White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  Watching Madame during the competition, sitting contentedly with his grandmother, inclining her head to acknowledge greetings and letting other teachers of her age or standing approach her, Alex concluded that half the purpose of their entry in the Prix was to meet old friends. He no longer marvelled at the inbred, claustrophobic world of the ballet, knowing that the accident of his birth had for ever admitted him to its innermost circles.

  More than half the profession was still under the control of his grandmother’s friends and contemporaries. Here was Madame Egorova from Paris, Madame Sokolova from London, Madame Nieloshevskaya from Stockholm, Madame Inkina from Rome and others, some younger or with younger assistants in tow, all eager to crowd around and renew a relationship which, he had begun to sense, was uniquely binding to them all.

  Even in the few days of the competition the entrants developed a desperate camaraderie, so that when he fell badly during his second solo he was at once surrounded by the other boys, massaging his twisted ankle, solicitously asking where it hurt and how much, commiserating with the despair which it was assumed he would be feeling since the accident would automatically rule him out of the contest. Alex felt no despair. He was still fuelled by the delight of making a dream into reality. It was enough for him to be able to dance. He was confident that he danced remarkably well, and that one day he would be exceptional.

  His report commended his lovely proportions, his quality of repose and his elevation, while noting that his technique lacked precision. Cécile was among the finalists; he was watching the presentation ceremony when a tank of a woman in a floral frock barged through the crowded hall to approach him and, after a few compliments and some expressions of sympathy for his fall, asked him to point out his teacher. His grandmother, recognizing her accent, broke into the conversation in Russian. As he anticipated, the stranger reacted when she introduced herself, and when he named Madame Sedova. Grandmère immediately embarked on the recitation of their relationship in which his grandfather’s name and hers were repeated as often as possible. The dark woman was evidently delighted to have had her judgement confirmed, and set off in Madame’s direction at once, nodding significantly to him over her shoulder.

  ‘Alex, you must have been a cat in your last life; when you fall it’s always the right way up.’ Madame bustled eagerly through the crowd which was streaming past them towards the exit doors. ‘Now I can go to my grave a happy woman, Lydia. She’s a teacher from home, and she has invited you before the examination committee in the summer.’

  ‘What examination committee?’

  ‘The examination committee of the Agrippina Vaganova Choreographic Academy in Leningrad. Obviously they’re looking for some likely lads to play the stupid peasants.’

  ‘Don’t be so cruel, Julie, the boy doesn’t know, why should he? Everything’s changed now. But wonderful, wonderful news! If it is a genuine invitation.’ Grandmère reached for Alex’s arm to help her down the entrance steps of the building.

  ‘I know they accept half a dozen foreign students in each year, and it’s for real study, not indoctrination. You won’t get a young Marxist back, Lydia, never fear,’ Madame negotiated the steps stiffly by herself.

  ‘I’m not worried, he likes to eat too well to be a Communist.’ She gave his biceps a pinch to indicate their inconvertible substance. ‘So, it seems you and I know a few tricks still?’

  Alex could see high satisfaction on both faces. ‘I still don’t get it – what is this place?’

  ‘The Vaganova was formerly the Leningrad Kirov Academic School, and before that the Imperial Theatre School, which for two hundred and forty years has produced all the great dancers in classical ballet, including, we cannot deny it, Kusminskaya my friend and myself.’

  ‘And my grandfather?’

  ‘Yes, naturally. And that fool Nieloshevskaya, trainer of the cart horse who just won the gold medal which our Cécile deserved a thousand times more, but let’s not criticize, back to work. Yes, yes, it’s a marvellous opportunity, if they accept you. But I can’t have you disgracing me in front of people who actually know what they’re doing, instead of just pretending. Stand up, don’t slouch. Seven years too late to be a dancer, you can’t afford to waste a minute now.’

  8. Buckinghamshire, 1979

  ‘Oh fucking infinity!’ Hermione had stepped on a sharp plastic bat’s wing lying on the polished eighteenth-century flagstone floor of her sister’s country kitchen. ‘Why can’t these fucking children put their fucking toys away!’

