No Telling

by Adam Thorpe

  Her face had got tight and less pretty for a moment, as if talking like a teacher made her look like one. I had never heard of Pelleas or Melisande. My upper lip started to quiver of its own accord, and I had to pinch my mouth. Her big greeny eyes looked at me. I hoped I wasn’t drunk. I imagined little spirals above my head, like Capitaine Haddock when he was drunk.

  ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I agree.’

  ‘And I’m sure it’s Pelleas’s baby at the end, even though he’s her husband’s brother. That’s not incest, though. That’s only the brother-in-law.’

  ‘My mother married her brother-in-law,’ I said, too keen to join in. It came out like a boast.

  ‘There you are then. Papatito hates Debussy,’ she added, leaning towards me and pretending to whisper, pointing out her father a few places away on the opposite side of the table. He had a large hooked nose which seemed to go right up to where his hair was swept back a long way above his connecting eyebrows, and had the same sort of mouth as Jocelyne, with a curvy pipe sticking out of it. He was nodding at someone opposite, but now and again his eyes flickered under his glasses in our direction. Jocelyne chattered on like a radio programme.

  ‘He reckons Debussy’s all too sentimental and floaty and not about material things, you know – real life and objective workers and dirty factories and things. He hates romantic ballet, too. He says it’s a sort of drug. He thinks everything’s much better in China. I’m sure he’s right, but we’re not in China, are we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He has a big picture of Chairman Mao in his study, next to Molière or Racine or someone with one of those silly wigs like hair-curlers, and puffs away in there all day with his books. He’s so sweet and dreamy, though, and he adores Debussy really, and even ballet probably, but he can’t say it. Poor old Papapito-tito. He says the Chinese are physically and mentally superior to us because they do funny exercises in public places right through the day. Horrors. Do me some funny mime.’

  ‘No, I can’t. Not here.’

  ‘Why? Are you shy? Master Modigliani. No, Master Diaghilev.’

  She giggled again, as if there was something amusing in the idea of me being Diaghilev, whoever he was. She was nasty and cruel, I thought. A toffee-nosed little Parisian, a fiend from Hell. I was damp and hot under my arms, nervous she would find me out. I wondered if Diaghilev was one of those painters who got drunk and sinned in the Latin Quarter, like Jonquille said Verlaine did. I thought about asking her, but decided not to risk it.

  ‘Yes, ballet’s such a bore but I have to do it,’ she went on. ‘I’m in Coppélia, at the beginning of May. We’re doing it with the senior students of the Academy, for the parents. I don’t like Coppélia, though it’s so popular. Much too lush and romantic, Papatito says, naturally. He’d love me to be in some modern thing set in a steel works with electronic music and men smashing pianos up.’

  ‘Oh, I like it.’

  ‘What? Men smashing pianos up in a steel works?’

  ‘Copperela.’

  ‘What?’ she squeaked, her face all screwed up as if I smelt funny. Her mother, two places down the table on the same side, frowned at her again.

  ‘That’s what I call it.’

  ‘Why?’

  I shrugged, licking lips that had gone dry and scratchy. I had fizzled out. It was the end of the road.

  ‘You’re a romantic, you silly thing,’ she laughed, and cupped her chin in her hand and put her head on one side – making my tummy go on one side, too, like a ship taking water.

  ‘A bit like Rimbaud,’ I mumbled, thinking of things Carole had said.

  ‘Oh, Rimbaud! What a sensible boy! He gave up poetry to become a businessman among the Arabs and niggers, didn’t he?’

  I saw her father’s head turn and he glared at her, his connecting eyebrows making a black cloud above his eyes. She blew a kiss at him and the cloud rose. The fact is, none of her phrases seemed quite to belong in her mouth: if I closed my eyes and forgot the squeakiness of her voice, she could have been an adult. I almost started to recite the one poem by Rimbaud that I knew, about the dead soldier in the valley among the crows, but my mouth was too dry.

  ‘Why don’t you come along and watch it, then, Master Diaghilev?’ she went on. ‘If you adore ballet so much. It’s not the original choreography, of course, it’s been simplified for us. I mean, the real thing’s full of horrible brisés and cabrioles and whatnot. Swanilda has to do eight brisés across the stage, at one point. Eight! I find it hard to do one. I’m only just learning to go on pointe. We’re not all Claude Bessy, are we?’

