The Snow Ball

by Brigid Brophy

‘It is possible’, he cautiously admitted, ‘that I squealed rather louder about that than I’d actually been hurt.’

  ‘I’m just not’, she said, making her voice comically rueful, ‘as attractive as I’d supposed.’

  The music in the ballroom came to a stop and was replaced by chatter.

  ‘Obviously’, Don Giovanni said, ‘I can’t say anything to contradict that—now. The whole situation is a minefield. I’m not sure which of us mined it. But I think I’d better just stand still for a bit and not move an inch either way.’

  Presently Anna said, raising her voice slightly to surmount the chattering from below:

  ‘I’d like to be attractive not as a person but as a thing. Not to be made use of—no monetary value: I’d like to be a useless thing. I’d like to be neither warm-blooded nor cold-blooded but just for there to be no question of blood at all. Nobody would worry if I was alive or dead providing I was made of something that had never been either. Of course, I should like to be an ornamental thing, but not a work of art, because people feel remorse towards those and guilt if they let them be destroyed, so simply a work of craft, a decoration, something very contrived, very highly wrought, that wouldn’t touch the heart at all …’

  ‘If it’s any consolation’, he said after a moment, ‘though you’re not in the least beautiful, you’re the most ornamental person I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He stopped leaning on the parapet, stood up straight and brushed the dust—if there was any—off the front of his costume, ‘Where does all this get us?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Wouldn’t we do better to go and seek pleasure, even if it does embarrass you a little?’

  ‘Yes’, she said, standing up straight, too. ‘Shall we go down and dance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He opened the small door in the gallery wall. Behind them in the ballroom all the lights went out.

  ‘What’s happening now?’

  They groped forward to the parapet and peered into the ballroom, where the people had been struck with silence in the dark. Here and there a giggle flared up and then went out, like a match. In one corner someone did light a match. It went out.

  A single steel-blue spotlight came on, felt round among the people, mowing swathes through them like machine gun fire, and quickly focused on the shallow wooden platform where the band had been but which was now empty apart from the piano and a double bass leaning against the piano stool. The blue light blanched the wooden boards of the platform until they looked like wood turned to ash.

  ‘I think it’s going to be the cabaret’, Anna said.

  ‘Damn’, he said. ‘We’d better stay up here for a bit.’

  8

  AS soon as the spotlight established itself, the people were reassured, even though it was not they it was illuminating. Without waiting to see who was going to step into the light, they filled the ballroom with talk again.

  The person who did, from somewhere in the surrounding dark, step up on to the platform was Tom-Tom.

  To Anna’s eyes, in the minstrels’ gallery, he presented only his back, but it was an unmistakable, characteristic back: huge, even when seen from above, and shapeless—shape-defying: his dark blue eighteenth-century silk costume became on him a dishevelled dressing gown. Naturally, there was no cord round the waist, and yet he seemed to be loosely lumped and knotted together by one; he turned the ball into a late, frowsty breakfast.

  Coming from above, the spotlight broke on Tom-Tom’s head, illuminating for most people in the ballroom his face but for Anna the back of his neck, which ran in folds, again without shape, this way and that. At the most brilliant point of illumination, the light reported colours truthfully. It shewed Tom-Tom’s neck as the deep ochre tinged with russet which Anna knew it really to be—the out-of-doors colour one would expect to see on a gardener or, which Tom-Tom was at weekends, sailor. He spent as many weekends as he could in his sailing dinghy: a huge, clumsy-footed man in a small, delicate boat that could be pierced by a clumsily placed foot: alone in it, because even gentle sailing in a harbour, which was all Tom-Tom did, made Anne sea-sick. Anna imagined that his manoeuvres within the harbour walls must consist of keeping his back to the sun, because his face and the front of his neck were quite white and city-looking.

