White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘I just want to wake up one morning and have you say we’re doing it today,’ she told him, still not fully believing that it would happen.

  ‘It won’t be before graduation. But after that – you’d better watch out, girl.’ She loved being called girl. She also loved the implication that this marriage was something into which he was going to trap her, not the other way around.

  Her parents were in Tuscany when he rolled over as she brought him his morning coffee at midday, reached for his watch and shouted, ‘Shit! We’ve got to be there in half an hour. Blast! Where the hell has Joe got to?’

  Hurling the sheet aside he scrambled to his feet and waved at her with one hand while trying to turn his jeans right side out with the other. ‘This is it, love. This is the big day! We’re getting married! Come on, you said you wanted to be surprised – get dressed! Hurry!’ He saw her expression and added, ‘Don’t worry, love, I’ve taken care of everything.’

  She was about to accuse him of joking when the doorbell rang and Joe appeared, pink eyed and smelling strongly of vodka and cigarettes. He extended towards her a fist carrying six creamy roses tied with a white ribbon. They were a variety she recognized, Pascale, specially grown for her grandmother’s favourite florist in Sloane Street.

  ‘I’m not late, am I?’ Joe had never previously arrived for an appointment less than a day in arrears. He was groping for something small in the upper pocket of his jeans jacket. Lovat hustled him into the kitchen and Bianca wonderingly deduced that it was the ring, her ring, and that this was not a joke.

  The nineteen bus deposited them close to Chelsea Registry Office, where Hermione was skipping up and down the pavement in a dress composed almost entirely of fluttering multicoloured ribbons. In the waiting room they found a random sample of Chelsea life: an overpainted blonde divorcee, a property developer in a white suit, a group of uneasy Irish with white carnations pinned to their lapels and two West Indian families in bright printed robes.

  Until she stood before the registrar and heard him read the words, the question of whether Bianca would have Lovat as her husband had never been formally posed. She had allowed herself to be washed along by his conviction and it had been a soothing, flattering and delicious experience. The wedding itself seemed to pass in the blink of an eye and immediately afterwards they were wafted to the overgrown sanctuary of Brompton Cemetery where they reclined in the long grass between the carved Victorian gravestones drinking champagne straight from the bottle while Hermione read poetry. The rings – for Lovat had one also – were plain wide bands of gold, standard issue for the visually aware modern wedding. He always got everything right.

  The Whitburns, who arrived in London a few days later, had obviously expected no less than a surprise announcement from their eldest son. Over dinner at the Savoy they presented him with a cheque in a large white envelope with a silver deckle edge. Lovat was embarrassed by the vulgarity of the gift, but Bianca enjoyed the bourgeois simplicity of her new parents-in-law; there was also a strong hint that the Whitburns were concerned that the Berrisfords should not see them as provincial fortune hunters, which the young couple both saw as an assertion necessarily and correctly made.

  Olivia and Hugh, when they returned from Tuscany with walnut-brown tans to pick up the reins of their London life, were harder to read. Both were predictably at pains to express their approval of the marriage, although it had clearly startled them. Hugh issued statements of endorsement which lacked his usual supple loquacity. Olivia, having almost warmly invited the newlyweds to dinner, turned grey and faint over cocktails and withdrew to bed. Hugh diagnosed a migraine, although she had never suffered from one before.

  This left Charlotte in the role of hostess at the table, and apparently on a whim she rose after the dessert, walked round to take Bianca’s hand and said, ‘I think it’s time for us to leave the gentlemen to their cigars, dear. We can get on with the coffee upstairs.’ Lovat nodded and so Bianca followed her grandmother out of the room, presuming that this too was part of his orchestration of their marriage.

  The older woman’s papery cheeks had blotches of high colour and her eyes were watery with emotion. To Bianca’s surprise, Charlotte embarked on a tirade of criticism masked as concerned questioning.

  ‘How well do you know Lovat – I mean, really know him?’ She began, passing Bianca her tiny cup of coffee.

  ‘We’ve been together almost a year now, I know his friends, his family – what else is there to know about a person?’

