A Company of Swans

1

There was no lovelier view in England, Harriet knew this. To her right, the soaring towers of King’s College Chapel and the immaculate lawns sloping down to the river’s edge; to her left, the blue and gold of the scillas and daffodils splashed in rich abundance between the trees of the Fellows’ Gardens. Yet as she leaned over the stone parapet of the bridge on which she stood, her face was pensive and her feet — and this was unusual in the daughter of a professor of classics in the year 1912 — were folded in the fifth position.

She was a thin girl, brown-haired and brown-eyed, whose gravity and gentleness could not always conceal her questing spirit and eagerness for life. Sensibly dressed in a blue caped coat and tam o’shanter bought to last, a leather music case propped against the wall beside her, she was a familiar figure to the passers-by: to ancient Dr Ferguson, tottering across the willow-fringed bridge in inner pursuit of an errant Indo-Germanic verb; to a gardener trimming the edges of the grass, who raised his cap to her. Professor Morton’s clever daughter; Miss Morton’s biddable niece.

To grow up in Cambridge was to be fortunate indeed. To be able to look at this marvellous city each day was a blessing of which one should never tire. Harriet, crumbling bread into the water for the world’s most blasé ducks, had told herself this again and again. But it is not cities which make the destinies of eighteen-year-old girls, it is people — and as she gazed at the lazy, muddy river and thought of her future and her home, her eyes held an expression which would have better become a little gutter starveling — a bleak and shipwrecked look devoid of happiness and hope.

Professor Morton was already in his forties when, at a reading party in Switzerland, he met an English girl working as a governess to the children of a Swiss industrialist living in an ochre-coloured castle across the lake.

Sophie Brent was enchanting, with big brown eyes, soft dark-gold hair and a beguiling chuckle. She was an orphan, poor and unprotected as only a governess can be and deeply impressed by the attentions of the serious, stern Professor with his firm opinions and cultured voice.

They married and returned to the tall, grey house in Cambridge, where the Professor’s elder sister, Louisa — a gaunt and iron-haired spinster who kept house for him — welcomed with outer resignation and inner chagrin the foolish, useless girl who had ensnared her brother.

Number 37 Scroope Terrace, off the Trumpington Road, was a house where ‘Waste Not Want Not’ was the motto. Louisa Morton counted the fish-knives on Thursdays and the silver plate on Saturdays and kept in her bedroom a box labelled ‘String too short to tie’. Though the Professor had a substantial private income in addition to his salary, she had been heard to upbraid the cook for the unbridled expenditure of three farthings on an ounce of parsley. Invitations to dine with the Mortons were among the most dreaded events in the University calendar.

In this cold, dark house filled with the smell of boiled fish and the sniffs of depressed housemaids, the Professor’s pretty young wife wilted and drooped. Sophie saw little of her husband, for the Professor wined, dined and had his being in the comfort of his College, returning to Scroope Terrace only to sleep. Though presumably acquainted with bright-eyed Nausicaa laughing with her maidens on an Aegean shore, with marvellous Sappho and her ‘love-loosened limbs’ — and indeed with all those gallant girls who had welcomed Jupiter in the guise of Swan or Bull or Shower of Gold — the Merlin Professor of Classical Studies was a dry and narrow-minded pedant. His published work consisted mainly of splenetic articles in which he vilified those who dared to disagree with his view that Odes VI and VII in the epinikia of Bacchylides had been incorrectly separated, and his lectures (from which all women were rigorously excluded) were confidently regarded as being not only the most boring in the University, but the most boring in the world.

The Professor’s passion for his young wife soon cooled. It was clear that Sophie would be no use to him in his career. Though constantly instructed by himself and Louisa, she seemed quite unable to learn the most basic rules of academic protocol. Again and again her patient husband caught her out in the most appalling lapses: attempting to seat the wife of the Professor of Divinity below the wife of the Professor of Mathematics and once, in a tea-shop, smiling at a young lecturer who was wearing shorts. When he was passed over for the Mastership of his College it was Sophie he blamed and Louisa — who had never really relinquished the reins of the household — now gathered them even more firmly into her bony and frugal hands.

It was into this house that Harriet was born.

Babies, as everyone who cares for them knows, come trailing their own particular essence. There are grave, contemplative babies still patently solving some equation of Euclidean geometry begun in another world, scrawny high-powered babies apparently shot into life without the slightest need to eat or sleep, and placid agricultural babies whose only concern is to thrive.

But sometimes… just sometimes, there are babies who appear to have swallowed some small private sun, rosy and endlessly obliging babies who explode into laughter long before one’s hand has actually touched their stomachs — laughter which has less to do with being tickled than with sharing and being together — and love.

Such a baby was Harriet Jane Morton in the first two years of her life: a baby who offered you her starfish of a foot, her slobbered rusk… a cornucopial life-affirmer from the start.

Then Sophie Morton, whose passion the child had been, caught a chill which turned to pneumonia, and died. Two weeks later, Louisa dismissed the country girl who had been Harriet’s nurse.

Within months the plump, rosy baby became a serious, bird-thin and almost silent little girl. As though reflecting a scarcely comprehended grief, her hair darkened, her hazel eyes lost their green and golden lights and settled to a solemn brown. It seemed as if the very skin and bone and muscle of this bewildered little being had changed into a minor key.

