White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘I never do.’ She smiled, flattered by his kind tone. If the Prince’s closest servant was still at pains to cherish her she must still be in good standing with his master.

  ‘The collier will be the talk of Paris, I’m sure.’ He patted the case with his gloved hand.

  ‘I don’t want to disappoint you – or the Parisians – but the collier is staying here.’ She read through the inventory one last time before handing it to him. ‘I simply dare not take it. It’s an heirloom, a piece of the Orlov family history, a piece of Russian history, even, and I have a feeling about it. It ought not to leave its own country. So it’s quite comfortable in the safe and it can have a good rest while I’m away. Instead I shall take the diamonds which His Imperial Majesty presented to me.’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’ He resumed his usual servile impassivity, bowed, and was gone.

  Charlotte picked up a smaller brass-bound case containing Lydia’s everyday jewels. ‘Besides’ – Lydia spoke as if to no one in particular; although Charlotte had become a confidante in the past two years, and understood fully the significance of her mistress’s trip, she was not quite comfortable with direct confessions – ‘when the whole of Paris is on its knees before me, the Prince will certainly wish he had paid me more attention. He’ll be furious to see me wearing another man’s diamonds, although if they’re the Tsar’s he can’t possibly complain. I can’t go out without one proper piece of jewellery, can I? Now, little Catastrophe …’ Kolya jumped off the last remaining trunk as the porters dragged it outside. ‘Come and kiss me goodbye and don’t wreck the place while I’m gone. Papa and I will be back soon. Come and wave to me and wish me luck.’

  13. France, 1968

  ‘Is our nestling ready to take to the air? And if so, in which direction should he launch himself?’ In her cluttered salon, Lydia presided at the head of the table over a conference called to determine her grandson’s future. With his developing instinct for the essence of a woman, he had chosen a present for her in Paris, a mohair stole woven with a mixture of dark wools. She wore it now around her shoulders like a robe of state, her ruined glamour confirmed by its rich setting.

  Aunt Julie was installed at her right, with her ballet master at her side. Alex had been sent to call on them immediately after his return. Realizing that the true story of his shame was unlikely ever to reach further than the end of Rossi Street, he had simply announced that he had been overpowered with loneliness in Leningrad and, seeing that his emotional condition was inhibiting his work, the directorate had agreed to send him home.

  All the old women had accepted this story with sympathy and capped it with memories of their own apparently desolate youth. The ballet master assessed the taller, broader Alex with a sceptical eye and remarked that homesickness at school was nothing compared to the bitter loneliness of touring with a company; he then suggested that Alex join a class to demonstrate his current level of achievement.

  Marie, at the far end of the table, busied herself with the tea. She was alarmingly changed in the few months since Alex had last seen her. The comforting mass of her body had shrivelled and her dress flapped limply from shoulders which had finally given up their proud line. ‘I’ve no appetite,’ she complained with a foolish smile. ‘Eating takes my breath away, lately. I don’t understand it.’

  The conference was completed by three men, since Grandmère considered that a decision was not made unless a man had at least ratified it. A very old Russian sat silent and smoking through the whole affair; an equally aged but more animated Frenchman, who occasionally contributed dance reviews to Nice-Matin, squinted speculatively at his feet as if wondering if he had laced his shoes correctly. At the end of the table a tall, elegant man of about sixty, apparently one of the last managers of the final incarnation of the Ballets Russes company, reclined in his chair with an air of weary condescension.

  The ballet master was called first to give his opinion. ‘Well, our Alex will always have technical limitations. His turn-out is much improved but still needs to be better, and with a fault like that it is impossible to achieve really good placement. But he’s a man now, his bones have finished growing – it’s too late. I think it’s time to go to work. He’s a good-looking lad, he’ll get something, I expect.’

  ‘Something! Our child is worth more than something, surely!’ Grandmère bestowed an aquiline glare on both the speaker and Julie, as if to accuse her friend of having hired an imbecile. ‘He’s a prodigy, a sensation! How many boys are given scholarships to train in Leningrad? And think of his heritage, my name, the publicity …’

  ‘Perhaps he should try his luck in London,’ the teacher continued, refusing to revise his assessment. ‘The language won’t be a problem for him and they’re always desperate for good boys.’

