White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘You’re getting emotional. I didn’t say that.’ Now he was desperate to regain control of the encounter. ‘I admit, I don’t want us to have another child, but I respect how you feel. And I care about you, Bianca, you must know I do. I know you’re not happy …’

  She stood up and brushed the dirt off her jeans with angry slaps. ‘I’m pregnant, that’s all. It’s normal to be emotional when you’re pregnant.’

  He glared at her. Arguments based on female biology were invincible, since she could claim superior knowledge. ‘As you wish,’ he muttered, retreating backwards towards the work table. Turning, he took in the smashed picture and the scattered tools. ‘What happened here?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What are these bits of picture everywhere?’

  ‘Don’t bully me, Lovat. You’re always bullying me.’

  ‘I was only asking what happened. Here’s a picture been smashed to pieces – anyone would be curious.’

  ‘It’s none of your business what happened.’ Decisively she made for the door, controlling her shaking voice. ‘And I’d be grateful if you stopped looking around for any more evidence that I’m crazy. Your dinner is cooking in the kitchen. Your children are playing in the garden. Your rugs are straight, your furniture is polished, and your wife will be dressed and smiling by the time your guests get here, so there’s nothing for you to worry about, is there?’

  She marched out of the studio and across the yard to the house, leaving Lovat to sit on the edge of the table and reflect. He did not like things to go wrong, especially when there seemed to be no obvious way of setting them right.

  Their bedroom and its adjacent suites occupied almost all the second floor of the house, with separate bathrooms and dressing rooms contrived so that Mr and Mrs Whitburn could prepare to entertain without being obliged to speak to each other. An hour later Bianca was standing on the west terrace in a cream linen dress by some new Japanese design genius, feeling the evening breeze lift her freshly washed hair.

  The car bringing Kusminsky was the first to arrive. A young man with dark curly hair got out to help his companion. Bianca took in the black glacé kid trousers and the gold bracelet, cursed under her breath and dived back into the house to call the kitchen on the internal telephone.

  ‘Mrs Harris, lay an extra place and send someone up to make the bamboo room ready for two not one. Someone’s brought his boyfriend down.’

  She was outside again, smiling and serene in a few seconds, in time to see the stooped figure in a camel coat emerge from the car.

  ‘You must be Kolya Kusminsky, how good of you to come. Of course I remember you from many years back. We’ve always heard so much about you.’

  ‘But how good it is to be here, Madame Berrisford. How kind you are to invite me. So beautiful!’ He straightened his back with difficulty, leaning over his silver-topped stick, and looked up at the rich brick walls glowing in the evening light, early roses tumbling from the trellises, swallows darting out from beneath the eaves. He had the padded face of a man who liked to live well, his small mouth overhung by once-cherubic cheeks. ‘And where is she, my Nounou?’

  ‘Here I am, here I am.’ Charlotte came running from the house, covering the distance rapidly in short stiff strides, her blue silk trousers flapping. ‘Comme tu es bienvenu, mon petit.’ They embraced, laughing, for although she called him her little one he towered over her, and now that he was nearly seventy and ill, and she, although her face was riven with lines, was fit and in her eighties, they appeared to be the same age. ‘You have lost weight, are you eating, my dear? You were such a big man …’

  ‘Too big, the doctor says.’ He patted the slack front of his shirt with a rueful hand. ‘But I am well looked after, Nounou. Not as well as when I was with you, of course, but as well as an old man could be. Now, you remember Etienne Sokolov.’ The young man stepped forward and shook hands with both women. Bianca caught his bright, bird-like eye, which seemed to acknowledge that his position was equivocal, and that people might think ill of him for befriending a much richer, much older man, but that in himself his conscience was clear.

  ‘Come inside, my dear, come and sit with me and we can gossip in Russian before everyone else arrives.’ Charlotte took his free arm and Etienne supported the old man on the other side as he proceeded over the uneven stones towards the french windows.

  ‘Heart is not too bad, they tell me, but arteries are terrible. Especially in legs. Cigarettes!’ As if to illustrate the point, he paused and coughed violently. His voice was heavily accented and each sentence closed with a wheeze like an old harmonium. ‘They told me to give up smoking, but I would rather die happy man with cigarette in my hand than miserable one with no pleasures left.’

