trucks went there by mistake,’ she urged. ‘It’s perfectly understandable. And if they aren’t there, you better place a call to Vienna and find out how long ago they left after the last performance there. Or if you want, I’ll telephone the operator at the American Embassy,’ Nina sounded sweet-voiced, pliant, ‘and ask her to make the call to Austria.’
The stage manager was visibly pricked by Nina’s resourcefulness. He looked around at his crew; they were silent now, arms folded or linked behind their necks, with blank stares or eyes on the floor. He repeated Nina’s own remark that the mistake was perfectly understandable. He was no longer shouting, but he carefully refused to let her take charge. If the crisis was not entirely his responsibility, then maybe he could help to resolve it after all. He would go to the telephone. He raised both hands, wrists bent back, palms horizontal, signalling patience, and announced that the trucks would be found and that everyone should calm down.
As he turned to leave, a costume mistress demanded, ‘So what did he say? What have they done with it all?’
‘He’ll find out,’ Nina sighed, putting her hand on the woman’s plump, insistent forearm. ‘He will. The staff here is a little nervous.’ She half smiled, half grimaced, trying to explain. ‘They’re not sure what to expect, any more than any of you. Obviously, everyone is – excited – about tonight, but being excited isn’t a sensation they can necessarily enjoy. It’s – probably pretty scary. They have to be – suspicious. It’s habitual. They can’t help it. I wouldn’t assume anyone has lost things on purpose. Nobody would risk such a thing.’ She lowered her voice a little, hoping for sympathy. ‘The trouble is that even though he doesn’t speak English, he sensed he was being accused of that – of deliberate provocation – if you can forgive me for being so frank.’
The costume mistress bristled, but only slightly. ‘Well, we can’t dance without costumes. Maybe without scenery. There’s plenty of it around to borrow. But to come all this way – Mr B. will sew costumes himself if he has to. It won’t be the first time. But I can tell you, he has no time for that.’
‘Yes,’ Nina said. She couldn’t think of anything else to add. She understood both sides too well. Feebly she muttered, ‘Let’s hope the stage manager is efficient on the telephone. Time is obviously vital now.’
She thought of going to the embassy all the same, while they were waiting. But she pictured the chain of telephone calls that might result, and she decided it would only take longer if somebody had to field a diplomatic request; they wouldn’t be able to concentrate on finding the trucks. And of course, the fear ingredient would be increased, and then nobody would be able to concentrate at all. The whole system might seize up.
A man now broke in on her thoughts, gently haranguing, in a soft, nasal monotone that reminded Nina of the seen-it-all streets of Manhattan. ‘At least the kids have practice clothes. Half of the ballets, that’s about what they wear anyway. These bastards won’t even put up a black backdrop for me. Can you at least get them to do that?’
Nina held back another sigh. She looked him in the eye, saw tension and pleading there, pink-rimmed, overworked, with wrinkled dry skin around the edges. ‘I can try. But wait until the stage manager comes back. Give him a chance.’
And for this she got a friendly, silent tip-up of the chin. The man reached for a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. ‘I’ll take a break,’ he said, feeling the pack. ‘Don’t disappear on me.’
Nina wandered back to watch the dancers again. One of the ballerinas had a sore foot. Balanchine was waving his hands at her, scowling.
‘If that hurts, don’t do it. Like this.’
He stepped in close to the ballerina, assumed her posture, raised his eyebrows and half-closed his eyes in an expression of yearning nobility, then demonstrated a combination by which he seemed as if magically to glide backwards using only one foot. Afterwards, he looked at the ballerina, waiting, smouldering with the thrill of his solution. In the silence, she copied him.
‘So. Just so,’ he said, nodding fiercely. ‘It’s better for you. And first you rest.’
Then he clapped his hands three times, looked around the stage, and threw his eyes into the air, all the way to the back of the theatre. Behind him, dancers scurried, stood up, began to assemble. He rubbed his hands together, as if with appetite, and walked away.
The orchestra now began to play, and it seemed to Nina like a miracle that the dancers began to dance without Balanchine among them. She sensed him there, still, at the centre of their group.
For a while, she was lost, watching. Then, from nowhere, Alice was beside her whispering. ‘Luckily Mr B. can make it up as he goes along. Two of the kids got hit by a trolley car the day after we opened in Hamburg. Everything had to be changed.’
Nina looked around, stunned. ‘A trolley car?’
‘It was bad. But they’re going to be OK. Honestly. They both ache like hell.’ Then Alice ran her hands over her tightly smoothed-back dark hair and sighed. ‘It’s good for me, in a way, I’m getting lots of parts. I’ve never danced so much. But, God, I miss my little boy! He’s only one and a half. Have you got children?’
Nina felt intensely embarrassed by this question, not only because she had managed during her visits to the Bolshoi to forget at last the horrible scene she had had with John, but also because in her role of chaperone she felt she should be more experienced than the dancers. Clearly, she was not more experienced than Alice and she wasn’t much older.
All Nina said was, ‘Not yet.’
And Alice whispered on, friendly, ‘Children change everything, that’s the thing. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. See that girl?’ She leaned close in the shadows, her cheek brushing Nina’s so that Nina could feel the light sweat on it, smell the fragrant layer of cold cream surfacing with the heat of Alice’s skin.
Alice was pointing to a coltish ballerina, big-eyed, young, with hair swinging from a knot at the top of her head. The girl had one endless leg flung up onto the black iron stair rail beside one of the entrances to the back of the stage; she reached along it towards her arched foot, demi-pliéd, rose again.
‘That girl,’ Alice confided, ‘learned a whole brand-new ballet overnight because the ballerina Mr B. choreographed it on got pregnant and her doctor suddenly ordered her to lie down. And now that girl will be a star. All of a sudden Mr B. has noticed her. And she is totally unpregnant, that girl. A maiden.’ Alice giggled. ‘If you know what I mean.’
Nina giggled, too; she couldn’t help it. Alice surprised her. The giggle didn’t feel malicious; it felt realistic, practical, accurate. To Nina, Alice seemed delightfully unfettered, brave.
And then Alice said, ‘A tour like this, with everyone on top of each other night and day, is pretty much nothing but love affairs. The windows of the bus were steaming up when we left Vienna.’
Again they giggled.
‘So why isn’t everyone pregnant?’ asked Nina.
‘Good question. Maybe they are?’ Then Alice abandoned her smart-alecky tone and said soberly, ‘But you know, sometimes I think ballerinas just aren’t that fertile. I mean, we miss our periods half the time anyway. Some girls are on the pill, but it makes you fat is the thing.’
‘Well, so does being pregnant.’ Nina laughed again, but she no longer felt light of heart. Suddenly, she felt afraid, assaulted by her
