A Glove Shop in Vienna and Other Stories

  ‘I will wait,’ she said.

  Alex returned to England. Vanni was sent for by the Principal and questioned.

  The questions yielded nothing. No, said Vanni, standing with downcast eyes in her blue serge dress, she had never seen the Englishman before and he had written no notes to her, made no assignations.

  Then why had she smiled in that brazen manner, asked Varvara Ivanova, who could still recall the unmistakable radiance, the intention behind that smile.

  Vanni shook her head. She did not know. But though usually so well-behaved and obedient, she did not apologise and the Principal decided not to prolong the interview for even at the mention of the Englishman, the girl became illumined, as if she had swallowed a small and private sun.

  So Vanni was punished – refused permission to visit her parents for three successive Sundays – and watched. But there were no further misdemeanours. When a boy on the floor above sent her a red tissue rose from his Easter cake, she returned it. No letters came from England and at rehearsals, when the older pupils went to augment the Cupids and nymphs of the corps de ballet she was conspicuous for not making sheep’s eyes at the handsome premier danseur, Vassilov.

  If she was still watched when she returned for her last year at the school, it was for a different reason.

  ‘There is something a little interesting, now, in her work,’ said Cecchetti, the most famous dancing master in the world, to Sonia Delsarte who taught the senior class. ‘And she seems stronger. ’

  But what he meant was ‘happier’.

  In May 1913, a year after Alex’s visit, she left the school, in Theatre Street and became a member of the corps de ballet at the Maryinsky Theatre. Her salary was six hundred roubles a month, her future assured. For her parents – for Vanni herself as they believed – it was the fulfilment of a dream.

  Back with his regiment on Salisbury Plain, Alex threw himself into his work. In the summer he took his battalion to Scotland for manoeuvres. Getting his men fit, turning them into first-class soldiers, occupied him physically. At night in his tent he read the technical manuals which poured from the world’s presses now that his profession was growing ever more complex and scientific. And when his army duties permitted he went down to Winterbourne, the estate which, since the death of his father two years earlier, had been wholly his.

  It was a place of unsurpassed and Arcadian loveliness. A Queen Anne house of rosy brick faced south across sloping lawns which merged with water meadows fragrant, in summer, with yellow iris and cuckoo pint and clover. Sheltered by verdant hills, Alex’s farmlands were rich and lush; the cows that grazed in the fields were the fattest, the most reposeful cows in the southern counties; his sheep moved in dreamy clusters as if waiting to be addressed by the Good Shepherd Himself. With Alex’s position at Winterbourne went the position of Master of Fox Hounds, a seat on the Bench, an elaborate system of duties to tenants and fellow landowners alike.

  It could not be – surely to God it could not be – that to share these duties he proposed to install a dancing girl, probably of low birth, whom he had glimpsed for five minutes in a strange barbaric land.

  For as the months passed, the memory of that extraordinary encounter became more and more blurred and dreamlike. He could remember Vanni’s posture at the barre but her face increasingly eluded him. So when his stately widowed mother told him that the Stanton-Darcys were coming for the weekend and bringing Diana, Alex was pleased. He had attended Diana’s coming-out ball, sat next to her at Hunt dinners. She was twenty-one, sweet, with curls as yellow as butter, large blue eyes and a soft voice.

  Diana came. The weekend was a great success. She went with Alex round the farms, the tenants took to her, his factor presented her with an adorable bulldog puppy. She was already a little in love with him – being in love with the handsome foxy-haired Captain Hamilton had been the fashion among the debutantes of her year. Yet somehow it happened that three months later she became engaged to the Earl of Farlington’s youngest son, for girls with blonde curls and big blue eyes do not lie about unclaimed for long.

  Alex’s mother swallowed her disappointment and tried again. Selena Fordington was an heiress – unnecessary in view of Alex’s considerable wealth – but agreeable none the less: a quiet, intelligent girl whose plainness vanished as soon as she became animated. Alex liked her enormously, took her to Ascot and Henley – and introduced her to his best friend who promptly married her.

