A Company of Swans

9

‘Eat, Coronel,’ begged Furo, pushing the tin plate towards his master.

The brightly patterned fish, salted and grilled on a driftwood fire, smelled delicious but Rom shook his head. He sat leaning against the twisted trunk of a mango, letting the fine sand of the praia on which they had made camp run through his fingers. Nearby the Daisy May floated quietly at anchor. A cormorant turned a yellow-ringed and disbelieving eye on the intruders and flapped off across the river. In the still water, the colours of the sunset changed from flame to primrose and a last glimmer of unearthly green.

Rom, usually aware of every stirring leaf, noticed nothing; he was lost in the horror of what he had just seen.

He had meant simply to spend a few days on the river, wanting to shake off the memory of that ill-fated lunch with Harriet. Taking only the silent and devoted Furo — loading the boat with the usual gifts of fish-hooks and beads and medical supplies — he had travelled up the Negro, bound for an island where tree orchids grew in incredible profusion and the snowy egrets made their nests.

Then something — he had no idea what it was — made him turn up the Ombidos river. There had long been rumours of gross ill-treatment of the Indians by the men who ran the Ombidos Rubber Company, and the report de Silva had sent down had made disquieting reading, but Rom had seen too many do-gooders and journalists make capital out of the rubber barons’ wicked treatment of the natives to be seriously disturbed. Moreover the company was entirely Brazilian-owned. Rom might fight exploitation ruthlessly where it was inflicted by Europeans, but he did not meddle in the affairs of his hosts.

Yet at the end of the second day, the Daisy May was chugging at a steady seven knots up the Ombidos. Perhaps it was hindsight, but it seemed to Rom a frightful place; the ‘green hell’ so beloved of the fiction writers come hideously to life. Oppressive, dark, ominously silent: only the mosquitos, incessant and insatiable even in the hissing rain, seemed to be alive on that Stygian stretch of water.

That night they had tied up in a creek, concealed by overhanging trees. The next morning Rom put on a battered sombrero, slung a rifle over his shoulder and, with his pockets full of trinkets, disappeared along a jungle track in the direction of the village. With his two-day stubble, his shirt stained by grease from the Daisy May’s engine, he passed easily enough for a poor-white trader come to cheat the natives out of basket-work or cured skins for a handful of beads.

He was away for twenty-four hours. Since then he had spoken only to give Furo orders which would take them away fast, and faster, from that accursed place. Even now, fifty miles down-river in as halcyon a spot as anyone could hope for, he sat like a man in a trance and in that steaming jungle, looked cold.

‘It was very bad, then?’ enquired Furo at last.

Rom stirred and turned.

‘Yes.’

He took the bottle of brandy that Furo had pushed towards him and tilted it to his mouth, but nothing could blot out what he had seen at Ombidos. He had believed that he knew of all the cruelties which men had inflicted on the Indians in their insane greed for rubber… Workers flayed into insensibility with tapir-hide whips for bringing in less cahuchu than their master craved; hirelings with Winchesters dragging into slavery every able-bodied man in a village… He himself had been offered — by a drunken overseer on the Madeira — one of the man’s native concubines, a girl just nine years old…

But he had seen nothing. Until he had been to Ombidos, he had not known what cruelty was. And with the men who had done… those things… he had smiled and joked. He had not killed one of them; had not throttled with his bare hands a single one of the torturers, because he had to return and bear witness.

‘Is it true that messages have gone to the Minister in Rio to tell of the bad things at Ombidos?’ asked Furo, staring trustingly at his master.

‘Yes, it is true. To Antonio Alvarez, the Minister for Amazonia.’

‘And he is coming to Manaus. So he will go to Ombidos and see for himself? He will make it right?’

Rom shook his head. ‘He will come, Furo. He will dine at the Sports Club and go to Madame Anita’s brothel with the Mayor and attend some meetings at the Town Hall in his tight suit and pointed shoes. But he will not go to Ombidos.’

