The Snow Ball (11 page)

‘I like your beauty spot’, he said. ‘I’ve liked it all night.’

‘I like you’, she repeated, in the same way as before.

‘Yet the curious thing is’, he said, ‘that although I like it I want to take it off.’

Anna said:

‘That’s one of the things I’d prefer to do for myself.’

‘All right. Then do.’

She looked down at her bosom, which in the
dimness
was a greenish white, the colour of flesh in an old painting on panel.

She put her thumbnail under the edge of the beauty spot. Slowly she peeled it off, held out her hand and let the beauty spot tumble invisibly to the floor.

‘You realise’, he said, ‘that you’ve made me
terrified
to touch you?’

‘Yes. I’ve been enjoying your terror for some minutes.’

‘Are you cruel?’ he asked.

She seemed to be breathless for a moment. ‘My cruelty is very, very delicate’, she eventually replied, slowly.

‘That’s as though you were going to behead me and promised that no single stroke would be fatal: you’d just do it with hundreds of little ones.’

His voice sounded to her extraordinarily loud and deep, but it could not have penetrated the muffling of the curtain because no one from the ballroom called Shush.

‘I’d rather thought it was you who were going to execute me’, she said, with a quiver, possibly a laugh, in the sentence. ‘You wear the executioner’s mask.’

‘Perhaps both. Each each.’

She said and did nothing.

His head bent forward, towards her, as though for the executioner’s stroke, and he began very
passionately
to kiss the place where the beauty spot had been.

‘O G
OD
’, Anna said, pulled almost off balance by his embrace and also shaken by the violence of her desire to embrace him.

‘Is it all right?’ he said quickly, anxiously, through the darkness. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing’, she said promptly. ‘It’s all right. It’s just that I didn’t know I felt so—violently about it. Isn’t it awful’, she went on, ‘to be surprised by one’s own feelings, at my age. And my feelings go veering about.’ She put up her hand and stroked the side of his face, encountering the mask and taking care not to disturb it. ‘But I won’t be a bitch this time. I really won’t.’

‘That’s just as well’, he said. ‘Because this time …’

‘Yes, I know … No, if I hesitate now, it’s purely because of practical considerations.’

‘Yes, well, obviously, not
here
’, he said, casting a look round the gallery—more for illustration than in the hope of seeing much through the gloom. ‘Come to my flat.’

‘That’s not the only practical consideration.’

‘O’, he said impatiently, ‘I’ve got plenty.’

‘I don’t know’, she said, consideringly, ‘that we shall need
plenty
…’

The mask stopped responding to the fluctuations of his expression and remained stretched taut and stiff for a full moment, while he was shocked. Then he realised she had consented and she felt the mask crease—fold and collapse inwards—as he gave a great grin.

‘Come to my flat’, he repeated. ‘We’ll probably pick up a taxi. Anyway, it’s only a mile or two. It’s in——’

She put her hand across his mouth.

He kissed and then gently bit at her fingers.

‘Be careful’, she said. ‘Be anonymous.’

His hand removed her hand from his mouth.

‘Let me just say——’ he began, but instead of
saying
anything his mouth made its way violently into hers. Her hand placed his hand on her breast, and it violently grasped her.

‘O God’, Anna said again.

This time he made no comment, accepting it.

‘I’m just shameless’, she said. ‘I just want to take you to the nearest bed.’

‘Well, come there’, he answered.

He softly tugged open the door at the back of the gallery. Even the dim lighting from the corridor
outside
was enough to bite at her eyes. She shut them for a moment and groped her way through; felt for the banister and then for the three shallow steps leading down from the gallery. She heard him quietly shut
the door behind them, almost wholly sealing off the French love song in the ballroom.

She opened her eyes and walked along the corridor.

He came hurrying after her, caught her up, and put his hand beneath her elbow. ‘Get your coat.’

‘No, listen’, she said, halting suddenly, so that he almost tumbled over her. Instead of retreating he remained huddled close against her. She turned towards him, and he was so close that she had to draw her head backwards before she could search for his eyes through the slits of his mask. ‘Listen’, she said. ‘I
am
an iconoclast.’

