Hester's Story (25 page)

Sod Hugo. He’ll soon see what he’s got in me, she told herself. Everyone said she was the best. How come all of them were wrong and he was right? The opposite was probably true. And in any case, it was too late for him to find a substitute, so he’d never actually get rid of her. He was as stuck with her as she was with him. It wasn’t any wonder he was saddled with a prima ballerina who was past it. And not only past it, but really cruel too. That remark at lunchtime to her kid about the bread roll when Alison was far from skinny was just plain unkind. It showed that Hugo had very poor judgement if he was in love with a creature like her. Other dancers probably steered well clear of him. Even as she was thinking this, Silver knew it was nonsense, but she allowed herself to be comforted by the thought that he wasn’t nearly as famous as Jacques Bodette, who thought she was incomparable. He’s forever saying it, and I believe him, Silver thought. Why shouldn’t I?

*

I’m safe, Alison thought. Mum’s there in the theatre, going over something with Hugo, and she’ll be there till suppertime and I can go wherever I want. She was walking along the path without looking where she was going, and she’d been out for ages and ages. She wondered at first whether to be worried or upset by the fact that not a single person in the whole world, right now this minute, knew where she was. No one, she thought, gives a shit about me, and that’s the truth. I could go and drown myself in that river and I bet Mum wouldn’t even miss class the next day. I bet she’d even be pleased. Well, I’m not going to give her the
satisfaction of having her photograph taken weeping and wailing over my grave. She’s not worth getting all steamed up about.

This was a sentiment that Alison had persuaded herself of over many years. She couldn’t remember exactly when it was, but about two or three years ago she’d come to certain conclusions. The main one was that she had to look after herself because no one else would if she didn’t. She’d made all sorts of plans and her head was usually buzzing with dreams, like her favourite at the moment – of herself getting on a plane and taking off to go and find her father in America. She had his address. She wrote to him from time to time. The last letter had been just before Christmas, and now as she remembered it Alison blushed a little. It had been nothing but moaning from beginning to end: moaning about Claudia, moaning about having to go to Wychwood for over ten days, moaning about school, and on and on. Thinking about it, she could imagine her father sighing and tearing it up and putting it into the wastepaper basket. They called it the trash in America which made it sound even more rubbishy.

I haven’t forgiven her for that remark at lunchtime. She thinks I forget all about the things she says a second or two after she says them, but just because she’s a butterfly brain it doesn’t mean that I am. I remember every single nasty remark she’s ever made, and I wish I could tell her so. There ought to be a button I could press and then they’d all spool out, as though they were on a tape, recorded forever in my memory. I could say them to her one after another. That’d make her sit up. Maybe I will one day, too.

There was a light shining out of the downstairs window of a small house just ahead of her. She hadn’t
seen it before. She must have walked right past the theatre without knowing it and be at the back of it. Yes, that was right. Alison turned and saw the outline of the Arcadia, darker even than the nearly black sky.

The house or cottage or whatever it was looked a bit like Hansel and Gretel’s house made of gingerbread and sugar and sweets, she thought. The house in the middle of the forest. She shivered a little and then said, half aloud, ‘This isn’t a forest, and Hansel and Gretel is a fairytale. Grow up, will you?’

She was just about to turn round and walk back the way she’d come, when the door of the fairytale cottage opened and she could see someone silhouetted against the light.

‘Alison? Is that you?’

‘Oh, Ruby! Yes, it’s me. I didn’t recognise you at first. I thought … never mind. I don’t know how I got down here. I was just walking about.’

‘Well, now that you’re here, you can come in for a cup of tea with me, and then we’ll go up to the house together.’

‘Thank you. Is this where you live?’

‘That’s right. Me and George. You met him at lunchtime. He’s still in the theatre, but he’ll be by for his tea. Come along in. You must be cold out there.’

Alison found that a verse from her father’s book was repeating itself in her head:

Here is a doll

dreaming of walking

down the path to another house
.

She dreams of a party

and drinking tea

and all the friends

she has gone to see
.

She followed Ruby into the house and closed the front door behind her.

‘I’ll go and fetch the tea things. You sit down here, Alison, and make yourself comfortable.’