  ‘I’m told that now they have Nureyev things are different,’ the critic announced with a self-important glance around the table.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve heard too,’ the elegant one confirmed. ‘Suddenly they’re all jumping at last.’

  ‘Surely he should try Paris first?’ With her full bosom leading, Madame Sedova sailed forth to meet any challenge to her authority. ‘Lifar at the Opéra will see him if we ask him, I’m sure.’

  Her ballet master shrugged. ‘He’ll see him, but whether he’ll take him is another matter.’

  ‘Contemporary, perhaps that’s his future,’ the critic suggested, one finger upraised.

  ‘I hate contemporary,’ Alex murmured in alarm from the far side of the room.

  ‘It’s much less demanding,’ the teacher told him with a sympathetic nod.

  ‘I hate it. All that modern music …’

  There was a general sigh of agreement. The company fell to dissecting the reputations of lesser Paris dance companies, considered briefly the merits of Amsterdam, Stuttgart and Milan and finally came back to Paris for their decision.

  ‘The Opéra it shall be – I’ll telephone Lifar tomorrow.’ Madame Sedova seemed thoroughly satisfied although Alex could tell from the ballet master’s calculated reticence that his old teacher did not consider he had much chance of acceptance.

  ‘Oh, what a tragedy! No sooner do I get my beautiful boy back than he is torn out of my arms again. Let me kiss you …’ Grandmère struggled to her feet and embraced him, a puddle of tears stained with mascara already forming below each eye. ‘A new life – another new life! Exciting for you, but for us old women who have to wait by the telephone for news … this is it, this is what my life has come to now. Well, I’ll call Kolya and tell him to expect you.’

  Alex was kissed and loaded with tears, fresh advice, more blessings. They drank more tea, smoked more cigarettes, reminisced and gossiped, then Marie, with an effort, took the squat yellow bottles of Zubrovka and glasses out of the carved wooden cupboard.

  Fetching dishes of food from the kitchen she announced each one, pausing frequently when she ran out of breath. ‘Meatballs with cream sauce, and these are some pancakes the girl made, but she makes them too thin. Little salted Korkun cucumbers which dear Kolya brings from Paris, and fish cutlets – I tried but these French fish don’t like to be mashed. Still I did my best.’ She sat down, perspiration trickling down her neck although it was a cool autumn day. ‘Oh yes, I forget everything nowadays – and potato salad, and cucumbers with salt … please, eat, everybody must eat. And the halva, I know there was some …’

  Alex ate and was comforted. The loss of Anya was still an open wound, but he was aware that Grandmère’s world, faded and inward-looking as it was, had the maternal power to restore him. He recognized now that these gatherings were a ritual in which the émigré colony asserted their national identity. In a subtropical climate they opted for dim light and food designed to pad the ribs against cold. In poverty they made their own society an elite more exclusive than any club. Among strangers, they exaggerated all the characteristics of their race, revelling in drink and emotionality as affirmation that they were still Russian, although they would nev
er see their country again.

  At the end of the afternoon the company took their leave. In the hallway the ballet master, kind-hearted as well as clear-sighted, took Alex aside and suggested that the world of revues and musical comedies might perhaps suit him, and scribbled down a few telephone numbers on a page torn from his diary. Then he left with Madame Sedova. Marie sighed, then hauled herself to her feet and began to clear the table.

  ‘It’s good she’s eating less,’ Grandmère announced to Alex. ‘She was always a bit of a glutton, you know. If she hadn’t retired when she married she would have been in trouble. And once the babies started, that was the end, she let herself go. I never did that, not even after your mother.’ Her hands settled proudly over the small, melon-shaped swell of her own stomach.

  ‘My dear Lydia, if your friend hadn’t been a little bit of a gourmand she would never have become such a marvellous cook.’ A current of fresh air and the tapping claws of the griffon on the floorboards announced Angela Partridge, who suffered to be kissed by them all before taking her usual chair. ‘And then you would have simplement starved to death. I saw the coast was clear so I thought I’d pop in. How do you feel today, Marie? It’s better now the weather isn’t so hot, isn’t it?’

