White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘It isn’t my business to like her or not. Hugh wanted her to be his wife.’ Her lips pursed as if to stop disloyal words from escaping, she began extracting a length of wool and reached into her bag for her spectacles. Charlotte always carried a capacious black leather shoulder bag in whose folds everything she needed was elusive. ‘Don’t sigh like that. You know I’m like Switzerland, permanently neutral.’

  ‘I think I’ll be Italy under the Borgias – thirty years of war, terror, murder and bloodshed.’ Bianca frowned, feeling the baby move again. ‘All that and they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo and the Renaissance. While Switzerland had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.’

  ‘Why are you talking in that ridiculous way?’

  ‘That’s how Orson Welles said it.’

  The response was a disdainful cluck. Charlotte would not be impressed by anything American. ‘I refuse to be a music-hall mother-in-law. You can’t interfere in another person’s life. I tried to once and it was a terrible mistake, so now I’ve learned my lesson.’

  ‘Don’t you even talk to Hugh about her?’

  ‘He talked to me, once.’ She pinched the end of a length of pink wool and threaded the needle in one triumphant move, proud that she could accomplish such a delicate manoeuvre at her age. ‘It was just after you married. He does love you, Bianca, in his way. You must never doubt that. I don’t think he knew about Lovat and your mother in the beginning; by all accounts there wasn’t much in it. But she told him and he was angry – I’ve never seen him so angry. Absolutely white with rage, his face was. He actually called her a whore and he could hardly say the word out loud. And then he said, “I won’t find looks of her quality in another woman of our age, and I won’t run around making a fool of myself with some young dolly.”’

  ‘That was all he said about her?’

  ‘You were the main topic of discussion then, dear.’ The needle descended unhesitatingly on a tiny hole in the tapestry.

  ‘So that was when you all conspired to let me go on living a lie?’ Would nothing shake a reaction out of Charlotte?

  ‘Nobody conspired. Actually I agreed to take on the task of telling you. I just wasn’t very good.’ Another stitch the size of a pinhead was added to the design. ‘But I think I was glad I made a mess of it. All that modern no-secrets nonsense Hugh believes in – a family needs secrets, they’re part of what hold people together. Everyone knows there is a secret, of course, but they don’t all know what it is and they agree the family is more important than something that’s all in the past anyway.’

  In the months that followed Bianca found she was finally grateful for her father’s dynastic ambitions. He paid her attention – not in the oppressive style of her early years, but a respectful, even kind interest which made the physical arrangement of her separation as easy as it could have been. Her lawyer was the domestic specialist in the firm which acted for the house of Berrisford; she never saw a bill and Hugh asked her so delicately if he might take care of it that she agreed. Olivia made a few awkward moves towards reconciliation with her daughter, then drifted away to New Mexico on the pretext of a year’s teaching at a new design college.

  Life for Bianca at first continued in the same rhythm as before, but her father began almost to compliment her by talking over his own affairs with her. Since her troubles occupied much of his time it seemed a fair exchange; she sensed that he was lonely, perhaps always had been. Olivia’s final response to her daughter’s divorce was a brief radiant return from America, with a face which had clearly been lifted once more. Then she disappeared again, and in a few months filed quietly for her own divorce.

  Hugh’s life seemed to have no real companion, and now that they could meet for the first time as independent adults Bianca was touched to discover he was an anxious man for whom decisions were not easy. A few times she came to London at his request to look at a troublesome painting or escort him to a big reception.

  Lovat argued over very little, and a separation agreement was quickly accomplished, to be followed in two years by the divorce. When told that Bianca wanted to sell all their property he proposed that he buy the London house since the boys would not then be deprived unnecessarily of a familiar home, but she prevaricated, saying she wanted to dispose of the Manor first. So inbred was the world of London’s dealers that Berrisford’s competitors made Lovat no offers, fearing the embarrassment of a family rift being played out in their own salerooms. A Japanese financial group offered him a consultancy, which he accepted for a year.