Antonio Alvarez, a man approaching sixty… A gourmet who travelled with a French chef; a dandy who kept a retinue of hairdressers, valets and masseurs in his mansion in Rio… Nothing on God’s earth, thought Rom, would get Alvarez to that hell-hole. It was said that once he had been different — an idealist and a patriot — but that had been decades ago. Some personal tragedy was supposed to have turned him into the man he now was, the man Rom knew: wily, powerful, idle…

Yet it was only Alvarez and the government he served that could clean up the cess-pit that was the Ombidos Rubber Company. The company had no foreign shareholders: impossible to evoke, as Casement had done on the Putumayo the conscience of Great Britain or the United States.

‘Shall I sling the hammocks now, Coronel?’

Rom nodded. Yet long after his servant slept, he still sat and watched beside the moonlit river.

‘But he shall go,’ he said aloud. ‘He shall go to Ombidos.’

The first week’s run of Swan Lake ended as it began with fifteen curtain calls for Simonova, though the last of these needed a little assistance from Dubrov, who seized the winch-handle from the stage hand who had been turning it and had been about to pack up and go home. The following week was to open with La Fille Mal Gardée, a relatively undemanding ballet in which the ballerina is merely required to be enchanting, innocent and tender, qualities which Simonova believed herself to possess in abundance. With the dreaded Nutcracker in which Masha Repin was to star still a week away, and Olga signalling her recovery by biting the thermometer in half and demanding borscht, the Company settled down to their well-earned Sunday rest.

At least… most of the Company. In the bedroom which Harriet shared with Kirstin and Marie-Claude, a rehearsal was in progress.

Marie-Claude’s star was rising high. Her meeting with Mr Parker had been wholly successful. He had given her a substantial sum for her costume and expenses, and promised that her sizeable fee would be waiting for her, in cash, on the evening of her appearance. With her usual efficiency, Marie-Claude had left instructions about the music with which she was to be accompanied, the topography of the cake, the arrangement of the concealed footstool which would enable her to leap effortlessly on to the banqueting table. She had even agreed to a brief run-through on the actual morning of the dinner — but to polish up the finer points of her routine she preferred the privacy of the Hotel Metropole.

‘I wish my Aunt Louisa could see you,’ said Harriet, grinning at her friend.

Marie-Claude was in costume: a pair of black fishnet stockings, an inch-wide band of black froth which apparently constituted knickers and two minuscule black and crimson rosettes which adhered by some mysterious process to her breasts. They had put their three chairs together in a circle to constitute a ‘cake’; the beds, pushed into the shape of a horseshoe, stood in for the banqueting tables and in the middle of the centre one, an upright bolster impersonated the Minister for Amazonia.

‘Harriet, you must do the music,’ instructed Marie-Claude. ‘It’s the Offenbach first. Then when I’m on the table, it’s the slow bit from The Odalisque — I’ve marked it there… Then back to the Offenbach for my exit.’

Harriet nodded. Since her lunch with Verney she had waited patiently for the ache left by his rejection to fade. It had not done so, but now, as she had set herself to work, so she set herself to help her friend. And trained to sight-read in the Bach choir at Cambridge, she launched into a very respectable rendering of La Belle Hélène.

In the bottom of the ‘cake’ crouched Marie-Claude, wrapped in the golden mantle of her hair. Then — at precisely the point where the music soared to a crescendo of expectancy — she burst!

It was a splendid spectacle: sudden, dramatic, timed to a split-second. Even Kirstin, busy sewing a miniature scabbard for Tante Berthe’s hat-pin, gasped and Harriet was so overcome that she lost her place in the score. One moment there had been nothing and the next second there was Marie-Claude, her dimpled arms extended, her lightly rouged palms turned upwards and her smile held with undiminished vigour until even the most distantly placed of the diners must have feasted on its rich promise.

When she was certain that the gentlemen had looked their fill, Marie-Claude caught hold of the iron ring which the Metropole kindly supplied for those guests who travelled with their own hammocks and, swinging her legs high over the chair, jumped down on to the floor.

‘In the proper cake there will be a little wooden ledge,’ she explained and, indicating to Harriet a quickening of the tempo, began to dance.

