Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

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.