Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #11
Zuleika will be someone who will benefit from her leaving.
Like she’s an old mother beech falling in the forest, making light for the saplings beneath her to thrive.
Zuleika’s a good dancer, but anxious. With Mara gone she’ll learn the Red Princess, and probably the Queen too, and that will give her some confidence.
Cecile marks through the first exercise in the centre and Mara steps onto pointe, pushing her arches into her shoes which are a little too soft to perform any of the Princesses but comfortable for class.
She watches Bella manipulating the toes of her pointe shoes with her hands.
She’s another who will thrive without Mara’s shade.
White or Blue Princess for her, probably starting rehearsals in the next couple of weeks.
She’s reliable, strong and has a lovely quality in the upper body.
The men go first and Mara stands in the wings, half watching the exercise to know it well enough to do it in a minute or two.
Find your balance now, girls, Mrs Jeffers used to say when they’d leave the safety of the old, splintered pews at the side of the room and stand facing the mirrors streaked with rust. Allow your pelvis to settle in gravity and support the spine with the tummy muscles.
All this nonsense ballet teachers tell you, lodged in your brain like toffee in a tooth.
‘Four bars for the women to come in,’ Cecile calls over the music and the men leave the stage.
Mara starts the exercise herself, moving through the tendus en croix and in effacé, thinking of Mrs Jeffers.
She should find that lady, if she’s still alive.
You’ll never guess where I spent the last decade of my life, she’ll say, though how on earth will she be able to describe the reality – the unreality – of The Apple and the Pearl to anyone?
And you know what, I heard your voice almost every single day.
‘We repeat the adage from yesterday,’ Cecile says, quickly marking it through. ‘Because I did not see a single one of you perform it correctly.’
Cecile looks at Michael with an uncharacteristically nervous eye, and she indicates to him to start.
He plays the adage from The Two Pigeons, another ballet class pianist staple, but this time he keeps his eyes open, fixed on the keys, alert with no possibility of allowing the Grit to take him over.
The men finish and the women replace them on the stage.
Mara stands on her left leg as she draws her right toe up her shin and extends it to the side.
She intends to keep her legs low, but the music gives her muscles a little push.
Where else will she get this feeling? In nightclubs?
In a group exercise class at the local leisure centre?
Perhaps she should look for another dancing job.
One last heist before she hangs up her shoes forever.
And now it’s pirouettes from the corner, the part of class that starts to feel like really dancing rather than just training and sculpting the body.
She watches Benji moving across the space, eating it up with joy.
He’s good at that. Even in class he covers the floor like a panther, his heart beaming out into the empty auditorium.
A nice lad. A considerate partner. Making his debut tonight as the Red Suitor.
She’s written him a card with a few words of encouragement he’ll never get from Cecile and the traditional lines from the rhyme – three clangs for the Suitors who lie in a dream. She’ll give it to him at the half.
She steps out of the wings just as Romero shuffles his feet into fifth position to start the exercise. He gestures to her to step in front of him, and she hops forward in the final bar of the last phrase before the exercise starts.
Chassé pas de bourreé, double pirouette, finish cleanly in fourth.
Nothing revolutionary about the combination, it’s as staid and stolid as a roast dinner with overcooked cabbage.
But every day it is subtly different on her body, every day she needs to greet the steps again, try them on, adjust the fit.
Michael is playing the waltz of the flowers from the Nutcracker, unusually mechanically.
Mara sighs. Someone really should do something about him.
She asked the Crow a few months ago, when the tannoys started crying during his solo during the Blue pas de deux, but it just smirked and rolled its eyes as if it were tired of people interceding on Michael’s behalf and went back to its tray.
Tchaikovsky shouldn’t be played like this, like it’s the hokey-cokey.
It should have some soul. Annie used to make fun of her when she said that.
What, the workhorse of ballet music? Good old Pete, beloved of Christmas adverts and stupid jingles the world over?
