White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

With a good-natured show of mock disgust their escort called up to the coachman to stop, but since he fell back into his seat immediately Lydia assumed that it was her responsibility now to help Marie to the river side as fast as she could stagger.

  While her friend leaned over the low wall and vomited her sumptuous dinner into the water, Lydia stood back, discreetly shielding her from view. The three-quarter moon was just visible through a scrim of clouds. It was at that moment that she at last remembered her meeting with Prince Orlov.

  Reluctantly, she withdrew from the lowest level of her memory the terrible details of that day, the last time the city had slept with confidence in its future, the last time she had seen her family. Unconsciously, she rubbed the back of her knee, remembering the bruises from his horse’s saddle. The glacial detachment of his manner had been the same even then, when murder had been all around and blood had stained these same streets.

  A lone seabird flew silently across the moon’s path on the surface of the water. A sense of predestination embraced her, crushing her to the point of breathlessness, and she sighed heavily, needing air. Whatever Mischa might say, however vast the social chasm, she was certain that to love Orlov was her fate.

  7. Nice, 1965

  Inside the Villa les Gazelles every surface was draped. Fringed wool shawls, with bright flowers printed on dark grounds, covered the chairs, the once-white art deco leather sofa and the iron banister rails. A black Chinese shawl half covered the baby grand piano, disguising the many burns and ring marks on its peeling walnut veneer. Over the metal-framed french windows, faded chenille curtains shut out the Riviera sun. The mantelshelf was covered with a linen runner worked in red cross-stitch, a pink chiffon scarf with a hole burned by a cigarette in one corner drooped like Spanish moss from the parchment shade of a standard lamp.

  Alex Wolfe looked wonderingly around him. The clutter in all the rooms was indescribable. It seemed as if nothing had been thrown away during all the decades of habitation since the house was built. Once it had been fashionably decorated, no doubt, with the few matching items of Odeon-style furniture which were now dilapidated and covered with rugs. The contents of a junk shop seemed to have been added since, cheap carved tables, a chaise with broken springs, items in pastel wicker and worn leather each placed carefully so that a few inches remained clear between them. A dog, small, black, and old, wheezed in a basket by the cold fireplace. Along one wall of the sitting room old newspapers and magazines were piled almost to the ceiling, with an empty birdcage balanced on top of them. There were a dozen small tables, each covered with a cloth and crowded with blurred sepia photographs, carved wooden animals, lacquer boxes, ashtrays and vases of cheap lustre glass.

  The folds of all the draperies were outlined in dust and more dust rolled itself into clouds of fluff around the margins of the dark parquet floors. Some attempt at cleaning was evidently made, since parts of the floor had been polished. On the walls, which were lined with pictures in dark wood frames, the cobwebs did not begin until the height of about six feet.

  His grandmother and her companion conveyed with gestures and chatter in French which he could not understand that he should take off his backpack and sit on the lopsided sofa. A diluted tang of the perfume his grandmother wore lingered in the still air. It was an aroma more exotic than anything he had ever scented, neither sweet nor pleasant, but it suggested the world he had been unable to imagine but always knew lay out there somewhere, beyond the furthest boundaries of his childhood, beyond Cleveland, beyond Ohio, beyond America itself.

  His grandmother first sat beside him and hung on to his hand, kissing it and pressing it to her cheek, talking softly to herself and to her companion, then released him and began hobbling to and fro on bowed, arthritic legs, unable to rest for excitement. He called her ‘Grandmère’, and she made him repeat it a hundred times, her hand to her ear as if miming listening to sweet birdsong. ‘Musique, musique!’ She nodded vigorously at him.

  Her companion she introduced at first as Marie, and then, with a creaky flourish and an unsteady bob of a curtsey, as La Comtesse Maria Stepanova Nikonova, with a few incomprehensible words added to this appellation, after which they clutched each other’s arms, laughing at some private joke.

  ‘Je ne parle pas très bien le français,’ he ventured, clearing his throat, which made the two old women shriek with amusement; then recollecting the possibility of making their precious guest uncomfortable they embraced him, patting his arms with dry, bony hands.

