White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  His relationship with Isabel also suffered, but this was almost a benefit. She only spoke to him when she wanted him to escort her in public, and only touched him when she wanted sex. Why she wanted sex was something he did not understand. She performed without enjoyment, but it seemed to be a component of the personality she had constructed for herself, less essential than the red hair, the outrageous clothes and the lurid slang, just an ugly part of the sub-frame which made her femininity look genuine. She said she would rather have a lobotomy than children.

  Meanwhile Lovat felt alarmingly little desire for her miniature body with its sharp angles and ridiculous little pads of flesh. It did not invite exploration, or offer warm contours to his touch, or lie softly, heavily, receptively against him drawing out the heat of his lust. Isabel had a technique, the calculated application of one orifice after the other, which was efficient but nothing to do with pleasure. He felt as if she was merely raiding him for his useless sperm.

  Soon Lovat and Bianca found themselves in direct competition. Martin Pownall became Berrisford’s director of financial services, and Bianca was gratified to take over his responsibility for new business. Lovat, with as much prime stock as his plan required, embarked on the next phase, choosing and opening a new market.

  They reached the same conclusion by different routes of reasoning. Lovat saw clearly that among all the options he could have pursued, the work of the Russian avant-garde in the early part of the century fulfilled most perfectly all the criteria of highly commercial art. A huge volume of paintings, sculptures, designs, textiles, and decorative pieces had been suppressed within Russia from the time of Stalin. Now they lay in obscurity like a lake of undiscovered oil, and the first person to sink a well would tap an inexhaustible fortune.

  All her life, Bianca had been abnormally sensitive to the glamour of all things Russian. The most insignificant vodka cup seemed to emanate enchantment. The country resonated with tragedy, struck chords of morbid romance, wild joy, despair. Surrounded by the heritage of every other nation in the old world, she had always strained for the Russian voice and had an instinct that there were others who did the same. She could even sympathize with Malcolm Forbes and the lesser Fabergé egg collectors, hoarding their derivative diamond-studded trinkets as much for their history as their craftsmanship.

  Bianca and Lovat responded identically to the artistic qualities of the work they were considering, loving the clear, Northern colours, the vitality which gleamed in the tiniest brush-stroke, the courage of artists who saw themselves as evangelists of a new order. The energy made Western European work of the same period seem weak, even decadent, lacking the love of humanity which glowed in the Russian canvases.

  When they looked at the future, they saw the same vision, sketched over the years by Charlotte’s network of elderly émigrés and confirmed in months of conversations with more informed sources. The old guard in Moscow would soon die out, liberalization of some kind would be inevitable, and then an avalanche of masterpieces would roll towards Britain.

  Charlotte became a pivot in both their lives, but it was as if she chose to decline this unlooked for prominence in the most effective way. She began to fade before Bianca’s eyes, growing thinner every day, the lustre draining from her already pale face and grey eyes. Her appetite disappeared, and when she ate she complained of indigestion. For months she refused to see a doctor, but then Bianca came home to find her sitting at the kitchen table looking at her hands, brushing one with the other as if they were covered in dust. ‘I can’t look in the mirror.’ She looked helpless for the first time in her life. ‘My hands are a funny colour – tell me, Bea dear, what about my face?’

  ‘You look a little yellow.’

  ‘I think I look quite a lot yellow, don’t I? I have seen jaundice before in my life.’

  ‘Oh, all right. You are yellow, your eyes especially. You’re going to let me call a doctor now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I shall have to.’ Her voice was quiet but irritated rather than resigned. Cancer was suspected, and Bianca last saw her grandmother smiling with the serenity induced by her pre-med injection, a tiny figure under a sheet on a hospital trolley. The exploratory operation found cancer of the pancreas and liver, both well advanced, but while the surgeon was considering whether to remove a tumour Charlotte’s blood pressure plunged, her pulse shuddered and her heart began to fail. Within a few minutes she was dead.

  The loss numbed Bianca, and shocked the four children who until then had believed that death only claimed four-legged creatures. One after the other they woke in the night, or interrogated her with aimless questions as they tried to make sense of their loss.

