The Snow Ball (15 page)

‘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 replied.

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.

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
”.’

H
IS
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.’

F
ROM
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.