A Company of Swans

3

What Marcus Aurelius had begun by causing Harriet to question the meaning of the word ‘good’, Henry with his trust and optimism completed. She determined to escape and to do so competently, and casting about for ways and means she remembered a girl called Betsy Fairfield who had been briefly at school with her in Cambridge, but now lived in London.

Betsy was pretty and a little silly and exceedingly good-natured. Harriet had written some essays for her and lent her some history notes and a friendship had developed. Now Betsy, who was a few months older than Harriet, was ‘doing the season’; she was already going to balls and was to be presented at court. Her mother was an easygoing, kindly society lady who had been kind to Harriet.

The afternoon after the visit to Stavely, accordingly, Harriet — finding herself alone — unhooked what Aunt Louisa still referred to as ‘the instrument’ from the dark brown wall of the hallway, asked for Betsy’s number and was eventually put through to her friend.

‘Betsy, this is Harriet.’

‘Harriet? How lovely!’ Shrieks of perfectly genuine if transient enthusiasm emitted from the cheerful Betsy. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m all right. Listen, Betsy, I want you to do me a very great favour. Will you?’

‘Yes, of course I will. Goodness, I always remember that essay you wrote for me about the Corn Laws. And the one about the “bedchamber question”. I got an “A” in both — the only time ever!’

‘Well, listen; I want you to get your mother to write a note to my Aunt Louisa, asking me to stay. I’d like her to write it straight away and I want her to ask me for three weeks. Do you think she would?’

‘Of course she would! Will you really come? That would be absolutely marvellous! You can help me with my court curtsey; you were always so good at dancing. Poor Hetty’s got water on the knee and we don’t know whether—’

It was a while before Harriet could interrupt the spate of words in order to say, ‘And Betsy, when your mother’s written the note could you telephone me yourself to arrange the journey? Ask for me personally? Would you do that? I promise not to be a nuisance.’

‘Goodness, you won’t be a nuisance. Mother really likes you; she’s often said—’ But at this point Betsy recollected what her mother had said about Professor Morton’s treatment of his daughter and the conversation was terminated.

Betsy was as good as her word and her mother wrote a charming note to Louisa requesting Harriet’s presence in London. That Mrs Fairfield’s uncle was a viscount helped to determine the issue; that and the fact that since the night of the unfortunate dinner-party, Harriet had not really been herself. Betsy rang up the day after the note arrived and when they had spoken, Harriet informed Aunt Louisa that the Fairfields would meet the 10.37 from Cambridge on Thursday morning. She packed her own suitcase and her aunt, reflecting on the fact that they would be saving on Harriet’s food for three weeks, actually suggested to the Professor that he might care to give his daughter a guinea, so that she would not be entirely dependent on her friend — and this he did. And so, at a quarter-past ten on Thursday morning, Harriet was assisted into a ‘Ladies Only’ carriage at Cambridge Station and put in charge of the guard.

That there was no one to meet her at King’s Cross was not surprising, since she had told Betsy that she would be arriving on the following day. Harriet gave up her ticket and posted two letters she had written in the privacy of her bedroom. One was to her aunt announcing her safe arrival at the Fairfields’; the other was to the Fairfields and was full of apologies and regrets. Her father’s cousin had been taken seriously ill in Harrogate and they were all leaving immediately for the north… She hoped so much to be able to join them later but at the moment, as they would understand, her aunt did not feel that she could spare her… She would post this letter on her way through London and remained their disappointed but affectionate Harriet.

This done, she stood bravely in line for a cab and when her turn came, gave the driver the address of the Century Theatre in Bloomsbury.

There were seventeen swans, an uneven number and a pity, but the mother of a girl Dubrov had engaged from the Lumley School of Dance in Regent Street had gone to Dr Mudie’s Library and looked up the Amazon in Chambers’ Encyclopaedia — and that had been that.