  Marie was stout, her belly clearly corseted for its bulk never stirred and the bones were visible at her sides through the tight material of her dress. She bore it before her proudly. Her hair, although completely white, was smooth and thick, and waved attractively, if unskilfully, off her round, tanned face. Her bulk, on her small frame, made her waddle as she went to the kitchen to make tea, but she still had far more ease of movement than his grandmother.

  While the tea was made in a silver pot, set down upon the stained cloth on the dining table and poured into red glasses with gold rims the old woman chattered at Alex, who smiled and shrugged and understood nothing. The French word for milk deserted him and seeing that the women drank the tea without it, he did not like to ask. They pursued a rapid conversation propelled by protesting gestures with their arms, until they evidently reached some agreement.

  Marie got up and went to the french door. The latch was stiff and Alex helped her open it, then handed her down the few broken steps into the small back garden, where she made off down a red sand path uttering piercing shrieks. By the time she reached the end wall another old woman appeared from the villa opposite, shrieking in response, a small brown dog with bulbous eyes at her feet. They called to each other like parrots over the straggling purple bougainvillaea, then gathered their skirts around their knees and returned indoors.

  Some time later a voice called ‘Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo!’ in the front garden and the knocker on the front door, a useless nickel-plated ring, was flapped impatiently. Marie set off and returned with their neighbour, who extended to Alex her translucent, freckled hand, its fingers swept sideways by rheumatoid arthritis.

  ‘Good afternoon, young man. I am Angela Partridge and as you can probably hear I am English.’ She was wearing a pleated silk afternoon dress in some beige print that looked like scribbling, with pale support stockings most carefully darned. The dog sat down at her feet and raised one forepaw. ‘And this is Sir Horace, he is a griffon and he would like you to shake his paw. That’s right.’

  ‘He’s got a cute face.’ Alex leaned down and did as he was told, noticing how clean the newcomer seemed beside the others and how the fresh air admitted by Marie’s exit was still hanging in a cloud in the centre of the room. ‘I’m Alexander Elliott Wolfe and I’ve come from Cleveland in the United States, but maybe you know that already.’

  ‘Since I speak something like your language, your grandmother – I believe it is – has invited me to translate, so I shall do my best. I do hope your journey was not too tiring.’ She seated herself on a hard dining chair, turning round to ascertain its condition first. ‘Did you fly? Simply thrilling! Do tell me – how long does it take?’

  She began to conduct an exchange of small talk of the kind which his mother’s church friends would have considered thoroughly refined, in that it touched on no subject whatever of any emotional significance to either of them. Each exchange she relayed in hideous French to her companions, until his grandmother at last erupted in a torrent of protest and began to direct the conversation herself.

  ‘And now,’ the offended translator continued, repositioning her white handbag under her elbow, ‘your grandmother would like you to come and look at some of her family pictures.’

  ‘That will be great.’ He jumped to his feet, clearly full of enthusiasm, and she looked up at him with cynical surprise. ‘You don’t understand, I’ve never seen any of that kind of stuff. Back home my mother doesn’t have photographs around. She doesn’t talk about her
family at all, as a matter of fact. I just kind of found out about my grandmother by accident. I didn’t even know she existed – I mean, I know she existed but I didn’t know where she was or who she was or anything about her.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Angela Partridge was now moved, and translated quickly, producing a flurry of amazement. ‘What an extraordinary thing. You do now know who your grandmother was, I suppose?’

  ‘Who she was?’ He was puzzled. ‘Well, not exactly. I just know her name and that she was French, although Kusminska isn’t a French name, is it? I thought maybe it was more Polish or something.’

  ‘Russian, dear boy. Never say Polish to them, they think they’re fools. Obviously Russian, look around you, nobody French would live like this, would they?’ Getting to her feet, she indicated the chaotic room with a brief wave of her bent fingers. Automatically he offered her his arm, but she indicated that he should help his grandmother to stand.

