A Glove Shop In Vienna

Theatre Street

Her name was Madame Delsarte. Trained at La Scala, she had danced in all the capitals of Europe, taught with her famous countryman, Cecchetti, in Russia.

Now she was old, the ramrod back held firm against the rigours of arthritis, the dyed hair piled high above a raddled, made-up face. Old, but deeply formidable as she surveyed the intake for the ballet school she now ran in London.

It was a late winter morning in 1931. Pavlova, killed by overwork, had died two months before; Diaghilev too was dead, but they had done their work. Even the English, who prided themselves on being Philistines, wanted their daughters — if not yet their sons — to dance. That morning, over thirty children had been brought to the tall, yellow stucco house in Regent’s Park which housed the prestigious Delsarte Academy of Dance. Of these, fifteen had already been rejected. Now, Madame turned her attention to the survivors. They had been weighed and measured, their hearing tested, their ability to sing in tune ascertained. Even so, another five would have to go.

‘You can dance now, mes enfants,’ she said. ‘Do anything you wish. Just follow the music’

The meek little woman at the piano played a Delibes waltz and the children danced. Three revealed themselves immediately as unmusical. There was one boy who was clearly gifted, another who — desperately though she needed boys — would have to go.

But these decisions were made below the level of her consciousness. She was watching only one child.

Someone had taught her and taught her well. There was no precociousness, no dangerous attempt to go up on her toes, yet at nine she had already tasted the control that alone brings freedom. A narrow little face, fawn hair cut in a fringe, large brown eyes. She had been shy at the interview but now she was wholly absorbed. ‘Even with her eyelashes, she dances,’ thought Madame.

She motioned to the pianist to stop and gave instructions to the two assistant teachers who gently led the casualties away.

‘Come here,’ said Madame to the child with the fawn hair, and she came, biting her lip and holding back her tears, for this summons could only mean that she had failed.

‘Dancers don’t grimace,’ said Madame Delsarte. She led her to the window embrasure and stabbed her cane at the pianist who broke into a march.

She was alone now with the child. Outside, snow had begun to fall. She could have been back in Russia, at the school in Theatre Street…

‘What is your name?’

‘Alexandra, Madame,’

‘And who taught you to dance, Alexandra?’

‘My mother.’

The voice was low, sweet, but absolutely English. Why then, this absurd sense of familiarity?

‘Mothers are usually a disaster. Is yours a dancer?’

‘Yes, Madame. At least she was.’

The pride in the child’s voice was unmistakable.

‘What is her name?’

The little girl was silent. Silky lashes curtained the downcast eyes. ‘I must not say. She told me not to tell.’

‘Nevertheless you will tell!’ The old woman’s face was hooded as an eagle’s; she tapped with her dreaded cane on the floor.

The child stood trapped. ‘Do exactly what they tell you, sweetheart,’ her mother had said. ‘Just do what they ask.’

She raised her eyes.

‘Starislova,’ she said. ‘Giovanna Starislova. That was her name.’

A long pause. It was impossible that this fierce and terrifying old lady could be crying, yet something glittered in the coal-black eyes.

‘Is she here?’

‘She is downstairs, Madame. In the hall. She wouldn’t come upstairs with the other—’

But Madame, flinging an imperious ‘Continuez!’ at her underlings, was already at the door.

It had begun many years earlier, in a now vanished world. On the fifteenth of April 1912, to be exact, with the visit of a young English officer, Captain Alex Hamilton, to the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg.

In Russia as aide de camp to his Brigadier who was heading a military delegation sent to discuss the establishment of a joint garrison in Badakhshan, that notorious trouble spot north of the Hindu Kush, he had already experienced Russian hospitality at its most lavish: at a banquet at Prince Yussoupov’s palace from which guests were still being carried two days later; at a dinner in the mess of the Chevalier Guards which had ended in a dawn visit to the gypsies on the Islands; and — more decorously — at a luncheon at Tsarskoe Selo with the Tsar, his wife and four pretty daughters.

