Introduction

Late spring 1945, London: The war in Europe is over. But for Briar Woods, a dancer at Sadler’s Wells Ballet, the past resurfaces and she must come face to face with the truth. It feels as though her war has only just begun.

Since 1939, Rosamund Caradon had taken in many children from Britain’s bombarded cities, sheltering them in her Devonshire manor. Now, with Germany’s surrender, she is en route to London to return the last evacuees, accompanied by her dance-obsessed daughter Jasmine. Rosamund vows to protect Jasmine from any peril, but a chance meeting with a Sadler’s Wells dancer changes everything. When the beautiful, elusive Briar Woods bursts into Rosamund’s train carriage, it’s clear her sights are set on the captivated Jasmine. As Briar sets out to charm them both, Rosamund cannot shake the eerie feeling this accidental encounter isn’t what it seems. While Briar may be far away from the pointe shoes and greasepaint of The Sleeping Beauty ballet rehearsals, her performance for Rosamund might just be her most successful yet. A dance that could turn deadly . . .

Editorial Review

No Editorial Review Currently Available

Excerpt

January 1946

I do not visit Gittisham Manor after Christmas. Every morning when I wake, I think about going there, imagining what would happen if I appeared at that heavy oak door and confronted Rosamund. I plan every word of the conversation, my courage, how I will admonish her for the way she keeps Jasmine hidden away from the world. A princess in a tower. But every time I come downstairs to breakfast, I change my mind. Mother will be sketching new designs at the kitchen table or embroidering details onto a hat, tiny lilac petals scattered in silk across the wooden surface. Father will be mumbling into his newspaper, calling out crossword clues every few minutes which Mother answers without looking up. If I take Jasmine now, I will have to leave all this behind. They won’t understand, not yet.

Rehearsals resume soon after Christmas, the opening performance of The Sleeping Beauty not too many weeks away. I return to London, relieved to have a break from the quiet of Ottery St Mary. All those hours of stillness, even the millinery shop closed for the holiday period, have given me too much space to worry. My mind keeps returning to Gittisham.

Train journeys have composed the rhythm of my life for as long as I can remember. Exeter to Paddington or the slow train from Honiton to London Waterloo; King’s Cross to Cambridge; up and down the country during the war as we found new theatres in new towns to which we could bring our ballet. I love that feeling as the train pulls out of the station, slowly gathering speed as it transports its passengers to new adventures. Returning to London has always been as exciting as visiting my childhood home in Devon, but today I feel uncertain, pulled both away and towards that dark old house hidden in the woods of the Otter Valley. Exhaling its shrieking whistle, the train seems to shudder as it starts to carve its path through the countryside. I am firm with myself, finding calm with the rise and fall of my needle as I sew an old set of ribbons onto my new pointe shoes. All I need is patience and I will find my opportunity.

Martha is still working downstairs in the bookshop when I arrive. She retired from dancing part way through the war, deciding that her time could be better used elsewhere. And she was sick of the constant pain in her feet, an injury from before the war resurfacing every time we danced on a solid concrete floor or were given no time and space to warm up before a punishing performance. She relished the change, casting aside leotards and woollens in favour of another sort of uniform. On an afternoon off from rehearsals, I had visited her at the mechanical transport training centre in Surrey. I remember not being at all surprised to see ballerina Martha Brackley looking comfortable in a pair of overalls with a tool bag at her side. Transitioning from sewing pointe shoes to greasing engines was easy for her, and I enjoyed watching her emerge from beneath a truck, a smear of oil across her neck. Once her training was complete, she moved back to the flat above her father’s bookshop on Cecil Court, working as a mechanic repairing ambulances during the day and managing clients’ orders in the evenings when her father went off to his air raid warden duties. It was, she told me, just swapping one routine for another.

Since 1940, I have lived with Martha in the flat over the shop. Her father doesn’t seem to notice me, the rare moments he spends upstairs just opportunities for him to disappear into his bedroom, an unruly pile of books and journals tumbling from his grip.

