The Snow Ball Read Online Free Page B

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 cawcaw’, 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