A Company of Swans

4

A soft breeze rustled the palm trees in front of the Palace of Justice; the flock of parakeets which had roosted on the equestrian statue of Pedro II flew noisily towards the river — and day broke across the Golden City. The cathedral bell tolled for Mass; the first tram clanked out of the depot. Maids in coloured bandannas emerged from the great houses in the Avenida Eduardo Ribero, bound for the arcaded fish-market. A procession of tiny orphans in black overalls crossed a cobbled square. One by one the shutters went up on the shops with their exotic, crazily priced wares from Europe: milliners and jewellers; delicatessens and patisseries…

Down by the docks the men arrived and began to load the balls of black rubber which were piled on the quayside. The fast-dying breeze sent a gentle oriental music through the rigging of the luxurious yachts crowded along the floating landing-stage; from the crazily patched and painted dug-outs of the Indians on the harbour’s fringe came the smell of hot cooking-oil and coffee. A uniformed official unlocked the ornate gates of the yellow customs house and on RMS Cardinal, at rest after her five-week voyage from Liverpool, sailors were scrubbing the already immaculate white decks.

But though this day began like all others, it was no ordinary day. Tonight the Opera House which presided over Manaus like a great benevolent dowager would blaze with light. Tonight carriages and automobiles would sweep across the dizzying mosaic square in front of the theatre and disgorge brilliantly dressed women and bemedalled men beneath the floodlit pink and white facade. Tonight there would be receptions and dinners; every café would be full to overflowing; every hotel room had been secured months ago. For tonight the Dubrov Ballet Company was opening in Swan Lake, and for the homesick Europeans and the culture-hungry Brazilians there would be moonlit glades and Tchaikovsky’s immortal music and Simonova’s celebrated interpretation of Odette.

In the turreted stucco villa which she had christened ‘The Retreat’, young Mrs Bennett surveyed the blue silk gown which she had laid out on the bed, the matching shoes. The blue was right with her eyes, but should she wear the pearls or the sapphires? The sapphires would seem to be the obvious choice, but Mrs Lehmann’s sapphires were so much bigger and better and the Lehmanns had the box next to theirs. ‘The pearls, I think, Concepcion,’ she said to her maid, a cabacla — half-Indian, half-Portuguese — with caring eyes. And her husband Jock, coming to kiss her goodbye, smiled with relief for today at least he would not come home to find her weeping over Peter’s photograph or staring with red-rimmed eyes at a letter with its childish scrawl. Of course the boy was homesick, of course seven was young to be sent so far away. But what could one do? A British boy had to go to a decent school — and anyway, you couldn’t bring up a child in this climate.

Still, today at least Lilian would be occupied. He himself did not care for ballet, but as he climbed into his carriage and was conveyed to his office on the quayside, Jock Bennett blessed the Dubrov Ballet Company from the bottom of his heart.

Unlike Jock Bennett, the six-foot-tall and massively bearded Count Sternov was a passionate balletomane and since dawn had roamed through the long, low house — which he had had built in imitation of his parents’ dacha on the Volga — in a state of exaltation.

‘I shall never forget her first Giselle — never, he said to the Countess. ‘The year before she left Russia. That unsupported adage in the last act!’

‘That was the time they found Dalguruky in the back of the box making love to the governess, do you remember?’

The Countess was in her dressing-gown. She seldom dressed before the afternoon, the heat did not suit her and her cris des nerfs were famous, but today she was happy. Today it would end as it had so often ended in St Petersburg, discussing the finer points of a cabriole in a lighted theatre… and the next day was the party for the cast at Follina, that fantastic riverside palazzo where everything that mattered out here took place. And there will be girls, thought the Count happily — young, lovely Russian girls…

The girls were uppermost in the mind of Colonel de Silva, the Prefect of Police, glancing at the clock in his office to see if it was time to go home and change. His scrawny domineering wife could stop him talking to them, stop him sending them flowers; she could drag him back to his carriage with her hand dug into his arm the second the curtain went down, but she couldn’t stop him seeing them — their legs, their thighs, their throats — thought the grateful Colonel, rescinding the death warrant of a bandit who had turned out to be a distant relative. Opera was better for bosoms and hips, but in ballet one saw more.

By the afternoon a veritable armada of small craft had begun to converge on the city. From the far shore of the River Negro, some ten miles across, came Dr Zugheimer and his wife, sitting erect in the bows of the Louisa, already in their evening clothes. The bespectacled Herr Doktor, a paternalistic employer who had put his seringueiros into uniform, thirsted for Lohengrin or Parsifal, but no one missed an opening night at the Teatro Amazonas and the blue eyes of his plump wife — who spent her lonely mornings struggling to turn the pulpy mangoes and guavas of the tropics into the firm and bread-crumbed Knödel of her native land, shone with excitement. Opera, ballet or farce… what did it matter? Tonight there would be gossip, companionship, laughter.

A launch chartered by the Amazonian Timber Company at Boa Vista disgorged twenty of their employees, who made their way into the town carrying their evening clothes under their arms. The mission boat belonging to the Silesian Brothers at Santa Maria brought Father Joseph and Father Anselm, who knew that all art was for the glory of God and had made sure of excellent seats in the stalls.

