The Yuletide Child Read online

  ‘I need to talk over tonight’s performance. It won’t wait.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, meaning far more than that she was sorry she couldn’t eat supper with him. She was saying she was sorry she wouldn’t be able to talk through the way they had danced, analyse any mistakes, discuss the audience reaction to this movement or that, the way they always did after each performance, while it was fresh in their minds. Each night was so different, each audience responded differently; you learnt so much from studying them. Added to all that, they had to talk themselves down from the fierce excitement of the night.

  And tonight Dylan was changing all that. Tonight Michael was no longer the centre of her universe. A new element had entered the equasion.

  ‘I’m having supper with Ross,’ she said.

  Michael stood there, very still, intensely concentrated on her, staring into her eyes and reading everything in them.

  They knew each other so well. She couldn’t hide anything from him. She didn’t even try.

  ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ he said at last. The door slammed again; he was gone but she was trembling.

  Ross stared at the door, then down at her; she stiffened, waiting for him to question her again about Michael. His eyes were hard and narrowed, dark with thought, but all he said was, ‘Shall we get away before he comes back to argue some more? My car’s parked in the next street.’

  The fans were outside the stage door, clustered around Michael, who was signing autographs. Ross took her hand and hurried her away, around the corner, before they were noticed. The crowds had all gone now. The streets were silent; their footsteps rang out in the stillness. This part of London did not have as much traffic at night as the busier parts of town. It was mostly city offices, very few people worked at night around here, and the shops and restaurants were all closed. The air was warm, a faint breeze blew her silky skirts around her legs.

  ‘Where are we going to eat?’

  ‘You suggest somewhere.’

  ‘I know an Italian trattoria not far from here—they stay open until midnight. Do you like Italian food?’

  ‘Love it.’ He stopped walking, looked down at her. ‘I don’t believe this,’ he said abruptly, still holding her hand. Raising it to his chest, he splayed it over his shirt-front. ‘Can you feel my heart beating?’

  Her palm flattened, she stood still, the heavy thudding right under her warm skin, and nodded, unable to speak.

  Ross looked at her with a passion that made her quiver. ‘Do you feel it, too? It’s as if I’ve been struck by lightning. I think I’ve fallen in love with you at first sight, and I never even believed in such a thing.’

  ‘Me, too,’ she whispered, and then he bent his head, his warm mouth moving against hers, sending the world whirling crazily around them.

  They spent the next two hours talking in a corner of the trattoria, eating their way through melon and prosciutto, the swordfish cooked in tomatoes, olives and garlic, with a green salad, followed by green figs.

  ‘Are you dieting?’ he asked her, and she laughed.

  ‘I don’t need to—I use up so much energy every day. I’m underweight for my height. But I love swordfish, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ve never eaten it before, but it’s good. Tell me about your usual day. When do you get up? Can we have breakfast together?’

  ‘You’re going too fast!’

  ‘I have to—there isn’t time to take it slowly. I live hundreds of miles away and I don’t get much time off.’

  He told her about his forest, talking passionately about his trees, how he worked among them, the life he led in the northern area between England and Scotland which was his home.

  She told him how hard and fiercely she had to work each day, how much she loved to dance, but how tired she often was.

  He asked her again about Michael. ‘Has he ever been your lover? Is he in love with you?’

  ‘No,’ she said to both questions.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re just good friends! He’s far too possessive for that to be true!’

  ‘We’re partners. It’s hard to explain. We need each other. It isn’t love.’ Nothing so easy to define, nothing so simple. Michael threatened the back of her mind like a bruise, darkening her skin, worrying her. How would he reaact to what was happening to her?

  ‘Never has been?’ insisted Ross, and she shook her head.

  ‘No. Michael has girlfriends but I was never one of them.’

  ‘Were there other men in your life?’

  ‘Nobody special. There was never enough time. I had to work too hard and I was always tired.’

  Ross drove her back to her flat in Islington, just a mile away from the theatre.

  ‘I won’t ask you in; it’s gone one o’clock, and I have to get some sleep,’ she said, sitting in his car outside the building.

  ‘Breakfast... when?’ He was very close. She knew he was going to kiss her; she was dying for the touch of his mouth. She couldn’t think about anything else. ‘Eight o’clock?’

  ‘Nine! I’ve got rehearsals at eleven,’ she thought aloud, knowing that tomorrow she was going to regret losing so much sleep. She needed a solid eight hours every night to restore her energy levels, so that she could keep up with her demanding schedule.

  ‘Skip them and spend the day with me.’

  ‘I can’t, Michael would kill me. We have to work at the barre every day to keep supple; muscles stiffen up so quickly if you don’t.’

  ‘When can you get away, then?’

  ‘Lunchtime. One o’clock. Then I’m supposed to have a rest, a nap before the evening performance. I don’t get much free time.’

  ‘Breakfast and then lunch,’ he said, framing her face between his hands and bending.

  Their mouths clung; she felt heat deep inside her body. It was the first time in her entire life that she had ever wanted a man like that.

