White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  The next day she seemed calm and at first the vinegary tone of her remarks persuaded them that sheer selfishness had saved her from suffering too much grief. ‘At least that girl knows how to fillet fish properly – Marie always made a hash of it,’ was all she said when Kolya explained that he had negotiated with the maid for her to come in every day and take over the cooking and the rest of Marie’s work.

  ‘You shouldn’t have taken the icon away from me like that,’ she complained a few hours later. ‘I didn’t intend to give it to her. That icon was a gift from Sergei Pavlovich. I was keeping it.’

  Kolya muttered something under his breath. ‘Imagine’ – he turned to his nephew as soon as they were outside the salon – ‘what it was like for me as a child. Who do you think put food in front of me, and noticed when I had outgrown my shoes, and haggled in the market just before it closed to get everything at the rock-bottom price?’

  ‘Not Grandmère.’

  ‘No, indeed. She is my mother, but Marie mothered me, truly. Actually, she mothered us all. Now one little icon is too much.’ It was the only harsh thing Alex had ever heard him say about Lydia.

  In the morning the old woman was up and moving about very early, which obliged Alex to wake up himself. He found her sitting upright on a sofa in a new black dress.

  ‘She’s so happy to be with Basil and her little ones.’ Her mouth, approximately painted with fresh lipstick, curved into an optimistic crescent. ‘She was here, she’s been here half the night. She was worried, you see, about how I would manage. Had to come and see for herself. But I could tell she was happy. They’re all together now, even the girl she left behind who died of inflammation of the lungs. Don’t you like my dress? Mourning clothes don’t have to be dreary, not if you’re clever about them.’

  ‘Is she going mad?’ he asked his uncle as soon as he arrived. ‘She said she’d seen Marie in the night.’

  Kolya drew in a sharp breath, offended by the boy’s careless judgement of insanity. ‘She always does that when somebody dies. Claims she’s had a spiritual visitation. She can’t really accept that they’ve gone and it’s her way of pretending they’re still alive. Just humour her, don’t argue.’

  The next day the old woman gave more conventional evidence of grief. ‘My friend, my only true friend in the world! You know, it was a formal arrangement for us, friendship, when we were girls? We swore the oath together. The only friend I had.’ She retreated to her bedroom and sat at the dressing table of stained maple veneer, sorting through the jumbled drawers for mementoes. ‘A good thing I have no jewellery left, now that I’ve no daughter to leave it to when I die. Soon it will be my turn, I know. There’s no point to life when you are unloved.’

  Other women friends came to call, but after a while she asked Kolya to tum them away. ‘They don’t care about me. They just want to look at my things. Jackdaws! I know. Beady eyes on what they’re going to steal when I’m gone.’

  ‘That’s a good sign,’ Kolya confided. ‘She’s fretting about her possessions as usual. I think we’ll be able to get back to Paris in a few days now.’

  Alex tried to mute his enthusiasm for this news. He was itching to begin the business of getting a job and had feared that he might be deputized to remain with his grandmother while she adjusted to her loss. But, sure enough, they were able to leave three days later.

  In Paris he found a different community of exiled Russians, larger, more diverse, more inclined to go about its business than to idle away the days in a haze of vodka and nostalgia. They recognized two races within their nationality – Russian, by which was meant an exile, and Russian-from-Russia. Uncle Kolya was something of a social focus; newly arrived visitors were brought to his door by acquaintances who said, ‘Have you met Kolya Kusminsky? Oh, but you must. Every Russian in Paris knows Kolya. His mother was a great ballerina, some say the greatest. He’s in antiques, Fabergé, silver, that kind of thing. Every day he has lunch at the fish restaurant on the comer, and after he shuts up you’ll find him in the little bar just opposite. Come and meet him, he’ll be so glad to see you.’

  His uncle welcomed him to his apartment by marching him down the hushed, deeply carpeted and immaculately swept staircase which they had just ascended and out into the street.