Now, in the dirty, draughty and near-derelict theatre in Bloomsbury he had hired for the last week prior to the Company’s departure, Dubrov was watching his maître de ballet rehearsing the corps in Act Two of Swan Lake. The moonlit act… the white act… the act in which the ravishing Swan Queen, Odette, is discovered by Prince Siegfried among her protecting and encircling swans…

The Swan Queen, however, was at the dentist and the premier danseur, Maximov, who played the Prince, was not on call until four o’clock. It was the swans that were at issue and here all was far from well. For from the swans in Swan Lake the choreographer demands not individuality or self-expression but a relentless and perfect unison. Above all, these doomed and feathered creatures are supposed to move as one.

‘Again!’ said Grisha wearily, turning his white Picasso clown’s face up to the heavens. ‘From the second entry. Remember heads down on the échappés and when you take hands it is to the front that you must face.’ He hummed, demonstrated, became — this comical wizened little man — for an instant a graceful swan. ‘Can you give me five bars before section 12?’ He nodded to Irina Petrova and the ancient accompanist stubbed out her cigarette in the discarded pointe shoe she had been using as an ashtray and lowered her mottled hands on to the piano keys.

And there’s still Act Three of Fille, thought Dubrov, watching out front — and Giselle and we’ve scarcely touched The Nutcracker, with five days to go. I must be mad, taking out four full-length ballets. But he hated the chopping and dismemberment that was so fashionable — plucking out an act here, a divertissement there… And his principals were good: not just Simonova and Maximov, but Lobotsky, his character dancer, and the young Polish girl whom Simonova feared but to whom she had ceded the Sugar Plum Fairy…

‘Cross over!’ yelled Grisha. ‘Both lines! And the legs are croisé behind you — all the legs!’ His voice rose to a shriek. ‘You there at the end! What is your name — Kirstin… Where are you going?

Where the slender sad-faced Swede was going, just as in earlier rehearsals, was upstage right, performing rather beautiful and mournful ports de bras as was invariably done at this point in the version of the ballet she had learned in Copenhagen. The petite and exquisite French girl, Marie-Claude, on the other hand, still carried a torch for the Paris Opéra version (which cut five minutes out of the Act Two running time to give the citizens time to refresh themselves) and had bourréed off altogether during a previous run-through to be discovered alone and puzzled in a corridor.

Even with the Russian girls who made up the bulk of the corps — marvellously drilled and strong-backed creatures who rightly knew that only in their country was the art of ballet seriously understood — all was not well. For the hallowed steps which Petipa and Ivanov had devised for Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece in St Petersburg had been wickedly tampered with by a rogue ballet master in Moscow and little Olga Narukov, finding herself en arabesque opposite a swan giving her all to her ronds de jambe, had stamped her foot and declared her intention of returning to Ashkhabad.

The disconsolate Kirstin was comforted by the girl next to her and the rehearsal was resumed. An hour later — exhausted, hungry and dripping with perspiration — they were still practising the fiendishly difficult pattern at the end of the act where the diagonal lines of swans cross over and dissolve to form three groups: unequal groups, since the number seventeen is notoriously difficult to divide by three.

It was at this point that a stage-hand came up to Dubrov and said, ‘There’s a young lady asking to see you. Said you said she could come.’

‘Oh?’ Dubrov was puzzled. ‘Well, bring her along.’

The man vanished and reappeared with a young girl in a blue coat and tam o’shanter, carrying a small suitcase. A schoolgirl, it seemed to him, with worried eyes.

‘I’m Harriet Morton,’ she said in her low, incorrigibly educated voice, ‘from Cambridge. You saw me at Madame Lavarre’s. You said.. ’ Her voice tailed away. She had made a mistake; of course he had not wanted her.

‘Yes.’ Dubrov had recognised her now and smilingly put a hand on her arm. ‘Grisha!’ he called. ‘Come here!’

The swans came to rest, the music stopped and Grisha, frowning at the interruption, came over to Dubrov.