Now, politely concealing his boredom, he entered with the Brigadier, a fellow officer seconded from the Indian Army, and Count Zinov, his Russian host, the portals of the Tsar’s own ballet school in Theatre Street. He was aware that an honour was being conferred on him. In Vienna, he would have been shown the Spanish Riding School with its ‘white pearls’, the horses of Lippiza; the Italians would have taken him to the Opera. The Russians showed him the cradle of the art they had brought to a perfection unequalled anywhere in the world: the ballet.

Not every visitor was taken to Theatre Street, Rossi’s lovely silent row of ochre-coloured and garlanded buildings, whose high, bare rooms — half palace, half convent — housed the school. At ten years old they came here, small girls with anxious eyes clutching their shoe-bags, to be paraded, measured, prodded and examined and — if admitted — put through eight years of the hardest training in the world. Small vestal virgins, these girls, in their blue wool dresses, their white aprons, their relentlessly braided and pulled-back hair. They slept in dormitories, all fifty of them, moved everywhere under the gaze of a posse of governesses, were forbidden even to speak to the boys on the floor above with whom they practised their polkas and mazurkas.

Then, at eighteen, they joined the Maryinsky Ballet, to become for the twenty or so years of their working life, snowflakes, or swans or sugar-plum-fairies… or once, every so often, that other thing. From the door Alex was now entering had emerged Pavlova, anguished about her thinness and frailty… Karsavina, destined to be Diaghilev’s darling… and that eighth wonder of the world, Nijinsky.

These hallowed ghosts were entirely invisible to Alex Hamilton as he crossed the hallway to be greeted by the formidable Principal, Varvara Ivanova. He was in every way a product of his class, trained to conceal anything which might single him out for attention. If nothing could be done about his good looks, his wide grey eyes, it was at least possible to barber and brush his hair so as to minimise its russet glint, its spring. His high intelligence he dealt with by speaking as seldom as possible. His knowledge of foreign languages — so deeply un-British — could be glossed over in a man who had, after all, won the Sword of Honour in his last year at Sandhurst. At twenty-six, it was inevitable that he should have known and pleased women, but the only emotion he had hitherto found uncontrollable was the homesickness which had attacked him when he woke, at the age of seven, in the barred dormitory of his prep school, and realised that as a result of some crime he was not aware of having committed, he was banished — perhaps for ever — from the adored gardens and streams and sunlit water meadows of his Wiltshire home.

It is perhaps worth adding that he was not musical. An unfortunate experience at Tosca when the heroine, after leaping off the battlements, had apparently bounced and reappeared, had left him with a distaste for opera. The only ballet he had ever seen — a divertissement from Coppelia inserted into a review at the Alhambra — had bored him stiff.

But the Principal was welcoming them in French, and the Brigadier’s bulbous nose twitched at Alex, instructing him to take over the conversation. Following her through the archway, they encountered a crocodile of tiny girls in fur-trimmed pelisses — each with a neatly-rolled towel under her arm, bound for the weekly ritual of the steam bath in a distant courtyard — passed through a vestibule where a huddle of infant Ice Maidens, pursued by maids with hair-brushes, waited to be conveyed to a matinee at the Maryinsky — and were led upstairs.

Explaining the routine of the school as she went, Varvara Ivanova took them through a dining room with oil-cloth covered tables, threw open the door of a classroom to reveal a pigtailed row of girls having a lesson in notation, another in which the pinafored pupils were dutifully drawing a vase decorated with acanthus leaves… And down a long corridor hung with portraits: of Taglioni, the first sylphide of them all whose ballet shoes, when she retired, had been cooked and eaten by her besotted admirers… of Legnani, whose thirty-two fouettes when she first came to Russia had had every child in Theatre Street pirouetting and turning in an agony of emulation.

They had come to the heart of the building and everywhere, escaping even the heavy double doors with their crests of Romanov eagles, came snatches of music. Fragments of Brahms waltzes, of etudes by Chopin or by some unknown hack, repeated again and again, relentlessly rhythmical, their only function however exalted their source, to serve the battements and glissees and arabesques that were these children’s alphabet.

