‘Kira is the nearest to you in size,’ said Dubrov to Simonova as she lay on the yellow silk couch of her dressing-room, fanning herself with a moulting ostrich fan.

‘Impossible! I will not be represented by a girl with square thighs.’

Dubrov sighed. ‘Lydia then. She is a little taller than you, but the colouring’s right.’

There was a pause while Simonova pulled up her kimono and studied her left knee. Then, ‘Give it to Harriet,’ said the ballerina.

‘Harriet?’ Dubrov looked up, surprised, from the knee he had automatically begun to massage. ‘I hadn’t thought of giving her anything extra — she is so new. But you’re right, she is the same height as you and the same build.’

‘She will know what to do,’ said Simonova. ‘A little too well, perhaps.’

‘Yes.’

Harriet had returned from her luncheon date with a blind, lost look that had made Dubrov want to shake the handsome and generous Mr Verney. Since then, saying nothing to anyone, she had worked if anything harder than before. It should have been a relief to be free of the child’s enthusiasms; Dubrov had suffered as much as anyone from Harriet’s determination to befriend the loathsome vultures that sat on the verandah of the hotel, holding out their black wings to dry after the rain, or the glad cries with which she announced the presence of a green and crimson frog who had taken refuge in the showers. But to see her become once more the quiet resigned girl she had been in Cambridge was hard.

‘What happened?’ Marie-Claude had demanded of Kirstin, returning to find Harriet white and silent, practising at the barre. And reproaching herself: ‘I should have stayed to see to her toilette.’

‘Oh, Marie-Claude, everything isn’t clothes. I saw how he looked at her when she came out of the stage-door. It was a misunderstanding, a quarrel — it must have been.’

Her summons to Dubrov’s office filled Harriet with alarm. Had he discovered after all that she had stood in for Marie-Claude?

‘You are to be the swan at the window instead of Olga,’ announced Dubrov, adding firmly, ‘It is an extremely small part and naturally there will be no increase in privileges. Or in pay.’

‘Oh!’ Her thin face lit up. Whatever happened there was still work. ‘But why me — surely one of the others…?’

‘It was Madame Simonova’s suggestion. Grisha will show you the movements after lunch. Then we shall rehearse once with the lights before the performance. You go on tonight, of course.’

‘Tonight! I can’t…’ she began to say, and stopped. For she could, as a matter of fact. This she could do.

Simonova herself attended the rehearsal, as did Dubrov and a surprising number of the cast. Harriet learned the steps quickly and indeed there was little enough to do except stand on her pointes and flutter her piteous arms. Nor was it possible for her to miss her cue, for it was the swan motif itself, with its haunting oboes, that heralded her brief entrance. In half an hour it was clear that Harriet would manage, and indeed there was no girl in the corps who could not have managed this unexacting task.

All the same, those who watched her were in their different ways, displeased.

‘Poor child! It is a mistake to be like that,’ said Simonova, flopping down on the bed when she was back in her room at the Metropole. ‘Of course, it is good for one’s dancing afterwards.’ She took off her shoes and dropped them on the floor. ‘What was the name of that hussar, do you remember? In the Rodenzky regiment? The year I met you.’

‘Count Zugarovitch,’ said Dubrov, coming to sit beside her on the bed. The young blue-eyed hussar had been killed in a duel soon afterwards and he could afford to be magnanimous.

‘Yes. It is because of him that I am unsurpassed in Giselle,’ said Simonova with her usual modesty. ‘Still, it is awful, this love.’ She laid her head with unaccustomed tenderness against his shoulder — a gesture which, though it was intended for the dead hussar, Dubrov proceeded to turn to good account.

Marie-Claude, accosting Harriet as she changed in the chorus dressing-room, was simply angry.

‘There is no need for you to act like that; it is only a rehearsal and the whole scene will be played behind gauzes and there is no extra pay.’

‘Like what?’ asked Harriet, bewildered.

‘As though you were really suffering. As though you were really outside and lost and frightened and looking in on happiness from which you were excluded et tout ça. It is not necessary,’ raged Marie-Claude.

‘You are certainly a good actress, Harriet,’ said Kirstin. ‘You seemed absolutely anguished.’

