Once a year, in the spring, Nadia Petrovna cleared her desk. She scooped the piles of unpaid invoices and tax demands into drawers with a long sigh of relief and escaped London for a fortnight to revisit the beloved Europe of her youth.
This year, as always, Paris laid out the red carpet for her. At the airport she was met by the Minister for the Arts, and stopped on the pavement beside his black limousine to beam at the select band of press photographers who showered her with affectionate greetings. The Minister’s secretary presented her with a bouquet of spring flowers and her wrinkled face lit up in delight.
“How lovely!” she said, more delighted by the daffodils than all the other combined attention. “They’re absolutely my favorite.”
Nadia Petrovna adored Paris. She went out to lunch with the director of the Opéra and then attended a gala performance on the arm of a great dancer who had taken his first classical steps under her tuition—and who had now, in his turn, retired to become one of France’s foremost choreographers.
At the Académie Française de la Danse, a little girl in pink tulle and satin slippers presented the dowager étoile with a bunch of pink roses, curtsying deeply as she had been instructed by the junior ballet teacher. Every year it was exactly the same; Nadia Petrovna Sekova had been making these visits for so long they had become part of the tradition of the dance world. Only the faces of the children changed; little girls who had once presented that annual pink bouquet were now dancing in the company, or had become teachers in their own right, or were married and had children.
“Nadia Petrovna,” said her old friend Henri, taking her hand. Like everyone in the ballet world, he addressed her in the old-fashioned Russian style, adding the feminine form of her father’s Christian name to hers. “You look younger every time I see you.”
The ancient woman smiled in reply and shook her head. They both knew she couldn’t go on making these trips forever. Already she relied heavily on her walking stick and this year, for the first time, she had taken a taxi to the Académie from her hotel instead of walking. Even the journeys to and from the airport exhausted her now.
“Paris always makes me feel young,” she said with a courageous sparkle in her old eyes.
Madame de Sancerre, the school’s director, accompanied Nadia Petrovna on her traditional tour of the classes, pointing out favorite young dancers with her long fingers. The atmosphere in every studio they entered prickled with nervous unease. Whenever Madame walked into a room it was as though an icy wind swept in with her through the open door. One by one, they went into each of the studios, sitting on wooden chairs at the front of the class while the anxious students performed their rond de jambe exercises, adages and allegros for the great dowager prima ballerina of the Diaghilev era.
Nadia Petrovna sat upright on her chair—alert and attentive—with her knotted, arthritic hands folded over the handle of her walking stick.
“That tall boy at the back,” she said, picking out one of the students at the barre in a large class of boys. “Why does his teacher not correct his position? Here . . .” She indicated on her own body a line between her shoulder and her hip. “Here, this is all wrong.”
Madeleine de Sancerre glanced sharply at the boy and turned to her guest with a gesture of irritated dismissal.
“There’s no point correcting him. He won’t be taught. It’s not his teachers’ fault: the boy is unteachable. He’s one of the ones we’re getting rid of this term. He was a promising child—extremely promising—but, like so many, puberty has ruined him. He’s sixteen now, and quite beyond salvage. Instead of improving, his technique just gets worse and worse. As you see, everything is out of place. Look at his feet and hands.”
Nadia Petrovna looked. Carefully. The light-haired boy was tall; his gangly limbs seemed too long for his narrow body, giving him an unbalanced, coltlike air. There was something very forlorn about him as he danced halfheartedly behind the other boys, not even attempting to keep up with the exercise. Nadia Petrovna studied him through pensively narrowed eyes. His technique was a disaster. Every movement he made was wrong. The question that puzzled her was why they hadn’t got rid of him sooner. Competition for places at the Académie was extremely fierce.
Madame went on, with pursed lips, “See how he keeps his eyes down? Henri has told him a hundred times that he can’t balance if he gazes at the floor. And yet look at him. I haven’t made up my mind whether it’s from stubbornness or sheer stupidity.”
Nadia Petrovna was still watching him with calm interest.
“Perhaps it’s just fear of heights.”
“No,” Madame snapped. “He’s deliberately obstructive. And the other boys take heed of his rudeness. He’s a nasty, destructive influence in this school and the sooner we’re rid of him the better. I hate that boy.”
