The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy Page A

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 oftank. 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 mammalsform 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?