White Ice

Home > Other > White Ice > Page 2
White Ice Page 2

by Celia Brayfield


  Now he perceived strong emotion. Her feelings were destructive; anarchy, chaos and havoc attended them. He soothed himself, reasoning that she was looking at a picture of her lover’s grandmother, her lost lover’s grandmother, and was therefore moved by grief. That he himself was at the root of her distress did not occur to him.

  Bianca left the window and distracted herself in appreciating the technical accomplishment of the picture, turning it towards the diffuse morning light from the windows, holding at arm’s length the knowledge that the portrait of Lydia Kusminskaya and the necklace around her plump young neck represented to her the difference between survival and ruin.

  Below that knowledge was something darker and even more threatening: a suspicion; when she was at ease with failure she addressed it directly. Being also at pains always to be honest with herself she periodically hauled this terrible doubt into the full light of her consciousness and examined it, found it reasonable, reiterated the worst consequences to herself, and then let it slip back into the shadows. When she did that the cupidity of Lydia Kusminskaya’s expression seemed more obvious.

  She felt breathless and there was a burning pain in the centre of her chest. In her mind’s eye she could see Lovat again on the day she asked for the divorce, suddenly seeming taller and so dark he was almost a silhouette. ‘You have no conception of what you’re getting into and it will be an utter, absolute and miserable catastrophe. And never think you can ask me for help, Bianca. After what you’ve done to me, there’s nothing I won’t do to finish you – and your bloody family.’

  Her hand did not shake and her gaze, the intense, drilling stare of an artist, did not waver. She took the catalogue proof from her father and when she spoke her voice was well modulated, something else he had always disliked. Her speech seemed to him to be overcareful, as if acquired through elocution lessons to replace a vulgar accent when effortlessly superior diction was part of her birthright from him.

  ‘It has come out better this time, don’t you think? You can get a much better idea of the quality of the work now, can’t you?’ She did not call him by his Christian name, as he would have preferred, or by an affectionate paternal diminutive, as she would have wished. This also was a detail on which they could not agree.

  There was a silent pause while he unfolded his spectacles to scrutinize the proof.

  ‘I suppose it is an improvement,’ he said at length. ‘If you are set on using the portrait.’

  ‘You know I am.’ Immediately, her voice was hard with irritation. ‘We’ve been through this already.’

  ‘I just …’ If asked, Hugh Berrisford would have agreed that his daughter was becoming angry at this point, but would never have considered her feelings to be any reason for hesitation in the expression of his own. ‘I just think we’ll only sell the Orlov necklace once in our lives and it’s worth doing in the best possible way.’

  ‘This is the best possible way.’

  ‘You can’t expect people to pay five million dollars …’

  ‘Pounds.’

  ‘You can’t expect them to pay that kind of money for a necklace and not show them a photograph of the real thing.’

  ‘You agree that this is a superb portrait …’

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t do the thing justice and it’s confusing to people. They’ll think the picture’s on sale itself, not the necklace.’

  ‘The picture is in the sale.’

  ‘I am aware of that, but the necklace is the major piece. How many other portraits are there on the list. Three? Four? Yes, it’s an important work but you must take into account that the market for Russian art is still developing …’

  His daughter ceased to hear him. Since she had realized that her father was less than a god, which had happened almost thirty years ago, his lecturing tone of voice had triggered an automatic failure in that part of her brain which received advice.

  ‘You need to show people the necklace and only the necklace,’ he continued, unaware of her response. ‘The portrait will get thirty thousand, perhaps. It’s good and now there’s all this interest in Russian art this is something we can hope to sell well. I grant that the ecology of the art market is changing but still in this sale the Orlov necklace is the thing, it’s what people will talk about, it’s historic, it’s sensational, people will come just to see it sold, and that’s what the catalogue cover needs to say, and say loudly and clearly.’

  ‘What makes the necklace unique is its story. What makes it sensational is its associations, and the picture tells you everything. Here’s Kusminskaya, a few moments after she left the stage wearing the necklace given to her by her lover, Prince Orlov, the last descendant of a noble house which had served at the courts of the Tsars for centuries. Their love affair was the talk of Europe; whoever buys the necklace buys the glory of imperial St Petersburg, the romance of the Ballets Russes, the tragedy of …’

  ‘My dear, you don’t need to sell it to me …’

  It was an unfortunate allusion, raising immediately in both their minds the fact that at that moment Hugh Berrisford could not have bought a strand of rhinestones at Woolworths, and that it was his bad judgement, in financing other covetous but equally ill-provided buyers in Berrisford’s saleroom, which had brought them both to the brink of bankruptcy.

  Hugh sensed unpleasantness ahead and avoided it. At the same time, he avoided acknowledging that he had no authority now to choose Berrisford’s catalogue covers, that he had, in theory, retired, and that his daughter was now the head of the firm.

  ‘But I suppose … if your mind’s made up, Bianca,’ he said after a pause, employing an ingratiating smile which contorted his small, lined face. His eyes were so deep-set that their colour and expression could not be distinguished.

  ‘Yes.’ She was biting her lower lip, an unconscious movement she had used since childhood to bite back everything she wanted to say to her father.

