The Snow Ball

by Brigid Brophy

  But she went on for a moment or two in the same way. While she bent, the edges of the rug dripped loose over her arms, sometimes getting in her way, sometimes threatening that the whole rug was going to slip off.

  Presently she stopped working and leaned against the side of the car, watching Edward work.

  ‘There’s more to making a snow man than you’d think. It’s’—he was panting—‘a highly skilled job.’

  Ruth tried to observe him as a person: but she could see in him only a representative of his sex.

  ‘You start with a snowball. And then you just have to get down and roll it, and roll it, and roll it, until it gets bigger, and bigger …’

  ‘What for?’ she asked, unthinking.

  ‘The body, of course.’ He rolled it through the snow on the ground. Already it was the size of a baby.

  To Ruth’s eye, every gesture he made, every pore of his body, was stamped with the fact: –masculine. His very sentences, let alone his sentiments, his very words, even, seemed distinguished from words a woman might say. She believed that the least sexual part of the human body—that a little toenail—that a clipping from a little toenail—must betray, must be impregnated with, the sex of its owner.

  While he worked, the snow stopped falling.

  Between men and women she felt an unbridgeable divorce: she was convinced that two minds of different sex could never achieve identity of content.

  He carried his large, roly-poly snowball on to the pavement, where he planted it down alongside the car.

  It looked like a stump, a column cut off.

  He squared it off a bit at the top, with his hands. Then he squatted beside it and heaped up a little snow skirt, pleated by his fingers, all the way round the base, to make sure it would stand steady.

  ‘Now the head.’

  He stooped for a handful of snow and stood compacting it this way and that between his hands.

  ‘There’s the beginning. Fortunately, this one needn’t be so big.’

  He bent down and began to roll his snowball, like a marble, up the slope, in the gutter.

  ‘Someone’s coming’, Ruth said.

  He snatched up his snowball in one hand and Ruth’s wrist in the other and made her run out into the road and then duck down, on the far side, behind the car.

  ‘It’s Anna’, Ruth whispered. ‘With that man.’

  Their steps made only a crunch in the snow: but their voices and laughter were clear.

  ‘He’s taken off his mask’, Edward whispered.

  ‘Where are they going?’

  ‘Back to the house, back to the ball. This road doesn’t lead anywhere else.’

  Ruth peered out again. She saw Anna’s head evidently alluding to the snow man as they walked past it, and heard her voice say:

  ‘The man of stone. The statue has come to your supper party.’

  ‘He lacks a head’, the man answered.

  ‘Nodded too hard in the graveyard scene’, said Anna’s voice, walking out of earshot.

  ‘I like her cheek’, Edward whispered, exhaling both in admiration and in relaxation because the two figures had passed. ‘Fancy daring to come back.’

  Ruth looked swiftly down at his hand.

  ‘Throw it’, she said.

  ‘What? This?’

  ‘Be quick.’

  He stepped out on to the pavement. He stood poised at the top of the little hill.

  Already the two figures were nearly at the house. Light from its windows reached out to them, snaring them in a frosty net, in which they were held up clear to Edward’s aim.

  He threw his snowball; and then threw himself back into hiding, slithering on his knees in the snow, next to Ruth.

  ‘Did you hit her?’

  ‘Slap in the middle of the back. No, higher. Between the shoulder blades.’

  But neither of them felt any laughter to stifle.

  Ruth looked out.

  The couple was still standing at the foot of the hill, at the entrance to the house. The two figures were vividly black. The man was still looking round, angrily or at least enquiringly; the woman holding his arm and making gestures of belittling the hurt or, perhaps, of dissuading him from pursuing enquiry or vengeance.

  At last, the man put his arm round the woman and drew her towards the house.

  There was still a trace of snow, which he had not managed to brush off, on the back of her coat.

  Light from the house caught and splintered on the sequins attached to the lace the woman wore at the back of her hair. Perhaps through something she had read, but more probably through cinema stills she had seen, Ruth was reminded of snowy platforms, of Russia, of—she had at last to admit—Anna Karenina. The woman’s head was wholly veiled in frosty air, as though someone had breathed round it and the breath had remained, opaque, on the still, cold atmosphere of the night, like white scratches engraved on a black sheet of ice.

