The Yuletide Child

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?