A Company of Swans

8

‘Thank you,’ said Harriet tenderly to the waiter, who was placing before her a fried egg swimming in grease and a mound of peppery beans. ‘Obrigado. Gosto muito!’

Breakfast at the Hotel Metropole was not normally a beautiful experience; the same food appeared at all meals, the sluggish fan scarcely stirred the fetid air, swollen black flies buzzed on the overcrowded flypapers. But the morning after the party at Follina the world, for Harriet, was bathed in an all-embracing golden light.

She had returned unnoticed the night before; both Kirstin and Marie-Claude had been fast asleep — her adventure was unknown to anyone but herself. And Mr Verney had said that today he would come to find her. She must not depend on it… but he had said it.

‘It is not necessary to give thanks for such a breakfast,’ said Marie-Claude, shuddering. But she herself was in a good mood, for her encounter with Harry Parker, the secretary of the Sports Club, had turned out to be extremely fortunate. She had been offered, and at very little personal inconvenience, a chance to augment by an appreciable sum the savings she and Vincent were amassing for the purchase of the restaurant.

‘In two weeks’ time,’ she said now, lowering her voice, for the rest of the Company was sitting at tables close by, ‘I am going to burst at the Sports Club! From a cake! For seven hundred and fifty milreis in cash.’ And as Kirstin and Harriet looked at her with raised eyebrows, she added, ‘Mr Parker invited me: it is a thing that is very much done in gentlemen’s clubs when there is a special dinner of some kind. This one is for the Minister for Amazonia, who is coming from Rio to discuss the organisation of river transport or some such thing. The cake is wheeled in for dessert and — hoop la!’ She put down her fork to sketch in the air the deliciously titillating eruption which would follow.

Harriet was impressed. ‘From a real cake, Marie-Claude?’

‘No, idiot! It’s an enormous wooden affair — generally pink and decorated with candles. Sometimes they release white doves at the same time, though then of course there are problems with the feathers and the excretion and so on. Sometimes there are men with trumpets who accompany the cake and a chef who plunges in the knife… and of course always balloons and streamers and a great deal of champagne.’

‘Will Vincent like it?’ enquired Kirstin.

‘It is precisely for Vincent that I am doing it,’ flashed Marie-Claude. But a pensive look spread for a moment over her heart-shaped face, for it was true that she had not precisely explained to Vincent the means she employed to increase their joint savings. Vincent himself was strait-laced and his family — notably his cousin Pierre under whom Vincent had trained — was positively gothic. Still, what could one do? It was necessary to be practical. ‘You won’t mention it to anyone?’ she pleaded. ‘The dinner begins very late; after the curtain goes down. No one at the theatre need know.’

‘Of course not.’ Harriet was overawed. Thus, she was sure, had Messalina erupted in the last days of Imperial Rome. ‘Only, Marie-Claude, when you come out of the cake won’t the gentlemen become overexcited and — you know?’

‘Over-excitement is something I do not permit,’ said Marie-Claude, pushing away her egg with a moue of disgust. ‘I made this absolutely clear to Mr Parker. I burst; I dance a little on the table; I sit for a moment in the lap of the Minister — and that is all.’

‘What will you wear?’ asked Kirstin.

‘Not very much,’ Marie-Claude admitted. ‘Mr Parker insisted on this. But there is always my hair which covers most things, and I have a special garter with a large rosette in which my Tante Berthe’s hat-pin can be concealed. Not that it will be necessary, I assure you. The whole affair is strictly a matter of art — a kind of tableau vivant — and anyway, the Minister is old.’ She paused and fixed her enormous eyes on Harriet. ‘There is, however, a problem,’ she said, lowering her voice still further and glancing over her shoulder at the alcove where Dubrov and those of the principals who could face the Metropole dining-room at breakfast were sitting. ‘I have to see Mr Parker at eleven thirty this morning to make the arrangements.’

‘But it’s the costume rehearsal for The Nutcracker,’ said Harriet.

‘Exactly. So you, Harriet, must be for me a mouse,’ said Marie-Claude.

‘Oh, Marie-Claude, I couldn’t,’ said Harriet, aghast. ‘I’ve never been a mouse; I don’t know the steps or anything!’

