The Ice Maiden

By Blanche Howard

Connie Brewster has traveled to London from her home in Calgary for the triumph of her career — the receipt of the Man Booker prize for her novel The Ice Maiden. For the gala event, she is accompanied by her handsome husband, Graham, and their two delightful, grown children.
On leaving the historic Guildhall, with the prize money tucked in her purse, the Brewsters are caught in a swarm of protesters. Gunfire rings out, Connie is wounded in the chest and her irrepressible, athletic, 18- year old son, Eliot suffers a severe injury resulting in the loss of his leg.
From that shocking beginning, Blanche Howard layers a tale of physical recovery, the death of illusion, and a reversal of values. Connie’s lengthy stay in a London hospital prompts her to see Graham and their marriage in a new light.
Graham, stranded on foreign shores, deprived of his bed-rock belief in the social value of extracting oil from tar sands, is vulnerable to the charms of an aristocratic, British beauty and noted environmental activist.
Lucille Goodwin, Connie’s literary agent who has piloted her career, and who loves Connie devotedly, is devastated when a rudderless Graham abruptly fires her to take over the job of managing Connie’s affairs.
Blanche Howard also is enormously skilled in portraying Connie as a major writer by weaving in scenes from Connie’s novel The Ice Maiden. She also is wickedly and deliciously entertaining as an observer of society and human nature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bev Editions
• Release date: Sep 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781927789520

Blanche Howard

Blanche Howard is the author of three previous novels, including ‘The Manipulator’, which won the Canadian Bookseller’s Award. Howard has also adapted ‘A Celibate Season’ as a play, which was a finalist in the Canadian National Theatre Playwriting Competition in 1989.

Book preview

The Ice Maiden

by

Blanche Howard

ISBN: 978-1-927789-52-0

Published by Bev Editions at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Blanche Howard

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

About the Author

Other Books by Blanche Howard

Excerpt From Penelope’s Way

ONE

Are you nervous Mom?

The Brewsters, Connie and Graham and their two adult children, Percy (for Persephone) and Eliot, were in a taxi that was threading its way through the maze of late afternoon traffic in London. When Connie didn’t answer immediately, Graham said, Of course she isn’t nervous. We’re totally prepared for whatever the gods decree. He squeezed his wife’s shoulder.

Mom?

I suppose I am, a bit, although I don’t know why, I haven’t got a hope in hell of winning.

Eliot, in the front seat beside the driver, examined his BlackBerry. Your odds are twenty-five to one.

Imagine a society that places odds on cultural events! Obviously I’m not going to win so I shouldn’t be nervous. Just get it over with, but –

But hope springs infernal, right Mom? Eliot said, and Percy groaned, then shivered slightly. Percy had a sensibility that had proven, in the past, to be almost otherworldly in its prescience, and Connie squeezed her cold hand. Don’t worry Sweetie, I’m adjusted to failure.

Half an hour later Connie Brewster, with her husband at her side and Percy and Eliot somewhere in the mêlée of well-dressed bodies, was standing, wine glass in one hand and little beaded purse in the other, in the Great Hall of London’s Guildhall. Normally she would have been staggered by the immensity of the vaulted ceilings and the Gothic windows at each end and the glimpses, over the heads of the approximately seven hundred guests, of moulded figures of graceful damsels, but she was too rigid with nervous anticipation to take it in. A rather portly man whose dinner jacket was straining against its buttons and who was wolfing down the remnants of a phyllo pastry shell, a line of whipped cream outlining his fleshy lips, held out his glass to her in a mock toast. I’ve been to Canada, he said, as though he had recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and when, politely, shouting over the roar of the crowd, she asked him which part? he said Montreal. I’ve always been a great fan of the late Mordecai Richler, I’m sure you knew him? When she answered that sadly, no, their paths had never crossed, he lost interest and mumbled an excuse and went off in search of more sophisticated company, although he did manage an unconvincing Good luck, as he left.

She wondered if anyone in this literate society had heard of CanLit, but they must have, Canadian writers had won the Booker, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro.

She couldn’t hope to rival them, didn’t have a hope in hell of winning, the odds, as Eliot had pointed out, were against it. But if by some inconceivable chance she were to win it would be the culmination, the pinnacle, no apotheoses that was the word, that would allow her to step back and live for the rest of her life on adulation. And there was still a faint chance since here she was in London of all places, and she repeated it to herself, as though a failure to remember that simple fact might allow something deadly to slip in and reveal a shoddiness beneath the glamour.

Graham squeezed her elbow. Maybe we should work our way over to our table. I’ll try to round up the kids.

