A Glove Shop In Vienna

DOUSHENKA

There was nothing odd about finding a photograph of Great-uncle Edwin wedged at the back of a bureau drawer. It was a day for finding wedged great-uncles, crumpled brides cut from local newspapers, albums of yellowing babies… I was in my last year at Oxford and had come up to London to help my parents move house.

But Great-uncle Edwin…? He had been a grocer, I thought, in a South London suburb. Wimbledon? Teddington? So why this photograph in which he wore a high-necked boyar blouse, felt boots and a round fur hat? Beside the mild, slightly surprised figure in its Russian clothes was the usual draped table on which he rested a light hand. But where was the aspidistra? Where the picture of the Queen? That wasn’t… but of course it was. A samovar!

I put the picture in my pocket, but I had to wait until the following Christmas for the visit of my mother’s eccentric older sister, my Aunt Geraldine, to get the story.

‘Edwin?’ she said. ‘Ah, yes, poor Edwin! Dear God, what a romantic that man was! And then to marry Edith… And yet…’

‘Would you tell me?’ I said. We were walking along the Embankment towards Chelsea Bridge. Beside us, the Thames snuffled gently against its walls, a slow barge went down towards Greenwich. It was all very English, very peaceful, very grey.

She looked at me, surprised, pleased perhaps that I — uncouth and masculine and young- should seem to care about the past.

‘He was obsessed,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how it happened. Perhaps a label on a crate of smoked sturgeon from the Volga, a delivery note for Ternov ham… He kept a grocer’s shop in Putney.’

‘Russia?’ I said and shivered as she nodded, because it is a devastating experience, finding a fellow-sufferer from the same disease.

‘If he was walking along here with you,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, ‘he wouldn’t see this river.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘He’d see the blue ice beginning to break on the Neva, the pale facade of the Winter Palace, Rasputin’s unspeakable head bobbing on the water…’

My aunt looked at me. A long look. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Though of course in those days Rasputin was still alive.’

‘One can’t choose one’s obsessions,’ she went on, and I think she meant to comfort me. ‘I myself spent the first three years of my adolescence as Third Daughter in the House of the Four Winds in the province of Soo Chow. Outwardly, of course, I was Geraldine Ferguson, the only girl in the Upper Fourth with acne and bunions. But inwardly I was Golden Bells whose verses did not displease the Emperor.’ She stopped for a moment and we leant over the Embankment Wall. ‘Something to do with reincarnation, perhaps,’ she said.

‘And Uncle Edwin?’ I prompted.

‘Ah yes. Well, he had it very badly. Words like “droshki” or “troika” would send him into a sort of trance. I imagine he must have been the only grocer in London who climbed to his haricot bean jar on three volumes of Lermontov. But of course he never had a hope of going and he found the language almost impossible to learn.’

‘And then he married Edith?’

My aunt nodded, staring at the gentle, unfrozen, incurably un-Russian Thames.

‘I shall never know what made him do it,’ she said.

‘What was she like?’

‘If I know what she was like, it is because I was with Edwin when he died. It was only in the last days of his life that he spoke freely. Before that he never complained.’

I waited.

‘She was a “not tonight, dear” woman,’ said my aunt. ‘They’re extinct now, I gather, and thank God for it because they’re killers. Slow killers. Poisoners. Edith didn’t just have nights when it was too hot and nights when it was too cold and nights when she had cream on her face. She had nights when her stays had left her tender and nights when the neighbour’s mother-in-law was asleep the other side of the wall…’

‘Poor Edwin.’

‘Poor Edwin indeed. Of course it just made him worse. He’d read Pushkin: “soul of my soul, light of my heart”, sitting there on a barrel of pickled cucumbers, and then go upstairs and find Edith with her mouth shut like a trap because it was the anniversary of the Prince Consort’s funeral.’

‘So what happened then?’

‘What happened then,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, ‘was that a man called Mr Frobisher shot himself.’

