Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (34 page)

‘I still don’t understand, sir.’

‘Never you mind. You just keep your eyes fixed on those Bolsheviks. And remember the great maxim of intelligence gathering: ‘Hold your friends tight but hold your enemies tighter.’

Michel Fokine was in cheerful mood when he called on the Powerscourts in Markham Square. Inspector Dutfield was organizing his forces, some to Somerset House, some to shadowing Alfred Bolm, some to search for more information about strangers on the night of the murder at the Ballets Russes.

‘You’ll never guess the success of those Blenheim Palace performances,’ Fokine said happily. ‘We’ve had invitations to come to all sorts of places: an Elizabethan jewel of a place called Montacute, wherever that is; a place with a room for every day of the year at Knole
(and I do know where that it is); and one from the Rothschilds at Waddesdon Manor. The Waddesdon people even offered to build a special replica of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg to be ready when we come back in the autumn. They said it wouldn’t matter if it rained. Why, there was a rumour that the Queen, who is interested in these things, wanted to send an invitation for us to give a small evening performance at Buckingham Palace.’

‘Was the rumour true, Monsieur Fokine? The one about Buckingham Palace, I mean?’

‘No, it wasn’t. People say that the King put his foot down. If I have this dancing lot in, he is supposed to have said, who the hell else is going to come through my doors and bore us all rigid? So that was the end of that.’

‘Monsieur Diaghilev must be vey pleased with the way it went.’

‘He is. But he says he’ll never do it again. The whole event, he says, was much riskier than anybody thought. He hadn’t counted on the people cheering and all that. Suppose they’d decided they didn’t like it, he said, the good people of Blenheim Palace and Woodstock. We, the Ballets Russes – my Ballets Russes, as he refers to them – could have been booed off the stage and into the lake.’

Powerscourt told him in very general terms about Alexander’s letters home and the messages they contained.

Fokine began pacing up and down the room again. ‘The business about being English or Russian is something he talked to me about. I thought it perfectly natural. London is pretty overwhelming
when you see it and its people in all their pomp at the ballet.’

‘So what did you tell him?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘I told him not to worry. I said it was perfectly natural to feel English in England – he’s been here loads of times before seeing family and so on; he speaks English at home – and equally natural to feel Russian in St Petersburg or Moscow. I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you, I told him.’

‘And the other stuff, about the papers and so on?’ said Powerscourt.

‘I’ve been thinking about that, my lord, and my only useful thought is that it concerns the future of the Ballets Russes.’ He paused for a moment and looked out into the square.

‘He could perhaps have seen something on Bolm’s desk when he was being made up; Alexander could have popped in to wish him good luck or some gesture like that.’

‘And what could that have related to?’

‘Well, Bolm is one of the senior dancers, so he’s given a sight of some of the upcoming plans to make sure he knows what’s coming. It could relate to one of two things. They might make a very small ripple here in Chelsea, Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, but they could create a huge wave in the Ballets Russes.’

‘Are you able to tell us what they might be?’

‘Yes, I’ll try. You’ve been more than generous to me while I’ve been here. The first could relate to the Ballets Russes going to perform back home in St Petersburg. We, the Ballets Russes, have never danced in our own country. Diaghilev had some fearsome row with the theatre authorities some years ago. Maybe he has
sorted that out. Maybe I haven’t been reading my mail, which I hate doing. That could be one surprise. It would cause a sensation all over Europe, the prodigal Diaghilev bringing his art and his artists home again.’

‘And the other thing?

‘I think the other thing would only make sense to somebody who lived inside the company, my lord. It concerns Stravinsky, the composer. There have been rumours for months now that he was writing the music for a new kind of ballet altogether, one that would change the rules. Nobody knows what it is called. Nobody knows when it will be finished. But it is going to be very different, composed to sound like some ancient dancing, and the music of Slav and peasant Russia, not the classical sound of the cosmopolitan elite of the great cities. It will be more primitive, more rustic. Many in the ballet do not like the sound of it. They prefer the classics like Chopin or Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky’s music would bring out the tension between the western capital of St Petersburg and the peasant dances and folk music of the interior. It still has no name, this ballet – but, believe me, any news of its coming could rock the Ballets Russes to their foundations.’

‘Does it have a date for the first performance, the opening night?’

‘Nobody knows the answer to that, but if Diaghilev is in charge, and I’m sure he will be, the first night will be in Paris next year.’

