Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

7

The real Francis Powerscourt was pacing about his drawing room in Markham Square. He was expecting a state visit from Lady Ripon and the prospect did not make his heart sing with joy. Lady Lucy had deserted him, saying that she would be going shopping in Sloane Street and trusted that the dreadful woman, as she referred to Lady Ripon, would be gone on her return.

‘I don’t expect it’ll take long. I’m not sure if I’ll be treated like the tenant of one of the farms on her estate or like a junior footman who has committed some unspeakable crime, like setting the forks out in the wrong order at a dinner party.’

‘Lady Ripon, my lord.’

As she advanced into hostile territory, she managed to secure Powerscourt’s favourite armchair by the side of the fire.

‘Have you solved the murder mystery yet, Powerscourt? And if not, why not?’

Powerscourt protested that they had had little time so far, and that the language difficulty was proving to be a problem.

‘I’ve always found, Powerscourt, in my experience in society, which is considerably wider than yours, that if you speak English loudly and often enough to these foreign persons, they will understand in the end.’

‘Doesn’t seem to work with the Russians, Lady Ripon. Perhaps it’s the different alphabet and so on. Makes things even more difficult; a different sort of language, I think you’ll find.’

‘Stuff and nonsense. You haven’t been trying hard enough. So you haven’t solved the mystery and located the murderer. Pretty poor, if you ask me. So what exactly have you been doing?’

‘Well, Lady Ripon. .’ Powerscourt had now established that in the Lady Ripon pecking order, he was the butler, personally responsible for some vast disaster on the catering front. ‘We have talked to the corps de ballet through the good offices of Natasha Shaporova, whom I believe you know.’

‘I do know Mrs Shaporova, and I have heard reports of these rather intimate gatherings where information is passed around with the tea. But they can’t have done it, Lord Powerscourt. Even you must see that. They were on stage at the time. Were you talking of Mrs Shaporova’s kind offer to help, Powerscourt? Are you carrying on with that young woman? It has been suggested to me, I have to report. It would explain your tardiness in detection. Are you carrying on with Natasha Shaporova, Powerscourt?’

‘I am not, Lady Ripon, and I regard it as a gross breach of my hospitality to even suggest it in my house.’

‘Oh well, I suspect you’re far too old for her, Powerscourt. What, pray, are your plans for the future in this investigation?’

‘We shall continue our work, Lady Ripon. I shall, of course, inform you of any developments.’

‘I happen to have with me a most interesting development, as you choose to call it. I have in my bag — ’ a capacious vehicle it was too — ‘an invitation from the Duke of Marlborough for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to perform two or three short ballets at Blenheim Palace, one for the Duke and his friends in the Great Hall, and the other in the open air for the surrounding populace. And a generous fee! What do you think of that?’

Powerscourt wondered if the real purpose of this visit hadn’t been to show off what was in her handbag. ‘I shall certainly attend, Lady Ripon, it sounds most interesting.’

‘You will have to find your place among the agricultural labourers and the poor of Woodstock, Powerscourt. I shall take great care over the guest list for the palace itself. Maybe you’ll find more enlightenment among the rabble in the park than you have been able to do so far in the people of the Ballets Russes.’

Word reached Diaghilev in one of the dressing rooms of the Royal Opera House. There were a couple of cleaned and freshly ironed shirts to the side of the dressing table and a long purple scarf hanging on the back of the door. There was the usual chaos of make-up jars, cleansing lotion, cold creams and all the apparatus needed to make up a ballerina for her performance. Diaghilev and his choreographer, and Bakst his principal designer, were discussing a new ballet to be performed in Paris the following year. The note was handed to Diaghilev. He passed it round.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘These English must think we are some travelling circus, pitching our tents here and there as the will takes us. Or travelling monks, maybe, processing through Siberian villages with some mystery plays. What do you think, Fokine?’

‘Well, Sergei Pavlovich, I had the good fortune to be briefed by the Duke’s man of business last night. But his French was very bad, so I am not clear at all on many points.’