  A week later they got engaged. The wedding was fixed for a month after that, although her father almost had kittens when she said she was planning to marry so quickly. Her mother would have been dead for two years that spring; it seemed longer. Dylan still missed her and wished she could talk to her about Ross, about getting married. Ingrid Adams had been fifty the year she’d died of cancer, after a mercifully short illness. Dylan’s father, Joe Adams, still hadn’t quite got over it, and was unable to cope with organising a wedding.

  ‘There isn’t time! You can’t arrange a wedding this soon!’ he said to her helplessly. ‘Why not wait a few months, give yourself time to think, time for us to organise everything?’

  ‘We don’t want to wait. We just want to get married!’

  He looked at her sister, Jenny, throwing up his hands in despair. Jenny tried to argue her out of being in such a hurry, too, but gave up when she realized Dylan simply was not listening.

  Michael was worse. Michael went crazy, white and shaking, his eyes black holes in his head. ‘You can’t do this to me—you can’t chuck everything away. For pity’s sake, Dylan, it’s just infatuation. Sleep with him, but don’t marry him. How can you go on with your career if you live at the back of beyond? You have to be in London to dance.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ was all she could say, almost in tears herself, because she hated quarrelling with him. She felt guilty because what he had said was true. She wasn’t just getting married. She was giving up her career. She was walking away from Michael and everything they had built up together.

  ‘My contract ends this month; I’m not signing up again.’ Their season ended, too, at the same time; they would have gone into rehearsal for a month, then gone on a protracted tour of the States before returning in the autumn to open a new season here in London. Now Michael would be doing all that without her.

  Michael grabbed her shoulders and shook her, hoarsely shouting. ‘I won’t let you do it! What about me? What am I supposed to do? I can’t dance without you.’

  He made her nervous, but she lifted her chin to stare back at
him defiantly. ‘I’m sorry, Michael. Don’t be so angry. I know it’s going to be a problem, but it will be a challenge, too—can’t you see that? You’ll find a new partner; they’ll queue up for the chance to dance with you, you know that. I’m not unique. You’ll find someone else, just as good, probably even better, and go on to even greater heights.’

  His face was stormy, full of bitterness. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re a great dancer, arguably the best of our generation...you can’t throw it all away on this stupid, ordinary, boring guy. My God, Dylan—he’s nobody. He doesn’t even understand what you are, how wonderful you are. He knows nothing about ballet. He is destroying a great dancer without even knowing what a great dancer is!’

  Helplessly she pleaded for him to understand, her voice shaking ‘Michael, try to see it from our side—he loves me: we love each other.’

  ‘Stop saying that—I just told you, it won’t last for ever, it never does. Use your brain, Dylan. What the hell is wrong with you? You’re possessed...out of your mind, crazy.’

  She laughed nervously. ‘Maybe I am, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I am being driven, Michael. I can’t think of anything else but Ross. If I stayed on in the ballet I’d be worse than useless. It doesn’t seem important any more. I no longer want to dance.’

  He looked as shocked as if she had hit him in the face. ‘You can’t be serious. I’d rather see you dead at my feet than let you stop dancing. The idea is unthinkable. You were born to dance, and I won’t let you stop, do you hear me? You aren’t going to do it!’

  ‘Yes, I am, Michael.’

  It went on day after day, all the same arguments, the same pleas and angry protests, until her wedding day.

  Michael’s bitterness and rage made life impossible in the theatre during that month but Dylan rode the storm somehow, her mind entirely set on the moment when she would become Ross’s wife. Michael was right—she was possessed, nothing else mattered to her, she was being carried away by an instinct older than time. She wanted to sleep in Ross’s bed every night, bear his children, spend her life with him. The life force had her in its grip and her career no longer mattered a damn. She found rehearsing tiring; the nightly performances passed in a vague dream. She was no longer part of the company. In her own mind she had already left, although her body went on performing.

  She hadn’t believed Michael would come to the wedding, but he did, glowering darkly from his seat in the church. His friends, the company, all the dancers they had been to school with, were on his side, their eyes accusing her of treachery, betrayal. How could she do this to him? they silently asked, those eyes.

  Afterwards, at the reception, he walked up to Dylan in her white dress and veil. She stiffened, afraid of what he might do next, but all he did was take her hands and kiss them lingeringly, the backs and then the pale pink palms.

  ‘I’m not saying goodbye. You’ll be back. You can’t exist away from us. When the madness passes, you’ll come back to me.’

  ‘Don’t hold your breath, Carossi!’ Ross snapped, tense as a drawn bow beside her, putting his arm around her waist and pulling her close to him.

  Michael ignored him as if he was invisible. Dylan watched him walk away, sadness welling up inside her. Ever since they’d first met at ballet school they had been so close, almost one person instead of two; it was hard to say goodbye, harder to think of life without him.

  She and Ross left for their honeymoon a few minutes later. They flew to Italy and spent two weeks at a small hotel in the Tuscan hills, making love day and night with a passion that excluded everyone and everything else, although they managed to spend a day at Venice and another at Florence. Dylan remembered both days like waking dreams: she and Ross wandered together, entranced, through the cities, looking at each other, not the beautiful buildings, the River Arno, the Grand Canal, the famous paintings, the statues in the narrow, old streets of both those ancient and exquisite cities. They were merely the background of the happiness Dylan and Ross shared, like painted designs on a stage backcloth.

