White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  Bianca remained on her feet, looking with obvious disdain at the framed Hockney prints on the walls. When the phone call was over she spoke without haste. ‘The reasoning is obvious – half this collection is rubbish, quite frankly, not worth a dealer’s storage charges. We are in a position to do something about that – there’s a lot of hype around a big sale. The very fact of being included is often enough to enhance the value of an item. Of course, that can’t happen with a private sale. In this sort of case what we can do is fix a price for the whole collection – it’s known as a global reserve.’

  ‘How much?’ He was editing his body language, holding his arrogant pose, but his nasal Yarpie accent was suddenly pronounced.

  ‘I’d need to get back to the Fine Art Department, but I’d guess three point seven.’ This was not a man to be charmed by coyness.

  ‘Right – when will you call me?’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  Within thirty seconds they were waiting for the glass-walled lift.

  ‘What’s this global reserve idea?’ Martin asked as soon as the doors closed.

  ‘I made it up.’ She flashed him a smile full of devilry. ‘Flashy little hyena – he annoyed me.’

  Martin took on the task of persuading Hugh to agree to the offer, but she noticed that her father’s face had the familiar closed expression which meant that reason was never going to penetrate his defences. ‘Whether we like it or not, there is competition and it’s getting more aggressive,’ Martin argued. ‘There’s nothing new in this; auction houses have been lending money for years. It’s a traditional way of keeping the market moving.’

  ‘Not for us. We’ve never needed to dabble in finance.’ Hugh was fiddling with his white agate paper knife, a sure sign of irritation. ‘If that Chicago cowboy who bought Sotheby’s wants to overheat the art business that’s his affair. Roaring inflation won’t do anyone any good in the end.’

  ‘Least of all us if we can’t keep up with it.’ Bianca knew that Hugh would never be swayed by an argument once his pride was challenged. ‘We’ll have to lose this one, Martin. It was my fault, I should have kept my mouth shut. He’ll be stupid to sell to a dealer, but that’s the kind of man he is.’ She made as if to leave.

  ‘You think he’s stupid?’ Hugh now felt responsible for the buyer’s impending mistake.

  ‘Not stupid stupid, but he doesn’t know anything about art – and why should he, growing up in Kenya? Of course we’re here to advise people like that, but if they don’t have confidence in our advice they won’t take it.’

  ‘No confidence?’ Now her father was concerned for Berrisford’s good name.

  ‘He understands finance, all right. From his angle he can’t see our difficulty, so he’s bound to wonder what our motives really are. He’s a developer, he’s used to doing business with sharks.’

  ‘I see.’ He made a tent out of his long fingers, an affectation which drove Bianca crazy. She looked away, knowing that any pressure from her would tip the scales the wrong way. ‘You are right in a way, Martin. A guaranteed reserve is something we’ve done before, not for quite a few years but we have done it. There are some important statues in the collection. – I wouldn’t like to see the best of them quietly disposed of without the right people getting a chance to bid for them. Wouldn’t be good.’ From being corrugated with anxiety, Martin’s forehead began to clear. ‘We’ll save this chap from himself, then, shall we?’

  Before he could change his mind, Bianca made the call in front of him, and a mood of expansion seemed to infuse the room.

  ‘Lending to sellers is only taking a gamble on your own expertise.’ Satisfaction laced Martin’s mobile face with smiles. ‘Lending to buyers will be the next thing. Pre-financing. Where Sotheby’s lead, the market is bound to follow.’

  ‘I can’t see how that can do anything else but create a conflict of interest and compromise the trust that people have in us,’ was the starchy response from Hugh.

  ‘That argument just doesn’t butter the peas with the buyers we’re seeing now. They don’t understand; they think that if they can borrow to finance any other kind of investment, why not art? If our business doesn’t keep pace there’ll be a loss of confidence. Values might even drop.’

  There was a pause while Hugh considered this terrible possibility. ‘It has happened before.’ His voice was diminished.

