Free Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs by Victoria Clayton Page A

million. Paper parcels contained slices of ham and salami, lettuce, poppy-seed rolls and a bar of hazelnut chocolate. There was also a bottle of apple juice and a copy of this month’s Vogue. Including the change at Newcastle, the journey was going to take five hours. I burrowed in my knapsack to find The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, which was second on the list of required reading for the intelligent conversationalist. Gibbon and I had gone far enough together for the time being.
    It was a second-hand copy from the bargain box of a local bookshop. The binding was an attractive blue but the book smelt as though it had been macerated for a hundred years in a leaky coffin in a subfluvial vault. And Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage , I read, dipping into the middle. This was the stuff all right, I thought to myself, and prepared to be enlightened. But Little-faith was of another temper. His mind was on things divine …
    I woke, absolutely starving, as we were drawing into Grantham station. I blessed Bobbie’s forethought. Getting to the restaurant car would have been quite as difficult as anything Christian could possibly have undergone. I ate much of the picnic and surreptitiously fed bits of ham and salami through the bars of Siggy’s prison-house, then wiped my fingers and took up the magazine. I was enjoying The Pilgrim’s Progress , of course, but Vogue might be a better digestif .
    I studied the models with interest. We dancers feel acute anxiety about our bodies, not surprisingly as we spend most of our time staring into mirrors. We observe people’s body shapes before faces, voices, cleverness, niceness. This probably seems terribly superficial, but how a dancer looks is extremely important. A smallhead, long neck, short torso and long, long slender legs are the ideal. The models were clearly giants, with large thigh bones, huge feet and big jaws, quite the wrong conformation for a dancer and the opposite of everything I had been taught to admire. They stood pigeon-toed with their hips and knees thrust forward and heads drooping and all their weight on the back of their feet.
    Dancers spend a great deal of effort in perfecting ‘turnout’ with not just our feet but our knees and hips at a quarter to three. This is the most fundamental aspect of classical ballet technique. Some dancers have perfect turnout naturally, but I had really had to work at it. I had drilled myself to make it second nature to turn out my legs during every single second of class and in performance. On stage, with the appropriate clothes, pointe shoes and perfectly disciplined movements, what is actually a distortion looks superbly graceful. When I was walking in the street or anywhere not to do with dancing I had to remind myself all the time to turn my toes in, so as not to look like a waddling duck.
    We were trained to stretch our necks, lift our chins and chests, straighten our backs and stand with just the skin of our heels on the ground so that our weight was centred on the arch of our feet. The models scowled with what Madame would have called ‘dead’ eyes. We were supposed to look engaged, expressive, reflective. It just shows how subjective beauty is.
    After I had marvelled at the prices of the clothes and read the advertisements, I closed my eyes in a well-stuffed haze and thought long and hard about Sebastian without coming to any conclusion except that now I had at least five weeks with no possibility of seeing him he seemed much less frightening. I imagined signing a contract with Miko and receiving ovations and rave reviews from Didelot for my interpretation of Kitri in Don Quixote .
    I must have slept again, for the next thing I knew we were drawing into York station. As we travelled further north the ridges of the ploughed fields were frosted with white and the occasionalsnowflake glanced against the window. By the time we left Darlington, snow was falling steadily and the sky had taken on a bluish