Free A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson Page B

pulled Dubrov down onto the platform.
    Two days later the little house in Cremorra—complete with vegetable garden, grazing for a substantial number of goats, three fretwork balconies and a chicken-house—was his.
    Fortunately, in Vienna the critics were kind and it was not too often that Simonova remembered the little wooden house which a kind peasant lady was looking after. They had spent a week there the year after he bought it and Dubrov had been rather ill, for there was a glut of apricots in their delightful orchard and Simonova had made a great deal of jam which did not set. Of late, however, Cremorra was getting closer and Dubrov, to whom the idea of living permanently in the country among inimical animals and loosening fruit was horrifying, now searched his mind for a diversion.
    "I employed a new girl today," he said. "The one I told you about in Cambridge. Sonia's pupil. She ran away to come to us, so no doubt I shall be arrested soon for luring away a minor."
    "Is she good?"
    The fear again… but behind the panic of being overtaken, something else—the curiosity, the eagerness about the thing itself: the dance and its future.
    "How could she be good? She is an amateur."
    "But Sonia taught her, you say?" They had been friends of a sort, she and Sonia who, a few years older, was already in the corps when Simonova joined the company. Together, infuriated by the antics of a visiting "star," they had unloosed an ancient, wheezing pug-dog on to the stage during a ballet called Trees…
    "Yes, but three times a week. Oh, you know how the British are about the arts—the gentility, the snobbery. It's a pity, for if they chose they could make marvelous dancers of their girls. Perhaps one day…"
    "Why did you want her then?"
    Dubrov, about to embark on the quality he had detected in Harriet—a totality and absorption—changed his mind. Simonova had started on a routine that was all too familiar—the lavish application of cold cream, the knee bandage, the wax ear-plugs to eliminate the noises of the traffic—which in about three minutes from now would result in his being chastely kissed on the forehead and dismissed.
    "She has ears like Natasha's," he said.
    The ballerina spun around. "Like Natasha's? In War and Peace? But Tolstoy doesn't describe her ears."
    Dubrov shrugged. "I don't need Tolstoy to tell me what her ears were like."
    It worked. The jealousy on her face was instantaneous and owed nothing to her profession. "You are an idiot." She put the ear-plugs back in the drawer, wiped off the cream with a piece of gauze.
    "Chort!" she said. "I'm tired. Let's go to bed."
    Harriet had always longed to be allowed to work. Now her wish was granted a hundredfold. There were constant disasters as this most unfledged of swans, this newest of snowflakes staggered across the stage. But though Harriet made mistakes, she did not make them twice.
    The girls, without exception, were helpful. They themselves had only just learned to work in unison, but they counted for her, pushed her, pulled her and retrieved her from inhospitable corners of the stage. Even Olga Narukov—a spitfire from the borders of Afghanistan who thought nothing of felling a dancer who displeased her with a kick like a mule's—kept her temper with Harriet, for the newcomer's grit and humility were curiously disarming.
    "Follow the girl in front!" Grisha yelled at Harriet when her musicality threatened to lead her astray. "Just follow the girl in front!"
    The girl in front, when the corps was arranged by height, was the French girl Marie-Claude, and there could be no one more worthy of being followed.
    The creation of brown-eyed blondes has long been regarded as one of God's better ideas. Marie-Claude's eyes were huge and velvety, her lashes like scimitars, her upturned mouth voluptuously curved. To this largesse had been added waist-length golden, curling hair which, had she chosen to sit on a rock brushing it, must have sent every sailor within miles plunging to