  The spotlight’s beam spilled out over the creases of Tom-Tom’s neck and tailed away, glancing off the middle of his big back like a feather of moonlight; and here, its concentration and powers of reportage exhausted, the light did falsify. Like sea air itself, it removed all colour from the silk. Anna knew it was navy blue only because she had seen it earlier; and now it occurred to her that he had converted his costume not so much into a dressing gown as into the kind of large, clumsy clothes he wore for sailing; even the knee breeches and silk stockings, so elegantly designed to display the fine turning of a calf, had only to be peopled by his legs to take on the likeness of an old pair of trousers lumpily stuffed into the tops of gum boots. Where Anna had previously imagined a dressing gown cord holding him together she now supplied a length of old rope.

  Tom-Tom did not ask his guests to sit down or to be silent. He no sooner stepped up on to the platform than the guests who had been standing on the dance floor, all uneasily turned towards the spotlight, decided to sit down. A patch here and there began it—as though blight had attacked a meadow: and then, with a soft, communal sighing, the whole body of people simply settled to the floor. Anna, peering into the dimness, could make out an impression as though the floor had been scattered with lumps of cushion.

  Tom-Tom did not even hold up a hand. He stood on the platform; and chattering stopped. Finally, even the soft fidgeting on the floor stopped.

  ‘He can always get silence’, Don Giovanni whispered to Anna. ‘It’s the same at board meetings.’

  ‘He must have a presence’, Anna whispered back.

  ‘It’s not that. It’s that money talks—and, when it does, the rest of us shut up.’

  ‘It’s all right, everyone’, Tom-Tom announced. ‘You’re not going to have to listen to me croon.’

  The ballroom laughed.

  ‘Where did he dig up that word?’ Don Giovanni whispered. ‘Nobody’s crooned for twenty years.’

  ‘You don’t like him a bit, do you?’ Anna murmured.

  ‘I do, actually. It’s just the proletarian in me. Guttersnipes are so called because they snipe. When I re-write Midsummer Night’s Dream’, he added, close to her ear, ‘the mechanicals are going to make sniping remarks while Theseus and Co. perform a classical tragedy.’

  ‘… the next best thing’, Tom-Tom was proclaiming, ‘to seeing the new year in in Paris. Mademoiselle Françoise Clouet. Soyez la bienvenue à Londres, Mademoiselle.’ He stepped down out of the light.

  ‘You’re jealous of him’, Anna whispered. ‘Perhaps you’re in love with Anne?’

  ‘Hardly know her, actually’, said Don Giovanni; but he conceded Anna a wry look, sideways. ‘It did cross my mind’, he went on, ‘whether you were an ex-mistress of Tom-Tom’s. It seemed to account for your position in the house.’

  ‘Hardly know him’, Anna replied; and conceded nothing.

  A man without characteristics hurried on to the platform, shifted the double bass and sat rapidly down at the piano.

  He was followed by a thin girl with thin straight colourless hair to her shoulders. She wore a short evening dress consisting of horizontal black frills which swaddled her tightly to just above the knees. Her legs, in very pale, peanut-coloured nylons, were thin, straight and apparently unbending—the legs of whitewood furniture: only the narrow knee cap made a small obstruction in the straightness, like an adam’s apple; and when the girl took a step it looked as though her legs had swallowed. Her high-heeled shoes had a narrow, twenties-ish strap across the instep.

  She paid no attention to her audience but stood with her back to them while she turned a nozzle of instructions on to her pianist, who sat with his head be
nt over the keyboard paying, in his turn, no attention to her.

  At the outskirts of the ballroom a door opened, spilling a drop of light, and was rapidly and quietly closed. There followed the sound of whoever it had been tiptoeing about to find a place. In the moment of spilled light Anna pieced together that the edges of the ballroom had been filled up with chairs. They were the lightweight gilt-backed chairs which she had once, to tease Anne, called couturier’s rococo. The ballroom was their usual place, but they had been cleared out for the dance; and now, Anna reconstructed, someone—probably Anne and the manservant—had spent the past quarter of an hour unobtrusively sliding them back into the ballroom, as supplements to the rout benches which were already there, providing seats for the people who were too staid or too careful of their fancy dress to sit on the floor.

  Suddenly the girl on the platform stopped talking to her accompanist and stepped into the centre of the spotlight.

