A Company of Swans

13

The Minister for Amazonia had sent for Rom.

It was the morning after the banquet. Rom had spent the night at the Casa Branca and had not slept well. The presence of Edward Finch-Dutton at the dinner had been as unexpected as it was unfortunate, and the flushed face and drunken mutterings of Harriet’s erstwhile suitor as he staggered from the room made it clear that all his own efforts to reconcile Harriet’s family to her activities must now be set at naught.

But Harriet’s affairs must wait. He had come to do battle with Alvarez and arriving, punctual to the minute, at the Palace of Justice, he was shown into the room set aside for the Minister.

‘Come in, Verney.’

Alvarez, immaculately dressed as always, was sitting at a vast desk shuffling a pile of papers, but he rose and shook Rom’s hand.

‘I wanted to see you about the Ombidos report,’ he said. ‘I’ve read it again.’

‘Yes.’ Rom braced himself for a repetition of the excuses of the previous day.

‘And I have decided to go!’

Surprise and relief chased the shadows from Rom’s face.

‘You will go yourself?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘To Ombidos? Oh, but that’s splendid! You are the only person who can put things right up there.’

‘It means delaying my return to Rio and I am sending home my domestic staff. I want you to take me as far as Santa Maria in the Amethyst; I shall let it be known that we’re off on a fishing trip. Can you spare a few days?’

‘Of course.’

‘De Silva can meet me there in a government launch with a suitable escort. We’ll go by night and take them by surprise. Nominally it will be merely a courtesy visit, but if half of what you say is true, then the rest will follow.’

‘Would you like me to come all the way to Ombidos? I can bring a dozen of my own men and follow you.’

Alvarez smiled at the eagerness in Rom’s voice, but shook his head.

‘I know how you feel, but this is a job for my own countrymen. You have already made quite enough of a reputation as a rescuer of the oppressed. Now it is my turn for some of the glory!’

Rom was not fooled. Alvarez faced a dangerous journey and the hostility of his fellow politicians in Rio, for there were powerful men making money from Ombidos.

‘Could I ask you what made you change your mind about going?’

‘Yes, you could ask. And I will tell you.’ Alvarez sat down again behind the massive desk and motioned Rom to a chair. ‘It was that girl last night — the girl in the cake.’

‘What!’ Rom leaned forward, unable to believe his ears.

‘Yes, the girl in the cake,’ repeated Alvarez. ‘You can thank her that I’m risking my neck up that hellish river.’ He felt in his pocket, brought out a wallet and extracted a faded sepia photograph, which he handed to Rom. ‘Do you see the resemblance?’

The picture showed a young girl in a wedding-dress holding a bouquet of lilies. The portrait was conventional enough, but transcending the stiff pose, the studio props, was the expression on the thin face — a look both brave and eager, as though she could hardly wait for the adventure of her life to begin.

‘Yes,’ said Rom quietly. ‘The eyes, particularly.’ And then: ‘Your wife?’

Alvarez nodded. ‘Her name was Lucia. It was an arranged marriage; she came to me direct from her convent… there was some family connection. But straight away… on the first night… I realised that I had found what half the world is looking for.’ He took back the picture, letting it rest in the palm of his hand. ‘She was no more beautiful than that girl last night was beautiful, but she was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence… they don’t talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good…’

Rom had taken a silver propelling pencil from the desk and was turning it over and over in his hands. ‘Go on, sir, if you will.’

‘I was very young in those days, and very idealistic. I thought Brazil would become the moral leader of the New World. There were a few of us who formed the Green Horizons Party — you may have heard of it. We planned to educate the Indians, build the finest schools and hospitals in the world… oh, all the usual dreams. They thought of me as a leader, but my fervour — even my ideas, many of them — came from my wife.’

‘I knew they had great hopes of you.’

‘Great hopes,’ repeated Alvarez. ‘We were going to get rid of yellow fever, set up irrigation schemes in Ceará… I was put in charge of a population survey in Pernambuco and Lucia went with me on most of my journeys. She insisted and I let her — selfish swine that I was — because I so hated us to be apart.’

