by Adle Geras
She loved the garden. She enjoyed walking in it and delighted in the wide sweep of moor and sky that you could see wherever you stood. She had made sure that benches were placed in those spots that gave the best views. Every morning, unless the weather was atrocious, she walked for at least half an hour, through the garden and out to the slopes behind the house. She followed this with an hour at the barre she’d had specially installed in her dressing room.
The house had ten bedrooms. Her own was along a corridor and set apart from the accommodation used by the visiting dancers. There was a public drawing room and the kitchen was shared by everyone when the Festival was on. The dining room was only used for the most formal occasions such as the New Year’s Eve dinner and the first night party. Ruby and George lived in a small cottage in the grounds. The passageway that led to the Arcadia Theatre went past the door of this room and she could always hear the dancers walking to and from their rehearsals.
Hester had her own sitting room and this room, where she spent most of her time, was known as the Office. The desk stood under the window and she kept the paperwork for both the Festival and her master classes in a mahogany tallboy. A filing cabinet would have looked wrong in a room which resembled in almost every particular dressing rooms she’d known while she was a ballerina. That’s why I’m comfortable here, she often thought. It’s completely familiar to me. There were no light bulbs around the mirror which hung on the wall near the door, and the smell of greasepaint had been replaced by the fragrance coming from an enormous bowl of pot-pourri, but otherwise it was what she had been used to for years.
She’d always insisted on having a chaise-longue in her dressing room and here in the Office she still liked to lie down whenever she needed to read or think. This chaise was new, and upholstered in dark red velvet, but the lacquered screen beside it, with its pattern of small boats on perfectly rippled water and conical snow-tipped mountains, was the same one she’d had since 1954. A cream silk shawl, fringed and printed with scarlet poppies, was draped over the other armchair.
The walls, papered in pale apricot, were crowded with framed photographs. There was the picture of her mother she had brought with her from France as a child, a few of Madame Olga, her first teacher, and better than a mother to her; several of her grandmother, darling Grand-mère, and many from productions in which she’d appeared. These were mostly of other dancers – her partners, her friends, and members of the corps de ballet. There was one exception. She’d hung the famous Cecil Wilding photograph of herself, the one known as A Backward Glance right next to the mirror. Every time she checked to see if her hair was tidy; every time she looked in the mirror to apply her lipstick before going out into the world, she compared how she was now (dark hair cut short in a near shoulder-length bob and highlighted with streaks of red, still excellent skin but, oh God, look at the tiny wrinkles appearing near her eyes!) with the person in the portrait: herself as Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. It was taken when she was seventeen. Her head was turned to one side, her hair (very long, in those days) was twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck and threaded with pink and white roses. Her hands were crossed gracefully just below her waist and rested on the stiffened skirts of her pale pink tutu. It was, Hester knew, every little girl’s dream of what a ballerina should look like, which was one of the reasons she loved it. She enjoyed the illusion that it represented.
She’d often thought it would be fun to put up another photo of herself right beside it, showing her sweating after a particularly hard class; hair scraped back and in need of a wash; darned tights; aching calves; torn and bloody feet after hours en pointe. But nobody wanted to see that. It was the truth, but who was interested in that when magic was so much prettier? Who wanted to admit that all the effortless grace, the leaping and the flying and the turning were the result of hours and hours of back-breaking work? No one. Everyone liked the illusion. Each time she passed the mirror on leaving the room, she still had the distinct feeling that she was making an entrance, leaving the space that was hers and entering a public stage. Seeing her portrait on the way out to take part in the life outside the Office reminded her of how much she’d loved performing and it gave her courage. She had, she reflected, needed to be brave all through her life, from the very earliest age.
1939
Estelle knew, even when she was a very little girl, that there was something about her which upset her father. Henri was his name – Henri Prévert. He left the house each day dressed in a dark suit. He worked in a bank and Grand-mère said his work was very important. He was extremely tall and thin, and when he came into a room he filled it and it was difficult to look at anyone else. And to his little daughter he appeared enormous and she was frightened by his appearance. He reminded her of a scarecrow she’d once seen in a field, who’d worn a hat like Papa and also stood like him motionless, unbending.
