The Snow Ball (5 page)

‘Well, you can’t avoid someone if you don’t know where they are.’

‘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.

‘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.’

‘
Could
you?’

‘What I can’t tell you is who on earth Cherubino is.’

‘Then you know the Blumenbaums?’

‘You don’t think I’d cut in on a man I didn’t know? He might get angry.’

‘But I thought you had the cheek of the devil.’

‘It’s all a front’, he said. ‘Like coming as Casanova.’

‘O, that’s who you are.’

‘That’s who I am. You can’t get anywhere without a front, these days.’

‘And you
are
getting somewhere?’ Anne asked.

‘My God I hope I’m getting to be Rudy
Blumenbaum’s
son-in-law. He’s
terribly
rich. Did you know that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sometimes I almost faint with excitement when I think of it.’

‘So every half hour she creeps away to fill in this diary.’

‘Admirable’, Anna said, ‘if a little cold-blooded.’

‘Cold-blooded? I think it’s sentimental. Like
keeping
wax fruits under a glass dome.’

‘More like keeping one’s appendix in a bottle.’

‘No, it’s sentimental. She wants to moon over the thing afterwards.’

‘Are you sure it isn’t to
prevent
her mooning
afterwards
?’

‘Well, she certainly won’t be able to do much mooning if she’s written down what I said about her costume.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I didn’t want to be seen dancing with a stablehand. Who
is
this Cherubino anyway?’

‘A page.’

‘You’d think she could look feminine for one
evening
, wouldn’t you?’

‘Does it offend you that she’s not a sentimentalist?’

‘Me? No. I’m a realist.’

‘In what way?’

‘I want money. You’re nowhere without money these days.’

‘What would you buy with it, if you had it?’

‘Anything that took my fancy, I suppose. You haven’t got money, have you?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not. You’re not even titled?’

‘No.’

‘Pity. I’d have to desert you. I mean I’d have to desert you afterwards, if I made you my mistress.’

‘O. Well, I daresay you would—if you did.’

‘What’re you thinking? That I’m cynical? That I have got the cheek of the devil after all? Or that I’d run away if you called my bluff?’

‘None of them’, said Anna. ‘To be frank, you don’t entice me.’

‘You think I’m too young for you?’

‘No. Too puritanical for me.’

‘Puri
tan
ical?’

‘Not to have thought what you’d do with the money.’

‘My God’, he said.

They danced in silence for a little.

‘My God’, he repeated. ‘You really are cynical. I shall warn people against you.’

Anna laughed. They danced along the edge of the ballroom.

‘You steered me here’, he said. ‘You’re looking for that person again, the one you’re avoiding.’

‘Perhaps I’m looking to see if your partner’s come back.’

‘Not likely. You’d be afraid I’d desert you.’

‘Actually, I was vaguely looking’, Anna said, ‘for a man shaped like a boiled egg. At least, he is from above. I’ve only seen him from above. I don’t know who he is.’

‘Perhaps he’s only visible from above. Perhaps he disappears on ground level.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Some people have personalities like that.’ He stopped dancing. They were beneath the minstrels’ gallery. He pointed up at its floor. ‘Let’s go up there and see if we can see him from above.’

‘No’, said Anna.

Something small but quite heavy plopped on the floor beside her. She moved further out into the
ballroom
, where one or two dancers bumped her, and looked up at the gallery. Anne was up there, leaning over the parapet, grinning. Foreshortened, and
apparently
flattened also sideways, her face looked plumper than ever, a great loaf of raw pastry in horizontal folds, the face of a mischievous, even a half-malevolent putto seen in a distorting glass, an earth genius, a clay genius.

Another object dropped beside Anna. The next one she caught. It was a peppermint cream. She bit off half of it and then called up to the gallery:

‘Delightful, but what is this? A snowstorm? A miraculous communion?’

‘Confetti’, Anne replied, and disappeared.

‘Anne!’

Anne fled from Anna, along the upstairs corridor, past the room which had been made over as a ladies’ cloakroom, pretending not to hear Anna’s pursuit. But Anna could tell, from a particular bent intentness in her friend’s back and from the unaccustomed
speediness
of the waddle, that Anne
had
heard. She even
believed she could tell, from the particularly intense undulations in the plump flesh folded round the back, that what Anne was bending over and hugging was a giggle.

