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‘Remember, no gymnastics! You can wriggle your toes but that’s all. Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace and Grace was a little girl who wouldn’t wash her face, ha ha!’ He breezed out to dispense healing and wisdom to the next patient.
‘Help!’ called Lizzie as soon as he’d gone. ‘I didn’t dare move. I’ve probably given myself third-degree burns. I had to suck the flannel to suppress bloodcurdling screams. I’ll just put in some cold.’
Mr Proudlock-Jones had put paid to sleepiness for the time being. While torrents of water flowed into the bath, I asked myself what I would do if his confidence proved for once to be unjustified. No course of action occurred to me. If I could not dance I could not live. Of course it would be all right. It had to be.
‘This is the most sensual experience I’ve had in years.’ Lizzie’s voice, floating through the open door, had gone down several tones and was gravelly with relaxation. ‘Much better than sex. And no evil consequences.’
Six months ago, Lizzie had fallen insanely in love with a Russian guest artist who, when wearing a wig and full make-up, looked slightly like Rudolf Nureyev. Certainly from behind the resemblance was remarkable. He had stayed only three weeks before being recalled to Leningrad and, two months after that, the company had a whip-round to pay for Lizzie to have a termination at the handy little nursing home in Southwark where all the female dancers in the company went when self-control or rubber failed. Since then, Lizzie had been much less keen on sex.
‘And generally much less worrying,’ I said, sitting up and helping myself to a biscuit to begin the process of repair. It was the first thing I had eaten for thirty-six hours and it tasted extraordinarily delicious. ‘No fretful evenings waiting for the bath to ring. No need to agonize over whether the bath thinks you were insufficiently enthusiastic and imaginative. One good thing about making love with Sebastian is that he’s so self-absorbed one might as well be an inflatable – Hello, Sebastian,’ I said loudly as he walked into the room. A violent splash came from the bathroom followed by silence.
‘Well! You’re looking quite a lot better already.’ Sebastian picked up the bottle of champagne, untwisted the wires and popped the cork. He picked up my glass and chucked the iced water over the artificial roses. ‘We’ll have to share this.’
‘I probably oughtn’t have alcohol so soon …’
‘Oh, rubbish! It won’t hurt your foot. Drink up.’ He held the beaker-full of foaming liquid under my nose. ‘It’ll relax you.’
Actually I was feeling quite relaxed already, but Sebastian was forking out zillions for my operation and my room so I could refuse him nothing.
‘Go on,’ he said, ‘finish it.’
The chocolate biscuit was powerless to counteract the effect of the champagne when it hit my otherwise empty stomach. When it combined with the remainder of the anaesthetic that was still in my bloodstream, I felt as though I had been shot into outer space in a large pink rocket. The world grew distant and all the consequences thereof.
He stroked my bare arm. ‘Mm. You’ve lost a couple of pounds.’ Sebastian was as obsessed with body shapes as the rest of us. ‘Don’t overdo it. You’ll start losing muscle.’ I wanted to say that it was nice of him to care but whatever part of my brain was in control of my tongue seemed to be paralysed. ‘It’s not unattractive, though.’
I set off on an orbit of the earth and very colourful it was, too, just like those photographs in the National Geographic magazine.
‘Marigold.’ Sebastian was bending over me. ‘You’re giggling like a schoolgirl. Just be serious for a moment. Shall I tell Miko to get lost?’
I bared my teeth in a grin as in the intervals between him talking to me I found I was flying over snow-sprinkled mountains and deep dark lakes.
‘Stop giggling.’ Sebastian sounded annoyed but I didn’t give a damn. ‘Move over. I want to fuck you.’
I thought I heard another splash from the bathroom and what might have been a stifled cry.
‘Now?’ It sounded a strange thing to want to do when one could soar like a bird over oceans and continents. ‘… nurses? … Lizzie?’
‘I’ve locked the door. Lizzie can wait outside.’
I wanted to explain that Lizzie was already inside but his hands were pulling up my gown. Too late his body was on mine, in mine.
‘I don’t know what’s so funny,’ he said afterwards in a slightly offended tone.
‘Neither do I.’ My voice boomed and in the distance someone cackled like a hen. Could it possibly have been me?
I spent two more enjoyable days in the clinic, warm, fed and practically killed with kindness, before Sebastian visited me again and said I must go home as it was costing a hundred pounds a day which the company could not afford.
‘As much as that?’ I flung back the covers and threw my good leg over the side, almost crushed by a terrible weight of guilt. ‘I had no idea. Of course I’ll leave at once. Oh, thank you, Sebastian, for paying for me.’ I seized his hand. My gratitude was so tremendous I felt I quite loved him.
