‘Well, mind my head please.’
Zach crouches by an upstage lighting boom, pointing at something while Lara leans over him and frowns.
‘Is there any way to predict how the stage will be different tomorrow?’ Lara is saying. ‘Like, does the Grit have a pattern or anything?’
In a little pool of light downstage, just in front of the curtain, Zuleika practices the tricky pirouettes in her solo. Cecile watches her from the darkness of the wings. She checks her watch: eight twenty-six. Zuleika does the turn perfectly once, twice, three times to be sure, pulls her legwarmers down her thighs, balls them up and tosses them into the wings.
Mackie sits on a bench hunched over his laptop. Shirley presses a strip of masking tape onto the props table and labels itKing – Crown. Charlie presses his little red button, leans towards his microphone and says, ‘Act two beginners please, act two beginners.’
***
As the first, shy notes of the violins creep over the tannoy, Cecile sits in her office with two sheets of paper on the desk in front of her – the casting of the performance that is currently underway and a blank version for tomorrow night. She’s done most of the corps de ballet and she’s working her way up to the soloists and principals, but she’s distracted, keeps checking the silent screen of her phone, glancing over her shoulder, seeking out her reflection in the square of mirror above the desk.
She pulls the paper towards her and stares at it. She needs to finish this casting before the end of the act. She stretches, hands clasped above her head, and tries to get comfortable in her chair. It’s an ergonomic office chair, ordered in one of Belinda’s fits of health and safety paranoia, but she’s never sat on anything so uncomfortable in all her life. The only thing she likes about it is the way you can swivel. She can turn away from these blasted blank sheets of paper with a single touch of her toes on the floor.
On stage, the surge of the overture subsides, the clarinets begin their looping, swooping song for the Princess’s dance and Cecile picks up her pencil to write Zuleika’s name in the column next to the wordsBlue Princess. She puts Greg’s name next to the wordKingand Romero’s next toBlue Suitor. She writes Harriet and Benji in for the Red Princess and Suitor, to give them another shot to get comfortable in the roles, and gives Stephanie the Queen.
She puts Josh’s name next to the White Suitor, even though it’s not his best role, which means it should be Sarah for the White Princess. That leaves Mara for the Crow, and she’ll put Stuart in one of the gaps in the hunting dance, just to keep him humble. There are no stars onThe Apple and the Pearl.
She flings the pen down and glances at her watch. Eight thirty-six. Not much time left now. This morning Gino had cheerfully told AJ,Phone and internet signal should you want it!while he slid her customary espresso across the counter without making eye contact. She would quite liketo make it up with Gino and sometimes she rehearses what she might say in apology.I should not have tried to interfere with your menu choices, of course our dancers should be well nourished, forgive me. Or,I was just trying to make my mark on the company, trying to be in charge by doing what the ballet mistresses of my youth had done.Or,Please understand, Gino, whenIwas performing I ate two apples and drank four coffees a day and no one cared about my health at all. But with every passing pledge it feels more and more impossible. She no longer cares if the dancers ofThe Apple and the Pearlare fat or thin – and she’s seen that the audience do not care either – but now she’s walled up behind her own stern mask and Gino exclusively communicates with her through AJ, though he still knows to buy that Sancerre she loves.
She looks at her watch again: eight forty. Might she have missed him? It’s never happened before; normally he’s like any three-year-old in that you can’t miss him. He jiggles and jangles at your elbow, insistently demanding your attention. But she did not want to take it for granted. All day, she’s been looking for him in the shadows and folds of things, behind graves and in between the dark ridges of the bark of the yews. Waiting for something, anything. His imperious little voice in her ear, a glimpse of his golden little head. Even a compulsion to place a gentle hand on a sleeping chest. She’d taught class like it was any other day of the year, ignored Michael’s abject attempts at an apology, allowed herself to get worked up thinking about him thinking he’s the only one with any kind of grief, then made herself feel calmerwith a bit of shouting at the new pledge in rehearsals. Luke is objectively disappointing but Cecile has to admit that it is not his fault that Belinda went rogue in hiring him, nor that Alex was so talented and likeable.He has no family in the world, Cecile, Belinda had said reproachfully,he’ll do fine for the corps de ballet.Cecile had had to do some deep belly breathing to avoid shouting right here in her office.This is not a home for waifs and strays, Belinda, this is a ballet company. And I am not anyone’s mother.