  ‘Now,’ he began in the voice of a benevolent schoolmaster, ‘you are in the square which was once called the Place Royale and now, God forgive us, is called the Place des Vosges. And why? Remember you are in France when you answer.’

  ‘Er – because of the magazine?’ Alex hazarded, tired from the long train journey and longing for a drink of anything, preferably Coke.

  ‘Magazine? No, no, dear boy, Vosges, not Vogue. Listen, listen! French is a precise language, not like Russian which is meant for screaming and mumbling. No – this enclave of architectural harmony, this jewel of Renaissance decoration, was called after the department of Vosges because after the Revolution the citizens of that region of France had the great stupidity to hand over their taxes before all the rest. That’s all that counts with the French, their lousy taxes. Now, let me point out to you some of the important features of the place …’

  ‘Can I put down my bags?’ Alex hoped for a reprieve but was disappointed.

  ‘Of course, just drop them by the concierge’s door, she’ll keep an eye on them for you. Now take a look around and notice that there are thirty-six grand houses here, each with four arches, none quite the same but unified by the subtle relationship of the details, the stone-work, the brick-work, the gables and so on. If we start here at number six, the former home of the writer Victor Hugo …’

  The tour concluded almost an hour later, by which time Alex was ready to sleep on his feet. Having devoted almost four years of his life to his physical development, he found mental work utterly exhausting. He had a brief impression of immensely tall windows, heavy dark furniture and tapestries in the apartment before sinking into a modern leather chair and closing his eyes.

  The weekend, which Kolya had generously set aside for his elementary education, passed in the same style. Obediently he walked through museums and monuments trying to assimilate the stream of facts which fell from his uncle’s lips while statues, paintings, buttresses, spires and carvings blurred before his eyes.

  Kusminsky’s shop was in a little courtyard off the Rue Jacob; almost every day the Sorbonne students found something to call them to the barricades, but only the noisiest demonstrations disturbed the quietness of this enclave. Kolya continued his education. With ten days in hand before he had to present himself at the Opéra, Alex, who cherished passionately the rare privilege of being able to lie in bed late, was dismayed to be issued with a cultural objective every morning. Within a few days he pleaded the necessity of attending a dance class every day, but he was still expected to meet his uncle for lunch at the fish brasserie, and then to preside behind the little lapis lazuli table in the outer showroom all afternoon while Kolya received visitors in the office at the rear.

  As he became familiar with the routine of his uncle’s life, he discovered that the affability which the older man showed him masked something darker. Lydia telephoned her son at his office every morning; she asked about Alex, and Kolya would reply that he was out, lightly but with an indefinable innuendo of laziness or even degeneracy. He never mentioned the calls to his nephew, or passed on the old woman’s good wishes.

  With a young man’s thoughtlessness, Alex did not telephone his grandmother, who soon involved all her coterie in the supposed problem of her grandson’s wayward behaviour. The deception came to light when Angela Partridge, who made a monthly pilgrimage to Paris to visit a niece working at the British Embassy, called at the Place des Vosges at 9 a. m. and found the young man rushing with a bag of kit to his first class of the day.

  ‘If I were you I’d make a point of keeping in close touch with your grandmother yourself,’ she advised after an uncomfortable lunch à trois with Kolya. ‘Mad as she may be, your uncle really is absolutely
devoted to her. He was her darling boy for half a century before you poled up, don’t forget. It’s only natural he should be a tiny bit jealous.’

  ‘Are you saying he was deliberately trying to stop her talking to me?’ Alex’s clear grey eyes were wide with amazement.

  ‘No. But with Kolya an awful lot happens without it being exactly deliberate. His right hand can be terribly dense about what his left gets up to.’

