The Snow Ball (6 page)

‘Do you think one
can
be grown-up, when one has such extreme changes of mood?’

‘But of course one isn’t grown-up. I’m old enough to know that’s an illusion.’

‘My emotions go veering about as though I was Ruth Blumenbaum’s age.’

‘What one learns as one grows older’, said Anne, ‘is that to think of oneself as Ruth Blumenbaum’s age is pitching it far too high. We’re much younger than that, you and I. We’re mere tots.’

‘You even
look
like a tot’, said Anna, looking at her. ‘It’s your tendency to toddle.’

‘Obscene word’, said Anne, pulling a face. ‘In
English it’s always the apparently innocent words that sound obscene … Listen, my dear.’ She unlinked her arm from Anna’s. ‘Come or not, as you please, but I must go and talk to some of my obscene guests.’

She moved into the crowd. Anna went swiftly after her, catching her round the upper arm. ‘Anne’, she whispered into Anne’s ear.

‘My dear?’

‘Anne, find him for me, please. Please find him.’

W
ITHOUT
logical support, Anna felt confident that Anne
would
be able to find him: because he was her guest. Anne seemed to abet her in the opinion. She questioned Anna with the calming confidence of a policeman undertaking to find a lost child’s mother.

‘Well, medium height’, Anna replied. ‘Medium age. Black costume. And a black mask.’

‘Eye mask?’

‘More than that. Covering all the upper part of the face. A domino. At least, I think that’s what a domino is.’

‘And you’re sure he’s not dancing?’

‘Pretty sure.’

‘Let’s try in here, then. Is he here?’

‘No.’

Anne shut the door she had opened. ‘You didn’t have a hallucination, did you?’

‘No.’

‘Sure?’

‘He probably has an objective existence’, Anna said, ‘in Ruth Blumenbaum’s diary. She’s keeping a diary of the ball.’

Anne ignored that, because she had had another thought:

‘My dear. Suppose he’s taken off the mask?’

‘O, if he’s taken
off
the mask’, Anna said, as if giving up, ‘I probably wouldn’t recognise him.’

‘Well, well’, Anne said reassuringly, ‘he must realise that himself, so he probably
won’t
take it off.’

‘I’d recognise him if he kissed me.’

‘Dearest child, I really can’t ask each of my guests to kiss you.’

‘Even I’, said Anna, ‘wouldn’t really want you to.’

Someone, passing, called to Anne:

‘Lovely party, Anne.’

‘All the lovelier for having you in it’, Anne called back, without in the least interrupting her
conversation
with Anna. ‘Have you looked in the supper room?’

‘No.’

‘Well, let’s try in there.’ As they went: ‘Didn’t it occur to you the poor man might be hungry? Are you heartless?’

‘I don’t think he eats much. Now I come to
remember
, he’s rather lean.’

‘O my dear, it’s always the lean ones that eat. The fat ones’—Anne smoothed her hands over her lamé hips—‘are the ones that
nibble.
Well?’ She had thrown open the door. ‘Is he eating?’

A trestle table ran the length of the room: over it, a white linen table cloth; on it, precious, hideous silver
vessels. Anna was put in mind first of altars, then of wedding receptions—specifically Anne’s wedding receptions; a collective memory: such a length of white table cloth could only have been hired. Behind the table stood a manservant whom Anne had not merely hired but fitted out with some
eighteenth-century
-suggesting clothes—in reality, Anna
supposed
, someone’s or some club’s livery. Behind
him,
in the niche of the shuttered window, stood a vast pottery urn, a funerary urn, full of irises and
daffodils
. The flowers looked hired, too: by which Anna meant that Anne had obviously not arranged them herself but had had them done by the florist.

A few guests stood about the room, eating. A few dishes of food stood about the table, partly eaten. Where there had been piles of sandwiches there were now sheer, unsteady towers, a single sandwich wide—the section with the flag or the cress on top, which no one had liked to take. Upside down, polished, a mass of clean wine glasses was marshalled at one end of the table. The rest of the table was littered with used glasses, some standing actually in the dishes, some propped, the dregs of liquid tilted in the bottom of the glass, already turning sticky and beginning to crystallise. Lying in one silver dish, not quite in
contact
with the untouched sandwiches, was a sandwich half eaten. The edges of the bread were beginning to curl apart; a death’s head grinning. The granules of the surface of the white bread were brushed with cigarette ash, like dirt engrained on the pores of a
hand. To Anna’s mind, it tilted the scene from
wedding
to funeral.