  15

  ANNE looked into the ballroom, saw Anna was not there and decided to—if only her guests would remain settled long enough—look for her upstairs. As she felt the approach of dawn and still had not found Anna, she became more and more remorseful towards her. She knew of nothing to justify the remorse except the tiny betrayal of having abandoned Anna to Dr. Brompius; that, and the fact, which was not her fault, that she had not found Don Giovanni for Anna. Yet in the absence of Anna—which might be a symptom itself; Anne could imagine her using her knowledge of the house to seek out a corner to weep in——Anne felt herself cut off from the supply of her friend’s thoughts. Not only did she not know what Anna was thinking: Anna did not know what she was thinking: Anna might, it seemed to her, spin out of her ignorance some far more monstrous betrayal than had ever been intended and attribute it, so wrongly, to Anne.

  Since she had taken them off and put them on again without washing them in between, Anne’s stockings sat loosely on her legs. Stretched once to the shape of the elephantine knees, they could not adapt themselves to the same knees now occupying them from a slightly different point of entry. As she went up the grand staircase Anne tugged surreptitiously at one of her suspenders through the lamé, hoping to induce it to hold the stocking more taut. But it would not. And as a matter of fact the lamé, too, was sitting loosely, for the same reason; she could hardly have washed that, but she might, if she had taken thought in time, have hung it up, or at least stretched it properly over something, just as she might have locked the bedroom door. It seemed to be with a shrug of self-reproach that her lamé covering—her pachydermous lamé covering—moved loosely over the great folding undulations of her body. She planted her footsteps wearily up the staircase: a very old working elephant going about its work.

  Don Giovanni stretched Anna’s coat over the cabin of the sedan chair in the hall, to give it a chance to dry.

  Seeing it stretched there, with a patch of moisture at the centre of the centre panel of the fabric, Anna re-experienced the sensation of receiving the snowball on her back. She also remembered, more faintly, the feeling she had had, when she and Rudy had been cut in on, of sensing the knuckles which tapped him in the nerves of her own back: her senses had appropriated the intruder’s summons, acknowledging that it was a summons for her—and yet it had turned out to have nothing to do with her, since the knocking on the back had come from Ruth Blumenbaum’s beau.

  Don Giovanni, seeing her looking at the place where the snowball had hit the coat, said what he had already said outside, before leading her into the house:

  ‘It must have been just a stray snowball. I’m sure no one was trying to hit you.’

  This time he revealed also why he insisted on that construction of it, by adding:

  ‘You mustn’t feel there’s anyone who’s hostile to you.’

  ‘I don’t’, she said. ‘It’s all right. I don’t feel aimed at.’

  Satisfied, he took off his own coat and threw it over one of the handles of the sedan chair; they had been left in the leather sockets, and stuck out o
n to the floor.

  ‘It’s not worth taking our things upstairs. We must leave ourselves time to dance.’

  ‘We’ve never danced together’, Anna said.

  Yet even in approaching the ballroom Anna noticed there was no music coming from inside.

  They opened the doors; and the ballroom—although all the lights were on—was empty.

  ‘The party can’t be over’, Don Giovanni said, disconcerted. ‘It’s not dawn yet.’

  ‘It looks enormous without the people.’

  ‘Perhaps they’ve all been deceived by the false dawn.’

  As she stared into the ballroom, he added:

  ‘There is a false dawn. Or perhaps it’s only a psychological phenomenon. But just as the sunrise is preceded by the dawn, so the dawn is preceded by something which at least seems to make the sky lighter. Or it has been on the few occasions when I’ve been awake and watching.’

  ‘Occasions’, Anna said, ‘mostly spent feeling slightly sick in continental trains.’ She seemed to give almost the shiver of nausea. ‘How could Anne face four honeymoons?’

  She threw off the shiver, stepped gaily into the ballroom and began to walk straight up the middle.

