White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Of course not …’

  ‘I understand of course that you have given the Orlov necklace to someone else.’ He paused, pained but wishing to appear disinterested. Her doubts immediately sprang forward like demons. ‘But I would be so very pleased just to see it, just to look at it …’

  Without a word Bianca stepped forward and picked up a case of pale birch wood. It was lined in white satin, with a coat of arms embossed in gold, the field quartered and divided between two rampant lions and two eagles. The case contained a mass of diamonds. ‘This is the one, Mr Wyngarde, or so we have been told.’

  ‘So you have been told, yes.’ Now he was in an agony of embarrassment, perspiration breaking out along his temples, his blubbery mouth stretched into a mask of tragedy.

  ‘But in your opinion,’ she prompted in a soft voice.

  ‘Well, my opinion … we have known each other many years, Mrs Berrisford.’ He was speaking so fast the words were barely distinguishable. ‘I tell you the truth. I don’t think so. In fact, I am sure. Yes, this is the Orlov crest, but the box is obviously new. The necklace was a family treasure, made in the eighteenth century, there is a description, the workshop records, its style was considerably less delicate. And the stones themselves, I would expect a cut typical of gems cut in Russia at that time, a little bit crude, shall we say, gives jewellery a pagan sort of look. Not the European cut of the next century. Also these are not well matched, some are grey, some a little yellow, the drop stones have been added much later, and there’s no record that coloured diamonds were used in the Orlov necklace, in fact they are described everywhere as very fine blue-white. The style of the setting is a little bit like, it’s true, these little scrolls – but not identical. The Fabergé records describe some yellow stones set for Kusminskaya in 1913, so that clinches it for me as you might say. I don’t … I’m sorry … not to disappoint you, but it is not the Orlov necklace.’

  She was silent, wishing she had not heard him, ridiculously wishing the silence could roll backwards over their conversation.

  ‘Of course, you will ask another opinion …’

  She shook her head at once, knowing what she would do. The fewer people to see the necklace now the better. ‘Thank you, Mr Wyngarde. Someone had to tell me.’

  ‘Yes, someone, but I wish it had not been me.’

  ‘Don’t say anything.’

  ‘Of course. You can always trust me.’

  ‘I know. I am grateful to you, really.’

  After he had gone and all the jewels, except the necklace, had been put away, Bianca sat on the tabletop like a schoolgirl and waited to feel something. Mentally, she rehearsed her decision, trying to scratch the numbness that filled her mind. I am going to commit a major fraud, she hectored herself. The sale will proceed as planned. The chances of discovery are at least fifty per cent. The scandal would be catastrophic. Far worse than any of my father’s mistakes. And it will be the end. Berrisford’s will be finished. Bankrupt. Seventy years, three generations brought to nothing. Shame on the family, shame on the business, shame on the whole country. The trust of the world in the London art market will be destroyed. And Lovat will be right.

  No emotion arose. The peace which would follow failure was so palpable she felt as if she could stretch out her arm and pick up a handful of it.

  1. St Petersburg, Russia, 1902

  The heart of St Petersburg was artificial in everything; in scale, situation and magnificence. For the sophisticated few who had travelled and lived in untidy, organic towns where every landmark masked a squalid alley, there was an unnatural excess of splendour.

  The city’s beauty had been calculated in the subtlest detail. It had the atmosphere of a pantomime stage set. To stand out against the snow in winter, the buildings were painted the colours of sugared almonds – apricot, aquamarine, turquoise and pink. In them was conducted the hopeless business of the Imperial Russian government, affairs of chaos, corruption, misery, bankruptcy and brutality carried on behind walls fit for fairy castles.

  The city was built as much on water as on land. At the command of emperors of all the Russias, St Petersburg had risen from marshlands intersected by countless rivers. Between its buildings and at the end of its streets flat expanses of water, grey and shallowly indented like vast sheets of hammered pewter, reflected the pale northern sunlight upwards, shortening perspectives and casting melodramatic shadows above pediments and lintels. Immense baroque façades were illuminated from behind like scenery flats. Noble vistas which led from palace to statue to cathedral in the ideal style were cut short at the water’s edge.