Soon, too soon, she taught herself to read and vanished for long hours into her attic with a book, to be discovered by one of the servants shivering with a cold she had been too absorbed to notice. If she spoke now, it was to her invisible playmate — a twin brother, fleet-footed and strong — or to the small creatures she befriended in that loveless house: the sparrows which settled on her window-sill; a squirrel she had called down from the one tree in the raked gravel rectangle which was the Mortons’ garden.

Yet it would be wrong to say that Harriet was neglected. If Louisa found it impossible to love this child of the frivolous usurper who had ensnared her brother, she was determined to do her duty. Harriet was conveyed to music lessons and to dancing classes which the family doctor, disconcerted by her pallor and thinness, recommended. She was regularly aired and exercised, sent on long walks with whatever ancient and grim-faced maid survived Louisa’s regime. If her father grew crustier and more bigoted as the years passed, he could still recognise academic excellence and himself taught her Latin and Greek.

And presently she was sent to an excellent day school most highly recommended by the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle who ruled Louisa Morton’s life.

No child ever loved school as much as Harriet. She was ready to leave with her satchel an hour before it was time to go; she begged for any job, however menial, which would keep her there in the afternoon. Arithmetic lessons, sago pudding, deportment… she enjoyed everything because it was shared by others and accompanied by laughter — because there was warmth.

Then a new headmistress came, detected in the vulnerable dark-eyed child a potential scholar, and herself coached her in English and History: lessons that Harriet was to remember all her life. After two terms she sent for Professor Morton in order to discuss Harriet’s university career. Did he favour Newnham or Girton, she enquired, pouring tea for him in her charming sitting-room — or would it be sensible to choose an Oxford college so as to give Harriet a fresh environment? Though it was always foolish to prophesy, she would be extremely surprised if Harriet failed to get a scholarship…

From the interview which followed both parties were invalided out in a state of fulminating rage. To the Professor it was genuinely incomprehensible that anybody could have lived in Cambridge for one week and not known his views on ‘women in the university’. And, unable to trust his daughter to this suffragette upstart, he took Harriet away from school.

That had been a year ago and Harriet could still not pass the familiar red brick building without a lump in her throat.

Now she threw her last crust of bread, narrowly missing the head of the Provost of St Anne’s who appeared suddenly in a punt beneath her, poling his blonde wife and pretty daughters down-river. To have hit the Provost would have been a particular disaster, for he was her father’s enemy, having criticised Professor Morton’s entry on Ammanius Marcellinus in the Classical Dictionary, and his wife — whose friendly wave Harriet could not help returning — was even worse, for she had been found (while still Secretary of the Association of University Wives) unashamedly reading a book by someone dirty called Sigmund Freud while in a hansom parked outside Peterhouse.

‘Poor child!’ said the Provost when they were out of earshot.

‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed his wife grimly, looking back at the forlorn little figure on the bridge. ‘How such a charming, sensitive child came to be born into that household of bigoted prigs, I shall never understand. It was a crime to take her away from school. I suppose they regard it as a perfectly fitting life for her — arranging flowers in a house where there are no flowers, taking the dog out when there isn’t any dog.’

‘There is a young man, one hears,’ murmured the Provost, expertly shooting beneath Clare Bridge, and raised his eyebrows at his wife’s most unladylike snort.

The Provost was correct: there was a young man. His name was Edward Finch-Dutton; he was a Fellow of the Professor’s own College, St Philip’s, and though his subject was Zoology — a new and upstart discipline of which it was impossible to approve — the Mortons had permitted him to come to the house. For there had been ‘unpleasantness’ about the decision to keep Harriet at home. Even the Master of Trinity, who ranked slightly below God, had taken the Professor aside after the University sermon to express surprise.

‘After all, you have made quite a little scholar of her yourself,’ he said. ‘I had a most enjoyable chat with her the other day. She has some highly original views on Heliodoras — and a delightful accent.’

‘If I taught Harriet the classics, it was so that she could make herself useful to me at home, not so that she could become an unfeminine hoyden and a disgrace to her sex,’ the Professor had replied.

Still, the encounter had rankled. Fortunately, in her dealings with her niece, Louisa had one unfailing source of guidance: the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle who had seceded from the Association of University Wives when it became clear that the parent body could no longer be relied upon to uphold etiquette and protocol. It was these ladies — headed by Mrs Belper, Louisa’s special friend — who had suggested that the best solution for Harriet might be an early marriage. Seeing the sense of this, the Mortons, rejecting various men who had shown an interest in Harriet (for unaccountably the child seemed to have the gift of pleasing) had selected Edward Finch-Dutton. He had a First, was sensible and ambitious and was related — albeit distantly — to the Master of St Swithin’s, Oxford. Not only that, but his mother — a Featherstonehaugh — had been accustomed to visit Stavely, the district’s most beautiful and prestigious home.

It was the long, serious face of this excellent young man that Harriet saw now as she looked into the water; and as always, his image brought a stab of fear.

