We cannot reconstitute the exact wording of the message, but we know it said that this thoughtful and very expensive gift was a huge beautiful doll — unfortunately, and strangely, more or less naked; still more strangely, with a braced right leg and a bandaged left arm, and a boxful of plaster jackets and rubber accessories, instead of the usual frocks and frills. Directions in Russian or Bulgarian made no sense because they were not in the modem Roman, but in the old Cyrillitsa, a nightmare alphabet which Dan had never been able to master. Could Marina come over at once to have suitable doll clothes cut out of some nice silk discards her maid had collected in a drawer he had discovered and wrap the box again in fresh tissue paper?
Ada, who had been reading the note over her mother’s shoulder, shuddered and said:
‘You tell him to take a pair of tongs and carry the whole business to the surgical dump.’
‘Bednyachok! Poor, poor little man,’ exclaimed Marina, her eyes brimming with pity. ‘Of course I’ll come. Your cruelty, Ada, is sometimes, sometimes, I don’t know — satanic!’
Briskly walking her long cane, her face twitching with nervous resolution, Marina marched toward the vehicle, which presently moved, turning and knocking over an empty half-gallon bottle as its fender leafed through an angry burnberry bush in order to avoid the parked calèche.
But whatever wrath there hung in the air, it soon subsided. Ada asked her governess for pencils and paper. Lying on his stomach, leaning his cheek on his hand, Van looked at his love’s inclined neck as she played anagrams with Grace, who had innocently suggested ‘insect.’
‘Scient,’ said Ada, writing it down.
‘Oh no!’ objected Grace.
‘Oh yes! I’m sure it exists. He is a great scient. Dr Entsic was scient in insects.’
Grace meditated, tapping her puckered brow with the eraser end of the pencil, and came up with:
‘Nicest!’
‘Incest,’ said Ada instantly.
‘I give up,’ said Grace. ‘We need a dictionary to check your little inventions.’
But the glow of the afternoon had entered its most oppressive phase, and the first bad mosquito of the season was resonantly slain on Ada’s shin by alert Lucette. The charabanc had already left with the armchairs, the hampers and the munching footmen, Essex, Middlesex and Somerset; and now Mlle Larivière and Mme Forestier were exchanging melodious adieux. Hands waved, and the twins with their ancient governess and sleepy young aunt were carried away in the landau. A pale diaphanous butterfly with a very black body followed them and Ada cried ‘Look!’ and explained it was closely related to a Japanese Parnassian. Mlle Larivière said suddenly she would use a pseudonym when publishing the story. She led her two pretty charges toward the calèche and poked sans façons in his fat red neck with the point of her parasol Ben Wright, grossly asleep in the back under the low-hanging festoons of foliage. Ada tossed her hat into Ida’s lap and ran back to where Van stood. Being unfamiliar with the itinerary of sun and shade in the clearing, he had left his bicycle to endure the blazing beams for at least three hours. Ada mounted it, uttered a yelp of pain, almost fell off, googled, recovered — and the rear tire burst with a comic bang.
The discomfitured machine was abandoned under a shrub to be fetched later by Bouteillan Junior, yet another household character. Lucette refused to give up her perch (accepting with a bland little nod the advice of her drunken boxfellow who was seen to touch her bare knees with a good-natured paw); and there being no strapontin, Ada had to content herself with Van’s hard lap.
It was the children’s first bodily contact and both were embarrassed. She settled down with her back to Van, resettled as the carriage jerked, and wriggled some more, arranging her ample pine-smelling skirt, which seemed to envelop him airily, for all the world like a barber’s sheet. In a trance of awkward delight he held her by the hips. Hot gouts of sun moved fast across her zebra stripes and the backs of her bare arms and seemed to continue their journey through the tunnel of his own frame.
‘Why did you cry?’ he asked, inhaling her hair and the heat of her ear. She turned her head and for a moment looked at him closely, in cryptic silence.
(Did I? I don’t know — it upset me somehow. I can’t explain it, but I felt there was something dreadful, brutal, dark, and, yes, dreadful, about the whole thing. A later note.)
‘I’m sorry,’ he said as she looked away, ‘I’ll never do it again in your presence.’
(By the way, that ‘for all the world,’ I detest the phrase. Another note in Ada’s late hand.)
With his entire being, the boiling and brimming lad relished her weight as he felt it responding to every bump of the road by softly parting in two and crushing beneath it the core of the longing which he knew he had to control lest a possible seep perplexed her innocence, He would have yielded and melted in animal laxity had not the girl’s governess saved the situation by addressing him. Poor Van shifted Ada’s bottom to his right knee, blunting what used to be termed in the jargon of the torture house ‘the angle of agony.’ In the mournful dullness of unconsummated desire he watched a row of izbas straggle by as the calèche drove through Gamlet, a hamlet.
‘I can never get used (m’y faire)’ said Mlle Laparure, ‘to the contrast between the opulence of nature and the squalor of human life. See that old moujik décharné with that rent in his shirt, see his miserable cabane. And see that agile swallow! How happy, nature, how unhappy, man! Neither of you told me how you liked my new story? Van?’
‘It’s a good fairy tale,’ said Van.
‘It’s a fairy tale,’ said careful Ada.
‘Allons donc!’ cried Mlle Larivière, ‘On the contrary — every detail is realistic. We have here the drama of the petty bourgeois, with all his class cares and class dreams and class pride.’
(True; that might have been the intent — apart from the pointe assassine; but the story lacked ‘realism’ within its own terms, since a punctilious, penny-counting employee would have found out, first of all, no matter how, quitte à tout dire à la veuve, what exactly the lost necklace had cost. That was the fatal flaw in the Larivière pathos-piece, but at the time young Van and younger Ada could not quite grope for that point although they felt instinctively the falsity of the whole affair.)
A slight commotion took place on the box. Lucette turned around and spoke to Ada.
‘I want to sit with you. Mne tut neudobno, i ot nego nehorosho pakhnet (I’m uncomfortable here, and he does not smell good).’
‘We’ll be there in a moment,’ retorted Ada, ‘poterpi (have a little patience).’
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mlle Larivière.
‘Nothing, Il pue.’
‘Oh dear! I doubt strongly he ever was in that Rajah’s service,’
14
Next day, or the day after the next, the entire family was having high tea in the garden. Ada, on the grass, kept trying to make an anadem of marguerites for the dog while Lucette looked on, munching a crumpet. Marina remained for almost a minute wordlessly stretching across the table her husband’s straw hat in his direction; finally he shook his head, glared at the sun that glared back and retired with his cup and the Toulouse Enquirer to a rustic seat on the other side of the lawn under an immense elm.