The Snow Ball Read online

  Already Anne was launched on the waves of dancers. Anna saw her breasting the rhythm of the music, buoyant in her obesity. She plunged, nodded, seemed about to sink, and swam—a great rippling, obese, sleek golden seal. Anna felt it was to a departing merman that she called and mouthed:

  ‘I’m too old for adventures. Too old.’

  ‘Too what, Anna?’ said Rudy Blumenbaum’s voice: his unmistakable voice: a dark baritone which every now and then rose into a squeak, as though Rudy was deeply snoring and yet whistling at the same time: and as the tone rose to falsetto, so Rudy’s accent become tinged with cockney.

  Anna turned and held out both hands to him. ‘Too old, Rudy.’

  He squeezed her hands. ‘Now listen, dearie. You’ve heard you’re as old as you feel? Well, you’—he converted his hand-squeezing into slipping his arm round her waist and squeezing that—‘feel pretty good to me. Care to dance?’

  His grip transformed itself again, now into a dancer’s grip, and before she had time to assent he had her with her back to the dance floor ready to begin.

  ‘Rudy’, she said, protesting at his swiftness, ‘I don’t know that I still can.’

  She meant she was still aching from the Scottish dancing, but he took it for another allusion to her age: he broke off, reached round behind her and gave her a little slap on the bottom. ‘Get along with you’, he said, resuming her hand like reins and giving her toes a neat little kick with his own. He danced her out into the middle of the floor, making her feel like a mare being given its first outing of the day by a jaunty head lad. Rudy was a rather horsey—a lightweight, an almost bow-legged—little man.

  4

  CROUCHED between the wall and the inmost pier glass in the ladies’ cloakroom, Ruth Blumenbaum opened her notebook, turned back to the beginning and read through the entry she had already made.

  This notebook seems almost too nice to spoil.

  I love new stationery.

  12.10 p.m. Meant to get away to start diary long before this but held up.

  Ruth interrupted her reading and, using her white silk-covered knees as a desk, scribbled out p.m. and wrote in a.m.

  Anyway, got to house about 10.20. Daddy had trouble parking on slight hill. V. sophistd. hour to start party, but b/se of new year’s eve, of course. All the way in the car Mummy kept saying we cd. leave any time after midnight, but sure D. will not want to. As soon as we arrived had to sep. from Daddy to leave coats. ‘Run and park your coats, ladies’, D. said, ‘hope Anne has not had parking meters installed up there.’ Actually she has had a lot of mirrors installed—and her housekeeper (I think: familiar, anyway). Tickets for coats, wh. are put on long trestle table—like bazaar. Mummy’s fur much nicest of those piled on table but wish she (M.) had made some effort at 18th c. costume. When saw housekeeper in cloakroom was afraid wd. not be able to creep away here to write up diary—wd. not want to be questioned by hskpr. But fortunately when came here to write it (12. 10) hskpr. not here. (Rather bad: anyone cd. steal coats.) Ought to have explained at start that want to keep diary on spot of first ball (‘a great event in a girl’s life’—Mummy) to have exact record of how felt at time: b/se am sure most people falsify when they remember such things afterwards. Am sure Mummy was not like she says she was when young. D. doesn’t talk much about his youth. Cd. have saved time by explaining purpose of diary at home before leaving. But want it all done on spot. Won’t alter after, either. Then notebook can become RELIC like Elisabeth B. was always talking about.

  Next to the name Elisabeth B., Ruth wrote in an asterisk and annotated it—sideways up the margin: ‘Cath. girl at schl.’