  A thrill shot through him at her words, the sheer excitement of the forbidden. Russian! Nobody in Cleveland was Russian. Some people, Jewish mostly, said they were Estonian or Lithuanian, but never Russian. Russians, as far as his parents were concerned, were enemies, spies, inhuman fiends forever poised to bomb Cuba, torch Vietnam and destroy American civilization. And here he was, apparently descended from a Russian, with the wicked blood running in his own veins.

  ‘And you come from a very distinguished family. Your grandmother was in the ballet, you know, a great ballerina. Absolutely the tops. So grand she was just called La Kusminskaya, like that, no Christian name. Even I had heard of her when we were all young, although of course I’m younger than they are. That’s why she’s crippled now, you see. She really was the toast of old St Petersburg. The lovers she had!’ This was added as if lovers were smart accessories. Alex had never heard anyone use the word in conversation before, let alone a well-bred old lady. ‘Even the Tsar used to come to her performances. Come along, look at the photographs and then it’ll all be clear as mud.’

  He had only the most elementary notion of ballet, but felt it to be something else rare and exotic, another manifestation of the unknown world he had set out to discover. As they progressed around the room he was shown a bewildering series of monochrome photographs, solemn children, groups of melancholy people in combination-length bathing costumes, posed portraits, formal studies taken on stage with dancers in strange old costumes.

  His grandmother picked up a picture of a boy in a sailor suit, riding in a trap pulled by a small white pony. ‘This is your uncle Kolya, Madame’s son, you see,’ the Englishwoman informed him. ‘He’s a grown man now of course and lives in Paris. And this’ – a portrait of a fair-haired dancer with a pretty smile, wearing a skirt almost down to her knees – ‘this is the Countess here as a young girl. She was in the ballet too, you can see that, but she retired from the stage after her marriage. And here she is with her husband.’ Marie laid a hand on the upper slope of her bosom, her smile now disappearing in a wreath of wrinkles.

  Next his grandmother led him to a corner of the room which he had not noticed before, where two small icons rested on a shelf with a night light in a green glass jar below them and dead matches scattered carelessly around. Above them was a family portrait of a tall man in a uniform loaded with braid and decorations, a small-featured woman with a frozen expression whose elaborate lace dress was ruffled up to her ears, four nearly identical adolescent girls and a small boy. ‘The man with the beautiful eyes is the last Tsar of Russia, and this is his family, who were all horribly murdered’ – Angela paused while the other two women continued a lengthy explanation – ‘and Lydia says it is so, she is quite certain, and all those people who say some of them escaped or it never happened are wrong, because she herself has met the magistrate who ran the special investigation into the murders in Paris after he emigrated and he told her all about it and showed her the photograph of the bodies. They were found in a mine. And the little keepsakes and trinkets found on the bodies were returned to relatives living here in France who recognized them ail.’

  Under this picture was a much more modern group, a woman with a full face, vivacious expression and dark hair with a widow’s peak, a man with a pleasant, level gaze and sharp nose, and an infant girl. ‘This is the present head of the Imperial Family in exile, the Grand Duke Vladimir, and his wife and daughter, the Grand Duchess Marie. There’s quite a large number of émigrés living here, poor things, and more in Paris. One does feel so sorry for them, having lost everything – except hope, perhaps. The young ones are more realistic, of course. And this man on a horse was her lover, Prince Orlov, and here they are together in the villa they used to have over in Monte.’

  ‘Does she have a picture of my grandfather anywhere?’ Alex was not much interested in historical figures and found it impossible to relate this aged shred of a woman to the girl with a tiny waist and out-thrust bosom who stared out from the old pictures, bright-eyed and carefree.

  ‘Il demande son grandpère,’ the old woman translated in an imperious tone. To Alex’s surprise his grandmother rattled off a long burst of delight and decided to kiss him again, then held him by the arms and invited Marie to look him in the face. ‘She says you’re the absolute living image of him, except you’re fair and he was dark. She’s looking for a picture of them both together.’