And how it hurt to say that! Especially in October, her favourite month of the year, counting down with every fallen leaf to this day, All Souls’, when she will get to remember that she was once, indeed, someone’s mother.
Her son appears to her differently each year. That first time it was a scent that followed her around all day, the smell of the talc she used to sprinkle onto his mottled newborn skin. In the years after it was a glimpse of him standing next to AJ on the conductor’s podium during the White Princess’s solo, a long conversation about teddy bears with his disembodied voice in her cabin just before reveille, a vision of him swinging from the curfew bell as she left the Grub after lunch.
At first she thought she was mad. Then she wished she were madder so she might have more of him. Was he following the Grub every day of the year but it was only on this day, All Souls’, that he was able to break through that so-called veil between worlds?
The Pearl waltz ends with the clatter of pointe shoes as the girls skitter off stage. There is a silence as Romero as theBlue Suitor walks on to the stage, and Cecile imagines AJ watching him, baton raised, ready for Wilf’s cello to sound and Romero’s jump to land at exactly the same moment.
She has never told AJ about Antoine, not in all these years. Not that he was born, not that he died, not that he comes back to her every year on this day. She thinks of that time seven years ago when AJ almost – but not quite – asked her to marry him. She would have told him about Antoine, but the moment passed. She thinks of AJ’s handsome profile, the way he draws a score in the air with his long fingers, the way he touched the keys on the electronic piano when he used to play for ballet class, like he was stroking the tender skin of a newborn baby. In another life she could have loved him. They could have lived together in a small house with roses climbing around the front door, books lining the walls and a grand piano. Children. Grandchildren. Glasses of cognac in front of a fire, with his beloved Rachmaninov on the record player and a—
‘Sur le pont d’Avignon…’Oh, here he is, at last! She can hear the sound of splashing and a child singing gleefully out of tune.
She used to sing this song to Antoine as she bathed him, throwing the rubber toys into the water. Cecile had read that music was good for brain development so she sang anything she could remember, all the time. Nursery rhymes, Charles Trenet, poorly pronounced Beatles songs. She had no idea how to raise a child. She had grown up with only a father, unmothered, unmoored by that continuingpresence in your life. She was making it up as she went along and singing to her son drowned out the insistent feeling of you’re-a-failure in her mind.
She kicks her shoes off and leans back in her chair. She squeezes her eyes tightly shut, listening to him burbling rhythmically to himself. She can hear the sound of something bashing against porcelain and his little voice has an echoey feel, like it’s bouncing off tiles.
‘Maman!’ he calls, and she almost feels his breath move the air between them but she doesn’t look round because she knows Antoine will not be there; she only gets to see him, or hear him or feel him. Not all at once. After twenty-two years she has learned this. ‘Chante!’
She smiles.
‘Et les belles dames font comme ça,’ she croons, and she imagines her little boy laughing, a rubber bath toy in each fat fist, raising them above his head to plop them into the water.
‘Et les beaux messieurs font comme ça,’Antoine sings back and she remembers the way people used to smile indulgently to see the two of them sitting together on the bus, devoted Madonna and child, singing an old-fashioned nursery rhyme, dipping their heads in mock courtly bows.
She hears him take a deep breath to shout the longohhhhhhhbefore the next verse and she joins in, their voices rising together to a tuneless pitch before crashing into an airless gasp.
He collapses into giggles and she drinks in the sound, lets it pour into her lungs like cool, crisp mountain air, lets itdrive out all the dust of days on end spent in the dark box of the Grit. She will eke it out all through the dark of winter, the blush of spring and the blaze of summer, surviving until next year.
A knock at the door. Cecile operates a not-exactly-explicit closed-door policy, letting it be known yet unspoken that, unless you’re AJ, you’d better have a really good reason for knocking on this door. But before she can turn to Antoine’s voice and tell him to be quiet, he shouts ‘Entrez!’ with the glee of a beloved game about to begin, the same way he used to when she’d call him her little prince and pretend to be giving him a royal buffet for him to enjoy in his bath.
Cecile hears the door creak open and she spins around on the ergonomic desk chair. Her eyes fly open to see Greg, dressed in his King costume and hand-knitted purple socks with MONDAY stitched on them, staring at the wall.
Cecile feels something like ice water drip down her neck as Greg lifts one hand and waves, a shy and dopey smile on his lips.
‘Can you… you can see him?’