The cafés were now filling up. A party of lady schoolteachers from a select seminary in Santarém, offered the choice of sleeping in the street or in Madam Anita’s brothel, sensibly chose the brothel. The captain of the Oriana escorted two massive, middle-aged Baltic princesses (on a round trip from Lisbon) down the gangway and into the car sent by the Mayor.

And now the lights were going up. Lights beneath the frieze of gods and goddesses on the Opera House facade; lights in the tall street-lamps lining the square. Lights in the blue and green art nouveau foyer; in the candelabra between the Carrera marble columns of the upstairs promenade… Lights limning the tiers of white and golden boxes; pouring down from the great eight-pointed chandelier on de Angeli’s frescoed ceiling with its swirling muses of Poetry, Music and Art…

Light, now, sparkling and dancing on the tiaras of the women as they entered; on the diamond and sapphire choker of Mrs John P. Lehmann, on Colonel de Silva’s Brazilian star…

The seats were filling up; row upon row of bejewelled bosoms, of bemedalled chests. The stout Baltic princesses entered the canopied box reserved for the President and stood, dowdy and gracious, bestowing kind waves. In the orchestra pit, the musicians were ready.

But the performance could not begin yet; all the citizens of Manaus were aware of that. For the box next to that of the President was still empty — the box that belonged to Mr Verney, the chairman of the Opera House trustees. Until Rom Verney came from Follina the curtain would stay lowered — and knowing this, the audience settled down to wait.

Verney woke early, as he always did, on the morning of the gala; he stretched in the great jaruna wood bed and pushed aside the cloud of white mosquito netting to go to the French windows and look out on his garden.

There was no garden like it in all of Amazonia. Only the gardens of the Moghul emperors — of Akbar and his heirs — had the same vision, the same panache. Only those despots — like this wealthiest of all the rubber barons — had the tenacity and labour to make real their dreams.

On the terrace below him, orchids and hibiscus and the dizzying scarlet flame-flowers which the humming birds loved to visit rioted in flamboyant exuberance from their urns, but elsewhere he had maintained a savage discipline on the fast-growing plants. In the avenue of jacarandas, shiveringly blue, which stretched to the distant river, each tree grew distinct and unimpeded. Beneath the catalpas in his arboretum he had planted only the white, star-petalled clerodendron, so that the trees seemed to grow from a drift of scented snow.

By the aviary which his Indians, somewhat to his dismay, had built for him when he was absent on a journey, Manuelo was already sweeping the paths. Two other Indians worked by the pool with its golden water-lilies, scraping derris root into the water against mosquitoes. Old Iquita, Manuelo’s mother-in-law, wearing a frilled petticoat left behind by an opera singer whose favours he had enjoyed, and a boa of anaconda skins, was poking her forked stick into a flower bed, busy with her self-appointed task of keeping his garden free from snakes. From the patch of forest behind the house, deliberately left untouched, where his Indians built their village, came the faint, disembodied sound of Dame Nellie Melba singing the ‘Bell Song’ from Lakmé. However many records he bought them, this remained their favourite.

He showered, slipped on a khaki shirt and trousers and made his way downstairs — a most un-English-looking Englishman, lithe and dark-skinned, his black hair (though he was not yet thirty) exotically streaked with silver — to be waylaid as he crossed the terrace by the first of the many animals to whom he offered the hospitality of his home: a coatimundi with a great bushy tail who jumped off a chair and demanded to be stroked.

Moving on down the steps, Verney made his way between banks of glossy-leaved gardenias, through a trellised arcade of jasmine and passion flowers, towards the orchard where he grew mangoes and plantains and avocados to feed his workers. He missed nothing — a new patch of fungus, an infinitesimal split in the stem of a pineapple, a procession of ants endeavouring to set up a colony in his coffee bushes — all were instantly observed and silently assessed. And the little-nosed bear trotted along behind him, for this morning inspection of the estate was something which the coati regarded as very much his affair.

As he came to the bridge over one of the many igarapes that flowed through his land, an aged blue and yellow macaw flopped from an acacia branch on to his shoulder and screamed at the coati in jealous rage. The river was close by now, with his boats: the schooner Amethyst, which he used to convey guests to and from Manaus; the Daisy May, a converted gun-boat he had stripped almost to the hull to carry his botanical specimens… And the first boat he had ever owned, the little Firefly, rakish and indestructible, beside the dug-outs of his Indians.

It was in the Firefly on a morning such as this that he had found Follina.

He had been beating his way up the mazed waterways of the Negro during his second year on the Amazon when he found, between two floating islands, the hidden entrance to a river. A light, clear river down which he travelled for perhaps a mile, entranced by the skimming kingfishers, the otters playing round his boat — and pulling into a sand-bank, he tied up to a cassia entirely covered in rich gold blossoms.

At first there was just the feeling that the jungle here was less dark, less pressing than elsewhere. Then, wandering along the edge of a sand-bar, he had come across a ruined jetty and in growing excitement found as he edged along it a clearing on which the sun shone as benignly as if it were England — and in the clearing, half-ruined but with its walls still standing, a house. Only not a house, really: a small, Italianate, pink-washed palazzo with a colonnaded terrace running its length; the remnants of carved pillars and stone statues still lying where they had fallen.

It had taken Verney nearly a year to trace anyone who could authorise a sale, but at last he found the descendants of Antonio Rinaldi, the visionary or madman who had come to Brazil at the beginning of the previous century, struck gold in Ouro Preto and come north to the Amazon to build — six thousand miles from Italy — the palazzo of his native village, Follina.

