Penguin Books Australia

The Girl Who Could Not Speak

Once upon a time – one hundred years ago, and half as many years again – there lived a girl called Clair-de-Lune, who could not speak.

She lived with her grandmother in an attic at the top of very tall, very narrow, very old building, with six floors and twelve rickety stairways climbing up and down precariously between them. They were very poor. But they were also very gentilles, which means that Clair-de-Lune's grandmother thought a good deal about table manners and lady-like behaviour, and would rather starve than be thought ill-mannered. In winter, the attic was cold, and the wind blew through the cracks around the window panes and snow floated in through the ceiling. But in spring and summer, the sparrows and the swallows and the doves and the pigeons flew in flocks past the attic windows, and Clair-de-Lune would wake in the morning to the strange, lovely sound of their wings beating against their breasts.

Clair-de-Lune's grandmother had been a ballerina, and so had Clair-de-Lune's mother. So it will not surprise you when I say that Clair-de-Lune spent every morning, Monday to Saturday, in a large, long room three floors below with four and twenty other girls and boys and a strict ballet-master by the name of Monsieur Dupoint, for she was learning to be a dancer, too. In the afternoons she studied Geography and History and French and Italian and went to the market for her grandmother, who was very frail (although as slim and straight-backed as a young tree) and rarely moved from the attic. On Sundays, Clair-de-Lune went to church, where she opened her mouth in time with the music, but did not sing.

Why was it that Clair-de-Lune could not speak? Ah! Nobody knew. But Clair-de-Lune's mother had died when she was a baby, and it was thought to have something to do with that.

Clair-de-Lune's mother – who had been known as La Lune, which means the Moon – had been much celebrated for a famous pas seul which came at the end of a tragic and beautiful ballet about swans, who, it is said, are mute until the very last moments of their lives, when they give forth the most lovely of all songs. Many years before the first performance of Swan Lake, and many years more before Anna Pavlova conquered the world with The Dying Swan, La Lune danced the role of a swan mortally wounded by the crossbow of a hunter, in a long, white tutu made of layers and layers of tulle and swans' feathers. And though La Lune made no sound, as dancers do not, there was one night when all the audience swore that she was singing the most unearthly song; as if her dancing was so beautiful that you could hear it. On that night, when she sank to the boards at the end of her pas seul, folding herself like a bird, she rested her head amongst the tulle and the feathers of her skirt, and did not rise again.

'Brava! Brava!' came the shouts from the audience, whose clapping and cheering were like thunder. At first, no one understood that anything was wrong. It was some moments before the audience, at first uncertain, grew quiet; before the curtains were drawn hurriedly and a doctor called; before the audience began to whisper, then to murmur among themselves. Then came the announcement: the head of the company in tears: 'Ladies and Gentlemen, La Lune is dead! The doctor says her heart was weak – too weak for her to dance – if only we had known . . .!' and the sobs of the audience, and the flowers which poured in from all over the country for weeks.

Some who were backstage on the night La Lune died said it was not singing they heard, but speech; that La Lune, the mute swan, the ballerina, had died trying to say something.

As for Clair-de-Lune – well, La Lune's public did not even know she existed. But she, too, was backstage that night, and though she was only a tiny baby, she must have understood something. For, from that day to this, she had never uttered a word.

Did Clair-de-Lune mind about not speaking? Ah, reader! It seemed to her that as each day passed the weight of things unsaid grew heavier and heavier on her heart.