Attitude

In ballet, an
attitude
has nothing to do with your personality. Actually, an
attitude
is a pose, a way that a dancer can hold herself. In order to perform an attitude, a dancer must balance herself on one leg while holding the other leg at a ninety-degree angle in a curved position. The raised leg can either be held to the back or the front. The arms of the dancer usually remain in fourth position, curved, one arm above the head, and one arm to the side.

Natasha Shaporova was coming back to London. She sent a very long telegram to carry her news before her as she left.

‘Taneyev household hopeless. They must have had a family meeting and decided to get rid of me. This was after I had talked at length to the father and the brother. Both admitted that they had received the letters I spoke of before. Both had destroyed them. Both had agreed not to speak of the matter again to any
living soul. They thanked me for my trouble and assured me that that was their final word. I might not have learnt the secret – if there was a secret – but nobody else would either. Alexander is in his grave, they said, and the content of his letters will stay with him there.

‘Back to
War and Peace
on the Warsaw train. Precious little peace here.’

Harry Smith, the printer from Camberwell who was printing the Lenin pamphlets, felt rather guilty about charging so much money for the job. He was, however, well schooled in the revolutionary doctrine that emphasized the importance of cell structure, that a comrade in one department should not tell anybody else what he was doing in another part of the organization, in case of capture or interrogation by the agents of the capitalist class. So he had not told Arthur Cooper that he had two very urgent jobs for trade unionists in the docks and the railways and that he had urgent work to be produced for them. And speed in the printing business cost money. As a penance he was bringing a couple of proof copies of the latest ‘Gospel according to Lenin’ round, to show Arthur Cooper that work was indeed in progress.

‘I’ve brought you these,’ he said, when they were closeted in the front room well away from wife and children, ‘a Russian one and an English one. These are just the first proofs. We’ve still got to check the translation and make sure that there aren’t any mistakes.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Cooper, picking up a page in Russian rather gingerly, as if it might blow up.
‘I can’t do anything with the Russian one. I tried once, you know, to teach myself Russian in the big library round here, but I couldn’t do it.’

He stared rather helplessly at the page. He noticed that it seemed to contain a large number of explanation marks.

‘Try this one,’ said Harry Smith, producing a version written in the King’s English. Looking down, Harry Smith noticed that it seemed to contain a number of old friends: the weak and vacillating bourgeoisie, the primacy of the working class and the importance of the revolutionary vanguard ready to lead and to speak and act in the name of the workers. He noticed too that the days of the capitalist class were numbered, the final crisis was at hand and that it just needed one final heave for the workers to triumph. Like some early Christian reading the Gospel of John some years after reading the Gospels of Luke and Mark, he felt that he had heard the main points before and, quite possibly, more than once. Like the Russian version, the English one contained plenty of exclamation marks. He wondered if there might be too many of them, as if the readers might not get tired of being shouted at all the time.

‘This is very fine, Harry,’ he said, handing back the proof. ‘I presume I won’t see any more of them until they are ready.’

‘That’s correct, if it’s all right with you.’

Arthur Cooper nodded.

‘There is the question of where I should deliver them to,’ said Smith. ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t guarantee their safety or their security for very long. The police and their people are always sniffing around. I could keep
them until a week today, if you like. They should be finished in a day or two.’

‘That should be fine, but I might want you to keep them somewhere safe, if you see what I mean,’ said Arthur Cooper, who was feeling slightly lost. You could hide revolutionary money in a capitalist bank, he said to himself. Where could you keep revolutionary literature? The British Museum? London University? The Bank of England? He rather thought not.

‘That’s fine,’ said Harry Smith.

As he departed on his bus for the delights of Camberwell, a figure emerged from the shadows beside Arthur Cooper’s house. The figure followed Harry Smith all the way home to his wife and his printing presses.

Sergeant Jenkins had never imagined there could be as many people with the surname Gilbert in the country. Surely, he thought, there can’t be as many as this, and these were only for the year of 1882. There were another thirty years to go. He gritted his teeth and decided that he just had to carry on. He wondered if he should ask for assistance in this dreary business.

The Sergeant had also decided to abandon his attempts at learning the Russian language. He had only just finished the tricky business of the alphabet with all those extra letters. Even if this case lasted until the end of the year, he didn’t think he’d be able to say any more than ‘Good morning’.

Walter Gilbert, Maidenhead. Walter Gilbert, Gateshead, William Gilbert, Padstow, William Gilbert, Richmond. William Gilbert, Newark. Looking ahead
he thought there must be another sixty or seventy Williams to go.