White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  At the head of the queue Lovat pulled over to the kerb and the taxi pulled out and drove on, followed by the other vehicles. The four drunks gave him a blast on their horn as they passed him, and the other drivers, waving and cheering, did the same, while he sat behind the wheel staring ahead, angry and embarrassed.

  Bianca joyously pulled the car door open and threw herself back into her seat. Her hair was wet and her dress beaded with moisture.

  ‘There! I’ve risked my life to tell the whole world that I love you. Now will you believe me?’ She leaned across to kiss him and he flinched away.

  ‘I think you’re mad,’ he said. His voice was thick with suppressed violence. The traffic lights turned red again, but Lovat shoved the car into gear and shot into the street regardless.

  The money which had been his parents’wedding present, with the matching sum which her parents had then been obliged to add to it, had been used to buy a first-floor flat in a tight, steep crescent in Notting Hill. The area was half occupied by lightly gilded young artists like themselves and half public housing owned by Kensington and Chelsea council. For fifteen years it had been London’s unofficial ghetto, the only area of the city where the cards that landlords pinned up in corner newsagents to advertise accommodation did not include the words ‘no blacks’. Cheap in consequence, it had lately attracted rock musicians, underground magazines and hippies of all persuasions. For Lovat and Bianca its chief virtue was its distance, geographical and psychological, from Chelsea.

  The apartment had two rooms. Overlooking the street was Bianca’s studio, the fashionable stripped floorboards already ankle deep in debris. Behind it was their bedroom, painted plain white, with a low bed in the corner.

  They lay side by side for hours without touching, each wrestling the serpents of their emotions in silence.

  When the night was at its deepest she felt Lovat roll over and stand up, then leave the room. For a fearful instant she imagined that he was going to put on his clothes, walk out into the street and leave her. The bathroom light suddenly glowed from the corridor and she was reassured. She heard the lavatory flush and the shower running.

  He came back and she felt a wash of relief. Then his weight depressed the edge of the bed and his hand, still damp, reached for her face on the pillow, fumbling in the darkness. She lay perfectly still, reminding herself that he was the one who had picked the quarrel and making up was now his obligation.

  The bed creaked and she felt him lean over her. In her stomach she felt a flash of fear, sensing his weight and strength above her. Then she smelt his breath, and his mouth pressed lightly above the bridge of her nose, in the place which Hermione her sister called the Third Eye. The fullness of his lips was trembling. There was a catch in his breathing. Something touched her cheek; it was wet, a tear, and it ran down towards her hairline as if it had been one of her own.

  Bianca reached up with her arms and pulled him to her, and soon afterwards drew up her legs and wound them around him, and let him make simple, selfish love to her. Her overpowering desire was to tell him that she loved him, but then the words were impossible between them. She had an obscure sense that she had been tricked, but could not explain to herself how or by whom.

  In the morning they lingered over their coffee in the narrow kitchen, unwilling to part with so many raw places unhealed. Eventually Lovat said, ‘Time to go to work, I suppose,’ pulled on his denim jacket and slipped down the stairs and out into the street, looking up to wave to her before he turned the corner with, she realized in slight pique, complete confidence that she would be at the window to return the gesture.

  Within an hour he came back. She was sitting by the window drawing at a flat table, which she had discovered she preferred to an easel. Nothing at all of any interest had come into her mind for weeks; she had made a drawing of one of her old hand moulds and was playing around with it, trying to think of new ways to catch the articulation of the joints. He came into the apartment without her hearing, walked silently up behind her and laid a long-stemmed yellow rose beside her paper.

  ‘Can you leave that?’ He spoke roughly, his body twisting as if his feelings were buffeting him like a wind. ‘I can’t concentrate. We could go for a walk or something.’

  ‘Where shall we go?’

  ‘I don’t know, you choose. I just want to be with you …’

  ‘I know.’ She stood up and held him, marvelling tenderly that a man could be so helpless. ‘Let’s go West, young man.’

