© W&N Publishers Page This book is avilable from: Dance Books Amazon Judith Mackrell reviews Jeffery Taylor reviews Web version held on Ballet.co by kind permission of Jeffery Taylor and the Sunday Express Express Website

But how deliciously at odds was the glamorous dancer with her companion’s middle class respectability, air of discreet wealth and academic sobriety. The lanky figure with the lugubrious moustache was John Maynard Keynes, who had gained an international reputation as the founder of modern economics with his seminal book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Aged 38, Keynes was also a leading figure in the smart Bloomsbury Group of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, characterised and caricatured for imaginative sex, drug abuse and, in polite society at least, an unseemly obsession with art. But most significantly for Lopokova, Keynes was an unrepentant and enthusiastic homosexual who boasted never having fallen in love with a woman. He was a middle aged heterosexual virgin. Nevertheless two weeks later Lopokova and Keynes were passionate lovers, and immediately following the Christmas break the famous dancer was installed in rooms four doors away from Keynes’s house, 46, Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

For a man to develop his heterosexuality later in life was nothing new in the hot house ballet world inhabited by Lopokova. Her one time partner, the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky, seduced by impresario Serge Diaghilev, found love aged 24 with Romola de Pulszky. In 1920 Diaghilev sacked his then lover and principal artist, Leonid Massine, for falling for English dancer, Vera Savina. But, as she split from composer Igor Stravinsky to be with Keynes and repulsed advances from industrialist Sam Courtauld, Lopokova had no intention of playing second fiddle to his young male fancies. Or tolerate an open relationship. For Lopokova who was rarely without a male partner since first setting foot on the stage, sex was the glue that bound them together. Throughout their relationship she wrote to him passionately in her Lydian English, as Keynes christened her use of words fractured by her Russian accent, of “blending mouth and heart to his” and “detaining infinitely our warm wet kisses.” And “I am so very glad I live with you, and am intimate with your …soul your breath and your kisses.” She was adamant that his former friend Sebastian Sprott was not invited to join them at Tilton, their Sussex country home, or accompany Keynes on business trips abroad.

At the time of their fateful lunch date, Keynes was a man comfortable with his homosexuality, enjoying the international celebrity brought by his ground breaking fiscal theories and happy to spend half the week teaching at King’s College, Cambridge. He juggled his life of academia, politics, money and ideas with enviable ease. His mental capacity was staggering. The more he demanded of his seemingly overstretched intellect, the more he could absorb. Lydia Lopokova was like nothing he had ever previously experienced and he embraced the challenge both mentally and physically. Eagerly relishing the exploration of a hitherto unknown but powerful force of nature, love for a woman, he fell hopelessly into her arms. He was hypnotised by her beauty, energy and talent, but above all her fearless acceptance of whatever life put her way. At last he had found a soul mate as well as a lover. Particularly in the bedroom, Keynes was fascinated by Lopokova’s dancer’s frank acceptance of her body, and in return, basking in his attention she felt clever, elevated and cherished. Love also made Keynes protective, and, shocked to discover that she deposited her earnings from her dancing with the porter at whatever hotel she happened to be in, he provided Lopokova with a bank account. She was thrilled.

Keynes and Lopokova married on 4th August 1925 in a fifteen minute ceremony at London’s St Pancras Registrar Office. There were no guests of the bride present, just Keynes’s mother, grandmother, sister and uncle. In the best free thinking Bloomsbury style Duncan Grant, accompanied by wife Vera, was best man. Two decades earlier, Keynes was besotted with the handsome young painter and though their affair was brief Keynes cared deeply for Grant as long as he lived. One of his greatest pleasures, he claimed, was watching his wife and former lover dance together at parties. Perhaps sulking about his blighted prospects of remaining Keynes’s heir, on the happy day Grant forgot the wedding ring.

Lydia Lopokova was born in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1891, the fourth of six children of Karlusha and Vasili. She followed her elder brother, Fedor, into the Imperial Ballet School, an accepted route, as it is today, for working class children to escape the poverty trap. Her natural charm and boundless energy soon advanced her through the rigours of the strict classical ballet training and she acquired a powerful technique yet with a unique lightness and delicacy once described by a British critic as “lively as a London sparrow.” In 1909 she graduated with high marks into the Imperial Ballet and was almost immediately recruited into Serge Diaghilev’s small and select group for its next sensationally successful Paris season. Wherever Lopokova danced she earned critical eulogies and audience adoration. She conquered North and South America, Spain and France and as Paris was shelled by the advancing Germans in 1917, Lopokova and Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes fled to London. For Lopokova it proved to be the greatest adventure of them all.

During her 21 years of marriage to John Maynard Keynes, Lydia Lopokova’s life slipped into a different gear. Approaching forty, she retired from the stage in 1932, her final role Swanilda in Coppelia at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Her husband’s financial genius put him firmly in the international spotlight, at the heart of government at home and abroad with the heavy social obligations that went with it. An intensely private person, like many great artists Lopokova only felt utterly free to expose her soul in public while in performance. But the natural sweetness of her nature and her disarming femininity proved irresistible to Kings and Queens, Presidents and Prime Ministers. Keynes, an architect of Britain’s welfare state, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the British Arts Council, was created Baron Keynes of Tilton in the County of Sussex in 1942. His Baroness wore the title with the joy of life that always flooded her dancing and earned her international adoration.

Keynes died at Tilton of a heart attack in 1946, aged 62. Lopokova was shattered. She wrote at the time, “I am so utterly alone without him. The light is gone. I grieve and weep.” She could not know of the thirty five years of loneliness stretchimg before her.

Lydia Lopokova, 89, Imperial ballerina and Baroness Keynes, made her final exit on 8 June 1981. Her ashes were taken to the top of Firle Beacon in Sussex, where she and her husband had found the peace and solitude to bond as one. She was scattered over the same grassy slopes that accepted her husband’s dusty remains nearly four decades earlier. It had been a long wait.