Death of a Dancer

‘I promise you, the figures are very promising, considering,’ he told her.

She went on talking, taking no notice. The man with the armchair and the maid waited in the corridor as Blake held a dressing-room door open for Columbine, more like a nervous host welcoming a duchess than a theatre manager whose star was late. The maid and the doorkeeper followed them inside with their burdens, then the doorkeeper came out, puffing his cheeks.

‘Dovey-wovey, why didn’t you wait for Rodders?’

The cry came from a gentleman who’d just strolled in from outside. He was a young man so pleased with himself that he seemed to glow from inside like a fat white candle. He was probably twenty-five or so, average height and running to fat already. His head was round and slightly too large for his body, set on his shoulders without much in the way of neck intervening, his hair so fair and fine that it stood out like a halo round his head. Buckskin breeches, fine tan riding boots with pink tops that matched the tassel on his walking cane, a chestnut-coloured cutaway coat over a waistcoat figured in squares of chestnut and pink completed the look of something from a child’s toy box grown to life size. The other gentlemen seemed to know him well and called out various sarcastic remarks about being late. He brushed past them and rapped with his cane on Columbine’s closed door.

Barnaby Blake’s voice was audible from inside, still trying to argue his case.

‘… audiences improving all the time. We’ll be playing to full houses all summer with the coronation coming up. There’ll be people from all over the country who’ve never seen anything like these shows before, fighting to get into theatres. I’ve had men begging me to let them invest.’

It sounded as if he hoped to keep Columbine on the bill all season, which would be bad news for Daniel.

The gentleman who called himself Rodders rapped on the door again.

‘Open up, Dovey-wovey.’

Columbine’s maid opened the door a crack, said some words that I couldn’t hear, and closed it in his face.

‘Dovey-wovey.’

The man set up a howl like a disappointed child. Barnaby Blake came out, looking annoyed at having his diplomacy interrupted, but his face changed when he saw who was causing the commotion.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Hardcastle.’

‘She won’t let me in,’ the gentleman wailed. ‘Why won’t she let me in?’

By now the sounds of the orchestra tuning up were drifting along the corridor. The chances of Columbine being ready in time for the first ballet seemed remote.

‘Artistic temperament, Mr Hardcastle. I’m sure she’ll be delighted to see you at the interval,’ Blake soothed, as if calming a child. ‘My wine merchant has just delivered a case of claret and I’d appreciate your opinion. Would you join me in a glass?’

Young Mr Hardcastle allowed himself to be led into the manager’s room, with backward glances towards Columbine’s door.

A smaller fuss was going on back at the dancers‘ dressing room. An eighth girl had arrived late and at a run, to a chorus of ironic cheers from the gentlemen and twitterings of ’Where were you, Pauline?’ from the girls. She was already unhooking her outdoor cloak as she ran into the room. A purple cloak and a bonnet with feathers over daffodil-coloured hair; the girl I’d seen going into the church. But then, why shouldn’t a dancer enter a church? Theatre people are notoriously superstitious; perhaps she was praying for good luck.

‘Has Madame arrived yet?’ she asked the other girls, her tone suggesting that she didn’t much care for Columbine. They told her that, yes, she had, so she’d better hurry up changing.

I walked towards the pit, intending to warn Daniel that curtain-rise looked likely to be late. Running footsteps sounded behind me. I turned and there was Jenny in her thin costume and dancing pumps. She laid a hand on my arm, light as a falling leaf.

‘Excuse me, Miss Lane …’ She spoke in a whisper, with a Kentish accent. She was shaking with nerves or cold, but determined to say her piece. ‘I wanted to tell you how grateful I am. I didn’t… didn’t know anybody could be so kind.’

I looked into her wide grey eyes and understood what Daniel meant about her courage, but she was fragile too. You could no more be unkind to her than a bird fallen out of its nest. I held out my hand to her.

Instead of taking it, she suddenly threw her arms round my neck and kissed me on the cheek.

‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

Then she turned and fled in a rustle of muslin, back towards the dancers’ dressing room.

