A Company of Swans (4 page)

The soup was cleared. The cod, whose sauce tartare surprisingly had come out slightly blue, arrived.

"Well, Harriet, and how did you fare today?" asked the Professor, addressing his daughter for the first time.

"All right, thank you, Father. I went to my dancing lesson."

"Ah, yes." The Professor, his duty done, would have turned back to his neighbor but Harriet, usually so silent, spoke to him once more.

"A man came to see Madame Lavarre. A Russian. He's going to take a ballet company up the Amazon to Manaus. To perform there."

Edward, assessing his piece of fish which did not, after all, appear to be a fillet, said, "A most interesting part of the world, one understands. With a quite extraordinary flora and fauna."

Harriet looked at him gratefully. And possessed by what madness she did not know, she continued, "He offered me a job… as a dancer—for the length of the tour."

Her remark affected those present profoundly, but in different ways. Her father laid down his fork as a flush spread over his sharp-featured face, Louisa opened her mouth and sat gaping at her niece, while Edward's shirt-front—responding to his sudden exhalation of breath—gave off a sharp and sudden "pop."

"He offered you a job?" said the Professor slowly. "You? My daughter!" He stared incredulously at Harriet. "I have never in all my life heard of such an impertinence!"

"No!" Harriet, knowing how useless it was, could not resist at least trying to make him see. "It's an honor. A real one. To be chosen—to be considered of professional standard. And it's a good thing to do—to take art to people who are hungry for it. Properly, objectively good like in Marcus Aurelius."

"How dare you, Harriet? How dare you argue with me!" His daughter's invocation of the great Roman Stoic, clearly his own property, had dangerously fanned the flames of the Professor's wrath. He glared at Louisa; she should have been firmer with the girl, taken her away from that unsuitable Academy years ago. Though actually Louisa had said often enough that she saw no point in wasting money on dancing lessons, and it was he who had said that Harriet could continue. Was it because he could still remember Sophie waltzing so gracefully beneath the lamplit trees in that Swiss hotel? If so, he had been suitably punished for his sentimentality.

"Please, Father. Please, let me go!" Harriet, whom one could usually silence with a look, seemed suddenly to have taken leave of her senses. "You didn't let me stay on at school, you didn't allow me to go to France with the Fergusons because they were agnostics… well, I understood that—yes, really, I understood. But this… they take a ballet mistress, it's absolutely respectable and I would be back in the autumn." She had pushed away her plate and was gripping the edge of the table, the intensity of her longing turning the usually clear, grave face into an image from a pietŕ: a wild-eyed and beseeching Magdalene. "Please, Father," said Harriet, "I implore you to let me go."

A scene! A scene at the dinner table. Overwhelmed by this ultimate in disasters, Louisa bowed her head over her plate.

"You will drop this subject immediately, Harriet," barked the Professor. "You are embarrassing our guests."

"No. I won't drop it." Harriet had become very pale, but her voice was steady. "You have always thought dancing was frivolous and silly, but it isn't—it's the most marvelous thing in the world. You can say things when you dance that you can't say any other way. People have danced for the glory of God since the beginning of time. David danced before the Ark of the Covenant… And this journey… this adventure…" She turned imploringly to Edward. "You must know what a wonder it would be?"

"Oh, no, Harriet! No, the Amazon is a most unsuitable place for a woman. For anyone!" From the plethora of dangerous diseases and potentially lethal animals, poor Edward—meaning only to scotch this dreadful topic once and for all—now had the misfortune to select the candiru. "There is a fish there," he said earnestly, "which swims into people's orifices when they are bathing and by means of backward pointing spines becomes impossible to dislodge…"

A moan from Louisa brought him to a halt. Orifices had been mentioned at dinner, and before ladies. Orifices and a scene in one evening! Casting about in her mind, she could not see that she had done anything to deserve such a disgrace. And as poor Edward flushed a deep crimson and Mrs. Marchmont suppressed a nervous giggle, the Professor rose and raced his daughter.

"You will leave the table immediately, Harriet, and go to your room." And when she did not rise instantly: "I think you heard me!"

"Yes." But she remained perfectly still, looking at her father, and in a moment of aberration he had the mad idea that she was pitying him.

Then she gave a little nod as though some transaction was now completed, and with the fluid grace that was her legacy from that damnable dancing place, she rose, walked to the door and was gone.

Everyone now made Herculean efforts, but it had to be admitted that even by Morton standards the dinner party was not proving a conspicuous success. Edward, torn between fear lest Harriet after all should turn out to have "ideas," and regret that she had been punished like a naughty child, was not his usual self. Mrs. Marchmont in her thin dress was so busy trying not to shiver that she contributed little. It was left to valiant Mr. Marchmont to sustain the conversation, which he did heroically until, biting into his mutton, he inexplicably encountered a lead pellet and broke a tooth.

Alone in her attic, Harriet threw herself down on the bed. Growing up in this gloomy house, she had taught herself a discipline for survival in which the weakness of tears played no part.

Yet now she cried as she had not cried since her mother's death. Cried for her lovely, lost adventure, for the unattainable forests and magical rivers she would never see; cried for the camaraderie of fellow artists and a job well-done.

But her real grief lay deeper. She was honest enough to admit that few girls in her position would have been allowed to travel to the Amazon. It was not her father's refusal that so devastated her now; it was his bigotry, his hatred, his determination not to understand. And lying there, her hair in damp strands across her crumpled face, Harriet gave up the long, long struggle to love her father and her aunt.

It was for this loss above all that she wept. She had learned, during the long years of her childhood, to live without receiving love. To live without giving it seemed more than she could bear.

Chapter Two

Harriet had always loved words: tasted them on her tongue, thought of them as friends. The word serendipity was one she valued especially, its meaning rooted in the world of fairy tales: 'The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.'

It was this word she thought of later when she remembered her encounter with a small boy called Henry in the maze at Stavely Hall. All her subsequent adventures stemmed from this one meeting and from the trust she saw in the child's eyes; nothing she experienced afterward was more unlikely or more strange.

The visit to Stavely, which occurred a week after the ill-fated dinner party, was the climax of the year for the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle. Weeks of preparation had gone into the expedition, for Stavely was forty miles to the west in the rolling Suffolk countryside and had awaited the benison of motor transport to make it a comfortable day's outing. Letters had been rent, the substantial fee mentioned by Mrs. Brandon for a tour of the house and permission to picnic in her gardens had been agreed. Now as they waited outside the house of their president, Mrs. Belper, for the arrival of the charabanc, the ladies found it necessary to remind Harriet again and again of her good fortune in being included in the party.

These ladies of the Tea Circle had presided over Harriet's young life like a flock of black birds in a Greek play. There were some thirty of them who had met originally in the home of Hermione Belper, the full-bosomed wife of St. Philip's meek and undersized bursar, in protest against the carryings-on of the Association of University Wives which not only admitted coloreds, foreigners and Jews, but had raised money—in a series of coffee mornings—for the purpose of enabling the Fitzwilliam Museum to buy a painting which had turned out to be of a lady not only nude, but crudely and specifically naked.

Mrs. Belper had proposed the formation of a new Tea Circle to uphold the values of old-fashioned womanhood and of the Empire, and since her house—only a stone's throw from Louisa's—was named Trumpington Villa, the unsuspecting suburb of Trumpington found itself lending its name to the new association.

It was the Tea Circle ladies who, through Louisa, decided what Harriet should wear, which families were suitable for her to visit and where she could go unchaperoned; it was they—scattered like an army of secret agents through the town—who reported to Louisa when her niece removed her gloves in public or had been seen talking in far too friendly a manner to a shop assistant.

In the eyes of these ladies, Harriet's good fortune was all the greater because Edward Finch-Dutton, too, was to come to Stavely Hall.

The decision to include a man in the party was one which Mrs. Belper and Aunt Louisa had debated for hours. The advantages of inviting Edward were clear: his mother had been on visiting terms with old General Brandon (the owner of Stavely) when he was alive and this fact, if mentioned in advance, would greatly increase their chances of being welcomed in person by his daughter-in-law, who in the continuing absence of her husband was Stavely's reigning mistress. Both Mrs. Belper and Louisa were passionate visitors of stately homes and lived in constant hope of converting a mere "sighting"—that of a distant marquis crouched over his herbaceous border or a viscountess entering her carriage, for example—into an actual meeting during which sentences were exchanged. And Isobel Brandon, a granddaughter of the Earl of Lexbury, was rumored to be red-haired, beautiful and elegant beyond belief.