  ‘Watch it?’

  ‘Coppélia. You said it was your favourite.’

  ‘Could I?’

  ‘My favourite bit’s when Franz blows kisses at Coppélia. The actual robot, I mean.’

  ‘The robot?’

  ‘Well, that’s what she is. Isn’t she? A mechanical doll is a sort of robot and that’s what she is! Don’t you think, Master Diaghilev?’

  I nodded, as if thinking about it.

  ‘I would love,’ she went on, ‘to do a really modern production of Coppélia, a modern robot in it. I mean, set in the future with funny space-suits and this silvery girl robot. What do you think?’

  Her eyes were searching mine, but not in a nice way. They were like fingers, searching through my messy cupboard of a head for something that would give me away.

  ‘They’re going to have phones like cigarette packets by 1990,’ I said. ‘With screens to see the person you’re talking to.’

  ‘Brilliant! I’ll have Franz trying to call Coppélia on a tiny phone and poor old Swanilda trying to call him – and then seeing Coppélia behind him on the little screen and getting all jealous!’

  ‘I don’t know if you’d see all that clearly,’ I said, as if I was a brilliant professor. ‘And everywhere’ll have doors that slide open as soon as you come up to them, like in Star Trek.’

  She didn’t take any notice.

  ‘I’ll have to change the choreography a touch, of course, but Terry says you should always make new. I’m so full of ideas. Oh, I simply adore Franz, stupid old Franz, the way he dances for Coppélia and then blows her the kiss. Such a fool. That’s my favourite moment. So what’s your favourite moment?’

  I bit my lip.

  ‘That’s mine, too.’

  ‘What is?’

  I started to go redder than I’d ever gone in my life, without warning. The fire started in my neck, took me by the ears, crept up my cheeks into my scalp and stayed there, 250 degrees on the oven, burning my brains into a sticky mess.

  ‘Same as your favourite bit,’ was all I could manage from behind the wall of flames. The word ‘kiss’ seemed to be lying at the end of a very long and shaky bridge which I couldn’t cross because of the heat. Amazingly, she didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘You and your romanticism! All the boys I know like the bit when Franz flirts away with the sexy village girl. She’s a whore, really. She would be if I was directing. That’s what I’m going to be, if my theatrical calling doesn’t sweep me into films. I don’t mean a whore! I mean a top director. And don’t you dare say they’re the same thing, Master Diaghilev! I’m so full of ideas I want to burst. Look, someone has to come along and watch us. The main dancers are quite good, of course, but if they were very good they’d be at the Opéra, wouldn’t they? The stuffy old Opéra. My Academy is supposed to be chic and forward-thinking, that’s the thing. But we’re not the tops. I don’t care. I’m not going to be a ballet dancer, am I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I hope it’s not cursed. I expect you know, Master Diaghilev, that St Léon died of a heart attack only two months after the first performance.’

  ‘St Léon?’

  I knew quite a few saints, especially more modern ones, but not him.

  ‘The choreographer, brainbox! The brilliant choreography for Coppélia!’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Well, he
dropped dead only two months afterwards! Only two months after the opening night!’

  I pretended to look impressed, the blush dying down and leaving my skin damp.

  ‘And then – I’ll bet you don’t know this, either, then. So did the star. I mean, the brilliant and very pretty Italian girl playing Swanilda – she died in the same month!’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Only she died of smallpox on her seventeenth birthday. Tragic, isn’t it? Not much older than us! So sad. Ephemeral, that’s what she was. Like a fairy. She only did eighteen performances, or maybe twenty-eight. Anyway, I’ll bet you didn’t know that. I can’t remember her name. I expect I will. Something like Botticelli, but it isn’t.’

  ‘Belmondo?’

  ‘And then, wait for it,’ she went on, not hearing me; ‘the dancer who played the Doctor, Doctor Coppélius. Well?’

  ‘Mn?’

  ‘Guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  The wine was making each detail incredibly perfect. The crochet in the tablecloth. The bit where her lips met her skin. The glittering balls hanging from the green dagger-shapes.