  As if sensing that it was resented, Bianca’s pregnancy became more and more irksome. Every part of her body developed its own particular discomfort – stiff shoulders, tingling wrists, heartburn, shooting pains in her abdomen and legs which stung and smarted if she stood for more than a few minutes. She was horrified to catch sight of them in a long mirror one evening and see that they were becoming corded with swollen veins. Her complexion, normally clearer than ever when she was pregnant, erupted in rebellious spots. The baby itself was restless, the wrong way up and obstinately keen to make a mockery of the obstetrician’s assertion that it would soon turn over.

  The plan for her future was formulated easily and she was impatient to act on it. She would move to Somerset and with her capital she and Hermione would turn the unprofitable sheep farm into a nursery, specializing in the rare old-fashioned garden plants they both loved. Already the greenhouse at the Manor was crammed with viola seedlings and cuttings of obscure herbs. Seumas, who Hermione observed lived an almost vegetable life himself, vanished behind a wall of wartime husbandry manuals and ancient herbals and began to murmur of cordials and vermouths, remedies for club root and the afflictions which might be cured by infusions of feverfew or poultices of lungwort.

  The baby arrived as annoyingly as it had grown. Bianca enjoyed driving fast, even in the family Range-Rover which handled ponderously, and in the pleasure of devouring the twisting country back roads between her sister’s home and the Manor she was oblivious to everything else. The police car which eventually pulled her over was the first surprise, the second was the pain which seized her abdomen as she opened her door.

  The constable, all of twenty-three with a thick Hampshire accent, was lecturing her from a great moral height when another contraction came, then another. It was humiliating to ask to be driven to the nearest hospital, more so to be disbelieved; she flew into a temper, scrambled back into the car and drove away at top speed. The child was delivered on a trolley in the car park of a cottage hospital. A nurse kept demanding ‘Somebody fetch ’ er ’usband’; the other patients were all over seventy and greatly disturbed by the police sirens.

  ‘He doesn’t look premature, does he? Thank God or they’d have kept me in. A month early – I’m never early,’ Bianca protested, giving the fretful baby to Hermione to hold while she pulled crib sheets from the linen cupboard.

  ‘Every soul chooses its own time.’ Hermione jostled the child hopefully. Babies always made her feel clumsy.

  Bianca pulled a cover over the little hypoallergenic mattress with one hand and snapped the French cot bumper appliquéd with sail boats into place with the other. ‘There, that’ll do. You can put him in now.’

  ‘Her.’

  ‘Oh God, it’s a girl. I keep forgetting.’

  Hermione gently laid the infant in the cradle on its stomach. Spasms agitated its tiny limbs, it tried with all its pitiful strength to raise its head, and it cried. ‘Maybe she doesn’t like lying on her front.’

  ‘They have to lie on their fronts in case they spew up and choke themselves.’ The baby uttered cry after cry, spluttering and fighting for breath. Bianca shut the linen cupboard with a perplexed expression.

  ‘She’s going to choke herself anyway.’

  ‘She can’t possibly.’ It was a remarkably loud cry for a new-born, let alone one who was supposedly premature. The baby looked apoplectic, its face and neck flushed dark red. ‘Oh all r
ight, let’s try him on his side. Her side. I hope this one isn’t going to be a pain like Orlando.’

  ‘I’m sure girls are different.’ Hermione pulled back the quilt and let her sister pick up the frantic bundle.

  ‘I don’t see that they can be that different.’ Once soothed and returned to the crib the baby fell asleep immediately.

  She proved to be from the same mould as Tom, healthy and contented, but, Bianca had to acknowledge, different. Naming her took some weeks, since a girl had not been expected, and Bianca eventually chose Elizabeth because it was the kind of name she had always wanted herself: plain, common and traditional. As an afterthought she added Marjorie, Lovat’s mother’s name, which everyone assumed was a thoughtful gesture towards the maintenance of family ties beyond the divorce but was in truth a choice made out of sheer malice because she knew he thought it was embarrassingly genteel.

