‘Oh, very important,’ said Ada, catching a drop of honey on her nether lip, ‘his mother was on the dorophone, and he said please tell her he was on his way home, and I forgot all about it, and rushed up to kiss you!’

‘At Riverlane,’ said Van, ‘we used to call that a Doughnut Truth: only the truth, and the whole truth, with a hole in the truth.’

‘I hate you,’ cried Ada, and made what she called a warning frog face, because Bouteillan had appeared in the doorway, his mustache shaved, coatless, tieless, in crimson braces that were holding up to his chest his well-filled black trousers. He disappeared, promising to bring them their coffee.

‘But let me ask you, dear Van, let me ask you something. How many times has Van been unfaithful to me since September, 1884?’

‘Six hundred and thirteen times,’ answered Van. ‘With at least two hundred whores, who only caressed me. I’ve remained absolutely true to you because those were only "obmanipulations" (sham, insignificant strokings by unremembered cold hands).’

The butler, now fully dressed, arrived with the coffee and toast. And the Ladore Gazette. It contained a picture of Marina being fawned upon by a young Latin actor.

‘Pah!’ exclaimed Ada. ‘I had quite forgotten. He’s coming today, with a movie man, and our afternoon will be ruined. But I feel refreshed and fit,’ she added (after a third cup of coffee).

‘It is only ten minutes to seven now. We shall go for a nice stroll in the park; there are one or two places that you might recognize.’

‘My love,’ said Van, ‘my phantom orchid, my lovely bladder-senna! I have not slept for two nights — one of which I spent imagining the other, and this other turned out to be more than I had imagined. I’ve had enough of you for the time being.’

‘Not a very fine compliment,’ said Ada, and rang resonantly for more toast.

‘I’ve paid you eight compliments, as a certain Venetian —’

‘I’m not interested in vulgar Venetians. You have become so coarse, dear Van, so strange…’

‘Sorry,’ he said, getting up. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m dead tired, I’ll see you at lunch.’

‘There will be no lunch today,’ said Ada. ‘It will be some messy snack at the poolside, and sticky drinks all day.’

He wanted to kiss her on her silky head but Bouteillan at that moment came in and while Ada was crossly rebuking him for the meager supply of toast, Van escaped.

32

The shooting script was now ready. Marina, in dorean robe and coolie hat, reclined reading in a long-chair on the patio. Her director, G.A. Vronsky, elderly, baldheaded, with a spread of grizzled fur on his fat chest, was alternately sipping his vodka-and-tonic and feeding Marina typewritten pages from a folder. On her other side, crosslegged on a mat, sat Pedro (surname unknown, stagename forgotten), a repulsively handsome, practically naked young actor, with satyr ears, slanty eyes, and lynx nostrils, whom she had brought from Mexico and was keeping at a hotel in Ladore.

Ada, lying on the edge of the swimming pool, was doing her best to make the shy dackel face the camera in a reasonably upright and decent position, while Philip Rack, an insignificant but on the whole likable young musician who in his baggy trunks looked even more dejected and awkward than in the green velvet suit he thought fit to wear for the piano lessons he gave Lucette, was trying to take a picture of the recalcitrant chop-licking animal and of the girl’s parted breasts which her half-prone position helped to disclose in the opening of her bathing suit.

If one dollied now to another group standing a few paces away under the purple garlands of the patio arch, one might take a medium shot of the young maestro’s pregnant wife in a polka-dotted dress replenishing goblets with salted almonds, and of our distinguished lady novelist resplendent in mauve flounces, mauve hat, mauve shoes, pressing a zebra vest on Lucette, who kept rejecting it with rude remarks, learned from a maid but uttered in a tone of voice just beyond deafish Mlle Larivière’s field of hearing.

Lucette remained topless. Her tight smooth skin was the color of thick peach syrup, her little crupper in willow-green shorts rolled drolly, the sun lay sleek on her russet bob and plumpish torso: it showed but a faint circumlocation of femininity, and Van, in a scowling mood, recalled with mixed feelings how much more developed her sister had been at not quite twelve years of age.