‘You will wish to see our advanced class, I imagine,’ said the Principal, ‘The girls who next year will leave us to join the corps de ballet. Some of them are already very talented.’ She consulted the watch pinned to her belt. ‘They will be in Room Five.’

Alex translated, the Brigadier nodded and Count Zinov pulled his moustache happily at the thought of the seventeen-year-olds. Suppressing a sigh, for he had hoped to visit a Cossack officer who had promised to show him his horses, Alex stood aside for his superiors as Varvara Ivanova opened yet another door.

The room they entered now was high and bare with three long windows, a barre running round the walls and everywhere mirrors. There was a white and golden stove, a portrait of the Tsar… a wooden floor raked like the stage of the Maryinsky. In the corner, beside them as they entered, was a middle-aged woman, ugly as a toad, coaxing with stumpy, mottled fingers a soaring phrase from a Schubert Impromptu out of the upright piano.

And all round the walls, girls in white practice dresses, one hand on the barre …

‘Continuez,’s’il vous plait’ ordered the Principal. ‘These gentlemen wish to see the class at work.’

The pianist resumed her phrase and the girls, who had paused with demure and downcast eyes, lifted their heads.

‘Let me have your plies again,’ ordered the maitresse de ballet.

‘One, two… good… up… demi plie fourth… close…’

Alex looked on idly. Five girls on the far wall beneath the portrait of the Tsar; six on the wall next to the corridor… another six along the window. It was this row he watched absently. Two very dark girls… a fair one… one with red hair…

And then a voice inside his head pronouncing with ice-cold clarity the words: ‘This is the one¹.

He did not at first understand what had happened, it was so patently impossible and absurd. Indeed he shook his head, as at some trifling accident, and let his eye travel again to the beginning of the row. The first girl, dark with a narrow Byzantine head; the second, dark also though a little taller; the third with that grey-eyed, blonde beauty that Pushkin gave to all his heroines; then the red-head… And now as he reached the girl who was fifth in line he ducked mentally, leaving a space, and came to the last one, another dark-eyed Circassian beauty.

Then, carefully, painstakingly, he let his eyes travel back to the girl who was fifth in line — and again, clear as a bell, the voice in his head said: ‘Yes”.

The fragment of Schubert gave way to an extended phrase from Bellini and the girls went into their battements. His face taut, Alex studied her.

She had a neat and elegant head, but so did all the other girls. Her arms were delicate and perfectly proportioned, her neck high and almost unnaturally slender — but so it was with all of them: how could it be otherwise, hand-picked and measured as they were? She moved with flawless grace and musicality, — and if she had not done would long ago have been sent away, so what was noteworthy in that? Her brown hair was scraped back off a high forehead; just one curl, escaping its bondage, cupped her small ear. Her eyes, too, were brown, but only brown — not liquid with oriental promise as with the girl who stood beside her.

Why then — for God’s sake, why?

The music had stopped. The girls stood quietly, their feet in the fifth position, their eyes cast down.

Except for this one girl; a good girl, hitherto known for her modesty and quietness, who now lifted her head, looked directly and with an expression of the most extraordinary happiness at the handsome English officer — and smiled.

Her name was Vanni. Giovanna, really, for the route that classical ballet had taken — Milan to Paris, Paris to St Petersburg — was reflected in her ancestry. Both her parents had been dancers and came to settle at the Maryinsky. At nine, dressed in white muslin, Vanni had carried her shoe-bag through the portals of the Ballet School for her audition as inevitably as Alex, dressed in grey shorts and a blazer with towers on the pocket, had climbed into his prep-school train.

She was an excellent pupil, industrious, obedient. Her teachers liked her; she got on well with the other girls.

Then, at a quarter-past three on the fifteenth of April, 1912, a week after her seventeenth birthday, in the middle of a cou de pied en devant, she felt… something.

