Eva Ibbotson

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 an 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 nightclub 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 roommates 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 Aida when a young farmer from the Languedoc decided to remove and marry her. Though only two years older than Harriet, their attitude toward 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 inquired, her excellent English fracturing under the shock.

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