  In the afternoons the silence in the shop was smothering. The air was still and always tainted with Kolya’s cigarettes. A few hundred yards away the crowds surged up and down the broad pavements of the Boulevard St Germain, and those whose objective was to find some expensive treasure among the Left Bank antique shops circulated purposefully towards the Seine, but few of them were washed up in the courtyard. Indeed, most of Kusminsky’s visitors came with the specific purpose of seeing him; browsers and carriage trade were discouraged. The shop, for all its subtle spotlights, pristine white walls and smearless glass cabinets displaying a king’s ransom in treasures, was merely symbolic. The turnover of the business, which Alex was awed to discover usually amounted to billions of francs each year, was almost all generated in deals done intensely over tea in the back office. For Alex, sprawled on an uncomfortable small chair between the case of tiny Fabergé masterpieces and the case of Moscow-school art deco jewellery, it was a major event if the paulownia tree in the courtyard dropped one of its large leaves.

  When he telephoned Grandmère she often sounded drunk even if she was not. There were times when she obviously did not know whether it was winter or summer, whether she had eaten or not or what day of the week it was. Sometimes she would demand to speak to Kolya, who would take the call with the merest hint of bad grace.

  At seven each evening another unpleasant development took place; his uncle’s lover appeared from the direction of the Faculty of Law. By all the natural laws of attraction, Kolya, approaching sixty with thinning hair and a small soft paunch rising under his beautiful hand-made shirts, should have been consumed with anxiety that his beautiful boy would fall for his equally beautiful nephew. Instead, Etienne seemed to express all the jealousy which the older man repressed. He sat all evening with his bony hand draped over Kolya’s shoulder, glaring at the interloper. In the course of the studies for which his protector was paying, Etienne’s wide shoulders had developed a pronounced stoop, and with his sleek, thick black hair and taste for black high-necked sweaters he had the malevolent air of a vulture.

  When his audition at the Opéra took place, Alex thought he did well. The examiners, two men and a woman, decided flatly that he was too tall, which angered him.

  He telephoned Madame Sedova in Cannes at once. ‘You really must do something. I didn’t see Lifar himself, just his deputy and the régisseur. I don’t think they even realized who I am.’

  ‘My poor Alex, they realized quite well,’ came the throaty reply. ‘Lifar telephoned me yesterday. You haven’t been exactly frank about your reasons for quitting the Vaganova, have you? Perhaps you thought a few silly old ladies would never suspect the truth. But this is such a small world, and everybody knows everything sooner or later.’

  ‘But I didn’t do anything wrong!’ In his own mind Vitya’s accident was already almost forgotten.

  ‘You broke the rules, that’s the worst wrong you can do in their eyes. So many boys would have given anything for your opportunity, and you wasted it. I shall keep it from your grandmother, she has had enough tragedy in her life – well, we all have. And that poor boy will be crippled for life. The girl is pregnant into the bargain.’

  ‘What girl? She can’t be, not Anya, I brought her …’ He remembered that Madame’s favourite, Cécile, the daughter of two obstetricians, had supplied him with forged prescriptions for the contraceptive pills on which so much of his happiness had been founded. ‘Let’s say I took care of her properly. And as for the boy, that was his own fault, I wasn’t even in the room.’

  He heard her take a deep breath and had a mental image of Madame’s bosom heaving with indignation under one of her favourite ruffled chiffon blouses. ‘So, it’s all true. How dare you try to justify yourself! And lie to us! What kind of fool do you think I felt I had been when Lifar called? Nobody wants a boy with your reputation in their company – one undisciplined dancer, one bad apple – and the rot soon spreads. My advice to you is to go back to school and try to demonstrate that you’ve changed your ways – or else, give up and get yourself a job in a cabaret. It might be a better life for someone with your kind of morality.’

  She rang off with an angry clatter of plastic. Alex threw the telephone into a comer of the room and paced about until he mastered his disappointment and annoyance. He had imagined that his Leningrad life had been a fantasy episode, and that the ballet school, like some enclosed religious order, would never make contact with the outside world, and so his sins within the walls would never be discovered. Now he had again been expelled from a family, another family in which he had felt no sense of belonging, which had detected his bad heart and rejected his attempts to conform.