  ‘Nonsense! Don’t talk about dying, not to me anyway …’

  At dinner he was quickly installed as the star of the table. As soon as they sat down he spread his napkin over his knees, smoothed it out without speaking for a few moments, then looked up and fixed Lovat in his watery, old man’s stare.

  ‘Now, young Monsieur, grandson-in-law to my Nounou, what would you say if I told you I had heard where is one of lost Fabergé eggs?’

  ‘I’d say I’d like to see it,’ Lovat replied with simple directness, forking a slice of fish into his mouth. His habit was to eat very fast, as if begrudging the time wasted. ‘I’ve some folk coming from America next week who might be interested if it’s genuine. Which one is it supposed to be?’

  ‘The Rosebud. It would be good one to find. Authenticated Imperial design, made 1895, actually Tsar’s wedding gift to his wife. There is photograph, in Wartski archives, published 1952. It’s quite in modern taste too, very beautiful, not too decorated, gold laurel wreaths, diamond arrows, ribbons … but I haven’t seen it myself yet. Armenian friend in Paris says he knows someone who has it.’ Content to have stimulated interest, he turned to his plate and prodded the gravadlax with his fork.

  ‘What’s your instinct about it?’ Lovat’s plate was now empty and the beam of his attention was fully trained on the old man.

  ‘Good, I think. I’ve dealt with Vartanian many years, he doesn’t waste time. Yes, good, good instinct.’

  ‘He knows how to tease, doesn’t he?’ At the far end of the table, Bianca whispered to her grandmother and was heard with a sudden bright smile.

  ‘What does it mean, a lost Fabergé egg?’ The wife of the heir to the Braques was a round-eyed blonde rumoured to have been a stripper and a Scientologist before her marriage.

  ‘Decorated Easter eggs were a Russian custom. Ordinary people painted ordinary eggs, but the rich had them made in gold and jewels. Fabergé was the court jeweller in St Petersburg before the Revolution; the eggs he made for the Tsar … I suppose they’re the most precious single objects in the world,’ Lovat replied, taking excessive care not to sound patronizing. He misjudged his tone; the woman was accustomed to condescending flirtation from all men and was mildly insulted by what she saw as lack of interest from the youngest heterosexual male at the table.

  ‘But if they’re so precious how can they be lost?’ She directed this inquiry towards Hugh, whose reserve had been visibly thawed by their conversation earlier.

  ‘An immense number of objects went missing at the time of the Revolution.’ Hugh, much taken with his companion, was delighted to have the opportunity to expound. ‘Luckily with jewellery and with the eggs the people who made them kept excellent records, with drawings even, so we know what was made. Many treasures were simply destroyed by people too ignorant to know what they were doing.’

  ‘Or they hated the aristocratic class and wanted just to smash everything to do with our way of life. Very sad. Perversion of human instincts.’ The fish, tender as it was, seemed too resistant for Kusminsky to cut it. Etienne, at his side, took the plate and used his own knife in a few unobtrusive movements.

  Olivia’s gold earrings tinkled as she flexed her long neck like a heron and prepared to pull the conversation back on
course. She never classed herself with her daughters, as a woman whose allocated role was fretting about domestic operations. Instead, when she chose, she allied herself with the men in steering the conversation into profitable channels. ‘But Kolya, the jewellery – small, easily carried … wasn’t a lot of it simply looted?’

  ‘Undoubtedly it was,’ her husband continued. They were a well-trained team. ‘And not only by the workers during the Revolution. In the Twenties the Russian government was desperate for cash, and they just emptied all the bank vaults and sent boxes of stuff out to be auctioned.’

  Kusminsky nodded in agreement, the candlelight shining on his high, bare forehead. His hair had thinned to a border of white around his head. ‘I went myself as young man to sales all over Germany. Priceless, marvellous things just heaped into fish boxes, with sailors or soldiers guarding. When you collected what you had bought they would give you receipt and you saw they could hardly write. And they started gold at good prices because they recognized it, but jewellery they had no idea about – “small items set with coloured stones”, catalogue paper might say, and they meant diamonds and emeralds!’

