Chapter 71
NIMBLE
In the early days of my border crossings, I walked everywhere in London and its neighbouring counties that my feet could take me between dawn and dusk.
There was much about mortals I had to learn, and to puzzle over.
Nothing better displayed the mortal need to obsessively regiment their surroundings than gardens, with their labyrinths, orchards, gravel paths, cut grass, and meticulously planted flowerbeds.
They made me uneasy, until I thought of how much my family would hate them. Then I learned to enjoy them very much.
I revelled in rock concerts, almost denting the ceilings when I jumped too high to the bass line.
I adored cinemas, impressed that mortals had engineered their own means of transporting themselves to other worlds by looking at their own through infinite prisms. The theatre roped me in once I realised that, unlike in the Silver Realm, the performers actually finished what they began, instead of growing bored after the first two scenes and wandering off to do something else.
I had been taught that after the Sun King left our realm, he shared our language with his court at Versailles, allowing it to be misused and corrupted, to add to the wealth of lies about us.
He recast us as “fairies” with wings, twisting our sacred vocabulary for frivolous storytelling ends.
Mortal ballets were our version of fairy tales, frothy as frog spawn, the lowest of low taste.
Obviously, I asked Glen to source as many tickets to different productions as possible, along with books, magazines, and old videotapes, until my bones and muscles understood our language as the mortals had adapted it.
Amidst this mania for my new passion, I was obliged to make a return visit to the Silver Realm and could not resist sneaking off to the music chambers – an enormous hollow oak lit by candles, reflected in the gold and silver of instruments – where I unearthed a soil-scratched vinyl record to play on a rickety gramophone.
I was trying to match Albrecht’s entrechat six from Giselle to some Mendelssohn when my uncle Wick appeared in the rounded doorway.
I pretended some moles had asked for my assistance in guiding their tunnel-digging, so they would not disturb our chambers with their hills.
That first near miss should have been enough to deter me from any more risky behaviour, and yet by early 1979 I was conspiring with Glen to find a way into a ballet company.
I am not proud to admit that it was necessary to use our glamour, the old reliable magic that deflects mortal attention away from what they call “the supernatural”, to capture the attention of the BCBC’s newest Artistic Director.
But half of it came down to carefully worded stories, lies only by omission, about the character of Aleksander Sylvan who I would eventually become – the costume I never wanted to take off.
I was offered a contract the same day, joining halfway through the 1978/79 season as a first artist. This confused everyone, and annoyed most of the men.
But I was not interested in petty politics – I put up with plenty of that in the Silver Realm.
I was there to do what I loved more than anything: dance.
Needless to say, this worked in my favour.
After my turns as the Bluebird in The Sleeping Beauty, the cartwheeling Chief Beggar in Manon, and Puck in The Dream, I was promoted from first artist to soloist, then to first soloist in 1981, which was the happiest I had ever been and the happiest I assumed I would ever be.
* * *
Until The Sleeping Beauty, Trix and I had never spoken alone for very long or to any meaningful end.
During our emergency rehearsal, she was professional, polite, and ready to work as hard as it took.
The stress fracture building in her leg like an open fire, one whose heat only she and I could detect, presented quite the dilemma.
On this side of the border, kisses are not so much gestures of affection as a way of imparting magic, of reviving someone close to death. They mend and restore, when done with meaning. After much agonising within myself, I gave a little of my glamour to her through that stage kiss.
Had I assured Glen that I would not cast magic around recklessly?
Yes. But I also understood by now that mortals paid a high price to become elite dancers, in a currency that was still foreign to me: years.
Years they would never claw back. It felt unethical not to help this one person, just for one night.
The desire to become entangled with a mortal had never crossed my mind, at least no more than stage partnering demanded.
Ray learned as much when he propositioned me, as did Grace, on the one occasion she extended an invitation to a sex party in Mayfair.
Such entanglements were exactly what I was trying to get away from, regardless of whether they resulted in a child.
When Nick promoted me to principal by way of pairing me with Carolyn, it was both an interesting new adventure and a relief – she was happily married, and treated me as nothing more or less than a colleague.
Curiously, even though she had no spouse of her own, Trix made me feel at ease from the moment she stepped into Carolyn’s place.
Most of the lead roles were as new to her as they were to me, so we could learn, make mistakes, and unpack the stories together.
I could not help but look forward to finishing the season with her.
I always preferred the ballets about mortal worlds free from otherworldly influences: The Two Pigeons, Coppélia, La Bayadère (opium-induced ghosts do not count, I think), La Fille mal gardée, A Month in the Country, Romeo and Juliet, or abstract neoclassical pieces that took place outside both the Restless Lands and the Silver Realm: Rhapsody, Dances at a Gathering, Charlie’s Quartet.
Anything involving fairies, two creatures meeting from different worlds, inevitably stirred up complicated feelings in me.
There were weeks when I believed the only way to get through was to lock myself in my own mind, to turn cold where I might have otherwise shown warmth.
But Trix never turned cold in response. She was always there when I came back to myself, to who I wanted to be. She began to feel like a lifeline. Like my new home.
* * *
Uncle Wick did not release my shoulder until after we stepped through the arch of holly leaves that led to the throne room.
I had been dreading the eyes and whispers of the entire realm on our arrival, but there were only two people on the other side of the vast space.
My father’s glare was as stony as the floor.
Cressida took small steps forward, then halted as if tethered by a rope. She looked me up and down, slowly. Uncomprehending. Her freckled hand descended, skimming my post-rehearsal T-shirt and baggy jeans.
Why are you dressed like that?
I wondered how much she had been told. How much had been held back, so that I would have to be the one to tell her. To pour salt into two different wounds.
‘I…’ My voice was suddenly a thing outside myself, an object that could fall out of my grasp.
I looked at my hands, but gestures deserted me.
Guilt, bitter and heavy, over my deception.
Then fury that I should feel guilt at all, when I had every right to howl at what had been taken from me, when the only thing that should have taken up space in my heart was sorrow.
Eventually one of my hands did something, wavering in the air between us. Cressida’s eyes were still wide and scandalised at the sound of my voice.
I know not what to say.
Everything thereafter came and went like sunlight between trees, as seen through the passenger window of a car, nauseating and unrelenting.
My mother, arriving in a furious flutter of white.
The particular curve of her talons that confirmed, once and for all, that the near-miss attack on Trix at Kenwood had been her doing.
That she had been biding her time at the Inter-Realm summit, perhaps considering when to break the news to my father and uncle.
The right moment to inflict maximum devastation on me.
My father, twisting the chains of the two pocket watches Glen had so carefully assembled, their silver cases as spotless as the day we first used them. He threw them to the floor, and a tiding of magpies took every last fragment, cawing their thanks to the generous king.
My mother, moving furiously towards Glen.
My footsteps, skidding across the flagstones to block her.
Her fierce green eyes, and the knifepoint of her grimace, when I did not yield.