  Wealthy citizens promenaded in their carriages around the embankments and parks contrived to idealize the grey sprawl of the river Neva. Its little sister, the Fontanka, lined with the family palaces of the aristocracy, was decorated with pretty bridges each guarded by a small corps of statues. At the point where the eye might be weary after a long stretch without a diverting feature, two cathedrals, their huge domes thoughtfully counterpoised, were deployed to break the monotony.

  The finest architects and craftsmen in the world had been imported to realize this vision. Italians, French, German, Dutch and English, they adorned the face which Russia wished to show the world with features which, for all their harmony, still recalled their home countries, and so one panorama whispered Canaletto, another Turner, a third Rembrandt, and the vital, throat-rending roar of Russia herself was suppressed.

  While the city was created to lure travellers, only the most adventurous or discontented of its own people voyaged abroad. As a race they were bold on their own territory but hesitant outside it, knowing that their dream homeland was a sham and feeling themselves inferior. St Petersburg was the mask which Russia had painted to show her superiority to the world, a gracious, cultured and European decoy behind which her Asian lineage, barbaric and hot-blooded, was disguised.

  This, like many great deceptions, had been undertaken for the highest motive: for love and duty. The man whom his people believed had been appointed by God to lead them, the Tsar Peter the Great, had decreed that the glorious city should be created at a strategically useful position on the mud of the Neva estuary, and so it was done, and his descendants and adherents for more than two hundred years had continued the work, pouring out their incalculable wealth to raise gold spires on the ooze. If their infallible and beloved Tsar had commanded that the greatest city in Europe was to be raised on a swamp, then it was God’s will and would be done, no matter what the cost in gold and human lives. As Russians they were already passionately in love with the idea of sacrifice. Furthermore impossibility was a concept which they could not precisely define; so many impossible things happened in Russia.

  In this vast theatrical illusion, theatres themselves acquired unusual dignity. A public theatre was a building fit to command a square of its own. The palace of every noble family included a gilded miniature auditorium. The Russians of St Petersburg built their theatres in the same propitiatory spirit that a Roman would have built a temple or an Englishman a garden. In place of Mithras or Nature, the god whose favour was needed was Civilization, in whose train all the Muses were presumed to dance.

  At the sanctum of the entire land a palace was built adjacent to the Imperial seat for the sole purpose of enshrining the arts, and a theatre built in it for the Court. The theatre in the Hermitage was designed to resemble a miniature temple, with statues of Apollo and the Muses posed between columns of rose-red marble. On the performers’side it was generously constructed, imposing minimal restraints on the productions which could be mounted. The audience’s portion was small, no larger than many of the city’s ballrooms, and decorated with restraint, which, to little Lydia Kusminskaya’s childish eye, was not at all satisfying.

  ‘Heavens, it’s tiny. And it’s all Greek.’ She stood on her toes at the edge of the stage, peeking through the spyhole in the drop curtain. Five companions from the Imperial Theatre School pressed impatiently around her, but she ignored them
. The backstage area was a cavern; the scenery was dwarfed by its size, its boundaries were lost in darkness, and bitter cold persisted in the corners which were too distant to draw warmth from the massive stoves which heated all the surrounding structure of the palace.

  Through the spyhole Lydia could make out a rectangular room, shallowly tiered and set with orderly rows of gilt-framed armchairs which gleamed dully by the reduced light of the great crystal chandelier. Two carved thrones with embroidered brocade slipcovers awaited the Tsar and Tsarina, but the auditorium seemed a mere box by comparison with the vast space behind the stage, and it was far too classical for her taste. To Lydia, elegance meant gilding and elaboration. The white capitals of the columns, which gleamed in the half darkness, were superbly carved but did not impress her. Her little round mouth drooped in disappointment. ‘There aren’t even any boxes or any paintings. I thought it would be bigger. And more decorated.’

  She had expected the court auditorium to be more gorgeous than any other in St Petersburg and felt her disappointment as a personal slight.

  ‘Let me see! Let me see!’

  ‘Be quiet, Marie, it’s my turn next.’

