A Glove Shop In Vienna (3 page)

And afterwards, lying on his bearskin rug, shredding its loose fur into petals with her narrow, nervous hands, Kira told him her story.

‘How did he understand her?’ I asked, ‘if his Russian was so bad?’

My aunt shrugged. ‘He understood her because he
had
to understand her,’ she said.

Kira was in her last year at the Ballet School, due to leave soon and join the
corps de ballet
at the Maryinsky. She made him see her life there very clearly: the huge, empty rooms where they practised, the vast dormitories each with its own governess in her curtained bed; the windows to the street made of frosted glass because once a pupil had eloped with a young hussar. The discipline, the austerity was what came over most. But she was happy.

And then her father, an idealistic country schoolmaster, wrote a book which was regarded as seditious and was sent to Siberia. A few months later her brother, a student at the Conservatoire, got himself mixed up with a group of revolutionaries and was imprisoned in the dreaded fortress of St Peter and St Paul.

Even then, she said, they wouldn’t have done anything to her. The ballet was outside politics in Russia, it was their pride to have it so. But she had lost her head.

‘It was knowing he was so near,’ she said, lifting her head to the window where the thin gold spire of the fortress cathedral still pierced the pale light of a northern evening. ‘Just across the river.’

She started creeping out at night to meet his friends, a group of hot-heads who were making plans to free him. Inevitably she was discovered. And dismissed…

‘But where will you go?’ asked Edwin. ‘Is your mother still alive?’

Kira shook her head. There was only her Aunt Lydia, who lived in a small town near Kazan. A dreadful town, Kira said: two dusty streets, endless fields of sugar-beet. ‘And chickens. You’ve never seen so many chickens.’

It was this aunt she had been vainly awaiting when Edwin came.

‘I need hardly tell you,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, as we made our way back along the river, ‘that Edwin behaved with perfect propriety…’

He sent another telegram to Kira’s Aunt Lydia, installed Kira in his own room while he moved to a smaller one overlooking a courtyard, and prepared to make tolerable for the shocked and lonely girl the time of waiting.

He began formally enough with drives to the Islands, visits to museums. But soon he found that she liked, as he did, just to walk the streets, just to look and listen, and explore…

So they fed the pigeons in the Summer Gardens, bought hot
piroshki
and ate them leaning against the bronze horses of the Anichkov Bridge… In the evenings they strolled along the embankment and listened to the students playing their mandolins, or drank lemonade on one of the barge cafes moored along the Quays. And always, without seeming to do so Edwin managed, in this city which was wholly strange to him, to avoid any place which might give her pain. Not just the Maryinsky Theatre, but all the theatres in this pleasure-loving town. Not just a poster announcing a ballet programme — even the portrait of a dancer in an art shop he could somehow smell out and keep from her.

Gradually her natural gaiety came to the surface, her eyes lost their shipwrecked look. On the day she laughed out loud at a tiny Maltese terrier, like a white wig on casters, which was chasing a huge Borzoi across Mars Meadow, he felt as though he had been given a million pounds. And already, knowing what the future would bring, he began to hoard those small, unimportant details which memory uses to unlock the doors of love. The way she cupped her bowl of coffee, holding its warmth against her chest; the despairing shake of her head when he mispronounced, yet again, a poem she was teaching him about a crocodile walking down the Nevsky Prospect…

She was a thief, too, unashamedly stealing sugar from the cafe tables to feed to the tired old
droshky
nags.

And every day as they returned to the hotel Edwin would hold his breath, expecting to see the waiting figure of Aunt Lydia, whom he imagined always as a vast peasant woman in felt boots and sacking, with a basket of chickens in her lap. And when she wasn’t sitting there, he felt weak with relief. Another day’s reprieve. Another day of idyll.

For what happened next, Edwin always blamed himself. He should have taken more care, supervised what she drank…

‘One morning,’ said my aunt, ‘Kira woke flushed and feverish. She couldn’t eat. By the evening she was very ill.’

It was typhoid fever. The hotel insisted she be moved to hospital. Edwin bribed and cajoled and blustered and they put up blankets dipped in disinfectant and let her stay. Edwin nursed her and let no one near. Two days earlier he had been shy of touching her elbow to guide her across the road. Now he washed her, changed her nightclothes, held her head when she vomited. When the old-fashioned English doctor wanted her hair cut, Edwin himself cut the long black tresses, strand by strand, while she slept.