  They walked out into the morning with his arm around her shoulders and by noon had ventured far beyond Shepherd’s Bush into a region of decaying Victorian cottages and flyblown suburban shops. At length they reached a park, with a banal Chinese-style bridge over a pond of Canada geese and an expanse of muddy football pitches beyond. The wind scraped their faces as they walked arm in arm down a straight path lined with leafless trees.

  A children’s playground completed the civic amenities. A few women, already stout and bundled up in winter coats and scarves, stood talking in a group while their children climbed on and off the merry-go-round. Another mother stood apart, pulling and pushing a shiny new pram with one hand and holding a black mongrel dog on a leash with the other.

  ‘It’s a different world down here, isn’t it?’ Lovat had not spoken for half an hour. His hands were thrust deep into his jacket pockets against the cold.

  ‘I suppose this is the real world. We just live in a fantasy bubble.’ Bianca curled her freezing toes inside her boots.

  ‘Do your feet hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘We can take the bus back, I’ve got money with me.’

  With one accord they turned slowly and began to retrace their steps. The woman with the pram, cheaply smart in a red coat, was walking twenty yards ahead of them, with her dog trotting obediently at one side and a small boy jumping and running on the other. She stopped, braking the pram with care, and reached into it to pick up the baby and rearrange its covers. As they passed her the infant stared moonily at them, sucking its tiny fingers. The mother’s face, which had only recently lost the bloom of youth, was illuminated with tenderness.

  ‘Enormous eyes babies have.’ Bianca smiled and coincidentally the child smiled also.

  She felt Lovat consider what he was about to say, then draw a deep breath. ‘You wouldn’t ever want one of them – would you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course I would.’ A ridiculous delight began to bubble under her heart.

  ‘You never said …’ They stopped walking and turned towards each other.

  ‘We never talked about it.’

  ‘You really would, I mean, really? A baby and all of that?’

  ‘Of course I would. Maybe even two.’ His hands were gripping her arms tightly.

  ‘But I mean, like now? Or …’

  ‘I think it takes a while to happen, doesn’t it? Nine months or something?’

  ‘Does it, then? Well, we can’t waste time hanging about here talking, can we? Best get home and get on with it.’ And they forgot their blisters and ran out of the park hand in hand, then stood at the bus stop giggling like children because the other people waiting could not possibly understand what a huge decision they had just made.

  Bianca stopped taking her contraceptive pills, but the next day it seemed that something settled upon so lightly, by a couple who were doing nothing more than healing a quarrel and smoothing down their doubts, could not ever become real. But to her surprise, events rushed from every direction to confirm their hasty promises. Within a few weeks she knew she was pregnant, and their life turned a corner and careered away from them on a new course.

  ‘I’m going back to school,’ Lovat announced one evening, with the obvious expectation that she would be pleased. ‘We can’t start a family like this. We’ll have to get a bigger place and I’ll have to get a job, at least for a while.’

  She knew at once that he was withhol
ding the most important piece of information there was. ‘What are you going back to do then?’

  ‘I’m going to Sotheby’s to do the Art History course.’

  ‘Where’s that going to get you?’

  ‘Closer to a wage packet, I hope.’ He had grasped that people in London had salary cheques, not wage packets, but at that moment it suited him to emphasize his disadvantages. ‘Face it, Bianca, you’re having a baby and I haven’t sold a single thing since I left college. It’s time to think seriously.’

  ‘You can’t give up because of me …’

  ‘I’m not giving up, just adding another string to my bow, as it were. I won’t live off my parents, Bianca, and I know you wouldn’t want anything from yours. I’ll still be a sculptor, don’t you worry. But we can’t afford a bigger flat and two studios, not right now.’

  She was deeply disturbed, but he refused to discuss anything more with her, and soon a new energy took over her mind and washed away all her old anxieties. From the first day that she found the waistband of her jeans uncomfortable the sweet, rich pleasure of pregnancy filled all her life, and then anything which was to be done for the baby’s sake was just another part of the blessing.

