A Company of Swans

  This done, she stood bravely in line for a cab and when her turn came, gave the driver the address of the Century Theatre 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 Chambers’ Encyclopaedia – and that had been that.

  Now, in the dirty, draughty and near-derelict theatre in Bloomsbury he had hired for the last week prior to the Company’s departure, Dubrov was watching his maître 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 on to the piano keys.

  And there’s still Act Three of Fille, 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-faced 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 Opéra 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 – marvellously 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 ronds 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 were still practising 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 tam 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 recognised 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 enquired 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 Mal 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 programme 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, gruelling, awful and marvellous 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 protégée?’

  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 humour; 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 theatre and where the proprietors were friendly and accustomed to the vagaries of their foreign guests.

  In this hotel, as in all the others where the dancers had stayed, Dubrov’s room adjoined that of the ballerina, Galina Simonova. Since Simonova’s views on ‘passion as an aid to the dance’ were well known, it might be concluded that Dubrov enjoyed what were technically known as conjugal rights, and this was so. Dubrov’s rights, however, were granted to him on such uncertain terms – were so dependent on the state of Simonova’s back, her Achilles tendon and her reviews – that he had learned to temper the wind to the shorn lamb in a way which was not unremarkable in a man who had once written a ninety-stanza poem in the style of Pushkin entitled Eros Proclaimed.

  The evening of Harriet’s arrival at the theatre, he found Simonova lying on the sofa – an ominous sign – staring with black and tormented eyes at her left knee.

  ‘It’s going again, Sashka; I can feel it! Dimitri has given me a massage, but it’s no use – it’s going. We must cancel the tour!’

  He came over to sit beside her and felt her knee, considerably more familiar to him than his own. ‘Let me see.’

  Her knee, her cervical vertebrae, the bursa on her Achilles tendon . . . he knew them like men know their children and now, as his stubby fingers moved gently over the joint, he wondered for the thousandth time why fate had linked him indissolubly with this temperamental, autocratic woman.

  Sitting with balletomane friends in his box in the bel étage at the Maryinsky in St Petersburg, he had picked her out of the corps. ‘That one,’ he had said, pointing at the row of water sprites in Ondine, and he was right. She became a coryphée, a soloist . . .

  It was not difficult in those days to enjoy her favours; he was young and rich and could present her own image to her in the way that women have always found irresistible. ‘If you give me half an hour to explain away my face, I could seduce the Queen of France,’ said Voltaire – and Dubrov, though uninterested in royalty, could have said the same.

  He bought her an apartment on the Fontanka Canal and she was moderately faithful, for she was obsessed by dancing – by her career. Outside revolutions rumbled, Grand Dukes were assassinated and picked off the cobbled streets in splinters, but to Simonova it mattered only that she ended badly after her pique turns in Paquita or started her solo a bar too soon. And because it was this that he loved in her – this crazy obsession with the art that he too adored – he put up with it all, became manager, masseur, choreographer, nurse . . .

  She rose steadily in the ranks of the Maryinsky. They gave her the Lilac Fairy, then Swanhilda in Coppelia and at last Giselle. After her first night in that immortal ballet, he watched one of the great clichés of the theatre brought to life – the students unharnessing the horses from her carriage in order to pull her through the streets – but later she had cried in his arms because she had not got her fall right in the Mad Scene: it was clumsy, she said, and the timing was wrong.

  A year later she threw it all away in a stupid, unnecessary row with the management, refusing to wear the costume they had designed for her in Aurora’s Wedding and appearing instead in a costume she preferred. She was fined and told to change it. She refused. No one believed it would come to anything, for the hierarchical, bureaucratic theatre was full of such scenes, but Simonova with childish obstinacy forced the director to a confrontation and when she was overruled, she resigned. Resigned from the theatre she adored, from the great tradition which had nourished her, and went to Europe. And Dubrov, too, exiled himself from his homeland, sold his interests in Russia and created a company in which she could dance.

  Since then they had toured Paris and Rome, Berlin and Stockholm, and it was understood between them that she hated Russia, that she would not return even if they asked her to do so on bended knees. For eight years now they had been exiles and it was hard – finding theatres, getting together a corps, luring soloists from other companies. Of late, too, there had been competition from other and younger dancers – from Pavlova, who had also come to Europe; from the divine Karsavina, Diaghilev’s darling, who with Nijinsky had taken the West by storm. Simonova owned to thirty-six, but she was almost forty and looked it: a stark woman with hooded eyes and deep lines etched between her autocratically arched brows.

  ‘We should never have attempted this tour,’ she said now. ‘It’s madness.’

  Fear again. It was fear, of course, that ailed her knee . . . fear of failure, of old age . . . of the new Polish dancer, Masha Repin, who had joined them three days earlier and was covering her Giselle . . .

  ‘You have told them it is my farewell performance?’ she demanded. ‘Positively my last one? You have put it on the posters?’

  Dubrov sighed and abandoned her knee. This was the latest fantasy – that each of her performances was the last, that she would not have to submit her ageing body to the endless torture of trying to achieve perfection any more. He knew what was coming next and now, as she moved his hand firmly to her fifth vertebra, it came.

  ‘Soon we shall give it all up, won’t we, Sashka, and go and live in Cremorra? Soon . . .’

  ‘Yes, dousha, yes.’

  ‘It will be so peaceful,’ she murmured, arching her back to give him better access. ‘We shall listen to the birds and have a goat and grow the best vegetables in Trentino. Won’t it be wonderful?’

  ‘Wonderful,’ agreed Dubrov dully.

>   Three years earlier, returning from a tour of the northern cities of Italy – in one of which a critic had dared to compare Simonova unfavourably with the great Legnani – the train that had been carrying them towards the Alps had come to a sudden stop. The day was exquisite; the air, as they lowered the window, like wine. Gentle-eyed cows with bells grazed in flower-filled fields, geraniums and petunias tumbled from the window-boxes of the little houses, a blue lake shimmered in the valley.

  All of which would not have mattered except that across a meadow, beside a sparkling stream, one of the toy houses proclaimed itself ‘For Sale’.

  To this oldest of fantasies, that of finding from a passing train the house of one’s dreams, Simonova instantly responded. She seized two hat-boxes and her dressing-case, issued a torrent of instructions to her dresser and pulled Dubrov down on to the platform.

  Two days later the little house in Cremorra – complete with vegetable garden, grazing for a substantial number of goats, three fretwork balconies and a chicken-house – was his.

  Fortunately, in Vienna the critics were kind and it was not too often that Simonova remembered the little wooden house which a kind peasant lady was looking after. They had spent a week there the year after he bought it and Dubrov had been rather ill, for there was a glut of apricots in their delightful orchard and Simonova had made a great deal of jam which did not set. Of late, however, Cremorra was getting closer and Dubrov, to whom the idea of living permanently in the country among inimical animals and loosening fruit was horrifying, now searched his mind for a diversion.