‘I’m just closing up,’ Martha says, giving me a quick kiss as I squeeze past the boxes crowding the staircase. The shop and the flat bleed into one another, books finding their way into every available corner. Now Martha has more time, her duties at the ambulance depot reduced to one shift a week, she is trying to develop her career as a writer. Currently she just does book and theatre reviews for a number of small journals, but I have seen her working on longer, creative pieces. Her project is to read all the novels she can find that have been published by women in the past few years: research, she calls it. I tell her she should write what she wants, but she taps her nose and tells me that she’ll only know what that is once she’s found out what everyone else wants too. And so there is a growing pile of Dorothy L. Sayers, Stevie Smith, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen and many more I have never heard of, piled high around her bed. She lives in what can only be described as a jungle of chaos, and yet somehow she manages to fit more into her days than I can even contemplate. Perhaps that is what I love about her, this pragmatism nestled among creative disorder.

Running up the stairs, I shake my head roughly, pushing these thoughts away. Martha. Jasmine. I know I cannot have them both.

The flat is dark and cold when I get upstairs. Martha will have been too busy to have thought about turning on the heater, and her father is clearly out somewhere. Since the end of his duties as an air raid warden, Mr Brackley has resumed his literary pursuits, attending book launches and lectures whenever he can persuade Martha to stay late in the shop. Business faded during the war, paper shortages severely limiting his stock, but he is working hard now to recapture his pre-war reputation.

I am glad to have time alone before Martha joins me. There is a photograph resting on a bookshelf, propped up by a collection of Edward Thomas poetry and a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I remember reading both right here on this sofa before we knew the war was coming, though really, if we had been paying attention, we should have worked it out. But it seemed to me then that those books described the aftermath of an old war, a war I assumed would never touch me. Clarissa Dalloway’s life was a strange and distant fiction. Back then, when I was so young and thought I knew precisely what I wanted, I let nothing get in the way of the path I had set for myself. I was to dance, to perform, to progress through the ranks of the ballet company. Everything else was an unnecessary disturbance. Now, in the dullness of the room, only a small table light switched on besides the heavy curtain, I go to stand in front of that photograph, lifting it off the shelf.

There we are: Martha, Vivian and me, dressed in our snowflake costumes for Casse-Noisette in February 1935, before everything changed. Our eyes look huge, black pencil lines drawn heavily over the white shimmer of our make-up. Martha is standing en pointe, but even then Vivian is taller than her. I am between them, smiling widely. The other two look a little more polished than me, more poised, Vivian with her serene gaze and translucent skin, Martha all precision and style. I remember how when I was a teenager I had envied the way they seemed so sure of who they were, effortlessly fitting in to our ballet-driven lives.

Martha appears in the doorway, and I can sense her watching me as I place the photograph back on the shelf. She knows me better than anyone in the world, but I cannot share this with her. This is for me to do alone. So I hug her and pull her onto the sofa with me and tell her about Christmas at Ottery St Mary, leaving out everything that matters about Jasmine and Rosamund and the thick stone walls of Gittisham Manor. I briefly let myself be taken back to the past, to the days when everything was easy and I didn’t need to pretend.

With Martha, just for tonight, perhaps I can forget about it all and become the Briar Woods I used to be. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. Rosamund and Briar’s war years were very different: Rosamund took in evacuees, while Briar toured with Sadler’s Wells Ballet company. What did you think about their attitudes to their own and each other’s work during the war?

2. Elements of the fairy tale of the sleeping beauty appear in many ways throughout the novel. For example, awakening from a long curse as a metaphor for the end of the war; the transitional stages of growing up reflected in sleeping and waking; the house in Devon surrounded by a forest; the ballet performances of The Sleeping Princess in 1939 and The Sleeping Beauty in 1946. Were there any sleeping beauty moments that resonated with you most strongly?

3. Briar, Martha and Vivian are close friends, but their friendship changes as the novel develops. What do you think led to those changes, and how might some of the conflicts between them have been avoided?


4. Briar’s determination to atone for what she felt were her mistakes before and during the war takes her down a dangerous path. She starts to lose her grip on reality, as well as her understanding of right and wrong. How did you react to her actions and the decisions that she made?

5. Both this novel and the ballet of The Sleeping Beauty explore motherhood. In the ballet we have the queen, the fairy godmothers, the evil fairy Carabosse. In the novel, there are Alice, Rosamund, Briar, Beatrice, as well as some ‘ballet mothers’. What was your impression of the different types of mothers and ways of being a mother in the novel?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's book info

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.

Member Reviews

There are no user reviews at this time.
Rate this book