  A tenth of the audience clapped thinly and with embarrassment.

  ‘I know just what we’re in for’, Don Giovanni whispered to Anna. ‘Three love songs and a ballad about Paris. One of the love songs—or possibly all three of the love songs—will say

  “Bonjour,

  Amour.”’

  The girl blew kisses into the audience, which became more embarrassed and provided a little more applause. Her long, thin arms lingered at their fullest extent with each kiss, as if greedy to gather what applause there was. Finally she put both hands at once to her mouth and, with a heroic breaststroke, flung a double kiss. ‘Merci. Merci.’

  Edward, crunched up on the floor very close to Ruth’s extended thigh, said:

  ‘O Christ. Don’t say it’s all going to be in French.’

  The pianist began to play a strummy accompaniment, contriving to make the piano sound like a ukulele.

  By the very faint outermost illumination from the spotlight, falling just beyond the platform, Anna picked out Tom-Tom sitting on the floor. A slight upheaval brought a glitter of lamé into the light. Given the hint, Anna’s eyes managed to trace the two broad shapes, reclining hip to hip, leaning one on the other: two old, long-married seals on a rock.

  Françoise Clouet began to shout a love song.

  Gently seated—rather like a balloon—on a gilt chair, near the door of the ballroom in case she should find it too hot and need to go out into the cooler air, Myra Blumenbaum leaned forward to Rudy, who was squatting on the floor at her feet, a little nervous about the sit of his kilt; she touched his shoulder.

  He looked round anxiously. But she only wanted to smile at him—perhaps over the love song. He gave her a cheery little jerk with his head as he turned it back again.

  ‘It reminds me——’ Don Giovanni whispered; but a voice from the ballroom said, loudly:

  ‘Shush.’

  After a moment Anna took him by the silken wrist and made him tiptoe along to the recess at the end of the gallery. In slow motion she shook out a fold of the curtain, not daring to disturb the curtain rings, and wrapped them both up, leaving a declivity at the corner so that they could look out. Hardly breathing, she mouthed:

  ‘What does it remind you of?’

  ‘I’ve clean forgotten.’

  She looked down into the ballroom but could no longer see Tom-Tom and Anne. Evidently they had slipped further into the darkness, seals sliding off the rock into the sea. Perhaps Anne had even left the ballroom altogether, going about some social business, rescuing guests shut out or seeing that the manservant got something to eat.

  The applause for the love song was tremendous.

  Françoise Clouet threw more kisses into the audience; and this time the kisses increased the audience’s fervour. She had to hold up her hand to conjure a silence into which to say—her speaking voice not appreciably different from her singing voice:

  ‘Et maintenant, une petite chanson—about Paris.’

  The very announcement provoked applause.

  The pianist cut it off by starting to play. It was the same accompaniment as for the previous song.

  ‘I know it’s going to rhyme Montmarte to Jean-Paul Sartre’, Don Giovanni whispered.

  ‘… ses parcs, ses cafés, ses trottoirs.’

  ‘… et ses pissoirs’, said Don Giovanni. ‘Why doesn’t she mention the principal tourist attraction?’

  ‘ Have you been to Paris?’ Edward whispered to Ruth.

  ‘Yes.’

  A neighbour looked at their conversation unkindly.

  ‘I went last summer’, Edward said. ‘It wasn’t nearly such hot stuff as I’d expected. But I think those places are really only meant for tourists.’

  ‘Yes, we could hardly get into the Sainte Chapelle there were so many tourists’, Ruth replied. ‘But then it isn’t very big.’

  During the louder than ever applause at the end, Don Giovanni said:

  ‘O my mad student days on the Métro. The long bohemian search for Châtelet.’

  The next song was of a different kind, though the accompaniment was the same as ever. This time the words were evidently more important: yet they were delivered much more rapidly. After two lines Anna had to give up trying to understand. But from the ballroom there came a screech of self-admiring laughter every time the narrative turned the corner into another verse.