  ‘You say it isn’t hot today?’ Marie was sweating so heavily that wherever her flowered crepe dress touched her body a dark stain appeared. ‘It’s enough for me, I tell you. Please, eat – there’s salad left, and some fresh bread …’

  ‘You sit down, I’ll look after myself.’ The Englishwoman was neither hungry nor anxious to trouble her friend, but she knew that it was impossible to refuse food in a Russian home. She returned from the kitchen with a plate strategically loaded with titbits. ‘And how’s the golden boy? Happy to be back before old Brezhnev decided to conscript you and send you off to Czechoslovakia?’ She reverted to English and extracted from Alex his sanitized account of his departure from Russia. ‘And do tell, I’m dying to know, did you find your grandmother’s old house before you left?’

  ‘I got pretty close, I think. I found Rimsky-Korsakov Street, or Prospekt, whatever, but the other street must have been renamed, I just couldn’t find it.’

  ‘What about the gates? Iron gates with olive branches? Frightfully elegant, even today I expect.’

  ‘None of the buildings had old gates or railings. An old man told me they were all sawn off and taken away to make nails or something when there was a shortage of metal. So what I did was take some photographs of all the corner buildings, and I thought if Grandmère could look at them herself maybe she’d see something she recognized.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘Well to tell the truth, Miss Partridge, with everything that’s been going on since I got back I haven’t had a chance to sit her down with them.’

  ‘But let’s do it now! At once! My dear Lydia, your palace! The boy has found your palace!’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ came the haughty response. ‘Marie forgets things, but I never do. I was just waiting for the right moment to ask him.’

  From the little room at the back Alex fetched the envelope of prints and explained anew, in French, how he had resolved the dilemma of Rimsky-Korsakov Street. Then he laid out the twelve photographs on the tablecloth.

  ‘They aren’t all that good, I’m afraid, some of them I couldn’t get the roof in, but over there you can’t just walk around the street with a camera.’

  Marie got to her feet and leaned over Lydia’s shoulder, affecting to sneeze as the mohair shawl tickled her nose. The two old women scanned the photographs in silence.

  ‘Snowing,’ Grandmère said at last.

  ‘Yes, that didn’t help either.’ Alex stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans. It had seemed such a clever idea at the time but now he felt foolish. ‘They are in order, from the little park to where the two canals join. If you could remember the church, or how many turnings …’

  ‘No.’ Something like Marie’s old sweet smile creased her shiny cheeks as she pointed out one particular picture.

  ‘Absolutely, no.’ With disdain, Grandmère pushed the Constructivist concrete villa aside.

  ‘Could be.’ Now Marie picked up the picture of the Palace of the Young Pioneers; the woman on the scaffolding a blurred shape because she had moved too fast. Grandmère blinked at the picture in silence.

  ‘Here, let me see.’ Angela Partridge opened her bag for her spectacles, kept in a petit point purse with a scrap of chamois. ‘The vainest creatures you could possibly imagine.’ She seized the photograph and focused on it. ‘Can’t see what’s under their noses and not even a magnifying glass in the house. Ah – oh, now, it isn’t the best photograph in the world, is it, dear boy? What have we got? Half the house is missing, scaffolding all over the place but I can see it’s green, very pretty sort of cucumber green, and quite symmetrical. Porch in the middle with white pillars, and steps up, then one, two, three four windows each side, long windows, plus a little round one over the porch …’

  ‘Give it to me, give it to me!’ Her mouth working with eagerness, Grandmère snatched back the picture and, as an afterthought, held out her hand for the spectacles. ‘Yes! Yes! Look, Marie, you can see! God is good, to keep my house for me all these years. The winter garden is gone, that’s what confused me, but I had the only porch with steps like that, and our little oeil-de-boeuf window to let light in on the staircase. Oh, you’re useless, you don’t remember anything.’ Marie made no response.

  ‘Do you feel quite well?’ Miss Partridge, who had been standing back with her hands on her hips, suddenly moved forward and took Marie’s arm an instant before she attempted to sit but fell beside her chair, pushing it aside with a screech of wood on wood as she collapsed on to the floor. ‘Oh God, I was afraid of this.’