  In a panic he sat down at his uncle’s desk and wrote at once to six small touring companies whose addresses his old teacher had sent to him. On his way to lunch he called at the photographic shop and ordered more prints of his photographs. His golden, glamorous future was suddenly dissolving like a mirage, and the present was becoming uncomfortable.

  While his uncle was outwardly kind, Alex felt ill at ease in sharing his life. They disagreed profoundly on the subject of women. Kusminsky had female friends, a handful of stupendously elegant women of around his own age who joined them for viewings, gallery parties, and formal social events. They were posed amidst his life like statues, required only to be beautiful and commented upon. If ever they asked for attention beyond ritual chivalry, or sympathy for their personal concerns, Kolya judged them pitiful, neurotic and emotionally voracious, and held them up as proof of the hopeless inferiority of their sex.

  Apart from these women, who had no idea how viciously they were criticized behind their backs, Kusminsky’s circle was exclusively homosexual and his life was orderly and dull. In addition to the social functions for which he summoned female company he and Etienne moved in a sedate cultural orbit plotted to take in every event necessary to be considered familiar with the arts. At weekends their friends entertained, lavishly, in a style which made Alex’s jaw drop, but mostly for the benefit of other homosexuals.

  It was always necessary, and always irritating, for Alex to confirm his own sexual orientation. He learned that if he strayed from Kolya’s side he would inevitably be propositioned. One evening at a party given by a conductor he had met an American boy of around his own age in Paris on a concert tour with a choral group. They had fallen into a long, pleasant conversation and Kolya, explaining afterwards that he had not wished to disturb him with a new friend, had left with Etienne.

  When the gathering broke up in the small hours of the morning Alex found himself alone with his host, who declared that there were no taxis at that hour and then pulled Alex’s face to his with both hands and kissed him. ‘Oh, you’re going to be too good – but wait! First, more champagne!’ the man commanded, flinging out one arm as if cueing an inattentive soloist, and taking Alex’s shocked immobility for consent. In the time it took the man to find a new bottle, Alex fell on the multiple door locks with both hands and escaped into the street. He said nothing to his uncle, who neverthless advised him the next evening that he should behave with more consideration.

  But Alex now mistrusted his uncle, which poisoned the simplest of their exchanges.

  ‘You look so pale – do you feel well?’ Kolya asked one evening when they returned to dress for the theatre. This warm sympathy immediately alarmed Alex.

  ‘Oh no, I’m fine.’

  ‘April is an enervating month, I find. The atmosphere is unsettled. I have asked a few friends to drop by and meet us for dinner afterwards, but if you would prefer to r
est I can always rearrange things. You haven’t said anything for a while, I wondered perhaps if you were a little tired?’

  ‘Well, yes. And I was listening to you talking about those enamelled things you bought today. You were saying something about Fabergé introducing colour into his jewellery.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, with his enamels, and with the hardstones like nephrite, jade, quartz, and semi-precious stones as well as the rubies and sapphires. Before Fabergé jewellers despised stones that were cheap, so they had a very limited palette from which to create. But enough of that, we’re talking about you. Sit down, relax, we’ll have a little cocktail.’ He indicated the sofa, piled with rich cushions, and then leaned over Alex’s shoulder to press the bell for his manservant, who appeared from the rear recesses of the apartment for orders. ‘I do apologize, I know I get carried away. Beautiful things give me so much pleasure, and I can sense that you, Alex, also respond to beauty – indeed who doesn’t, it’s natural, after all. I just wanted to share some of my pleasure with you. But perhaps you are a little sad? Disappointed about the Opéra – have you heard from any of the other companies?’

  ‘Yes, not good news, two of them wrote back at once saying they don’t need anyone right now. The others haven’t replied yet – it’s been a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Easter is only just over, people are still on holiday. Perhaps I could ask around, I’ve got a few friends who might be helpful.’

  ‘Oh no, please don’t put yourself out for me. You’ve done so much already.’ Having seen how effective the homosexual network was in advancing its members’careers, Alex was terrified of becoming inextricably tangled in its web. ‘I’ve just got a lot on my mind at the moment.’