The sight was unforgettable. In Cambridge the plump and brassy Lily at Madame Lavarre’s had occasionally given the girls a glimpse of what she did in her class for ‘stage’; and it had seemed saucy and titillating in the extreme but Lily, as Harriet now realised, was an infant. It was fortunate that Marie-Claude was familiar with the music to which she danced, for Harriet, gazing wide-eyed at her friend, was providing only the sketchiest of accompaniments.

Her ravishing smile unimpaired by her exertions, her hips apparently hinged only most lightly to her torso, Marie-Claude performed movements that Harriet had scarcely known existed. She smoothed down her own waist, she lifted her legs so high that it seemed as if the froth of lace must be torn most hideously asunder… She did incredible things with her hair — now covering her face with it; now tossing it away so that it whipped out behind her; now, as the music grew softer, winding strands of it round her wrists. She bent forward to let her crossed hands dabble in the dimples of her knees, then backward so that the solitary brilliant in her navel shone straight into the ‘eyes’ of the bolster that was Antonio Alvarez.

‘Ça va? she enquired as Harriet, hoarse and overcome, limped to the end of the passage. ‘That was about seven minutes, I think?’

‘Six and a half,’ said Kirstin, looking at the ormolu clock they had borrowed from the hotel lounge.

‘I understand now about Salome,’ said Harriet. ‘Why they gave her John the Baptist’s head, I mean. I used to think it was too much: a whole head just for a dance.’

Marie-Claude was not at all pleased with the compliment. ‘She was a gloomy lady. They are altogether an exceedingly depressive people, the old Hebrews, and veils are not at all fashionable. But I use some of the same effects when I get on the table. One has to be more legato on tables — especially out here, I suppose, with so many insects eating into the wood.’

Marie-Claude’s routine on the table, performed to a sugary but voluptuous tune from a French musical, was certainly less exuberant but its effect, as her smile became sleepier, her velvet eyes more specific in their promise, was staggering.

‘Then just for a moment, if he is not too drunk, I come and sit on the knees of the Minister,’ said Marie-Claude, sliding down to bestow a cursory hug on the bolster. ‘But before he can do anything, there is a fanfare on the trumpets and — bang — the lights go out! I have arranged a signal for this with Mr Parker — it is when I raise my right arm so it can happen earlier if there is any unpleasantness. And when they can see again, I am back in the cake blowing kisses and being wheeled away!’

They rehearsed several times and would have gone on longer had it not been for a mineral prospector from Iquitos who had been trying to have a siesta in the room beneath them and who came up to complain.

‘We’ll try it again tomorrow, but I think it will be all right, hein?’ enquired Marie-Claude.

Her friends reassured her. Harriet, however, was forced to express a reservation.

‘Only I’m afraid, Marie-Claude, that the gentlemen will get overexcited, whether you permit it or not. I don’t see how they can fail to!’

‘Ah, well,’ said Marie-Claude philosophically, ‘it is for the restaurant,’ — and removed her garters.

Rom disliked the Manaus Sports Club and visited it as rarely as possible. Built at the beginning of the rubber boom, it was a colonial-style mansion on the edge of the town which combined all the things he had disliked most in Europe: snobbery, reactionary politics and a leering ‘Oh là là’ attitude to women, who were excluded from virtually all its functions. The heavy red plush furniture was disastrous for the tropics; the food was indifferent. There were even two old gentlemen straight out of a Punch cartoon who sat in the bar reading aloud the obituary columns from the five-week-old Times.

The day after his return from Ombidos, however, Rom drove his Cadillac up the drive to discuss with Harry Parker the dinner for Alvarez in two days’ time. He had never hoped to avoid the occasion; Alvarez, a connoisseur of food and women, was also a connoisseur of plants and had visited Follina. The Minister had particularly asked for his presence and Rom had no intention of snubbing him. He had hoped, however, to be involved as little as possible. Now he had changed his mind.

‘Verney!’ said Harry Parker, coming out to greet him. ‘I heard you’d been away and I don’t mind telling you I was terrified in case you didn’t make it for Saturday! The thing is, we have agreed that someone ought to make a speech in the Minister’s honour, just a short one before the toasts. It must be in Portuguese, of course, and everyone suggested you.’

