Eva Ibbotson

And everywhere, covering the panelled walls, climbing up the stairway, were daguerrotypes and paintings and photographs… of Kchessinskaya, erstwhile mistress of the Tsar, en pointe in Esmerelda … of the graduation class of 1882 with Madame in a white dress and fichu, demure and doe-eyed in the front row… of rose-wreathed Taglioni, the first Sylphide of them all, whose ballet slippers had been cooked and eaten by her besotted Russian admirers when she retired. For it was not genteel ballroom dancing which was taught by Madame—beached-up in Cambridge after a brief marriage to a French lecturer who died—but the painful and manically disciplined art of the ballet.

Harriet hurried upstairs, smiling as she passed the open door of Room 3 from which came the sounds of a Schubert impromptu, its rhythm relentlessly stressed to serve the wobbly plies of the beginners with their gap-teeth and perilously slithering chignons. “My Pavlova class,” Madame called it, blessing the great ballerina whom she knew and cordially disliked. For these were the children of mothers who on some shopping trip to London had seen Pavlova in Giselle or The Dying Swan and had come to believe that perhaps ballet was not just something done by girls who were no better than they should be.

There were only four pupils in the advanced class with Harriet and all of them were there before her in the changing-room. At first they had been aloof and unfriendly, rejecting Harriet with her snobbish university background. Phyllis—the pretty one, with her blonde curls—was the daughter of a shopkeeper; she had added ballet to “stage” and already danced in pantomime. Mabel, conscientious and hard-working and inexorably fat, was the daughter of a railway clerk. Red-haired Lily’s mother worked in the Blue Boar. Harriet, with her “posh” voice, arriving at the beginning with a maid to help her change and skewer up her hair, had been an object of derision and mockery… But now, survivors of nine years under the whip of ‘Madame’s tongue, they were all good friends.

“She’s got someone with her,” said Phyllis, tying her shoes. “A foreigner. Russian, I think. Funny-looking bloke!”

Harriet changed hurriedly. In her white practice dress, her long brown hair scraped back from her face and coiled high under a bandeau, she was transformed in a way which would have disconcerted the ladies of Trumpington. The neat and elegant head; the long, almost unnaturally slender throat; the delicate arms all signalled an unmistakable message—that here in this place Professor Morton’s quiet daughter was where she belonged.

The girls entered, curtseyed to Madame—formidable as always in her black pleated dress, a chiffon bandeau tied round her dyed orange hair—and took their places at the bane.

“This is Monsieur Dubrov,” Madame announced. “He will watch the class.”

She stabbed with her dreaded cane at the cowed accompanist, who began to play a phrase from Delibes. The girls straightened, lifted their heads…

“Demi-plié… grand plié… tendu devant … pull up, everybody… dégagé… demi-plié in fourth… close.”

The relentless, repetitive work began and Harriet, emptying her mind of everything except the need to place her feet perfectly, to stretch her back to its limit, did not even realize that while she worked she was for once completely happy.

Beside the petite and formidable figure of Madame stood Dubrov, his wild gray curls circling a central dome of pinkly shining scalp, his blue eyes alert. He had seen what he wanted to see in the first three minutes; but this portly, slightly absurd man—who had never danced a step—could not resist, even here in this provincial room, tracing one perfect gesture which had its origin in Cecchetti’s class of perfection in St. Petersburg or—even in the fat girl—the épaulement that was the glory of the Maryinsky. How Sonia had done it with these English amateurs he did not know, but she had done it.

“You will work alone now,” ordered Madame after a while. “The enchatnement we practiced on Thursday…” and led her old friend downstairs. Five minutes later they were installed in her cluttered sitting-room, stirring raspberry jam into glasses of tea.

“Well, you are quite right,” said Dubrov. “It is the little brown one I want. A lyrical port de bras, nice straight knees and, as you say, the ballon … an intelligent dancer and God knows it’s rarely enough one sees a body intelligently used.” But it was more than that, he thought, remembering the way each phrase of the music has seemed literally to pass across the child’s rapt, utterly responsive face. “Of course her technique is still—”