Authors: Hilary Norman
“Are you okay, sis?” Joe asked. “You sound breathless.”
“Just getting changed – class is in ten minutes.”
“You wanna call me back later?”
“You’re never there – will you be there?” She tucked the receiver under her chin, stepped into her blush pink rehearsal skirt, then tugged on leg warmers.
“Probably not.”
Lally smiled again. “Okay, let’s do a round up. I’m well and happy, Hugo had a cold but now he’s okay, the roof needs clearing, the path needs sweeping and gritting
again, but otherwise the house is fine – ” The Siamese came and rubbed around her ankles. “Nijinsky sends his love – he’s great.” She picked up her pointe shoes.
“One of the children I teach isn’t so great, and I’m worried about her, but everything else is just wonderful, and I love you and I miss you, and I wish you’d all come and
live back here.”
Joe, too, grinned. “I miss you, too, sweetheart, and everyone this end’s great, too – and Sal was talking about you this morning, said that if you don’t get over here
soon, you’ll wake up one day and find her on your doorstep.”
“Tell her any time.”
“I love you, sis.”
“Joe?”
“What?”
“Be careful.”
“You, too.”
Nature, Lally always felt, had struck an almost perfect balance in the Berkshires. No mountain or valley or lake was too massive or too daunting. There was a wonderful blend,
an almost perfectly harmonious mix of natural landscape and the human factors of villages, small towns and country roads, of farms, large and small, of handsome churches and old colonial
graveyards. There were the seasons, so clearly defined: youthful springs and richly blooming summers, memorable, glowing autumns, splendid, uncompromising winters. Visitors came from far and wide
to the region, drawn by its beauty and its cultural appeal, for the Berkshires were famed for their summer festivals of dance, theatre and music. But for Lally Duval, so deeply rooted in western
Massachusetts, there was an earthy solidity, a sense of permanence and belonging that had little to do with those things.
Her mother, Ellen Carpenter Duval, had been born and raised in Lee, just a few miles away, in a family who had lived in the area for five generations, and even Jean-Pierre Duval, of
French-Canadian extraction, was a second-generation resident of West Stockbridge. There must have been at least one other Duval over the decades with travel lust, but Joe was the only one
who’d ever up and gone anywhere for keeps.
“Are you sure you want to stay in town?” he’d asked Lally when she’d found her new house a few months after their parents’ death. It was a white clapboard
Cape-style home with blue shutters, a porch and a sun room with a bay window and a view of the distant Berkshire hills, and it stood on Lenox Road, not much more than a mile from their old family
house on Main Street.
“Of course I am,” Lally had reassured him. “It’s home and I love it – not just because of the past, but because of the present and future. I can’t really
imagine wanting to live anywhere else.”
She had felt no desire to alter anything much about her life; that wasn’t why she’d agreed to sell their parents’ home. She had always been independent, even as a young child,
and both Jean-Pierre and Ellen had respected their daughter’s individuality and need for space. A house, with land – even a small scrap of land – was something Lally felt she
could stamp herself on, something she could grow within, in which she could expand and extend herself. Besides, a dancer needed both space and the confidence that the thumping of her entrechats and
the echoing of her beloved music would not disturb neighbours, especially if – as happened quite often – the urge to dance woke her up out of sleep in the middle of the night.
Lally had known since she was fourteen that she would never be a great ballerina. In the first place, she had grown too tall, and in the second, dance was not everything to her. It was what she
looked forward to doing every day of her life, and it was something she could not conceive of giving up, but Lally loved life in general a little too much to dedicate herself utterly to ballet. She
had never been a slave to ritual, and if the weather was especially gorgeous or the air particularly invigorating, she would always much rather have gone outdoors than go to ballet practice, and if
a friend needed a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on, Lally never thought twice about her priorities, for people naturally came before dance. And so early on, she had sought her own compromise,
and had found it in teaching.
Classes at the Lally Duval School of Dance were held in an old converted barn next to Lally’s house. She taught children from the ages of five to twelve, and this
afternoon’s class was made up mainly of ten-year-olds, including Katy Webber, the student she’d referred to on the phone to Joe.