‘Yes, all right. I’ll do it.’

‘I say, that’s terribly decent of you,’ said Parker, surprised and greatly relieved. ‘Everyone’s coming! De Silva, the Mayor, Count Sternov… I’m putting you on the right of Alvarez with the Mayor opposite. I’ll show you the seating plan.’

They walked together past the tennis courts, the swimming-pool, the new one-storey wooden building which Parker had had built in the grounds to provide acommodation for visitors defeated by the Golden City’s inexplicably ghastly hotels. Rom cared little for Parker’s views, but he had to admit that the young man — brought out from England to run the club on ‘British’ lines — was doing a good job.

‘Actually there’s been a bit of a fuss,’ said Parker. ‘We’ve just heard that Alvarez travels everywhere with his own chef — got a delicate stomach or something. Some high-up French fellow… He intends to bring him here to supervise his own dishes for the banquet. You can imagine how my kitchen staff’s taken it! I hope there won’t be any bloodshed.’

He led Rom through into his office and showed him the plans.

‘That seems all right,’ said Rom. ‘I shall want to speak to Alvarez privately before the dinner. Tell him I want to brush up on his new honours before my speech. Can you clear the smoking-room and give us drinks in there?’

‘Of course. No trouble. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you’re helping us out. You know the fellow, don’t you?’

‘Yes, he’s been out to Follina once. He is a keen gardener.’

‘I’ve laid on a bit of… you know… afterwards,’ said Parker, and over his sharp-featured face there spread a middle-aged leer. ‘A surprise. The old man likes women, I gather?’

‘Yes.’

But if Parker had hoped to be asked more about the ‘surprise’ he was destined to be disappointed. Odd fellow, Verney, the secretary thought. A devil with the women, they said, and certainly that singer two years ago had been the most staggering female he had ever seen. Yet when men stayed behind to tell a certain kind of story or compare notes of their conquests, Verney always seemed to melt away.

‘Come and have a drink, anyway, before you go,’ he suggested.

In the bar Carstairs and Phillips were where they always were: one on either side of an overstuffed sofa, beneath a portrait of King Edward VII at Sandringham despatching grouse. Carstairs’s bald pink pate was bent over the slightly yellowed pages of the five-week-old Times and he was reading out the current crop of deaths to the wheezing Phillips, who sat with one hand cupped round his whiskery ear.

‘Arbuthnot’s gone!’ he yelled across to his friend. ‘Remember him? Andy Arbuthnot. Seventy-three, he was. Pity when they go young like that.’

Phillips shook his wispy head. ‘Don’t remember him. What about Barchester? Peregrine Barchester. Been waiting for him to go these ten years. Always had a dicky heart.’

Carstairs peered at the paper with his bloodshot eyes. ‘No. No Barchester here. Berkely… Bellers… Birt-Chesterfield! That must be the widow — the old man went years ago. Yes, that’s right — Mabel Birt-Chesterfield. Ninety-eight, she was.’

‘She’ll cut up nicely — oh, very nicely.’ Phillips’s head bobbed sagely on its withered stalk.

‘Well, I should hope so; they’ve waited long enough. Always in straits, the Birt-Chesterfields. Someone here’s going to be cremated: Borkmann.’

‘Don’t hold with that. Womanish business, cremation. Still, I daresay he’ll be foreign.’

‘There’s a very young fellow here. Brandon. Henry Brandon. Never heard of him. Only thirty-eight.’

‘Hunting accident, I suppose?’

‘Can’t be. Died in Toulouse. Henry Brandon of Stavely Hall, Suffolk. They don’t hunt in Toulouse, do they?’

‘There was a General Brandon in the Indian Army. My brother knew him. Might be his son, I suppose.’

‘Excuse me, but might I look at your paper for a moment?’

A look of incredulity and outrage spread over the old gentleman’s face. He would have been less shocked if the man had come into his bathroom and asked to look at his wife. As a matter of fact it would have been easier to hand over Florence while she lived. And it wasn’t as though the man was an outsider. He was a well-thought-of chap: Verney, a member of the Club.