‘He hadn’t,’ she went on, ‘meant to shoot himself. He’d been after pheasants on his home moor when he tripped and fell and the gun went off. Mr Frobisher was a retired haberdasher who’d done extremely well out of a patent spring-clip for bow ties. He was also Edwin’s godfather and when the will was read, it turned out that he’d left Edwin a thousand pounds.’

I stopped dead, a few yards from the Albert Bridge.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He didn’t?’

My aunt nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was a brave man. He went to Russia.’

‘Brave?’ I said. ‘Idiotic! Insane!’ To put all those dreams to the test… to travel on trains to whose wheels still clung ghost shreds of Anna Karenina’s muff… to let the sapphire curtains of the Maryinsky part on the fabulous Kschessinskaya, mistress of the Czar…

‘He left his assistant to look after the shop,’ said my aunt, ‘sent Edith back to Mummy in Clapham (and weren’t they both pleased!) and arrived, at the end of April, at the Finland Station in St Petersburg.’

Like everyone who dreams of Russia, he had seen it always under snow. But now it was spring. In the Alexander Gardens, where the English governesses sat watching diminutive princesses roll their hoops, the lime trees were green and gold. The Neva sparkled and danced between its granite banks, the air blew softly from the Gulf of Finland. From his hotel he could see Peter the Great, bronze and invincible, astride his rearing horse; in the drawer of his writing desk, impressing him vastly, he found the visiting card of the room’s former occupant: Lord Broomhaven of Craghill Castle, Yorks.

Edwin had no plan for his days. He just walked and walked, as pleased with the marble and jasper sarcophagi of the dead Romanovs as with a stall selling gingerbread from Tver.

And then one evening he was walking down Theatre Street…

My aunt paused. ‘You’ve heard of it?’

‘Oh, yes.’ I’d heard of it all right. A wide and elegant street running between the Alexandrinsky Theatre and the Fontanka river. A street peopled with limbo’s most graceful ghosts: the young Pavlova running to the Summer Gardens to feed her swans; Karsavina, after her debut, ecstatic at Petipa’s praise; sledgeloads of nascent cygnets or Sugar-plum fairies driving to rehearsal at the Maryinsky… For on one side of Theatre Street, half huge and splendid palace, half nunnery, is the place where it all began: the Imperial Ballet School.

Edwin was no balletomane. It was the hour of the evening meal, the street was empty and he was on the way back to his hotel. What stopped him was a sound: perhaps the most forlorn sound in the whole world. The sound of someone not crying.

He turned. Leaning against a closed doorway in the side of the huge building was a young girl. She wore an old-fashioned brown cloak a little small for her; an ancient carpet-bag lay like an unwanted animal across her feet, and on her long, dark lashes he could see the tears held steady by her bursting will.

‘Are you locked out?’ Edwin managed in his clumsy Russian.

She lifted her face to his. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But for ever. I have been expelled for ever from the Imperial Ballet school.’

Her name was Kira. Edwin took her back to the hotel. And began, he said, his life.

‘If you consider,’ said my aunt, ‘you’ll realise that always, in every age, there’s been a romantic ideal: a kind of girl whose looks, whose whole way of life, appeases that yearning for chivalry and tenderness that even the most sophisticated men don’t seem able to stamp out of themselves. All those Paris midinettes with their poverty and hearts of gold; those demure oppressed Victorian governesses… And of course, then as now, the girls of the ballet.’

Kira was barely seventeen, small-boned and supple as a willow. Not at all beautiful, Edwin told my aunt, desperately proud of this piece of detachment. Not beautiful, then: a narrow face with immense Byzantine eyes, smooth hair pulled up behind faun’s ears. ‘And when she sat down to listen to you,’ Edwin said, ‘it was her feet she folded.’

As soon as he took charge of Kira, Edwin changed. He might really have been the Lord Broomhaven of Craghill whose visiting card he had taken to carrying in his pocket. He ordered a room for her in the hotel, was told there was no room, insisted — and got one. He asked for a meal to be served to them upstairs, was told it was too late, and presently sat with her by his window over grilled sturgeon and sparkling Crimean wine.

