A Glove Shop in Vienna and Other Stories

by Eva Ibbotson

  Yet when she packed her case the following morning, Jenny thought, well really it wasn’t so amazing. No one swung from any chandeliers. We’re just people who are fond of each other and wanted to be together. What’s all the fuss about? Fidelity … adultery… all those stupid words. Why do people carry on so? Why did I get in such a state?

  They had decided to travel back by separate trains, but Thomas insisted on seeing her off. So once again they stood on the platform at Euston station, smiling at each other, keeping an eye open for acquaintances, thanking each other over and over again.

  Then Jenny got on the train and shut the door and lowered the window. And as she felt the door slam between her and Thomas, saw him stand there with his head back, looking at her, his glasses in his hand, she was seized suddenly with an anguish so terrible, so physically overwhelming that she thought she could not bear it. It was as though everything inside her had suddenly imploded – as though each and every organ in her body was collapsing one by one and crumbling into dust – and she cried, ‘I can’t leave you, I can’t, I can’t!’

  But the train had started; there was only time for a last glimpse of Thomas’s face showing the same incomprehensible anguish that was on her own and then they were past the end of the platform, moving between sooty walls and tenements, gathering speed …

  It was then, standing there in the corridor of the 1.35 to Torchester on a drizzly morning on the twenty-third of June, that Jenny understood about the Bible. She understood why it had said ‘ Thou shalt not commit adultery’ in that stroppy, unequivocal way, and she understood why it had not said why. It had not said why because most probably it did not know, or more likely because there were no words for the knowing. But Jenny, tottering to the buffet car to see if it was yet open and would sell her, so early in the day, a double whisky or perhaps a pint of opium, could have told the Old Testamental gentleman who had penned that bit exactly why. Because to make love is to make love and in that plastic hotel behind the British Museum, on a bed most hideously covered in purple candle-wick, she and Dr Thomas Marsham had given birth to this devastating product, had manufactured it as surely and solidly as the Bessemer Process – in the far-off, halcyon corridor of her schooldays – had been supposed to manufacture steel.

  There was nothing to be done about it. She had set off on this course and somehow she would work it through and perhaps in the end she would hurt no one, not even herself. But as she travelled homeward, disembowelled and divided, as to a distant, sun-drenched landscape she could never hope to reach, Jenny, drinking whisky and eating hard-boiled eggs (for passion, like pregnancy, most strangely affects the appetite) knew why the Bible carried on the way it did. She wouldn’t read it – one didn’t any more. But, God, she knew …

  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 matinée 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 fouettés 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, ofétudes 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 glissées 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 pliés again,’ ordered the maîtresse de ballet. ‘One, two … good … up … demi plié in 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 one’.

  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.