  Anyway after fuss to get D. and M. to let me come didn’t feel partic, excited. Left cloakroom with M. and almost at once met Edward. He was silly and aggressive about my costume—said he didn’t like it. I expect he didn’t understand when I told him who I was. He is v. badly educated: anyway, about cultured things. I thought he was trying to spoil my confidence at start of evening. He was all in black, says he is Casanova, wh. is silly at his age. Wish men were not all so aggressive or at least wish I was not depressed by it. Note: They can’t all be. D. is a man. Went down to ballroom and danced twist, 2 tangoes, 1 slow fox with Ed. and 1 slow waltz with Rex (man Ed. knows: v. tall: Cambridge) wh. made Ed. jealous, I think. Had sandwiches (turkey and pâté) with Ed. Drank gin and French. Quite interestg. conversn., which is why did not get away to write diary. Ed. says he is a realist. Saw Anna K. was here. Then Scottish dancing began, wh. I hate, but went through with it to prove to Ed. I was not affected, wh. he had just said I was during conversn, over sandwchs. Saw D. was dancing (he is in Scotch costume, of course, appropriate to Scotch dancing) and also Mummy!! D. v. gay. He is so funny at parties, just as he is at home, not shy at all—most people like him, even Ed. People v. much amused by his joke about who he is. Saw Anna K. was dancing in D.’s set. If I have to speak to her wonder if I ought to call her Anna or Mrs. K. She will call me Ruth of course, but that is b/se she has known me since I was a child. She prob. won’t recognise me anyway. At midnight band played Auld Lang Syne. Afterwards people kissed. Ed. suddenly took a whistle out of his pocket and blew it. Hideous noise. Saw D. had ended up next to Anna K. and wondered if he wd. kiss her but of course he kissed M. instead. Ed. kissed me. Not a success. Like when he kissed me at Xmas, really. Feel v. depressed, not just by Ed. but by all the people, men and women, kissing. Anna K. kissed a man in a black mask. Feel there is something awful about all the people in the world, can’t think what they are here for—they don’t seem to matter—they are like atoms—they just move around without aim attracted or repelled by each other; hardly matters which. Anna K. is the most attractive woman I have ever seen. I detest her.

  At the bottom Ruth wrote

  None of this expresses what I feel at all before beginning her next entry:

  1.25 a.m.

  ‘Rudy, you can’t have a daughter old enough to come to a ball.’

  ‘No use saying I can’t, Anna. My accountant assures me I have. You should see what her fancy dress cost me.’

  ‘But Rudy. Last time I saw her she was—what? Twelve?’ Anna jerked her cheek away from its impersonal proximity to Rudy’s in order to look at his face. She was startled, as she always was when she saw it close to, by the high contrast of his colouring: he had a heavy blue stubble, but the rest of his skin was a bright, transparent, easily perspiring crimson, the skin of a youth not old enough to grow a beard, so that his face, as well as his voice, seemed a physiological impossibility. ‘Her name’s Ruth, isn’t it? Have I remembered right?’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  ‘O well. I expect last time I saw her I said you couldn’t have a daughter of twelve.’

  ‘And I expect I said what a lot it was costing to educate her.’

  They laughed. Anna’s cheek returned to its slot above Rudy’s shoulder, parallel with Rudy’s cheek; not touching his, but receptive of the warmth issuing from it as palpably as from the radiator grille of an electric fire.

  ‘Fortunately’, Anna said, ‘you’re made of money. Aren’t you, Rudy?’

  ‘Yes’, he said, ‘and you’re made of flesh and blood, but you’d squeal if you had to part with any, just the same.’

  Anna laughed and danced on, anaesthetised to effort; it seemed that Rudy, his face invisible to her, had become a machine and that he was supplying the motive power as well as steering. Her eyes, invisible to his, felt free to sweep the ballroom: dancing had none of the intimacy of conversation face to face: her vision swept and swooped, taking in whatever Rudy put it in her way to see—but he himself, of course, was not seeing what she saw; he was merely the machine, or the operator hidden beneath the rather jerky, bumpy motor which impelled the switch-back car on its route, from which she observed, as chance allowed, swathes of landscape, each suddenly cut off and replaced by another.

  She was not startled even when she glimpsed the black costume and black mask, lurking—like one of Francesco Guardi’s
impressionistic cloaked figures in the colonnade of the Doges’ Palace—among the spectators at the edge of the ballroom. She felt as safe as a passenger on a switch-back in a thriller, whose enemy had been left in the fairground below. She did not mind if Don Giovanni saw her, since Rudy’s arms must proclaim her safe: Rudy’s very arms must proclaim that Rudy was monogamous and devoted to his wife and daughter: and in any case Rudy’s arms quickly swept her round and presented the other side of the ballroom to her view, so that Don Giovanni, if he did see her, must do so without her knowing whether he had or not and without, therefore, establishing communication or even communion of minds.