‘There are no steps,’ said Marie-Claude contemptuously. ‘One scampers and runs about and bites toy soldiers in the legs.’ She poured herself another cup of coffee and contemplated with gloom the bizarre events on which Tchaikovsky had wasted some of his loveliest music. And indeed it is not easy to see why little Clara is so delighted to get a nutcracker for Christmas nor why, almost at once, there is a battle between toy soldiers and some hitherto unsuspected mice.

‘I’ll help you, Harriet,’ offered Kirstin. A little taller than the others, she was doomed to be a soldier and smite the attacking rodents with a wooden sword. ‘And in any case the rehearsal will be chaos; everyone will be in hysterics long before lunch.’

She spoke no less than the truth. The Nutcracker was the only ballet in which Simonova did not star, but in ceding the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy to Masha Repin, Simonova was by no means quitting the field. She was going to supervise rehearsals, she was going to put her experience at the service of the younger girl; she was going to help.

‘Please, Harriet?’ begged Marie-Claude, laying a pearl-tipped hand on Harriet’s arm. ‘I would ask Olga, but she was sick in the night and the other Russian girls are such prigs.’

Of such a request there could only be one outcome. Harriet might hate deceiving Monsieur Dubrov and be frightened of the consequences, but it was out of the question that she should refuse to help her friend. Thus two hours later, entirely enveloped (at a temperature of ninety-two degrees) in simulated fur, her face covered by a mask, she was on stage being a belligerent and really rather unpleasant mouse.

Rom came in the little Firefly, a sentimental gesture which almost doubled his travelling time, and tying up at his private jetty made his way along the quayside, acknowledging the salutations of his men, who were trundling their black ‘biscuits’ of rubber towards the lighters. He passed quickly through his warehouses and entered the chaotic office — with its maps, samples of cahuchu, telegraph machine and stained coffee-cups — from which his manager attended the needs of the Verney empire.

‘All is well, Coronel?’ asked Miguel, lifting his pince-nez and removing a pile of files from a chair for his employer. But the question was rhetorical. Miguel, rescued from schoolmastering, had served Verney since he first came to the Amazon and it was clear that this morning his master was very well indeed. Was this the moment, Miguel wondered, to put in a word for his nephew who was just out of school and looking for a job?

But Verney was in a hurry. ‘I have an appointment,’ he said. ‘We’ll just do the most urgent things. I want the Pittsburg contract and the projection of the hardwood requirements for Bernard Fils in Marseilles. The rest can wait.’

Miguel nodded and produced the documents in an instant from the apparent confusion of his desk. ‘One of de Silva’s clerks came in this morning with a copy of the Ombidos report. He said you wanted to see it before the visit of the Minister.’

‘That’s right.’ Rom’s face was momentarily sombre at the mention of Ombidos, that plague spot from which rumours of ill-treatment and butchery of the Indians continued to filter through. ‘I’ll take it home.’

Less than an hour later Verney left the office, crossed the narrow harbour-side road and climbed a steep flight of steps to enter, through a blue door in a high wall, the bougainvillea-covered Casa Branca.

It was the smallest of houses — a toy place high above the huddle of buildings that looked out over the river; a white box with blue shutters and a handkerchief of a terrace with a fig tree. An unlikely dwelling for a rubber baron, but it was the first home Rom had owned and he had kept it, finding it useful when he had to spend a night in the city. Carmen looked after the house; Pedro acted as chauffeur for the Cadillac he kept in a neighbouring mews. No women came to the Casa Branca but it was here under the fig tree in the little courtyard suspended over the harbour that he had decided to give Harriet lunch. She would like the view; she would like Pedro and Carmen — and he did not want her exposed to the stares and nudges of the other diners in fashionable restaurants.

‘A light meal, Carmen,’ he said. ‘An avocado mousse, some fish… And the Frascati to drink.’

‘Will you want the motor, Senhor?’

‘No.’

He went upstairs to shower and fifteen minutes later was letting himself into the Teatro Amazonas by a side door.

Dubrov, watching out front, turned and half rose as Rom slipped into a seat beside him.