‘What happened?’

Alvarez took out a monogrammed silk handkerchief and wiped his brow.

‘Cholera. It was in one of those villages in the survey. She knew, but she wouldn’t stay behind. God, what an illness… well, I have no need to tell you, you must have seen enough of it. She literally wasted away… just her eyes…’ He broke off, shook his head. ‘After that I didn’t care and when they deposed Dom Pedro I just drifted with the scum. I must have had a hundred women since and they have meant nothing.’ He shrugged. ‘I thought I had forgotten; after all, it was more than thirty years ago. And then last night there was this girl with just that look Lucia had.’

‘She would have wanted you to go to Ombidos?’ asked Rom. ‘Your wife?’

‘Yes.’ Alvarez carefully put back the photograph in his wallet. ‘And you know, I thought the other one would have wanted it too — the girl last night who danced on the table. Absurd, isn’t it!’ He looked sharply at Rom from under his oiled eyebrows and leaned forward to retrieve the propelling pencil from which Rom had just broken the lead. ‘Now, how soon can you have the Amethyst ready? I’d like to leave today.’

The first cable which Edward sent, announcing that Harriet had been found and was well, strangely produced less apparent pleasure than the second, which brought to Louisa’s eye — and to the eye of Hermione Belper, as she virtually snatched it from Louisa’s hand — a glimmer of something which could not really have been satisfaction but looked remarkably like it.

Mrs Belper had come from Trumpington Villa to inform her friend that Stavely Hall, which had been put on the market a month ago, was sold and to an unknown buyer. She had brought the piece in the East Anglian Times which related this event and featured a view of Stavely’s south front. But the interesting speculations this item of news aroused were quite set aside when the maid arrived with the cable which poor Edward had despatched the night after the dinner in the Club.

HARRIET SUNK TO UNSPEAKABLE DEPRAVITY STOP MUST REQUEST AUTHORISATION FOR HER DETENTION AND IMMEDIATE REPATRIATION STOP PLEASE CABLE PREFECT OF POLICE MANAUS STOP EDWARD.

‘Oh, heavens!’ said Louisa, putting her hand to her chest. ‘Yet it is only what we expected.’

‘What all of us must have expected from the start, dear Louisa, even if we didn’t like to say so.’

‘What will Bernard say? Oh, how the poor man has been plagued by that girl. The bad blood there must have been in her mother!’

‘She was a dreadfully flighty little thing; I remember her well. Always mooning over the piano.’

‘What do you suppose he means by “unspeakable depravity”, Hermione?’ said Louisa, grasping her friend’s arm. ‘Could there be some scandal that… that one simply cannot hush up? Something… medical?’

The Professor’s key in the lock put an end to this line of speculation. He entered the drawing-room and, without preamble, Louisa put the cable into his hand.

He read it once, read it again. ‘This tells me nothing that I did not already know,’ said the Professor heavily. ‘It was perfectly obvious that the first cable was just moonshine. No girl would defy her father and throw in her lot with those scoundrels unless she was thoroughly sick in her soul. And her body.’ His voice shook with anger. ‘Harriet had everything here: a good home, upright companions, financial security. It was you’ — he rounded on Louisa — ‘who told me to give her a guinea. Without that, she could not have done it.’

Louisa bowed her head. ‘Yes, Bernard. I admit it. I let my generosity overcome me — but see how I have been punished!’

The Professor took out his watch. ‘Too late to go up to London now; I shall take the first train in the morning. This is a matter for the Foreign Office. Cedric Fitzackerly will know what to do; he’s a Junior Secretary now.’

‘That was the student you actually approved of, wasn’t it?’ said Louisa. ‘The one that didn’t argue or fall asleep in tutorials?’

She had not expressed it exactly as the Professor would have wished, but substantially she was correct. Unlike the idle, womanising undergraduates it was his misfortune to teach, Fitzackerly had been attentive and polite, thanking the Professor at the end of every lecture and devoting his final-year dissertation to the Professor’s own views on the odes of Bacchylides, so that when the young man came to him for references it had been a pleasure to write something that would make those fellows in Whitehall sit up.