CHAPTER FOUR

The curtain rose half an hour late, but the audience seemed cheerful enough about it. Rodney Hardcastle and his gentlemen friends took their places in the two on-stage boxes after the overture had started. Most of them were talking loudly to each other, although Hardcastle himself looked sulky. I was standing by Daniel at the piano, making myself useful sorting out music and giving myself a good view of stage boxes and stage. As the overture ended, the twin acrobats spun themselves into complicated somersaults on and off a see-saw placed in front of the curtain. They were a marvel of strong nerves and good timing, but chiefly there to give late-comers a chance to settle. When they bounded off, the orchestra went straight into the introduction to the first ballet. The curtain quivered and rose. The chorus skipped on, wafting garlands. Columbine, in green satin and gold gauze, entered en pointe as Titania, with a smile that looked as if it had been set in wax. Bursts of cheers broke out from the boxes and front row, along with a thumping of walking canes on the floor and snorts of laughter from Rodney Hardcastle’s friends. There was a joke going on among them that the rest of the audience didn’t share.

I watched Columbine carefully, trying to understand why Disraeli should consider her a possible threat to the good order of society. She looked younger and more beautiful under stage lighting than close-to, but as for her dancing … To describe it as second rate would have been charitable. She was the wrong shape for a dancer. Admittedly her feet were small and neat, and her ankles and calves shapely. But her breasts, only just contained by her bodice, were like a swell of downland. They were magnificent, but put her out of balance, like a schoolboy’s top that can only stay upright if it keeps twirling fast. She could not twirl fast. She was insecure en pointe, hardly airborne in her leaps, unreliable in her pirouettes. Luckily, the ballet had been arranged so that the eight dancers were always on hand to offer discreet support. They did their work efficiently, but only Jenny danced as if there were any joy in it. Her diffidence fell away and she moved with an instinctive response to the music, sure as a fish darting through water. She belonged in some other, less tawdry, ballet. Daniel’s eyes followed her every move until almost the end of the ballet.

Columbine finished triumphantly on tiptoe, the girls kneeling round her, leaning back like the petals of a flower. All that was needed was a repetition of the opening bars to get them off the stage. Daniel was already signalling with his eyes to the bassoon player to be ready for the comic fanfare that opened the burletta, so he didn’t see what came next. The girls stood up and formed a line. Columbine walked past them towards the wings, curtseying to the applause at every few steps. It happened that Jenny was the last in line, standing like the rest, head up and arms extended sideways. Straightening up from her final curtsey, Columbine stretched her arm back in an arc and, quite deliberately, struck Jenny hard across the ribs. The audience probably didn’t notice anything or thought Jenny was simply being clumsy when she staggered back, but from the pit I saw it quite clearly and even heard the gasp of pain that Jenny gave. She recovered almost at once, and walked off into the wings with the rest of the dancers. Then the curtain came down.

‘What did she do to deserve that?’

The lead violin whispered the question to me, under cover of the bassoon blasts. He was Toby Kennedy, a big and kindly Irishman from County Cork, friend of both my father and Daniel. If Daniel assembled a group of players for anything from Haydn string quartets to the present shambles, Toby Kennedy would be there. He might have been one of the greatest violinists of his day, if it hadn’t been for an easy-going temperament that made him love company and good fellowship better than his art. He must have been in his fifties but wore his age as lightly as everything else; a bear of a man with a shock of curly grey hair and a wind-tanned face from riding on the outside of coaches on his way to far-flung concert engagements.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Better not tell him. Not until afterwards, anyway.’

He nodded towards Daniel.

‘No. He’s … he is very fond of Jenny Jarvis, isn’t he?’

He gave me a sideways look.

‘Don’t worry, I’ve seen him like this a few times before. Usually it’s the soprano in whatever opera he’s directing. He’ll recover in time.’

‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ I said. ‘Not this time.’

The violins were cued so he couldn’t answer.

Hardcastle and his friends sat through the burletta, then left noisily as the arithmetical horse began its act. They returned an hour later, even more noisily and some of them unsteady on their feet, during the instrumental prologue to the second ballet.

