Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (15 page)

‘When they got there the steward – he’s the man in charge of the whole estate, am I right?’

Powerscourt nodded, reluctant to interrupt the flow. ‘Well, he’d lined all the servants up around that great front door, like Diaghilev was the King or something. He spoke perfect French, by the way, and he and Diaghilev got on like a house on fire.

‘“Welcome to Blenheim,” says the steward, embracing Diaghilev on both cheeks, “and welcome to the Great Hall.” Diaghilev raised his cane as his eye took in the enormous room rising high up to the painted ceiling. Then he brought it crashing down and rapped the floor very hard. Then he waved it around.

‘“Here! my friend,” he said.

‘“Here?” repeated the steward.

‘“Here!” said Diaghilev, “we shall have one performance of our ballet! In this great chamber here! It will be wonderful.” He summoned the other choreographer and a number of his people to work out the details.

‘“About one hundred souls will watch the Ballets Russes in this magnificent room!” Diaghilev proclaimed, and then he embraced the steward and kissed him on both cheeks. “And now, my friend, we must find the other location. Did I not see a lake on the way in? Lead me to it!”’

Fokine sprang from the sofa suddenly and grabbed the longest poker from the Powerscourt fire irons. ‘Now,’ he beamed, ‘I can be more like Diaghilev with this poker to serve as his cane!’

With that he moved rapidly to the door and began waddling on the spot.

‘Here is Diaghilev, cane raised as a sign of leadership, progressing with his motley army of Ballets Russes people – carpenters, builders and God knows who else from the palace, a couple of tall footmen and a pair of curious chambermaids bringing up the rear. He is Joshua at the walls of Jericho, perhaps, or the Pied Piper at the gates of Hamelin.’

Fokine made his way to the back of the sofa. ‘Here you have to use your imagination, Lord and Lady Powerscourt.’

He took up his position at the back of the sofa. ‘This is what they call the Palladian bridge, designed not by the man from Vicenza but by architect Vanbrugh himself, with dining rooms beneath where you could take dinner at a level below the water line. In front of you is a great sweep of water, ending up in a shape bigger than a U and slightly smaller than an O. There are gates into the park at the far end. Behind you is more water, more lake, but not so good perhaps for the ballet. Ahead of me, beyond the bridge, is the path through the grounds that leads up to the great obelisk
that commemorates the warrior’s triumphs. Behind me is the palace, with scarcely a window unoccupied as the staff and perhaps the family watch the show.’

Fokine waddled to the middle of the sofa and struck the parapet in the centre three mighty blows. ‘Neither water nor gold ran out, I fear to say, but a great silence descended on the gossiping attendants.

‘“Here! Here!” Diaghilev cried, “is where the musicians shall play. Not on the bridge, but I can see in my mind’s eye a great platform in the lake, secured on the bridge here, with the orchestra, and on a further platform, the dancers, with wooden tongues running out from their base, deep into the lake and towards the dry land.”’

Fokine tapped his cane poker twice more on the parapet and pointed dramatically out towards the imaginary lake and the grass sloping down towards the water.

‘“And on either side,” Diaghilev said, virtually shouting now, “we have the audience in tiers of seats if our friends can provide them, or squatting on the grass, or standing at the back. All will be welcome. For the first” – and almost certainly the last – ’ Fokine added in an aside – ‘“time in its history, the Ballets Russes will dance for free! For the first time in its history, the Ballets Russes will perform in the open air! I and my artists do not care if it rains. What is a little damp to interrupt a spectacle such as ours? Ever since we started, our company has tried to perform before the maximum number of people. Let them come from Woodstock! Let them come from Oxford! Let them come from the four points of the compass and enjoy our ballets! This is our thank you to the people of England for the welcome we
always enjoy here. Let us cheer for the Ballets Russes! Let us cheer for the Duke of Marlborough who invited us here! Let us cheer for Blenheim Palace for the joy and the glory it is about to deliver.”’

Fokine returned to his recumbent position on the sofa. ‘Diaghilev then convened a series of meetings, with the steward ever present, with the carpenters, the acoustic men, who wanted to put a series of heavy curtains over the musicians to stop the sound disappearing into the heavens, with conductors, with me, with the dancers. Little working parties were established. As far as I know, Diaghilev is still there supervising everything. All I know is that the ballets will have the minimum number of dancers in case the platform begins to wobble. The most likely thing to happen then,’ Fokine said with a smile, ‘is that the dancers would start to giggle and would probably fall into the water.’

‘Thank you for your performance, Monsieur Fokine,’ said Lady Lucy, clapping his description of the scene at Blenheim, ‘it was magnificent. Would you care for a drink after your efforts?’

‘I’d love a beer,’ said the choreographer, sinking back into the sofa, the poker still clutched firmly in his hand.

Cabriole

Meaning caper. An
allegro
step in which the extended legs are beaten in the air.
Cabrioles
are divided into two categories: petite, which are executed at forty-five degrees, and grande, which are executed at ninety degrees. The working leg is thrust into the air, the underneath leg follows and beats against the first leg, sending it higher. The landing is then made on the underneath leg.
Cabriole
may be done
devant
,
derrière
and
à la seconde
in any given position of the body such as
croisé
,
effacé
,
écarté
, and so on.

Mrs Maud Butler watched very carefully from her window as Johnny Fitzgerald made his way slowly down the street. Then she headed for the phone downstairs to talk to her sister Clarissa. She was at home.

‘Clary,’ said the sister in Chelsea, ‘you’ll never guess who I’ve just had in my drawing room?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said the sister from Richmond, well used to bouts of excitement from her sister.

‘It was that man Johnny Fitzgerald, the man who came with Lord Powerscourt to investigate the missing portraits! Surely you remember him? Perhaps you were away at school at the time.’

