The Snow Ball Page 3

  High above Anna’s shoulder the kitten stared at its own face in the glass. In a parallel gaze, Anna stared at her face. For a few seconds there was a contest of narcissisms. Then Anna yielded and transferred her gaze from her own reflexion to the kitten’s. It went on staring at itself.

  ‘How did anyone ever suppose’, Anna asked, ‘that blue eyes betoken honesty and frankness?’

  ‘Don’t you like him?’

  ‘I respect him.’

  In silence they all three stared at the kitten’s face.

  Suddenly the kitten let out a monstrous ‘Caw caw caw’, opening its mouth very wide with each noise, more like a baby bird than a cat, and not pausing to draw breath between.

  Anne took it back to the bed, where it settled in her lap. ‘I know’, she said, ‘that you’re Donna Anna. Someone told me. Of course I knew it would be something from Mozart.’

  ‘Mm’, said Anna, her mouth distorted and gagged in the effort of precision as she made up her eyelashes.

  ‘You’ve heard Rudy’s joke?’

  ‘Mm.’

  Reverting, Anne said:

  ‘Your face isn’t a bit like a lapdog’s. More like a cherub’s.’

  Anna held her eyes purposely startled and unblinking, to give the mascara time to dry. Propelling the mascara stick back into its holder, she said:

  ‘Then perhaps I should have come as Cherubino.’

  ‘O my dear you should. To shew off your lovely legs.’

  ‘Bony’, said Anna. ‘Indecent to reveal so much of one’s skeleton while one yet lives.’

  ‘You should experience being buried alive in a tomb of flesh’, said Anne. ‘If you knew how I envy you your figure.’

  Anna picked out a lipstick, one of the long thin ones, pulled off its cap and held it up, preparatory, in the admonishing position of John the Baptist’s forefinger. ‘No you don’t. You know yours is much more appealing in bed.’

  ‘My dear’, said Anne, despairingly. She made a sling of her two hands joined, eased it under the cat curled in her lap, and carefully, like the slowest and smoothest of cranes, raised him, swung him clear and lowered him without disturbance on to the bed. But the cat instantly jumped up, shook himself and turned completely about before settling again in exactly the position Anne had given him to begin with. ‘You’re as perverse as this cat. What is your mood tonight? Morbid? Cynical?’

  Hesitating with the lipstick at her lips, Anna replied:

  ‘I mistrust tonight.’

  ‘Yes, new year. Hateful new years.’

  With a lipstick of enamel pink Anna precisely outlined the involuted border of the left half of her upper lip. Starting at the outside right, she brought the other line to meet it. She filled in the colour, blunted it on a tissue and then, having created half an enamel rose, paused to ask:

  ‘If you hate new years, why celebrate them?’

  ‘It’s not me, darling. It’s Tom-Tom.’

  Anna coloured her lower lip in one deep curve. ‘Darling, does he like being called by that absurd name?’

  ‘Darling, he gets furious if people don’t.’

  Anna dabbed powder over her face, covering the newly coloured lips, which she presently cleared by using the lipstick again, this time as a snow plough. On her cheeks she smoothed in the powder with a baby’s hairbrush. ‘There. Finished’, she said, before she was, wiping her fingers on a tissue like a priest after communion, tumbling her apparatus back into her case like a doctor or a children’s entertainer after a visit, and re-instated Anne’s snuff box in the centre of the dressing table. Her hand paused, went back to the snuff box and picked it up. She rose, vacating the chair, offering it back to Anne, even while she pored over the snuff box’s floral top. ‘Pretty thing.’

  ‘Yes’, said Anne, rising from the bed.

  ‘And yet, you know’, Anna said, putting the snuff box down again, ‘in all eighteenth-century pottery there’s that hint …’

  ‘That hint?’ asked Anne, sitting heavily in the vacated chair like a fat Italian taking his turn in the barber’s shop.

  ‘Of the chamber pot’, said Anna.

  ‘What a mood. What a mood’, said Anne.

  ‘I’m angry with myself.’ It was spoken emptily, in a voice that put you in mind of the suck-back of an ebbing wave and of the chilliness after swimming.

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I told you. Run away.’

  ‘What from?’

