She can hear where he’s going wrong. She should tell him, she can’t bear to listen to this all afternoon but really it’s Lance’s job to make sure everyone’s score is correct. And what has Michael been doing, sitting in front of him night after night while he gets this bit wrong? She deletes the last sentence.I have been thinking of you both endlessly. Spoke to my father and Sam today, they’re both all right—
She stops. She puts her phone in her lap and sighs.
‘It’s F sharp,’ Jean says quietly.
‘Sorry?’ Henry startles.
‘It goes,da da di da da di daF sharp.’
He looks at the score in front of him. ‘It says E in here.’
Jean shrugs. ‘It’s F sharp.’
He frowns, pulls his violin to his chin and plays the bars again. The notes trip perfectly from his beautiful instrument. ‘Of course.’ He murmurs. ‘I remember now.’
And there is such a curious look of longing in Henry’s face as he plays that phrase properly that Jean cannot breathe for a moment. Her heart caught in her mouth, she has a bright flash of understanding. Henry’s fixed gaze on Michael each night as AJ comes into the pit; the way you hardly see Michael without this handsome face hovering somewhere nearby; the way Henry has refused all otherovertures. There’s something charmingly old-fashioned about his constancy. She doesn’t know when or how it started or if Michael has ever given him any reason to hope, but the sadness of it all swamps her as Henry plays the Red Suitor’s melody with his eyes half shut. Words rise desperately in her throat:You know, I also love someone – two someones – who don’t love me back. I am also paralysed by grief, I am also leaden with a useless secret, I am also stuck here without any hope of loving anyone else ever again.
On the tannoy, Cecile calls, ‘Tonight’s cast of the hunting dance,s’il vous plaît!’ and the toilet flushes next door and Sandra comes into the room, phone squeezed between her ear and her shoulder, wiping her hands on her jumper. Jean smiles at her and she mimes hello back.
She wants to grab Michael’s face and squeeze his grey cheeks between her palms and snarl,Listen! Everything you think you know about love is wrong. You think you would have loved Evelyn forever the way you did these past months but you’re full of shit and she knew it. It always falls apart, like everything, like the whole damn universe will if you leave it spinning for long enough. Your love will tear over the tiny sleeping bodies of your babies, the piled-up bills, the exhaustion, the endless conversations about plumbing. And then you’ll look at each other and you’ll just see someone that you used to love, someone you know better than anything by now but maybe you don’t even like anymore and it’ll be like being inside your own head, itchy, annoying, you’ll do anything to get out of there. So she left you to keep you loving her and you’re too stupid to see it.
But what right has she got to lecture anyone on real love? She, with a few sterile relationships in her twenties, a failed marriage to an idiot, almost two decades of resigned celibacy before a late, glorious flush of passion refracted like a rainbow through two bodies, abandoned because… well, she’s still not sure why it ended, and isn’t that what hurts the most? She, who sits here typing and deleting and typing and deleting a message to the women she loves, unable even to say she loves them, even to herself?
Jean picks up her phone again as Henry starts the Red Suitor’s solo from the top. She types:How lovely to hear from you both. Hope you’re well and thriving in the real world. We are stopped in a graveyard, which is slightly obvious of the Grub but you know what it’s like. All fine here, you know how it is. Thinking of you both.And she presses send before she can change her mind.
She puts the phone at the very bottom of her handbag and pulls out her laptop. While it whirrs itself into sentience, she opens the lid of her oboe case again and rummages for her glasses. She logs into her bank account, sends Sam some money, pays the other three invoices. She looks at the photo of her cousin’s grandchild; there is something of Sam as an infant about the little one’s chubby face and she starts to type an email to her cousin to tell her so when her phone buzzes at the bottom of her handbag.
She shuts her eyes. She’ll look at the message, of course she will but first she’ll sit here for a moment, wallowing in the beauty of that message’s boundless possibilities becausebefore she swipes her thumb across the screen and sees its words it could say anything, anything at all.We’ve got a place by the sea, we want you to come and live with us.Or,we are very happy, we are living with a lovely young lady called Veronica and she does us the power of good. Or,fuck the money, we’ll help you, you’re ours.She told the Crow she wouldn’t break her pledge and she meant it but how will she stay here for another two and a half months if they’re calling her, how will she open her oboe case each morning knowing that they are waiting for her, how will she deal with the danger in the auditorium each night knowing that there are those who love her out there in the world?
She opens her eyes, closes her laptop and reaches into her bag.
***
In the stage right wing, Bella is lying under the props table with her foot stretched over her head, listening to the piano gurgle the tune of the third act hunting dance. She’s using the underside of the table as an anchor for her foot and sewing a ribbon onto the heel of a brand new pointe shoe.
