It seemed to Cristena that a net had been cast for her and that slowly she was being pulled in to a snowy shore. It was useless to dissemble. She knew she would eventually go to the city, to the circus. There was even a vague fear that if she delayed too long, the circus might have moved on, and she would have missed it. At last this fear got the better of her.
An automatic hire car drove her along the frozen road, back into the icicled city, and delivered her at the entrance of the theater where the circus was resident.
Cristena took a gilded seat at the front of the auditorium. She was nervous, and as the spangled performers swung or pirouetted or leaped past, she imagined they stared recognizingly into her face with eyes as cruel as knives.
When the moment came for Snow-Drop’s act with the seven dwarfs, Cristena was trembling, and she took some large gulps from a golden flask.
The dwarfs came springing out like seven sable cats. Snow-Drop appeared ethereally, wafted down on wires from the roof of the stage. She was dressed like a princess, in a long alabaster gown and diamante tiara. But she peeled off the dress and wires, to reveal her sequined second skin, and turned a series of cartwheels. At each revolution she went by one of the dwarfs, who in turn began to cartwheel. The eight forms twirled about each other until Cristena was giddy and shut her eyes.
When she opened them again the dwarfs were busy raising a body mountain up which Snow-Drop walked, and next they became a body sea on which she swam.
The dwarfs made Snow-Drop the axis of every pattern. They were landscapes over which she traveled and buildings into which she went and from whose windows she looked out. By prancing off each other’s shoulders, they made her seem to juggle them—the audience laughed and clapped—and at one point they became an animal, a dwarf for each leg and three dwarfs composing a body, head, and waving tail. Snow-Drop sat on its back and it cantered to and fro, at last rearing up and catapulting her away into a scintillant triple spin.
Unlike all the other acts, neither the dwarfs nor Snow-Drop seemed ever to glance into Cristena’s face. As they went through their plasticene antics, their eyes were fixed wide and brilliant and far away.
Cristena’s nervousness gradually left her. She observed the acrobats with condescending interest. She began to want them to notice her. She wanted beautiful Snow-Drop, white and black and red, to look at her, to know her. It was not possible realization should be only on one side. It occurred to Cristena they were actually ignoring her, cutting her, but that of course was absurd.
Finally there was a danse macabre, during which three of the dwarfs stood on each other to fashion a tall man, with whom Snow-Drop waltzed. But Snow-Drop grew dizzy and fell down and died. The dwarfs bore her to the center of the stage, where they described a funeral, and buried her in their dark bodies. Then a spot-light sun shone on the mound, and a white shoot pierced up through the earth of dwarfs. Snow-Drop dived in graceful slow-motion up into the air and was reborn like her name flower, to great applause.
As they bowed, Cristena stared at them, the seven handsome dwarfs and Snow-Drop. But their faces were like enamel masks. When they darted off the stage, anger flushed through Cristena, hotter than the vodka in her flask.
Soon after she was outside the theater, standing back among some bare trees below the Stage Door, while across the street, the hire car waited like an obedient ghost.
A group of other people had also gathered here, and a number of children with autograph books. Artists emerged and were beaming and gracious. Presently the dwarfs came out all together in wonderful fake fur coats. They were jolly, and teased the patrons and scared the children. In the street-lamps their eyes were now wicked and wise. Long after they had gone, when the autograph hunters had become impatient and many drifted away, Snow-Drop emerged. Unlike the dwarfs, she wore a skimpy black jacket and ankle boots. Her hair was done in a long plait. She spoke to her admirers solemnly and signed their books quickly, like a thief. Cristena watched, and wondered what she would do. But when Snow-Drop’s fans had melted away, she walked directly down toward the trees. Cristena stepped out as if on cue.
“Hallo, how are you. Perhaps you remember me?”
Snow-Drop did not seem startled although she had halted at once. In fact an immediate slyness was apparent, a vixenish glaze of evaluation passing over her eyes. Then she smiled without opening her mouth and shook her head.
