Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

‘Let me have your plies again,’ ordered the maitresse de ballet .

‘One, two… good… up… demi plie fourth… close…’

Alex looked on idly. Five girls on the far wall beneath the portrait of the Tsar; six on the wall next to the corridor… another six along the window. It was this row he watched absently. Two very dark girls… a fair one… one with red hair…

And then a voice inside his head pronouncing with ice-cold clarity the words: ‘ This is the one 1 .

He did not at first understand what had happened, it was so patently impossible and absurd. Indeed he shook his head, as at some trifling accident, and let his eye travel again to the beginning of the row. The first girl, dark with a narrow Byzantine head; the second, dark also though a little taller; the third with that grey-eyed, blonde beauty that Pushkin gave to all his heroines; then the red-head… And now as he reached the girl who was fifth in line he ducked mentally, leaving a space, and came to the last one, another dark-eyed Circassian beauty.

Then, carefully, painstakingly, he let his eyes travel back to the girl who was fifth in line — and again, clear as a bell, the voice in his head said: ‘ Yes” .

The fragment of Schubert gave way to an extended phrase from Bellini and the girls went into their battements . His face taut, Alex studied her.

She had a neat and elegant head, but so did all the other girls. Her arms were delicate and perfectly proportioned, her neck high and almost unnaturally slender — but so it was with all of them: how could it be otherwise, hand-picked and measured as they were? She moved with flawless grace and musicality, — and if she had not done would long ago have been sent away, so what was noteworthy in that? Her brown hair was scraped back off a high forehead; just one curl, escaping its bondage, cupped her small ear. Her eyes, too, were brown, but only brown — not liquid with oriental promise as with the girl who stood beside her.

Why then — for God’s sake, why ?

The music had stopped. The girls stood quietly, their feet in the fifth position, their eyes cast down.

Except for this one girl; a good girl, hitherto known for her modesty and quietness, who now lifted her head, looked directly and with an expression of the most extraordinary happiness at the handsome English officer — and smiled.

Her name was Vanni. Giovanna, really, for the route that classical ballet had taken — Milan to Paris, Paris to St Petersburg — was reflected in her ancestry. Both her parents had been dancers and came to settle at the Maryinsky. At nine, dressed in white muslin, Vanni had carried her shoe-bag through the portals of the Ballet School for her audition as inevitably as Alex, dressed in grey shorts and a blazer with towers on the pocket, had climbed into his prep-school train.

She was an excellent pupil, industrious, obedient. Her teachers liked her; she got on well with the other girls.

Then, at a quarter-past three on the fifteenth of April, 1912, a week after her seventeenth birthday, in the middle of a cou de pied en devant , she felt… something.

When the music stopped, she turned and saw in a group of people standing by the piano only one man. A man who, in the now silent room, calmly and deliberately crossed the expanse of empty floor and came to stand, as she had known he would, in front of her.

It was a piece of extraordinary effrontery. The Principal hissed; the Brigadier stared, unable to believe his eyes; the other girls giggled nervously. The Tsar himself would have hesitated thus to single out one girl.

‘What is your name?’ said Alex. He spoke in French, the language of the dance, and urgently for it could only be minutes before they were separated.

‘Vanni. Giovanna Starislova. My school number is 157. I shall be here until May 1913, then at the Maryinsky.’

She had understood at once; given him what he needed.

‘I’m Alex Hamilton of the 14th Fusiliers. My home is Winterbourne Hall in Wiltshire.’

She nodded, a frown mark between her eyes as she memorised these English names. Quickly he took possession of his territory. A small bridge of freckles over the nose, gold glints in the brown eyes, lashes which shone like sunflower seeds… There was a tiny mole on her left cheek; a fleeting scent of camomile came from her hair. ‘She is good ,’ he thought blissfully. ‘A good girl’. It was a bonus, unexpected.

‘I will come back,’ he said. His voice was very low, but each word as distinct as when he briefed his soldiers. ‘I don’t know when, but I shall return.’

She had folded her slender hands as women do in prayer. Now she tilted them towards him so that her fingertips rested for a brief moment on his tunic. ‘I will wait,’ she said.

Alex returned to England. Vanni was sent for by the Principal and questioned.

The questions yielded nothing. No, said Vanni, standing with downcast eyes in her blue serge dress, she had never seen the Englishman before and he had written no notes to her, made no assignations.

Then why had she smiled in that brazen manner, asked Varvara Ivanova, who could still recall the unmistakable radiance, the intention behind that smile.

Vanni shook her head. She did not know. But though usually so well-behaved and obedient, she did not apologise and the Principal decided not to prolong the interview for even at the mention of the Englishman, the girl became illumined, as if she had swallowed a small and private sun.

So Vanni was punished — refused permission to visit her parents for three successive Sundays — and watched. But there were no further misdemeanours. When a boy on the floor above sent her a red tissue rose from his Easter cake, she returned it. No letters came from England and at rehearsals, when the older pupils went to augment the Cupids and nymphs of the corps de ballet she was conspicuous for not making sheep’s eyes at the handsome premier danseur , Vassilov.

If she was still watched when she returned for her last year at the school, it was for a different reason.

‘There is something a little interesting, now, in her work,’ said Cecchetti, the most famous dancing master in the world, to Sonia Delsarte who taught the senior class. ‘And she seems stronger.’

But what he meant was ‘happier’.

In May 1913, a year after Alex’s visit, she left the school in Theatre Street and became a member of the corps de ballet at the Maryinsky Theatre. Her salary was six hundred roubles a month, her future assured. For her parents — for Vanni herself as they believed — it was the fulfilment of a dream.

Back with his regiment on Salisbury Plain, Alex threw himself into his work. In the summer he took his battalion to Scotland for manoeuvres. Getting his men fit, turning them into first-class soldiers, occupied him physically. At night in his tent he read the technical manuals which poured from the world’s presses now that his profession was growing ever more complex and scientific. And when his army duties permitted he went down to Winterbourne, the estate which, since the death of his father two years earlier, had been wholly his.

It was a place of unsurpassed and Arcadian loveliness. A Queen Anne house of rosy brick faced south across sloping lawns which merged with water meadows fragrant, in summer, with yellow iris and cuckoo pint and clover. Sheltered by verdant hills, Alex’s farmlands were rich and lush; the cows that grazed in the fields were the fattest, the most reposeful cows in the southern counties; his sheep moved in dreamy clusters as if waiting to be addressed by the Good Shepherd Himself. With Alex’s position at Winterbourne went the position of Master of Fox Hounds, a seat on the Bench, an elaborate system of duties to tenants and fellow landowners alike.