  Now the room was hanging on his words, so the old man paused to finish eating and let the plates be cleared. The conversation broke up around the table while the venison was brought in and served. Bianca confirmed automatically that it was cooked, glazed and decorated to perfection and watched the diners prepare to consume it. They seemed very small, like actors on a distant stage, and their voices, talking three languages, were muffled.

  Her mother, she noticed, was unusually animated. Olivia always looked the same to her, impossibly polished, with a predatory alertness in all her movements. Her beauty was maintained with the benefit of plastic surgery, which everyone suspected but she denied, visiting a clinic in France and calling it a holiday. Bianca felt that she did not age, but a more distant observer would have noted a little blurring of her contours, deeper lines around her eyes and a certain squaring of her lean hips. She seemed to have fewer lovers now, or to be more discreet with them. Her social strategies were still designed to elicit men’s admiration, if not the men themselves, but tonight she was playing the part of a good guest, doing a fine job of drawing out Etienne. The young man had been sitting with a half smile fixed on his face throughout the meal, attentive to Kusminsky but saying little apart from a few soft words in Russian exchanged with the old man.

  Olivia’s girlish squeak, a wholly uncharacteristic exclamation, suddenly pierced the murmuring conversations. Bianca noticed her mother’s blue eyes dart fiercely towards Lovat, demanding his attention. ‘Kolya’s never told Etienne the story of how he and Charlotte left St Petersburg! You know his mother was a great ballerina, I’m sure, yes. It’s a wonderful tale, and quite apropos, Kolya, please, tell us again, do!’

  It was clear that the old man was reluctant to retrieve this memory, but he had been trapped. Etienne’s gentle smile was expectant. ‘Well, I was boy seven years old,’ he began, drawing in a long, rattling breath. ‘And this lady and I were in Petersburg and as you know she was my governess. And it was 1917 – was it?’

  ‘Yes, the spring, 1917.’ Charlotte’s oval eyes were wide with fond nostalgia. ‘And it was Petrograd by then, they renamed it because they hated the Germans once the war began. And fighting was still going on in Europe and your mother had fallen ill in the South of France.’

  ‘Kolya’s father was a prince,’ Olivia informed the company, a piece of vital information which she knew the old man himself could not contribute without seeming boastful. ‘And high up in the government, so he knew what was going to happen.’

  ‘He was a clever man, you know. He had foresight. Most of them had no idea.’

  ‘Revolution had begun,’ Kusminsky continued, looking down at the table top because it was too painful to talk directly to another person. ‘I was little boy, to me it was all games. Soldiers, shooting, lorries going up and down our street filled with men who waved red flags. But my father said it would be safer for us to go to London, and then to Monte Carlo where my mother was.’

  ‘He knew the Tsar was going to abdicate, you see,’ Charlotte added. ‘I remember him calling me into the sitting room and standing with one hand up on the stove and saying, “The Kaiser or the Reds, what a choice we have. God knows what will happen, Charlotte, but everything precious must be sent to a place of safety at once.” Oh, how we had to run around, his valet and I, taking silver to the bank and his old coins to the Friendly Society.’

  ‘This is really wild,’ the Braque heiress whispered to Hugh, who inclined his ear gravely. ‘These two are real living bits of history, aren’t they?’

  ‘But he didn’t send everything away, did he?’ Olivia clearly had an end in mind for the tale and would not rest until she had extracted it.

  ‘What I always will remember,’ Kusminsky obediently began, and then paused, coughing into his napkin. Etienne refilled his water glass and when the spasm had passed placed it in his hand, tenderly closing his slender fingers over the old man’s gnarled knuckles. ‘What I always remember was him coming up to the nursery with my mother’s jewellery – the things she had you could not imagine, a mountain of diamonds, a king’s ransom, our little room was like Aladdin’s Cave – and piling it all on the table where I was eating my supper, and the women sewing it into my clothes.’

  ‘What a romantic thing …’ Now the young woman was totally entranced.

