Eva Ibbotson

It was in an immaculate dress shirt from his laundry basket that Rom, delayed by a blocked feed-pipe on the Amethyst, entered his box in the Teatro Amazonas and saw—without undue excitement—the curtain rise on Act One of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake.

“I’m going to be sick,” said Harriet.

“You cannot be going to be sick again, ‘arriette,” said Marie-Claude, exasperated, turning from the long mirror where the girls sat in their tutus whitening their arms, putting on false eyelashes, applying Cupid’s bows to their mouths.

“I can—” said Harriet, and fled.

Act One had been called, but Act One is no business of the swans and the girls still had half an hour to complete their toilettes. It was a half-hour which Harriet did not expect to live through.

“For heaven’s sake, there are eighteen swans in this production. Also two big swans. Also those idiot cygnets with their pas de quatre,” said Kirstin when Harriet returned, green and shivering. “You don’t matter! Why don’t you tell yourself that?”

“I know I don’t matter,” said Harriet—and indeed no one could have lived for eighteen years in Scroope Terrace and not known that. “If I get it right, I don’t matter. But if I get it wrong … all those people who trusted me… Monsieur Dubrov and everyone… making the company look silly.”

“You won’t get it wrong. I’m in front of you most of the time and when it isn’t me, it’s Olga,” said Maria-Claude, piling up her golden hair and jabbing pins through the circlet of feathers in a way which would have driven the wardrobe mistress into fits. “Merde,” she said softly—and indeed the headdresses had not traveled well. She turned and dabbed a spot of red into each corner of Harriet’s eyes. “There is no need to whiten yourself. You look like a ghost.”

“I must say, Harriet, such fear is excessive,” said Kirstin. “What would your Roman emperor say?”

But for once the thought of the great Marcus Aurelius did little for Harriet. The famous Stoic had experienced most of the troubles of mankind, but it was unlikely that he had ever made his debut before a thousand people as an enchanted swan.

If Dubrov’s newest swan was nervous to the point of prostration, his ballerina assoluta was hardly in a state of calm.

“Why didn’t you put it on the posters, that this was my farewell appearance?” She yelled at Dubrov. “I asked you to do it—and you promised. A simple thing like that and you can’t do it!”

She was already dressed in her glittering white tutu.

Beneath the shining little crown her gaunt face, trapped and desperate, was that of an old woman.

“I will announce it after the performance, dousha.”

He did not waste breath telling her to relax, to be quiet. There was nothing to be done about her terror; she went on stage each time as if she was going to her death. All he could do was to be there, pray that the hundred instructions he had given to his underlings would be carried out and let her rage at him.

“That cow Legnani! The first thing I shall do when I am retired is to go to Milan and slap her face!”

He sighed. Legnani, one of the world’s great ballerinas, had been the first to introduce the thirty-two fouettés which make Act Three of Swan Lake so fiendishly difficult to dance, and Simonova’s vendetta against her was unending.

She stopped pacing, came over, clutched him with feverish arms. “But this is the last tour, isn’t it, Sashka? Soon it will be over for good? Soon now we shall go and live in Cremorra and grow—”

But at that moment—fortunately for Dubrov, who was in no state to discuss the cultivation of vegetables—her final call came.

For Simonova, fine and experienced dancer that she was, the terror ended the moment that she went on stage. Alas, the same could not be said for Harriet.

Rom was not a balletomane. From his mother he had inherited a passion for the human voice and though he had refused all the other dignities that people tried to thrust on him, he had accepted the chairmanship of the Opera House trustees. To Rom fell the task or cajoling reluctant prima donnas from Europe; of arranging the entertainment for the cast. It was he who had taken six actors from a Spanish company to Follina to be nursed when they were stricken with yellow fever. But it was opera that held his heart and as the curtain went up on Prince Siegfried’s birthday revels, the plight of this young man—Maximov in silver tights and straining cod-piece—left him relatively unmoved. Act One is something of a prologue. The Prince is bidden by his parents to marry, but feels disinclined. Pretty girls come up to dance with him and he supports their arabesques with the resigned look of a conscientious meat porter steadying a side of beef. His mother gives him a cross-bow… the eerie music of the swan motif is heard and the Prince decides to go hunting. The curtain falls.