‘Of course, if one goes in for horseplay...’ murmured Ada — and opened, at its emerald ribbon, the small brown, gold-tooled book (a great success with the passing sun flecks) that she had been already reading during the ride to the picnic.
‘I do fancy a little horseplay,’ said Van. ‘It has left me with quite a tingle, for more reasons than one.’
‘I saw you — horseplaying,’ said Lucette, turning her head.
‘Sh-sh,’ uttered Van.
‘I mean you and him.’
‘We are not interested in your impressions, girl. And don’t look back all the time. You know you get carriage-sick when the road —’
‘Coincidence: "Jean qui tâchait de lui tourner la tête...,"’ surfaced Ada briefly.
‘— when the road "runs out of you," as your sister once said when she was your age.’
‘True,’ mused Lucette tunefully.
She had been prevailed upon to clothe her honey-brown body. Her white jersey had filched a lot from its recent background — pine needles, a bit of moss, a cake crumb, a baby caterpillar. Her remarkably well-filled green shorts were stained with burnberry purple. Her ember-bright hair flew into his face and smelt of a past summer. Family smell; yes, coincidence: a set of coincidences slightly displaced; the artistry of asymmetry. She sat in his lap, heavily, dreamily, full of foie gras and peach punch, with the backs of her brown iridescent bare arms almost touching his face — touching it when he glanced down, right and left, to check if the mushrooms had been taken. They had. The little footboy was reading and picking his nose — judging by the movements of his elbow. Lucette’s compact bottom and cool thighs seemed to sink deeper and deeper in the quicksand of the dream-like, dream-rephrased, legend-distorted past. Ada, sitting next to him, turning her smaller pages quicker than the boy on the box, was, of course, enchanting, obsessive, eternal and lovelier, more somberly ardent than four summers ago — but it was that other picnic which he now relived and it was Ada’s soft haunches which he now held as if she were present in duplicate, in two different color prints.
Through strands of coppery silk he looked aslant at Ada, who puckered her lips at him in the semblance of a transmitted kiss (pardoning him at last for his part in that brawl!) and presently went back to her vellum-bound little volume, Ombres et couleurs, an 1820 edition of Chateaubriand’s short stories with hand-painted vignettes and the flat mummy of a pressed anemone. The gouts and glooms of the woodland passed across her book, her face and Lucette’s right arm, on which he could not help kissing a mosquito bite in pure tribute to the duplication. Poor Lucette stole a languorous look at him and looked away again — at the red neck of the coachman — of that other coachman who for several months had haunted her dreams.
We do not care to follow the thoughts troubling Ada, whose attention to her book was far shallower than might seem; we will not, nay, cannot follow them with any success, for thoughts are much more faintly remembered than shadows or colors, or the throbs of young lust, or a green snake in a dark paradise. Therefore we find ourselves more comfortably sitting within Van while his Ada sits within Lucette, and both sit within Van (and all three in me, adds Ada).
He remembered with a pang of pleasure the indulgent skirt Ada had been wearing then, so swoony-baloony as the Chose young things said, and he regretted (smiling) that Lucette had those chaste shorts on today, and Ada, husked-corn (laughing) trousers. In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes (nodding gravely), sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose — and that not owing to some blessed pill or potion (indicating the bedside clutter) or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug.
Van closed his eyes in order better to concentrate on the golden flood of swelling joy. Many, oh, many, many years later he recollected with wonder (how could one have endured such rapture?) that moment of total happiness, the complete eclipse of the piercing and preying ache, the logic of intoxication, the circular argument to the effect that the most eccentric girl cannot help being faithful if she loves one as one loves her. He watched Ada’s bracelet flash in rhythm with the swaying of the victoria and her full lips, parted slightly in profile, show in the sun the red pollen of a remnant of salve drying in the transversal thumbnail lines of their texture. He opened his eyes: the bracelet was indeed flashing but her lips had lost all trace of rouge, and the certainty that in another moment he would touch their hot pale pulp threatened to touch off a private crisis under the solemn load of another child. But the little proxy’s neck, glistening with sweat, was pathetic, her trustful immobility, sobering, and after all no furtive fiction could compete with what awaited him in Ada’s bower. A twinge in his kneecap also came to the rescue, and honest Van chided himself for having attempted to use a little pauper instead of the princess in the fairy tale — ‘whose precious flesh must not blush with the impression of a chastising hand,’ says Pierrot in Peterson’s version.
With the fading of that fugitive flame his mood changed. Something should be said, a command should be given, the matter was serious or might become serious. They were now about to enter Gamlet, the little Russian village, from which a birch-lined road led quickly to Ardis. A small procession of kerchiefed peasant nymphs, unwashed, no doubt, but adorably pretty with naked shiny shoulders and high-divided plump breasts tuliped up by their corsets, walked past through a coppice, singing an old ditty in their touching English:
Thorns and nettles
For silly girls:
Ah, torn the petals,
Ah, spilled the pearls!
‘You have a little pencil in your back pocket,’ said Van to Lucette. ‘May I borrow it, I want to write down that song.’
‘If you don’t tickle me there,’ said the child.
Van reached for Ada’s book and wrote on the fly leaf, as she watched him with odd wary eyes:
I don’t wish to see him again.
It’s serious.
Tell M. not to receive him or I leave.
No answer required.
She read it, and slowly, silently erased the lines with the top of the pencil which she passed back to Van, who replaced it where it had been.
‘You’re awfully fidgety,’ Lucette observed without turning. ‘Next time,’ she added, ‘I won’t have him dislodge me.’
They now swept up to the porch, and Trofim had to cuff the tiny blue-coated reader in order to have him lay his book aside and jump down to hand Ada out of the carriage.
40
Van was lying in his netted nest under the liriodendrons, reading Antiterrenus on Rattner. His knee had troubled him all night; now, after lunch, it seemed a bit better. Ada had gone on horseback to Ladore, where he hoped she would forget to buy the messy turpentine oil Marina had told her to bring him.
His valet advanced toward him across the lawn, followed by a messenger, a slender youth clad in black leather from neck to ankle, chestnut curls escaping from under a vizored cap. The strange child glanced around with an amateur thespian’s exaggeration of attitude, and handed a letter, marked ‘confidential,’ to Van.
Dear Veen,
In a couple of days I must leave for a spell of military service abroad. If you desire to see me before I go I shall be glad to entertain you (and any other gentleman you might wish to bring along) at dawn tomorrow where the Maidenhair road crosses Tourbière Lane. If not, I beg you to confirm in a brief note that you bear me no grudge, just as no grudge is cherished in regard to you, sir, by your obedient servant