When the music stopped, she turned and saw in a group of people standing by the piano only one man. A man who, in the now silent room, calmly and deliberately crossed the expanse of empty floor and came to stand, as she had known he would, in front of her.

It was a piece of extraordinary effrontery. The Principal hissed; the Brigadier stared, unable to believe his eyes; the other girls giggled nervously. The Tsar himself would have hesitated thus to single out one girl.

‘What is your name?’ said Alex. He spoke in French, the language of the dance, and urgently for it could only be minutes before they were separated.

‘Vanni. Giovanna Starislova. My school number is 157. I shall be here until May 1913, then at the Maryinsky.’

She had understood at once; given him what he needed.

‘I’m Alex Hamilton of the 14th Fusiliers. My home is Winterbourne Hall in Wiltshire.’

She nodded, a frown mark between her eyes as she memorised these English names. Quickly he took possession of his territory. A small bridge of freckles over the nose, gold glints in the brown eyes, lashes which shone like sunflower seeds… There was a tiny mole on her left cheek; a fleeting scent of camomile came from her hair. ‘She is good,’ he thought blissfully. ‘A good girl’. It was a bonus, unexpected.

‘I will come back,’ he said. His voice was very low, but each word as distinct as when he briefed his soldiers. ‘I don’t know when, but I shall return.’

She had folded her slender hands as women do in prayer. Now she tilted them towards him so that her fingertips rested for a brief moment on his tunic. ‘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, despairing at her fate (for she is, of course, an enchanted princess) Odette glides forward. A row of fifteen swans jete 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 corners. 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 four-poster 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 cafe — 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 marche 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 l914. 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.

They were strolling hand in hand along the quai de Flores when a newsboy came by, calling his ‘Extra!’

‘What is it,’ asked Vanni as Alex bought a paper.

‘Just some Austrian Archduke been assassinated,’ he said lightly.

‘Oh,’ she said, relieved. Russia had an unending supply of Archdukes who were constantly being blown up by devout revolutionaries. It was sad, of course; especially when they had been patrons of the ballet.

Alex, in the days that followed, was gayer and more light-hearted than ever, but he redoubled his onslaught on the Embassy — and at night he had to steel himself not to hurry over her hairpins, not to tumble them on the floor in his desperate need to be beside her.

They had most of July, still, to hope as the world hoped. Then Germany declared general mobilisation. France followed. And a telegram came recalling Alex.

For the rest of her life, Vanni needed no map of Hades. Not Dante’s limbo with its damned and swirling souls, not the black river Styx. Just Platform One of the Gare du Nord on a bright day in high summer. A well-kept station, geraniums in hanging baskets, sunlight glancing through the glass. All around them, women sobbing and men hugging their girls… And Alex, in uniform again, standing quite still beside the train that was to take her back to Russia, folding and unfolding her small hands like a fan.

‘It’ll be over by Christmas,’ they heard a young soldier say — and Alex turned his head, a look of naked envy on his face as he glanced at someone so foolish and so young.

Then the doors began to slam and as she turned to climb into the carriage he said, ‘Wait!’, and lifted her hat a little — a brave hat trimmed with marguerites — and pulled one silver hairpin from her hair. And then he stood back and let her go.

Vanni had three weeks before the opening of the new season during which to get her body back into shape. It was not enough, but she did it. Her parents had gone to live in the country; she moved into an apartment on the Fontaka with Olga and Lydia and she danced.

In October they gave her one of the slave dances in Prince Igor and the pas de trois in La Bayadere. She was made a coryphee…

Her modest success passed in a haze. She lived for letters from the front.

‘There’s a letter from France,’ Grisha, the old doorman, would say as she came in for her morning class, his eyes shining with happiness on her behalf.

‘There’s a letter, Vannoushka,’ Olga would whisper, hurrying into the foyer de danse for a rehearsal. ‘Hurry, you just have time.’

Even Vassilov, the Apollo of the Maryinsky, stopped her once on the way to his dressing room to tell her that the post had come.