‘What is this Blenheim Palace? Where is it? I thought the only palace here was that little one they call Buckingham with the toy soldiers marching up and down.’

‘I believe,’ Fokine was scratching his head now, ‘that Blenheim was a battle in southern Germany that ended in an English victory. The General was made Duke of Marlborough and they gave him a palace as a thank-you present. The house was built in the early seventeen hundreds and is considered to be one of the finest in England.’

‘Pshaw,’ said Diaghilev. ‘They speak of a performance in the open air for the surrounding peasantry. How are we to do that, in heaven’s name? I think we should say no. Bakst, what is your view?’

‘There are obviously great difficulties. But five thousand pounds is a great deal of money. And we have always argued, from the earliest times, that art should be brought to as many people as possible. We could at least aspire to that here.’

Bakst had always suspected that when Diaghilev referred to the widest possible audience he was referring to the workers by brain rather than the workers by hand. He, Diaghilev, really wanted the intelligentsia of St Petersburg and Paris to rejoice at his talents, rather than members of some mighty proletariat who travelled on foot or by bus rather than by barouche or taxi.

‘The money is just a drop in the ocean,’ Diaghilev said rather sadly. The gossip about his being on the edge of bankruptcy was pretty close to the mark. What really irked him was the prospect of leaving the Savoy Hotel and its luxury, high-class food available at all hours of the day and night.

‘Is this place what we would call a palace, Fokine?’

‘I do not think, if it is anything like the Buckingham, it will be what we could call a palace at all. It sounded to me like a superior sort of hunting lodge with great military honours displayed on the inside.’

‘And they expect us to put on our art in a hunting lodge for five thousand pounds in all the uncertainties of the damned English weather? What do we do if it rains, in heaven’s name? The colour would start to run out of your bloody costumes, Bakst, wouldn’t it?’

Bakst laughed. ‘Sergei Pavlovich, it would be a lasting reminder of the impermanence of art, the transient nature of beauty.’

‘Do you think the bloody peasants will appreciate that? I bet their smocks don’t disintegrate in the rain. I don’t want to accept the offer, gentlemen. But I don’t want to upset any of the English aristocracy. Some of them have enormous incomes from coal and investments. They could bail out our poor company and not notice they’d done it.’ Diaghilev picked up the purple scarf and let it run through his fingers. ‘Would these colours hold in the rain, Bakst? Don’t tell me. I know what we are going to do. Fokine, can you get back in touch with the Duke’s man of business? Tell him we are honoured by his invitation. It would be a great tribute to the Ballets Russes to perform in such an august location. Lay it on with a trowel, Fokine, you know how to do that. Just tell him the money is wrong.’

‘What do you want me to say? Eight? Ten, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Let’s not beat about the bush, gentlemen. Great art has its price. Tell him twenty-five thousand pounds.’

Captain Yuri Gorodetsky of the London branch of the Russian Secret Service, the Okhrana, had always suffered from anxieties about the telephone. There was nothing rational about his concerns — he had even read through a manual for one of the wretched objects and understood how it worked. But he wondered, often last thing at night after a couple of hefty swigs at the vodka bottle, if other voices might come out of it, Peter the Great come to upbraid the inhabitants about their slowness in building his great city St Petersburg, Tolstoy on the line urging all those connected by those strange wires to abandon the sins of the flesh and join him in the universe of love on the way to some provincial railway station. His tidings this morning, as he waited for the connection to General Kilyagin in Paris, were undoubtedly out of the ordinary run of secret-service intelligence.

‘Gorodetsky, you old rogue,’ the voice of his master boomed out of the phone with considerable force, as if the General himself was one of those night-time phantoms. ‘What news of the Bolsheviks from Bethnal Green?’

‘Good morning, General, the news is most unusual.’

‘What do you mean unusual?’

‘I mean, I don’t think anybody could have predicted it!’

‘Out with it, man. Have those pocket-sized London Lenins robbed the banks as well as changing their money?’