‘I shall go and telegraph Fitzackerly now and tell him to expect me. It’s too late to hush things up — matters have gone too far. Edward must be given every assistance by the authorities out there. Better even that Harriet should be locked up until the boat sails rather than—’ But here for a moment he was unable to continue. ‘We must not forget our debt to Edward. To travel back with a girl such as she has become involves a considerable sacrifice. If, that is, he means to bring her back himself.’

‘He has wasted a great many words on that cable,’ said Louisa. ‘There was no need to put MUST — it would have made quite good sense without it. Or PLEASE. To put PLEASE on a cable is quite unnecessary. No one expects it.’

But for once the Professor, usually sympathetic to Louisa’s passion for frugality, was impatient. ‘This is hardly the moment to think of such trivialities, Louisa. We had best give our minds to thinking of how Harriet can be punished when she returns.’

‘Do you mean to have her back here, then, Bernard? Would it not be better if she was sent to some kind of institution where they deal with… girls of that sort?’

‘When she has been returned, we shall decide what to do,’ said the Professor.

He then left for the post office and Hermione Belper also prepared to take her departure. A discussion of who had bought Stavely and what would happen to the Brandons would clearly have to wait for another day and, determined to be the first to spread the news of Harriet’s degradation through the city, she too hurried away.

‘Merde,’ said Marie-Claude, giving the traditional first-night greeting but without much hope that the expected good luck would follow. The première of Nutcracker was upon them and backstage the atmosphere was tense. Masha Repin was not popular. Her ambition was so violent, it had not yet acquired the cloak of good manners and while Maximov might dislike Simonova, he felt secure with her as he did not with the Polish girl. The tension filtered through even to the corps. Lydia, finding her head-dress too tight, burst into tears. A limping boy rubbing his calves showed that Olga, too, was not immune to the general stress — and the temperature stood at 101 degrees.

Harriet, reaching for her snowflake costume, was forestalled by Marie-Claude, who held it out, ready to help her slip it on.

‘Marie-Claude, you mustn’t! I can manage, honestly.’

During the two days since the banquet, Marie-Claude’s gratitude had been a heavy cross to bear. She insisted on tidying Harriet’s locker, fetched coffee for her during rehearsal breaks and commandeered her dancing shoes in order to shellac the linings and darn the toes.

‘But you have to take half the money,’ she had cried when Harriet returned from the Sports Club. ‘You ought to have all of it, you know that.’

Harriet’s refusal had been steadfast. ‘I don’t want it; it’s for the restaurant.’ And as Marie-Claude continued to look at her beseechingly: ‘I must have somewhere really special to sweep into with my admirers when I am a prima ballerina assoluta, you must see that!’

Her little joke had fallen flat; neither Kirstin nor Marie-Claude had smiled. Harriet’s work was becoming very good; she was beginning to be talked about.

Out front, Simonova sat very straight in Verney’s crimson-lined box on the bel étage. He had left his key for them before he went up-river and now Dubrov — letting things go hang backstage — was beside her and lending silent support. She was looking splendid and formidable in a jade green silk dress and turban and the ear-rings he had bought her after her first Giselle. Only her hands, clenching and unclenching on her lap, showed the ordeal this occasion was for her.

The curtain rose to sighs of appreciation from the audience. Stifling in evening clothes, living in a land without seasons, they were enchanted by the great Christmas tree, its spire reaching almost to the proscenium arch. The children arrived at Councillor Stahlbaum’s party; little Clara — played by Tatiana, the prettiest of the Russian girls — received her nutcracker. No tension, so far — Masha Repin as the Sugar Plum Fairy did not appear until the second act.

The transformation scene next. The ornaments dropped from the tree, the councillor’s drawing-room vanished… and the snow began to fall. Snow and snow and still more snow, turning the tree into a miracle of white… They loved that, the Brazilians, many of whom had never seen this strange substance, and applause ran through the house.

The snowflake fairies entered and Simonova leaned forward intently to look at the corps.

‘She grows strong,’ she whispered. ‘Grisha is right.’

