The Snow Ball

by Brigid Brophy

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes’, he said. ‘Yes, I am. You know I am. Don’t you?’

  The door of the supper room stood open, releasing one or two people and a strong, smoked smell of bacon and eggs. Ruth guessed her parents would be in there. She went straight in, sought them out through the crowd, automatically, for reassurance, like a puppy, almost by nose or tactile sense: but once she had found them she did not want them.

  ‘Hullo, dear’, Myra said. ‘Where’s Edward?’

  ‘Outside, as far as I know. He wanted some air.’

  ‘He’s not drunk, is he?’ Myra asked.

  ‘Not so’s he can’t stand up’, Ruth replied, and drifted away from her parents into the crowd. Her answer, although it shewed a sophisticated refusal to be impressed by the idea of drunkenness, displeased her as much as if it had been a weak answer, because she knew that what had brought it to her mind was the fact that, when she had last seen him, Edward could not stand up.

  As Ruth disappeared into the crowd, Myra said to Rudy:

  ‘O dear. I do hope she’s going to get something to eat.’

  ‘Now don’t fuss, Mother. She won’t come to any harm if she goes without her breakfast for once. She looks overgrown to me as it is.’

  ‘They grow up so quickly these days’, Myra said. ‘It’s these sexy advertisements they see all over the place.’

  Anna stood leaning her full weight on the parapet, looking down into the ballroom, where still only a sprinkling of people had appeared. Don Giovanni stood with an arm loosely and comfortably thrown round her, like a cloak or the wing of a man-high bird, while he looked down on the top of her head.

  ‘As I seem to have spent all evening telling you’, he said lazily into her hair and the black lace at the back of it, ‘it’s no use running away. Because you don’t want to.’

  She did not contradict.

  ‘If you could keep imagining you saw me at this ball’, he said, ‘just think what you’d be like at Piccadilly Circus in the rush hour.’

  She still did not contradict.

  ‘Besides’, he added, ‘From a purely practical point of view …’

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Well you must realise, if you think about it. I can quite easily find out who you are, where you live, all about you—from Tom-Tom.’

  She stirred away from him and began to object, but he counter-objected:

  ‘All right, so you wouldn’t answer my letters or speak to me on the phone. But I can get Tom-Tom to invite us both to dinner. He’d do it for me. He’s got a soft spot for me.’

  She moved quite away from him, turned deliberately towards him and spoke contemptuously.

  ‘You talk as if you were his valet. You boast of his soft spot for you.’

  ‘All right’, he said, challengingly. ‘I’m not his valet, but I am his hireling. So what? I’m not ashamed of it. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘O my dear’, she said. ‘Before you boast of having your master’s ear, have you considered my position in this house?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve only to tell Anne not to dream of inviting us both to dinner. I’ve only to tell Anne to tell Tom-Tom not to tell you my name.’

  ‘All right’, he said, submissively this time, after a moment, and bowed his head. ‘All the same’, he said, raising it again. ‘You really want——’

  ‘Oh, want’, she said, disparagingly.

  ‘Why must you be so withering? It was you that said that in this house the servants’ staircase was appropriate to us. Now you talk as if you belonged to their class.’

  ‘I do in a way’, she said wearily. ‘I married into it.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘That’s how I know them.’

  ‘Them?’ he said quickly. ‘Which of them? They’ve only been married a short time themselves.’

  ‘O, Anne, of course’, she said. ‘I’ve told you, I hardly know Tom-Tom.’ She began slowly: ‘My husband was——’

  ‘Was? But he isn’t dead?’

  ‘No. I said “was” to try and get the time sequence right for you. My husband was Anne’s——’

  ‘Let me guess’, he interposed. ‘Anne’s brother?’

  ‘No, that would be “is”, I suppose’, Anna said. ‘He presumably still would be her brother …’ She looked at Don Giovanni, with a gentler expression. ‘My dear, you grope through my labyrinth amazingly well. You don’t get it right, but my God you get the feel of the thing.’

  ‘Well, tell me, then’, he said.