  ‘O—the implications of being Donna Anna.’

  ‘I don’t’, Anne said, lying back in her chair, ‘understand you. What made you come as Donna Anna, anyway?’

  ‘O, we poor’, said Anna, walking round the bed for the sake of walking, ‘we don’t have psychology, my dear. We merely have shifts and exigencies. A black dress the poor have always with them. Ergo, one comes as a bereaved daughter.’

  ‘You’re not poor.’

  ‘No, of course I’m not. But you are rich.’

  ‘How inimical you sound tonight.’

  ‘Dear Anne, dear Anne.’ Anna let herself fall forward on to the bed, disturbing the kitten again. ‘I’m sorry, dearest Anne. And sorry to have upset your kitten. But you know, I always have to warn myself against you.’

  ‘Warn yourself, dear child?’

  ‘When I’m here, I might almost think this was my room, as though I were as rich as you. No, it’s not that. But there is a conflict of interest somewhere—or, if there were to be one—if it came to a crisis——’

  ‘Well?’ Anne’s voice was steadfast.

  ‘O, you’ll expel me from your igloo some day’, Anna said. ‘Aren’t you going to do your face?’

  ‘I tell you, it’s beyond salvage. That’s not what I came for. I’d never mean to expel you, you know.’

  ‘What did you come for?’

  Anne’s plump hand, satirically furtive, tugged open one of the drawers of the dressing table, slipped in and came out clenched round half a dozen of the expensive peppermint creams she bought, in packages shaped like flower baskets, from a café in Wigmore Street.

  She offered in gesture to throw one to Anna, who shook her head: Anne put the sweet in her own mouth: ‘Darling’, said Anna, ‘even your vices are white—and so expensive.’

  As Anne sucked, the scent of mint crept into the room and hung, palpable as drapery, pungent, pervasive. The nose overwhelmingly suggested to the eye that the white-hung room must be a bower of flowering mint, like the blackthorn bower behind the Chelsea rustics.

  ‘Minthe was a nymph’, Anna said.

  ‘I’, said Anne, putting another sweet in her mouth, ‘am anything but. Have you noticed, by the way, that both you and I have come as people of our own real name? Now what does that signify? How honest we are? That we’re opposed to disguises?’

  ‘No, the opposite. We’re unwilling to reveal ourselves. We won’t give away what our daydreams are.’

  ‘People come to fancy dress balls as their daydreams?’

  ‘Why else should the least witty man in the world come as Voltaire? The lady in London least likely to commit adultery as Lady Hamilton?’

  Laughing, protesting, salivating, Anne said:

  ‘All right, two examples, but you can’t build a theory on two examples. What about Rudy?’

  ‘Even Rudy would like to be a poet.’

  ‘Well … Maybe.’ Anne swallowed her peppermint and began another.

  ‘I daresay bankers often would. I don’t know many bankers.’

  ‘No, wait’, Anne said, talking hastily round her new mouthful, ‘I can refute you: Marie Antoinette.’ She swallowed. ‘There are at least five Marie Antoinettes in the house tonight.’

  ‘All women want to have their heads chopped off’, Anna replied, ‘Don’t you know that yet?’

  Anne let her hands, from which she had finished all the peppermints, flop over the sides of her chair. It was meant as a gesture of giving Anna up, but evidently it brought home to her how weary she was: she pushed off her shoes
and extended her legs, and then, like a sculptor deciding the points of support for a figure, arranged herself with the round back of her heels propped on the floor and the round back of her head against the chair. Eyes shut, voice drowsing, she said:

  ‘We must go back to the party. It calls me from below, like knowing something’s on in the kitchen.’

  ‘Let it seethe’, said Anna, immobile on the bed.

  ‘No, really …’

  ‘All right. Let’s go.’

  Neither of them moved. The only sound was the kitten’s breathing which, strained through its fur, whistled thinly like the night wind in a melodrama.

  ‘All the same, I don’t believe you want your head chopped off’, Anne said, without opening her eyes, ‘even though you might deserve it. But I’m blessed if I see what you do want.’ Anna did not reply, so Anne elaborated: ‘What do you want, I mean, as Donna Anna? I feel sure that’s the clue to your mood tonight. To be seduced by Don Giovanni?’