“Your mother . . .” said Cristena. She added patronizingly, “You would have been too young to recall.”
“I’m older than I look,” said Snow-Drop primly. Her voice was flat and unpolished, and the statement offered its own obscure meaning, redolent of something murky.
“Well, would you like to see the house?” said Cristena boldly. She had planned nothing, but the words came as simply as in one of her novels.
“The house? Your house?”
“Yes, naturally mine. And we can have some wine, and perhaps dinner. The kitchen’s fully automated.”
“That would be nice,” said Snow-Drop, in her cheap little voice. Only the under-pavement heating must have kept her slim legs from the cold in that short skirt and those unsuitable boots.
Cristena walked across the road, and Snow-Drop followed her neatly, docile. Under the lamps her face was just the face of the paintings, and her mouth had been lipsticked an even redder red.
There was no one left by the stage door, the street was empty, and Cristena did not think anyone had seen Snow-Drop come with her to the car. She was glad, for after all Snow-Drop was a little embarrassing. Yet, as the car drove them away into the countryside, Snow-Drop’s awful loveliness filled the atmosphere like a low buzzing. Cristena felt the need to talk. She lied sumptuously.
“Your mother was so fond of you. I haven’t seen her for so long.”
Without protest or overt cunning, Snow-Drop announced, “I never knew my mother. I was brought up by the troupe.”
“Are you close to them, the seven—”
“Oh, they don’t like me,” said Snow-Drop, reasonably.
• • •
The house glowed at them from across the lake, and when the car brought them to the door, extra lights flamed on in welcome. Cristena could see Snow-Drop was impressed. A nasty complacency had thinned her lips.
They went into the living room. Here, where the water-colors had hung in such abundance, Snow-Drop made a living sculpture. Cristena tensed for the house to respond in some way. But, when it did not, no poltergeist activity took place of any sort, she decided that she had already exorcized the architecture.
They drank a fresh yellow wine.
Cristena asked Snow-Drop questions about her life, and rather to her surprise Snow-Drop responded without either reticence or verbosity. She laid out events in bleak rows before Cristena. It was a sordid unjoyful existence which the Snow-Drop led, out of all keeping with her looks. And it had made her mean and ordinary in spite of herself. She had not ascended to tragedy or grotesqueness, but plummeted to the mealy-mouthed and the dull. Only glints of acquisitiveness distinguished her, and it was obvious she reckoned she would get, was getting, something out of Cristena. Otherwise she dwelled in the shadow of the circus and especially of the dwarfs. She was their slave, seeing to their laundry by hand, shopping for and cooking their meals on those occasions they demanded it. Cristena suspected that Snow-Drop was also their sexual toy. For that matter, almost anyone’s, maybe. There was a metallic fragrance of willingness, which grew stronger as the wine left the decanter and filled instead their bodies.
“Offstage, do you always plait your hair?” asked Cristena.
“Shall I undo it?” asked Snow-Drop.
“Yes, why not? I’ve got a marvelous comb that perfumes the hair. We can go up. I’ll show you my dresses. You might like to choose some. They’d be too big for you, but we can always have them re-tailored.”
They went up the stair and along
a passage where the artist’s paintings had hung, and into Cristena’s dressing room.
Cristena threw open doors.
“Look, that crimson silk would suit you. My husband bought it. I never wear red. And this black one with sparkles.”
With a studied unselfconsciousness, Snow-Drop slipped off her tawdry skirt and top, and stood in faded under-things, dim pants and tights, and, since she did not wear a brassière, only a thin little cotton bodice to conceal her bosom. Her acrobat’s body was perfect, firm slim muscle lightly padded by white satin, and the symmetrical rounded young breasts bobbing in their vest. She tried on the dresses greedily. Cristena pinched in material to show how well they would suit Snow-Drop once they had been altered.
From its case she brought the magic comb and switched it on. When it had heated up, she combed Snow-Drop’s amazingly long tendrilly hair. A scent of warm roses, jasmine and cinnamon throbbed in the room. They drank more wine.
