White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

The reception was the sensation which he had predicted, she made sure of that. She knew full well that telephone lines between the Côte and Paris would hum the following afternoon with reports of the style in which the new Russian prima ballerina entertained, and she saw the event as an important part of her strategy to ensure that she would capture Paris triumphantly. Ostentation moved Lydia as no other endeavour could; she knew that spring on the Côte was nothing but a succession of fetes and fantasies, so to be memorable it would be necessary to employ all her creative powers.

  The automobiles filled the small pine wood above the villa, and the overspill lined up in the lane itself, and from them descended two hundred guests, princes, aristocracy, millionaires, patrons of the ballet and, for their decorative value, a few dozen flower-like debutantes and their fresh-faced escorts.

  Lydia heard that a great violinist from Moscow, Mischa Elman, was in Nice and begged him to play. Floodlights and seating were hired to transform the new tennis court into an outdoor auditorium, and Massine and three of the young newcomers in the company performed The Awakening of Flora in front of a backdrop of cypress trees and marble columns. A hundred myrtle bushes in pots scented the air.

  The gardens were illuminated by torch flares procured by the property master of the company, giving a pagan touch to a night which would otherwise have been merely elegant. A hundred lobsters were sacrificed for the buffet, which was prepared by a chef loaned by the elderly Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin who lived along the coast at Eze. There were fireworks at midnight. Lydia wore a gold tunic by Fortuny secured with tiny gold beads at the shoulders, with a draped underskirt of gold-encrusted dark red silk crepe. Cursing the fact that the Orlov necklace was in Petersburg and the yellow diamond collar in Paris, she wore it with a five-stranded collar of small pearls draped between vertical bars set with rubies, and had her French maid, for the Latvian girl was far too clumsy, mount a thin ruby and diamond collar on a red silk headband set off with a single black plume.

  Anxious that his company should get a reasonable night’s rest before their opening the next day, Diaghilev made sure that the party broke up at 2 a.m. by removing Tata, Massine, Bolm and Grigoriev in a group. Jean, the young artist who designed their posters, swooped out of the throng to take his arm with casual possessiveness. The two Germans on whose play Joseph was based followed, and Pablo, a young Spanish painter whom Diaghilev was trying to convince that cubism and ballet could be combined, was called to join them. At the rear trailed the thin, bespectacled figure of Igor Stravinsky with his equally diminutive wife, protesting mildly that in Russia no party ever started before 2 a.m.

  Within an hour the glittering crowd had drifted away, reminding each other of their deep understanding of the ballet by agreeing that dancers needed to follow an abstemious regime while they were working – hence, they all agreed at once, their imperishable beauty. A few couples deep in sentimental conversation remained, and on the tennis court a small group had turned their gilt chairs round in a circle and were enjoying a passionate argument on some musical topic.

  Lydia drifted triumphantly from room to room, supervising the servants with unusual benevolence. Six hours of uninterrupted admiration from all quarters had almost sated her. She felt deliciously drunk.

  Laughter floated up to the terrace on the warm night air; leaning over, she saw the group on the tennis court break up and walk towards the stone staircase, tossing their cigars into the bushes as they left. The last of the group was obviously a careful man, who lingered to extinguish every smouldering butt. She recognized him at once from the peculiar intensity of his movements. It was Leo.

  ‘You adorable man.’ He climbed the last few steps to the terrace and found her holding out her arms to him. ‘How beautifully you take care of me. Everyone else enjoys themselves without a thought of anything but pleasure, but Leonid Sergeyevich is wise, and thanks to him a forest fire is put out before it starts.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ he muttered, clearly flattered. As he drew close she noticed a film of perspiration on his forehead and his upper lip. His eyes involuntarily roamed over her body as she stepped forward. His normal wary tension was gone; he was quite drunk from vodka. She recognized the signs. The rest of his companions were out of sight.

  ‘Nothing! But for you, my love, my garden would be scorched earth. My rosemary and lavender, my myrtles – didn’t you like my myrtles, their smell is so delicate and sweet? Everything would have been burned, the inferno would have swept the whole hillside …’ She kissed him lingeringly on the mouth, her arms around his neck.

