‘Cross over!’ yelled Grisha. ‘Both lines! And the legs are croisé behind you — all the legs!’ His voice rose to a shriek. ‘You there at the end! What is your name — Kirstin… Where are you going?

Where the slender sad-faced Swede was going, just as in earlier rehearsals, was upstage right, performing rather beautiful and mournful ports de bras as was invariably done at this point in the version of the ballet she had learned in Copenhagen. The petite and exquisite French girl, Marie-Claude, on the other hand, still carried a torch for the Paris Opéra version (which cut five minutes out of the Act Two running time to give the citizens time to refresh themselves) and had bourréed off altogether during a previous run-through to be discovered alone and puzzled in a corridor.

Even with the Russian girls who made up the bulk of the corps — marvellously drilled and strong-backed creatures who rightly knew that only in their country was the art of ballet seriously understood — all was not well. For the hallowed steps which Petipa and Ivanov had devised for Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece in St Petersburg had been wickedly tampered with by a rogue ballet master in Moscow and little Olga Narukov, finding herself en arabesque opposite a swan giving her all to her ronds de jambe, had stamped her foot and declared her intention of returning to Ashkhabad.

The disconsolate Kirstin was comforted by the girl next to her and the rehearsal was resumed. An hour later — exhausted, hungry and dripping with perspiration — they were still practising the fiendishly difficult pattern at the end of the act where the diagonal lines of swans cross over and dissolve to form three groups: unequal groups, since the number seventeen is notoriously difficult to divide by three.

It was at this point that a stage-hand came up to Dubrov and said, ‘There’s a young lady asking to see you. Said you said she could come.’

‘Oh?’ Dubrov was puzzled. ‘Well, bring her along.’

The man vanished and reappeared with a young girl in a blue coat and tam o’shanter, carrying a small suitcase. A schoolgirl, it seemed to him, with worried eyes.

‘I’m Harriet Morton,’ she said in her low, incorrigibly educated voice, ‘from Cambridge. You saw me at Madame Lavarre’s. You said.. ’ Her voice tailed away. She had made a mistake; of course he had not wanted her.

‘Yes.’ Dubrov had recognised her now and smilingly put a hand on her arm. ‘Grisha!’ he called. ‘Come here!’

The swans came to rest, the music stopped and Grisha, frowning at the interruption, came over to Dubrov.

‘This is Harriet Morton,’ said the impresario. ‘Your eighteenth swan.’

The ballet master stared at her. What was he supposed to do now, at the eleventh hour, with this English child?

‘I have just rearranged everything for seventeen,’ he said sourly.

‘Well then, rearrange it back again,’ answered Dubrov.

Grisha raked her with his coal-black eyes. The height was right — she would fit in with the smaller girls and she didn’t look stupid like some of the others. All the same…

‘Which version of Lac is it that you have danced?’ he enquired cautiously. ‘Of Swan Lake? The Petipa-Ivanov? The Sermontoff?’ and as she remained silent, ‘Not that abomination that Orloffsky has made in Krakov?’

Harriet swallowed. ‘I have not danced in any of them, Monsieur.’

‘Not in any of them?’ The ballet master mopped his brow. ‘You are joking me?’

She shook her head.

‘And Casse Noisette? The last act — which production?’

‘No production. I have never danced in Casse Noisette.’

Grisha sighed and became placatory. Obviously the girl was so nervous she had lost her wits. ‘In English it is called The Nutcracker. In this ballet you have been a snowflake?’

‘No.’

‘Or an attendant to the Sugar Plum Fairy?’ Grisha continued imploringly. He broke into the ‘Valse des Fleurs’, revolved, swayed, became an icing-sugar rose.

Harriet shook her head once more and looked beseechingly at Dubrov. But the impresario, who seemed to be enjoying himself, was staring at the ceiling.

‘But a Wili?’ persisted Grisha desperately. ‘A Wili in Giselle?’ And making a final bid, ‘A chicken, then? In Fille Mal Gardée, a little chicken?’ A broken man, he executed a few rapid and chicken-like échappés.

Harriet lifted her head and in a voice she just managed to hold steady said, ‘I have never danced on any stage before.’

A strangled sound came from Grisha. ‘Impossible,’ he managed to say. ‘It is impossible! In five days we leave.’

She made no attempt to entreat or argue, but he saw her bring her small white teeth down on to her lower lip to stop it trembling, and then she bent down to pick up her case.

