Chapter 70
THE NEW MILLENNIUM
The Covent Garden Dance Hall hosts a party to see in the new millennium, beginning with canapés and champagne on the ground floor, winding through a grand buffet in the Conservatory and Salon, all the way up to the rooftop garden for cocktails and a panoramic view of the fireworks.
There’s been a big refurb in anticipation, the jewel tones of the walls even richer than I remember.
How has it taken us so long to catch up, if this even counts as catching up?
Why, after nine years, do I still default to “us”?
There are new portraits of old faces, too.
Rudolf Nureyev, who was buried with a pair of ballet flats in 1993, having succumbed to complications from AIDS.
Kenneth MacMillan, who collapsed backstage during a performance of Mayerling in 1992, the audience instructed to depart in silence.
Fonteyn, who died in Panama in 1991, as far as it was possible to be from my parents’ guest room and yet no less painful to learn of.
A full stop on the final sentence of a long, beautiful tome of ballet history, my own name somewhere in the last chapter.
Tonight, the Hall is bustling with company dancers, patrons, set designers, costumiers, board members past and present. It takes a while to find faces I recognise. Nick has buzzed off most of his mad scientist hair, leaving an Arctic circle of white around the back.
‘I see you’ve done the same,’ he says, flicking the ends of my bob. I experimented with a pixie cut a few years back before growing it out to something that felt more like me, though I’m still grappling with what that means. ‘Have you come to any performances recently?’
‘Not recently, no,’ I say, because technically it isn’t a lie. ‘What would you recommend?’
‘Charlie’s newest mixed bill is coming up in May – he’s created it on two of the newer artists, Nell and Carl. Just over there, if I’m not mistaken. I think I need to update my lens prescription.’
I have no idea who these two bright young things are. I fight the instinct to make my excuses, abandon the champagne, and pay an extortionate taxi fare home.
‘Will you ever switch to dance reviews, Trix?’ Mariska asks, silver drop earrings cresting the slopes of a plush fur stole. ‘It’s been long enough, no? You have some distance now.’
‘Some, but not enough. One day, perhaps.’
A few weeks after I tore my ACL for the second time, when I was mired in what I could not bring myself to call depression, and my only regular activities were solitary walks around Hyde Park and cooking passable meals for my parents, Erin Desborough left another voicemail, asking if, in the wake of all the obituaries for Margot Fonteyn, I wanted to write a personal feature about her and how she’d influenced my career.
The fact that Dad cleared a space for me in his study revealed how badly he and Mum wanted me to do something other than listen to classical music while staring at the wall.
Erin liked my feature enough to send me a new biography of Balanchine to review.
After that, the books kept coming. I sidestepped into theatre reviews.
As the following winter let its cloak of dark mornings and darker nights fall away, my spirit found its way back to the sun.
I pitched what has since become a staple of my various income streams: a weekly culture outings column.
‘We loved your write-up of that Thomas Hardy musical at the Savoy,’ Jamie says, adjusting his Elton John-esque novelty sunglasses. ‘You tore it to pieces, but in a classy way.’
‘That’s what they pay me for.’
‘Are you kicking off the new millennium with anything exciting?’
‘I’ve been invited to a Buster Keaton film festival next month, if you’d like to be my plus one.’ I know full well he would. We’ve both loved Old Hollywood films, talkies and silents alike, since our BBA days.
‘Funny, the niches we carve out for ourselves,’ Lorenzo says, not just of me, but of the physiotherapy practice he and Jamie run in Islington.
They retired from the BCBC only last year so they could focus all their energy on it.
‘We were so sure you’d follow Carolyn and become a character artist. Shows how much we know. ’
I wonder, but don’t ask, if he remembers that they were the ones who first suggested it to me, in the summer of 1991.
I still think of it as my lost summer. My lost year.
I lied and told them I’d already made enquiries, but that there were no vacancies.
It may well have been true: the BCBC only has a small number of character artists.
Any dancing is fairly low impact, so one person can perform the same role a dozen times within a single run.
They either took me at my word, or saw through me and chose not to press the matter.
The truth, even if I couldn’t articulate it then, was that the thought of going back into the Dance Hall brought me nothing but anguish.
