White Ice
Page 1
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Contents
Celia Brayfield
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Prologue: London, 1991
1. St Petersburg, Russia, 1902
2. Chelsea, London, 1968
3. Atlanta, Georgia, 1964
4. St Petersburg, 1905
5. London, 1969
6. St Petersburg, 1907
7. Nice, 1965
8. Buckinghamshire, 1979
9. St Petersburg, 1910
10. Leningrad, 1968
11. Britain, 1979
12. St Petersburg, 1912
13. France, 1968
14. New York, 1984
15. Monte Carlo, 1914
16. London, 1986
17. Paris, May 1914
18. Leningrad, 1988
19. Petrograd, 1917
20. London, 1990
21. Leningrad, 1990
22. London, 1991
Author’s Note
Celia Brayfield
White Ice
Celia Brayfield
Celia Brayfield is a novelist and cultural commentator. She is the author of nine novels. The latest, Wild Weekend explores the tensions in a Suffolk village in homage to Oliver Goldmsith’s She Stoops to Conquer. To explore suburban living, she created the community of Westwick and explored mid-life manners in Mr Fabulous And Friends, and the environmental implications of urbanisation in Getting Home. She has often juxtaposed historical and contemporary settings, notably eighteenth century Spain in Sunset, pre-revolutionary St Petersburg in White Ice and Malaysia in the time of World War II in Pearls. Four of her novels have been optioned by major US, UK or French producers.
Her non-fiction titles include two standard works on the art of writing: Arts Reviews (Kamera Books, 2008) and Bestseller (Fourth Estate, 1996.) Her most recent is Deep France (Pan, 2004) a journal of a year she spent writing in south-west France.
She has served on the management committee of The Society of Authors and judged national literary awards including the Betty Trask Award and the Macmillan Silver PEN Prize. A former media columnist, she contributes to The Times, BBC Radio 4 and other national and international media.
Acknowledgements
I owe an immense debt to Veronyka Bodnarec, not only for her advice and encouragement during the writing of this book but also for the many hours of casual conversation about Russia and its citizens, from which I have freely borrowed themes and anecdotes. For my original reading list on Russian life and history I am most grateful to my cousin, Yvette Jansco. Additional books recommended by Tony Cash, Tim Hodlin and William Gill were of great help. My thanks are due to Joan Benham for her inspiration and patience in teaching me enough Russian to catch a trolleybus in a very short but pleasant time.
Those whose advice and experience I have drawn on for the contemporary section of the book include Glynn and Carrie Boyd Harte, Janet and Rodney Fitch, Clare Francis, Thomas Gibson, Elaine Mayson, Biddie Saliba, Camilla Shivarg and Dr Fabien Stein. In addition, several friends were kind enough to agree to read the original manuscript and give me comments from their particular perspectives for this considerable kindness, and for their flattering reactions, I am grateful to Alfreda Thorogood and David Wall, Marina Vaizey and Paul Haley.
White Ice is dedicated to Andrew and Margaret Hewson, who sustained me through this book and many others by their friendship, care, patience and judgement. Finally, none of this would have been possible without the kindness of the late Charles Cahn, who first invited me to the ballet.
Epigraph
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty
is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
Prologue: London, 1991
She despised all superstitions except one, her own personal item of folklore. If she could steal the early morning for herself, then she could win the rest of the day. Because she had come to believe this, and because her lover used to grumble if she left him before sunrise, she preferred to sleep alone. Her energy frightened people; lately, it had frightened herself.
Needing to win this day more than most, Bianca Berrisford arrived at her offices in time to meet the overnight courier from the printers. He handed her the proofs of the catalogue for her firm’s sale of Russian art and jewellery, a rush job, begun too late; only she knew the true reason. She approved the proofs with confidently scribbled initials, then settled down to read them and marked them for immediate return. Lastly, she recalled that the signature of at least one other director was needed. Waiting was torture to her, but she would have to wait.
She walked around her desk, looking at the catalogue cover from different angles, approving its design. The Berrisford family had been in the art business for three generations; people said that Sotheby’s were all hype, Christie’s were all starch but Berrisford’s were all style.
Bianca Berrisford was a success, a typical member of the family in that at least. She had changed the firm from a dusty second-division house to the leader in London’s art market, and one of the most respected businesses in the international field. When Berrisford’s were on a roll, they could lead world markets by the nose.
Lately, the markets had been going nowhere. London needed more than a few Japanese buyers hoping to find a few little Renoirs cheap. Odd how failure had a scent, an aroma so subtle it was like the smell of approaching rain, indefinable but indisputable. She could smell it now. She was not frightened. Failure promised peace of a kind, the calm which would follow the final destruction. Peace and freedom. There had been moments recently when she had truly longed to fail, when it seemed misguided to struggle when the end was inevitable.
