Free Hester's Story by Adèle Geras Page B

Nutcracker was one. And perhaps she could also be one of the cygnets in Swan Lake , dancing to that music, the music that went round and round in her head.
    While Paula slept, Estelle would lie awake in her bed thinking about the costumes she would wear: jewelled and feathered and silky; organza and tulle. Her ballet slippers would be made of satin and she wouldn’t have just one pair, but dozens and dozens. She’d need black and white and pink and blue and red. She’d curtsey infront of the apricot and blue footlights and people in the audience would throw flowers at her feet.
    Those were the good dreams. At other times, when she was feeling less cheerful, Estelle had visions of Madame Olga asking permission from her father and being turned away at the door. Or getting a letter from him … yes, that was how it would be, because Papa was in France … a letter saying, I will most certainly never give permission for my daughter to become a ballet dancer. She is far too young to leave the Wellick household and live in London at her age. I sent her to England to be properly educated and properly educated she will be. You are wasting your time, Madame .
    By the time the day of Piers Cranley’s visit arrived, Estelle had persuaded herself that joining a proper ballet company in London would never happen. She’d be condemned to remain in the life she’d been leading, stuck in the depths of the countryside in the dismal Wellick house until she was twenty-one and could do exactly what she wanted to do. But, of course, by then it would be much too late for her to become a ballerina. She could reduce herself to tears simply by thinking about it.
    She didn’t tell anyone else what she was feeling. Her friends – Pam and Betty at dancing class and Felicity at school – knew nothing of her ambitions. They’d have thought she was ‘showing off’. Wanting to perform on a public stage was the most obvious kind of showing off there could possibly be. They wouldn’t have understood it. Estelle knew what they thought of her.
    She was shy and rather quiet in class and she never ventured an opinion unless someone called on her specifically. But her answers when she did give them were usually correct and Miss Wilcox noticed this.
    ‘You’re a dark horse, Estelle dear. I’m sure you’recapable of much more than you’re giving, especially in English,’ she said.
    Estelle just smiled at her. She’d been cultivating an enigmatic, mysterious smile for a long time. Sometimes, as a special treat, Auntie Rhoda took the girls to the cinema in Leeds and Estelle read the film magazines greedily. She used to study the faces – Garbo, Dietrich, Vivien Leigh, Merle Oberon – and notice how they looked when they were smiling. Then she imitated them, and she was good at it. She regarded this as part of her ballet training because Madame Olga had often said how very important acting was for a dancer.
    ‘And you, my child, you have the gift,’ she said to Estelle, more than once. ‘It moves the heart when the audience can feel your emotion. When you are Giselle, I can have your madness and your love in my heart, here!’ She would beat on her chest with a fist, and then open her hand and move it through the air, like a perfect white butterfly.
    She didn’t mean the real Giselle . A thirteen-year-old girl in a ballet class couldn’t possibly dance the whole ballet on her own. Still, Madame Olga had devised two small solos for her pupil, set to Adolphe Adam’s music. She’d told Estelle the story of the ballet in great detail, so that she knew who she was supposed to be and what she was meant to be feeling. In one dance she was filled with joy as she declared her love for Loys, and in the second she had to lose her mind after discovering that her true love was not who he claimed to be. Estelle had no experience of ‘madness’ or ‘love’, but she did feel everything deeply. She’d read about these emotions in books, seen them