‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s fun to be two secret agents in an alien country. Marina has gone upstairs. Your hair is wet.’

‘Spies from Terra? You believe, you believe in the existence of Terra? Oh, you do! You accept it. I know you!’

‘I accept it as a state of mind. That’s not quite the same thing.’

‘Yes, but you want to prove it is the same thing.’

He brushed her lips with another religious’ kiss. Its edge, however, was beginning to catch fire.

‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘I will ask you for a repeat performance. You will sit as you did four years ago, at the same table, in the same light, drawing the same flower, and I shall go through the same scene with such joy, such pride, such — I don’t know — gratitude! Look, all the windows are dark now. I, too, can translate when I simply have to. Listen to this:


Lights in the rooms were going out.

Breathed fragrantly the rozï.

We sat together in the shade

Of a wide-branched beryozï.’


‘Yes, "birch" is what leaves the translator in the "lurch," doesn’t it? That’s a terrible little poem by Konstantin Romanov, right? Just elected president of the Lyascan Academy of Literature, right? Wretched poet and happy husband. Happy husband!’

‘You know,’ said Van, ‘I really think you should wear something underneath on formal occasions.’

‘Your hands are cold. Why formal? You said yourself it was a family affair.’

‘Even so. You were in peril whenever you bent or sprawled.’

‘I never sprawl!’

‘I’m quite sure it’s not hygienic, or perhaps it’s a kind of jealousy on my part. Memoirs of a Happy Chair. Oh, my darling.’

‘At least,’ whispered Ada, ‘it pays off now, doesn’t it? Croquet room? Ou comme ça?’

‘Comme ça, for once,’ said Van.

39

Although fairly eclectic in 1888, Ladore fashions were not quite as free as taken for granted at Ardis.

For the grand picnic on her birthday sixteen-year-old Ada wore a plain linen blouse, maize-yellow slacks and scuffed moccasins. Van had wanted her to let her hair down; she demurred, saying it was too long for country comfort, but finally compromised by tying it midway behind with a rumpled ribbon of black silk. Van’s only observance of summer elegancies consisted of a blue polo jersey, knee-length gray flannel trousers, and sport ‘creepers’.

While the rustic feast was being prepared and distributed among the sun gouts of the traditional pine glade, the wild girl and her lover slipped away for a few moments of ravenous ardor in a ferny ravine where a rill dipped from ledge to ledge between tall burnberry bushes. The day was hot and breathless. The smallest pine had its cicada.

She said: ‘Speaking as a character in an old novel, it seems so long, long ago, davnïm davno, since I used to play word-games here with Grace and two other lovely girls. "Insect, incest, nicest."’

Speaking as a botanist and a mad woman, she said, the most extraordinary word in the English language was ‘husked,’ becaused it stood for opposite things, covered and uncovered, tightly husked but easily husked, meaning they peel off quite easily, you don’t have to tear the waistband, you brute. ‘Carefully husked brute,’ said Van tenderly. The passage of time could only enhance his tenderness for the creature he clasped, this adored creature, whose motion was now more supple, whose haunches had grown more lyrate, whose hair-ribbon he had undone.

As they crouched on the brink of one of the brook’s crystal shelves, where, before falling, it stopped to have its picture taken and take pictures itself, Van, at the last throb, saw the reflection of Ada’s gaze in the water flash a warning. Something of the sort had happened somewhere before: he did not have time to identify the recollection that, nonetheless, led him to identify at once the sound of the stumble behind him.

Among the rugged rocks they found and consoled poor little Lucette, whose foot had slipped on a granite slab in a tangle of bushes. Flushed and flustered, the child rubbed her thigh in much-overdone agony. Van and Ada gaily grasped one little hand each and ran Lucette back to the glade, where she laughed, where she flopped, where she made for her favorite tarts awaiting her on one of the unfolded tables. There she husked out of her sweat shirt, hitched up her green shorts and, asquat on the russet ground, attacked the food she had collected.

Ada had declined to invite anybody except the Erminin twins to her picnic; but she had had no intention of inviting the brother without the sister. The latter, it turned out, could not come, having gone to New Cranton to see a young drummer, her first boy friend, sail off into the sunrise with his regiment. But Greg had to be asked to come after all: on the previous day he had called on her bringing a ‘talisman’ from his very sick father, who wanted Ada to treasure as much as his grandam had a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok.