  ‘You’re exaggerating.’

  He seemed mesmerized, unable to move. She walked away to the balustrade and watched him watch her.

  ‘How long have we known each other? Do you know it’s almost twenty years?’ The words stole from her lips like a zephyr. ‘I’m so pleased. It makes me feel wonderful to know that, do you understand?’

  His mind was empty. She was moving again, a feline prowl in a circle around him. Perhaps if he stayed still, did not turn to face her, nothing would happen. Warm breath was on his neck, his ear. She was behind him. Her hands stroked his shoulders. Above them the quarter moon was bright as a newly minted coin.

  ‘And what would I have been without you – or you without me? Oh Leo, we have grown up like two vines, our destinies are wrapped around each other. You will always be in my life, won’t you? Whatever happens?’

  ‘What can possibly happen?’ She had spoken with childlike anxiety, which irritated him.

  ‘Anything can happen, Leo.’ He felt her body rise behind his, press against him. She bit his ear. He felt her lips against his neck, heard her breathing. Still he could not move. She realized that he was completely in her power, that whatever she chose to do he would follow.

  He felt her move away and his skin seemed suddenly cold. Hands reappeared around his chest, loosened the buttons of his jacket and pulled it away by the lapels. She was warm against him again for a moment while fingers tugged at his tie and discarded it, then his collar was unsnapped and her lips touched the nape of his neck. Again she withdrew and he stood swaying with longing until she touched him again. There was a whisper of falling silk and something brushed lightly against his calves. Then her hands tugged at his shirt tails, his back was exposed to the air and he felt her naked body, burning hot and soft as feathers, pressing against his skin.

  ‘You will always be with me, I know that, and I will be with you. You are in my soul, we can’t be separated. I have resisted you, I know. I was fearful of life, I wanted to be safe more than anything. But there is nothing to resist now, our spirits are together, they always have been. We are already one being. And I don’t believe in fighting Destiny, it’s impossible. Now I want to vanish into you, I want you to vanish into me, and where we once were there will be a new person.’ Her hands slowly roamed his bare chest; her spine undulating, she brushed her breasts against his back. Then she took his arm and turned him to face her. ‘Look at me, Leo. Remember me – no one else will ever see me like this. This is who I am with you.’

  The dress was a pool of gold around her feet. Above the ruby and pearl collar she held up her head, raised her white arms and began to pull out her hairpins. They fell to the ground one by one, the tiny metallic noises of their impact blending into the shrilling of the night insects. Her silk stockings gleamed in the moonlight, pale but not so pale as her skin. She plucked out the last pin and shook her hair free, deliberately displaying her trembling breasts.

  His mind was torn in two; half hated her for profaning his own sacred emotions, the love he had buried deep and secretly in his heart, which he cherished for its very hopelessness. But half of him was filled with joy and wanted only to seize her. He saw himself fall on his knees before her, but feared her contempt. Inertia finally lost its grip on him and he threw himself at her feet, kissing blindly whatever was under his lips, her shoes, her knees, a garter, her thighs. Her legs were shivering. She parted them for an ins
tant, releasing the sweet, wet perfume of her sex, then tangled her fingers in his hair and pulled him to his feet to kiss her.

  In her bedroom the belief came to him that he could in truth consume her through making love, and so possess her for ever. She willingly yielded her body to his; after Orlov’s soft limbs and familiar movements this hard body, bursting with force and power, excited her. She snarled and scratched like an animal. They fell from the bed and, uncaring, pursued their passion to its climax on the floor.

  He slipped immediately into a doze and she left him, sprawled with a sheet tangled around one foot like the victim of a massacre painted by Delacroix. The villa was quiet and restored to cleanliness and order. She walked from room to room, allowing the beauty to soothe her, feeling her legs heavy with the deep fatigue of satisfied lust. Then the need to care for her establishment gave her new energy, and she busied herself checking that the china and silver had been counted and stored away. Her imagination leaped a month ahead, to Paris, to Nikolai. She saw herself bringing to him the animalistic appetites which she had just discovered. Leo was forgotten as she perfected the choreography of her erotic scheme for Orlov.