When she weighed her options, one consideration was heavier than the others. If she failed, her husband would be right. Her ex-husband. Every day she heard the echo of his voice like a church bell, promising to ruin her if she did not do the job herself. Lovat kept promises; in other circumstances it would have been a virtue. Now she was tired and her will to win was failing, but Lovat was the goad which kept her going. She had to struggle. If she failed, he would claim it as his victory.
Bianca had the double-edged gift of seeming calm when she was distressed. Anguish drained the expression from her pale face and tautened its softness. Her thick, level brows contracted, her nostrils flared, her lips compressed. Behind her birchwood Biedermeier desk – her office was always furnished with a lone, magnificent example of the style currently most coveted – she sat very straight, her shoulders braced in defence, as still as marble, listening to the sounds of people arriving for work.
There was a knock at the double doors and she got up to open them. Two porters in the Berrisford uniform of grey-striped shirts and green felt aprons brought in a painting and installed it with the care due to any putative masterpiece on the picture rail which extended around all four walls. Behind them her father arrived, bestowing camel coat, felt hat and black umbrella on her secretary before taking up a proprietary pose in front of the picture.
‘You look tired.’ This was his usual greeting to hi
s daughter.
‘Oh well … the boys, you know.’ She played her fuzzy maternal smile and glanced at the plain silver frame on her desk which displayed the photograph of her children. He said nothing. First blood to her.
Bianca had three sons and a daughter. She had discovered very early in parenthood that three sons amounted to an ace in the hole. From the obstetrician onwards, almost every man who found out that she had three boys looked at her with dizzy worship.
Career mothers who discovered that she had three sons stopped asking her how much time she spent with her children. When the Italian waiter at the Caprice discovered that she had three sons he ceased to feel awkward about giving the bill to her rather than her male guest. Middle Eastern customers could look her in the eye when they discovered that she had three sons. Nobody argued with the possession of three sons, especially not her father, who had two daughters. Bianca despised anyone who conceded when she played her three sons as trumps, and took special pleasure in turning her father’s own prejudice against him.
‘What do you think of it, now it’s been cleaned?’ She stood up and went to examine the picture, peering closely at its surface where she knew that there had been damage to repair.
‘Without doubt one of the finest portraits we have ever sold,’ her father announced.
‘I can agree with that.’ The restorer had left just enough in the way of dirt and scratches to make it appear that the painting had not been touched.
‘A landmark in the history of portrait painting. Realism, narrative, almost allegorical use of detail, that Russian richness and a truly European refinement …’ Tall, slender and grey, Hugh Berrisford began to sway like a violinist, moved by his own eloquence. His hair had receded at his temples, leaving a high forehead, smooth and polished with the faint outline of his knotted old-man’s veins just discernible when the light struck in a certain way.
‘It’s an extraordinary picture,’ she said.
‘Extraordinary to think of such very great talents undiscovered and unappreciated, behind the Iron Curtain, for decades now …’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ The day had begun. Events would now invade the anxious limbo of her early morning, people would crowd into her loneliness. The catalogue cover was a reproduction of the portrait, and Bianca picked it up at arm’s length to compare with the original.
A masterpiece. The painter had chosen a young woman with abundant dark red hair and caught her alone before her dressing-room mirror, throwing herself sidelong glances from beneath her short lashes. She had sharply angled black eyebrows, like circumflex accents, which gave her face an indelible air of cheap pertness, for all she had tried to soften their line with greasepaint.
This was the face only her mirror knew; after a few minutes of looking at the painting there was an uncomfortable impression of having violated the privacy of the girl’s toilette, but at the same time fascination with her character. She was alone, rehearsing a repertoire of flirtatious gestures, certainly for the benefit in due time of the lover who waited offstage but also it seemed because she was compelled to coquet even with her own reflection.
The title appeared below the picture. Prima Ballerina Lydia Kusminskaya, painted in 1912 by Zinaida Serebryakova. The portrait had a disconcerting graphic quality; its clarity and detail were so emphatic and the subject so enduring that the picture could have been finished yesterday by a modern photorealist.
Despite her grand title, Lydia Kusminskaya seemed to have been about twenty years old. She was pretty, her costume was decorative and her surroundings attractively arranged, but the whole effect of the picture was disconcerting. The subject was charming but the painter was not beguiled. The composition had a knowing quality, an atmosphere of pitiless feminine intimacy, a wealth of disingenuous observation. The foreground clutter of paints and grimy puffs was minutely observed and every object in the composition implied a reference to the politics of seduction.
The young dancer was still in full costume, a black tutu encrusted with sequins and feathers, suggesting Odile, the false princess in Swan Lake. The heavy make-up was distinct, but it was clear from her unbound hair and her heightened physical condition that she was pausing in the act of undressing after a performance.
In the shadowy background of the room pale garments and ribbons lay in disarray around a rose plush chaise-longue with a deep gold fringe. The outline of a door could be seen, half opened as if a visitor was expected. A bouquet of some fat, creamy blooms spilled from a bamboo stand in a far corner but a fragment of wilting lilac blossom which lay discarded between pincushion and hairbrush seemed to be of more significance.
