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Lizzie isn’t sure if she particularly likes ballet.
She likes the idea of ballet. She likes the glamour, and the pomp, the surrounding beauty. She likes the fact that she can summon a troupe of dancers into her living room and create another world inside it, a beautiful fantasy world of glitter and light. She enjoys sitting and being seen, in a dress worth more than jewels and jewels worth more than a king’s ransom. It’s the theatre of it all that she likes, the dramatics, the flair, the glamour.
The actual dancing doesn’t do much for her. Overly made-up women and men in tight leotards twist and stretch across the stage, bodies contorting in a way that doesn’t feel natural or comfortable. This one has a prince in it, she realises after twenty minutes of theatrical bouncing, because they always seem too. A Prince and his Princess – beautiful, docile and trapped. The Princess is enchanted into a swan, only the Prince can see her for who she truly is. Only his love can rescue her, break the enchantment and make her a woman.
Tommy’s hand reaches across and grasps hers. Lizzie feels a fondness seep over her. She remembers how intense he was in the kitchen, how desperate, how hungry. Tommy has always wanted to protect the people he loves, and now he seems to be putting them all into even greater danger. He’s breaking apart, she thinks, fracturing into pieces, the centre cannot hold.
She strokes his thumb. His hand does not pull away.
The Princess and Prince agree to meet at a ball, but the evil enchanter sends another swan-woman instead. The black swan, her dance oozing seduction and sex. Unlike the soft fluttering white swan her moves are fiercer, her will stronger. The Prince is captured, helpless, unable to recognise his own girlfriend. The poor white swan chassés delicately in her anguish, her wings beating at the windows of the palace while inside, the only man who can save her whirls around in the arms of another.
Lizzie lets her eyes flicker sideways to Tommy. He’s staring at the ballet, eyes blank and clearly not watching. He’s far away somewhere, or maybe he’s even closer, locked inside his own head.
Which swan am I, Tommy Shelby? She thinks. The pretty one you love, or the evil one who seduced you?
She tries not to notice as Arthur stands up, tries to concentrate on the ballet while a deep sinking feeling swoops into her stomach. She has a horrible premonition where this is going; both for Arthur and for the poor fluttering swan onstage. It’ll be danger, because it’s always danger, and at least one of the swans will die, because they always die. Maybe the Prince will kill her, maddened by love. Of all the ballets and all the theatres she’s watched over the years it really is amazing how many involve men killing the women they love. She thinks of how fairy tales were first told, stories at the fireside by mothers to their children, by grandmas to their daughters, by women, for women, to women. They warned us, she thinks, They’ve been warning us all our lives.
There’s a screech of tires outside. The swan writhes and flutters on stage, too beautiful and gentle to live. Tommy stands up and Lizzie follows him automatically, turning her face away from the fantasy of death on the stage and towards the brutal reality of it waiting in the driveway. Linda is there, tearful and crazed, holding a gun, and Arthur…
Arthur seems relieved he’s finally found someone else to pull the trigger.
The report of the gun doesn’t startle her, what does make her jump is the direction it comes from. Not from Linda, or Arthur, or even Tommy, but from somewhere in the bushes. For a frozen heartbeat, Lizzie wonders if she’s been shot, then if Tommy has. Arthur gives a groan, but it’s Linda who falls, staggering and collapsing onto the ground, blood seeping out over her dress, hands shaking.
And in the fantasy world of lights and music, as she’s done a hundred times and will a hundred more, artistically and beautifully, the swan dies.