The Snow Ball (2 page)

B
ABIES
in baroque pictures and rococo
decorations
seemed to incarnate the pure, sweet, all-desirable prettiness of sugar. Painted, modelled, carved; profane putti or almost wholly profaned cherubs: it made no difference: and there were hundreds of them in this house … They swarmed in delicate flights over its ceilings and alighted wherever it offered them a plinth or a pinnacle; they were its genius.

A group of them, rather orange in colour, supported a cloud on an oval canvas inset, among the fruits of a plaster orchard, on the ceiling of the hall. One looked down, almost malevolent, from the edge of a soffit as you left the ballroom: unwary, you might look
suddenly
up and catch its evil eye. Three chased one another for a veiled purpose up the drawing room wall, fluttering round half a trompe l’oeil column: the whole, fragmented column and all but fragmented cupids—one of them lacked the last inch of fleeing heel—was a patch rescued, and transferred here, from a destroyed fresco.

In fresco, the babies had the sugariness of meringues, their bottoms whipped but only as white of egg was
whipped and left, standing up stiff, in a spiralled dollop. They represented a confectioner’s notion of a sea-urchin. Faint dustiness of surface suggested that a percussive finger could powder them away: and yet the minutely granular texture of their surface implied they were bound all through with the resilience of white of egg, actually bound together and bodied forth with indestructible bubbles of air. In other parts of the house they were made of stucco: or—like the big Cupid looking down the grand staircase—wood: or again, shrinking now in scale, porcelain. In porcelain they took on the alabaster half-translucence of sugar just touched by moisture. The half-translucence was a hint, like half-nudity: it hinted that something irresistibly desirable was just on the point of being dissolved on the tip of a tongue.

Yet everywhere, in every part of the house, when you looked at them in detail, they were hideous. Seen close to, their airiness was an airy carelessness: a flick from the carver’s wrist, a clumsy squeeze from the moulder’s thumb, a mere blob from a clogged brush.

They were utter little monsters.

Worse than earthy, they had rouged buttocks for cheeks; dots, blank or malicious, for eyes; and either a nose stuck on, an appliqué nose, protruding, not always even centrally, like a carnival beak or else no nose at all, a nose merely implied by the presence of one hideously large, dark, curling nostril.

Anna knew, without regret, that her face belonged to their category—which was, perhaps, why she felt
the most welcome, the most fitting and fitted, of guests in this house. It was almost a sibling’s salute she gave in passing to the monster Cupid in his niche above the grand staircase.

Her face did not preclude her from being an
attractive
woman, any more than theirs precluded
decorative
putti from being decorative. But it was, or it
provoked
, a question of taste, a question of style. Anyone who contemplated forming an intimate relation to this face must ask himself whether he possessed such a taste and, possessing it, was prepared to develop it. That would demand that he immerse his senses in it, undergoing a larger and larger dose of exposure to it, until he became in a way calloused. The face would yield sensuous pleasure: but the sensualist must undertake an ascetic self-discipline first. He must
harden
himself to tolerate a tragic face whose tragedy was couched in half-formed baby features which,
individually
smudged and then squeezed up close together, had finally slipped or been twisted sideways in relation to the face, making it the face of an immortal baroque baby pettishly carrying into middle age the impress of being newly, and distortingly, born.

Anna, whose own answer had long been Yes, she could tolerate it, cherished her face without pity or special pleading. She knew that to the eye of love its spoiled prettiness presented hints, minimal but
re-current
, of the erotic, like the idea of an unfrocked nun. In the eye of self-love, the mirror, she had found its infinite rococo complexity infinitely interesting. A
beautiful face might lead the mind that contemplated it into a daydream so unimpeded as to verge on sleep. Anna’s face, like one of the lizards called monsters, would have startled you awake if you had been asleep to begin with, so grossly did it contradict every dream satisfaction: and yet it was to the imagination that it was addressed: it was as much a flight of fancy as a swag of putti supporting a cloud; the word it
recurrently
brought to mind was
fantastic.