Katy was one of the most promising children Lally had ever taught, a pretty, slender, fair-haired girl with the look of a fragile fawn and the underlying constitution and determination of a
prizefighter. Katy never missed class, had every ounce of passion, ambition and courage necessary for a dancer, and yet Lally had always been glad to note that she combined those gifts with a
normal capacity for fun, and it was plain as the nose on her face that the healthy balance in the child was nurtured by her parents, Chris and Andrea Webber, who both encouraged and patently adored
their daughter.
Lally had noticed the stiffness first – a slight loss of flexibility in Katy’s back – during class a couple of months ago. On questioning the child, Lally had sensed an unusual
evasiveness in her, and had refrained from pressing the issue, and two days later, Katy had seemed back to normal. When, the following week, Lally saw her wince during an arabesque, she had ordered
her to stop and to see her at the end of class, but by the time the rest of the children had made their customary final curtseys and bows, Katy had gone.
Andrea Webber had telephoned that evening.
“Katy wanted me to apologize for leaving without speaking to you.”
“That’s okay,” Lally said easily. “It was just that she seemed to be having a little difficulty today, and I wanted to be sure she was all right.”
“That’s why Chris and I didn’t let her wait when we picked her up. Chris had an idea Katy might be coming down with something, and so we got her home and tucked her up right
away.”
Katy had missed her next class, and Lally had assumed that the flu, or whatever, must have caught up with her, but three weeks later, when Lally came into the girls’ changing room to check
on a leaking radiator, she caught a glimpse, just before Katy had time to cover herself with a towel, of a large black bruise on the child’s right buttock. It was the look in the
ten-year-old’s eyes that had stopped Lally in her tracks, freezing the question in her throat. Lally knew suddenly, without being told, that the bruise was not the result of an innocent
accident. She knew it from the split second’s fear and embarrassment in Katy’s blue eyes.
“What should I do?” Lally had asked Hugo next morning in the café.
“There’s nothing you can do, or at least nothing you should do.”
“How can you say that if there’s a child at risk?”
“Kids are always getting bruised.” Hugo shrugged, and his pony tail bounced. “It may not mean anything.”
Since Hugo Barzinsky had come to live in Lally’s house two and a half years before, he’d become her closest friend. Hugo was thirty-four, tall and skinny, with a hawkish nose, a
gentle smile and straight, light brown hair, receding a little for which he compensated by wearing it long, usually in a pony tail. Until his twenty-sixth year he had danced with the Joffrey Ballet
in New York, but then a violent mugging in Greenwich Village had left him with a back injury that had ended his career and brought him back home. Their community being a small one, Lally had known
all about Hugo’s rise and fall, yet they had hardly exchanged more than a courteous greeting until two summers before, when they had both chosen, on an especially lovely day, to eat their
respective lunches on a bench in the Berkshire Botanical Garden off Route 102. They’d chatted about the weather for a moment or two, exchanged sandwiches and a little local gossip, and had
swiftly discovered not only that they had dance in common, but also that they loved good food, baked their own bread, hated Wagner and liked crime novels. Their friendship had blossomed; in a
matter of months, Hugo had come to live in Lally’s house as a paying lodger; within the year,
Hugo’s
had opened its doors on Main Street, and with their combined talents, there
was seldom a free table to be had in the café.
Many people in the community thought that Hugo was gay, which he was not, but Hugo didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought about his sexuality. The only person he really cared about at
all these days was Lally, and since that day when they’d shared their sandwiches in the Botanical Garden, he’d never looked at another woman. So far as Lally was concerned, their
relationship was one hundred per cent platonic, but though Hugo knew he would never risk telling her how he felt, he still fantasized, sometimes, like a teenager with a crush, that Lally –
who had no special man in her life – might wake up to her own feelings for him, but she never had and he doubted that she ever would.
“What if Katy’s bruises do mean something?” Lally asked Hugo now.
“You mean what if someone’s hurting her?”
“Of course that’s what I mean.” The thought made Lally feel physically sick. “I can’t stand by and do nothing.”