‘This is Harriet Morton,’ said the impresario. ‘Your eighteenth swan.’

The ballet master stared at her. What was he supposed to do now, at the eleventh hour, with this English child?

‘I have just rearranged everything for seventeen,’ he said sourly.

‘Well then, rearrange it back again,’ answered Dubrov.

Grisha raked her with his coal-black eyes. The height was right — she would fit in with the smaller girls and she didn’t look stupid like some of the others. All the same…

‘Which version of Lac is it that you have danced?’ he enquired cautiously. ‘Of Swan Lake? The Petipa-Ivanov? The Sermontoff?’ and as she remained silent, ‘Not that abomination that Orloffsky has made in Krakov?’

Harriet swallowed. ‘I have not danced in any of them, Monsieur.’

‘Not in any of them?’ The ballet master mopped his brow. ‘You are joking me?’

She shook her head.

‘And Casse Noisette? The last act — which production?’

‘No production. I have never danced in Casse Noisette.’

Grisha sighed and became placatory. Obviously the girl was so nervous she had lost her wits. ‘In English it is called The Nutcracker. In this ballet you have been a snowflake?’

‘No.’

‘Or an attendant to the Sugar Plum Fairy?’ Grisha continued imploringly. He broke into the ‘Valse des Fleurs’, revolved, swayed, became an icing-sugar rose.

Harriet shook her head once more and looked beseechingly at Dubrov. But the impresario, who seemed to be enjoying himself, was staring at the ceiling.

‘But a Wili?’ persisted Grisha desperately. ‘A Wili in Giselle?’ And making a final bid, ‘A chicken, then? In Fille Mal Gardée, a little chicken?’ A broken man, he executed a few rapid and chicken-like échappés.

Harriet lifted her head and in a voice she just managed to hold steady said, ‘I have never danced on any stage before.’

A strangled sound came from Grisha. ‘Impossible,’ he managed to say. ‘It is impossible! In five days we leave.’

She made no attempt to entreat or argue, but he saw her bring her small white teeth down on to her lower lip to stop it trembling, and then she bent down to pick up her case.

Grisha swore lustily in Russian. ‘You have your pointe shoes with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then put them on. And hurry!’

‘On the programme you will appear as Natasha Alexandrovna,’ said Dubrov to Harriet as she sat opposite him in his office, a shawl over her practice dress. ‘Dancers cannot have English names.’

‘Natasha! Oh…’ She leaned forward, her eyes alight and on her face the memory still of that terrifying, gruelling, awful and marvellous hour she had just spent on stage.

‘Why? Because of War and Peace?’

‘Yes. I used… oh, to be Natasha, for years and years. It made me so angry with Prince Andrei.’

‘Angry!’ Dubrov glared at her. ‘What are you saying? Prince Andrei is the finest portrayal of goodness in our entire literature.’

‘Goodness? How can it be good to get someone so ready for love and for life… so absolutely ready — and then just go away and leave them? Like setting them some kind of good conduct exam!’

‘An exam which, however, she failed.’

‘How could she help failing!’ Harriet leaned forward, flushed. ‘When you are so ready and longing, and the person you love just goes. He didn’t have to go — it wasn’t the war.’ She broke off, suddenly aghast at her impertinence; she had never spoken like this in Scroope Terrace. ‘I’m sorry.’

Dubrov waved away her apology. ‘Not at all — Smetlikov, one of our critics, takes a very similar view However, we must get down to business. You will attend class every morning at ten. The rest of the time you will work to learn the corps de ballet roles. There are five days to do this and of course the voyage. It is impossible. You will do it.’

‘Yes.’

He looked up, to see again that extraordinary illumination of her face from within which had followed Grisha’s order to put on her dancing shoes. To be told to do the impossible seemed to be all that she desired.

‘The tour is extended. We shall go on to Lima and Caracas, so we will be away all summer.’ And as she nodded, ‘Have you somewhere to stay?’

She flushed. ‘Well, no, not actually. I was wondering if I could sleep in the dressing-room just until we sail?’

‘Impossible.’ He sighed. ‘I will speak to one of the girls — perhaps Marie-Claude or Kirstin will find room for you in their lodgings. You have money?’

‘A little.’

‘Good.’ He put the tips of his plump fingers together and said reflectively, ‘Of course, if someone should come here and ask me if I am employing a girl called Natasha Alexandrovna in my corps de ballet, I shall have to say “Yes”. But if they ask me if I am employing a girl called Harriet Morton, that is a different matter. Of such a girl I naturally know nothing!’

‘Oh… Thank you!’ She paused. ‘You see, my father… didn’t exactly give me permission.’

‘Yes,’ said Dubrov heavily, ‘I gathered this. Perhaps you should tell me…’

Later, meeting Grisha in the corridor, he said, ‘Well, how is she, my little protégée?’

Grisha shrugged. ‘It is a pity. But there; it is only their horses that the British train properly. And now it’s too late… I think?’ He pondered and added, ‘Elle est sérieuse.’

Serious. Not lacking in humour; not pompous or self-important, but serious — giving the job the full weight of her being.

Dubrov nodded and passed on.

The principal dancers, unlike the rest of the Company who were in lodgings or hostels, were accommodated in the Queen’s Hotel in Bloomsbury until their date of departure: a draughty place with dingy lace curtains and terrible food, but handy for the theatre and where the proprietors were friendly and accustomed to the vagaries of their foreign guests.

In this hotel, as in all the others where the dancers had stayed, Dubrov’s room adjoined that of the ballerina, Galina Simonova. Since Simonova’s views on ‘passion as an aid to the dance’ were well known, it might be concluded that Dubrov enjoyed what were technically known as conjugal rights, and this was so. Dubrov’s rights, however, were granted to him on such uncertain terms — were so dependent on the state of Simonova’s back, her Achilles tendon and her reviews — that he had learned to temper the wind to the shorn lamb in a way which was not unremarkable in a man who had once written a ninety-stanza poem in the style of Pushkin entitled Eros Proclaimed.

The evening of Harriet’s arrival at the theatre, he found Simonova lying on the sofa — an ominous sign — staring with black and tormented eyes at her left knee.

‘It’s going again, Sashka; I can feel it! Dimitri has given me a massage, but it’s no use — it’s going. We must cancel the tour!’

He came over to sit beside her and felt her knee, considerably more familiar to him than his own. ‘Let me see.’

Her knee, her cervical vertebrae, the bursa on her Achilles tendon… he knew them like men know their children and now, as his stubby fingers moved gently over the joint, he wondered for the thousandth time why fate had linked him indissolubly with this temperamental, autocratic woman.

Sitting with balletomane friends in his box in the bel étage at the Maryinsky in St Petersburg, he had picked her out of the corps. ‘That one,’ he had said, pointing at the row of water sprites in Ondine, and he was right. She became a coryphée, a soloist…

It was not difficult in those days to enjoy her favours; he was young and rich and could present her own image to her in the way that women have always found irresistible. ‘If you give me half an hour to explain away my face, I could seduce the Queen of France,’ said Voltaire — and Dubrov, though uninterested in royalty, could have said the same.

He bought her an apartment on the Fontanka Canal and she was moderately faithful, for she was obsessed by dancing — by her career. Outside revolutions rumbled, Grand Dukes were assassinated and picked off the cobbled streets in splinters, but to Simonova it mattered only that she ended badly after her pique turns in Paquita or started her solo a bar too soon. And because it was this that he loved in her — this crazy obsession with the art that he too adored — he put up with it all, became manager, masseur, choreographer, nurse…

She rose steadily in the ranks of the Maryinsky. They gave her the Lilac Fairy, then Swanhilda in Coppelia and at last Giselle. After her first night in that immortal ballet, he watched one of the great clichés of the theatre brought to life — the students unharnessing the horses from her carriage in order to pull her through the streets — but later she had cried in his arms because she had not got her fall right in the Mad Scene: it was clumsy, she said, and the timing was wrong.

A year later she threw it all away in a stupid, unnecessary row with the management, refusing to wear the costume they had designed for her in Aurora’s Wedding and appearing instead in a costume she preferred. She was fined and told to change it. She refused. No one believed it would come to anything, for the hierarchical, bureaucratic theatre was full of such scenes, but Simonova with childish obstinacy forced the director to a confrontation and when she was overruled, she resigned. Resigned from the theatre she adored, from the great tradition which had nourished her, and went to Europe. And Dubrov, too, exiled himself from his homeland, sold his interests in Russia and created a company in which she could dance.

Since then they had toured Paris and Rome, Berlin and Stockholm, and it was understood between them that she hated Russia, that she would not return even if they asked her to do so on bended knees. For eight years now they had been exiles and it was hard — finding theatres, getting together a corps, luring soloists from other companies. Of late, too, there had been competition from other and younger dancers — from Pavlova, who had also come to Europe; from the divine Karsavina, Diaghilev’s darling, who with Nijinsky had taken the West by storm. Simonova owned to thirty-six, but she was almost forty and looked it: a stark woman with hooded eyes and deep lines etched between her autocratically arched brows.

‘We should never have attempted this tour,’ she said now. ‘It’s madness.’

Fear again. It was fear, of course, that ailed her knee… fear of failure, of old age… of the new Polish dancer, Masha Repin, who had joined them three days earlier and was covering her Giselle…

‘You have told them it is my farewell performance?’ she demanded. ‘Positively my last one? You have put it on the posters?’

Dubrov sighed and abandoned her knee. This was the latest fantasy — that each of her performances was the last, that she would not have to submit her ageing body to the endless torture of trying to achieve perfection any more. He knew what was coming next and now, as she moved his hand firmly to her fifth vertebra, it came.

‘Soon we shall give it all up, won’t we, Sashka, and go and live in Cremorra? Soon…’

‘Yes, dousha, yes.’

‘It will be so peaceful,’ she murmured, arching her back to give him better access. ‘We shall listen to the birds and have a goat and grow the best vegetables in Trentino. Won’t it be wonderful?’

‘Wonderful,’ agreed Dubrov dully.

Three years earlier, returning from a tour of the northern cities of Italy — in one of which a critic had dared to compare Simonova unfavourably with the great Legnani — the train that had been carrying them towards the Alps had come to a sudden stop. The day was exquisite; the air, as they lowered the window, like wine. Gentle-eyed cows with bells grazed in flower-filled fields, geraniums and petunias tumbled from the window-boxes of the little houses, a blue lake shimmered in the valley.

All of which would not have mattered except that across a meadow, beside a sparkling stream, one of the toy houses proclaimed itself ‘For Sale’.

To this oldest of fantasies, that of finding from a passing train the house of one’s dreams, Simonova instantly responded. She seized two hat-boxes and her dressing-case, issued a torrent of instructions to her dresser and pulled Dubrov down on to the platform.

Two days later the little house in Cremorra — complete with vegetable garden, grazing for a substantial number of goats, three fretwork balconies and a chicken-house — was his.

Fortunately, in Vienna the critics were kind and it was not too often that Simonova remembered the little wooden house which a kind peasant lady was looking after. They had spent a week there the year after he bought it and Dubrov had been rather ill, for there was a glut of apricots in their delightful orchard and Simonova had made a great deal of jam which did not set. Of late, however, Cremorra was getting closer and Dubrov, to whom the idea of living permanently in the country among inimical animals and loosening fruit was horrifying, now searched his mind for a diversion.

‘I employed a new girl today,’ he said. ‘The one I told you about in Cambridge. Sonia’s pupil. She ran away to come to us, so no doubt I shall be arrested soon for luring away a minor.’