  ‘I mean, are you sure you can trust him?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure, I wouldn’t have married him otherwise. Do you think he’s after money or something? Because he isn’t, his parents are loaded, they want to buy us a house. They’re not sophisticated people, but money’s no problem. And Lovat is brilliant, Charlotte, everyone says so. I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to have him.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s interested in money, that isn’t what I meant at all. I’m just wondering if perhaps there isn’t something he might be concealing from you.’

  ‘Like what?’ Bianca was beginning to feel angry. How typical of her family to plan this devious way of attacking her, instead of coming straight out and saying they were angry that she had got married without letting them take charge of the whole process.

  ‘Well, like his history before he met you. With women, I mean.’

  ‘He isn’t concealing anything. The whole college knows. He screwed every cheap cunt between the Chelsea Potter and the Queen’s Elm.’

  Bianca was satisfied to see the older woman flinch at her language. She felt she had at last found the strength to defend herself. It was the first noticeable benefit of her new status as a wife.

  ‘If you don’t want to discuss this …’ her grandmother persisted in a stiff tone.

  ‘I’ll discuss whatever you like,’ Bianca replied quietly. ‘But if you all don’t like my marriage, why not simply say so? It won’t alter the way I feel. I love Lovat and I trust him completely. But you’re entitled to your opinions.’

  The old woman sighed with exasperation and was about to say more when the men’s heavy footsteps and loud conversation were heard from the stairs. A few seconds later they entered the room in a pall of cigar smoke, surprisingly convivial together. As her husband sat down beside her Bianca took his arm, enjoying the comfort of his protection.

  3. Atlanta, Georgia, 1964

  The prisoner was a white male, fifteen years old. He was in fact very white, without the sun-reddened complexion of a local boy. Fear might have drained the colour from his face, and maybe he studied hard and did not get out in the sun much. It was not the pallor of poor nutrition or illness; although he was slender, he gave the impression of milk-fed good health. He stood well, without fidgeting. His thick cornsilk hair needed cutting, it was falling in his eyes and touching his protruding ears. Apart from that there was no sign that he was the rebellious type. His attitude to the court had been respectful, his expression was grave and the judge considered that he understood the seriousness of the charge. In fact, he had seemed close to tears at the beginning of the hearing.

  His mother had travelled from their home in Ohio. She was apparently a decent woman; her entire manner in the courtroom advertised that. Small and neat, wearing a good suit and a hat in a hard shade of turquoise, she sat with her hands clasped on her purse and her knees pressed together as if to draw herself apart from the doubtful characters on either side. When the judge looked at her a second time he concluded that she was older than he would have expected.

  The father was a supervisor in an insurance company. This was their only child and indeed he had a certain air of having been over-protected, not allowed the freedom to run about with his pals. Too docile, too dutiful, his boyish energy suppressed. The probation report showed that his school had no complaints about him other than poor grades in the past few months and he sang in the choir at the Christian Science church in Cleveland. Six or seven years ago he would
have been a perfect living Norman Rockwell kid; in another six or seven years, the judge considered, he would be a fine young American. Right now it seemed obvious that he was just kicking over the traces; it would be plain irresponsible to send him down to juvenile hall to learn criminal behaviour from no-hope negro kids.

  ‘Alexander Thomas Elliott Wolfe’ – the judge gave him a smile which was intended to be reassuring but looked to the prisoner as if the old boy was trying to stop his false teeth from falling out – ‘I find you guilty of the charge which has been brought against you, namely of stealing two packets of cigarettes from the Peachtree gas station on International Boulevard here in Atlanta. You pleaded guilty, I consider you have shown remorse and as this is your first offence I am going to give you a year’s probation and send you back to school to work hard and stay out of trouble.’

  ‘Thank you, Sir.’ The prisoner used a very quiet voice. The mother nodded as if she had been asked to agree with the verdict, half rising in her seat as if she intended to repossess her child immediately.

  ‘And remember, son, whatever your problems are, or whatever you think they are, you’ll do better to stand your ground and face them than to run away.’

