‘I’m a good, good girl. Here are her special pencils. It was very considerate and altogether charming of you to invite her next weekend. I think she’s even more madly in love with you than with me, the poor pet. Demon got them in Strassburg. After all she’s a demi-vierge now’ (‘I hear you and Dad —’ began Van, but the introduction of a new subject was swamped) ‘and we shan’t be afraid of her witnessing our ébats’ (pronouncing on purpose, with triumphant hooliganism, for which my prose, too, is praised, the first vowel à la Russe).
‘You do the puma,’ he said, ‘but she does — to perfection! — my favorite viola sardina. She’s a wonderful imitatrix, by the way, and if you are even better —’
‘We’ll speak about my talents and tricks some other time,’ said Ada. ‘It’s a painful subject. Now let’s look at these snapshots.’
7
During her dreary stay at Ardis, a considerably changed and enlarged Kim Beauharnais called upon her. He carried under his arm an album bound in orange-brown cloth, a dirty hue she had hated all her life. In the last two or three years she had not seen him, the light-footed, lean lad with the sallow complexion had become a dusky colossus, vaguely resembling a janizary in some exotic opera, stomping in to announce an invasion or an execution. Uncle Dan, who just then was being wheeled out by his handsome and haughty nurse into the garden where coppery and blood-red leaves were falling, clamored to be given the big book, but Kim said ‘Perhaps later,’ and joined Ada in the reception corner of the hall.
He had brought her a present, a collection of photographs he had taken in the good old days. He had been hoping the good old days would resume their course, but since he understood that mossio votre cossin (he spoke a thick Creole thinking that its use in solemn circumstances would be more proper than his everyday Ladore English) was not expected to revisit the castle soon — and thus help bring the album up to date — the best procedure pour tous les cernés (‘the shadowed ones,’ the ‘encircled’ rather than ‘concerned’) might be for her to keep (or destroy and forget, so as not to hurt anybody) the illustrated document now in her pretty hands. Wincing angrily at the jolies, Ada opened the album at one of its maroon markers meaningly inserted here and there, glanced once, reclicked the clasp, handed the grinning blackmailer a thousand-dollar note that she happened to have in her bag, summoned Bouteillan and told him to throw Kim out. The mud-colored scrapbook remained on a chair, under her Spanish shawl. With a shuffling kick the old retainer expelled a swamp-tulip leaf swept in by the draft and closed the front door again.
‘Mademoiselle n’aurait jamais dû recevoir ce gredin,’ he grumbled on his way back through the hall.
‘That’s just what I was on the point of observing,’ said Van when Ada had finished relating the nasty incident. ‘Were the photos pretty filthy?’
‘Ach!’ exhaled Ada.
‘That money might have furthered a worthier cause — Home for Blind Colts or Aging Ashettes.’
‘Odd, your saying that.’
‘Why?’
‘Never mind. Anyway, the beastly thing is now safe. I had to pay for it, lest he show poor Marina pictures of Van seducing his little cousin Ada — which would have been bad enough; actually, as a hawk of genius, he may have suspected the whole truth.’
‘So you really think that because you bought his album for a paltry thousand all evidence has been disposed of and everything is in order?’
‘Why, yes. Do you think the sum was too mean? I might send him more. I know where to reach him. He lectures, if you please, on the Art of Shooting Life at the School of Photography in Kalugano.’
‘Good place for shooting,’ said Van. ‘So you are quite sure you own the «beastly thing»?’
‘Of course, I do. It’s with me, at the bottom of that trunk; I’ll show it to you in a moment.’
‘Tell me, my love, what was your so-called I.Q. when we first met?’
‘Two hundred and something. A sensational figure.’
‘Well, by now it has shrunk rather badly. Peeking Kim has kept all the negatives plus lots of pictures he will paste or post later.’
‘Would you say it has dropped to Cordula’s level?’
‘Lower. Now let’s look at those snapshots — before settling his monthly salary.’
The first item in the evil series had projected one of Van’s initial impressions of Ardis Manor at an angle that differed from that of his own recollection. Its area lay between the shadow of a calèche darkening the gravel and the white step of a pillared porch shining in the sun. Marina, one arm still in the sleeve of the dust coat which a footman (Price) was helping her to remove, stood brandishing her free arm in a theatrical gesture of welcome (entirely at variance with the grimace of helpless beatitude twisting her face), while Ada in a black hockey blazer — belonging really to Vanda — spilled her hair over her bare knees as she flexed them and flipped Dack with her flowers to check his nervous barks.