  ‘You are slow, Master Diaghilev! He popped it, of course. He dropped dead, too – just weeks after, would you believe! Like a plague! There was a curse on it, that’s my theory – I mean on Coppélia. That’s what I think. I’m going to write a novel about it, when I’m a bit older. Based on fact. It’ll sell millions and I’ll retire to Tahiti. Do you believe in curses?’

  I nearly shrugged again, but realised in time that I had over-shrugged already.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said.

  ‘You either do or you don’t! Well, Coppélia was cursed. That’s my theory. I mean, think what happened just after it! The Germans!’

  ‘The Germans?’

  ‘The war, silly!’

  ‘Me and my friend, we found a German side-car from the war. Gestapo. No, probably SS. Same thing, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t mean that war, darling,’ she said. My heart inflated to the size of the chair in my bedroom.

  ‘No, I know. I was just saying it.’

  She gave a long sigh, rolling her eyes up to the orange stripes on the ceiling.

  ‘Wars are so second-rate. But especially that one. That one was third-rate. Papatito thinks it started everything off.’

  ‘We won that war,’ I went on, thinking of my grandfather’s limp.

  ‘Oh, don’t be a cretin. Of course we didn’t. It was a most humiliating disaster, which is why you never hear about it. Wasn’t it, Papatito?’

  Her father turned his head towards her.

  ‘Wasn’t 1870 a humiliating disaster for us, Papatito?’

  He leaned forward, straining to hear. The pipe with the big curve in it wasn’t lit.

  ‘The war of 1870! He’s going deaf, of course. Wasn’t it simply humiliating? For France?’

  Her father dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin and spoke in a low rumble of sentences that seemed to come together and then spread out without ever reaching their end or meaning anything. Everyone else seemed to be listening, too, which made me want to disappear.

  Jocelyne turned to me, triumphant, as the others grimaced or nodded and started talking about the Germans. ‘Papa should know,’ she said. ‘He’s an Academician. He’s studying the philosophy of religion which Jean-Paul – Sartre, I mean – told him was just what he – Jean-Paul, I mean – wanted to study, too.’

  ‘I thought you meant the Great War,’ I said, definitely feeling a cretin. ‘I’m not that stupid, I know about the war of 1870.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. The Prussians completely smashed us. The Battle of Sedan. And …’

  ‘Ye-es?’

  She was just like a teacher. I could see her as a really awful teacher.

  ‘Bagneux,’ I said.

  ‘Bagneux?’ she cried, scoffingly.

  ‘There was a battle at Bagneux, for a start. In 1870.’

  ‘A tiny suburban one, probably. Where have you got up to?’

  ‘Up to?’

  ‘In History, darling?’

  ‘Clovis.’

  She laughed as if Clovis was a joke.

  ‘Anyway,’ she chattered on, as if she’d won a round, ‘Coppélia was, of course, as everybody knows, the very last ballet of the Romantic movement. Why? Because of the curse! That’s my own idea, by the way. It made the lovely Second Empire collapse. You see? I’d have loved to have lived then. All anyone talked about was love. And then it was the dreadful war, and then the scheming Empress had to flee her palace and join her stupid sick husband Louis-Napoleon the Third. And then Papa’s heroic workers burnt it down, hip hip hurrah for the Reds.’

  ‘Burnt what down?’

  ‘The Tuileries Palace, O slow one! Don’t you know? I can practically see it from my bedroom – I mean where it used to be, it’s now just silly municipal flower-beds with horrible pansies in them. And then there was the Siege, the Siege of Paris, of course, by the Germans and after the Siege of Paris the heroic workers were slaughtered by their own countrymen, the horrid peasants that Papatito adores so much, along with lots of women and children. All that’s going to be in my novel.’

  I was fiddling with a bit of bread, trying to understand what she was chattering on about.

  ‘The heroine’s that tragic real-life ballerina beginning with B who’s the star of Coppélia and of course she falls deeply deeply in love with a Communard and they both die one after the other. It’ll sell millions, I’m sure. It’s going to be called The Curse of Coppélia and it’ll have a bit at the end about the H-bomb. Their mistake was not to empty the Banque de France, of course. That’s what Papatito says: everything comes down to who’s got the gold. You know – the Siege of Paris, when they all ate rats. Ugh. Would you eat a rat, even if you were starving?’

