The Snow Ball (12 page)

‘W
AIT
’, Anna said, letting her hand, which had been stroking the side of his face, pause on the mask. ‘It’s absurd you should be wearing this.’

He tried to prop himself on one elbow and get his other hand up to hold some point on the mask while he twisted his head out of it.

‘Let me do it’, she said. ‘Indeed, I think I owe it to you.’

He dropped his head forward on to her breast and she, craning up a little so she could see her fingers working at the back of his head, unfastened the black tapes.

He eased his face sideways to help her peel off the mask, which she dropped over the side of the bed.

His forehead descended on her breast again.

She clasped her two hands to the sides of his head and pressed it between her palms, almost convulsively and yet carefully, as though his head had been an easter egg.

A groove ran round the back of his head, a declivity in the hair left by the tapes, like the brand left on someone who had been wearing an eye patch.

‘No’, she whispered, lifting his head a little between her hands. ‘Let me
see
you.’

He raised himself.

She looked at his face, making it out quite well by the light from outside the window. It was simply a man’s face. The two halves, the one she knew and the one she had never seen, fitted together logically, and into a quite comely whole. The eyes were more
handsome
than they had appeared through the slits; and surrounded by a new context, they looked strange to her. Perhaps in fancy, perhaps by an illusion of the unsatisfactory light, the part of the face which had been covered seemed to shew signs of it: nothing so pronounced as the shoot-pallid look of skin that had emerged from sticking plaster; more like the
imprecisely
naked look of eyes that normally wore spectacles when the spectacles were removed.

‘Is it all right?’ he asked, almost unhappily.

‘It’s marvellous.’

‘O, it’s not that, I’m afraid.’

‘No …’, she agreed. ‘But if it’s not beautiful it seems to me very ornamental.’

He acknowledged the remark, with a touch of a smile.

‘Really, you know’, Anna said, ‘I’ve met men’s faces for the first time from many strange angles and in many strange situations but never, before, in
this
situation …’

She saw on his face that moment’s rigidity, the rigidity of being shocked, which previously she had
perceived only transmitted through the velvet of the mask.

He gave, his face still rigid, the first wing, a mere flutter, which he left uncompleted, of a laugh.

The flutter was transmuted into a flutter inside her body.

The rigidity of his look dissolved.

Then his head plunged, and his face was lost to her. She lost the wish to see it, the memory even that it existed, in the response of her sensations to his
labouring
body: until she suddenly emerged, at the end of the same arc of sensations which had begun with the flutter of his laugh and of his body, to the knowledge that her sensations had passed the point up to which she was free to go back on them, and that she was now free to have thoughts again, since her voyage to pleasure was from now on involuntary.

Having only to wait, she—or some part of her,
perhaps
her hand on his head, perhaps her mouth on his shoulder—convulsively, repetitively and in the end, she felt, abrasively, caressed his body; it was done with the mere idleness of excited yet reluctant
impatience
, a musician sawing at the unending rhythms of Bach; as though by digging into his flesh, by
pitting
him, her fingers or teeth could actually lay hold on the paradox whereby so much thought and strategy in the vertical world went towards
manoeuvring
into this horizontal situation where pleasure consisted in something being imposed, in being carried beyond the point of no return, in suffering an act as
unwilled as sneezing, falling asleep or dying.
Suffering
, sobbing, swelling, sawing, sweating, her body was at last convulsed by the wave that broke inside it: and the image which was dashed up on to the walls of her mind and deposited like droplets there, distinct but quite passive, was of the rococo cartouche which broke everlastingly over the walls of Anne’s bedroom, perpetually but without moisture drenching the white satin with drops like drops of glycerine or sweat.

Anna lay listening bodily to her after-sensations. An intense, deep-buried throbbing shook the lower part of her body as sobbing might have shaken the upper. Indeed, these throbs seemed to her an exact counterpart and antonym to sobs. They made an
outburst
, a shower, of pleasure: the opposite of a storm of weeping. In a storm of weeping there would have been, as in all storms, a wry warmth and happiness, if only for the relief and release: and equally, in this most intense, least voluntary and therefore most
death-imagin
g of pleasures there was—and also for the release—a wry sadness.

T
OM
-T
OM
made a great fuss about the fact that they had been intruded upon. All the time he was dressing, stuffing himself back into his costume, whose navy blue surface was now completely crumpled into facets like the surface of a sea, he complained and speculated about who, and how, it could have been.

Anne was concerned only to make him hurry. She told him that the cabaret, which had been their
opportunity
, must be long finished; that guests must be seeking hosts; that some guests probably wanted to take their leave; that if he did not come soon
hundreds
of them would invade upstairs.

Tom-Tom talked himself into the explanation that it had been a guest who did not know the house and was searching for the lavatory.

Anne did not contradict him. Yet she was fairly sure that she had—and she had, after all, had the advantage of being face up—recognised Anna in the lighted doorway. She reconstructed that Anna had come to reclaim her make-up case. Anne, who knew it was there—who had, in fact, lifted it down on to
the floor—blamed herself for not taking thought and locking the door.

