"My Dear Vicky..."
9 December 2023 02:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlode“My Dear Vicky...”
Lermontov takes up his pen to write a letter, and is not interrupted. AU.
Staring down at the two letters on the desk in front of him, Boris Lermontov knew that he had lost. It was a sensation to which he had been so utterly unaccustomed of late that he experienced it as an almost physical pang, as if the excellent dinner the hotel had served up last night had abruptly begun to disagree with him.
He had thought that Vicky would realise the supreme folly of what she had done: the disaster that must inevitably follow for her career if she walked out on the Ballet Lermontov merely because he, Boris Lermontov, would not permit her to throw away her future on love, marriage, and all such distractions. He could see that stupid affaire with young Julian Craster for the ephemeral nonsense that it was. Sooner or later —he had clung to that certainty even after the news of the wedding— sooner or later she would come to her senses. The world would yield to the sheer force of his will, and Miss Victoria Page would not waste her talents, as she had been doing, in dancing for lesser companies...
He had sacked Craster. Laid claim to every note the boy had written for him under contract, as he had the absolute right to do. Julian Craster could take his so-called talents elsewhere, but for the impertinence of inducing Vicky for even one moment to forget her destined path — for what great artiste could be dedicated to anything save her art? — he would never be forgiven.
Vicky would not leave the Ballet Lermontov. Vicky would not leave for long. Vicky would soon learn what her Julian was worth, and she would not be able to stay away...
Only she had. Lermontov stared down at the letters on his desk, the postmarks mocking him with unalterable fact. She had stayed away for an entire season, and he had been forced to bring back Irina Boronskaya —Boronskaya, whom he had vowed would never dance for him again after she had abandoned them in Paris for a marriage of her own— to play her old leading roles in Vicky’s place. Vicky Page had shown no signs whatsoever of humbling herself or of regretting her wilful choice.
She had, Lermontov admitted it at last, succeeded in calling his bluff. She had won.
And with that bitter blow to his pride there came also the other pang he had not let himself acknowledge until now. She had written to Grisha, a gay, impudent letter as full of chatter as the irrepressible Grisha himself. Craster had written a letter by the same post to Livy, his former colleague, scrawled all over with musical sketches and plans for the future, with an enthusiasm that almost burst off the page.
There had been no letter, of course, for Lermontov. Had he expected one? Hardly... and yet he was illogically sure that both those letters had been meant in one fashion or another for his eyes. Vicky had known that he would hear of it; that Grisha and Livy, his choreographer and music director, would pass on the escaped prodigals’ news.
If she had written to him, he would have torn it up, and told himself that was victory. He would have taken satisfaction in spurning any reconciliation she might offer. And yet it hurt with a quite unforeseen pain to know that she had not.
If he, Lermontov, was the brains behind this company that was his family, the driving will that set its course, then old Sergei was perhaps the nearest thing it had to a heart. The old man had received a letter of his own from Vicky, but it was not together with the others on Lermontov’s desk now.
The echo of their voices —Grisha, Livy, Sergei— still hung in memory, drifting from outside the office door. He wondered, bitterly, for a moment whether he had been intended to overhear.
“I could not let him see it,” Sergei had protested, helpless. “She calls him a monster...”
Lermontov’s face set rigid against the spasm that threatened its mask. Still staring down at the correspondence on the desk in front of him, he reached out for a sheet of paper. Uncapped his pen, with an effort as great as if it had been a physical rupture of his pride.
The ink flowed boldly, stark against the creamy page. My dear Vicky...
Lermontov broke off for a moment at the sound of a step outside; glanced towards the door. But no-one entered, and he set himself once more to the task at hand.
He paused an instant or two longer, and heard a muttered imprecation and the sudden explosive impact of crushed paper against the wall. Silence. Then the faint scratch of the pen began again, at a halting pace.
Undoubtedly for the time being it would be better to leave Boris Simeonovych to his own devices. The town gossip would serve to entertain him later, when he was in a more receptive mood.
The manservant slipped away quietly, and Lermontov’s letter was left in peace to take laborious shape. It was a composition that required a humility to which the author was entirely unaccustomed.
“Are you coming for breakfast?” Vicky called cheerfully, poking at the bacon on Julian’s toast.
