The Snow Ball (9 page)

‘Each one’, Don Giovanni said, ‘reminds me of an immensely ornate aria for a Mozart soprano. It’s the way each piece of glass just drops into space, like a note. Those sort of glass necklaces that are draped from one branch to the next are the runs. And of course the actual glitter, the fire, is pure coloratura.’

‘They
can
sing, as a matter of fact’, Anna said.

‘You mean they tinkle, if there’s a wind? Or if you could get up there to give them a shake?’

‘Yes, they do that, but they also perform
spontaneously
. They vibrate in sympathy, if you choose the right note to set them off.’

‘Is it known what note?’

‘An A natural.’

‘A for Anne, of course?’

‘Of course. I’d demonstrate, if the people weren’t here.’

‘I hope you’d get it right first time. I’d hate your demonstration to fall flat.’

‘O, I’d get it right. I wouldn’t offer to demonstrate otherwise.’ She paused and then said: ‘I’ve got
perfect
pitch.’

‘That’s your other gift?’

She turned sideways, leaning her hip on the
parapet
, and looked direct at his profile. ‘My only gift.’

He turned to face her. He stood, one hand on the
parapet, one leg loosely crossed in front of the other; tightly, ripplingly black-silk-costumed; thin, largeish, rather elegant, relaxed: Harlequin. From his mask he half appraised, half challenged her. In the end he said: ‘I think that’s absolutely perfect.’

‘Yes, well it is. Perfect’, she said, without dropping her eyes.

‘I don’t just mean the pitch. I mean perfect for you.’

‘I know you do … It’s just a complete, perfect, isolated gift’, she said. ‘I
am
fairly musical, but it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s detached. It’s no good to anyone or anything. There’s nothing you can do by, with or from it, except tune pianos. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s slightly fantastic and quite irrelevant. It’s like the form of some exotic marine creature that’s not only very low on the scale of being but quite out of the main course of evolution. It’s simply there. It’s perfect: but why?’

‘You’d think she was more
experienced’,
Edward said, ‘than to go somewhere where everyone can see.’

‘I
HAD
to run away’, Anna said. ‘It was the only thing to do.’

‘Was it?’

‘You don’t understand?’

‘Well naturally you can’t expect it to look the same from my point of view.’

‘Well at least it was
something
to do. I mean, it was something to
do
. There’s nothing worse than just waiting passively for things to be done.’

‘Yes, well that I do understand, in a way’, he said. ‘I’ve often thought that must be one of the difficulties about being a woman.’

‘It’s not really even about being a woman. It
happens
to whichever isn’t the active one. I mean, the woman can make the advances. I have done, in my time. But then you only put the man in the
intolerable
position. It’s like being a patient, and waiting for them to do things to you. Or like being an actor and having nothing to do with your hands. It would be much easier to be asked to do something very difficult with them.’

‘All the same’, he said, ‘it’s not always easy and straightforward being the active one.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘You may miscalculate. You may overshoot the mark.’

‘Yes.’

‘As I did.’ He gave her a brief look.

‘Yes.’ She didn’t look at him. ‘Did you come as Don Giovanni’, she asked, ‘with a view to finding someone to seduce?’

He hesitated before replying:

‘I don’t know whether you’ll find this flattering or the opposite. But, actually, no. That aspect of the character—though it’s really the obvious one—didn’t really strike me until I met you. I was thinking more of Don Giovanni as the social rebel.

‘Are you a social rebel?’

‘Well, more a social outcast. It would be truer to say society kicked me out than that I kicked against it. It’s not prepared to pay me to do the things I like doing, which are mainly quite passive and useless, like listening to Mozart, and so I have to do a job which I think is quite useless but which society calls doing an honest day’s work.’

‘There’s no
class
that cares about Mozart’, she said.

‘No.’

‘There never has been. When he was working for the Archbishop of Salzburg, his place at table was with the servants. Above the cooks, but below the valets.’

‘On nights like this, I hate the rich’, he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Almost as much as I hate the poor.’

‘Yes. I see. You
are
an outcast.’

‘Aren’t you?’

Instead of replying, she said, as she looked down at the dancers:

‘Earlier this evening I felt as though I knew what everyone in the room was thinking. Now I feel I don’t know what
any
of them are. They’re all so frankly here for pleasure. I can’t think why it doesn’t embarrass them.’

‘Why should it embarrass them?’

‘This passivity, again’, she said. ‘If I say to myself “Now I’m setting out to seek pleasure”, my mind goes blank. I don’t know what to do with my hands. One of the bravest things about the eighteenth
century
was that people were always frankly setting off on pleasure parties.’