The old woman turned her head to look at her in surprise. Madame de Sancerre looked down at her clasped hands as she apologized mutedly for her outburst.
“Forgive me,” she muttered. “It makes me so angry.”
Nadia Petrovna nodded her sympathy. There was no need to explain. She knew from her own experience that nothing makes a ballet teacher more bitter than wasted talent.
“Madeleine, I’m sure the poor boy has no idea he’s caused you so much frustration.”
“Oh, he knows,” she replied acidly. “He doesn’t speak—won’t even answer direct questions. Never looks you in the eye. Never smiles. Never frowns. No expression at all. He does it on purpose just to infuriate us.”
Nadia Petrovna doubted that even a stubborn teenager could keep that up, day after day, merely for the satisfaction of annoying his teachers. But she kept her own counsel and tactfully pointed to a different student.
“That boy there, with the black hair, has the most beautifully polished feet. You’ve done a marvelous job with him.”
“Yes, he’s a very dedicated worker,” Madame said with relief. “Only fifteen. Henri thinks he might go into the Upper School a year early.”
A few minutes later she rose from her seat and led her aged guest out of the studio to continue their tour of the classes. At the door Nadia Petrovna stopped and looked back along the row of boys as they swept their feet over the floor in rapid unison, all in identical green dance uniform. At the far end of the barre, the willowy boy with the blond curly hair and invisible eyes was marking the exercise listlessly, his arms and feet moving mechanically in time to the thumping of the pianist’s hands, his technique floundering on every step. Nadia Petrovna’s heart went out to him.
In the afternoon, after lunching with Madeleine de Sancerre and Henri Renoir, Nadia Petrovna escaped from her companions and stole a pleasant half hour to wander alone through the school where she had taught for so many years. In the pillared foyer she lifted her face, still radiant despite its great age, to look at the Rococo paintings on the curved ceiling of the huge dome. She had always loved that dome. Such grandeur. Like classical dance at its best—untouched by the pettiness and the humdrum of the lives that passed beneath it.
She walked slowly through the corridors of the school, leaning on her walking stick, thinking of all those children she had taught so long ago in these echoing studios. She still remembered every face, every pair of feet, every heartbreaking injury that had destroyed a promising career. Silently, in one of the empty studios on the top floor, she ran her hand lovingly over the barre remembering a time even before her teaching days. Her hands were misshapen and white now, crippled with arthritis, fragile skin stretched over them like parchment. Once they had been described as the most beautiful hands in Europe.
She stopped outside one of the small studios, resting both hands on top of her stick, and looked through the little window in the door. The tall, fair-haired boy was standing alone in the studio, his back propped indolently against the barre with his arms folded and his feet, in long white ballet socks and ballet shoes, crossed at the ankles. Through an open window at his side the sound of piano music drifted in from across the courtyard. He was gazing through the window, listening, lost in abstraction.
Nadia Petrovna opened the door quietly and went in.
When the boy saw who had entered he unfolded his arms and shifted his weight away from the barre in an unconscious gesture of respect. Nadia Petrovna permitted herself a small smile. Hostile and undisciplined he might be, but he was still a pupil of the Académie Française.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Am I interrupting you?”
He looked at her warily and glanced at the door behind her to see who might be about to follow her into the room. “No, Madame.”
“A little bird in the staff room whispered to me that I would find you up here. Under strict instructions, as I understand the situation, to spend an hour working on your pirouettes.”
He made a small explanatory gesture toward the window, indicating the music.
“Chopin,” he said. “Les Sylphides. I was listening, Madame.”
Nadia Petrovna smiled at that.
“I see. And can you not listen and dance at the same time?”
“I can’t even dance and dance at the same time.” He looked away. “As you saw in class this morning.”
The old woman walked slowly across the wooden studio floor to stand beside him at the barre. She peered up at his face with shrewd interest.
“How tall you are. I think I should be rather frightened to be so tall. Do you get vertigo all the way up there?”
He looked down into her sympathetic eyes, not fully comprehending her meaning. His own gray eyes were a little perturbed. It wasn’t every day that a pupil of the Académie found himself face-to-face with a genuine danseuse étoile of the old Russian school.
He cleared his throat. “Shall I get you a chair, Madame?” Despite his height and his sixteen years his voice was not yet quite settled in its precarious baritone.
