Not every visitor was taken to Theatre Street, Rossi’s lovely silent row of ochre-coloured and garlanded buildings, whose high, bare rooms — half palace, half convent — housed the school. At ten years old they came here, small girls with anxious eyes clutching their shoe-bags, to be paraded, measured, prodded and examined and — if admitted — put through eight years of the hardest training in the world. Small vestal virgins, these girls, in their blue wool dresses, their white aprons, their relentlessly braided and pulled-back hair. They slept in dormitories, all fifty of them, moved everywhere under the gaze of a posse of governesses, were forbidden even to speak to the boys on the floor above with whom they practised their polkas and mazurkas.
Then, at eighteen, they joined the Maryinsky Ballet, to become for the twenty or so years of their working life, snowflakes, or swans or sugar-plum-fairies… or once, every so often, that other thing. From the door Alex was now entering had emerged Pavlova, anguished about her thinness and frailty… Karsavina, destined to be Diaghilev’s darling… and that eighth wonder of the world, Nijinsky.
These hallowed ghosts were entirely invisible to Alex Hamilton as he crossed the hallway to be greeted by the formidable Principal, Varvara Ivanova. He was in every way a product of his class, trained to conceal anything which might single him out for attention. If nothing could be done about his good looks, his wide grey eyes, it was at least possible to barber and brush his hair so as to minimise its russet glint, its spring. His high intelligence he dealt with by speaking as seldom as possible. His knowledge of foreign languages — so deeply un-British — could be glossed over in a man who had, after all, won the Sword of Honour in his last year at Sandhurst. At twenty-six, it was inevitable that he should have known and pleased women, but the only emotion he had hitherto found uncontrollable was the homesickness which had attacked him when he woke, at the age of seven, in the barred dormitory of his prep school, and realised that as a result of some crime he was not aware of having committed, he was banished — perhaps for ever — from the adored gardens and streams and sunlit water meadows of his Wiltshire home.
It is perhaps worth adding that he was not musical. An unfortunate experience at Tosca when the heroine, after leaping off the battlements, had apparently bounced and reappeared, had left him with a distaste for opera. The only ballet he had ever seen — a divertissement from Coppelia inserted into a review at the Alhambra — had bored him stiff.
But the Principal was welcoming them in French, and the Brigadier’s bulbous nose twitched at Alex, instructing him to take over the conversation. Following her through the archway, they encountered a crocodile of tiny girls in fur-trimmed pelisses — each with a neatly-rolled towel under her arm, bound for the weekly ritual of the steam bath in a distant courtyard — passed through a vestibule where a huddle of infant Ice Maidens, pursued by maids with hair-brushes, waited to be conveyed to a matinee at the Maryinsky — and were led upstairs.
Explaining the routine of the school as she went, Varvara Ivanova took them through a dining room with oil-cloth covered tables, threw open the door of a classroom to reveal a pigtailed row of girls having a lesson in notation, another in which the pinafored pupils were dutifully drawing a vase decorated with acanthus leaves… And down a long corridor hung with portraits: of Taglioni, the first sylphide of them all whose ballet shoes, when she retired, had been cooked and eaten by her besotted admirers… of Legnani, whose thirty-two fouettes when she first came to Russia had had every child in Theatre Street pirouetting and turning in an agony of emulation.
They had come to the heart of the building and everywhere, escaping even the heavy double doors with their crests of Romanov eagles, came snatches of music. Fragments of Brahms waltzes, of etudes by Chopin or by some unknown hack, repeated again and again, relentlessly rhythmical, their only function however exalted their source, to serve the battements and glissees and arabesques that were these children’s alphabet.
‘You will wish to see our advanced class, I imagine,’ said the Principal, ‘The girls who next year will leave us to join the corps de ballet. Some of them are already very talented.’ She consulted the watch pinned to her belt. ‘They will be in Room Five.’
Alex translated, the Brigadier nodded and Count Zinov pulled his moustache happily at the thought of the seventeen-year-olds. Suppressing a sigh, for he had hoped to visit a Cossack officer who had promised to show him his horses, Alex stood aside for his superiors as Varvara Ivanova opened yet another door.
The room they entered now was high and bare with three long windows, a barre running round the walls and everywhere mirrors. There was a white and golden stove, a portrait of the Tsar… a wooden floor raked like the stage of the Maryinsky. In the corner, beside them as they entered, was a middle-aged woman, ugly as a toad, coaxing with stumpy, mottled fingers a soaring phrase from a Schubert Impromptu out of the upright piano.
And all round the walls, girls in white practice dresses, one hand on the barre …
‘Continuez,’s’il vous plait’ ordered the Principal. ‘These gentlemen wish to see the class at work.’
The pianist resumed her phrase and the girls, who had paused with demure and downcast eyes, lifted their heads.
‘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 one1.
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.