White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  In a few more days there was a storm in the kitchen. It was Saturday. Bianca had flown back from New York in the night, and she and Alex were preparing for a long formal evening, the presentation of the European Heritage Awards at the National Portrait Gallery. At lunchtime, the boys had drifted into the kitchen in the hope of food.

  Alex compared their childhood to the only other of which he had good experience – his own – and often criticized them for their laziness around the house. Benedict, who was in his foundation year at Chelsea, had spent the entire morning writing a technical drawing programme on his computer, and when he complained that there was no meal imminent, Alex attacked.

  ‘You’ve spent four hours sitting on your butt in front of a screen – I was younger than you when I was painting the back fence for my parents. You can cook your own dinner, can’t you? Your mother has had a tough week, she’s had nothing but tough weeks for months. Why don’t any of you ever lift a finger to help out? You’re just exploiting her, lying around like you do when there’s chores to be done.’

  ‘I suppose you do know what you’re talking about,’ rejoined Benedict, who spoke seldom but usually to good effect, ‘but I don’t see you showing us the way, exactly.’

  There had followed a shocked silence; Wolfe had not understood the jibe and stood looking awkwardly at the youth across the kitchen table. Bianca was infuriated but forced herself not to show it; Benedict’s lazy manner belied a very sharp mind and it was never wise to engage him in a verbal battle, particularly when he had his brothers at his back.

  ‘That’s not fair, Ben. Alex is employed by Berrisford’s as a consultant, he pays rent for the flat and looks after himself. That’s more than you do, any of you; I’m not criticizing you for that, you’re my children, it’s natural, but you’ve no right to insult someone I care about because he also works for me.’

  ‘He’s your boyfriend,’ Orlando sneered from the far end of the room.

  ‘That isn’t the point,’ Tom put in. Sometimes he had the perfect manner for a smart young barrister.

  ‘I am entitled to a boyfriend. I’ve chosen Alex. Your obligation is to behave decently towards him, as you would to any other person, and to consider my feelings as well.’ Orlando kicked the cat’s dish, which was fortunately empty, and loafed out of the room. ‘But I must say, Alex, that how the boys behave towards me is really between them and me.’

  Alex had started an angry protest, but she silenced him with a look. Ben apologized with a good grace, and the boys slunk out of the kitchen in silence.

  ‘You’re too soft on them, you shouldn’t have let them get away …’

  ‘Alex, I meant what I said. I don’t think you can tell them how they should act with any special authority. You’re not their father.’

  He folded his arms, his grey eyes almost black with anger, ‘I don’t think you should allow some feather-bedded kid of eighteen to …’

  ‘Darling, don’t you see where this is going to end?’ She softened her voice, not wanting to hurt him. ‘I don’t want to be put in the position of having to choose between my children or you. And that’s what it will come down to if you can’t all get on.’

  ‘Meaning you’ll choose them.’

  ‘They are my children.’

  ‘And so you let them run your life?’

  ‘It’s not my life, it’s our life. The children and I, we’re part of the same life.’

  ‘So where does that leave me?’

  ‘Alex, I care about you very deeply, but …’ Then she saw that he was unable to understand what she was trying to explain. He was comparing her love of her children directly with her feeling for him, blind to the fact that there was nothing causal about a parental bond. ‘I don’t think you understand this.’ She took his hand, and he allowed it, but did not respond. ‘You can’t compare the two things. I can’t stop loving my children because they behave badly, and they can’t make me love them by being good. That isn’t the point. They’re my children therefore I love them, and that’s what my life is about. I would put them first, whoever, or whatever, came in conflict with the tie between us.’

  Alex had drifted away to a mental distance from which he could camouflage the unwelcome truth. He tipped up her chin and kissed her, a gesture which she usually found endearing, and then said, ‘Poor Bianca, the wounded tigress sacrificing herself for her cubs. Why don’t you leave all this and come away for next weekend?’