He had spent most of the day fast asleep in his room, and a long, rambling, dreary dream had repeated, in a kind of pointless parody, his strenuous ‘Casanovanic’ night with Ada and that somehow ominous morning talk with her. Now that I am writing this, after so many hollows and heights of time, I find it not easy to separate our conversation, as set down in an inevitably stylized form, and the drone of complaints, turning on sordid betrayals that obsessed young Van in his dull nightmare. Or was he dreaming now that he had been dreaming? Had a grotesque governess really written a novel entitled Les Enfants Maudits? To be filmed by frivolous dummies, now discussing its adaptation? To be made even triter than the original Book of the Fortnight, and its gurgling blurbs? Did he detest Ada as he had in his dreams? He did.

Now, at fifteen, she was an irritating and hopeless beauty; a rather unkempt one, too; only twelve hours ago, in the dim toolroom he had whispered a riddle in her ear: what begins with a ‘de’ and rhymes more or less with a Silesian river ant? She was eccentric in habits and clothing. She cared nothing for sunbathing, and not a tinge of the tan that had californized Lucette could be traced on the shameless white of Ada’s long limbs and scrawny shoulder blades.

A remote cousin, no longer René’s sister, not even his half-sister (so lyrically anathematized by Monparnasse), she stepped over him as over a log and returned the embarrassed dog to Marina. The actor, who quite likely would run into some body’s fist in a forthcoming scene, made a filthy remark in broken French.

‘Du sollst nicht zuhören,’ murmured Ada to German Dack before putting him back in Marina’s lap under the ‘accursed children.’ ‘On ne parle pas comme ça devant un chien,’ added Ada, not deigning to glance at Pedro, who nevertheless got up, reconstructed his crotch, and beat her to the pool with a Nurjinski leap.

Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture. The silly girl had heaped her hair under a rubber cap, and this gave an unfamiliar, vaguely clinical look to her neck, with its odd dark wisps and strags, as if she had obtained a nurse’s job and would never dance again. Her faded, bluish-gray, one-piece swimsuit had a spot of grease and a hole above one hip — nibbled through, one might conjecture, by a tallow-starved larva — and seemed much too short for careless comfort. She smelled of damp cotton, axillary tufts, and nenuphars, like mad Ophelia. None of those minor matters would have annoyed Van, had she and he been alone together; but the presence of the all-male actor made everything obscene, drab and insupportable. We move back to the lip of the pool.

Our young man, being exceptionally brezgliv (squeamish, easily disgusted), had no desire to share a few cubic meters of chlorinated celestino (‘blues your bath’) with two other fellows. He was emphatically not Japanese. He always remembered, with — shudders of revulsion, the indoor pool of his prep school, the running noses, the pimpled chests, the chance contacts with odious male flesh, the suspicious bubble bursting like a small stink bomb, and especially, especially, the bland, sly, triumphant and absolutely revolting wretch who stood in shoulder-high water and secretly urinated (and, God, how he had beaten him up, though that Vere de Vere was three years older than he).

He now kept carefully out of reach of any possible splash as Pedro and Phil snorted and fooled in their foul bath. Presently the pianist, floating up and showing his awful gums in a servile grin, tried to draw Ada into the pool from her outstretched position on the tiled margin, but she evaded the grab of his despair by embracing the big orange ball she had just fished out and, pushing him away with that shield, she then threw it toward Van, who slapped it aside, refusing the gambit, ignoring the gambol, scorning the gambler.

And now hairy Pedro hoisted himself onto the brink and began to flirt with the miserable girl (his banal attentions were, really, the least of her troubles).

‘Your leetle aperture must be raccommodated,’ he said.

‘Que voulez-vous dire, for goodness sake?’ she asked, instead of dealing him a backhand wallop.

‘Permit that I contact your charming penetralium,’ the idiot insisted, and put a wet finger on the hole in her swimsuit.

‘Oh that’ (shrugging and rearranging the shoulder strap displaced by the shrug). ‘Never mind that. Next time, maybe, I’ll put on my fabulous new bikini.’

‘Next time, maybe, no Pedro?’

‘Too bad,’ said Ada. ‘Now go and fetch me a Coke, like a good dog.’

‘E tu?’ Pedro asked Marina as he walked past her chair. ‘Again screwdriver?’

‘Yes, dear, but with grapefruit, not orange, and a little zucchero. I can’t understand’ (turning to Vronsky), ‘why do I sound a hundred years old on this page and fifteen on the next? Because if it is a flashback — and it is a flashback, I suppose’ (she pronounced it fieshbeck), ‘Renny, or what’s his name, René, should not know what he seems to know.’