by Eva Ibbotson
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 lighthearted 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 coryphée …
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 régisseur, found her on the deserted stage after a matinée.
‘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 Mal Gardée.’
‘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 régime 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 . . .’)
‘Give it to me,’ he said in his thick dialect.
She stepped back. ‘If you want it, you must kill me first,’ she said quietly.
He cursed, scowled – and let her go.
Then they were in Finland and free. Free to walk through two hundred miles of forest to the coast… and to arrive at last, on a day as foggy as any Vanni had imagined, in a grimy northern English port.
Their fame had long since spread to Europe. De Witte, that gifted impresario, built his London season around them. They had never danced better; there was a new rapprochement between them born of the hardships they had shared, and
it showed in their work. If her Odette and Giselle now reached a new perfection, it was partly because of Vassilov’s unselfish partnering. For he now loved Vanni and wanted them to marry.
‘Why not?’ he demanded. ‘ Yes, I know all about the Englishman, but it is three years!’
She did not know why not. He was a good man and had shown unexpected courage on their nightmare journey; he could make her laugh.
It was to please Vanni that Vassilov gave up his precious free time to go on the dismal, inconvenient tours of hospitals and army camps on which she insisted, travelling with only an accompanist, and a reduced group of girls, to perform on rickety stages to puzzled soldiers who would greatly have preferred the chorus from Chu Chin Chow.
But the day before she was due to dance at an army camp near Devizes she travelled alone, for Vassilov had a sore throat. She booked in at the Red Lion and the next morning took the bus to Winterbourne.
The gate stood open. The elms lining the avenue were just touched with the first gold of autumn.
She knew it all. The lake on her left with the tangled water-lilies … the stream … and yes, there – a skimming streak of blue – was the kingfisher.
The house, now. Serene, lovely – but shuttered … dead …
No, not quite. An old man, a caretaker presumably, came out of a side door towards her.
‘Can I help you, miss?’
‘I am wondering…’ Her English was still uncertain and fragmented. ‘Is the lady … Mrs Hamilton … The mother of…’ But it seemed she still couldn’t say Alex’s name.
The old man stared at her. ‘Mrs Hamilton died more than two years ago. In the winter of 1916. Had a stroke and was gone in a couple of hours.’
‘I see … There is no one here, then?’
‘No one, miss.’
Slowly she walked back across the grass, wanting now only to be gone. And then she saw his tree: the great oak he had loved so much. (‘It was a whole world to me, Vanni, that tree. There were squirrels in it and little mice and hollows filled with water when it rained. I used to spend hours in that tree.’)
She walked up to it and rested her back against the trunk.
And felt suddenly an incredible sense of release. It was as if the grief and anguish that had weighed her down were physically lifted from her. She felt a lightness and something else she could not at first believe.
‘I’m happy,’ thought Vanni wonderingly. ‘Happy!’
The debt of sorrow she had owed her love was paid, then. She was free. And in that instant she saw as clearly as if she really stood before her, the image of a child: her child, a girl, fair-haired and lightly made, waiting to be born – and to dance.
So precise was the moment of her rebirth that Vanni looked at her watch. A quarter-past twelve. Then she walked lightly to the gate.
Back at the hotel, she wondered whether to ring Vassilov and tell him that she was ready now to marry him. But there was time. Everything would unfold in its own way.
Three hours later at the army camp, she danced a pas seul from La Fille Mal Gardée and a Tommy called Ron Smith, who could barely spell his own name, became a lifelong balletomane. Then, as she always did, she accompanied the camp commandant and the doctor on a tour of the hospital.
It was in a magnificent Palladian mansion, a little way from the camp. Long windows, high bare rooms in which men sat playing cards or writing letters, their crutches against their beds …
A very silent room, now, with the really sick: the shell-shock cases, those with head wounds. The room had been the private gymnasium of the nobleman who had given his house. There were wooden bars round the walls, a bare parquet floor. And rows of beds… eight down one side of the wall by the windows, eight by the left-hand wall, another eight facing her. Identical white beds with grey blankets, many of them screened by identical screens.
Vanni stopped. Her thoughts came to her in Russian, sometimes in Italian or French. But it was in English now that the voice in her head stated matter-of-factly: ‘That one‘.
What happened next should have been easy enough to ascertain, yet to the last there were different versions. On one thing, however, everyone was agreed. The famous ballerina moved up to the third bed from the left and said in a voice from which the charming foreign hesitance was entirely absent, ‘Take away the screen.’
This done, there were revealed – to the extreme annoyance of the Matron – two of the prettiest nurses (who should have been elsewhere) leaning in concern over patient Number 59613. Really, was there no limit to the fuss that had to be made over this admittedly heroic major with his medals and his amnesia? After all, other men had been decorated three times for bravery, had been grievously wounded and left for dead. Yet even in his present state, the man seemed to possess an unquenchable glamour.
