‘Protestuyu!’ cried Marina. ‘Yes, I’m speaking seriozno. I object to your giving her kvaka sesva (quoi que ce soit), Dan and I will take care of all that.’
‘Besides you’ll forget,’ said Ada laughing, and very deftly showed the tip of her tongue to Van who had been on the lookout for her conditional reaction to ‘diamonds.’
Van asked: ‘Provided what?’
‘Provided you don’t have one waiting already for you in George’s Garage, Ranta Road.’
‘Ada, you’ll be jikkering alone soon,’ he continued, ‘I’m going to have Mascodagama round out his vacation in Paris. Qui something sur son front, en accuse la beauté!’
So the trivial patter went. Who does not harbor in the darkest gulf of his mind such bright recollections? Who has not squirmed and covered his face with his hands as the dazzling past leered at him? Who, in the terror and solitude of a long night —
‘What was that?’ exclaimed Marina, whom certicle storms terrified even more than they did the Antiamberians of Ladore County.
‘Sheet lightning,’ suggested Van.
‘If you ask me,’ said Demon, turning on his chair to consider the billowing drapery, ‘I’d guess it was a photographer’s flash. After all, we have here a famous actress and a sensational acrobat.’
Ada ran to the window. From under the anxious magnolias a white-faced boy flanked by two gaping handmaids stood aiming a camera at the harmless, gay family group. But it was only a nocturnal mirage, not unusual in July. Nobody was taking pictures except Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder. In expectation of the rumble, Marina started to count under her breath, as if she were praying or checking the pulse of a very sick person. One heartbeat was supposed to span one mile of black night between the living heart and a doomed herdsman, felled somewhere — oh, very far — on the top of a mountain. The rumble came — but sounded rather subdued. A second flash revealed the structure of the French window.
Ada returned to her seat. Van picked up her napkin from under her chair and in the course of his brief plunge and ascent brushed the side of her knee with his temple.
‘Might I have another helping of Peterson’s Grouse, Tetrastes bonasia windriverensis?’ asked Ada loftily.
Marina jangled a diminutive cowbell of bronze. Demon placed his palm on the back of Ada’s hand and asked her to pass him the oddly evocative object. She did so in a staccato arc. Demon inserted his monocle and, muffling the tongue of memory, examined the bell; but it was not the one that had once stood on a bed-tray in a dim room of Dr Lapiner’s chalet; was not even of Swiss make; was merely one of those sweet-sounding translations which reveal a paraphrast’s crass counterfeit as soon as you look up the original.
Alas, the bird had not survived ‘the honor one had made to it,’ and after a brief consultation with Bouteillan a somewhat incongruous but highly palatable bit of saucisson d’Arles added itself to the young lady’s fare of asperges en branches that everybody was now enjoying. It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce orally from some heavenly height the voluptuous ally of the prim lily of the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers, not unlike the reformed ‘sign of the cross’ for protesting against which (a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves. Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855–1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then ‘everyone has his own taste,’ as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, ‘A Great Good Man’ — according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion.
Marina helped herself to an Albany from a crystal box of Turkish cigarettes tipped with red rose petal and passed the box on to Demon. Ada, somewhat self-consciously, lit up too.
‘You know quite well,’ said Marina, ‘that your father disapproves of your smoking at table.’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ murmured Demon.
‘I had Dan in view,’ explained Marina heavily. ‘He’s very prissy on that score.’
‘Well, and I’m not,’ answered Demon.
Ada and Van could not help laughing. All that was banter — not of a high order, but still banter.
A moment later, however, Van remarked: ‘I think I’ll take an Alibi — I mean an Albany — myself.’
‘Please note, everybody,’ said Ada, ‘how voulu that slip was! I like a smoke when I go mushrooming, but when I’m back, this horrid tease insists I smell of some romantic Turk or Albanian met in the woods.’
‘Well,’ said Demon, ‘Van’s quite right to look after your morals.’