As against this, there were the obvious dangers of allowing the "young people" to get out of hand. Stavely was reputed to be the most magnificent and romantic of East Anglia's great houses and the thought of Edward and Harriet disappearing into some impenetrable yew arbor or lingering behind a carved oak screen was too horrible to contemplate.

"But we shall be able to prevent that, Louisa," Mrs. Belper had decided, coming down in favor of Edward. "After all, there are more than thirty of us. I shall talk to the girls."

So Mrs. Belper had talked to them—not to eighty-seven-year-old Mrs. Transom, the widow of the Emeritus Professor of Architecture, a "girl" of whom little could be expected, but to Millicent Braithwaite who single-handedly had pulled three drunken undergraduates from a high, spiked wall as they tried to climb into Trinity, and to Eugenia Crowley who was amazingly fleet-footed from cross-country running with her pack of Guides—and they had promised that the young couple would never be out of sight.

Edward accordingly had been invited and now, sensibly deciding to mix business with pleasure, he stood beside Harriet, dressed for the country and holding his butterfly-net, a strong canvas sweep-net for those insects which preferred to hop or crawl along the ground, and a khaki haversack containing his pooter, his killing bottle and his tins.

The omnibus arrived; rugs, parasols and hampers of food were loaded on. Miss Transom climbed aboard and began to heave her aged, cantankerous mother on to the step. Eugenia Crowley, twitching with responsibility, and Millicent Braithwaite—a deeply muscular figure in a magenta two-piece and kid boots—performed a neat pincer movement, placing themselves one in front of and one behind the seat which contained Edward and Harriet—and the bus set off.

Harriet had not wanted to come; she could imagine nothing less enjoyable than trailing round a great house in the company of the Tea Circle ladies, and Edward's presence was an added burden for present always in her mind was the dread that one day she would be driven to yield—to accept, if it came, his offer of marriage. If she married Edward, she could have a garden in which flowers actually grew; a dog; a pond with goldfish. She could sit in the sun and read and have her friends. But at this point always she stopped her thoughts, for somewhere in this imagined garden there was a pram with a gurgling baby: her baby, soft and warm.

But not only hers. And as so often before Harriet gave thanks for Maisie, the melancholy and eccentric housemaid who had given her, when she was six years old, such a comprehensive and unadorned account of what people did to bring babies into the world. Harriet had lain awake in her attic for many nights trying to comprehend the complicated unpleasantness of what she had heard, but now she was glad of Maisie's detailed crudity. Too easy otherwise, when she read of Dante's sublime passion for his Beatrice or (in melting and mellifluous Greek) of the innocent Daphnis' pursuit of Chloe, to imagine love as some glorious upsurge of the human spirit. It was of course, but not only, and now as she gently drew away her arm from Edward's—which was growing warm in the crowded bus—she knew that that way out was barred.

But what way was open? Her father, the night after the dinner party, had himself gone to Madame Lavarre and stopped her dancing lessons once and for all. There was nothing left now: nothing.

Only I must not despair, thought Harriet. Despair was a sin, she knew that: turning one's face away from the created world. And resolutely she forced herself not just to look at, but really to see the greening hedges, the glistening buttercups, the absurd new lambs—setting herself, as unhappy people do, a kind of pastoral litany.

And presently she succeeded, for the gentle peaceful countryside under the light wide sky was truly lovely and it was spring and there had to be a future somewhere, even for her. So that when Edward said, "This is very pleasant, Harriet, is it not?" she was able to turn to him, pushing back her loose hair behind her ears, and smile and agree.

But when at last the bus turned in between the stone lions on the gateposts and they drove down Stavely's famous double avenue of beeches toward the house, Harriet's soft "Oh!" of pleasure owed nothing to the deliberate exercise of will. She had expected grandeur, ostentation, pomp… and found instead an unequivocal and awe-inspiring beauty.