  ‘Come on Lydia, move over.’ The other girls urged her but did not push. Although she was the smallest of them, Lydia was acknowledged the strongest; to reach the peephole she had been standing on full point for some minutes without wavering in the slightest, a feat none of the others could match. She was also the quickest to resort to using her hairpins as weapons.

  ‘There you are, Olga, but it’s not much to see.’ Lydia at last lowered her heels to the floor and moved aside in favour of a tall, pale girl who at once exclaimed:

  ‘Oh! It’s so beautiful! It’s all marble! I can’t believe we’re going to dance in such a beautiful place. But it’s so small – how can we possibly think about our dancing when we’re only six feet away from all Their Majesties?’

  Scuffling and whispering, their blocked shoes tapping on the bare boards and tarlatan skirts scraping their knees, the girls discussed this question. With their fluttering hands and sharp shoulder blades they jostled like a brood of half-fledged birds, awkward and graceful in the same moment.

  They were alike in so many features that they could have been sisters. Their high-cheek boned faces were refined, flattened and poised on elongated necks. Their shoulders were level, their calves round, their thighs straight, their hips flat and their waists slim but round and firm. The sway of each spine, the articulation of every joint, was identical. However diverse the forms decreed by their genes and hormones, they had been shaped alike by their daily regime of exercise. As their soft bones lengthened, the pull of muscles meticulously trained to move in unison had made their form the same.

  Their ears were attuned to music, their eyes were taught to watch their mirrored reflections and their minds were drilled to judge themselves and never be satisfied. So the dance had claimed them entirely, sacrifices to their nation’s glory no less than the three hundred men who had died in the hazardous process of gilding the domes of the new cathedral of St Basil, and they were proud to be members of the Imperial household and to have the privilege of entertaining the Tsar, his family, his nobles, his foreign guests and the elite of his country.

  ‘Well, if I were the Tsar I’d have a really splendid theatre,’ Lydia continued in a wounded tone.

  ‘Holy Mary!’ Olga’s narrow fingers flew to her lips. ‘They’ll all be right under our toes. I think I’m going to faint.’

  ‘Oh don’t be silly. You’ve danced for Their Majesties lots of times.’ At the Maryinsky Theatre, where ballets were performed twice a week and Sunday’s performance was always attended by the Court, small divertissements and tiny roles in crowd ensembles were always included for the school students so that they should become accustomed to the stage as early as possible.

  ‘But not so close, not so close.’ Olga sounded as if she were going to weep. She was acknowledged to be excessively sensitive.

  ‘Just think – how frightful if they saw our knickers!’

  ‘Lydia! How can you be so vulgar!’

  ‘Olga! How can you be so stupid!’ She pulled faces and flounced her skirts, but no one defended her. The disapproval of the others pricked like needles. Lydia hated to feel excluded from the group. She had only intended to lighten Olga’s gloomy mood. Normally she could trust her wit to mask her sharpness, but when it came to questions of taste it was so easy to go wrong.

  ‘Trust you to spoil everything. You’ve no sense of propriety at all.’ Olga seemed ready to shed tears at any moment.

  ‘Ssh! Sssh! everyone – the boys!’

  ‘Not in front of the boys, Lydia.’ Performances were the only opportunity which the school pupils had to escape for a few instants from the institution’s strict chaperonage. From the wings stepped forward two slim adolescents, subdued by the grandeur of their surroundings and by the sudden transformation of their schoolmates into miniature women. All the young dancers, who were to portray Parisian ballet students, were costumed in severe smocks and pinafores, exaggerations of the uniforms they wore every day at school, whose design had not changed for seventy years; mysteriously this dress made the boys appear younger but conferred a precocious maturity on the girls.

  ‘Leo! Nico! Do come and look.’ Little blonde Marie Kozhukova bubbled with vivacity that was natural, like a spring; she was being friendly rather than flirtatious and one after the other, the two boys stepped up awkwardly to the curtain to see where their audience would shortly be seated.

  ‘What wonderful shadows.’ Leo, the taller and darker of the two, moved aside to stand by Lydia. ‘The statues of Apollo and the Muses look as if they’re almost ready to step down from their alcoves, don’t you think?’

  ‘No.’ She responded promptly, and was rewarded by stifled sniggers from her companions. Leo was always trying to get her attention with such pretentious observations but what was the use when his ears stuck out like bat’s wings?

  ‘Lydia never thinks, Leo, you ought to know that.’ And Olga was always trying to get Leo’s attention by being sweet to him. He ought to pay her more notice, she was nearly as pompous as he was. Contented to have spurned a suitor, Lydia twitched her neck to toss her curls, hoping that the stage lighting would show up the full depth of their colour. Her hair was a rich dark auburn and when it was plaited for the school day she boasted the longest and thickest pigtail in her class.

  On hearing a silly slight against his beloved, Leo froze with disapproval and stepped back with Nico in disdainful silence. He seemed unaware of his humiliation, which Lydia – ascribed to his hopeless arrogance and her companions to the fact that he adored her so passionately that in his eyes she could do no wrong.

  ‘There aren’t any boxes – where will Chinchilla be sitting?’ Olga wisely decided to change the subject. Chinchilla was their nickname for the ballet’s administrator of special services, a tall, heavy man with a thick head of black hair striped by a forelock of premature grey. Although dangerously attracted by modern ideas, his artistic judgement was superb, particularly when he organized these entertainments for the Imperial Family, and the whole company lived in hope of his approbation.

  ‘He always sits in the Administration’s seats.’ Nico spoke with authority.

  ‘But he won’t be here tonight, will he?’ Olga’s huge eyes expanded with anxiety. ‘Since he fell out with the new director?’

  ‘He’s still in with the Court, though.’ Gossip was an important weapon in the battles for distinction which the dancers would wage violently for the brief duration of their stage lives. Lydia, in addition, enjoyed gossip for its own sake.

  ‘And Kchessinskaya,’ Lydia added, pausing involuntarily as she uttered the name of the prima ballerina, ‘he was smart enough to get her on his side years ago.’

  ‘They say he supported Mikhail Mikhailovich and that idiotic questionnaire he sent everyone.’ In a transparent attempt to gain support for his ambitions towards modern
choreography, a soloist called Mikhail Folcine had written to all the senior dancers in the company demanding to know if they felt ballet needed fundamental reforms.

  ‘That was two years ago and anyway I don’t believe it, Chinchilla would never have approved of anything so ridiculous.’

  ‘Mikhail Mikhailovich is one of his little favourites.’

  ‘Chinchilla kept himself well out of the whole affair.’

  ‘And Tamara Platonova told me that Chinchilla told the director that only in Russia would ballet dancers have the intelligence and the sense of artistic responsibility to do such a thing, because it is only in Russia that the ballet is truly an art whereas in the rest of the world it has become nothing more than a decadent entertainment…’

  ‘In a pig’s eye!’ Lydia’s piercing laugh echoed in the void of the stage. ‘He knows how to lay it on all right!’

  ‘And decadent entertainment – now in that he’s a real connoisseur!’ Marie was almost bouncing with amusement.

  ‘Chinchilla can’t go wrong with the Court now,’ announced Leo, whose deep-set eyes caught fire at the mention of anyone connected with the avant-garde set which he idolized. ‘The Academy of Arts are backing him. All the people who went to Paris said his exhibition of paintings was a succes fou. I’ve heard people say he’ll have all Europe at Russia’s feet.’

  ‘Grand Duke Vladimir is still on his side, I suppose. He’s definitely in with him. Hasn’t he agreed to finance Chinchilla’s next show in Paris? Oh dear, I shall be so nervous if he’s here tonight.’ If Chinchilla had a failing, it was his leaning towards skinny neurotics like Olga. He had already acclaimed Anna Pavlova, who was as weak and thin as a bundle of sticks, and always seemed to have a special word to encourage Olga although she was, if anything, even less suited to the dance. No matter. It was easy to deal with such feeble competition.

  ‘Oh, then Chinchilla’s bound to be here,’ Lydia assured her companion cheerfully. ‘And I expect he’ll sit on one of the aisles, because he always comes in late from backstage. Maybe he’ll sit with the Grand Duke.’ Olga wavered visibly with apprehension. ‘But it will be dreadful, he’ll have to disturb everyone,’ Lydia continued, as if oblivious. ‘It’s such a badly designed theatre – why didn’t the architects think of things like that?’