The Snow Ball (4 page)

‘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.

C
OMING
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.’

‘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.

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.

C
ROUCHED
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.

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

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

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.

‘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.”’

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.