Chapter 19
FROM EVERYWHERE
Shortly after we finished the curtain calls for our final performance of Coppélia, Carolyn appeared backstage, bright with post-nausea joie de vivre and a pregnancy bump the size of a beachball under her long maternity dress.
‘I watched with Nick from one of the boxes,’ she said as Sander and I took turns to give her careful hugs. ‘I truly have no words.’
Sander crossed his hands over his heart with a smile.
Tears welled in my eyes, stinging with sweat and make-up.
I had looked up to this woman for my entire career, and she’d gone to the considerable inconvenience of sitting in a hard-backed chair for two hours while heavily pregnant, just to watch us.
She shooed my gratitude away. ‘Are you joking? Darling, I feel privileged to have seen with my own eyes what the critics have been raving about. Good Lord, you just… go so well together.’ She put a hand on each of our shoulders and squeezed.
‘What a treat. And thank you, darling,’ she said to Sander, ‘for taking such good care of her.’
Sander gave a one-sided shrug: I try.
‘He has,’ I said.
By this point rehearsals were already well underway for Rhapsody, so our schedules increasingly fell into step.
Without any formality or fanfare, Sander and I began eating lunch together.
I use the word “lunch” loosely – we never had long between class and rehearsals, so it was more of an extended snack break.
For all his quick footwork, he ate his Tupperware roast chicken salads leisurely and thoughtfully.
‘I did not always know how to cook,’ he said when I asked. ‘But yes, I enjoy it now. Relaxing.’
‘I wish I were better at it myself. God help anyone who marries me expecting his own Delia Smith, unless he’s especially fond of tomato soup.’
Who knows why I said that. I did, in fact, own Delia’s newest cookbook: One Is Fun.
‘You are one of very few ballerinas I have seen eat a lunch,’ he observed.
I wasn’t sure what sort of answer he was expecting, if he wanted one at all.
I considered borrowing his tactic of demurring questions and comments with a shrug, but his curiosity – put into words, rather than an ambiguous glance – felt like something worth honouring.
I opted for the truth. ‘I wouldn’t be in the habit if my mother hadn’t put the fear of God in me early on. ’
Whenever I’d explained this to other male dancers, like Jamie and Charlie, they’d nodded in understanding without inviting me to elaborate.
Sander tilted his head, waiting expectantly.
His eyes had a way of making time slow down when they met mine, so that it felt like my heart at rest was beating much too quickly. It flustered me.
‘Well, you know how it is in junior school.’
His gaze flickered so briefly I could easily have missed it. ‘Actually, I… do not.’
‘Oh. Perhaps they did things differently where you trained.’ I still didn’t know where that was, or if he’d had private lessons.
That would explain a great deal. ‘Well, I mean, even before I enrolled in the BBA, my weekend ballet teacher started talking to us about watching our waistlines, working harder in class to burn off fat, and the need to “lengthen out” once we were older. So suddenly the thought of getting curves became our greatest fear. The glossy mags – magazines,’ I clarified.
‘Ah.’ He nodded.
‘Our mothers left them all over the house. You might say they became our bibles.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘What a gift.’
‘But these “mags” – they are for grown women, not young girls.’
‘Ah, but you see, in our underdeveloped brains, we were grown women, waiting for our bodies to catch up. Mature for our age, concerned with adult business, all of that. We couldn’t wait to stop being young girls, the same way I’m sure you and the other boys couldn’t wait to grow tall and muscular, able to make those impossibly high leaps. ’
The lettuce leaf he’d speared stopped halfway to his mouth – not at the mention of impossible leaps, but of other boys. Then he continued eating with a non-committal sound.
‘Fiona and I kept food diaries in tiny notebooks. We used to hold each other to account over every almond, every pot of low-fat yoghurt, and half-eaten lasagne, next to columns of all the hours we’d spent dancing, to compensate for the grievous sin of calorie consumption.
’ I laughed, but it came out coarse. I hadn’t spoken about this to anyone for a long time.
I still didn’t know Sander that well, still didn’t know anything particularly meaningful about him, and yet the words were pouring out of me as if we were in a confession booth.
