Save the Last Dance: The Ballerina Bride / Invitation to the Boss's Ball

Thankfully, her body had been rehearsed so hard the steps were almost a reflex and it sprang to life and ran onto the stage, dragging her disjointed head with it. There was a moment of hush, a pause in the music, and she sensed every person in the audience had simultaneously and unconsciously held their breath.

They were watching her. Waiting for her.

It was her job to dazzle and amaze, to transport them to another world. And, just as she lifted her arm in a port de bras that swept over her head, preparing her for a series of long and lilting steps across the diagonal of the stage, she wished that were possible. She wished that she could escape into another world. And maybe stay there. Somewhere new, somewhere exciting, where no one expected anything of her and she had no possibility of failing to make the grade.

But tonight, while she made the audience believe she was the Little Mermaid, while they saw her float and turn and defy gravity, she would know the truth. She would feel the impact of every jump in her whole skeleton. She would hear the knocking of her pointe shoes on the stage even if the orchestra drowned out the noise for the audience. She would feel her toes rub and blister inside their unforgiving, solid shoes.

No, she knew the reality of ballet. It might look effortless from the outside, but from the inside it was hard and demanding. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t pretty or nice. A fierce kind of beauty that asked for your very soul in return for greatness, and then devoured it without compunction.

She had chosen this path and there was no escape. There was no other world. It was all an illusion.

But she would fool them all. She would dance like a girl who was full of sadness, trapped in a state of endless longing, wishing for a reality that could never be hers. And she would dance it well. She wouldn’t even be acting, because it was the truth. Her truth.

No escape. No matter how much you wanted it.

Truth like the pain of a thousand knives.

‘It was marvellous, darling. Absolutely stunning.’

Allegra air-kissed the woman whose name she couldn’t remember and smiled back. ‘Thank you. But, really, the credit has to go to Damien, for giving me such wonderful choreography to work with.’

Bad form for a principal dancer to hog all the credit. She was merely the vessel for someone else’s genius, after all. The blank canvas for someone else to paint their vision on.

‘Nonsense,’ the woman said, waving her glass of champagne and spilling a drop on the arm of one of the other guests. Neither one noticed. But Allegra saw it all. She saw every last detail of the after-show party in crisp, exquisite, painful detail.

She saw the Victorian steel and glass arches of the tall hall that had once been part of Covent Garden’s famous flower market, the white vertical struts and pillars so straight, so uniform that it felt they were penning her in. She saw the herds of people milling, champagne classes pinched between their fingers, half of them trying to gawp at her while not getting caught. Most of all she saw the tempting patches of midnight-blue beyond the glass and white-painted iron-work of the roof.

If colours could talk, she mused, blue would be an invitation.

Come to me…

She wrenched her eyes off the night sky with difficulty and focused them back where they were supposed to be. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, bestowing the woman with a gracious smile. ‘I see my father over there…’

The woman glanced over her shoulder to where her father was half-hidden by the ostentatious champagne bar filling the middle of the room and then smiled widely back at Allegra. ‘Of course, of course. Such a talented conductor and a wonderful man… And it must be fantastic to know that your father is close by on an opening night. What a marvellous sense of support he must give you.’

Allegra wanted to say, No, actually, it isn’t. She wanted to say that sometimes, having a parent so invested in one’s life was anything but comforting. She wanted to shock the woman by telling her how many times she’d wished her father was a builder or a schoolteacher. Anything but a conductor. Or how much she wished he’d sit in the back of the stalls occasionally, as the other parents did, rather than standing only a few feet beyond the footlights. Maybe then she wouldn’t feel weighed down by his gaze, weighed down by all the hopes and expectations of not just a parent but also her manager and her mentor.

She didn’t say anything, of course, but smiled softly in what the woman probably took for gracious agreement, then used the excuse of her fabulous father to make her departure.

Of course, the press loved the father-daughter angle—devastated widower conducts as ballerina daughter tops the bill, just as he’d done for her tragic mother when she’d been alive. They ate it up.

In her darker moments she silently accused him of loving it, too, of wanting double the glory. Double the adoration. But it wasn’t that, really. He just wanted things to be the way they’d been before, wanted to claw back time and resurrect the dead. Impossible, of course, so he’d had to settle for second best. Even so, Allegra hadn’t failed to see how he’d come back to life when she’d grown old enough to fill her mother’s shoes, dance her mother’s old roles.