And Lucille, see if you can spot her. Lucille Goodwin was Connie’s agent and the person who had done the most to bring Connie from Canada to this exotic great room. Connie raised her eyes above the crowd, hoping to spot Lucille who was nearly six feet tall, and instead spotted another of the nominees, the Australian Stephen Major who must be six foot four at least. He caught her eyes and held up his glass and compressed his lips and winked conspiratorially, as though he and she shared something, ex-colonialism perhaps, or wry disbelief. Connie smiled back and raised her glass. She liked his writing, could see the genesis of his style in earlier Australian writers, Carey, Patrick White. She was quite good at that, at spotting styles that sometimes stayed within the boundaries of countries, and when Eliot told her that computer wizards have discovered ‘write-prints’, distinctive writing patterns that can out the anonymous composers of tweets and blogs, she said she was one step ahead of the experts.

She hoped Stephen would win. (She had no hope, she reminded herself, except for the truth in her son’s wry pun that hope springs infernal.)

Graham came back with Eliot and Percy in tow. People assumed, before meeting Percy, that she was a man instead of a beautiful young woman, poised and self-assured in her perfect little black cocktail dress with scooped neckline. Most of the women were in black, maybe, Connie thought, she should have worn black too? But Percy had been firm, this might not be the Oscars but win or lose she would be on T.V., black is so draining. And Connie loved the dress Percy had helped her to pick out, almost copper-coloured with a sheen that scattered light into a shiny iridescence and that had five rows of material sewn into horizontal pleats above the hem-line and a matching row around the neckline. Scissor pleats, the saleswoman had called them. It had cost $750.00 and when Connie gasped her daughter said firmly, So what? These jeans cost $300.00. The dress matches your hair perfectly, the saleswoman said. Connie’s hair was slightly darker but still had a few copper highlights as well as a few grey streaks – she had resisted her mother’s strict instructions to have it coloured. Her neck was still smooth thank God, and the pearls her late mother-in-law had given her were stylishly understated and real. Real pearls.

Eliot laughing as he spoke to an admiring young woman, hard to believe he was now twenty-three with his baby face and funny little beard and the dinner jacket he’d gotten five years ago for high school graduation and that was straining across the shoulders. The pants, she noticed, were a tiny bit short; he must have grown since he was eighteen. He’d refused to get a new one; I won’t need it in Africa, he’d said, where he was off to do good deeds. He folded his lanky body into his chair next to Percy - he was the tallest of the Brewster clan. They were all tall, Connie at five feet ten the shortest of the four.

A few minutes later her agent joined them. She was in a state of excitement that worried Connie momentarily, since Lucille and booze sometimes teamed up with disastrous consequences. But even she seemed subdued, dazzled. I just met A. S. Byatt, she said in awe. Who? Graham asked, and Connie said quickly, A. S. Byatt. She’s a famous British novelist who won in an earlier year.

The representatives of Connie’s publishers, Canadian, American, British, and two women she didn’t know, their friends she supposed, sat down and there were introductions all around. She joined in the polite laughter when Graham answered an eager question from the man across from them (although the question had been directed to Connie) about how they were enjoying England. Simply wonderful. We can’t thank you enough, you’ve been so very very kind. I hardly even feel colonial!. Then, as an afterthought, But I did spend two post-grad years here in Oxford so it’s not entirely a foreign land to us. – Connie was with me of course.

And you, Mrs. Brewster? How are you enjoying our little island after the enormous sweep of your native land?

Was there the tiniest hint of patronage? But Connie replied with her usual eager breathiness (she was trying to curb that, to speak with a bit of detachment) that she was, indeed, overwhelmed with the welcome, overwhelmed with their kindness, overwhelmed with the ancient lineage of London, and – here she paused and said with a light laugh – I’m afraid the only word I can think of at the moment is overwhelmed. A rather limited vocabulary under the circumstances. Everyone laughed. She and Graham must work on her responses; as Graham had said just this morning (when she was busy telling them both that she hadn’t a hope in hell of winning) this sort of thing didn’t come easily to either of them, hailing as they did from what had been a frontier society a mere century ago. Not enough time to develop the embedded social structure of the Brits, although Graham thanked God they’d had the two years in Oxford, it gave them some idea of what to expect.

Connie didn’t eat. Her stomach had clamped shut and twice she checked her purse for the notes on the off chance, however unlikely, that she might win. The press table was between them and the podium, and in her direct line of sight a rather pudgy man with a pig-like face. Connie wondered if he was the one who had written, ‘The Ice Maiden, an appropriately named novel from the frozen north. The central character, insofar as we can make out under the layers of his embroidered parka, is afraid to take anything off during sex except to undo the zipper covering the most essential item, in case of frostbite. One wonders, but hopes not to find out personally, if this would be irreversibly damaging.’