  Hermione drifted into the kitchen with Anjelica, her four-year-old daughter, perched on her hip. ‘Yes, Bea, why don’t you? I’ll be here to hold the fort, after all. You need a break, you’re totally stressed out.’

  ‘Where shall we go? The world’s your oyster …’

  She looked from one face to the other, her sister rounded and reproachful, her lover intense. He was pulling a strand of her hair free from the band which held it at the nape of her neck and winding it around his fingertips. The force which drew them together was still potent. She gave in. ‘No long flights. Actually, no flights at all. Can’t we just go to somewhere in the country? Rain and mud and log fires and stuff? I know England’s miserable in spring, but I just want to cocoon.’

  At Berrisford’s, the past six months had been stormy. The board had agreed to prune their American operation severely, and she had been obliged to go to New York almost every week. Making people redundant was a sickening business, not least because, as the true condition of the company became more apparent, she had begun to reproach herself for not seizing earlier the power which had been given to her too late.

  ‘Leave it to me, darling. I’ll take care of everything. Just be ready to leave when I tell you on Friday.’ Alex held her close for an instant, gave her one of his soul-boring looks and brushed her lips with his before striding out of the door. His physical presence was so strong that whenever he left a room he left a sense of vacuum, and a faint tang of Vetiver in the air.

  ‘Why aren’t I more annoyed with him?’ Bianca held out her arms to take her niece while Hermione prepared toast and Marmite for her tea. ‘He’s just picked a fight with Ben, and then ran out on talking about it because he just doesn’t understand that the kids are first with me. And he talks to me and touches me as if he was …’

  ‘John Wayne? Patronizing sexist crap?’

  ‘No, be fair, Herm, he is sexy with it – let’s say Burt Lancaster.’

  ‘Muscle-bound patronizing sexist crap with teeth?’

  ‘Poor love, he wouldn’t know sexist crap if he trod in it.’

  ‘Thekthsit cwap!’ Anjelica seemed to be in agreement, but it was hard to tell when she spoke through a mouthful of toast. She was a crazy child who fizzed through her little life like a firecracker, leaping unpredictably in one direction after another, beyond any kind of order or discipline. Even finding one ruly curl in her white-blonde head to which to attach a bow was difficult. ‘Thekthsit cwap!’ She shook her head violently.

  ‘If you spit that toast out you’ll be sorry, kiddo. Why don’t you ask your aunt if she’s going bust this week?’

  ‘Butht! Butht!’

  ‘Not this week. What about you?’ Hermione had arrived a month ago, with Anjelica and her new baby who was asleep upstairs. The nursery had lost money since its opening, and she had mortgaged the farmhouse to keep going. With the interest now at fifteen per cent, the business was no longer viable. Since Hermione could at least make plants grow, Seumas had insisted that the administration should be his responsibility, but he had diverted a few thousand pounds of VAT and left the last six months’bills unpaid in order to take a trip to Utah to learn Native American husbandry skills. The bailiffs had arrived the day he left.

  Bianca was selfishly pleased, since she missed small children around the house, and missed her sister. The trouble with being one of the most powerful women in any business was that you had very few peers, and you could not afford to be friends with any of them. She yearned for a woman friend and her sister, although her response to bad fortune
was to spout more moonshine than ever, was a warm, intimate companion. Yesterday, Hermione had gone to meet the receiver to decide what denomination of bankruptcy was appropriate to her affairs.

  ‘The receiver was really cool. He wants to liquidate the business and pay everybody, including me, because I’m an employee. It turns out Seumas was a closet control freak. He decided he could be a director but I could be an employee. It was my house and my mortgage paying the business debts, but he didn’t see that as relevant. He didn’t feel it was even relevant to tell me. I called him and he said he felt the stress would be too much for me, interfere with my ability to bond with the kids and why was I hung up on these meaningless words anyway? But it means he’s liable, and I’m not – so how’s that for what goes around coming around?’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  ‘So Berrisford’s can fight another day, too, huh?’