Alex wrote little of the danger, the horrors he saw daily. It was only indirectly that she gathered he had been promoted, had won the M.C. after only four months of fighting. It was the future — always and only the future that Alex wrote about: their marriage and their life at Winterbourne.

In the spring his letter came from England. He had been hit in the shoulder; he was in hospital; it was nothing.

Vanni rejoiced. He was in hospital; he was safe! Her exultation showed in her work and they gave her the Columbine in Harlequinade…

She had rejoiced too soon. The wound healed well, Alex refused convalescence and insisted on returning to his men. In July he was back on the Somme.

Then, on a bright October morning, Vanni came into the theatre and found Grisha slumped over his table. It was ten o’clock in the morning, but he was already drunk.

‘It may not be…’ he murmured, and picked up a black-rimmed envelope from Britain.

But it was.

His mother, swallowing her disapproval of the foreign girl who had ensnared her son, had kept her promise to him. She wrote of his incredible bravery, the devotion of his men, the last confused and horrific battle in which, until the shell that destroyed his dug-out, he had conducted himself with a heroism that was already becoming a legend. He had been awarded the D.S.O___

‘Oh, God, why doesn’t she cry!’ raged Olga in the days that followed. ‘I cannot bear it!’

But Vanni could manage nothing: not to eat, or talk — or cry… only to dance.

One afternoon Sergueeff, the celebrated regisseur, found her on the deserted stage after a matinee.

‘So,’ he said, tapping her with his stick. ‘Why are you still here, may one ask?’

She curtseyed. ‘I’m sorry, Maestro.’

He examined her. What had happened to her was betrayed in a strange darkening of her hair, her eyes. ‘It does not occur to you, perhaps, that you are fortunate?’ he enquired.

Somehow she managed to smile. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘It does not… occur to me.’

He sat down on a stage rock and motioned her to do likewise.

‘Grief,’ he said. ‘Sorrow… Everyone experiences them. Each day now, there are women who get letters like yours. Sons, husbands, lovers are killed. Their world ends. And what can they do with this grief? Nothing. It is locked inside them; useless. But you…’

She was looking at him, trying very hard, as she did these days, to turn the sounds that came from people’s mouths into recognisable words.

‘You are an artist. For you, sorrow is a force that can be harnessed. It has a use.’

Vanni shook her head. ‘I’m not like that,’ she said. ‘I’m not a great dancer.’

‘No. Not yet.’ He paused. ‘Vassilov wants you,’ said the old man. ‘That’s why I came. We’re giving you La Fille Mai Gardee.’

‘Vassilov! She jumped up, incredulous. ‘Vassilov wants to dance with me?’

So began one of the most illustrious partnerships in the history of ballet. Anton Vassilov, at the time they began to dance together, was at the height of his fame: a tall, marvellously built dancer of the old school. Vanni brought him her youth, the hunger for work caused by her all-consuming grief. He brought her authority, prestige, the glamour of his name.

The war was going badly for the Russians. Food was scarce, fuel had to be begged for. They danced now for men, many of them wounded, whose eyes had seen what no man should see and live. Yet these were marvellous nights at the Maryinsky — these last nights of the Romanov Empire when Vassilov and the little Starislova gave new meaning to the great ballets blancs of the classical repertoire. Men died, that awful year of 1917, with a piece of ribbon from Vanni’s ballet shoes in the pocket of their tunics. She was carried shoulder-high through the streets after her first Giselle.

The revolution did not greatly affect the company and the new regime treated them well. No one could have been less politically minded than Vanni and her good-natured easygoing partner. Yet in the spring of 1918 they found themselves fleeing the country with forged passports, their dancers’ bodies swathed in old coats, walking as if bent and stiff. On the way to a rehearsal they had rescued a little countess, who was trying to make her way into a food queue, from the sport and jeering of the crowd. Someone had denounced them as ‘enemies of the people’. An anonymous phone call at three in the morning warned them that they were to be taken for questioning and urged them to leave at once.