She blamed herself more incisively for, now, not saying any of this to Tom-Tom. She scrupulously liked to report to him everything that passed in her mind. But she could not bring herself to risk antagonising him against Anna when she was not even sure it had been Anna. She decided to wait and, some time, some time when she could find her, ask Anna. Then, if it had been, she would tell Tom-Tom: and by then the lapse of time would have made him less apt to be antagonised.

He had never shewn himself in the least jealous of Anna. Yet Anne, for fear he should be, often played down her affection for her friend when she spoke to Tom-Tom: but from time to time, when she caught herself in this habit of playing down, her
scrupulousness
obliged her to correct for it, and she would make to Tom-Tom a formal declaration of her affection for Anna.

All that worried her now about the intrusion—all, indeed, that even held it in her memory—was the thought that she might know the true explanation and be concealing it from Tom-Tom. The incident itself, from the moment the actual fright had passed, seemed to her a nothing. She bundled it away as the sort of thing that always happened to one in foreign hotels: it had surely happened to her, she imprecisely remembered on all four of her honeymoons.

All the street lamps had gone out.

Ruth felt justified in leaning forward and switching on the light, whatever protest it might bring from Edward.

However, although his body jerked when Ruth disturbed him by heaving forward, and again when the light went on, he did not wake up. After a moment his head turned away from the light, and away from Ruth, his profile disintegrating, his mouth opening against the back of the seat. Still without waking up, he began to gulp, chokingly.

Rather frightened, Ruth thought of waking him up. She remembered that during her first year at school a girl in her dormitory had made even more frightening sounds—sounds of strangulation—in her sleep, and yet had never come to any harm. After a minute Edward stopped gulping.

Ruth took out her diary and pencil. Under the entry ‘
ANNA K. IS A WHORE
’, she wrote:

‘Supose I am, too, now (3.22 a.m.)’

Presently, the light still on inside the car, she fell asleep again. Her head slipped down towards the side window, at the opposite extreme from Edward’s, although their bodies remained in warm dishevelled contact beneath the rug. The two together made a shape as though, at the back of the silent, lighted interior, an enormous flower had opened to its fullest, its almost overblown, extent.

Anna’s eyes opened and disclosed to her that she was lying not merely face down but face half over the edge of the bed, looking down at the floor boards.

On one of the floor boards lay a piece of paper.

She let her hand trail over the floor, which was slightly dusty, and pick up the paper.

She recognised that it must have slid out of Don Giovanni’s pocket when he undressed.

The poor light would not have permitted her to read it if she had not known in advance what it said:

‘What are you doing?’

‘I was trying not to wake you’, Anna said.

‘But what are you doing?’ He had neither moved nor opened his eyes.

‘I think it must be dawn.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘“It was the nightingale and not the lark”. O my dear, it
can
be, though I don’t know if it is.’

‘My watch is on the mantelpiece.’

‘It looked lighter, all of a sudden.’

‘What does my watch say?’

From the window she told him:

‘It’s not dawn. It’s snow.’

‘Snow? Then it
is
perfect.’ He went to sleep again.

She began to get dressed.

After a little, he said:

‘Why are you getting dressed?’

‘I’m going back to the party.’

‘Not yet.’

‘I haven’t said goodbye to Anne.’

‘Neither have I.’

‘I’ll say it for you.’

‘No, I’m coming.’ Again, he fell asleep.

While she pinned the black lace to her hair again, she watched the snowflakes tumbling past the window and thought that his consciousness must equally be drifting and spinning down into the dark.

He got out of bed. ‘You can’t say goodbye for me. You don’t know who I am.’

Dressed, he picked up the mask and dangled it. ‘I don’t have to put this on again?’

‘For those who understand symbolism it will be instructive to have seen you arrive in it and then come back without it.’

‘You yourself’, he said, ‘have lost your beauty spot.’

A
S
soon as she saw that the snow was lying, Ruth Blumenbaum wanted to get out of the car and into the snow. She visually imagined the flakes
drifting
about her figure, their whiteness merging into the white of her costume: herself freezing in a statue’s pose, as though in the game of statues: herself
petrified
,
become
a statue, a garden statue, with a furrow of snow piling up like a fur tippet along her arms: herself a snow man, a Cherubino of snow, a snow page. At the same time the nerves in her skin were also imagining. They prefigured the icy burning touch of the snow, which would purify her.

Yet for some reason she did not want to get out of the car alone. So she woke Edward.

Her first attempt only set him gulping. She had to thump his shoulder with her fist—though as a matter of fact she did not want to touch him. But the instant she told him that there was snow and that it was lying he came to consciousness willingly, even eagerly.

Although she had herself thought of the snow as a purification, she was offended by the welcoming way he went hopping out of the car into it. Although she
had hated the intimate contact of their bodies in the car she felt that in shaking it off with such obvious pleasure he was betraying it, like a man betraying hearth and home.

She switched off the light and followed him
resentfully
out of the car.