  ‘It wasn’t in the least romantic,’ snapped Charlotte. ‘It took us all night and our fingers were absolutely blistered by the time we’d finished.’

  ‘And I was furious because she had to cut open my teddy bear – well, I had a lion actually – but she cut open his stomach to put big diamond necklace in it. Oh, I was so angry!’

  There was general laughter. Bianca raised a weak smile, noticing her mother lean back to exchange a private word with Lovat.

  ‘And do you know, to finish story, after wounding my lion who I loved so much, they still could not get necklace into him without it being easy to discover, so they decided to leave it behind. And you’ – he pointed to Charlotte with his fork – ‘you said that they would be sure to find safe, and that it was best to hide all the valuable things somewhere else. So down in kitchen my father himself, who never picked up hammer in his life before, made hole in wall, hid everything and put all bricks back like before. And then, when we arrived in Monte Carlo, months later after travelling in terrible danger, my mother was absolutely in rage because we did not have her necklace.’

  ‘You were just a little boy!’ Sympathy shone from every ounce of Hermione’s body. She leaned forward, accidentally trailing her red silk sleeve across her plate, and touched the old man’s arm. ‘What a terrible trauma for you.’

  ‘My dear, there had been war, revolution, traumas for everyone, far worse than your mother being in bad temper.’ Nevertheless, he patted her hand kindly, feeling overcome by the force of the emotions stirred up by his memories.

  ‘I don’t know why my children should think that an angry mother is worse than war and revolution.’ With a complacent toss of her head, which set her earrings tinkling again, Olivia reclaimed the company’s attention. There was one final point which she wished the story to cover. ‘Go on, Kolya, tell them what happened to the things.’

  ‘Well, back in Russia the Bolsheviks shot my father and confiscated everything belonging to all the aristocracy and so we had nothing. First my mother mortgage our villa, then she sell jewellery, first one piece, then the next … very hard, very sad for my mother, she can’t bear it. All memories of my father and her career and her wonderful life as young woman all disappearing. So I used to go to dealer for her, and in time our friends gave me their things to sell also, because they trusted me, I was one of them, a Russian too. So then I become dealer. I bought shop in Paris, I began proper business and so … well, that’s my life.’

  His voice faded away. Charlotte had fallen silent, all the vitality drained
from her face. A pall of melancholy descended on Bianca, weighting her shoulders with guilt for having always seen her grandmother as an old woman with her own kind of hard tranquillity, and not as a tender girl compelled to love and then give up another woman’s child. She felt that there had been something unseemly about the whole reminiscence, coldly drawn out by Olivia for the sake of glamorizing the Berrisford name, and probably endured by Kusminsky for the sake of getting Lovat hot for the Fabergé egg.

  After dinner the company adjourned to the toile de Jouy music room for coffee. Etienne helped Kusminsky upstairs to bed almost at once, pleading that the old man was exhausted but, to Bianca’s eyes, protecting him from the crass curiosity of strangers.

  As she turned after bidding them goodnight she saw from the corner of her eye her mother leading Lovat outside. Olivia had taken hold of his arm, her hand under his elbow, and was again speaking confidentially, her mouth close to his ear. The picture was one she had seen many times before, whenever her mother had been cutting out a man she wanted from the herd. Perhaps now she wanted Lovat.

  Once the thought had entered Bianca’s mind it took hold like a brush fire. Her memories swiftly arranged themselves to prove that her mother and her husband were lovers and perhaps had been for years. She felt pain, and panic, and wanted desperately to find somewhere to run away to where these terrible feelings could not follow her.

  A tiny voice told her that she was being absurd, that the suggestion had only been born of her weak and distressed condition. Needing to hear a rational opinion before flames consumed her sanity, she looked wildly around the room for Hermione but her sister was nowhere to be seen. Charlotte also had gone to bed. Her father was standing in front of the low fire, talking to the two remaining men. Stella Bainbridge sat on one of the small sofas asking the banker’s wife where she bought her clothes with a creditable show of lively interest. Breaking into either conversation would seem odd, and the longer she stood there in the doorway the greater the risk that this too would appear bizarre.