Van did not err in believing that Ada remained unaffected by Greg’s devotion. He now met him again with pleasure — the kind of pleasure, immoral in its very purity, which adds its icy tang to the friendly feelings a successful rival bears toward a thoroughly decent fellow.

Greg, who had left his splendid new black Silentium motorcycle in the forest ride, observed:

‘We have company.’

‘Indeed we do,’ assented Van. ‘Kto sii (who are they)? Do you have any idea?’

Nobody had. Raincoated, unpainted, morose, Marina came over and peered through the trees the way Van pointed.

After reverently inspecting the Silentium, a dozen elderly townsmen, in dark clothes, shabby and uncouth, walked into the forest across the road and sat down there to a modest colazione of cheese, buns, salami, sardines and Chianti. They were quite sufficiently far from our picnickers not to bother them in any way. They had no mechanical music boxes with them. Their voices were subdued, their movements could not have been more discreet. The predominant gesture seemed to be ritually limited to this or that fist crumpling brown paper or coarse gazette paper or baker’s paper (the very lightweight and inefficient sort), and discarding the crumpled bit in quiet, abstract fashion, while other sad apostolic hands unwrapped the victuals or for some reason or other wrapped them up again, in the noble shade of the pines, in the humble shade of the false acacias.

‘How odd,’ said Marina, scratching her sunlit bald patch.

She sent a footman to investigate the situation and tell those Gipsy politicians, or Calabrian laborers, that Squire Veen would be furious if he discovered trespassers camping in his woods.

The footman returned, shaking his head. They did not speak English. Van went over:

‘Please go away, this is private property,’ said Van in Vulgar Latin, French, Canadian French, Russian, Yukonian Russian, very low Latin again: proprieta privata.

He stood looking at them, hardly noticed by them, hardly shade-touched by the foliage. They were ill-shaven, blue-jowled men in old Sunday suits. One or two wore no collar but had kept the thyroid stud. One had a beard and a humid squint. Patent boots, with dust in the cracks, or orange-brown shoes either very square or very pointed had been taken off and pushed under the burdocks or placed on the old tree stumps of the rather drab clearing. How odd indeed! When Van repeated his request, the intruders started to mutter among themselves in a totally incomprehensible jargon, making small flapping motions in his direction as if half-heartedly chasing away a gnat.

He asked Marina — did she want him to use force, but sweet, dear Marina said, patting her hair, one hand on her hip, no, let us ignore them — especially as they were now drawing a little deeper into the trees — look, look — some dragging à reculons the various parts of their repast upon what resembled an old bedspread, which receded like a fishing boat pulled over pebbly sand, while others politely removed the crumpled wrappings to other more distant hiding places in keeping with the general relocation: a most melancholy and meaningful picture — but meaning what, what?

Gradually their presence dissolved from Van’s mind. Everybody was now having a wonderful time. Marina threw off the pale raincoat or rather ‘dustcoat’ she had put on for the picnic (after all, with one thing and another, her domestic gray dress with the pink fichu was quite gay enough, she declared, for an old lady) and raising an empty glass she sang, with brio and very musically, the Green Grass aria: ‘Replenish, replenish the glasses with wine! Here’s a toast to love! To the rapture of love!’ With awe and pity, and no love, Van kept reverting to that poor bald patch on Traverdiata’s poor old head, to the scalp burnished by her hairdye an awful pine rust color much shinier than her dead hair. He attempted, as so many times before, to squeeze out some fondness for her but as usual failed and as usual told himself that Ada did not love her mother either, a vague and cowardly consolation.

Greg, assuming with touching simplicity that Ada would notice and approve, showered Mlle Larivière with a thousand little attentions — helping her out of her mauve jacket, pouring out for her the milk into Lucette’s mug from a thermos bottle, passing the sandwiches, replenishing, replenishing Mlle Larivière’s wineglass and listening with a rapt grin to her diatribes against the English, whom she said she disliked even more than the Tartars, or the, well, Assyrians.