Eden Falls (44 page)

Ruby pulled a face as she poured. ‘English breakfast, I suppose. All very well, but it never brought anyone back from yellow fever.’

‘Ruby,’ Eve said, and the other woman looked up from the task.

‘Yes?’

‘Bless you. Bless your goodness and your kindness. And thank you.’

Ruby waved away the words, but she was deeply gratified, and moved. She passed the cup, just half full so it wouldn’t spill, to Eve, whose expression, when she took a drink, was full of bliss, like Batista’s when she imagined the comfort that waited for her in heaven. This brew that the English loved so much, thought Ruby, it might not be beneficial to their health, but she was willing to accept it could be beneficial to their souls.

A
nna and Eliza were wedged together on the garden swing, the one that Daniel made for the children when he and Eve were first married and he moved in to Ravenscliffe. Anna had an arm around Eliza, who leaned in to her, drawing comfort from the closeness. As well as Anna’s particular smell – not cologne but something toasty, definitely something edible – Eliza breathed in the sharp, fresh scent of grass that rose up from beneath their feet and, on the breeze, the smell of the pits, a rich, acrid, coal-and-smoke smell that, when you lived here, you almost stopped noticing. Over the picket fence, where the garden ended and the common began, Ellen and Maya were stalking ladybirds and holding them captive in a matchbox. Watching them, seeing their absorption, Eliza felt older, somehow, than she wanted to be. She had lost the knack of forgetting, of living in the moment.

‘If she’s dead…’ Eliza said.

‘She isn’t dead,’ Anna said quite calmly, because they’d been over this ground before and Anna realised that the girl only said it for the simple solace of her answers. ‘If she was, we would know.’

‘’ow would we know?’

‘Well, we would be told by telegram. That’s the ordinary way. But also, I know in my heart that Eve is still with us. If she had died, my heart would’ve told me.’

Eliza sighed. ‘I wrote again. Daniel posted it yesterday.’

‘That’s what she needs, letters from home.’

‘She ’asn’t written to me for a long time.’

‘That’s the illness. When she can, she will. Hugh said he’d send news, too, the moment he got there.’

‘I like Mr Oliver,’ Eliza said. ‘I like t’way ’e talks to me in t’same way ’e talks to you and Daniel. I like being included. Some grown-ups just talk over you, as if you’re invisible.’

Hugh Oliver, on a brief visit to Netherwood, had come to Ravenscliffe and shared a meal, a Russian dish made with beef short ribs and rice, and all the exotic seasonings that Anna had brought to Ravenscliffe when she lived there. ‘This cayenne,’ she had said, waggling the jar at a bemused audience of children, ‘has not been used since I left for Ardington. Shame on you all!’

‘No call for it in meat ’n’ tatie pie,’ Lilly Pickering had said. She was disgruntled by Anna’s recent return to the fold: in Eve’s absence, Lilly herself had been at the domestic tiller. But her standards were not ambitiously high and when Anna had arrived, wielding a wet mop across the front-hall tiles and filling the kitchen with foreign smells, Lilly had taken her coat from the peg and said she was off. ‘You mun call me,’ she said to Daniel, ‘when she’s gone.’ Her offspring had trailed after her, reluctantly because they preferred this house on the common to their own in Beaumont Lane. But Anna had been unapologetic.

‘Place is pigsty,’ she had said hotly. ‘That woman is disgrace.’

They knew not to argue, even though they all felt an injustice had been done. Any port in a storm, after all, and they had been able to depend on Lilly, bad-tempered and hatchet-faced though she often was. Plus, the Pickerings were poor; what would they all eat if they didn’t eat here, Eliza had wondered. She resolved to bake scones and take them to Lilly; they would be a peace offering with a practical application. In her mind, the Pickering children would fall on the home baking with cries of ecstatic delight.

The truth of it was that Lilly had done what she could. Daniel had been the problem, dragging the house and everyone in it into the pit of his crippling despondency. Part of Anna’s anger when she first arrived had been founded in shock: the house seemed to sag with the weight of Daniel’s misery. She had always regarded Ravenscliffe as invulnerable, a province set apart from the outside world, a place of comfort and renewal; when she first saw it – and it had been empty and neglected, standing firm on its flattened and windblown portion of the common – her spirits had soared. It wasn’t that the house was beautiful or elegant. It was heftily built from local stone and it hunkered down against the wind, with its back to the town. But it had a visceral quality, and a mind of its own; when Anna persuaded Eve to move her family into it, it was as much that Ravenscliffe had chosen her as she had chosen Ravenscliffe. But under the slack stewardship of Lilly, and with Daniel grieving for a wife he thought he had lost, the house had filled with shadows. It took every ounce of Anna’s will, every last scrap of her optimism, to chase them away. She and Maya had come to stay and would remain, she told Amos, until Ravenscliffe felt right again. When he protested, she reminded him that this was, after all, what he had wanted.