  A year had passed since his visit to Russia and his longing to be ordinary, not to be singled out in this bizarre way, grew steadily. Yet the following winter he stood aside and let Pippa Latham go. Pippa, his childhood love, a tomboy with the lightest hands in the hunting field and a wild sense of humour, who returned from India a raven-haired beauty with a figure to send men mad …

  It was time to return to Russia and lay his ghosts. His and hers, for Vanni, if she remembered him at all, was probably living under the protection of a wealthy balletomane or even married to a dancer with hamstrings like hawsers and long hair. He would take her out for a meal, buy her a keepsake … They would laugh together about what had seemed to happen in that high bare room in Theatre Street, wish each other luck … And he would return to his country a free and normal man.

  Thus at the end of May 1914, having arranged to take the long leave owing to him, Alex set off again for Russia.

  His host, the hospitable Count Zinov, was overjoyed to see him, but apologetic.

  ‘It is the last night of the Maryinsky season – a gala performance of Swan Lake. It would be hard for my wife and me to miss it, but if you did not feel like joining us we could arrange for you to dine with friends. I know you do not care for ballet.’

  Alex bowed. ‘I would be honoured to accompany you,’ he said.

  The Maryinsky is a blue and golden theatre, sumptuous beyond belief. The chandeliers, all fire and dew, drew sparks from the tiaras of the women, the medals of the men. The Tsar was in his box with his wife and two eldest daughters. The Grand Duchess Olga had put up her hair.

  In the Zinovs’ loge, Alex joined in the applause for the conductor. Tchaikovsky’s luscious soaring music began … The curtain rose.

  Act One: A courtyard in Prince Siegfried’s Palace … The courtiers parade in cloth of gold. The peasantry arrive with gifts for the Prince. They dance. They dance, it seems to Alex, for a remarkably long time. The King and Queen approach their son. It is his birthday, they inform him in elaborate mime; it is time to choose a bride.

  But the Prince – the great Vassilov in suitably straining tights – does not wish to marry. He grows pensive …

  The music changes, becomes dark and tragic. Swans, seemingly, are flying overhead. The Prince is excited. He will go and hunt them. His courtiers follow.

  The curtain falls.

  An interval … champagne … a French Countess in the next box flirting outrageously with Alex.

  And now, Act Two. This of course is the act that is the ballet. A moonlit glade … a lake … a romantic ruin, some equally romantic trees. To the world’s best loved ballet music, the doomed Swan Queen enters on her pointes. She is in a white tutu with a tiny crown on her lovely head, and on the night in question is greeted by sighs of adoration for she is danced by the fabled Kschessinskaya, once mistress of the Tsar.

  The crown on her head is useful, for were she to be danced by anyone less exquisite it might not be easy at once to distinguish her from her encircling and protective swans.

  Just how many swans there are in Swan Lake depends of course on the finances and traditions of the company, but there are a remarkable number and the discipline and precision with which they conduct themselves can make or mar this masterpiece. Perfect unity, the ability to act as one is what the Russians demand and get from their corps. Identical in calf-length tutus, their hair hidden by circlets of feathers, their arms and faces blanched by powder, these relentlessly drilled girls would have made peas in a pod look idiosyncratic.

  So now, despairi
ng at her fate (for she is, of course, an enchanted princess) Odette glides forward. A row of fifteen swans jeté from stage left towards her, so far away on the vast stage that their faces are nothing but a blur. Fifteen more come from stage right. Ten swans enter diagonally from both the upstage comers. And from the centre, as if from the lake itself, the last row of girls, their fluttering arms crossed at the wrists, doing their battements …

  The first swan, the second, the third …

  At which point, the voice in Alex’ head which had been silent for two years said, ‘That one’.

  Two hours later he waited at the stage door among a crowd of students and admirers. The orchestra came out first: tired men in shabby overcoats carrying their instruments. Then the first group of girls, chattering like starlings, excited at the long summer break ahead … and another …

  And now three girls: a curly red-head, a dark Circassian beauty and in the middle …

  ‘Come on, Vannoushka,’ begged the curly-haired Olga.

  ‘No … you go on.’ Vanni had stopped, hesitant and bewildered, like a fawn at the edge of an unfamiliar clearing. ‘ I feel … so strange.’