‘Don’t let me give in, God,’ she begged, tilting back her head, sending the long soft hair cascading down her back as she searched the quiet, dove-grey sky of Cambridge for some portent — Halley’s comet; the pointing finger of Isfrael — to indicate deliverance. ‘Don’t let me marry Edward just to get away from home. Don’t let me, God, I beg of you! Show me some other way to live.’

A church clock struck four, and another… and suddenly she smiled, the grave little face utterly transformed as she picked up her case. Somehow her dancing lessons had survived; those most precious times were left to her. And abandoning the resolutely silent firmament, she quickly made her way beside the verdant lawns towards King’s Parade.

Ten minutes later she entered the tall, shabby building in Fitzwilliam Street which housed the Sonia Lavarre Academy of Dance.

At once she was in a different world. The streets of Cambridge with their bicycles and dons might never have existed and she could be in St Petersburg in the Tsar’s Imperial Ballet School in Theatre Street, where Madame Lavarre — then Sonia Zugorsky — had spent eight years of her childhood. A tiled stove, incorrectly installed by a baffled Cambridge plumber, roared in the hallway; the sad Byzantine face of St Demetrius of Rostov stared at her from the icon corner…

And everywhere, covering the panelled walls, climbing up the stairway, were daguerrotypes and paintings and photographs… of Kchessinskaya, erstwhile mistress of the Tsar, en pointe in Esmerelda… of the graduation class of 1882 with Madame in a white dress and fichu, demure and doe-eyed in the front row… of rose-wreathed Taglioni, the first Sylphide of them all, whose ballet slippers had been cooked and eaten by her besotted Russian admirers when she retired.

For it was not genteel ballroom dancing which was taught by Madame — beached-up in Cambridge after a brief marriage to a French lecturer who died — but the painful and manically disciplined art of the ballet.

Harriet hurried upstairs, smiling as she passed the open door of Room 3 from which came the sounds of a Schubert impromptu, its rhythm relentlessly stressed to serve the wobbly pliés of the beginners with their gap-teeth and perilously slithering chignons. ‘My Pavlova class,’ Madame called it, blessing the great ballerina whom she knew and cordially disliked. For these were the children of mothers who on some shopping trip to London had seen Pavlova in Giselle or The Dying Swan and had come to believe that perhaps ballet was not just something done by girls who were no better than they should be.

There were only four pupils in the advanced class with Harriet and all of them were there before her in the changing-room. At first they had been aloof and unfriendly, rejecting Harriet with her snobbish university background. Phyllis — the pretty one, with her blonde curls — was the daughter of a shopkeeper; she had added ballet to ‘stage’ and already danced in pantomime. Mabel, conscientious and hardworking and inexorably fat, was the daughter of a railway clerk. Red-haired Lily’s mother worked in the Blue Boar. Harriet, with her ‘posh’ voice, arriving at the beginning with a maid to help her change and skewer up her hair, had been an object of derision and mockery.

But now, survivors of nine years under the whip of Madame’s tongue, they were all good friends.

‘She’s got someone with her,’ said Phyllis, tying her shoes. ‘A foreigner. Russian, I think. Funny-looking bloke!’

Harriet changed hurriedly. In her white practice dress, her long brown hair scraped back from her face and coiled high under a bandeau, she was transformed in a way which would have disconcerted the ladies of Trumpington. The neat and elegant head; the long, almost unnaturally slender throat; the delicate arms all signalled an unmistakable message — that here in this place Professor Morton’s quiet daughter was where she belonged.

The girls entered, curtseyed to Madame — formidable as always in her black pleated dress, a chiffon bandeau tied round her dyed orange hair — and took their places at the barre.

‘This is Monsieur Dubrov,’ Madame announced. ‘He will watch the class.’

She stabbed with her dreaded cane at the cowed accompanist, who began to play a phrase from Delibes. The girls straightened, lifted their heads…

‘Demi-plié… grand plié… tendu devant… pull up, everybody… dégagé… demi-plié in fourth… close.’

The relentless, repetitive work began and Harriet, emptying her mind of everything except the need to place her feet perfectly, to stretch her back to its limit, did not even realise that while she worked she was for once completely happy.

Beside the petite and formidable figure of Madame stood Dubrov, his wild grey curls circling a central dome of pinkly shining scalp, his blue eyes alert. He had seen what he wanted to see in the first three minutes; but this portly, slightly absurd man — who had never danced a step — could not resist, even here in this provincial room, tracing one perfect gesture which had its origin in Cecchetti’s class of perfection in St Petersburg or — even in the fat girl — the épaulement that was the glory of the Maryinsky. How Sonia had done it with these English amateurs he did not know, but she had done it.

‘You will work alone now,’ ordered Madame after a while. ‘The enchaînment we practised on Thursday and led her old friend downstairs. Five minutes later they were installed in her cluttered sitting-room, stirring raspberry jam into glasses of tea.

