Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs

by Clayton, Victoria

  ‘Married? Bobbie, you might have told me! And who is Finn?’

  ‘I know it was bad of me but truthfully we didn’t tell anyone. We married in the register office in Dublin with two colleagues from Trinity College as witnesses and afterwards we went out to dinner, just the two of us, and that was it. He has three children, you see, by his first wife, and we didn’t want to make a fuss. Most people in Connemara – that’s where we live – wouldn’t even consider that we are married. Divorce isn’t recognized in Ireland, though Finn went to a lot of trouble to get his first marriage annulled. I wouldn’t have minded living in sin for the rest of my life as long as I could be with him.’

  ‘Tell me about Finn. It’s a beautiful name.’

  Bobbie smiled. ‘Oh … he’s very clever. And very good … though he’d laugh if he heard me say that. He’s very handsome, very Irish, though that could mean any number of things. He’s writing a biography about Parnell – the Irish politician – and he’s an advisor to the government on education. Does that make him sound dull? He certainly isn’t that. I only have to see the back of his head and I get butterflies.’ She was silent for a moment, thinking. ‘He’s in everything I do, in everything I see, in every thought, in every hope, every dream. Yet I don’t really know how to describe him.’

  I laughed. ‘Well, the picture so far is encouraging. Tell me about the children? How do you get on with them?’

  ‘I love them. And I hope they love me. It would take too long to tell you the whole story now and I want to hear about you, but Curraghcourt – that’s Finn’s house where his family have lived for centuries – is the most wonderful place and we’ve opened it to the public to help pay for repairs. And I’ve started an antiques business. That’s why I’m here, looking up dealers, people I used to know when I worked for the auction house. Finn and I never have a minute to call our own, except sometimes after dinner we sneak off alone together and then – well – it’s paradise.’

  I tried, but failed, to imagine wanting to be with someone that much. This was worrying. Was I a cold heartless person, incapable of love? I had no time to answer this question because Bobbie was asking me about my leg.

  ‘I’ve got an appointment in six weeks.’

  ‘And how long till you can dance on it?’

  I looked down at my glass. ‘About two months. That’s if …’ Despite my best intentions my nose began to prickle and my throat became tight. Tears began to well. ‘Bobbie, I’m terrified … if it doesn’t heal properly I may never be able to dance again.’

  ‘Oh, darling!’

  ‘And the awful thing is, life without dancing seems … utterly pointless. If I try to imagine myself not dancing – I don’t even know who I am!’

  After this confession I broke down completely. Bobbie got up and put her arms round me and I sobbed hard on her shoulder. At last the storm of weeping blew itself out. I mopped my face on the handkerchief she offered. ‘Thanks. I never seem to have one. I’ll wash it and send it back.’

  ‘Keep it. I really am sorry to have touched such a tender place.’

  ‘I needed to say it. It’s something we’re all so frightened of that it’s like a taboo. But it’s been in my mind all the time, haunting me like something terrifying you think might be under the bed only you can’t bring yourself to bend down and look in case it’s staring at you with glaring red eyes …’

  ‘Your problem is you’ve got so much imagination. Don’t you remember, when you were little, that story about a scarecrow who came alive? Kate thought it was funny but you woke screaming for several nights after. Not that imagination isn’t generally a good thing, and you wouldn’t be such a good dancer if you didn’t have it.’

  ‘If I can’t dance again I’ve just got to try to face up to it. I certainly won’t be the only one. It happens all the time. Mostly feet but sometimes backs and knees – then it’s goodbye career, hello teaching, reviewing, whatever you can get.’ I was annoyed to hear my voice wobble pathetically. ‘When you think how few opportunities there are to dance the principal roles and how many good dancers there are I ought to be grateful that I’ve had the chance to do Lac and Giselle and Manon and all those brilliant parts.’

  ‘What you need is—’ Bobbie broke off with a little yell as Siggy poked out his head from beneath the eiderdown and bared his incisors at her.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s only Siegfried. He’s hungry, I expect.’ I leaned over the side of the bed and put a morsel of chicken on his saucer. He pushed his head out further, looked at Bobbie with unfriendly eyes and hopped down to the floor. Siggy was possessive and jealous, but his marked preference for me above all other beings was good for my morale.

