The Snow Ball (3 page)

She came back into the bedroom and opened her small suitcase on the bed, accidentally creating a declivity in the quilted surface into which the kitten tumbled with resentment. She spread her jars and bottles on the dressing table, pushing to one side the tiny snuff box Anne kept there for pins, and seated herself in the white, buttoned tub armchair, pulling it up to the dressing table so that at last her face, and only her face, came into position in the looking glass.

Very swiftly she rubbed foundation over and into
her face, with hands that were long, ineluctably
competent
and much too bony, like the hand of death in a gruesome marble tombscape—but with deep pink fingernails.

She sat back, waiting for the foundation to set, her lids lowered so as not to disturb the forming surface. When her skin began to prickle, she very cautiously flickered her eyes open and leaned forward to confirm in the mirror image that surface and dressing had fused without blemish, and that her face was ready for her.

She sat before her face: painter before primed
canvas
, potter before bisque, gilder before wood on which the gesso had been laid. She behaved without hurry or excitement and almost without thoughts, in the craftsman’s near-automatism, his subjection of his mind to his skill.

To her dispassionate artificer’s gaze her face gazed beadily back. In the centre of the eighteenth-century glass it pouted in the same style as the rococo frame. Pouches beneath her eyes, puffing like cherubs’
profiles
, seemed to continue the dressing table’s quilting into the face; Anna’s nose, triangular and truncated as the nose—or the hat, or the whole person—of a chinoiserie Chinaman, served only to button down the flesh for a central moment, after which it cushioned out on every side with the apple surface of wax round a seal’s imprint, until it was gathered again and came puckering in to form the mouth, which drooped asymetrically, small, deep—a rosebud, but bruised.

Very carefully but still almost unthinkingly Anna chose, among her little disk-shaped boxes, so much smaller than Anne’s pin box, the one which contained silver and turquoise. She wanted a metallic suggestion and at the same time a suggestion of patina, but of patina not wholly opaque and not virulent. To metal she wanted to fuse porcelain—she wanted, in fact, lustre; and this the silver ingredient was to supply: but she did not want to forfeit the translucence of porcelain, and by choosing a colour which contained blue she meant to catch the kind of bluish ceramic glaze which embodied, in a tone like the shadowed parts of milk, the blue tint of flesh above a vein.

After swivelling open the lid of the box, a disk rotating round a disk, she touched the cushion of her little finger to the cushion of eye shadow, transferred its load to her eyelid, pressed, and then raised her finger as delicately as a leaf which had discharged its quota of gold. Remembering the exact amount of pressure she had given to eye shadow and lid, she measured it out again for the other eye. In the glass she scrutinised first one closed lid and then the other. She had given them a look of such translucence that it seemed to be the green-blue colour of her own irises which was shewing through.

Anna opened a bottle of chalky grey liquid, picked out the finest of her brushes and began to inscribe a grey line along her lid above the lashes, noticing that she must be bodily relaxed since the skin accepted the brush instead of puckering before it like water before
a prow. The door of the bedroom opened with a padded sound, its action muffled by the quilting inside. Anna saw, in a corner of the glass, a fold of gold lamé, and Anne said:

‘My dear. You’re up
here
.’

‘I ran away.’

‘So have I. How lovely to find you.’ She kissed the top of Anna’s head, a thing she could do only when Anna was sitting down.

Anna laid aside her brush and turned to look at the short plump dumpy woman undulating in gold lamé behind the chair. ‘I haven’t seen you all evening. I suppose one never
sees
one’s hostess. How are you? Also, incidentally,
who
are you?’

‘Don’t you know the news? Queen Anne is dead.’

‘Queen Anne.’ Anna contemplated her. ‘Hence the regal gold?’

‘Hence. I’m so glad if it
is
regal. At first I thought purple velvet. Then I thought No, not on
me
. As for white—people would think I was marrying again.’

‘You’re not, by the way?’

‘Anna, don’t try to be shocking.’

Anna laughed. It came into her mind that the essence of her friend’s resemblance to the queen, and of the queen’s to her rôle, was that both perfectly resembled a solid gold orb: you could sense yourself assessing its weight in the palm of your hand.

‘I’ve usurped your dressing table’, Anna said,
making
apologetically as if to rise.