And afterwards, lying on his bearskin rug, shredding its loose fur into petals with her narrow, nervous hands, Kira told him her story.

‘How did he understand her?’ I asked, ‘if his Russian was so bad?’

My aunt shrugged. ‘He understood her because he had to understand her,’ she said.

Kira was in her last year at the Ballet School, due to leave soon and join the corps de ballet at the Maryinsky. She made him see her life there very clearly: the huge, empty rooms where they practised, the vast dormitories each with its own governess in her curtained bed; the windows to the street made of frosted glass because once a pupil had eloped with a young hussar. The discipline, the austerity was what came over most. But she was happy.

And then her father, an idealistic country schoolmaster, wrote a book which was regarded as seditious and was sent to Siberia. A few months later her brother, a student at the Conservatoire, got himself mixed up with a group of revolutionaries and was imprisoned in the dreaded fortress of St Peter and St Paul.

Even then, she said, they wouldn’t have done anything to her. The ballet was outside politics in Russia, it was their pride to have it so. But she had lost her head.

‘It was knowing he was so near,’ she said, lifting her head to the window where the thin gold spire of the fortress cathedral still pierced the pale light of a northern evening. ‘Just across the river.’

She started creeping out at night to meet his friends, a group of hot-heads who were making plans to free him. Inevitably she was discovered. And dismissed…

‘But where will you go?’ asked Edwin. ‘Is your mother still alive?’

Kira shook her head. There was only her Aunt Lydia, who lived in a small town near Kazan. A dreadful town, Kira said: two dusty streets, endless fields of sugar-beet. ‘And chickens. You’ve never seen so many chickens.’

It was this aunt she had been vainly awaiting when Edwin came.

‘I need hardly tell you,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, as we made our way back along the river, ‘that Edwin behaved with perfect propriety…’

He sent another telegram to Kira’s Aunt Lydia, installed Kira in his own room while he moved to a smaller one overlooking a courtyard, and prepared to make tolerable for the shocked and lonely girl the time of waiting.

He began formally enough with drives to the Islands, visits to museums. But soon he found that she liked, as he did, just to walk the streets, just to look and listen, and explore…

So they fed the pigeons in the Summer Gardens, bought hot piroshki and ate them leaning against the bronze horses of the Anichkov Bridge… In the evenings they strolled along the embankment and listened to the students playing their mandolins, or drank lemonade on one of the barge cafes moored along the Quays. And always, without seeming to do so Edwin managed, in this city which was wholly strange to him, to avoid any place which might give her pain. Not just the Maryinsky Theatre, but all the theatres in this pleasure-loving town. Not just a poster announcing a ballet programme — even the portrait of a dancer in an art shop he could somehow smell out and keep from her.

Gradually her natural gaiety came to the surface, her eyes lost their shipwrecked look. On the day she laughed out loud at a tiny Maltese terrier, like a white wig on casters, which was chasing a huge Borzoi across Mars Meadow, he felt as though he had been given a million pounds. And already, knowing what the future would bring, he began to hoard those small, unimportant details which memory uses to unlock the doors of love. The way she cupped her bowl of coffee, holding its warmth against her chest; the despairing shake of her head when he mispronounced, yet again, a poem she was teaching him about a crocodile walking down the Nevsky Prospect…

She was a thief, too, unashamedly stealing sugar from the cafe tables to feed to the tired old droshky nags.

And every day as they returned to the hotel Edwin would hold his breath, expecting to see the waiting figure of Aunt Lydia, whom he imagined always as a vast peasant woman in felt boots and sacking, with a basket of chickens in her lap. And when she wasn’t sitting there, he felt weak with relief. Another day’s reprieve. Another day of idyll.

For what happened next, Edwin always blamed himself. He should have taken more care, supervised what she drank…

‘One morning,’ said my aunt, ‘Kira woke flushed and feverish. She couldn’t eat. By the evening she was very ill.’

