White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Don’t give me that crap. The painting isn’t a significant work …’ If she had been involved then without doubt this was an act of hostility. Not content with destroying his personal life, she was starting a business vendetta. That must have been her whole purpose in joining the firm. The clear flame of Lovat’s fury was burning higher with every second.

  ‘The board considers that it is. They’ve submitted a request for the licence to be refused, but it’s up to the French and the minister. You can make a counter-submission …’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I can do.’

  ‘Lovat, don’t shout at me.’

  He took a deep breath and spoke with all the menace he could command. ‘Don’t let’s kid ourselves, shall we? You know what this is about. If you take me on in this, Bianca, you’ll be ruined. You’ve enough arrogance and stupidity to shoot yourself down and bring the whole of Berrisford’s with you. And if you don’t ruin yourself, I’ll do the job for you. You’re dead either way, I promise that. I’m the one who keeps promises, remember?’

  15. Monte Carlo, 1914

  Nothing delights a newly qualified sophisticate so much as the opportunity to initiate another into the pleasures for which she has only just acquired a taste. On the long train journey across Poland, Germany, the Low Countries and finally France, Lydia travelled in a private stateroom in the greatest possible luxury; in addition to the comforts she had ordered herself, she was welcomed with an ornamental bucket of caviar, chocolates, a small icon in a silver case and a bouquet too large for the table with a card which assured her that Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev eagerly anticipated her arrival in Monte Carlo. Leo, who travelled by the same train, had only the second-class ticket purchased for him by the company; with no motive other than her own diversion, she invited him to join her every day and there was hardly a haystack which she did not point out to him to explain its exotic foreign significance.

  They left Russia in the muddy exhaustion of early spring, when half-melted snow still lay in dirty strips by the hedges and lumps of ice floated in the turbulent rivers. Here and there a few small leaves unfurled or some thin blades of grass struggled from the waterlogged earth, but the landscape as a whole was a picture of chill desolation.

  As the express thundered southwards they had the impression of hurtling through the season itself. Once past Warsaw the countryside was in the full enthusiasm of spring, carpeted with blossoming orchards. The ditches had swollen into rivulets. Mating birds perched on the signal posts, joyously proclaiming their attractions. In the meadows beside the railway track, newborn calves, alarmed by the monstrous train, rolled their soft eyes and started juvenile stampedes.

  Lydia was adept at passing time, and found Leo for once willing to lay aside his books and play cards with her to beguile the tedious hours. She sat with the pug dog curled on the seat in a fold of her blue velveteen travelling costume and produced one amusement after another from a deep leather-covered box with brass fittings, a larger relative of her jewel case. Beneath the brim of her little toque hat covered in lapis blue ribbon rosettes her eyes shone and she laughed easily. This new phase of her life, and the renewal of her love, filled her with eagerness and she was impatient to arrive and to begin work. Leo was showered with information, words in German and Italian, descriptions of the delights ahead.

  Nothing marked the train’s progress more tellingly than the quality of the food which the maid fetched from the restaurant car. Cabbage and haphazardly butchered meat were replaced by good roasts and potatoes as they sped through Germany, and by the time the Belgian border was passed she was able to press him to try foie gras and truffled poussin. In her company Leo was enthusiastic, but when he returned alone to his uncomfortable narrow compartment his mind was overcast and he criticized himself mercilessly.

  He acknowledged that he was jealous, unable to forget that every new delight which she showed him now she had first shared with Orlov. Jealousy indicated that he loved her still, even though she had grown from a silly girl whose greed for high living was excusable to a worldly, selfish woman whose light-mindedness was almost a crime. And he was married now, to a fine soul worth a thousand of Lydia, so why should his heart leap every morning when he heard Antra, her Latvian maid, exclaiming softly in her own language as she struggled down the swaying corridor to summon him?