The real profitrol’ (very soft ‘l’) of the Russians, as first made by their cooks in Gavana before 1700, consists of larger puffs coated with creamier chocolate than the dark and puny ‘profit rolls’ served in European restaurants. Our friends had finished that rich sweetmeat flooded with chocolat-au-lait sauce, and were ready for some fruit, when Bout followed by his father and floundering Jones made a sensational entry.
All the toilets and waterpipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions. This always signified, and introduced a long-distance call. Marina, who had been awaiting for several days a certain message from California in response to a torrid letter, could now hardly contain her passionate impatience and had been on the point of running to the dorophone in the hall at the first bubbling spasm, when young Bout hurried in dragging the long green cord (visibly palpitating in a series of swells and contractions rather like a serpent ingesting a field mouse) of the ornate, brass-and-nacre receiver, which Marina with a wild ‘A l’eau!’ pressed to her ear. It was, however, only fussy old Dan ringing her up to inform everybody that Miller could not make it that night after all and would accompany him to Ardis bright and early on the following morning.
‘Early but hardly bright,’ observed Demon, who was now glutted with family joys and slightly annoyed he had missed the first half of a gambling night in Ladore for the sake of all that well-meant but not quite first-rate food.
‘We’ll have coffee in the yellow drawing room,’ said Marina as sadly as if she were evoking a place of dreary exile. ‘Jones, please, don’t walk on that phonecord. You have no idea, Demon, how I dread meeting again, after all those years, that dislikable Norbert von Miller, who has probably become even more arrogant and obsequious, and moreover does not realize, I’m sure, that Dan’s wife is me. He’s a Baltic Russian’ (turning to Van) ‘but really echt deutsch, though his mother was born Ivanov or Romanov, or something, who owned a calico factory in Finland or Denmark. I can’t imagine how he got his barony; when I knew him twenty years ago he was plain Mr Miller.’
‘He is still that,’ said Demon drily, ‘because you’ve got two Millers mixed up. The lawyer who works for Dan is my old friend Norman Miller of the Fainley, Fehler and Miller law firm and physically bears a striking resemblance to Wilfrid Laurier. Norbert, on the other hand, has, I remember, a head like a kegelkugel, lives in Switzerland, knows perfectly well whom you married and is an unmentionable blackguard.’
After a quick cup of coffee and a drop of cherry liqueur Demon got up.
‘Partir c’est mourir un peu, et mourir c’est partir un peu trop. Do tell Dan and Norman I can give them tea-and-cake any time tomorrow at the Bryant. By the way, how’
s Lucette?’
Marina knitted her brows and shook her head acting the fond, worried mother though, in point of fact, she bore her daughters even less affection than she had for cute Dack and pathetic Dan.
‘Oh, we had quite a scare,’ she replied finally, ‘quite a nasty scare. But now, apparently —’
‘Van,’ said his father, ‘be a good scout. I did not have a hat but I did have gloves. Ask Bouteillan to look in the gallery, I may have dropped them there. No. Stay! It’s all right. I left them in the car, because I recall the cold of this flower, which I took from a vase in passing…’
He now threw it away, discarding with it the shadow of his fugitive urge to plunge both hands in a soft bosom.
‘I had hoped you’d sleep here,’ said Marina (not really caring one way or another). ‘What is your room number at the hotel — not 222 by any chance?’
She liked romantic coincidences. Demon consulted the tag on his key: 221 — which was good enough, fatidically and anecdotically speaking. Naughty Ada, of course, stole a glance at Van, who tensed up the wings of his nose in a grimace that mimicked the slant of Pedro’s narrow, beautiful nostrils.
‘They make fun of an old woman,’ said Marina, not without coquetry, and in the Russian manner kissed her guest on his inclined brow as he lifted her hand to his lips: ‘You’ll forgive me,’ she added, ‘for not going out on the terrace, I’ve grown allergic to damp and darkness; I’m sure my temperature has already gone up to thirty-seven and seven, at least,’
Demon tapped the barometer next to the door. It had been tapped too often to react in any intelligible way and remained standing at a quarter past three.