‘Is she good?’

The fear again… but behind the panic of being overtaken, something else — the curiosity, the eagerness about the thing itself: the dance and its future.

‘How could she be good? She is an amateur.’

‘But Sonia taught her, you say?’ They had been friends of a sort, she and Sonia who, a few years older, was already in the corps when Simonova joined the company. Together, infuriated by the antics of a visiting ‘star’, they had unloosed an ancient, wheezing pug-dog on to the stage during a ballet called Trees…

‘Yes, but three times a week. Oh, you know how the British are about the arts — the gentility, the snobbery. It’s a pity, for if they chose they could make marvellous dancers of their girls. Perhaps one day…’

‘Why did you want her then?’

Dubrov, about to embark on the quality he had detected in Harriet — a totality and absorption — changed his mind. Simonova had started on a routine that was all too familiar — the lavish application of cold cream, the knee bandage, the wax ear-plugs to eliminate the noises of the traffic — which in about three minutes from now would result in his being chastely kissed on the forehead and dismissed.

‘She has ears like Natasha’s,’ he said.

The ballerina spun round. ‘Like Natasha’s? In War and Peace? But Tolstoy doesn’t describe her ears.’

Dubrov shrugged. ‘I don’t need Tolstoy to tell me what her ears were like.’

It worked. The jealousy on her face was instantaneous and owed nothing to her profession. ‘You are an idiot.’ She put the ear-plugs back in the drawer, wiped off the cream with a piece of gauze.

‘Chort!’ she said. ‘I’m tired. Let’s go to bed.’

Harriet had always longed to be allowed to work. Now her wish was granted a hundredfold. There were constant disasters as this most unfledged of swans, this newest of snowflakes staggered across the stage. But though Harriet made mistakes, she did not make them twice.

The girls, without exception, were helpful. They themselves had only just learned to work in unison, but they counted for her, pushed her, pulled her and retrieved her from inhospitable corners of the stage. Even Olga Narukov — a spitfire from the borders of Afghanistan who thought nothing of felling a dancer who displeased her with a kick like a mule’s — kept her temper with Harriet, for the newcomer’s grit and humility were curiously disarming.

‘Follow the girl in front!’ Grisha yelled at Harriet when her musicality threatened to lead her astray. ‘Just follow the girl in front!’

The girl in front, when the corps was arranged by height, was the French girl Marie-Claude, and there could be no one more worthy of being followed.

The creation of brown-eyed blondes has long been regarded as one of God’s better ideas. Marie-Claude’s eyes were huge and velvety, her lashes like scimitars, her upturned mouth voluptuously curved. To this largesse had been added waist-length golden, curling hair which, had she chosen to sit on a rock brushing it, must have sent every sailor within miles plunging to his doom.

Marie-Claude, however, did not so choose. She was entirely faithful to her fiancé, a young chef who worked in a hotel in Montpellier, and though occasionally willing (if the price was right) to emerge from a seashell at the Trocadero or sit on a swing in some night-club clad only in her hair, she did so strictly to earn money for the restaurant which she and Vincent, as soon as they had saved enough, were proposing to open in the hills above Nice.

It was Marie-Claude and the Swedish girl, Kirstin, who found space for Harriet in the tiny room they shared in a hostel in Gray’s Inn Road. It was already crammed full with their two truckle-beds, but the good-natured warden put a mattress on the floor for Harriet. The confusion and clutter were indescribable but to Harriet — used to the solitude and icy hygiene of her bedroom in Scroope Terrace — everything was a delight.

From her new room-mates Harriet learned a great deal about the Company. That the Russian girls were on summer leave from their dancing academies in Kiev and Odessa and would return to their native land in the autumn. That Simonova detested Maximov, who had once dropped her in the grand pas de deux at the end of Sleeping Beauty. That Masha Repin, the brilliant young Pole, was reputed to be sticking pins into a wax model of Simonova so that she could take over Giselle…

Neither of the girls was ambitious: of ‘the dance’ they asked only that it give them a living, and the fabled city of Manaus might have been Newcastle or Turin: it was somewhere they could work and be paid.