‘You should have told us you were coming,’ he said, pushing a hand through his dishevelled hair. ‘Simonova would have wished to welcome you herself.’ (She would have wished to… but he had left the ballerina in her dressing-room, screaming with rage at Masha Repin’s refusal to be coached.)

‘I’ve come to take Harriet out to lunch,’ said Rom in a low voice, fascinated by the antics on the stage. ‘If that’s convenient? When do you expect a break?’

‘It shouldn’t be long now. There have been a few… difficulties.’ So Mr Verney was interested in Harriet? Flattering; very flattering. ‘It will do her good to get out,’ said the impresario. ‘She works so hard.’

‘She certainly seems to be dancing with great aplomb. It must be very hot under those pelts.’

Dubrov smiled tolerantly. Mr Verney was a man of formidable intelligence, but no connoisseur of the ballet. ‘Harriet is not dancing at the moment. Later you will see her; she is a snowflake.’

‘Really? I could have sworn she was that one on the right, just coming out from behind the Christmas tree. With the tattered ear.

Dubrov shook a decisive head. ‘That’s Marie-Claude. It’s a crime to put a girl like that into a mask, but there!’

Somewhat to Dubrov’s surprise, Simonova greeted the news of Harriet’s luncheon engagement with satisfaction.

‘It will annoy Masha,’ she said simply. ‘Did you notice the sheep’s eyes she made at Verney yesterday?’

Dubrov nodded. Masha Repin had certainly made efforts to attract Verney’s attention, but so had virtually every other woman who was there. Still, anything that distracted Simonova from Masha Repin’s arrogance, her inability to take the advice which she, Simonova, had taken so gladly, so willingly from Kchessinskaya, from Legat — from absolutely everyone who was kind enough to help her — was all to the good.

It was not only Simonova who watched Harriet go with a feeling of pleasure at her good fortune. Lobotsky, the character dancer, patted her shoulder; the ASM wished her luck; even Maximov deigned to smile at her. Only Kirstin was disquieted. Harriet looked nice — even the absent Marie-Claude could not have complained about her blue skirt and white blouse — but to expose to the gods a face of such unalloyed expectation and happiness seemed to the gentle Swede to be little short of madness.

Rom was right. Harriet liked the Casa Branca.

‘Oh, the view!’ she said. ‘They always say something beautiful is breathtaking, but it ought to be breathgiving, oughtn’t it?’

They had lunch in the shade of the fig tree and beneath them the life of the river unfolded for their delight. Rom had wined and dined innumerable women, flicking his fingers at servile waiters, but now he found himself watching over Harriet as if she was a child in his keeping, concerned lest even the smallest of bones should scratch her delicate throat; buttering her roll.

‘Tell me, were you a mouse just now?’ he asked. ‘A mouse with a tattered ear?’

She looked up, flushing. ‘Yes, I was.’

Rom nodded. ‘I thought you were. Dubrov swore it was Marie-Claude, but I knew it was you.’

She put down her fork. ‘How? I was completely covered with a mask. How could you know?’

‘I knew,’ said Rom. He let the words stand deliberately ringed in silence… but not for long. She must remain untroubled by anything for which she was not yet ready. ‘Were you covering up for Marie-Claude?’

Harriet nodded. ‘But please don’t mention it to Monsieur Dubrov. She had to go away on business — for Vincent and the restaurant.’

‘Ah, yes… the famous Vincent. Have you met him?’

‘No, but I have seen his photograph. A lot of photographs!’

‘And?’ said Rom. ‘Is he a match for your ravishing friend?’

‘Well, it’s strange. I mean, it’s absolutely clear that she adores him. And of course he does have a very large moustache, which is important to her — all his family are famous for their moustaches — and photographs don’t tell you very much about people, do they? I think it must be his personality.’

‘A strong man, then?’

‘Very practical and Marie-Claude likes that. She gets very annoyed with people like Romeo. He should have got a chicken feather, she thinks, and laid it on Juliet’s lips to see if she was breathing, not rushed about and killed himself.’

‘Vincent is a chicken-feather man, then?’