He loved Maman. Grand-mère told Estelle that he did, and she believed her. Henri was her only child, but she had as much affection for her daughter-in-law as if she’d been her own flesh and blood.
‘The love between your parents,’ she told Estelle, ‘was a mad love. Un amour fou.’
Grand-mère looked after everything in the house, so that Henri’s beloved wife might have nothing to do but be with him. Estelle’s mother was English, and she had no relations except for her second cousin, Rhoda, who lived in Yorkshire. Her mother spoke to Estelle in English from the day she was born, and she found nothing strange about speaking in two languages. One of Estelle’s favourite stories was the one about how Papa met Maman. Grand-mère used to tell it to her quite often and it was better than any fairytale, because it was true. Helen was a ballerina. She danced in the corps de ballet, and when Henri first saw her he fell so in love with her that he couldn’t think about anything else. He used to stand outside the stage door every night. After each performance, there he’d be, bearing a bunch of scarlet roses for her. Helen had many fans but this one was different. He looked very serious and he was also much handsomer than any other fan she’d seen. She spoke to him at last, and when she realised how much he adored her, she fell in love with him. They married very soon after they met and she never danced again. Grand-mère never said a word about her being sad not to be a ballerina any longer, but Estelle thought that she must have missed wearing all the lovely clothes and dancing on the stage in front of people and hearing them clapping her.
The house in the Rue Lavaudan was tall and narrow. Henri spent much of his time at the bank, but it pleased him to know that his beautiful wife was at home, waiting for him, longing for nothing but his company as he longed for hers.
Helen nearly died giving birth to her daughter, and Estelle’s father made sure that the child knew this, even when she was very young. Almost the first thing he said to her was, ‘You nearly killed poor Maman coming into this world, and you’ll tire her out all over again if you worry her now.’
Although Estelle couldn’t remember exactly when her father had said this, the words and the feeling behind the words never left her. She understood that he didn’t love her, not then and not at any time. Later in her life she understood a little of how this lack of love came about, though she could never forgive it. She, by being born, had changed the body of his beloved wife into something gross and fat and unlovable. She’d torn it into a mess of blood and pain, and then she’d sucked from the breast that was his, that he wanted. How could he look at his daughter and not feel some sort of hatred?
The child loved her mother and she loved her Grand-mère and because her father was so busy, busy with his work, he hardly came into her life until after Helen’s death. As she grew up, Estelle invented memories of her mother. She made up an idea of her, almost a dream of what she was like, and inserted it into the times she could remember, when Grand-mère was her closest companion.
The house was always sunlit. The kitchen had pale yellow walls, and her grandmother liked to bake. Estelle used to kneel up on a chair and help her create patterns
with apple slices on the tartes aux pommes she made every week. Grand-mère sang all the time, small snatches of parlour songs and operettas and the better-known arias from Carmen and La Traviata. She used to take the little girl for walks in the Jardin du Luxembourg, near the house, where they watched the puppet shows together and then sat on a bench under the trees while she told her granddaughter stories about her own father when he was a small boy. Estelle found it hard to match the person her grandmother was speaking of with the silent papa whose smiles for her touched his lips briefly and never reached his eyes.
On rainy days, Grand-mère let Estelle dress up in her clothes and jewels and even wear her high-heeled shoes. Best of all were the hats, carefully put away in striped hatboxes that lived in a special cupboard in the spare bedroom.
‘One would need ten lifetimes to wear them all,’ Grand-mère used to say, picking up a velvet toque, or a neat little red felt circle with spotted netting attached to it, or one of the many straw hats with wide brims she wore in the summer. These were the ones Estelle loved best. They had flowers and bows and bunches of cherries glazed to a dazzling shine attached to the ribbon round the crown, and she felt like a princess when she put one on and paraded in front of the mirror.