  Life had teased her, letting her have a few drops of mothering then snatching away the bottle before she could even take the edge off her lifetime’s thirst. Whose love would anchor her in the future? She would love her children, and they would love her, but that was not the same as the love of another woman, a nourishing, strengthening foundation. Her sister was an eternal child, her friends had all been distanced in her years of marriage.

  As for the love of men – Bianca considered that it did not exist. The word had a different meaning for them. Men might claim to feel love but their actions belied them. They expected you to love them, to prepare banquets of care, sympathy and acceptance every day, with your very soul dressed and decorated to their specification as the centre-piece, and in return they would toss you the cold left-over scraps of their attention, and expect gratitude.

  Hermione, with her new baby, plunged into deep depression but Bianca was so muffled in her own grief that she was unable to help. Only one person, the last she would have predicted, seemed to understand precisely how she felt. ‘She was so quiet.’ Hugh Berrisford spoke at the precise moment when a fresh wave of sadness broke over her. ‘I used sometimes to think that you hardly knew she was there, but you did, of course. Now just look at the hole that’s left. I know it will fill up, in good time, but just now I can’t believe that.’

  It was Hugh who broke the news to Lovat, in a conversation which he then instinctively phrased to suggest that he should not attend the funeral, but that he might come to the memorial service in Chelsea Old Church the following month. The younger man was profoundly offended. Although Hugh himself was responsible, it seemed to Lovat that this was Bianca’s decision, full of a woman’s inhuman malice. To spite him she was even ready to insult her grandmother’s memory, for Charlotte had too big a heart for such petty cruelty. A cold thread of fear ran through him, a man’s fear of the alien female, unpredictable and merciless. He had been too restrained, for the sake of the children’s loyalty and Charlotte’s peace of mind, and made himself vulnerable. Now it was time to attack and hold nothing back.

  17. Paris, May 1914

  On Thursday 14 May the sixth season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris opened at the Opéra with the European première of The Legend of Salome. ‘Welcome to the Gare de l’Opéra – can you believe that a hundred architects could produce still such a hideous building?’ Leon Samilovich seemed slighter than ever, a dapper little doll, standing on the monumental steps at the front of the building to greet Lydia when she arrived for the first day of rehearsals; ‘But, ugly as it is, the old place loves us so we must love it in return, eh? Come, I’ll show you the way to the stage door. If we start now and step on it we’ll get there by lunchtime.’

  Even the regular company members, accustomed to the colossal building from previous seasons, felt overawed by the Opéra’s massive proportions. At the first rehearsal the vastness of the stage disoriented them; the pit was a chasm, the auditorium a void. Leo called endlessly for wider gestures and bolder mime, and cursed Fokine for having significantly failed to warn him that his trademark subtleties would be lost in the bigger theatre.

  Among the fifteen floors and the labyrinthine corridors, the multiplicity of staircases and the acres of rehearsal rooms, dancers got lost every day. They blundered into sewing rooms, wig room
s, offices, the classrooms of the resident ballet school, the engineers’ workshop and rooms full of musical instruments, shrouded harps and cellos in their cases like so many Egyptian mummies. They asked the way of one or two of the thousand people who, even in the summer, were fully employed at the Opéra, but were inevitably too confused to regain their proper location, gave way to fears of being lost for ever or claimed by the famous phantom, and then were at last discovered and conducted tearfully home like lost sheep.

  The fortunate few in the company who had friends to show them around the institution were the more intimidated to discover that its wonders included stables occupied by stage-trained white horses under the forecourt and a lake of water below the basement which was sucked into the hydraulic machinery which raised the curtain every night. The Maryinsky had nothing to rival the great foyer with its high painted ceiling, and seemed like a toy theatre in comparison.

  For all its monumental proportions, the flower of Paris society was crammed in the auditorium on the first night, and the company also brought its own suite of admirers from St Petersburg; balletomanes, fellow artists, critics, lovers and admirers. The principals were permitted to slip through the door leading to the stage box and watch the audience arrive.

