The Last Word
The panic that I carried back and forth across the border was enough to make me seriously consider accepting one of the many offers I had received to transfer to an American or mainland European ballet company.
But that hardly counted as a solution – my kin had realms everywhere.
Even across oceans, they had reliable allies in the Selkies and Sirens.
As the exiled Selkie Sam had put it: none of them would care about the fate of a servant, but a runaway prince?
No matter where I fled, I would eventually be found.
‘You could always stop dancing,’ Glen suggested, once, before he saw my expression. ‘Or – though I’m sure you’ll like this even less – you could plead your case before the court.’
‘Ah yes, I can see it now.’ I mimed my side of the exchange: Beloved parents, rulers of the Silver Realm, I know you long for a grandchild to ensure the survival of our line but, alas, instead I have pledged my loyalty to the Restless Lands and fallen in love with a mortal, a thing you believe is possible, not.
‘I am sure I will come out of that with my bones intact, my eyeballs and tongue safely in my skull, rather than fed to the crows.’
‘Point made. Vividly. Wait.’ Glen blinked, bringing his palms to his heart as I had just done. In love?
I opened my mouth and raised my hands, but neither words nor gestures came to me.
‘Well, my friend, you’ll have to think of a way out sooner rather than later.’
* * *
Once she had her dream role as Juliet in writing, Trix went into her Manon performance fearlessly.
A high-class courtesan, pulled between the humble lodgings of her scholarly lover Des Grieux and the luxurious apartments of Monsieur G, with whom her brother Lescaut brokers a deal.
It was the second full-length MacMillan ballet in which I danced the lead.
Where Mayerling had pushed my acting range, Des Grieux’s adages pushed my technique, demanding slowness and control where, in my soloist days, I would have itched to be fast and freewheeling.
It was one of the rare shows where, by curtain call, I felt well and truly exercised.
Trix was more than justified in feeling the same, having died dramatically in prison colony ship rags and a shorn wig.
She joked that it was good practice for all the dying we would have to do in Romeo and Juliet.
‘When was the last time your character died in front of the audience?’ she asked on the morning of our first learning call. I had to think a while.
‘When I was Mercutio.’
‘No! It can’t have been that long ago.’
‘Even in Mayerling, Rudolf shoots himself behind a screen. I, meanwhile, have had to watch you die seven different ways. Eight, if you count Aurora’s sleeping death.’
‘Goodness, when you put it like that… consider me an expert on dying. Are you nervous about it?’
‘You remember rehearsals for Giselle? Pain does not come naturally to me.’
She wrinkled her nose and laughed. ‘Says the principal dancer. Do you mean the moment Romeo drinks the poison?’
The poison makes Romeo collapse before he can lie down next to Juliet, whose body refuses to stir even after he has thrown her over his shoulder and tried to revive her in a final pas de deux.
His wish to die at her side is denied: instead, he slumps onto the floor, facing away from the audience.
The music lifts, Juliet awakens, and it is her turn to throw herself on her unresponsive lover, to scream, rush for the dagger Romeo used to kill Paris, and stab herself.
To struggle back across the altar, hauling herself up with one arm even as she loses blood and consciousness.
With her last breath, she reaches across the orchestra’s final chords to grasp his hand.
‘I can’t decide which is better,’ Trix said over lunch, after we had blocked out the death scene for the first time.
‘Should I let Juliet succeed? Should she at least manage a little brush before sliding into death?’ She reached across my lap and nudged the back of my hand with hers.
‘Do I heap another layer of tragedy over the scene, or do I show Juliet some small mercy, let her touch her star-crossed soulmate one last time? I wish we had MacMillan here in person, so he could just tell me what he thinks would be best.’
‘I like that he leaves those decisions to the dancers.’
‘What would you choose, if the roles were reversed?’
I wagged my finger. ‘Only you can decide. Perhaps tragedy one night, mercy the next. See what comes in the moment.’
* * *
Now that I have been dragged back here, and I am all anyone can discuss at court, the wedding will no longer be put off for anything.
Glen has been spared from a charge of treason only because I insisted that the whole thing had been my idea, and that he was bound by our very laws to follow my lead, both of which are true.
The coded list I left behind for Trix was a desperate wish on my part.
A balm, to make bearable the endless mornings that give way to endless nights.
A farewell, so that she would not feel discarded.
So that she might remember me long after everyone else has forgotten.
Glen may have been forced to erase my image from the Dance Hall, and my kin have always excelled at papering over memories, but I took a calculated risk on their negligence to scrub my name out of all written records.
Memories made safe, preserved for the future.
“B pdd” was for both of us. If she gleans only one message from that list, please, please let it be “Balcony”. I will say it to myself as many times as I need to get through the ceremony when it comes, and for the wedding night. I hope time will show mercy and pass quickly.
I have rewritten the note in my head many times since, of course: a self-inflicted punishment.
I was gripped by panic in that dressing room, with only five minutes to write whatever came to mind.
The line about The Sleeping Beauty – a promise that I would search for a way to find Trix somewhere in the dreamscape, the only realm where versions of us might have a chance of meeting again, in storms or snow or mist. I was thinking so clearly of the vision sequence between Aurora and Florimund in Act II, and yet, in also thinking of mist, I wrote down the Entr’acte.
I deserve the title of fool, not prince.
I regret that I did not find a way to write in Clara’s necklace from The Nutcracker.
A token from her adventures with Hans-Peter in the magical Kingdom of Sweets.
When they pass each other again in the mortal world, it will give her the faintest gleam of recognition.
Assurance that what happened between them was real.
And why, why did I underline the reprise of La Sylphide? Was I so anxious to give her the truth, after all this time? What if she starts to perceive Hampstead Heath differently? Could she uncover its significance?
I can only hope not. I can only hope that the meaning eludes her, or that any attempts to act on it lead nowhere.
That the Restless Lands’ twentieth-century way of thinking wins out – move along now, nothing supernatural here.
Nothing beyond what is directly before her eyes.
I must take comfort in that. Because if she tries to cross the border, if she uses any of the music from my list to make a key… no, it does not bear thinking about.