Sebastian’s eye fell on several inches of naked thigh below my crumpled nightdress. ‘Mm. There’s no immediate hurry. I’ll just lock the door.’
‘Oh, yes, do!’
‘Your enthusiasm makes an agreeable change,’ he said after a while. ‘Of course I’m perfectly aware that the motive is mercenary.’
An increase of guilt encouraged me to submit willingly to a predilection of Sebastian’s I hated, the details of which I’d rather not go into.
‘You needn’t feel overburdened by indebtedness,’ said Sebastian as he rolled away from me, elegantly pale with effort and, one hoped, thoroughly sated. ‘I shall deduct the four hundred pounds from your salary in instalments over the next year.’
As I lay mute with indignation he laughed long and low.
4 (#ua0eeadbd-b6a7-5ae9-8aa5-48a0428a5b73)
‘Marigold! It’s me,’ called Lizzie, coming in through the front door of the flat accompanied by the most delicious smell of vinegar. ‘How are you, darling? Have you been horribly bored?’
I had been taken by ambulance back to 44 Maxwell Street that morning. The flat was up four flights of stairs and our miserly landlord had set the timer switch so that you had to run like mad, taking three steps at a time, to get from one landing to the next before the light went out. The ambulance men, manoeuvring the stretcher with difficulty round the narrow bends, had complained volubly about being plunged into absolute darkness every eight seconds while comparing the stink unfavourably with a ferret’s cage. I explained that the pungent smell was due to the third-floor lodger treating the stairwell as his own private pissoir. After that they advised me to throw myself on the mercy of Social Services and plainly disbelieved my protests that I was actually quite fond of the place. Because Nancy and Sorel were in America with the touring part of the company, I could only afford to heat my bedroom, and the temperature of the rest of the flat struck cold as a tomb. The men looked at my extravagant interior decorations with expressions of wonderment not unmixed with derision, but they had been sympathetic and friendly and I was sorry to see them go.
I had spent the intervening hours between their departure and Lizzie’s arrival shivering and dozing. ‘A bit. What’s in those parcels?’
‘Fish and chips! Isn’t it utter bliss?’
I agreed that it was but habitual caution could not be entirely suppressed. ‘Should you be eating a zillion calories, dear girl? For that matter should I?’
‘Oh, who gives a damn! You need nourishment and I need cheering up. Let’s for once just forget about our waistlines. Want a plate?’
‘Certainly not.’ I opened the newspaper on my knee. ‘Oh, the smell of ancient reheated fat! So sinful yet so delicious! Why do you need cheering up?’
Lizzie tucked her springing blond hair behind her ears and looked at me regretfully. ‘Oh, you know … I cocked up in the rehearsal today … So what’s the verdict on the leg, then? I asked Sebastian but he wouldn’t tell me.’
‘Cast off in six weeks. No dancing for two months.’
‘Darling, don’t worry. The six weeks will go in a flash and then after a few weeks of class you’ll be dancing as well – in fact better – than ever. Does your leg hurt very much?’
‘It’s okay when no one’s crashing it against banisters. I’m going to be pretty much marooned up here until the cast comes off.’
‘Oh dear.’ Lizzie looked anxious. ‘Six whole weeks! It couldn’t have happened at a worse time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well … it’s so cold … and Nancy and Sorel are away … I know! I’ve got something that’s going to cheer you up.’ She took a newspaper from her bag. ‘Take a look at this!’ She turned to a page on which she had outlined a paragraph in red. ‘It’s by Didelot!’
I screamed and grabbed the paper. ‘I’d no idea he was there. I’d have been a hundred times more nervous if I’d known. Does he say terribly cutting things? I hardly dare look.’
Didelot was the nom de plume of a ballet critic with a formidable reputation, an unforgiving eye and a pitiless pen. Tales of careers ruined by his caustic criticisms abounded. It was enough for him to point out that a dancer had dropped an elbow or had landed one fraction of a second behind the beat or had ‘spoon’ hands for that dancer to feel that they might as well pack their bags. In his favour he would not allow himself to be courted, refusing all invitations to fraternize with directors, dancers and choreographers. Apparently, when approached by an interested party, he would give them a blank stare and turn on his heel, disdaining even to notice their greeting. Sebastian had once pointed Didelot out to me as he sat in the audience taking notes, an insignificant figure with a bald patch, a fringe of grey curls and a large black moustache. It was widely acknowledged that his judgement was as much to be respected as it was feared.