She shook her head, amused. “No, thank you, child. I know I look dreadfully feeble but I’m not quite so decrepit that I can’t stand for a few minutes.” She saw that she had embarrassed him and immediately regretted her flippancy. What, after all, could a boy of sixteen be expected to know about such great age as hers? “Tell me,” she said, “what’s your name?”
He answered her reluctantly: “Jean-Baptiste St. Michel.”
Nadia Petrovna managed to hide her surprise. She looked him over slowly, recognizing now the extraordinary familiarity of those fair curls and those guarded gray eyes. St. Michel—yes. Oh yes, that explained a great deal. Indeed, she thought, that name must be quite a burden for a boy to bear in the world of dance. With a profound tact born of almost half a century’s experience with teenage students she pretended not to recognize his family name.
“Jean-Baptiste,” she said. “What a charming name.”
“I’m always called Michel.”
“May I ask why? Or is it a secret?”
“It’s not a secret, but I can’t tell you why. I don’t know.”
“Then it’s a mystery. I love mysteries; there should be more of them in life. They keep us young.” Her gleeful smile vanished and she looked him firmly in the eye. “Your teachers tell me you’re lazy, Michel. That you’re unfocused and make no effort to take corrections. That you’re rude and undisciplined. Why is this?”
He grappled with her question in discomfort but he couldn’t find a reply. Watching him closely, Nadia Petrovna saw in his troubled gray eyes something she couldn’t define; something that had no place in the eyes of any sixteen-year-old boy.
“Let me ask you a different question,” she said. “Do you love dancing?”
“I’ve lost the facility, Madame. I can’t do things that came easily to me at twelve or thirteen. I can’t even turn anymore.”
“That was not my question. I asked if you love dancing.”
Again he struggled to find an answer. His withdrawn gaze turned involuntarily for a moment toward the window, toward the piano music that was still drifting up across the courtyard.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Nadia Petrovna’s old eyes sparkled softly. He couldn’t know how eloquent that simple glance had been.
“Sixteen is a good age,” she said, with a plucky cheerfulness that defied her physical frailty. “A splendid age. It’s the age of choice, Michel. Choice! Do you realize what a wonderful word that is? It’s an age when you can be who you want to be. Even when being sixteen is ghastly it’s still absolutely wonderful. And the best news is it gets better as you go along. Dancers always whine terribly about getting older—take no notice of them. I’ll tell you a secret: being old and white-haired is tremendous fun. The only thing that’s not fun about it, apart from arthritis, is the unfulfilled dreams you’ve left behind you.”
She paused to let Michel speak if he wanted to, but he said nothing. He just watched her with quiet, interested eyes.
“You’re not a great talker, I see. You prefer to listen.”
“I can’t learn anything when I’m talking.”
Nadia Petrovna nodded slowly.
“I think you are rather a bright young man.”
He looked at her in surprise. No one had ever called him a young man before. And certainly no one had ever suggested that he was anything other than patently dull-witted.
“I don’t read or write very well,” he said doubtfully.
“There are different kinds of intelligence and different things you can do with it.” She raised her chin with a proud smile. “Did you know I have my own little company in London?”
“Yes, Madame. Charles Crown is your choreographer.”
“Good! You have heard of him! Excellent! What have you heard? Be frank.”
“That his style’s very modern. And his ballets are controversial.” She saw the flicker of a dormant personality steal into his eyes for the first time. “And that he’s dangerous, Madame.”
“Dangerous?” She clenched her fragile fist and shook it in excitement. Her ancient eyes blazed with enthusiasm. “Is that how he is known in France? Hurrah!”
“The other boys say he’s clever,” Michel said. “Some of them went to the summer school he gave on choreography last year.”
“And why didn’t you go?” she demanded.
“I wasn’t allowed to. I had to attend the classical summer school here at the Académie to work on my technique.”
“Well, you missed a great opportunity. Did you know that he is also a very fine dance teacher? Between you and me, I think he’s the best.”
He was puzzled: “But you don’t have a school, Madame.”
“No, but we have students within the company. A few boys and girls around your age who come to finish their training and learn to perform onstage.” She smiled mischievously. “It allows us to have our little stake in the future of dance. And, to be truthful, I’m afraid it helps keep our company solvent. Now what do you think of our scheme?”
