He visited every week, still respectfully dating Jennifer on Saturday nights. The fact that this first love was doomed, that she was promised to another man and must leave him in the summer, seemed ideally poignant and freed them both to ecstasies of melancholy.
In the interludes between lovemaking he began to ask her about France. The glamour of being, as he supposed, partly French himself now illuminated all the gloomy corners of his mind. She related every detail of her student year in Aix-en-Provence, and he envisioned the lavender fields and the bakeries so passionately that the smells seemed to fill his nostrils. He began to repeat words after her, savouring their strangeness, and so she set him simple exercises and loaned him books which he read through the empty nights at home, burning out his torch batteries under the blankets.
In time the next phase of the miracle came to fruition, and a cheap blue envelope arrived from France. The handwriting was small and tremulous but the sense was as dramatic as he had hoped. His grandmother was moved to the very depths of her heart by his letter. Inexpressible joy filled her life and made her forget all the terrible things which had happened in the past. There were three pages in the same operatic vein, then a cascade of demands for photographs and details of his life, and finally more professions of love and joy before the signature.
‘I think we did the right thing,’ the teacher concluded as she put the letter in his hand. ‘Imagine that poor woman pining for you all these years.’ They reflected that when the term ended they too would pine and held each other more closely.
She composed a reply and he dispatched it, but Alex began to entertain the idea of meeting his grandmother face to face. He imagined her in a dozen different ways, white haired or pepper-and-salt, dressed in black lace, or in lavender chiffon, with a stick, a parasol, maybe some species of French lapdog, always smiling, always holding out her arms to him. Soon the craving to know was always with him, and he started to form plans. Finding that his life seemed more his own if he had a secret to keep, he told no one, but extracted from his lover the procedure for applying for a passport and buying an air ticket.
When his father drove him to the bank he went in, sat down for a few minutes, then came out again with the cash from his redoubled chores still in his pocket, and when he returned home he hid it in the toe of one of his snow boots. He learned to forge his father’s signature. The birth certificate and the passport application were easy to get. His final inspiration was to volunteer to help at the church summer camp on the lake at Port Clinton. It was not a paid job but the tips were generous, and it set the seal on his parents’reassurance that his previous escape was just an isolated adolescent aberration.
If the work was hard it helped him to forget the tearful parting with his lover at the term’s end.
By October he had more than enough money. His father fell ill, which meant that the house was invaded by a succession of women from the church who sat with the sufferer reading him the arguments of Mary Baker Eddy to help the old man understand that his gallstone was an illusion of the material world. Seeing the opportunity for an escape which would not be noticed for days, Alex offered to stay with the McIlwaines until his father was better, so that one of the church women could sleep in the house overnight.
It was a Friday. He left school with his hiking pack and took a bus to the airport, mentally saying farewell to the towering, featureless buildings, the gangling men in dungarees on the street corners, the sign forbidding agricultural vehicles to be driven in the city and everything else which he despised about Cleveland.
He bought tickets and was in Paris within twenty-four hours. Delighted at his ability to buy a sandwich and decipher destination boards, he transferred to the Gare de Lyon and sat up all night on the train to Marseilles, listening to the strange metallic sounds of the railway.
At Marseilles he caught a few hours of sleep on a bench, then boarded a smaller train for Nice. As the morning sun rose his compartment grew hotter and hotter. People, French people, looked at him incuriously and grumbled at the heat, animated brown faces with black eyes and bad teeth. He strained his eyes against the light to see the landscape, the houses with their red-tiled roofs, the pine trees and at last the glittering blue sea in the distance. The Mediterranean! Yesterday it had been only an exotic shape in an atlas, and today it was gleaming behind the rocky hills, a thousand times more real than the steely expanses of Lake Erie.
Restless with excitement, he got up and spent the rest of the journey hanging out of the window at the carriage door, breathing the warm resinous air. Names brilliant with romance passed on station signs: Juan les Pins, Cap d’Antibes, Cannes.
