The Snow Ball

by Brigid Brophy

‘Could you?’

  ‘What I can’t tell you is who on earth Cherubino is.’

  ‘Then you know the Blumenbaums?’

  ‘You don’t think I’d cut in on a man I didn’t know? He might get angry.’

  ‘But I thought you had the cheek of the devil.’

  ‘It’s all a front’, he said. ‘Like coming as Casanova.’

  ‘O, that’s who you are.’

  ‘That’s who I am. You can’t get anywhere without a front, these days.’

  ‘And you are getting somewhere?’ Anne asked.

  ‘My God I hope I’m getting to be Rudy Blumenbaum’s son-in-law. He’s terribly rich. Did you know that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sometimes I almost faint with excitement when I think of it.’

  Don’t think Ed. has ever been in love. This prob. why he seems naive to me. Also this is source of friction, why don’t always get on. He seems to have no past, only future. At least, only thinks of future. Mummy talks about her youth like this—‘Everything was so fresh, you didn’t know what life was going to offer.’ Think this must be falsified. Anyway what life did offer her was pretty gd.—Daddy. I don’t feel everything fresh, everything just beginning, feel a lot of things ended for ever. As if had been brought up on island wh. now forbidden to go back to. Or not forbidden—unable. Island sunk, as it were. Perhaps real trouble between Ed. and me is am already too old to love.

  ‘So every half hour she creeps away to fill in this diary.’

  ‘Admirable’, Anna said, ‘if a little cold-blooded.’

  ‘Cold-blooded? I think it’s sentimental. Like keeping wax fruits under a glass dome.’

  ‘More like keeping one’s appendix in a bottle.’

  ‘No, it’s sentimental. She wants to moon over the thing afterwards.’

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t to prevent her mooning afterwards?’

  ‘Well, she certainly won’t be able to do much mooning if she’s written down what I said about her costume.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I didn’t want to be seen dancing with a stablehand. Who is this Cherubino anyway?’

  ‘A page.’

  ‘You’d think she could look feminine for one evening, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Does it offend you that she’s not a sentimentalist?’

  ‘Me? No. I’m a realist.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I want money. You’re nowhere without money these days.’

  ‘What would you buy with it, if you had it?’

  ‘Anything that took my fancy, I suppose. You haven’t got money, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought not. You’re not even titled?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity. I’d have to desert you. I mean I’d have to desert you afterwards, if I made you my mistress.’

  ‘O. Well, I daresay you would—if you did.’

  ‘What’re you thinking? That I’m cynical? That I have got the cheek of the devil after all? Or that I’d run away if you called my bluff?’

  ‘None of them’, said Anna. ‘To be frank, you don’t entice me.’

  ‘You think I’m too young for you?’

  ‘No. Too puritanical for me.’

  ‘Puritanical?’

  ‘Not to have thought what you’d do with the money.’

  ‘My God’, he said.

  They danced in silence for a little.

  ‘My God’, he repeated. ‘You really are cynical. I shall warn people against you.’

  Anna laughed. They danced along the edge of the ballroom.

  ‘You steered me here’, he said. ‘You’re looking for that person again, the one you’re avoiding.’

  ‘Perhaps I’m looking to see if your partner’s come back.’

  ‘Not likely. You’d be afraid I’d desert you.’

  ‘Actually, I was vaguely looking’, Anna said, ‘for a man shaped like a boiled egg. At least, he is from above. I’ve only seen him from above. I don’t know who he is.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s only visible from above. Perhaps he disappears on ground level.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Some people have personalities like that.’ He stopped dancing. They were beneath the minstrels’ gallery. He pointed up at its floor. ‘Let’s go up there and see if we can see him from above.’

  ‘No’, said Anna.

  Something small but quite heavy plopped on the floor beside her. She moved further out into the ballroom, where one or two dancers bumped her, and looked up at the gallery. Anne was up there, leaning over the parapet, grinning. Foreshortened, and apparently flattened also sideways, her face looked plumper than ever, a great loaf of raw pastry in horizontal folds, the face of a mischievous, even a half-malevolent putto seen in a distorting glass, an earth genius, a clay genius.

  Another object dropped beside Anna. The next one she caught. It was a peppermint cream. She bit off half of it and then called up to the gallery:

  ‘Delightful, but what is this? A snowstorm? A miraculous communion?’

  ‘Confetti’, Anne replied, and disappeared.

  Went back to ballroom, saw Ed. at edge of floor with Anna K. who was FEEDING him. Don’t know what, sweet/sandwich, but she bit off half and later put other half in his mouth. Felt had seen something disgusting as if it was her tongue. Or something sacrilegious: blasphemous communion or something. Admit am jealous of Anna K. Admit, admit but still feel it. It’s like being told you are going to die. Can’t imagine what it wd. be like to know you are dying. Can’t imagine what it wd. be like to be jealous. But AM jealous. And of course am going to die. Everyone is. Anna K. is. When went into ballroom felt as if had been shot through heart. But am still conscious. This sounds melodramatic but is not exaggerated. This is the true account. Wonder if D. will take me home at once.

  ‘Anne!’

  Anne fled from Anna, along the upstairs corridor, past the room which had been made over as a ladies’ cloakroom, pretending not to hear Anna’s pursuit. But Anna could tell, from a particular bent intentness in her friend’s back and from the unaccustomed speediness of the waddle, that Anne had heard. She even believed she could tell, from the particularly intense undulations in the plump flesh folded round the back, that what Anne was bending over and hugging was a giggle.