In particular, she was in sympathy with her face when she made it up. She sympathised with her reflexion not at all with a therapist’s sympathy, the feeling that the handicapped thing needed to be
painstakingly
built up before it could shew itself with even a semblance of equality among its fellows, but rather with the virtuoso craftsman’s sympathy with the organic nature, the grain, the accidents that could be turned to account, of his medium. When she fled the dance floor, she made her excuse the disrepair that dancing and drink had wrought in her face. But that really was excuse, not cause. It was not the face
fleeing
to its repair, but Anna repairing to her favourite refuge: –communion, stimulation, re-creation, work to be done, all in relation to the reflexion of her face.

She could not seek that communion in the crowded room on the first floor which had been set aside for the women guests and where, in one of the pier glasses placed for the evening in two facing lines like the guard of honour at a wedding, she might have had to contemplate her face peeping vulgarly or
surrealistically
out from above someone else’s bare shoulders. She went into the warmth, the smell of powder, the zoo chatter like the dropping and grinding together of nutshells on the floor, only for a moment, in order to retrieve the make-up case she had deposited there; and then pushed her way straight out again, between the warm bare backs like animals steaming in their stalls after a race, some of which, as she was recognised in the mirrors, responded to her passage like animal flesh responding to a palm it knew. Outside in the corridor she made her way through a further crowd, sparser, and less naked because it was composed of men as well as women. Having the advantage over the crowd of knowing the house, she rose over the crowd by
mounting
the second staircase, the one with deep steps, narrow treads and commonplace wood: up, stepping by layers out of the party noise as if it was a frilled petticoat: up, carrying her small rigid suitcase, as if going to a solitary picnic on the roof in the snow: up two floors, four flights—how rich one had to be in the twentieth century to sleep in the servants’ quarters of an eighteenth-century house—to her hostess’s
bedroom
.

She opened the door gently in case someone was in there: but the room was dark. She left it dark while she went in, lest light slopping out into the corridor should signal some guest, exploring or lost up here, that this was a room he might enter. Shutting the door cut short the last trace of party sound. Anna in the dark was muffled: in the central-heating warmth,
so dry as to make it clear that no other human being was in the room; in the room’s effect, which could be felt before it was seen, of quilting; and in the
knowledge
that this room always did receive her in.

She put on the light and the Siamese kitten in the middle of the white bed pricked up its head, shook it—so violently that its ears made in miniature the waxed creaking of a swan’s wings—and settled into sleep again.

The entire room was white: a room of snow—but warm: an igloo.

Having no senses of its own, the room could not immerse them in Anna: it could only allow her to penetrate it, closing up again round her when she was in, lodging her there in the perfect homogeneity of her style with its own. It was as though between this room and Anna there was a genetic resemblance, a line of descent: as though it was a womb: into which, a newly born cherub in her early forties, she was always welcome to creep back.

The room’s receptiveness was, of course, a medallion image stamped in it by the senses of the woman who had created it, between whom and Anna, as Anna had known for a long time, the relation was that of mother to adopted daughter: the woman in her early fifties an adoptive mother to the woman in her early forties.

Anna’s hostess was, in fact, the least virginal of women to have created for herself a white bedroom—least virginal, but most bridal: four times married:
and only in this, her fourth married home, had she let her infatuation with white romp to the extreme of covering her whole bedroom with it—such an
excess
of satin purity, so blazoned, as to be not pure at all, but rioting, sensuous, shameless, like white lilac.

Presented, by her husband’s wealth, with a perfectly meted-out plain little cube to play with—by a sort of inversion of a child’s being given a building block to play with; the player placed inside a hollowed-out building block—this woman had set ingeniously about making it rounded: perhaps because she was a rounded little woman herself; perhaps to mark its change of status from utilitarian servant’s to mistress’s bedroom; perhaps in perversity, the sheer spirit of rococo. The walls’ plumbness she had turned into plumpness by hanging them with some rich white material that had a pile: it did not look like anything so plain as paper, though it might in fact be paper, but as the rich understood it. The white carpet was overlaid by circular rugs, also white but of a deeper texture. The curved dressing table was quilted in white. So were the bed and its headboard. The bed, shaping itself to its mistress, was oval and perhaps for that reason ambiguous in size: was it single or double? The mystery of wealthy marriages—they always had separate bedrooms. Yet Anna would not have entered so confidently had this been her host’s bedroom as well.