At Nice, light-headed with tiredness and agitation, he almost ran out of the station, brushing aside unheard the well-dressed man with a pink carnation in his lapel who advanced to offer the good-looking boy accommodation. A kiosk was conveniently placed in his path and he bought nougat and a map which promised wonders. The casino, the opera, the flower market and the Promenade des Anglais danced invitingly under his eyes, but he collected himself and referred to the index to find his grandmother’s address. It was in the extreme south-west quarter of the city.
The walk was long and full of marvels. He passed shops crammed with shiny sugared fruit, stalls loaded with carnations, news stands buried under piles of foreign periodicals. There were gardens overflowing with palms and bright subtropical flowers. The main boulevard was crowded with people in light summer clothes and the smells of burnt sugar, garlic and bad drains delighted his nose.
Eventually he made his way to a residential district, where villas painted pink and orange were shuttered against the sun and fragrant rosemary and lavender bushes spilled over their walls. He was close to his destination when he unexpectedly came upon a crazy fairy-tale church, with multiple fat domes in Walt Disney pastels and palm trees in its garden.
He walked uphill, with the sparkle of the sea far behind him, and at last came to a house which bore the number he sought. It was in a street of similar two-storey buildings in Thirties style, with Villa les Gazelles worked in the wrought-iron screen across its frosted-glass door. The geraniums in the garden were old, stunted plants with small flowers and the rosemary had sprawled so far that the bush had torn itself in two and was half dead.
Alex paused and drew a slow breath. His search was over. After travelling for two days, four thousand miles across an entire ocean, he was outside his grandmother’s house. It had a somnolent air, but in the breathless heat of late afternoon the whole town seemed to be dozing.
The bell did not ring the first time he tried it, so after an interval he tried again with more pressure and heard not one but several buzzes inside the house. Silence followed. He thought after a while that he heard a sound, but could not be sure. Perhaps she was out, perhaps away. He had money, he could find a hotel or a students’ hostel.
Very slowly the door opened four inches and he saw a brown face with straggling black hair above it.
‘Vous cherchez quelqu’un, Monsieur?’
He pulled the blue envelope from his shirt pocket, pointed to the address and made the announcement which he had prepared:
‘C’est moi, Alex. Je suis Alex.’
A hand, all veins and sinews, reached for the envelope and he passed it over. The door closed three inches, and he heard a whispered conversation, then it opened wide and he saw two small women, wrinkled and stooped but not like any old ladies he had ever seen in his life. The one who had opened the door wore a black dress with her hair pinned firmly in a chignon.
The other one was pale-skinned and dishevelled, clutching around her a stained peach satin wrapper edged with feathers. Her hair was short and the colour of rust, her eyes painted thickly with black liner. Her lips were colourless, but the red lipstick had run into the deep lines around her mouth. She was holding the wrapper together at the neck so tightly that she seemed to be throttling herself.
‘Mais c’est lui! C’est vraiment lui! Personne d’autre! S
on image vivant!’
Her voice was a crow’s screech. She clutched her heart. The two conferred rapidly in another language full of harsh sounds, and then she stepped towards him, smiling and opening her arms, revealing a nightdress from the neck of which hung a length of torn lace. Her clothing released a wave of thick, musky perfume. The gesture was exactly as he had visualized it, but the rest of the picture was strange beyond his imaginings and all the more thrilling.
‘Alex!’ Her bare foot stamped on the dark parquet, and she tossed back her red head, commanding him to respond.
He stepped forward and leaned down to embrace her. ‘Grandmother!’
4. St Petersburg, 1905
‘My sister says she has half my clothes finished already.’ Marie turned over the next page of her letter. After Easter, in a few months’ time, the class was to graduate, find places in the Imperial ballet company and emerge in the wide world. The girls who had lived in the school building at Theatre Street and worn the plain uniform garments for ten years past would go home, some to a veritable trousseau of new clothes. ‘Two visiting dresses,’ Marie continued, ‘and two evening dresses, with gloves, stockings … but she says she will wait until I come home to look for my new boots – oh, she’s such a bitch, look what she says here – “because I’m sure you will have acquired some new corns or bunions or other unimaginable disfigurements by now and we will have the devil’s own job to find anything to fit you”.’