  ‘Yes, Sir, I will remember that.’ Damn, that Southern drawl had crept into his speech; they would think he was ridiculing them and the act would be spoiled.

  In the daydreams which passed more than half of Alex Wolfe’s waking time he sometimes chose to be an international confidence trickster, a Cary Grant figure on the French Riviera who suavely persuaded beautiful women to give him their money and jewels. He had discovered that he had a very useful ability to appear as whoever people wanted to see. The good student or the ideal date were roles he could play to perfection; the prodigal son obviously still needed practice. He enjoyed these performances for the secret sense of power over his duped audiences which they gave him. Perhaps he ought to be an actor. The drama teacher was more and more inclined to make a pet of him, but his father never lost an opportunity to point out that showbusiness folk were immoral, lazy, spendthrift, antisocial trash.

  ‘Alex, I can’t understand you,’ his mother began as soon as they left the court. She had a taxi waiting to take them directly to the airport. ‘What in the world possessed you to run away like that? I could hardly believe it when the call came to say you were in Atlanta. Atlanta! Do you know what it’s costing me to come and bring you home? Why did you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He stared out of the car window. She pulled at his shirt sleeve, the most violent movement he had ever known her make.

  ‘You will answer me, Alex, you will. I’m your mother, I have to know what has come over you. You are a beautiful child, a true offspring of the spirit, and you have had a good spiritual education but to do something like this you must have fallen into an error of thought. If I know what it is I can explain it to you.’

  He sighed, but not so that she could see. His mother was forever trying to invade his mind to clean it out. The only defence was to keep his thoughts so indefinite that they could not be grasped. ‘Nothing’s come over me, Mother. I just didn’t want to spend the weekend in Bedford Heights. I just wanted to go someplace.’

  It had been a beautiful moment, when the idea had come to him. He had gone out at her request on Saturday morning to shovel snow off the driveway, and some blessed random impulse had prompted him to put down the shovel and walk on, out into the street.

  Bedford Heights was a very quiet neighbourhood. As its street life went, a defective fire hydrant was a major event. A pedestrian was unusual, but on a winter Saturday morning all the inhabitants were snug inside their spacious, low-roofed homes. There were a few tyre tracks which indicated that some fathers had taken their sons to sports coaching.

  The silence had been stifling. He had heard only his own footfalls and the thin whine of the wind in the trees. It was a noise which he imagined came echoing from the distant wastes of Canada, of the far-off howl of the tundra, the lament of the great forests for the dead lakes and from further still the sound of nothing, the base note of the emptiness of the world. It would whistle away across the great plains, picking up the hiss of dry corn stalks and the rumble of running cattle until the heat of the South warmed it and the crash of the sea swallowed it and it returned to its source. Maybe it went to God. In the Bible it said that the Spirit held the wind in his fists.

  He saw himself as an atom in the air, a particle of some mysterious inert gas whirling alone among the common myriads of nitrogen, skimming the ice on the lake, tumbling around the great ugly buildings of the city centre, soaring in the updraft from a heating duct, skimming through the wing feathers of a flock of geese.

  In time his thoughts became blurred. All his being had been impelled to move and he had begun to run, his swift economical stride carrying him around the corner and away towards the estate’s gatehouse. Running was dangerous, nobody ran in Bedford Heights, it would draw attention to him. He pulled himself up and tried to recapture his reverie but nothing came into focus except the bitter cold hurting his bare hands.

  He had stuffed his hands in the pockets of his red plaid work jacket. Stretching his fingers in the warmth, he touched some bills, money awarded by his father for doing chores around the house. The tariff for yard sweeping, car washing, table setting and the like, written in Elliott Wolfe’s very small even hand, was taped to the kitchen wall. His father prided himself on having taught his son the value of money from his earliest years. Once a month the boy was treated to a ride to the bank to deposit his earnings. The ride was due in two days’time. He had almost forty dollars. The impulsion of his imagination had made his feet so restless that it was almost painful to set them down on the sidewalk. He had to move. Accordingly, he made for the highway, hitched a ride downtown and went to the bus station.

