hugo within days of their getting together. You’re a big girl now, Claudia told her. Twelve years old and quite capable of hearing the truth.

‘I love him, darling,’ she’d said.
Be frank with your children about your feelings
. Alison was convinced her mother had read that in a magazine somewhere. ‘I really hope you’ll do your best to like him too.’

Alison had told her he was okay and he was, compared with some of the men Claudia’d been involved with in the past. She decided that it was pointless to go on about Wychwood. They would do exactly what suited Claudia. They always did. She helped herself to Christmas pudding. At least I can have as much as I want of this, she thought. Mum won’t even allow such stuff anywhere near her plate and, as for brandy butter, well. That was the embodiment of evil.

27 December 1986

Hugo Carradine was sitting in the front stalls of the Arcadia Theatre. A few hours and they’d all be arriving – Claudia and Alison and the other members of the company – but for the moment he was alone here at Wychwood. He’d got up early, left his father’s house, and driven to Yorkshire as the light was breaking over the moors. Now he had a short space in which to be alone and able to savour the special atmosphere of an empty theatre. The curtain was open, and the stage glowed a little in the pearly light of the winter afternoon, which filtered down from the small windows set into the roof, high above the flies and the lighting galleries. Here, wooden beams were hung about with the black shapes of the lamps that changed the space beneath them into one magic kingdom after another. When the lighting man slipped a gel, a square of coloured celluloid, into the frame, the colour of everything was transformed.

Colour. Hugo smiled. He looked at the rose-pink velvet curtains and seat covers; the garlands of fat flowers and harps and ribbons all painted gold; the thick carpets in a darker shade of pink and thought it’s a bit like a
fin-de-siècle
brothel, but very pretty nonetheless.

Time to go back to the house. He edged out of the stalls and left the theatre, wondering whether to return along the covered walkway which Miss Fielding had
told him she’d insisted upon. She had apparently told the architect, ‘You can’t have ballet dancers freezing their legs off on the way to class or a performance,’ and that was that. She was obviously the sort of person who was used to getting her own way, but of course she was quite right. Still, Hugo decided to walk back along the outdoor path, even though it was much longer than the indoor route. The rain had held off, but the wind was strong and it was colder than he’d expected. He pulled his cashmere scarf (a Christmas present from Claudia) close around his neck and set off along the ribbon of road that wound up through the garden.

To his right as he walked, the wide lawn, almost white with frost, stretched to the high hedge that separated Wychwood from the road that ran beside the river. He could see the water, sluggish, brown and slow at this time of year, and the moor rising up from the opposite bank. There was not a sign of human habitation anywhere he looked, though there were plenty of sheep dotted around the slopes in the distance.

‘It’s deserted!’ was Hugo’s thought when he’d first arrived at Wychwood. But it was beautiful, and he knew from the full houses that companies always played to during the Festival that no one minded having to travel some distance to get to the Arcadia Theatre. The nearest railway station was five miles away. The taxi firm that served the village consisted of two old Ford Escorts. It really
was
best to come to Wychwood by car. Hester Fielding had thought of everything. She’d managed to persuade the farmer who was her nearest neighbour to sell one of his fields
et voilà
 … there was a car park tucked away behind the theatre, hidden by a screen of trees and quite out of sight of the house.

There’s such a lot of sky everywhere, he thought. It was like a dome over everything and the patterns of cloud and the play of light turned it into something different whenever you looked. All his professional life, he realised, had been spent in boxes of one kind and another. The stage sets in which his dancers moved pretended to be forests, mountainsides, town squares, fairy kingdoms and so forth, but in truth they were nothing but paint on canvas always, and on every side, flat and confining. From the stalls you had an illusion of limitless space. Designers and lighting men were good at creating the lie, but it
was
a lie and that was part of the magic. And the theatre was another box, a larger one with the stage set enclosed within it.

He passed a few flowerbeds on his left. He could see the pruned roses that would doubtless flower in profusion during the summer. Bushes lined the drive, camellias and rhododendrons so well established they were practically trees. Someone had told him that gardeners came in from the village to keep the grounds looking at their best all year round.

Hugo felt an unaccustomed surge of pure happiness pass through him. He was here, at Wychwood, and in a matter of days every critic in the country, everyone who was anyone in the world of ballet, would be sitting in the theatre’s pink plush seats, looking at his work; something he’d created, something different from anything they’d ever seen.

He was aware of his reputation. Hugo’s wonderful, people said, but his heart’s not in anything really avant-garde. He’s a romantic when it comes right down to it, yearning for the days of Petipa and Diaghilev.
For Carradine
(Hugo remembered the whole review by heart. You always remember the bad ones)
it’s as though the last fifty years had never happened
.

Well, fuck Alasdair Clough, Hugo thought. That bastard’s going to change his tune when he sees
Sarabande
. He’d have changed it already if only he’d bothered to come and see
Silver Girls
. Hugo’s reinterpretation of
Giselle
, with the Wilis transformed into disco dancers in a Seventies style club had been a huge hit. Somehow the pathos and madness of the original had moved with no problem to the modern setting. The contrast between the music and the decor had been sensational.

Thinking of
Silver Girls
brought Silver into his mind. She was the most exciting talent he’d seen for a long time, though he wondered how far she’d be prepared to push herself. It had struck him during the audition that if she had a fault it was the kind of laziness that goes with great gifts. People who were particularly brilliant often felt they didn’t have to make the same effort as everyone else. Well, he thought, she’ll soon find out that I expect the best – demand it even – and that I’m not afraid to impose my will on the company. He knew very well that he was known as a perfectionist, but what that meant was a possibility at least of achieving perfection. Hugo wasn’t interested in anyone who didn’t share his aspirations and Silver would have to adjust to the customs of the company. She was right at the start of her career. He could help build her growing reputation with the part of the Angel in this ballet. Already he was thinking of new steps, new patterns, that he could fit into his vision of the whole to take advantage of her height, her youth and her famous athleticism. He realised he was looking forward to starting work with her, showing her the set and playing her the music for the first time. How would she react to it?