But the girls were ready with their defence.
‘We heard him speak, Matron. A name, it sounded like. We thought he might be coming round.’
‘At a quarter-past twelve, it was,’ said the second nurse, pleased to show her efficiency.
‘Rubbish!’ said the Matron. ‘The patient’s been in a deep coma ever since he was repatriated.’
To this interchange the visiting ballerina paid no attention. Instead she removed, for some reason, her small, pillbox hat and handed it to the commandant to hold as if he was a footman. Then she moved over to the bed and knelt down.
She knelt and she waited. Then, after a while, quietly and without emotion, she pronounced the patient’s Christian name.
And now there was some disagreement over what happened next. That the man stirred on the pillow and turned his head was indisputable. Indisputable, too, that he smiled: a slow, incredibly peaceful smile quite without awe or incredulity.
At this point, on account of the smile, the nurses were already crying, so that their testimony is not really worth much. The ballerina, on the other hand, did not cry. Rather, as the man’s emaciated but still shapely hand lifted itself from the counterpane, she bent her head so that he found, first, her high-piled shining hair.
‘He was just stroking her hair,’ said the first nurse afterwards; a nice girl, decently brought-up, who hunted with the Quorn.
‘Oh, yeah?’ said the second, who was deplorably Cockney and working-class.
And it had to be admitted that the Major’s long chiselled fingers seemed to move through the brown tresses with a sense of undoubted purpose – to come to rest with what was surely a kind of familiarity on the first hairpin … the second and the third. It was probably just an accident – for he was still pitifully weak – that the pins should fall one by one on to the blankets so that presently the dancer’s quiet, transfigured face was entirely framed in her loosened hair …
But if a certain disquiet nevertheless remained, if the action did not seem to be quite that of an English officer and gentleman, the first word with which the gallant major signalled his return to health and sanity was as reassuring and high-minded as anyone could wish.
‘Sanctuary,’ said Alex Hamilton, and smiled once more, and slept.
‘Vanni! Doushenka! Milenkaya!’
For all her seventy years, Madame Delsarte ran down the last flight of stairs, and the elegant woman standing in the hall turned and absurdly, in her Chanel coat and sable muff, she curtseyed. To be pulled to her feet, embraced and addressed in a spate of Russian.
‘Oh you bad, bad girl!’ scolded Madame. ‘To give it all up just like that! After such a Giselle!’ She shook her head. ‘ How you must have suffered! What a struggle!’
Vanni smiled. ‘No. There was no struggle. I never had to think, not for a moment. As soon as I found him again, all I wanted was to be with him.’
‘Yes, I can see it in your face, your happiness. He must be a good man, I think, not only a brave soldier. So you have no regrets?’
‘None.’ But Vanni’s eyes rested now, with an infinity of love, on the child who had followed Madame and stood quietly waiting on the upstairs landing.
‘Is she—’ she began, but found she could not trust her voice.
‘She is accepted, of course,’ said Madame Delsarte. She paused. Then throwing common-sense, caution, even wisdom to the winds, she put an arm round Vanni and answered the question in her former pupil’s gentle eyes. ‘Do not fear, doushenka,’ she said, too softly for the child to hear. ‘She is one of us. She will dance.’
THE MAGI OF MARKHAM STREET
IT WAS about the second week in December that I became really desperate about the baby Jesus.
The trouble was, I could see their point very well. Jimmy MacAlpine’s point and Russell Taylor’s point – and Maggie Burtt’s point too, before the school doctor excluded her because of the nits in her hair. We had had real frogs from real frogspawn, real hyacinths thrusting from real black, crumbly soil, a real goldfish with – alas – real fungus on its fins. My class had a thing about real-ness – and it was I who had put it there.
So naturally for the Nativity Play, they wanted a real baby Jesus.
‘A proper ‘un. Alive,’ said Jimmy MacAlpine, standing threateningly in front of me and sending laser beams of willpower at me from out of his violet eyes. Jimmy’s mother was dead, his father in prison; so that to cast him as the Angel Gabriel and allow him to annunciate from a step-ladder wreathed in cloud-grey tissue paper had seemed the least I could do. Also, I most terribly loved him.
It was rather a place for love, Markham Street Primary School. Perhaps it was the ugliness outside – the belching chimneys of the Butterworth Chemical Works dwarfing the town; the black, greasy streets; the dank, discouraged river. You had to light it up somehow, so you did it from inside.
But that was only an excuse of course. Mr Hunter, for example, I would have loved even in a green and grassy school, a school with plate-glass windows and an abstract sculpture in the hall. I would have loved him in the King’s Road, Chelsea, in a cafe in Greenwich Village or on the Boulevard St Michel. It didn’t need adversity to make me love Mr Hunter.