  Martin quickly restated his opinion. ‘We need a credit mechanism, we need to smarten up our act and we need to boot the dealers out of the market.’

  Afterwards he told Bianca, ‘When you were a little girl your father was a lot bolder and he got his fingers burned. Guaranteed a murky little Canaletto that didn’t make the reserve. Sheer bad judgement. But he was humiliated in public, and the firm was knocked back by it as well. He’s never forgotten.’

  ‘It’s so strange – I’ve never thought of him as conservative – as parents they were so modern they embarrassed us.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say he was conservative. His ideas are progressive, but he doesn’t enjoy taking risks. If you want to be a high flyer you must never look down, it breaks your nerve.’

  The smartening-up operation was delegated to Bianca, who was appointed Senior Marketing Executive, but she found nothing challenging in purging the firm’s literature of technical language, finding a faster printer and hiring a decorator to transform the Mayfair building from something that might have been mistaken for a lumber room into a headquarters fit for an image-conscious international company. The Tollemache collection realized over £4 million, and a new optimism flooded the freshly painted corridors.

  Having discovered the thrill of snatching a sale away from a rival, she was eager to repeat it and once her mind was focused on new business, she discovered that many useful memories had been banked in her years with Lovat. Inevitably, he was the rival who most often discovered that Martin Pownall from Berrisford’s was giving him hot competition. One loss – of a series of searingly coloured London river scenes by Derain for which he had a red-hot buyer in Canada – was enough to turn Lovat’s thoughts to new tactics.

  He canvassed support from other dealers, who sank their rivalries willingly to attack their common enemy. Editorials appeared in glossy periodicals, civil servants were consulted, politicians lobbied and questions asked in the House of Commons. A few months later a letter arrived at Berrisford’s from the Department of Trade and Industry announcing that a review of the legislation and guidelines relating to auctions was planned.

  Shortly afterwards a team of investigators invaded Mayfair, determined to penetrate the wall of gentlemanly reticence which hid traditions that in any other business would have been considered sharp practice if not outright fraud. They expressed schoolgirlish distaste for secret reserve prices and phony bids designed to drive up prices, and a vulgar cynicism about the industry’s moral health. Bianca, who until then had considered these things dubious, joined the chorus of outrage and asserted that civil servants did not understand the market’s reactions. In the report, Berrisford’s escaped specific criticism, but joined the larger houses in a counter-attack. The Minister promised stiffer regulations, a committee was formed, but after eighteen months nothing more happened.

  In this period Lovat and Bianca met rarely and communicated as little as possible. Once the decision to join her father had been taken, Bianca moved her life and family to London. The two eldest boys were accepted as day pupils by a public school in West London; Orlando was enrolled in a special school for dyslexics close to their old home north of the park.

  When it came to choosing a new house, her resistance to Chelsea had not diminished; she found she was so full of loathing for her childhood home that she wanted a substantial distance between them. Charlotte found a tall Regency house on the river at Hammersmith, where watery reflections shimmered on the drawing-room ceiling when the sun shone. She fetched Orlando from school and visited almost every afternoon, attracted to the house by a magnetism which Bianca at first did
not understand.

  Had Olivia ever performed an act of motherhood beyond giving birth, her alienation would have been a double blow. As it was, Bianca passed through a period of horror and loathing for her mother, then reached a plateau from which she was to be seen quite clearly as a woman so afraid that she would never measure up to the conventional criteria of goodness that she had renounced them defiantly and condemned herself to empty rebellion for the rest of her days. Bianca found that she was able to pity her; Charlotte, who had often stifled her urge to mother the abandoned, bewildered child, was now free to give her all the maternal care she needed.

  It was a healing, a strange, beautiful restoration of the parts of her soul which had been denied since her infancy. Bianca luxuriated in her grandmother’s care: the fussing, the worrying, the advising, the undemanding presence in the background of her life in which she could root her energy. Charlotte seemed always to be there when the weekends were impossible to plan, offering to ferry the children between their hard-pressed, hostile parents. She greeted every new development in Bianca‘s life as if she had specifically predicted it, saying simply ‘Oh yes,’ when the tailored suits replaced the self-consciously interesting clothes of her married days, and trips to Geneva or New York were scheduled instead of meetings with the Jacob Sheep Society. Charlotte said little, but she buffered the connections between all the members of the family, helping to weave them into a new pattern so that the hole torn by Lovat was covered and the fabric stronger than before.