  ‘… the absolute earth’, Rudy was saying, ‘to educate her. And the object of the whole exercise was to convince her her father is vulgar.’

  ‘O Rudy’, Anna began: but something warm and like the slap of a wave caressed itself against her back, and Anne’s voice whispered:

  ‘How’s the Don?’

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t care. I’m on the run’, Anna replied, twisting round, searching over her shoulder for the woman who had been behind her. But the whirligig of the dance had reversed them. It was Anne’s partner who presented himself to Anna’s vision; and it turned out that Anne was now dancing with her great shambling, shapeless husband, behind whom even she was obliterated from sight.

  ‘Tom-Tom—hullo.’

  ‘Anna—goodbye.’

  ‘Tom-Tom’s in great form tonight’, said Rudy.

  ‘Isn’t he? So are you, Rudy.’

  ‘You take the words out of my mouth. I’ve been meaning to tell you all evening. You look blooming, Anna. Really blooming.’

  She thanked him. They danced. Presently, she reverted:

  ‘Rudy, I’m sure Ruth——’

  ‘Won’t think me vulgar?’

  ‘I’m sure she has enough native wit to stand out against any such idea. She must have. She’s your child.’

  ‘Ah, don’t say blood is thicker than an expensive education.’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’

  ‘That means I’ve wasted my money’, said Rudy.

  D. danced with Anna K. Cd. see from way she laughed at his conversatn. she sees how amusing he is. Also he is much more lively dancer than anyone else on floor. Anna K. looks rather a beanpole dancing with him, though she is not really tall. He is a bit short, of course. She is obviously charmed by him. Most people are. I suppose he finds her attractive. But can’t be sure of this. Often when you think somebody so attractive everyone must notice it, people turn out never to have given it a thought. Everyone thought Jane T. the most beautiful girl in the school but Mummy didn’t even notice which one she was in the play. D.’s style of dancing may be old-fashioned but it is good style. Much better that Ed.’s. Ed. v. aggressive, so came up here to write up diary. Feel much older than Ed. Emotionally, I mean.

  ‘Technically, she isn’t old enough to be here. Her mother kept saying she oughtn’t to go to a ball until she’s come out officially. But I said: “Go on, Mum. Even if she hasn’t come out, let her trickle out.”’

  When was a schoolgirl if I met an attractive woman I used to fall in love w. her. Suppose this was way of not being depressed at her being more attractive than me. (Query: this diary too introspective? Morbid, as Ed. wd. say. Beastly egotistical, anyway.) Used to think must be Lesbian. Looked up Sappho and Lesbos in encycl. Liked idea of Gk. island: sun: blue sky: playing ball on sands beside blue sea—like one of those classical Picassos Miss L. so keen on. But do not really care for pink, monumental women—a bit like M.!—but cannot imagine M. playing ball w. nothing on!! Used to wonder if when was grown-up D. wd. BUY Lesbos for me. But all that ages ago. Realise now it was naive idea. Mean Sappho etc. ages ago, mod. civilisn. much more complic.d, etc. (Expect you can’t buy Gk island, at least not big one, any more, even if D. cd. and wd. Expect he cd.) But way I have written it is ambiguous, cd. mean it’s ages ago that I used to think it wd. be nice—and actually this is true, too. Cannot feel like that any more. No doubt more healthy and normal but makes v. vulnerable to depressn. Certainly cannot imagine loving Anna K. But people must have done—men, I mean. She looks as if she has had lots of lovers. Suppose I think her attractive b/se she is not monumental type. This may mean D. does not find her attractive, as he evidently likes monumental type, e.g. Mummy. Anna K. more on scraggy side, like me. Actually she is not quite tall enough. Think I am about ideal height for a woman. (Not conceit—have many disadvantages.) Of course people of my generation usually are taller than people of Anna K.’s—better feeding when babies.

  Anna felt a brake applied and the machinery jerk before she realised what had prompted it to do so: a man’s knuckles knocking on Rudy’s back.

  Rudy swung round, opening up for Anna a view of the intruder. But she had already seen his black costume.

  She felt quite palpably between her own shoulder blades the rhythm of his knocking on Rudy’s back.