She left the sitting room then, and Alison could hear cup and saucer noises from the kitchen, which was down a small corridor. As she looked around the room, she noticed that in this cottage too, there was no sign of Christmas anywhere. It had struck her as strange when they arrived last night there wasn’t a single card or decoration anywhere in Wychwood House, and no sign of a tree either. Hester must have got rid of everything on Boxing Day, which was most peculiar. And here in Ruby’s cottage it was the same. She wondered whether she could ask about it and decided she probably couldn’t. She went over to the mantelpiece to look at the photos that were lined up there. One or two of them were of Hester. You could see that it was her, even though she was young, because she was dressed in ballet clothes and hadn’t changed all that much, really. The picture Alison liked best showed five children sitting on a bench in a park, or perhaps it was a big garden. The eldest girl had a kind of beret on, and she looked about fourteen. She wasn’t smiling, but all the others in the photo were. Two of the littler children were boys and two were girls. The baby girl was sweet as anything, like a doll, and she had a bit of hair caught up in a ribbon. When she heard Ruby coming in with the tray, Alison turned round.

‘I love this picture. Is it of your children?’

‘No,’ Ruby answered, putting the tea things down on a table between the sofa and the armchairs on the other side of the fire. ‘That’s me and my brothers and sisters. I’m the eldest.’

‘You’re lucky.’ Alison took the cup of tea Ruby
handed her and bit into a buttered scone. ‘I wish I wasn’t an only child.’

‘I used to wish I was,’ Ruby smiled. ‘Then I was ashamed of myself at once of course, but still, I couldn’t help it. I always felt I was the one who had to look after them, be responsible for them. Too much for a young girl I suppose it was, looking back. I didn’t think so at the time. I thought it was my duty, that’s all.’

She set her cup down on the table and took out a piece of canvas from a basket lying beside the fire. ‘You don’t mind if I do my tapestry?’

‘No, it’s lovely. I like the colours. Is it a picture of anything?’

‘Well, I don’t have a printed pattern, if that’s what you mean. I just seem to know what I want to do next.’

Alison noticed, as Ruby spoke, that there were cushions with tapestry covers on every chair; there was a firescreen pushed up against the wall which Ruby must have made as well.

‘You do it jolly quickly,’ she said.

Ruby smiled. ‘Years of practice in dressing rooms here and there. I used to do it to keep myself busy while I was waiting to do a change of costume, or when a dress rehearsal went on into the night. They do that quite often.’

Alison helped herself to another scone and remembered briefly how furious she was with her mother. If she could see me now, she’d have a fit, Alison thought. I don’t care though. It’s delicious and I’m hungry. She watched Ruby’s silver needle pricking in and out of the canvas, and wondered if she dared to ask why she’d been crying earlier, in Wardrobe. Would Ruby get upset and throw her out? How should she put it?
Perhaps it would be tactful to pretend she’d never seen it. Ruby looked up from her tapestry.

‘There’s something troubling you, Alison. Am I right?’

‘Well, not troubling me exactly, only – well – I wanted to ask you something and I don’t know if you’d like me to. That’s all.’

‘Ask away.’

She couldn’t. She couldn’t ask about the crying. Instead, she said the first thing that came into her head. ‘Why don’t you have decorations or a tree up still? It’s only just been Christmas.’

The silence that followed seemed to go on for a very long time. Ruby appeared to be completely absorbed in her tapestry and it was such ages before she lifted her head that Alison was on the point of saying something else, something quite different, to change the subject and make everything all right again. But Ruby spoke before she was able to think of the right words.

‘We have never celebrated Christmas here. Not at any time since I started working for Hester. She … well, she’s never really had a chance to, what with being someone who always worked on Boxing Day, all through her life as a dancer. It just didn’t seem worth it, somehow, to put everything up and then not be able to appreciate it properly. And for the last ten years, of course, there’s been the Festival. What with a company on the point of arriving and then the rehearsals and so forth, it never seemed …’ She paused. ‘Appropriate. There’s always a party after the first night, and that’s sort of taken the place of Christmas here at Wychwood.’

Alison nodded, only partly satisfied. ‘I expect you have the turkey and things, don’t you, even though there’s no tree?’

Ruby shook her head and looked straight at Alison. ‘Salmon, usually. Hester doesn’t like Christmas pudding. And besides …’ She shook her head. ‘It’s such a sad time of the year, isn’t it? The longest night and all the trees looking so bare and nothing much in the garden. We’re busy arranging the Festival. We try not to notice the dark days.’

