Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #4
She thinks back to the last incident, only forty-six days ago.
A dancer, one of the young men in the corps de ballet.
Alex, on his third pledge, disappeared after class.
Cecile had looked a little sad for once.
Excellent allegro, she’d murmured as she filled out the accident form.
I’d planned for him to learn the Blue Suitor.
Before that it was Bobby, that French horn taken on a rainy day in September.
Stupid man. Shuffling about with his shoes undone.
AJ had given her the accident form two days later.
I don’t see why I have to fill one of these out every time we lose a soul, Belinda.
Sometimes their luck just runs out and that’s that.
They all rail against the paperwork. Cecile flounces as she takes the forms and makes her provocative sounds of disgust, Mackie gives one of his heavy sighs, and AJ fills them out in unreadable handwriting – deliberately, she’s sure – but they take the smooth, safe passage of their lives here for granted.
Either they don’t know or don’t care that she pores over each form for days after a snatching, trying to tease out any lessons she might find, wondering how to stop it happening again.
But sometimes, even she has to admit there’s nothing she could have done.
The dancer went back to the Grub alone – which is against the rules – and the French horn was being chased, tripped and fell into the Otherworld.
Wilf saw it and spent a long hour detailing here in her office detailing every movement.
He was just unlucky, Belinda, he’d said, staring out the window. Simple as that.
Replacing the French horn had been relatively simple, but hiring dancers never is.
There was no time to hold an open audition; instead she wrote to an old friend who worked at a ballet school and asked her to send someone.
I’ve got just the young man for you: solid, dependable, won’t set the world alight with his intellect but sweet enough.
No family left, brought up by his grandmother who has recently died.
Belinda winced when she read that. It makes this show seem like some kind of dumping ground for orphans and runaways, given to The Apple and the Pearl because they’ve got no one in the outside world who’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Luke turned up at London Bridge the next day with a backpack and a too-big coat, smelling of mildew. The Crow had taken one look at him and rolled its eyes, though it let him pledge. Cecile had been horrified not to be consulted on his hiring, and has been making his life a misery ever since.
Belinda shrugs her coat off and switches her laptop on.
As it whirrs and grumbles into life and she untangles the lead, she thinks about that silly little rhyme the dancers mumble to each other to say good luck before a show, that doggerel about the king, the queen and the suitors in a dream.
Where did it come from? she asked the old company manager, Percy Montgomery, during her first week.
No idea, old Montgomery had shrugged. I leave them to their superstitions.
Their lives are ruled by luck, can you blame them?
Yes, there’s luck here, and you want your fair share of it, but there are also rules.
Keep a perfectly timed watch, don’t move between the Grub and the Grit alone – never bloody obeyed, that one – don’t touch the Pearl, don’t look at the creatures in the auditorium.
There are curfews and salt everywhere, and vast sheets of iron in the Grub and the Grit.
There’s Gino to feed every single one of them exactly what their hearts desire, there’s Belinda herself, who – while she would not like to overstate her abilities – has a few tricks up her sleeve.
There’s the Crow, though the vast majority of the cast and crew will never understand it.
There’s a bronze bell cast by the latest scion of an ancient metalworking family—
—Ah, the bell smith. She needs to get back to him.
The laptop screen blinks on and Belinda types in her password.
She clicks on her email, finds the message from the bell smith and begins to write: Are you able to get to Didcot Parkway on the 12th?
I’ll pick you up from the ticket office and walk you through the guest cabin, as usual.
I’d like you to look at the hinges of the bell frame which are a little rusty and you know how we feel about rust here!
* * *
Midday and it’s musicians’ reveille in the cabins.
For Michael it sounds like a tumbling, tinkling harp but he barely hears it because his ears are plugged with foam earplugs he buys in pharmacies on days off.
He doesn’t need an alarm anyway. He’s awake: he has been since the vibrations of the technical crew’s stomping boots woke him.
