White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘I tried to reach you.’ Lovat was not trying very hard to sound neutral although she read both guilt and anger in his manner. ‘She was calling for you. She fell downstairs at my house today – it’s a really nasty break, several places. Fixing it was a big operation, and she’s got to go back tomorrow.’

  ‘Poor little Lizzie – does it hurt?’

  The child gave her a weak smile and nestled her head against her. ‘They gave me tons of aspirin. It tasted disgusting but it doesn’t hurt now. I fell over Isabel’s shoes.’

  ‘I telephoned the hotel, but they said you couldn’t be disturbed.’

  ‘Oh dear, I did tell them that.’

  ‘But why – with four children surely …’

  ‘Yes, I know anything can happen any time. I’ve been on call for over twenty years, Lovat – this weekend I wanted a few days of peace with Alex.’

  He had a hungry, restless look, something she had never seen on him before. After their split he had gained weight, and his face had become heavy. Now he had suddenly dropped the excess pounds, and become almost thin. His shoulders seemed bony under his corduroy windcheater. Something of his youthful, classical look had returned. His hair was cut very short, and his eyes were very bright, like the eyes of a cat.

  ‘Did Hermione give you anything to drink?’ The journey from the country had tired her and a jolt of alcohol seemed attractive.

  ‘I think she was embarrassed at letting me in, but I had to see you and tell you what happened. I didn’t want you imagining things …’

  ‘Will you put me to bed now, Mummy?’ Bianca took Lizzie upstairs and tucked her in, then came down and poured them both large neat vodkas over ice.

  ‘Nostrovya.’

  ‘You’re not asking me to drink to your Russian sale, I hope.’

  ‘Why not, won’t you be putting some of your mistakes in it?’

  ‘We don’t make mistakes at Whitburn-Tuttlingen. And if we do, we don’t tell anyone about them.’

  ‘We could drink to getting through ten years of separation without killing each other.’

  ‘All right, I’ll drink to that. Pinch any more pictures from me and things’ll be different.’

  ‘How did she fall over Isabel’s shoes?’

  ‘Isabel walked out on me this afternoon. She dropped the shoes on the way.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Bianca tried hard to sound sincere.

  ‘About the shoes or her leaving? I was delighted to see the back of her. She gave me the crap about needing space but actually she’s been screwing some playwright and they’re both taking off for Los Angeles. She was the biggest – well, the second biggest – mistake of my life, that woman.’

  ‘Oh – what was the first?’ He looked away, annoyed to have revealed himself. ‘Oh – I forgot. The apologizing gene isn’t on the Y chromosome, is it?’

  ‘If this is going to be …’

  ‘It isn’t. Forget it, sorry I spoke. At least Isabel kept out of the children’s way.’

  ‘She couldn’t stand them.’

  They talked amiably for an hour, mostly about the children. To Lovat’s eyes, she was showing no sign of strain, and he wondered if she even realized how she had been manoeuvred into the position of presiding over the fall of the house of Berrisford.

  ‘How are things?’ He looked into her eyes, something else that he had not done for many years.

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Berrisford’s. You let me pick up those Somov pictures without much of a fight.’ Mitrokin had recently offered him a set of four rococo fantasies by that artist, painted as designs for chocolate boxes.

  She smiled. Her lips were still sore. The trouble with a love affair fragmented by business was that you never got into training for serious kissing. ‘You bought them from that dealer in Leningrad, didn’t you?’

  ‘Mitrokin. Amazing guy.’ So that was his source – what a fool to let slip the name.

  ‘Leningrad’s not my turf, is it? Kusminsky gave me Moscow. Wasn’t that a judgement of Solomon?’ He did not remember her smiling so much when they had been married. It suited her.

  ‘Kolya just wants to play both ends against the middle. He’s always very discreet about you. But I was surprised – I know two of my Somov paintings came from Moscow.’

  ‘He’s always discreet about you, too. I can’t get excited about Somov, you know. His stuff is either sentimental or just plain bad. The way I think about all those early avant-gardes is Somov them aren’t worth the hassle. Pure yuk. I’d have been embarrassed to have them in the saleroom.’