They looked at photographs too, and it was on those afternoons, sitting beside her grandmother on the sofa and turning over the stiff grey pages, that Estelle assembled an image of her mother. There were the photographs of her in various productions, dressed in a tutu and wearing a headdress of one kind and another. One of these, the best of all, was the picture Estelle took with her to England. Grand-mère put it into a frame and packed it among her clothes in the small suitcase she was taking with her. The photograph showed a pretty lady with her hair piled in an arrangement of waves on top of her head. She was dressed in a practice skirt and was leaning against a wickerwork skip, evidently backstage. A gauzy scarf was wound round her neck and she was smiling. On her feet she wore ballet shoes, and Estelle often wondered who had taken this photograph of her mother, who was obviously on her way to change her clothes after some rehearsal. She was smiling, and Estelle always imagined that the smile was directed at her even though she knew that this was impossible. She hadn’t even been born when the photograph was taken.
Helen died of pneumonia at the age of twenty-seven. Estelle was only five but all her life she remembered the sadness she’d felt at the time in the way you remember a distant illness. As she grew older, the pain grew less sharp – not so much a wound anymore but like a hidden bruise, only painful when you prod it.
When Papa announced that she was to be sent to England to stay with her mother’s cousin, it didn’t occur to Estelle to ask why. Henri did not consult his daughter, but she wouldn’t have expected it. You did as you were told, and Estelle wouldn’t have dared to object to anything her father had decided. Her grandmother spoke about the decision only once, as they were packing the child’s few belongings into a suitcase. Estelle was anxious about Antoinette, her doll.
‘I can take her, can’t I, Grand-mère?’
‘Of course, my darling.’ She sat on the edge of Estelle’s bed, and took the little girl on to her lap. Her eyes were red. Since Helen had died, she had wept so much that this was their normal condition. She said, ‘I will write to you every week, Estelle, and you will ask Mrs Wellick to read my letters, won’t you? Then soon you’ll learn to write yourself, and we can correspond like two real friends, two ladies. That’ll be lovely, won’t it? Oh, but I’ll miss you so much, chérie, I will pray for your safety and happiness. And you won’t forget your French will you, Estelle? You won’t become entirely English?’
Estelle shook her head. ‘If I stayed here, I could speak French all the time. Why can’t I stay? Why does Papa want to send me to England?’
She had an idea of England in her mind because of what her mother had told her. There was fog there, and rain and white cliffs.
‘Because,’ said Grand-mère, ‘he wants you to be with someone nearer your own age. Your mother’s cousin has a daughter who’s only a little bit older than you. It’ll be company for you. I’m getting old, and your father is always busy with his work. And your mother would have been so happy to know you’re going to be educated in England. Of course it’s best …’
Grand-mère’s voice faded to nothing and she hugged Estelle to her so closely that the child could hardly breathe for a while. When she let her go, and started talking about Antoinette and how they were going to fit her into the suitcase so as not to crush her dress, Estelle could hear a sort of shaking in her voice and saw her eyes were full of tears. She was blinking a lot, to hold them back.
*
England, when she first saw it, was indeed a place with white cliffs. It seemed to her to be entirely grey – grey skies, grey sea, greyish buildings. They travelled to Yorkshire by train and she stared out of the window as the rain streaked across the glass in horizontal grey lines. When they reached the Wellick house, it was as though Estelle’s father disappeared almost before he arrived. One meal, a kiss and a brief hug, and then he was gone in the same taxi that they had taken from the station. Henri had asked the driver to return for him.
The place looked completely empty to Estelle. It was raining when they arrived, and the sky was so low and grey over the purplish hills that she felt she could reach up and touch it. There were a few sheep grazing on the moor and what her father called ‘a village’ was two streets, a church, a grim-looking grey stone school house, one shop and a tavern of some kind called a ‘pub’, her father said. Her mother’s cousin lived at the far end of the village. On the drive from the station, just before they reached their destination, they passed a big house. Estelle looked at it through the bars of its tall, wrought-iron gates and wondered who lived there. Paula, Estelle’s cousin, told her later that it was called the Witch’s House and that it had been empty for years, spiders and bats the only company for the ghosts who lived there, and hooty owls nesting in the trees that grew behind it.
