Chapter 17
PARTNERS
I remember exactly where I was sitting when I read that for the first time in the library of the British Ballet Academy, my back against the shelves.
The way her words rang through my bones.
I was fifteen; the girls’ and boys’ classes had just begun compulsory partnering lessons.
My classmates were starting to mingle with the boys outside of class, too.
Suddenly my dorm mates had gone from blowing air kisses to their wall posters of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jacques d’Amboise, and Erik Bruhn to whispering about the “stuff” they’d done with actual, real-life boys at end-of-term parties and in the summer breaks.
Up until our mid-teens, I had been as chatty and sociable as the rest of them, but in the first year of upper school I went very quiet.
The only redeeming quality of our sex education lessons was that no one expected us to sit an exam afterwards.
I spent term after term waiting for someone else, just one other girl, someone braver than me, to declare that she, too, had no interest in games of truth or dare where the only truths anyone wanted to hear were about sex.
I waited for someone else to ask if we were quite sure we all meant the same thing when we tossed around words like “crush” and “intimate”, “romantic” and “hot”.
In the absence of such validation, I came to the logical conclusion that I must be the one who had it all wrong.
Feeling like an outsider was no less than I deserved.
Sometimes, the others interpreted my silence as an attempt to keep my exploits to myself, a pretence at being above basic human biology.
I accepted the euphemisms without a fight – as a girl on her way to womanhood, there were myriad worse things to be called than “cold” or “prude”.
In my haughtier moments, I took my lack of interest in sex as a sign that my brain wanted to save valuable space for ballet.
I still had crushes, here and there, but always from a safe distance, always from behind an invisible wall.
I quickly learned how to separate my mind and spirit from the rest of my body, a necessary thing when boys you’ve barely spoken to are suddenly obliged to balance your pubic bone in the palm of their hand, or grip under your ribcage to provide elevation.
Admiring them from the other side of the room and feeling giddy when they grinned at me was one thing – submitting myself to their hands was quite another.
I don’t think any of us really lost our sense of touch as a romantic or sensual act, but as long as we wanted to be professional dancers, any romance was ideally to be reserved for performances.
Otherwise, touch was mechanical, impersonal, and mundane: a means to an end.
Towards the end of our senior years at the BBA, I dabbled in kissing, and conceded that it felt good, almost delicious, when a cute boy ran his hand up and down my back.
But none of us really knew what we were doing, and I graduated with those experiences feeling like little more than an item crossed off a list, a few extra coins of social currency.
The only time I clearly recall taking genuine pleasure in touch was around my seventeenth birthday, when my mother treated me to a spa weekend and we went into separate rooms for massages – having someone brush my skin and smooth the tension out of my muscles, without manoeuvring or flipping me into another position, was exquisite.
Sometimes, I’d imagine a future husband doing the same thing.
It was one of the only authentic fantasies I could offer up during late-night talks in the girls’ dorm, to prove I wasn’t completely bloodless.
When asked if I had a “type”, I would mutter something about good cheekbones and nice eyes, but could only go so far before lapsing into silence once more.
* * *
Not that silence is a bad thing in ballet.
We were silent so that the music could breathe.
In the corps, you were meant to be seen, never heard – God forbid your pointe shoes were the ones that thumped too loudly, spoiling the illusion of weightless sylphs.
Principal dancers wore their silence like a mantle onstage, cloaking frantic breaths and small moans of pain.
Silence went hand in hand with mime, and the next full-length on the performance grid for the 1985/86 season, Coppélia, had a veritable cabinet of mime curiosities waiting for us.
The cast list and rehearsal schedule went up in the final week of Beauty, with the dress rehearsal for Enigma Variations still to come.
As we trickled out of our morning classes, we all went through the ritual of feigning disinterest, dawdling in the corridor, letting the excitable younger artists get the first look.
Eventually, Fiona gave in to her curiosity, pumping the air upon seeing she’d landed the Prayer solo in Act III.
We both adored that meditative adage, and high-fived to celebrate her win.
‘Oh, wait a minute,’ she said, looking at the grid again. ‘I’m confused. Where’s Stephen?’
‘I’m right here,’ he said from two feet away.
‘No, I mean where’s your name?’
‘Should be under Trix’s, no?’ Stephen stepped closer to the grid. ‘Yes, see, there I am as Franz, and there’s… Grace? Hang on.’
For a few horrible seconds I thought I hadn’t been cast in the ballet at all. But then I spotted my name one sheet to the left, in Cast 2:
SWANILDA – PATRICIA ERRINGTON
FRANZ – ALEKSANDER SYLVAN
DR COPPéLIUS – GERARD DIXON
‘Suppose Nick wants to see whether lightning strikes twice,’ Charlie observed with the comically arched eyebrows that lent themselves so well to his character performances.
I glanced down the corridor at Sander – as we’d come to expect, he’d put as much distance between himself and the other dancers as possible while still technically occupying the same space.
He was frowning intently at something in his hand: a watch.
A pocket watch, of all things. I put my surprise at the cast list to one side and wandered over to him, my footsteps so muffled by the ageing carpet that when I asked, ‘Is that an antique?’, he actually flinched.
‘Hm?’ He blinked, eyes wide, and closed the watch before I could get a good look at it, though I glimpsed a veritable artist’s palette of colours inside.
He slipped it into the pocket of his warm-up trousers, as if that would put an end to the conversation.
I’d been thoroughly annoyed with myself for my embarrassed retreat after interrupting his studio practice, so this time I allowed my curiosity the floor and held eye contact until he answered with a shake of the head.
‘Sorry, it’s not really any of my business. I just don’t know anyone who carries a pocket watch these days. Not even my dad, and he’s the very definition of “old-school”.’
Sander nodded slowly. ‘Yes. I suppose it seems… old.’
‘In a good way. It’s nice.’ Before we could tip into full-blown awkward silence, I pointed to the noticeboard. ‘We’re in Cast 2 together. You’re my Franz.’
‘Oh,’ he said, in a tone that could have meant anything. How was this man so maddeningly difficult to read? ‘Good.’
‘Yes, I hope so.’ I turned my feet out and in again on the carpet, waiting to see if he would address the question of what he’d been doing in the Nijinsky, if he would let me in on whatever had allowed him to spin and soar with a level of athleticism I still couldn’t explain.
But the seconds ticked by on the wall clock.
Fiona and Charlie walked past us with inquisitive looks, the way visitors to a zoo might look in at a keeper feeding a rare bird.
‘Well… see you later, then.’
If all our conversations were going to be like that, I’d have to pray Mariska and Salvatore worked us so hard in the studio that there wouldn’t be time for chit-chat.
‘Perhaps he inherited it,’ Fiona suggested when I told her about the watch later, by the lockers.
‘Perhaps,’ I said, although the thought of Sander inheriting something implied relatives, relationships, roots.
I tried to imagine him at a long lunch with his parents, writing Christmas cards to cousins, pouring tea for a grandmother surrounded by china figurines.
Being handed a grandfather’s pocket watch along with detailed instructions on how to keep it pristine.
‘I wish I’d got a better look at it. It was almost like a relic of the Russian empire, all…
colourful and intricate. I’d love to know the story behind it, if he’s ever inclined to share. ’
Fiona gave me a sideways glance. ‘If ever, indeed.’