  Miraculously, the baby-to-be brought about everything which she had wished for in her family. Her father retreated from her, as if at last acknowledging that she was a woman, with a right to womanly, concerns which were beyond his comprehension. Her mother seemed simply defeated. She shot Bianca a poisonous glance which conveyed powerfully that she was not ready to be a grandmother. They received the news with hardly a word, gave Lovat more money to match the second gift of his own parents, retreated for a few weeks and then, having formulated appropriate behaviour for this new situation, began asking them to lunch instead of to dinner.

  A few days after Bianca felt the mysterious flutter of the foetus within her, Hermione suddenly returned from India, not an inch thinner than when she had left but with the forelock of her hair bleached almost white. She enrolled herself in a cooking school nearby and visited Bianca every afternoon with a bag of buttery, misshapen ‘experiments’, to inquire if her sister felt connected to the Great Mother, the primary goddess, the wellspring of all life, and to hold a variety of pendulums over the swelling in an attempt to divine the baby’s sex.

  Their grandmother, Charlotte, felt compelled to bury the hostility to Lovat which she had maintained sturdily for months, and the two rapidly became excellent companions. ‘I can mother him, and I could never mother your father,’ she told Bianca. ‘Your father would never say that he was worried about anything, but Lovat really talks to me. He’s so young, poor lamb.’

  ‘I’m younger than he is.’ Bianca was a little jealous, seeing her husband elicit from Charlotte a quality of affection which was different from the indulgence she gave her granddaughters. ‘And I’m the one who has to have this baby.’

  ‘You’re a woman, and women endure better than men,’ was the response.

  Charlotte left her usual position of neutrality on the sidelines of the family, and fussed around Bianca, looking for useful actions to perform. Her presence was soothing, and when Lovat found them a new home she took over the entire task of organizing the move.

  ‘This is what I call a real little home,’ she exclaimed, standing among the packing cases with a clipboard. ‘You’re very quiet, darling, don’t you like it?’

  Bianca, by now thoroughly tranquillized by her hormones, looked around the building with a vague expression. ‘It’s a house, not a flat, that’s all. Lovat says he thinks a family ought to have a house, and there are no small houses in Notting Hill and it’s not a family area, so here we are in Chelsea, more or less.’

  ‘He’s quite right, children need a garden, they can’t run around in a flat. You’ll be just down the road, darling, so convenient. And we’ll have a wonderful time decorating it, you wait and see.’

  ‘Where do you want this, love?’ The contractor stood in the doorway with the case containing her tools and clay on a trolley.

  ‘Oh, out the back in the garden shed.’ Bianca waved him to the rear of the house. Albion Street SW3 was a charming strip of Victorian artisan housing on a much smaller scale than the buildings in their old crescent.

  ‘Don’t you want it in your studio?’ Charlotte stepped forward and peered up the stairs as if looking for a signpost.

  ‘I’m not having a studio, there won’t be room with the baby. I’ll just work on the kitchen table. The materials can live in the coal hole. After all, I’ll be a mother first, plenty of time to catch up on my work later. And I’m sure the experience will change me, make me want to do different things …’ Bianca felt completely disinclined towards doing anything but reading baby-care manuals and shopping for nursery equipment. She was looking forward to the baby as a cast-iron excuse to escape from her destiny as a Berrisford.

  She sat on the stairs, suddenly feeling her back ache for the first time. ‘What was it like when you had Hugh, Charlotte?’

  ‘Oh goodness, you can’t expect me to remember that, it was more than fifty years ago and the war was on.’ The older woman was looking intently at the plain white marble mantelpiece, a sure sign of evasion. Bianca knew better than to press her.

  A few weeks later she asked Olivia about her own birth. ‘Oh darling, I really can’t remember,’ was the careless reply. ‘I had so much gas-and-air I was completely stoned most of the time.’

  Bianca felt a wrench of deep loneliness, from which only her sister could rescue her. ‘I just wish they’d both behave the way families are supposed to, for once,’ she complained. ‘It’s not that I want them to knit or anything, but some corny advice and a few old wives’tales would stop me feeling as if I was the only woman in the world ever to do this.’