  Little Lizzie was pleased to accept other blessings which Bianca had missed. She seemed to have a powerful fascination for all the males in her orbit. Hugh said she was the only really pretty baby he had ever seen. Orlando insisted on pushing her pram, Benedict, the most contemplative of the boys, kept volunteering to watch her ‘In case something wakes her up when she’s asleep’, and Tom, who never normally wanted to superintend his brothers, was sure no one else could protect her from their enthusiasm.

  It was Lovat, however, who was most markedly charmed by his daughter. He paid her all the besotted attention which Bianca had craved for the older children and never extracted. It was cruelly unfair, and she could do nothing but bite back the observation and let the boys instruct him in the best methods of rocking, feeding and changing their new sister. Her instinct was to keep the child entirely for herself and it hurt a great deal to be reasonable and make Lovat welcome on his visits. He seemed to be spending more and more time in America, and she began to hope that he would move there permanently.

  In a few months Lovat’s direction became clear; a new dealership was launched on Fifth Avenue, in the name of Whitburn-Tuttlingen. In her dentist’s waiting room, Bianca saw photographs of the opening party in a glossy magazine and felt a stab of hostility. What a mass of teeth Cheri Tuttlingen had for such a little woman, and what a volume of hair, standing out against Lovat’s dark suit. The caption described them as ‘long-time associates’, whatever that implied. Their opening exhibition was of Ottoman arms and armour, one of Lovat’s personal obsessions, exquisite metalwork and all very photogenic on the boys they’d hired to model it, but no way to get New York to take you seriously. She had never been so pleased to hear that the dentist was ready to see her.

  Soon there was a more serious reason to be angry with Lovat. ‘Were you planning on coming up to London next week?’ Her father was trying to sound casual but his face was set in a preoccupied frown. ‘There’s something you could look at for me if you’ve got the time.’

  ‘Can’t you just tell me about it?’ Hugh seemed to believe that no problem surrounding an object could be properly assessed without laying eyes on it. He would also never ask directly for her company.

  ‘It’s an unusual thing, very. Actually unique, I’m told. You know I like to have your opinions.’

  ‘Well, I suppose Lizzie doesn’t need me any more.’ The baby had weaned herself with unflattering lack of hesitation as soon as she had been offered a bottle of milk.

  The problem was a small faded box some three hundred years old, covered with satin panels embroidered in silk, the colours faded but the charm still fresh. A lion and unicorn sat face to face on the lid, figures of women representing Faith, Hope and Charity posed among flowers on the front and the rest was a fantasy landscape filled with animals, insects and fish. Bianca recognized it at once. It was the most important item in a collection of needlework done between the ages of eight and twelve by a girl named Mary Hodlin. Berrisford’s had negotiated a private sale for one of her descendants a few years earlier; the buyer had been one of Britain’s wealthiest men, a member of the ancient City Guild of Embroiderers, to whose museum he donated the collection. Lovat had been particularly proud of negotiating a double tax remission.

  ‘The Embroiderers decided to sell the collection, brought it back to us, we called in the same man as before to do the authentication and he turned round right here in this office and said he’d changed his opinion, if you please. New techniques, new tests … probably a Victorian copy, at least two hundred years later. I just don’t know what to do. If this, gets out … I told Lovat it wasn’t our thing in the first place.’

  Bianca considered the box, and considered how one might set about faking satin worn to shreds and stitches so small they were almost invisible. The entire collection, a dozen samplers and some smaller boxes worked with beads, had been in the same style, with the initials MH worked into the corners; and some of the motifs, the ladybird and the snail, recurred in every one. The child had received silver charms as rewards for her work, and a written commendation from a school inspector. Bianca had brought Tom and Benedict to see them, knowing how one child could understand another’s vision, even through three centuries.

  ‘There was a blaze of publicity – that was all Lovat’s doing – so now there’ll be a scandal. And they’ll sue us, and they’ll win.’ Hugh was walking around his office, gesticulating, and Bianca sensed that he was trying to avoid his own share of blame.

  ‘Who authenticated it? I remember him, wasn’t he Scottish, bright and not very tactful?’

