A Girl’s Guide to Kissing Frogs. Victoria Clayton

A virgin pair clacks as loudly on the stage as the husks of coconuts imitating a trotting horse. The second act of Giselle calls for feather-light landings. I had already broken in three pairs for that evening’s performance but, with the state my foot was in after that unlucky sissone, I thought it might be wise to have a fourth. Once the box – the hard section your toes fit into – becomes soft through wear your foot isn’t supported properly. I was worried but not despairing about the injury sustained that morning. Dancers spend practically all their professional lives in pain. Often our feet are soaked in blood. They have to be wrapped in bandages and lashings of antibiotic ointment. The rest of our bodies are tortured by strained muscles and ligaments and the overuse of joints. Perhaps the undeniable romance of suffering for one’s art helps to make the agony bearable.

      Each dancer has her own method for breaking in new pointe shoes. Some people smash them on the floor, some shut them in doors, but I always used a rubber mallet. A few judicious blows weaken the brittle layers of hessian and glue that the toe box is made from. Having moulded them to the shape of your foot so they fit like a second skin, you paint them with shellac which hardens to preserve the exact shape. Then the tips have to be darned to give a good grip and the ribbons sewn on. It was a process with which I was so familiar that it always acted as a tranquillizer for mounting nerves.

      When I had prepared the shoes to my own satisfaction, I examined my body for hair. Dancers have to be perfectly smooth. Everything except eyebrows and eyelashes must be plucked away. This was no problem for me as my body hair was fine and easily discouraged, but girls with dark hair spent hours each week painfully engaged with tweezers and hot wax. Then I sat by the window and contemplated a fading photograph of a woman wearing a long tutu with a garland of flowers round her skirts and more flowers in her hair, en arabesque penchée. Dancers are a superstitious lot and before performances they resort to whatever sympathetic magic they’ve convinced themselves will help them to give of their best – invoking saints, lighting candles, hiding amulets in their underwear, or in my case attempting to commune with the spirit of Anna Pavlova. Pavlova had weak feet, poor turn-out, a scrawny physique and bad placement, yet she was one of the greatest ballerinas of the twentieth century. She was famous for the power and passion of her dancing which she combined with a delicate expressiveness. Technique alone does not make a good dancer. I always reminded myself of this before I went on stage.

      Giselle was due to start at half-past seven. I arrived at the theatre at six. An enormous bouquet of dark pink lilies, pale yellow roses and green hellebores took up much of the valuable space in my dressing room. I looked at the card. With respect and admiration, Miko Lubikoff. I almost screamed aloud. Who else would have read it? Certainly Annie, my dresser, and Cyril, the stage-door keeper. Like everyone else they were gossips. The arrival of the flowers must be all round the theatre by now, which presumably was what Mr Lubikoff had intended. Sebastian was too lofty for mundane conversation, but Madame would lose no time in letting him know. I cut the card into tiny scraps with my nail scissors and threw them into the bin. I would have to tell a lie and it ought to be a good one.

      ‘Hello, darling.’ Lizzie was wearing a mauve quilted dressing gown full of holes. Her face was covered with Max Factor pancake. Her ringlets had been temporarily tamed by a hairnet and her round brown eyes had been extended with black lines almost to her temples. ‘Just came to wish you good – my God! When Annie said it was a enormous bunch she wasn’t exaggerating! Lubikoff’s serious then? You sneaky thing! I do think you might have told me.’

      ‘The flowers, you mean.’ I tried to look unconcerned. ‘They’re from my godmother, actually.’

      Lizzie snorted. ‘You’re going to have to do better than that if you don’t want Sebastian to rend you limb from gorgeous limb. That bouquet can’t have cost less than twenty pounds. Everyone knows that godmothers are mean as hell.’