“That’s exactly what you should do,” Hugo said, gently. “You have no real evidence, Lally – you said yourself it was more of a gut feeling, and I respect your
instincts, but they’re not proof, are they?”
“I guess not.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t keep an eye on her.”
“You bet I’ll keep an eye on her.”
Lally clapped her hands.
“Into the centre, girls.”
The children assembled neatly in the middle of the studio. There were nine girls and three boys, some more graceful and natural than others, but all pink-cheeked, sparky eyed and eager to
please.
“Okay, we’ll start with grand plié in second position, ending with the right arm in third position and the left in second.”
She walked towards them. Katy Webber was in the front row. Lally saw it right away, could hardly understand that she’d missed it until then. She felt a kick of horror in the pit of her
stomach.
“Madame?”
Lally blinked. Thomas Walton, one of the boys, was looking expectantly at her. All the children were waiting.
She tore her eyes away from Katy and took a deep, steadying breath.
“Turn your bodies to the right,” she directed, “and step on the right leg in second arabesque . . .”
The class went on.
She called Hugo at the café directly the children had gone.
“It’s on the inside of her left arm,” she said. “It looks like a bite.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“She said that one of her mother’s German Shepherds bit her – a nursing bitch, upset because Katy picked up one of her pups.”
“Sounds reasonable enough.” Andrea Webber ran a dog-breeding business from their house in Stockbridge.
“Does it?” Lally was in the kitchen, Nijinsky twining himself around her ankles. “Katy’s been living around her mother’s breeding kennels ever since she could walk.
She knows better than to pick up a brand-new pup.”
“What are you saying, Lally?”
“That I don’t think it was a dog bite.” Her voice showed her distress. “Hugo, it was her face, her expression. Katy’s such a transparently honest child, and
I’m sure she was hiding something.”
“Or someone.”
“I think so.”
“So what now?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You could go to her school, talk to her teachers, see if they’ve noticed anything.”
“I could, or I could pay the Webbers a visit.”
“Lally, you can’t do that – you can’t just walk into someone’s home and start talking about something as sensitive as this.”
“I know I can’t,” she said wretchedly.
“So what? You’ll try the school?”
“Maybe.” Lally heard voices at Hugo’s end. “Customers?”
“It’s pretty busy in here.”
“Go on then.”
“Promise you won’t do anything on impulse?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“
Promise
me.”
“Okay, okay, I promise.”
The dizziness hit her about five seconds after she put down the phone, catching her unawares. Lally grabbed the edge of the pine table to stop herself falling, then stood very still, hunched
over at the waist, for a moment or two after it had passed, and then, slowly, she straightened up again.
“What was that about?” she said to the cat.
Nijinsky made one of his small low chirruping sounds, and went on rubbing.
“You’re right,” Lally said. “It was nothing.”
She wasn’t especially concerned. Probably she’d eaten too little for lunch – in winter, she needed extra fuel, particularly when she was teaching – or maybe she was
getting her period a little early, which sometimes affected her strangely.
She put it out of her mind, and returned her thoughts to Katy Webber. She might not have any idea who was hurting the girl, but she was certain now that someone was. She didn’t know yet
exactly what she was going to do about it, or even how best to begin to tackle the problem without running the risk of making life worse for Katy instead of better.
She only knew that she had to do something.
The man leaned back in his chair, and wondered if it had begun. Outside, the sky was as dark as it ever became over the city. Snow flurries blew past the plate-glass windows,
beyond the sealed room. Inside, the filtered air was warm, maintained at just the right humidity, not too dry, not too moist, the lighting an even pre-dusk, electronically sustained.
The man led a full, vigorous life outside the room, yet there was no other place in the world where he felt so comfortable, so at ease. He encountered dozens of people every day, yet the only
friends he trusted were here, within these walls. He confided in them, he cared for their every need, he sustained their life processes. He controlled their very existence, which was why he felt
able to trust them. He had always found power intensely satisfying, and he knew now that the absolute power he had created extended beyond the room, further, perhaps, than even he could hazard, but
no one else knew that yet. Though they would know soon enough.