summer." And as she nodded, "Have you somewhere to stay?"
She flushed. "Well, no, not actually. I was wondering if I could sleep in the dressing room just until we sail?"
"Impossible." He sighed. "I will speak to one of the girlsperhaps Marie-Claude or Kirstin will find room for you in their lodgings. You have money?"
"A little."
"Good." He put the tips of his plump fingers together and said reflectively, "Of course, if someone should come here and ask me if I am employing a girl called Natasha Alexandrovna in my corps de ballet, I shall have to say 'Yes.' But if they ask me if I am employing a girl called Harriet Morton, that is a different matter. Of such a girl I naturally know nothing!"
"Oh
Thank you!" She paused. "You see, my father
didn't exactly give me permission."
"Yes," said Dubrov heavily, "I gathered this. Perhaps you should tell me
"
Later, meeting Grisha in the corridor, he said, "Well, how is she, my little protegee?"
Grisha shrugged. "It is a pity. But there; it is only their horses that the British train properly. And now it's too late
I think?" He pondered and added, "Elle est'sérieuse."
Serious. Not lacking in humor, not pompous or self-important, but seriousgiving the job the full weight of her being.
Dubrov nodded and passed on.
The principal dancers, unlike the rest of the Company who were in lodgings or hostels, were accommodated in the Queen's Hotel in Bloomsbury until their date of departure: a draughty place with dingy lace curtains and terrible food, but handy for the theater and where the proprietors were friendly and accustomed to the vagaries of their foreign guests.
In this hotel, as in all the others where the dancers had stayed, Dubrov's room adjoined that of the ballerina, Galina Simonova. Since Simonova's views on "passion as an aid to the dance" were well-known, it might be concluded that Dubrov enjoyed what were technically known as conjugal rights, and this was so. Dubrov's rights, however, were granted to him on such uncertain termswere so dependent on the state of Simonova's back, her Achilles tendon and her reviewsthat he had learned to temper the wind to the shorn lamb in a way which was not unremarkable in a man who had once written a ninety-stanza poem in the style of Pushkin entitled Eros Proclaimed.
The evening of Harriet's arrival at the theater, he found Simonova lying on the sofaan ominous sign-staring with black and tormented eyes at her left knee.
"It's going again, Sashka; I can feel it! Dimitri has given me a massage, but it's no useit's going. We must cancel the tour!"
He came over to sit beside her and felt her knee, considerably more familiar to him than his own. "Let me see."
Her knee, her cervical vertebrae, the bursa on her Achilles tendon
he knew them like men know their children and now, as his stubby fingers moved gently over the joint, he wondered for the thousandth time why fate had linked him indissolubly with this temperamental, autocratic woman.
Sitting with balletomane friends in his box in the bel étage at the Maryinsky in St. Petersburg, he had picked her out of the corps. "That one," he had said, pointing at the row of water sprites in Ondine, and he was right. She became a coryphée, a soloist
It was not difficult in those days to enjoy her favors; he was young and rich and could present her own image to her in the way that women have always found irresistible. "If you give me half an hour to explain away my face, I could seduce the Queen of France," said Voltaireand Dubrov, though uninterested in royalty, could have said the same.
He bought her an apartment on the Fontanka Canal and she was moderately faithful for she was obsessed by dancingby her career. Outside revolutions rumbled, Grand Dukes were assassinated and picked off the cobbled streets in splinters, but to Simonova it mattered only that she ended badly after her pique turns in Paquita or started her solo a bar too soon. And because it was this
Chelle Bliss, Brenda Rothert