  ‘My husband was Anne’s first husband. She married him. She divorced him. I married him. I divorced him.’

  ‘O’, Don Giovanni said; then, evidently re-treading the old while he became accustomed to the new information: ‘And now he lives abroad?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Well I can’t think’, Don Giovanni said, coming to it finally, ‘why you didn’t tell me before. It’s not monstrous. It’s not incestuous. It’s just that you and Anne have a husband in common. That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all’, she agreed. ‘I didn’t tell you because I thought it might mislead you. I thought you might think it explained everything—or at least things it doesn’t.’

  ‘What an odd relationship you must have with Anne’, he said.

  ‘There you go, you see … I haven’t. What do you think? Do you think we discuss him, exchange the confidences of the marriage bed?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t.’

  ‘Then do you think we avoid the subject? Do you think it’s the one subject that’s never mentioned between us?’

  ‘Well, more, I should have guessed, in that direction than the other.’

  ‘It isn’t so’, she said, her voice very tired. ‘That’s the extraordinary thing. It isn’t an extraordinary relationship at all. The really strange thing is that I think it never comes into either of our minds. I think we’ve both simply forgotten what it was that brought us together.’

  Sitting on the running board, Edward became quite numb with cold and knew that, having exaggerated his injury to Ruth, he was now exaggerating it to himself. As a matter of fact, he had been bearing down so hard on her hands that her legs had not had much freedom of manoeuvre and she had not got in a very forceful blow. Nevertheless he felt justified in his exaggeration, because she might have injured him badly: she was ignorant enough: by which he meant that she needed a lesson.

  He got up and trudged round in the snow, trying to remember to stamp his feet to warm them up. He did not stir far from the Blumenbaums’ car: it was in his mind that if a policeman should come on him loitering beside the cars of people who did not know him and would not speak up for him he might be arrested.

  The back of the Blumenbaums’ car rose, and to some height, not quite vertically but at the staidest of inclines, like the back of a spinster on a bicycle. Edward’s own taste preferred cars that crouched low as though over dropped handlebars. That was what he would have bought if he had had the same amount of money to spend on a car as Rudy Blumenbaum had spent on this. But he did not trust his own taste, and thought that, if he had had the money to spend, he would merely have betrayed the shallowness of his taste. He believed in good and bad taste as absolutes, though not in his own ability to tell them apart. What Rudy had got for his money was not merely luxury but respectable luxury: the respectability that went with old-fashioned things, with the look of ancien régime. Edward hated and despised Rudy Blumenbaum’s car but would not for the world have forfeited his connexion with it: he half hoped a policeman would challenge him: it was a connexion to an object Edward could not have acquired, because his taste would not have been elastic enough to let him reach for it. He felt towards the Blumenbaums’ car as a young man might to an elderly spinster distant connexion who was tiresome, old-fashioned and tedious in her insistence on discipline—her hints that young people should be taught to sit up straight by having boards strapped to their backs—and yet invaluable because she had a ti
tle.

  On the staidly sloping back of the car snow had uncertainly gathered—it might all slide off, in a sheet, at any moment: it had compiled from the bottom upwards, and at the edges and top the staid dark green paint was still visible. Taking great care not to dislodge the whole sheet, Edward’s finger wrote in the snow ‘JEWBOY’; and then he went, quite happily, back to the ball.

  Twenty or thirty people were now in the ballroom promenading. There was still no music, though one or two members of the band had come back and were re-establishing themselves on the platform. There was, however, an air of altered purpose about them—an unhappy air. They had set up music stands and were propping music sheets on them, as though they were going to play real music,

  Don Giovanni said to Anna, in the gallery:

  ‘It doesn’t alter anything. We come back to the fact that you can’t run away because you don’t want to, A person of your temperament can’t want to.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Because to part is to die a little. The remark’, he added, ‘of a rather well-read hairdresser. I’m sorry’, he super-added. ‘When I’m very tired I start laying double-yolked puns.’

  She laughed. ‘We could both do with a good day’s sleep’, she said.

  ‘Well shall you have it at my flat, or I at yours?’