  After a moment Anna said carefully:

  ‘I met a Don Giovanni.’

  ‘Really? Is there one here?’ Anne opened her eyes, as though he could be in her bedroom. ‘I haven’t seen half the guests. Another reason why I must get back to the party. I probably don’t know half the guests. Such a lot of them are Tom-Tom’s friends …’ And then, having talked her thoughts to the point: ‘Was it Don Giovanni you ran away from? From your fate?’

  ‘But what is Donna Anna’s fate?’ Anna lazily asked.

  ‘Well, to be seduced by Don Giovanni.’

  ‘But is she?’ Anna insisted—but faintly.

  ‘Well, my dear, Act One Scene One—I mean, the woman comes tumbling out of her house in the middle of the night trying to stop him getting away before she can unmask him and yelling blue murder or, rather, blue rape …’

  ‘Yes, but has he succeeded’, Anna asked, not permitting her voice or body to betray any interest in the outcome, ‘or has he only tried?’

  ‘Well, I’d always assumed——’. Anne stopped short. ‘Of course she says it was only an attempt. But she’d have to say that, wouldn’t she? I mean, it was the eighteenth century, and there was her honour, and that wet fiancé of hers to be considered. And the poor thing was Spanish …’

  ‘Even so’, said Anna. ‘It doesn’t absolutely preclude that she was telling the truth.’

  ‘I think the audience is meant to assume …’

  ‘How can the audience judge? Whatever happens happens before the curtain goes up.’

  ‘You could hardly expect it to happen on stage’, said Anne.

  ‘That’s assuming it does happen’, said Anna.

  They both laughed, and both fell silent.

  ‘Perhaps’, said Anne presently, whispering under the enchantment of the idea, ‘if one listened very attentively to the music of the overture it would turn out to be describing what’s taking place just before the curtain goes up.’

  ‘Ah, if only one could—in that sense—read music.’ Anna suddenly jumped to her feet, startling the kitten. ‘Come on, Anne. Come back to your party.’

  ‘Coming’—not coming, still lying in the chair.

  ‘No, really.’

  Anne began to rise, grunting into her shoes.

  ‘You’re throwing a ball’, Anna said. ‘It’s too good to throw away.’

  ‘What a sweet thing to say’, Anne said, following Anna to the door. ‘May I tell Tom-Tom you said it?’

  ‘Seriously, darling’, Anna asked again, as she opened the door, ‘does he like being called that?’

  ‘My dear, I tell you …’ Anne decided to shut the door again. She drew Anna back secretively into the white bosom of the room. ‘Listen, dearest. Do you believe there are intimacies of married life one ought not to reveal even to one’s best friend?’

  ‘No; certainly not when you’re obviously proposing to reveal one.’

  ‘Well, listen.’ Anne confronted her. ‘He’s Tom-Tom.’ Her face searched, almost anxiously, up into Anna’s. ‘I’m Tum-Tum.’

  Anna gaped in horror down at her friend before starting to giggle. Anne started to giggle, too. Both giggling, they fumbled the light off and got the door opened and themselves into the corridor, where they stepped into the feeble shuffling noise of party talk and dancing in the distance below, with a thin treble intimation of the band. Anne closed the door of her bedroom behind them and as she did so Anna, though still giggling, thought with sharp, sensuously experienced sadness that the smell of mint which was now being shut into the room in the dark would soon shrivel and vanish, like a corpse entombed, like fruits in a garden whose owner had gone away after locking the gate.

  3

  COMING down the grand staircase by Anne’s stately side, Anna distinguished, in the crowd below, the quaint fat man who, when you looked down on him from above, as Anna seemed always to do, resembled a boiled egg. He still seemed alone—more than ever so, since he was now without even his cup of coffee. Yet he still had the air of protecting something: his opalescent waistcoast, perhaps, or his paunch, or his sense of being himself.

  For the space of a couple of descending steps Anna let her eye pursue his meanderings through the crowd. Rather, that turned out to be a railway station illusion, and it was the crowd which was sifting past him, while he stood stock—protectively—still.

