White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  The thought of pregnancy was so far from her mind that Lydia sat for a full minute in silence with her mouth open.

  ‘You want?’ The old woman reached for the large bag of cracked black leather in which she carried her wares. ‘You want child or you don’t want?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said distractedly. ‘I hadn’t thought … didn’t you give me something to stop it?’

  ‘Yes, but …’ A revolting expression crossed the sunken light blue eyes. ‘It don’t work on honeymoon – you make too much romantic, eh?’

  ‘Oh go away! I’ll send for you if I want you again.’ Lydia walked abruptly out of the sitting room into her winter garden, where a huge pot of jasmine, having been deceived as to the season by the gardener, was flowering vigorously and scenting the warm air. Orlov was reading his newspaper and thinking about leaving for the Ministry. She decided to consult a doctor at once – one way or another the old witch had to be wrong.

  The doctor confirmed her pregnancy immediately. ‘A Christmas child, if I’m not mistaken,’ he told her. ‘Don’t worry, my dear, I wish all my patients were as healthy as you. You are young and strong, just take care to get enough rest now and you will recover completely by Easter, I promise you.’

  ‘But my …’ She paused, realizing that she was unable to use the word ‘husband’, and suddenly wanted to weep.

  ‘His Highness will be delighted, I’m sure. Gentlemen usually are – and this will be his first child, I believe. In my experience the loss of a few months of comfort is more than compensated by the pride a man feels in his children once they are born.’

  She doubted him, knowing how much her lover valued her for her beauty, but it seemed that the doctor was correct. Orlov professed himself delighted, and willingly indulged Lydia in acquiring every fashionable accessory for their offspring. A room was chosen for a nursery, redecorated and filled with toys which, if absurdly inappropriate for a baby, delighted the deprived child in Lydia herself, who sat on the rocking horse every day until she grew too awkward to balance. A nursemaid was hired, and since every good household in St Petersburg had either a French or English governess, Lydia put in hand the engagement of a girl from London with the help of the wife of a young diplomat at the British Embassy.

  The birth, the day after Christmas, was short but so terrible that Lydia vowed at once, from the very bottom of her heart, never to undergo such agony again. When Orlov was called and presented with his child he seemed hardly to see it, and instead went directly to the bedside to touch her face. She lay dreadfully still, her complexion lustreless, her eyes sunken and dull. She made a small, defeated motion with one hand, attempted a smile but dissolved into tears.

  ‘What have they done to you, my poor child? What have I done to you?’ He embraced her awkwardly, frightened by the limpness of her body.

  ‘She may be too weak to reply just yet.’ The doctor touched him on the shoulder. ‘Nature is remarkable, Your Highness, she never takes without giving. Madame will be restored to health very soon, I can assure you. And you have a fine healthy son, a big boy although he gave his mother very little trouble for his size.’

  ‘When will she be able to dance again?’

  ‘She may begin light exercise in a month, and then continue by degrees. But she must take care not to over-exert herself.’ The midwife, seeing that the baby had attracted little interest, prepared to bear him away to the nursery but Orlov seemed to remember suddenly that he had a child.

  ‘Let me see him,’ he demanded. The red-faced, chubby infant, his eyes almost lost in plump creases, blinked at his father. ‘What a beautiful child, quite beautiful! What a wonderful colour! And he has black hair like my mother.’ The conspirators around the bed exchanged glances. ‘Oh yes, we shall certainly take care of them both, Doctor, you can be sure of that.’ Behind this show of concern, however, he felt bewildered by this new acquisition. The infant had a disconcertingly specific presence; Nikolai Nikolaivitch Kusminsky, as he was to be christened six weeks later, was one of those babies whose whole manner evokes their inborn character in the cradle. Orlov sensed that he had acquired a person whom he had not chosen, and he had a definite instinct that this person was completely outside his control. The baby’s arrival had already banished the gleaming enchantress he had installed as his mistress and substituted a wretched shadow. His first meeting with his son alarmed him profoundly.