  It was an hour before Leo awoke and found himself alone and chilled on the floor. He had the sensation that his heart was open like a full-blown rose in the warmth of the sun. A blazing happiness filled him, although he became aware that his body ached and his mouth was dry. He found water in the bathroom, then set off in search of Lydia.

  She was in the kitchen, where the draining boards were wet and the rich aromas of food still lingered, standing in the centre of the floor in a black silk kimono and frowning at the remains of the one glass which had been broken, faithfully retained on a dustpan for her inspection.

  ‘Ah, Leo, that’s good. Now you’re awake I’ll get the driver,’ she said, looking at him with well-mannered concern, as if they had only just met.

  ‘No, wait …’ Foreboding quenched his joy at once. Yes, what they had just done could have meant nothing to her. She was shallow enough; after twenty years he knew that at least. His dark-fringed eyes narrowed in disbelief.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she assured him, totally misunderstanding his concern. ‘I told him there was one last guest and not to fall asleep. Can you find your clothes?’ She moved to the service telephone in the comer and turned the handle. ‘Gaston, we’ll be ready for the car in five minutes.’

  Leo’s pride was as terrible as a madman’s rage, although the destruction it enacted was contained within himself. Lydia, who hardly paid him more than courteous attention until he left, did not remark that his old awkward tension bound his limbs once more, that his eyes seemed to sink under his brows and his lips pressed so tightly together that the skin above them turned white. The open portals of his spirit were walled up in those moments, all the tender surfaces of his soul were cauterized. He buried his love once more, considering it now an undead thing, a vampire which would leech his lifeblood unless he could discover some ritual of exorcism. In that vague hope, although he had vowed atheism all his life, he asked the chauffeur to take him to the cathedral where he joined the first mass of the day.

  16. London, 1986

  The fight between Bianca Berrisford and Lovat Whitburn was a duel of two champions struggling hand to hand while behind them two armies roared encouragement. Their personal battle was caught up in a war which broke out between auctioneers and art dealers. They fought over the new clients, whom Hugh Berrisford drily dismissed as the species Billionairis ignorans, men who had never thought much about art until they got rich. They used a new weapon, finance, and the strategies of the stock market to procure higher and higher prices. Art was an investment; buy the right Picasso and you could watch it appreciate at an adrenalin-pumping twenty per cent per annum, net of all costs. What’s more, art was sexy, it was instant public relations: buy paintings and a glamorous international profile was thrown in with the deal. Pictures, sculptures, furniture, ceramics, carpets – any decorative object might represent serious money.

  Dealers used the skills once polished on connoisseurs to court bankers instead. The auction houses offered loans for potential buyers, fifty per cent of the hammer price at four percent over base. No peacemaker was foolish enough to complain that paintings were becoming nothing but currency, with no meaning other than their price, because the prices leaped higher at every sale. A few disgruntled museum curators, unable even to dream of acquiring important works when they came on the market, bleated bitterly that art was the common property of mankind, but they were drowned in the din of combat.

  The whole of Europe became one big art auction, because the Billionairis species was not found there, but in the United States, Japan, Hong Kong or Australia. Hugh Berrisford persevered doggedly with the European Heritage Foundation while his colleagues wrote bitter articles for their periodicals accusing him of being a poacher turned gamekeeper. The concept of art as an investment, which had once offended him, became more acceptable when he was faced with the hypocritical onslaughts of his rivals. He had always felt a private uneasiness in selling Van Gogh, knowing that the painter never sold a picture in his life; trying to keep the artist’s work near his landscape, or in public galleries where it was accessible to all seemed an acceptable penance for the price Berrisford’s could extract for it. He strove to find a connection between the dead painters whose work fetched millions and living artists who could not make a living from their work, countering criticism with rambling editorials published only because of his position.

