Stumbling from the box, running down the corridor, choked by his collar, he heard the clapping begin — the stamping, the cries of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Bis!’ That would be one curtain call already… two, three… Oh, God damn the fools who could not distinguish between a technically competent dancer and the flawed, true artist Simonova was!

He had reached the heavy door that led backstage and now pushed against it.

It did not open.

All doors between the auditorium and the stage had to be open by law in case of fire, but this door would not move. Someone had locked it.

Cursing, perspiring, the portly little man ran back again, up the stairs to the next floor… And still the applause came undiminished, and the roars.

The upstairs door was open, but there was a twisting iron staircase to negotiate before he reached the level of the stage.

A group of people were standing in the wings, among them Harriet with a towel over her shoulder, and her face creased with anxiety as she watched the curtain rise once more.

‘How many?’ panted Dubrov.

‘Eighteen,’ said Harriet miserably. ‘Grisha tried to stop them, but they wouldn’t listen.’

She motioned to the stage-hand still turning the winch-handle to let Masha — as loaded with flowers as a hearse — curtsey ecstatically to her audience.

‘That’s the nineteenth now,’ said Harriet.

Nineteen… Four more than Simonova. Dubrov shook his weary head. No good intervening now; the damage was done. And still the curtain rose and fell… Twenty… twenty-one… twenty-two… Until at last it was over and with a triumphant smile, Masha Repin swept away.

Dubrov had expected Simonova to rage and stamp and make a scene, but it was worse than that. She came backstage to congratulate her rival; she insisted that they drink champagne.

‘She is good, Sashka,’ said Simonova quietly when they were back at the Metropole. ‘She is young and she is good, and the public loved her.’

‘Idiots!’ raged Dubrov. ‘She’s a balletic clothes-horse, all tricks and glitter.’

‘No. She is inexperienced, but the feeling will come.’

Dubrov was silent, wondering if the door had been locked on purpose and waiting — praying — for the abuse, the tantrums, the talk of retirement and Cremorra with which he knew so well how to deal.

But she was quiet, almost docile, and remained so for the rest of Nutcracker’s initial run, and knowing her as he did, he was afraid that something had been damaged inside her in a way that he could not soothe or talk away.

And he was right, for three days later, at the première of Giselle, Simonova hurt her back.

It was an inexplicable injury. The Act One pas de deux in which it occurred was as familiar to her as breathing and Maximov, as everyone agreed, was blameless. Yet as he came up behind her to lift her, turn her and set her down in arabesque her body sagged, she gave a despairing cry — and fell, to lie prone and unmoving on the floor.

The orchestra stuttered into silence; the audience hissed their consternation and as Maximov bent over the ballerina in anguish and Dubrov ran in from the wings, the curtain came down on a great dancer — and a great career.

An hour later, Simonova lay very white and very still in her bed at the Metropole.

‘Well, Sashka, it’s over,’ she whispered to the man who had loved her for twenty years. ‘But it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?’

There had been three doctors in the audience and though their diagnoses had differed, there was one thing on which they had all agreed, and in the injured woman’s presence — that she would never dance again.

‘It was very good, doushenka. It was the best,’ he said, and sat holding her hand until she fell into a chloral-induced sleep.

But Dubrov did not sleep. Instead, he surveyed the future. There was no question now of going on to Caracas or Lima. As soon as she was well enough to travel, she must be taken back to Europe — to Leblanc in Paris, the most famous orthopaedic surgeon in the world. If it really was a haemorrhage into the spinal canal, as one of the doctors had suggested, there was probably little that could be done, but she must have every chance. Which left the rest of their time in Manaus… He couldn’t run Nutcracker for a whole fortnight, nor could he afford to shut the theatre and lose all the takings. So Masha Repin must have Giselle…

In the small hours, in the still stifling heat, Simonova woke in pain and her mind turned to the past — to Russia and the snow.

‘Do you remember those drives from the theatre in your sledge?’ she whispered. ‘Sitting all wrapped up in my sables, squashing the poor violets on my muff?’

‘Yes, I remember. The frost made your eyelashes longer. You were so vain about that.’

‘And the street-lamps making that lilac mist… There is nowhere else in the world where they do that — only in Petersburg.’

‘We could go back,’ he said with sudden hope. ‘I still have the apartment.’

Ill as she was, she fought him. ‘No! Not after the way they treated me at the Maryinsky. Never!’

It will be Cremorra, then, thought Dubrov; there is no escape — and half in jest, mocking his own misery, he moved over to a pile of books on the bureau and pulled out a brightly coloured volume which he had hoped never actually to read.

‘Yes!’ said Simonova eagerly. ‘Read it aloud to me. I can’t sleep anyway, and I must learn. I must prepare myself. At first of course I’ll only be able to watch from the verandah, but when my back is better, ah, you’ll see! We’ll be so happy!’

The book was in English, as books on vegetable gardening are apt to be, and as the humid oppressive night wore on Dubrov read to her about the fan training of espalier plums, about the successive trench sowing of broad beans and the preparation of decayed vegetable matter to make a mulch.

‘What is it, this mulch?’ came Simonova’s hoarse voice from the bed.

Dubrov consulted the book. ‘It is something to put on the roots to stop them drying out. There is also a verb: to mulch…’

He looked up. Simonova, who had not cried out once when they lifted her battered body on to the stretcher, who had not shed one tear when the doctors pronounced their implacable verdict, was weeping.

