A Glove Shop In Vienna (26 page)

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…’