  ‘Pure business – I’ve a collector in San Diego goes ape for that stuff. Somov us have got it and Somov us haven’t, I guess. But seriously, now that Hugh’s off the scene, I’ve heard things …’ The glasses were empty again, but he did not want to refill them at that critical instant for fear of looking as if he were trying to get her drunk.

  ‘They’re all true. We’re buggered, that’s all there is to it.’ She was still smiling, but at the absurdity of life, not from any desire to please. ‘Hugh agreed some loans which have gone bad, Martin bought an office which we can’t afford. Most of the market has collapsed, I’m running like mad to stay in the same place, but I can’t see any way we won’t sink in the end.’

  ‘You don’t seem upset.’

  ‘What would be the point of that? We can still do our best for our clients, still employ most of our people, I’ve got a few things cooking and we may squeeze through. Running around like a headless chicken won’t help.’

  ‘But aren’t you mad at Hugh …’

  ‘I’ve no more energy to be mad at my parents. If that’s maturity, I’ve got there. In his position I’d probably have done exactly the same. Have you heard what I’ve heard about the Bank of Japan?’

  ‘Planning to restrict loans secured on Tokyo property? Yes, they’re announcing it next week, aren’t they? That’ll freeze the bollocks off a few of my players.’

  She nodded, draining her glass and getting up to refill them both. ‘You never really liked selling to banks, did you?’

  ‘No. Not the big pictures they were never going to be able to display. I mean, what’s a painting for, if not to be looked at? Of course, some of them stick them up in their board rooms …’ They killed another hour in trading information and discovering that their ideas had hardly changed since the day they met. Eventually Bianca unsteadily got up and told him to leave because she had an early start ahead. He called a taxi, and it crossed her mind as she shut the front door behind him that for the first time since their separation he had been jealous. The idea of herself and Alex, together in a hotel room and not taking telephone calls, had touched a place that was still raw. The thought pleased her. She scrawled ‘Mitrokin’on the kitchen memo board and went to bed.

  Lovat sat in his house for another two hours, enjoying its emptiness. How well he had considered that he knew Bianca’s courage; he had dismissed it as a woman’s bravado, born of ignorance and that peculiar, female lack of respect for risk. To get a gambler’s rush you needed to be good friends with danger. Bianca, matriarchally self-righteous as wife and mother, had declined even to make its acquaintance. Bianca as art-market raider seemed now to be deeply in love with it. She was so clearly aware of her company’s ruin; she blamed no one, she intended to see things through even to the bitterest of ends. He had never given her credit for that kind of guts.

  At 3 a.m. he noticed that the bottle of vodka was empty. He put it down on Isabel’s favourite table, made of a reclaimed railway sleeper of Australian jarrah wood. It had cost two thousand pounds. The bottle fell over on the uneven surface. Lovat contemplated the still life with annoyance. After a while, he picked the table up and walked out into the street with it. It was heavy, but there was bound to be a skip within a few yards; people were still improving their houses in Holland Park.

  In the morning Bianca’s desk was piled high with bad news, and worse was to come. Berrisford’s shares had been falli
ng slowly but surely for weeks. In the early afternoon she learned that one particular buyer had been mopping up the bargain stock – Whitburn-Tuttlingen.

  She was immediately outraged that Lovat had sat in her own home pretending to be a good father, a decent person and pleasant companion all the time knowing that he had been plotting her downfall for months. Her anger was surprisingly brief; she found her better self mocking her hostile instincts. Lovat had pretended nothing – by anyone’s standards, he was a good father, a decent person and a pleasant companion. Had not she been plotting his downfall for years?

  How extraordinarily well-matched they were as adversaries. Many times she had been able to read his mind, and just as frequently he had read hers, and they had feinted, bluffed and double-bluffed until that deal was done and they squared up for the next. The memories made her smile. Until Alex had appeared and coaxed her withered sensuality into bloom, duelling with her ex-husband had been her greatest selfish pleasure.