  In four days they arrived at Monte Carlo, where the newly inaugurated Ballets Russes tradition required the season to begin. ‘Ah! At last! Can you smell it, Leo? That divine spicy smell of the Côte?’ She hung playfully from the handrail, feeling her light muslin skirt blow in the balmy air. Although it was still early in the morning, the sun cast hard-edged shadows across the platform. Palm trees waved above the low station buildings. ‘It’s all so bright, so hot! How I love it! Look at the flowers. Look, you can even see the sea already. I shall dance so much better here, the air is so warm. You know, I do believe in Russia even in the heat of summer we never feel truly warm, our poor limbs can never forget the bitter cold of winter.’

  Leo was silent. A sheen of perspiration appeared immediately at the roots of his hair and he ran his finger round the edge of his uncomfortable collar.

  Among the figures in soft pastel clothes who met the train were Inna, who at once seized Leo by the arms and reclaimed him with many kisses, and Serioza Grigoriev, the company manager, who greeted Lydia with a small bouquet. Diaghilev himself was in Moscow and would not rejoin the company until the season had begun. ‘And whatever you do,’ Inna counselled her with flaunting condescension, ‘when he gets here, don’t mention Vaslav to Sergei Pavlovich.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? You’re so cut off in Petersburg, I forget. They had a terrible bust-up. Vaslav ran off and married some Hungarian girl in Buenos Aires. That was a bolt from the blue all right. Chinchilla’s madder than the seventh level of hell. They say he’s been out of his mind all winter. He can’t be wounded so much personally, they were coming to the end of the road anyway, but for the company he is quite distraught. He’s sworn he’ll ruin him. And in the meantime he’ll do anything to get some excitement into this season.’

  This was clearly a jibe at Lydia, which, in the confusion of arrival, she did not register. Inna wound herself around Leo’s arm. ‘At least we won’t have to struggle with Vaslav’s choreography any more – out of bad comes good. You’ll be the star of this season, my love, no doubt about that.’

  On their last trip Prince Orlov and Lydia had bought a house on the Cap d’Ail, which he had named the Villa Cassandra for some reason which Lydia had not understood but which had given him some cynical amusement. She travelled directly there, eager to see the new tennis court which he had ordered to be built in the park, and the redecoration which she had commanded. The servants were permanently in residence and had been telegraphed to expect her arrival, and in addition Tata and Grigoriev had thoughtfully inspected the house the day before to make sure the preparations were faultless.

  The site was dramatic, the buildings with their balustraded terraces tumbling down the side of a steep hill overhanging the sea, with cascades of pale blue plumbago growing wild amongst the red crags. The four guest rooms were at the highest level, with the suite occupied by Lydia and Orlov below it, the reception rooms yet lower and the servants’quarters and the garage at the level of the winding lane which linked the estate to the coast road.

  She found the whole place as charming as she had hoped. Orlov’s classical predilections had dictated her new decor; the artist had just retouched the trompe-l’oeil ceiling in the dining room, a copy of a Roman mosaic in which Neptune presided over gambolling dolphins. The principal bathroom was also in Roman style, copied shamelessly and, she intended, flatteringly from Kchessinskaya’s bathroom in her new house in Petersburg, with which the ageing prima was so taken that she regularly used the room for parties.

  The bronze, Empire-style lamps and fittings, which had been ordered from Paris, were exactly as she had imagined the
m. A pleasing aroma of beeswax and lavender rose from the dark wooden floors; the interiors were dim and cool, in contrast to the bright glare outside, and white curtains blew at the french windows.

  Her butler presented her with a young dove with cinnamon-brown plumage which had flown into the garden that morning. From its exhausted condition they concluded that it had flown from Africa, and she named it Dido. In a few days it recovered and became tame, arriving at her breakfast tray on the terrace each morning to peck croissant flakes from the white cloth. She found that she was lonely; longing for Orlov was forbidden, the better to play him in Paris. Charlotte’s company was more acutely missing; she needed a permanent audience now, someone to respond to every word and applaud her smallest move.

  ‘I feel like someone who looks in the mirror and sees no one there,’ she wrote to her son’s governess, ‘or Narcissus bereft of Echo. There are plenty of English here, but they don’t care for the ballet, I’m told most of them have never seen it, that when they go to London Lulu Kyasht and Pavlova are relegated to interludes between the comedians in their music-hall shows. All the same, when I hear their accents I think of you.’ She had sealed the letter before remembering an omission; the envelope was torn open and she scrawled a postscript, ‘Kiss Kolya for me three times and tell him I will bring our dove home for him when I come.’