  ‘We’ve got it to ourselves’, he said, accompanying her.

  ‘But no music.’ She did not look at him but walked as though trying to keep to a straight line.

  ‘Make the chandeliers sing’, he said.

  She quickened her steps, so that she drew a little in front of him, still keeping her straight course.

  Undeviating, she briefly sang a note.

  All the chandeliers responded, neither loud nor soft; the same note but a hint more brazen in its overtones than her voice had been. They sustained their note much longer than she had hers.

  Without pausing Anna walked on, emphasising the casualness of what she had done.

  The note from the chandeliers died out.

  ‘Do it again’, Don Giovanni said, from behind her. She could tell from his voice that he had halted half way up the ballroom.

  ‘The magic vanishes if the trick is repeated.’ She walked straight on, reached the end of the ballroom and stood under the gallery.

  ‘Not all magic’, he said.

  She turned to face him. As he came to her, she said:

  ‘I’ve remembered where all the people must be. In the supper room. Anne said she was going to give them bacon and eggs and champagne.’

  ‘The breakfast room, then.’

  ‘The breakfast room.’

  ‘Are you thinking of wedding breakfasts’, he said, ‘which aren’t really breakfasts, either?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked at him. ‘Of Anne’s wedding breakfasts.’

  They looked away from each other, and both surveyed the ballroom. Its size made them huddle together under the gallery. He put his arm round her waist. They might have been sheltering in a storm.

  ‘Would you like some breakfast?’

  ‘No. Would you?’

  ‘I’m not hungry’, he said.

  ‘I told Anne you didn’t eat much. I’ve just realised why.’

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why were you telling Anne I didn’t eat much?’

  ‘I’ve just seen it’s because Don Giovanni says he needs women more than the bread he eats.’

  ‘Yes, well maybe I do, too’‚ he said, ‘but why were you telling Anne anything about me, whether I eat a lot or a little?’

  ‘O, so she could help me find you.’

  ‘Were you looking for me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’d run away.’

  ‘At first, I thought you were looking for me. I kept thinking I saw you. Actually, you were in the library the whole time.’

  ‘Do you quite realise what you’ve confessed to?’ he asked.

  ‘I wonder’, she said, ‘if Don Giovanni’s initials influence the use of the keys D and G in the opera?’

  ‘You have a cryptogrammatic mind.’

  ‘I feel at the moment more as if I had no mind. Stay there’, she said, moving his arm from round her and leaving him; ‘I want to look down at you from the gallery.’

  Dr. Brompius explained to Tom-Tom that although he did not mind eating sandwiches or even a cold buffet supper while he stood up, he had found bacon and eggs digestible only if he ate them sitting down. All the gilt chairs had been removed, once again, from the ballroom to the supper room. But none was vacant. Tom-Tom suggested that Dr. Brompius take his plate up to the small drawing room on the first floor.

  When she appeared in the gallery he took up a pose beneath it and sang her, in a pretty baritone, the beginning of Don Giovanni’s serenade:

  Deh, vieni alla finestra, o mio tesoro!

  Deh, vieni a consolar il pianto mio!

  ‘Don’t stop’, she said. ‘I like your voice.’

  ‘It’s all right’, he said, ‘in an amateur way, like nonvintage wine. But I’m frightened, because of your perfect pitch.’

  ‘I’m sad to inhibit you. That would be perfect bitch.’

  ‘Well in a general way’, he said, ‘you don’t. And you weren’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do realise, don’t you, that you can’t simply leave—I mean, go away—at the end of this ball?’ He was craning his head upwards, to see her expression in the gallery.

  She said nothing.

  ‘Are you’, he asked, ‘free? I mean, legally?’

  ‘Shush’, she said. ‘The people are coming back.’

  He looked round. The ballroom doors were open. Two or three figures stood in the doorway, prepared, evidently, to seep back into the ballroom, but for the moment still chattering to people in the hall beyond.

  ‘I wonder’, Don Giovanni said, ‘if I can do a trick.’

  He sprang suddenly, his arm reaching for the bottom of the gallery parapet. But his fingers did not touch it.

  ‘I’m useless as a latin lover’, he said, standing beneath her and dusting his hands together for no reason except that he had failed.

  ‘Come up the stairs’, she said. ‘Come quickly.’

  ‘Was that’, Ruth asked Edward, ‘the first time you’ve ever done it?’

  ‘Done what? Thrown a snowball? Made a snow man?’

  ‘Had sex’, she said.

  He hesitated.

  They were sitting in the back of the car again; under the rug; but not touching each other.

  ‘Well if you want to know, it was’, he said in the end. ‘You’ve got to start somewhere.’

  ‘I suppose people get better at it’, Ruth said, ‘with experience.’

  ‘If you didn’t enjoy yourself, why blame me? Virgins are notoriously awkward to negotiate.’

  ‘But you were a virgin, too.’

  ‘The word “virgin” only applies to women’, he said.

  ‘It doesn’t. I’ve read it in a book, applied to a man.’

  ‘What book? You don’t want to believe everything you see in print.’

  ‘Malory’s Morte D’Arthur’, Ruth said.

  ‘Did you do it at school?’

  ‘Bits of it. It said Sir Galahad was a virgin.’

  ‘I expect it was a misprint’, Edward said. ‘Did the teacher explain it?’

  ‘That wasn’t one of the bits we were meant to read. I just read on to that bit for myself.’

  ‘Because you thought it would have something sexy in it?’

  ‘No, because it’s literature. It wasn’t very interesting.’

  ‘Maybe French literature would be more to the point’, Edward said. ‘I wish my French wasn’t so bad.’

  ‘But not useless as a lover’, Anna said to him when he joined her in the gallery.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘By the most unmistakable tokens’, she said.

  ‘Well, I think she’s a bloody attractive woman’, Edward said as they got out of the car. ‘That’s why it gave me such satisfaction to throw a snowball at her.’

  ‘That’s a contradiction. Peop
le throw things at people they don’t like. I expect it hurt her, too. You’d made it all hard and icy in your hand. And anyway, she wouldn’t look at you, even if you do find her attractive.’

  ‘It isn’t a contradiction at all’, Edward said. ‘That just shews how little you know about sex. And middle aged women quite often do look at younger men. In France it’s part of a young man’s education to have a mistress who’s rather older than he is, and very experienced.’

  ‘Such as Anna?’ Ruth said, challenging him.

  ‘Such as Anna’, he repeated, defying her.

  She rushed at him, fighting him.

  He put the palms of his hands up, and received hers, like buffers receiving a train. He grasped her wrists and immobilised her hands. But her legs were still free. She kicked snow at him. Laughing, warmed and rather pleased to be in physical contact with her again, he tried to plant his feet down, wide apart, on her feet, to pin them. He failed. She brought her sharp, white-silk knee up into his crutch.

  He pushed her away from him, and doubled up. After a moment he felt his way backwards and sat down on the running-board of the car.

  ‘Christ’, he said. ‘Didn’t they ever tell you not to kick men there?’

  She stood and stared at him, terrified by the mystery and divorce of sex, wondering if it was the same pain as being hit on the breasts or worse.

  ‘You’re ignorant’, he said.

  She became infuriated.

  ‘I don’t care if I’ve——’ she angrily began; but he had already disturbed her confidence by questioning her vocabulary; and, not sure of getting the word right, she left the thought unarticulated, turned and ran down the hill and into the house.

  ‘But I can’t leap up into galleries’, he said. ‘All the women in the world could appear to me on their balconies, and I couldn’t get at them.’

  ‘Do you want all the women in the world?’

  He thought. Then: ‘Yes. But only faintly.’

  She laughed.

  ‘If you transferred yourself’, she suggested, ‘from Don Giovanni to Seraglio, you could have the help of a ladder.’

  ‘There’s no baritone part in Seraglio’, he objected. ‘And the bass, even supposing I could get down to it, is too buffo for me. I’m essentially serious.’