  The fight involved Alex somehow; all her instincts told her that his entry into her life had been too well-timed. He had restored her womanliness, but that was one of destiny’s own little jokes. Plans sizzled in her mind – it was time to make a move and trick Lovat into giving away his position.

  ‘Alex, about what you said at the weekend, about your grandmother’s necklace …’ She slipped into his office and sat on his desk, a familiarity that she knew would charm him. ‘I’ve changed my mind. You’re right. It is worth a shot. Actually, it’s worth our best shot. And there’s a dealer you can see for me, if you can find him. Mitrokin. When do you want to go?’

  21. Leningrad, 1990

  Anya looked at the buff form in her hand. Three votes to be cast. Should the city be renamed St Petersburg – cross out the word no if you wanted the new name. Or rather, the old name. Would changing the name be an insult to Lenin? Who cared, what had Lenin ever done for her? Would keeping the name be an insult to St Peter? St Peter denied Christ; naturally, he was a man, don’t men deny everything when it suits them? That shit at the hotel denied he’d got another woman, and denied he’d got her a flat. Anya thanked God and her own common sense that her flat had been fixed by Andrusha; old lovers were worth more than new ones.

  She looked down at her red dress, creased in front and seated behind although she pressed it every day. The hem was becoming uneven; she had resewn most of the seams and the zipper a dozen times. It was made from poor-quality wool, reclaimed probably, there was no heart in it. In the real St Petersburg they had worn elegant clothes. This place was filthy, collapsing into its own mud, there was no food. A miracle it had survived so long. Her father used to say the city had risen from its ashes like a phoenix so many times, it would surely do so again. Maybe the new name would help. She crossed out ‘No’.

  Now, the party leader. Some self-righteous babushka on the metro had told the whole carriage of people that only gays, tarts and spivs would vote for Yeltsin. ‘Sounds like everybody I know,’ a young man had answered and the entire sardine-tin of people had laughed. They said that strangers met and fucked in the metro without anyone knowing, people were all jammed together so tightly. They said that every Russian woman was a prostitute. Anya preferred to call herself a free-trade zone. She voted for Yeltsin.

  Lastly the mayor. Sobchak was a doll, he was a civilized man, rational but not a fence-sitter. She loved watching him on television, that cute chipmunk smile, and the only one with brains. Last night he had said that the only thing worth working for was for your children and grandchildren to live in a different society. She agreed with that. Anya had no living children and had had seven – no, eight – abortions. Not so bad, that was the average so there must be women with more. But it wasn’t too late. And hadn’t she been working on living in a different society herself all her life?

  She voted for Sobchak, folded her paper and posted it into the plain varnished wooden ballot box, giving the huge iron padlock a cynical pat. Of course the election was rigged but you had to go through the motions all the same.

  It was the height of summer. Out by the open sea the sweetish smell of the water was pleasant, but as they approached the city on the trolley-bus there was only the stink of dust and sweaty people. The air was like a steam bath and two cars with boiling radiators caused a traffic jam half a mile from the terminus. She struggled through the crush of passengers and jumped down to walk, pleased to have got away without putting her five kopecks in the ticket machine.

  On the way to the hotel she saw a queue, not too long either, outside a meat shop. ‘Not for those horrible Chernobyl chickens, is it?’ she asked the last person. Any chicken was good to find these days, even the mutant ones with twisted beaks or a stump instead of a wing. He shrugged and grunted. People used to be kinder, now they never wanted to talk. She saw a woman leave with a round parcel. Even the radioactive birds were never that shape.

  In forty minutes she saw with satisfaction that it was pork and bought all she could afford, snapping abuse at the women behind her. It wasn’t rationed so why shouldn’t she buy what she could? Walking on to the free-enterprise market she looked for cucumbers and potatoes; you could never count on anything these days. There were some cucumbers, but the price! Two years ago cucumbers were five roubles a kilo, but you paid anything for them now. The only ones left were malformed but she still had to fight over them with some pot-bellied young hooligan who thought he had the right to shoulder her aside just because he pissed standing up. No time to queue for potatoes, even if there were any.