In the theatrical digs that were all they had been able to afford on their return to London, after the wedding, the landlady, Mrs Hodges, had been benignly tolerant of lodgers with late-night habits who were apt to take breakfast at eleven o’clock in the morning. But Aunt Isabel, when she heard that Vicky and her new husband were living in penury in a couple of furnished rooms, had protested that it was quite absurd for her niece to exist in such circumstances when there was an entire unused floor in the big house on Eaton Square. If they insisted on paying rent, Lady Neston said tartly, then they could equally well pay it for the use of her empty rooms, particularly when there was a perfectly good piano up there that could easily be put back into order...
And it was of no avail for her niece to protest that they were not, in fact, suffering any inconvenience from Mrs Hodges’ over-furnished rooms with their admittedly hideous ornaments, and that the location was convenient for Julian’s poorly-paid job as a rehearsal pianist, which was the only regular source of income that either of them had been able to rely upon. Julian, who would not even for an instant have considered accepting money from his wife’s family, had no sooner set eyes on the old piano standing forlornly in Aunt Isabel’s lumber-room than he had announced, in his most schoolboyish grand manner, that it was an excellent instrument and ought to be put back in working order immediately.
The matter had been decided almost on the spot. They would move into the disused rooms up on the fourth floor —which had once, in the halcyon days before the Great War, been accommodation for the upper servants— the piano would be tuned and restored, and they would pay Aunt Isabel precisely the same sum in rent that they had been paying each week to Mrs Hodges.
They had not been able to afford very much furniture. Their new home consisted largely of bare boards, fitted out with whatever oddments Vicky had been able to salvage from the collection of lumber as it was being cleared, the barre Lady Neston had installed years ago downstairs so that her niece could practise properly, and a long mirror that Julian had borne back in triumph one afternoon from the junk-shop to go with it. But it was their own domain, a self-contained apartment where Vicky could practise her barre-work at first light and Julian could —and did— resort to the piano in the small hours when inspiration struck him.
Only one could not very well ask Tildy, down in the kitchen, to send up breakfast at all hours... especially not when, as Aunt Isabel was forever bemoaning, it was so hard to keep really good domestics these days. Just at present Julian had his first really promising commission on hand, an opera for which he had managed to obtain a production on the basis of the raw talent of his rough sketches and the success of “The Red Shoes”, and his muse had, in consequence, been more than usually nocturnal. The process was a little hard on both of them, but chiefly on Vicky, whose last professional engagement had been a month ago, but who still diligently attended ballet class every morning. But she had become a dab hand at grilling bacon over the fire on her return, and it would make all the difference in the world if Julian could just get ‘Cupid and Psyche’ onto the London stage.
“Breakfast!” she prompted again more loudly, laughing. “Or are you still in bed?”
“I’ll have you know I’ve been up for a good hour, and down to fetch the post,” Julian retorted cheerfully, appearing around the edge of the door with the air of a rumpled, sandy-haired jack-in-the box, a sheaf of envelopes in one hand. His tone softened. “And you don’t need to minister to my needs, you know. I’m quite capable of getting my own breakfast — a world-class ballerina doesn’t need to be doing that.”
“Except we both know that if you were left to your own devices, you wouldn’t bother.” Vicky made an impudent face at him and danced across the room to plant a kiss on his nose. “Honestly, if I’d had any idea composers had such irregular habits—”
Julian held her away from him for a moment to look down rather anxiously into her face. “You don’t mean that, do you? You don’t— don’t have any regrets? I know what it’s cost you to walk out on Lermontov for my sake; you haven’t had the roles you deserve. But just as soon as I’ve got this opera under way, I’ll sit down and write you another ballet that will rival ‘The Red Shoes’.”
“You already did write one,” Vicky reminded him. “And Livy thought it was very good — remember?”
“Well, Lermontov didn’t.” A shrug. “And since he has decided to sit tight on it and suppress everything I had done —confound him!— I don’t suppose anyone else is ever likely to find out.”
But he flung himself upon the toast and bacon with the resilience of youth, sifting through the pile of post between mouthfuls.
“Here, this one’s for you, from Monte Carlo. Good old Grisha! Livy hasn’t answered mine; too busy drilling his orchestra, I expect...”
The letter was addressed to her under her married name, in a foreign hand. But it was not Grisha’s writing, familiar from countless rehearsal calls. It was not even old Sergei’s painstaking artist’s script. Staring down at the Monte Carlo postmark, Vicky knew almost at once who it was that had written to her. What she could not even guess was why.
She reached slowly to open it. “Well?” Julian said cheerfully, mopping up crumbs. “What’s the latest gossip? What is the sacred monster up to these days?”