Michel shook his head quickly.
“I could never afford it. Apprenticeships like that are very expensive.”
Nadia Petrovna stopped herself from replying that a course of study at the Académie was hardly cheap. The faint flush that had stolen over his face warned her against it. And yet, she thought, someone must be paying for his education.
“I am sure we can find a solution if we try,” she said, and then, seeing his uncertainty: “Think about it, Michel. I will be in Paris for three more days. The office downstairs can give you the address of my hotel.”
As Nadia Petrovna made her way slowly to the door Michel gazed after her.
“Excuse me, Madame . . . ?”
She stopped to look back at him. “Yes, child?”
“Is it true that you danced in the first production of Les Sylphides?”
Nadia Petrovna laughed. “I am very old, Michel, but I am not that old. It was first performed in 1907 in St. Petersburg. The first time I danced in it was here in Paris in 1913, with Pavlova and Nijinsky. I had only just turned fourteen.” Her eyes softened for a moment, gazing into the past, and then she smiled at him. “You can work out my present age for yourself.”
The front hall and corridors of the Islington Ballet’s headquarters in London were alive with bustling dancers on their way to and from the studios, and up to the wardrobe room for fittings. In the large ground-floor studio Charles Crown was auditioning young women for the corps. Nadia Petrovna walked very slowly along the short corridor, leaning on her stick as always, to peer through the reinforced glass in the studio doors. Eyeing the rows of hopeful girls at the barres she shook her head. She knew the artistic director’s taste.
“No,” she told herself. “Not one.”
She went back to her office and filled the electric kettle, exhuming the files of unpaid invoices from her desk drawer with a sigh. They couldn’t stay buried forever.
One by one, she turned over the bills, dunking a peppermint tea bag in a bone china cup of hot water. Before long, through the wall of her office, she heard the foyer reverberate with the violent crash of a door being slammed. A moment later angry footsteps thudded on the linoleum floor of the passage.
Nadia Petrovna squeezed out her tea bag and laid it on the saucer.
“Come in, Charles,” she murmured quietly.
The door flew open and the short figure of the artistic director exploded into the room. His dark eyes were spitting black fury.
“Mindless bloody elephants!” he bellowed, closing the door behind him. “Waste of a whole fucking morning!”
“Charles,” she said calmly, “you swear so terribly. Were they really no good?”
“No good?” Crown lit a cigarette and flung the spent match into the bin in frustration. “Nadia Petrovna, what do those girls think about?” He waved his hand in front of his eyes to indicate a blank stare. “Nothing! Nothing going on in there at all! And what, for Christ’s sake, do they eat?”
“Sit down, Charles, and have a cup of coffee.”
“I haven’t got time to sit down.” His dark eyes glared at her as he plugged in the kettle. “Did you have a good trip?”
“Very pleasant.”
“You look tired. You said you were going to take it easy.”
Nadia Petrovna passed him the sugar bowl.
“I had a marvelous time. I saw two ballets in Paris, had lunch at Maxim’s with Rudy . . .”
“At your age? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“And I saw Béjart’s new piece in Brussels—naturally I didn’t have a clue what it was about. I sent you a postcard. Did you get it?”
“I don’t know; probably.”
He paced the office with his coffee, frowning as his thoughts moved on to the thousand and one details for the new ballet awaiting his attention. Charles Crown was a very small, powerful man with strong Latin features and black hair, and ferocious black eyes that blazed with concentration, never resting for a moment. As he paced back and forth he managed to half listen to Nadia Petrovna’s chatter, even while his mind was tugging away at the host of problems waiting to be solved.
“Charles,” she said, aware that he was distracted, “I managed to see the Arts Commission in Brussels.”
The piercing eyes turned toward hers, instantly attentive.
“And . . . ?”
“They are considering our application. The grant committee doesn’t meet again until October.”
“October!” He ran his hand through his black hair with a growl of anxiety. “October! How are we going to survive until then? The print for Aeneas ran way over budget, by the way; there was nothing we could . . . Jesus! I forgot to tell you; Alf got out the rest of the touring floor last week. Four rolls are completely perished. God only knows what we’re going to do.”