  ‘A sell-out as usual, my dears. Congratulations!’ Mischa Alexandrov turned his opera glasses on the stalls. He now had the overblown looks of a handsome man who had encountered many temptations and resisted none of them. He danced less and socialized more, always believing that it was his royal blood, not his genius for sexual introductions, which made him popular. He had travelled from Cannes with Kchessinskaya and the Grand Duke André, en route from a state visit to Italy, and had broken his journey in Paris while they continued homewards to St Petersburg. ‘And what an audience – I’m sorry for anyone in Paris who isn’t here, obviously it’s still social death to miss Diaghilev’s first night.’

  ‘He is so clever, our Sergei Pavlovich, look how he plans everything.’ Tata, already garbed as a yellow butterfly for the opening piece, stood at Lydia’s shoulder pointing out the faces she would need to recognize. ‘They’re hand-picked, every one. He gives tickets to everyone who has backed him and everyone who he hopes will back him in the future, and a box to every interesting artist, whatever his field, because he’s sure one day he’ll be able to get his tentacles around them and draw them into the ballet.’

  ‘My, what a show! Who are all those unescorted ladies?’ In the light of the huge chandeliers Lydia saw one elegant woman after another take her seat in the Grand Circle.

  ‘Don’t they look dazzling? Have you ever seen so many beauties? Fifty free tickets to the loveliest women in Paris, allocated so that there are never two of the same hair colour together. He stole the idea from his business partner the first year. The poor man went bust, of course. But isn’t it clever, to dress the house just like you decorate the stage? Absolutely no gentlemen in their boring black suits. People call it the Diamond Horseshoe, or the Flower Basket because of all the jewels and the pretty faces crowded together.’

  Lydia’s eyes raked the huge auditorium, looking for Orlov’s tall, still figure. At the Ritz they occupied separate suites, which was her choice since she did not want to diminish her position with Diaghilev by saving him money. They had spent their evenings and nights together since she had arrived with the rest of the company ten days ago; yet despite this handsome share of his company, she fancied she had detected all the signs of an unfaithful lover: the abstracted manner, the plans for the future only vaguely discussed and, most telltale of all, a new way of holding and touching her which she felt sure carried the undeniable imprint of another woman’s body.

  Prince Orlov’s mind was certainly on other matters, but not on the superior Comtesse, as Lydia feared; she had chosen to flirt with him in St Petersburg out of sheer boredom, and here in Paris, where he seemed awkward and at a loss among her own set, she was in any case fully occupied with her long-standing lover. Orlov found the dry reserve of the French deadening; he needed emotional people around him to lift him out of himself, and when Lydia arrived with her bright chatter and general air of energy and bustle he was pleased.

  Clouding his thoughts perpetually were the implications of his mission to draft an arms control treaty, which posed irreconcilable paradoxes to tease his brain and subdue his spirits. On one side his associates in Russia argued that all the wars in Europe would in future proceed from the rivalry between England and Germany; Russia, with a German empress and innumerable links with that country, should not be allying herself with England. He had spent time with one statesman in particular whose warning resounded daily in his ears – ‘Only the Jews will benefit!’ Once in the West, he found himself part of a team cataloguing a massed arsenal large enough to procure an apocalypse, and talking to war office officials who saw positive merit in boasting that for every gun their German counterparts ordered, they would order ten.

  He had promised in an abstracted manner to attend the première. Now Lydia scanned thousands of faces and when she found him she hardly recognized him at first because he was, as ever, lost in thought, physically present but mentally elsewhere. Tata, unaware of her anxiety, prattled on.

  ‘You’ll see the Comtesse de Greffuhle, Robert de Montesquiou, the Ephrussys who always give a fête champêtre for us at the end of the season, and then you can see all our friends in the boxes. Every artist you’ve always wanted to meet – Maurice Ravel is there, do you see? He’s working on a score for us. And Rodin, up there behind him. And do you see Jean, with that beautiful Misia Sert? She bails us out every year when the bills come in. Isn’t she lovely? Everyone’s painted her and her first husband’s still crazy about her, which is convenient since he owns Le Matin. My God, look who’s with her, it’s Vaslav!’