“There are some gorgeous underclothes too,” said Cristena. “I never use them.”
She opened the drawers, and let fall a shower of black and white silk corsets, black stockings sewn with orchids, garters of crow lace with silver buckles.
With no apparent modesty or reluctance, the Snow-Drop pulled off her drab tights and pants, and up over her delicate head in a whirlwind of hair went the inadequate bosom-bodice. She sat on a chair and drew the embroidered stockings along her dainty legs, and fixed on the garters. She flexed her thighs and her firm, curved stomach moved, and her breasts quivered like smooth white birds. Cristena assisted her into the black corset shot with ivory silk. She fitted it round the swaying stem of body and tilted into the bone cups the birds of the breasts, so the candy pink tip of a nipple rose just above each frill. Cristena laced up the corset severely. “You must wear it tight.”
Snow-Drop posed before the mirror. She raised her arms artlessly, and the pink sweets rose further from their black froth containers. Between the silky limbs, under the corset’s ribboned border, Snow-Drop’s private hair, dark and thick like the fur of a cat, seemed the blackest thing in the room.
“That’s very pretty,” said Cristena.
She felt heavy, languid, tingling, mad. She put her hands around Snow-Drop’s body and made a small adjustment to the corset top. Her fingers brushed an icing-sugar nipple. Snow-Drop giggled.
“Now, you mustn’t be ticklish,” said Cristena. She tried the nipple again.
Snow-Drop squirmed, pressing back against her.
In the mirror, Cristena saw, the beautiful doll with its bosom popping from the frills, its hands-span waist, and its naked lower limbs, wriggling. Snow-Drop’s eyes were shut and her red lips parted.
Cristena pulled the girl backward against her body. She caressed her breasts, sought the V of coal-black fur. She watched in the mirror. Snow-Drop writhed. She parted her legs and thrust her buttocks into Cristena’s belly. She uttered tiny shrill squeaks.
Fire engulfed Cristena. She pinioned Snow-Drop, rubbing, tickling, squeezing, choked by the perfume of roses and cinnamon, hair and skin, drunken and furious, and the girl was screaming, in the glass a demon of black and white and red.
Cristena felt the climax roll up between her thighs, turning her inner life, her soul, over and over in blind ecstasy, as Snow-Drop wailed in her grip and the room exploded.
When Cristena came to herself, Snow-Drop was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She sucked her thumb and played with the ribbons of the corset, like a spoiled child which knows it has been naughty, but that this will not matter.
• • •
Cristena told herself it would not matter, over and again, as she assisted the kitchen in the preparation of a lavish supper. Never in her life had she experienced such alarm. It was not shame, more terror. For Snow-Drop came of a dangerous, scurrilous race. Who knew now what she might do? For the moment she sat on the couch, still in the corset and still half nude, drinking wine and looking at the television, in whose speculative lens she had first appeared. Later it was possible she might be persuaded to go back to the city. But then again she might want to spend the night here. And after tonight, how many other nights? What payment would she exact, in emotion or hard cash? How luminous her eyes as she glanced about her at the furnishings of Cristena’s husband’s house.
Cristena put the last touches to the food and drink. Her hands were shaking, but she pulled herself together and made herself survey what she had done. It was a meal of red, white and black, although she doubted the Snow-Drop would take this in, let alone appreciate it. White soft rolls and creamy cheeses, slices of palest chicken in an almond sauce, caviar, fat grapes as black as agate, pomegranate seeds, burgundy apples whose crisp hearts were the shade of virgin ice. In the decanter now a rich ruby wine.
As she followed the service trolley into the living room, Cristena wished there had been someone to pray to. But there was not, she must deal with this herself.
“I hope you’re hungry.”
“Oh yes. I like my food,” said the Snow-Drop, who had looked as if she lived on honey-dew.
She began to eat at once; alcohol and orgasm had evidently stimulated her appetite.
Cristena observed. She was prepared to say, if pressed, “No, I had dinner earlier. You have it all.” But Snow-Drop, gobbling up everything in a prissy yet vulture-like way, did not bother with Cristena, did not seem to notice that her hostess ate nothing.