I read the review carefully. Marigold Savage gave us a refreshingly different Giselle. In Act I the shyness, the sensitivity, the innocence were there as the role requires, but there was a waywardness in the extension of the arms, a suggestion of abandon in the épaulement which satisfactorily prefigured the descent into madness. When Albrecht’s treachery was revealed, Savage’s dancing expressed anger as well as pathos. When she lifted the sword it was a matter for debate whether it was intended for Albrecht or herself. She was triumphant as well as tragic. This brought into sharper contrast the ethereal, intangible spirit of Act II who is permanently either en l’air or sur les pointes. Here Savage’s unusual colouring, her startlingly red hair and alabaster skin served her particularly well. Her dancing was unearthly, as transparent as a skeleton leaf. Alex Bird was an imperfect Albrecht, however. His tours en l’air were almost faultless but his performance was undermined by his inelegant port de bras …
There was more in this vein.
Though naturally indignant on Alex’s behalf, I was thrilled by Didelot’s praise of my own performance. When I looked up, having committed every plaudit to memory, Lizzie was smiling at me. I thought, as so often before, what a good – what an exceptional – friend she was to delight in my success. All the same, so she should not think me conceited, I tried to conceal my elation. ‘One’s only as good as one’s last performance in this game.’
‘Yes, but this might persuade Sebastian to give you an increase in salary to stop you signing up with Mr Lubikoff. Of course it’s incredibly selfish of me but I dread you going. We’d hardly see each other.’ She patted my hand. ‘But naturally you must make the best decision for your career. I shall completely understand if you opt for the EB.’
For a moment I was tempted to tell her about Sebastian’s offer of marriage. But since he had not mentioned it again and continued to behave with the same offhand un-loverlike impatience, without a single word of tenderness, I was beginning to think I must have hallucinated the whole thing. Or else that Sebastian had never for a moment dreamed I would take him seriously. He probably assumed that I would understand he was playing some sort of game with Miko. In which case I would look an awful fool if I mentioned it to anyone. Lizzie was a darling and absolutely my best friend but discretion was not her strong suit.
‘I don’t even know if he’ll want me now I’m injured. It’s easy to get a reputation for unreliability.’
‘You’ve never had to pull out before. Nobody could be so mean as to hold one injury against you.’
‘No.’ I attempted to put on a bright face. ‘I’m just feeling a little bleak. But it’s unfair when you’ve struggled all the way over here and brought me these heavenly chips. Sorry. I promise not to be glum any more. I’m so grateful – and you’ve got to flog all the way back to Brockley—’
‘Well, actually, no. I left my suitcase in the hall – oh God, I’m so sorry, I feel as though I’m letting you down … The thing is –’ Lizzie looked apologetic – ‘I’m on my way to Heathrow. One of the corps in the touring company has pulled a ligament and Sebastian insists on me replacing her. I tried to tell him that you’ll need someone to bring you food and things but he just walked off … you know what a beast he is. I’m catching a plane in three hours’ time.’
I tried to prevent my dismay from showing on my face. ‘How long will you be away?’
‘The tour ends in three weeks.’
‘What about your grandmother?’
‘She’s going into a residential home for the time I’m away. I’ve brought you the entire contents of our larder. I’m afraid it’s mostly brawn which is Granny’s favourite.’
‘How delicious! Thank you.’
‘Do you think so?’ Lizzie looked surprised, which proved I was a better actress than I’d thought. ‘I never eat it for fear of finding bristly hairs. There are some tins of frankfurters as well. Oh, Marigold, I feel awful about leaving you.’
‘You can’t help it. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. At the dentist’s the other day I read this article in a magazine – hang on, I’ve got it somewhere,’ I opened the drawer in the table beside my bed, ‘I sneakily tore it out: here it is. The Art of Making Conversation. “Do you ever feel at a loss for something to say at parties?” Well, I always feel a complete dunderhead unless I’m with someone to do with ballet. “Ever embarrassed by an inability to make witty incisive remarks?” I should say so! I’ve never made a witty incisive remark in my life. “Do you find yourself resorting to banal topics like the weather and your children’s schools?” Well, not the latter obviously. Apparently, good conversationalists talk about ideas, the second rate talk about things and the third rate talk about people.’
‘Okay, so I’m third rate,’ said Lizzie. ‘There’s nothing I like better than gossip.’
‘The article says in order to be an interesting dinner-party guest you have to have a cultivated mind. It gives a list of the hundred most essential books one ought to have read. I’ve bought copies of the first five books on the list and now’s my opportunity to read them. I shall begin with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’
Lizzie’s eyes widened. ‘Jolly good luck.’
‘So you see I’ll be as merry as a grig – whatever that is.’
We smiled bravely at each other.