At the Finnish border, they were stopped by the ragged peasant soldiers who guarded the new republic. One of them, searching their meagre possessions, saw the glint of the golden heart Vanni wore round her throat. (‘The Lord watch between me and thee.. ’)

‘Give it to me,’ he said in his thick dialect.

She stepped back. ‘If you want it, you must kill me first,’ she said quietly.

He cursed, scowled — and let her go.

Then they were in Finland and free. Free to walk through two hundred miles of forest to the coast… and to arrive at last, on a day as foggy as any Vanni had imagined, in a grimy northern English port.

Their fame had long since spread to Europe. De Witte, that gifted impresario, built his London season around them. They had never danced better; there was a new rapprochement between them born of the hardships they had shared, and it showed in their work. If her Odette and Giselle now reached a new perfection, it was partly because of Vassilov’s unselfish partnering. For he now loved Vanni and wanted them to marry.

‘Why not?’ he demanded. ‘Yes, I know all about the Englishman, but it is three years!’

She did not know why not. He was a good man and had shown unexpected courage on their nightmare journey; he could make her laugh.

It was to please Vanni that Vassilov gave up his precious free time to go on the dismal, inconvenient tours of hospitals and army camps on which she insisted, travelling with only an accompanist, and a reduced group of girls, to perform on rickety stages to puzzled soldiers who would greatly have preferred the chorus from Chu Chin Chow.

But the day before she was due to dance at an army camp near Devizes she travelled alone, for Vassilov had a sore throat. She booked in at the Red Lion and the next morning took the bus to Winterbourne.

The gate stood open. The elms lining the avenue were just touched with the first gold of autumn.

She knew it all. The lake on her left with the tangled water-lilies… the stream… and yes, there — a skimming streak of blue — was the kingfisher.

The house, now. Serene, lovely — but shuttered… dead…

No, not quite. An old man, a caretaker presumably, came out of a side door towards her.

‘Can I help you, miss?’

‘I am wondering…’ Her English was still uncertain and fragmented. ‘Is the lady… Mrs Hamilton… The mother of…’ But it seemed she still couldn’t say Alex’s name.

The old man stared at her. ‘Mrs Hamilton died more than two years ago. In the winter of 1916. Had a stroke and was gone in a couple of hours.’

‘I see… There is no one here, then?’

‘No one, miss.’

Slowly she walked back across the grass, wanting now only to be gone. And then she saw his tree: the great oak he had loved so much. (‘It was a whole world to me, Vanni, that tree. There were squirrels in it and little mice and hollows filled with water when it rained. I used to spend hours in that tree.’)

She walked up to it and rested her back against the trunk.

And felt suddenly an incredible sense of release. It was as if the grief and anguish that had weighed her down were physically lifted from her. She felt a lightness and something else she could not at first believe.

‘I’m happy,’ thought Vanni wonderingly. ‘Happy!’

The debt of sorrow she had owed her love was paid, then. She was free. And in that instant she saw as clearly as if she really stood before her, the image of a child: her child, a girl, fair-haired and lightly made, waiting to be born — and to dance.

So precise was the moment of her rebirth that Vanni looked at her watch. A quarter-past twelve. Then she walked lightly to the gate.

Back at the hotel, she wondered whether to ring Vassilov and tell him that she was ready now to marry him. But there was time. Everything would unfold in its own way.

Three hours later at the army camp, she danced a pas seul from La Fille Mai Gardee and a Tommy called Ron Smith, who could barely spell his own name, became a lifelong balletomane. Then, as she always did, she accompanied the camp commandant and the doctor on a tour of the hospital.

It was in a magnificent Palladian mansion, a little way from the camp. Long windows, high bare rooms in which men sat playing cards or writing letters, their crutches against their beds…

A very silent room, now, with the really sick: the shell-shock cases, those with head wounds. The room had been the private gymnasium of the nobleman who had given his house. There were wooden bars round the walls, a bare parquet floor. And rows of beds… eight down one side of the wall by the windows, eight by the left-hand wall, another eight facing her. Identical white beds with grey blankets, many of them screened by identical screens.

