Free A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson Page A

that he loved in her—this crazy obsession with the art that he too adored—he put up with it all, became manager, masseur, choreographer, nurse…
    She rose steadily in the ranks of the Maryinsky. They gave her the Lilac Fairy, then Swanhilda in Coppélia and at last Giselle. After her first night in that immortal ballet, he watched one of the great cliches of the theater brought to life—the students unharnessing the horses from her carriage in order to pull her through the streets—but later she had cried in his arms because she had not got her fall right in the Mad Scene: it was clumsy, she said, and the timing was wrong.
    A year later she threw it all away in a stupid, unnecessary row with the management, refusing to wear the costume they had designed for her in Aurora's Wedding and appearing instead in a costume she preferred. She was fined and told to change it. She refused. No one believed it would come to anything for the hierarchical, bureaucratic theater was full of such scenes, but Simonova with childish obstinacy forced the director to a confrontation and when she was overruled, she resigned. Resigned from the theater she adored, from the great tradition which had nourished her, and went to Europe. And Dubrov, too, exiled himself from his homeland, sold his interests in Russia and created a company in which she could dance.
    Since then they had toured Paris and Rome, Berlin and Stockholm, and it was understood between them that she hated Russia, that she would not return even if they asked her to do so on bended knees. For eight years now they had been exiles and it was hard—finding theaters, getting together a corps, luring soloists from other companies. Of late, too, there had been competition from other and younger dancers—from Pavlova, who had also come to Europe; from the divine Karsavina, Diaghilev's darling, who with Nijinsky had taken the West by storm. Simonova owned to thirty-six, but she was almost forty and looked it: a stark woman with hooded eyes and deep lines etched between her autocratically arched brows.
    "We should never have attempted this tour," she said now. "It's madness."
    Fear again. It was fear, of course, that ailed her knee… fear of failure, of old age… of the new Polish dancer, Masha Repin, who had joined them three days earlier and was covering her Giselle…
    "You have told them it is my farewell performance?" she demanded. "Positively my last one? You have put it on the posters?"
    Dubrov sighed and abandoned her knee. This was the latest fantasy—that each of her performances was the last, that she would not have to submit her aging body to the endless torture of trying to achieve perfection anymore. He knew what was coming next and now, as she moved his hand firmly to her fifth vertebra, it came.
    "Soon we shall give it all up, won't we, Sashka, and go and live in Cremorra? Soon…"
    "Yes, dousha, yes."
    "It will be so peaceful," she murmured, arching her back to give him better access. "We shall listen to the birds and have a goat and grow the best vegetables in Trentino. Won't it be wonderful?"
    "Wonderful," agreed Dubrov dully.
    Three years earlier, returning from a tour of the northern cities of Italy—in one of which a critic had dared to compare Simonova unfavorably with the great Legnani—the train that had been carrying them toward the Alps had come to a sudden stop. The day was exquisite; the air, as they lowered the window, like wine. Gentle-eyed cows with bells grazed in flower-filled fields, geraniums and petunias tumbled from the window-boxes of the little houses, a blue lake shimmered in the valley.
    All of which would not have mattered except that across a meadow, beside a sparkling stream, one of the toy houses proclaimed itself "For Sale."
    To this oldest of fantasies, that of finding from a passing train the house of one's dreams, Simonova instantly responded. She seized two hat-boxes and her dressing-case, issued a torrent of instructions to her dresser and