  Bianca thrived. The wretched exhaustion of the last months of her marriage was hardly even a memory. A day, which had seemed interminable, was now a delicious succession of incidents, over too soon. The anger which she felt towards Lovat was diffused between her father and her male colleagues, transformed into initiatives and tough competition. Ideas welled up in her mind and instantly flowed out as actions. She disposed of herculean work-loads and then, with equal ease, delegated the tasks that weighed her down and instinctively reserved for herself the work that had the most leverage in raising Berrisford’s profits. Her skin glowed, her eyes gleamed, and her body quickly acquired shape and a vibrant energy of movement.

  The endless maternal patience which had previously been her cardinal quality evaporated. Lovat was startled to find that her tolerance for changed schedules and last-minute replanning dropped rapidly. She developed a sharp tongue and a temper to go with it. He often felt forced to cancel or rearrange the boys’ visits because none of his associates took any account of his family feelings. She ought to have understood, being now in the same business, but she did not.

  ‘I refuse to take out my feelings on the children,’ Bianca told herself and anyone else who would listen. ‘I’ve got to be civilized about this even if their father screws up all the time.’

  ‘My children have suffered enough, it wouldn’t be right to turn them against their mother, no matter how strongly I feel,’ Lovat explained to Isabel, who was uninterested. Neither of them were able to live up to these noble intentions.

  Benedict, who sat for longer and longer in front of his computer, was most markedly affected by the ugly atmosphere between his parents, but all three boys lost a degree of confidence. Tom simply looked anxious and a few Bs appeared on his report cards where nothing but As had been before. Orlando became so violently energetic that he needed to be tired out before he was capable of sitting quietly at school, and was summoned half an hour early each day for an exercise period.

  The little girl was a joy to Bianca and an innocent thorn in her father’s side. Lovat had never really understood why having a family should mean that doorways were barred with unsightly half-gates, cupboards were locked and the stereo moved to an unreasonably high shelf. Nor did he believe that he needed to cut short important conversations because there were children in the house.

  An inkling of understanding came when he wound up a long call from Don tying up the ends of the Derain affair and Tom guiltily suggested that his sister might have toddled out of the garage door. He found her in the main road which adjoined their street, standing in front of a builder’s van, her whole body scarlet with rage, screaming ‘Bad cat!’ over and over again. On the pavement an alsatian dog was chewing one of her shoes. The builder, two West Indian women at a bus stop and the skinhead leading the dog all abused him for his negligence.

  After her rescue Lizzie continued to scream for an hour and nothing would comfort her. When Charlotte arrived she suggested that gripe water might be calming but Lizzie fought against swallowing it and finally vomited the whole contents of her stomach. When she was returned to her mother, wet and retching, Charlotte worked very hard to stop the inflamed Bianca from calling her lawyer immediately.

  On another occasion Lovat was putting away some clean shirts in his dressing room when another call made it necessary for him to run downstairs to find a catalogue in his briefcase. After ten minutes of conversation he returned to find that Lizzie had taken all Isabel’s boxes of powder and tipped them out over the shirts. The child was happily flinging handfuls of the scented pile in the air. It was fine and clinging, extraordinarily difficult to wash off the walls. The curtains had to be dry cleaned – just taking them down was half an hour’s work. The shirts had to be re-laundered, and some of his suits sponged and pressed.

  Both Lizzie and Isabel slapped him, and Isabel also hit the child, hard enough to knock her to the ground. Lovat, shocked, lost his temper, but Isabel showed no emotion. ‘Don’t chuck a mental at me because you can’t control your disgusting kids. Dickhead – can’t you see what this means? I’m going to have to go on wearing the shit they use in make-up – I wouldn’t hang wallpaper with it. I’m late already, I’m out of here,’ was all she said, before stepping disdainfully around a screaming Lizzie and walking out of the house. She did not return until the next day, but his anger was still hot and they did not speak for a week.