Van and Ada saw him off. The night was very warm and dripping with what Ladore farmers called green rain. Demon’s black sedan glinted elegantly among the varnished laurels in the moth-flaked porchlight. He tenderly kissed the children, the girl on one cheek, the boy on the other, then Ada again — in the hollow of the white arm that clasped his neck. Nobody paid much attention to Marina, who waved from a tangelo-colored oriel window a spangled shawl although all she could see was the sheen of the car’s bonnet and the rain slanting in the light of its lamps.
Demon pulled on his gloves and sped away with a great growl of damp gravel.
‘That last kiss went a little too far,’ remarked Van, laughing.
‘Oh well — his lips sort of slipped,’ laughed Ada and, laughing, they embraced in the dark as they skirted the wing of the house.
They stopped for a moment under the shelter of an indulgent tree, where many a cigar-smoking guest had stopped after dinner. Tranquilly, innocently, side by side in their separately ordained attitudes, they added a trickle and a gush to the more professional sounds of the rain in the night, and then lingered, hand in hand, in a corner of the latticed gallery waiting for the lights in the windows to go out.
‘What was faintly off-key, ne tak, about the whole evening?’ asked Van softly. ‘You noticed?’
‘Of course, I did. And yet I adore him. I think he’s quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible — and there is absolutely nobody like him.’
‘But what went wrong tonight? You were tongue-tied, and everything we said was fal’shivo. I wonder if some inner nose in him smelled you in me, and me in you. He tried to ask me… Oh it was not a nice family reunion. What exactly went wrong at dinner?’
‘My love, my love, as if you don’t know! We’ll manage, perhaps, to wear our masks always, till dee do us part, but we shall never be able to marry — while they’re both alive. We simply can’t swing it, because he’s more conventional in his own way than even the law and the social lice. One can’t bribe one’s parents, and waiting forty, fifty years for them to die is too horrible to imagine — I mean the mere thought of anybody waiting for such a thing is not in our nature, is mean and monstrous!’
He kissed her half-closed lips, gently and ‘morally’ as they defined moments of depth to distinguish them from the despair of passion.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s fun to be two secret agents in an alien country. Marina has gone upstairs. Your hair is wet.’
‘Spies from Terra? You believe, you believe in the existence of Terra? Oh, you do! You accept it. I know you!’
‘I accept it as a state of mind. That’s not quite the same thing.’
‘Yes, but you want to prove it is the same thing.’
He brushed her lips with another religious’ kiss. Its edge, however, was beginning to catch fire.
‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘I will ask you for a repeat performance. You will sit as you did four years ago, at the same table, in the same light, drawing the same flower, and I shall go through the same scene with such joy, such pride, such — I don’t know — gratitude! Look, all the windows are dark now. I, too, can translate when I simply have to. Listen to this:
Lights in the rooms were going out.
Breathed fragrantly the rozï.
We sat together in the shade
Of a wide-branched beryozï.’
‘Yes, "birch" is what leaves the translator in the "lurch," doesn’t it? That’s a terrible little poem by Konstantin Romanov, right? Just elected president of the Lyascan Academy of Literature, right? Wretched poet and happy husband. Happy husband!’
‘You know,’ said Van, ‘I really think you should wear something underneath on formal occasions.’
‘Your hands are cold. Why formal? You said yourself it was a family affair.’
‘Even so. You were in peril whenever you bent or sprawled.’
‘I never sprawl!’
‘I’m quite sure it’s not hygienic, or perhaps it’s a kind of jealousy on my part. Memoirs of a Happy Chair. Oh, my darling.’
‘At least,’ whispered Ada, ‘it pays off now, doesn’t it? Croquet room? Ou comme ça?’
‘Comme ça, for once,’ said Van.
39
Although fairly eclectic in 1888, Ladore fashions were not quite as free as taken for granted at Ardis.