Rinaldi had planted the avenue of jacarandas, the grove of hardwood trees. Verney — excavating, replanting, clearing — had achieved in eight years what in a temperate climate would have taken him eighty.

Before ever he came to Brazil, Verney had read the great Cervantes’ description of the New World and what it stood for to those settlers who came there first from Europe. ‘The refuge of all the poor devils of Spain, the sanctuary of the bankrupt, the safeguard of murderers, the promised land for ladies of easy virtue…a lure and disillusionment for the many — and an incomparable remedy for the few.’

Verney had been one of the few. Fleeing his homeland, heartsick and savage, he had indeed found this country an ‘incomparable remedy’. He had succeeded beyond his childish dreams; neither the heat nor the danger from disease nor the enmity of those whose policies he opposed troubled him, and the jungle which others feared or loathed had showered him with benisons. Yet now, passing the creeper-clad huts which housed his generators and ice-machine, he put up a hand to pull down the heavy yellow pod of a cacao tree — and in an instant everything before him vanished and he was back in the orchard at Stavely. It was late October, the frost had turned the long grass into silvered spears and he was reaching out for one last apple hanging on the bare bough: an Orange Pippin with its flushed and lightly wrinkled skin.

Once they came, these images of England, it was best to let them have their way… to let himself walk through the beech copse where the pheasants strutted on the russet leaves… to ride out between Stavely’s April hedges or climb, wind-buffeted, up the steep turf path to the Barrows while the black dog played God among the scuttling rabbits.

And soon it was over — this sudden burst of longing, not for England’s customs and manners, but for the physical look of her countryside — and he was aware again of the heat on his back, the whirr of the cicadas and the coati peering at him expectantly from a clump of osiers.

‘Yes, you’re quite right; it’s time for breakfast,’ said Rom, and turning away from the river he made his way back to the house.

He had been christened Romain Paul Verney Brandon, but the Frenchified Christian name had been too much for the locals. He was known always as Rom — and for the first nineteen years of his life the woods and fields of Stavely were his heritage and his delight.

He was the son of General Brandon by the General’s late second marriage to the beautiful foreign singer, Toussia Kandinsky: a most unnecessary marriage, the County thought it, having planned for the General — who was already well into middle age — a decorous widowerhood. He was, after all, not alone — there was his five-year-old son, young Henry Alexander, a sensible child who would make Stavely an excellent heir.

But the General, a distinguished soldier who had shown enormous personal courage during the bitter Afghanistan Wars and risked his life even more spectacularly during his leaves while pursuing rare plants in the cracks and crevices of the Karakorum Mountains, failed to oblige them.

Eighteen months after the death of his wife, he went to a flower show in London and afterwards allowed a musical acquaintance to take him to a concert where a half-French, half-Russian singer was giving a recital of Lieder. The General did not care greatly for the Lieder, but for the woman who sang them he conceived a romantic passion which ended only with her death.

Toussia Kandinsky was in her thirties — a mature, warm woman with sad dark eyes, an extraordinarily beautiful mouth and one feature which made her face spectacular: hair which since the age of twenty had been as white as snow.

They married — the cosmopolitan woman with a tragic past (her father had died in a Tsarist jail) and the seemingly conventional British soldier, and he took her back to Stavely, where the County did their best with a woman who did not hunt but could be seen speaking to the horses tenderly in French, who used the Music Room for music and filled the Gallery with paintings by those mad and immoral Impressionists.

Gossip about the new Mrs Brandon inevitably abounded, but even the most virulent of her detractors had to admit that she was exceptionally good to her stepson. She spent hours with young Henry Alexander, read to him, played with him, took him about with her and celebrated his seventh birthhday with a party that was talked about for years. When her own son was born the following year, both she and the General redoubled their attentions to Stavely’s heir. The day after Rom’s birth, there appeared in the stables a white pony for Henry that a prince of the blood would have been proud to own.

No, it was Rom himself who did the damage, who ate into poor Henry’s soul. A dark-skinned, quicksilver child with high cheekbones and the flared nostrils that are supposed to denote genius or temper (and generally both), he had inherited also the thick, ink-black hair which had been his mother’s in her girlhood and her passionate mouth. Had it not been for the General’s wide grey eyes looking out of the child’s intense, exotic face, the County would have been inclined to wonder.

For it was not only Rom’s appearance that was dramatic. The child, brought down by his nurse to the drawing-room at teatime, would throw his arms round his parents — round both of them — and speak to them of love. ‘I love you as much as the sun and the moon and the stars,’ the three-year-old Rom said to his mother in the presence of Mrs Farquharson, who had come about the Red Cross Fête; and Henry, a decent, well-brought-up British boy, had to stand by and endure the shame.

Again and again, Henry’s despised half-brother revealed his ‘foreignness’. Rom chattered in French as easily as in English; he asked — he actually asked — to play the violin, and though Henry knew that forestry was respectable and that his father’s plant-hunting trips were nothing to hide, to see Rom helping the gardeners to plant flowers was almost more than he could bear.

And then, just when Henry had consoled himself by utterly despising the outlandish half-brother who seemed to have no idea how to conduct himself, Rom would confound him by some spectacular act of courage, climbing fearlessly to the top of a tree so slender that even under Rom’s light weight it bent and swayed as if it must break. It was Rom, not Henry (though he too was present) who jumped into the river by the mill-race to try to rescue a little village girl who had played too near the water’s edge — and even then Rom couldn’t behave like other children, for when he would have been a hero he lay down in front of the church door refusing to go inside because ‘God shouldn’t have let Dorcas drown’. It was Rom who found the black dog, snarling and wild, with his leg in a trap and who risked rabies and heaven-knows-what to free him — and soon Henry, dutifully walking his hound puppies, had the mortification of hearing Rom’s wonder dog — with his intelligence and fidelity — spoken of wherever he went. It was Rom — not Henry, the eldest son, the heir — who smelled burning one wild night in October and led the white Arab — Henry’s own horse, rearing and terrified — to safety.

No wonder Henry hated his younger brother, but there was nothing anyone could do. Mrs Brandon’s efforts to shower her stepson with attentions began to border on the ludicrous; the General never betrayed by one flicker of his wise grey eyes that his younger son held his heart. Rom himself, at the beginning, looked up to Henry and longed for his companionship. It was useless. The jealousy that enslaved Henry was the stuff of myth and legend, and it grew stronger every year.

Then, when Rom was almost eleven, fate stepped in on Henry’s side. Mrs Brandon fell ill; leukaemia was diagnosed and six months later she was dead.

‘Hadn’t you better pull yourself together?’ said Henry (recalled from his last term at Eton for the funeral) to Rom, sobbing wildly in his mother’s empty room — and stepped back hastily, for he thought that Rom was about to spring at him and take him by the throat.

Instead Rom vanished with his dog, managing to go to ground in the Suffolk countryside as though it was indeed the Amazon in whose imagined jungles he had so often played.

When he came back he was different — quieter, less ‘excessive’. He had learned to consume his own smoke, but for the rest of his life he responded to loss not with grief but with a fierce and inward anger.

It was now that Henry was able to express a little of his hatred. The General, unable to bear Stavely without his wife, left for the Himalayas on an extended botanical expedition and Henry the heir — now home from school for good — began to issue orders that were obeyed. Rom’s dog was forbidden the house; his unsuitable friends — children of the village whose games he had led — were banished. Most of the servants were loyal to the younger child and Nannie, now retired and living in the Lodge, had never been able to conceal her love for the ‘little foreigner’, but there were others — notably Grunthorpe the first footman, whom Rom had surprised in the gunroom stealing boxes of cartridges to sell in the local town — who were only too glad to ingratiate themselves with the heir.

Henry’s triumph, however, was short-lived. The General returned; Rom was restored to his rightful place and presently he followed his brother to Eton, where he was safe from Henry’s tricks.

And then, in the year when Rom became eighteen, Isobel Hope and her widowed mother came to live in the village next to Stavely.

Isobel’s connections were aristocratic — her mother was the youngest daughter of the Earl of Lexbury; her father, who had died in the hunting field, had belonged to an ancient West Country family — but she was poor. As a small child Isobel had seen the great Lexbury estate go under the hammer, and her handsome father had lived on his Army pay and promises. Even before she met Henry, this lovely girl had decided that Stavely’s heir would make her a suitable husband.

She met him first at a ball in a neighbouring house, but standing beside Henry on the grand staircase, relaxed and at ease, was his younger brother… and that was that.

The love that blazed between Rom and Isobel was violent, passionate and total. They met to ride at dawn, Isobel eluding all attempts at chaperonage, and were together again by noon to play tennis, wander through the gardens or chase each other through the maze. To watch them together was almost to gasp at their happiness; no one who saw them that summer ever quite forgot them. ‘A striking couple’, ‘a handsome pair’, ‘meant for each other’ — none of the phrases that people used came anywhere near the image of those two: the slender girl with her shower of dark red hair, her deep blue eyes; the incorrigibly graceful, brilliant boy.

Rom had won a scholarship to Oxford, but he persuaded his father to let him stay at Stavely. He had inherited the General’s passion for trees and together they planned plantations, discussed rare hardwoods, spoke of a sawmill to supply the cabinet trade…

When Rom was nineteen he and Isobel became engaged. It was now that the General sent for them and told them of the will he proposed to make. Stavely was not entailed, but there was no question of disinheriting his eldest son. Henry would have Stavely Hall, its gardens and orchards, the Home Park… To Rom he would leave the two outlying farms — Millpond and The Grebe — the North Plantation and Paradise Farm itself.

Rom was overjoyed, for he had an intense and imaginative passion for land, and Isobel, though she still yearned for Stavely itself, was satisfied, for Paradise was a perfect Palladian house, pillared and porticoed, built by an earlier and wealthy Mrs Brandon who had not cared for her daughter-in-law Unless poor Henry married an outstanding woman — and this was not likely — Isobel knew she could soon make Paradise the social centre of the estate.

Three months later the General died of a heart attack, sitting in a chair with a bundle of Toussia’s letters in his hand. When the funeral was over they looked for the will he said he had made, but it was nowhere to be found. Curiously the solicitor he had called in had gone abroad, and his clerk knew nothing of a later document. It was thus that the old will was declared valid — the will made before Rom was born — in which every stick and stone on the estate was left to Henry.

Why did Rom do nothing to save himself, people asked later? Why didn’t he insist on an enquiry or bring pressure to bear on his brother to make an equitable division?