‘It’s nothing like that, General. They simply ran away.’

‘What do you mean? Did they never even get as far as the bloody banks?’

‘You’re nearly there, General.’

‘They got as far as the bloody banks and couldn’t face going in?’

‘Exactly so, General. Only one of them had ever been in a bank before and that had to do with his mother’s funeral.’

‘Hold on a minute, Captain. Did our funereal friend at least make it inside the doors?’

‘On the contrary. His experience deserted him, or maybe it didn’t. He told the leader afterwards that he was so overcome by the memories of his mother’s death that he started running back to the East End as fast as he could go.’

‘Do we have eye witnesses to this tragic story?’

‘Mostly the head porters, sir, the men on guard at the entry to the banks. They’re pretty formidable fellows and they claim they intimidated the revolutionaries so much that they didn’t dare go inside.’

‘Revolutionaries be damned!’ The General was in full boom now. ‘England is safe from the Communist International and all the other crackpot bodies these fellows belong to! It’s as if the sans-culottes and the rest of the Paris mob took one look at the Bastille and simply ran away. It’s unthinkable. Just imagine French history without the storming of the Bastille — they’d probably still have a bloody monarchy, for God’s sake. This is the best news I’ve heard for a month, Captain. Are they regrouping, the Bolsheviks from Bethnal Green? Planning another assault by running away from the Bank of England with those pink-coated porters guarding the doors and the gold?’

‘I understand there is a plan to try again, sir. They’re going to go into a lot of smaller banks with very small deposits or to open accounts for themselves.’

‘Sounds to me like they’re joining the capitalist system, Captain. Any word in London about the ghastly Lenin with that bloody beard, in his Polish exile?’

‘Not as yet, sir. I think they’re not going to tell Lenin and his people for a while, if they tell him at all. One of the revolutionaries pointed out to his fellows that Lenin wasn’t doing much for the revolution just now, holed up in that café in Cracow reading newspapers and writing pamphlets. That’s hardly the first wave of the proletarian vanguard is it?’

‘“The opening scene, a green forest glade of tall willows and beeches, joined by a rocky bridge, and in the distance the red glow of the setting sun. In the semi-darkness, a strange band of wood sprites, with olive-green bodies and large pointed ears emerged from the shadows, some hopping half upright, some gliding on all fours.”’

It was breakfast time in Markham Square. Powerscourt was reading from the arts pages of his newspaper.

‘What on earth is that, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy Powerscourt, who knew precisely what it was. She had been dreading this moment for days now.

‘There’s more,’ said her husband, ‘loads more. . “Karsavina was dressed in a violet pleated peplum, decorated with silver leaves, her long hair loose and hanging down her back. There was one inimitable gesture, which made the whole ballet worth while: the burying of her face in the crook of her arm, a moving demonstration of her grief when Narcissus disdained her love. Nijinsky wore a fair Grecian wig, a white chlamys with one shoulder bare, and green and gold sandals with the legs cross-gartered.”

‘We know somebody else who was cross-gartered, Lucy, do we not? And his dress made clear that Malvolio had lost his wits at the end of Twelfth Night. Has London lost its wits over these Russian dancers, Lucy?’

The dancers of the Ballets Russes had conquered Covent Garden and Lady Ripon’s little theatre at Coombe. Now they were laying siege to Markham Square and Lord Francis Powerscourt — a reluctant convert, if, indeed, convert he was.

‘I think that must be Narcissus, Francis, that ballet you were reading about. Your sister Burke and her daughters were raving to me about it only yesterday.’

‘Narcissus be damned,’ said her husband. ‘I said I didn’t care for it before they arrived. I still don’t care for it now it’s here, with all this fuss.’

Lady Lucy did not tell her Francis, but she had tickets for a box that very evening at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, entry despatched only yesterday by Natasha Shaporova, who seemed to have access to innumerable tickets, most of them, it had to be admitted, in the more expensive parts of the theatre. Lady Lucy had not yet worked out how to lure her husband into the building, but she was sure she could think of something.