  ‘Bloody rude, I’d say. That was another thing, it was a nightmare tracking him down. Gone to work in Washington. We had to fly him over and it had to be Concorde.’

  ‘What new tests did he do, exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know what people do with sewing.’

  He chewed the word disdainfully as he said it, and Bianca realized that Hugh thought needlework was just a woman’s pastime, valueless as art or history and not worth bothering about. Hence his panic and his blindness to a very, ordinary manoeuvre which, had it happened with sculpture or painting, he would surely have spotted at once. ‘Will the casket get an export licence?’

  ‘It won’t need one if it’s a Victorian fake, will it?’

  ‘Will the collection without the casket get an export licence?’

  ‘I should think so, without the casket it’s not nearly so important. It was being a unified body of work with direct descent in the family of the vendor that made it exceptional. And it’s cute.’

  ‘Well, my advice is to get a second opinion, and from within this country. Surely there is a world expert on English needlework in England?’

  ‘My dear girl, we can’t have this getting around …’

  She heard a note of absolute terror in his voice and reached across to touch his hand in reassurance. ‘Hugh, my instinct is that it is perfectly genuine. If a foreign collector wanted to acquire it – and let’s face it, the collection is unique, and this little box is a star – there’d be an outcry and the licence would be refused. But if the box is a dud … nobody’s got a problem. I think that canny lad’s got a buyer up his sleeve, folk art’s always big in the States, isn’t it?’

  Hugh looked at her in surprise for a few seconds while he assimilated the idea that a small girl’s schoolwork might be termed folk art. Then he shook his head. ‘It’s too risky, you know how gossip gets about in this business. A whisper over breakfast is being shouted all over Bond Street by lunch.’

  ‘Finesse him a bit. Call him up and tell him in the circumstances you might consider advising another private sale. See what comes up. If he says he could introduce a buyer – then you know.’

  ‘I can’t do that!’

  She smiled, feeling a distinct adrenalin buzz, and reached for the telephone. ‘Then let me do it. What’s the number?’

  In five minutes, with the conversation amplified around the room on the telephone’s conference speaker and Hugh listening from a distance as if he might be seen if he came too close, they knew that her suspicions w
ere correct. Her father was so relieved he was almost affable and wanted to take her out for dinner. Bianca was gratified to be right, happy to have his praise and excited as well. She did not consider that she had done more than support her father through a moment of quite uncharacteristic confusion.

  The sale of the Manor proceeded slowly but surely to a conclusion, but she could not find a house in Somerset that was large enough for four children, close to Hermione’s farm and what she had in mind for her new home. Schools for the boys were a problem – never close enough, either too academic for Orlando or not enough for Tom. She never seemed to find an outlook she liked, there was so much flat land, so many hills. The estate agents grew exasperated with her as she looked at one lovely stone mansion after another and could never quite say what was wrong with each one.

  Hermione and Seumas prepared themselves for the vile world of business by travelling to an island off the coast of Northumberland where, aided by crossed ley lines and ancient Celtic standing stones, they took a course called Spiritual Money. With their prosperity consciousness thus raised and their understanding of the cosmic law of increase deepened, they fixed notes all over the farm. One on the bathroom mirror read, ‘I am a money magnet.’ One on the fridge proclaimed, ‘Increase is the law of the universe.’ The telephone announced, ‘I love my work and that love brings me all the money I want.’

  Bianca was annoyed that they forgot to switch on the watering system in the greenhouse before they went, and most of her seedlings died. ‘That’s your poverty mind-set talking,’ Seumas argued earnestly. ‘When you realize that the world is full of abundance, that your creativity is infinite, then you will understand that there will be more seedlings.’

  ‘Somebody will still have to water them,’ Bianca said crisply, catching Lizzie as she reached for a hypodermic full of the sheep antibiotics, despised and forgotten under the greenhouse bench.

  ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea,’ he announced. ‘Division of labour. If you take care of the growing side, Herm and I can do the office and the books and that, yeah?’