  Alex had been hidden at the back of the crowd. Now he came forward, walked up to her, bared his head.

  ‘We met two years ago, in Theatre Street. I said I would return. Do you remember?’

  And she said, ‘Yes.’

  They went to Paris, the Mecca of all Russians. When they arrived, he booked two rooms at the luxurious Hotel Achilles in the Rue St Honore. They dined in its magnificant restaurant, strolled in the Tuileries Gardens. Then he took her upstairs, let her into her room and went on into his own room next door.

  An hour later, leaning out of the window, he heard one of the most heart-rending sounds in the world: that of someone trying not to cry.

  ‘What is it, Vanni?’ he said, throwing open her door. ‘For God’s sake, my darling, what’s the matter?’

  She was sitting in her white nightdress on the edge of a fourposter bed. Her long brown hair was loose about her shoulders and the tears were rolling silently, steadily down her face.

  ‘Why did you bring me, then?’ she managed to say. ‘If … I do not please you. You knew I was not pretty… You knew…’

  Appalled, he began to babble … about marriage … about respect … he was going to the Embassy tomorrow to arrange

  ‘But it is not tomorrow,’ she said, bewildered. ‘It is now. It is today.’

  The years of his idiotic upbringing, the taboos and conventions he had drunk in with his mother’s milk dropped from him. He took her in his arms. And from that moment, all that night and the next night and the next, always and always, it was today.

  They moved to a little hotel in a narrow street on the Left Bank. Their room was on the top floor, under the steep grey roof. If she leant out of their attic window – but he had to hold on to her – she could just see the silver ribbon of the Seine. It was hot as summer advanced, the pigeons made an appalling din under the eaves and they spoke of moving on … to the Dordogne with its golden castles and wild delphiniums and walnut trees… or to Tuscany with its blue-hazed hills.

  But they didn’t move. They stayed in Paris, dazed by their happiness, watching the city empty for summer.

  It is, of course, religion that is meant to do it: meant to make people take true delight in momentariness, meant to make them aspire to goodness, to let go of the clamorous self. Alas, it is so very much more often a complete, requited and all-too-human love.

  A dancer’s body is a kind of miracle. She seemed to talk with her feet, the back of her neck, her small, soft ears. As she moved about their little room, learning it by heart, touching with questing fingertips the brass knobs of the bed, the chest of drawers, the buttons on his jacket as it lay across a chair, he could not take his eyes from her fluent grace. Yet she had the gift of all true dancers: she could be absolutely, heart-stoppingly still.

  They lived like children. He had had servants or batmen all his life; she had been brought up in an institution. To go to the baker, buy a long baguette, sit on a park bench crumbling it for each other, and the birds, was an enchantment. They fed each other grapes in the Bois, spent dreamy afternoons gliding down the river in a bateau mouche, In the sun she grew golden; the brown hair lightened; hair, skin, eyes merged in a honey-coloured glow.

  Alex disapproved. ‘When we came you had eight freckles across the bridge of your nose,’ he said, pulling her towards him in the Luxembourg Gardens and getting a Gallic nod of approval from the park-keeper. ‘Now you’ve got twelve. I don’t remember giving you permission to change.’

  ‘It’s happiness,’ she said. ‘Happiness gives you freckles, everyone knows that.’

  ‘Rubbish! I shall buy you a parasol.’

  So he bought her a most expensive sky-blue parasol, much fringed and embroidered with forget-me-nots – and the same afternoon threw it off the Pont Neuf because it prevented him from kissing her.

  A wealthy and a generous man, it had been his intention to buy her beautiful clothes, present her with jewels, but here his luck was out. To the information – conveyed by Alex as they breakfasted off hot chocolate and croissants on the pavement of their personal café – that they were bound for the couture houses of the Rue de la Paix, she reacted with wide-eyed despair. ‘Ah, no, Alex! They will take me from you and put me in booths and there will be ladies with pins!’ Nor could he lure her into Cartiers, with its magnificent display of rings and brooches.

  Then on Sunday at the marché aux puces, as they wandered between the barrows she suddenly picked up a small gold heart on a chain. On one side was engraved the word: Mizpah. She turned it over. ‘Look, Alex; the words are in English. Read them.’