The blinds were drawn in the back room of Messrs Neeskens and Sons, diamond and fine jewellers of Antwerp. Mathias Neeskens was an old man now, his eyes so weak that his grandchildren felt it was unfair to play hide-and-seek games with him as he could see so poorly. He had on his thickest glasses as he checked again through Mr Killick’s haul.

‘These are the finest jewels I have seen for years,’ the old man said. ‘You were right to bring them to me. My son Jacob runs the business now and he has a wider and younger clientele than me. But there is still nothing like a glittering diamond to cheer up an old lady. It makes them feel their dancing days may not yet be over and that it is worth dressing up once more.’

‘Do you think you will be able to place some of them?’

‘I believe I could place a fair number with my clients here. They come from all over Europe, as you know. We have a partner we do a lot of business with in Vienna. They are nearly as fond of jewels there as they are in St Petersburg. You said you believed there was a Russian connection, I believe?’

‘I did, there was talk of a bank in Moscow and a grandfather. The bank is well known and very respectable.’

‘I do not think these gems came from Moscow. These are jewels to adorn the aristocratic ladies of St Petersburg, not the wives of the rich merchants of Moscow. Jewels usually follow a king or a tsar or an emperor in Europe, as they hold the most glittering balls. It is different in America, my nephew Joshua tells me. He is on loan to an old firm of jewel merchants in New York before he returns to join our business here. He says that over there the most glittering jewels always go to those whose husbands or lovers have the most glittering bank accounts. It must make life easier, don’t you think?’

‘Indeed, Mr Neeskens. Now tell me your plan of action. I came here to place myself in your hands, after all.’

‘Thank you. You were wise to do so. Tomorrow Jacob sets off to Vienna on a train so early he will hardly go to bed at all. I shall transact my business from here. For yourself I propose that you set off for Munich. I shall furnish you with the name of a firm we trust in that great city. They have wide contacts across Germany. We shall be in touch three evenings from now.’

Powerscourt might have been unwilling to visit Diaghilev’s creations, but the same morning the Ballets Russes came to him just as he was about to go out.

‘Monsieur Fokine of the Ballets Russes, to see you, my lord.’ Rhys the Powerscourt butler coughed his usual cough when announcing visitors, ‘Monsieur Michel Fokine.’

Fokine was a tall slim young man with dark hair and a dazzling smile.

‘My dear Lord Powerscourt, please don’t get up, and pardon me for calling on you out of the blue,’ he began, settling down on the edge of the Powerscourt sofa and disturbing the twins’ cat.

‘How very nice to see you, Mr Fokine. The Ballets Russes are the talk of London,’ said Powerscourt, waiting for the young man to declare his business.

‘I have come to apologize for the lack of cooperation between our company and yourself and your associates, Lord Powerscourt. All I can say is that Diaghilev is a hard and occasionally erratic taskmaster. His thoughts are always on the ballets. I know he regards the murder as an irritant, a flea to divert him from his real purposes.’

‘And what would you say they were, those purposes, Mr Fokine?’

‘Well, Sergei Pavlovich wants to create the finest ballet company the world has ever seen. And it will be a Russian ballet company, for he is very conscious of the country he comes from, even if his creations are always seen in the lands of others. He does not work alone, Diaghilev, in spite of his love of publicity — which he says is always about the ballet and never about him. There are a group of people — writers, artists, musicians, set designers and costume designers, composers and so on — who form his inner circle. He leads but he always brings them with him. He has a craving for the new. He is, if you like, a dictator of whim, a dictator of passing fancies, of awful temper and a gift for making enemies where he need not and then being reconciled to them. I think he is the greatest impresario the world has ever seen. I know, for example, that I too will be out of fashion one day for Diaghilev and his ballets. Then I will also be cast on the scrapheap of Diaghilev’s ambitions, like so many before me.’

‘And what would you say is the reason for the Ballets Russes’ success?’