There was no need for Dubrov to ask of whom she spoke. A strange friendship had grown up between the ageing ballerina and the newest, youngest member of the corps. Harriet never put herself forward, but she could not conceal her avid interest for everything that touched Simonova’s life. To pass on memories and experiences to the young is a great longing — if the young will listen. Harriet listened.

Act Two now, and Simonova’s hands were gripping the edge of the box like talons. The Kingdom of the Sweets — and there was Masha with her dreaded youth, her smile, her blonde hair and little crown, sitting on her throne… descending.. looking very beautiful… executing her little dance en pointe…

Excuting it damnably well and getting a roar of applause from the audience, who were very much taken by this ballet which demanded so little of them and produced such a festive atmosphere. And she was pretty, this Sugar Plum Fairy, in her pale pink tutu covered in delicate, sugar-plum lace, her crown of stars. Here was a heroine much to the Brazilian taste.

The ensemble nonsense which followed gave Simonova a chance to compose herself. Spanish dances, Arabian dances, dances for marzipan shepherdesses… The ‘Valse des Fleurs’ next, the most loved of all Tchaikovsky’s waltzes, and it was Dubrov’s turn to notice how well Harriet was dancing. Whatever happened to her off-stage seemed to send her further into her work.

But now came the moment of high drama when the Prince leads out the Sugar Plum Fairy for possibly the most sensational and difficult duet in all Tchaikovsky’s works: the grand pas de deux to music that is the apotheosis of ballet.

Oh, God, thought Dubrov; she’s a bitch, but she can dance — those arabesques, those sweeping attitudes… the speed, the dazzle! And Maximov was partnering her well, unselfishly. He too was on his mettle against the usurper, youth.

Her solo now — and how the audience loved it: the tinkling bells, the sugary music, the pretty ballerina untouched by agony or time.

Maximov was back, lifting her… She soared, smiled. Smiled too much for Dubrov’s taste, but not for the audience.

And Simonova sat beside him with that unnatural, contained stillness, very upright, watching, watching.. for mistakes, for human frailty.

There were no mistakes, no frailty.

It was only as the dancers came together for the final tableau that Dubrov perceived the danger.

Stumbling from the box, running down the corridor, choked by his collar, he heard the clapping begin — the stamping, the cries of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Bis!’ That would be one curtain call already… two, three… Oh, God damn the fools who could not distinguish between a technically competent dancer and the flawed, true artist Simonova was!

He had reached the heavy door that led backstage and now pushed against it.

It did not open.

All doors between the auditorium and the stage had to be open by law in case of fire, but this door would not move. Someone had locked it.

Cursing, perspiring, the portly little man ran back again, up the stairs to the next floor… And still the applause came undiminished, and the roars.

The upstairs door was open, but there was a twisting iron staircase to negotiate before he reached the level of the stage.

A group of people were standing in the wings, among them Harriet with a towel over her shoulder, and her face creased with anxiety as she watched the curtain rise once more.

‘How many?’ panted Dubrov.

‘Eighteen,’ said Harriet miserably. ‘Grisha tried to stop them, but they wouldn’t listen.’

She motioned to the stage-hand still turning the winch-handle to let Masha — as loaded with flowers as a hearse — curtsey ecstatically to her audience.

‘That’s the nineteenth now,’ said Harriet.

Nineteen… Four more than Simonova. Dubrov shook his weary head. No good intervening now; the damage was done. And still the curtain rose and fell… Twenty… twenty-one… twenty-two… Until at last it was over and with a triumphant smile, Masha Repin swept away.

Dubrov had expected Simonova to rage and stamp and make a scene, but it was worse than that. She came backstage to congratulate her rival; she insisted that they drink champagne.

‘She is good, Sashka,’ said Simonova quietly when they were back at the Metropole. ‘She is young and she is good, and the public loved her.’

‘Idiots!’ raged Dubrov. ‘She’s a balletic clothes-horse, all tricks and glitter.’

‘No. She is inexperienced, but the feeling will come.’

