Breakfast at the Hotel Metropole was not normally a beautiful experience; the same food appeared at all meals, the sluggish fan scarcely stirred the fetid air, swollen black flies buzzed on the overcrowded flypapers. But the morning after the party at Follina the world, for Harriet, was bathed in an all-embracing golden light.
She had returned unnoticed the night before; both Kirstin and Marie-Claude had been fast asleep — her adventure was unknown to anyone but herself. And Mr Verney had said that today he would come to find her. She must not depend on it… but he had said it.
‘It is not necessary to give thanks for such a breakfast,’ said Marie-Claude, shuddering. But she herself was in a good mood, for her encounter with Harry Parker, the secretary of the Sports Club, had turned out to be extremely fortunate. She had been offered, and at very little personal inconvenience, a chance to augment by an appreciable sum the savings she and Vincent were amassing for the purchase of the restaurant.
‘In two weeks’ time,’ she said now, lowering her voice, for the rest of the Company was sitting at tables close by, ‘I am going to burst at the Sports Club! From a cake! For seven hundred and fifty milreis in cash.’ And as Kirstin and Harriet looked at her with raised eyebrows, she added, ‘Mr Parker invited me: it is a thing that is very much done in gentlemen’s clubs when there is a special dinner of some kind. This one is for the Minister for Amazonia, who is coming from Rio to discuss the organisation of river transport or some such thing. The cake is wheeled in for dessert and — hoop la!’ She put down her fork to sketch in the air the deliciously titillating eruption which would follow.
Harriet was impressed. ‘From a real cake, Marie-Claude?’
‘No, idiot! It’s an enormous wooden affair — generally pink and decorated with candles. Sometimes they release white doves at the same time, though then of course there are problems with the feathers and the excretion and so on. Sometimes there are men with trumpets who accompany the cake and a chef who plunges in the knife… and of course always balloons and streamers and a great deal of champagne.’
‘Will Vincent like it?’ enquired Kirstin.
‘It is precisely for Vincent that I am doing it,’ flashed Marie-Claude. But a pensive look spread for a moment over her heart-shaped face, for it was true that she had not precisely explained to Vincent the means she employed to increase their joint savings. Vincent himself was strait-laced and his family — notably his cousin Pierre under whom Vincent had trained — was positively gothic. Still, what could one do? It was necessary to be practical. ‘You won’t mention it to anyone?’ she pleaded. ‘The dinner begins very late; after the curtain goes down. No one at the theatre need know.’
‘Of course not.’ Harriet was overawed. Thus, she was sure, had Messalina erupted in the last days of Imperial Rome. ‘Only, Marie-Claude, when you come out of the cake won’t the gentlemen become overexcited and — you know?’
‘Over-excitement is something I do not permit,’ said Marie-Claude, pushing away her egg with a moue of disgust. ‘I made this absolutely clear to Mr Parker. I burst; I dance a little on the table; I sit for a moment in the lap of the Minister — and that is all.’
‘What will you wear?’ asked Kirstin.
‘Not very much,’ Marie-Claude admitted. ‘Mr Parker insisted on this. But there is always my hair which covers most things, and I have a special garter with a large rosette in which my Tante Berthe’s hat-pin can be concealed. Not that it will be necessary, I assure you. The whole affair is strictly a matter of art — a kind of tableau vivant — and anyway, the Minister is old.’ She paused and fixed her enormous eyes on Harriet. ‘There is, however, a problem,’ she said, lowering her voice still further and glancing over her shoulder at the alcove where Dubrov and those of the principals who could face the Metropole dining-room at breakfast were sitting. ‘I have to see Mr Parker at eleven thirty this morning to make the arrangements.’
‘But it’s the costume rehearsal for The Nutcracker,’ said Harriet.
‘Exactly. So you, Harriet, must be for me a mouse,’ said Marie-Claude.
‘Oh, Marie-Claude, I couldn’t,’ said Harriet, aghast. ‘I’ve never been a mouse; I don’t know the steps or anything!’
‘There are no steps,’ said Marie-Claude contemptuously. ‘One scampers and runs about and bites toy soldiers in the legs.’ She poured herself another cup of coffee and contemplated with gloom the bizarre events on which Tchaikovsky had wasted some of his loveliest music. And indeed it is not easy to see why little Clara is so delighted to get a nutcracker for Christmas nor why, almost at once, there is a battle between toy soldiers and some hitherto unsuspected mice.
‘I’ll help you, Harriet,’ offered Kirstin. A little taller than the others, she was doomed to be a soldier and smite the attacking rodents with a wooden sword. ‘And in any case the rehearsal will be chaos; everyone will be in hysterics long before lunch.’
She spoke no less than the truth. The Nutcracker was the only ballet in which Simonova did not star, but in ceding the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy to Masha Repin, Simonova was by no means quitting the field. She was going to supervise rehearsals, she was going to put her experience at the service of the younger girl; she was going to help.
‘Please, Harriet?’ begged Marie-Claude, laying a pearl-tipped hand on Harriet’s arm. ‘I would ask Olga, but she was sick in the night and the other Russian girls are such prigs.’
Of such a request there could only be one outcome. Harriet might hate deceiving Monsieur Dubrov and be frightened of the consequences, but it was out of the question that she should refuse to help her friend. Thus two hours later, entirely enveloped (at a temperature of ninety-two degrees) in simulated fur, her face covered by a mask, she was on stage being a belligerent and really rather unpleasant mouse.
Rom came in the little Firefly, a sentimental gesture which almost doubled his travelling time, and tying up at his private jetty made his way along the quayside, acknowledging the salutations of his men, who were trundling their black ‘biscuits’ of rubber towards the lighters. He passed quickly through his warehouses and entered the chaotic office — with its maps, samples of cahuchu, telegraph machine and stained coffee-cups — from which his manager attended the needs of the Verney empire.
‘All is well, Coronel?’ asked Miguel, lifting his pince-nez and removing a pile of files from a chair for his employer. But the question was rhetorical. Miguel, rescued from schoolmastering, had served Verney since he first came to the Amazon and it was clear that this morning his master was very well indeed. Was this the moment, Miguel wondered, to put in a word for his nephew who was just out of school and looking for a job?
But Verney was in a hurry. ‘I have an appointment,’ he said. ‘We’ll just do the most urgent things. I want the Pittsburg contract and the projection of the hardwood requirements for Bernard Fils in Marseilles. The rest can wait.’
Miguel nodded and produced the documents in an instant from the apparent confusion of his desk. ‘One of de Silva’s clerks came in this morning with a copy of the Ombidos report. He said you wanted to see it before the visit of the Minister.’
‘That’s right.’ Rom’s face was momentarily sombre at the mention of Ombidos, that plague spot from which rumours of ill-treatment and butchery of the Indians continued to filter through. ‘I’ll take it home.’
Less than an hour later Verney left the office, crossed the narrow harbour-side road and climbed a steep flight of steps to enter, through a blue door in a high wall, the bougainvillea-covered Casa Branca.