But that was the point, they shouldn’t use the Nutcracker to sell plastic tat or Swan Lake to inject some drama into a scripted reality TV show. Some things should be sacred.
She lands the double pirouette cleanly in fifth position.
Will she still be able to do these basic movements after a year with no ballet class, two years, ten?
How long does it take the muscles to forget that they were long and lithe and supple?
She catches sight of Cecile, sitting on her stool with her long neck and back as straight as a poker, as she turns.
How long has it been since Cecile took a ballet class? The body remembers.
It might be time to get sentimental about this ordinary combination of steps.
How many more times will she do it? Chassé pas de bourreé, double pirouette, finish in fourth.
Pledge day is just before Christmas. There are between forty and fifty ballet classes and shows still to go, depending on when Belinda decides their days off will be.
Forty to fifty days marked with that strange light of the blessed or the damned, she’s never figured it out, when the creatures in the audience will be able to tell that soon she’ll be out of their grasp.
It’s happened before. It happened to Charlotte a few years ago.
She was forty-two and limping but still commanding on stage, and a week after Cecile called her into her office and told her she absolutely had to leave she was snatched while walking to the Grit before class.
Mara had seen the whole thing from the doorway of the Grub while she waited for Stuart.
A tall figure dressed in a deep purple dress, strolling along a cobbled lane between two hay meadows, opening their arms as they came towards Charlotte.
Mara had opened her mouth to call to them, smirking at the thought of what Alina would do when she discovered someone had taken one of the page costumes for a walkabout but then Charlotte had begun to shimmer and the cobbles beneath her feet glowed and she gave a fleeting glance back to the Grub, nodded, and vanished.
Mara relayed the story to Belinda an hour later, sitting in her office with the Crow perched on the desk.
She’d been shaking so hard Belinda had poured her a shot of brandy.
Was it because Cecile sacked her? she’d whimpered.
Belinda had taken off her glasses and rubbed at the bridge of her nose.
Maybe. But it could have been you, or Stuart, or anyone else.
To the best of Mara’s knowledge, Cecile hasn’t sacked anyone for being old and broken since.
She would rather die than admit guilt to anyone but she’s not a complete monster.
That must be what’s keeping Greg here. Really, it should have been Greg who received severance pay from the Crow – though who’s to say he hasn’t, the Crow certainly doesn’t keep Mara updated with its plans for their destinies.
Greg is thirty-seven and fit only for the knacker’s yard, he says glumly when he’s had a bit too much to drink.
Recently, Mara has caught Cecile watching him in class with something like pity.
She imagines Cecile opening the window to her office at the interval to let the Crow perch on the sill.
For the love of God, creature, tell him to go before something seizes him from the stage.
She still hasn’t told Cecile about the joke coin from the Crow. It won’t be real until she tells Cecile.
Mara finishes the exercise and moves into the wings, watching Cecile as the last group finish the exercise from the left. She gives no corrections, just nods and glances at her watch.
‘You know it.’ She calls from her stool. ‘Eight in first, eight in second, eight changements, four echappés sautés. Maestro.’
In another life, if Cecile were ten years older and Mara hadn’t been told to leave, and if she cared a fraction more about the minutiae of ballet technique and the staging of the show, Mara could imagine herself becoming the ballet mistress here.
Sitting in Cecile’s office doing the casting, meetings with AJ, Mackie and Belinda, watching class with narrowed eyes, looking to see who is getting strong and competent and needs to be doing soloist roles.
Maybe that’s what Charlotte was holding on for.
The men go first again and Cecile clasps her hands in her lap, eyes low and narrowed, watching the way her dancers’ feet leave the floor.
Mara retreats to the back of the stage and sits on the floor under the ballet barres.
From this angle she can join Cecile in one of her obsessions – I see ninety-nine per cent of injuries in the second you leave the floor – she shouts at least once a week, and she watches the feet of the three newest pledges as they spring up and down.