White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  Gina’s long magenta fingernails touched her shoulder again. ‘He’s glad-handing the Ghoul now.’

  ‘Stop pawing me, we’ll look like a pair of lezzos.’ At last she identified Lovat, reacting politely to the cold, clammy handshake of their Miyake-draped host, who then wafted him in the direction of the painter, a plump woman in khaki linen. ‘OK, I got him in focus.’ Romantic, broody-looking, tall, dark, Gucci shoes, skin untouched by UV, maybe bit of a square-head. Actually there was something a little bit tragic about him. No wedding ring. Query a friend of the artist – he was holding both her hands while they talked. Query gay, but that wasn’t the vibe he gave out. ‘Wow, I get it. Heathcliff plus handsome lessons, yeah? OK, let’s go for it.’

  ‘Let’s you go for it.’ Gina’s eye was drawn towards the two leather-wrapped young men who had emerged squawking and sniffing from the door to the toilets. As a hunting buddy, she was becoming a drag. They had been working on a cabaret act, Placenta Pizza, post-punk, post-feminist, and now, Izza decided, postponed until further notice. The girl had no focus – if she had a choice between sex and drugs, Gina went for the dope every time. The minute there was even a whiff of weed in the air she was on the trail.

  ‘So long, Bong Brain, I’ll catch you later.’ Izza tightened the seven buckles of her little black Gaultier and darted away like a bondage dragonfly.

  Lovat was convinced for the rest of his life that he had simply noticed this dazzlingly original girl, a friend of an old friend, in the crowded room, discovered that she was remarkably nice and asked her to dinner. One advantage of being five feet four was that a woman of childlike proportions was seldom thought to be pushy even when her behaviour was utterly brazen.

  They ate at One-Fifth, which Izza considered hideously passé, and the waiter recommended a wine as being ‘loquacious’at which her laughter pealed around the room.

  ‘Why did I leave Australia? There’s just no culture. Especially the men, they think art’s for queers, Too much sun – their brains get fried. And when it comes to women they’re all hung up at the sheep-station stage – get on, get it, get off and of the legs. You know the Australian word for foreplay? Sheep-shearing.’ Lovat thought she was the most amusing woman he had ever met.

  Izza had evaluated him as dull, perhaps crucially so, and probably a social lightweight, but worth once around the floor in the horizontal bop because she considered it was kind of winding up the Almighty to pass on a straight eight in the Apple. Lightning would probably fry her on the spot.

  ‘I hate to be a stickybeak, but what happened to your wife?’ She listened to his answer, heard the hostility and checked the time frame. Some of these retreads seemed to carry the grudge forever and you didn’t want to end up dunked in the chop left by some other woman’s takeoff. Over the double decaff espresso she swallowed a sigh. The trouble with looking for a long-term monogamous relationship was all the fucking around you had to do to find one.

  At three minutes past seven the following morning Lovat heard the switchback inflection of a television announcer. ‘And for your comments on today’s happy headlines, over to our girl on the spots, Isabel McKinnon. Where are you today, Isabel?’

  ‘Here I am, up on Columbus, the stretch they’re calling Yuppie Gulch because there’s more Armani on the sidewalks than there’s worms in a sushi bar. I’ve died and gone to foodie heaven. Pignozzi’s, the deli with most alfredo fettucine in town, and this is my friend Zbigniew. Did I say that right? Zib, how about I call you Zib? C’mon be a sport. OK Zib, now the question is, what do you think of the US invasion of Grenada?’

  ‘Asshole.’ It was the same voice. Confused, Lovat cautiously raised his eyelids. In the midfield of his vision was a bare back, narrow as a child’s, a white arm raised and a hand tousling the geranium-red hair. The other hand was waving the TV console like Darth Vader wielding a light sabre.

  ‘Oh my, did we invade Grenada? Is that what you said?’