‘I’ve heard about the paintings, I remember Mama talking about them and the people who came from London. What on earth was he doing in your drawing room, Maud?’

‘That’s just it, Clary, can’t you see? They were investigators then and they’re investigators now. They’ve been asked by somebody to look into Alexander’s death.’

‘Have they indeed?’ said Clary. ‘They haven’t wasted much time. What did you tell them?’

‘Well, I told them about Uncle Richard and his will and his always changing his mind about which of the boys he was going to leave the money to.’

‘You told him what?’ The voice from Richmond seemed to have gone up an octave. ‘You didn’t have to tell him a single word about that. You could have kept mum and said we had no idea what was going to happen to Uncle’s will, we hadn’t really thought about it. I think you’ll find that most families don’t think about each other’s wills unless the person concerned has loads and loads of money.’

‘Which is precisely what Uncle Richard has,’ said the sister from Chelsea, sensing perhaps that things were going to move in her direction now. ‘It’s only natural for his sisters to wonder about his will.’

‘But not to the extent that he changes his mind all the time. That you definitely did not have to tell him.’ Richmond now trying to recapture the high ground that had looked like slipping away. ‘That was a mistake.’

There was a gasp down the line. ‘Oh, I say, Clary, I might have made another mistake. I told him that Mark had been spending a lot of time at the Ballets Russes performances. Well, he has. I’m sure they’d have found out away.’

‘You told him that your Mark had been a regular at the Royal Opera House? You did? Well, you’ve just guaranteed that your son is high up on the list of suspects for the murder of his cousin. That’s all.’

Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough, had been a creature of habit since his days in the military when he had served as an Acting Captain and been on the staff of Lord Roberts in the Boer War. His brief political career seemed to have drawn to a close since two short periods as a junior minister under Lord Salisbury and then his nephew, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. The Duke did not usually breakfast alone – his mistress Gladys Deacon was accustomed to reading him selected extracts from the newspapers as he wrestled with his kedgeree. But today Mrs Deacon, mistress but not wife of his household, had sent word that she would be breakfasting in her rooms on the first floor. It had been the same yesterday and the same the day before.

The Duke had also seen minor but not negligible service in his own locality, serving twice in the past decade as Mayor of Woodstock, the little town that bordered on the Blenheim estates. Some of his fellow peers remained mayor of their local borough year in and year out, regularly returned by a grateful tenantry, but that was not to be the fate of
Charles Spencer Churchill. After two terms he was voted out.

At ten o’clock it was his custom to meet with his Steward to discuss the business of the estate. Every day now the Steward made the question of the Ballets Russes the last item on the agenda. Her Ladyship – she might not have been a Ladyship outside the walls of the estate, Mrs Deacon was accustomed to tell friends and visitors, but she bloody well was inside the walls of the Palace – posed the question the Duke thought he had settled once and for all. What was he going to do about the Ballets Russes? Was he going to employ them to dance in the palace or not? Each day, with declining levels of firmness, the Duke had said no. After his meeting, the Duke took some coffee and looked at the racing magazines.

Under the normal domestic regimen, the Duke and his partner would have luncheon together, but the ‘together’ element had also been disrupted by the authorities upstairs. The Duke, who had always had a dread of eating alone, especially in that triumphant dining room with its works of art proclaiming a military victory that he would never achieve, took himself off to The Bear Hotel in Woodstock and ate in state in a private dining room. The Duke firmly believed that his dread of solitary mealtimes was known only to himself, but he was wrong. Once in his cups at Monte Carlo, he had shouted to Gladys that if she didn’t hurry up he would have to eat alone in that bloody great hotel dining room and that he would, therefore, be the only person doing so. The shame and the boredom, he had yelled through her dressing-room door, would finish him off. Mrs Deacon, unlike the Duke, did not forget
very much, but she saved this information for particularly important campaigns, like invitations to Royal Garden Parties or inviting Diaghilev to Blenheim.

What does a Duke do in the afternoons? The 9th Duke of Marlborough was accustomed to walking his estates and checking on the recent work he had ordered. But that was difficult now because half the estate, the half running away from the house past the Palladian bridge up towards the obelisk was destined to be the home of dancing nymphs and the glories of the corps de ballet, if Mrs Deacon had her way. Even his new water garden failed to bring any cheer, the water spouting away in splendour into the late afternoon sun. And his customary large gin at six thirty sharp, the starting pistol for an evening’s refreshment, failed to lift his spirits as he looked at a couple of his ancestors on the walls, destined, like him, never to shine as brightly as the 1st Duke of Marlborough.

Then it was that damned dining room once more, the footmen specifically instructed never to speak in Her Ladyship’s presence, or – by extension of Her Ladyship’s command – to him either. They glided in, taking this plate away and bringing another one in. They hovered discreetly about his glass, with this evening a bottle of his cellar’s finest St Emilion. Even though he had perhaps been – in Lloyd George’s memorable phrase – one of five hundred men chosen at random from the ranks of the unemployed to sit in the House of Lords, the Duke had been brought up to expect and to exercise some measure of power in his own and in the wider world. This was intolerable. The Duke knew that there was a siege in progress, but whether he was the attacking or the defending power
he had no idea. His adversary, still taking her meals in solitary splendour upstairs, had no doubt on that question. The Duke was under siege and the Ballets Russes at Blenheim was the prize.

It was the guinea fowl that did it, a guinea fowl served with a rich cream sauce with truffles and mushrooms that finally destroyed the remnants of the Duke’s resistance. He remembered eating a similar dish years before at some grand military dinner at the Carlton Club. He asked for pen, paper and envelope. He wrote out the terms of his surrender. But the lady in question did not abandon the field that evening. She made him wait until after breakfast the following morning.