  Sometimes Bianca believed her sister’s claim to have intuition. ‘Mmn. Barely, if you want the truth. Let me tell you …’

  In Martin Pownall’s place, the board had announced as one man that they wanted to recruit a new finance director from outside the company. They had chosen Hugh to speak for them; it had been a mistake. He spoke as if giving her an order, and Bianca, knowing that her father was never so authoritative as when he was guilty, had been suspicious. She had looked around at them, eight men dressed identically in dark suits, striped shirts, discreet ties with tiny patterns, silk handkerchiefs or gold watch-chains worn like regimental badges, and seen that they were looking for another fall guy to take the blame – but for what? Undoubtedly for something she did not know about, something worse than the current mess.

  ‘I went over and locked the door, Herm. And then I put the key in front of me on the table and told them they’d better come clean because none of them were leaving until they did.’

  ‘Headmistress trip, huh?’

  ‘Absolutely. Oh, they blustered and blathered, but they didn’t dare complain, they knew I was right. And then that ass Bainbridge tried to tell me a cock-and-bull story about loans, but I wouldn’t buy it. And I pointed out that the new finance director would be breaking the bad news soon enough, and when he did there’d undoubtedly be a few resignations needed, whereas this way they could all keep their seats – for now, at any rate. And in the end a couple of younger guys cracked. It’s a mess, Herm. Actually it’s a fucking disaster. Hugh and Pownall decided that we needed a bigger building, and signed some kind of agreement with a developer for a double site in Belgravia. We’re due to take possession next month. We don’t need it, we can’t afford it, commercial property’s got pneumonia, we’ll never sell the old place, they’ve sunk millions in the development itself – out of our reserves, for God’s sake.’

  ‘You mean you really think …’ They sat opposite each other at the old pine table, holding mugs of cold tea and thinking of what Berrisford’s meant to them.

  ‘Terminal. God! The shareholders could sue the lot of them. The only way I can see out of this would be to find some hole in the contract – it’s apparently a pretty idiosyncratic document. That’s the only prayer we’ve got. No wonder Pownall was so eager to retire. I hope his kickback’s worth it. I’m just glad I threw him out when I did.’

  ‘What did you do when they told you?’

  ‘Recalled the meeting for the next morning and asked for proposals to deal with the situation. It’s bloody easy being the boss, you know, everyone else does the work. Nobody came up with anything worth sneezing on. So I sent the execs away to come up with plans for twenty per cent staff cutbacks in their departments, plus fifty per cent budget cuts. Next week we work out the details. It’ll be absolute hell. I say that and I’ll have a job at the end of it – a lot of people won’t.’

  Hermione paused to hand her small daughter a cloth with which to wipe her face, then helped the child down from her chair. She ran away to the toy basket at the far end of the room. ‘Will Berrisford’s be all right then?’

  ‘I doubt it. It will buy us time, that’s all. The market’s turned, the big boys are trying to talk it up but it’s no use. We’ve been smart to some extent, diversified, opened new markets, but I need a big sale, Herm. If we can’t get a big sale in the coming year we won’t have enough cash to carry on. The Russian sale is our best bet, but we need to clear five million on it and I just don’t see how we can possibly do it.’ They sat silently, looking at the half-empty cups of cold tea. The collapse of the firm that shared their name was unthinkable.

  When Alex took Bianca away for a weekend, the bill arrived on her desk a month later in the form of his company credit card account. She had once suggested that she would be happy with a more modest and more genuine invitation, or equally pleased to pay herself, but he had sulked and snapped and accused her of trampling on his feelings and making him out to be a kept man. Since she enjoyed the new sensation of being cared for, she let his leaking logic alone and paid the credit card bills herself.

  He had chosen a hotel in the Lake District. They arrived in torrential rain and ate an exquisite meal over which he made her off-load the week’s traumas in detail.

  ‘I need a big sale,’ she repeated. It was a mantra she recited to herself constantly at that time.

  ‘Won’t the Russian sale be big?’

  She shook her head, enjoying the motion of her freshly washed hair. ‘Not big enough. We need to clear five million.’

