Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: ‘real things’ which were unfrequent and priceless, simply ‘things’ which formed the routine stuff of life; and ‘ghost things,’ also called ‘fogs,’ such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a ‘tower,’ or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a ‘bridge.’ ‘Real towers’ and ‘real bridges’ were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral ‘thing’ might look or even actually become ‘real’ or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid ‘fog.’ When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with ‘ruined towers’ and ‘broken bridges.’
The pictorial and architectural details of her metaphysics made her nights easier than Van’s, «and that morning — as on most mornings — he had the sensation of returning from a much more remote and grim country than she and her sunlight had come from.
Her plump, stickily glistening lips smiled.
(When I kiss you here, he said to her years later, I always remember that blue morning on the balcony when you were eating a tartine au miel; so much better in French.)
The classical beauty of clover honey, smooth, pale, translucent, freely flowing from the spoon and soaking my love’s bread and butter in liquid brass. The crumb steeped in nectar.
‘Real thing?’ he asked.
‘Tower,’ she answered.
And the wasp.
The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing.
‘We shall try to eat one later,’ she observed, ‘but it must be gorged to taste good. Of course, it can’t sting your tongue. No animal will touch a person’s tongue. When a lion has finished a traveler, bones and all, he always leaves the man’s tongue lying like that in the desert’ (making a negligent gesture).
‘I doubt it.’
‘It’s a well-known mystery.’
Her hair was well brushed that day and sheened darkly in contrast with the lusterless pallor of her neck and arms. She wore the striped tee shirt which in his lone fantasies he especially liked to peel off her twisting torso. The oilcloth was divided into blue and white squares. A smear of honey stained what remained of the butter in its cool crock.
‘All right. And the third Real Thing?’
She considered him. A fiery droplet in the wick of her mouth considered him. A three-colored velvet violet, of which she had done an aquarelle on the eve, considered him from its fluted crystal. She said nothing. She licked her spread fingers, still looking at him.
Van, getting no answer, left the balcony. Softly her tower crumbled in the sweet silent sun.
13
For the big picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday and Ida’s forty-second jour de fête, the child was permitted to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy of that name in Osberg’s novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish ‘t,’ not a thick English one), a rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt, with red poppies or peonies, ‘deficient in botanical reality,’ as she grandly expressed it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and only this, dream.
(Nor did you, wise Van. Her note.)
She had stepped into it, naked, while her legs were still damp and ‘piney’ after a special rubbing with a washcloth (morning baths being unknown under Mlle Larivière’s regime) and pulled it on with a brisk jiggle of the hips which provoked her governess’s familiar rebuke: mais ne te trémousse pas comme ça quand tu mets ta jupe! Une petite fille de bonne maison, etc. Per contra, the omission of panties was ignored by Ida Larivière, a bosomy woman of great and repulsive beauty (in nothing but corset and gartered stockings at the moment) who was not above making secret concessions to the heat of the dog-days herself; but in tender Ada’s case the practice had deprecable effects. The child tried to assuage the rash in the sort arch, with all its accompaniment of sticky, itchy, not altogether unpleasurable sensations, by tightly straddling the cool limb of a Shattal apple tree, much to Van’s disgust as we shall see more than once. Besides the lolita, she wore a short-sleeved white black-striped jersey, a floppy hat (hanging behind her back from an elastic around her throat), a velvet hairband and a pair of old sandals. Neither hygiene, nor sophistication of taste, were, as Van kept observing, typical of the Ardis household.
She tumbled out of her tree like a hoopoe when they all were ready to start. Hurry, hurry, my bird, my angel. The English coachman, Ben Wright, was still stone-sober (having had for breakfast only one pint of ale). Blanche, who had been to a big picnic at least once (when rushed to Pineglen to unlace Mademoiselle, who had fainted), now perfomed the less glamorous duty of carrying away snarling and writhing Dack to her little room in the turret.
A charabanc had already conveyed two footmen, three armchairs and a number of hampers to the site of the picnic. The novelist, wearing a white satin dress (made by Vass of Manhattan for Marina who had lately lost ten pounds), with Ada sitting beside her, and Lucette, très en beauté in a white sailor blouse, perched next to sullen Wright, drove there in the calèche. Van rode behind on one of his uncle’s or grand-uncle’s bicycles. The forest road remained reasonably smooth if you kept to its middle run (still sticky and dark after a rainy dawn) between the sky-blue ruts, speckled with the reflections of the same birch leaves whose shadows sped over the taut nacrine silk of Mlle Larivière’s open sunshade and the wide brim of Ada’s rather rakishly donned white hat. Now and then Lucette from beside blue-coated Ben looked back at Van and made slacken-speed little signals with the flat of one hand as she had seen her mother do to Ada when fearing she would crash with her pony or bicycle into the back of the carriage.
Marina came in a red motorcar of an early ‘runabout’ type, operated by the butler very warily as if it were some fancy variety of corkscrew. She looked unwontedly smart in a man’s gray flannels and sat holding the palm of her gloved hand on the knob of a clouded cane as the car, wobbling a little, arrived to the very edge of the picnic site, a picturesque glade in an old pinewood cut by ravishingly lovely ravines. A strange pale butterfly passed from the opposite side of the woods, along the Lugano dirt road, and was followed presently by a landau from which emerged one by one, nimbly or slowly, depending on age and condition, the Erminin twins, their young pregnant aunt (narrationally a great burden), and a governess, white-haired Mme Forestier, the school friend of Mathilde in a forthcoming story.
Three adult gentlemen, moreover, were expected but never turned up: Uncle Dan, who missed the morning train from town; Colonel Erminin, a widower, whose liver, he said in a note, was behaving like a pecheneg; and his doctor (and chess partner), the famous Dr Krolik, who called himself Ada’s court jeweler, and indeed brought her his birthday present early on the following day — three exquisitely carved chrysalids (‘Inestimable gems,’ cried throatily Ada, tensing her brows), all of which were to yield before long, specimens of a disappointing ichneumon instead of the Kibo Fritillary, a recently discovered rarity.
Stacks of tender crustless sandwiches (perfect rectangles five inches by two), the tawny corpse of a turkey, black Russian bread, pots of Gray Bead caviar, candied violets, little raspberry tarts, half a gallon of Goodson white port, another of ruby, watered claret in thermos flasks for the girls, and the cold sweet tea of happy childhoods — all this is more readily imagined than described. One found it instructive [thus in the MS. Ed.].
One found it instructive to place side by side Ada Veen and Grace Erminin: the skimmed-milk pallor of Ada and her coeval’s healthy hot flush; the straight black witchwench-hair of the one and the brown bob of the other; my love’s lackluster grave eyes and the blue twinkle behind Grace’s horn-rimmed glasses; the former’s naked thigh and the latter’s long red stockings; the gipsy skirt and the sailor suit. Still more instructive, perhaps, was to note how Greg’s plain features had been transposed practically intact into his sister’s aura where they acquired a semblance of girlish’ good looks’ without impairing the close resemblance between sailor boy and maiden.
The ruins of the turkey, the port wine which only the governesses had touched, and a broken Sèvres plate were quickly removed by the servants. A cat appeared from under a bush, stared in a shock
