Eva Ibbotson

“Yes, he did, didn’t he? An absolutely marvelous stepfather! A proper wolf!” Henry was radiant. “Oh yes—and Uncle Rom’s a bit like a wolf, isn’t he—sort of brave and wild?” As he smiled up at her she noticed that the gaps in his teeth were almost filled; it was three months since they had met in the maze. “Would you like to come and see Mummy?” he went on. “She was in the sitting room just now, hugging Uncle Rom and everything, but I expect they’ve stopped now.” He broke off, his russet head tilted in concern. “Are you all right, Harriet? You’re not getting the measles?”

“No, Henry. I’m… perfectly all right.”

“I’d better go back to bed then or Mummy will be cross.” He put up his arms and she kissed him for the last time. “You’re sure you’re not getting the measles?” And as she nodded, “I’ll see you in the morning. You’re my best friend in the whole world, Harriet.”

“And you are mine.”

At the top of the terrace he turned. “Do you know what I’m sleeping in, Harriet? A hammock! Uncle Rom said I could—honestly!” said Henry and pattered away toward the house.

He had gone, but she wasn’t sick and the trembling had stopped. Because of course it couldn’t be true, what Henry had said—it couldn’t be over so suddenly, so completely, without the journey back still to be with Rom. Henry wouldn’t lie, but he must be mistaken. He was so intelligent that it was easy to forget that he was just a little child.

She went quietly up the last of the steps, made her way toward the windows of the salon. The curtains were open and light streamed out onto the terrace.

Inside, two figures, unaware of her… absorbed.

(“I know what it’s like… I know how it is to be at a window… outside… and to look in on a lighted room and not be able to make anyone hear.”

“How do you know? You have not experienced it.”

“Perhaps I am going to one day. There is a man in England who says that time is curved…”)

Rom stood with his back to her, the dark head bent, one arm resting on a bookcase. Isobel faced him, almost as tall as he, and for a moment it seemed to Harriet that she looked straight at her, but of course she could not have seen her in the darkness—that was absurd. She had loosened the beautiful red hair which flowed like a river over her black gown and as she leaned toward Rom, smiling, putting a hand on his arm, their sense of kinship came across to Harriet as clearly as if she had proclaimed, “We belong, this man and I! We inhabit the same world!”

Then, perhaps responding to something Rom had said, she moved forward, stumbled a little… seemed as if she might fall—and as he moved quickly toward her, her arms went around him and her head came to rest against his shoulder. And as she stood thus in sanctuary, staring past the place where Harriet stood, her face was transfigured by pride and happiness and love.

“It is only necessary to do the steps,” Marie-Claude had said.

But there were no steps for this: no piteous undulations of the arms, no bounces backward. Just a slow turning to stone… a nothingness… a death.

Then she turned and walked away—moving, this lightest of dancers, like an old, old woman—and vanished into the dark.

“No! No! No!” yelled Grisha, whacking at Harriet’s shins with his cane. “You are a durak—an idiot! Why do you bend your knees like a carthorse? The line must be smooth, smooth …” He demonstrated, flicked his fingers at the old accompanist—and in the cleared Palm Lounge of the Lafayette, Harriet resumed her assembles.

She had been working for two hours and before that there had been class and Grisha, formerly so kind, had bullied and shouted and despaired of her as he had done each day of their journey across the calm Atlantic. For Harriet was no longer just a girl in the corps—Simonova was taking her to Russia; she was to be a serious dancer and for a girl thus singled out there could be no mercy and no rest.

Nor did Harriet want rest. Every muscle ached, the perspiration ran down her back, but she dreaded the moment when Grisha would dismiss her. She would have liked to collapse with exhaustion, to weep like Taglioni and faint like Taglioni. To faint particularly, and thus find the oblivion that sleep did not bring as in her dreams she tore through bramble thickets, clawed at stone walls, searching in vain for Rom.

“Sixteen grandes battements—then twelve ronds de jambe en l’air,” said Grisha viciously as Simonova swept in to study the progress of her future pupil. It had been a brilliant idea to take Harriet along. For Cremorra no longer figured in Simonova’s itinerary. A triumph at the Maryinsky and then a return to Paris to open a school and become, as she had been the world’s greatest ballerina, its greatest teacher of the dance—this was what she now intended. And who was better suited to be a show pupil than this work-hungry English girl?