‘I do not want to mulch!’ cried the ballerina — and burst into uncontrollable sobs.

Cedric Fitzackerly, anxious to get rid of the tiresome old Professor for whom he no longer had the slightest use, duly sent a cable to Manaus requesting that Edward Finch-Dutton be given every assistance in securing the return of Harriet Morton, a fugitive and a minor, to her native land.

The telegram carrying an awesome Foreign Office signature duly arrived on the desk of the Prefect of Police, where young Captain Carlos put it into the ‘In’ tray and hoped it would go away.

To have been left in charge of the police station was an honour, but it was one which put the Captain — scarcely out of his teens — under considerable strain. De Silva had taken three-quarters of the city’s military police along with him on his mission; they had been gone nearly a week, no one knew where, and young Carlos (whose title of Captain was a courtesy one borrowed for the occasion) lived in dread of an occurrence with which he would find it impossible to deal.

‘Here he comes again,’ said Sergeant Barra — a huge muscular cabaclo with a broken nose — looking up from the children’s comic he had been laboriously trying to read.

Captain Carlos put down the mirror in which he had been studying the progress of his incipient moustache and sighed.

‘I suppose we’d better let him in.’

Edward Finch-Dutton, still clutching his butterfly net, was admitted as he had been yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Though his Portuguese had not reached even the phrase-book stage which would enable him to complain that there was a fly in his soup, he had — by endless repetition of Harriet’s name, the word ‘England’ and what he believed to be Morse code noises — managed to make the Captain understand that he was enquiring whether a cable had arrived for him from his native land.

‘Nao,’ said Carlos, shaking his head as he had done on all the previous days. ‘Nada. Nothing. No.’

This had always been enough to send the Englishman away with a disconsolate air, but today it failed. Edward, still suffering from the shock of Harriet’s depravity, and from a touch of fever as he tottered from the Sports Club into the jungle on collecting forays and back again, suddenly lost control. There was no one to whom he could turn; Verney was still away, the consul was in São Paulo and he had not dared to mention his connection with Harriet to Harry Parker. Now his frustration boiled over and he began to shout and bang his fist on the table.

‘I don’t believe you. You’re lying! It must have come! Have a look, damn you — go through those papers there and look!’

He pointed at the pile of documents in the tray. Reluctantly the Captain pulled it towards him and shuffled a few of the envelopes.

‘Go on! Go right through the lot. Let me see for myself.’

Half-way down the pile Nemesis overtook poor Captain Carlos.

‘There! That one in the yellow envelope. Read it!’

The Captain picked up the cable and stared at it. ‘Eenglish,’ he said gloomily.

‘Then give it to me,’ said Edward, reaching across the desk.

This the Captain was naturally reluctant to do. At the same time it was clear that this irritating foreigner would now have to be dealt with, and even before de Silva’s return. He compromised.

‘Get Leo up from the cells,’ he said to the Sergeant.

Leo, when he appeared clanking his bunch of keys, turned out to be the gaoler, a retired Negro boxer who had once worked for Pinkerton’s detective agency in New York, spoke English and could even read.

‘It’s the real thing, all right,’ he said to Captain Carlos when he had perused the contents of the cable. ‘The British Foreign Office sent it, no mistake. They want the girl back in England and they want you to help this gentleman get her there.’ And he nodded without irony at Edward before depositing a gob of tobacco spittle at his feet.

‘You see!’ said Edward triumphantly. ‘I told you.’ He turned to Leo. ‘Now listen carefully. Tell them I want at least two men, strong ones. I want them outside the theatre on Friday evening just before the performance ends, and I want a closed cab waiting too. They’re to seize the girl as she comes off stage — without hurting her, mind you — bundle her into the cab and take her down to the docks. The Gregory sails at dawn — there will be a cabin waiting for her. She must be locked in — I have spoken to the stewardess, but she will want to see your authorisation — and I’ll let her out myself when we’re safely down-river. Got it?’

He leaned back, extremely pleased with himself. The plan, masterful and simple, had occurred to him as soon as the Gregory arrived — a white oasis of British calm and hygiene in the turmoil of the docks — and two cabins for the return journey had unexpectedly become available.

Leo spoke to the Captain, who nodded. It might have been worse — he had been afraid he would be expected to hold the girl in his gaol. And at least the Englishman was going with her. Not to see Edward Finch-Dutton’s long, equine face ever again had become the Captain’s most passionate desire.

He turned to Leo. ‘Ask him how we’re to know which girl to grab?’

‘I shall of course come with you to identify her,’ said Edward. ‘Naturally…’

14

The disaster that Simonova’s accident represented struck the Company afresh on Friday as they rehearsed with Masha Repin for the evening performance of Giselle. The Polish girl, having plotted and schemed for just this chance, was nervous and hysterical, abused the conductor for his tempi, complained of Maximov’s lifts and threw her costume at the wardrobe mistress. Simonova’s rages had been no less violent, but in a curious way they concerned — in the end — the performance as a whole. Masha’s panic was for herself.

For Harriet, Simonova’s injury had been a personal blow. As long as she lived she would never forget the moment when the proud, arched body crumpled and fell — and if she hated any human beings it was those doctors who, uncaring of the injured woman’s presence, had pronounced their horrendous verdict.