It was pride, of course, the fierce pride of the gifted and strong who will take nothing from anyone; perhaps also the knowledge that if Henry had practised any kind of fraud the mills of God would grind him more surely than Rom could hope to do. But there was something else, something that Henry saw with a puzzled fury — a kind of exaltation, a glittering excitement at being stripped thus to the bone. To begin again somewhere else, to pit himself against the world, to make a fortune and a place for Isobel that owed nothing to privilege and class was a challenge to which Rom’s passionate nature rose with a kind of joy.

‘We’ll start again somewhere quite different — somewhere in the New World. I shall build you a house fifteen times as grand as Stavely, you’ll see!’

‘Oh, Rom — in that wretched Amazon of yours!’

‘No.’ But he smiled, for one cannot entirely choose one’s obsessions and since his ninth birthday his had been that vast, wild place of mazed rivers and impenetrable jungle. ‘There’s a fortune to be made there, but you would hate the climate. In North America — California, perhaps. Or Canada — wherever you please!’

He stretched out his hands to her, for he no more doubted her than he doubted his own right arm, but she shook her head. Isobel had seen her mother humbled when the great Lexbury estate was broken up. She was afraid — and she wanted Stavely.

Thus it was Isobel who succeeded where Henry had failed; it was she who broke Rom. A month after the General’s death, she withdrew from her engagement. That night Rom found her in the Orangery with Henry and knew what she would do.

The next day he was gone and nobody at Stavely ever heard from him again.

Crossing the courtyard behind the house with the coati at his heels, Rom’s way was barred by Lorenzo, his butler and general factotum, beaming with pleasure and surrounded by a cluster of indoor servants who had left their preparations for tomorrow’s party for the ballet company in order to share their master’s impending joy.

‘It has come, Coronel!’ said Lorenzo, throwing out an annunciatory arm. ‘Roderigo has sent word from São Gabriel and Furo has gone to fetch it in the truck.’

There was no need for Rom to ask what had come. Follina was connected by a rough road, passable by motor in the dry season, to Manaus, where he had his main office and warehouse. Another, much shorter track led to the tiny village of São Gabriel on the Negro, where he had built a floating jetty, storehouses and a rubber-smoking shed; it was there, rather than at his private landing stage, that goods for Follina were unloaded.

But though Rom could pioneer a dozen new enterprises, could import grand pianos from Germany, American motor cars, carpets from Isfahan, nothing excited his men so much as the arrival of the washing basket from Truscott and Musgrave in Piccadilly containing his freshly laundered shirts.

To add to the stories of ludicrous and extravagant behaviour among the rubber barons had not been his intention. Mrs Lehmann, who washed her carriage horses in champagne, or young Wetherby, who walked a jaguar with a diamond collar through the streets, had Rom’s utmost contempt. Yet unwittingly he had created a legend which outclassed them all. The travels of his laundry to and from London’s most exclusive valeting service were spoken of in Rio and Liverpool, in Paris and Madrid.

Rom ran Follina entirely with a native staff. He found that his Indians could be taught to do anything except perhaps to count; certainly they washed and ironed entirely to his satisfaction. His shirts travelled to England to be laundered because of a promise he had made to a generous and lovely woman and it was her memory, now, that softened his face.

Had it not been for Madeleine de la Tour, Rom’s midnight flight from Stavely might have ended very differently. Arriving penniless in London, half-crazed with rage and pain, he had gone to the house of the only relative he knew his mother to possess: a distant cousin; Jacques de la Tour, who had a number of business interests and who Rom hoped might give him work.

Jacques was away on an extended tour of the East, but his wife Madeleine took Rom in. She took him in in all senses: into her house, her mind, her heart and — with marvellous flair and intelligence — into her bed. She soothed the appalling hurt that Isobel had dealt him; she civilised him and left him with a sense of gratitude that had never faded. In the end, sensing his need to start on his adventure, she insisted on lending him money for his fare to Brazil.

‘Only don’t turn into a savage, Romain,’ she had said, standing at Euston, brave as a grenadier — and much more beautiful — to see him go. ‘Be particularly careful of your shirts — the starch must be just so. No thumping them on flat stones, promise?’

‘I promise.’

Then the train went and she cried a little in the ladies’ room and went on to the Summer Exhibition at Burlington House in a splendid herbaceous border of a hat because she was as gallant as she was good and knew that English ladies must not make a fuss.

Rom never repaid the money that she lent him. He waited two years and then went down to the Minas Gerais, that strange mineral-rich region of Brazil famous for its ornate and treasure-stocked churches, to seek out a hunchbacked craftsman who wrought precious stones into jewellery for the processional Madonnas. And a few months later a messenger arrived in Grosvenor Place and delivered a package which Madeleine opened to find — wrapped round a laundry receipt from Truscott and Musgrave — a necklace. A diamond necklace, each stone set in an intricately wrought halo of platinum, which her sensible husband — after a gasp of incredulity — fastened without too many questions around her lovely throat.

It was in an immaculate dress shirt from his laundry basket that Rom, delayed by a blocked feed-pipe on the Amethyst, entered his box in the Teatro Amazonas and saw — without undue excitement — the curtain rise on Act One of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Harriet.

‘You cannot be going to be sick again, ’arriette,’ said Marie-Claude, exasperated, turning from the long mirror where the girls sat in their tutus whitening their arms, putting on false eyelashes, applying Cupid’s bows to their mouths.