In her delirium, Kira went back into early childhood. She wept as the chickens of Kazan pecked her small fingers, ran after her brother begging him to wait, oh,
please
to wait for her, screamed as her mother’s grave was filled again with earth. And always, like a brook running through the centre of her experience, was this
leit-motif
, the work of the ballet, as she murmured: ‘
Plie… battement tendu… soutenu.
. .’, counted her beat and in her cracked and fever-ridden voice hummed snatches of music.

Edwin never left her, day or night. Before, he had had the luxury of a romantic and tender emotion; he had been ‘in love’. Now he cut right through that. Kira became his unborn child, the wife he had never had, the woman she would be when she was old. When it was over, he said, he
knew
her.

At the peak of Kira’s illness, Aunt Lydia arrived at the hotel. He had imagined her quite wrongly. She was a thin, anxious woman in an exhumed-looking black coat – the village schoolmistress. All the time he spoke to her she kept a handkerchief soaked in carbolic across her mouth. Illness terrified her; she dreaded being asked to stay and nurse her niece.

Edwin reassured her, gave her money for the journey back, told her he would bring Kira himself when she was well. And forgot her.

It is a slow illness, typhoid fever, and nearly a month passed before Kira was out of danger. Then suddenly she was sitting up in bed, convalescent. She had a passion for jigsaw puzzles. There was one in particular, of the Czarina and the four little Grand Duchesses… ‘A real stinger, that was,’ Edwin told my aunt. ‘We must have spent hours looking for Anastasia’s hair-ribbon.’

Her illness seemed to have washed Kira free of her distress about the Ballet School. She asked no questions about the future, obeyed Edwin like a trusting child, seemed content to drift.

One beautiful day towards the end of May, with the sunlight streaming into the room, he picked her up and carried her from her bed to the open window.

‘
Oh
!’ she said. ‘Oh, Edwin, look! The river! The sky! Oh, isn’t it
marvellous
that I’m not dead!’

And she turned in his arms and kissed him.

‘Edwin was no fool,’ said my aunt. ‘He knew exactly what that kiss was about. Gratitude for a return to health, artless affection, .nothing more. All the same, as a result of it, he decided to change his life.’

Two days later he left Kira with some magazines, went along to the English grocer in Gogol Street and asked for a job. They needed English-speaking staff, were impressed by his knowledge of the trade and told him he could start the following month.

Edwin didn’t go back to Kira straight away. He walked back across Palace Square and sat down on one of the benches in the Alexander Gardens.

It was a beautiful day. Babies in perambulators passed him, pushed by nurses with streamers in their caps; beside him on the grass a small girl in a white dress built a stick-house for a captured beetle. And Edwin closed his eyes and looked into the future.

He was a modest man, but he knew that he was better than

Aunt Lydia and the chickens of Kazan. And sitting there, the sun on his face, Edwin lived through the life he would have with Kira.

He saw their little flat on the other bank of the Neva where everything was cheaper; two rooms, a window box, a canary to sing for Kira when he was out at work. He saw her sitting opposite him in the morning, cupping her bowl of coffee, while he told her how much, how very much it had grown in the night – her poor, shorn, duckling-feather hair; saw her running towards him in the evening in an apron too big for her. He felt her hand creep from her muff into his pocket as they walked the snowy streets to buy their Christmas tree; dusted the pollen off her nose after he had brought her the first king-cups. By the gay and gilded fountains of Peterhof they bandied preposterous names for their unborn child. At night, in their big wooden bed, he watched her spoon cherry jam into her tea and told her that her habits were disgusting, that he loved her more than life itself.

‘When he was dying,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, jabbing the tip of her umbrella into a cracked paving-stone, ‘he told me that of all the hours of his life, that hour in the Alexander Gardens was the one he would most like to have again.’