  After Sotheby’s opened their financial services department in New York, voices within Berrisford’s pleaded for changes, and Martin Pownall was loud among them. He was the most brilliantly persuasive man Bianca had ever encountered and he turned all his powers to the task of winning her to his side, knowing that Hugh was indecisive and relied on one chosen loyal associate to crystallize his thoughts. The role Lovat had once taken was now fulfilled by Bianca. Beneath his superior manner her father was hobbled by inner doubts, whereas she had the gift of conviction. Despite her ignorance and inexperience, he trusted her.

  Thin limbs agitating in acquisitive frenzy, Pownall scuttled across half the world in a quest for collections and estates, empathizing, flattering, reassuring. He had a matador’s sense of timing, knowing precisely the moment to press a cautious executor for a decision, but in his enthusiasm for the new he dashed from one deal to the next, leaving the details to Bianca. She rushed after him in a snowstorm of paperwork, which he regarded as a waste of his abilities. ‘Bor-ing!’ he would sing, scribbling ‘BB to deal’on files barely a month old and tossing them into her lap as he reached for the telephone to set up his next target.

  Sitting in on his negotiations, she showed a quick grasp, a clear mind and an instinct for negotiation. Their first victory was the Tollemache estate: neo-classical sculptures collected in the nineteenth century by a biscuit millionaire, an eccentric who bought on impulse and displayed great pieces side by side with junk. His grandson, on inheriting a chaotic estate, offered the collection to Berrisford’s and then changed his mind:

  ‘A dealer’s given him a guarantee,’ Martin briefed Bianca as they left the office. ‘We’re going to have to match it at least, or lose the business. This sort of thing is happening more and more. Sharp little bastard, too. Trust him to shop around.’

  ‘He’s not still in biscuits, then?’ Bianca climbed into the taxi first, conscious of her legs. Her new red business suit made her feel like a majorette. How curious that it was right for a woman in business to wear short, tight bright clothes, but a mother was expected to be colourless and on the dull side of demure.

  ‘No, father sold the company to a multinational after the war, sank a fortune in a farm in Kenya and lost the lot after independence. The kid’s in property now, doing well I believe.’

  ‘They always want to do better, though, don’t they?’

  He was in his middle-thirties, spruce and confident in shirt sleeves. His office
was in a former warehouse in Hackney, converted by a fashionable architect to a cavernous workspace criss-crossed by steel walkways, and views from the vast windows were of derelict sites, scummy water and cranes. Always curious about artwork, Bianca looked at the plans on the draughtsman’s desk; under the title Nutmeg Wharf: Phase II were elevations of a thirty-floor building decorated with broken pediments and black marble.

  ‘At Berrisford’s we are wary of guarantees.’ Martin crossed his etiolated legs and adopted an avuncular tone. ‘Our experience in the Seventies was that they created a false market, an inflationary situation.’

  ‘That’s your problem. Doesn’t concern me, I’m only selling once, aren’t I?’ Behind his black marble table, the quarry leaned back in his steel-framed chair, his teeth bared in a cocksure smile.

  ‘And naturally the best price is important to you. A dealer almost certainly won’t get you the best price at a sale, because he’ll take his commission.’

  ‘The figures take account of that. He’s giving me three point three mill guaranteed on seven pieces, so what have I got to lose?’ A light flashed from one of the three telephones and he excused himself to answer it, not troubling to lower his voice. ‘Tell him I’ll be out of this meeting in a couple of minutes,’ was his first response. Bianca considered that he was overdoing the pretence of having already made up his mind. She stood up and led Martin across the room out of earshot.

  ‘He knows we can do better. Why don’t we offer a guaranteed price on the whole collection? He’s desperate for cash and he doesn’t want any hassle. And if he’s stuck with that grotesque one-armed Pegasus he can hardly put it in the atrium here. With the publicity we can get for the sale the lesser pieces will go for more than they’re worth, won’t they?’

  ‘OK, but you pitch it.’ Martin was annoyed with himself; instead of feeling confident in an old-established firm, the man had obviously felt patronized.