  Anna hurried, swerving round single promenaders and, when she met a whole clump, putting out her hand as a buffer and then using it to hold the clump stationary while she dodged round it. Her thoughts were occupied by her immediately past actions, as though at the time she had gulped them too quickly. Pushing the other half of the peppermint into her partner’s mouth; leaving him without ceremony; running—tripping on her hem—up the grand staircase and from the top catching sight of Anne on her way from the minstrels’ gallery; knowing from the acceleration in the quarry’s steps that the quarry knew itself sighted: the sequence had printed itself, vivid as an image on the eye, in the very nerves whereby Anna’s limbs recognised where they were and what they were doing. She had performed these actions without premeditation; but premeditation was determined to take place and would settle, if it had to, for taking place after the event. ‘Anne!’ Occupied with the past, Anna did not immediately act on a perception of the future. While Anne fled from her down the corridor, a man in black—distinctly glimpsed for a second, between promenaders, and recognised—advanced up the corridor towards Anna. Yet Anna permitted herself to go on running after Anne, on whom she was gaining: as though what she really wanted was not to overtake Anne at all but—head on, and as quickly as she could—to meet him.

  She stopped just short of where he must, by now, have reached; turned; ran back up the corridor again faster than she had come and dodged into the ladies’ cloakroom, where she slammed the door behind her.

  She saw nothing but the two rows of pier glasses, reflecting each other.

  A figure stood up, behind the furthest pier glass on the left-hand side. In Anna’s eyes it represented a whole se
ries of infractions of nature, so complex as to seem a fantasy and yet so logical in its complexity as to trap her. The person on whom she had shut the door behind her now stood before her. He had, by changing his sex, introduced himself into the ladies’ cloakroom, and yet he retained the masculine costume. That costume, which had been all black, was now all white: white from top to toe: white as Anne’s bedroom. ‘O—Ruth’, Anna said. ‘You frightened me.’

  ‘Hullo Anna.’

  She was a tall, bony but large-limbed girl, without resemblance to either of her parents except for a smudge of Rudy’s high colour in her cheeks. She had bold features and very black hair. She was perhaps going to be beautiful. In the white satin knee breeches her long legs were elongated almost past belief. One hand clasped a notebook as though it had been a prayer book. The other hand (Anna reconstructed that she must have been crouching down) was tugging the breeches into a more comfortable sit. The gesture of the chapel and the gesture of the stables: between them they gave her the cachet of an expensive schooling.

  ‘I hear you’re Cherubino.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Then we’re both from Mozart. I’m Donna Anna.’

  ‘I don’t know who that is.’

  ‘From Don Giovanni.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘O, you should hear it. You’d like it, if you like Figaro.’

  ‘I don’t particularly’, said Ruth. ‘We just went to it, in a school party.’

  ‘O.’

  ‘D’you want the loo?’ Ruth gestured with her head. ‘It’s through there.’

  ‘No. I just came for a moment’s respite.’

  ‘I came to write up my diary.’

  Anna made a sound of assent only, not knowing whether it would hurt Ruth’s feelings to discover she knew already.

  ‘I’m keeping a diary of the ball.’

  ‘Then you’ve got the evening’, Anna said, looking down at Ruth’s notebook, ‘in there, pressed like a flower.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Ruth added, curtly: ‘You’re in it.’

  ‘Am I? It gives one a curious feeling …’

  ‘Only a passing reference, of course.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well, I’ve finished now, anyway’, said Ruth. She pushed past Anna and left.

  Anna looked into one of the pier glasses, not examining what she saw but supposing that if something was badly amiss with her make-up or costume she would notice.

  She heard the door open. Anne came in.

  ‘What’re you doing up here?’ Anne said. ‘Why aren’t you down in the thick of it with your beau?’

  ‘He’s not my beau.’

  ‘Darling, you’re not still resisting fate? You haven’t run away again?’

  ‘Anne! Listen! He’s not Don Giovanni.’

  ‘He’s not?’

  ‘I knew you’d misunderstood. Do you think I’m a cradle snatcher? Actually, he’s Ruth Blumenbaum’s beau. I came after you to explain. If you’d only waited …’

  ‘Wait for me a second. I must go to the john.’

  Anna waited.

  Anne came out, tried to straighten her lamé skirt in front of one of the glasses and then put her arm through Anna’s. ‘Now, my dear.’

  ‘You weren’t so far out. That one is Casanova.’

  ‘O my dear. From the sublime to the ridiculous. What a faux pas. Well, we must start again.’ Her arm still through Anna’s, she led Anna out into the corridor.

  ‘Start what again?’

  ‘It’s like having the sort of daughter who refuses to leave home. I throw you out, and you bounce back.’

  ‘I warned you I was on the run. I kept seeing him. At least I thought I kept seeing him.’

  The corridor was full of neutral figures, several of them in black, all of them incapable of engaging Anna’s attention.

  ‘Perhaps I really was looking for him’, said Anna.

  ‘I shall lead you down the staircase again’, said Anne, ‘and launch you again. You see, I’m determined.’

  Arm in arm they descended the grand staircase, wheeling like a cavalry formation past the big Cupid at the turn of the stair. Perhaps because they were arm in arm or perhaps because Anne looked what she had said she was, determined, people made way for them. At the bottom, Anna said:

  ‘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.’

  5

  WITHOUT 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-sugge
sting 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.’