  ‘Asshole!’ In the distance the TV screen was occupied by Izza in a fluffy suit of searing pink and a grossly obese man with black hair in a pony tail. Behind them half a dozen people with wire baskets gawked at the camera and a few committed shoppers browsed the vegetable cabinet.

  ‘You’re right Zib, that’s not the happiest of happy headlines, is it? Now they’re gonna make Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday – how d’you feel about that?’

  ‘I think it’s great, I really do. I just love national holidays, especially in the summer, I like to get out to Fire Island …’

  The mattress rebounded as Izza sprang off it, swept up her clothes from the floor and disappeared into the bathroom. On the screen the animated pink figure pulled a face at the camera.

  ‘That’s terrific, Zib. Now here we have – gimme your name again …’ Her earrings clattered against the microphone as she took a giggling woman in a red polyester pants suit by the arm.

  ‘June, dear.’

  ‘June Dear! Well, June Dear, how about that lady in Eugene, Oregon giving birth to seven children after treatment with fertility drugs. What are your feelings here, June?’

  The woman in the pants suit laughed heartily at the camera. ‘I’m sure glad it wasn’t me.’

  ‘Right! Let’s see, can we take a peek at your shopping, what’ve we got here, we’ve got refined flour, cherry tomatoes, avocados, virgin avocados, extra virgin olive oil – tell me June, do you feel you have a thing about purity at all?’

  A bar of harsh light fell across the bed. Izza flung open the bathroom door and noticed that Lovat was awake. Intending to leave before he woke up and skip the morning formalities, she had mentally dismissed him already.

  ‘Oh God, I’d have died rather than you see that. I’m so embarrassed by it.’ She put one foot on the edge of the bed, the better to zip up her ankle boots.

  ‘Why? You’re really good, it’s funny.’

  ‘You’re being kind. It’s crap.’ She changed feet and smoothed her stocking under her knee before pulling up the second zipper. The sound made Lovat’s blood tingle. ‘I can’t believe that’s me up there asking those idiot questions. In Sydney I did an arts show, you know – exhibitions, the opera, kind of stuff – and late night so you could get a little challenging, choose some really provocative topics. They don’t do that here, it’s a total issue-free zone.’ She paused, thinking that he looked better out of clothes. A bit pale and fleshy, but for a Pom he was pretty clean. Polite and gentle, too, which made a change.

  ‘Why don’t you come to London?’ He hardly knew he had said it – the words had hopped out of his mouth like frogs. ‘I know a few people in TV …’

  London had been her second-choice destination; she had passed through the city, and been intimidated by the old world, strength-in-depth culture, The Brits were a devious bunch, not exactly welcoming, and her competition looked fierce – what was considered an outrageous style statement in Sydney seemed to be what they wore to the office. With the right entrée, however, things could be different.

  ‘Do you have something I can sit on?’

  ‘Huh?’ While Lovat was wondering what could have happened to his chairs, she threw back the quilt.

  ‘I was thinking of something kind-of big and hot and hard … maybe this would do.’ Her hand was so tiny that the fingers and thumb did not meet around his penis, even allowing for the long red nails. ‘You’re not using this at the moment, are you? I always do a little bit of cock before breakfast, it really sets me up for the morning.’ With her free hand she was scrabbling in her purse for a condom. Her dress rolled up as she stepped up on to the bed and sank slowly down, settling her narrow thighs tightly around him. ‘Have you noticed that’s something else they don’t do in New York? The morning quickie. Dorph-head city – gym before work, work before life. You can move too, it is allowed by the way. Ooh, yeah! Me, if I’ve got to sit in an office for hours, I like to sit on a smile. C’mon baby, fuck me good now, gonna be a long day.’ Her first employer in the States had
been a telephone sex line; after a week they fired her for making the other women laugh, but it had been a good learning experience.

  In London, Lovat found himself reeling in the slipstream as she launched herself into the city. Izza saw a town as a celebrity chessboard. In the past she had been a mere pawn, but as Lovat’s consort she was a back-row piece, able to make the big moves. It was so simple. You wanted a TV break, you chose your channel, found out which party the director was going to attend, made Lovat take you there and hit in half an hour. In a month, she was getting her own invitations and no longer needed to sort through the stack on the marble mantelpiece at his house.