‘I know you are …’

‘Do you believe’, she asked, her voice betraying that she was almost suffocated by the excitement of her own mischief, even while she tried to phrase the idea as formally as possible in order to calm, or to arrange, the excitement, ‘that perfect bad taste is almost as hard to achieve as perfect good taste?’

‘Well I don’t know’, he said in a delaying voice, not so much in reluctance against her plan as in fear that it might involve a change in his. ‘I don’t know what you’re …’

She slipped her fingers round his wrist, just as she had when she made him tiptoe along the gallery. But this time she moved much more swiftly and easily. She reversed their direction. She led him back along the corridor; past the entrance to the gallery; along to the far end of the corridor: to the second staircase.

He came perfectly obediently and passively, just as
he had tiptoeing along the gallery: but this time his hand was active. His wrist twisted and slithered inside her grip as though her grip was a handcuff, and his fingers flapped and bent upwards, trying to make contact with her hand and insinuate themselves into it.

She started up the stairs, drawing him, willing, behind her. With determination, she did not look back at him.

She made him almost run up the first flight.

He offered no protest.

The next flight she had to take more slowly
herself
.

Halfway up, she said, but still without looking back:

‘This was originally the servants’ staircase. It seems appropriate to our position in this house.’

He gave no answer, or only a ‘Mm’.

Speaking had made her out of breath. In her own deeper breathing she could not hear whether he was out of breath, too.

The staircase was badly lit, by only an occasional bulb on the landings. The whole house seemed empty and quiet. There was only the noise of their footsteps, the plain wood creaking beneath them, Anna’s
breathing
and from time to time a squelch, a sound almost of sap being bruised, when the high heels of Anna’s shoes actually dug into the naked surface of the wood.

Against her desire, Anna found that the higher she
mounted, and the higher her excitement and hurry, the slower she had to go.

A few steps from the top, she paused altogether, altogether out of breath. She took the opportunity to slip off her shoes, which were making too much noise. Don Giovanni steadied her while she took them off; but she still would not look round at him.

Splinters in the surface of the wooden tread pulled at threads in the sole of her stockings.

She put her two shoes together and held them in one hand. Her other hand groped behind her, to resume Don Giovanni’s wrist. He thrust it at her.

She ran up the last few steps, and he followed her to the door of Anne’s bedroom.

Softly Anna opened the door. She groped round the jamb, found the light switch and put it on, knowing that the sudden brightness might affront their eyes but wanting Don Giovanni to see the room instantly and whole.

Her eyes
were
affronted. For a moment she could not understand the heavings, the upheaval, in the oval white bed. She had illuminated the back of a neck, ochre coloured; with difficulty she recognised that she had lately been looking at it illuminated by a spotlight; but now its voice was spluttering and its huge body was straining in an effort to roll over
sideways
, to roll
off,
like a seal trying to roll off a rock; and, as it did manage to heave a little up and roll a little to one side, it revealed another head on the
pillow, face up, a startled face, the face of its wife, the face which had been
beneath
…

Anna brushed the light out, jammed the door shut, snatched with her free hand at Don Giovanni and ran back to the top of the stairs and then down the first flight.

From behind the closed door above her she faintly heard the frightened, creaking ‘Caw caw caw’ of the kitten.

Don Giovanni followed her.

She tumbled her way down the next flight, not
caring
whether she missed a step, took two steps at a time, bumped the newel of the banisters in hurling herself round …

She stopped, and the noise of her hurry stopped, perhaps two thirds of the way down, only because she had let one of her shoes tumble out of her hand. It somersaulted to a couple of steps below where she had stopped, and rested there. She lacked the energy for the precise movements of going the further two steps, bending down and retrieving it.

Don Giovanni came down the stairs behind her. He hesitated; passed her; descended and picked up the shoe. He handed it back, and she took it.

He mounted a step.

He stood face to face with her, one step below her.

‘O my dear, how
grotesque
’,
she said.

She bent her head towards his chest and burst into tears there.

‘Y
OU
see’, Anna said. ‘I just can’t be perfect.’

They sat down side by side on the stairs. No one came. The house was still silent.

‘I over-reached myself’, she said. ‘I thought I could carry off something that was beyond me.’

She looked down at his handkerchief between her hands. She had been surprised to see the ordinary twentieth-century handkerchief coming out of his eighteenth-century pocket. She gave it back to him. He stretched his silken leg out, down the steps, in order to get the handkerchief to the mouth of his pocket.

‘I’ve made the front of your costume damp’, Anna said, glancing at it.

He gave a deprecating move of the head.

‘She has a perfect right’, Anna said. ‘Her own husband.’ She added: ‘Her own house. Her own party.’

‘Yes.’

‘How
can
I feel betrayed?’

‘One’s feelings aren’t always logical.’

‘It’s
her
bed.’

She put her forefinger on the pouch of flesh just below her eye. She did not want to rub the eye, for fear of blurring the mascara; so she depressed the flesh into a waterspout, a gargoyle, through which to channel off the remaining tears, which were already cool.

‘It may be rather comic’, she said. ‘Though it
is
grotesque as well Especially if you knew what he calls her in bed.’ Then: ‘Have I ruined my mascara?’

He twisted to face her and scrutinised the
underneath
of her eyes.

‘It’s run a bit’, he said.

He stretched his leg out again, got at the
handkerchief
again and offered it to her.

She made it into a fingerstall, licked the tip, touched it to her eyes and said:

‘Guide me.’

He did so.

‘That’s all we can do about it’, she said, stopping his finger; and he put his handkerchief away again. ‘You’ll have to take me as I am. I’ve left my make-up case up there.’

‘Up there?’

‘Up there’, she said wryly. ‘On the dressing table, I think. Or the bed.’

‘I hope they moved it’, he said.

‘I’m sorry you didn’t see the kitten.’

‘I heard it, I think.’

‘I hope they moved that.’

‘You’re very tired’, he said. ‘Come to my flat. You needn’t be seduced.’

‘I want to be.’

But neither of them moved from the stairs.

‘I expect you’re too tired’, Anna said. ‘I’ve made you run up and down the stairs. For nothing. The servants’ stairs are always more steep, because nobody cared about
them
.’

‘Get your coat.’

This time they did stand up.

S
HE
found him waiting for her, his back turned to where she must appear from, in the hall. No one else was there.

He had put on an ordinary black topcoat over his costume, and the fact that no trousers emerged from beneath its hem was farcical.

‘My dear’, she said going up behind him, ‘you look like a bishop.’

‘You’re giving a perfectly respectable adventure an air of scandal’, he replied.

In his coat he looked larger—which put it in Anna’s mind to take his arm, cling to it, and chatter to him.

The sedan chair which she had seen carried bodily into the ballroom now stood empty, unlit, in a corner of the hall, a large egg that had hatched.

‘Perhaps it’ll be snowing’, Anna said.

‘Wouldn’t that be perfect?’

He opened the front door for her.

‘No’, she said. ‘It isn’t snowing.’

As he stepped through the shallow portico of the house, his hand went up to his face and he tilted his head, beginning to slip it out of the mask.

‘Stop’, Anna said.

He stopped: both what he was doing, and walking:

‘Don’t be absurd’, he said. ‘I can’t walk through the street in a mask.’

‘If you take it off, I’m not coming.’

‘That’s sheerest blackmail. I can’t stop a cab with a mask on. The man’ll think it’s a hold-up.’

‘I’ll stop the cab.’

‘O don’t——’

‘Then he’ll only think you’re drunk. You can tell him where to go through the partition.’

‘The whole business is quite absurd’, he said,
taking
her arm and propelling her forward, but
protestingly
. ‘Do you realise I don’t even know what to call you?’

‘You can call me Anna. I’ll allow you to drop the Donna.’

‘Of course Anna might be your real name.’

‘It might.’

There was nothing to shew it ever had snowed except a particularly glittering, anvil-hard patch at the centre of each paving stone, which might indicate that a few flakes had settled, melted and then frozen again.