A minor scene in the novel, out of context, completely unfair, and Connie examined the passage in her head. The man eases himself out of the tangle of bedclothes with James Bond assurance and blows on his hands. Except for his boots he is fully dressed. He sits on the lone chair and yanks on his leather-tooled boots. Without looking at the woman half-hidden by a thick comforter he pulls a wad of bank notes from his pocket and peels off a fifty and throws it down on the shabby night table. He pats his skinny hips, checking that his pearl-handled Colt is in place, and puts on a suede parka whose furry hood covers his curly blonde hair. He works his fingers into a pair of leather gloves and the camera pulls back to watch as he steps onto the snow-covered balcony and leaps over it into a snowdrift and runs across the lot to his silver Porsche. Shots ring out as he accelerates, skidding down the icy road, and he leans out to aim one shot that fells the first gunman.

Beside the pig-like man was a slim man with a pleasant face, fiftyish maybe, possibly the reviewer from the Times Literary Supplement who had found the novel ‘enchanting in its exploration of an icy northern space, on the fringes of a modern industrialized state.’ Sometimes she murmured the line in her sleep.

Next to him was a fussy-looking little person with a bright pink ruffled shirt under his dinner jacket, and Connie wondered if he might be one of the three (male) reviewers who had been incensed that she, a woman, would dare write from a man’s point of view. Pat Barker she isn’t, the man from The Guardian grumbled. Her protagonist thinks of sex only once a day which puts him on the low end of the testosterone scale, although presumably bundled-up Inuit females (Inuit is what we, in our less politically-correct way, used to call Eskimos) take a fairly powerful imagination to posit as pin-ups.

Almost all of them were determined to read eco-awareness into the novel. Some approved; others accused her of structuring her characters to support her ideals, leaving them two-dimensional (‘nothing but padding under the parkas’), or, as The Daily Mail, in an aside to a story covering the betting odds, said of the book, ‘About as rounded as a deck of playing cards.’ That was when her chances of winning had been downgraded from ten to one to twenty-five to one.

There was a hush and Connie’s heart was pounding as a rather handsome man, the chair of the Man Booker Prize Foundation, stood at the microphone and said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize is Connie Brewster for her novel, The Ice Maiden."

Applause. Shouting. Everyone standing up. A tiny moment of incredulity in which Connie’s mind struggled to take in the meaning of the words and then hugs and hand-shaking all around. She was trembling with excitement, with disbelief. How did she get to the podium? she wondered afterwards. She must have floated, defied the laws of gravity, been lifted up like a saint in the moment of exaltation. She did remember accepting the cheque – 50,000 pounds! – and shaking the hand of the chairman and fumbling in her bag for her notes and her glasses. She dropped the glasses and the chairman retrieved them and handed them to her.

The television lights were blinding, although she could make out her own table and Graham’s encouraging half-smile. Her mind was a blank, flooded with wild chemicals that were new to her. Thank heavens for notes and she wondered how past winners could have sounded so calm, so in charge. She had listened to the video of Salmon Rushdie as he accepted the award for being Best of the Booker and it had given them a bit of inspiration when she and Graham worked on the acceptance speech, even though she didn’t have a hope in hell of winning. Graham, with his immensely popular lectures, knew the ropes, and after they had reworked it last night using Graham’s laptop – she hadn’t brought hers, keep the weight down – she realized that he hadn’t included Lucille in the list of acknowledgements. She was just doing her job, Graham said, but Connie insisted. They revised the speech to include Lucille and then he went down to the lobby and persuaded the hotel cashier to print it out on her computer. Connie smoothed out the papers but her voice came out thinly and the chairman adjusted the microphone and thank heavens her voice seemed to be working.

First the thank-yous. Her husband, her publishers, her children, her various editors, her fellow finalists – someone was missing. She hesitated, her mind scrambling to fill in the blank, and then realized Graham had forgotten Lucille after all. And most of all I want to thank Lucille Goodwin, for being not only my agent but my first reader and my most unrelenting critic. Lucille sprang to her feet and clasped her hands over her head like a boxer who has just scored a knock-out punch and the crowd clapped and laughed, although Connie could see Graham bending over the table and clutching his head.

Than the calmness of the about-to-be-executed as she looked again at her notes and cleared her throat. It was important to start off with a couple of small, self-deprecating jokes Graham had said, bring the audience on side, but her slight sally about thinking the prairies were big until she saw the Great Hall fell a bit flat. A sudden stillness, into which crept an illumination like a searchlight that carved its way through her brain and calmed the swirling neurons, guiding them to the thing she needed to say. She took off her glasses and set aside the notes. Looking straight, unwaveringly, into the lights she said that there was a misconception abroad, one that had only swum into focus in the four days since they’d arrived at Heathrow, that her novel was about the fragility of our rapidly warming planet. Some reviewers had waded in with gloomy paranoia about the insidious machinations of Big Oil in global warming, seeking signs of villainy amongst the characters in her novel. She had no wish to be drawn into that particular debate; she’d lived through enough of it in Calgary. I am not taking sides in the current controversy about the causes of global warming, although anyone who has seen the permafrost melting recognizes its truth, Connie said, looking earnestly at the attentive audience. I am not well enough versed in the pros and cons to do that. I merely use the massive Alberta Oil Sands project as a backdrop against which to develop my characters. The way Dickens did in David Copperfield, where David emerges from the hopelessness of child labour. His novel wasn’t about child labour as such, it was about the development of David himself. There are certain parallels in my novel; for instance Angus Jeann spends his first years in poverty and squalor on a native reserve before being adopted by a reasonably well-off couple in Ottawa. Not an uncommon practice in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s in Canada.