‘Well, you are quite right,’ said Dubrov. ‘It is the little brown one I want. A lyrical port de bras, nice straight knees and, as you say, the ballon… an intelligent dancer and God knows it’s rarely enough one sees a body intelligently used.’ But it was more than that, he thought, remembering the way each phrase of the music had seemed literally to pass across the child’s rapt, utterly responsive face. ‘Of course her technique is still—’

‘I’ve told you, you cannot have her,’ interrupted Madame. ‘So don’t waste my time. Her father is the Merlin Professor of Classical Studies; her aunt comes here as if there was a bad smell in the place. Harriet was not even allowed to take part in a charity performance for the police orphans. Imagine it, the orphans of policemen, is there anything more respectable than that?’ She inserted a Balkan Sobranie into a long jet holder and leaned back in her chair. ‘The child was so disappointed that I swallowed my pride and went to plead with the aunt. Mon Dieu, that house — it was like a grave! After an hour she offered me a glass of water and a biscuit — one biscuit, completely naked, with little holes in it for drainage.’

Madame had changed into French in order to do justice to the horrors of the Mortons’ hospitality. Now she shook her head, seeing through the clouds of smoke she was blowing out of her imperious nose the twelve-year-old Harriet standing in the wings of the draughty, improvised stage of the drill hall, watching the other girls dance. All day Harriet had helped: pinning up Phyllis’s butterfly costume, ironing the infants’ tarlatans, fixing Lily’s headdress for her solo as Princess of Araby… And then just stood quietly in the wings and watched. Madame had repeatedly heard Harriet described as ‘clever’. In her own view, the girl was something rarer and more interesting: good.

‘No,’ she said now, ‘you must absolutely forget my poor Harriet.’

‘Surely to travel is part of every young girl’s education?’ murmured Dubrov.

‘They do not seem unduly concerned about Harriet’s education,’ commented Madame drily. ‘She is to marry a young man with an Adam’s apple — a cutter-up of dead animals, one understands. But I must say, I myself would hesitate to let a daughter of mine travel up the Amazon in your disreputable corps de ballet and endure Simonova’s tantrums. What are you after, Sasha; it’s a mad idea!’

‘No, it isn’t.’ The blue eyes were dreamy. He passed a pudgy but beautifully manicured hand over his forehead and sighed. Born of a wealthy land-owning family which had dominion over two thousand serfs somewhere on the Upper Volga, Dubrov might well have led the contented life of his forebears, riding round his estates with his borzois at his heel and seasonally despatching the bears and boars and wolves with which his forests were plentifully stocked. Instead, at the age of fifteen he visited his godmother in St Petersburg and had the misfortune to see the sapphire curtains of the Maryinsky part on the première of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. Carlotta Brianzi had danced Aurora, Maria Petipa was the Lilac Fairy — and that was that. For the last twenty years, first in his homeland and latterly in Europe, Dubrov had served the art that he adored.

That this romantic little man should become obsessed with one of the truly legendary names on the map of the world was inevitable. A thousand miles up the River Amazon, in the midst of impenetrable forest, the wealth of the ‘rubber barons’ had brought forth a city which was the very stuff of dreams. A Kubla Khan city of spacious squares and rococo mansions, of imposing fountains and mosaic pavements… A city with electric light and tramways, and shops whose clothes matched those of Paris and New York. And the crown of this city, which they called Manaus, was its Opera House: the Teatro Amazonas, said to be the most opulent and lovely theatre in the world.

It was to this theatre that Dubrov proposed to bring a visiting ballet company led by the veteran ballerina he had the misfortune to love; it was to recruit young dancers for the corps de ballet that he had visited his old friend Sonia Lavarre.

‘Manaus,’ murmured Madame. ‘Caruso sang there, didn’t he?’

‘Yes. In ninety-six. And Sarah Bernhardt acted there… So what more fitting than that the Dubrov Ballet Company should dance!’

‘Hmm. The fee must be good, if Simonova has agreed to go.’ But her face belied her words. She had worked with Simonova in Russia and knew her to be an incomparable artist.

He shrugged. ‘There is more money in those few hundred miles of the Amazon than in all of Europe put together. They paid Adelina Patti a thousand dollars to appear for one night! Everybody who has gone out there and managed to acquire a piece of land has made a killing with the rubber trees; Spaniards, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Germans. The English too. The richest man of all out there is English, so they say.’

‘So why do you come to me for dancers? Why are all the young girls not queueing up to go out there with you?’

Dubrov sighed into his glass of tea. ‘Diaghilev has all the best dancers. The rest are with Pavlova.’ He glanced at her sideways from beneath his Santa Claus eyebrows. ‘And of course there are a few who don’t like the idea of the insects and the diseases and so on,’ he admitted. He threw out a dismissive hand and returned to his present preoccupation. ‘I could take the blonde with the curls, I suppose, but I can get girls like that from an agency. It’s the little brown one I want. Let me talk to her myself; perhaps I can persuade her.’

‘How obstinate you are, my poor Sasha! Still, it will be interesting for all the girls to hear of your plans. I shall stop the class early and Harriet can listen with the others. It is always instructive to watch Harriet listen.’

So the advanced class was stopped early and the girls came down. Phyllis had removed her bandeau to let her curls tumble round her face, but Harriet came as she was and as she sank on to a footstool, Dubrov nodded, for she had that unteachable thing that nevertheless comes only after years of teaching: that harmonious placing of the limbs and head that they call line. And obstinately, unreasonably — for she would be only one of twenty or more girls — he wanted her.

Like all men of his class, Dubrov had had an English governess and spoke the language fluently. Yet beneath his words, as he began to describe the journey he would make, there beat the grave exotic rhythm that enables the Slavs to make poetry even of a laundry list.