Anna hurried, swerving round single promenaders and, when she met a whole clump, putting out her hand as a buffer and then using it to hold the clump stationary while she dodged round it. Her thoughts were occupied by her immediately past actions, as though at the time she had gulped them too quickly. Pushing the other half of the peppermint into her partner’s mouth; leaving him without ceremony;
running
—tripping on her hem—up the grand staircase and from the top catching sight of Anne on her way from the minstrels’ gallery; knowing from the
acceleration
in the quarry’s steps that the quarry knew itself sighted: the sequence had printed itself, vivid as an image on the eye, in the very nerves whereby Anna’s limbs recognised where they were and what they were doing. She had performed these actions without
premeditation
; but premeditation was determined to take place and would settle, if it had to, for taking place after the event. ‘Anne!’ Occupied with the past, Anna did not immediately act on a perception of the future. While Anne fled from her down the corridor, a man in black—distinctly glimpsed for a second, between promenaders, and recognised—advanced up the corridor towards Anna. Yet Anna permitted
herself
to go on running after Anne, on whom she was gaining: as though what she really wanted was not
to overtake Anne at all but—head on, and as quickly as she could—to meet him.

She stopped just short of where he must, by now, have reached; turned; ran back up the corridor again faster than she had come and dodged into the ladies’ cloakroom, where she slammed the door behind her.

She saw nothing but the two rows of pier glasses, reflecting each other.

A figure stood up, behind the furthest pier glass on the left-hand side. In Anna’s eyes it represented a whole series of infractions of nature, so complex as to seem a fantasy and yet so logical in its complexity as to trap her. The person on whom she had shut the door behind her now stood before her. He had, by changing his sex, introduced himself into the ladies’ cloakroom, and yet he retained the masculine costume. That costume, which had been all black, was now all white: white from top to toe: white as Anne’s bedroom. ‘O—
Ruth
’, Anna said. ‘You frightened me.’

‘Hullo Anna.’

She was a tall, bony but large-limbed girl, without resemblance to either of her parents except for a smudge of Rudy’s high colour in her cheeks. She had bold features and very black hair. She was perhaps going to be beautiful. In the white satin knee breeches her long legs were elongated almost past belief. One hand clasped a notebook as though it had been a prayer book. The other hand (Anna reconstructed that she must have been crouching down) was tugging the
breeches into a more comfortable sit. The gesture of the chapel and the gesture of the stables: between them they gave her the cachet of an expensive
schooling
.

‘I hear you’re Cherubino.’

‘Mm.’

‘Then we’re both from Mozart. I’m Donna Anna.’

‘I don’t know who that is.’

‘From
Don
Giovanni.
’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘O, you should hear it. You’d like it, if you like
Figaro
.’

‘I don’t particularly’, said Ruth. ‘We just went to it, in a school party.’

‘O.’

‘D’you want the loo?’ Ruth gestured with her head. ‘It’s through there.’

‘No. I just came for a moment’s respite.’

‘I came to write up my diary.’

Anna made a sound of assent only, not knowing whether it would hurt Ruth’s feelings to discover she knew already.

‘I’m keeping a diary of the ball.’

‘Then you’ve
got
the evening’, Anna said, looking down at Ruth’s notebook, ‘in there, pressed like a flower.’

‘I suppose so.’ Ruth added, curtly: ‘You’re in it.’

‘Am I? It gives one a curious feeling …’

‘Only a passing reference, of course.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, I’ve finished now, anyway’, said Ruth. She pushed past Anna and left.

Anna looked into one of the pier glasses, not
examining
what she saw but supposing that if
something
was badly amiss with her make-up or costume she would notice.

She heard the door open. Anne came in.

‘What’re you doing up here?’ Anne said. ‘Why aren’t you down in the thick of it with your beau?’

‘He’s not my beau.’

‘Darling, you’re not still resisting fate? You haven’t run away again?’

‘Anne! Listen! He’s not Don Giovanni.’

‘He’s not?’

‘I
knew
you’d misunderstood. Do you think I’m a cradle snatcher? Actually, he’s Ruth Blumenbaum’s beau. I came after you to explain. If you’d only waited …’

‘Wait for
me
a second. I must go to the john.’

Anna waited.

Anne came out, tried to straighten her lamé skirt in front of one of the glasses and then put her arm through Anna’s. ‘Now, my dear.’

‘You weren’t so far out. That one is Casanova.’

‘O my dear. From the sublime to the ridiculous. What a faux pas. Well, we must start again.’ Her arm still through Anna’s, she led Anna out into the corridor.

‘Start what again?’

‘It’s like having the sort of daughter who refuses
to leave home. I throw you out, and you bounce back.’

‘I warned you I was on the run. I kept seeing him. At least I thought I kept seeing him.’

The corridor was full of neutral figures, several of them in black, all of them incapable of engaging Anna’s attention.

‘Perhaps I really
was
looking for him’, said Anna.

‘I shall lead you down the staircase again’, said Anne, ‘and launch you again. You see, I’m
determined
.’

Arm in arm they descended the grand staircase, wheeling like a cavalry formation past the big Cupid at the turn of the stair. Perhaps because they were arm in arm or perhaps because Anne looked what she had said she was, determined, people made way for them. At the bottom, Anna said: