White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  She paused and pushed the folio across the writing table to Alexandrov, who nodded as he read it. ‘It’s not too much, is it?’ she asked him, her face very pale. It was nine in the morning and she had returned only a few hours earlier from a mad trip with Prince Orlov to dine in Viborg, more than eighty miles distant. With a large, noisy party they had travelled two-by-two in open sleighs, pelting through the icy night in a cocoon of furs and sipping vodka to keep warm.

  Orlov had courted her for more than a year, and in the last few months had issued an invitation to dine almost every week, always with an air of disinterest and always, as propriety demanded, proposing a party with others. The summer months, when half the ballet company decamped to the neighbourhood of the Tsar’s summer palace, had been a period of enchantment for her. The Prince had been a frequent spectator at rehearsals, and in the relaxed atmosphere of the season their relationship had bloomed.

  There had been many gifts, at first impersonal tokens like her pen, progressing to oblique tributes to her femininity, jade scent bottles and a boudoir clock of white enamel decorated with bows and rosebuds of rubies. In due time she was able to accept jewellery, diamond earrings in the shape of vine leaves, on her birthday a beautiful brooch set with cloudy Siberian emeralds and diamonds, and lately an emerald pendant to match it.

  That night the hectic excitement of the long fast sleigh ride, the drink, the hours alone except for the coachman’s impervious back had all at once destroyed Orlov’s characteristic detachment. The man had forgotten himself. The impression of his fierce grasp burned around her waist like a brand. Involuntarily, she swallowed again and again; she could still feel his mouth on her lips.

  When she had repulsed him he had at first been angry, then withdrawn. At last, as they were reaching the outskirts of the city, he made the proposition. ‘You must be mine,’ he began abruptly and Lydia, still in distress, had simply begged him to be silent and say nothing more. In consternation she had sent a message to Alexandrov immediately and was reassured when, far from expressing dismay at her stupidity, he had rubbed his hands and suggested that a well-worded letter might secure the ideal outcome of the affair.

  ‘It’s absolute perfection,’ he assured her, waving the page to dry the ink. ‘All this passion and pathos is just the ticket. He knows the score, they all know the score. We just want him to get a good sense of what he’ll be missing if he doesn’t come across. Stick a good long languishing farewell on the end and we’ll have it delivered immediately.’

  ‘I do truly adore him, you know. I really believe we’re meant to be together, I know it, I’ve always known it,’ she repeated with vehemence, as if to bring about the desired conclusion to her love affair purely by the power of her speech.

  ‘I think this will get us what we’re after, in fact I’d put money on it.’ He winked at her as she handed him the signed letter.

  ‘That’s no consolation – you’d put money on anything.’ Nowadays the commissions which Mischa collected from his friends for effecting introductions in the ballet company stayed in his pocket a short time since he had become devoted to the game of roulette.

  ‘Only if it’s red or black, dear, don’t be so hard on your old friend. And when you’re established in your dear little house with your jewels and your motor car and your entourage just remember who held your hand while the stakes were raised, eh?’

  ‘I have done the right thing, haven’t I?’

  To her surprise Mischa flung his arms around her shoulders and hugged her to his beautifully tailored chest. ‘Your old uncle Mischa’s guided many a shy virgin along the perilous paths of love and nobody ever tripped along as nimbly as you, and that’s the truth. You’re a credit to me, if you want to know. I do believe you love the man, and heaven knows why but that’s not my concern. You’ve kept your head and never given way to any sentimental romantic rubbish or let hot blood get in the way of good business. You really are a star, Lydia. Now go and lie down, have some verbena tea and decide what colour you want your chauffeur’s uniform.’

  ‘I can’t, I’m dancing tonight and I’m late for class already.’

  ‘But you haven’t slept a wink!’

  ‘I know. I can sleep later but I can’t get stiff today.’

  ‘The dedication! What’s the ballet?’

  ‘Don Quixote. I’m the lead, it’s my first night!’