‘I can—’ said Harriet, and fled.

Act One had been called, but Act One is no business of the swans and the girls still had half an hour to complete their toilettes. It was a half-hour which Harriet did not expect to live through.

‘For heaven’s sake, there are eighteen swans in this production. Also two big swans. Also those idiot cygnets with their pas de quatre,’ said Kirstin when Harriet returned, green and shivering. ‘You don’t matter! Why don’t you tell yourself that?’

‘I know I don’t matter,’ said Harriet — and indeed no one could have lived for eighteen years in Scroope Terrace and not known that. ‘If I get it right, I don’t matter. But if I get it wrong… all those people who trusted me… Monsieur Dubrov and everyone… making the company look silly.’

‘You won’t get it wrong. I’m in front of you most of the time and when it isn’t me, it’s Olga,’ said Marie-Claude, piling up her golden hair and jabbing pins through the circlet of feathers in a way which would have driven the wardrobe mistress into fits. ‘Merde,’ she said softly — and indeed the head-dresses had not travelled well. She turned and dabbed a spot of red into each corner of Harriet’s eyes. ‘There is no need to whiten yourself. You look like a ghost.’

‘I must say, Harriet, such fear is excessive,’ said Kirstin. ‘What would your Roman emperor say?’

But for once the thought of the great Marcus Aurelius did little for Harriet. The famous Stoic had experienced most of the troubles of mankind, but it was unlikely that he had ever made his debut before a thousand people as an enchanted swan.

If Dubrov’s newest swan was nervous to the point of prostration, his ballerina assoluta was hardly in a state of calm.

‘Why didn’t you put it on the posters, that this was my farewell appearance?’ she yelled at Dubrov. ‘I asked you to do it — and you promised. A simple thing like that and you can’t do it!’

She was already dressed in her glittering white tutu. Beneath the shining little crown her gaunt face, trapped and desperate, was that of an old woman.

‘I will announce it after the performance, dousha.’

He did not waste breath telling her to relax, to be quiet. There was nothing to be done about her terror; she went on stage each time as if she was going to her death. All he could do was to be there, pray that the hundred instructions he had given to his underlings would be carried out and let her rage at him.

‘That cow Legnani! The first thing I shall do when I am retired is to go to Milan and slap her face!’

He sighed. Legnani, one of the world’s great ballerinas, had been the first to introduce the thirty-two fouettés which make Act Three of Swan Lake so fiendishly difficult to dance, and Simonova’s vendetta against her was unending.

She stopped pacing, came over, clutched him with feverish arms. ‘But this is the last tour, isn’t it, Sashka? Soon it will be over for good? Soon now we shall go and live in Cremorra and grow—’

But at that moment — fortunately for Dubrov, who was in no state to discuss the cultivation of vegetables — her final call came.

For Simonova, fine and experienced dancer that she was, the terror ended the moment that she went on stage. Alas, the same could not be said for Harriet.

Rom was not a balletomane. From his mother he had inherited a passion for the human voice and though he had refused all the other dignities that people tried to thrust on him, he had accepted the chairmanship of the Opera House trustees. To Rom fell the task of cajoling reluctant prima donnas from Europe; of arranging the entertainment for the cast. It was he who had taken six actors from a Spanish company to Follina to be nursed when they were stricken with yellow fever. But it was opera that held his heart and as the curtain went up on Prince Siegfried’s birthday revels, the plight of this young man — Maximov in silver tights and straining cod-piece — left him relatively unmoved.

Act One is something of a prologue. The Prince is bidden by his parents to marry, but feels disinclined. Pretty girls come up to dance with him and he supports their arabesques with the resigned look of a conscientious meat porter steadying a side of beef. His mother gives him a cross-bow… the eerie music of the swan motif is heard and the Prince decides to go hunting. The curtain falls.

The second act is different. A moonlit glade… romantic trees… a lake… And presently, Simonova gliding on — fluttering her arms, still freeing herself from the water. A fine dancer — Rom had heard her spoken of on a visit to Paris and she deserved her praise. The Prince appears and sees her… he is amazed. She tells him in absurd but effective mime that she is an enchanted princess, doomed to take the shape of a swan for ever unless a prince will truly love her. I will love you, signals Maximov; I will… They go off together…

And now to muffled ‘Ohs’ and ‘Ahs’ from the audience, there entered the swans. In his box the Prefect of Police, de Silva, leaned forward avidly, to be jerked back by the iron hand of his wife. The Mayor, squeezed like a small black currant between the bun-like figures of the Baltic princesses, smiled happily.

And Rom picked up his high-precision Zeiss opera glasses and fixed them on the stage.

As a youth, Rom had never doubted that he would be faithful to Isobel. The whole strange concept of a Christian marriage with its oaths, its unreasonable expectation that one man and one woman can find in each other all that the human heart desires, had found an echo in his ardent and romantic soul. When Isobel betrayed him, he put away these thoughts — and the kindness of Madeleine de la Tour had been for him a bridge to another and equally ancient tradition: that of woman as an amused and amusing source of pleasure. Of women, since he had come to the Amazon, Rom asked that they should be beautiful, willing — and know the score. And perfectly fulfilling these demands were the girls of the theatre who touched down here — bringing their experience, their flair and talent for the game of dalliance. Gabriella d’Aosta, a singer in the chorus of La Traviata, with her black curls and great boudoir eyes… Little Millie Trant from Milwaukee, who had played the part of the maid in a mindless American farce — a delicious girl who had extracted more jewellery from him than he had ever bestowed on a human female and been worth every carat… And the russet-haired, barefoot dancer, the poor man’s Isadora Duncan, whose high-mindedness had ended so delightfully after dark.