It was noon when he returned to the hotel. He was a quiet man, always, and now, opening the door of his room, he made no sound. Kira’s back was to him. She was standing by the open window through which there flowed, badly played, relentlessly rhythmic, the sound of someone practising a Schubert waltz. Kira’s feet were folded in the fifth position; her arms were curved in to her side. And then as he watched, slowly, so shakily, with the ghost of her former strength, she began to go through one of her old routines:
glissade…jete… attitude en avant
…

Edwin stood very still, holding on to the knob of the door. He could see only her back and the nape of her neck with its heartbreaking, sawn-off hair, but he knew…

‘You’re crying,’ he said.

Her arms dropped. Her foot glided to rest like an autumn leaf.

‘From the back of my neck you can tell I’m crying?’ she said wonderingly.

Probably she grew up at that moment. At any rate she turned and came towards him and lifted her face to his, and he kissed her wet eyelids, her mouth, while everything inside him crumbled slowly into dust.

The next day he went to Druce’s in the Nevsky Prospect and bought a pair of incredibly expensive English gloves. He said he didn’t think he could have done it without those gloves. Then he took out Lord Broomhaven’s visiting card and drove to Theatre Street.

‘I’ll never know how he managed it,’ said my aunt. ‘You’ll notice I’ve used the same words about him again and again: “meek”, “quiet”, “gentle”. All the same, he confronted the Principal and persuaded her that he really was an English aristocrat whose
entourage
had been horrified to find a member of the Czar’s famous Ballet School abandoned and at death’s door. He hinted at a scandal in the English press, implied a special interest in Kira on the part of a high-ranking diplomat -and just at the right moment became a supplicant, stressing Kira’s remorse and change of heart.’

The decision to expel her had not been unanimous. Now it was reversed.

And so, on a still grey morning, he drove Kira back to Theatre Street. At the last minute she was afraid and by the same door at which he had found her she clung to him and said, ‘No! No! I want to stay with you!’

But he was beyond everything by now and gently he loosened her arms and picked up the great brass knocker shaped like the Imperial Eagle of the Czar, and then he just stood there very quietly and watched her go.

My aunt stopped talking. She had finished her umbrella-jabbing and we stood side by side, our elbows on the parapet, looking at, and not seeing, the river Thames.

‘That’s all?’ I said at last.

She shrugged. ‘He’d meant to go on, to see Moscow, Kiev, the Crimea. But his money had run out, of course, and anyway…’

‘So he went back to Edith?’

My aunt nodded. ‘Edith,’ she said, ‘was tired after the

I

journey from Clapham. She was sitting up in bed with cream on her face and —’

‘No! She didn’t! She didn’t say it to him. Not that first night!’

‘She said it! And Edwin went up to her and said: “Yes. Tonight. And any other night I choose.” And went on living with her for thirty years.’

‘Oh,
hell
!’ I said. ‘He had so little. For so short a time.’

‘No,’ said my aunt. ‘You’re wrong. Edwin was all right.’

I waited.

‘I was with him at the end, as I told you. And just before he died, suddenly… he lifted up his head…’ She broke off. ‘I have never,’ she went on, ‘seen such a look of happiness on any human face. And then he said this one word. I didn’t know what it was; I had to look it up.’

‘
Dousha
,’ I said. ‘Was it that?
Doushenka
?’ And suddenly it seemed desperately, frantically important that I had guessed right.

My aunt looked up, started. ‘That was it. It’s an endearment, of course.’

‘Yes.’ It’s an endearment, all right, and for my money the best ever, the ultimate. ‘My soul’, ‘My little soul’…

‘So you see,’ said my aunt, unfurling her umbrella, ‘that he really was
all right
.’

And we turned and left the quiet, grey, incurably English river and went home to tea.

I must have flown over Vienna a dozen times and scarcely stirred in my seat. So why, this time, did I peer forward so eagerly into the darkness, searching the haphazard sprinkling of lights below me for… what? The city of my boyhood? My youth?

No, it wasn’t the Vienna of the chestnut trees, Strauss in the Stadtpark
, guglhupf at
Sacher’s that I groped for, devastated by the sudden, embarrassing nostalgia of middle age. It was something more specific; a particular collection of… ghosts, I suppose. The ghosts of my ancestors.

Only of course they weren’t ancestors then. Just my relations. And could anyone have made ghosts of them though they were long, long dead?