  ‘Oh my God! And Orlov is bound to be there, isn’t he? Do you want me to see if I can get you something?’ Among Mischa’s vast acquaintance were a few pharmacists with much experience in formulating tinctures to make good deficiencies in a dancer’s willpower, mixtures to numb pain, suppress the appetite or supply extra vitality.

  ‘Oh, darling Mischa, would you? I really think I need it today.’ Lydia hardly hesitated.

  A clean, intelligent boy, a grandson of Alexandrov’s housekeeper, presented the letter to the doorman at the Orlov Palace and when the Prince rose in the early afternoon the missive was brought to him in his study. His taste was for the classical; bas-relief columns of red Kushkuldine jasper lined the plain buff walls. The moulded frieze of entwined military symbols was picked out in white and gold. In his early twenties he had obsessively collected Greek and Roman antiquities and his choicest purchases were kept where they would be always under his eyes. Vases crowded the mantelpiece, small statues adorned the low bookcases and four busts of Greek philosophers stood on marble plinths in the alcoves. The very first acquisitions, a set of medals inherited from his grandfather, were displayed in a special case like a circular table. The most treasured possession, an eager bronze Hermes hardly six inches high, stood poised for flight on his plain mahogany desk.

  Alexandrov had slandered him when he judged the Prince uninterested in beauty. It was the only quality capable of moving his heart and he was acutely aware of it in art or nature. However, his temperament was profoundly cerebral. Emotion, sensuality, even comfort appeared to him as corrupting distractions and when his senses were aroused he was quick to rationalize his feelings.

  His responses to La Kusminskaya, as Lydia was quickly becoming known, yielded incompletely to this process. He had disdained the ballet as an entertainment for the undemanding intellect, and despised those of his colleagues who were pallidly embowered by ballerinas and actresses. He told himself that curiosity – and social diplomacy – had led him to accept an invitation to the box of the senior Ragosin a few weeks after encountering the dancer at supper.

  She appeared in a short ballet before the main offering of the evening, a piece called Le Jardin Animé, which by chance mirrored one of his own adolescent fantasies. An unhappy poet moped in a sculpture garden by moonlight and the stone nymphs, moved by his grief, came alive and stepped down one by one to console him. The music was not the usual tinselly trash, but a suite in quasi-baroque style. Out loud he criticized the historical inaccuracy of the costumes, which for reasons of tradition and propriety had all parties absurdly overdressed, but his eye was imprinted with all the lines of Kusminskaya’s body and his intellect toyed with the notion of a dancer as a living work of art.

  At her curtain call, when bouquets suddenly filled the stage and a palpable wave of adulation roared down from the gallery, he was touched in another sensitive place. Orlov, for all his generations of high breeding, was most susceptible to public acclaim; although he scorned to court the attention of common people, or even acknowledge the gratification it inspired in him, recognition as trivial as the naming of his coat of arms on his carriage door by a passer-by could inflate his vanity.

  He was on leave for a few months pending his appointment to a post in the Ministry of Defence. Being learned in theoretical strategy but inept as a commander of men this was a predictable development in his career and one to which he looked forward. Since the approaching winter made travel difficult, he had planned to beguile his leisure reading some of his favourite Latin texts. He took Cicero and Caesar down from the shelves of his library, but with them Ovid’s Ars Amatoria,
and all at once poetry seemed far more challenging to his intellect than prose.

  Step by step his own excellent mind led him along the path to erotic fascination. He told himself that good relations with as many generals as possible would be of importance in his new role, and General Ragosin, to whom the pleasure of forty saucy pairs of knees flashing to and fro under short skirts was an essential highlight of every week, was eager to secure the favour of a fledgling statesman for whom much was predicted.

