White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘That’s not the way at all, dear boy. All down at once – what do they say, no heel taps? Just throw it into your mouth. They’ll probably break some glasses, it’s meant to be lucky.’

  The spirit warmed his throat. A man with a white moustache yellowed from tobacco and a cheroot tucked between his lips took the glass from him, carried it ceremonially to the fireplace and stamped on it.

  Alex found a fresh glass in his hand being filled from a stone jar. ‘It’s the most frightful bath-tub hooch,’ Angela Partridge warned him in a loud whisper. ‘I’ve got a little gin in my bag if you’d rather.’

  He was repeatedly introduced, kissed, pawed and patted. A thin woman in a dress of bias-cut black crepe with a spray of pink carnations pinned to the shoulder stood up by the piano with a violin, and after some argument with the pianist, began to play a waltz. He found himself shuffling awkwardly around the floor with one tiny old woman after another, and then after a while they ignored him and he sat with the griffon on a couch in the corner and went to sleep.

  He had the impression that the party continued for days. His grandmother became very drunk and was periodically taken to her room to recover, but Marie never tired and swooped around the gathering with a permanent smile, making ineffectual attempts to clear the debris. People left with much kissing, other people arrived with more kissing. The air in the room was thick with smoke. Plates were scraped, sometimes washed, and piled with food again. Alex, thirsty and with a headache, drank a tumbler of vodka in mistake for water, and once it had taken hold went on to drink more, until he had to run to the bathroom to be sick. In the half light behind the curtains it was hard to tell what time of day it was.

  Finally no more people came, except a young black-haired woman with very brown skin, evidently the maid, who carried piles of dishes into the kitchen and began washing them. Angela Partridge and her dog had long since disappeared, his grandmother was in her room and Marie was poised precariously on a stool, one leg crossed awkwardly over the other, trying to pull her shoe off her swollen foot.

  Last to arrive had been a tall man with thinning fair hair, who now went to the windows and drew the curtains. The brilliant sunlight seemed to drain all the colour from the room, leaving it a dreary muddle. He wedged his cigarette between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand and extended his right to Alex, who hesitantly shook it.

  ‘I am uncle,’ he announced. His accent was very strong. ‘You call me Kolya, Kolya Kusminsky. Welcome.’

  He was a man of a kind Alex recognized only by instinct. In the dingy surroundings of the villa he seemed to be standing under a spotlight, fine-looking, beautifully dressed, radiantly prosperous. Properly, he should have been called middle-aged, but there was nothing staid about him, his manner was supple and responsive. Light blue eyes examined Alex carefully, without haste, while the left hand carried the cigarette to his mouth and away again. His cuffs were secured by crested gold links that were an important fraction too large, as was his silk tie with its vibrant abstract print. A powerful aura of physical confidence surrounded him. Alex, uncomfortable with the idea of finding another man attractive, felt a thin trickle of apprehension.

  ‘The son of my sister, that is you.’ His tone was inquisitorial.

  ‘I believe so, yes, Sir.’

  ‘No Sir, Kolya. Why you believe it?’

  ‘I found a letter which my grandmother wrote to my mother, Sir.’

  ‘You have letter? Show me, please.’

  ‘It’s in the bedroom, I’ll get it.’

  While the maid trotted energetically to and fro restoring the room to its former order, Alex submitted to a cross-examination. He had prepared for it, and brought all the letters, and a selection of other documents which might attest his identity. The photograph of his parents, taken in his infancy, was scrutinized at length. Kolya posed many questions about the account of her early life which his mother had given, and seemed suspicious that Alex could relate very little.

  ‘She always said her life began when she met my father. I got the impression she didn’t want to talk about her childhood, Sir. I didn’t even know her parents were Russian, or anything, until I got here.’

  ‘How old you are?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Too young. You go to school?’

  ‘I went to school in Cleveland, yes.’

  Kolya seemed to have made up his mind sufficiently to decide the next course of action. ‘I need you passport, please. Bring all these papers. We visit a friend and maybe American consul. Clean shirt, yes?’ His hand, which was warm and heavy, fell on Alex’s shoulder. The forefinger lifted the corner of his shirt collar. The panic he felt must have shown in his face because Kolya withdrew his hand at once and said, ‘Don’t worry.’ The sense of conspiracy this generated was still more alarming.