‘When I was fourteen, I left my food diary on the table at home, and my mother found it. She marched into my bedroom and said – I’ll never forget it, I can still hear her now – “What the hell is this?”’
He followed my hand as it shook invisible pages.
‘She threatened to pull me out of school if I carried on. As you doubtless know from your own experience’ – again, he glanced off– ‘ballet teachers can be some of the most frightening people on the planet. But none of them could hold a candle to my mother that day. I knew it wasn’t an empty threat – she was deadly serious. ’
Sander nodded in a way that intrigued me. He seemed to understand this better than anything else I’d said. Before I could ask if he’d had a similar moment with his own parents, he asked, ‘Is that what made you stop?’
I pondered the remaining corner of cheese sandwich in my hand. ‘Well, when the choice was to give up ballet or give up the running tally of my sins…’
‘Food is not sin,’ Sander said matter-of-factly, chasing an olive around his Tupperware. ‘Without it, you could not dance.’
‘Mm,’ I said, dabbing a paper napkin at my mouth.
My psyche would always be corroded by the rhetoric of disordered eating and self-denial – I instinctively declined the dessert menu whenever dining out – but calling a truce with food sooner rather than later had definitely been the right decision.
‘I don’t know how Fiona and the others have managed it all these years, doing pointework on fumes, seeing how little they can get away with eating before they get dizzy. ’
‘What do they eat? What is “not sinful”?’
‘Celery sticks tend to be the snack of choice. Occasionally with a dollop of cottage cheese. But I made my peace with carbohydrates long ago, and the treaty’s still in place.’
I finished my sandwich, turning slightly away from Sander as if he hadn’t just watched me eating for the last ten minutes.
I was startled by how much I’d confided in him, how easy it had been.
Had I unconsciously taken advantage of his tendency to listen rather than speak?
Was his seemingly solitary nature enough to make me trust him so readily?
I made a mental note to be more careful in the future.
As we packed our things away and got up to resume rehearsals, Sander lightly touched my arm. ‘Your mother is a good person.’
‘Yes, she is.’
His accent sometimes made it difficult to tell if he was offering up a statement or a question.
Rumour had it that the first time another dancer had asked him where he hailed from, he’d said only that he was “from everywhere”.
Jamie wondered if this meant he came from a military family, which I thought was rather a good guess.
Fiona preferred the theory that Sander was a Nureyev-style defector from behind the Iron Curtain, and that speaking about it in detail was too painful.
Stephen thought he was just pretentious.
I decided to put the matter to rest once and for all, and asked him outright during our next break at three o’clock.
Without a moment’s hesitation he said, ‘My accent is from everywhere.’
‘Right. Except, when you say “everywhere” – did you move around a lot as a child?’
He shook his head.
‘Oh.’ There went Jamie’s theory. ‘You didn’t… attend some sort of international school?’
He shook his head again.
‘Is it difficult to talk about where you grew up?’
Now I’d hit upon something. The light in his eyes shifted, and his shoulders visibly tensed. He nodded.
‘Oh. I’m sorry. I won’t ask again, if it hurts you.’
‘It does not hurt me,’ he said, clearing the air with his hands. ‘No need for sorry.’ As we returned to the centre of the studio, he added, ‘Where we are raised does not matter. Where we choose to grow up – that is what matters.’
It wasn’t information, exactly, but later I stepped out of the studio feeling that I had, at last, gleaned something about him. Before we could go our separate ways to the dressing rooms, I tried my luck just once more. ‘Do you have the time?’
He turned, glanced back with a furrowed brow at the studio where, only moments earlier, Mariska had pointed at the wall clock and shooed us out.
I waited until, with visible trepidation, he reached into his bag and took out the pocket watch.
We weren’t standing by a window, or directly under a light, and yet the silver case shone as if it had been waiting to dazzle the first person it encountered.
Sander clicked it open without angling the face towards me. ‘Seven minutes after five.’
Before I could ask for a closer look at the painted face within, he slipped it back into his bag. I watched him disappear around the corner and wished I could have found another question, another conversational foothold, to keep him around a little longer. To keep his eyes on me.