  He would never have considered a relationship with an Englishwoman fifteen years his junior, but the fact that Isabel was Australian made a difference. She was so witty, so dynamic and so eager to flaunt her creative credentials that she seemed almost his equal, while in fact, as a stranger in his town, she was almost completely in his power for the first few weeks.

  This interlude seemed to restore his masculinity, but it soon came to an end. She found an apartment above a designer dress shop in Chelsea in which she spent a worrying amount of time. A late-night television programme claimed four evenings a week, then a radio show on Sunday morning wrecked the weekend. A book on British style was commissioned, and although she hired a researcher, her own diary became crowded with fashionable names. Friends flocked to her, and many of them he did not like – they were young, rude and weird in appearance and the men all found her as entrancing as he did.

  At the start of their affair, Lovat had marvelled at her ability to reach orgasm from cold in two hundred seconds or less; now it seemed like a time-management trick. Her body was so small that it seemed childlike, and his desire began to fluctuate. Touching her was not exciting, there was no flesh to hold, no lush contours to caress. The teasing he had found so thrilling at first gave way to sharp cracks and perfunctory sensuality.

  They argued about the condoms. He accused her of only using them because it was trendy, she accused him of out-of-date language and irresponsibility. When his divorce was granted and became final, she seemed to become even less available.

  ‘I’m taking the boys to Northumberland for the weekend, why don’t you come?’ Benedict and Orlando also considered that she was the most entertaining female they had ever met. Tom, while alarmed that she was cheeky to his father, allowed that she made him happy. ‘You can tape the show, you’ve done that before.’

  ‘Oh great. Six months of no connection without erection and now you want to row me in on your kids. What’s the matter, the nanny give notice?’ Lovat’s protectiveness towards his family appeared to Isabel to be an insult to her; the last thing she wanted was to be lumbered with kids, whatever their parentage, especially three precocious, noisy brats and a drooling baby. ‘Count me out, I’ve got proofs to check.’

  Panic knotted his stomach when he considered the possibility of another rejection, and a more public one since Isabel had procured a high profile for both of them in her progress across the celebrity chessboard of the city. He had nothing with which to restrain her, since she ignored his opinions and laughed at criticism.

  The business stabilized his life. Isabel was uninterested in anything old, and did not appreciate the glamour which his stock in trade held for him, or how sweet were the triumphs of his new career. From three separate sources he borrowed half a million pounds which, added to Don Tuttlingen’s stake, gave him enough to buy a Van Gogh landscape from a small French dealership. He knew, and the joy of that certainty was enormous and swelled his heart every time he looked at it, that it was a far better picture than the dealer had rated it, and he knew that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was assembling works for a major exhibition of the painter’s Provençal landscapes. In New York he picked the right ears to hear of his acquisition. The painting was included in the show, and sold on handsomely afterwards. He kept the catalogue in his office for months, open at the page bearing his name as the owner of the work.

  ‘They insured that show for a billion dollars’ – Isabel was unimpressed. ‘That’s sick. How can a little heap of paint and canvas be worth a billion dollars?’

  ‘You don’t understand. Insurance valuations are usually done by auction houses, who quote the maximum price on a painting to maintain the image of its market value. Then people are tempted to sell.’ Lovat thought he was helping her to be better informed.

  ‘That’s bent,’ she announced without hesitation. ‘Why don’t you take up stealing and cut out the middle men? Send the insurance money to Ethiopia.’ But she came to the opening on his arm, in a Lacroix toreador suit and hat.