  Following the success of Les Pléiades, the talents of both Kusminskaya and Leo Volinsky were acknowledged by the ballet’s management. Kchessinskaya’s attention was distracted, first by the task of building herself a sumptuous new townhouse, then by the virtual rebuilding of her summer residence, and finally by a season in Paris organized by Sergei Diaghilev, which she claimed as her own personal triumph despite the reports that Vaslav Nijinsky and Tata Karsavina had enjoyed greater success. Whatever the truth, all these affairs diverted her influence at home in the ballet and Lydia at last began to receive opportunities to display her gifts.

  Among these were new works by Mikhail Fokine and by Leo, and both were eager to challenge the old order and advance their art. Lydia appeared adorable in white lace as Columbine; with much initial protest, she wore unblocked shoes and gauzy draperies as the Persian sibyl, and was surprised to find that she was considered to have a gift for suggesting pagan eroticism. The tempi of Schumann and Rimsky-Korsakov were as easy to disregard as those of lesser composers. From Ragosin’s box, Orlov responded to the aestheticism of both choreographers. He found around him new friends, some of them undoubtedly men and women of deep culture, happy to explain or to argue the merits of the modern styles.

  It had always seemed to him indicative of the self-indulgent, emotional response which ballet evoked that the lovers of the art called themselves balletomanes, implying that their appreciation was a mania, a kind of madness which possessed them. Now he found something profoundly romantic in the appellation, and sought the company of balletomanes the better to learn the styles of his new devotion. An artistic revolution was under way, and he seemed to have appeared in its centre. His German countess, for all her exquisite taste in jewellery, found his new enthusiasm tedious; the best that Poiret and Paquin did for her could not hide the fact that her legs were disproportionately short. Orlov saw an increasing resemblance between his lover and her pet dachshund.

  Lydia Kusminskaya, to his eyes, appeared a living goddess. Her legs were beyond perfection. The elongated diamond-shaped swell of her calves was extraordinary. The neat articulation of her knees, the filigree delicacy of her ankles, and lissom extension of her thighs all fascinated him. He adored her white arms, her long neck, the dove-like thrust of her ribs. At rest she was beautiful; in movement she was divine. The unique quality of her grace sang to him like a siren, promising ecstasy beyond mortal comprehension. By the time he resolved to court her he was sinking in a quicksand of sexual obsession, into which he had been lured by his own intellectual arrogance.

  He turned Lydia’s letter over several times with his fingertips, feeling that he hardly needed to open it. Deep in his mind he had already made his decision. The question was not whether he would pay to possess this treasure, but how much she would ask, and from another compartment in his ordered mind, which knew and judged Alexandrov, he had already estimated the price. Money hardly concerned him – the house of Orlov was accustomed to epic expenditure; mortgages on their land from the Imperial exchequer subsidized it now, for the Tsars had felt it only fair to protect their extended family of nobility from the consequences of transforming millions of serfs into landowning peasants.

  The cost to his self-respect of installing a ballet dancer as his mistress weighed more heavily, but as a man accustomed to the satisfaction of all his needs it was now a necessity which he accepted. He was ready to join the ranks of noblemen who allied themselves with glamorous women of the artistic demi-monde, although he did not see himself going as far as the Grand Duke Gabriel, who shared a roof with the ballerina Nina Nesterova, keeping open house for half the Court with rare wines and finest foods and games of poker which lasted until dawn.

  Gabriel was a fool, as weak-minded as his brother Igor who cared only for horses and should have been born a groom. Orlov saw himself as a serious man, despised all hedonists and remained suspicious of pleasure. Eventually, he recognized, he would do his duty and marry, and until then what he needed was oblivion rather than enjoyment. The German countess had an earthy sexual appetite which it pleased him to feed, but he never had the sense of losing himself in her arms. The awareness of his own imperfection oppressed him; at times the hopelessness of the whole human condition made him feel that life was not worth living. He craved relief from these truths, and as a younger man had tried to reach it through sport, drink and opium, but he could not accept the way of life which each dictated.