  ‘A rabbit!’ Bobbie laughed and bent down to stroke him.

  Too late I cried, ‘Look out, he bites!’

  Already his head had flashed forward. For a slightly overweight creature he could move fast when he wanted. She drew back her hand with a cry of pain. A drop of blood burst out on her finger.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Please don’t feel hurt. He bites everybody but me.’

  ‘It’s all right. I like animals – even savage ones.’ Bobbie really was an exemplary guest. She sucked the wound, then examined it. ‘It’s all right. Just a tiny puncture. He’s certainly a very good-looking rabbit.’

  Most people were insulting about Siggy after he had bitten them. Though I deplored his character, I could not help feeling proud of him. He had lovely orange eyes, neat little ears and a beautiful fluffy coat of thundercloud grey.

  ‘I’ve had him a year now. I found some children trying to push a sack down the culvert at the end of the street. I asked them what was in it and they said it was a rabbit which bit them all the time so they’d decided to drown it. Of course I took the sack away from them. Immediately they all ran off so I was lumbered, really. He’s never once bitten me. It’s as if he knows I rescued him from a horrible fate and he’s grateful.’

  ‘A very intelligent rabbit.’ Bobbie looked kindly at Siggy. I felt the sort of glow parents of an infant prodigy must enjoy. ‘Marigold, do listen to me a minute.’ Bobbie offered her camembert crust to Siggy who chomped it down, making a mess of his whiskers. ‘I don’t think it’s good for you to stay here. You’re lonely, freezing and semi-starving. People who are recovering from operations need warmth and good food and fresh air.’ She looked apologetic. ‘I can smell the stairs a tiny bit in here. You mentioned someone called Sebastian. Who is he and why is it up to him whether you go into a nursing home or not?’

  ‘He’s the director of the Lenoir Ballet Company. And my lover … sort of.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘Well, strictly in the physical sense. Not in the sense of loving each other. Though we might be engaged to be married. I’m not really sure.’

  Bobbie took away our plates and refilled our glasses. Then she lay on the bed next to me and rearranged the blankets to cover both of us. ‘That’s better. I can feel the blood returning to my feet. Now, tell me all.’

  I was entirely frank and did not bother to garb the relationship with spurious romance. Bobbie listened intently, putting in the occasional question which I answered truthfully.

  When I had told everything there was to tell she said, ‘I see. Now I feel more strongly than ever that you ought, for a time at least, to have … a little holiday. If you could contemplate the journey to Ireland, Finn and I will be absolutely delighted to have you to stay. You never saw such wonderful countryside and you’d love Patience, his sister who lives with us and … why are you shaking your head?’

  ‘Thank you so much, darling Bobbie, for asking me, but I should be conscious the whole time that I was yet another person requiring attention and taking up your time. You said it yourself. It’s paradise when you can be alone with Finn. It’s enormously kind of you to offer and perhaps when you’ve become used to him and are content just to rest your eyes on him across a crowded room, I’ll come willingly.’

  Bobbie laugh
ed. ‘I’d love to have you. Truthfully.’

  ‘Thanks. But I’d be a martyr to guilt the whole time.’

  ‘Well, then, the alternative is—’

  ‘All right! I know whither this is tending. You want me to go home.’

  ‘Just for a few weeks.’ Bobbie looked at me pleadingly. ‘Dimpsie’s such an angel and she’d love to have you. Think of the scenery and the clean air. Proper food, relaxation, new horizons. You might even enjoy it.’

  ‘I might,’ I replied rather glumly.

  Less than twenty-four hours later I was standing on the platform at King’s Cross with Siggy in a travelling basket and a one-way ticket to Northumberland.

  6

  ‘Safe journey, darling.’ Bobbie had been saintly, getting me and my suitcase downstairs and into a taxi, coming to the station with me, helping me on to the train and stowing my suitcase behind my seat. We kissed each other. ‘Give Dimpsie my love. Goodbye Siggy.’ She tapped the door at one end of the wicker cage that she had kindly bought that morning from a pet shop. We had draped it with a shawl, leaving the door uncovered so he could breathe. Siggy launched himself at the bars with snapping teeth. ‘I hope they won’t make you put him in the luggage van. Perhaps you’d better put the coat over him as well when the ticket inspector comes round.’

  ‘Not your beautiful coat,’ I protested. ‘I’d never ever forgive myself if he chewed it.’ When Bobbie had seen the state of my fur cloak which had once lapped the shoulders of the Snow Queen and in which Siggy had bitten a hole in just where my tail would have come through if I’d had one, she had insisted on lending me her own pale-honey-coloured cashmere coat to travel in. The arrangement was that I would return it when next she came to London.

  ‘It really isn’t that precious. I’m going straight to Heathrow and I’m being met by Finn the other end. I shan’t miss it.’

  ‘You’ve been angelic.’ I hugged her again.

  ‘Write when you get the chance and let me know how things are. There’s the whistle. I must go. Goodbye, darling.’

  She put a carrier bag on the seat beside me and rushed to get off. She waited on the platform until the train drew away. I saw her smiling figure recede with a sharp pang of parting. To console myself I opened the carrier bag. Bobbie was a friend in a million. Paper parcels contained slices of ham and salami, lettuce, poppy-seed rolls and a bar of hazelnut chocolate. There was also a bottle of apple juice and a copy of this month’s Vogue. Including the change at Newcastle, the journey was going to take five hours. I burrowed in my knapsack to find The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, which was second on the list of required reading for the intelligent conversationalist. Gibbon and I had gone far enough together for the time being.

  It was a second-hand copy from the bargain box of a local bookshop. The binding was an attractive blue but the book smelt as though it had been macerated for a hundred years in a leaky coffin in a subfluvial vault. And Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, I read, dipping into the middle. This was the stuff all right, I thought to myself, and prepared to be enlightened. But Little-faith was of another temper. His mind was on things divine …

  I woke, absolutely starving, as we were drawing into Grantham station. I blessed Bobbie’s forethought. Getting to the restaurant car would have been quite as difficult as anything Christian could possibly have undergone. I ate much of the picnic and surreptitiously fed bits of ham and salami through the bars of Siggy’s prison-house, then wiped my fingers and took up the magazine. I was enjoying The Pilgrim’s Progress, of course, but Vogue might be a better digestif.

  I studied the models with interest. We dancers feel acute anxiety about our bodies, not surprisingly as we spend most of our time staring into mirrors. We observe people’s body shapes before faces, voices, cleverness, niceness. This probably seems terribly superficial, but how a dancer looks is extremely important. A small head, long neck, short torso and long, long slender legs are the ideal. The models were clearly giants, with large thigh bones, huge feet and big jaws, quite the wrong conformation for a dancer and the opposite of everything I had been taught to admire. They stood pigeon-toed with their hips and knees thrust forward and heads drooping and all their weight on the back of their feet.

  Dancers spend a great deal of effort in perfecting ‘turnout’ with not just our feet but our knees and hips at a quarter to three. This is the most fundamental aspect of classical ballet technique. Some dancers have perfect turnout naturally, but I had really had to work at it. I had drilled myself to make it second nature to turn out my legs during every single second of class and in performance. On stage, with the appropriate clothes, pointe shoes and perfectly disciplined movements, what is actually a distortion looks superbly graceful. When I was walking in the street or anywhere not to do with dancing I had to remind myself all the time to turn my toes in, so as not to look like a waddling duck.

  We were trained to stretch our necks, lift our chins and chests, straighten our backs and stand with just the skin of our heels on the ground so that our weight was centred on the arch of our feet. The models scowled with what Madame would have called ‘dead’ eyes. We were supposed to look engaged, expressive, reflective. It just shows how subjective beauty is.

  After I had marvelled at the prices of the clothes and read the advertisements, I closed my eyes in a well-stuffed haze and thought long and hard about Sebastian without coming to any conclusion except that now I had at least five weeks with no possibility of seeing him he seemed much less frightening. I imagined signing a contract with Miko and receiving ovations and rave reviews from Didelot for my interpretation of Kitri in Don Quixote.

  I must have slept again, for the next thing I knew we were drawing into York station. As we travelled further north the ridges of the ploughed fields were frosted with white and the occasional snowflake glanced against the window. By the time we left Darlington, snow was falling steadily and the sky had taken on a bluish tinge presaging dusk. While dreaming about taking the Met by storm in the jazzy, flashy Rubies section of Balanchine’s Jewels, I finished the rest of Bobbie’s picnic. Siggy deigned to eat some of the hazelnut chocolate, which could not have been good for him but the nuts kept him busy. I enjoyed looking at the white hills and dales that formed graceful parabolas like giant elbows and knees carved from marble.

  A ticket inspector came aboard at Durham, so I dropped my shawl over the front of Siggy’s cage. When I removed it later he had eaten half the fringe, this despite my having given him an old jersey for this very purpose, which as far as I could see remained untouched.

  ‘You really are a naughty boy!’ I said with some heat, because the shawl was a fine wool paisley printed in lovely colours of rose and ochre which I had been delighted to find in an Oxfam shop.

  A man sitting opposite, wearing a dog collar, glanced at me with an expression of alarm and then stared sternly out of the window, slowly reddening.

  It was nearly dark when we chugged into Newcastle. The rawness of the weather had stolen the colour from people’s lips and cheeks and restored it to their noses. Each light had its own murky halo and every cold surface a silvery sheen of condensation. Our train was late, which left me five minutes to catch the connection to Haltwhistle. With my bag slung round my neck and Siggy’s basket in one hand, I tried with the other to pull my suitcase from where Bobbie had stowed it between the seats.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the clergyman. ‘I’m awfully sorry, would you mind …?’

  He pretended not to hear me and made a bolt for the exit, coat flapping.

  ‘Give it here, pet.’ A small stout woman in a grey gabardine mackintosh took hold of the handle of my case and tugged it into the aisle, along the carriage and down on to the platform. Luckily, a cool-looking porter sauntered up with a trolley.

  ‘I’m so grateful,’ I said to the woman, whose forehead glistened with perspiration.

  She glared at the other passengers who were flowing around us like a torrent round a boulder.
‘It’s come to something if we can’t help a poor bloody cripple.’

  I smiled. ‘It’s only temporary.’

  She clicked her tongue. ‘I hope so, I’m sure.’ She trotted away on fat little legs.

  My porter was waiting patiently by an open carriage door at a platform on the far side of the station when I hobbled up on my crutches, feeling feverish with anxiety and exhaustion.

  The carriage was one of those old-fashioned ones with a corridor and compartments seating six. An old lady sitting by the door drew back her legs to accommodate my elephantine limb. I fell into the window seat and brushed my damp hair from my forehead with a glove beaded with moisture. The porter put Siggy’s basket on the seat beside me and my suitcase into the rack. I gave him a twenty-pence piece, which I could ill afford. He looked at it as though I had handed him something phosphorescent with putrefaction. A whistle blew and the train began to crawl out of the station.

  While I waited for my breathing to return to normal, I ran a cursory eye over my fellow passengers. Opposite me was a wispy blonde with magenta lipstick. She was studying a magazine with intense concentration, holding it at an angle that made it possible for me to see photographs of the princess of Wales peeping shyly from beneath the brims of various neat little hats. The marriage of Charles and Diana the summer before had provided the stuff of dreams for every woman in the land. She turned to a picture of the balcony kiss, put her head on one side and pursed her lips slightly, perhaps imagining what it was like to be kissed by a prince of the blood royal.

  Next to her was a small boy, who fixed his eyes on my plastered leg. The corner seat diagonally opposite mine was taken by a dark-haired man who wore a coat with an astrakhan collar. He was reading the New Scientist. The old lady who had drawn back her legs to make room for me had taken out a bag of sweets and was sucking one with a slow circular motion of her jaw, while staring at the picture of a heathery mountain and lake above the man’s head.