As far as there was a plot, it concerned the goddess Diana, out hunting with her maidens. Anything less like the chaste moon goddess than Columbine in gold-spangled muslin and a coronet sprouting blue ostrich feathers in her hair it would be hard to imagine. The high point of the dance was Columbine turning a series of pirouettes. The girls kneeled down and stretched out imploring palms to their goddess, so that if she became unsteady she could take support from the one nearest. With luck, it would look like a graceful acceptance of homage rather than desperation. One pirouette safely executed, second pirouette, a hasty clutch at a nymph’s hand, similarly with three. She came down flat-footed at four and a half, turned and dropped her usual curtsey to acknowledge the applause. Jenny was at the end of the line and there was no need for Columbine to touch her at all. I couldn’t believe it when she straightened from the curtsey, put her hand on Jenny’s outstretched palm and forced it backwards with all her weight. Jenny made no sound that I could hear, but her face contorted.

Daniel positively yelled a protest that must have been audible on stage if not to the audience and, for once in his life, missed a note. Kennedy rallied the strings and the dance went on. Jenny was smiling again, the automatic smile of all the nymphs. Daniel looked at me. I signed to him to go on playing and he did, his eyes fixed on the stage.

The yellow-haired girl, Pauline, presented Diana with a wooden hunting spear. Some animal was notionally attacking them from a canvas-painted thicket. The nymphs formed a protective circle round their goddess. Columbine flourished her spear and drove the point of it straight into Jenny’s shin. Jenny yelped and jumped. This time the audience couldn’t have missed it. There was a hole in Jenny’s stocking and blood flowing. The dancers nearest her looked horrified, while the others held their attitudes and their smiles.

For a moment it looked as if Jenny was going to take it as passively as the previous attacks; but only for a moment. Still moving with delicate grace, she kicked Columbine hard and accurately on the kneecap. Columbine’s shriek was probably heard in the street outside. The gallery were ecstatic, whooping and cheering. They were too far from the stage to see the brutal reality of the thing and thought this was all part of the entertainment, much more to their taste than ballet. Most of the musicians had stopped playing by now, though Kennedy – on the principle that in theatre you must keep going whatever happens – fiddled out an Irish jig that formed an oddly appropriate accompaniment.

Jenny, seeing the look on Columbine’s face, tried to move for shelter behind the other dancers, but Columbine went after her, limping heavily but with more energy than she’d put into the dance. She caught Jenny by the back of the bodice, spun her round, and raked her nails deeply down her cheek. By that point, Daniel was climbing on to the stage. I caught his coat tails.

‘No – you’ll only make it worse.’

Jenny, with fierce stripes of red on her cheek, clutched at Columbine’s hair and yanked hard. By then, the rest of the audience had taken their cue from the gallery and were laughing out loud, even Hardcastle’s party, who were surely in a position to see it was all too real. The laughter grew to hysteria as Jenny fell over backwards on the stage, with Columbine’s wig and its coronet of ostrich feathers spread across her body like the tendrils of an exotic octopus.

Columbine screeched again and clapped her hands to her head. She wasn’t bald, nothing as bad as that, but her own hair was thinner than the wig, pinned close to her scalp and wet from perspiration. The combination of her small, wet head, smudged rouge and spreading circles of eye make-up above her billowing gauze was oddly clownish.

Through it all I’d been aware of the voice of Barnaby Blake shouting from the wings. He’d probably been ordering the stagehands to bring the curtain down, because it descended so suddenly that some of the dancers who’d been watching open-mouthed had to leap backwards to save themselves from being knocked off their feet. Behind it, Columbine was still yelling.

Daniel ran up the steps to the stage and round the edge of the curtain. I followed. On the way he almost collided with Rodney Hardcastle, who was trying to scramble over the edge of the box, possibly with the belated idea of helping Columbine. Daniel simply pushed him aside. As I went past I glimpsed Hardcastle’s round face, mouth open, expression caught between hilarity and alarm.