The Snow Ball

by Brigid Brophy

  Two doors along from the music room, in the small drawing room, Anne found Dr. Brompius. He was sitting on the plump, pretty, flowered sofa; on the empty square next to him lay a coldly greasy plate.

  He stood up as Anne came in; and simultaneously she asked:

  ‘Dr. Brompius, have you seen Anna?’

  and he asked:

  ‘Madame, it is time for the Swedish dance suites?’

  Dismayed by having forgotten, and dismayed again by her own liquid hypocrisy, Anne said:

  ‘That’s why I’m looking for Anna. She’d be so disappointed to miss them.’

  ‘Then I expect she will already be down there. Shall we go, madame?’

  ‘Dr. Brompius, you go’, Anne said, as though asking him a confidential favour. She moved his plate on to the top of a pretty little walnut escritoire which stood against the wall, and sat down in its place on the sofa. ‘I’m so exhausted, I must just have a moment’s rest on my own.’

  ‘I understand’, he replied, and to her surprise began to withdraw. From the door, he said:

  ‘I have not seen the lady you asked after for many hours. She went away with a gentleman in the character of Don Giovanni.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Anne cried after him, half rising from the sofa. ‘In black? With a mask on?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes’, Dr. Brompius said: in the corridor he had heard the Swedish music from below, and was hurrying away to it.

  Anne sat back in the sofa, contented: so contented that she presently reached up and, from where she sat, contrived to get her fingertips to grip on the ridge of the pull down of the escritoire. She pulled it down and revealed, inside, an intricate wooden simulation of the façade of a Grecian temple. Heaving a little over the arm of the sofa, she got her hand to penetrate the peristyle, and it came out tugging after it a pretty little George II silver basket, in which Anne always kept a few peppermint creams.

  ‘There’s Dr. Lugubrius himself’, Don Giovanni said, pointing down into the ballroom. ‘He’s just come in. He wants to listen.’

  They watched the top of his head as he swam forcefully through the crowd and took up a position near the band—who noticed him, pretended not to, and were obviously made uneasy by him.

  ‘There’s your boiled egg, too’, Don Giovanni said. ‘He’s arrived in time for breakfast.’

  He was walking, alone, in the crowd.

  The ballroom was almost all crowd now, with only a little dancing going on in the middle. The dancers were almost wholly engulfed by the promenaders, like its prey by an amoeba.

  ‘You can’t leave me’, Don Giovanni said to Anna.

  ‘Why can’t I? Because I’m one of your victims?’ But there was hardly any challenge left in her voice.

  ‘Because I’m one of yours. I love you.’

  ‘O, love’, she said, in the same disparaging tone in which she had said it before; but with less fire.

  ‘You can’t write it off like that.’

  ‘Why can’t I?’ But her voice was almost wholly worn out.

  ‘Because you believe in it’, he said. ‘I almost said “believe in him”.’

  16

  HIS statue stood in the niche on the landing at the top of the grand staircase, so that he presided over the house.

  Anna had once pointed out to Anne that he presided in the same way over Mozart’s operas. Anne’s mind often ran with Mozart quotations, and especially so when she thought about Anna—whose mind, she knew, teemed with them. Anne’s own store had supplied the memory of Pedrillo invoking Cupid as a heart-thief—Nun Cupido, du Herzensdieb—and bidding him hold the ladder down which the women were to be thieved away from the seraglio; and the memory of Countess Almaviva praying to Cupid in the direct character of Love when she sang

  Porgi, Amor …

  And Cherubino himself, Anne now added, passing the statue on her way to the stairs, was first cousin to Cupid.

  She thought, as she descended, of the two as infant cousins playing together like Leonardo’s Christ and John the Baptist; or as closer than cousins, like Leonardo’s other two little boys, playing together after emerging from a single shell, from Leda’s double-yolked egg.

  Anne turned, and went some way back up the stairs to look at the statue.

  Seen at close quarters, he was hideous. Partly, of course, it was his age: an infant aged at least two hundred years—in the wood, that was to say; aged two millennia, probably, in the mythological conception. His gold was peeling off in great leaves, as though he had got sunburn, shewing the crimson ground beneath; his wing was chipped; worm had visited, and then left, him. But he was hideous, also, in the mythological conception, and all the restoration in the world could not have hidden it. A great lump, overfed, overgrown, over-active for his presumptive age, if you judged his age by his chubbiness, he should hardly have been able to crawl: yet here he was, flying about the world, a precocious monster, and already thinking of nothing except sex. Able to fly and yet uncertain about alighting, he had landed with one spreading, stubby toe on the ground. But his airy pose of being poised little became him, since he had in reality to be propped up on a rusty iron stanchion which rose from his plinth and disappeared into his nether world, into the flutter of wooden drapery which he daintily kept round his pubic region, with the indelicate coyness of an old man wrapping himself up in a bathing towel and yet not scrupling to reveal the far more indelicate swag of his corpulent belly. Cupid, corpulent as any old man about the belly, peevish about the mouth, petulant in the cheeks, puffed-up and actually worm-riddled in the buttocks, had no business to cover his nakedness, since he was still only an infant, matter for old women to bath: Anne would have bathed him, if she had not thought his gold would peel wholly off: though in fact it was for his own mother, from whom he never strayed far for all his pretences to independence of mischief making, to keep the fat child kempt, if she—that woman, that goddess—had not been a slut and a whore, her mind on other things. In any case, there was no purpose in his fluttering drapery, since the whole of him was phallic. He was phallic to his wing tips (the chip off the end of one of them coud not disguise or impair it): phallic to his fat tiptoe: phallic to his arrow tips. (If he had ever managed to complete the action his carver had given him to have perpetually begun, if he had managed to pull out the arrow he was just fingering in the quiver and had got it notched to the—now vanished—bow string, his shot would have lethally penetrated straight to the heart of the ballroom.) Even the base of his quiver, a little depository of weapons which he wore at loins height, made a socket like a scrotum. So it was no good his veiling his mystery from women, his precocious potency from men, teasing maidens to guess what was there and young men maidens to guess what should be done with it.