‘It’s The Times, you know,’ he said, thinking that Verney had not understood. ‘It’s just come off the boat.’

‘I know. I won’t be a moment. You mentioned a name I thought I knew.’

‘Ah.’ Well, if the fellow had suffered a bereavement that wasn’t quite so bad. He handed over the paper, pointing with his rheumatic finger at the obituary column.

There was silence while Rom looked at the entry.

BRANDON: On May the 3rd, suddenly, at Toulouse, Henry Alexander St John, of Stavely Hall, Suffolk, aged 38. Funeral private. No flowers by request.

‘Friend of yours?’ enquired Carstairs presently.

‘No,’ said Rom and handed back the paper.

La Fille Mal Gardée is a light and charming ballet without the depths of Swan Lake or Giselle. It ends happily: the village girl, Lise, gets her handsome young farmer; the rich and foolish suitor departs in confusion. There are dances with ribbons, harvest frolics and of course the chickens with their échappés.

But there is, in the last act, an extraordinarily moving passage of mime which has become a classic. It occurs when the heroine, shut into her house by her strict mother, lives in imagination — and to the tenderest of melodies — the future that she hopes for with her love.

It was this passage which Simonova was rehearsing while Harriet — who should have been elsewhere — stood in the wings, unable to tear herself away. Almost a week had passed since Verney had stormed away from her at the Casa Branca and the ache of his rejection never quite seemed to go away, but now she forgot herself utterly as she watched… and saw the gaunt, eagle-faced woman turn into a tremulous young girl… saw her put on with reverence her wedding-dress… saw her pick up her first-born and rock it in her arms… count out the other children she would have — and chide them, as they grew, for disobedience.

There were no props and only ancient Irina Petrovna with her cigarette playing the upright piano. Simonova was in a tattered practice dress and hideous bandeau, but it was all there: the glory of married love and its marvellous and celebratory ordinariness.

‘So! What are you doing here? There is no rehearsal for the corps!’

The ballerina, sweeping off, had encountered Harriet.

‘I’m sorry, Madame… only I had to watch,’ said Harriet, rising from her curtsey. ‘You were…’ She shook a wondering head. ‘I shall never forget it. Never! It seemed so simple… there isn’t even really any dancing.’

‘Oh yes, there is dancing,’ said Simonova. ‘Make no mistake! Every finger dances.’ She looked for a moment at Harriet’s rapt face. ‘It is one of the glories of our tradition, that mime. When Karsavina does it, it is impossible not to weep.’

‘Nobody can do it better than you!’

Harriet’s husky-voiced adulation made the ballerina smile. ‘Kchessinskaya taught it to me. Perhaps one day I shall teach it to you, who knows?’ She patted Harriet on the cheek, swept up her accompanist and was gone — but her words sang in Harriet’s head. It meant nothing of course, it was only nonsense; she would never dance Lise. But if just once in my life I could do that mime, thought Harriet — and still in a dream, she moved out on to the empty silent stage.

Thus Rom, coming to find her, stood in the wings and watched as she had watched Simonova. He had put out of his mind this girl who had been Henry’s creature: he would do nothing now except gently break to her the news he had brought, and leave her. Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.

Harriet was humming, trying to remember… After Simonova had stretched out her hand in church for her lover’s ring — had she knelt to pray? No, surely she must have looked up, lifted her face for the bridal kiss. Yes, of course she had. She had pushed back her veil, turned, lifted her head…

So Harriet turned, lifted her head… and saw Verney standing in the shadows.

‘I must speak to you, Harriet.’ His words were curt, his face guarded again. The insane desire to step forward into her dream had passed. ‘We can go to the trustees’ room; there will be no one there.’

He led her through a baize door, along a corridor… up a flight of steps to a richly panelled room dominated by a vast, satinwood table.

‘Sit down.’

She sat obediently, looking very small in one of the twelve carved and high-backed chairs, like a studious pupil facing a board of examiners.