It was an important point to clear up. Returning to the table, her stomach still shivering, carrying her little purse and the beautiful designer-bound copy of her own book in one hand and shaking anonymous outstretched hands with the other, she sought reassurance from her husband. She couldn’t see him because Lucille was on her feet, flushed and triumphant, her dress hiking up as she raised her arms in order to clap above the crowd, the uneven hemline scissoring her legs at mid-thigh, her black-clad frame blocking the view. Suddenly Connie was swept up in the arms of Stephen Major. You were my second choice, after me, he said, hugging her. You’ll be coming to Australia, You’ll be my mate and I’ll show you real country! and Connie thought yes, of course I’ll go to Australia and my dear dear friend Stephen (although she had only met him two days ago) will be my best mate, and then her two children were hugging her and patting her back the way she used to pat them when they were babies, a weird sort of role reversal. But it was Graham she needed, and then she saw him, saw that he had stopped smiling as though the effort were too much for his lips to sustain. He met her eyes, the slight upward slant of his pursed lips not so much an expression of approval as of triumph, or vindication, as though he, or rather they, had moved into what he regarded as their rightful place in this class-ridden British society in spite of their flat Canadian accents and their doubtful Calgary domicile, a put-down that Graham had fretted over when he was at Oxford twenty-five years ago and that still bugged him. He enveloped her in a hug and helped her to her chair.

Later, the press conference. An eager young woman had the floor. You seem to have hit on the same theme as Ian McEwan in his latest novel, that of eco-awareness on our warming planet, she said, her tape recorder held aloft. "Was that serendipity or was it merely picking up on the crise du jour?" and Connie answered that McEwan’s Solar hadn’t come out when she first submitted her novel to her publisher so it must have been serendipity. "And really, mine isn’t, as I mentioned in my speech, the same theme. But to answer your question, if I’d known Ian McEwan was using a similar backdrop I might have been too intimidated to try. He’s such a wonderful writer, don’t you think? I couldn’t even sleep after I read Black Dogs, and as for Saturday, that is my all-time favourite."

And now you’re following in his footsteps in winning the Man Booker prize. How does that make you feel? and, slightly flustered, Connie answered, Well if you really want to know, it makes me feel a bit of a fraud, as though I’m masquerading in someone else’s skin and I’ll be found out at any moment. The interviewer laughed and she sensed the audience onside, as though there had been a communal but invisible nod of understanding. But out of the corner of her eye she saw Graham and his compressed lips forming a half-smile of embarrassment. The sense of approbation disappeared, sucked out of the air like a momentary mirage. It was too late: every television camera in the world would choose this for their evening bow to literacy. Never trash your own work, a long-ago writer at a Writers’ Union A.G.M. had told his seminar audience, and here she was doing just that because of her predilection for Ian McEwan’s sophisticated novels. The Inuit versus the ever-fascinating English social structures, no contest.

"The Ice Maiden, a man with a plummy accent asking her a question, his pencil poised to capture her immortal words. Sorry, she murmured, I couldn’t quite hear. Would you mind repeating your question?"

Graham, perhaps sensing her confusion, said, Perhaps I can help, and she imagined the relief of the interviewer in dealing now with a man. Men like to talk to men, ask anyone who has been to a barbeque in Calgary. Come to think of it that would probably be everybody, she couldn’t imagine anyone in cow-town who had never attended a barbeque.

But maybe Englishmen were a different breed since this one turned, rather pointedly, away from Graham (Connie felt a flash of anger that he would dare treat Graham like that) and repeated his question. Have you spent a great deal of time in northern Canada?

Quite a bit around the Oil Sands project of course, and when I was very young I actually taught in Fort McMurray for a year. That was before extracting oil from the oil sands was considered feasible – there wasn’t much there then, but now they are putting in a designated bus lane on Highway 63 into the Fort because of severe traffic jams. So I did know the area reasonably well, and I got a look at the high Arctic because I was able to hitch rides occasionally with pilots going up as far as Inuvik.

Where is – ah – Inuvik?

Quite north. In the North West Territories, Canada’s most northern town, about a hundred and twenty miles north of the Arctic Circle. She paused, thinking there must be something else she should add, but the reporter, perhaps hoping for domestic upheaval, said, Did the family go with you when you were doing your research?