‘We shall embark at Liverpool,’ he said, addressing all the girls yet speaking only to one, ‘on a white ship of great comfort and luxury; a ship with salons and recreation rooms and even a library… a veritable hotel on which we shall steam westwards across the Atlantic with its white birds and great green waves.’

Here he paused for a moment, recalling that Maximov, his premier danseur, had managed to be seasick on a five-minute ferry crossing of the Neva, but rallied to describe the beneficial effects on the Company of the ozone, the excellent food, the long rest as they lay back on deck-chairs sipping beef-tea… ‘But when at last we reach the port of Belem in Brazil, our real adventure will only just be beginning. For the ship will enter the mouth of the greatest river in the world — the Amazon — and for a thousand miles we shall steam up this waterway which is so mighty that they call it the Rio Mare… the River Sea.’

He spoke on, untroubled by considerations of accuracy, for the flora and fauna of Brazil were quite unknown to him, and as he spoke Harriet closed her eyes — and saw…

She saw a white ship steaming in silence along the mazed waterways of the River Sea… She saw a shimmering world in which trees grew from the dusky water only to find themselves embraced by ferns and fronds and brilliantly coloured orchids. She saw an alligator slide from a gleaming sand-bar into the leaf-stained shallows… and the grey skeleton of a deodar, its roots asphyxiated by the water, aflame with scarlet ibis…

Standing in the bows of the ship as it steamed through this enchanted world, Harriet saw a raven-haired woman, pensive and beautiful: La Simonova, the Maryinsky’s brightest jewel and beside her, manly and protective, the leonine premier danseur, Maximov… She saw, streaming away from them on either side like a formation of wild geese in flight, the white-clad dancers who would be Simonova’s snowflakes and cygnets and sylphides… and saw a golden-eyed jaguar peer from the trellis of green in wonder at the sight.

Dubrov had reached the ‘wedding of the waters’, the place where the leaf-brown waters of the Amazon flowed distinct and separate beside the black waters of the Negro. It was up this Stygian river that he now took them and there — shining, dazzling, its wonder reflected in Harriet’s suddenly opened eyes — was the green and gold dome of the Opera House soaring over the roofs of the city.

‘We shall be giving Swan Lake, Fille Mal Gardée and Casse Noisette,’ said Dubrov. ‘Also Giselle — and The Dying Swan if Pavlova does not sue.’ He paused to wipe his forehead and Harriet saw the homesick Europeans, the famous ‘rubber barons’, leaving their riverside palaces clad in their opera cloaks, their richly attired wives beside them, saw them converge in boats from the river’s tributaries, in carriages, in litters carried through the jungle, on to the Opera House ablaze with light… heard their gasps of wonder as the curtain rose on Tchaikovsky’s coolly sumptuous woodland glade — while outside the howler monkeys howled and the brilliantly plumaged parakeets flew past.

Dubrov paused to light a cigar and threw a quick glance at Harriet. Even with her eyelashes she listens, he thought — and went on to speak of the ‘Arabian Nights’ lifestyle of the audience for whom they would dance. ‘There is a woman who has her carriage horses washed down in champagne,’ he said, ‘and a man who sends back his shirts to London to be laundered,’ — and here Madame smiled, for as she had expected a small frown mark had appeared between Harriet’s eyebrows.

Harriet did not think it necessary to wash carriage horses in champagne or to send one’s laundry five thousand miles to be washed.

Dubrov now was nearing the end of his discourse. Lightly, almost dismissively, he touched on the triumph, the innumerable curtain calls which would follow their performances of the old ballets blancs, chosen particularly to appeal to those exiled from their own culture; then with a last flourish he brought the Company back to England, laden with jewels and silverware, with ocelot and jaguar skins — to loud acclaim and an almost certain engagement at the Alhambra, Leicester Square.

‘You may go now,’ said Madame when Dubrov had been thanked, and as the girls slipped out Phyllis could be heard saying, ‘I wouldn’t fancy going out there, would you? Not with all those creepy-crawlies!’

‘And the Indians having a gobble at you, I shouldn’t wonder,’ added Lily.

But when Harriet prepared to follow her companions, Madame barred her way. ‘You will remain behind, Harriet,’ she commanded. And as Harriet turned and waited by the door, her hands respectfully folded, she went on, ‘Monsieur Dubrov came here to recruit dancers for the tour he has just described to you. He has seen your work and would be willing to offer you a contract.’

‘Your lack of experience would of course be a disadvantage,’ interposed Dubrov quickly. ‘Your salary would naturally be less than that of a fully trained dancer.’

It was this haggling, this evidence that she was not simply dreaming, that effected the extraordinary change they now saw in the girl.

‘You are offering me a job?’ she said slowly. ‘You would take me?’

‘There is no need to sound so surprised,’ snapped Madame. ‘Any pupil in my advanced class has reached a professional standard entirely adequate for the corps de ballet of a South American touring company.’

Harriet continued to stand perfectly still by the door of the room. She had brought up her folded hands to her face as women do in prayer, and her eyes had widened, lightened — shot now with those flecks of amber and gold which had seemed to vanish after her mother’s death.