  Each morning she was driven through the town to their rehearsal rooms, in a square, five-storey building the colour of yellow ochre which was built right on the edge of the Mediterranean. The rooms were cooled by sea breezes. When the shutters were closed against the heat, stripes of bright sunlight fell across the floor. Here the dancers took classes all morning, then rehearsed in the afternoon, or stood patiently while their costumes were fitted.

  Her Paris debut had been planned in the imposing pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty, and the Black Swan pas de deux from Swan Lake, both partnered by the reliable Adolph Bolm. With Tata she was to appear in Mikhail Mikhailovich’s Sylphides. With Diaghilev’s new discovery, Leo Massine, a timid, large-eyed lad of eighteen from Moscow, she was to dance in Scheherazade and in a new ballet, Joseph, as the seductive wife of Potiphar; The Legend of Salome was to be revived, with an extended solo for her at the finale. But Lydia found to her chagrin that she had been scheduled to alternate in the role with Inna.

  ‘Not my choice, Lydia, I swear to you.’ Leo’s pale eyes begged to be believed but she did not waste a single thought on his possible motives. She needed the status of a prima ballerina, unrivalled by any other except of course Tata, who after all had six years of seniority on her side.

  ‘Inna can’t dance Salome,’ she announced in a final tone. ‘She’s brittle and spiky, and about as sensual as an umbrella frame. And you’re telling me this new dance is intended to be wild and full of animal sexuality and cause the kind of sensation that Vaslav used to raise? Inna’s not up to that – she’ll look absurd.’

  She was pleased to note that Leo did not dispute for one instant her low opinion of his wife’s erotic potential. ‘I know, I know, but what can I do? Sergei Pavlovich promised it to her.’

  ‘As a reward for recruiting you, I suppose. We’ll see about that. What happens here is of no consequence, anyway.’ All her energies were focused on the future, on Paris, on the moment when she would be acclaimed by the huge auditorium of the Opéra, by the most discerning audience in the world, in the centre of the fashionable hurricane that the Ballets Russes season had become, and Prince Orlov would once again be forced to claim her before them all.

  In the meantime, she was well supplied with distractions. The dancers were the smart guests of the season. The rich and well born fought to entertain them. All along the Riviera the cry of ‘The Russian dancers are here!’ turned hostesses emerald with envy. Incessant invitations to dances, suppers and parties, to this villa, that yacht, the Sporting Club and the Eden Hotel arrived at Grigoriev’s office and, following Diaghilev’s policy of inducing word-of-mouth success by expert social manoeuvring, they were encouraged to accept. Many of the most cosmopolitan society figures in St Petersburg were already installed in their own villas, and Lydia found herself sought after in addition by princesses and grand duchesses with whom she was barely on nodding terms back home.

  By day, Lydia worked like a machine. Her spirit was abstracted, fuelling an inferno of rage in Leo, who at first showered her with criticism. Their initial rehearsals were marked by the airing of every ancient difference between them. ‘You heathen, you philistine – God, why did I ever agree to work with you again? If you despise me, can’t you at least have some respect for the music? You’re as expressive as a windmill today. The audience will die laughing at this rate.’

  Fortunately his attacks rolled off her complacent heart like water off a duck’s back. ‘Oh have a heart, Levrusha,’ she would respond without much concern, ‘I’m hung over this morning, you must know how much champagne I drank last night. You were pouring it for me so attentively after all!’

  ‘I don’t know how you can behave like this – you’ve done nothing but eat and drink since we arrived and look at you!’

  ‘That lobster was heavenly – you ate your share, I saw you.’

  ‘But you’re putting on weight, ruining your line …’

  ‘Oh, so you agree I had a little beauty to spoil?’

  ‘For the love of God, can’t you ever be serious?’ He refused to soften his harsh tone, but her old flirtatious tricks were unexpectedly reassuring. The sunwarmed pleasure-stuffed life of Monte Carlo filled him with suspicion, and, temporarily unable to occupy the creative high ground, he felt disoriented and aware of working alongside artists who were far more at ease in the daring atmosphere of the Ballets Russes.