Like yesterday, and the day before and the day before that, he is lying in his cabin re-reading his notebooks. He flicks through the pages quickly, the words hurtling back to his mind from the forgotten place he had stashed them.
The Grub has stopped in an orchard of mulberries and quince and as they were setting up the Grit for the show we walked together among the trees, pulling fruit off the boughs and biting into it, black and yellow juice making bumblebee stripes on ourbchins.
He turns the page to read a detailed and appreciative description of Evelyn’s unique tuning, written while he sat with her in the pit after rehearsals as she moved her levers and plucked her harp strings.
Once he had thought of his notebooks as a record for their children and so he did not write about the shape of her bare white thighs around his waist or the long moan of her juddering climax as she clung to him.
But now it is an exquisite torture to him that these things are missing.
He is living on the lingering scent of her and these chaste cliches in his diaries, with nothing of substance to his fantasies, nothing to fill or nourish him.
The reveille ends, but in Michael’s cabin there is still an echo of the harp burbling away in a stream of arpeggios.
This is why he uses the earplugs. There is always a harp playing in his ears while he’s inside the train, all day and all night.
He is never free from it. That’s what the Crow does when he’s in here, it reaches inside him and pulls out threads of melody to hum his obsessions back at him, singing songs he barely remembers, snatches of nursery rhymes he’s not heard since he was at his mother’s breast, and weaving it all into whatever reality he’s currently swimming in with a kind of childish glee, careless of whether that music might be sweet to him or if the last thing he wants to hear is a fucking harp.
Evelyn’s introduction to the Pearl waltz tonight was so beautiful I almost missed my cue. My bow was poised, I was looking at the exact bar in the score, but her vibrato just went on and on, right through my bones.
The new harpist is fine. He’s competent, his instrument gilded finely enough to sit at the front of the pit and look plush, his manner affable enough, but there is no more sparkle of a black sequinned dress as the orchestra stands during the curtain calls, no more vibrato before the second act waltz and no more stray red hairs in his bed.
Dinner with Lance after the show and we were talking about the music we loved as children and right at the same time Evelyn and I started talking about Sandy Denny and we looked at Lance and held hands under the table and sang ‘Who knows where the time goes…’ and he laughed and she leaned in to rest her head on my shoulder and I have never been so happy, so right, so light in all my life.
Enough. He wedges the notebook back on the shelves in a place he tells himself he will forget by tomorrow morning and pulls on his trousers and an old jumper of Lance’s.
At the door he takes a battered satchel off the hook on the back of door and slings the strap over his shoulder.
There is a brief, agonising whisper of the siren arpeggios as the earplugs slip a little but he does not let it pull him into madness.
He hums ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ to distract himself and shoves it back in. His cabin door clicks shut behind him.
The dining car is right in the middle of the Grub, the centre of everyone’s world.
At this time of day it’s filled with technical crew just finished setting up the Grit, pouring themselves cups of thick black coffee from the urns beside Gino’s serving hatch.
Michael joins the end of the line and shuffles along.
He is hungry, but it is almost indistinguishable from all the other emptinesses he feels.
He stands between Danny and Kavi the stagehands, skinny among their burl, and each of them nods good morning without speaking. Everyone knows about the earplugs.
‘Afternoon morning,’ says Gino as he passes Michael a knife and fork through the hatch.
‘I never know which one. I’m still serving some breakfast so you can have roasted millet pancakes with a variety of toppings or celeriac soup, which is the lunch option.
’ Michael can barely hear Gino through the plugs and the thrum of voices in the dining car, but his beard makes the movements of his lips very obvious and he’s got very good at reading lips.
‘The soup please.’
‘Good choice.’ Gino slides a plate across the hatch. ‘And there’s phone signal, by the way. In case you want to contact anyone.’
A slick of ice along his spine. ‘Why are you telling me that?’
Gino sighs. ‘I’m telling everyone, Michael. I’m supposed to spread the word like I always do.’