5 (#ua0eeadbd-b6a7-5ae9-8aa5-48a0428a5b73)
The winter of 1982 was the coldest on record. I read in the newspaper Lizzie had brought the fish and chips in that they were restoring the hothouses at Kew and one of the rarest plants, a Chilean palm, had been wrapped in a polythene tower through which warm air was pumped to keep it alive. I envied it. Shortly after Lizzie left, the boiler that provided hot water for the bathroom and heated the tiny radiator in my bedroom broke down. In the morning there were frost patterns all over the window and my breath curled up like a whale spout into the crimson canopy.
The hours went by at the pace of an old woman crawling on arthritic hands and knees. My spirits drooped but I told myself not to be so self-indulgent, hopped over to the bookcase and found the first volume of Gibbon. I managed to read for ten minutes before sleep overwhelmed me. I awoke with a dry throat and a feeling of loneliness so acute that even Siggy in all his transcendent beauty could not console me. I read more Gibbon. Gibbon-lovers I had met always held forth in a lofty way about the elegant simplicity of his prose. Probably you have to be in a cheerful mood for it to do you any good. After three-quarters of an hour I was ready to throw myself out of the window.
I had a jolly good cry for about five minutes which made me feel marginally better. I mopped my swollen lids with a hanky soaked in cold water and stared through the grimy window at the darkening sky bisected by pigeons and starlings. If I could not show more strength of mind than this I deserved to fail. Emotional resilience is not the least of the requirements for a dancer. From the moment training starts at the age of ten or eleven, there is a high possibility of failure. At the end of each summer term, weeping girls are driven away, never to return. If you are one of the lucky ones chosen to go up to the next level, your elation is moderated by the knowledge that the following summer it could easily be you packing your suitcase in tears because you are too tall, too fat, too heavy-footed or not strong enough. Or you might lack the right temperament, be unable to take instruction fast enough, have a muted personality, be unmusical or simply not please the eye. After six years of gruelling work, if you meet the requirements of the selection board, you graduate into the upper school and become a student. But this is not a guarantee that you will get a place in a company. Even those who attend ballet schools that feed specific companies have only a small chance of a contract. Perhaps half a dozen a year are taken into the corps.
When I showed an aptitude for ballet my parents sent me to Brackenbury House in Manchester. The teaching was excellent but we girls always felt ourselves to be provincials. At the age of sixteen, five of us, considered the best dancers in the school, were determined to come to London to audition for the Lenoir Ballet Company. We chose the LBC because it had no feeder school of its own. Bella, Lizzie and I got in. The other two, good though they were, had to face the fact that their careers in ballet were effectively over. One went into musicals and the other became a PE teacher. That’s how hard it is to get anywhere.
I had to convince myself that this injury was a temporary blip on the upward trajectory of my career. The gods had been with me so far. I would earn their respect by maintaining a positive cheerfulness in the face of this minor disaster.
I put on a hat and gloves and tried to read more Gibbon with nothing but my watering eyes over the bedclothes before giving in and shivering with Siggy in the darkness beneath the blankets, popping our heads out at intervals for oxygen. I had never thought about it before because I had been too busy, but now I realized that happiness, my happiness anyway, depended on structure and order. From the age of ten almost every minute of my life had been organized. A dancer’s body is like a fine instrument that needs delicate tuning. After even a few days’ rest, one’s muscles become stiff and uncooperative. However tired we were, however bad our headaches or colds, six days out of seven we went to at least one class a day. On Sundays, Nancy, Sorel and I exercised for several hours in our sitting room, which had a barre and a large mirror that we had fixed to the wall ourselves. Now the hours stretched ahead of me, blank, frighteningly empty.
I was roused from a state of semiconsciousness by a knock on the front door. I looked at my clock. Half-past seven in the evening of the longest day of my life. The knock came again. Pulling the eiderdown round me, I limped into the hall. I lifted the letterbox flap. A delicious and reassuring scent drifted through the draughty rectangle. I opened the door.
‘Marigold! Thank … goodness!’
‘Bobbie! How wonderful! But you’re almost the last person in the world I expected to see! I thought you were in Ireland.’
‘I am … usually. Can … come in? … as … phyxiating out here.’
‘Of course!’ I embraced her enthusiastically. ‘Oh, sorry, I probably stink to high heaven. I haven’t been able to have a bath today and you smell gorgeous.’
‘Luckily … bottle of scent to … drown myself … might not … made it … top.’ Bobbie was puffing like one of those little funicular trains that run up cliffs. ‘… going to see … Giselle … last night but you … not dancing … rang the company … at home … broken leg.’ She hugged me again then held me at arm’s length. ‘… look at you.’ Her eyes took in my cap, my gloves, my cast and my shivering state. ‘Marigold! … mauve … cold! Bed … at once!’
