Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

‘Go and sit at the other end of the lab, Jenkins,’ he ordered now, and the huge muscular Welshman ambled off obediently to sit beside Dr Henderson, a refugee from the crowded Botany lab, who was bubbling carbon dioxide through a tank in which an elderly parsnip silently respired.

Edward demonstrated the recti muscles of the eye and began on the tricky dissection of the cranial nerves. The best time to propose to Harriet, he had decided — and for them to become officially engaged — was at the St Philip’s May Ball. The Mortons’ permission for him to take Harriet (in a suitably chaperoned party of course) was tantamount to an expectation of this sort. He had set aside an adequate sum of money for a ring and after the engagement would be able to work for at least two years without further interruptions before it was necessary to make preparations for their wedding. The thought of waltzing with Harriet brought a faint smile to his long and studious face. He had seen her first at a performance of the B minor Mass in King’s College Chapel and been much taken by her stillness and concentration — been much taken too, it had to be admitted, by her delicate profile and the way one pointed ear peeped out between the strands of her loose hair. Of course it had been gratifying to find that she was the daughter of the Merlin Professor — it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise — but the knowledge that his feelings for her were basically disinterested gave him an enduring and justifiable satisfaction.

Half an hour later the students had dispersed and were bent over their own dissections while Edward, his hands behind his back, walked slowly between the benches, putting in a word here, an admonition there. Even Jenkins had recovered and was working busily.

‘Please, Dr Finch-Dutton, I don’t know what this is?’

Edward flinched. It was a girl who had spoken — an unsuitably pretty brunette who worked with two other Girtonians on a separate bench. The girls were the plague of his life. He was almost certain that they taunted him deliberately, for his detestation of women students was as well-known and as strong as that of his future father-in-law. Last week’s practical, when the class had dissected the reproductive system, had been a nightmare. Though he had particularly instructed Price to give the girls a female fish, the technician had failed in his duty as so often before and they had called him incessantly to demonstrate organs whose names it was quite atrociously embarrassing to pronounce in the presence of ladies.

But today there was no danger and having explained to the brunette, on whose slender neck a cluster of escaping curls most disconcertingly danced as she bent over her work, that she was in the presence of the trigeminal nerve, he retreated to the shelter of Henderson’s parsnip.

At five, the practical concluded, he made his way along the corridor to his corner of the research lab where a neat row of black boxes — each containing a hundred perfectly mounted microscope slides of flattened fleas — awaited him. He had classified (mainly by means of the bristles edging the head capsule) some eighteen species, but this work would take a lifetime. Not that he regretted taking on the Aphaniptera… his supervisor had been perfectly right when he said that fleas were virgin territory… but before he placed the next slide under his binocular, Edward allowed himself a long and lusting look at the serried rows of butterflies pinned in cases on the wall above him. Fleas were Edward’s bread and butter, but the Lepidoptera were his passion.

Punctually at six thirty, he tidied up and bicycled back to his rooms. But before he prepared to shave and change into his dinner-jacket, he sent one of the college servants to the buttery for a pork pie. Edward had not yet dined at the Mortons’, but he had twice taken luncheon there and knew that it was best to be prepared.

It was to be a rather special dinner-party — the first time that Edward had been to dinner and the first chance for Marchmont (the new Classics lecturer) and his young wife to meet the Professor in the relaxed informality of his home.

So Louisa was taking trouble. In the dining-room grate, behind the iron grille of the fireguard, at least half-a-dozen coals were actually alight, constituting by the standards of Scroope Terrace a blazing fire. Moreover she had permitted the maids to replace the electric light bulbs which she had removed, for reasons of economy, from the central chandelier. The carpet, with its squares of brown and mustard, had been freshly brushed with tea-leaves, the Professor’s portrait in cap and gown hung straight above the sideboard and though she had baulked at the purchase of flowers so early in the year, the cup that her brother had won as an undergraduate in the Horatian oratory contest made, she thought now, an excellent epergne.