‘You were crying before,’ Alison said, and the words were out of her mouth almost before she was aware of what she was saying. ‘In the theatre. I wanted to know why you were, but I didn’t dare to ask. It’s none of my business, but—’

‘Och, that was nothing to get upset about. I should have explained at once, I suppose, but I hadn’t met you then. I was thinking of an old friend of ours, mine and Hester’s, who died recently, that’s all. Adam Lennister, his name was. He died far too young. I think it must have been passing the
Giselle
costume in the bar that put me in mind of him, because that was his favourite ballet. That’s all.’

‘I expect a Christmas tree and decorations wouldn’t be right if you’re in mourning, would it?’

‘No, I suppose this year, Adam’s death has made a celebration less possible than it usually is.’

Ruby resumed her stitching. Alison wondered again whether what she’d just heard was the whole story. There was nothing sinister or strange about being sad when someone you knew died. That was quite normal, but there was something in the way Ruby never once looked at her while she was speaking, and her eyes sort of moved from side to side in a way that Alison thought looked like someone who wanted to run away. She’d had a lot of practice with Claudia, who was always varnishing the truth, and she was almost sure that Ruby had been crying about something quite different; something she didn’t want to talk about. Or
maybe she was crying about more than one thing and had only told Alison about the most obvious one.

‘Hello, ladies,’ said someone, and Alison jumped up from her chair.

‘You’ve met Alison, haven’t you, George?’

‘What a nice surprise. Come to have tea with us, have you?’ said George. ‘I hope you’ve kept a scone or two for me.’

He sat in the other armchair and Ruby took the tray out to the kitchen to make fresh tea for him. He picked up a scone and ate it in three swift bites.

‘I had no idea when I married her that Ruby was such a good cook, but if I had, that would have been a very good reason to propose, I reckon. Have you had one?’

‘Yes, they’re lovely.’ Alison racked her brain for something to say but found herself suddenly tongue-tied. She didn’t have to worry, though, because George was someone who chatted away whether you joined in or not. He was just finishing a story about when he was in the army and had got in trouble with a sergeant for nicking someone else’s cigarettes or something, when Ruby came back with the tea.

‘I was just talking to that Nick chap, Ruby,’ he told her. ‘He’s got a lot of good stories to tell about some of the London companies.’

Alison, who’d almost fallen into a doze, what with the warmth of the fire and the lovely food and the softness of the cushions in the armchair, sprang to attention mentally when she heard Nick’s name mentioned. Alison knew that it was completely stupid and ridiculous to think that Nick might ever be interested in her, even if he wasn’t gay, which she thought he might be. She was almost sure she’d heard Ilene mentioning something about this to Andy. Nick was just being friendly when he smiled at her and touched
her arm. He’s nice to everyone, she thought, and then something truly hideous occurred to her. What if he fancied Claudia? Lots and lots of men did, Alison knew that. Being nice to her daughter was a thing some of them did to make her like them. They weren’t to know that this wasn’t going to impress her.

Alison stifled a sigh. She could practically
see
a mood of misery and chilliness creeping over her. It looked like a grey, shapeless ghost and Alison knew that it was about to engulf her and then the pleasant feelings she’d been having, sitting here drinking tea with Ruby and her husband, would all disappear in a moment.

*

‘Are you coming, darling?’ Claudia was in a seductive mood. Nick had shaken her up rather. He was without a doubt the most gorgeous young man she’d seen for ages and he was having a predictable effect on her. She couldn’t wait to rehearse their
pas de deux
tomorrow. Those long fingers holding her waist, his breath on her neck. She shivered. Hugo could have distracted her, but he was sitting at the small table in the corner of their bedroom, rather too preoccupied with the papers in front of him. That was his problem. He was dedicated. It didn’t seem to matter a scrap to him that she’d arranged herself on one of the twin beds in a way that would have driven any normal man crazy. No, he was taken up with thinking about tomorrow’s rehearsals and probably that Silver person. He clearly thought she was the cat’s pyjamas, and saw her as the new, the young – yes, the
young
 – up and coming star. Well, Claudia thought, there’s time enough for him to worry about that tomorrow. He ought to be paying some attention to me now. She lay back on top of the duvet, with her breasts almost entirely exposed, and
sighed. Hugo was running a hand through his hair and pretending he hadn’t seen her.