‘You’re so lucky. God knows what my mother will have got ready for me. I expect she’ll complain, she always does. Maybe if I write to her and drop a few hints she’ll get the message.’
To train themselves for society, Lydia and Marie had pledged to speak only in French to each other for the rest of the term, so they would be as fluent in the language of the elite as any coddled debutante from the Smolny Convent. French made them both more animated and they chattered like a pair of finches as they crossed the inner courtyards in the school complex on their way to the bath house.
They paused for an instant, oblivious of the lacerating cold, to look up to the windows of the rehearsal room on the first floor, where dancers appeared in silhouette against the drawn blinds. All the windows in the school had been provided with opaque blinds since the Director had discovered that a rehearsal room elsewhere in the city was vulnerable to balletomanes who rode upstairs on the omnibuses to catch sight of the dancers at work. The double windows cut out all sound, but it was still possible to see poor Tamara Platonova fumble her turns and some of the onlookers turn aside to hide their sneers.
‘Poor thing, and she works so hard too.’ Marie put away her letter and blew on her fingers. ‘Whatever problems we’ve got they can’t be as bad as hers. Especially not you, with your steel feet. Lucky for Tata she’s so sweet, she can get by on personality. Or do you think her father pulls strings for her?’
Lydia shook her head as they proceeded onwards along the icy path. ‘He can’t any more, he’s lost his job – haven’t you heard?’
‘No! Poor Tata. And she’s got no one to look after her, has she? That’s the kind of news that really makes me count my blessings. I don’t know what I’d do if it wasn’t for my sister – she’s the lucky one really to have married so well and be able to look after me.’ It was the simple truth. Every ballet school pupil was the child of parents who were either dead or impoverished. Even the children of older dancers, or of singers or musicians in the Imperial train, were well used to tight circumstances at home. Others, like the fragile Olga, had come straight from the orphanage. They were always conscious of poverty snapping at their heels.
They lived in a no-man’s-land between starvation and opulence. The luxury of the ballet’s mise en scène was held to be one of its cardinal qualities. Productions called for scores of people to be on stage, for lavish scenery and elaborate effects, horses and chariots, even gilded barges with silk sails gliding over the lakes at the Tsar’s summer palaces in the country. The costumes were made of the finest fabrics, trimmed with rich furs, braids and ribbons, and worn with the dancers’own jewels. Beyond these sumptuous illusions lay the genuine splendour of St Petersburg society, and the Imperial Court. Behind, however, was the monastic simplicity and discipline of the school. This they would never leave, even after graduation. Daily classes and rehearsals, plain clothes and bare board floors would remind them of the instability of their lives, in which an accident, an illness or an injury could throw them back into deprivation.
The young dancers had the épaulement of goddesses, imposed by fine training but finally enhanced by knowing their own good fortune. However harsh their teachers might be, however strict their regime, at school they could eat meat three times a day, be educated, have their morals guarded and their manners guided and if they worked hard and behaved properly would at last be released into a glittering world with a livelihood and excellent opportunities to improve on it; those with real gifts would be rewarded, although political agility was at least as important as artistic talent; the average performers could still find lovers, and for the girls, like Marie’s sister, perhaps even husbands, who would provide for them. For Lydia and Marie the day of release was intoxicatingly close; they lapsed regularly into fevers of anticipation.
They passed under a broad archway into the smallest courtyard, picked their way around the stacks of firewood, and entered the wooden bath house, which seemed to Lydia like Hansel and Gretel’s cottage in the forest in comparison with the school’s classical buildings. Faint light radiated from the tiny windows into the gloom of the winter evening.
