Birth Marks Read Free Page A

pleasure of leaving home. And how, of course, you never really succeed. Even if you stop writing the letters and picking up the phone.
    The train was twenty minutes late, and not interested in improving the situation. We crawled through the edge of daylight into a grey winter evening. I sat and watched till the sheep were eaten up by darkness, then turned my attention to the grey file.
    Carolyn Hamilton. Her life story in words and pictures. Not much really when you consider the effort that must have gone into it. A thin black scrapbook retold the news: a series of local cuttings celebrating a young girl’s success, first in provincial competitions then in winning medals and lastly in getting into the Royal Ballet School. A blurred news picture showed a delicate little fair-haired girl in costume, poised and posed. Then there was another, older, more confident Carolyn, staring straight into the camera, hair scraped tightly back, eyes bright and smiling. Closer to she was good looking, but in that long-haired high-cheekboned way that most dancers are. Maybe bone structure and nimble feet go together. Or maybe they just don’t eat enough. Either way I’d be hard pressed to pick her out of a corps de ballet at ten paces. I turned over a few more pages. Sure enough there were the line-ups, a bevy of adolescent swans all clamped into cute little white-feather headbands and stiff white tulle, flashing Colgate smiles. About as much help as a mug shot. The final picture was at least out of costume. This time the young woman had her hair down, a great shining wave of it, gushing over her shoulders and down her back, like an ad for conditioner. But the photograph had been taken into the sun and the face was all cheeks and mouth, the eyes screwed up and squinting. At a rough guess she could have been anyone. So much for the visuals.
    I moved on to the correspondence, although that proved altogether too grand a word for what turned out to be a stash of postcards. They dated back a year, to the time when, according to Miss Patrick, Carolyn had left her job without telling her patron. Mind you, if these were representative of their communication, then she could hardly have expected a full account. Postcards are usually the way people tell you they don’t want to write you letters.
    These particular haikus were all much the same, all in the ‘Dear Aunt Maud, thank you for the book token. Hope the cat is well, love Hannah’ mould. For a 23-year-old Carolyn had retained an alarmingly youthful style. Still, hers was a physical rather than a verbal talent. Why should one expect eloquence? But what about intimacy? Wasn’t she writing to the woman who had become her second mother? It must, I realized after I had read it, have been one of the last postcards Miss Patrick had received.
    â€˜Dear Miss Patrick, This week I saw a marvellous production of the Romeo and Juliet at the Garden. Working hard on a couple of new pieces, music by Rodney Bennett. There is a possibility of a tour sometime in the spring. Will let you know. Yours, Carolyn.’
    I turned it over. A Degas dancer bent low over her shoes, the graceful curve of her back inviting admiration. Maybe the words were in the pictures. I flicked through the others. Consistently vacuous. Even the last, postmarked 6 December and sent from somewhere in the West End with a snow-scene stamp and a Christmas franking greeting, was the same anodyne diet of weather and ballet repertoires. Hardly the words of a girl about to disappear. But then that’s the point about clues, you have to go looking for them.
    Deeper in the folder I found the address and phone number of the last job, a company which I had never heard of. Given my Baryshnikov experience I wasn’t willing to stake my life on it, but the Cherubim Studios in the Walworth Road didn’t sound like the City Ballet or the Rambert. Could it be that Carolyn’s shoulders were flagging under the burden of