The piano stops mid-phrase – there’s been a lot of that – and Cecile shouts at Luke, who has become redder and redder each time she’s stopped him. Now he looks like a tomato about to go splat under a heel.
‘Non!’ She claps her hands and the piano stops mid-bar. ‘I said the arms go throughla secondeon the way to the fifth, I need accuracy! Again!’
From where she’s lying she can hear Michael’s soft, weary sigh as he plays the opening notes of the hunting dance again. Most of the dancers have been spared the agony of watching Luke rehearse this role very slowly and very publicly, but Cecile has said they’re going to run through the Pearl waltz next and so she has to wait, ready to jump up at a moment’s notice, for however long it takes for Cecile to get bored of poking and prodding at that poor boy and decide to move on.
She checks her watch – four seventeen, there’s still over an hour to go until Cecile is obliged by the union to let them go – and pushes the needle through the canvas lining of the pointe shoe. She could do without rehearsing the bloody Pearl waltz again – she knows four parts inside out and could do the other four with a quick walk through – but she’d rather die than grumble. You’ve got to show willing. You’ve got to be up Cecile’s arse and keep in her favour so when it’s time for someone new to learn a principal role you’re right there, smiling and reliable. You’ve also got to know what you’re doing and do it well, something that’s a little far from poor Luke right now.
Mind you, she’s been a model member ofThe Apple and the Pearlfor two and a half years now and there’s not been so much as a sniff of her learning a principal role. Some days she thinks she’s close, when Cecile walks past her during afrappéexercise and pauses before walking by without a word. She imagines explaining her pride in that to anyone else, can picture their baffled pity.No, you don’t understand, she’d say.Silence is praise, usually.
At night she lies in her cabin massaging out her calves, daydreaming about the day when Cecile will beckon to her during that caesura in ballet class between the lastgrands battementsat the barre and the firstadagein the centre. When, instead of changing her pointe shoes from the hard ones she’s breaking in to the softer ones, she’ll obediently trot to the front of the stage, skin prickling with the curious eyes of the other dancers as they wonder if she is in favour or disgrace. Cecile will quietly tell her to make sure she’s watching one of the Princesses – she thinks it will be the White Princess, because the solo is full of quick little jumps and tricky beats and she’s got the power and stamina for it. The daydream skips a couple of months, past all the costume fittings, the well-meaning advice from Mara and Stephanie and Stuart, past Josh’s inevitable sneers, past Cecile’s theatrical screeching during the interminable rehearsals to the moment when the curtain goes up on the first act on her first show, the dazzle in her face, the audience hungry for her and she for them, her first chance to be truly—
A shadow falls across her, blocking the light to see her sewing by. She bends her leg back into her chest and rolls out from under the props table to see Kavi the fly operator looking down at her with a half-smile playing about his mouth.
‘I thought it was you,’ he says. ‘You’re the only one with those orange leggings.’
Well now, isn’t that interesting. He’s been noticing her legs. She is kneeling at his feet, her fingertips almosttouching his steel-capped black boots and there is a flutter low in her belly. She stands, kicks the half-sewn pointe shoe back under the props table and leans against the edge. She fights the urge to brush the dust from her hair. She is attempting a seduction, and aren’t you supposed to pretend like you don’t care? Like if they can’t or won’t just take you as you are, a pale-faced, orange legwarmer-clad, dusty-haired idiot, then it’s nothing to you.
‘I just came to check something for Charlie,’ he says, but he doesn’t move, just keeps staring at her with that smile like he knows a secret.
The silence between them stretches like strings of glue, ensnaring any clever thoughts she might have had. The truth is she’s out of practice. Alina the wardrobe mistress, warming to her favourite theme:Yes I use the word CLOISTERED ladies because although there are technically men employed here I see NO relationship material and NO ONE I would willingly fuck. And although all the girls in the dressing room giggle when she gets going on this topic, there is something of the maiden aunt in the titter, something desperate that none of them will acknowledge. Jessica, a bit drunk at pledge party:I just want to feel a man’s hands on me, you know? On my actual skin, not on the bodice of my sodding costume.
Bella did know. It’s been literally years since she’s been to bed with anyone and this is the first time there’s been even a hint that someone wants her. All right, yes there was Lance the trumpet player who’d sidled up to her in the dining carin her third week to compliment her hair, and of course she’d been flattered at first, then aroused, even though she had already heard that Lance was that kind of guy. But then she’d caught sight of Mara’s stony face over Lance’s shoulder and skittered away, feeling queasy at the thought of causing romantic uproar in her very first month.