Dubrov was silent, wondering if the door had been locked on purpose and waiting — praying — for the abuse, the tantrums, the talk of retirement and Cremorra with which he knew so well how to deal.

But she was quiet, almost docile, and remained so for the rest of Nutcracker’s initial run, and knowing her as he did, he was afraid that something had been damaged inside her in a way that he could not soothe or talk away.

And he was right, for three days later, at the première of Giselle, Simonova hurt her back.

It was an inexplicable injury. The Act One pas de deux in which it occurred was as familiar to her as breathing and Maximov, as everyone agreed, was blameless. Yet as he came up behind her to lift her, turn her and set her down in arabesque her body sagged, she gave a despairing cry — and fell, to lie prone and unmoving on the floor.

The orchestra stuttered into silence; the audience hissed their consternation and as Maximov bent over the ballerina in anguish and Dubrov ran in from the wings, the curtain came down on a great dancer — and a great career.

An hour later, Simonova lay very white and very still in her bed at the Metropole.

‘Well, Sashka, it’s over,’ she whispered to the man who had loved her for twenty years. ‘But it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?’

There had been three doctors in the audience and though their diagnoses had differed, there was one thing on which they had all agreed, and in the injured woman’s presence — that she would never dance again.

‘It was very good, doushenka. It was the best,’ he said, and sat holding her hand until she fell into a chloral-induced sleep.

But Dubrov did not sleep. Instead, he surveyed the future. There was no question now of going on to Caracas or Lima. As soon as she was well enough to travel, she must be taken back to Europe — to Leblanc in Paris, the most famous orthopaedic surgeon in the world. If it really was a haemorrhage into the spinal canal, as one of the doctors had suggested, there was probably little that could be done, but she must have every chance. Which left the rest of their time in Manaus… He couldn’t run Nutcracker for a whole fortnight, nor could he afford to shut the theatre and lose all the takings. So Masha Repin must have Giselle…

In the small hours, in the still stifling heat, Simonova woke in pain and her mind turned to the past — to Russia and the snow.

‘Do you remember those drives from the theatre in your sledge?’ she whispered. ‘Sitting all wrapped up in my sables, squashing the poor violets on my muff?’

‘Yes, I remember. The frost made your eyelashes longer. You were so vain about that.’

‘And the street-lamps making that lilac mist… There is nowhere else in the world where they do that — only in Petersburg.’

‘We could go back,’ he said with sudden hope. ‘I still have the apartment.’

Ill as she was, she fought him. ‘No! Not after the way they treated me at the Maryinsky. Never!’

It will be Cremorra, then, thought Dubrov; there is no escape — and half in jest, mocking his own misery, he moved over to a pile of books on the bureau and pulled out a brightly coloured volume which he had hoped never actually to read.

‘Yes!’ said Simonova eagerly. ‘Read it aloud to me. I can’t sleep anyway, and I must learn. I must prepare myself. At first of course I’ll only be able to watch from the verandah, but when my back is better, ah, you’ll see! We’ll be so happy!’

The book was in English, as books on vegetable gardening are apt to be, and as the humid oppressive night wore on Dubrov read to her about the fan training of espalier plums, about the successive trench sowing of broad beans and the preparation of decayed vegetable matter to make a mulch.

‘What is it, this mulch?’ came Simonova’s hoarse voice from the bed.

Dubrov consulted the book. ‘It is something to put on the roots to stop them drying out. There is also a verb: to mulch…’

He looked up. Simonova, who had not cried out once when they lifted her battered body on to the stretcher, who had not shed one tear when the doctors pronounced their implacable verdict, was weeping.

‘I do not want to mulch!’ cried the ballerina — and burst into uncontrollable sobs.

Cedric Fitzackerly, anxious to get rid of the tiresome old Professor for whom he no longer had the slightest use, duly sent a cable to Manaus requesting that Edward Finch-Dutton be given every assistance in securing the return of Harriet Morton, a fugitive and a minor, to her native land.

The telegram carrying an awesome Foreign Office signature duly arrived on the desk of the Prefect of Police, where young Captain Carlos put it into the ‘In’ tray and hoped it would go away.