  After their honeymoon Ross took her up north to the house they were going to share, and for the first time she saw his forest, the ranked dark green of the conifers, the scent of pine, the darkness in the heart of the trees. There was no other house in sight. There was very little traffic; few cars ever passed along that narrow road.

  Dylan was a city girl, used to the busy streets of London, the noise and fumes, the roofs crowding the skyline, other people everywhere. Even during their honeymoon there had always been crowds circling them. Now they were alone, in a haunted landscape.

  This was the first moment she felt a stirring of doubt, a sense of panic. She had married Ross without stopping to think about what she was throwing away, leaving behind; the city she had lived in all her life, the pleasure and pain of dancing, the companionship of the ballet company, the partnership with Michael which had been her life for years.

  From her first sight of Ross none of that had seemed to matter any more. She had become a driven creature, only knowing she needed this man more than breath itself. Love had not so much obsessed her as consumed her, taken over her whole life.

  Now she was alone with Ross and his forest, facing the consequences of her marriage, looking down into the deep abyss between her past and her future, the life she had led and the life she would lead in future. Standing at the window of their bedroom, looking out, she saw nothing but trees and sky, heard only the wind moving the branches, the sigh and whisper of the forest, and fear prickled under her skin.

  What had she done?

  CHAPTER TWO

  AND then Ross came up behind her, put his arms around her waist and kissed her softly on the side of her neck. Dylan leaned back against him, sighing with pleasure, pushing away her moment of doubt and uncertainty. She loved him more than she had ever loved anything or anyone else before. Whatever she had had to give up weighed very little in the scales against having Ross.

  ‘Come and meet my trees,’ he whispered.

  He always talked about them as if they were human, had feelings, could hear what he said to them and even answered him in their own way. Dylan smiled, touched by that, by his passionate commitment to his work That was what she wanted from him—that deep, unfaltering love. She wanted to give as much back, too.

  ‘I’m dying to!’ she assured him.

  His smile of pleasure made her heart lift. He wanted her to share his feelings about the forest. Dylan wanted to be part of every aspect of his life. Wasn’t that what marriage meant? Sharing everything, becoming one flesh, one heart, one mind?

  The unforgettable scent of pine met them as soon as they walked through the gate in their garden hedge into the forest. Ferns brushed their legs, flies and midges buzzed them, powdery-winged brown and blue butterflies hovered over spring flowers in the long grass at the forest rim. Under their feet was the crunch of pine needles. Sunlight laid out needle-fine paths in front of them under the fir trees until they faded into darkness.

  As the shadows around them deepened Dylan couldn’t help shivering. ‘It’s quite cold in here, isn’t it?’

  She was wearing jeans and a light pink shirt, over which she wore a denim waistcoat but no jacket because the weather was warm for late March, so long as you were out in the sunlight. Once they were deep into the forest, though, the sun didn’t penetrate the closely set trees and her skin had chilled rapidly.

  Ross gave her a quick look, then took off his tweed jacket and put it round her shoulders. ‘Better?’

  She snuggled into the warmth from his body which the tweed retained along with his own particular body scent. ‘That’s lovely. But I don’t want you to get cold. Maybe we should go back?’

  ‘Oh, I’m used to working out here in all weathers; I never feel the cold.’ He took her hand. ‘Come on, I want to show you something.’

  She had to move quickly to keep up with his long-legged stride. The tall pines stretched all around them now; they were deep into the
forest, with very little light to show them where they were going, and Dylan was oddly afraid of the pressing tree trunks, the shadows, the cool, pine-scented air.

  All the forests and woods she had ever known had had broadleaf trees, oak and hornbeam, beech and ash, which shed their leaves in autumn and did not grow too close together, so that open glades stretched in places, full of light and giving space for wild flowers and tussocks of long grass. She had never been nervous in those woods, but she was nervous now.

  At last Ross stopped moving and put a finger to his lips, whispering to her, ‘Keep very still. Look...there...’ He pointed to a tree a few feet away.

  Obediently not moving, Dylan peered, but at first could not see anything interesting. Then there was a shirr of wings, a flash of gold and cream. A tiny bird flew up to a branch of the conifer and perched on a web of ivy. A second later Dylan spotted a basket-shape hanging there; the little bird disappeared into it.

  Looking up at Ross, she silently shaped the word ‘nest’.

  He nodded. ‘A goldcrest’s nest,’ he whispered, so softly she could only just hear him.

  The bird flew out and vanished among the trees, and Ross said very quietly, ‘The nest is made of moss—isn’t it clever, the way it’s made? She must have fledglings. We often get goldcrests here; they feed on insects which live on conifers, breed in the bark—beetles and flies, for instance—not many birds live among fir trees, but it’s a habitat that agrees with goldcrests.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a goldcrest before,’ she said wonderingly. ‘It’s such a wonderful colour.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t have—they aren’t city birds.’

  ‘I wish I could see the fledglings. Do you know, I’ve never seen a bird’s nest? If I’d had a brother I might have done, but there was just me and Jenny and we never went bird-nesting.’