White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  The silence of a July afternoon was broken by a small human noise. In the doorway stood a tall woman wearing a panama hat low over her eyes. From her square shoulders to her ankles she was enveloped in a double-breasted riding coat of some heavy matt silk printed like python skin. He had become accustomed to seeing magnificently dressed women wherever he went in Paris, but even so he was temporarily tongue-tied by the effect.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he managed to say at last. Of her face, only her full, sad mouth and sharp jaw were visible.

  ‘I hope so. I want to buy something but I don’t know what, exactly.’

  ‘Is it for a special occasion?’ Since most of Kusminsky’s business was with other dealers, personal buyers were unusual; this was the first unaccompanied female customer he had ever seen.

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘A ball, perhaps, or a birthday …’ Alex moved towards the jewellery cabinet, searching for the keys in the inside pocket of the jacket which Kolya insisted he wear despite the summer heat. Sometimes when his eyes strayed over the necklaces and tiaras in the case he imagined them being worn by exquisitely dressed women of the kind he only read about in Paris Match.

  ‘No. A divorce …’

  Momentarily bewildered, he busied himself with the security routine, locking the door and setting the alarm. ‘A divorce …’

  The mouth smiled without inhibition, revealing strong teeth. ‘My divorce. Today it’s final so – I have to do something, why not go shopping? I always wanted a piece of jewellery that wasn’t just stones, you know, something with a little history to it, a little romance.’

  ‘Well, you’ve come to the right shop, of course.’ He pasted a courteous expression on his face, hoping that his amazement would not show. Kolya seldom bothered to tell him the price of items on display, since he did all the negotiation himself, but he had naturally asked, and knew that there was nothing there worth less than twenty thousand francs. ‘Is there anything particular I can show you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know … let me see.’ She joined him beside the case and pointed to a bow-knot brooch with a large, milky-blue gem set at the centre. ‘What’s the stone in that brooch there, at the back?’

  ‘It’s what Fabergé called the Mecca stone. Actually that’s not the correct name, because a Mecca stone is a sort of pinkish cornelian, and this is a translucent blue chalcedony.’

  ‘It looks like a piece of the moon.’

  ‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’ He wanted to tell her how poetic she must be to see such significance in the jewel. ‘And those diamonds around it are little rose-cut stones set so as to enhance its sparkle. That was a particular innovation of the house of Fabergé.’

  ‘What a lot you know. Are you studying jewellery design?’

  ‘No, I – this is my uncle’s shop. I’m a dancer, at least, I hope I am.’

  She drew out the bare facts of his life expertly, all the time switching attention from his face to the jewellery. He wished passionately that she would take off her hat, and as if the intuitive message had been received she removed it shortly afterwards, releasing straight tawny blonde hair which fell to her shoulders.

  ‘Let me see how that necklace looks.’ One by one the large coat buttons were unfastened. Underneath she wore a halterneck beige silk dress. He helped her out of the coat and laid it over a chair.

  ‘I know that necklace ought to be about two million francs.’ His voice cracked with anxiety.

  ‘I’m not going to buy it. The appropriate compensation for losing my husband to some Mexican whore is around half a million, I decided.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I see.’ Reverently, he picked the necklace out of its birch wood box and approached her. Her eyes were speckled green, the colour of some of the Siberian emeralds, but unless she smiled they had a wounded darkness in them. With her right hand she twisted up her hair again, allowing him to put it round her neck. She had a light suntan and her skin was fine-grained and taut. He had to touch her. At the last moment he made it look accidental, brushing his palm against the ball of her bare shoulder, but she started immediately, then caught his eye in the mirror.

  ‘So, what can I get for half a million francs in this shop?’ The question was accompanied by a very level look and a half smile. He knew he was blushing violently, and took excessive care in unfastening the necklace and putting it back on its white satin cushion.

  ‘I don’t know the price of everything, I’ll have to ask my uncle.’

  He moved rapidly towards the rear office, knocked and blundered through the door.