‘I shall not be allowed to go,’ she said, addressing Dubrov in her soft, carefully modulated voice. ‘There is no possible way that I can get permission; and I am only eighteen so that if I run away, I shall be pursued and retrieved and that will make trouble for others. But I shall never forget that you wanted me. Never, as long as I live, shall I forget that.’

And then this primly reared girl with her stiff academic background came forward and took Dubrov’s hand and kissed it.

Then she gave Madame her réverénce and would have left the room, but Dubrov seized her arm and said, ‘Wait! Take this… there may after all be a miracle.’ And as she took the card with his address, he added, ‘You will find me there or at the Century Theatre until April the 25th. If you can reach me before then, I will take you.’

‘Thank you,’ said Harriet; then she curtseyed once more and was gone.

Edward Finch-Dutton was dissecting the efferent nervous system of a large and somewhat pickled dogfish. The deeply dead elasmobranch lay in a large dish with a waxed bottom, pins spearing the flaps of its rough and spotted skin. The familiar smell of formalin which permeated the laboratory beat its way not unpleasantly into Edward’s capacious and somewhat equine nostrils. He had already sliced away the roof of the cranium and now, firmly and competently — his large freckled hands doing his bidding perfectly — he snipped away at the irrelevant flotsam of muscle, skin and connective tissue to reveal, with calm assurance, the creature’s brain.

‘The prosencephalon,’ he pronounced, pointing with his seeker at the smooth globular mass, and the first-year students surrounding him in the Cambridge Zoology laboratory nodded intelligently.

‘The olfactory lobes,’ continued Edward, ‘the thalamencephalon. And note, please, the pineal gland.’

The students noted it, for with Dr Finch-Dutton’s dissections the pineal gland could be noted, which was not always so with lesser demonstrators. Eagerly they peered and scribbled in their notebooks, for their own specimens awaited them, set out on the long benches of the lab.

So assured was Edward, so predictable the state of things in the cartilaginous fishes, that as he proceeded downwards towards the medulla oblongata, squirting away intrusive blood clots with his water bottle, he was free to pursue his own thoughts. And his thoughts, on this day when he was to dine at her house, were all of Harriet.

Edward had not intended to marry for a considerable period of time. Having obtained his Fellowship it was obviously sensible to wait, for he agreed with the Master of St Philip’s that eight or even ten years of celibacy was not too great a price to pay for the security of an academic life.

Yet he intended to lead Harriet to the altar a great deal sooner than that. True, he would see very little of her: St Philip’s rules about women in the College were particularly strict, but it would be good to know that she was waiting for him somewhere in a suitable house on the edge of the town. Her quiet and gentle presence, the intelligent way she listened would be deeply comforting to a man who had set himself, as he had done, the onerous task of definitively classifying the Aphaniptera. In five years — no, perhaps that was rash — in eight years, when he had published at least a dozen papers and his ascent of the promotional ladder was secure, he would let her have a baby. Not just because women never seemed to know what to do without little babies, but because he himself, coming from an old and distinguished family, would like to have an heir.

He laid down his scissors, picked up his forceps, began to prise up the left eyeball — and paused to look at Jenkins, a sixteen-stone rugger Blue from Pontypridd. Jenkins was much given to fainting and eyeballs, so Edward had found, were always difficult.

‘Go and sit at the other end of the lab, Jenkins,’ he ordered now, and the huge muscular Welshman ambled off obediently to sit beside Dr Henderson, a refugee from the crowded Botany lab, who was bubbling carbon dioxide through a tank in which an elderly parsnip silently respired.

Edward demonstrated the recti muscles of the eye and began on the tricky dissection of the cranial nerves. The best time to propose to Harriet, he had decided — and for them to become officially engaged — was at the St Philip’s May Ball. The Mortons’ permission for him to take Harriet (in a suitably chaperoned party of course) was tantamount to an expectation of this sort. He had set aside an adequate sum of money for a ring and after the engagement would be able to work for at least two years without further interruptions before it was necessary to make preparations for their wedding. The thought of waltzing with Harriet brought a faint smile to his long and studious face. He had seen her first at a performance of the B minor Mass in King’s College Chapel and been much taken by her stillness and concentration — been much taken too, it had to be admitted, by her delicate profile and the way one pointed ear peeped out between the strands of her loose hair. Of course it had been gratifying to find that she was the daughter of the Merlin Professor — it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise — but the knowledge that his feelings for her were basically disinterested gave him an enduring and justifiable satisfaction.

Half an hour later the students had dispersed and were bent over their own dissections while Edward, his hands behind his back, walked slowly between the benches, putting in a word here, an admonition there. Even Jenkins had recovered and was working busily.

‘Please, Dr Finch-Dutton, I don’t know what this is?’

Edward flinched. It was a girl who had spoken — an unsuitably pretty brunette who worked with two other Girtonians on a separate bench. The girls were the plague of his life. He was almost certain that they taunted him deliberately, for his detestation of women students was as well-known and as strong as that of his future father-in-law. Last week’s practical, when the class had dissected the reproductive system, had been a nightmare. Though he had particularly instructed Price to give the girls a female fish, the technician had failed in his duty as so often before and they had called him incessantly to demonstrate organs whose names it was quite atrociously embarrassing to pronounce in the presence of ladies.