  With a woman he could find peace. Whores and low women provoked disgust, but a woman with something of the exotic always excited him. For some years he had been in the habit of visiting a gypsy cabaret on the outskirts of the city with his brother officers. There he released his stifled desires with one or more of the singers, sinewy creatures with obsidian eyes who stank of sweat and cigarette smoke, spoke in curses and worked with a keen sense of value for money. Lydia, when he gave her a present, snatched it like a child beggar, her eyes flashing wide as if amazed at his gullibility, arousing a similar feeling.

  He broke the seal on her letter, noticing with annoyance that the cheap wax crumbled into his coffee. He rapidly scanned the text, then rang for his valet to fetch a clean cup, finished his breakfast and moved to his writing desk to compose a reply which protested his eternal adoration, sympathized with her position, pledged his care for her welfare and proposed that they should meet, perhaps with his steward and her guardian, to agree arrangements which would satisfy them all.

  Little of the afternoon then remained; within a few hours he dressed for the evening and took the route which had become so familiar to the Maryinsky Theatre and settled into his usual armchair in the corner of General Ragosin’s box, separated from the wide Imperial box only by a gilded barleytwist column.

  As a ballet, Don Quixote is not much occupied with the old man crazed by dreams of chivalry of Cervantes’stories; its focus is the dream of Spain which crazes every milk-and-water northerner, a black and red tapestry of the hot blood, high passion, fierce women and proud men. At the centre of this flamenco-spiced romance is the fiery young heroine, a role for which even Lydia’s harshest critics admitted she might have been expressly created. Orlov found himself leaping to his feet to applaud again and again, amid a packed auditorium moved to the same pitch of ecstasy, and after the final pas de deux a rare event occurred. With her partner she repeated the coda as an encore. Whistling and stamping, the audience demanded another, and after modest protestations which allowed them to catch their breath, the young pair performed again.

  Then the benevolent uproar in the theatre, instead of dying down, redoubled, and a third repetition was demanded with loud chants of ‘Bis! bis!’ from every level of the great blue and gold auditorium.

  ‘If we’re going again for God’s sake let’s get on with it,’ Leo, her partner, whispered in her ear under cover of a tender gesture collecting her for another presentation to her public. ‘My legs are getting cold and I’ve ripped a hamstring, I know it.’

  Never solicitous of her colleagues, Lydia barely heard him and continued her sequence of curtsies. ‘You need permission for a third encore – go on, ask now!’ he hissed as she turned towards the Imperial box, and at last recalled that as she had waited offstage that evening Nicolai Legat had given her a kiss for good luck and muttered, in the manner of a kind man anxious not to prepare her only for disappointment, ‘If they do want three encores, little girl, don’t forget the permission.’

  She rose from her curtsey with knees that momentarily lost their strength. Since his son had
fallen ill the Tsar nowadays spent more and more time at his palace in the country, and the box was occupied that night by his mother, the Empress Maria Fyodorovna. Her beauty always carried the grave tint of a woman who had been widowed unfairly young, but tonight she seemed as full of delight as the rest of the house. Hardly knowing what she was doing, Lydia demonstrated their ardour to her with a quick, expressive gesture and dropped another curtsey of supplication, immediately followed by a third of acknowledgement as the Empress gave an animated nod. Orlov, standing not six feet away, tried in vain to catch Lydia’s eye as she rose.

  When Don Quixote was at last finished an avalanche of people flowed into the square outside, but had no intention of dispersing. Orlov accompanied General Ragosin, who intended to pay court to his particular fancy through the window of her dressing room, which conveniently overlooked the private entrance used by the Imperial Family. They were soon surrounded by the most ardent balletomanes, who remained close to the theatre and jostled their way to the stage door. The gallery regulars, nicknamed ‘the chickencoop’, were calling Kusminskaya’s name; they were all young men. Orlov picked out the uniforms of all St Petersburg’s most distinguished scholastic establishment, and smiled with tolerant amusement at the high school students in their best grey overcoats twirling newly-sprouted moustaches. Looking down on them, the undergraduates in their elegant new cloaks struck poetic attitudes under the street lamps.