So now, though with considerably less excitement than in his former days, Rom raked his opera glasses down the line of swans.

In every chorus line there is one beauty and there now, fourth from the left and dancing with competent precision, she was. A blonde, surprising in a troupe of Russian girls, with big velvety eyes, a lovely mouth and perfectly rounded limbs. But as Rom followed her along the line of swans — nice girls, perfectly in step, doing rather fetching emboîtés — something peculiar happened. His extremely expensive opera glasses seemed to take on a life of their own, moving again and again to the left of the lovely creature he was pursuing in order to home in on the serious, entirely ordinary face of the girl beside her: a brown-haired, grave-eyed girl, the third from the left.

Only why? She danced with grace and musicality, but that was certainly not what had drawn him. Rather there seemed to emanate from her some extreme emotion: one that drew from him an instinctive feeling of protection and concern.

The swans had come to rest upstage, facing the audience, leaning their heads on their arms. The head of the serious brown-haired girl leaned very tenderly — she cared about the fate of her Queen — but Rom, watching her, saw now a faint but unmistakable trembling of her chin. She was frightened, very frightened indeed, and in an unexpected burst of empathy he saw what she was seeing — the infinite yawning gap of the auditorium with its blurred rows of potential executioners.

Her debut, then? Unlikely — Russian ballet girls were always put on the stage early… yet he felt it must be so. He tried to imagine her receiving a sudden summons in some dark, snowbound apartment in St Petersburg or bidding her family goodbye in a wooden house in Kiev, but none of the images fitted, nor did a glance at the programme help. She might be Tatiana Volkoffsky, or Lydia Pigorsky or Natasha Alexandrovna — and she might not.

The idiot huntsmen appeared and threatened to shoot the swans and it was with considerable relief that Rom saw Simonova return and stand protectively in front of them, banishing the huntsmen with a great sweep of her arms. The third swan from the left, with her troubled eyes, had quite enough to put up with without getting shot.

Though he dutifully continued to study the blonde in the waltz that followed, Rom found himself returning rather more often than he intended to the girl beside her, checking up on her progress as might a good shepherd with a slightly wounded lamb. She was doing well; he could feel her confidence growing. She had, it occurred to him, rather a lovely throat.

But now the stage cleared, the slow, sweet strains of the solo violin rose from the orchestra — and there began the great pas de deux of love and plighted troth that for many people is Swan Lake.

Simonova had willed herself into youth. As Maximov — no meat porter now, but a manly and noble Prince — raised her from the ground, she pirouetted slowly beneath his arm… leaned against him in arabesque penchée… developpéd forward to throw herself back with total trust against his chest. He lifted her high above his head, put her down again to revolve slowly en pointe, her free foot fluttering in little battements. When he held her it was by the wrists, leaving her hands free for their poignant, wing-like draping.

Thunderous applause greeted the end of the adage and the swans returned. To Rom it seemed that his little brown-haired swan was feeling distinctly better and he might have felt free once more to pursue ‘the beauty’ had he not seen at that moment a new and real danger that threatened her. A single feather had come loose from the circlet round her head and, still held at its base, trembled disconcertingly over one of her eyes.

The unfairness of this shocked Rom. She had begun to conquer her fear; she was dancing beautifully — and now this! Following her as she hopped and circled about the stage, he saw how manfully she attempted to avert disaster. Again and again her lower lip came out as she tried to blow away the offending feather, but without success.

The music was increasing in speed; the evil sorcerer, Rothbart, was making himself felt and Siegfried was hurtling about between the swans, seeking his Queen… He found her and now as dawn broke, they danced their farewell while the swans stood sadly by, their arms crossed over their breasts.

Not much longer to go, Rom said to her silently. Hang on. But as she stood there, a gust of air from the passing soloists completed the fell deed; the feather dislodged itself, fluttered upwards, descended again… and settled on her small and serious nose.

At which point, most understandably, she sneezed.

Rom might allow himself to enjoy his box alone during the performance, detesting the whispers and chatter that accompanied so much theatre-going, but in the interval he did his social duty and, making his way to the refreshment lounge, was soon the centre of a group of friends — being stared at through lorgnettes by ladies who thrived on gossip about his affairs. Mrs Lehmann, permanently chagrined since he had made it clear that her obese and insufferable daughter was not destined to become mistress of Follina, nevertheless came up to tell him that he had done well to bring the Dubrov Company to Manaus. The Curtis twins, their hair up for the first time, edged closer to the exotic Mr Verney, with whom, since he had procured lemonade for them at the Consulate fête, they were officially in love, and were reproved by their tight-lipped mama.

‘I should have thought you would know better than to make eyes at a man who all but murdered a fellow countryman!’

‘He didn’t murder Mr Carruthers,’ said Mary. ‘He just threw him in the river.’