  I shrugged yet again, still not really understanding what she’d been chattering about. I’d never heard of this Siege, anyway. My uncle and Emil and others were having some sort of argument about Germans further up the table.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t!’ she went on. ‘That’s when she died, on her seventeenth birthday. This brilliant ballerina. A name like Bugatti. Very pretty and so brilliant. There was that other one whose tutu caught fire at about the same time but she’s different. It’s bound to sell millions and win lots of prizes. What’s her stupid name? She only died because of the horrible Prussians besieging Paris, lots of smallpox and things and not enough vegetables probably and no heating. But deep down it was because of the Curse. So ephemeral, she was. Like a fairy. I’m going to be a sort of Colette, only historical,’ she added, and took a gulp of her wine.

  ‘Vegetables are very important,’ I said, and took a gulp of mine, too. It got stuck in my throat and I nearly coughed it up again. My throat burned.

  ‘Oh, you are adorable, Master Diaghilev,’ she cried, in a way that didn’t make me feel at all good. Then she giggled into her hand. She was obviously a bit drunk. ‘Papatito says we’d be much better off without the Emperor, between you and me,’ she went on in a pretend whisper, her hair brushing my ear.

  ‘We haven’t got an Emperor,’ I said, hesitating just in case we had and I’d forgotten.

  ‘What do you think de Gaulle is, then?’ she laughed, and jabbed me painfully in the waist with her elbow. I winced – immediately turning the wince into a silly grin.

  ‘We didn’t do all this at school,’ she said, not looking at me. ‘Our ballet teacher told us because she says it’s so important to keep the intellect exercised, we’re not just muscles! She’s quite political, you see, like Terry. She’s a Communist, but not the same type as Papatito. I said to her once, she ought to join the Bolshoi. She got very annoyed.’

  ‘Muscles?’

  ‘Oh yes, you have to be very strong, you know. Look at a ballet dancer’s legs! They’re not thin, you know. They’re thick and hard.’

  She slapped her thighs, catching the tablecloth and sending her dessert fork onto he
r lap and giving a little shriek. Her father frowned, but with a sort of smile around his pipe. She winked at him and put the dessert fork back and sipped some more wine, her curls bobbing around her ears. I found my mouth open and closed it quickly. The table’s noise was like a flood of warm water up to my ears: somehow it had been shut out while she was talking. Emil was saying, in a loud voice that everyone was turning towards as if too tired to chat among themselves, that French military equipment had not been up to German standards. It wouldn’t have made any difference if not one piece of it had been captured. My uncle said what about the French 47mm anti-tank gun. Emil snorted and slapped his hands on the table and said that he had seen with his own eyes what a German 75mm Pak 40 did to a British tank from a range of 3,000 metres and my uncle said he hoped Emil wasn’t part of the gun’s crew and Emil threw his napkin down with a furious face and stood up and started unbelting his trousers to show us the hideous scar he’d got on his arse while fighting for free France and only his wife pulling on his arm and my uncle apologising and pouring out more wine calmed him down. Everyone else in the restaurant was looking at our table, but Jocelyne’s father sat very calmly with a knowing little smile around his pipe-stem during the whole thing. I was disappointed not to see Emil’s hideous scar.

  ‘How embarrassing,’ said Jocelyne. ‘Like little boys. You’re not like them, thank goodness, Master Diaghilev. You like ballet.’

  She didn’t look at me as she said this, and I felt worried that she might turn it into a joke by bursting out laughing. She didn’t.

  ‘I like sport,’ I lied.

  ‘Oh, what a pity. I thought you were interesting.’

  Her greeny eyes slid to the side of her face, looking at me without turning her head, her mouth rumpled up as if she was pretending to be sad. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Have you, er, really got tickets?’

  ‘What tickets?’

  ‘For your show. For Copp-élia.’

  ‘Oh there aren’t any tickets,’ she said, turning her head now in a swing of curls. ‘You just come along. But don’t expect the Opéra, will you? Don’t expect Anna Pavlova or Claude Bessy, Master D.! I’ve got Claude Bessy’s signature, you know. We went to the Opéra in January and she was still on crutches but now she isn’t! They say she’s going to be dancing in Daphnis et Chloé next month! Imagine! What heroism! Back from the dead! Can you imagine?’