  It was at last located on the piano, a stage portrait of a young man with a penetrating stare, kneeling with outstretched arms, while a pretty girl crowned with flowers leaned on his shoulder, holding an arabesque on one point. His black doublet was outlined sharply against her long white skirt, and the tails of the large white bow at the neck of his shirt flowed almost to his waist. Behind them could just be made out a painted backdrop with a ruined wall, a broken column and some leafy branches. The whole effect was ridiculous, dated and artificial, and Alex saw no resemblance to himself at all, except that the man’s ears were curious, large and rather elfin, very much like his own.

  ‘Tell me about this, where was it taken?’ He ran wondering fingers over the glass, leaving trails in the dust.

  ‘It was taken in Monte Carlo in 1914, at the start of the Russian Ballet season, and the ballet was called Les Sylphides. Your grandfather was a dancer and choreographer called Leonid Volinsky, and he was a very, very gifted man who adored your grandmother all his life although she says she was vile to him, frightfully cruel … oh crikey, somebody turned on the waterworks.’

  His grandmother sank heavily on to the piano stool in an attitude of despair, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief produced from the pocket of her wrapper. Her voice sank to something between a soft wail and a whisper.

  ‘Is he still alive?’ Alex asked the Englishwoman, feeling raw and tired himself.

  ‘Don’t ask about it now, for Gawd’s sake. Frightful thing, always sets her off;’

  In a few minutes the old woman recovered, crossed herself and got shakily to her feet; in the process she knocked a glass dish in the shape of a butterfly off the piano, picked it up with difficulty and put it back, stroking the wings with her fingers. Then she beckoned Alex and their translator, who was acquiring a martyred air, to a place on the wall where a series of ballet pictures commenced, all identically framed.

  ‘This is your grandmother as Salome in your father’s ballet, and this is her as the Princess in The Sleeping Beauty, and here’s the programme from that performance, and this is her with Nijinsky, and this is with your father again in Don Quixote but you see it got mildewed so it’s not very good of him, and this is with Diaghilev, the great impresario, I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him, and Picasso and some other people, and this is with the Countess again, and Anna Pavlova – you must have heard of her …’

  Here there was a violent interjection. ‘She was the most frightful bitch apparently, and then this one with the goat in is Esmeralda …’

  ‘Does she have one of my mother?’ The names were all meaningless to Alex, who now felt very tired.

  �
�I’ll ask, but since she ran away, you know … I’ve never seen one.’ The two women conferred, looking all around the room, until Marie sailed to a far corner and returned with a long, informal group photograph, men in white flannels and women with cloche hats, seated upon a rug in a garden. Almost in the background was the figure of a little girl in a caped coat, her straight hair scraped to one side, holding a wicker hamper that was almost larger than she was.

  ‘This is incredible, just incredible,’ he said, not liking to remark that from her expression she seemed as bad-tempered as ever. He had brought a photograph of his parents to show his grandmother, but she seemed so pointedly uninterested that he did not mention it. ‘I just can’t believe I’m seeing all these things, all these people, my family.’

  ‘Well she says you are a miracle from heaven and the answer to her prayers after all these years of loneliness. It’s impossible to express her joy at seeing you here. So everybody’s happy. Now are you staying anywhere? She’ll want to give you her son’s room, I expect.’

  He was installed in a small, high-ceilinged room at the back of the villa by Marie, while his grandmother lowered herself into a corner of the sofa and began to call people on the ancient black telephone, pausing frequently to untangle the cord from the earpiece. Angela Partridge warned him to expect a party and in a few hours his grandmother appeared from her room in a sleeveless black satin gown which flapped around her thin body. A rope of blistered artificial pearls was wound several times around her neck and her sparse curls were anchored by pins. People began to arrive, most of them also elderly émigrés, and they brought dishes of food, sticky cold vegetables smothered in mayonnaise, fish in vinegar, chewy bread and pale meat fried in breadcrumbs, which soon covered the table. The piano was opened and a very thin old man sat down to play.

  ‘Oh, is this vodka?’ Someone put a tiny glass of spirit in Alex’s hand. He sipped it cautiously and heard the Englishwoman’s loud voice above the general protest.