Grisha swore lustily in Russian. ‘You have your pointe shoes with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then put them on. And hurry!’

‘On the programme you will appear as Natasha Alexandrovna,’ said Dubrov to Harriet as she sat opposite him in his office, a shawl over her practice dress. ‘Dancers cannot have English names.’

‘Natasha! Oh…’ She leaned forward, her eyes alight and on her face the memory still of that terrifying, gruelling, awful and marvellous hour she had just spent on stage.

‘Why? Because of War and Peace?’

‘Yes. I used… oh, to be Natasha, for years and years. It made me so angry with Prince Andrei.’

‘Angry!’ Dubrov glared at her. ‘What are you saying? Prince Andrei is the finest portrayal of goodness in our entire literature.’

‘Goodness? How can it be good to get someone so ready for love and for life… so absolutely ready — and then just go away and leave them? Like setting them some kind of good conduct exam!’

‘An exam which, however, she failed.’

‘How could she help failing!’ Harriet leaned forward, flushed. ‘When you are so ready and longing, and the person you love just goes. He didn’t have to go — it wasn’t the war.’ She broke off, suddenly aghast at her impertinence; she had never spoken like this in Scroope Terrace. ‘I’m sorry.’

Dubrov waved away her apology. ‘Not at all — Smetlikov, one of our critics, takes a very similar view However, we must get down to business. You will attend class every morning at ten. The rest of the time you will work to learn the corps de ballet roles. There are five days to do this and of course the voyage. It is impossible. You will do it.’

‘Yes.’

He looked up, to see again that extraordinary illumination of her face from within which had followed Grisha’s order to put on her dancing shoes. To be told to do the impossible seemed to be all that she desired.

‘The tour is extended. We shall go on to Lima and Caracas, so we will be away all summer.’ And as she nodded, ‘Have you somewhere to stay?’

She flushed. ‘Well, no, not actually. I was wondering if I could sleep in the dressing-room just until we sail?’

‘Impossible.’ He sighed. ‘I will speak to one of the girls — perhaps Marie-Claude or Kirstin will find room for you in their lodgings. You have money?’

‘A little.’

‘Good.’ He put the tips of his plump fingers together and said reflectively, ‘Of course, if someone should come here and ask me if I am employing a girl called Natasha Alexandrovna in my corps de ballet, I shall have to say “Yes”. But if they ask me if I am employing a girl called Harriet Morton, that is a different matter. Of such a girl I naturally know nothing!’

‘Oh… Thank you!’ She paused. ‘You see, my father… didn’t exactly give me permission.’

‘Yes,’ said Dubrov heavily, ‘I gathered this. Perhaps you should tell me…’

Later, meeting Grisha in the corridor, he said, ‘Well, how is she, my little protégée?’

Grisha shrugged. ‘It is a pity. But there; it is only their horses that the British train properly. And now it’s too late… I think?’ He pondered and added, ‘Elle est sérieuse.’

Serious. Not lacking in humour; not pompous or self-important, but serious — giving the job the full weight of her being.

Dubrov nodded and passed on.

The principal dancers, unlike the rest of the Company who were in lodgings or hostels, were accommodated in the Queen’s Hotel in Bloomsbury until their date of departure: a draughty place with dingy lace curtains and terrible food, but handy for the theatre and where the proprietors were friendly and accustomed to the vagaries of their foreign guests.

In this hotel, as in all the others where the dancers had stayed, Dubrov’s room adjoined that of the ballerina, Galina Simonova. Since Simonova’s views on ‘passion as an aid to the dance’ were well known, it might be concluded that Dubrov enjoyed what were technically known as conjugal rights, and this was so. Dubrov’s rights, however, were granted to him on such uncertain terms — were so dependent on the state of Simonova’s back, her Achilles tendon and her reviews — that he had learned to temper the wind to the shorn lamb in a way which was not unremarkable in a man who had once written a ninety-stanza poem in the style of Pushkin entitled Eros Proclaimed.

The evening of Harriet’s arrival at the theatre, he found Simonova lying on the sofa — an ominous sign — staring with black and tormented eyes at her left knee.

‘It’s going again, Sashka; I can feel it! Dimitri has given me a massage, but it’s no use — it’s going. We must cancel the tour!’

He came over to sit beside her and felt her knee, considerably more familiar to him than his own. ‘Let me see.’