Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

‘Ah, yes,’ she would agree, rubbing her cheek against his face. ‘I shall be a great lady and pour milk into my tea and eat ham and eggs and ride on big horses in the fog,’ said Vanni, whose image of England had been implanted at a very early age.

They were strolling hand in hand along the quai de Flores when a newsboy came by, calling his ‘Extra!’

‘What is it,’ asked Vanni as Alex bought a paper.

‘Just some Austrian Archduke been assassinated,’ he said lightly.

‘Oh,’ she said, relieved. Russia had an unending supply of Archdukes who were constantly being blown up by devout revolutionaries. It was sad, of course; especially when they had been patrons of the ballet.

Alex, in the days that followed, was gayer and more light-hearted than ever, but he redoubled his onslaught on the Embassy — and at night he had to steel himself not to hurry over her hairpins, not to tumble them on the floor in his desperate need to be beside her.

They had most of July, still, to hope as the world hoped. Then Germany declared general mobilisation. France followed. And a telegram came recalling Alex.

For the rest of her life, Vanni needed no map of Hades. Not Dante’s limbo with its damned and swirling souls, not the black river Styx. Just Platform One of the Gare du Nord on a bright day in high summer. A well-kept station, geraniums in hanging baskets, sunlight glancing through the glass. All around them, women sobbing and men hugging their girls… And Alex, in uniform again, standing quite still beside the train that was to take her back to Russia, folding and unfolding her small hands like a fan.

‘It’ll be over by Christmas,’ they heard a young soldier say — and Alex turned his head, a look of naked envy on his face as he glanced at someone so foolish and so young.

Then the doors began to slam and as she turned to climb into the carriage he said, ‘Wait!’, and lifted her hat a little — a brave hat trimmed with marguerites — and pulled one silver hairpin from her hair. And then he stood back and let her go.

Vanni had three weeks before the opening of the new season during which to get her body back into shape. It was not enough, but she did it. Her parents had gone to live in the country; she moved into an apartment on the Fontaka with Olga and Lydia and she danced.

In October they gave her one of the slave dances in Prince Igor and the pas de trois in La Bayadere . She was made a coryphee …

Her modest success passed in a haze. She lived for letters from the front.

‘There’s a letter from France,’ Grisha, the old doorman, would say as she came in for her morning class, his eyes shining with happiness on her behalf.

‘There’s a letter, Vannoushka,’ Olga would whisper, hurrying into the foyer de danse for a rehearsal. ‘Hurry, you just have time.’

Even Vassilov, the Apollo of the Maryinsky, stopped her once on the way to his dressing room to tell her that the post had come.

Alex wrote little of the danger, the horrors he saw daily. It was only indirectly that she gathered he had been promoted, had won the M.C. after only four months of fighting. It was the future — always and only the future that Alex wrote about: their marriage and their life at Winterbourne.

In the spring his letter came from England. He had been hit in the shoulder; he was in hospital; it was nothing.

Vanni rejoiced. He was in hospital; he was safe! Her exultation showed in her work and they gave her the Columbine in Harlequinade …

She had rejoiced too soon. The wound healed well, Alex refused convalescence and insisted on returning to his men. In July he was back on the Somme.

Then, on a bright October morning, Vanni came into the theatre and found Grisha slumped over his table. It was ten o’clock in the morning, but he was already drunk.

‘It may not be…’ he murmured, and picked up a black-rimmed envelope from Britain.

But it was.

His mother, swallowing her disapproval of the foreign girl who had ensnared her son, had kept her promise to him. She wrote of his incredible bravery, the devotion of his men, the last confused and horrific battle in which, until the shell that destroyed his dug-out, he had conducted himself with a heroism that was already becoming a legend. He had been awarded the D.S.O___

‘Oh, God, why doesn’t she cry!’ raged Olga in the days that followed. ‘I cannot bear it!’

But Vanni could manage nothing: not to eat, or talk — or cry… only to dance.

One afternoon Sergueeff, the celebrated regisseur , found her on the deserted stage after a matinee.

‘So,’ he said, tapping her with his stick. ‘Why are you still here, may one ask?’

She curtseyed. ‘I’m sorry, Maestro.’

He examined her. What had happened to her was betrayed in a strange darkening of her hair, her eyes. ‘It does not occur to you, perhaps, that you are fortunate?’ he enquired.

Somehow she managed to smile. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘It does not… occur to me.’

He sat down on a stage rock and motioned her to do likewise.

‘Grief,’ he said. ‘Sorrow… Everyone experiences them. Each day now, there are women who get letters like yours. Sons, husbands, lovers are killed. Their world ends. And what can they do with this grief? Nothing. It is locked inside them; useless. But you…’

She was looking at him, trying very hard, as she did these days, to turn the sounds that came from people’s mouths into recognisable words.

‘You are an artist. For you, sorrow is a force that can be harnessed. It has a use.’

Vanni shook her head. ‘I’m not like that,’ she said. ‘I’m not a great dancer.’

‘No. Not yet.’ He paused. ‘Vassilov wants you,’ said the old man. ‘That’s why I came. We’re giving you La Fille Mai Gardee .’

‘Vassilov! She jumped up, incredulous. ‘Vassilov wants to dance with me ?’

So began one of the most illustrious partnerships in the history of ballet. Anton Vassilov, at the time they began to dance together, was at the height of his fame: a tall, marvellously built dancer of the old school. Vanni brought him her youth, the hunger for work caused by her all-consuming grief. He brought her authority, prestige, the glamour of his name.

The war was going badly for the Russians. Food was scarce, fuel had to be begged for. They danced now for men, many of them wounded, whose eyes had seen what no man should see and live. Yet these were marvellous nights at the Maryinsky — these last nights of the Romanov Empire when Vassilov and the little Starislova gave new meaning to the great ballets blancs of the classical repertoire. Men died, that awful year of 1917, with a piece of ribbon from Vanni’s ballet shoes in the pocket of their tunics. She was carried shoulder-high through the streets after her first Giselle .

The revolution did not greatly affect the company and the new regime treated them well. No one could have been less politically minded than Vanni and her good-natured easygoing partner. Yet in the spring of 1918 they found themselves fleeing the country with forged passports, their dancers’ bodies swathed in old coats, walking as if bent and stiff. On the way to a rehearsal they had rescued a little countess, who was trying to make her way into a food queue, from the sport and jeering of the crowd. Someone had denounced them as ‘enemies of the people’. An anonymous phone call at three in the morning warned them that they were to be taken for questioning and urged them to leave at once.

At the Finnish border, they were stopped by the ragged peasant soldiers who guarded the new republic. One of them, searching their meagre possessions, saw the glint of the golden heart Vanni wore round her throat. (‘ The Lord watch between me and thee. . ’)