17. The Stolen Grace Reveal
The Stolen Grace Reveal
MORVEN
H e followed me from the vault. He closed the door of my room behind him and sat on the floor with his back against the wardrobe. I sat on the end of the bed. Neither of us spoke for a while.
The room was dark except for the landing light filtering under the door and the distant glow of the Clyde through the curtains – the silver-grey light that Cairndhu produced at night, when the moon caught the water and the water threw it back and the whole coastline existed in a permanent state of half-illumination.
It was enough to see his face. It was enough to see that the face he was wearing was not the one he wore for the world.
“Cat was my half-sister,” he said. “Different mothers. Same father – Callum Ramsay, who was a dockworker and a drinker and a man who loved two women and married neither of them and left them both with children he couldn’t afford and memories he didn’t deserve.
Cat’s mother was a woman named Jean Alloway.
She lived in the council flats on the east side.
She worked in the chip shop on Marine Parade. ” He paused. “The same chip shop.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Cat danced. She started at St.Jude’s when she was eight.
Isobel took her in – Isobel takes in everyone who walks through the door with the right feet, and Cat had the right feet.
She was –” He stopped. His jaw worked. The landing light caught the line of his throat and I watched him swallow the word he’d been about to say and replace it with a different one.
“She was gifted. Not in the way people use the word when they mean good. In the way they use it when they mean something they can’t explain. ”
“She auditioned for the junior company recommendation,” I said.
“She was sixteen. She’d been working towards it for three years.
She practised every day. She walked to St.Jude’s from the east side every morning before school and every evening after, and Jean worked double shifts to pay for shoes and leotards, and Cat was going to be the thing that proved it had been worth it.
All of it. Every chip she’d fried and every shift she’d pulled and every night she’d gone to bed exhausted in a flat that smelled of cooking oil and bleach. ”
He looked at the floor.
“Isobel said no. She said Cat wasn’t ready. She said she needed another year, maybe two. She said the technique was there but the maturity wasn’t, and she wouldn’t recommend someone who would crack under the pressure of a professional environment.”
“Was she right? ”
“I don’t know.” He met my eyes. “I’ve never been able to work that out.
Whether Isobel was being honest or being protective or being the kind of teacher who makes decisions about other people’s lives and believes the decision is theirs to make.
I don’t know. I was nineteen. I was angry.
I watched my sister come home from that studio and not speak for three days and then stop dancing entirely, and I didn’t know who to blame so I blamed Isobel, and then I blamed the girl who got the recommendation instead. ”
The room was very quiet. The Clyde moved outside the window.
“Me,” I said.
“You.” He didn’t say it with venom. He said it flat, exhausted, like a man who’d carried a thing for seven years and had examined it from every angle and had discovered that the anger, when he finally took it apart, was not anger at all.
“Morven Gault, fourteen years old, recommended by Isobel Drummond for the summer intensive at the Royal. The one Cat should have got. The one that led to everything – the vocational school, the apprenticeship, the company. You got the trajectory. Cat got the chip shop.”
“What happened to her?”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them he was looking at the wall behind me, at the plaster, at nothing.
“She applied for university. Social work. She lasted a year and a half. There was a boyfriend – not a good one. Jean got ill.Cat came back to look after her. Jean died. Cat was twenty-one and alone in the east-side flat with no qualifications and no mother and no ballet and no brother who was doing anything useful about any of it, because her brother was already inside the Syndicate by then, already doing what Lachlan told him, already telling himself that the money he sent to Cat every month was enough.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“It was never going to be enough.” He pressed his palms against his eyes.
The gesture lasted two seconds. “She left. Two years ago. Packed a bag and took the train south and I don’t know where she is.
I’ve looked. We’ve all looked. Lachlan has resources that would make MI5 uncomfortable and he’s used them, and we can’t find her, which means she doesn’t want to be found. ”
I sat on the bed. I held the edge of the mattress with both hands. The fabric was cool under my fingers and the room was dark and the man on my floor was raw in a way that had nothing to do with charm or performance or the bright, warm mask he wore for Cairndhu and councillors and beer festivals.
