The Horse Dancer (50 page)

‘With respect, sir, I don’t believe I can be happy here.’

‘Happiness? You think that me cutting you loose will give you happiness?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘There is no happiness in this world other than what is achieved by love of one’s work. This is your world, Henri. A fool could see it. You cannot cut a man out of his world and expect him to be happy.’

‘With respect, sir, I have made up my mind. I would like to be released.’

It had felt good to be so determined, to see his future so clearly. The only moment he had come close to changing his mind was when he walked down the covered yard to see Gerontius for the last time. The great horse whinnied as he approached, nudged his pockets, then rested his head on Henri’s shoulder as Henri tickled his nose. Henri blinked back tears. He had never had to let go of anyone he loved before; until Florence he had never loved anyone. Just this magnificent, gentle horse.

He closed his eyes, breathing in the familiar scent of the animal’s warm skin, feeling the velvet softness of his nostrils, the immutable sense of grace that came from being in his presence. And then, gritting his teeth and hoisting his bag over his shoulder, Henri Lachapelle turned and walked towards the gates of L’École du Cavalerie.

The first months in England had been tolerable, their trials masked by the quiet satisfaction he felt as a newly married man. Florence glowed under his attention; a million times a day he saw in her little things that enabled him to justify his decision. Her family, while obviously a little wary of the young Frenchman who had whisked their daughter off her feet, were polite. Not as antagonistic as his own father would have been, no matter whom he had brought home. Cleverly, Florence had asked him to wear his uniform when he first met them; the war still fresh in their memories, her parents’ generation found it hard to see anything but good in a man in uniform. ‘You’re not thinking of settling in France, though?’ her father had confirmed, several times. ‘Florence is a family girl. She wouldn’t do well so far from home.’

‘My home is here,’ Henri said, believing it. And Florence, seated beside him, had flushed with pleasure.

He had taken lodgings and, a matter of weeks after he arrived in England, they had married in Marylebone Register Office, so swiftly that for several months afterwards the neighbours cast suspicious looks at Florence’s waistline whenever they passed. He set out to find work, travelled across London and to the suburbs, trying for employment as a riding instructor, but riding for pleasure was still very much the preserve of the wealthy, and on the few occasions he was taken on trial, his poor grasp of the language, impenetrable accent and formal opinions on riding won him few admirers. In turn, he found the English attitude to horses incomprehensible, their ill-thought out approach to equestrianism, based on the hunting field, sloppy, inexact and, worse, unsympathetic. They seemed to care more about dominating the horse than working with it or encouraging it to show itself off to its full advantage.

He found England a disappointment. The food was worse than he had received in the cavalry. The people seemed happy to eat everything from tins; there were few markets at which you could buy cheap, fresh food, the bread was spongy and tasteless, the meat ground to a brown gruel and re-formed into dishes with peculiar names: faggots, rissoles, shepherd’s pie. On a few occasions he brought home fresh food and prepared it himself: tomato salad, fish enlivened with the few dried herbs he could find. But Florence’s parents would widen their eyes over the dinner-table, as if he had done something subversive. ‘Bit sharp for me,’ her mother would remark, ‘but thank you, Henry. Very kind of you to try.’

‘Not my cup of tea, I’m afraid,’ her father would say, pushing his plate to the centre of the tablecloth.

He felt stifled by the forbidding grey skyline, and would return to the narrow house in Clerkenwell to reveal that he had been ‘let go’ again, often without being paid what he was owed. It was impossible to argue in a language he did not yet understand. Family meals were tense. Florence’s father, Martin, would ask over tea whether he had found another job yet, and when the answer was no, whether he might think about improving his English a little so that he could get a ‘proper’ one. One that apparently involved sitting behind a desk.

Florence would clasp his hand under the table. ‘Henri is so very talented, Dad,’ she would say. ‘I know someone will find a role for him soon.’ He became grateful that the language barrier precluded all but the most cursory conversations.

At night he dreamt of Gerontius. He rode out into the place du Chardonnet, seated in a slow, rocking canter, urging his brave old horse to switch his leading leg here, to flick his feet out in
passage
there. He danced, pirouetted, rose up on his back in a perfect
levade
, and saw the world laid out beneath him. And then, inevitably, he woke in the cramped bedroom of Florence’s childhood, with its drab brown furniture, view of the high street, and his wife, her hair in rollers, snoring gently beside him.

A year on, he could no longer disguise the magnitude of his error. The English were worse than Parisians, suspicious when he opened his mouth, the older men muttering disparaging comments about the war that they thought he could not understand. Those who surrounded him had no appetite for learning or for bettering themselves. They seemed to care only about earning money that they would drink on a Friday night with a kind of grim determination. Or they would stay locked in their houses, even when the weather was beautiful, curtains drawn, hypnotised by their new television sets.

Florence detected his unhappiness and tried to compensate, loving him more, praising him, assuring him that things would improve. He saw only the desperation in her eyes, felt her adoration morph into clinginess, and would announce that the following week he would leave to find work again, even when he knew there was no work to be had. Her attempts to disguise her disappointment merely fuelled his guilt and resentment.

It was April – almost fifteen months after he had arrived – when he plucked up the courage to write to Varjus. He was not a great communicator, and kept the letter brief:

 

He handed it over at the post office feeling terrible guilt but also hope. Florence would understand. She could not want a husband who earned nothing, who could not provide her with a home. She would adapt to France eventually. And if not – here he would feel shame lodging deep within him – would it be so bad if he never returned? Surely she could not be happy as things were. Surely she understood that no man could continue to be so distant from the thing he loved.

He held the knowledge of that letter winging its way across the continent throughout another interminable supper. It was chicken. Mrs Jacobs had cooked it to a leathery texture and dressed it with some kind of cheese sauce. A small mound of unrecognisable vegetables sat beside it, diced into submission.