  His car was a little white Mercedes convertible, shallow like a cigarette box, which purred out of the suburbs, along the coast road lined with palms and into the bustling heart of the city. They visited a lawyer, a gently spoken young man who had prematurely lost much hair and who seemed familiar with the implications of runaway foreign minors. It was decided that Alex should write home at once, reassuring his parents that he was with his grandmother, was well, and had been compelled to satisfy his curiosity about his origins. Kolya then took him to an elegant small restaurant overlooking the sea, where several other men friends stopped at their table and eyed the boy with curiosity.

  Several weeks of limbo followed, which Alex occupied pleasantly in lying on the pebble beach and walking around the town. He struck up acquaintance with two girls from Boston who were studying at the university in Aix-en-Provence, but his lack of money limited their interest. Slowly he woke up to his new environment. Kolya left for Paris, returning for a few weekend visits, and his grandmother dozed most of the day beside her telephone. Shopping and cooking were done by the maid, and Marie played patience and corresponded with her children, a son in Biarritz and a daughter in London.

  In due course a stiff letter arrived from his father announcing that he had broken his mother’s heart, betrayed their trust and shamed them in front of the whole neighbourhood. It concluded: ‘As your parents we will honour our obligation to offer you a home under our roof until you are of age but while you choose to turn your back on us and on your country whatever becomes of you is no concern of ours.’

  ‘This is sad. Sad man. No love, no life.’ Kolya read the letter slowly, holding it at a distance because the script was cramped and he needed spectacles but was too vain to wear them. ‘So now, it’s your life, what shall we do?’ His tone was unexpectedly harsh.

  Alex was suddenly afraid. Kolya’s indulgence was evidently not to be relied upon. He had not expected the door to his old life to slam quite so firmly behind him. There was an immediate sense of freedom, but also a stab of loss, and mistrust of his newly discovered family. Being now accustomed to the unrestrained emotionality of his grandmother, his father’s chilly response, with all natural feeling hypocritically traduced into self-justification, seemed doubly painful.

  Lunch with Kolya was now an expected treat for them both, and he could relax with the fact that his uncle obviously enjoyed the curiosity of friends who saw him with an attractive stranger. It made him feel adult and worldly, both very welcome sensations.

  ‘What was my mother like as a little girl, Kolya?’ He had drunk more than his share of wine.

  His uncle paused, dipping a fork into his bouillabaisse while he collected his thoughts. ‘Never happy,’ he said at last, picking out a small piece of red mullet. ‘You understand my mother was very ill when she born, and afterwards she can’t love the child. When I see her first, after end of war, she like gypsy child, like beggar, dirty, no shoes. Nobody cares for her. My mother blame her for everything bad in her life.’

  ‘I can’t imagine her getting dirty. She’s just obsessive about things like that now.’ He tried to smile but it was not easy.

  ‘Yes, yes, exa
ctly. As she grow up, she get very quiet, and work very hard. Everything in house, she do it. Because then we have no money, and you understand my mother has never in her life made one cup of tea. Really this little girl was housewife. But she never happy. She hate for things to be dirty, people to get drunk, people smoke cigarettes, people forget, be stupid, be crying maybe or dancing. Russian people are like that.’

  ‘And she ran away?’ It seemed the first link between them, for now he too had run away.

  ‘We had bigger house, and people living in it who pay for their rooms, lodgers. Mostly also Russian. One day – now your mother is almost not child any more – this woman comes, Ukrainian, very good family, now she is teacher. And she has fiancé in New York, and she and my sister’ – he held up his left hand with the first two fingers crossed – ‘friends. They have same heart. So when the teacher leaves, she take your mother with her and we never see her again.’ He emphasized the last words with a touch of resentment. ‘One letter. One letter in twenty-five years, when she is going to get married. She is sténographe, insurance business.’

  ‘Grandmère never talks about her.’