  ‘We’re agreed then.’ It was intended to sound like a magnanimous concession.

  ‘Yes, I suppose we are.’ She stood up and walked out to her secretary’s office with the proof, needing to put distance between herself and her father. ‘Now you’ll have to excuse me,’ she told him through the half-open door. ‘I want to look in on the chap doing the authentication before all the Foundation people get here.’

  He looked pained. The Foundation for Art in Britain, commonly reduced to the acronym FAB, was in truth another extension of Bianca’s war with her husband, a body convened to raise money to keep works of art in the country while Lovat’s dealership specialized in finding neglected masterpieces for Japanese banks. Hugh was also on the board, and was afraid that here, too, his daughter would overshadow him.

  Descending the narrow, curved staircase at Berrisford’s, no one would imagine that the business was falling to pieces. The decor was fresh and flawless, the walls dragged in muted shades of green, the heavy rush carpeting exuded a faint scent of spice. Young men with slick haircuts, young women with interesting large earrings, moved in and out of quiet rooms where screens flickered in silence. A large Aubusson in shades of gold and grey softened the light in the stairwell. Periodically a Chinese Chippendale fauteuil issued the passer-by an invitation to sit and be uncomfortable.

  Under Bianca’s direction the firm emphasized its modernity. Not for Berrisford’s the dusty clutter of picture frames, stopped clocks, folded tapestries and rolled carpets which characterize the premises of other auction houses. The offices were spacious and bare.

  Berrisford’s had been the first to realize that the trade in beautiful things would appeal to the leaders of the new consumer culture. Their salerooms had been crammed with the new rich, brokers and dealers, property developers, bankers and arbitrageurs, people with no respect for tradition and much attraction to a public, socially admired and ethically irreproachable means of displaying their wealth. The quiet coteries of art dealers had been almost literally elbowed aside as the new rich fought for their trophies with the frenzy of f
eeding fish.

  In the first-floor saleroom the walls were painted red to generate warmth and excitement. To Bianca this room always recalled their famous 14 May sale – at the outset a mob scene like the rest but then the madness had died down, the buyers themselves awed by the prices to which they had pushed each other. When the chief auctioneer had brought down his gavel almost timidly on the first record sum, applause had broken out. The next picture broke that record. In all they had sold seven Matisses, each for more than the one before.

  There were perhaps five hundred people in the world capable of paying more than ten million pounds for a picture, and Bianca talked to most of them in the course of a year. Even the newest and least sophisticated collectors were muttering about price stability. The total business done at Berrisford’s on 14. May 1989 was more than the turnover they projected for the first half of this year.

  A small sale of furniture was in progress that morning.

  ‘Five thousand pounds, ladies and gentlemen. Five thousand pounds. Five thousand pounds.’ She had taken Patrick on six months ago, from the Scottish National Gallery. He was young and overconfident, a born auctioneer and he knew it. They found his accent easy to understand in the New York office. It pained him to be knocking down a signed Louis XVI writing table at such a low price.

  ‘Five thousand pounds, five thousand five hundred, thank you, Sir, five thousand five hundred … can I hear six?’ He almost skipped with pleasure behind his desk. With his blond hair springing straight up like a brush and his hand-painted bow tie, he was optimism personified, but the room was cold and within a few minutes the porters reluctantly stepped forward to move the piece and the dealers wrote £5,500 in the margins of their programmes without much comment.

  Patrick took off his wire-rimmed spectacles and polished them. He had just married a very promising young woman in the Oriental department. She was pregnant although she might not yet be aware of it – Bianca could tell, by instinct, sometimes almost from the moment of conception. If Berrisford’s went down, what would happen to them?

  She hurried away, unwilling to allow her mind to dwell on all the consequences of failure. The Russian sale would be a success. She would make it a success. It was simple. Whatever had to be done, she would do it.

  Nobody else now knew exactly how dangerous the situation was. The accountant knew that the handsome large company cheque books with the copperplate insignia of an old-established private bank could not be used at present. The directors knew the size of the last year’s loss, and that a similar loss could not be sustained again. Bianca and her new financial director knew that loans outstanding to buyers at the year’s end would exceed thirty million pounds. The sales director knew that his department had done half as much business this year as last. Bianca, Hugh and Hugh’s former assistant knew that the collection of uninspired Impressionists which the firm itself had bought for almost a million was unlikely to be sold at current prices. The only hopeful secret was kept by their lawyers, who had found a loophole in the contract for the new offices which they could not afford.

  Other senior staff knew that mortgages had been raised or extended on several Berrisford’s properties in Europe, but not the exact figures involved. There were two bank managers in London who had lunch with Bianca occasionally and did not know that they were rivals.

  The shareholders knew that the firm had reported losses, and that Lovat Whitburn would buy their shares if they cared to sell them. He already owned 38 per cent. Ten years ago Whitburn had been a director of Berrisford’s, and the architect of their success. He had also been Bianca’s husband. There was a body of opinion which put all the company’s troubles down to Bianca’s relentless impulse to fight Lovat for every dollar and yen in the art market. She considered that she was only defending herself.

  At the ground floor there was at last an impression of busyness. The uniformed doorman bustled in and out as he admitted the visitors who struggled with their bags, packages and cardboard boxes. At the long counter she saw people waiting patiently.

  ‘The market is a little slow just at the moment but …’

  ‘I can’t seem to find a signature …’

  ‘Of course, since the Americans stopped coming …’

  ‘A very good copy of an eighteenth-century pattern …’

  ‘We can’t advise our sellers to look for that kind of price in the present climate, but we are planning a sale early next year and if you still wanted to sell then …’

  To herself, Bianca called the front office the salon des refusés. They had opened a separate suite for liquidators. She used to train the staff herself. Buyers and sellers are all this business is about. Never forget that everyone who you see is selling something they love because they need money. And they all fantasize about what it might be worth. Of course, they’ll always say it was a piece of junk they inherited, but the chances are that in the piece of junk are their childhood memories, their family pride, their love for their favourite aunt. They’ve lost their jobs. Their businesses have gone bankrupt. They can’t pay their mortgages. They need holidays and can’t afford them. Their wives are leaving them. They’re in pain. Be kind. Be gentle. Ask them what else was in the bequest, if they‘re interested in collecting. And don’t use the word ‘recession’, or even think the word ‘slump’, or tell them the market is collapsing and there’s nothing scheduled after the big Russian sale. Be positive.

  Crumpled newspapers and cardboard boxes littered the room. All the hard horsehair Victorian couches against the wall were full and people were standing patiently in small groups, silent except for periodic coughs. There had never in Bianca’s memory been so many people so anxious to sell, or, alas, so few people able to buy.

  She continued downwards to the strongroom in the basement, pausing to slide her security card through the automatic lock which released the bomb-proof doors. Ever since a gang of thieves had rammed a truck through the window of Asprey’s in Bond Street a siege mentality had prevailed in the commercial heart of Mayfair. Bianca, complacently aware that Berrisford’s security was already the best, had admired the villains’nerve; she always admired nerve. Her own capacity for bone-marrow recklessness was criticized constantly, but without it she knew she would have remained a shapeless, spineless creature hiding under her family like a slug beneath a stone.

  The elderly man sitting beside a pool of bright light in the far comer of the room had no recklessness about him. He was small, bony and yellow-skinned, but gave the impression of having once been a plump man. His smile was thick-lipped and wide, like a fat man’s smile, though his teeth were stained.

  ‘Mrs Berrisford! So beautiful!’

  She was not and never had been Mrs Berrisford, but people always called her that and she never corrected them. She did not correct people who called her beautiful either, but in this instance the man was referring to the array of jewels blazing from their cases at his side. They glittered as if they were alive; they seemed to move, a luminous slick of lava cooling from white to red hot as it spilled over the table.

  ‘Yes, Mr Wyngarde, they are beautiful, aren’t they?’

  ‘Magnificent. Mag – nificent.’ The heavy, elided vowel sounds indicated his origin. Wyngarde had been born in Russia as Vinogradov and her father had made one of his weighty jokes of the name for them as children, calling him Mr Vineyard.

  ‘I feel really, truly …’ With both hands clasped to his heart, he almost bowed over the gems. ‘Well, truly, it’s an honour to have … to be … for once in one’s life … even for one half hour … just even to see them.’

  His obvious emotion reassured her. ‘I’m glad you like them.’

  ‘Like them …’ When she was younger he would have pinched her cheek. Even now he was tempted; adorable, the way she pulled down the centre of her mouth so the upper lip was almost straight, twitching her nose, her eyes mysterious, blue or grey, one could not quite decide, and the eyebrows also rather flat, something which could have been ugly but w
as with her quite distinguished. ‘One does not like pieces of this quality; one loves, reveres, worships perhaps …’

  ‘All I need is authentication, Mr Wyngarde. Do we have any problems?’

  ‘I don’t think so, I don’t think so. Certainly not, no, nothing, nothing I can see.’ He folded his arms, resting his curved, bony spine against the edge of the table, as if to show he could turn his back on the jewels and trust them. Gold and silver, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, pearls, amethysts, brilliant lacquer and semi-precious stones glowed under the strong light. Always methodical, Mr Wyngarde had arranged their cases in straight lines.

  ‘The Empire-style Cartier was all catalogued, all this Fabergé is exactly, exactly as the workshop drawings, this …’ He turned to pick up a diamond hair ornament like a miniature ostrich feather. ‘Countess Ouvarov was photographed with it and you see it is the same, these curled pieces, unmistakable …’ He replaced the slender ornament with a precise gesture. His hand hovered for an instant over the dazzling array and descended slowly to pick up a plain gold watch, its case decorated with a double-headed eagle and a crest in small diamonds. ‘And this, Stolypin’s watch, again, beyond question, documented … what a treasure, what a story it could tell, how close to the assassin’s bullet, how close to history itself … no, my dear, I can’t find any problems for you.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Why did she still disbelieve him?

  ‘Now we have known each other many years so you won’t mind me asking you something.’

 

‹ Prev