It was typhoid fever. The hotel insisted she be moved to hospital. Edwin bribed and cajoled and blustered and they put up blankets dipped in disinfectant and let her stay. Edwin nursed her and let no one near. Two days earlier he had been shy of touching her elbow to guide her across the road. Now he washed her, changed her nightclothes, held her head when she vomited. When the old-fashioned English doctor wanted her hair cut, Edwin himself cut the long black tresses, strand by strand, while she slept.

In her delirium, Kira went back into early childhood. She wept as the chickens of Kazan pecked her small fingers, ran after her brother begging him to wait, oh, please to wait for her, screamed as her mother’s grave was filled again with earth. And always, like a brook running through the centre of her experience, was this leit-motif, the work of the ballet, as she murmured: ‘Plie… battement tendu… soutenu.. ’, counted her beat and in her cracked and fever-ridden voice hummed snatches of music.

Edwin never left her, day or night. Before, he had had the luxury of a romantic and tender emotion; he had been ‘in love’. Now he cut right through that. Kira became his unborn child, the wife he had never had, the woman she would be when she was old. When it was over, he said, he knew her.

At the peak of Kira’s illness, Aunt Lydia arrived at the hotel. He had imagined her quite wrongly. She was a thin, anxious woman in an exhumed-looking black coat — the village schoolmistress. All the time he spoke to her she kept a handkerchief soaked in carbolic across her mouth. Illness terrified her; she dreaded being asked to stay and nurse her niece.

Edwin reassured her, gave her money for the journey back, told her he would bring Kira himself when she was well. And forgot her.

It is a slow illness, typhoid fever, and nearly a month passed before Kira was out of danger. Then suddenly she was sitting up in bed, convalescent. She had a passion for jigsaw puzzles. There was one in particular, of the Czarina and the four little Grand Duchesses… ‘A real stinger, that was,’ Edwin told my aunt. ‘We must have spent hours looking for Anastasia’s hair-ribbon.’

Her illness seemed to have washed Kira free of her distress about the Ballet School. She asked no questions about the future, obeyed Edwin like a trusting child, seemed content to drift.

One beautiful day towards the end of May, with the sunlight streaming into the room, he picked her up and carried her from her bed to the open window.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh, Edwin, look! The river! The sky! Oh, isn’t it marvellous that I’m not dead!’

And she turned in his arms and kissed him.

‘Edwin was no fool,’ said my aunt. ‘He knew exactly what that kiss was about. Gratitude for a return to health, artless affection, nothing more. All the same, as a result of it, he decided to change his life.’

Two days later he left Kira with some magazines, went along to the English grocer in Gogol Street and asked for a job. They needed English-speaking staff, were impressed by his knowledge of the trade and told him he could start the following month.

Edwin didn’t go back to Kira straight away. He walked back across Palace Square and sat down on one of the benches in the Alexander Gardens.

It was a beautiful day. Babies in perambulators passed him, pushed by nurses with streamers in their caps; beside him on the grass a small girl in a white dress built a stick-house for a captured beetle. And Edwin closed his eyes and looked into the future.

He was a modest man, but he knew that he was better than

Aunt Lydia and the chickens of Kazan. And sitting there, the sun on his face, Edwin lived through the life he would have with Kira.

He saw their little flat on the other bank of the Neva where everything was cheaper; two rooms, a window box, a canary to sing for Kira when he was out at work. He saw her sitting opposite him in the morning, cupping her bowl of coffee, while he told her how much, how very much it had grown in the night — her poor, shorn, duckling-feather hair; saw her running towards him in the evening in an apron too big for her. He felt her hand creep from her muff into his pocket as they walked the snowy streets to buy their Christmas tree; dusted the pollen off her nose after he had brought her the first king-cups. By the gay and gilded fountains of Peterhof they bandied preposterous names for their unborn child. At night, in their big wooden bed, he watched her spoon cherry jam into her tea and told her that her habits were disgusting, that he loved her more than life itself.