The old woman smiled confidently. “Don’t worry, Charles, these problems will resolve themselves. They always do.”
“No,” he spat. “No, they don’t! I resolve them. Me!”
“Sit down. You make me nervous with all your pacing and fidgeting. There’s no question of buying any more flooring this year, so we will just have to find another way. How about The British National Ballet? Maybe it’s time to call in a few favors from Martyn Greene?”
Crown had sat down but he was now pulling apart a paper clip with vigor.
“I called Martyn; he’s in New Zealand until Tuesday.”
“So we will just have to practice the virtue of patience.”
“Patience!” The dark eyes flashed fiercely. “Nadia Petrovna, have you any idea what’s been going on in this place while you’ve been gallivanting around Europe? I’ve got ten days until Aeneas opens. Seven of the girls . . .” He held up seven fingers for emphasis. “. . . seven aren’t dancing on pointe; three of them with serious sprains. I’ve got Carlotta and Ingrid at each other’s throats over the role of Dido; it’s like bloody Armageddon in rehearsals. I’ve had to get the whole print run redone, which is going to make it next week before we get handbills, and the Theatre Royal in Margate is trying to shove us two weeks further into July which will screw up Chichester. Boris is in hospital—did you know that? It transpires that what we thought was depression and flu is actually an incurable compulsion to stick needles in his arm, full of some shit whose name I can’t even remember . . .”
“Good Lord!” said Nadia Petrovna.
“And what’s more, the set’s come out six inches longer than Alf calculated so it won’t fit in the scenery truck we’ve leased from Brownings. So, Nadia Petrovna, don’t—and I repeat don’t sit there lecturing me on the virtues of fucking patience.”
“Poor Charles.”
His aged colleague made the words sound like a caress; her mournful Russian accent, which had never faded even after all her years in the West, gave even her most commonplace remarks an exotic flavor.
They were interrupted by a knock on the door and Carlotta, one of the company’s leading dancers, stuck her head into the room.
“Am I intruding?”
Crown looked up at her from his chair with a tense frown.
“What is it, darling?”
“I’ve just been up to wardrobe to try on the frock for Act One. It’s above the knee. I’m sorry, Charles; I don’t mind on the knee but I can’t wear it like that.”
“That’s the way it was designed.”
“But it’s utterly hideous.”
“I’m sure it’s fine.” Carlotta was a very highly strung ballerina and Crown was keeping his temper admirably. “I’ll look at it on you once everyone else is in costume, darling. That’s the only way to tell.”
“I’m not wearing it. I absolutely refuse.”
Crown exploded. “Carlotta, I’m the artistic director of this company and you’ll wear a fucking beard if I say so! Understand?”
The door slammed behind the departing ballerina and Nadia Petrovna smiled dryly, sipping her tea.
“Very tactful, Charles.”
“Don’t start.”
“Oh, but I meant it.” She did mean it. On one of his bad days Crown would have told the girl to learn to dance before she started criticizing the rest of the creative team. “I watched part of the rehearsal upstairs when I arrived this morning,” she told him. “The choreography’s beautiful.”
Crown nodded and shrugged. There would be time to talk about all that once the tour was up and running.
“That reminds me,” the old woman said after a moment’s careful thought, “do you remember, long ago, back in Paris before we went to Rotterdam, when you spent—how long was it?—at the Académie?”
“Two years.”
“Yes, two years. There was another boy there at the same time; a tall fellow with blond curly hair; rather handsome and really quite talented. He may have been a few years older than you. He became a principal at the Opéra; very popular with the French fans. He’s in America now, making quite a name for himself, I understand, as a choreographer . . .”
“Jacques St. Michel,” Crown said, picking up the printer’s invoice from Nadia Petrovna’s desk to check through the figures. His strong features twisted into a scowl of derision. “Yes, I remember him very well. He was an arrogant shit, even then. I saw him give a workshop in New York when I was over there in eighty-two; thinks the sun shines out of his own arse. His choreography stinks too—although the Americans love all that surreal crap. We were deadly enemies at school.” He looked up at her. “Why?”
She ran her tongue over her thin, dry lips.
“Nothing important. I think I . . . someone mentioned him, that’s all.”Copyright © 2005 by Rebecca Horsfall