  ‘Suppose you had a really magnificent, historic thing …’ He had floated the notion of the Orlov necklace, his grandmother’s mythical treasure, before, and she had dismissed it.

  ‘Are you offering to go and find your grandmother’s necklace again?’

  ‘Don’t say it that way. I’ve always felt it was part of me, part of my roots, if you like. And I know it’s still there, and you can’t believe how easy it is in Russia …’

  ‘Alex, darling … no. It’s just too much of a risk and too much of a romance.’ From the mutinous way he pushed aside his plate, she knew that he would raise the subject again.

  They went to bed, a seven-foot expanse of chintz, and in the morning it was still raining, so they did not get up. By noon, Bianca was saturated with physical wellbeing. The true luxury of being with this man was that she could claim the full occupancy of her body, reacquaint herself with every nerve ending, use her muscles, touch with her fingers, lick with her tongue, enjoy the softness of her skin, the silky length of her hair.

  They communicated physically things which, she sometimes saw quite clearly, they did not really intend. In ecstasy, in abandon, in giving their bodies to each other, they felt transcending emotions and called them love. Bianca had no memory of her early love for her husband, only of behaving as if she had loved him. Now intense emotions detonated in her guts for a man for whom she cared but could not fully admire, and she wondered what feelings she had really had for Lovat.

  Alex’s standard distance for making love was an hour to an hour and a half, and he seemed to feel rejected if she did not want him every night and morning when they were together, and at least once again in addition in every twenty-four hours.

  It was bliss to surrender herself to feeling, to wind her limbs around his firm, warm flesh, to explore his body and discover its secrets. She had never made love to a man whose responses were so passionate. There was a place in the small of his back which she could stroke or kiss and make his whole body shiver with excitement. His nipples were as sensitive as a woman’s, if she touched them at the right moment the noise would start deep in his stomach and reach his lips as a roar as he began to come.

  In the first few weeks she enjoyed the sensation of being awakened, but felt inhibited because his body was not only perfect but radiant with the care he took of it. He was toned and groomed like a race-horse. She confessed that she felt half alive beside him, and when he simply answered, ‘Well, you could work out a little, you know,’ she pressed for his advice. Alex still took dance classes several times a week, wherever
he was in the world, and whoever he was with. She could not lose that much time from her schedule, and so she hired a trainer who took her running along the river embankment in the morning or to a gym near the office after work. She changed shape, her skin lost its dry, papery texture and acquired the voluptuous glow of one of Lely’s Beauties. For the first time in her life, it was a pleasure to look at her own naked body in a mirror.

  That confidence had led them to higher planes of sensuality; the simple caresses of their early days became themes on which they could compose variations. The freedom to trust his strength and his experience was thrilling, but finally she became aware that he did not feel equally free with her, that he was always alert to the impression he was making, and that his care for her was ultimately care for himself.

  ‘How do you end it with the women in your life?’ she asked him on the morning of the second day, when it was still raining.

  ‘Why?’ He was guarded, the eyes which should have been open and frank closed off, as if he had run down shutters behind the irises.

  ‘I wondered, that’s all. Nothing to do with us.’

  ‘I don’t end it, things just seem to come to a natural end, that’s all.’

  She dropped the subject, and rang down for clean sheets. Perhaps his confrontation with Benedict had been part of the natural ending process, a way of offering her grounds for anger. Her sense was that if he could not live in her house, he would break away as soon as he could. He was uncomfortable living by himself, even though she slept with him at the apartment several times a week.

  She left him there on Sunday night, took her own car and drove home. Hermione opened the door as she approached.

  ‘Lovat’s here,’ she whispered, an anxious look in her eyes. ‘There’s been an accident. It’s Lizzie, she’s broken an arm.’

  They were waiting in the sitting room, Lizzie with an immense white sling across her chest and her fingers, protruding from a new white plaster cast, visible at the end of it. Her daughter had inherited her own fair colouring; now her face was as white as the bandage and there were dark circles under her eyes. Bianca went over and carefully embraced her.