‘Though there is a great deal of money to be made out there,’ pointed out the practical Marie-Claude. ‘Vincent’s cousin works as a chef to an important man in Rio and he sends back enormous sums to Montpellier.’

Kirstin had been put to dancing by her father — a ballet master who worked in Scandinavia and London — and Marie-Claude by her half-English mother, an opera dancer who had been undulating between two camels in an open-air production of Aïda when a young farmer from the Languedoc decided to remove and marry her. Though only two years older than Harriet, their attitude towards the English girl was that of two worldly and experienced aunts.

‘It must be incredible, being so beautiful,’ said Harriet now, overawed by the sight of Marie-Claude in her shift preparing for bed.

‘Not at all,’ said the French girl dismissively. ‘Until I met Vincent it was extremely disagreeable. From the age of six I had to go everywhere with a hat-pin — a very long one from my Tante Berthe’s Sunday hat. Even so, it wasn’t always so simple. For example, when I was fifteen there was an old gentleman who used to wait for me outside school and offer to give a thousand francs to the Red Cross if I would let him see me brush my hair. Obviously, simply to jab a hat-pin into such an old gentleman would not have been correct. It is, after all, a very good cause — the Red Cross. But now I have Vincent and everything is—’ she broke off to look aghast at the voluminous flannel nightdress which Harriet was pulling over her head — ‘’arriette, what is that that you have there?’ she enquired, her excellent English fracturing under the shock.

‘It’s all I have,’ said Harriet ruefully. ‘My Aunt Louisa chose it.’

Marie-Claude deliberated. ‘Perhaps if you undid the top button… and pushed up the sleeves, comme ça?

‘But I’m only going to bed.’

Kirstin, who had been rubbing methylated spirit into her slender feet, pushed back her straight pale hair and exchanged a glance with Marie-Claude.

‘Only?’ said Marie-Claude, speaking for them both.

But long after the other two were asleep, Harriet, the top button of her nightdress obediently undone, sat up on her mattress recalling the day. She had escaped but she was not yet safe; a knock at the door could mean a policeman, recapture and the misery of a life which, now she had tasted freedom, she felt she could not endure again. Yet presently she found her fingers involuntarily marking out the steps in the snowflake waltz they had gone through at the last rehearsal, using instinctively the curious shorthand — a kind of deaf-and-dumb language — that dancers employ… And waking at dawn, she rose and in the deserted dining-room of the hostel, among the stacked chairs, she practised.

She practised on the top of the number 15 bus going to the theatre, marking the steps with the tips of her toes beneath the seat; she practised in the tea-shop to which the others dragged her, hanging on to the edge of the table until her doughnut came. She danced with her bruised and bleeding feet, with her fingers, inside her head… and on the third day Dubrov, encountering her as she walked backwards up the iron stairs to the dressing-room in order to ease the aching muscles of her calves, smiled happily. He liked that; he liked it very much.

There was everything to learn: how to put on makeup, how to allow space at rehearsal between herself and the others which later the costumes would fill… How to anoint and darn and squeeze and thump the ballet shoes, which seemed to be as often on the girls’ hands as on their feet.

But it was class that made Harriet into a dancer. Class, that unfailing daily torture to which dancers come on every morning of their lives. Class in freezing rehearsal rooms, in foyers, on board ocean liners carrying them across the sea. Class with streaming colds, class after their lovers have jilted them, on days when women would give anything to be spared… Class for the prima ballerina assoluta as for the youngest member of the corps.

