A year and a day, that’s how long she managed to resistLance. Longer than Annie, who she found creeping out of his cabin at musician’s reveille a month after their pledge. She’d found it funny, and slightly romantic too. Lance was handsome and talented, and Annie was beautiful and sweet. That’s all you needed, surely? But then it got messy. Lance left the dining car one night very publicly with Juliet, the old lighting director and everyone saw Annie crying. Charlotte, who was then the most senior dancer atThe Apple and the Pearl, made it known that she was sleeping with him and she would destroy the careers of anyone who dared look at him. But a few weeks after that, Jennifer, who was junior in the corps de ballet like Mara and Annie at the time, was seen leaving his cabin after curfew, and then Belinda had to step in.
The day of their first pledge renewal came and she, Annie and Lance gathered in Belinda’s office after the show. Annie was over it by then, and Mara pretended Lance didn’t even exist, never forgetting that sensation of tumbling into his eyes when they’d first met at Marylebone.
You joining the party?Lance had asked afterwards.I’ve persuaded Gino to do happy hour for us.
Glasses of wine, a sambuca shot with the second violins, some kind of tequila cocktail Zach brought out of his cabin, then another and another and everything blurred and the bell was tolling curfew and somehow – she has never worked out how – she was in Lance’s cabin and he had his hands on her and her clothes were on the floor and his hands were on her skin and her memories flicker like a tuning radio.
Morning. She woke up naked in Lance’s cabin with the musicians’ reveille which sounded like a long, low blast of a saxophone, horrified by the sight of him.Did you drug me?she hissed, gathering up her clothes in a panic. He caught her wrists, actually upset for once.What? Of course I didn’t! You wanted it.And she ran out into the corridor, mercifully emptied by the thick hangovers, and straight into the shower. She never spoke of it again.
But there hasn’t really been anyone since. Jason, the old assistant stage manager, which progressed in a lukewarm kind of way until he left to go on a world tour ofCatsand it was silently agreed that whatever they’d shared had been mainly for convenience and wasn’t worth eking out across the distances and worlds between them. A brief fling with a clarinetist who drank too much and would pass out on her bed before they’d even got their clothes off and keep her awake all night with his snoring. Everybody else fucking like rabbits, emotionally incontinent and calling it love, and her alone, trying to pretend she didn’t care.
‘Sixteen bars for your own stretches!’ Cecile calls and Mara sinks to the floor to bend over her legs, massaging that fragile place on her left instep with all the scar tissue from the multiple sprains.
Perhaps she’ll meet someone when she leaves here. A kind man, the owner of a bookshop maybe, someone with his own flat with a balcony where he grows sweet peas in the summer and they’ll sit together on sunny Sunday mornings with a cup of coffee and he’ll lean to her and saysomething like,Tell me about your dancing lifeand she will think back to moments like this, hamstrings finally warm and supple from thefonduexercise, Michael banging away at the tango rhythm, fingers resting on the scuffed vinyl floor and she will not know how to answer.Every day we did ballet class, she’ll say hesitantly.And it was neither good nor bad, it just was.
She watches Cecile demonstrate afrappéexercise and stands in fifth again. Flex the foot at the ankle and brush the ball of the foot against the floor as the leg extends, to the front, to the side, to the back, like striking a match on the squeaky floor. Her first ballet teacher was called Mrs Jeffers and she taught after-school classes in the church hall down the road where her mother went to WI meetings and one of her sisters did judo. Mara can still hear her voice calling over the music,You are preparing your body to jump, you are telling your legs to get ready to propel you into the air. And although she does thefrappéwith everyone else, because you can’t pick and choose the ones you like, she has never seen the logic of this match-striking movement helping her to jump. She closes her right foot into a neat fifth position and turns to the other side to make sparks with her left leg.
It gets to the point – and truthfully she is long past it – where you forget what the point of these individual exercises are and you do them faithfully every day like you lay down in your bed, because to not do them would be a rupture with everything you know to be good for you. Every day she does ballet class and that’s what she’s been doing for what?Fifteen years now? And maybe there’s something released by the combination of these movements, some hormone that lingers in the fibres of your muscles that acts like a drug, keeps you coming back for more. Is she addicted to ballet class? She feels like she needs it to function, her body will not obey her until she’s finished at least the barre and her mind is scattered and distracted until the end ofallegro. Part of the brainwashing, she said to the lads once, but Stuart had laughed and Josh had rolled his eyes.I know you’re on a crusade to make this place into a hippy commune, but I don’t think you’ll manage to get rid of class.
What will happen to her without daily ballet class? Withdrawal, perhaps. An uncontrollable shaking that won’t stop until she gets out of bed, pushes the rug back and starts doingpliés. Grief, likely, like someone has died, and to be honest they might as well have because she will never come here again and she will probably never see these people again.
And yes, people have left before and she got over it. She and Annie were inseparable for a couple of years and now Mara doesn’t know a thing about her life. They’ve passed out of the realms of long-distance friends, through the land of old mates, and now they’re merely two women who used to share everything but sex. She looks across the stage to the place where Greg and Stuart stand opposite each other at the barre, concentrating on each flex and stretch of their legs. Never to giggle with Stuart again, never to feel the judder of his shoulders next to hers as they sit in a boothin the dining car, laughing at something Cecile said. Never to hear Greg’s soft taps on her cabin door in the morning, never to sit with them after shows nursing a beer and talking about nothing in particular. She might even miss Josh, grumpy old git that he is.