As more and more of the food and wine was consumed, Cristena’s shaking increased. When Snow-Drop plucked up one of the gleaming red apples, Cristena flinched. Of all of the feast, she was afraid she had taken a chance with the apples.
Snow-Drop put the apple to her mouth and bit into it. Then, quite slowly, her jaw dropped. Cristena saw inside her mouth, to the piece of white and red apple lying on Snow-Drop’s tongue. Snow-Drop turned to her. Snow-Drop looked mildly inquiring. “Mmr,” she said. Then her eyes turned up in their sockets and she slid down the couch on to the carpet.
She lay there half an hour, motionless. Then there was a small spasm, which did not wake her. Crystal urine flowed out and wet the rug. A thread of scarlet slipped between Snow-Drop’s lips. That was all. She was dead. She could not be anything else. Cristena had crushed twenty tasteless soluble sleeping capsules in the wine, and in the sauces, meat, fish, cheese, and fruit, had gone the odorless soft corrosive cleaning acids of the house, the unsmelling garden pesticides. She had burnished the apples with a vitriolic substance employed to polish the mirrors.
• • •
The house buried Snow-Drop’s body without any difficulty in the garden. After the job had been done, the digger took up deep snow from the lawn and packed it in above the grave. But in any case that night new snow came down and covered everything.
If there were reports on the television of Snow-Drop’s disappearance, Cristena, who studied the screen closely, did not see them.
Presumably no one knew where Snow-Drop had gone on the night of her vanishment, and perhaps ultimately nobody cared. The seven dwarfs had not liked her and would probably find it challenging to locate and train up another beautiful lost child as their helpmeet and victim.
Cristena felt no compunction. She had had to protect herself. She settled down and completed her novel, then put it into the machine to be typed. By the time her husband returned to the house, the book would be in the hands of her publishers, and she could present him with the advance, which would humiliate him.
• • •
He came home some weeks early, when the snow was still down across the landscape. Calling her from the airport, he told her that he was bringing two of his business associates, and in the background she heard their hearty, stupid and inebriated voices. Cristena was not pleased, but she made believe she did not mind, sure he would bring the men to upset her and she could ruin his trick by seeming unconcerned.
She went about the house
behind the automatic dusters. For months she had thought of it mostly as hers. She did not suppose he would like the new color scheme, and he was capable of having it changed. Cristena braced herself to be merry and careless.
The men arrived in the afternoon and came swaggering up to the house. Her husband was in the lead. He had put on yet more weight, and she had never seen him look so ugly, as if he had done it on purpose.
For an hour or so the male colleagues sprawled in the living room, eating things the kitchen prepared, and drinking beer. Cristena’s husband had greeted her with affectionate uninterest, and now largely ignored her, but neither did he remark adversely on the redecoration. Indeed, he abruptly praised it. “The house is looking good. But wait until you see what I’ve brought for the garden.” And somehow he made it obvious he had deliberately not brought a present for Cristena, who did not deserve one, but for the house.
They went outside, into the freezing twilit day.
With the help of the house porter, Cristena’s husband trundled a large lamp-like structure into the garden, and set it up among the birch trees. He threw a switch and the lamp began softly to hum. From its bowl a yellow light streamed out and bathed the slope. It became warm. Strange scents shot from the ground, the trees. They were the smells of spring.
“The snow will be gone in minutes,” said Cristena’s husband. “The plants start coming up in half an hour. You can have a spring and summer garden in the middle of winter. Expensive, I’ll admit, this sun-lamp, but wait till you see.”
They waited, and they saw. And presently, after they had been splashed with snow and mud from the broiling, roiling earth, they retreated into the living room again, and looked on from there.
The garden was in flux, in tumult. Snow rushed in avalanches from the trees and along the ground. A kind of seismic activity thrust up huge tumuli, which seemed to boil. And on these peculiar black mounds, the porcelain flowers of spring bubbled through.