  Sometimes she felt like hanging herself after queuing. It was so humiliating, people were so vicious. At the hotel there was a message to go to room 157, which made her even more gloomy. Why had she ever allowed herself to get into hotel work? Because she was too old to be an air hostess and too dumb to have stayed married.

  Her husband was just a dealer, not a big noise like Andrusha, but he didn’t have a hard life. Could it have been so bad, taking care of him? He was never home anyway. But then before him, with her pilot, she’d been used to the whole imported lifestyle, the magazines with pages like silk, the underwear good enough to go to the theatre in – such a difference between everything she wanted and whatever rubbish had come her husband’s way. She had a period every month, God willing, but how often did his gorillas get their hands on tampons? Once in five years, and then they sneered at you for wanting them. How could a woman feel like a woman without perfume – sometimes even without soap? Maybe her mother was right, if she’d been sweeter-tempered to him, he’d have paid her more attention. Too late now, anyway.

  The translating was OK, but the best jobs were going to the younger, thinner girls. The entertaining wasn’t exactly arduous, all you had to do was keep your john downstairs while the surveillance team changed a tape or turned the room over. Neither of them were KGB jobs, but you had to sign the KGB pledge all the same, and then, of course, they had you. When their own girls were tied up, you got sent to room 157 and given the dirty stuff. No question of refusing, unless you wanted to end up working the Moskovsky Station tomorrow.

  ‘Here he is, an American, here for a week but he knows the city, he’s studied here, and we have to get to him straight from the airport. He’s just checked in, he’ll be down for dinner soon.’ The important guy in the centre handed over the photograph.

  ‘Do we have to use her again? Why can’t one of our girls take this one?’ Pathetic little whelps, the secret police recruits nowadays. She’d seen pigs with more intelligence.

  ‘We’ve no option, with the African trade delegation at the Astoria.’ He turned to Anya, who was studying the photography. ‘What’s the matter, not handsome enough for you? Too much like work, is it?’ He leaned forward across the desk on his knuckles.

  Anya turned the photograph to the light which struggled through the dirty curtains. ‘He’s an actor, isn’t he?’

  ‘No, antique dealer, so he says. Usual job, just keep him downstairs as long as you can, OK? And get moving.’
She lowered her eyes shyly. The demure number was what these little shits liked. At least she didn’t work for them full time, but what a life they led you anyway. Always pushing it, always after a deal, looking down on you like you weren’t fit to lick their boots and you had to smile and do what you were told, and the only reward was they didn’t kick you out of the hotel.

  The head waiter seated her in a quiet corner at the side of the empty dance floor. ‘I’ll put him there.’ He pointed to a small table close by. ‘How about a nice little snack to keep you going?’

  ‘Great, I’m starving.’ It was early and the cabaret group were warming up, the drummer testing the tension in his skins and the girl showing off, doing splits and back-flips, while a party of Japanese students dutifully applauded.

  The asshole brought her nothing but a wafer of cheese and a few olives, with a beer and a bit of bread. She could have had a better meal off her own lipstick. And the john took his time, so hungry as she was she had to leave food on the plate to make everything look natural and light up a cigarette to kill her appetite.

  Anya had her own strategy with these pick-up jobs. Every foreigner in the hotel expected to be approached either by a spy or a prostitute. Therefore it was pointless to try acting the smart Soviet lady accidentally on her own in a foreigners-only hotel. If you pretended to be a hooker they would never suspect you, and if you felt like a quick one with a nice-looking guy with good European manners, you could have it and get a few dollars on the side into the bargain.

  Only once had this plan gone wrong, when the crazy bastard had stuffed ten dollars into her bag and dragged her upstairs before the goons were finished with his room. How could a woman put her heart into getting laid when there was a dumb cop under the bed? What a Charlie Chaplin scene, getting the fool out while the john took a leak. She had a good laugh about it with the other girls, and it had put the KGB off using her for a while.