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 beforea 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