  The two men were so intent on their task that they did not hear him. Alex hesitated, remembering too late that Kolya had asked not to be disturbed. It was a routine order; most of the business transacted in the back office was less than legal.

  Fragments of rainbow danced all over the white walls, refracted from a high-powered lamp by the facets of the jewels which Kolya was examining under his most powerful equipment, a surgeon’s lens mounted on a bracket. Gotz, the dealer from Moscow, sat opposite him at the desk; globules of perspiration standing like blisters on his forehead. In spite of the heat he still wore his grey overcoat.

  ‘This dust is terrible.’ Kolya spoke in his mannered, old-fashioned Russian. With delicate strokes of a paintbrush, he was trying to clean the stones. ‘The way it clings – terrible.’

  ‘What do you expect? You knock down an old wall, there’s bound to be dust. The cut is still quite recognizable, isn’t it?’ Gotz was showing the usual anxiety of a seller encountering Kusminsky’s legendary bargaining style.

  Kolya gave no answer, but turned his attention from the jewels to the books open on the desk top; he always identified potential purchases from his library of reference works, sale catalogues and copies of the Fabergé ledgers. Alex noticed that he had also opened one of the albums bound in blue watered silk in which the photographs and mementoes of La Kusminskaya’s career were mounted.

  ‘It’s the old cut, undoubtedly. But that’s no help – if it was a twentieth-century piece I might have workshop records, but just from these little photographs …’ He shook his head.

  Through the half-open door, Alex saw the woman walk restlessly across the shop. Should he interrupt the negotiation now, or wait for them to finish?

  ‘They gave me the exact address.’ Gotz set his jaw, implying that he had worn down tougher men in his time.

  Without haste, Kolya countered, ‘Alas, we never even knew it. Her memory …’

  ‘But they have it in the records at Rossi Street – it will be very simple to verify.’

  Kolya blew thoughtfully across the gleaming stones and a little cloud of white dust settled on the album of photographs. The woman was gazing out of the shop window with a discontented frown. Alex’s patience gave way. He coughed.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ Rapidly, Kusminsky covered the jewels with a comer of the white cloth on which he had spread them for examination. Gotz seemed to jump out of his skin with alarm.

  ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, Kolya. I forgot you didn’t want to be interrupted.’

  ‘Well, now I’ve reminded you. Fuck off out of here, I’ll see you later. And shut the damn door.’

  His uncle so rarely swore that Alex felt as if he had been assaulted. As soon as he drew the office door shut behind him he heard the heavy iron bolts being turned on the inside.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Madame, my uncle’s in a meeting right now and …’

  ‘Whatever did he say to you? You look quite upset.’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. I made him angry, I suppose.’

  She was holding the Mecca stone brooch with the fingertips of both hands, admiring the mysterious light in its depths. The compulsion to connect made him bold.

  ‘That was such a beautiful thing you said about the stone just now – do you think the moon really is like that?’

  ‘We’ll soon find out, won’t we? Your countrymen are supposed to be arriving there tonight.’ Now she had an air
of confidence about her, and the dark pain in her eyes had gone.

  ‘Oh, my goodness, is that tonight?’

  ‘The first men on the moon, imagine. Where are you from?’

  ‘I must have a terrible accent still.’

  ‘No, it’s very good, but I have an excellent ear. I was an actress before I married.’ She put down the brooch and reached for her coat. ‘It’s so hot, I’m dying for a drink. Why don’t you join me? At least you won’t be disturbing your uncle.’

  He promptly put away the jewellery, unlocked the door, reset the alarm and followed her into the courtyard. By the end of an hour he thought that she was the most beautiful, kind, clever and amusing person in the world, and even if she never allowed him to make love to her his existence would have been enriched for ever by their conversation. In two hours she knew the full story of his life and had disclosed the most recent events in her own. His heart overflowed with tenderness for her pain and he wished aloud that he were a professional hit-man and able to give her brute of a husband what he deserved. In another hour, he had confessed the truth of his last night in Leningrad, and felt light-headed with relief. She invited him to watch the moon landing at her house.