  She was stricken first by the panic, and then rapidly by the embarrassment of suffering an arrest. In sheer shyness she looked down and away. It was some seconds before she let it seep into her vision that he was not Don Giovanni: he was without a mask, a good deal taller than Don Giovanni, fairer and much younger—much, much younger than either Don Giovanni or herself.

  Anna and Rudy began to speak apologetically, regretfully, to one another. But the stranger ducked under the trailing grip Rudy had kept on Anna’s hand, assumed her and danced her away. ‘Is this an excuse-me dance?’ Anna asked him at once, worried.

  ‘No. It’s just that my partner’s run away from me and I’ve got the cheek of the devil.’

  ‘Have you?’ Without attending, she submitted to the convention whereby women on a dance floor, like horses in a riding stables, must passively accept whatever partner proposed himself. It was probably because she had experienced on his behalf a panic which had turned out unneeded that she felt empty of any capacity to feel interested in him.

  She was prepared for her face to fit itself into the old slot in relation to the new partner, as though the partner’s personality was nothing and the only adjustment that need be made was an alteration of, as it were, stirrup length from Rudy’s shortness to the young man’s height. But the young man, disdaining the false intimacy of pressing his cheek against hers, thrust her away from him, trying to impose on her the true intimacy of looking him in the face, while he held her very loosely and danced in a gangling but quite practised way. She struggled for a minute against his manner of dancing: but the convention had given it to him, not her, to dictate.

  ‘Who’re you looking for?’ he said.

  ‘Looking for? No one.’

  ‘Your eyes keep looking round the room.’

  ‘Do they? … Actually, I’m avoiding someone.’

  ‘It’s the same thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’ For the first time Anna-felt an interest. She looked at him deliberately. His face, though it was pleasant, and perhaps even quite handsome, reminded her of Donald Duck’s. Not that the nose was very long, but it stuck out at a sharpish angle and was flatly triangular, formed into two deep grooves like the grooves on a bill. Beneath it the mouth and chin were pushed up rather close and small-scale, like the mouth and chin beneath a cat’s muzzle. The mouth was quite wide across the face but thin- and smooth-lipped, the chin quite sharply defined but delicate: a little pussy’s mouth and chin, and not really any more gentle. His colouring was pink and gold. He probably had little incisive white teeth, like a pussy. His small, bright-eyed face turned brightly this way and that, as though he moved it by pulling a rod and was deliberately giving the effect of brightness, above a tall, thin neck which perhaps had contributed to the initial thought of Donald Duck, since it had a poultry scragginess. Anna took a moment to let herself realise that his neck was thin because he was still so young: the last of the changes begun by puberty had not yet been quite completed.

  ‘Well, you can’t avoid someone if you don’t know where they are.’
<
br />   ‘O. No. I see what you mean.’

  Evidently he was aware that she had lost interest; and it was presumably in a bid to bully it back that he let go of her altogether—apart from their linked hands—and left her to dance on her own while he pranced about, reminding her now of a rocking horse, no longer in front of her but beside her, letting his own gaze, this time, survey the ballroom.

  Anna danced, her hand dangling by her side. Something touched her hand. She looked, saw gold lamé and then Anne, who had already danced—in orthodox fashion—past, leaving a little folded piece of paper in Anna’s hand. It lay loosely, rolling as the hand dangled.

  The young man swooped in on Anna, faced her again and held her again at his long arms’ length in his loose embrace.

  ‘If you danced in the old-fashioned orthodox way’, Anna said, ‘my face would be up against your shoulder—like a baby being burped.’

  ‘Yup’, he said, ‘and I wouldn’t be able to see your expression.’

  ‘Neither would you be able to see me unfold and read the note which has just been put into my hand.’

  ‘You’ll have to read it under my nose. If it’s a guilty secret I shall know from your face.’

  ‘I’ll have to chance it’, Anna said. She removed her hand from his shoulder and undid the note. ‘With your permission.’

  The handwriting was—she had feared it would not be—Anne’s.

  ‘My dear, just to convince you there’s only one rôle left to you. Rudy Blumenbaum’s daughter is here as Cherubino.’

  ‘Good news?’ said the young man. ‘Football pools? Rich aunt died?’

  ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. It’s hardly gossip. It says Rudy Blumenbaum’s daughter is here as Cherubino.’

  ‘I could have told you that.’