Certainly the air was freezing. That was apparent from the clear frosty look of the light from the street lamps, which seemed suspended like icy lemons in the bare branches of the trees that lined the pavement. Cars were parked thickly, along the whole cul-de-sac, up the slight, slightly twisted, asphalted hill by which
the cul-de-sac turned into the main road. Under the street lamps the car tops gleamed with frost.

‘I’m not so inquisitive’, Anna said. ‘For all I know, it was your wife who arrived at the ball in a sedan chair. Her name might even be Elvira.’

‘I guarantee’, he said, with an appearance of
cunning
, ‘that no wife of mine is at that ball.’

‘No, I didn’t think you’d ever been married’, Anna said.

‘I’m not very good at this game, am I?’

‘You’re improving.’

‘I don’t think my heart’s in it. I wish I knew about your husband.’

‘He’s alive and well. I heard from him for
Christmas
.’

‘Then you don’t live with him?’

‘Perhaps I’ve been a little unfair’, Anna said. ‘I promise you, he’s not even in this country.’

He looked down at her: gratified. ‘And do you suppose’, he asked, happily resuming the game, ‘that my name is Giovanni?’

‘It seems unlikely.’

‘John, then?’

‘Sheer statistics would favour that in any case.’

‘Had you considered’, he cunningly put it, ‘that it might be Donald?’

She did consider it. ‘No’, she said at last, ‘I don’t think you’re Scottish. Even though your present appearance might mislead people into supposing that you’re wearing a kilt.’

She noticed as they passed that the dark green door of one of the cars parked on the little hill, near the top of the cul-de-sac, bore, painted on it, like fake armorial bearings, the little rebus—a tree in blossom—whereby Rudy was accustomed, on his writing paper, his book plate, his table napkin rings, to pun on the name Blumenbaum.

Edward had protested against leaving the light on, saying it hurt his eyes. But Ruth said that to write up her diary by the light of the street lamp alone might hurt her eyes permanently.

She started the entry on a fresh page, so that Edward could not read what had gone before.

Watching over her shoulder, he said:

‘It wasn’t about a gorilla.’

‘It was. Didn’t you hear her keep singing “Un gorille”?’

‘It can’t have been. Or the word must have some slang meaning. I was sure it was about politics.’

When he heard voices and footsteps approach, he flicked off the light switch and pulled Ruth down to kneel on the floor of the car.

‘What are you
doing
?’

‘Someone’s coming.’

‘Well what does it matter? We aren’t stealing anything.’

‘Keep your head down.’

Nonetheless Ruth raised it enough to look through the window.

‘It’s Anna’, she said. ‘She’s going home with that man.’

Edward tumbled over to Ruth’s side of the car, in time to watch the two figures walking away, up the hill, into the main road.

‘I
thought
she must be quite experienced’, he said. ‘Unless he’s her husband?’

‘No. She’s divorced’, Ruth said.

She sat up on the seat again, re-arranged the rug over her lap and resumed her diary. She did not bother to put on the light again. The street lamp did give enough illumination for her to write, in large capitals:

‘
ANNA K. IS A WHORE
’.

‘Let’s just snuggle under the rug and be cosy for a bit’, Edward said, sliding far down on the seat.

To Ruth his remark seemed so uncharacteristic of him that she felt on guard. It was even
uncharacteristic
of him not to want the light on. He was not a person who preferred half-dark.

Now that he was suddenly unaggressive she
paradoxically
felt more strained in relation to him. She sat rather stiff and high up against the back of the car, riding the rear seat like an old-fashioned bicycle,
trying
to resist the insinuating downward tendency of his warm snuggly body beneath the rug.

Her eyes rested on the light switch, as though she was putting it on by thought. It was high on the side wall, between the doors, at the dividing point between the front and the back of the car. It was well in front of her, rather to her left and, in the high, rigid car, quite out of her reach. But by fixing her eyes on it she seemed to anchor her body against being drawn deeper into the soft slippery nest Edward was making of the back of the car.

Her mind was really on something else; but her thoughts seemed to be enquiring why the light switches in cars could not be of the ordinary pattern but consisted of a little square-sided stick of brownish plastic, and what motoring purpose it could serve to make the end of the stick grooved, like the milling—but wider—on coins.