Vanni stopped. Her thoughts came to her in Russian, sometimes in Italian or French. But it was in English now that the voice in her head stated matter-of-factly: ‘That one’.

What happened next should have been easy enough to ascertain, yet to the last there were different versions. On one thing, however, everyone was agreed. The famous ballerina moved up to the third bed from the left and said in a voice from which the charming foreign hesitance was entirely absent, ‘Take away the screen.’

This done, there were revealed — to the extreme annoyance of the Matron — two of the prettiest nurses (who should have been elsewhere) leaning in concern over patient Number 59613. Really, was there no limit to the fuss that had to be made over this admittedly heroic major with his medals and his amnesia? After all, other men had been decorated three times for bravery, had been grievously wounded and left for dead. Yet even in his present state, the man seemed to possess an unquenchable glamour.

But the girls were ready with their defence.

‘We heard him speak, Matron. A name, it sounded like. We thought he might be coming round.’

‘At a quarter-past twelve, it was,’ said the second nurse, pleased to show her efficiency.

‘Rubbish!’ said the Matron. ‘The patient’s been in a deep coma ever since he was repatriated.’

To this interchange the visiting ballerina paid no attention. Instead she removed, for some reason, her small, pillbox hat and handed it to the commandant to hold as if he was a footman. Then she moved over to the bed and knelt down.

She knelt and she waited. Then, after a while, quietly and without emotion, she pronounced the patient’s Christian name.

And now there was some disagreement over what happened next. That the man stirred on the pillow and turned his head was indisputable. Indisputable, too, that he smiled: a slow, incredibly peaceful smile quite without awe or incredulity.

At this point, on account of the smile, the nurses were already crying, so that their testimony is not really worth much. The ballerina, on the other hand, did not cry. Rather, as the man’s emaciated but still shapely hand lifted itself from the counterpane, she bent her head so that he found, first, her high-piled shining hair.

‘He was just stroking her hair,’ said the first nurse afterwards; a nice girl, decently brought-up, who hunted with the Quorn.

‘Oh, yeah?’ said the second, who was deplorably Cockney and working-class.

And it had to be admitted that the Major’s long chiselled fingers seemed to move through the brown tresses with a sense

of undoubted purpose — to come to rest with what was surely a kind of familiarity on the first hairpin… the second and the third. It was probably just an accident — for he was still pitifully weak- that the pins should fall one by one on to the blankets so that presently the dancer’s quiet, transfigured face was entirely framed in her loosened hair…

But if a certain disquiet nevertheless remained, if the action did not seem to be quite that of an English officer and gentleman, the first word with which the gallant major signalled his return to health and sanity was as reassuring and high-minded as anyone could wish.

‘Sanctuary,’ said Alex Hamilton, and smiled once more, and slept.

‘Vanni! Doushenka! Milenkaya!’

For all her seventy years, Madame Delsarte ran down the last flight of stairs, and the elegant woman standing in the hall turned and absurdly, in her Chanel coat and sable muff, she curtseyed. To be pulled to her feet, embraced and addressed in a spate of Russian.

‘Oh you bad, bad girl!’ scolded Madame. ‘To give it all up just like that! After such a Giselle!’ She shook her head. ‘How you must have suffered! What a struggle!’

Vanni smiled. ‘No. There was no struggle. I never had to think, not for a moment. As soon as I found him again, all I wanted was to be with him.’

‘Yes, I can see it in your face, your happiness. He must be a good man, I think, not only a brave soldier. So you have no regrets?’

‘None.’ But Vanni’s eyes rested now, with an infinity of love, on the child who had followed Madame and stood quietly waiting on the upstairs landing.

‘Is she—’ she began, but found she could not trust her voice.

‘She is accepted, of course,’ said Madame Delsarte. She paused. Then throwing common-sense, caution, even wisdom to the winds, she put an arm round Vanni and answered the question in her former pupil’s gentle eyes. ‘Do not fear, doushenka,’ she said, too softly for the child to hear. ‘She is one of us. She will dance.’