The only person in the room who bore the least resemblance to Don Giovanni—and that was only a second’s illusion—was the manservant.

‘I thought for a moment it must be your
manservant
.’

‘Well why not?’ Anne said.

‘Why not? Did he seem—when you took him on—enterprising enough to put on a mask and try to seduce your guests?’

‘No, I must confess. He seemed thoroughly reliable.’

‘Well then.’

‘Not here then?’

‘Not here.’

‘O dear’, Anne said. ‘But Dr. Brompius
is
here. And alone.’

‘Does that mean you’ve got to rescue him?’

‘It’s not’, Anne said, ‘unpromising. For you, I mean.’

Anna picked out the one person who was obviously alone. He stood, eating, beside the centre of the table: an elderly man, in ordinary evening dress, with a bulging belly, bulging eyes, bulging spectacles.

‘Anne. It manifestly
is
.’

‘No, darling’, said Anne.’ I won’t let him kiss you. But he
is
a musicologist, you know.’

‘I didn’t’, said Anna, drawing her back. ‘Or
perhaps
. Vaguely. I don’t really
know
about these things.’

‘Well you ought to’, said Anne. ‘He’s said to be
immensely distinguished. He’s working on Tom-Tom’s collection. It’s said to be an immense honour for us. Dr. Brompius, the distinguished Dutch musicologist?’ she said, testing the formula. ‘Or is he Swedish? I shall never understand why it’s the least latin races that have the Latin ending for their names …’

‘Do you think’, Anna whispered, ‘that in the accusative he’s Dr. Brompium?’

‘Docto
rem
Brompium’, Anne corrected, ‘but do get out of your accusative frame of mind, darling.’

‘You go’, said Anna, trying to detach her arm from Anne’s. ‘To adopt your own lousy pun, I’m not
feeling
very vocative.’

‘I would rather not’, said Anne, pulling her
forward
, ‘be forced to examine which case
does
suit the way your thoughts are tending at the moment.’ When they were half way across the room, Dr. Brompius looked up, and Anna had to stop tugging against the introduction.

Munching, he bowed to Anna; stopped munching while he kissed Anne’s hand; and then went
shamelessly
on with the same mouthful, giving an indelicate impression that it was now a mouthful of Anne’s hand through which he murmured to her, in a heavy unlatin accent:

‘Chère madame.’

‘Dr. Brompius’, Anne said, ‘is it too much to
consult
you in your professional capacity a second time?’

‘How could it be too much, chère madame, for you?’

But the gestures of Anne’s head, referring always to Anna, made it clear that it was not for her but for Anna.

‘Dr. Brompius’, she explained to Anna, ‘has already arranged some dance suites for us, for later in the evening.’

Dr. Brompius, taking the idea that he was to address himself to Anna, elaborated to her:

‘Some little known works of the Swedish eighteenth-century court composers.’

Anna smiled at him, and sulked at Anne. But Anne went on:

‘And now we want to consult you again. It’s about
Don
Giovanni
.’

‘Ah, this is most interesting’, Dr. Brompius said. ‘I will later explain why. But first you, chères
mesdames
.’

‘We want to know’, Anne said, ‘whether Don Giovanni really does seduce Donna Anna.’

Anne refused absolutely to receive Anna’s look. She fixed her eyes on Dr. Brompius, who said:

‘This question is fascinating.’

‘Of course we realise it’s one of the classic puzzles. We know she says he didn’t. But we know she’d have to
say
he didn’t, in any case.’

‘Here’, said Dr. Brompius, ‘is a question we must examine in its historical aspect.’ He turned to the table and took a bridge roll. Now it was Anne who was trying to engage Anna’s attention, and Anna who, now the thing was definitely started, had no better
defence than to pretend to be insensitive to
everything
except a polite impatience for Dr. Brompius’s reply. She fixed her gaze on the back of his head. When he turned round again—the bridge roll already, and whole, in his mouth—he took up Anna’s gaze and held it.