  ‘What is it, what’s the matter with her?’ Lydia did not immediately understand, and spoke with irritation, as if she suspected her friend was playing some silly trick.

  With a crash as it hit the floorboards, her friend’s head fell helplessly to one side, the eyes open but seeing nothing, a trickle of saliva running from the side of her mouth. Alex rushed to the old woman and tried to gather her into his arms; her flesh through the thin dress felt limp and cold.

  ‘Just let her lie down on the floor, where she is. We can turn her on her side. It’s all right. I did some nursing. Take care, don’t bang her head again. Now draw up her knees, that’s it …’ The Englishwoman reached for a wrist, then pressed her fingers into the loose swag of Marie’s lowest chin. ‘Something’s moving, but it’s pretty faint. We need an ambulance.’

  ‘Is she ill?’ Grandmère was standing at Marie’s feet, pulling the wrap more tightly around her shoulders, anxiety dawning in her eyes.

  Miss Partridge was at the telephone, every vestige of French inflection deserting her as she urgently commanded an ambulance. ‘Mal au coeur, trés grave. Une femme de quatre-vingts ans.’ She was almost shouting. Then it seemed that she had been understood, for she dropped her voice and hung up the earpiece.

  ‘She’s not eighty yet, she can’t be. We’re the same age.’ Lydia was still standing over the fallen body. ‘She never said she was ill.’

  ‘My dear girl, she’s been feeling sick and breathless all week, I heard her say so myself. You only had to look at her to see.’

  ‘But she was always complaining.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t, the life you led her?’ There was no sting of blame in the question, but the Englishwoman did not use the widened eyes and crooked grin which normally signified a humorous understatement.

  ‘We are Russian, what do you understand of the way we live?’ Lydia stepped stiflly over her friend’s ankles to strike a pose in the centre of the room, flinging wide her arms as if to embrace the attention of an audience. Her stole flapped, stirring a pile of papers on the table. ‘If we have tears to shed, we cry. If our heart is full, we love. Our soul is deep, full of passion …’

  ‘For the love of God don’t start a
ll that nonsense again. If you want to do something, call up Father Vasily, that’s his name, isn’t it?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Don’t you Russians fetch a priest when someone is dying?’

  ‘Naturally we do, we are not animals.’

  ‘Well, then, you need him now, don’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean? Tell me what you mean – she isn’t dying. She can’t be!’ The arms, so thin that they were widest at the elbow joint, faltered in the air and returned to clasp each other in the folds of the wrap.

  ‘Yes, Lydia, I think she may be, I really do. Didn’t you see the way she looked, haven’t you seen it before? The way a person is when they can feel death creeping up on them, but they can’t be sure because they’ve never felt it before and all they know is that they don’t understand what’s happening to them. You didn’t see it so much in the war, death is always on a soldier’s mind I suppose, but even then you’d get the ones who never believed it would come to them. I used to think it was one of Nature’s tricks, to help people slip away quietly, not in a dreadful panic. Is that the siren? Alex, you’ve got young ears, go outside and listen.’

  In a few moments the low-riding white Citroen swung around the corner and pulled in outside the villa. He heard his grandmother howling ‘No! no!’ from the interior of the house. Marie was carried out on a stretcher, a rounded shape under the red blankets with only a lock of her white hair visible. It was the last Alex saw of her; she died that night and the priest, citing the climate, advised against the traditional laying out of the body at home.

  At the funeral service in the Russian cathedral the incense seemed to choke him. The effort of suppressing his urge to cough brought tears to his eyes. Feeling faint, he willingly allowed Kolya alone to support his grandmother on the long walk to the side of the open coffin. Wreaths and bouquets were stacked around it and the edge was lined with white carnations. Lydia had wept incessantly since her friend’s last moments. Her cheeks were wet under her veil, but she was quiet and moved as if in a trance. As the last of the mourners moved away, Kolya gently pulled a small icon in a silver case from his mother’s hands and laid it inside the casket before it was closed.