Fokine suddenly began to pace up and down the Powerscourt drawing room, as if he were Powerscourt himself.

‘Forgive me,’ said the young man, ‘I often think better walking up and down. Let me put it this way. Suppose your house here, Lord Powerscourt, is the world of ballet before Diaghilev came along. The composer lives in the basement. The librettist is in the attic along with the corps de ballet. The producer is in the other half of the basement. I, the choreographer, am in your study with the telephone I saw on my way upstairs. The set designer lives on the first floor along with the scene shifters. The other choreographer is on the second floor. So is Diaghilev. Nobody speaks to each other. Each prepares his part in the performance without any contact at all with the other elements. That is what Diaghilev changed. They may all still live in this house, but they talk to each other all the time now; there are non-stop meetings to build an integrated whole, here in your drawing room. It’s this cooperation, this cross-fertilization of ideas, that has made the ballet what it is.’

‘Were you surprised by the murder, Monsieur Fokine?’

‘Of course I was, Lord Powerscourt. We all were. Jealousy, feuds, factions, temporary ganging up on somebody for no apparent reason; all these are commonplace in a group of people forced to live very closely together for long periods of time. I expect you could find similar displays of emotion in any other similar organization. But murder is something new. After an interval of six months or so, I expect Diaghilev to order somebody to compose the music for an opera about a murder, only it will take place in the seraglio of some Eastern potentate, with dramatic colours to be provided by Bakst and dance choreographed by me. The murder, if you like,’ here Fokine stopped walking and resumed his seat, ‘was the culmination of things that had gone before, but things that had always run their course without the terrible outcome of death on the stage.’

‘So the death will not have come as a complete surprise?’

‘That depends on how old you are, Lord Powerscourt. For the young girls who make my life difficult, it will have come as a complete shock. Many, I’m sure, will be wondering if their mamas or papas are going to arrive in London suddenly to take them home. I do not think they would want to go — the murder adds a certain spice to life. It gives people something else to talk about after Diaghilev’s affair with Nijinsky or whether the company is bankrupt or not.’

‘I was going to come to the bankruptcy in a moment, actually. But first, let me ask you this. Remember that we have only talked to the girls of the corps de ballet. The young men, it would seem, do not have the same appetite for tea from the samovar and the finest English cakes as the girls.’

‘I wish I could help you there,’ said the young choreographer, ‘but the night of the murder I was waiting in the wings to make sure nothing went wrong. They were my ballets, if you like. So I wouldn’t have noticed anything happening offstage. But there is one thing you should know.’ Fokine paused for a moment to brush a speck of dust off his immaculate trousers. ‘The girls would never know it because they never see it.’

‘And what might that be?’

‘That whole area backstage — there’s nobody looking after it during the performance, no porter, nobody from the Royal Opera House staff. I’ve often wandered round there when one of my ballets is on next — I’m a great prowler, as you saw just now. There are all kinds of people scurrying about: dressers, make-up artists, people bringing messages for one of the stars, new props being delivered, new costumes. It could be anything or anybody.’

‘I do have one question for you, Monsieur Fokine, and let me tell you how grateful I am for your visit here and the help you have already provided. I hope I may ask you more questions as the investigation develops. And I presume that you would not want Diaghilev to know of our association?’

‘Diaghilev would have a major tantrum if he knew I was in touch with you, Lord Powerscourt. He is a possessive man and I, for the moment, am one of his possessions. Shouting, expulsion from the ballet, wish that I’d never been born, what a hopeless choreographer I am — that would just be for starters.’

‘My question is this,’ Powerscourt said, ‘and it may not at first sight have much to do with the case in hand. But it may do. Is the Ballets Russes going bankrupt? Is Diaghilev — for the moment, anyway — completely broke? Bankruptcy has a startling effect — it ricochets around the place, crashing into all sorts of unexpected people and places. That information could be most helpful.’

‘I’ll do my best, my very best for you, Lord Powerscourt. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind knowing about a bankruptcy myself.’