‘Excellent. I was afraid the necklace would lose its importance but if anything it stands out more – what do you think?’
‘What?’
Hugh Berrisford acted as if he had hardly heard his daughter speak to him from the less exalted plane of existence which she occupied.
‘This is the proof of the catalogue cover. Come and look.’
Her father unwillingly turned his attention to the practicalities of marketing.
The necklace, not the woman, was the focus of the whole painting. Both the girl’s small hands rested avidly on her chest, drawing all the viewer’s attention to the object which she had paused to admire. Her necklace seemed to be creeping close around the base of her neck like frost fronds advancing across a windowpane, a chill rime of diamonds. So many diamonds, massive stones and primitively cut, so skilfully painted that every tiny lance of light from thousands of facets seemed to have been recorded and the texture, and the effect of brilliance, was perfectly conveyed. If the viewer stood close to the painting the necklace became nothing but a mass of tiny brush strokes; two paces backwards and it appeared as a dazzling jewel.
The piece had a pagan look. It was not delicate; the jeweller’s aim seemed to have been to attach together as many of the largest stones as he could find. The mass of huge, crude gems had been cunningly painted, but the artist had been unable to admire it. Instead she had issued a satirical invitation to the viewer, to consider whether the necklace was truly more valuable than the young woman who displayed it to herself with such possessive pride. The tiny dashes of paint, the delicacy with which the minute points of light refracted into the shadow under the sharp chin were rendered, the suggestion that the jewels weighed down the soft neck, were all remarkable. On the neck itself, the artist had worked with passion.
The parchment pallor of the young dancer’s flesh, palpitating invisibly with vitality, the rises and hollows of the collarbones, the light sheen of perspiration, the fine skin, the blue veins and the flush of colour at the earlobes suggesting a hectic excitement, all these had been captured with a mastery which forced them on the eye and demanded that the content of the picture should be acknowledged.
The printer’s proof on which the painting was reproduced had a wide green border. The green was dark, the colour considered evocative of the English at their most aesthetically refined – gardener’s green, forest green, British racing green. The name Berrisford’s appeared in fine gold lettering above the picture, and below it the words ‘The Eagle and The Firebird: Sale of Russian art and jewellery at our London saleroom, 11 June 1991 at 11 a.m. By Invitation Only.’
Bianca Berrisford walked away from her father and spent a few moments looking down from the tall window of her office to the short, straight Mayfair street It was empty except for a traffic warden patiently patrolling the line of legally parked cars, waiting to catch a few minutes of offence in her ticket book.
A year ago the narrow pavements would have been peopled by men and women in beautifully tailored dark suits, getting in and out of chauffeured cars, making for one or other of the plate-glass doors of the great art traders of London. No one was buying art this year, and people were only selling if they had no option.
A year ago, if she had leaned backwards a trifle, she would have been able to see the rear entrance to Fortnum & Mason, and those doors also would have swun
g constantly open to admit mostly the curious who wanted to see the most expensive store in London but among them a reasonable number of people who treated it simply as a convenient place to buy clothes. Now the doors were still. No one was shopping.
A year ago it would have been impossible to get a taxi in that street. Now the only vehicles which moved were cruising cabs, the drivers anxiously scanning the pavements for passengers. Theatre tickets and restaurant tables were easy to get now; people laughed at the touts outside The Phantom of the Opera.
Every now and then Bianca drew a deep breath, as if the spring air, heavy, cold and humid even for London, was painful to breathe. It was an uneven respiration not unlike the prelude to weeping; her thin, square shoulders rose and fell in silence, only the changing light on the folds of her shirt indicating movement.
She was wearing what she called her Fuck You I’m Rich shirt; the waiting list for it at Gucci was six months long. Some things were still in demand. Red, gold and black, acanthus leaves, leopard spots – she thought the design was a dog’s breakfast but if she could impress a few more fools by wearing it, she would.
Her father saw that she was in distress and was disturbed. He considered his daughter’s energy neurotic. She would have been beautiful if she had ever achieved serenity. Hugh Berrisford had well-developed opinions about beauty, as he had about many things. He considered that women with his daughter’s looks – cool, pale, rounded, aqueous, with soft, indefinite hair and eyes the colour of river mist – could only achieve beauty if they were tranquil.
Her trouble, he considered, was that she had lived too many lives, tried too many roles. Her energy was a torrent which had torn up and borne along art, children, husband and family; too many directions, too many people in the one being. She did not understand the virtue of restraint.
Of course, he had tried to teach her, but Bianca had always smouldered with a quarrelsome inner fire which had heated her resistance and fuelled her ambitions. Her tenderness, love, care – he assumed that being female she had once had these qualities – had scorched to death in the heat and now her heart was burned out. Now she was clinging to her territory like a stubborn tree stump, already hollow in the centre but too deeply rooted to be destroyed. It had been more and more difficult to pity his daughter as she moved into the fullness of her womanhood, but Hugh always did his best.