‘O, that was part of the aristocratic frame of mind’, he said, ‘which no longer exists. Nowadays it’s all so sordid. The first thing Tom-Tom does when he gets to the office every morning is search
The
Times
to make sure his shares haven’t dropped. Well, I
mean.
He might as well take his socks off to make sure his arches haven’t. It’s the sort of thing aristocrats didn’t do.’

‘O I don’t know’, she said. ‘I doubt if the
aristocratic
frame of mind ever existed.’

‘I always thought it did until the French
Revolution
.’

‘And yet even before the French Revolution each work of art contained a French Revolution. Each great work of art, I mean.’

‘It’s a very impressive remark’, he said.

‘It may even be true’, she said. ‘When Don
Giovanni
gave a pleasure party it ended in the Terror. A statue came to supper and hauled him off to Hell.’

‘You’re going a long way towards justifying your remark.’

‘And then’, she said, ‘those people going on pleasure parties in Watteau’s pictures, in those
beautiful
boats that look like rococo beds. Or
Così
, which is one enormous pleasure party.’

‘Yes? What about them?’

‘Well, they’re so
sad
’, she said. ‘Those are tragic works of art.’

‘O, that’s because people have to die’, he said. ‘Pleasure has to end
then
.’

‘I thought’, she said, ‘it
was you who were
reproaching
me for that thought.’

‘Damn’, he said.

She laughed.

‘Nevertheless’, he said. ‘Nevertheless, I do
reproach
you. It’s a thought that must be overcome.’

‘You’ve already given me your prescription.’

‘I’d like to emend it.’

‘All right. Emend it.’

‘The prescription is simply “Be brave”. That’s the
moral of
Don
Giovanni.
He was the bravest man in the world. Death is coming. All right, it’s coming. Whatever happens, one mustn’t let it browbeat one into believing in God and the Devil.’

‘You don’t?’ she asked.

‘No. Do you?’

‘No.’

‘I just can’t’, he said, with an effect of
helplessness
, ‘see it in the same way as other people seem to. Or as they say they do. Or let it be thought they do.’

‘What way, in particular?’

‘Well the people down there’, he began, nodding towards them fiercely, ‘or at least about half of them, including most of the older ones, would consider most of the things I consider thoroughly desirable, like seducing you, either wrong or silly. Silly because there’s no money in it. Whereas a good deal of what they do for a living and almost everything they do for pleasure seems to me criminal.’

‘For example?’

‘For example—o, killing animals.’

‘I, too’, Anna said carefully, after watching her wrist bones for a moment while she turned them this way and that, ‘find it easier to like animals than people. And things than animals.’

‘I can’t go with you as far as the things’, he said.

‘You’re not as old as I am. That’s the remark that used to make one livid at seventeen. Isn’t it odd one should have lived to make it oneself? Your
prescription, by the way, seems too passive to me.’

‘Would you rather revert to the earlier one?’

‘No.’

‘And yet’, he said, ‘even though you didn’t want to wait for it passively, you nearly took the earlier one, didn’t you?’

‘Nearly’, she admitted. ‘It had the appeal of iconoclasm. I was hating the rich tonight, too. It attracted me because middle-aged, middle-class women just
don’t
. With masked men in the middle of the night’, she added.

‘They still don’t, you know’, he said, opening up an invitation by tilting his head and glancing at her sideways.

She shook her head.

‘You can’t be brave passively’, she said. ‘Hence the guillotine. I think Don Giovanni was perfectly right to go round seducing women until he provoked Hell into coming to get him prematurely. I shan’t wait to die, either.’

‘Do you mean you’ll forestall it?’

‘Yes. Then at least I shan’t have it done to me. Since it must be done, I’ll do it. Like taking the
sticking
plaster off for oneself.’ In a faintly sardonic voice she added: ‘Don’t worry—I’m not going to do it tonight. Not for some considerable time. Not
middle-age-anasia
. Just one day before it can do it to me.’

‘You’re perfectly serious, aren’t you?’

‘Perfectly’, she said frivolously, ‘but I
couldn’t
choose tonight. It would
ruin
Anne’s party.’

‘You won’t be able to do it at all.’

‘Why not—if I don’t spoil any party? Myself is the only person I’m prepared to injure. Injuring others involves too much responsibility.’

‘You obviously
are
involved with people’, he said. ‘You can make yourself anonymous to me, but you can’t have spent your whole life at a costume ball. There must
be
people who know you and love you, and whom you love. And that’s why you’ll find you can’t do it.’

‘Sometimes I think I don’t love anyone except Anne. And I’m feeling a bit cross with
her
at the moment.’

‘Are you in love with Anne, perhaps?’ he
suggested
.

‘No, it’s more as though we were mother and daughter.’

‘“… and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary.”’

‘What’s that?’

‘Walter Pater.’

‘O yes, of course: “She is older than the rocks among which she sits.” O my
dear
’, Anna said, ‘I don’t like your trains of thought.’