But today there was no danger and having explained to the brunette, on whose slender neck a cluster of escaping curls most disconcertingly danced as she bent over her work, that she was in the presence of the trigeminal nerve, he retreated to the shelter of Henderson’s parsnip.

At five, the practical concluded, he made his way along the corridor to his corner of the research lab where a neat row of black boxes — each containing a hundred perfectly mounted microscope slides of flattened fleas — awaited him. He had classified (mainly by means of the bristles edging the head capsule) some eighteen species, but this work would take a lifetime. Not that he regretted taking on the Aphaniptera… his supervisor had been perfectly right when he said that fleas were virgin territory… but before he placed the next slide under his binocular, Edward allowed himself a long and lusting look at the serried rows of butterflies pinned in cases on the wall above him. Fleas were Edward’s bread and butter, but the Lepidoptera were his passion.

Punctually at six thirty, he tidied up and bicycled back to his rooms. But before he prepared to shave and change into his dinner-jacket, he sent one of the college servants to the buttery for a pork pie. Edward had not yet dined at the Mortons’, but he had twice taken luncheon there and knew that it was best to be prepared.

It was to be a rather special dinner-party — the first time that Edward had been to dinner and the first chance for Marchmont (the new Classics lecturer) and his young wife to meet the Professor in the relaxed informality of his home.

So Louisa was taking trouble. In the dining-room grate, behind the iron grille of the fireguard, at least half-a-dozen coals were actually alight, constituting by the standards of Scroope Terrace a blazing fire. Moreover she had permitted the maids to replace the electric light bulbs which she had removed, for reasons of economy, from the central chandelier. The carpet, with its squares of brown and mustard, had been freshly brushed with tea-leaves, the Professor’s portrait in cap and gown hung straight above the sideboard and though she had baulked at the purchase of flowers so early in the year, the cup that her brother had won as an undergraduate in the Horatian oratory contest made, she thought now, an excellent epergne.

Descending to the basement, she found in the kitchen a similar air of festive abandonment. To her everyday soup of turnips and bacon bones Cook had added chopped carrots, giving the broth a pleasant yellowish tint. A cold codling waited in liquid for its sauce tartare and the leg of mutton (a real bargain from an enterprising butcher who specialised in cheap meat from injured but perfectly healthy animals which had to be despatched in situ) was already sizzling in the range.

‘That seems to be all right, Cook. What about the dessert?’

Cook motioned her head towards a large plate on which a coffee blancmange, just turned out of its mould, still shivered faintly.

‘I’m going to stick glacé cherries round it,’ offered Cook.

‘I must say that seems a little excessive,’ said Louisa. She frowned, thinking. Still, it was a dinner-party. ‘All right, then — but halve them first.’

She made her way upstairs again and was just in time to encounter her niece coming in from her dancing class.

It was always difficult for Harriet to leave the friendly, interesting streets and re-enter the dark house where the temperature generally seemed to be several degrees lower than that outside. Today, with Dubrov’s words still sounding in her ears, she stood more forlornly than usual in the hallway, lost in her unattainable dreams — and justifiably annoyed her aunt.

‘For goodness sake, Harriet, don’t dawdle! Have you forgotten we have dinner guests? I want you changed and in the drawing-room by seven o’clock.’

‘Yes, Aunt Louisa.’

‘You are to wear the pink crêpe de chine. And you can put up your hair.’

In her attic Harriet slowly washed, changed into the hideous dress her aunt had bought in the January sales and embarked on the battle to put up the long, soft hair which only curved slightly at the tips and needed a battery of pins to keep it in the coronet of plaits which the Trumpington Ladies had deemed suitable. She would have given anything for a quiet evening in which to relive what had happened… anything not to face Edward with his pompous and proprietary manner and the underlying kindness which made it impossible to dislike him as one longed to do.

When she had finished she went over to the bookcase and took down a volume of poetry, turning the pages until she found what she was looking for: a poem simply called ‘Life’:

She stood for a long time looking at the verses in which Emily Dickinson had chronicled her heartbreak. Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood — it was just that so very often they were dead, and in a book.

Two hours later the dinner-party was in full swing, though this was perhaps not the phrase which would have occurred to pretty Mrs Marchmont, supping her soup with a slight air of disbelief. She had been warned about the Mortons’ dinner-parties, but she had not been warned enough.

At the head of the table, the Professor was explaining to Mr Marchmont the iniquity of the latest Senate ruling on the allocation of marks in the Classical Tripos. Edward was valiantly discussing the ‘dreadful price of everything’ with Aunt Louisa, while in the grate the handful of smouldering coals — kicked too hard by the underpaid parlourmaid — blackened and expired.

The soup was cleared. The cod, whose sauce tartare surprisingly had come out slightly blue, arrived.

‘Well, Harriet, and how did you fare today?’ asked the Professor, addressing his daughter for the first time.

‘All right, thank you, Father. I went to my dancing lesson.’

‘Ah, yes.’ The Professor, his duty done, would have turned back to his neighbour but Harriet, usually so silent, spoke to him once more.

‘A man came to see Madame Lavarre. A Russian. He’s going to take a ballet company up the Amazon to Manaus. To perform there.’