‘Did I?’ Harriet was surprised. ‘It’s just that I know… what it is like. I know how it is to be at a window… outside… and to look in on a lighted room and not be able to make anybody hear.’

‘How can you know? You have not experienced it.’

Harriet hung Odette’s glittering crown on a peg above the mirror and reached for her comb. ‘Perhaps I am going to one day,’ she said. ‘There is a man in England who says that time is curved and that we can sometimes see—’

But Marie-Claude was entirely uninterested in metaphysical theories about time. ‘It is only necessary to do the steps,’ she snapped.

And after all Marie-Claude was right, for when Harriet came on that night she was just a distant, half-lit figure, vanishing in an instant — and the only man who might have known that it was Harriet and not Olga who trembled and beckoned at the window was a hundred miles away.

9

‘Eat, Coronel,’ begged Furo, pushing the tin plate towards his master.

The brightly patterned fish, salted and grilled on a driftwood fire, smelled delicious but Rom shook his head. He sat leaning against the twisted trunk of a mango, letting the fine sand of the praia on which they had made camp run through his fingers. Nearby the Daisy May floated quietly at anchor. A cormorant turned a yellow-ringed and disbelieving eye on the intruders and flapped off across the river. In the still water, the colours of the sunset changed from flame to primrose and a last glimmer of unearthly green.

Rom, usually aware of every stirring leaf, noticed nothing; he was lost in the horror of what he had just seen.

He had meant simply to spend a few days on the river, wanting to shake off the memory of that ill-fated lunch with Harriet. Taking only the silent and devoted Furo — loading the boat with the usual gifts of fish-hooks and beads and medical supplies — he had travelled up the Negro, bound for an island where tree orchids grew in incredible profusion and the snowy egrets made their nests.

Then something — he had no idea what it was — made him turn up the Ombidos river. There had long been rumours of gross ill-treatment of the Indians by the men who ran the Ombidos Rubber Company, and the report de Silva had sent down had made disquieting reading, but Rom had seen too many do-gooders and journalists make capital out of the rubber barons’ wicked treatment of the natives to be seriously disturbed. Moreover the company was entirely Brazilian-owned. Rom might fight exploitation ruthlessly where it was inflicted by Europeans, but he did not meddle in the affairs of his hosts.

Yet at the end of the second day, the Daisy May was chugging at a steady seven knots up the Ombidos. Perhaps it was hindsight, but it seemed to Rom a frightful place; the ‘green hell’ so beloved of the fiction writers come hideously to life. Oppressive, dark, ominously silent: only the mosquitos, incessant and insatiable even in the hissing rain, seemed to be alive on that Stygian stretch of water.

That night they had tied up in a creek, concealed by overhanging trees. The next morning Rom put on a battered sombrero, slung a rifle over his shoulder and, with his pockets full of trinkets, disappeared along a jungle track in the direction of the village. With his two-day stubble, his shirt stained by grease from the Daisy May’s engine, he passed easily enough for a poor-white trader come to cheat the natives out of basket-work or cured skins for a handful of beads.

He was away for twenty-four hours. Since then he had spoken only to give Furo orders which would take them away fast, and faster, from that accursed place. Even now, fifty miles down-river in as halcyon a spot as anyone could hope for, he sat like a man in a trance and in that steaming jungle, looked cold.

‘It was very bad, then?’ enquired Furo at last.

Rom stirred and turned.

‘Yes.’

He took the bottle of brandy that Furo had pushed towards him and tilted it to his mouth, but nothing could blot out what he had seen at Ombidos. He had believed that he knew of all the cruelties which men had inflicted on the Indians in their insane greed for rubber… Workers flayed into insensibility with tapir-hide whips for bringing in less cahuchu than their master craved; hirelings with Winchesters dragging into slavery every able-bodied man in a village… He himself had been offered — by a drunken overseer on the Madeira — one of the man’s native concubines, a girl just nine years old…

But he had seen nothing. Until he had been to Ombidos, he had not known what cruelty was. And with the men who had done… those things… he had smiled and joked. He had not killed one of them; had not throttled with his bare hands a single one of the torturers, because he had to return and bear witness.

‘Is it true that messages have gone to the Minister in Rio to tell of the bad things at Ombidos?’ asked Furo, staring trustingly at his master.