  He was quite hideous, seen from close to.

  Anne wished for a world in which all weapons were only phallic symbols: in which the stroke of death should be not merely as but wholly and solely a lover’s pinch.

  Standing in front of the statue she said, audibly, a prayer to the only god she believed in: but him she believed capable of saving the world.

  ‘O Cupid, save the world.’

  17

  FROM the gallery Anna saw Anne come energetically into the ballroom—or at least, Anna detected, with a resolution to be energetic—fall on her guests and drive them into dancing to the funereal music. Head down, she bustled, a plump and indomitable little Pallas Athena armoured in lamé (Queen Anne in an heroical allegory) or perhaps Pallas Athena’s downy little owl, to the rescue of a battle line that was certainly breaking if not broken. Anna wondered if her willingness to sacrifice the last vestige of her energy to saving Dr. Brompius’s face was prompted by remorse at having, earlier, sacrificed her friend by pushing her into his maw. Anne rallied the line that existed or was hanging on to existence; she drummed up new recruits; she had got both Voltaire and Rudy Blumenbaum, one by each hand, and was dragging them, and with them a whole wilting row, forward to meet another row—most of whom had not
come forward at the right moment: to bow: to retreat again. It was a slow and stately version of nuts-in-may. On the ebb Anne retreated with so much stately energy, bumping her back so strenuously into those of the crowd who got in her way, that the crowd was obliged to yield, even to make space for the dancing which, it was now forced to notice, was taking place in the middle of it.

  Then suddenly, at the moment when the thing might have worked, everything stopped because the man who looked like a boiled egg fell to the floor in the middle of the crowd in the middle of the ballroom.

  ‘Your egg’s fainted’, Don Giovanni said.

  Voltaire—and Anne, of course, too—were promptly there. People stopped talking. Anna heard Voltaire say, kneeling beside the man:

  ‘These eighteenth-century clothes are too tight. I’ll see if I can get it undone.’

  The musicians, uncertain what had happened, took the opportunity to stop playing the difficult music and lean forward to find out.

  Anna noticed that Ruth Blumenbaum’s young man, the one dressed as Casanova, was also there, kneeling.

  Voltaire mouthed something, evidently meant for only Anne to read; but of course other people took it up and queried it—including the young Casanova, who queried it and evidently received confirmation because he suddenly, as though in horror, removed the hand he was leaning on from its proximity to the man like a boiled egg.

  Only Dr. Brompius neither understood nor attended. Standing beside the platform he endlessly remonstrated—Anna could see but not hear, because the whole room had begun to talk—with the silent musicians. They ignored him. But he went on. At last one of the musicians sitting near the outside of the platform felt obliged to remonstrate back, to expostulate, with a touch of self-righteousness, almost, in his exasperation, and finally to—in a gesture which seemed to fling Dr. Brompius’s unreasonableness down for all to see—point: and thus bring it to Dr. Brompius’s attention that in the centre of the ballroom a man lay dead.

  18

  ANNA hurtled down the stairs. Don Giovanni, following her for his life, felt something sticky detain the sole of his shoe. He tried to kick it off, did not succeed and had to pause for a second because he was afraid it was going to pull his shoe off altogether. It was a small white lump, dirtily grained with black marks. It might have been snow, brought in from the street, soiled by tyres. But it stuck. He peeled it off, noticing that it was a peppermint cream that had been trodden, moved a little further on and then discarded by a hundred other soles; he flung it away; and ran violently after Anna, who said:

  ‘Don’t try to stop me. I’ve got to go to Anne.’

  ‘I’m not trying to stop you. I’m only trying to come with you.’

  But at the entrance to the ballroom they threw themselves against a hundred backs.

  It was obviously impossible to make any penetration.

  ‘It would be more help to Anne if we started a movement for going home.’

  ‘Yes’, Anna said. ‘I will.’

  In the portico, he said:

  ‘You can’t be so cruel.’

  ‘Only to myself’, she said.

  He followed rather than accompanied her up the little hill out of the cul-de-sac, because she had already cast him off, leaving him to trail behind like an urchin offering services that were not wanted.

  A cab came past almost as soon as she turned into the main road, and she stopped it.

  Even so, he hung about, as though hoping to pick up something she might fling to him.

  ‘Go straight ahead’, she said to the driver. ‘I’ll tell you the address in a moment.’

  Presently, looking out of the taxi window, she noticed that the snow in the streets was already stained brownish, perhaps melting. She neither hoped nor did not hope that it would survive the day.

  The next time she looked out it was because the taxi was taking her along a narrow street she liked: two low brick terraces, grey in this cold light, built as cottages but now expensive.

  The taxi turned a corner. Anna saw the driver’s head duck for a second, and her own eyes winced. The sunrise was spread in bars across the sky in front of them: hideous crimson and blood-coloured bars, like the elements of a monstrous electric fire aping the cosiness of coal.

  She tipped the driver enough to make him flatter her with the word Miss.

  ‘Good night, Miss. Or should I say Good morning?’

  ‘Either way’, Anna said, completely coldly, ‘a hideous time of day.’

  He was confounded. Not till she had her key in the lock did he call out:

  ‘Anyway. Happy new year.’

  She let herself in, thinking about death.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © The Estate of Brigid Brophy, 1964

  The right of Brigid Brophy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–30474–5