  These episodes were minor in comparison with the day that Lizzie returned from her father’s house to Hammersmith with a small plastic envelope among the contents of her treasured miniature handbag. ‘S’opping,’ she announced, and tipped out the bag on the kitchen table. Hermione, now four months pregnant with her first child, picked up the envelope with the tips of her finger and thumb.

  ‘Tom,’ she called out as the boys ran past, ‘where did Lizzie get this from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ They were heading for the television.

  ‘It’s important, kiddo, come back here and think about it.’ There were some flecks of white in the corners of the envelope. Hermione blew on it to open it and sniffed the interior. ‘Was this at your father’s house?’

  ‘I know where she got it, it was in the downstairs bathroom on the floor. There were lots of them.’ Benedict was anxious not to miss the football which was due to start at any second.

  ‘Bea, come and look at this. Benny, now, tell me, was it empty like this or was there something in it? Sugar or something?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked blank.

  ‘Did you see her eating anything or licking anything?’

  ‘She’s always eating, she’s a pig,’ volunteered Orlando.

  ‘But this afternoon, anything out of this little bag.’ The boys shrugged and Hermione turned to her sister and lowered her voice. ‘There was coke in this, and when it was full, there was enough in it to kill her. I’m going to phone the hospital.’

  At the back of Bianca’s mind a small, rational voice argued that her sister was speaking with the paranoia of the pregnant, that Lizzie would have reacted already if she had ingested any of the drug, and that unlimited bureaucratic harassment could be provoked by a hospital visit. But the joy of having Lovat in the wrong was very tempting.

  ‘They say to take her to casualty straight away.’ Hermione put down the telephone, her eyes wide with almost superstitious anxiety. ‘Lovat never ever did drugs. Do you think the Aussie has turned him on?’

  ‘Who knows what Lovat does nowadays?’ Bianca reache
d for her daughter’s jacket, trying to pretend that she was not delighted to be able to accuse her ex-husband of a major crime. After three hours avoiding drunken derelicts in the casualty ward and an overnight stay in the hospital she was smouldering with righteous anger. Then a junior doctor, a man hardly twenty-five years old, discovered that she was a single parent with four children and a full-time job; being unable to interpret the signals given by her Chanel blouse and Kenzo jeans, he called her into an empty side ward and questioned her, clearly suspecting that she was an addict, a drug dealer and an unfit mother. She returned home in an icy rage, related the affair to her lawyers and instructed them to inform Lovat that he was to be denied access to the children.

  At the front door next morning appeared what Hermione described as ‘a typical bourgeois cow of a social worker with her eyes on stalks thinking that this was some sort of drug-sodden temple of ritual child abuse’. Hermione did what her sister, enraged as she was, had decided was unworthy behaviour. She invited the woman to recline on the Aubusson cushions, contemplate the self-portrait of Walter Berrisford, R.A. with his grandchildren, have some Earl Grey tea in a Bridgewater spongeware mug, and, once fully aware of the privilege, luxury and high aesthetic heritage of the home, discuss the possibility that the peculiar girl on the television, with the pink hair and horrible voice, who was the children’s stepmother, was not merely taking cocaine but also dealing in it.

  If Lovat was angry when a mini-bus full of police officers woke him at 4 a.m. and searched the house, Isabel was hysterical with fury. ‘I don’t use drugs, my friends don’t use drugs, your fucking ex is trying to get me deported and you’re doing fuck all about it!’ she screamed. ‘Jeez! What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you just peel your balls and let her whizz’em up in the blender?’

  It was five months before he was permitted to see his children again, with their grandmother or their nanny present to make up for his inadequacy as a parent. It cost him the price of a good English watercolour in lawyers’ bills, and severe damage to his self-esteem.