Henri sat in silence, forking pieces diligently into his mouth as Mr Jacobs muttered darkly about ‘that Russian bloke’ going into space. He seemed to take Mr Gagarin’s exploration as a personal affront. ‘I don’t see what they’re doing, sending men up into the sky,’ he observed, for the third time. ‘It’s against all the laws of nature.’

Mr Jacobs was not a man, Henri had worked out very quickly, who liked change, and was pretty sure now that his daughter marrying a Frenchman fell into the ‘unwelcome’ category.

‘I think it’s exciting,’ Florence ventured.

Henri was surprised: she rarely expressed an opinion that might contradict her father’s view.

‘It’s romantic,’ she added, cutting a piece of chicken neatly. ‘I like the thought that someone’s up there, amid all the twinkly stars, looking back at us.’ She smiled at him, a secret smile. Her mother, he realised, was smiling at both of them.

‘Florence has something to tell you, Henry,’ she said, catching his confusion.

Florence wiped her mouth and put her napkin on her lap. She blushed a little.

‘What?’ he said.

‘I was going to keep it secret a bit longer, but I couldn’t. I told Mother. We’re going to have to set another place at our table.’

‘Why?’ said Mr Jacobs, tearing his attention from his newspaper. ‘Who’s coming?’

Florence and her mother burst out laughing. ‘No one’s coming, Father. I’m – I’m in the family way . . .’ She took Henri’s hand over the tablecloth. ‘We’re going to have a baby.’

Well, they certainly did things differently in France, Mrs Jacobs remarked later to her husband, long after the younger couple had retreated to their room. For all the talk of Frenchmen being so sophisticated, she didn’t think she’d ever seen a man so shocked in all her life.

Henri was leaving the flat when he met the postman on the landing. Varjus, true to his nature, had written back within a week. He ripped open the envelope and read the hastily written words, his face impassive.

 

‘Good news, mate?’ The postman thrust a folded magazine into number forty-seven’s letterbox.

Henri screwed the note into a ball and thrust it deep into his pocket. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t speak English,’ he said.

‘Two paths’, the Grand Dieu had said. Why had he not warned him how quickly they would turn into one?

He opened the front door to let himself into the narrow hallway. The smell of overcooked cabbage pervaded the air and he closed his eyes briefly in silent dread of whatever food was coming that evening. Then a sound made him stop. In the living room, on the other side of the anaglypta wallpaper, he could hear noisy sobs.

The kitchen door opened and Florence appeared. She navigated herself along the passageway and reached up to kiss him.

‘What is this?’ he said, hoping she would not detect the alcohol on his breath.

‘I’ve told them that after the baby is born we’re going to France,’ she said. Her voice was calm, her hands neatly folded in front of her. At the word ‘France’ another round of noisy sobs ensued.

Henri looked at his wife, confused.

She took his hands. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for ages. You’ve given me everything –
everything
,’ she glanced down at her belly, ‘but I know you’re not happy here, Henri. And it’s too hard on you to expect you to be, with people having such closed minds, and the horse thing being so different over here and all. So, I’ve told Mother and Father that once we’ve recovered from the birth, you’ll provide for me there. As you can probably tell, Mother hasn’t taken it too well.’

She searched his face. ‘Will Le Cadre Noir take you back, darling? I’m sure once I’ve got the hang of it I could keep a little house for you nearby. I’ll learn French. Bring up the baby there. What do you think?’

Perhaps disconcerted by his lack of a response, she began to play with her cuff. ‘I wanted to say we’d go now. But I wasn’t sure about going through the birth not knowing how to speak to the doctors . . . and Mother would be beside herself if she wasn’t with me. But I’ve told them we’ll go after the baby comes. I hope I did the right thing . . . Henri?’

This brave, beautiful Englishwoman. Henri was moved beyond words. He didn’t deserve her. She had no idea how close he had come . . . He stepped forwards and buried his face in her hair. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered. ‘You don’t know what this means. I will make sure we have a better future . . . for us and our baby.’

‘I know you will,’ she said softly. ‘I want you to fly again, Henri.’

He heard the baby crying even before he reached the little house, a thin wail echoing over the quiet street. Even before he opened the door to their room he knew what he would find.

She was bent over the crib, uttering soothing noises, her hand fluttering vainly over the child. At Henri’s approach, she turned. She was pale and her eyes spoke of long anxious hours.

‘How long has she been crying?’

‘Not long. Really.’ She straightened up, stepping aside. ‘Just since Mother went out.’

‘Then why . . . ?’

‘You know I’m afraid to carry her when you’re not here. My hands aren’t working again. I dropped a cup this afternoon and—’

He gritted his teeth. ‘
Chérie
, there is nothing wrong with your hands. The doctor said so. You just need confidence.’

He plucked Simone from her cot, deftly holding the tiny child close to his chest, and she quieted immediately. Her little mouth opened and closed near his shirt, seeking milk. Florence sat on the chair in the corner, holding out her arms to receive her, closing them around her daughter only when she was sure she had been safely delivered into her embrace.

While she fed the baby, Henri removed his boots, placing them neatly by the door. He took off his jacket and put the kettle on the stove. He had finally found a job on the railways. It was not so bad. Nothing was so bad, now that he knew it would be temporary. Neither of them spoke, the silence of the room broken only by the baby’s greedy sucking and an occasional car passing outside.

‘Have you been out today?’

‘I meant to . . . but I told you, I was afraid to carry her.’

‘Your parents bought us a pram. You could have put her in it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t say sorry.’

‘But I am . . . Henri . . .’

You don’t have to be. If you would just be less complicated about everything. If you would be less anxious about the child, drop these ridiculous complaints about hands that supposedly won’t work any more, the imagined dizziness.