  The art market was rapidly turning into a casino, and there were going to be more losers than winners. Lovat was enough of an inverted snob to relish the new atmosphere, although as a dealer, the game could go either way for him. The big auctioneers were trying to by-pass the professionals and sell directly. An auction sale, once a calm, discreet affair attended largely by the cartel of dealers, became a major social event, crowded by people in evening dress who applauded winning bids as if they were operatic arias. Berrisford’s began the trend with a sale of Pre-Raphaelites, and knowing that Hugh had no taste for the genre Lovat suspected the influence of his ex-wife. The champagne flowed and the publicity department – Berrisford’s had never before considered such a vulgar enterprise – orchestrated coverage by Vogue in four countries.

  ‘She’s a fool, going into the business. I don’t know what she’s doing it for – she always said she hated it, she doesn’t understand it and she’ll ruin them if they give her a chance.’ He was not aware that he was smiling when he spoke, but such signs never escaped Isabel, who simply demanded:

  ‘Why are you so down on her all the time? Most men are thrilled when their old lady goes out to work.’

  Isabel seemed to see no reason to support his business in any way. Indeed, she openly complained about it. ‘I don’t have to eat dinner with some cruddy bankers,’ she announced. ‘They give me toxic schlock syndrome. Can’t three guys make conversation without a woman to oil the wheels? What’s the deal with them anyway?’

  ‘I want to open up a line of credit for the firm, I need backing.’

  ‘You want to lend people money to buy piccies they can’t afford. Lease another brain cell – the one you got must be getting lonely.’

  The more wayward she was, the more attractive she became and the more his life without her seemed a dismal wasteland. Isabel in fact considered that he was the perfect springboard for the next phase in her career, and was determined to marry him because where she was going she needed all the straight credentials she could get. But the idea of behaving pleasingly towards an intended spouse seemed ridiculous to her.

  Since the one acceptable gift he had to offer her was his social position, Lovat chose the most glamorous date in his diary for his proposal. A sale of Fauve and late Impressionist pictures was to be staged in Monte Carlo as part of a benefit for Princess Grace’s children’s hospital. The major works on offer were by Cézanne; Lovat had been commissioned to acquire one by his old Japanese associates and on his own account he had his eye on some Matisse cut-paper pictures about which he had an instinct. Isabel was persuaded to knock a five-day window in her diary, and he rented a yacht.

  By the time they flew back to London they were both tanned, relaxed and married. The wedding had been conducted in the middle of the Mediterranean sea by the British consul who had waited all his career to be roused by a romantic couple demanding a special licence. That had been Isabel’s idea. ‘Why wait? If we’re going to do it let’s do it. We couldn’t go home and plan anything half as romantic as this, you clever old possum.’ Maybe it had been the cramped cabin, or perhaps the word ‘old’, or the way Isabel suddenly lay back and expected him to thrill her because it was their wedding night, but consummating the marriage had been an unexpected struggle.

  In his office, Lovat met another unforeseen difficulty. A fax fr
om the shippers informed him that the export licence needed for the Cézanne had been withheld, pending a submission to the French Ministry of Culture and Communication from the European Heritage Foundation. He imagined this body to be some offshoot of the European bureaucracy, and set his assistant the task of research, confident that a telephone call to the right person was all that would be necessary to free the painting for his buyer.

  ‘I don’t think you’re going to like this.’ The young man sidled into his room, holding a sheaf of fax messages against his chest. ‘I’ve checked out the board, they’re mostly museum people, a few politicians and academics, but look here …’

  He put the Foundation’s letterhead on the desk, pointed to the list of patrons at the bottom and retreated towards the door. Lovat’s eyes immediately locked on one name – Hugh Berrisford.

  ‘If he wants a fight, he can have it! Hugh Berrisford can’t think he can screw me for two million – if he does, he’s a bigger fool than I thought.’ Lovat reached for the telephone and dialled the number of Hugh’s direct line.

  When Bianca answered, his blood seethed. ‘You can’t speak to my father, he’s in Paris today.’ Her voice had the cool, liquid tone that maddened him. ‘I know all about this, I dealt with it for him, but there’s nothing we can do, Lovat. It was a board decision … nothing to do with us.’