  ‘No!’ At once every eye in the party was straining to make out Nijinsky in the depth of the Serts’box. He was standing silently at the back, apparently alone.

  ‘So, he couldn’t bear to stay away.’ Mischa was delighted to have chanced upon a choice morsel of gossip for his own return to St Petersburg. ‘Will he come back, do you think?’

  ‘He wouldn’t dare – he’s so shy, even now. I hope he doesn’t, it will upset Sergei Pavlovich, I know it will. How sadly life can turn out! We were all such friends. I’ll wave when he looks this way …’ Tata was as good as her word and blew a fleeting kiss when the blank, oriental eyes seemed to be looking in her direction. ‘Oh, and look Lydia, there’s your Monsieur Paquin …’

  ‘I buy a frock or two but I don’t own him, you know.’ Lydia’s tone was surprisingly harsh.

  ‘Oh! Are you nervous, darling? Forgive me, chattering on about all those grand people. Don’t worry they’ll simply eat you up, I promise. Come, let’s go backstage, walk up and down a little and then start to warm up our feet.’

  The older woman’s sympathetic arm pulled Lydia away. As she swallowed she felt her throat rasp. She was indeed in a real paroxysm of fear, by far the worst she had ever felt. Under her wrapper she was clammy with sweat.

  When their train had pulled into the Gare de Lyon one of the youngest dancers had fainted clean away with the excitement of being in the fabled city of Paris. For all of them it had been a Shangri-la of style and elegance, a magical city where the streets were polished like ballroom floors and the buildings made of silver. The idea of taking the most exacting artistic community in the world by storm suddenly seemed pathetic, ridiculous.

  An hour later she waited in her dressing room for the stage manager’s call. Everything irritated her to madness. Her dresser had not let out her costume as she had asked, and it cut uncomfortably around the arm holes. She had chosen to wear the yellow diamond collar on stage, for the second act, but that again, once reclaimed from Fabergé, had proved too tight for her new, indulged contours. There had been no time to alter it, so it was to be fastened with silk cord at the nape of her neck, and felt precarious.

  She began to fight for breath, feeling pani
c squeeze her like an iron hand. Once her years of triumph had begun, the episodes of possession by her old Magic Spirit had ceased, and she had hardly remarked the loss. When she had confided in one of the teachers at Theatre Street that her random sense of inspiration had deserted her, the elderly woman had brushed aside the idea with a wave of her knotted hand and answered, ‘You are never without inspiration, little girl, but now I think you have trained it to come when you call it, you don’t have to wait upon its caprices any more. That is the mark of a true artist, never fear.’

  Her old superstitious habits had also been forgotten and she had skimmed brightly through her life with not a cobweb of doubt to obscure her confidence. Now she felt helpless and frightened. She wanted Charlotte to be cool and quiet and make her feel better. She wanted her dog to be stupidly faithful. She wanted to be able to turn to Leo for comfort, but he was dead to her now and she reproached herself for wronging him. The small icon with which Diaghilev had welcomed her on to the train – it seemed so long ago – was on her dressing table, and another, larger picture of her own showing St Nicholas. Lydia moved them to a clear space and, placing a towel on the floor in order not to mark her costume, knelt down to pray.

  Once she was on stage her fear was transmuted into a hectic excitement. She saw that Leo was as white as paper under his make-up, and that Massine, all long limbs and big eyes, startled like a colt at every unusual sound. Inna, who had ungraciously accepted the role of Herodias to secure her position in the season’s most talked-about new production, seemed more than ever an unattractive composition of sharp elbows and brittle knees. As the overture began, Lydia kissed them all on both cheeks, letting loose all the magnetism at her command, willing them into animation.

  Nevertheless the opening moments of the ballet were stilted. Leo forgot a piece of mime and was ahead of the music for a tense six bars. Lydia looked into his eyes for the first time since their night at her villa, and saw that his meticulous temperament had been shattered by the mistake and he was on the point of collapsing under an avalanche of panic. She placed her hand firmly on his shoulder and added some gestures of her own to absorb the delay.