‘My God, this is just what we needed’, he said. He stood for a moment, shoulders scrunched up, hands in his coat pockets flat against his hips, white flakes tumbling about his black figure. Then:

‘Come on’, he said, vigorously.

‘Come on what?’

‘Make a snow man, of course.’

‘It seems a pity to spoil it’, she said, looking round. ‘It’s so beautiful.’

He stooped and began working.

Yet when she looked at it, although it was
beautiful
, she was not sure that she liked it. It was not reassuring. The road in which she had gone to sleep had been changed while she slept.

Also, although it looked as soft and warm as a woolly animal, the actual touch of the snow was much more stingingly, even numbingly, cold than her nerves had been able to imagine.

She went and fetched the rug from the car, and draped it round her shoulders.

‘Do something’, Edward said, looking up and
observing
her. ‘That’s the way to keep warm.’

She stooped and began scraping together a little hump of snow, in which her fingers left grooves.

‘Not like that’, Edward said. ‘It won’t even stand up if you make it like that. Won’t be firm enough.’

But she went on for a moment or two in the same way. While she bent, the edges of the rug dripped loose over her arms, sometimes getting in her way, sometimes threatening that the whole rug was going to slip off.

Presently she stopped working and leaned against the side of the car, watching Edward work.

‘There’s more to making a snow man than you’d think. It’s’—he was panting—‘a highly skilled job.’

Ruth tried to observe him as a person: but she could see in him only a representative of his sex.

‘You start with a snowball. And then you just have to get down and roll it, and roll it, and roll it, until it gets bigger, and bigger …’

‘What for?’ she asked, unthinking.

‘The body, of course.’ He rolled it through the snow on the ground. Already it was the size of a baby.

To Ruth’s eye, every gesture he made, every pore of his body, was stamped with the fact: –masculine. His very sentences, let alone his sentiments, his very words, even, seemed distinguished from words a woman might say. She believed that the least sexual part of the human body—that a little toenail—that a clipping from a little toenail—must betray, must be impregnated with, the sex of its owner.

While he worked, the snow stopped falling.

Between men and women she felt an unbridgeable
divorce: she was convinced that two minds of
different
sex could never achieve identity of content.

He carried his large, roly-poly snowball on to the pavement, where he planted it down alongside the car.

It looked like a stump, a column cut off.

He squared it off a bit at the top, with his hands. Then he squatted beside it and heaped up a little snow skirt, pleated by his fingers, all the way round the base, to make sure it would stand steady.

‘Now the head.’

He stooped for a handful of snow and stood
compacting
it this way and that between his hands.

‘There’s the beginning. Fortunately, this one needn’t be so big.’

He bent down and began to roll his snowball, like a marble, up the slope, in the gutter.

‘Someone’s coming’, Ruth said.

He snatched up his snowball in one hand and Ruth’s wrist in the other and made her run out into the road and then duck down, on the far side, behind the car.

‘It’s Anna’, Ruth whispered. ‘With that man.’

Their steps made only a crunch in the snow: but their voices and laughter were clear.

‘He’s taken off his mask’, Edward whispered.

‘Where are they going?’

‘Back to the house, back to the ball. This road doesn’t lead anywhere else.’

Ruth peered out again. She saw Anna’s head
evidently
alluding to the snow man as they walked past it, and heard her voice say:

‘The man of stone. The statue
has
come to your supper party.’

‘He lacks a head’, the man answered.

‘Nodded too hard in the graveyard scene’, said Anna’s voice, walking out of earshot.

‘I like her cheek’, Edward whispered, exhaling both in admiration and in relaxation because the two figures had passed. ‘Fancy daring to come
back
.’

Ruth looked swiftly down at his hand.

‘Throw it’, she said.

‘What? This?’

‘Be quick.’

He stepped out on to the pavement. He stood poised at the top of the little hill.

Already the two figures were nearly at the house. Light from its windows reached out to them, snaring them in a frosty net, in which they were held up clear to Edward’s aim.

He threw his snowball; and then threw himself back into hiding, slithering on his knees in the snow, next to Ruth.

‘Did you hit her?’

‘Slap in the middle of the back. No, higher. Between the shoulder blades.’

But neither of them felt any laughter to stifle.

Ruth looked out.

The couple was still standing at the foot of the hill, at the entrance to the house. The two figures were
vividly black. The man was still looking round, angrily or at least enquiringly; the woman holding his arm and making gestures of belittling the hurt or,
perhaps
, of dissuading him from pursuing enquiry or vengeance.

At last, the man put his arm round the woman and drew her towards the house.

There was still a trace of snow, which he had not managed to brush off, on the back of her coat.

Light from the house caught and splintered on the sequins attached to the lace the woman wore at the back of her hair. Perhaps through something she had read, but more probably through cinema stills she had seen, Ruth was reminded of snowy platforms, of Russia, of—she had at last to admit—Anna Karenina. The woman’s head was wholly veiled in frosty air, as though someone had breathed round it and the breath had remained, opaque, on the still, cold atmosphere of the night, like white scratches engraved on a black sheet of ice.