Chapter 2 The Continent
THE CONTINENT
Shortly after Margaret Thatcher’s re-election, I went to my parents’ house in South Kensington for Sunday lunch and nodded along politely while my father and uncle picked over the results, as if I hadn’t secretly gone against them in the polling booth.
Mum had drilled into me from an early age the importance of not throwing away everything my suffragist great-grandmother had campaigned for, so I always made the effort to go out and vote.
But for the first time in my life, I’d voted differently from the rest of my family, on impulse.
Not a carefree impulse, but an impulse triggered by two things at odds in my mind.
In February, the Conservative MP and professional provider of unsolicited opinions Edwina Currie had said that “good Christian people who would not dream of misbehaving will not catch AIDS”.
Then, between the end of La Bayadère and the start of The Dream, two BCBC artists had gone off ill with pneumonia which, according to whispers up and down the Dance Hall corridors, wasn’t just pneumonia.
Jamie said their parents had collected their things from the corps’ dressing room with no word of when they might be back.
Foolish as it sounds, that was the first time politics meant more to me than the petty in-fighting that went on in the House of Commons. When I asked Dad if it bothered him that Currie would remain Junior Health Minister, he waved his hand dismissively.
‘If she wants to broadcast her crackpot opinions every once in a while, let her. She keeps the papers in business. Besides, they’re only words. What harm can they do?’
A week after that, word got round that the boys – because they were boys – had died in the same hospital within days of each other.
Brian Laughton and Grant Macready, twenty and twenty-one.
I didn’t learn their full names, or even remember what they looked like, until I went digging through the Dance Hall archives, something I wasn’t yet in the habit of doing.
* * *
Regardless of what was going on in the wider world, the Covent Garden Dance Hall was always a happy and hopeful place in July, because the end of the season meant the announcement of promotions.
Stephen’s two performances as Solor in La Bayadère had finally hauled him up to principal – his turn as the lead man in Symphonic Variations had just been the elegant white icing on the classical cake.
Akihiko became the BCBC’s first Japanese principal ballerina, and only the second Japanese dancer ever to earn the rank since the early seventies.
‘That’s all right,’ Isabel said graciously during our final morning class before summer break. ‘I’ll still be the first British-Japanese principal ballerina.’
‘Keep your tights on,’ Fiona said. ‘You’ve only just been made a first soloist. Give the rest of us a chance to catch up.’
Isabel squeaked every time someone reminded her.
She and Charlie had both been promoted, and he’d twirled her in giddy circles until she begged him to stop.
He promptly invited all the soloists and first soloists to an end-of-season party at the flat he shared with Jamie and Leo near Russell Square, making an exception on the guest list for me and Sander.
While the sun took its leisurely time to wind down, I retreated to their little balcony for some air, having suddenly noticed that I was the only one in the room who wasn’t sitting on someone else’s lap, or canoodling in a corner.
‘I like this music,’ Sander said, joining me from the kitchen. I tuned my ears back in – Whitney Houston wanted to dance with somebody.
‘Naturally,’ I said, smiling. The sunset relaxed me, as did the prospect of a day to breathe before jetting off for our continental performances.
‘You always want to dance, with or without a somebody.’ I thought back to that evening, over a year ago, when I’d found him in the studio after hours.
The way he looked at me now in the slanted sun, I suspected he was thinking of it, too. ‘Which do you prefer?’
‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On the dance. And the somebody.’
Before I could think of a smooth response, Jamie came between us with the Pimm’s jug and insisted on topping us up, Charlie detached himself from Isabel long enough to come out for a cigarette, and soon enough most of the party had moved to the balcony.
* * *
Sander and I spent the rest of the summer break on a mini-tour: a one-night gala at the Staatsoper Stuttgart, a two-night gala at the Palais Garnier in Paris, and a three-day festival of dance at Stockholm’s Kunliga Operan.
We spent as much time on trains and planes as we did rehearsing in studios, which meant I witnessed Sander’s acute travel sickness first hand.
‘I am sorry you saw that,’ he murmured from the tiles of his ensuite at the Steigenberger Graf Zeppelin.
We’d barely made it out of the lift before he was scrambling to open his hotel room door and sticking his head into the toilet bowl.
With both doors still ajar, I lingered on the threshold, then wheeled his suitcase inside as noisily as possible to cover up the sounds of retching.
Even after he stopped, he was gasping so heavily that I felt compelled to look in and cautiously rub his back.
‘Gosh, you did well to keep it together on the flight.’