  His uncle shrugged, implying that she was entitled to her little enmities. ‘If she don’t like something then it don’t exist for her. Your mother is a woman who can never be happy. Is impossible. She always criticize inside, always thinking what other people think. She has nothing for another person. Women like that are nightmare. When you are man you will meet them. I think it is your destiny, make women happy, but not this kind.’ He raised his eyebrows humorously and wagged a finger across the table. ‘My advice if you meet this kind – run.’

  ‘Well, I ran, didn’t I?’ Alex hoped he was not blushing. He felt both flattered and offended by Kolya’s worldly advice.

  ‘Yes, you did. Very good. Now we find where you run to. Next question. First, we get suit.’

  They had visited a tailor a few weeks earlier, and now Alex found himself provided with an evening suit and a beautiful ruffled white shirt. Feeling already like a new person, he spread out awkwardly in the back of the Mercedes that evening speeding along the coast to Monte Carlo, watching Kolya’s strong grip on the gearshift and listening to his grandmother in front pointing out the villas of her long-departed friends as they passed.

  The suit and the drive were already more glamour than he had ever experienced, but what awaited him at the little gilded opera house touched the hidden mainspring of his character. It was a gala evening, attended by a crowd of awesome wealth and elegance into which Kolya plunged without hesitation. Women with smooth hair piled high and long false eyelashes, extraordinarily thin, glittering with jewels and sequins, swooped down on him at once. Alex heard murmurs of ‘La Kusminskaya’, a few seconds before he was blinded by photographers’flashlights.

  On his arm his grandmother suddenly seemed less frail. He felt her usual tremor replaced by a firm touch, and she began smiling and nodding to acquaintances around them, standing erect and ordering her satin skirt into folds with an automatic twitch of her free hand. The dress had a close-fitting bodice and long sleeves, thickly embroidered with jet beads, and he saw that she was beautiful and graceful, and that Kolya, now leaning over her shoulder to point out another face in the crowd, still bore towards her the infinite love of a child.

  Footmen parted the throng to let them move forward, and Alex was so overcome by the sight of people being held back to let his family pass that he stumbled and almost fell on the red-carpeted stairs.

  ‘You are going to see Russian salad, not real ballet,’ his uncle warned him. ‘Little taste of this, little bit of that. Here is your American Princess.’ The orchestra attacked the Ruritanian strains of the Monegasque national anthem as Princess Grace, in cerise satin, took her seat behind a bank of flowers in the royal box.

  The performance began with Les Sylphides, which left Alex in a state of delicate rapture which he imagined must be akin to being in love. The entire confection fell into his parched mind like water into a desert. Connections at last began to form between the faded photographs in the Villa les Gazelles, this dazzling world of wealth and sophistication, and himself. Once my grandfather did that, he marvelled as the poet chased the last woodnymph away in the moonlight.

  His head was still palpitating with Chopin when the next piece began with harsh chords from the orchestra. A man in loose oriental trousers tore across the stage as if he were about to kill someone. The audience burst into applause. Alex was electrified. A ballerina appeared, but while she proceeded with the intricacies of a pas de deux the male dancer soared and leaped as if powered by inhuman fury. His feet were soundless, like a cat’s, and showers of sweat flew off his half-naked body at every turn, making his thick blond hair dark. He was clearly pushing his body to its limit and was not wholly in control; at one point he ran off the stage, leaving it empty while the music played on until the ballerina made her next entrance.

  ‘Who is that?’ he asked of his uncle during the tenth curtain call, when the volume of applause was finally low enough for him to be heard.

  ‘New boy from the Kirov. Nureyev. Good jump but no manners. Grandmère thinks he is scandal.’

  ‘I think he’s terrific.’

  Kolya looked shrewdly at his nephew, who was showing all his beautiful large white American teeth in a smile and clapping heartily as if he were at a football match. The boy was not dull, he thought, only uneducated, without culture, which was to be expected. He was not clever enough to be dishonest, but he had a fey quality which was perhaps mostly shyness. Obviously he had never been exposed to any kind of art, except perhaps a few books, but his instincts were surprisingly refined. But perhaps not surprisingly, considering his grandfather. Kolya had always regretted being born of the less interesting of his mother’s lovers. He was also a little pained that his mother was now lamenting the choices of her golden youth. Undeniably, however, this boy had become the light of her life, and so they must do their best for him.

  The next day Alex’s head was still full of passion, poetry and music when he sat down with his new family to discuss his education. His grandmother held one of his hands in both of hers while Kolya explained that it would be futile to send him to a French school, he would never surmount the barrier of language in time or catch up with the archaic syllabus. There was an international school, in the city, where he could study in English for the baccalaureat which was a recognized qualification in most of the world.

  ‘Can I study the ballet?’ he asked hesitantly, unaccustomed to having his wishes respected. ‘I thought seeing as how it’s in my family and everything … it might be kinda fun.’

  ‘You can study here. It is only small museum but very interesting collection.’ His uncle waved a hand at the chaotic room, his fleshy cheeks ruddy with amusement.

  ‘No, I don’t mean study like books and things, I mean learn it, do it, whatever people say?’

  ‘Dance. You mean dance.’

  ‘Oh yeah, how stupid, dance.’

  ‘Well, why not?’ The light eyes appraised him a second time, now noting his level shoulders, open chest, light but well formed musculature and starry eyes. ‘My aunt Julie has studio in Cannes, if she is still alive. She always like boys, nice boys.’ Kolya translated for his mother, who immediately got to her feet and spun around the room, miming joy, then headed for the telephone.

  Madame Sedova’s saucer eyes filled with tears at the sight of her old friend. She called for tea, and while Kolya smoked patiently the women enjoyed a full half hour of reminiscence before Alex was pushed forward and his origins explained, with much simpering by Lydia and teasing by Julie. At last she called in a younger woman, over-painted and wearing a turban, and a pale, lean man in jeans with close-cropped grey hair. Alex was presented and examined, asked to strip down to his underwear and examined again, then taken away by the man to find practice clothes before being walked up and down the mirrored studio and asked to copy some simple exercises at the barre.

&n
bsp; ‘She says OK,’ Kolya translated at the end of the morning, rolling off his chair with relief. ‘You have to come on Saturday and Wednesday and you must work hard. They say you have your grandfather’s ears but pray God you don’t got his knees also.’ His grandmother was tapping her chest, explaining that the young man’s excellent physique was undoubtedly inherited from her. ‘And she will make you practise every day. Every day, is important. Training normally start at eight years old. And please not to grow any more tall.’

  A competition reveals the world of ballet at its most cruel. The choice of one gold medal winner, who would carry the unofficial title of the best dancer in the world, and sixteen finalists in the annual Prix Lausanne was a clinical procedure.

  They began lying on their backs in straight rows of eight, a white plastic cover over the wooden studio floor clearly revealing their lean silhouettes. The twelve judges, seated on a dais at the end of the room, one by one got up and walked between the bodies, noting rotated knees and uneven shoulders. Then the hundred young dancers from all over the world were closeted together for three days with their teachers and judges, aware as they carried their bags of sweaty clothing between classrooms and rehearsal halls that their bodies were being scrutinized in the most pitiless detail at every moment.

  Wolfe, Alexandre, with the number 24 pinned to his plain black practice clothes, floated through the affair with an air of cheerful unconcern, only the occasional flash of his dark-lashed grey eyes suggesting that he was at all nervous. A high proportion of his rivals were eliminated after the introductory classes. The tears began. He had discovered that people wept every day in this world, sometimes from sheer emotion but more often from disappointment heaped on temperaments already frayed by criticism and weakened by impossible physical demands.

  ‘We will do this to learn,’ Madame Sedova had instructed him and her best girl pupil, Cécile, a colourless waif utterly absorbed in herself. ‘Learn to go before a public, learn how good you are compared to the international standard. Learn to rule your nerves.’ She glared at Cécile. ‘Learn why you have to work.’ She glared at Alex, but he merely smiled, secure in her underlying approval. For two years he had been nagged incessantly about the technique he needed to perfect, but at the same time he realized that they would not hammer him so mercilessly unless he was good.