Don Giovanni poured a handful of silver into her hand so that she could pay the driver while he opened the front door of the block of flats.

The driver must have turned round during the journey and seen them occupied in kissing: even so Anna thought him relieved to be quit of them. His
relief bounced like a spring in his voice as he called, loudly so that it would reach the man standing on the steps:

‘Happy new year!’

They replied perfunctorily, Anna embarrassed because the driver must take them for husband and wife returning home, Don Giovanni bodily
embarrassed
because he did not want to turn round on the steps and let the mask be seen again.

She ran across the pavement and up the steps to join him as hurriedly as if it
had
been snowing: it was cold enough to: and with her hands she made blinkers for her eyes, as though to keep out a blizzard.

‘I didn’t see anything’, she said as he pushed open the front door for her. ‘I have no idea whatever where we are.’

He punched the three-minute switch in the hall. ‘Second floor.’ They began to walk up the marble stairs.

‘Didn’t you hear when I gave the driver the address?’

‘I put my hands over my ears.’

‘Of course, if you once heard the number, you’d never forget.’

‘Are my shoes making too much noise?’

‘No, you needn’t take them off this time. People expect a certain amount of noise on new year’s eve.’

‘New year’s day.’

‘Yes, new year’s day.’

He unlocked the front door of his flat.

The hall inside was a mere carpeted cupboard. It revealed nothing about him. It hadn’t space to.

He pushed open a door. ‘Come in here.’ His hand reached in front of her and pushed down a light switch, but no light came on. ‘O, it needs to be put on beside the bed. It’s one of those two-way
arrangements
. I always catch it on the wrong foot.’

‘Don’t put it on’, she said.

He stopped, having groped half way across the room.

‘You’re absurd’, he said.

She shut the bedroom door behind them.

‘You’re making a fetish of anonymity. I take it it’s that? You don’t want to see where I live?
Anyway
, your purpose is defeated before you start. The light from the hall shews under the door. There’s a house light on the front of the block just outside my window, and it doesn’t go out all night. And I’m going to switch on the electric fire, which gives a little light.’

The fire stood in a disused hearth. He switched it on, and it began to hum.

‘All right’, she said. ‘Then there’s enough light. We don’t need any more.’

‘You must be able to see quite clearly.’

‘It must all look different, though, in this light. Not like itself. Of course it looks the same to you, because you know it.’

She looked round. His bed was a single bed. She picked her way over to the hearth.

‘It takes a minute or two for it to warm up the place’, he said, his head alluding down to the electric fire. ‘And to stop humming.’ He went on, in a friendlier voice: ‘What note’s it humming on?’

‘The A below middle C.’

She picked up an invitation card that was propped on his mantelpiece, carried it a step or two—it was a small room—to the window, folded the top of the card out of sight in case his name had been written there and read the rest in the light from outside. It was the invitation to the ball.

‘Eighteenth-century costume

10 p.m.—dawn’,

it said at the bottom right-hand corner.

‘I must leave before dawn’, Anna said, putting the folded card back on the shelf, ‘or I
shall
see your room, against my will.’

The fire stopped humming.

‘A for Anna’, he said, ‘of course?’

‘Of course.’

He approached behind her and laid his hands on the lapels of her coat. ‘Are you warm enough?’

She slipped out of her coat and he put it carefully over a chair.

He came back, approached in the same way and from behind her laid his hands on the straps of her dress.

‘O, that’s more baffling’, she said. ‘Many a waiter has been frustrated by that.’ She began to unfasten it. ‘Undress quickly’, she bade him. ‘It’s cold.’

He took off his coat and then began to peel off his silk costume, letting the pieces slide to the floor. It all came quite easily and logically to pieces—he was Harlequin disassembled, the lozenges shuffled in the kaleidoscope—although when it was all on him you could not see where the joins would come.

Naked, Anna scurried into his bed, exaggerating the chill which made her shiver and huddle down, because she felt a little shy.

The electric fire threw a crimson wash over his bare skin.