Estelle first saw Paula looking down from the upstairs front room window as she and her father got out of the taxi. She had a narrow face, a long nose and thin lips, and her brown fringe fell on to a wide forehead. She looked cross, as though she wasn’t a bit pleased that her French cousin was coming to live with the family, and this, Estelle realised quite quickly, was entirely true. Paula thought of her as a nuisance and treated her from the very first with complete disdain and dislike.
Mr and Mrs Wellick – Auntie Rhoda and Uncle Bob – weren’t unkind. Estelle only realised much later that they had little aptitude for conversation or laughter and exchanges with them from the very first day were formal and wooden. Whatever came out of their mouths sounded to her like sentences repeated from a reader, or textbook.
This is your room, dear … we hope you’ll be very happy with us … we’re sure you’ll be a good girl … eat your nice tapioca pudding now. And on and on. Those puddings made every meal a torment. Wobbly or gelatinous or gritty white concoctions appeared regularly on her plate and she found them disgusting. As she swallowed each mouthful, she tried hard to think about Grand-mère’s pastries and lemon mousse, her pots au chocolat, meringues and profiterôles – everything delicious she’d ever eaten.
The house was colourless. Curtains of a dark non-colour hung at the windows; the paintwork was a lighter shade of nothing; the carpets were trying to be green but failing miserably. Auntie Rhoda and Uncle Bob dressed to blend into their surroundings in washed-out grey and a thousand variations on beige.
The Wellicks did their best. Bob Wellick went into Keighley every day to work as a clerk in an accountant’s office and returned at night. Auntie Rhoda stayed at home and looked after Paula and Estelle.
Estelle felt a desperate longing for France that she didn’t have the words to express. On her first night in England she lay in chilly sheets, with Paula asleep in the next bed, and stared at the ceiling. She thought of the taxi, driving away down the road with her father, wh
o never looked back to wave at her, even though she’d stood at the gate for a long time staring after the car. It had truly happened – he’d left her in this place all on her own. Until the moment when she saw the car disappear into the mist that seemed to have fallen while they were drinking tea with the Wellicks, part of Estelle believed that perhaps it wouldn’t happen, that Papa would say Right, my dear. Drink up your milk and come home to Paris with me.
She felt she was nowhere; not in her home, not in some other home, just in a sort of limbo, a non-place that she would never get used to. Where was Grand-mère? Was she thinking of her? Did she miss her? Estelle imagined her grandmother in the high bed at the Rue Lavaudan, with lace-trimmed pillows heaped behind her head, and the thought made tears run down her cheeks. They made puddles under her neck and she was too miserable and scared to call anyone. Also she knew, young as she was, that she didn’t want Auntie Rhoda coming to comfort her. She knew that her cousin’s presence would make her feel worse, not better, so she swallowed her sorrow and, for many nights after that, she’d wait until Paula’s breathing slowed and deepened then cry herself to sleep.
In the end, she became accustomed to her situation and accepted it. She ate, she slept, and eventually she went to school in the village. She became silent because Paula, who was supposed to be her friend and companion, made it quite clear from the moment Estelle moved in that she was quite simply not interested in her. Paula was sly, and Estelle’s days were filled with tiny little pinpricks of unkindness that she could not have legitimately complained about without appearing to be what Paula and her friends called a tell-tale-tit.
One particularly awful memory stood out from the rest. After Estelle had been in England for about two years, she and Paula were invited to celebrate the birthday of one of Paula’s classmates. Estelle was in the class below her cousin at school, so she didn’t see much of her there. Nevertheless, Paula’s best friend, Marjorie, invited Estelle to the party and she was happier and more excited at the prospect than she’d been about anything for a long time. She understood that Paula wasn’t too thrilled at the idea, but she didn’t care. She was going to wear her best dress: scarlet velvet, smocked across the bodice, which was a little short. It reminded her of Grand-mère, who had done the smocking with her own hands, and Estelle was determined to show it off.