  The ideas that were dangerously progressive in St Petersburg were here accepted as the norm, and the avant-garde was flirting with cubism, surrealism and jazz, influences he did not understand. The opinion in the company was that Mikhail Mikhailovich was finished as a choreographer; it was expedient to give the public the Fokine ballets which had been so successful in the first years, like Les Sylphides and Scheherazade, but by now they were creaking old standards which Diaghilev was always threatening to sell, scenery, costumes and all. Leo remained a little in awe of his former mentor but dared not defend him.

  Everyday transactions reinforced his sense of inferiority. He discovered that his French accent was poor and he needed to speak carefully to be understood, that if he went into a cafe for a drink he was never certain whether he should leave a tip, or how much it should be. The company was made up of dancers from all over Europe, who had learned a variety of styles and had all manner of strange expectations. When he faltered, Inna thoughtlessly corrected him. They squabbled continually and he felt his control of his life crumbling.

  Lydia, without any particular intention to be kind, introduced Leo to this intimidating foreign world with the same thoughtful grace that Orlov had employed in initiating her. She seemed always to be at his side, telling him what to expect in a light tone which carried no implication of gaucheness on his part, which was generous considering his inability to remember two new names in an evening.

  ‘You can leave your cocktail, the servant will bring it,’ she would whisper, effectively leading him to supper. ‘How delightful, you’re seated between our hostess and the Marquesa Passano – that’s her husband with the black beard; they have a villa on the Cap. She’s Russian, the daughter of Shchedrin, the writer.’ At work it was the same. ‘Get the porters to move the piano now,’ she would advise as midday approached. ‘Or they won’t be back until four – they all take a siesta after lunch.’ ‘We can let this pose just flow into the preparation for the next – they don’t wait for encores here like we do in Russia.’

  To blow even more fiercely on the never-quenched embers of his love, the new dance for Salome became something which extracted from them both a strain of sexual inspiration which they had never found in the sexual act itself. Salome was required to dance w
ith the head of John the Baptist in a way which indicated that her child’s innocence had for ever been corrupted in the decadent milieu of Herod’s court. The dance expressed the first passion of her body fatally perverted to the total possession of her trophy, which she would at last kiss lingeringly on its dead and bloody lips.

  After a day or two of hesitation, the entire dance was created in an afternoon and neither of them quite knew what had taken place between them. It was as sensational as Sergei Pavlovich had demanded, beginning with a sinuous evocation of the veil dance which had won Salome her trophy and degenerating into wanton writhing on the floor. Lydia instinctively added to Leo’s instructions the things which he had imagined but dared not say in words. She ran on legs which trembled in sexual frenzy, froze with her back arched like a cat in season and held the severed head to her bosom with a gesture so subtle, but yet so vile, that it shocked them both.

  They fell into the habit of rehearsing into the evening until the point came when they were tired and spoke no more. Then they would change, and dine together at a little restaurant with a balcony overlooking the harbour, and within an hour the bizarre enchantment of their work passed and Lydia became her old eager self. ‘Let’s try every single cheese they’ve got,’ she suggested, her eyes large as a child’s. ‘I’ve always wanted to do that.’

  ‘Lydia, how can you? On top of that chocolate mess … you can’t possibly let yourself get fat now.’ Although, he had to admit, it suited her to carry a little more weight; it never settled around her legs, but softened her neck and shoulders. With round cheeks and a little cushion under her chin she looked herself like a tempting morsel.

  ‘Bavarois, my love, not mess. Wasn’t it absolutely luscious? I cannot understand it, I’ve tried asking for recipes and taking them home but Denis never gets them right He says the chocolate in Petersburg is hopelessly inferior, it won’t do anything it should. Now tell us,’ she commanded the waiter with a flick of her glove, ‘what’s that one with the black crust? Is it good? It looks strong … is it goat? How can you resist, Leo? Here, try a piece. Don’t waste this wonderful opportunity – with all the goats in the Caucasus we can’t make anything so delicious at home.’