“Oh, darling, you can’t call him that—”
“Why not? You did.” Julian was unrepentant. “And you’ve got to admit it fits like a glove.”
Vicky scarcely heard him. She found herself reading the single stiffly-written sheet in front of her again and again.
“Julian.” Her voice in her own ears sounded odd and far away. “This is a letter from Lermontov. And I think... I think he wants to apologise.”
“He wants what?” The utter disbelief on Julian’s features only echoed her own.
“He wants—” She broke off, conscious for the first time of a tug of pity towards the arrogant, impossible man and the pride that was being humbled in the dust. “Darling, he wants to make peace.”
“He wants you back,” Julian said at once with unfailing accuracy. He had jumped up. “I wouldn’t trust him an inch... Here, let me see that.”
Rereading over her husband’s shoulder, Vicky was not so sure. It was on Julian’s account that they had quarrelled, but he had written to her under her husband’s name, a gesture that must have galled, and in his letter he made no demands. Oh, he doubtless meant to bargain over any reconciliation, or he would not be Boris Lermontov. But he had brought himself to make the opening offer, and from what she knew she thought it had cost him a good deal.
“I think he means it, Julian. Look, here he writes I may have acted over-hastily — he’s as good as admitting he was in the wrong.”
“That’s more than I ever expected from him,” Julian conceded, pressing a kiss absent-mindedly against her hair.
“And your ballet, ‘La Belle Meunière’ — he’s prepared to waive the contract at last and let you have the rights. Everything you’d written, and all the unfinished material.”
“He’s not going to let go of ‘The Red Shoes’, though, is he?”
“Well, no.” Vicky felt a laugh bubbling up. “I wouldn’t have believed in that for a minute — would you?”
“Not a single second... He can have it, for all I care. He won’t be staging it again without you, we both know that, and as he told me once—” A crack in his voice. “Better to be stolen from than to have to steal. He understood, Vicky. I was a young idiot and I thought he understood. I thought he was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me—”
“He was.” Vicky caught at his arm, laying her head against his chest. “He was the greatest thing that ever happened to either of us. And without him —without ‘The Red Shoes’— we wouldn’t be here together, now. You’d be a poor music student without a published work to his name, and I’d still be dancing to gramophone records and trying to convince the world I was more than just Lady Neston’s niece, looking for favours... and if the Ballet Lermontov hadn’t happened to both of us, I would never have met you. However badly it all turned out in the end, I owe him that — and so much else.”
“He didn’t make you a star.” Julian’s arms came round her, holding her tight. “Your own talent did that, and hard work, and—”
“And Grisha, and dear Sergei, and all the rest of them. All of us working together. For him. Because he chooses people, and pushes them to be the best they can be, and he doesn’t count the cost. I know that now. But if I had the same chance, the same choice, I’d do it all over again.”
“All of it?”
“All.” She nestled closer. “Including leaving. With you.”
Her husband turned her face up and kissed her, first tenderly and then with enthusiasm, and presently Lermontov’s letter was entirely forgotten, and Julian was very nearly late for rehearsal. But when she had bundled him into his coat and heard his footsteps go clattering away down the stairs, Vicky’s eye fell again on the single sheet of paper where it had slipped to the floor.
She bent to pick it up, and stood for a long time with the letter in her hand, looking down at the words but not really seeing them. Her thoughts had strayed to a worn pair of red ballet shoes in her bottom drawer, and the face of a man who could not endure human feeling.
“Are you going to reply to Lermontov?” Julian enquired much later, sitting up in bed with his pyjama jacket half-buttoned and his hair sticking out in different directions.
“I must. It was a peace-offering — he wants to make amends. It would be too cruel to leave him without a word.”
“He still wants you back, you know.”
“I know.” But if ever she danced for Boris Lermontov again, it would be on her own terms and at a time of her own choosing. However much she missed it: the intensity, the rush, the relentless worship at the altar of art. Ballet was a religion, he had told her once, and for him she thought it was true.
For a long while she had believed as he did, that there was nothing, nothing in the world, that could not and should not be sacrificed in that name. Only she knew now —she met Julian’s smile, and felt her heart lift all over again at the knowledge that he was hers— that there were parts of life that she could not cut away as Lermontov had done.
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps it made her a lesser dancer to take happiness outside her art. But if all men and women were driven by ruthless clockwork, then there would be no human joys or sorrows for music and movement to express... and if Lermontov truly believed that hers had proved a lesser talent, then he would not have offered up that olive branch for Julian in the hopes of bringing her back.