  ‘The surface is like a fine powder. It has a soft beauty all its own,’ reported Neil Armstrong, his breathy communication proceeding from the moon to the earth, from Cape Kennedy back to a communication satellite and thence to the television in the corner of the woman’s bedroom in the middle of the night. The blue-grey light from the screen flickered over tangled bodies and disordered sheets.

  ‘A soft beauty all its own.’ Alex traced the centre line of her stomach with his lips and kissed her navel. His fingertip felt her response, a quiver of the wet, hot, satiny folds – it had seemed impossible to give up possession of her body because their most acute pleasure was past for the moment. Juice ran down to his wrist and he felt drunk with her female smell.

  The woman considered that such soft beauty as she possessed was the consequence of being forty-two years old and the mother of children, but said nothing. He seemed a very genuine boy. He was the youngest man she had ever slept with; the flattery was thrilling. With his nerves and his timidity, he seemed to be no more than he claimed. Surely a gigolo would never be so passionately affectionate?

  He was so beautiful that when she half-closed her eyes it looked as if a marble statue of Apollo was lying between her thighs. The first time he had been too anxious to do himself justice, but she could see that he was aroused again, and in that area he was of more than classical proportions. She sat up and kissed him, caressing his chest and feeling his nipples harden at her touch and a moan escape between their fused lips. She decided that if he did cost her half a million francs, he would be worth it, perhaps even only for that night.

  14. New York, 1984

  In his head, Lovat talked to his wife all the time. How could you do this to me, you unbelievable bitch? How could you do this to our children? Haven’t you any feelings, don’t you understand you’ve destroyed a family here? You’ve wrecked five people’s lives just as surely as if you’d murdered us – and for what? For the pleasure of getting your own way. You are the most monstrously selfish creature on earth. You’re not fit to be a mother, you’re nothing but a child yourself. You’re mad, you’re a psychopath, right and wrong don’t mean anything to you. You’ve broken all your promises, run away from all your responsibilities. A dumb animal would know better.

  The sum of these endless conversations was one word – why? The word screamed itself inside his head when he woke up. Why? All he had done was be a good husband. He had loved her, made love to her, given her children, given her a good life, given up everything for her, given her everything she wanted. Why would a woman do such a thing? Women didn’t destroy families, they created them, fought for them, struggled for them. Bianca had gone against all human instinct.

  The question seeped into all his conversations, especially his conversations with women who he felt must have special understanding of their own kind. So much anger radiated from him that he was often left talking to a politely vacated space or a tactfully turned shoulder. ‘I don’t know why, Lovat!’ Exasperation eventually robbed even Shona of her good manners. ‘Do stop going on, you’re just being obsessive. Every time you come round here you just mope around asking me why. You should know, for God’s sake, you were her husband.’

  He slept badly and woke early, opened his eyes, shut them at once before the tastelessness of the bedroom in his rented house assaulted him, and fantasized about killing Bianca. Machine-gunning her on the steps to the water garden, the blood running over the lovely old lichen-spotted stones and dripping into the pool. Or stabbing her in her bathroom, and the blood flying up the marble-tiled walls and dripping down like raindrops, and her hands smearing it over the taps as she fell to the floor. Or bludgeoning her in the music room itself, with the poker? Would that be heavy enough? A hammer would be better, a heavy one, one blow! Ker-splat! Chips of skull and gobs of brain spattered over the blue and white toile de Jouy. Then this nightmare would be over, and he could settle down with the boys and a new woman – a vague figure whose details did not interest him at that point – and make life good again.

  Another fantasy occasionally offered itself. He would make himself reject it, refusing to contemplate even in imagination the possibility of a reconciliation. In this scenario Bianca appeared in the hideous bamboo, eau-de-Nil and peach sitting room of the rented house while he was watching the news on television. She looked the way she did just after she had a baby, bony and colourless, although she had made a pathetic attempt to be attractive. Weeping hysterically she told him she had been a fool, that she realized he was the most wonderful man in the world, that no one could have been a better husband or father, that she couldn’t live without him, that she begged his forgiveness and wanted him back.