  ‘In India,’ Hermione told her, ‘birth takes place in the home, with all the women of the village singing and the mother and grandmother and the midwife supporting the woman in a squatting position.’

  ‘If we asked our mother or grandmother to do that they would probably say they couldn’t remember which end the baby comes out of.’ Bianca folded her new cot sheets crisply and put them into a drawer in the room designated the nursery.

  She floated through the last months of her pregnancy in a haze of fecund happiness. Every bodily development seemed to promise her a new life as a new person. She had let her hair grow, which it did at a remarkable rate, reaching a short, sleek bob in a few months. Gliding along, belly first, in dungarees and clogs, she hugged her tight-skinned stomach as if it was her best friend. ‘I don’t want to have this baby,’ she admitted to her sister with a silly smile. ‘It’s so beautiful where it is.’

  ‘You may find you’re bucking the laws of the universe there. And it doesn’t care for it, let me tell you. Do you want me to make you some raspberry-leaf tea?’

  ‘What does that do?’

  ‘It’s an ancient herbal remedy against the pains of childbirth. Doesn’t taste too bad.’

  ‘All right, but I want to hug you first.’ Hermione found her sister’s thin arms around her shoulders and they embraced awkwardly around the bulge. ‘You fill up such a big hole in my life, Herm. Don’t go off travelling again, will you?’

  The birth took place on the exact day predicted, took five hours and seemed to cause the mother so little distress that the midwife complained of feeling redundant. Lovat seemed to be suffering from the same sensation. Having delivered his wife to the maternity hospital, and waited to view the baby, he seemed confused and stood awkwardly by the crib at the foot of her bed not knowing what to say.

  ‘This isn’t the right time, but I must tell you,’ he announced at last. ‘I’ve been offered a job so – well – I’m taking it.’

  ‘But that’s wonderful,’ she told him, still tired and feeling as if everything were taking place behind an invisible curtain that muffled sound and feeling. ‘What job is it?’

  ‘You remember that American woman, Cheri Tuttlingen? I’m going to
manage her gallery. Twentieth-century sculpture is going to be the main thing; Cheri’s going back to New York for half the year and I’m to buy for her in Europe.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said again with a dreamy smile.

  ‘Well, not that wonderful. I’ve got to go to New York next week, just for a few days.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. Hermione will look after me.’

  ‘That’s all right then.’

  ‘Of course it is, darling. You’re acting like it’s the end of the world.’

  If Bianca had been happy before, she was now permanently ecstatic. Her energy switched from the inner marvels of her womb to the wonderful child in her arms, and all her thoughts, dreams and reactions became attuned to him. Her sleeping and waking followed his. Her ears heard his smallest murmur before any other sound. Finding herself possessed of the most perfect natural instinct for everything the baby needed, Bianca was grateful, but guilty, that Lovat was often absent or preoccupied and so unable to break the glorious spell that bound her and the child together. He seemed anxious to make love to her as soon as he could, and since her healthy young tissues recovered rapidly they went to bed the moment she was home while the baby slept in his carrycot, but a new dimension of her soul had opened and what had filled her being before was now just one sensation among many others.

  The child was named Tom, and far from being the perplexing, distressing, howling creature which she had anticipated he fed and slept with enthusiasm and seemed determined to pass all the milestones on his developmental chart ahead of time. She breast-fed him. He was deliciously greedy; feeding binges sometimes lasted half the day. He lay heavy and robust in her arms and was soon able to smile with satisfaction.

  Hugh and Olivia approved of none of the decisions she made about the baby, from the colour of his clothes – traditional baby blue – to her decision to bring him up by herself, without the help of the nanny for whom a room lay waiting at the top of the new house. They protested that she would change her mind, but instead of falling into resentful silence she cheerfully said, ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so. Not until the next one, anyway,’ and was amazed to see her mother twitch her lips with annoyance and her father step back and swallow his criticism.