The ghosts of my ACL ruptures still haunted me, but even without them, the idea of standing on the stage, watching younger, more hopeful dancers leap and spin past me, was too much to bear.
I didn’t have Carolyn’s generosity of spirit – I would have hated watching them, and then hated myself for hating them.
I had no concept of who Patricia Errington was anymore, but I knew I didn’t want her to become that bitter.
Of our peer group, Charlie is the only one who’s carried on with the BCBC in a full-time position, flourishing as Choreographer in Residence.
Isabel still dances for the company as a guest principal, but devotes most of her days to a degree in interior design.
I find them chatting to Fiona in the Conservatory, London lit through the dark glass by sparks and neon.
‘We weren’t sure you would come,’ she shouts over the hubbub. ‘No party at Danseuse, or any of the papers?’
‘I wouldn’t survive the hangover,’ I shout back. ‘Besides, I wanted to see you. And it felt like the right time to visit this old place again.’
‘Must feel more new than old now!’ Charlie tops up Isabel’s champagne. ‘Have you seen the picture of yours truly on the wall?’
‘Armand knows gold when he sees it,’ I say, referring to the photo he took of Charlie in head-to-toe body paint for his turn as the Golden Idol in La Bayadère.
Next to it is a black-and-white one of me, en pointe as Aurora in Act I of The Sleeping Beauty, 1986.
One of the happiest, most triumphant nights of my life.
The fact that I can look at it, at her, and feel fine is a mile marker on the long road that began nine years ago.
‘Where’s George?’ I ask Fiona.
‘In bed early with a terrible cold. I tried to lure him out with the promise of a hot toddy, but no dice.’ She winces as a nearby gaggle of impossibly young and willowy dancers cackle at an inside joke. ‘Shall we go up to the roof garden?’
Every street in the city is alive with noise, thousands of people jostling for space by the river.
But we’re high enough that the excitement feels far away, as if we’ve stepped into a different time zone and will come to midnight only when we’re ready.
The four of us lean against the railing so that we don’t have to speak through the haze of a hundred cigarettes.
‘Has the Christmas season been good to you, Fee?’ Isabel asks.
‘George’s idea to put a basket of “stocking fillers” by the till was inspired. Glass rings in different colours.’ She flexes her hand, the painted rings alternating with silver bands, her wedding ring sparkling in the middle. ‘We might actually be able to go on holiday this year.’
Fiona has always worked hard, but opening her own shop in West Hampstead three years ago has thrown her into overdrive.
It’s the same energy she would have continued to pour into her career as a first soloist, if she hadn’t been forced into retirement by a catastrophic tendon injury that revealed the main bone in her little toe had turned necrotic.
She’d pushed through the pain until there was no pain left to feel.
Charlie turns away from the view of London and admires the other partygoers, a wave of nostalgia washing over his face.
‘What was your last role, Fee? Was it Juliet?’
‘No, it was Tatiana in Onegin.’
‘Ah, right, right. Then who…?’ The answer comes in his pause. Isabel and Fiona shift on the rail, stealing glances at me to gauge if I’m ready to open that door.
‘It was me. Juliet was my last role.’ I smile.
It doesn’t take as much effort as it used to.
For the first year or so after my unofficial retirement, my friends still invited me to dinner parties and coffees, but I spent more time listening than talking, and they went out of their way to avoid dwelling on ballet.
As horrible as 1991 and 1992 were, those years gifted me some valuable knowledge: true friends are the ones who keep you around even when your light has dimmed and it’s not clear when, if ever, it will brighten again.
‘I never did get to dance Tatiana,’ I say neutrally. Or Myrtha. Marie Larisch. The Young Girl in The Two Pigeons. Not to mention all the roles I’d assumed I would get to do again, to revisit and reinterpret in new ways. Never again Aurora, Giselle, Titania, Odette/Odile, Juliet.
‘You got to do literally everything else.’ Fiona’s voice feigns lightness, but the resentment runs too close to the surface for me not to notice.
Charlie and Isabel slide ever so slightly away from us, wisely opting out of whatever turn this conversation is about to take. ‘Can I tell you something horrible?’
‘By all means.’
‘No, but it’s really awful.’
‘Are you sloshed?’ Isabel asks.