‘This question is one which we can answer, I think, without going into musical technicalities, which are so boring. What we, however,
must
consider is history. History is the thing with which we may not dispense. This was said by a professor whose lectures I have attended in Hamburg in 1909, a most gifted man, and I have never forgotten it. If we permit
ourselves
to forget that in dealing with this matter we are dealing not with a modern but with an
eighteenth-century
opera, dramatis personae, audience, librettist, etcetera, etcetera, we shall find that we are thinking unhistorically and we shall permit ourselves to be led astray. What we have to do in this case—chères
mesdames
, you are not eating.’ He slid a silver dish from the table and thrust it towards Anna’s waist. ‘What we have to do is think our way into the conditions obtaining during the latter part of the eighteenth century, for that is when our opera was written, although, of course, its story is much older. To
understand
the opera situation at this period we must
consider
the whole culture-situation of the period, in which the opera-situation is embedded like a jewel in its setting.’

Anna looked down at the shallow silver dish he
was proffering. There was nothing in it except a paper doily, some strands of cress and a few crumbs of chopped hard boiled egg.

She faintly shook her head, as though too rapt to attend to eating.

‘You are not hungry’, said Dr. Brompius. ‘In the light of the culture-situation of the period, let us examine the alternatives. Let us postulate, first, that Donna Anna has
not
been seduced. What, in these circumstances, will she say on this subject? She will say, I think, that she has not been seduced. For there is nothing in these circumstances, the circumstances of not having been seduced, which we are entitled to pick out from a psychological point of view as
affording
her a motive for telling a lie. We must now
consider
the other alternative. Let us suppose that Donna Anna
has
been seduced.’

At the edge of her vision Anna saw Anne give an apologetic signal to Dr. Brompius, a mime of being drawn away down the table perforce, of taking care nonetheless not to go out of earshot, of continuing at the very least to watch his lips, though she had against her will to slide further and further away, while her hand faintly trailed along the table top until by blindest chance it met a dish from which not all the bridge rolls had been taken.

‘Now what is Donna Anna going to say if she in fact
has
been seduced? Two possibilities are open to her. This is in distinction from the former case, where we discovered that she was unlikely to say anything
but the truth. In this present instance she
may
, as before, tell the truth. On the other hand, she may tell a lie. For in this instance, unlike the other, we may readily identify a motive which might prompt her to lie.’

Far down the table, Anne, with a bridge roll in her hand, was talking to a knot of guests.

Anna stared at Dr. Brompius’s spectacles, which reminded her of the eye pieces of an antique gas mask.

‘A woman in the eighteenth century who was known to have been seduced was considered
dishonoured
. Whether this was based upon any
deep-seated
moralistic or religious conviction need not
concern
us now. It is possible that the concept of
dishonour
was not in all strata of society taken wholly seriously. It may even have been regarded with a dash of cynicism, so typical of the period. For us, however, it is enough that this was the conventional belief, whether or not it was a real belief. For our purposes it is sufficient that it was believed to be believed. Here, then, we have Donna Anna’s motive.’

Still distantly miming to Dr. Brompius that she was not doing, would not dream of doing, could not bear to do any such thing, Anne was leaving the room.

‘When I refer to her motive, I mean, of course, her motive for lying—
if
she is lying. For let us consider the statement Donna Anna actually makes. She says—or, at least, the narrative she relates to Don Ottavio implies—that she has
not
been seduced. Now you will observe that this fulfils the requirements of at least
one possibility in each of the alternatives we
postulated
. We postulated that if she had not been seduced she would say that she had not, and this is what in fact she does say. But we also postulated that if she
had
been seduced, it would be open to her to say that she had
not
, and this is again what she does in fact say or imply. In other words, we are not in a position to infer, on the basis of Donna Anna’s own statement on the subject, from which of the two alternatives we postulated her motivation arises.’

To Anna’s surprise, he stopped talking.

She waited, but he did not resume. He seemed to be waiting, rather, for her.

‘Yes, I see’, she said in a thoughtful voice. ‘But I’m afraid I still don’t quite see the answer.’

‘We have re-stated the problem’, he said, ‘in somewhat clearer terms.’

‘O. Yes. I see.’

‘And if you ask me how we can be sure that our new statement is somewhat clearer, that can be
subjected
to an empirical test. For from our new
statement
of the problem it emerges with greater clarity than it did before that it is not possible to infer the answer.’

‘Yes’, said Anna.

‘And you still will not take some food?’ He put the dish back on the table. ‘This seems to you perhaps an inconclusive answer?’

‘Not at all.’

‘The seeker after truth must sometimes accept
inconclusive answers. This is better than to be misled.’

‘Much better.’

‘There is, however, one thing which we can state quite definitely and firmly, without fear of
contradiction
.’