Anne patted her down, ‘Get on with doing your pretty face. Mine’s beyond repair.’

Anna turned back to the mirror. ‘Pretty face?’ she said, looking at it, groping with her hand for her brush, ‘The face of a discontented lapdog about to sneeze.’

‘O my dear’, Anne protested, but laughing.

Anna unscrewed the grooved metal stick with which she put on mascara and twisted herself sideways so that she could see in the glass the mascara’s moment of contact with her lashes.

Anne sat down on the bed, making another and much greater declivity into which the kitten rolled unable to recover itself. She picked it up and held it with its cheek beside her own, presently carrying it across and standing behind Anna’s chair. ‘This is my discontented lapcat.’

High above Anna’s shoulder the kitten stared at its own face in the glass. In a parallel gaze, Anna stared at her face. For a few seconds there was a
contest
of narcissisms. Then Anna yielded and transferred her gaze from her own reflexion to the kitten’s. It went on staring at itself.

‘How did anyone ever suppose’, Anna asked, ‘that blue eyes betoken honesty and frankness?’

‘Don’t you like him?’

‘I respect him.’

In silence they all three stared at the kitten’s face.

Suddenly the kitten let out a monstrous ‘Caw caw
caw’, opening its mouth very wide with each noise, more like a baby bird than a cat, and not pausing to draw breath between.

Anne took it back to the bed, where it settled in her lap. ‘I know’, she said, ‘that you’re Donna Anna. Someone told me. Of course I knew it would be
some
thing
from Mozart.’

‘Mm’, said Anna, her mouth distorted and gagged in the effort of precision as she made up her eyelashes.

‘You’ve heard Rudy’s joke?’

‘Mm.’

Reverting, Anne said:

‘Your face isn’t a bit like a lapdog’s. More like a cherub’s.’

Anna held her eyes purposely startled and
unblinking
, to give the mascara time to dry. Propelling the mascara stick back into its holder, she said:

‘Then perhaps I should have come as Cherubino.’

‘O my dear you
should.
To shew off your lovely legs.’

‘Bony’, said Anna. ‘Indecent to reveal so much of one’s skeleton while one yet lives.’

‘You should experience being buried alive in a tomb of flesh’, said Anne. ‘If you knew how I envy you your figure.’

Anna picked out a lipstick, one of the long thin ones, pulled off its cap and held it up, preparatory, in the admonishing position of John the Baptist’s
forefinger
. ‘No you don’t. You know yours is much more appealing in bed.’

‘My
dear
’, said Anne, despairingly. She made a sling of her two hands joined, eased it under the cat curled in her lap, and carefully, like the slowest and smoothest of cranes, raised him, swung him clear and lowered him without disturbance on to the bed. But the cat instantly jumped up, shook himself and turned completely about before settling again in exactly the position Anne had given him to begin with. ‘You’re as perverse as this cat. What
is
your mood tonight? Morbid? Cynical?’

Hesitating with the lipstick at her lips, Anna replied:

‘I mistrust tonight.’

‘Yes, new year. Hateful new years.’

With a lipstick of enamel pink Anna precisely
outlined
the involuted border of the left half of her upper lip. Starting at the outside right, she brought the other line to meet it. She filled in the colour, blunted it on a tissue and then, having created half an enamel rose, paused to ask:

‘If you hate new years, why celebrate them?’

‘It’s not me, darling. It’s Tom-Tom.’

Anna coloured her lower lip in one deep curve. ‘Darling, does he
like
being called by that absurd name?’

‘Darling, he gets furious if people
don’t
.
’

Anna dabbed powder over her face, covering the newly coloured lips, which she presently cleared by using the lipstick again, this time as a snow plough. On her cheeks she smoothed in the powder with a
baby’s hairbrush. ‘There. Finished’, she said, before she was, wiping her fingers on a tissue like a priest after communion, tumbling her apparatus back into her case like a doctor or a children’s entertainer after a visit, and re-instated Anne’s snuff box in the centre of the dressing table. Her hand paused, went back to the snuff box and picked it up. She rose, vacating the chair, offering it back to Anne, even while she pored over the snuff box’s floral top. ‘Pretty thing.’

‘Yes’, said Anne, rising from the bed.