It was in class that Harriet saw what it cost Lubotsky, the ageing character dancer, to get his muscles to warm up — yet saw too the marvellous authority he still carried. It was in class that she saw Maximov — the darling of the gallery — sweating, exhausted, crying out with the pain of a wrenched muscle… saw the grace and spirituality emanating from little Olga Narukov who ten minutes earlier had pinched a boy from the corps so as to draw blood.

And if Harriet watched the others, there were those who watched her. For even in class there are those who dance the notes and those who dance the music and, ‘A pity, yes, definitely a pity,’ said Grisha with increasing emphasis when Dubrov enquired after his latest swan.

It was not until two days before they sailed that Harriet saw the prima ballerina of the Company, for Simonova had been attending class privately with an old Russian émigré in Pimlico. She arrived for her first rehearsal with the corps on a grey drizzly morning, sweeping on to the stage in a ragged practice tutu set off by purple leg-warmers with holes in them. Her cheek was swollen from the ministrations of her dentist, her complexion was sallow; a muffler of the kind that old gentlemen wear when running along tow-paths during boat-races concealed her throat. Beneath her widow’s peak, with the centre parting that is the hallmark of the ballerina, her black eyes with their pouches of exhaustion, her high-bridged nose and thin mouth gave her the look of a distempered bird of prey.

To Harriet, all this was quite irrelevant. ‘She is a true artiste,’ Madame Lavarre had said and Harriet’s eyes shone with veneration.

Simonova raked the assembled girls and her eyes fell on Harriet.

Who is that?’ she demanded in her guttural and alarming voice.

Dubrov, who knew that she knew perfectly well who it was, introduced Harriet, who curtseyed deeply. For a moment they gazed at each other — the ardent, worshipping girl and the weary, autocratic woman. Then, ‘There is nothing in the least unusual about her ears,’ pronounced Simonova in Russian, to the mystification of those who spoke the language.

She went over to the piano, unwound her muffler, handed her medallion of St Demetrius to the accompanist — and raised her eyebrows at Grisha.

‘Act One, Giselle,’ he confirmed. ‘From the entry of the hunting party…’

Everyone had expected Simonova simply to mark her steps. This was a routine rehearsal to give the corps their positions in relation to hers; she would rehearse seriously with Maximov later.

But she did not. Simonova, on that grey and drizzly morning in a draughty tumbledown London theatre, danced. She danced fully, absolutely — danced as if she were back on the stage of the Maryinsky and the Tsar was in his blue and golden box. No, better than that — she danced as if she were alone in the world and had only this gift to pour into the heartbreaking emptiness.

And in the theatre for the first time there was real excitement; the mottled hands of grumpy old Irina Petrovna coaxed from the tinny piano some approximation to the delicious score, and Dubrov — who alone knew why she had done it — remembered not only that he loved this ageing, difficult woman, but why…

By midnight on Thursday the last of the props had been packed up and piled into the carts to go to Euston Station. The following morning, the sleepy girls followed the principals on to the train and late that afternoon, Harriet walked with unforgettable excitement up the gangway of the RMS Cardinal with her slim dark funnel and snow-white decks.

‘Come, let’s find our cabins,’ said Marie-Claude.

But Harriet could not tear herself away from the movement and bustle of the docks, from the tangle of cranes and masts, the cries of men loading the freight and hung, huge-eyed and entranced, over the side. Here, now swinging high over the deck and dropping into the hold, was the wicker skip that she had sat on the night before so that the stage-hands could fasten the straps… and here the tarpaulin they had tied round the Act Two flats for Fille.

It was fortunate that she did not observe another, impressively strapped wicker basket waiting on the quay — a basket which had been unloaded earlier and contained three dozen silk shirts bound for Truscott and Musgrave in Piccadilly. For of gentlemen who sent back their shirts to Britain to be laundered, Harriet did not and could not approve.

A man with a megaphone came by, instructing visitors to leave the ship; a single hoot from the slender funnel announced their imminent departure.

It was only when she saw the ever-widening strip of grey and dirty water between herself and the shore that Harriet realised she had done it. She was safe.