‘When he was dying,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, jabbing the tip of her umbrella into a cracked paving-stone, ‘he told me that of all the hours of his life, that hour in the Alexander Gardens was the one he would most like to have again.’

It was noon when he returned to the hotel. He was a quiet man, always, and now, opening the door of his room, he made no sound. Kira’s back was to him. She was standing by the open window through which there flowed, badly played, relentlessly rhythmic, the sound of someone practising a Schubert waltz. Kira’s feet were folded in the fifth position; her arms were curved in to her side. And then as he watched, slowly, so shakily, with the ghost of her former strength, she began to go through one of her old routines: glissade…jete… attitude en avant…

Edwin stood very still, holding on to the knob of the door. He could see only her back and the nape of her neck with its heartbreaking, sawn-off hair, but he knew…

‘You’re crying,’ he said.

Her arms dropped. Her foot glided to rest like an autumn leaf.

‘From the back of my neck you can tell I’m crying?’ she said wonderingly.

Probably she grew up at that moment. At any rate she turned and came towards him and lifted her face to his, and he kissed her wet eyelids, her mouth, while everything inside him crumbled slowly into dust.

The next day he went to Druce’s in the Nevsky Prospect and bought a pair of incredibly expensive English gloves. He said he didn’t think he could have done it without those gloves. Then he took out Lord Broomhaven’s visiting card and drove to Theatre Street.

‘I’ll never know how he managed it,’ said my aunt. ‘You’ll notice I’ve used the same words about him again and again: “meek”, “quiet”, “gentle”. All the same, he confronted the Principal and persuaded her that he really was an English aristocrat whose entourage had been horrified to find a member of the Czar’s famous Ballet School abandoned and at death’s door. He hinted at a scandal in the English press, implied a special interest in Kira on the part of a high-ranking diplomat — and just at the right moment became a supplicant, stressing Kira’s remorse and change of heart.’

The decision to expel her had not been unanimous. Now it was reversed.

And so, on a still grey morning, he drove Kira back to Theatre Street. At the last minute she was afraid and by the same door at which he had found her she clung to him and said, ‘No! No! I want to stay with you!’

But he was beyond everything by now and gently he loosened her arms and picked up the great brass knocker shaped like the Imperial Eagle of the Czar, and then he just stood there very quietly and watched her go.

My aunt stopped talking. She had finished her umbrella-jabbing and we stood side by side, our elbows on the parapet, looking at, and not seeing, the river Thames.

‘That’s all?’ I said at last.

She shrugged. ‘He’d meant to go on, to see Moscow, Kiev, the Crimea. But his money had run out, of course, and anyway…’

‘So he went back to Edith?’

My aunt nodded. ‘Edith,’ she said, ‘was tired after the journey from Clapham. She was sitting up in bed with cream on her face and —’

‘No! She didn’t! She didn’t say it to him. Not that first night!’

‘She said it! And Edwin went up to her and said: “Yes. Tonight. And any other night I choose.” And went on living with her for thirty years.’

‘Oh, hell!’ I said. ‘He had so little. For so short a time.’

‘No,’ said my aunt. ‘You’re wrong. Edwin was all right.’

I waited.

‘I was with him at the end, as I told you. And just before he died, suddenly… he lifted up his head…’ She broke off. ‘I have never,’ she went on, ‘seen such a look of happiness on any human face. And then he said this one word. I didn’t know what it was; I had to look it up.’

‘Dousha,’ I said. ‘Was it that? Doushenka?’ And suddenly it seemed desperately, frantically important that I had guessed right.

My aunt looked up, started. ‘That was it. It’s an endearment, of course.’

‘Yes.’ It’s an endearment, all right, and for my money the best ever, the ultimate. ‘My soul’, ‘My little soul’…

‘So you see,’ said my aunt, unfurling her umbrella, ‘that he really was all right.’

And we turned and left the quiet, grey, incurably English river and went home to tea.