‘You can stay too, Dad,’ Maya had said. ‘Can’t he, Mam?’

But Anna didn’t appear to have heard, and Amos had only kissed Maya and left them there.

‘Can I talk to you about Paris?’ Eliza said now.

Anna looked at her in surprise. She’d talked to Eliza a good deal about Paris already: the glamour of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré where they had stayed; the glory of the Ballet de l’Opéra; the whirling, breathless excitement of the Ballets Russes and a dancer named Nijinsky who so thrilled the audience at the Théâtre du Châtelet that they leapt to their feet as if the seats were on fire and roared their appreciation. All of this had poured forth from Eliza, who, until Anna’s arrival, had felt she had no one to tell. But now, she was saying, there was more.

‘Go on,’ Anna said, patiently.

Eliza looked at her hands, which were knotted together in her lap. ‘Well,’ she said, then stopped again.

‘Eliza?’

‘There was a man there … two men, actually…’ again Eliza hesitated, and panic filled Anna’s chest at what the child was about to say. Terrible images flashed through her mind of the potential dangers on the streets of Paris for a beautiful young girl, inadequately chaperoned. ‘They were in charge of the Ballets Russes,’ Eliza said, and looked up into Anna’s face, as if she’d finished.

‘Oh!’ Anna said, trying quickly to mask her relief. ‘Do you mean Sergei Diaghilev?’

‘Yes, I do. ’e was one of ’em.’

‘And?’ Anna’s heart still raced, but now for a different reason.

‘They ’eld a sort of audition. We didn’t know anything about it, Mademoiselle and me; we didn’t have my things, even. But Mademoiselle knew one of t’company from her own days as a dancer, and she mentioned it when Mademoiselle told ’er. About me, I mean.’

The words tumbled out in a hectic rush, and Anna’s face bore a small scowl of concentration.

‘So we went, and I wore borrowed pointes, which you never should do, but I had to because—’

‘You didn’t have your things, Eliza, you said that already.’

‘Exactly, so anyway, I danced for them. There were millions of girls, and they were all French, and they were all in pink tulle, and I had somebody’s satin skirt that kept trying to slip down, so Mademoiselle tied a ribbon round the waistband. The pointes fitted, though, but after I’d started dancing they told me to take them off and dance barefoot, so I did.’

‘Eliza!’

‘What?’

‘What are you telling me? Are you telling me you danced for Diaghilev?’

‘I am, yes.’

‘Then stop talking about your clothing!’

‘Sorry. Mr Diaghilev and t’other man – I think he was a choreographer – they asked my name and told me to dance. I could do whatever I liked. There was a lady at a piano, and she played something I’ve never ’eard.’

‘That must’ve been difficult for you. What did you do?’

‘I just danced. It was nice,’ Eliza said simply.

‘Eliza, what an extraordinary thing! My darling girl, did you tell any of this to Daniel?’

She shook her head. ‘Nobody knows, just me and Mademoiselle, and now you.’

Anna gave her a squeeze. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m very, very proud of you. So will Daniel be when you tell him, and your mam too. You know, Sergei Diaghilev is from Russia, just like me.’

‘He is, yes,’ Eliza said, nodding fervently. ‘St Petersburg, Mademoiselle said.’

‘Your Mademoiselle sounds interesting.’

‘She is,’ Eliza said, proud as punch of her teacher.

‘Well I never, what a time you had! Shall we go in now? Have some tea and toast?’

‘The thing is…’

‘Mmm?’ Anna was already off the swing, looking around for Maya and Ellen. She turned back to Eliza and smiled at her fondly, wondering what could possibly be left to say.

‘Mr Diaghilev asked me to come back t’next day, and then there were only about eight of us.’

Anna stared. ‘Go on.’

‘I danced again, in bare feet, to some music that Mr Diaghilev said was so new nobody had ever danced to it before. He told me to forget everything I’d ever been taught. That sounded a bit rude, I thought, because Mademoiselle was there, and she likes us to do exactly what she says, but she nodded at me so I listened to t’music and started to dance.’