Sometimes, pursuing her psychological perception as a fantasy, Anna asked herself whether she could
have been the child of her adoptive mother’s husband—of any of them: but she seemed to carry not a trait of resemblance—to any of them: and they, as a matter of fact, seemed to have nothing in common with one another except wealth and wife. Anna in this adoptive friendship was wholly her mother’s daughter.

The adoption was emphasised by her being named, accidentally, for her mother: they were both Anne. The younger had politely ceded her name and become Anna (which had suggested to her to become, for the ball, Donna Anna). She was not Anna in every
company
, but only for the convenience of people who knew both Annes—which included, ex officio, Anne’s husband, who was neither receptive nor antagonistic towards Anna but treated her less as a person than as a foible of his wife’s. Anne married exclusively men who could afford to indulge her foibles: after
announcing
her engagement to her fourth fortune, she had said to Anna ‘My dear, you look at me cynically. I think you think of me as one who has loved not well but too wisely’. All her husbands indulged her
ambition
towards her purely white room, and if its
achievement
had been delayed till recently it must be through emotional not economic inhibitions.

Achieved under the fourth, the room had been made the setting for ornaments—Anna perhaps among them—devoutly collected under earlier régimes. The alpine whiteness was pierced by
coloratura
moments, flowerings of confectioner’s colour, always unnatural and sometimes anti-natural in
heraldic
or tropical extravagance. Above the bed, half of an opened Chinese umbrella, struts solidified into brass, silk into iridescent enamel, afforded the
occupant
or occupants fantasy protection from fantasy weather. A gilt cartouche, German rococo, bursting at all its tips like buds of foliage, finally broke into moistureless waves over a placidly white wall. Two cherubs’ heads—two cherubs’ knobs—conferred tête à tête under a cornice; a flutter of wing beneath them made a conversational gesture as it might be of the hand they were whispering behind. From the mantel as from the sea emerged a porcelain pedestal, white and gold, at once seashell, mollusc’s foot and exotic island, on which a Chelsea shepherd for ever gave tuition on the flute to a Chelsea shepherdess for ever unlearning of both the arts he was trying to teach; she sat without expression, a lamb in her lap and her tutor’s arms about her neck; while behind the whole group an asymetrical blackthorn of inorganic green bloomed in grainy, brain-like white clumps of
cauliflower
.

From the room’s shiny surfaces of white, the eye seemed continually slipping off, slipping down, as though your eyelids were being pulled shut and your body being depressed towards floor or bed in a delicious swoon that was half laziness. The whole room tugged, with its own gravitation, against the vertical,
drooping
and bending under its own heaviness as under an armful of lilacs. Anna, upright in the centre of it all, saw herself, with her head and most of her legs
chopped off, in her hostess’s looking glass. A middle view of her own vertically, it shewed chiefly her black dress, though it included her pale upper arms, thin as the body of a stick insect, and the bare
skeleton
of her shoulders and collar bone, harnessed by the dress’s two broad black straps. It made, in the
whiteness
, a photograph of too high contrast. Only the Siamese kitten on the bed behind mediated between the tones, a small tussock the colour of snow turned slushy in the street.

Without touching or addressing the kitten, or even properly looking at it, though with an awareness of it as if it had been a temple idol not merely collected but seriously invoked by her friend up here in
solitude
, Anna walked past the bed and into the little bathroom, where she creamed her face out of Anne’s jar of cold cream, wiped it on Anne’s tissues, dashed it with water from Anne’s basin, which was a modern, fake rococo shell with a single mixer tap, and dried herself in one of Anne’s white towels.