      It was certainly true that mine was. For my last birthday she had sent me a card with a ‘reduced to half price’ label on the back and a cookery book which was clearly second-hand as half the pages were stuck together. As I cannot afford to be wasteful, I had hollowed out the middle, carving my way through splashes of bygone soups, kedgerees and charlottes to make a cache for valuables. It would come in very useful when I had any.

      ‘Oh, Lizzie! I’ve hated not telling you. But there isn’t actually anything to tell. I got a letter from Mr Lubikoff last week saying that he was coming to the workshop and was hoping to be able to talk to me alone afterwards. That’s all.’

      This was not quite true. He had gone on to say that he considered me a fine classical dancer with extraordinary vitality and a magnificent line. He was anxious that because of my undoubted fitness for the ballets blancs – things like Swan Lake, Giselle and La Bayadère in which the girls wear white tutus – I might be denied the chance to interpret contemporary works. He thought the role of Alice in Through the Looking Glass, which the EB were putting on in a few months’ time would be perfectly suited to developing my range of dramatic expression. I knew this paragraph by heart. Everyone is hungry for praise but I believe dancers are more famished than any other group of artists. During classes we receive a continual flow of negative criticism which, although intended to be constructive, lowers morale. Even after a good performance there is always a painstaking analysis with emphasis on improvements that could be made to the curve of a wrist here, the turn of a head there.

      However, modesty forbad taking Lizzie fully into my confidence. Besides, words cost nothing, and in the theatrical world are flung about like autumn leaves.

      ‘Mind you don’t accept less than twice what Sebastian pays you.’ Lizzie giggled. ‘Oh, my! Won’t he be hopping mad!’

      I felt my stomach lurch at the idea of Sebastian’s rage.

      ‘Marigold! Darling!’ Bruce Gamble, who was dancing the caractère role of Hilarion, had stuck his head round the door. ‘Who’s a lucky girl then? I know for a fact that when Lubikoff wooed Skrivanova he only sent horrid pink carnations.’ He sucked in his cheeks and lowered his eyelids to express disgust. ‘Nasty vulgar things that never die, fit only for cemeteries.’

      ‘You mean these?’ I pointed to the lilies, roses and hellebores. ‘My uncle sent them. Wasn’t it kind of him?’

      Bruce pursed lips blood-red with rouge. ‘I’m afraid you’ll never get on if you can’t lie better than that, my pet. Only people on the make send expensive flowers. Now the person to whom you represent money at the moment is Sebastian. But he’s already got you signed up professionally and he’s fucking you. We all know he’s too stingy to spend as much as a ha’penny on his spunk-buckets.’

      I considered, then abandoned, the idea of taking issue with this graphic description of my status in Sebastian’s life. Scabrous language was Bruce’s only vice. Temperate in all his appetites, he ate only nuts, fruit and sprouting things, drank nothing but tisanes, eschewed sex of any kind and devoted himself, mind and body, to dancing.

      ‘But of course if Miko Lubikoff is thinking of you as his dear little honey-pot—’

      ‘Aie! It is true!’ Irina Yzgrouchka pushed past Bruce and went to bury her face in the flowers, breathing in their delicious scent with a moan of pleasure. She was dressed in a dark blue riding habit and a lavishly plumed hat for the non-dancing role of Bathilde, Count Albrecht’s fiancée. Irina’s age … forty-two … and an accumulation of injuries had put paid to her suppleness. ‘How I will miss you, my own sweet Marigold!’ Irina put her arm round my neck and shed a few tears. Emotions are always near the surface in any ballet company, and illusion and reality are inextricably mixed, but I paid us both the compliment of believing that some of the tears were genuine. I was no threat to her now.

      ‘They’re from an unknown admirer,’ I said, blushing a little beneath the gaze of Bruce and Lizzie.

      Irina looked at me from beneath false lashes clotted with mascara. In accordance with the almost universal practice, she had put a red dot in the inner corner of each eye to make them appear more open, but it looked very odd close to. ‘Darlink, the poor little falsehood is stillborn, no pathetic infant cry,