‘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.
‘You’re not afraid of being a bitch, are you?’
‘Not particularly’, said Anna.
‘Why not?’
‘Why should I be? I’ve experienced frustrated desire. That’s one of the things I don’t believe are different for men.’
‘You mean you’ve experienced it and it wasn’t so bad?’
‘O, bad’, she said and shrugged. ‘It’s bearable.’
‘Well anything’s bearable’, he said, ‘that people have to bear. That’s a poor argument. That would justify anything.’ His voice was churlish and resentful, on purpose.
The music stopped. The extra lights were switched on again. The band began to play something jolly. The sound, going out through the house, began to attract more people to the floor.
‘This is more like us’, Edward said. He took Ruth by the hand only to fling her away from him. ‘Come on, let’s whoop this party up some.’
‘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 undressing.’
‘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?’
‘O, none, I suppose’, he said ironically. ‘But I was thinking of the short run.’
‘Then we were bound to be out of step, as I can’t get my mind off the long run.’
‘Rudy, darling’, said Myra Blumenbaum, in her gentle, failing, lady-like voice, ‘you’re out of time.’
‘Out of time with you’, he said in his chipper voice, ‘but in time with the music.’
‘O’, she said, sounding hurt. ‘Perhaps that’s true.’ But then she usually did sound hurt, even when she wasn’t.
‘Now that I’m not going to cuckold him, I feel you owe me some information about your husband. Or has he been dead for ten years, too?’
They were again leaning on the parapet, arm parallel with arm, cheek parallel with cheek; but not touching. Anna had let her clasped hands drop, from the wrists, below the level of the parapet, but not out of Don Giovanni’s sight. She was aware of his head turned ten degrees from the straight and of his gaze resting, consumingly, on her hands.
‘My husband—’, she began, but broke off. She twisted her wedding ring a millimetre further round. ‘Please let’s remain anonymous.’
‘All right. But it restricts the conversation.’
‘It needn’t. Tell me what sort of person you are. In general terms.’
‘I don’t think in general terms.’
‘What things do you think about?’
‘Mozart and sex’, he said.
‘Nothing else?’
‘Nothing else in general terms. And you?’
‘Mozart, sex and death’, she said.
There was a pause. They both burst into laughter.
‘What made you come to this costume ball’, he presently asked,’ since you don’t usually go to them?’
‘To please Anne, I suppose. No. I’m fond enough of Anne to displease her if I want to. Because it was eighteenth-century, probably.’
‘Because of Mozart?’
‘I daresay. And you?’
‘O, I’ve never been asked to one before. But I probably wouldn’t have gone, for any other century.’
‘What’s the psychology of historical costume balls?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. One’s childhood, I suppose’, he said. ‘Most things are. I really came’, he added, ‘because I wanted to see the house. I’ve never been here before.’
‘I came to see the house filled with eighteenth-century people. But of course they don’t, subtly, look right.’
‘It’s the faces’, he said.
‘Fake faces … You think th
ey’ll pass, and then at the last minute they won’t. Just as mine won’t pass for seventeen.’
‘I don’t see why you should want it to’, he said.
‘You had the sense to hide yours. It’s easy to say that from behind a mask.’
‘Shall I take it off?’ He put his hand to it.
‘No’, she said quickly. He lowered his hand. ‘I might know you’, she said.
‘I promise you you don’t. At least, I don’t know you. You needn’t be afraid that I am actually your husband. Or your brother or your uncle.’
‘What an operatic world you must think I live in’, she said, ‘where to disguise the upper part of the face is to disguise all, and women are never surprised that the man they married as a baritone has turned into a tenor overnight, or even a soprano.’
‘Perhaps opera heroines are tone deaf.’
‘Well some singers, of course …’
‘When we next meet, I shan’t be in the mask. Shall you know me?’
‘We shan’t meet.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘I can’t be sure. But the chances are about as small as the chances of committing incest by taking up with a masked stranger.’
‘The chances of that depend on the size of one’s family.’