  10. Leningrad, 1968

  ‘It’s Anya’s birthday, it’s Anya’s birthday.’ Alex lounged at the barre, singing under his breath to the tinkling of the practice-room piano. ‘Let’s have a party, let’s have a party. I’ll get some vodka, and some sausage, and in my suitcase, I’ll find a present. Happy birthday Anya, I love my little Anya, she’s so be-yoooo-ti-ful!’

  ‘Ssssh! Everyone will hear you.’ She blushed and turned to the wall to hide it, worrying a corner of the peeling cream wallpaper with her toe. The first group of students finished their exercise and cleared the floor. The boards were bare and bleached to an exhausted grey, their surface pulverized almost to splinters by the countless students who had worn out their shoes there.

  Anya blew upwards at the fringe of her curly blonde hair, hoping to stop it sticking to her perspiring forehead, and stepped out into the centre of the room. He could see that she was pleased by the swing of her hips. With her round face and curled upper lip, Alex thought she looked adorable.

  ‘You look like a goldfish blowing bubbles when you blow your hair like that.’

  ‘How sweet. I suppose when you drop me you’ll say it’s my fault for being wet and slippery.’

  ‘I thought maybe we could get around to that later.’

  ‘How dare you make pornographic suggestions to me in pas de deux class?’

  ‘I’m so sorry, when would you prefer me to make pornographic suggestions to you?’

  ‘Quiet!’ Their teacher, who was normally noted for his reserved dignity, glared at them from beneath his heavy black brows. ‘Now remember, children, pas de deux is always the expression of love and harmony. Your movements must twine together, develop together.’ He wrapped his hands around themselves to illustrate. ‘Balance, timing, all movement of you both should be as one.’ He always felt foolish explaining this when he had a pair of real lovers in the class; Kirilova and the American boy, the picture of coltish romance as they whispered together in English, made him feel ashamed to be teaching. Even allowing for the effect of young love, Wolfe had a gift for projecting tenderness. Exasperating that he was so lazy – a good-looking boy like that, with his noble manner and sensitive temperament could have a good future. The teacher clapped his hands loudly. ‘So, now, begin – after four. And one!’

  The five girls rose on points, steadied by their partners’hands at their waists. From the portrait wall at the end of the classroom the face of Agrippina Vaganova, the school’s first director after the Revolution, looked down on the couples dancing in the centre of the floor. Elsewhere her pictures revealed that she had been cursed with a long bulbous nose, receding forehead and thin hair, with only a bright smile to save her from downright ugliness, but for this portrait the artist had prettified her features so unsubtly that the students joked his real vocation had been painting official corpses for their lying-in-state.

  Anya trusted herself to Alex’s firm grasp, blessing God for having sent him. She was not a popular partner now, being one of those girls whose hormones had outwitted the centuries of expertise with which the examiners of the Vaganova Academy selected their children. For eight years she had been as light, slender and clean-limbed as the others and now, in her final year, a disaster was happening. Every day she grew more voluptuous. Rounded hips and breasts spoiled her line, her thighs were almost ham-shaped. Her bones themselves seemed to have become thicker and heavier. The boys struggled to lift her. By the unsparing aesthetics of the ballet school she had become ugly, so her status had plummeted and her ambitions been denied. She had to forget the legendary Kirov company; at this
rate she would be lucky to get a place in a folk dance group.

  None of this seemed to concern the American boy. Here he was, crazily in love with her, bringing her clothes, make-up, contraceptives and medicines every time he went to his family in Paris. The fuller her breasts grew, the more he smothered them with affection. He was strong enough to toss her around like a football if he chose, but miraculously gentle, unlike the Russian boys who considered a few slaps an essential part of courtship. Inside and outside the classroom, Anya luxuriated in his chivalry. Fascinated, the other girls claimed that he could not be very masculine but even the most intimate secrets could not be kept long in the school and those whose curiosity kept them awake long enough confirmed her assertion that the American could stay in the saddle for a couple of hours on a regular basis.