Descending to the basement, she found in the kitchen a similar air of festive abandonment. To her everyday soup of turnips and bacon bones Cook had added chopped carrots, giving the broth a pleasant yellowish tint. A cold codling waited in liquid for its sauce tartare and the leg of mutton (a real bargain from an enterprising butcher who specialised in cheap meat from injured but perfectly healthy animals which had to be despatched in situ) was already sizzling in the range.

‘That seems to be all right, Cook. What about the dessert?’

Cook motioned her head towards a large plate on which a coffee blancmange, just turned out of its mould, still shivered faintly.

‘I’m going to stick glacé cherries round it,’ offered Cook.

‘I must say that seems a little excessive,’ said Louisa. She frowned, thinking. Still, it was a dinner-party. ‘All right, then — but halve them first.’

She made her way upstairs again and was just in time to encounter her niece coming in from her dancing class.

It was always difficult for Harriet to leave the friendly, interesting streets and re-enter the dark house where the temperature generally seemed to be several degrees lower than that outside. Today, with Dubrov’s words still sounding in her ears, she stood more forlornly than usual in the hallway, lost in her unattainable dreams — and justifiably annoyed her aunt.

‘For goodness sake, Harriet, don’t dawdle! Have you forgotten we have dinner guests? I want you changed and in the drawing-room by seven o’clock.’

‘Yes, Aunt Louisa.’

‘You are to wear the pink crêpe de chine. And you can put up your hair.’

In her attic Harriet slowly washed, changed into the hideous dress her aunt had bought in the January sales and embarked on the battle to put up the long, soft hair which only curved slightly at the tips and needed a battery of pins to keep it in the coronet of plaits which the Trumpington Ladies had deemed suitable. She would have given anything for a quiet evening in which to relive what had happened… anything not to face Edward with his pompous and proprietary manner and the underlying kindness which made it impossible to dislike him as one longed to do.

When she had finished she went over to the bookcase and took down a volume of poetry, turning the pages until she found what she was looking for: a poem simply called ‘Life’:

She stood for a long time looking at the verses in which Emily Dickinson had chronicled her heartbreak. Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood — it was just that so very often they were dead, and in a book.

Two hours later the dinner-party was in full swing, though this was perhaps not the phrase which would have occurred to pretty Mrs Marchmont, supping her soup with a slight air of disbelief. She had been warned about the Mortons’ dinner-parties, but she had not been warned enough.

At the head of the table, the Professor was explaining to Mr Marchmont the iniquity of the latest Senate ruling on the allocation of marks in the Classical Tripos. Edward was valiantly discussing the ‘dreadful price of everything’ with Aunt Louisa, while in the grate the handful of smouldering coals — kicked too hard by the underpaid parlourmaid — blackened and expired.

The soup was cleared. The cod, whose sauce tartare surprisingly had come out slightly blue, arrived.

‘Well, Harriet, and how did you fare today?’ asked the Professor, addressing his daughter for the first time.

‘All right, thank you, Father. I went to my dancing lesson.’

‘Ah, yes.’ The Professor, his duty done, would have turned back to his neighbour but Harriet, usually so silent, spoke to him once more.

‘A man came to see Madame Lavarre. A Russian. He’s going to take a ballet company up the Amazon to Manaus. To perform there.’

Edward, assessing his piece of fish, which did not, after all, appear to be a fillet, said, ‘A most interesting part of the world, one understands. With a quite extraordinary flora and fauna.’

Harriet looked at him gratefully. And possessed by what madness she did not know, she continued, ‘He offered me a job… as a dancer — for the length of the tour.’

Her remark affected those present profoundly, but in different ways. Her father laid down his fork as a flush spread over his sharp-featured face, Louisa opened her mouth and sat gaping at her niece, while Edward’s shirt-front — responding to his sudden exhalation of breath — gave off a sharp and sudden ‘pop’.