To have been left in charge of the police station was an honour, but it was one which put the Captain — scarcely out of his teens — under considerable strain. De Silva had taken three-quarters of the city’s military police along with him on his mission; they had been gone nearly a week, no one knew where, and young Carlos (whose title of Captain was a courtesy one borrowed for the occasion) lived in dread of an occurrence with which he would find it impossible to deal.

‘Here he comes again,’ said Sergeant Barra — a huge muscular cabaclo with a broken nose — looking up from the children’s comic he had been laboriously trying to read.

Captain Carlos put down the mirror in which he had been studying the progress of his incipient moustache and sighed.

‘I suppose we’d better let him in.’

Edward Finch-Dutton, still clutching his butterfly net, was admitted as he had been yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Though his Portuguese had not reached even the phrase-book stage which would enable him to complain that there was a fly in his soup, he had — by endless repetition of Harriet’s name, the word ‘England’ and what he believed to be Morse code noises — managed to make the Captain understand that he was enquiring whether a cable had arrived for him from his native land.

‘Nao,’ said Carlos, shaking his head as he had done on all the previous days. ‘Nada. Nothing. No.’

This had always been enough to send the Englishman away with a disconsolate air, but today it failed. Edward, still suffering from the shock of Harriet’s depravity, and from a touch of fever as he tottered from the Sports Club into the jungle on collecting forays and back again, suddenly lost control. There was no one to whom he could turn; Verney was still away, the consul was in São Paulo and he had not dared to mention his connection with Harriet to Harry Parker. Now his frustration boiled over and he began to shout and bang his fist on the table.

‘I don’t believe you. You’re lying! It must have come! Have a look, damn you — go through those papers there and look!’

He pointed at the pile of documents in the tray. Reluctantly the Captain pulled it towards him and shuffled a few of the envelopes.

‘Go on! Go right through the lot. Let me see for myself.’

Half-way down the pile Nemesis overtook poor Captain Carlos.

‘There! That one in the yellow envelope. Read it!’

The Captain picked up the cable and stared at it. ‘Eenglish,’ he said gloomily.

‘Then give it to me,’ said Edward, reaching across the desk.

This the Captain was naturally reluctant to do. At the same time it was clear that this irritating foreigner would now have to be dealt with, and even before de Silva’s return. He compromised.

‘Get Leo up from the cells,’ he said to the Sergeant.

Leo, when he appeared clanking his bunch of keys, turned out to be the gaoler, a retired Negro boxer who had once worked for Pinkerton’s detective agency in New York, spoke English and could even read.

‘It’s the real thing, all right,’ he said to Captain Carlos when he had perused the contents of the cable. ‘The British Foreign Office sent it, no mistake. They want the girl back in England and they want you to help this gentleman get her there.’ And he nodded without irony at Edward before depositing a gob of tobacco spittle at his feet.

‘You see!’ said Edward triumphantly. ‘I told you.’ He turned to Leo. ‘Now listen carefully. Tell them I want at least two men, strong ones. I want them outside the theatre on Friday evening just before the performance ends, and I want a closed cab waiting too. They’re to seize the girl as she comes off stage — without hurting her, mind you — bundle her into the cab and take her down to the docks. The Gregory sails at dawn — there will be a cabin waiting for her. She must be locked in — I have spoken to the stewardess, but she will want to see your authorisation — and I’ll let her out myself when we’re safely down-river. Got it?’

He leaned back, extremely pleased with himself. The plan, masterful and simple, had occurred to him as soon as the Gregory arrived — a white oasis of British calm and hygiene in the turmoil of the docks — and two cabins for the return journey had unexpectedly become available.

Leo spoke to the Captain, who nodded. It might have been worse — he had been afraid he would be expected to hold the girl in his gaol. And at least the Englishman was going with her. Not to see Edward Finch-Dutton’s long, equine face ever again had become the Captain’s most passionate desire.

He turned to Leo. ‘Ask him how we’re to know which girl to grab?’

‘I shall of course come with you to identify her,’ said Edward. ‘Naturally…’