‘Mr Carruthers had been ill-treating his Indians horribly,’ said Alice. ‘He tied them to ant-heaps and—’

‘That’s quite enough,’ hissed Mrs Curtis, dragging her daughters past the group surrounding Verney. No doubt they would all be going on to the party at Follina on the following day, breaking the Sabbath. An orgy it would be, with every kind of carry-on. She herself would not dream of setting foot in the place, even if he should once deign to invite her! Everyone knew about his morals: opera singers and actresses! Even now he had probably picked out some girl on the stage who would stay behind when the others left and turn up next morning in the Amethyst with bags under her eyes and a pocket full of jewels. Disgusting, it was — absolutely disgusting!

‘What did you think of the little blonde… you know, the fourth from the end?’ asked de Silva, speaking hurriedly, for his wife would return at any moment from the ladies’ cloakroom.

‘Charming,’ said Rom, smiling at his friend. ‘Though I think we should reserve judgement until tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ de Silva sighed. What must it be like to know that any girl you wanted could be had for the asking? What was it about Rom? Other men were almost as wealthy, though few matched him for sheer nerve. Was it that corsair look of his, or the stories of his physical endurance — those mad journeys alone in the Firefly? Or just that he didn’t really care one way or another?

Count Sternov arrived, bear-like and entranced, and the conversation changed to Russian.

‘She is incomparable, Simonova!’ said the Count. ‘Incomparable! Sofka thinks her interpretation is finer than Kchessinskaya’s, don’t you, coucoushka?’

The Countess, splendid in a brocade kaftan and lopsided tiara, nodded. ‘Kchessinskaya is more girlish, more frightened — but Simonova has the grandeur, the pathos… and boshti moy, those extended arabesques!’

‘Ah, but will she manage the fouettés? She is no longer young.’

‘She will manage them,’ declared the Countess.

Young Mrs Bennett, in her blue silk gown, passed them and smiled shyly at Mr Verney. He was far too grand and important to speak to her, of course; Jock was only an accountant in the timber-exporting firm of which Verney was director. But to her surprise, Verney not only bowed but came forward to address her, for he had remembered the shy little boy with the blond curls who had been everywhere with his mother.

‘I was wondering if you and your husband would like to come to the party I’m giving at Follina tomorrow? It will be rather noisy, I expect, but you would be very welcome.’

‘Oh!’ Her big blue eyes, so like Peter’s, lit up with pleasure. ‘Thank you very much! I’ll go and tell my husband.’

A party at Follina — an invitation for which the Lehmanns and the Roderiguez and that stuffy Mrs Curtis would have given their eyes! She hurried away, and for a few hours the small ghost who haunted her, waking and sleeping, was laid to rest.

But Nemesis now awaited Verney as he stood relaxed and at ease with his glass of champagne. The Mayor arrived and informed him that the Baltic princesses had requested he be presented to them.

‘Ah, a summons!’ Rom put down his glass, but as he prepared to follow the Mayor he turned and asked casually, ‘Did anyone notice the little girl in the corps that sneezed? Third from the left as they came on?’

De Silva shook his head; so did the Count and Countess and the other men standing by.

‘I didn’t hear anyone sneeze,’ said Sternov. ‘I don’t see how one could with all that row’

‘Odd,’ said Rom.

Very odd, he thought, following the Mayor to the President’s box. For it seemed to him that that small sneeze was what Act Two had rather been about.

Act Three is entirely swan-less. Prince Siegfried’s parents give a great ball to which the princesses of many lands are invited, in the hope that one of them will catch his eye. The hope is vain. They dance for him, but the Prince says no to all of them. Then the evil Rothbart brings in his daughter, whom he has enchanted so as to resemble Odette. Dazzled by her virtuosity (the thirty-two fouettés!) and believing her to be Odette, the Prince promises to marry her and it is at this moment — and a very poignant moment it is — that the ‘real’ Odette appears at the window, a despairing shape fluttering in anguish to show the Prince that she has been betrayed.

It is in the last act that the swans reappear and they do so rising rather effectively from a bed of mist. At least, they do if the dry ice works, but dry ice on the Amazon is apt to be capricious. Thus some swans rose out of the mist; others, notably the swan that had sneezed, seemed likely to remain permanently immersed in it. Yet when the stage cleared and her serious face and graceful arms emerged, it appeared to Rom that she was very much improved in spirits. The little pucker between her eyes had gone and the rest of her feathers seemed to be secure. And considerably relieved, he lowered his glasses and prepared to watch Simonova dance her farewell pas de deux of forgiveness and reconciliation with Maximov before vanishing — this time for ever — into the lake.

The curtain fell on an ovation. Simonova was recalled again and again. Bouquets were showered on her: the bouquet ordered by the Opera House trustees, the bouquet of Count Sternov, of the Mayor… A large water-lily thrown by an admirer hit her in the chest like a cannon-ball and she did not flinch. The gallery yelled for Maximov…

‘A triumph, ma chère,’ said Dubrov, waiting in the wings with her wrap.

‘Not bad, eh?’ she agreed. ‘Fifteen curtain calls! I was thinking, Sashka — let’s announce my retirement at the end of the tour, what do you think? Right now it might be rather a disappointment for them.’

Swans do not take curtain calls. Harriet, back in the dressing-room, smiled like a Botticelli angel and said wonderingly, ‘I’m alive. I’m still alive!’ And then, ‘Do you think anybody heard me sneeze?’

‘Nobody heard you sneeze,’ said Marie-Claude, who knew a great deal but not quite everything. ‘And now please hurry, because tomorrow there is to be a very splendid party and I want some sleep.’