  ‘Because they’re boys, dear. Boys destroy, it’s a rule of nature.’ Her grandmother, following her in from the garden with a basket of herb clippings, paused to retrieve the rest of the intergalactic vampire transport and throw it into a basket. It was a handsome Tuscan willow basket placed in the corner of the kitchen by Bianca to receive the boys’ hideous toys and so preserve the aesthetic standard of the room. ‘And with each extra boy the destruction increases exponentially, so three boys destroy nine times as much as one. That’s a law of mathematics.’

  ‘Mathematics. Hot, acid, yang, left-brain – forget it.’ Hermione massaged her bare foot, tangling irritably with the fringes of her red Indian skirt. ‘What are we doing with all this, Bianca?’

  ‘Dill on the chopping board, mint by itself in a jar of water and the thyme can be tied and hung up to dry in the larder.’ Bianca came in last, her basket piled high with red and white currants, trailing wearily already although it was only halfway through the bright May morning. ‘Can’t you put your shoes on?’

  ‘I like to go bare-foot on the earth, it’s good because there’s nothing to stop the energy flowing up into your spine.’

  ‘Which jar, darling?’ Charlotte paused in front of an array of Victorian preserve pots, French confit containers and bright modern spongeware.

  ‘The old majolica if it’s there.’

  The garden’s bounty was swiftly disposed about the spacious room, the proper living touch to complete the day’s set-dressing of the kitchen.

  ‘So how many has Lovat invited for the weekend this time?’ Hermione lived in open-mouthed wonder at her sister’s life. Since Bianca was buttressed by every possible luxury and permanently unhappy, she offered reassuring proof that materialism was spiritual death.

  ‘Six. And Joe and Shona are coming for Saturday dinner. And your Russian friend from Paris – the one who does icons and Fabergé, I’ve forgotten his name.’

  ‘Oh I say – you don’t mean Kolya Kusminsky?’ Charlotte clapped her hands together over her heart, partly a gesture of joyful anticipation and partly because she was wounded that the young could so carelessly trample the memories of her own youth. ‘Kolya’s not just a friend, he was my baby! I looked after him as a tiny child all those long years ago! You can’t imagine how precious he is to me – why, we escaped the Revolution together. Why didn’t someone tell me he was coming? It will be such a treat to see him again. We haven’t met since – oh, it must be ten, twelve years. Little Kolya, just imagine. You remember him, surely? He used always to come and have tea with me when he was in London. I know you’ve met him.’

  ‘Well, I know he was tall and smelt exotic. Ten years ago I was pregnant, my memory’s a little hazy. Lovat just saw him in the saleroom a couple of days ago.’

  ‘This will be a wonderful occasion! Wonderful!’ Her grandmother was childlike in her eagerness.

  ‘Wonderful if you don’t have to cook for them all, maybe. Lovat asked him because he’s got some Americans coming next week to look for Fabergé. And the Bainbridges because his uncle’s just popped off in Grasse and left them some Braques, and the Llewellyns because he buys for some Japanese bank. Hugh to help clinch the deals, Joe because he thinks Lovat’s a living god. I get my sister to stop me going mad.’ Making more noise than necessary in order to express her annoyance, Bianca dragged a high stool to the scrubbed pine table which filled the centre of the room and began the laborious business of dragging a fork down the currant stems to fre
e the fruit for her famous red-and-white-currant compote.

  ‘Wow, those look delicious!’ Hermione picked out a choice stem of berries and ate them in one gulp. ‘I should eat more food like this, raw and light, I’m too kapha, I need stimulation. What are we making for dinner?’ Without any evident urgency, Hermione pulled another fork from the drawer and drifted across the room to help.

  ‘Home-cured gravadlax, saddle of venison, gooseberry sorbet with elderflower cordial … Mrs Harris! That reminds me, have we put the flowers I cut yesterday in the porcelain planter in the music room?’ The housekeeper, who was sorting the boys’shoes into the rack in the boot room by the kitchen door, reassured her. ‘Oh good, and you gave them a drink afterwards? Good.’ Bianca put her hands to her head as if to grope for reminders of everything else that needed to be done before the guests arrived. ‘And the American percale sheets are on in the bamboo room? And the clock in the garden room is back from the menders and we’ve wound it up? Have I given you a cheque for the pool engineer? And am I picking Orlando up from school today or is he being dropped off?’