‘What I have to say will upset and sadden you,’ he began and she made a movement of acquiescence. Anything he said while he still looked so angry and bitter would do just that. ‘But I felt you should know while you were out here and had a chance to… forget a little. Henry is dead, Harriet. Henry Brandon. He died a week after you left England.’

Her reaction was worse than anything he could have imagined. The colour drained from her face and she shrank back in the tall chair. She was completely stricken.

‘No… Oh, no, he can’t be! God couldn’t…’

She had really loved him then, that pale deceitful slug of a man, thought Rom, noting with detached surprise the degree of his own wretchedness.

‘I’m afraid it’s true, Harriet. I cabled for confirmation.’

‘He was perfectly all right when I saw him… he was in the maze… he was reading your book,’ she said wildly. ‘He admired you so much.’ Her mouth began to tremble and she bit her lip with a desperate effort at control. ‘How did he die?’ she managed to say. ‘What happened?’

He had decided to tell her only if she asked. ‘He shot himself.’

Her head jerked up. ‘Shot himself? But that’s impossible! How can a little child shoot himself? Did they let him play in the gun-room? Surely even that horrible Mr Grunthorpe wouldn’t have let—’

‘Wait!’ Rom took a steadying breath. At the same time everything suddenly grew lighter — the room, the lowering sky outside. ‘Harriet, I am talking of Henry Brandon, the owner of Stavely — Isobel’s husband. A man of thirty-eight.’

‘A man? Oh, I suppose that’s his father. I never met him. My Henry will be eight in June.’ Her face as she took in what Rom had said became transfigured. ‘It’s all right, then? My Henry is all right?’

‘Yes, I’m sure he is. We’ll cable anyway, but there’s not the slightest reason to assume otherwise.’ He had been standing, needing to be distanced from her grief. Now he pulled out a chair in order to sit beside her. ‘I didn’t know there was a child,’ he said slowly. ‘I took good care to know nothing about what went on at Stavely.’ He stared for a while at the swirling clouds outside, massing for the afternoon downpour. Then: ‘When you talked of meeting Henry… of loving him… it was of my brother that I thought you spoke. Of the man who has just died.’

She looked up, amazed. ‘But I never even met him! And if I had, I wouldn’t plead for a grown man who had deserted his family. It would be none of my business… well, it isn’t anyway, I suppose. But if you had seen Henry — my Henry — he’s lost all his milk teeth and he worries about wearing spectacles and he had this image of you. I think the idea of you somehow kept him going.’

She fell silent, realising how uncannily accurate the child’s description of Rom had been. Rom could save Stavely; he could save anything or anyone he chose.

‘Yes, I see. I’m afraid it’s a case of Romeo and the chicken feather,’ he said ruefully. ‘I should have thought — it was obvious really — but I was too angry. I have no reason to be fond of my half-brother.’ There was a pause. Then, ‘Did you see Isobel Brandon?’

‘I saw her for a moment through a doorway. She seemed very distressed. And very beautiful.’

‘Yes, I can imagine she would still be beautiful.’ He looked about for something to help him through what was to come, found Harriet’s hand and appropriated it, feeling it to be his due. ‘I think it’s time I told you about my youth at Stavely. I was once engaged to Isobel, you see.’

He began to speak then, and in the hour that followed he held back nothing.

Harriet learned of his childhood, his veneration for his father, the desolation he had felt at his mother’s death. Of his brother he could not speak even now without hatred, but the passage of time made it possible for him to be fair to Isobel. He emphasised her youth, the agony she had experienced when her grandfather was ruined.

‘I saw only her betrayal,’ he said. ‘Now I see that she must have suffered. I expected too much from someone so young.’

‘No.’ Harriet’s denial was scarcely audible, but he caught it and smiled, unfolding her fingers to make a fan, which he spread out on the satinwood table.

‘I was penniless, futureless; she wanted to be safe.’

He went on then to tell Harriet of the kindness of Madeleine de la Tour, of his early adventures on the river. But there remained with Harriet the image of a woman, beautiful and high-born, whom he had passionately loved — a woman who belonged to his own world — and a place for which he still craved. And she saw that in calling up help for Isobel’s child, she had also invoked help for Isobel, whose first — and surely last — love he had been.