It was deliciously warm after the bitter cold outside, and the smells of smoke and the wet, resinous wood were unique to the place. In the dressing room they shed their heavy coats and unlaced their boots. The maids helped them remove their long white pinafores and their serge dresses of plain blue. They pulled off their petticoats and their white cotton undergarments with modest lace edging. Wrapped in towels which were harsh from much laundering, they decided to sit in the steam bath and climbed up the wooden benches against the panelled walls. The maids threw water on the stove filled with stones in the middle of the floor.
‘Here.’ Lapsing into Russian, Marie handed the nearest woman a small brown bottle. ‘Put some of this in the water – it’s juniper balm, my sister says it’s good for making your muscles relax.’
Billows of steam shot to the ceiling and spread out in a cloud. Lydia pinched her nostrils to keep them from being scalded until the temperature moderated. ‘Go on, Marie, tell me about your clothes again.’
Marie obligingly recited descriptions of her dresses. Lydia had an extraordinary passion for everything pretty, for clothes, costumes, knick-knacks, flowers; if she could not own these things, it was almost as good to hear about them. ‘Do you think your mother will get you anything?’ her friend finished hesitantly.
‘I don’t know. I hope so. I know what I’d like, I’ve been dreaming about it. I want a black and white hat, with feathers …’
‘Ooh, yes. Everyone’s wearing them this year, my sister says.’
‘And a polka-dot dress to go with it, with a low waist.’ The languor induced by the steam was blown away by her enthusiasm and she got up to demonstrate, drawing imaginary seams around her naked body. She had already passed hours sketching the dresses of her dreams in her school notebooks. ‘And something with those contrast-colour revers, cream and delft blue, or cream and red, maybe a coat, you know, with the buttons in cream.’
‘Gorgeous! I wish I could have something like that too.’ ‘We’d look like sisters.’ The heat and the excitement had made her breathless and Lydia lay down again. ‘I do wish I had a sister like you.’
Marie’s little hand, its fingertips scarlet with the heat, reached blindly across to pat one of hers. ‘I’ll always be your friend, Lydia. We all love you, you know that. And you know there’s always Leo …’ She giggled and turned over to watch her friend’s reaction.
‘He hasn’t given you an
other note?’
‘I almost forgot it – it’s in my pocket.’
‘You ought to be kinder to him, he’s absolutely devoted.’
‘Yes, and absolutely dull.’ Leo had graduated the previous year, but the senior pupils and the dancers often worked together. Marie was now Leo’s partner in the pas de deux class and a week seldom passed without another poem, or a little present, being smuggled to Lydia by her friend. Her adolescent contempt had matured into mere irritation, but now that the world was about to open before her the idea of an admirer, albeit a poor one, had its attractions. Not that she had any intention of throwing herself away on a dancer. There had been a number of notes from a number of men, even one or two fan letters which she had not been allowed to see, and she had a sturdy sense of what her worth would be once the market opened.
‘I think Leo’s going to ask if he can partner you next season.’
‘Oh. Is he?’ Clearly, he had asked the kind-hearted Marie to sound her out. The deference was flattering. It was now beyond question that she was one of the outstanding dancers of her year. Leo himself was perhaps not so gifted; fervent in private, forever planning and arguing in pursuit of his ideals, he was still reserved on stage. He was attending classes with Mikhail Fokine, and made no secret of his ambition to follow him as a choreographer and try all kinds of modern experiments. He could have set his sights on partnering one of the senior ballerinas, and equally Lydia was hoping to be chosen by one of the first dancers. ‘I think it depends what they give me, doesn’t it? I don’t know what parts the Director is going to choose for me, do I?’
‘He wants me to tell you something – something really big – but you mustn’t breathe a word, all right?’
‘Oh yes!’ Nothing was more delicious than a secret.
‘Leo’s father told him they were going to give you a debut.’
‘No! Marie! How wonderful!’ She sat up again, gasping in the heat. ‘Is he sure! Who told his father? Oh, I can’t believe it! I can’t breathe! I can’t talk in this heat – let’s get out of here, quickly.’
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