  ‘The Lord watch between thee and me when we are absent one from another,’ he read. He looked at her face. She was learning English quickly; she had understood. ‘You want it?’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘It’s only a trumpery thing,’ he complained – but he paid, without bargaining, the absurd price the stallholder asked, and as he bent to fasten it round her neck he kissed her suddenly, unashamed, on the throat and said huskily: ‘He will watch, my beloved. He will watch between us.’

  Alex continued to besiege the Embassy, the immigration office, more determined than ever to take her back to England and arrange their marriage, but they were beset by delays. She had not brought the right papers from Russia; until her parents sent them, they were helpless.

  ‘Incompetent, bureaucratic idiots,’ raged Alex when the official he was dealing with dared to go on holiday.

  But there was one absolute solution; one unfailing panacea nowadays for anything which vexed Alex. On the first night, in their room under the eaves, Vanni had begun herself to unpin her hair and he had forced down her hand and said, ‘ No, that’s my job. That is for me to do.’ Now always he would say, ‘ Come here,’ standing with his back to the window, and she would come to him and bend her head and then carefully, methodically, he would remove one by one the hairpins with which she secured her heavy, high-piled tresses. ‘Things must be done properly,’ he would say, laying the pins neatly in a row on the sill. ‘No cheating. ’ And it was only when he had laid the last pin beside the others that he allowed himself to pick her up, the cool silk of her loosened tresses running down his arms, and carry her to bed.

  ‘Yes, but what about my soul?’ she protested. ‘I am after all, mostly Russian. Souls are important to us.’

  ‘I’m mad about your soul, je t’assure,’ he murmured. ‘I see it quite clearly – a sort of soft, blue-grey colour. The colour of peace. Afterwards I will tell you.…’

  And afterwards he did tell her. He spoke to her indeed as he had not believed it was possible to speak to another human being.

  ‘It must be reincarnation,’ she said. ‘That’s the only way one can explain the way we knew each other, just like that.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he murmured. ‘You may have been one of Tutankhamen??
?s temple dancers, but I’m damned certain I wasn’t his High Priest.’

  ‘No, you were certainly not a High Priest,’ she said demurely, ‘but perhaps you were a great Crusader on a horse … and you saw me in the slave market at Antioch. There were hundreds of slaves, all very beautiful, tied up in chains, but you saw me and said—’

  ‘This is the one,’ quoted Alex.

  ‘Yes.’ She looked at him sideways. ‘You’re sure it was me you wanted, not Olga? She has such marvellous red hair. Or Lydia … ? Someone has written an ode to Lydia’s kneecaps, did you know? Are you sure it was me?’

  ‘Well, I think it was you,’ said Alex, lazily teasing. ‘But I’m not absolutely certain. Perhaps if you would just come a little closer.’

  ‘But I’m already very close,’ she protested, not unreasonably, for her head lay against his chest.

  ‘Not close enough.’ His voice suddenly was rough, anguished, as he was gripped by one of those damnable intimations of mortality that are the concomitant of passion.

  But it was not of mortality that they thought during that sweet and carefree summer of 1914. It was rather of the future that Alex spoke, lying in the dark after love – and of his home. And she would listen as to a marvellous fairy tale, learning her way in imagination out of the French windows of the drawing room, down the smooth lawns to the lake with its tangled yellow water-lilies and the stream over which the kingfisher skimmed. She learnt the names of his farms: Midstead … South Mill… and of his fields: Ellesmere… High Pasture… Paradise …

  ‘Paradise!’ she exclaimed. ‘You have a field called Paradise?’

  She heard about his dogs: the gentle huge wolfhound, Flynn, and the bull-terrier bitch, Mangle; and about the Winter-bourne oak, as old and venerable as the house itself…

  ‘And there you will live, my darling, and be my wife and my love,’ Alex would finish.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she would agree, rubbing her cheek against his face. ‘I shall be a great lady and pour milk into my tea and eat ham and eggs and ride on big horses in the fog,’ said Vanni, whose image of England had been implanted at a very early age.