  Pas de deux was Alex’s best class; in the rest of the work, he had his problems. Undeniably the boy was a prodigy, born with immense integrated strength, but he too had grown unpredictably, first bolting upwards like a bean plant then broadening across the shoulders; now he was losing speed and lightness. He was a late starter – well, so were quite a few male dancers, even Konstantin Sergeyev, the director of the Kirov ballet company and omnipotent ruler of their world; this could be overcome by hard work, but Alex was not able to work. His faith in his vision of himself as a dancer fluctuated, and with it his concentration. On days when he was convinced he belonged, his expressiveness was so sublime that his faults became insignificant; when he felt at the bottom of his heart he was just a dull American kid with ridiculous artistic pretensions, he was so uncontrolled that the other boys sniggered openly and the teachers despaired.

  There was also the problem of his attitude. A peculiar arrogance, gentle but stubborn, framed all his responses to discipline. Every other student at the Vaganova Academy was ecstatically grateful to be there, but Wolfe seemed unmoved by the honour extended to him. He lacked the proper reverence for the institution. The constant criticism of the teachers, which he ought to have accepted eagerly, went in one ear and out the other, as if he could not believe that he was not already perfect. He was like a small child who was unable to understand the difference between dancing and merely jumping around to music.

  The ballet master frowned as his pupils concluded their exercise, then walked across to an exceptionally thin girl with dark hair parted in the centre, and took her by the hand.

  ‘Boys! What is this?’ They looked at him blankly. ‘Is this a carcase? No! And what are you, porters in the abattoir? No! This is a beautiful woman, the woman you love; and you want the whole world to see how beautiful she is – so, what do you do? Throw her over your shoulder like dead meat? No! Wolf, please …’ The whole school called him ‘Volk’, the Russian word for wolf, routinely now, but at the outset they often used a mocking inflection imputing a predatory character to himself and his country.

  The teacher gestured to Alex to assume his position behind the dark girl, who waited expectantly, unable to keep a complacent smirk from her thin lips. It made her resemblance to the Mona Lisa even more marked.

  ‘Look, all of you, this is where it begins. The placing of the hand, sensitive, natural, simple as a sigh but everything comes from this. Then when you lift’ – he indicated that they should demonstrate a small jump – ‘like magic, like a conjuring trick. More than easy, it must look as if it happens by itself.’ The dark girl sprang silently into the air and floated back to earth as if by reluctant choice.

  ‘But this does not happen by itself, does it? It happens because you use this …’ He slapped Alex’s back where his white cotton shirt met his black tights. ‘The back! The centre of control! Not this!’ He pinched Alex’s biceps. ‘And girls! Your pliés! You get your power here – the mainspring of your action! Don’t be mean and make the boys do all the work. And above all, boys, you must use this’ – he folded his hands over his own chest. ‘The heart. Love this woman. Worship this woman. Show her to the audience as if she is a beautiful flower unfolding in the sunshine. Now, again. First group, please.’

  In sulky silence, the students exchanged places and the dark girl fluttered back to her partner. Nadia was the golden child of her year for two reasons – she was a superb dancer and a party snitch. That pure Madonna’s face masked a compromised soul. She threw Alex a languishing stare under her eyelashes, but to this he was oblivious. As far as he was concerned, Anya was the only woman in the world.

  His roommate Vitya raised a laugh, mincing up to his partner and planting increasingly lustful kisses from her fingertips to her ear. Alex caught some resentful looks from the boys, and tried to turn them away with a self-deprecating shrug. He appreciated that in their eyes he did not really deserve to be singled out to demonstrate; in all the other classes he was picked out for his faults. His only real friend was Vitya, cursed with a stocky build and a humorous but undeniably porcine face, who had already given up all pretensions to being a ladies’man.

