Eva Ibbotson

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 theaters, 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 aging body to the endless torture of trying to achieve perfection anymore. 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 unfavorably with the great Legnani—the train that had been carrying them toward 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 onto 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 marvelous 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 around. “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.”