  ‘I bet life wasn’t as complicated as this in old St Petersburg, eh, Charlotte?’ Hermione watched a currant fly off her fork into the far corner of the room and decided not to retrieve it. The mice were part of the ecosystem too.

  ‘Everyone had armies of servants – and God knows how some of those people would have lived otherwise. A man in the equivalent of Lovat’s position would have had at least twenty staff.’ Charlotte fetched a basket of clean washing and began pairing up the boys’ socks.

  ‘And when your Kolya was a little boy did he rip up his toys and drop bits of them on the floor?’ Hermione’s foot was still smarting.

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t even my job to pick them up. There was a children’s nurse and two maids under her. Of course they didn’t have all these labour-saving devices. Someone had to wash everything by hand. But Madame would never have considered even coming into the kitchen. There wasn’t all this pressure to be a mistress of all the domestic arts. Even when they went to the dacha and played at simple life in the country she never lifted a finger. That wasn’t her place in life.’

  ‘Lucky Madame.’ Bianca had resumed her seat and was gazing at the pile of prepared fruit with a dull expression, wondering what task it was now demanding of her. After a few moments she got up again, fetched a copper preserving pan and piled the berries into it. Charlotte put the laundry aside and went to rub her granddaughter’s shoulders, noticing their boniness.

  ‘Why don’t you leave this and go and lie down? If a woman can’t rest when she’s pregnant, then when can she?’

  ‘I’m only three months pregnant and there’s so much to do. I have to finish something in the studio this afternoon, as well.’ Bianca knew that Charlotte and Hermione between them would not prepare the food to anything like the standard she needed. Mrs Harris helped, but the cook lived out, and would not appear until the next day for the major dinner of the weekend. Lovat liked the personal touch of offering his guests food prepared by his wife and nobody, in truth, took as much trouble as she did over things. ‘Lovat will be in a bad temper if everything isn’t perfect, you know what he’s like. I don’t look tired, do I?’

  ‘No, darling, you never look tired, heaven knows why. Sad, maybe …’

  Bianca sighed. Charlotte, as usual, was correct and was, in her subtle way, implying much more than she said. A heavy melancholy had crept up on Bianca in the last few weeks, leeching away her energy and blunting her emotions. It seemed impossible that she should be sad with so many blessings in her life, so she had hardly acknowledged the feeling to herseif.

  Since their existence was a picture of perfection, few people understood that Bianca and Lovat Whitburn had been waging war against each other for years. Both were doing only what was expected of a man and a woman, she raising their family and he providing handsomely for it, so they could not be faulted – indeed, the family was frequently held up among their acquaintance as an excellent example of folk who had everything.

  They had a London house, in Holland Park, a few streets away from their newlywed apartment in terms of distance but a world apart in affluence. They had a farmhouse in the Dordogne, with a pigeonnier and a swimming pool. There was also a pool at their home in Buckinghamshire, where Bianca and the children lived most of the time. Parts of the house dated from the fourteenth century and the garden was famed among horticulturalists and open to them for two days each year. In all these homes they had antique furniture, pedigree pets and contented domestic staff. Three cars, his, hers and the housekeepers’, ferried personnel to and fro.

  They had three sons; Tom was gangly, dark-haired and quiet, Benedict was round-faced and mad about football and the youngest, at the age of five, was Orlando, hyperactive and given to climbing any solid-seeming object he encountered. For each boy the parents, after careful discussion of his temperament and abilities, had selected an individual educational path, so Tom and Benedict attended different prep schools in Oxford. Orlando ran riot with their blessing in the village school, saw a child psychologist weekly and was destined for a smart academy for under-achievers.