  Unmoved, he would continue watching television, perhaps favour her with a look of utter contempt. She would begin to scream and sob, fall to her knees, try to kiss his feet, plead to suck his cock, beg to have sex if only for one last time and then, finally understanding that she had wounded him beyond the limit of human decency, she would run out into Bayswater Road and throw herself under a car – usually some kind of flashed-up Ford Escort driven by a spotty boy racer, stickers on the rear window and ‘Errol and Sharon’across the windscreen. The body would be tossed in the air like a doll and impaled on the railings of Hyde Park.

  In the terrible days after his marriage ended the fantasies of killing Bianca could occupy an hour or two if necessary. Then, feeling energized but slightly ashamed, he would get out of the faux-bamboo bed and be equal to the ordeal of pulling up the taupe and peach ruched blinds in the bedroom.

  The violence of his hatred scared him. He was genuinely afraid that if he passed much time in his wife’s company she would drop one of her oblique insults, his control would snap and he would do in reality what he had so often imagined. Such a volcano of rage was smouldering in him that even the idea of provoking her was frightening, and so he kept a distance and took care to be civil. In Bianca’s estimation he was as insensitive as ever, completely unaffected by their separation, continuing his life without interruption, as self-absorbed as he had been throughout their marriage.

  Lovat also wanted to keep his innocence spotless, so that he could stand before his children with a clear conscience for the rest of his life and say, ‘This was not my choice, I did not want this, I did not deserve it. This is what your mother has done to us.’ That and his pride made him agree to all the terms of the separation in spite of his lawyer’s advice. He wanted the boys to know that he was right and she was wrong, and with children actions meant more than words. They were always so silent, except Orlando who seemed to act out a perpetual comic strip under his breath. The truth was he never knew what to say to them.

  Of the one crime of which he had been justly accused, he had no real memory. Intense guilt had long overlaid his recolle
ction of floundering on the floor with Olivia, half drunk and thoroughly scared of a powerful and much older woman. The pile of the white wool rug in his nose and mouth was the outstanding physical sensation. Before Bianca almost every sexual encounter had been equally meaningless. Olivia was one of the governors of the art school; they had met at a party in the studio of one of the tutors, and in his naivety Lovat had believed that he was obliged to fuck her if she asked him, or be expelled.

  Afterwards, however, he had respected her for cutting through his shame and confusion, taking the initiative immediately when he appeared as a significant figure in her daughter’s life and suggesting that they should forget the whole episode for Bianca’s sake. It had seemed so naturally correct; the way intelligent, civilized, thinking people like the Berrisfords would behave. Why should he now suffer this terrible punishment for a forgotten misdemeanour of which he as much as anyone had been a victim?

  Divorce meant failure to him, and it meant shame. His father had once boasted that his mills never employed a divorced woman. No doubt Bianca would call the notion bourgeois, but it seemed to Lovat to have some sense. At the bottom of his heart he had always considered that divorced people were weak, people who made promises they could not keep and did not really care about their children.

  Losing his job – that was another horror story from family folklore. In the North everyone had a story about the Depression. It was a bigger event than either of the world wars in the lives of ordinary people. His father often told him how, at a younger age than he was now, he had laid off hundreds of mill girls, grown women who were already the sole financial support of their families. ‘The boss sent me to do his dirty work because he said I was young and soft-looking but they turned on me just the same and I had a broken nose before I got off the floor.’

  When he opened the thick white Berrisford’s envelope which contained his five-figure severance pay, and another enclosing a handwritten note from Hugh expressing civilized regret and good wishes for his future, Lovat felt the fury and despair of losing a job, even if he had to acknowledge that he was some way away from a dole queue. He was grateful to hide himself in a consultancy for a while, fly to Japan twice a month and avoid his former associates. The guilt for accepting the charity of his wife’s family, successfully suppressed for years, broke into the forefront of his mind and undermined his confidence. Would anyone else have employed him then? Would anyone employ him now?