A niggling ache of cramp starts in her left arch.
The music finishes and Mara holds the balance in a lowarabesquefor longer than she really wants to, just to show herself she can, and she stays there while Cecile bustles to the front of the stage and starts to demonstrate a difficultadage, full of long holds of the legs in positions that will make the thighs ache and calves burn.
‘Today we will fight the damp outside and put fire in our muscles!’ Cecile trills and there is a groan from the place where Greg, Romero and Stuart stand draped over the barre. She gives them a mock-flirtatious smile filled with steel. ‘And the principal gentlemen shall show us all how it’s done.’
Mara smirks; after all these years she has learned to appreciate Cecile’s sense of humour. But everyone else looks somewhere between reluctantly stoic and mutinous, and as Cecile strides to the front of the stage and looks at Michael to count him in, there is a barely suppressed groan.
‘Give me your juiciest melodies, maestro,’ she calls to the front of the stage. ‘I need something to get them going.’
‘Never a break, never a chance to just chill,’ Jessica mutters as she wearily crosses her thighs into fifth position. ‘Always there with the whip.’
‘Hold!’ Cecile calls. ‘Three and four. Use the stomach, keep the shoulders still.Bien, Harriet.’
Mara has always accepted this – the burn in the thigh, the pouring sweat, the feeling of I-can’t-go-on-I-must-go-on. The incessant practice of one tiny movement; the scrutinising of the line and form of the body in the mirror; the desperate horror of the gap between you and what you want to be.
It’s all the other bullshit she can’t accept. The artificiality of it, the arbitrariness of the rules. The insistence on being as bony as a corpse. Some French king long ago liked to boogie and he had the power to make his friends do it too, and one thing led to another and now ballet is this strange, diamantine thing, made of equal parts cruelty and beauty. The bullying passed on like a chain, each generation forging its own link, misery hooked onto misery, supposedly in the service of this thing.
The fetish of the blood pouring out of the pointe shoe; the insistence that you abdicate your selfhood to a teacher you don’t even like; the demand to punish the body for existing as it does, unforgivably imperfect. It attracts the sadists and the masochists and now, after nine years, she’s worked out that’s why the audience ofThe Apple and the Pearlkeep coming back. They want to see pain and they want to see beauty and they want to sip at that space between pain and beauty.
Perhaps there’s a point to all the suffering. She’s never found it herself, but it’s clearly there for others, some deepermeaning to the tortures they all endure. It has been her undoing sometimes, to thinkbut why? When ballet teachers have acted like no one ever gets a career unless some great sacrifice is given, like you need to throw your true love down a well to be able to dance oneSwan Lake, she’s just been baffled. People lap it up: she knows, she’s seen it. Anorexia, psychiatric units, double knee replacements at thirty-nine, and all for what? To stand on stage and be applauded? Not that you even get that, here atThe Apple and the Pearl. For the thrill of it, to be admired, to be loved if only for the hour or two a night you spend on stage? It’s no life at all, for her.
Tell me about your parents, Annie had said one night in the Grub when they were talking about something like this.
Mara had shrugged.Nothing to say. Both nice. My dad died a few years ago. We were sad but we live with it.
There you go, Annie said.Most people are trying to fill a void in themselves, Mara. Drugs, booze, ballet. It’s all the same.
For Mara there is only one reason to dance, and it’s being beautifully demonstrated right at this moment by Michael. He’s taken Cecile at her word and is playing the act twopas de deuxfromSpartacusas if his life depends on it, as if Kachaturian himself is standing next to him. All swelling arpeggios and thundering chords, she lets her body soak it up and pour through her skin as she squeezes her back muscles to hold herarabesquea little higher, lets her arm extend from the shoulder a fraction, everything pulled and stretched like she’s on an exquisite rack strung entirely of the notes of thisadagio.
She remembers a car journey as a little girl, sitting in the front seat beside her father as her mother tended to the twins in their bulky car seats in the back, wiggling her shoulders and swinging her legs in the cavernous footwell to a song with a bouncy, cheesy beat that came on the radio. And her father asked her with a twinkling smile if she liked the music and she said,Not really, but my feet do.And she’d thought it a reasonable thing to say, an accurate way of describing how the music moved through her body without passing by her brain or her heart, but then she had caught her father look at her mother in the rearview mirror and seen the amusement in their shared glance and felt shrunken. She stopped swinging her legs, held herself still. It truly wasn’t a very good song.
Twenty-five years later, she thinks it would not be possible to say it any better than she did that day in the car. The music makes my body dance and I like it. That’s it.
Because they are not saving lives. They are not making history. They are not one of those people who put their shoulders to the creaky wheel of society to shift it somewhere better.You are the artists, her mother once said, when things were bad at ballet school and she was considering – not for the first or last time – stopping completely.The feeling people get when they watch you is what they’re all living for.