Edward, assessing his piece of fish, which did not, after all, appear to be a fillet, said, ‘A most interesting part of the world, one understands. With a quite extraordinary flora and fauna.’

Harriet looked at him gratefully. And possessed by what madness she did not know, she continued, ‘He offered me a job… as a dancer — for the length of the tour.’

Her remark affected those present profoundly, but in different ways. Her father laid down his fork as a flush spread over his sharp-featured face, Louisa opened her mouth and sat gaping at her niece, while Edward’s shirt-front — responding to his sudden exhalation of breath — gave off a sharp and sudden ‘pop’.

‘He offered you a job?’ said the Professor slowly. ‘You? My daughter!’ He stared incredulously at Harriet. ‘I have never in all my life heard of such an impertinence!’

‘No!’ Harriet, knowing how useless it was, could not resist at least trying to make him see. ‘It’s an honour. A real one. To be chosen — to be considered of professional standard. And it’s a good thing to do — to take art to people who are hungry for it. Properly, objectively good like in Marcus Aurelius.’

‘How dare you, Harriet? How dare you argue with me!’ His daughter’s invocation of the great Roman Stoic, clearly his own property, had dangerously fanned the flames of the Professor’s wrath. He glared at Louisa; she should have been firmer with the girl, taken her away from that unsuitable Academy years ago. Though actually Louisa had said often enough that she saw no point in wasting money on dancing lessons, and it was he who had said that Harriet could continue. Was it because he could still remember Sophie waltzing so gracefully beneath the lamplit trees in that Swiss hotel? If so, he had been suitably punished for his sentimentality.

‘Please, Father. Please, let me go!’ Harriet, whom one could usually silence with a look, seemed suddenly to have taken leave of her senses. ‘You didn’t let me stay on at school, you didn’t allow me to go to France with the Fergusons because they were agnostics… well, I understood that — yes, really, I understood. But this… they take a ballet mistress, it’s absolutely respectable and I would be back in the autumn.’ She had pushed away her plate and was gripping the edge of the table, the intensity of her longing turning the usually clear, grave face into an image from a pietà: a wild-eyed and beseeching Magdalene. ‘Please, Father,’ said Harriet, ‘I implore you to let me go.’

A scene! A scene at the dinner-table. Overwhelmed by this ultimate in disasters, Louisa bowed her head over her plate.

‘You will drop this subject immediately, Harriet,’ barked the Professor. ‘You are embarrassing our guests.’

‘No. I won’t drop it.’ Harriet had become very pale, but her voice was steady. ‘You have always thought dancing was frivolous and silly, but it isn’t — it’s the most marvellous thing in the world. You can say things when you dance that you can’t say any other way. People have danced for the glory of God since the beginning of time. David danced before the Ark of the Covenant… And this journey… this adventure…’ She turned imploringly to Edward. ‘You must know what a wonder it would be?’

‘Oh, no, Harriet! No, the Amazon is a most unsuitable place for a woman. For anyone!’ From the plethora of dangerous diseases and potentially lethal animals, poor Edward — meaning only to scotch this dreadful topic once and for all — now had the misfortune to select the candiru. ‘There is a fish there,’ he said earnestly, ‘which swims into people’s orifices when they are bathing and by means of backwards pointing spines becomes impossible to dislodge

A moan from Louisa brought him to a halt. Orifices had been mentioned at dinner, and before ladies. Orifices and a scene in one evening! Casting about in her mind, she could not see that she had done anything to deserve such a disgrace. And as poor Edward flushed a deep crimson and Mrs Marchmont suppressed a nervous giggle, the Professor rose and faced his daughter.

‘You will leave the table immediately, Harriet, and go to your room.’ And when she did not rise instantly: ‘I think you heard me!’

‘Yes.’ But she remained perfectly still, looking at her father, and in a moment of aberration he had the mad idea that she was pitying him.

Then she gave a little nod as though some transaction was now completed, and with the fluid grace that was her legacy from that damnable dancing place, she rose, walked to the door and was gone.

Everyone now made Herculean efforts, but it had to be admitted that even by Morton standards the dinnerparty was not proving a conspicuous success. Edward, torn between fear lest Harriet after all should turn out to have ‘ideas’, and regret that she had been punished like a naughty child, was not his usual self. Mrs Marchmont in her thin dress was so busy trying not to shiver that she contributed little. It was left to valiant Mr Marchmont to sustain the conversation, which he did heroically until, biting into his mutton, he inexplicably encountered a lead pellet and broke a tooth.

Alone in her attic, Harriet threw herself down on the bed. Growing up in this gloomy house, she had taught herself a discipline for survival in which the weakness of tears played no part.

Yet now she cried as she had not cried since her mother’s death. Cried for her lovely, lost adventure, for the unattainable forests and magical rivers she would never see; cried for the camaraderie of fellow artists and a job well done.

But her real grief lay deeper. She was honest enough to admit that few girls in her position would have been allowed to travel to the Amazon. It was not her father’s refusal that so devastated her now; it was his bigotry, his hatred, his determination not to understand. And lying there, her hair in damp strands across her crumpled face, Harriet gave up the long, long struggle to love her father and her aunt.

It was for this loss above all that she wept. She had learned, during the long years of her childhood, to live without receiving love. To live without giving it seemed more than she could bear.