He put up both hands to cover his ears. ‘Stop
beating
me about the head with trains of thought. As a matter of fact, that’s a favourite incantation of mine. I often murmur it in times of trouble.’

‘Is this a time of trouble?’

‘Of course. You’re very troubling.’

‘Well, think’, she said gaily, ‘how much worse it would be for Anne’s party if I died in the middle of it
in
voluntarily.’

‘I don’t want to think of it at all.’

‘“Be brave”’ she mocked. ‘I suppose’, she added, ‘that a man with the name of Pater would
have
to have an obsession with mothers.’

‘
Your
mind runs on incest’, he said.

‘It is quite true’, she said, ‘that it’s the idea of
mother
—of having one or being one—that’s always betraying me.’

‘How do you mean, betraying?’

‘It prevents me from being perfect. It brings my plans for being perfect to nothing. I’m one of the people who would like to be perfect.’

‘Shouldn’t we all?’

‘No, some people prefer life to perfection, I think. And take imperfection as a sign of life. Whereas I should like to be complete, even at the risk of being cut off. I rather like the inorganic. Or at least the not very highly organic. No doubt I feel safer with them. Ideally, I would live surrounded by very
beautiful
, highly coloured, fantastic reptiles or fish.
Something
cold-blooded, that had never been in a womb—that had never even been properly hatched. Birds are too nearly like mammals, because the eggs are sat on. Cold-blooded creatures wouldn’t try to have any sort of relationship with me, wouldn’t even recognise me, and so I shouldn’t feel sad when they died. They could just turn their bellies up and float up to the top of
tank. And I’d throw the corpse in the dustbin and buy a new one.’

‘Well, why
don’t
you live surrounded by fish?’ he said, in a depressed voice.

‘Because mammals exist, I suppose.’

For some time they stood in silence, listening to the music from below, which presently changed into a syrupy waltz—to accompany which some of the lights were turned out again.

Anna said quietly and rather rapidly:

‘Damned little furry, warm-blooded, cuddly
mammals
, always wanting to know what you’re thinking, whether you’re going to cuddle them or give them their dinner—if they’re very young, they’re always nuzzling around to find your breasts if you’re a woman. They’re almost as bad as people. They and I have only to take one look at each other and one or other of us starts
comforting
the other. They have the same aspiration to immortal souls as people, but of course there are only mortal souls, and so one dreads their death. And so there’s remorse. There’s a Siamese kitten up in Anne’s bedroom at this moment which I feel remorseful towards, because I wasn’t very nice to it. I mean, I
didn’t
comfort it. Siamese cats seem to me so reptilian that I think I can treat them as reptiles. But of course they’re mortals, mammals, like anyone else. It wants mothering. Anne mothers it. It’s allowed to lie on her bed. Perhaps I was jealous of it, for that reason. It has an image of Anne. All mammals
form images of you, and so you feel remorse, because you
can’t
live up to the image.’

‘Why shouldn’t you?’ he asked in a hostile voice. ‘Why shouldn’t someone live up to the image, for once?’

‘Because what people want the image to have is immortality. Sometimes they even want the image to confer it, as well.’

He began to protest.

‘Didn’t you’, she asked, ‘try to sell me sexual intercourse as a prescription against thoughts of death?’

‘It was you that had the thoughts. That’s not what I wanted it for.’

‘You wanted some sort of comfort from me.’ She confessed quickly, so that he should not feel obliged to contradict: ‘And I from you. But mothers can’t prevent children from dying, or children mothers, or lovers lovers. I can’t even make a Siamese kitten immortal. We’re doomed to disappoint one another. Everyone, I mean. Everyone all round.’

In a rather fatigued voice he asked:

‘Did you run away because you were afraid of
disappointing
me?’

‘At first’, she said, not replying to the question, ‘our thoughts did pursue the same course, even though we were apart. You guessed I’d be debating whether Donna Anna really was seduced or not.’

‘But later our thoughts diverged? Well, you’ve only yourself to blame. It was you that ran away.
You can’t expect everything of telepathy. After a bit the lines of communication get over-extended. At least, it always feels like telepathy, doesn’t it? But what I really mean is that if you don’t know very much about a person you’ve only a certain amount of material out of which to supply their thoughts.’

‘I didn’t say I had anyone else to blame. I think I’m probably to blame for the whole mistake.’

‘When did you decide it was a mistake?’

‘When you made love to me, it felt to me like a put up job. As though you were fulfilling a napoleonic master-plan, rather than actually being attracted by
me.
Had you, in fact, been standing in the library telling yourself you could carry it off, you were Superman, you were the great seducer?’

‘Not exactly’, he said. ‘But if I thought more about what I’d like to be than what you really were—well, you’d removed yourself from view.’