Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

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 matinee 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 fouettes 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, of etudes 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 glissees 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.