  ‘If there were no other’, she said, ‘there are practical objections. I can’t be seen simply going off with you.’

  ‘Why not? What would it matter? But anyway, even if you want to observe the proprieties, it’s perfectly all right. You’re forgetting it’ll be morning. It’s perfectly all right to be seen going anywhere with anyone in the morning. It’s as safe as going home with the milkman.’

  ‘Had you ever thought about the milkman?’ she asked sleepily. ‘Did you know about the place he occupies in our civilisation? He’s a super-parent-figure.’

  ‘I can see’, Don Giovanni said, ‘that he’s a sort of daily Santa Claus.’

  ‘He dates, in one’s memory’, Anna said, ‘from before that awful moment of divorce when one realises one has to have two parents, one of each sex. That is, he’s a man: yet one gets milk from him.’

  ‘That’s so absurd’, Don Giovanni said, ‘that I think it must be true. Or else I’m very tired.’

  Looking into the ballroom Anna distinguished, among the promenaders, the man who looked like a boiled egg.

  Trying, with fatigued systematicness, all the doors in turn on the first floor, Anne looked in at the little music room where she sometimes played the piano while Anna sang. But Anna was not there. It was a practical room, almost the only practical room in the house: its single ornament was a large crystal egg, the size of an ostrich egg, which lay in the middle of the mantelpiece with a screw of silver paper pushed under its edge to prevent it from rolling off.

  Although Anna was not there, Anne went in and shut the door. She rolled up her lamé skirt and tried to make her suspender tighter.

  The egg on the mantel always reminded her of Leda. She liked pictures of Leda and the swan: Correggio’s, the Leonardo composition, anyone’s, indeed, that she could think of—she admitted that it was not the treatment but the subject itself which pleased her. It gave her, as a matter of fact, an erotic thrill. She decided to remember to ask Anna, when she should find her, to explain the psychology of the thrill. She herself could not account for it, because she had never felt the least desire to copulate with a swan.

  She carefully rolled down the lamé and took a step, but found that the suspender was no tighter.

  It came into her mind that when Tom-Tom was dressed for sailing his thick feet in gum boots or waders resembled the strong, grey-black, waterproof feet of a wading bird.

  ‘My eye has been lighting on that funny little man all night’, Anna said.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘With the chinese waistcoat and the paunch.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Neither in real life nor in costume. Nobody seems to have any idea. He’s always alone.’

  ‘He doesn’t really look like anyone. Neither in real life nor in costume.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s done a rather brilliant thing’, Anna suggested, ‘and come as an anonymous eighteenth-century man. Anyway, he reminds me of a boiled egg.’

  ‘By the way’, Don Giovanni said. ‘About the milkman. You realise he also lays eggs on one’s doorstep?’

  ‘Leda’, they both said.

  ‘Have you noticed’, Don Giovanni said, ‘that the beginning of love always is to find the same thought in the other person’s mind?’

  ‘O, love’, she said, dismissively.

  ‘You can’t be so offhand …’ he said.

  ‘It’s curious’, Anna said. ‘Your Walter Pater incantation about Leda is one of Anne’s favourite quotations, too.’

  Edward found Ruth straight away, went straight up to her and put his arm round her waist.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked instantly, breathlessly. She wanted, curious, but embarrassed at being curious, to look down at the lower half of his body, which in the tight-fitting breeches would be, she felt, almost naked to her scrutiny; in her anxiety not to look down, she fixed her eyes on his face, with a disingenuous concentration, as though his lower limbs were an acquaintance she was trying not to see walk past in the street.

  ‘I’m fine’, he replied, having forgotten why he should not be. ‘Why? I’m feeling dandy.’

  ‘Are you?’ Ruth said, distrustfully, drawing away from him a little. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking’, he said. ‘It is rather magnificent, isn’t it? I mean, the first time one has it—to have it in a Bentley.’

  ‘Anne divorced him’, Don Giovanni said, making a resumé, ‘and then you divorced him. And then Anne married again.’

  ‘And again. And again …’ Anna said, a touch wryly, a touch wearily.

  ‘But not you?’

  ‘No. I didn’t.’