He wasn’t so drained that he couldn’t raise an eyebrow. ‘Better than last year.’
I pulled the tab on a can of Coke from the mini-fridge and told him to let it go flat before drinking it.
To our mutual relief, he regained his equilibrium in time for our performance of The Sleeping Beauty’s Act III wedding grand pas. Now that we’d done a season and a half’s worth of ballet together, it was nice to dust off previous roles and make them shine for a new audience.
In the circular rehearsal studio of the Palais Garnier, with its Beaux-Arts windows that reminded me of old diving bells, we revived Swanilda and Franz’s wedding pas de deux and whirlwind galop from Coppélia.
In the marzipan-pink building of the Swedish Royal Opera, we returned to Giselle and Albrecht’s mournful graveside reunion, and also met up with Charlie, Isabel, and Jamie for the international debut of Quartet.
The flights were never more than three hours long, but Sander white-knuckled every single one, either hunched over in his seat or bolt upright. On the Stuttgart-Paris flight, I made the mistake of encouraging him to hold my hand – he almost squeezed the marrow out of my bones.
‘I didn’t think you were afraid of anything,’ I told him, trying not to sound too teasing as we waited at the luggage carousel, my arm around his waist out of necessity until his knees stopped shivering. He shook his head. ‘Not afraid? Just uncomfortable? Discombobulated?’
He nodded. ‘Good words.’
I rubbed his back again, trying to channel some of the sunny, warm energy he always managed to give me during curtain calls.
During the trip, I discovered there were other things to which he was curiously averse – in Stuttgart, he declined my invitation to hop on the old funicular cable car that went into the heart of a forest cemetery, and shook his head at the base of the Eiffel Tower as if it had slighted him.
‘Nice to look at from afar, but… I will stay on the ground.’
With those minor exceptions, we spent most of our free time together.
I wasn’t in the habit of walking long distances if I could help it, to preserve my energy and foot strength.
But Sander, who was as keen to avoid taxis and bicycles as he was trains and planes, insisted on walking everywhere.
To my surprise, neither of us felt tired for it.
We walked through the Mittlerer Schlossgarten and along the Seine; we walked through open-air second-hand book stalls, the Jardin des Tuileries, and up Montmartre; we walked around Rosendals Tr?dg?rd and the open-air Skansen museum.
The more we saw, the better I understood what kept Sander’s eyes agleam: he was quietly, perpetually, delighted by everything.
A swan-shaped pedalo crossing a pond was enough to make him smile; apropos of nothing, he would tap my elbow, point at a little dog out for its afternoon walk and whisper, ‘Little dog!’
But the thing that really threw me for a loop was his fluency in other languages. Whenever a stranger addressed him, be it in German, French, or Swedish (even, in the case of an admirer waiting by the stage door, Japanese) he spoke back to them, as slowly and thoughtfully as in English.
‘Did you know he could do that?’ I asked Charlie on our flight back to Heathrow.
‘I knew he spoke Italian and Russian, but not the rest.’
‘Wait, what?’
‘Oh, he’s had full conversations with Dmitri in Russian before morning class, and he talks to Sal in Italian all the time.’
I didn’t know what to make of it. Sander had already told me he hadn’t moved around much growing up, yet he conducted himself like the son of an ambassador, educated in the finest schools and furnished with the greatest ballet teachers who, despite everyone having asked for years, he refused to name.
‘I hope he’ll be all right on the way to and from Milan,’ I said, thinking of him on the ground in Stockholm while our plane rose above the clouds.
I had to get back to London in time to rehearse our first ballet of the new season, MacMillan’s three-act reworking of Anastasia, but Nick had agreed to lend Sander out to Teatro alla Scala for a fortnight’s residency during their production of Paquita.
‘He’ll be fine – he always is.’
As Charlie leaned back in his seat, Isabel leaned forward, her long black hair falling into her lap. ‘Do you like him, Trix?’
My school training kicked in: detach your expression from whatever’s going on in your head. ‘Sander? Of course I like him. He’s become a real friend.’
‘Just a friend?’ She and Charlie exchanged looks that made me wonder if one of them had money riding on my answer.
‘A great friend,’ I said pleasantly.
‘Oh, but you two would be so—’
‘Leave it, babe,’ Charlie said with expert lightness. ‘Why don’t you put your matchmaking skills to use on someone who actually wants them, like Fiona.’
Isabel considered. ‘You know, now that you mention it, Stephen’s been single for a while now. Maybe he’d be good for her.’
I laughed so harshly that the people in the next row turned their heads.