  Fluttering with the little streamers of crowd past him, Anna’s gaze was drawn to distinguish someone else—or, at least, something else: a flash of black costume. She did not allow it to imprint more than an impressionistic wisp across her vision but withdrew her gaze and—in so suddenly shortening its reins—half-stumbled on a chair.

  She clutched for Anne’s arm but did not need to make contact with it before recovering herself.

  Even so, she had already said, quickly, like an excuse or a minor curse on being clumsy:

  ‘I should have come as Cherubino after all. It would have been easier than a skirt for the stairs.’

  Anne, pursuing her own thickly flowing course—a golden syrup of lamé—and intent on controlling the heavy resistances of her own skirt, as though intent on wading, replied without haste and without looking at Anna:

  ‘On second thoughts, darling, you are a little old to play Cherubino.’

  Anna laughed, made on an indrawn breath a sound—‘O, O’—as though to indicate a touch at fencing, and looked ahead to the foot of the staircase where the hostess’s approach had been observed. Two or three guests seemed to be leaping up towards her already; and the impression that these were Anne’s dogs, over-excited by the thought that she was going to exercise them, was lent detail by the three rows of precisely crimped curls which ran along the sides of some of the men’s wigs and which could be read as the horizontal bars of waves shimmying down a cocker spaniel’s ears.

  Descending deeper, nearer them, further into the party roar, Anna’s mind re-interpreted the silken waves into ocean waves, which crashed against the staircase, casting up a sprinkling of foam and laughter, making fingers which encroached graspingly, but as lazily as caterpillars, up on to the second, on to the third, step. Round the terminal of the outward-curling banisters one young man had arched himself backwards, catwise, like a wave slicing itself on a breakwater, and from this unexpected direction his arm pussyfooted higher than anyone else’s, an inlet of foam making towards Anne’s descending ankles.

  Yet though it seemed as much to be taken seriously as a brute, inanimate element, this was still a personal sea, not merely encroaching but predatory and selective, the sea in a Greek myth, reaching up to snatch Anne and leave Anna alone.

  Anne, however, descending into it as imperturbably as if she was going to bathe, and paying Anna the compliment of not directing her attention to it one moment before its touch should actually claim her flesh, went on:

  ‘So, my dear’—this was the first time Anna realised that her friend’s thought had not been completed—‘you have no choice but to be Donna Anna. The question is only what you’re going to do.’<
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  ‘Do?’ Anna said gaily, at the very moment that her foot, in guardsman’s harmony with her friend’s, touched the floor. ‘Throw myself into your ball, of course.’

  Importunities plucked at Anne, the polite over-eagerness of guests. But Anne, as though she had so far only paddled into the verge of the sea and crossed only the technical border between land and ocean, waded—stumped—on, the importunate guests going with her, as it were backwards, higgledy-piggledy, head-over-heels: if they seemed to cling to her, she seemed to lift them clean off their feet, to be actually carrying them, she a champion, they mere nothings. Yet as she went in deeper, encountering thicker crowd, the nothings, too, so easy to lift up once, seemed to make their weight felt with being carried a distance. Anne’s stumpings became more widely spaced; her footsteps, more weightily planted, began to shiver with each impact of planting and to heave, quake, almost refuse, at each effort at transplanting.

  Anna, meanwhile, trying to follow a parallel course, was buffeted by the eddies thrown off round Anne’s progress. Shoulders wheeled into her, knocked her aside and made her lose way; and so Anne had to turn not merely to the side but completely round in order to make sure that Anna was still present and within earshot when she asked:

  ‘No—I mean do about the Don?’

  ‘O my dear——’. Anna began to throw her reply despairingly, a lifeline that would never reach its destination across the storm. Before she could finish, Anne had crossed the border which took her out of her depth. Anna lost sight of her.

  When she recovered it, she perceived that Anne had at last surrendered to the exchange and had suffered the nothings she had been carrying to carry her. The border they had lifted her across was the double doorway into the ballroom. She was already on the dance floor. One of the nothings had importuned successfully. Even in his arms, however, she was looking back, round his shoulder, towards the edge, towards Anna; and Anna, dodging this way and that like a spectator at a procession, was trying to make her face visible to Anne so that her answer could be lipread if not heard.