  At the end of the lesson the ballet master had one final word for him. ‘You may have your grandmother’s strength, Alexei, but I wish you hadn’t also inherited her deafness. Listen to the music. This poor woman is not playing for her own pleasure, you know.’ The accompanist spoiled the lecture by shaking her head, smiling so much that her eyes disappeared into her plump face. Another reason that he was unpopular with the boys was that Alex Wolfe affected women like catnip affected cats.

  He sloped along the corridor to the changing room, bored now that physical activity had ceased, his spirits further lowered by the shabby austerity all around. Eighteen months ago he had entered the school which had been held up to him as the sacred cradle of ballet through an archway from which half the stucco was missing and the rest blistered. The unbroken façades on both sides of Rossi Street, painted pale apricot but streaked with grime, seemed institutional in their symmetry. The thrill of being in this forbidden country began to drain away almost immediately. He noticed that the street itself was unswept and nameless dirt filled the gutters.

  The Director was a woman whose looks were of a style which would later become familiar to him. Her portrait photographs, in costume and make-up, witnessed her youthful beauty, but even as a young woman there had been nothing dewy in her gaze, no tenderness in her mouth, none of the faun-like vulnerability shown by her contemporaries. A career of petty betrayals and small rewards, of serving herself before her art, of slavery to a whole hierarchy of crass political satraps, had stolen every shred of loveliness from her face. In middle life she was suety and coarse, expressionless, her grey hair dyed a harsh yellow, her grace replaced by awkward bulk.

  In the course of his first term Alex noted that she shared her particular ugliness with many other administrators, and concluded that corruption was a poor guardian of beauty. He compared the women with his grandmother, who at twice the age had vivacity, expression and a fragile but proper pride in her bearing; he noted that the pure features of Nadia the snitch were setting a little harder, a little narrower for every classmate informed upon for such anti-Soviet practices as wasting hot water in the showers.

  He considered the link between a woman’s beauty and her integrity a fascinating discovery, and began to form the theory that only women were capable of true goodness, while men were condemned to struggle in vain against their self-seeking instincts. He had no way of communicating these thoughts, and no companion receptive to them. He treasured his ideas alone, adding them to a store of female mythology, unconsciously collected to bestow on the woman he loved.

  After his formal welcome, he had been taken at once to the museum which adjoined the Director’s office, where the Curator, middle-aged but with an air of naive devotion, showed him round. She had the stance he now recognized, the mark which the dance had left on her, erect, still graceful in the upper body but stiff from the consequences of a thousand strains from the hips downwards.

  In the museum he received his formal introduction to the ghosts who flitted hourly through the hallowed classrooms of
Rossi Street. Around the plain white walls in historical progression were photographs of all the great names he recognized from his grandmother’s nostalgic conversations, whom the Director and Curator talked about as if they were not only still alive, but their close friends. ‘Karsavina – very talented but she had no technique, her legs would not turn out. She never made the thirty-two fouettés but she was always developing herself, her character. She turned her mistakes into her qualities,’ they said, gazing approvingly at the soulful face crowned with silk flowers. ‘Pavlova – wherever she worked she left a little bit of the Russian ballet, she gathered children and she taught them some exercises. A great romantic ballerina but weak, with many faults. She died at the right time because younger dancers were having more success. Whereas next, Spessitseva – the last Imperial ballerina, the first modern ballerina. Diaghilev said that Pavlova and Spessitseva were two halves of the same apple, but Spessitseva was the one which is turned to the sun. Her family put her in a mental hospital for thirty years to get her away from a bad love affair.’

  They were proud to trace the lineage of their own authority. Here was Christian Johanson, who taught Nikolai Legat, who taught Agrippina Vaganova, who taught both of them, who in their turn had taught Kolpakova, Osipenko, Makharova and the dancers in the company now and also – here the Curator dropped her voice – Nureyev, who ran away from the family, after which she had been ordered to remove his photograph from the wall. Of course, from a patriotic viewpoint, it was right to condemn him for his desertion, but she felt personally that officialdom could take a kinder view of the frailty of genius.