‘Was the music nice?’

‘Beautiful. Lively and cheerful.’

‘Just like you.’

Eliza beamed.

‘And did Mr Diaghilev enjoy your performance?’ Anna was rapt; she could barely believe what she was hearing. Eliza sat, swinging gently and making what was quite extraordinary sound exactly the opposite.

‘At the end we all stepped forwards onto t’stage and stood in a line, and Mr Diaghilev stood up. He said’ – here Eliza adopted a fruity baritone, with an accent borrowed from Anna – ‘I’ll take the girl with the smile on her face; she dances with her soul.’ We all looked at each other, to see who was smiling.’

‘And was it you?’

‘It was,’ Eliza said. ‘Yes.’

The next day, Anna and the three girls went to Barnsley, to see Evangeline Durand at her school of ballet. Daniel had been only semi-engaged the evening before, when Anna told him what Eliza had now told her. She had been able to see how entirely impossible it must have been for the girl to share her excitement with him. When he came in from work, hopeless misery trailed in behind him through the door. She had waited until the children were in bed and then she had spoken to him, dealing in blunt home truths. He was grieving for a loss he hadn’t suffered, she said. He was doing a disservice to Eve, and to her children, who needed his loving support and a semblance of normality in their home. He was not honouring his love for Eve by wallowing in this way. All of this he listened to with a brooding countenance and then, when she’d finished, he merely said, ‘You cannot know how I feel, so don’t presume to judge me,’ and walked out of the room. The silence he left behind was profound and unsettling. Anna, though, was unrepentant. She was gravely disappointed in him: he was being tested, as they all were. This was not his crisis alone. In the morning, when Anna rose, he had already gone to work, and she was grateful for it.

She had instigated a new regime at Ravenscliffe since her arrival, so before they could leave for Barnsley each girl had a task to accomplish. Eliza tidied away the breakfast things, Ellen swept and mopped the floor, and Maya beat the mats and collected wild flowers from the common, and put them in a crisp Cornishware jug on the sill. Anna cleaned the kitchen window with vinegar and water until the panes were as clear as a mountain spring. Show the house you love it, she told them, and it will always give you a warm welcome. The girls swapped sidelong, eye-rolling glances, but even their mutual scepticism was cheering, somehow, and by the time they left for the station the mood among the four of them was almost jolly. When the train passed through Ardington Maya waved at the stationmaster, who lifted his cap at her and bowed.

In Barnsley, Eliza led the way to the dance school, although they all knew perfectly well where it was. Even Ellen indulged her, falling in line as they processed along Mill Street to the towering building that housed Mademoiselle Evangeline’s little domain. Inside, they climbed a dark staircase, then passed through the loom room and into the wide, bright studio where twenty little girls at the barre turned their heads to stare with solemn faces at the intruders. Ellen and Maya stared back.

‘Eliza,
chérie
!’ This was Mademoiselle Evangeline, pit-patting across the wooden floor with her arms outstretched. She resembled a matryoshka doll, thought Anna: neat and rosy, with shining black eyes and glossy black hair so tightly bunned it could indeed have been painted on her head. She kissed Eliza once on each cheek and then said, ‘Who do we have here?’

Eliza made the introductions, and Mademoiselle Evangeline cast an assessing gaze over Ellen and Maya, looking instinctively for a dancer’s bearing. Maya, she thought, looked promising. Anna said, ‘Eliza’s told me all about Paris.’

Mademoiselle Evangeline said, ‘Ah,’ and nodded vigorously. ‘
Très bien, chérie
,’ she said to Eliza and then, in a whisper to Anna, ‘I began to wonder if Monsieur Diaghilev had scared her away.’ She gave a quick smile, a fleeting acknowledgement that she was not wholly serious, then clapped twice and the little girls at the barre changed position, although she had her back to them.

‘Not at all,’ Anna said. ‘But life at home is a little—’

‘Difficult,
oui
, I understand. Prepare, one, and two, second position, arms down,
demi plié
.’ Behind their teacher, the little ballerinas responded as one. Eliza watched them with a critical eye; she watched them as someone who had danced for Diaghilev and been chosen. They were only young – seven and eight, she thought – but she could see they were unpromising. A favourite word of her dad’s popped into her head: clodhoppers. This made her smile, and some of the girls at the barre smiled back.