Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

‘So… who are you if you’re not Loremarie?’ she said when she could speak again.

‘I’m Annika. I live across the square. And I’m a foundling.’

‘Ah, that explains it.’

‘What does it explain?’

The old lady lay back on her pillows. ‘Foundlings make their own lives.’ For a while she was silent and Annika was wondering if she should go, when she said, ‘We could tell stories instead of reading them.’

‘Yes. I’d like that,’ said Annika. ‘I know a lot of stories because my friend Pauline works in a bookshop, and we act them.’

‘Ah, acting. Do you like that?’

‘Yes, very much. I don’t know that it’s proper acting though; we only do it for ourselves.’

‘Of course… Of course…’

Annika waited, sitting on the chair with folded hands. ‘Will you start?’ she said.

‘All right then… Once upon a time… there was a girl who lived in a very pompous, silly family in a very pompous, silly town. Her mother and father were stuffy and her brothers and sisters were stuffy — they used to take two hours to finish their breakfast and then it was time to start laying the table again for lunch: salt cellars, pepper-mills, mustard pots… on and on and on.’

Annika nodded. She knew about meals that went on and on.

‘The girl wanted to see the world — and she wanted to dance and act and sing, properly — in a theatre. But no one in her family danced or sang — dear me, no. Dancing was not respectable. So they looked about for a husband for her and they found an alderman with a big stomach and a watch chain across it, and when the girl saw him she decided to run away.’

‘Properly?’ breathed Annika. ‘With a ladder and knotted sheets?’

The old lady nodded. ‘More or less. She escaped at night and she had a little bit of money saved and she went to Paris. You know about Paris? So free… so beautiful… She found someone who ran a theatre and she begged him for work — any work, so that she could learn and watch — but he only laughed at her. He said he had a hundred girls who wanted to dance and sing, for every place he had.

‘So the girl became very poor and very hungry; she scrubbed floors and worked as a waitress, but she didn’t give up. Then one day she found a theatre manager who said she could stand at the back of the stage and pretend to milk a cow — it was a musical comedy set on a farm. So for many months she milked cows and sang songs about springtime, but all the time she watched and practised and learned.

‘And then one day something happened. A new designer came and he had made a swing that rose up very, very high above the stage, and swayed back and forwards, and on the swing was a great basket of flowers — and they wanted a girl to go up on the swing and strew the flowers.’

Annika thought she knew what came next.

‘And everybody was frightened except this girl?’

‘That’s right. Mind you, they were right to be frightened — it was a dangerous contraption. But the girl said she would do it. She was not afraid of heights and she liked the idea of strewing flowers — even paper flowers. She liked it very much. So they combed out her hair — she had lots of hair; pretty hair like yours — and they hauled her up and up and up, and she strewed and smiled and everyone clapped and cheered. And that was the beginning…’

The old lady’s voice died away.

But Annika wanted to be sure. She put her hand over the wrinkled one lying on the counterpane.

‘It was you, wasn’t it? The girl on the swing was you?’

The lids fluttered; the blue eyes opened. She smiled.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was me.’

When Annika got back she found Pauline hunched in the wicker chair in the corner of the kitchen. She was eating a cheese straw, which Ellie had given her before she went to the shops, and she looked angry and most unusually clean. Pauline’s hair had been washed and stood up in a frizzy mass round her head, her fringe had been ruthlessly cut and she wore a starched dress with a glaringly white collar.

‘Your mother’s come?’ asked Annika.

‘Yes. For a whole week. She’s scrubbing her way round the shop at the moment. Grandfather’s gone to bed with a book about the Galapagos Islands, but it won’t help him. She’s going to turn out the bedrooms next. Really, Annika, I don’t know why you’re so interested in mothers.’

Pauline’s mother wasn’t just a nurse, she was a very high-ranking one, and the way Pauline and her grandfather lived filled her with despair. Whenever she had a holiday from her hospital she came from Berlin and washed and scoured and scrubbed and polished, while they tried to keep out of her way and became cleaner and gloomier by the minute.

‘The trouble is, by the time she goes, I’ve sort of got used to her and I almost miss her. You really can’t win with mothers.’

But of course her mother wouldn’t be like that at all, thought Annika. She would step out of her carriage in her lovely clothes, smelling of French perfume and hold out her arms. Scrubbing and cleaning simply wouldn’t come into it.

The next time Annika went to visit the Eggharts’ great-aunt, Loremarie let her go up alone. There seemed to be nobody about and she was glad of it, because she had brought a sprig of jasmine from the bush growing against the courtyard wall.

‘And Ellie baked some honey cakes, but we didn’t know if—’

The old lady shook her head. ‘I don’t get hungry. But the jasmine…’ She put it to her nose. ‘I can still smell it. Just.’

She was drowsy today, but she had not forgotten that it was Annika’s turn to tell a story.

‘But not “Gunga Din” or Stanley and Livingstone. Your story. How you were found.’

So Annika told her about the church in the mountains and about Ellie and Sigrid, who had taken her in and brought her up.

‘Ellie is soft and comfortable like a mother and Sigrid is strong and busy like an aunt — and the professors are good to me. But sometimes… I dream about my real mother coming. Often I dream it — that she’s looked and looked for me and at last she’s found me. Do you think it’s wrong to keep dreaming that?’

‘How could it be wrong?’

‘Well, when Ellie and Sigrid look after me so well.’

‘Dreams don’t work like that, Annika.’

She was still holding the spray of jasmine to her face and her eyes were shut, but Annika didn’t go away. She wanted the rest of the story.

‘Last time you said it was the beginning,’ she said. ‘Being on the swing.’

‘Yes. I was a success. People called me La Rondine — it means a swallow in Italian — and they put me on to clouds and into hot-air balloons and gondolas, but always high, high over the stage and always I strewed something. Flowers mostly; but sometimes autumn leaves or golden coins or gingerbread hearts… And once, in Russia, I strewed snow!’

‘Snow! But how…?’

‘Well, of course it was tissue-paper snow, but it looked wonderful. We were touring Moscow and St Petersburg and I was the Spirit of Winter. The Russians stamped and shouted and cheered. They love it when it begins to snow — it makes the streets so quiet, the horses’ hoofs are muffled and there are sledges everywhere. A count who lived in a wooden palace in the middle of a forest gave a great banquet for us. He was mad but so generous — he gave me an emerald pendant, which had belonged to his grandmother. The Star of Kazan, it was called.’

‘Were there wolves?’

‘We didn’t see any, but we heard them — and when we arrived it was dusk and there was a whole line of the count’s servants with lighted flares to lead us up the drive and welcome us.’

Her eyes closed. She began to snore, and her mouth went slack, but it didn’t matter any more. Annika was looking at a friend.