She slipped further down in bed and closed her eyes, curling up between the sheets. “What will you make out of ‘La Belle Meunière’ when you get it, Julian?”
“It’s going to be a ballet, of course, exactly as I always intended. I had you in my mind’s eye all the time I was writing it — in the town square scene, and the three rustic lovers down by the river, and the scene in the Count’s courtyard with the performing bear....”
“I never did see how you were going to get that bear onto the stage,” Vicky murmured sleepily.
“You just have to listen,” Julian protested. “It’s all in the music. The rest— well, the rest of it I leave to Grisha.”
“But you won’t have Grisha, darling. You won’t even have Sergei to draw out the designs. Ballets don’t create themselves, you know.”
“And Lermontov’s isn’t the only first-class ballet company in Europe!”
Silence. Presently Vicky sighed and turned over, propping herself up onto one elbow. By the glow of his bedside lamp she could see her husband lying on his back, apparently frowning up at the ceiling.
“Vicky?”
“Mmm?”
“Your aunt is going to the South of France this year, isn’t she?”
“Mmm. Cannes. She asked me to come and stay, remember? To ‘take a rest from all this opera business’...”
“Somehow,” Julian said ruefully, “I don’t think your aunt has much faith in my ‘Cupid and Psyche’... Well, I think it’s an excellent idea. In fact”—he looked across at her with a grin—“I think we should both go.”
“But Julian, you can’t—”
“It would have to be after the first night, of course. Do you think you could put her off until then?”
“I’m sure she won’t mind, but—” It was Vicky’s turn to sit up, quite suddenly. “You mean — Monte Carlo?”
“We might make a slight detour.” Julian tucked one arm behind his head and lay back on the pillow with an air of repose that was betrayed by dawning mischief. “If Lermontov is going to hold out an olive-branch, I feel it’s only fair for us to accept it in person — don’t you? See how far he’s prepared to make friendly noises, pick up the rough score and the rest of the manuscript sketches for ‘La Belle Meunière’... and we might do just a little stealing on our own account.”
“Grisha’s very fond of Lermontov, you know.”
“Yes, but he’s also very fond of you. And I know he had a lot of ideas worked out for that ballet...”
It would not be that easy to prise Grisha free of his allegiance, Vicky thought, and she did not suppose it would turn out anything like the way Julian was expecting... but at the least she would see them all again, and have a chance to forgive and be forgiven. She would be able to share her happiness with people she loved, and who had become as close as family to her, as she knew they were to Lermontov. And he —impossible, implacable, irreplaceable tyrant that he was— there would never be anyone else like him. She smiled a little, planning the letter she would write, and fell asleep at last thinking of Monte Carlo, and of what he would say when they met.
In her dreams, she was dancing to Julian’s music with Grisha, who was dressed as a bear, every movement of his quick, mobile features and expressive body depicting the animal so clearly that she could not help but laugh. And then somehow it was not Grisha but Lermontov himself, strong hands wrapped around hers, looking down into her face with an odd, unexpected expression that was almost akin to pleading.
The music swirled around them, the lovely, lilting tune that Julian had written for her as La Belle Meunière, the Miller’s Bride, and now she was in her husband’s arms, leaning back into the warm certainty of his embrace. Julian resisted her for a moment, bemused, but the waltz swept them up and together they were flying, borne onwards by the dance. Their bodies moved as one, becoming swift and sure; she laughed for sheer delight and heard his delighted response. Countless others, close-clasped, filled a vast ballroom in a joyous explosion of colour, and from moment to moment it seemed to her both that they were floating on a bright cloud, and that they spun through a painted scene before the footlights of some immeasurably distant stage.
For a moment she was afraid. But the shoes she wore were silver and not red, and with Julian as refuge she could rest... She looked up, unthinking, across the void to the place where Lermontov’s box would have been, and saw him seated there, dark eyes focused and intense.
One eyebrow rose. And then he smiled, the rare, measured smile that told her she had done well, and Vicky knew in her dream through a great rush of relief that it would be all right. Lermontov would yield. Julian would unbend. Things would come together again. She would dance, and love, and make great art, and offer it up in lieu of sacrifice upon the altar, and they would blazon their names brightly across the page to come.
And Lermontov... Lermontov would believe until his dying day that he had been the making of them both, and perhaps —she was smiling in her sleep— perhaps he would be right. But she would tell him unprompted to his face how much she had missed him, and for once in her life see him disconcerted at last.