  After the final verse, Anna said to Don Giovanni:

  ‘It did contain my two words of argot, but as it contained a lot of others as well I couldn’t follow it.’

  ‘I followed it’, he said, ‘because I’ve heard it before. A French person played me the record of it and explained.’

  ‘Well what does it say?’

  ‘It’s about a gorilla in the pay of the Russians who plays football for France and ends by scoring a de Gaulle. It’s the sort of really hard-hitting, no-holds-barred political satire we just don’t get in this country.’

  The next song everyone understood. It was the lament of a young woman whose rich husband was impotent. What no one understood was whether it was meant to be funny or sad. Françoise Clouet’s delivery gave no hint, either way. The audience decided to shew no reaction during the song; but clapped roundly at the end.

  Françoise Clouet began a straightforward love song. This time, instead of shouting, she muttered it, apparently in deference to the subject, as though love had been a bereavement.

  ‘All this gooey love stuff’, Edward said. ‘It gets monotonous. Let’s go and sit in your father’s car for a bit.’

  ‘Don’t be silly’, Ruth said. ‘We’d freeze.’

  Anna sensed that Don Giovanni’s satirical impulse was spent. In herself she had ceased to feel any impulses at all. Not by design, merely by an exhausted gravitation, they let themselves be drawn back into recess, until they were both leaning against the rear wall of the gallery.

  Anna had propped the curtain in such a way as to leave them a peephole, but from where she stood she could not see out of it.

  Presently the curtain slid a little under its own weight. It paused: for a minute; for a minute and a half: and then, when she had stopped expecting it, it gave a weighty swoosh and dropped sheer to the floor of the gallery.

  The peephole was quite cut off. But she was too tired to step forward and make it again.

  Only an infinitesimal amount of light reached them: accidental fragments of the spotlight or perhaps reflexions from it, seeping round the curtain. The curtain muffled the love song, too; such tune as it had was almost too blurred for them to pick it out as a tune. They were surrounded by the smell of dust.

  Edward whispered:

  ‘It’s got a heater, hasn’t it?’

  ‘You have to switch the engine on.’

  ‘Well what about rugs? Aren’t there some rugs?’

  ‘Actually’, said Don Giovanni, as though it took an effort for him to speak, ‘I like Siamese cats rather better than the ordinary kind.’

  ‘I like you’, Anna said, without any emphasis or expression at all.

  ‘I bet your
mother never stirs out without being swathed in rugs.’

  Don Giovanni made no reply to what she had said. But after a little she discerned that he was peering through the dimness towards her, towards the place at the rise of her breasts where, a little more to the left than to the right, she had stuck a beauty spot.

  ‘I like your beauty spot’, he said. ‘I’ve liked it all night.’

  ‘I like you’, she repeated, in the same way as before.

  ‘Yet the curious thing is’, he said, ‘that although I like it I want to take it off.’

  ‘O all right’, Ruth said. ‘I can do my diary there. It’s going to be rather difficult writing down all the French.’

  Anna said:

  ‘That’s one of the things I’d prefer to do for myself.’

  ‘All right. Then do.’

  She looked down at her bosom, which in the dimness was a greenish white, the colour of flesh in an old painting on panel.

  She put her thumbnail under the edge of the beauty spot. Slowly she peeled it off, held out her hand and let the beauty spot tumble invisibly to the floor.

  ‘You realise’, he said, ‘that you’ve made me terrified to touch you?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been enjoying your terror for some minutes.’

  ‘Are you cruel?’ he asked.

  She seemed to be breathless for a moment. ‘My cruelty is very, very delicate’, she eventually replied, slowly.

  ‘That’s as though you were going to behead me and promised that no single stroke would be fatal: you’d just do it with hundreds of little ones.’

  His voice sounded to her extraordinarily loud and deep, but it could not have penetrated the muffling of the curtain because no one from the ballroom called Shush.

  ‘I’d rather thought it was you who were going to execute me’, she said, with a quiver, possibly a laugh, in the sentence. ‘You wear the executioner’s mask.’

  ‘Perhaps both. Each each.’

  She said and did nothing.