‘And yet, you know’, Anna said, putting the snuff box down again, ‘in all eighteenth-century pottery there’s that hint …’

‘That hint?’ asked Anne, sitting heavily in the vacated chair like a fat Italian taking his turn in the barber’s shop.

‘Of the chamber pot’, said Anna.

‘
What
a mood. What a
mood
’,
said Anne.

‘I’m angry with myself.’ It was spoken emptily, in a voice that put you in mind of the suck-back of an ebbing wave and of the chilliness after swimming.

‘What have you done?’

‘I told you. Run away.’

‘What from?’

‘O—the implications of being Donna Anna.’

‘I don’t’, Anne said, lying back in her chair, ‘understand you. What made you come as Donna Anna, anyway?’

‘O, we poor’, said Anna, walking round the bed for the sake of walking, ‘we don’t have
psychology,
my dear. We merely have shifts and exigencies. A black dress the poor have always with them. Ergo, one comes as a bereaved daughter.’

‘You’re not poor.’

‘No, of course I’m not. But you
are
rich.’

‘How inimical you sound tonight.’

‘Dear Anne, dear Anne.’ Anna let herself fall
forward
on to the bed, disturbing the kitten again. ‘I’m sorry, dearest Anne. And sorry to have upset your kitten. But you know, I always have to warn myself against you.’

‘Warn yourself, dear child?’

‘When I’m here, I might almost think this was
my
room, as though I were as rich as you. No, it’s not that. But there is a conflict of interest somewhere—or, if there
were
to be one—if it came to a crisis——’

‘Well?’ Anne’s voice was steadfast.

‘O, you’ll expel me from your igloo some day’, Anna said. ‘Aren’t you going to do your face?’

‘I tell you, it’s beyond salvage. That’s not what I came for. I’d never
mean
to expel you, you know.’

‘What
did
you come for?’

Anne’s plump hand, satirically furtive, tugged open one of the drawers of the dressing table, slipped in and came out clenched round half a dozen of the
expensive
peppermint creams she bought, in packages shaped like flower baskets, from a café in Wigmore Street.

She offered in gesture to throw one to Anna, who shook her head: Anne put the sweet in her own
mouth: ‘Darling’, said Anna, ‘even your vices are white—and so expensive.’

As Anne sucked, the scent of mint crept into the room and hung, palpable as drapery, pungent,
pervasive
. The nose overwhelmingly suggested to the eye that the white-hung room must be a bower of
flowering
mint, like the blackthorn bower behind the Chelsea rustics.

‘Minthe was a nymph’, Anna said.

‘I’, said Anne, putting another sweet in her mouth, ‘am anything but. Have you noticed, by the way, that both you and I have come as people of our own real name? Now what does that signify? How honest we are? That we’re opposed to disguises?’

‘No, the opposite. We’re unwilling to reveal
ourselves
. We won’t give away what our daydreams are.’

‘People come to fancy dress balls as their
daydreams
?’

‘Why else should the least witty man in the world come as Voltaire? The lady in London least likely to commit adultery as Lady Hamilton?’

Laughing, protesting, salivating, Anne said:

‘All right, two examples, but you can’t build a theory on two examples. What about Rudy?’

‘Even Rudy would like to be a poet.’

‘Well … Maybe.’ Anne swallowed her
peppermint
and began another.

‘I daresay bankers often would. I don’t know many bankers.’

‘No, wait’, Anne said, talking hastily round her
new mouthful, ‘I can refute you: Marie Antoinette.’ She swallowed. ‘There are at least five Marie
Antoinettes
in the house tonight.’

‘All women want to have their heads chopped off’, Anna replied, ‘Don’t you know that yet?’

Anne let her hands, from which she had finished all the peppermints, flop over the sides of her chair. It was meant as a gesture of giving Anna up, but evidently it brought home to her how weary she was: she pushed off her shoes and extended her legs, and then, like a sculptor deciding the points of support for a figure, arranged herself with the round back of her heels propped on the floor and the round back of her head against the chair. Eyes shut, voice drowsing, she said:

‘We must go back to the party. It calls me from below, like knowing something’s on in the kitchen.’

‘Let it seethe’, said Anna, immobile on the bed.

‘No, really …’