  Atlanta had been the first destination on the timetable within his budget. It had seemed to promise the oblivion of the Southern heat, but getting there had been less exciting than leaving Bedford Heights, and staying there with only two dollars and a quarter was obviously unfeasible, so he had stolen the cigarettes in the hope that he would be picked up and somehow sent home. The juvenile court had been outside the scope of his imagination, but Alex had the blithe certainty of a coddled suburban child that no real harm could ever come to him and the experience had not shaken this belief.

  ‘Cigarettes.’ His mother’s mouth was compressed to a small cerise slit. ‘You know tobacco is one of the depraved appetites that proceed from an unconscious error. This is how sin begins, a little thought with no reason behind it that leads us to evil.’

  ‘I didn’t smoke them, I just took them so that the police would come.’ He did not bother to elaborate.

  ‘You are such a mystery to me.’ She looked at him without affection, reminding herself that suffering was a gift with which she could refine the spirit within. ‘You realize you will have to see a’ – she baulked at the term probation officer – ‘a person when you get home? Every week? For a year?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, what are we going to do about it, Alexander?’

  ‘I don’t know, I guess I’ll go after school or something.’ She had evidently set off on another of her incomprehensible flights of anxiety.

  ‘You little fool, that’s not what I mean. I mean, what are we going to do? To tell people?’

  ‘Why do we have to tell people?’

  ‘It will be remarked. Be sure of that. Oh yes.’ She clutched her purse more firmly to her side as if holding tight to it could preserve the family’s privacy. ‘People will be curious, they always are.’

  ‘So?’ The car stopped at doors to the departure hall and he helped her to get out as she had trained him to do. People noted the chivalrous effect he created. He did not feel at all gracious towards his mother, but Alex was a youth distinguished by an innate delicacy of movement and could not be clumsy if he tried. She gave him money and he paid the driver.

  ‘I
cannot believe your stupidity, Alexander. How long are you going to remain a child in knowledge? Do you want the entire neighbourhood to know that I have a criminal for a son?’

  ‘But I’m not a criminal.’

  ‘Why do you think you were arrested and taken to that court? You’re a thief, that’s all. My son is a thief.’ She was pulling down on his arm so that she could hiss in his ear and avoid raising her voice and being overheard. He caught her sickly floral scent, a smell which he associated with all those angry, furtive conversations in which she had told him what to say or how to act for the benefit of other people. These were the only occasions on which she ever came physically dose to him.

  ‘We’ll tell them you’re going to a tutor,’ she decided suddenly, ‘anyone who had seen your grades would certainly have no trouble in believing that.’

  He picked up her bag and pulled open the door. ‘And you can thank me that I have not told your father you were arrested.’ She reached into her purse and gave him their tickets to present at the desk. ‘Not to save you any embarrassment, oh no. But to save him. Your father lives in error in spite of the best we can do. He has no spiritual defences, he believes that a shock could give a man a heart attack. Your father is to be sixty years old next year and we can thank God that he is still with us because many women lose their husbands long before sixty. So you be sure never to breathe one word of this, Alexander, because that word might make me a widow.’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘I had to tell him where you were, or course, but we can say you were just picked up as a runaway.’ It was an order, not a suggestion. She sat down on the worn upholstered bench to wait for their flight call and looked around her with an air which was both inquiring and accusatory. Alex knew the mannerism well; it meant that he should fetch her something to drink.

  Elliott Wolfe was a man so devoid of imagination that he could not be interested in anything. He sailed slowly through life on an even keel of mental limitation, feeling neither enthusiasm nor anxiety. When the newspapers or the TV presented him with evidence that the world could be magical or bizarre, he dismissed it as exaggeration. When his colleague in Sales explained that syphilis was being spread by Moscow-trained female carriers as part of a Communist plot to undermine the health of the young men of America, he was disappointingly unimpressed with the hypothesis. He was probably the only man over the age of thirty in his city who had never contemplated the peaceniks demonstrating in Washington and seen in his mind’s eye the Russian army on May Day parade down the Memorial Shoreway, with Khrushchev in the first tank grinning, gorilla-like, leaning on his arms.