The Lake House: A Novel by Kate Morton

Author:Kate Morton [Morton, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781451649321
Amazon: 1451649320
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2015-10-19T11:00:00+00:00

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The No. 9 bus drove by as Alice waited to cross Kensington Road. It was one of the old Routemasters and had an advertisement for the Kirov corps de ballet’s Swan Lake on its flank. Alice would have liked to see the production but was afraid she’d left it too late to organize tickets. She didn’t go to the ballet unless she could sit close enough to hear the dancers’ pointe shoes hitting the stage boards. Excellence was the result of hard work and Alice had no interest in pretending otherwise. She understood illusion was part of performance, that dancers strived for the appearance of ease; she knew, too, that for many in the audience the romance of effortless grace was the point; but it was not so for Alice. She was a great admirer of mental and physical rigor and considered a performance much improved by the sheen of sweat on the leading man’s shoulders, the sigh of completion at the end of the ballerina’s solo, the blunt thud of toes hitting wood as the dancer spun and smiled. It was just the same as spotting the scaffolding in other writers’ books. Awareness of construction didn’t diminish her pleasure, only added to it.

Alice was not of a romantic disposition. It was one of the ways in which she’d willfully distinguished herself from Eleanor, a childhood resolve that had hardened into habit. To wit, her mother’s favorite ballet story came from the summer she met their father. “It was 1911, before the war, and the world was still filled with magic.” Eleanor had told it often over the years. “I was staying with my aunt in Mayfair and had met your father earlier that week. He invited me to see the Ballets Russes perform and I said yes without thinking twice, without checking with my mother, as it happens. You can imagine, Grandmother deShiel almost disowned me. Oh, but it was worth it. That night! How perfect it was, and how young we were. How impossibly young.” At that she always gave a small smile, acknowledgment that her children would of course never truly accept that their parents had been anything other than as they were now. “Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la rose was like nothing I’d seen before. He danced a fifteen-minute solo and it passed like a dream. He was wearing a silk tricot, palest nude, onto which were pinned dozens of silk Bakst petals, pink and red and purple. The most exotic creature, so beautiful, like a shiny, graceful insect on the verge of flight. He leapt as if it cost him no effort, lingering in the air far longer than was possible, and seemed not to touch the stage between times. I believed that night that a man might fly, that anything was possible.”

But no—Alice frowned. She was being unfair. Eleanor might have retained her childhood fluency in the fairy-tale language of fate and superstitions, but her romantic nature wasn’t all love affairs

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