Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

‘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.