Then came several preparatory views of the immediate grounds: the colutea circle, an avenue, the grotto’s black O, and the hill, and the big chain around the trunk of the rare oak, Quercus ruslan Chat., and a number of other spots meant to be picturesque by the compiler of the illustrated pamphlet but looking a little shabby owing to inexperienced photography.
It improved gradually.
Another girl (Blanche!) stooping and squatting exactly like Ada (and indeed not unlike her in features) over Van’s valise opened on the floor, and ‘eating with her eyes’ the silhouette of Ivory Revery in a perfume advertisement. Then the cross and the shade of boughs above the grave of Marina’s dear housekeeper, Anna Pimenovna Nepraslinov (1797-1883).
Let’s skip nature shots — of skunklike squirrels, of a striped fish in a bubble tank, of a canary in its pretty prison.
A photograph of an oval painting, considerably diminished, portrayed Princess Sophia Zemski as she was at twenty, in 1775, with her two children (Marina’s grandfather born in 1772, and Demon’s grandmother, born in 1773).
‘I don’t seem to remember it,’ said Van, ‘where did it hang?’
‘In Marina’s boudoir. And do you know who this bum in the frock coat is?’
‘Looks to me like a poor print cut out of a magazine. Who’s he?’
‘Sumerechnikov! He took sumerographs of Uncle Vanya years ago.’
‘The Twilight before the Lumières. Hey, and here’s Alonso, the swimming-pool expert. I met his sweet sad daughter at a Cyprian party — she felt and smelt and melted like you. The strong charm of coincidence.’
‘I’m not interested. Now comes a little boy.’
‘Zdraste, Ivan Dementievich,’ said Van, greeting his fourteen-year-old self, shirtless, in shorts, aiming a conical missile at the marble fore-image of a Crimean girl doomed to offer an everlasting draught of marble water to a dying marine from her bullet-chipped jar.
Skip Lucette skipping rope.
Ah, the famous first finch.
‘No, that’s a kitayskaya punochka (Chinese Wall Bunting). It has settled on the threshold of a basement door. The door is ajar. There are garden tools and croquet mallets inside. You remember how many exotic, alpine and polar, animals mixed with ordinary ones in our region.’
Lunchtime. Ada bending low over the dripping peach improperly peeled that she is devouring (shot from the garden through the french window).
Drama and comedy. Blanche struggling with two amorous tsigans in the Baguenaudier Bower. Uncle Dan calmly reading a newspaper in his little red motorcar, hopelessly stuck in black mud on the Ladore road.
Two huge common Peacock moths, still connected. Grooms and gardeners brought Ada that species every blessed year; which, in a way reminds us of you, sweet Marco d’Andrea, or you, red-haired Domenico Benci, or you, dark and broody Giovanni del Brina (who thought they were bats) or the one I dare not mention (because it is Lucette’s scholarly contribution — so easily botched after the scholar’s death) who likewise might have picked up, at the foot of an orchard wall, not overhung with not-yet-imported wisteria (her half-sister’s addition), on a May morning in 1542, near Florence, a pair of the Pear Peacock in copula, the male with the feathery antennae, the female with the plain threads, to depict them faithfully (among wretched, unvisualized insects) on one side of a fenestral niche in the so-called ‘Elements Room’ of the Palazzo Vecchio.
Sunrise at Ardis. Congs: naked Van still cocooned in his hammock under the ‘lidderons’ as they called in Ladore the liriodendrons, not exactly a lit d’édredon, though worth an auroral pun and certainly conducive to the physical expression of a young dreamer’s fancy undisguised by the network.
‘Congratulations,’ repeated Van in male language. ‘The first indecent postcard. Bewhorny, no doubt, has a blown-up copy in his private stock.’
Ada examined the pattern of the hammock through a magnifying glass (used by Van for deciphering certain details of his lunatics’ drawings).
‘I’m afraid there’s more to come,’ she remarked with a catch in her voice; and taking advantage of their looking at the album in bed (which we now think lacked taste) odd Ada used the reading loupe on live Van, something she had done many times as a scientifically curious and artistically depraved child in that year of grace, here