For the grand picnic on her birthday sixteen-year-old Ada wore a plain linen blouse, maize-yellow slacks and scuffed moccasins. Van had wanted her to let her hair down; she demurred, saying it was too long for country comfort, but finally compromised by tying it midway behind with a rumpled ribbon of black silk. Van’s only observance of summer elegancies consisted of a blue polo jersey, knee-length gray flannel trousers, and sport ‘creepers’.
While the rustic feast was being prepared and distributed among the sun gouts of the traditional pine glade, the wild girl and her lover slipped away for a few moments of ravenous ardor in a ferny ravine where a rill dipped from ledge to ledge between tall burnberry bushes. The day was hot and breathless. The smallest pine had its cicada.
She said: ‘Speaking as a character in an old novel, it seems so long, long ago, davnïm davno, since I used to play word-games here with Grace and two other lovely girls. "Insect, incest, nicest."’
Speaking as a botanist and a mad woman, she said, the most extraordinary word in the English language was ‘husked,’ becaused it stood for opposite things, covered and uncovered, tightly husked but easily husked, meaning they peel off quite easily, you don’t have to tear the waistband, you brute. ‘Carefully husked brute,’ said Van tenderly. The passage of time could only enhance his tenderness for the creature he clasped, this adored creature, whose motion was now more supple, whose haunches had grown more lyrate, whose hair-ribbon he had undone.
As they crouched on the brink of one of the brook’s crystal shelves, where, before falling, it stopped to have its picture taken and take pictures itself, Van, at the last throb, saw the reflection of Ada’s gaze in the water flash a warning. Something of the sort had happened somewhere before: he did not have time to identify the recollection that, nonetheless, led him to identify at once the sound of the stumble behind him.
Among the rugged rocks they found and consoled poor little Lucette, whose foot had s
lipped on a granite slab in a tangle of bushes. Flushed and flustered, the child rubbed her thigh in much-overdone agony. Van and Ada gaily grasped one little hand each and ran Lucette back to the glade, where she laughed, where she flopped, where she made for her favorite tarts awaiting her on one of the unfolded tables. There she husked out of her sweat shirt, hitched up her green shorts and, asquat on the russet ground, attacked the food she had collected.
Ada had declined to invite anybody except the Erminin twins to her picnic; but she had had no intention of inviting the brother without the sister. The latter, it turned out, could not come, having gone to New Cranton to see a young drummer, her first boy friend, sail off into the sunrise with his regiment. But Greg had to be asked to come after all: on the previous day he had called on her bringing a ‘talisman’ from his very sick father, who wanted Ada to treasure as much as his grandam had a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok.
Van did not err in believing that Ada remained unaffected by Greg’s devotion. He now met him again with pleasure — the kind of pleasure, immoral in its very purity, which adds its icy tang to the friendly feelings a successful rival bears toward a thoroughly decent fellow.
Greg, who had left his splendid new black Silentium motorcycle in the forest ride, observed:
‘We have company.’
‘Indeed we do,’ assented Van. ‘Kto sii (who are they)? Do you have any idea?’
Nobody had. Raincoated, unpainted, morose, Marina came over and peered through the trees the way Van pointed.
After reverently inspecting the Silentium, a dozen elderly townsmen, in dark clothes, shabby and uncouth, walked into the forest across the road and sat down there to a modest colazione of cheese, buns, salami, sardines and Chianti. They were quite sufficiently far from our picnickers not to bother them in any way. They had no mechanical music boxes with them. Their voices were subdued, their movements could not have been more discreet. The predominant gesture seemed to be ritually limited to this or that fist crumpling brown paper or coarse gazette paper or baker’s paper (the very lightweight and inefficient sort), and discarding the crumpled bit in quiet, abstract fashion, while other sad apostolic hands unwrapped the victuals or for some reason or other wrapped them up again, in the noble shade of the pines, in the humble shade of the false acacias.