The Snow Ball (7 page)

‘Is there?’

‘Indeed there is. It is this. If Donna Anna had
not
been seduced, it is quite impossible—sociologically, historically and psychologically—
quite
impossible that she would ever have said that she
had
.’

‘Unless she just liked mischief’, said Anna.

‘O but I do not think she
did
’‚
said Dr. Brompius.

A third person joined them. Without difficulty, surprise or embarrassment, Anna recognised Don Giovanni.

Dr. Brompius took him in with a glance to the side and turned excitedly back to Anna.

‘You will remember that I have said to you that it was very interesting that you should speak of this opera? This was because I already knew that this gentleman was here tonight in the character of Don Giovanni. Permit me to——’

‘We’ve already met’, Don Giovanni said. ‘I’ve come to claim Donna Anna.’

‘Y
OU
ran away’, he said. ‘Why?’

His black silken sleeve touched Anna’s bare arm as they leaned on the parapet of the minstrels’ gallery, looking down into the dancers.

‘Lots of reasons. I’m old.’

‘No older than I am.’

‘Well I expect actually I
am.
But anyway isn’t that one of the things that’re said to be different for men?’

‘It may be said. I shouldn’t think it’s particularly true.’

‘If one wants to forget one’s age’, Anna said, ‘new year’s eve is the wrong eve to start.’

‘Tell me another of the reasons.’

‘They’re all interconnected. I’m no longer
beautiful
.’

He hesitated for an instant and then asked:

‘Were you ever?’

She, too, considered before replying:

‘Well, no. Obviously not, in that sense. But I must have had the sort of beauty that all young human beings have. Anyway, I must have turned into a
horrible human being now’, she added, ‘because new year’s eve fills me with thoughts against the young.’

He laughed. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what you mean. It’s a night for youthanasia.’

She turned to look at him, took the pun and said ‘Yes’, smiling. He bore no resemblance to the
reconstruction
she had made while she was searching for him; yet confronted with him her original memory responded to the summons and confirmed without hesitating that it was he and that she was perfectly well acquainted with what he looked like.

She even remembered, and quite precisely, that towards the wrist, where it fitted closely, his black sleeve wrinkled into small horizontal folds, like a sleeve by Watteau.

‘Still’, he said, looking regretfully down at the dance floor, ‘there’s no need for violence. The youngest of them will grow old in time.’

‘So I kept thinking’, Anna said. After a moment she added: ‘You ran away, too.’

‘No I didn’t. I reculer-d pour mieux sauter.’

‘
Where
did you reculer?’

‘To the library.’

‘O yes. I’d forgotten the library.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me’, he said. ‘It’s because you’re not rich.
Are
you?’

‘That’s the second time I’ve been asked tonight. The other person was disappointed I wasn’t.’

‘I’d be disappointed if you were. I like the fellow
feeling. I could tell that you and I were both
Cinderellas
at this ball.’

‘What has that to do with libraries?’

‘O, because the rich have libraries, whereas people like us have books. People like us read books. The rich have them catalogued.’

‘Anne reads them, I think.’

‘I don’t know about Anne. I’m fairly sure
Tom-Tom
doesn’t.’

‘Do you know Tom-Tom well?’

‘Very well.’ Presently he emended: ‘Very well from one angle only—below. I work with him. At least, that’s how he puts it, which is decent of him. In fact, I work
for
him.’

‘We belong on different sides of the aisle’, Anna said. ‘Bridegroom’s party and bride’s party.’

‘But you don’t work for Anne?’

‘No.’

‘What——’

‘Were you in the library the whole time?’ Anna asked.

‘Yes, from the moment you ran away. I found old Grumpius or whatever he’s called in there.’

‘No doubt he’s got in the habit of being in there. He’s been working on Tom-Tom’s musicological things. Tom-Tom collects manuscript scores and so forth.’

‘So Grumpius told me, but at greater length.
Fortunately
, he got hungry after a while. But it’s just as well he
was
in there, because he’s arranged
everything
according to some system, with the result that you can’t find anything without his help. Anyway, why, in particular? I mean about where I was?’

‘No reason in particular’, Anna said. ‘What were you looking for?’

‘Evidence. To convince you it’s no use running away.’

‘Did you find it?’

He handed her a piece of paper, which she
unfolded
. It was die-stamped at the top with Anne’s and Tom-Tom’s address. Underneath, Don Giovanni had copied out in pencil:–

Underneath he had written:

Anna handed the paper back to him. ‘In all the authorities you must have consulted, could you find only one to back you up?’

‘But what an authority’, he said, putting the paper away in the pocket of his eighteenth-century coat. ‘
The
authority.’

‘Incidentally’, Anna said, ‘you can’t kill my father. He’s been dead for ten years.’

‘It’s not that aspect of my character I’m pursuing tonight.’

‘Yet it’s that aspect that’s preoccupying me tonight.’

‘Of my character?’

‘No, of things in general. It comes between me and your character. No doubt it’s really why I ran away.’

They were silent for a moment. Anna shifted her stance a little, so that her wrist instead of her elbows rested on the parapet and she was no longer touching Don Giovanni. She clasped her hands. She was aware of Don Giovanni’s gaze moving slightly sideways, towards her: not enough to take in
her
, but taking in her hands and, probably, her wedding ring.

‘Seriously’, he said, ‘if that’s so, it’s all the more reason for you
not
to run away.’

She did nothing.

She felt him move. One arm remained extended, the hand lying on the parapet, but he had shifted round
to stand behind her, perhaps in order to come in
contact
with her again—her back could faintly feel him—or perhaps in order to speak from behind, with the voice of a tempter.

‘There’s only one answer to thoughts of that kind’, he said from behind her.

She did not reply.

‘Seriously. It’s a well-known psychological fact. Obsessive thoughts about death are in inverse
proportion
to the frequency of sexual intercourse.’

She made no move.

‘Listen’, he said in a rough voice. ‘How long is it? When did you last have an affair?’

For a moment it appeared she was still not going to answer. Then she turned completely round, leaned her back against the parapet and stared full at him, deep into his mask.

‘Last year’, she said, making her own face like a mask.

‘O, but tonight’, he said quickly, ‘
tonight
that could mean …’

‘Yes’, said Anna. She stared at him an instant longer and then turned again and gazed deep into the dancing.

It had become intense. Some of the lights had been turned out. Frills of talk and laughter from the verges of the ballroom and from the more brightly lit
corridors
and rooms round it indicated that those people who danced only socially were pursuing their social purposes elsewhere and had withdrawn from the dance
floor, leaving only couples who were seriously
interested
either in dancing or in one another. The band itself was playing less noisily and more intently,
giving
only a concentration of its musical purpose, which would be understandable to connoisseurs.

Don Giovanni moved away from Anna: she was aware he had moved further along, into the recess of the gallery, the small, dark, dusty section at the end, which was invisible to the ballroom.

Few of the dancers spoke to one another. The band had almost abnegated melody. For bars at a stretch the only sound it made was a dry bean-bag noise, as though seeds were being shaken inside a gourd. From the floor the only sound was a concerted shuffling of feet, like a rhythmical breathless sighing, or like the repeated sifting of brown sugar with a spoon held by someone concentrating on something else.

Don Giovanni came back to her. ‘Did you know there was a curtain here?’

‘A curtain?’

They spoke in low voices, because of the quiet in the ballroom.

Anna followed him along to the end of the gallery. Drawn well back, bunched up and stowed out of sight was an immense heavy curtain of a patterned deep yellow brocade which brought to mind the word
genoese.

‘Tom-Tom and Anne must have been having amateur theatricals up here’, Don Giovanni said.

He took a handful of the curtain and gave it a tug.
It ran easily along the rail at the top: its rings, which must have been horn, not brass, made a rattling like the ribs of a fan or of a peacock’s tail. Dust fell out of the material. Anna gave a slight cough.

Taking a great swathe of the curtain, Don Giovanni enveloped himself and Anna. ‘Now we’re really in the opera house. We’ve got a box.’

She pushed a fold in the edge of the curtain and held it down, so that she could see out. He, further into the recess and deeper in curtain, was not even pretending.

At the far end of the ballroom the egg-shaped man was walking towards the double doors as though to open them and leave the ball. But dancers came between him and Anna and she could not see whether he really did or not.

Muffled beneath the curtain, Don Giovanni’s arm fell like the shadow of a branch in spring sunshine across Anna’s back. His hand, making itself into the shape of a prehensile flower with five fleshy petals, settled round her breast. She moved neither towards him nor away from him. His head bent towards the side of her neck; she felt the velvet, accidental contact of his mask before she felt the searching contact of his lips. After a moment she said ‘No’. She still had not moved, but the very fact that her flesh did not yield made an impression as though she was pulling against him. His lips nuzzled for a moment more at her neck. Then he let her go and moved a little apart.

Ruth Blumenbaum was almost without thoughts. She could perceive only a distant glimmer of thought, which she knew to be dread of the ending of the dance. For the time being she and Edward were one in the near-absence of thought: a telepathy of having nothing to communicate. He was dancing with her not in his usual loose and lively way but close to. Heat generated between them fused them like a couple sharing a fireside: an aged peasant couple, in a long, an almost unending, a medieval winter’s night. His sweating cheek was pressed against hers as though they could never come unstuck. The two cheeks might have been two fragments of broken china,
re-united
, being held together for the glue to set. The bristles on his jaw ate into her skin, on the verge of becoming painful to her but never quite crossing the verge, preventing her, rather, from ever quite crossing the verge into complete automatism: they caught at her interest because only men’s faces had them; and the physical sense of them was a sub-pleasure to her, a sub-stimulus; they were minute hooks, sub-erotic, tattoo needles, hundreds of little grapples holding her to him. Through his thin silk costume she could feel his warmth and sweat and the actual outline of his breasts. Her white silk thighs moved in perfect accord with his black silk thighs—so perfect that they hardly moved, were hardly voluntarily controlled, but had become automatic fins swishing to hold the two of them steady in the stream. Yet she was afraid of
Edward’s rebellion against all this when the music should stop.

‘Well. What shall we talk about now?’ Don
Giovanni
said, in a bitter voice. He took the curtain,
which was now wholly in his possession, folded it into a roll and shaped it into a yoke round his neck, like a commedia dell’arte character feigning hanging himself. ‘Shall I tell you the story of my life?’

‘Let’s preserve our anonymity’, Anna said. ‘At least.’

‘Meaning that’s all we’ve got left?’

‘Well that’s something’, she said, ‘—something romantic’; and then, going back to reply to his question: ‘Meaning what more would we really know if we did know all about each other?’

‘Have you noticed what a metaphysical ball this it?’ he said. ‘All these people bumping into one another and asking “Who are you?” even when they’ve known each other for years.’

‘You see’, said Anna.

‘What’s the psychology of costume balls?’ he casually asked.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been to one before.’

‘Neither have I.’

‘I don’t know’, she repeated. ‘Dressing up,
perhaps
? Everyone loves to dress up? At least, children do.’

‘Since I ceased to be a child I’ve preferred
un
dressing
.’

‘O you should have come naked’, she said, rather sarcastically and impatiently. ‘Then everyone would have known you were Don Giovanni at first glance.’

‘Well it’s only make-believe either way, as you’ve
impressed on me. I’m not an emperor and I wasn’t invited to take off my new clothes.’

‘What difference would it have made, in the long run?’