I was too weak to do other than obey. Bobbie brought a chair up to the bed and sat panting for a while, holding my hand and chafing my back.
‘All right, I’ve got my breath now. Why is this place colder than a polar cap?’
I explained about the boiler. She went away and came back with the blankets from the other two beds. She piled them on my recumbent form, keeping one to wrap round herself. ‘That’s better. Now tell me about your poor leg.’
‘Foot actually. It’s a comminuted fracture but the surgeon thinks it’ll mend all right. I’m starting to feel warmer already. I don’t know why I didn’t think about Nancy and Sorel’s bedclothes.’
‘I expect you’ve got mild hypothermia. The mind is the first thing that goes, apparently.’
‘Oh, Bobbie!’ I looked at her with pleasure. Even had she been as ugly as a warty old crone I would have been thrilled to see a fellow human being, but she happened to be remarkably beautiful. ‘I hope you aren’t a dream. I couldn’t bear it if you vanished now.’
‘I’m here, darling, and I’m not going to leave you until I know you’re all right. Why aren’t you being properly looked after?’
‘Sebastian told the clinic I was going to a nursing home so they’d let me out early, but it would have been too expensive. And everyone in the company’s either away or too busy.’ I brought Bobbie up to date with the events of the past week, feeling warmth return to my extremities and optimism to my powers of reasoning. ‘I don’t need looking after, really. I can hobble about. It’s just that it’s so difficult to get up and down the stairs.’
‘I’ll find something for us to eat and then we’ll think what’s the best thing to do.’
‘There’s a tin of frankfurters.’ I pulled a face. ‘Otherwise it’s brawn, I’m afraid.’
Bobbie picked up a pale green carrier bag with ‘Fortnum and Mason’ written on it. ‘I stopped on my way to pick up a few bits and pieces. I won’t be a minute.’
She returned with a tray piled with good things.
‘Smoked salmon!’ I cried. ‘Oh, the luxury! A whole camembert! Tomatoes and olives! Cold chicken!’ I felt my mouth fill with saliva. ‘And little fruit tarts! You angel!’ I winked away tears of gratitude.
She had also brought a bottle of claret that tasted deliciously of raspberries and liquorice. While we ate and drank we talked as easily as though we had met yesterday, though in fact it had been two years since we had last seen each other.
I had known Bobbie all my life. Our mothers had been at the same boarding school. As a homesick new girl, my mother, who was much given to hero-worship, had developed a crush on Bobbie’s mother, who was several years her senior. She had run errands for her and written her passionate notes and spent all her pocket money on presents of chocolates and bath salts. To judge by her adult personality, Bobbie’s mother, Laetitia, had been a good-looking but reserved and probably rather friendless girl. It must have suited her to have an acolyte.
Somehow the relationship had lasted beyond school and even after marriage. Laetitia was invalidish. My mother spent weeks with the Pickford-Nortons in their large, gloomy house in Sussex, surrounded by dripping trees and sodden shrubberies, cooking little delicacies, running baths, fetching books from the library, a willing slave. After she married my father the visits became much less frequent, but once a year my mother, my sister Kate and I made the long journey from Northumberland to the south coast to stay for a week or two at Cutham Hall.
Given the eight-year age gap, it would have been quite understandable had Bobbie chosen to ignore me altogether during these visits, but she had been angelically kind and looked after me like a mother – which was just as well as my real mother was too busy to have time for me. Laetitia became more demanding with age. She had to have shawls, spectacles, hats and pills fetched, and constant cups of tea and cakes made while she lay either in bed, on a sofa or in a deckchair in the garden. Her cook and her daily gave notice almost hourly and had to be cajoled into staying. During the sulking periods, my mother had to vacuum acres of carpet, polish her way through cupboards of silver and rustle up lunch and supper for Major Pickford-Norton, a small man with a peppery temper and a selfishness quite as colossal as his wife’s.
Bobbie had taken us for walks and helped us make daisy chains and grass whistles or collect conkers, depending on the time of year. Sometimes we went to the beach. Bobbie would give us piggybacks down to the place where it briefly became sand and we’d make mermaids with shells and bladderwrack and skate’s-egg cases and she would plait my hair so that it wasn’t torture to brush afterwards. On wet days she took us in turn on her knee and read us stories and played Happy Families and Ludo. I thought her the most beautiful creature in the world, with her long fair wavy hair and eyes that were the colour of the sea. Despite my dislike of Cutham Hall and my fear of Major Pickford-Norton, it was a huge disappointment when Laetitia wrote to say that her indifferent health precluded any more visits.