  They had two careers. Lovat was a director of Berrisford’s, and the effective leader of the firm. Shortly after he arrived at the dusty, cluttered offices off Jermyn Street, Sir John Crawford-Pitt, gasping with indignation at the size of his latest tax demand and ‘bloody socialists hellbent on bleeding this country to death’, summoned him and asked him to sell the entire contents of his gallery.

  ‘I’m not a rich man,’ the baronet had whined as he watched his paintings disappear into packing crates. ‘I’ve got nothing in the bank, live off an overdraft like everybody else. All I’ve got is what my father left me, and what his father left him. Now I’ve got to sell it all off and what for? So that I can afford to die and leave something to my son, while the government pays the bloody dustmen to go on strike.’

  It was Berrisford’s most important collection to date, and it established the firm immediately in the international arena. Lovat grasped at once that Sir John was only one minor representative of a whole section of British society whose wealth was being pillaged by the government, and who needed sympathetic, but not overly scrupulous, help in realizing their assets. He also proved to have an almost infallible instinct for fakes.

  ‘That husband of yours is a wizard,’ Hugh Berrisford told his daughter. ‘It’s not natural, the way he can smell out a dud in thirty seconds. We had an African bronze in today valued at fifty thousand and you know what the boy did? Took a paperclip off my desk and scratched it, classic trick to check the depth of the patina. He didn’t know that, he’d be the first to say he knows fuck-all about bronze from Africa or anywhere, but he just had an instinct and he was dead right.’

  Bianca received this judgement badly. It seemed to her that Lovat was manoeuvring himself into a position in which he had her whole family in his power.

  Within a year he had persuaded Hugh to add a tax adviser to their staff. Berrisford’s rapidly became known as champions of the beleaguered estate owners, the Scarlet Pimpernels who would rescue aristocrats from the penal tax regime. Five years later they also became what Lovat termed ‘poachers turned gamekeepers’, and were employed to advise the Inland Revenue on valuing works of art offered in settlement of taxes.

  Lovat, while spending half his time abroad and almost every evening at business meetings, refused to have it be said that he had in any way oppressed Bianca by denying her the opportunity for artistic self-fulfilment. Hugh and Olivia, equally, did not consider a full-time housewife an appropriate daughter for them. Among their acquaintance they selected the curator of the metalwork collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum as the right mentor. While she lived in London Bianca drove to his office in Kensington three mornings a week, to watch him run his nervous, tapering fingers over Saxon silver and art deco enamel as if to divine their provenance by dowsing. He had a stammer, and her main function
was to make his telephone calls for him. The work was interesting and pleasant, but not of her choosing.

  When Orlando arrived, and did not sleep for more than ten minutes at a stretch during his first two years, she had an ideal exit excuse. Calling for space, peace and clean air, she moved the family to the country and prepared to retreat into domesticity again. Then there was the studio, and the expectant faces asking, ‘Now what are you going to do with yourself?’

  Guiltily, she cast about for a new medium to disguise her limitations, and hit upon collage. Lovat brought people to see the work, and as if her own creations were plotting against her, it began to sell. She composed a series of pictures in cut paper, wire and papier mâché on the theme of mothers, rounded, grinning fertile figures with big breasts and bellies enclosing children in their curves. Being amusing, feminist and prettily coloured, they were very popular and a small gallery at the end of their street in London had offered her an exhibition as soon as she had enough work finished.

  All the things which they owned were intended to demonstrate their own personal excellence. They themselves were convinced by their possessions that they were whole and contented. When Lovat drove his Ferrari with its interior of tan leather and birch veneer through the gateway and the vista of his house, its ancient brick front smiling amiably down on the village from the knoll, he felt soothed as if by a mother’s touch and the internal void in his life was temporarily filled. When he picked out the spot where the helicopter pad would be built it evaporated all the doubts he felt about the corporate development strategy which he had manoeuvred his father-in-law and co-directors into accepting. When Bianca saw her boys run into school in their specifically preferred clothes, uniform for Tom, denim for Benedict and miniature American football jacket for Orlando, she had the full experience of being a good mother, a warm, powerful satisfaction which the actual acts of mothering did not bring her.