But not tonight. This one was all hers. No comparisons could be made. She would stand or fall in her own right when the reviews came out in the morning.

She supposed that since she’d used her father as an excuse she’d better go and say hello, so she forged through the crowd, ignoring the people who tried to catch her eye. And there were plenty. She was the star of the show. It was her evening, after all.

But she didn’t want to talk to them. Not the ones she knew in the company who either envied or idolised her, nor the ones she didn’t know, who saw her as some strange creature imbued with magical powers. Gifted—or should that be cursed?—with a talent they daren’t even dream of having. They looked at her as if she was somehow different from them. As if she were an alien from outer space. Something to be studied and discussed and dissected. But not human. Never human.

What she wouldn’t give for one person on this planet to see past the tutus and the pointe shoes.

More than once she had to change direction when a gap between bodies closed up. Eventually, she just stood still and waited. Chasing the holes in the crowd was impossible; she would wait for the tide of bodies to shift once again and let the gaps come to her. Her stillness, however, was just another way to mark herself out from the other guests.

All around her people were celebrating. It had taken an army of people months to prepare for this night, and now they’d pulled it off their relief and joy was spilling out of them in smiles and laughter and excited conversation.

But Allegra felt nothing.

No joy. No bubbling. Nothing inside desperate to spill out of her.

Except, maybe, a desire to scream.

It was funny, really. For a few years now she’d wondered what would happen if one day she did exactly that. What would they all do if the habitually reserved Allegra Martin planted her feet in the centre of the room and split the hubbub with a scream that had forced its way up from the depths of her soul?

The look on their faces would be priceless.

She treasured this little fantasy, because it had got her through more stuffy cocktail parties, lunches and benefits than she cared to count. Only it didn’t seem quite as funny any more, because tonight she felt like making the fantasy a reality. She really felt like doing it for real. In fact, the urge was quickly becoming irresistible, and that was scaring her.

She had to start moving again, keep walking at all costs, even if she ended up momentarily heading away from her father, because she feared that if she paused, that if her two feet stayed grounded for long enough, she might just do it.

Despite her meandering progress across the Floral Hall, she had almost reached her father now. He hadn’t noticed her silent zig-zagging approach, however, because he was deep in conversation with the Artistic Director. She heard her name mentioned briefly above the din of the party. Neither man looked happy.

Had she done badly tonight? Had she let them all down? The thought made the panic racing inside her torso double its speed. And that internal momentum had a strange effect: just as she was on the verge of stepping into the circle of their conversation, a gap opened up to her right and, instead of ploughing forward and greeting her father, she took it.

Bizarrely, she found that once she’d started going in that direction she couldn’t stop. Not until she’d left the crush of the party far behind, not until she’d run down the minimalist wooden staircase at full pelt, leaving her warm champagne glass on the flat banister at the top, not until she was standing in the foyer. She rushed past the cloakrooms to the large revolving door and moments later she was amidst the pillars and cobbles of Covent Garden, the cold night air soothing her lungs.

But she didn’t run any further; she stood there, blinking.

What was she doing?

She couldn’t leave yet. She couldn’t escape.

Her father would be waiting for her. There were senior staff and investors and a minor Royal waiting to greet her.

No, her body said. Enough. And she was inclined to agree with it.

Now that the adrenalin high from the performance had evaporated, she ached all over. She’d been up since six, had done class this morning and then had spent most of the afternoon making last-minute changes to a pas de deux with her partner, Stephen, that the choreographer had insisted were essential. And the performance that had seemed so light and ethereal on the outside had been gruelling beyond belief.

She stood still for a few seconds, closed her eyes. Trap the breath then let it out slowly…smoothly.

Unfortunately, a sense of duty was hardwired into a dancer’s psyche.

When she had finished pushing the carbon dioxide out through her clenched teeth she opened her lids again.

And then the ballerina turned, with all the grace expected of her, and let the revolving door coax her back inside, let its momentum almost propel her back up the stairs and into the crowded bar. Her glass, full of warm and flat champagne, was waiting for her on the banister and she retrieved it before pulling herself up tall and losing herself in the tangle of bodies.

Allegra cranked open an eyelid and focused half-heartedly on the digital clock by her bedside. Definitely way too late still to be awake. Or should that be way too early to get up?

Ugh. Who cared?