  ‘But you had plenty of lovers?’

  ‘Oh, what’s “plenty”?’ she said, mocking him. ‘What are your standards? By Messalina’s standards, I’d make a poor shewing.’

  ‘Well, enough, then’, he emended,

  ‘Enough? Yes, enough. It isn’t hard, you know, just to find men. I am—or I have been—quite attractive.’

  ‘Do you imagine you have to tell me that?’

  ‘Well I’ve let you in, you know, to my imperfections.’

  ‘But I’m one of the people’, he said, ‘who do prefer life to perfection.’

  ‘You’re too innocent, Rudy’, Myra Blumenbaum said, as they walked towards the ballroom. ‘I’m sure he kisses her when they’re alone together. O dear’, she added, ‘I never meant us to stay so late. It must be almost dawn already.’

  ‘O go on’, he said. ‘The kids’ve got to have their fun.’

  ‘Don’t you mind if he kisses her?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant we’ve got to stay up a bit for once, to give them a chance. I don’t expect he does kiss her.’

  ‘I’m sure he does. They’re all so precocious nowadays.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better have a word with young Edward.’

  ‘O no, don’t, Rudy. What would you say?’

  ‘O, you know me’, Rudy said. ‘Mild as milk when it comes to it. I expect I’d just say “Steady, Eddy”.’

  The band began to play: but it was music of a kind to which neither musicians nor dancers were accustomed.

  ‘O dear’, Anna said, half-laughing into Don Giovanni’s arm, which she was holding. ‘Now we shall never dance together. Why are eighteenth-century dances so lugubrious? The last thing one could do is dance to them.’

  ‘Not for nothing are so many of them called contredanses.’

  ‘I expect they’re really for funerals. It’s all a misunderstanding. Dr. Brompius arranged these, by the way. They’re by Swedish court composers.’

  ‘They sound it’, he lugubriously repli
ed.

  Nevertheless, a few people down in the ballroom were trying to dance to them. They had arranged themselves in two lines, and were trying to improvise a dance on the model of the statelier kind of country dance. But it was obvious that no one could remember the model. The two lines became straggly, the dancers at the edges dropping out and joining the crowd which was still occupying most of the ballroom as a promenade.

  The musicians played as though they, too, would like the opportunity to drop out.

  Dr. Brompius had not been able to arrange a part. for the man who had made the bean-bag noise. The man was on the platform, but doing nothing; on the verge of sleep.

  Anna’s eye was drawn to the tall elegant windows of the ballroom. The sky outside had become a lighter grey.

  ‘Is it the dawn?’ she asked Don Giovanni. ‘Or just the false dawn?’

  They both watched for a moment. The light increased perceptibly: then unmistakably.

  ‘Dawn’, he said, his voice depressed.

  Grey bars of cloud stretched across the window: straggling, flocky, coming to pieces at the edges: just like the bars of dancers across the floor.

  On the ceiling, the lights were negated by the light from outside. They continued to shine, but like a person talking without an audience. They were hardly lights any more; their illumination ceased to illuminate and took on colour; they were mere yellow things, pale yellow, easily overlooked. They could no longer strike any fire from the chandeliers, whose nimbus shrank to a mere slight fizziness, the colour of champagne; each chandelier was like a badly bleached, badly coiffured blonde head, the bleach and the set growing—straggling—out.

  Perhaps dawn brought a momentary thaw; perhaps it was the first sign of a general thaw: outside in the cul-de-sac a little furry inch of snow, like a caterpillar, fell from one of the thin branches low down on one of the trees. After a minute, the snow began falling off the whole length of the branch. The first consignment landed, exploded and then lay opened out like a tassel on top of the torso of the snow man Edward had made. The rest fell straight and whole, a diagonal whiplash, across the roof of Rudy Blumenbaum’s car. The very end of the line of snow, representing the very tip of the branch it had tumbled off, struck the top corner of the sloping back of the car. The snow piled on the back was set shifting. After a second’s hesitation it was all dislodged and carried away, crumpling on to the road somewhere behind the car’s rear bumper.