She laughed. ‘And our meeting again depends on the size of the gathering. Don’t you see, it’s taken a really big do, Tom-Tom’s net and Anne’s net both cast really wide, to bring us together once? Do you like the house, by the way, now that you see it?’
‘I’d seen the outside. I knew it would be pretty. But actually, the inside—it’s pretty, but I’m disappointed. It doesn’t satisfy my historical sense. Is it too done up? Faked?’
‘Or not faked enough?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, since they’re rich, most of their pieces are eighteenth-century. So they look a bit battered. Presumably in the eighteenth century things didn’t look two hundred years old.’
‘Yes, maybe it’s that’, he said. He turned round, so that his back was to the parapet. ‘Surely you wouldn’t want to be seventeen again?’
‘Your mask doesn’t hide your train of thought’, Anna said.
‘That wasn’t my train of thought.’ He turned back towards the ballroom again, and lowered his head. The mask did not hide a slight blush either.
‘I don’t want to be seventeen’, Anna said, more gently, ‘only to be capable of passing for it.’
‘I think that’s a mistaken wish’, he muttered. After gazing down on the ball for a minute he said: ‘All preoccupation with history is preoccupation with one’s own past. The unanswerable question:– what was it like to live then? But of course living in 1787 wasn’t like anything, any more than being seventeen was, or being seven. They were just living and being.’
‘All the same. Twentieth-century faces are different.’
‘Yes, they give the show away.’ He looked at her sideways. ‘You blame the faces for being twentieth-century, and the furniture for not being.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? Life isn’t arranged moralistically. It isn’t fair.’
‘No. It’s certainly not that.’
‘Actually, the prettiest room in this house is almost completely fake’, Anna said. “Anne’s bedroom.’
‘O. Well naturally I haven’t seen that.’
‘No more than I’ve seen the office where Tom-Tom works. Though I suppose I could see that, if I wanted to.’
‘No reason why you should want to. There’s nothing pretty in Tom-Tom’s office.’
‘There’s nothing ugly in Anne’s bedroom … Even so, you mightn’t like the effect. You might say it was tart’s rococo. It isn’t’, she corrected. ‘I feel disloyal for even suggesting it …’ She corrected herself again: ‘No, I don’t. It is tart’s rococo. But I adore it.’
‘You make it sound very enticing’, he said.
‘It is. Like sugar. Like peppermint creams.’
‘Funny thing’, Edward said, coming in close enough to Ruth to talk to her but still panting from the strenuous steps he had been performing on his own, ‘when I was dancing with whatshername—that woman—someone up in that gallery place threw down a lot of peppermint creams.’
His head alluded illustratively up to the gallery. Ruth’s gaze followed his gesture.
‘She’s up there now’, Ruth said.
‘Who is?’
‘Anna. With a man.’
He turned to look, and then went on dancing. ‘I can’t understand how anyone would want to spend the evening just watching other people dance.’
‘I expect Anna’s too old to do much dancing’, said Ruth.
‘O I don’t know’, Edward said. ‘Look at the way your father’s been hopping around like a grasshopper all night.’
‘Yes, but Daddy isn’t like an old person. Mummy hasn’t danced much. And only with Daddy.’
‘I expect Anna whatsit went up there to cuddle her man’, Edward said. ‘But it’s a damn silly place to choose. They can’t have sex up there with everyone looking.’
He had danced Ruth down towards the end of the ballroom, near the gallery. He looked up, waited his chance and caught Anna’s eye. He threw her a kiss.
She waved back.
‘Who’s that?’ Don Giovanni asked.
‘I don’t know his real name. For tonight he’s Casanova.’
‘What a young Casanova.’
‘The girl, whose real name I do know, is Cherubino.’
‘The funny thing is, although she’s so dark and he’s so fair, they look alike.’
‘It’s their common youth.’
‘And of course they’re dressed alike. One black, one white.’
‘The fair one in black, and the dark one in white.’