‘Very much so, I understand.’ Harriet hesitated. ‘I can see Marie-Claude’s point. When I read about love in Cambridge — and I used to read a lot because my Aunt Louisa let me do my homework in the public library to save the gas — I got very discouraged. It seemed to me that as soon as you loved anyone very much, you were inevitably doomed. You know… Heloise and Abelard, Tristan and Isolde… To love in moderation was all right, but when it became excessive… total… you were punished. And yet it must be right, surely, to give everything? To hold nothing back? That must be what one wants to do?’

‘Yes, one wants to do just that. And I assure you that there are plenty of people who have loved truly and found their Avalon or their Hesperides and set up house there and tended their crops and lit their fires. Only who cares for them? Who writes about the valley with no earthquake, the river that is not in flood?’

He smiled at her, the grey eyes serene and comforting, and led her on to talk not of her home which he knew would give her pain, but of Cambridge itself, that incomparable city. And if he had doubted his feelings, those doubts would have been banished by the greed with which he longed to share her childhood and her memories.

Carmen brought coffee and a bowl of fruit which Rom studied attentively before picking a golden-pink pomegranate, which he placed not on Harriet’s plate, but into her obediently cupped hands. ‘Are you willing to take the risk?’ he asked. ‘They’re dangerous things, pomegranates.’

She caught the allusion instantly, as he had known she would.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It would be no punishment to have to remain here in this place. Or to return. Not for five months or fifty.’

She was silent, thinking of Persephone who had eaten her pomegranate in Hades, carried there by cruel Pluto, King of the Underworld. Had she minded going back into darkness, compelled to return for as many months as she had eaten seeds, while the world in her absence turned to winter? Or had Pluto looked a little like the man who faced her? Dark-visaged; sardonic; a few silver threads in the ink-black hair. In which case she must have wished she had eaten more seeds… And smiling, Harriet picked up the silver fruit knife.

But Rom now had decided that it was time for her to speak, for he had not forgotten that this was a meal with a purpose and, sensing that she might find it difficult to begin, he prompted her.

‘Tell me now, Harriet. Tell me why you stayed behind after the party. What was it you wanted to speak to me about?’

She put down the knife again, her face suddenly sombre. Increasingly it seemed impertinent to mention his past life. He must have contacts in every country in the world and certainly in England. If he had wanted to keep in touch with the place that had been his home, nothing could have been easier. And to give herself strength she summoned up again the image of the red-haired child in the maze, bewildered by the disaster that had struck his house.

‘It was Stavely,’ said Harriet in a low voice. ‘It was Stavely that I wanted to talk about.’

‘Stavely!’

The effect was extraordinary. The comradeship, the warmth that had been between them vanished in an instant. The dark, exotic face became blank, shuttered. But it was too late now to withdraw.

‘Forgive me — but you did live there, didn’t you, as a child?’

‘Yes. I lived there for the first nineteen years of my life.’

She nodded. ‘I knew. Even before you named the manatee. When you stepped out of the trees, I knew.’

He could make no sense of this and sat tracing the pattern of the tablecloth with one finger. From Stavely, where Henry and Isobel presumably dwelt in connubial bliss, there could come nothing that one way or another could fail to cause him pain.

‘I don’t know if you’ve heard,’ said Harriet, forcing herself to go on, ‘but things are very bad there.’

‘No, I had not. In what way?’

‘Well, the house is… unkempt… ill-cared-for; there are hardly any servants except horrible Mr Grunthorpe. And the garden — oh, the garden is heartbreaking. Such lovely plants and everything overgrown and neglected.’

He pushed away his chair and rose, the simple gesture taking on an extraordinary sense of violence, and moved across to where the fig tree leaned its branches over the terrace wall.

‘He had no right,’ she heard him murmur. ‘Not the garden…’ and for a moment he leaned his head against the smooth grey bark as if in unutterable weariness.

‘There was no need for that,’ he said, coming back to stand behind his chair. ‘My father left enough.’

‘Your father?’

‘My father was General Brandon. I am his son by his second marriage.’ He made an impatient gesture. ‘I don’t wish to go into that; I simply want to know why you have come to tell me all this. Why you, Harriet?’

‘Because of Henry.’

She was looking down, her head bent over the table, and missed the whitening of his knuckles as he grasped the chair-back, the shock that passed over his face.

Henry! As clearly as if he stood before him, Rom saw the smug pale face of his hated step-brother. Henry who had cheated him, betrayed him… who had stood smirking down at Isobel in the Orangery on that last day…

‘Yes, it was because of Henry,’ said Harriet. ‘I met him there when I went on a visit and I liked him so much. I loved him, I think.’ Her voice was ineffably tender; she made the gesture that women make when they express a sensuous surrender, cupping her hands round her own throat. ‘I wanted to help him.’

Rom did not speak. His face as he struggled with the blow she had dealt him was that of a Tartar chieftain, foreign and cruel.

‘Henry thought you might be here.’ Her voice was still dreamy with remembrance. ‘Because of the book you left behind with Nannie. Because you were always talking about the Amazon. He said, if I found you, would I ask you to come back. He thought you would be able to make everything all right again at Stavely. It was because of him, really, that I came,’ finished Harriet. ‘He made me brave.’

Only now did she look up. ‘What is it?’ she faltered. ‘What have I done?’

Rom was in control again. She had spoken for scarcely two minutes, yet in that time he had torn from his heart every feeling she had aroused; every hope that loneliness was ended. Only his anger remained — the anger with which, since his mother’s death, Rom had responded to loss.

‘Let me get this clear, Harriet. When you stayed behind last night, it was to tell me what you have told me now? It was to plead for Henry Brandon?’

‘Yes.’ Separated by fear from the common-sense which might have saved them both, stupid with bewilderment, she could only repeat, ‘I wanted to help him, is that so terrible? What have I done?

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You have done nothing. On the contrary, you have fulfilled your mission excellently. And now please go back and tell your protégé that I will see him in hell before I raise a finger to save Stavely. Just tell him that.’ He stood for a moment looking down at the fruit on the table with the ghost of a smile. ‘How wise you were not to open it,’ he said, picking up the pomegranate. ‘Not a single seed eaten. No reason ever to return.’

He balanced the golden orb for a moment on his hand — then threw it with all his strength in a high arc over the wall. ‘Pedro will take you back in the car,’ he said — and without a goodbye, without a handshake, was gone.

Two days later the redoubtable Olga fell ill. Since their arrival Dubrov had relentlessly patrolled the Metropole dining-room, forbidding anyone to drink unboiled water on pain of instant dismissal; he had handed out quinine, had himself checked the mosquito netting in the girls’ bedrooms and confiscated all fruit bought from barrows in the street. Even so, several members of the company had complained of stomach pains and with three days of the first week’s run of Swan Lake still to go, Olga was definitely too ill to dance.

‘Seventeen swans again,’ said Grisha gloomily.

But more serious than the inconvenience of rearranging the choreography for the corps was the need to rehearse a new ‘Odette-at-the window’. For Olga had been the girl who, dressed as the Swan Queen in her white tutu and glittering crown, flutters at the window in such anguish to show the Prince that he has been tricked — that the girl he has just promised to marry is not the real Odette, but an usurper.

It is a short scene, scarcely three minutes in all — yet it is rare for anyone to leave the theatre without recalling the image of that beseeching, moonlit figure, exiled from happiness and love.

‘Kira is the nearest to you in size,’ said Dubrov to Simonova as she lay on the yellow silk couch of her dressing-room, fanning herself with a moulting ostrich fan.

‘Impossible! I will not be represented by a girl with square thighs.’

Dubrov sighed. ‘Lydia then. She is a little taller than you, but the colouring’s right.’

There was a pause while Simonova pulled up her kimono and studied her left knee. Then, ‘Give it to Harriet,’ said the ballerina.

‘Harriet?’ Dubrov looked up, surprised, from the knee he had automatically begun to massage. ‘I hadn’t thought of giving her anything extra — she is so new. But you’re right, she is the same height as you and the same build.’

‘She will know what to do,’ said Simonova. ‘A little too well, perhaps.’

‘Yes.’

Harriet had returned from her luncheon date with a blind, lost look that had made Dubrov want to shake the handsome and generous Mr Verney. Since then, saying nothing to anyone, she had worked if anything harder than before. It should have been a relief to be free of the child’s enthusiasms; Dubrov had suffered as much as anyone from Harriet’s determination to befriend the loathsome vultures that sat on the verandah of the hotel, holding out their black wings to dry after the rain, or the glad cries with which she announced the presence of a green and crimson frog who had taken refuge in the showers. But to see her become once more the quiet resigned girl she had been in Cambridge was hard.

‘What happened?’ Marie-Claude had demanded of Kirstin, returning to find Harriet white and silent, practising at the barre. And reproaching herself: ‘I should have stayed to see to her toilette.’

‘Oh, Marie-Claude, everything isn’t clothes. I saw how he looked at her when she came out of the stage-door. It was a misunderstanding, a quarrel — it must have been.’

Her summons to Dubrov’s office filled Harriet with alarm. Had he discovered after all that she had stood in for Marie-Claude?

‘You are to be the swan at the window instead of Olga,’ announced Dubrov, adding firmly, ‘It is an extremely small part and naturally there will be no increase in privileges. Or in pay.’

‘Oh!’ Her thin face lit up. Whatever happened there was still work. ‘But why me — surely one of the others…?’

‘It was Madame Simonova’s suggestion. Grisha will show you the movements after lunch. Then we shall rehearse once with the lights before the performance. You go on tonight, of course.’

‘Tonight! I can’t…’ she began to say, and stopped. For she could, as a matter of fact. This she could do.

Simonova herself attended the rehearsal, as did Dubrov and a surprising number of the cast. Harriet learned the steps quickly and indeed there was little enough to do except stand on her pointes and flutter her piteous arms. Nor was it possible for her to miss her cue, for it was the swan motif itself, with its haunting oboes, that heralded her brief entrance. In half an hour it was clear that Harriet would manage, and indeed there was no girl in the corps who could not have managed this unexacting task.

All the same, those who watched her were in their different ways, displeased.

‘Poor child! It is a mistake to be like that,’ said Simonova, flopping down on the bed when she was back in her room at the Metropole. ‘Of course, it is good for one’s dancing afterwards.’ She took off her shoes and dropped them on the floor. ‘What was the name of that hussar, do you remember? In the Rodenzky regiment? The year I met you.’

‘Count Zugarovitch,’ said Dubrov, coming to sit beside her on the bed. The young blue-eyed hussar had been killed in a duel soon afterwards and he could afford to be magnanimous.

‘Yes. It is because of him that I am unsurpassed in Giselle,’ said Simonova with her usual modesty. ‘Still, it is awful, this love.’ She laid her head with unaccustomed tenderness against his shoulder — a gesture which, though it was intended for the dead hussar, Dubrov proceeded to turn to good account.

Marie-Claude, accosting Harriet as she changed in the chorus dressing-room, was simply angry.

‘There is no need for you to act like that; it is only a rehearsal and the whole scene will be played behind gauzes and there is no extra pay.’

‘Like what?’ asked Harriet, bewildered.

‘As though you were really suffering. As though you were really outside and lost and frightened and looking in on happiness from which you were excluded et tout ça. It is not necessary,’ raged Marie-Claude.

‘You are certainly a good actress, Harriet,’ said Kirstin. ‘You seemed absolutely anguished.’

‘Did I?’ Harriet was surprised. ‘It’s just that I know… what it is like. I know how it is to be at a window… outside… and to look in on a lighted room and not be able to make anybody hear.’

‘How can you know? You have not experienced it.’

Harriet hung Odette’s glittering crown on a peg above the mirror and reached for her comb. ‘Perhaps I am going to one day,’ she said. ‘There is a man in England who says that time is curved and that we can sometimes see—’

But Marie-Claude was entirely uninterested in metaphysical theories about time. ‘It is only necessary to do the steps,’ she snapped.

And after all Marie-Claude was right, for when Harriet came on that night she was just a distant, half-lit figure, vanishing in an instant — and the only man who might have known that it was Harriet and not Olga who trembled and beckoned at the window was a hundred miles away.