Movements In Seduction

Grace Whitlock is nineteen years old, polite to a fault, and a very good little dancer.

That is the problem.

Good is not what gets you on the front page of the programme. Good is not what makes a London audience get to their feet. Good is what scholarship girls from Surrey do when they are too well brought up to want anything noisy.

Then the gala choreographer arrives.

Madame Irina Petrova-Lane wears black, smokes when she's thinking, and looks at Grace across a crowded audition studio for one second longer than is polite. She says one word. Interesting. Then she puts her dark glasses back on, and the next morning Grace's name is at the top of the cast list, and the small civilised life Grace has built around herself begins, very quietly, to come apart.

It starts with a hand on her ribs. Cool fingers, two and a thumb, lifting her chest one inch and showing her the body she did not know she had. It starts with an extra hour after company rehearsal, every evening, just the two of them, the river going grey then gold then black through the studio windows. It starts with a pair of pointe shoes in a white box, dyed the colour of Grace's skin, ribbons sewn in black satin instead of pink, hidden at the bottom of her locker because they are not for anyone else to see.

It does not stay there.

There is a Shoreditch loft with a barre at the windows and a cream rug on polished concrete. There is a centre split on that rug with a hand on her back and a question whispered into her hair. There is a paddle. There is a thin rattan cane and a count whispered through tears. There is a folding chair in the middle of an empty studio and a kneeling lesson taught from a pad sewn out of old pointe shoes. There is a bench in a changing room and a boyfriend in Clapham who has no idea where she goes on Saturday nights. There is a remote control in the wings of a dress rehearsal and a secret humming inside her body for forty two minutes while she dances the principal role of her life.

And there is one word, spoken in Russian, soft against her ear.

Mine.

Movements In Seduction is a slow, patient, unbearably hot novel about a girl who arrives at a conservatoire able to do everything correctly and nothing bravely, and the woman in black who decides to do something about that. It is about ownership and obedience and the particular sound a good girl makes when she is finally told to stop holding back.

If you have ever wanted to kneel for someone who knew exactly what to do with you, this one is for you.

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