‘They look almost like brother and sister’, said Don Giovanni, watching them dance back into the crowd and lose themselves. ‘Or I suppose I should say brother and brother.’
‘Your mind runs on incest’, said Anna.
‘Anne, dearie. Lovely dress. Lamé, isn’t it?’
‘Rudy, dear friend.’
‘Lovely party, too, dear.’
‘I’m so glad if you’re enjoying it.’
‘O we are. You do know Myra, don’t you?’
‘Yes of course. We’ve often met’—and never found anything to say.
Anne and Myra smiled at one another and prolonged the smiles. Rudy seemed unable to break the silence of his wife. Anne considered putting the obvious question who Myra was, but it was answered before put by the obvious fact that she was nothing—nothing except Myra. Her costume was simply one of Myra’s usual evening dresses—one of Myra’s usual evening gowns: draped dove-grey crêpe, chosen for its inability to make any noise, even if you violently shook it, which Myra would never do—or encourage anyone else to do: chosen at great cost to make as nearly as possible the effect of not being there and yet remaining at the furthest possible remove from leaving Myra naked. At last Anne said to her:
‘Ruth looks sweet as Cherubino’
and at the same moment Rudy said to Anne:
‘Spare me a dance, Anne dear?’
‘O I’d love to, Rudy, but I mustn’t. You haven’t seen Anna, have you?’
‘Anna? I had a dance with her earlier. We were cut in on.’
‘I must find her. I want to make sure she’s all right. I did such an awful thing to her.’
‘I can’t believe that’, Rudy said. ‘I thought you two were as thick as thieves.’
‘O my dear’, said Anne, ‘you make me feel all the more remorseful. I must find her. I left her ententacled. By a sort of octopus. He always reminds me of an octopus. He bulges so. Well my dear, I know I bulge myself. I may remind people of an octopus myself. But he’s so hungry. I’m afraid he may have eaten her …’
Anne oozed away from them; and when she had gone Myra said, in a soft, worried and completely serious voice:
‘O Rudy. How awful for Anna.’
> ‘Was it a peppermint cream’, Ruth abruptly asked Edward, ‘that she was feeding you? I mean, practically from her own mouth?’
‘Were you there? I thought you were doing your diary.’
‘I came back.’
‘O.’
‘Did you actually eat it?’ Ruth said. ‘How could you?’
‘Well of course I ate it. What the hell else would I do with a peppermint cream?’
‘Casanova was at the first performance of Don Giovanni. The real Casanova, I mean. Did you know that?’
‘Yes, actually’, Anna replied, without much emphasis. ‘The first performance was on the twenty-ninth of October, 1787.’
‘Good God. How did you remember that?’
‘Well, you can remember, too. The year, anyway.’
‘Can I? Anyway, how do you know I can?’
‘Because you said living in 1787 wouldn’t be like anything.’
‘Did I? I didn’t really notice I did. I mean, I didn’t pick on the year consciously. But, anyway, I’ve just been going through the reference books. You must have it all in your head.’
‘It isn’t really miraculous’, Anna said. ‘For one thing, I once did some research on Don Giovanni——’
‘Did you publish it?’ he interrupted quickly. ‘I’ll read it.’
‘It’s under my maiden name.’
‘That doesn’t impress me as an obstacle. You’re forgetting I don’t even know your married name. And were you a maiden when you published it?’
‘It is a long time ago, but not so long as that.’
‘When——’
‘And for another thing’, Anna said, ‘I have the sort of mind that remembers numbers.’
‘Some numbers, like your age, you seem unable to forget.’
‘You’re quite right’, she said, turning her head and looking at him for a moment. ‘It isn’t a gift. I mean, it’s not enviable.’
‘But you have other gifts. For example, you’re musical.’
‘Fairly’, she said. ‘Nothing exceptional.’
‘I think I’d better not say what I think your other gifts are. I might make you angry.’
‘O then don’t’, Anna said. After a pause, she added: ‘Actually, I have one other gift, which you don’t know about.’
The Snow Ball Page 7