They tried the attic, but noticed, just in time, a rent in its floor through which one glimpsed a corner of the mangle room where French, the second maid, could be seen in her corset and petticoat, passing to and fro. They looked around — and could not understand how they had ever been able to make tender love among splintered boxes and projecting nails, or wriggle through the skylight onto the roof, which any green imp with coppery limbs could easily keep under surveillance from a fork of the giant elm.
There still was the shooting gallery, with its Orientally draped recess under the sloping roof. But it crawled now with bedbugs, reeked of stale beer, and was so grimy and greasy that one could not dream of undressing or using the little divan. All Van saw there of his new Ada were her ivorine thighs and haunches, and the very first time he clasped them she bade him, in the midst of his vigorous joy, to glance across her shoulder over the window ledge, which her hands were still clutching in the ebbing throbs of her own response, and note that Lucette was approaching — skipping rope, along a path in the shrubbery.
Those intrusions were repeated on the next two or three occasions. Lucette would come ever nearer, now picking a chanterelle and feigning to eat it raw, then crouching to capture a grasshopper or at least going through the natural motions of idle play and carefree pursuit. She would advance up to the center of the weedy playground in front of the forbidden pavilion, and there, with an air of dreamy innocence, start to jiggle the board of an old swing that hung from the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a partly leafless but still healthy old oak (which appeared — oh, I remember, Van! — in a century-old lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast, as a young colossus protecting four cows and a lad in rags, one shoulder bare). When our lovers (you like the authorial possessive, don’t you, Van?) happened to look out again, Lucette was rocking the glum dackel, or looking up at an imaginary woodpecker, or with various pretty contortions unhurriedly mounting the gray-looped board and swinging gently and gingerly as if never having done it yet, while idiot Dack barked at the locked pavilion door. She increased her momentum so cannily that Ada and her cavalier, in the pardonable blindness of ascending bliss, never once witnessed the instant when the round rosy face with all its freckles aglow swooped up and two green eyes leveled at the astounding tandem.
Lucette, the shadow, followed them from lawn to loft, from gatehouse to stable, from a modem shower booth near the pool to the ancient bathroom upstairs. Lucette-in-the-Box came out of a trunk. Lucette desired they take her for walks. Lucette insisted on their playing ‘leaptoad’ with her — and Ada and Van exchanged dark looks.
Ada thought up a plan that was not simple, was not clever, and moreover worked the wrong way. Perhaps she did it on purpose. (Strike out, strike out, please, Van.) The idea was to have Van fool Lucette by petting her in Ada’s presence, while kissing Ada at the same time, and by caressing and kissing Lucette when Ada was away in the woods (‘in the woods,’ ‘botanizing’). This, Ada affirmed, would achieve two ends — assuage the pubescent child’s jealousy and act as an alibi in case she caught them in the middle of a more ambiguous romp.
The three of them cuddled and cosseted so frequently and so thoroughly that at last one afternoon on the long-suffering black divan he and Ada could no longer restrain their amorous excitement, and under the absurd pretext of a hide-and-seek game they locked up Lucette in a closet used for storing bound volumes of The Kaluga Waters and The Lugano Sun, and frantically made love, while the child knocked and called and kicked until the key fell out and the keyhole turned an angry green.
More objectionable yet than those fits of vile temper were, to Ada’s mind, the look of stricken ecstasy that Lucette’s face expressed when she would tightly cling to Van with arms, and knees, and prehensile tail, as if he were a tree trunk, even an ambulating tree trunk, and could not be pried off him unless smartly slapped by big sister.
‘I have to admit,’ said Ada to Van as they floated downstream in a red boat, toward a drape of willows on a Ladore islet, ‘I have to admit with shame and sorrow, Van, that the splendid plan is a foozle. I think the brat has a dirty mind. I think she is criminally in love with you. I think I shall tell her you are her uterine brother and that it is illegal and altogether abominable to flirt with uterine brothers. Ugly dark words scare her, I know; they scared me when I was four; but she is essentially a dumb child, and should be protected from nightmares and stallions. If she still does not desist, I can always complain to Marina, saying she disturbs us in our meditations and studies. But perhaps you don’t mind? Perhaps she excites you? Yes? She excites you, confess?’
‘This summer is so much sadder than the other,’ said Van softly.
35
We are now on a willow islet amidst the quietest branch of the blue Ladore, with wet fields on one side and on the other a view of Bryant’s Castle, remote and romantically black on its oak-timbered hill. In that oval seclusion, Van subjected his new Ada to a comparative study; juxtapositions were easy, since the child he had known in minute detail four years before stood vividly illumined in his mind against the same backdrop of flowing blue.
Her forehead area seemed to have diminished, not only because she had become taller, but because she did her hair differently, with a dramatic swirl in front; its whiteness, now clear of all blemishes, had acquired a particularly mattinge, and soft skin-folds crossed it, as if she had been frowning too much all those years, poor Ada.
The eyebrows were as regal and thick as ever.
The eyes. The eyes had kept their voluptuous palpebral creases; the lashes, their semblance of jet-dust incrustation; the raised iris, its Hindu-hypnotic position; the lids, their inability to stay alert and wide open during the briefest embrace; but those eyes’ expression — when she ate an apple, or examined a found thing, or simply listened to an animal or a person — had changed, as if new layers of reticence and sadness had accumulated, half-veiling the pupil, while the glossy eyeballs shifted in their lovely long sockets with a more restless motion than of yore: Mlle Hypnokush, ‘whose eyes never dwell on you and yet pierce you.’
Her nose had not followed Van’s in the latter’s thickening of Hibernian outline; but the bone was definitely bolder, and the tip seemed to turn up more strongly, and had a little vertical groove that he did not recall having seen in the twelve-year-old colleenette.
In strong light, a suggestion of darkish silk down (related to that on her forearms) could be now made out between nose and mouth but was doomed, she said, to extinction at the first cosmetical session of the fall season. A touch of lipstick now gave her mouth an air of deadpan sullenness, which, by contrast, increased the shock of beauty when in gayety or greed she revealed the moist shine of her large teeth and the red riches of tongue and palate.
Her neck had been, and remained, his most delicate, most poignant delight, especially when she let her hair flow freely, and the warm, white, adorable skin showed through in chance separations of glossy black strands. Boils and mosquito bites had stopped pestering her, but he discovered the pale trace of an inch-long cut which ran parallel to her vertebrae just below the waist and which resulted from a deep scratch caused last August by an erratic hatpin — or rather by a thorny twig in the inviting hay.
(You are merciless, Van.)
On that secret islet (forbidden to Sunday couples — it belonged to the Veens, and a notice-board calmly proclaimed that ‘trespassers might get shot by sportsmen from Ardis Hall,’ Dan’s wording) the vegetation consisted of three Babylonian willows, a fringe of alder, many grasses, cattails, sweet-flags, and a few purple-lipped twayblades, over which Ada crooned as she did over puppies or kittens.
Under the shelter of those neurotic willows Van pursued his survey.
Her shoulders were intolerably graceful:
