BALLERINA Bryony Brind is talking for the first time about her relationship with Prince Michael of Kent and of the death in a climbing accident of the man she planned to marry. About being violently mugged in London last week and about her psychic abilities and plans to marry on a cliff top. And of her youth when she was the Royal Ballet’s youngest star, Rudolph Nureyev’s partner and hailed as the new Margot Fonteyn.

But she won’t elaborate on the house she wants to build, constructed of water.

When I arrive at Glyndebourne, where she’s rehearsing for the principal role in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, she’s walking the dogs with her mother. Bryony, ‘roughly’ 33 years old, in baggy track suit and leg warmers, 5ft 5in and with wrist-sized hips, picks her way balletically across the mud. Then she sits on the grass in elegant yoga-cum-ballet position.

Not so long ago she was reported to have sought comfort in the company of Prince Michael of Kent, 51, who took her out to exclusive restaurants while Princess Michael, known for her marital rows and tendresses for foreign men, was in the Bahamas working on her new book. The Prince and Bryony were oft spotted sharing a quiet table in Julies Restaurant in Holland Park, sometimes until 1am.

‘I met the Prince at the house of a friend, another dancer, one evening,’ says Bryony, answering reluctantly. ‘He’s the most charming man, has got time for everybody and the smallest things excite him. That’s really special. It would be so easy to take things for granted.’ What does he appreciate in her? ‘I’ve no idea,’ she says, stumbling. ‘He’s just a casual acquaintance really.’ And one with whom she dined four times in just one month? ‘Who’s counting?’ (Unamused laugh.) Can she describe her relationship with him? ‘Can I describe our relationship? Excuse me sucking away on this thing here (a Thermos flask). Oh, we’re purely friends.’ Did Princess Michael laugh off the press coverage or stop Bryony seeing her husband? ‘She was the one who suggested he call me up because she was away at the time.’ Why? ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe different sort of company from what he’s used to.’

DIDN’T Bryony think there would be problems about intimate but public dinners with a married Royal? ‘No, because I really believe it’s possible to be friends with a man. He’s in no way after me and I’m not after him. He’s married, apart from anything else.’ Has she ever had an affair with a married man? She laughs. ‘Not yet.’

Poor Bryony was also linked in the Press with Nick Allott, 36, the estranged husband of Anneka Rice, when Anneka wanted a reconciliation. ‘But I’ve known Nick for years and years.’ So it wasn’t a romance? ‘I don’t think so, no.’ And she laughs again.

Once voted one of the most beautiful women in London, Bryony has natural red hair, a wide mouth, troubled brown eyes and exerts a strange fascination over men. Her face often looks heavy. ‘I suppose I’m sad. I feel like a tumble drier inside.’

In fact, she’s remained resolutely single since the tragic death of Jonathan, a landscape gardener she’d hoped to marry and who died in a fall in the Alps in 1989. ‘He was like a soul mate. We were childhood friends and went out for two years. I called him my ‘ray of sunshine’ because of his wonderful blond hair and fantastic joie de vivre. I think I was in love with him.

‘Then he went on an activity holiday while I collapsed in the sun. When I got back, his father rang and said in a terribly blunt, matter-of-fact way that he’d died. I still don’t believe he’s not here, because he is here. I still talk to him. There’s always a seat for him at table. I’m always saying things to him like, ‘You were right,” she laughs. ‘It’s a totally different relationship now. It’s almost got better, if that doesn’t sound terribly callous. I think we’re closer now than we were. I keep finding little notes from him which mean so much more now.’

She was profoundly affected by his death and dealt ‘badly’ with it. ‘I cut off from his family. I started socialising with people much older than me who I didn’t identify with. I just wanted to get out and see as many people as I could but wasn’t looking for anyone to have a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship with. Now it’s changed and I’m back in the running. I’ve got my feelers out.’

But things have gone badly. Last Thursday she was waiting outside for her dinner date at Julies when she was mugged by a teenager, dragged 20 yards along the pavement on her coccyx and badly bruised. He took the £700 she had for a season ticket. ‘Not a lot of money to pay for my life.’ But she’s traumatised. ‘I keep seeing him, keep reliving it, keep thinking if only … I’m nervy and jumpy. I can’t lie on my back because it’s so painful. But dancing hurts only marginally more than it would anyway.’

Bryony, who is superstitious and tends to see signs and portents in things, has discarded the outfit she was wearing. ‘You start thinking, did that have something to do with it …’ And her pearls. ‘They signify tears. I never normally wear them.’ Instead she’s wearing a crystal her mother (around whom she sees a white aura) gave her. Last week she tried to see a fortune teller. She appears to want to find answers and an order and meaning in things, to make sense of her emotional turmoil.

Her mother, an artist who teaches yoga, joined her over the weekend to look after her and is driving her the four hours a day to and from rehearsals. Why doesn’t she stay in Sussex? ‘I have two cats I can’t leave in London.’

Bryony was once the chosen partner of Rudolph Nureyev. ‘He was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. Originally I was terrified of him, but he became a mentor, supporter and friend.’ But the late Sir Kenneth MacMillan by-passed her, the roles dried up and she left the Royal Ballet in 1991, diversifying her career into acting and modelling. It has been tough parting from a company in which she’d become institutionalised – ‘You just work as hard as you possibly can and they tell you what to do’ – and where people had known her since she was 11. ‘My self-confidence has always been low. I was like a little girl. Now I have to be somebody else.’ She’s now dancing in opera for the first time.

She’s intensely self-critical (‘At ballet school you were never told you were any good’); has tunnel vision (‘I blank out my problems. That’s how I handle them’); and is a perfectionist, meeting the inexorable demands of her job and seeing her body as ‘a vehicle, an instrument’. She denies being bulimic or anorexic but dislikes her physique, thinking she has a double chin and saying: ‘Dancing, you have to look at your body every day, which is bad enough at the best of times.’

SHE pretends to be more vulnerable than she is, is eager to please, astute and delightful company. We return to her love life. Is she unhappy not having a romance? ‘I suppose I am. I’m waiting, I’m waiting. It will happen, I’m sure.’

Is she lonely? “No, I’m hardly ever at home, always going out.” She wants to marry, eventually, in a Cornish clifftop church. “Before, I wanted to marry outside on the rocks.” And she wants to have children before she is 41. “Dancers seem to be able to have them much later.”