“I remember the audition,” I said. “Not hers specifically – I didn’t know her name. But I remember the girls who went in before me. There was a girl with dark hair. Small.” I paused. “She danced a variation from La Sylphide . The Scottish one. She was extraordinary.”
He looked up. The light caught his eyes and they were wet and he didn’t try to hide it.
“She was,” he said.
“I remember thinking: she’s better than me.
I remember being sure I wouldn’t get the recommendation because the girl who went before me was better.
And then I did get it, and I felt –” I held the mattress edge tighter.
“I felt the weight of it. The awful weight of competitive arts. Someone has to win. Someone has to lose. And neither of them chose the contest. ”
The silence between us changed. It had been his grief, his story, his wound.
Now it was ours. The shared thing – the recognition that we were both products of the same system, the same pipeline that took talented girls and sorted them into trajectories, and the sorting was not always fair and the trajectories were not always kind and the girls who didn’t make it carried the not-making as a wound that no one outside the world understood.
“Do you hate me?” I asked.
The pause was long. The Clyde moved against the cliffs. A ferry horn sounded, far away, the low brass note carried through the mist and the dark.
“I wanted to.” He said it slowly. Testing the words against the truth.
“For years. I carried it – the girl who got Cat’s place.
The career. The trajectory. The reviewers writing nice things while my sister fried chips in a council flat.
I hated you in principle. In theory. In the abstract.
” He looked at me. “And then you walked into the Hook.”
“And?”
“And you were real.” He held my gaze. “You were real and you were angry and you were precise and you stood in a room full of dangerous men and you didn’t flinch.
And you looked like her. Not physically – not the same face, not the same frame.
But the same quality. The same stillness. The same –” He stopped.
“The same what?”
“Grace.” He said it like it cost him. “The same grace. And I’m working out what to do with the fact that I don’t hate you, because not hating you feels like betraying her, and I need you to know that’s the shape of the thing I’m carrying.”
He moved. Not towards the door. Toward me.
He came to the edge of the bed and sat down beside me – not touching, but close enough that I could feel the heat of him through the midnight-blue silk that I was still wearing, the dress Lachlan had chosen, the compliance costume that had become something else over the course of the evening.
He sat beside me and the space between us became negotiated.
The air in it had density. I was aware of every centimetre – the distance between his thigh and mine, the angle of his shoulder to my shoulder, the way his breathing had slowed to something deep and steady, as though he was counting beats the way I counted beats, holding a position because letting go of it would mean something neither of us was ready to name.
He didn’t touch me. I didn’t touch him. But we sat on the edge of my bed in the dark room with the Clyde outside the window and the story of his sister between us, and the not-touching was its own kind of contact – a negotiation, a boundary held and honoured, a space maintained not because there was nothing in it but because what was in it was too large and too fragile to rush.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “I’m going to tell you something funny. And you’re going to laugh. And it will feel like betraying her, and I want you to know that it isn’t.”
He got up. He went to the door. His hand was on the handle when he turned back and looked at me – a single, unperformed look, stripped of everything except the man underneath – and then he went out and closed the door and I was alone in the dark room in the blue dress with the weight of his grief and the warmth of his proximity and the shape of a girl named Catriona Alloway who had danced a variation from La Sylphide at sixteen and had been extraordinary and had been told she wasn’t ready and had never danced again.
I sat for a long time thinking about all the ways grief can disguise itself as something else.
As anger. As charm. As a smile that covers everything.
As a man sitting on your bedroom floor telling you the worst thing that ever happened to him with a flat voice and wet eyes and the devastating trust of someone who has decided that you are the person who gets to hear it.
The midnight-blue silk was wrinkled where my hands had gripped the mattress. The candle scent from the dining room was still in my hair. The night pressed against the window. I didn’t change. I didn’t move.
I sat with all of it. And it held.