After feasting fiercely on her throat and nipples he was about to proceed to the next stage of demented impatience, but she stopped him, explaining that she must first of all take her morning bath (this, indeed, was a new Ada) and that, moreover, she expected her luggage would be brought up any moment now by the louts of the ‘Monaco’ lounge (she had taken the wrong entrance — yet Van had bribed Cordula’s devoted janitor to practically carry Ada upstairs). ‘Quick, quick,’ said Ada, ‘da, da, Ada’ll be out of the foam in two secs!’ But mad, obstinate Van shed his terry and followed her into the bathroom, where she strained across the low tub to turn on both taps and then bent over to insert the bronze chained plug; it got sucked in by itself, however, while he steadied her lovely lyre and next moment was at the suede-soft root, was gripped, was deep between the familiar, incomparable, crimson-lined lips. She caught at the twin cock crosses, thus involuntarily increasing the sympathetic volume of the water’s noise, and Van emitted a long groan of deliverance, and now their four eyes were looking again into the azure brook of Pinedale, and Lucette pushed the door open with a perfunctory knuckle knock and stopped, mesmerized by the sight of Van’s hairy rear and the dreadful scar all along his left side.

Ada’s hands stopped the water. Luggage was being bumped down allover the flat.

‘I’m not looking,’ said Lucette idiotically, ‘I only dropped in for my box.’

‘Please, tip them, pet,’ said Van, a compulsive tipper — ‘And pass me that towel,’ added Ada, but the ancilla was picking up coins she had spilled in her haste, and Ada now saw in her turn Van’s scarlet ladder of sutures — ‘Oh my poor darling,’ she cried, and out of sheer compassion allowed him the repeat performance which Lucette’s entrance had threatened to interrupt.

‘I’m not sure I did bring her damned Cranach crayons,’ said Ada a moment later, making a frightened frog face. He watched her with a sense of perfect pine-fragrant bliss, as she squeezed out spurts of gem-like liquid from a tube of Pennsilvestris lotion into the bath water.

Lucette had gone (leaving a curt note with her room number at the Winster Hotel for Young Ladies) when our two lovers, now weak-legged and decently robed, sat down to a beautiful breakfast (Ardis’ crisp bacon! Ardis’ translucent honey!) brought up in the lift by Valerio, a ginger-haired elderly Roman, always ill-shaven and gloomy, but a dear old boy (he it was who, having procured neat Rose last June, was being paid to keep her strictly for Veen and Dean).

What laughs, what tears, what sticky kisses, what a tumult of multitudinous plans! And what safety, what freedom of love! Two unrelated gypsy courtesans, a wild girl in a gaudy lolita, poppy-mouthed and black-downed, picked up in a café between Grasse and Nice, and another, a part-time model (you have seen her fondling a virile lipstick in Fellata ads), aptly nicknamed Swallowtail by the patrons of a Norfolk Broads floramor, had both given our hero exactly the same reason, unmentionable in a family chronicle, for considering him absolutely sterile despite his prowesses. Amused by the Hecatean diagnose, Van underwent certain tests, and although pooh-poohing the symptom as coincidental, all the doctors agreed that Van Veen might be a doughty and durable lover but could never hope for an offspring. How merrily little Ada clapped her hands!

Would she like to stay in this apartment till Spring Term (he thought in terms of Terms now) and then accompany him to Kingston, or would she prefer to go abroad for a couple of months — anywhere, Patagonia, Angola, Gululu in the New Zealand mountains? Stay in this apartment? So, she liked it? Except some of Cordula’s stuff which should be ejected — as, for example, that conspicuous Brown Hill Alma Mater of Almehs left open on poor Vanda’s portrait. She had been shot dead by the girlfriend of a girlfriend on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places. It was, Van said, sad. Little Lucette no doubt had told him about a later escapade? Punning in an Ophelian frenzy on the feminine glans? Raving about the delectations of clitorism? ‘N’exagérons pas, tu sais,’ said Ada, patting the air down with both palms. ‘Lucette affirmed,’ he said, ‘that she (Ada) imitated mountain lions.’

He was omniscient. Better say, omni-incest.

‘That’s right,’ said the other total-recaller.

And, by the way, Grace — yes, Grace — was Vanda’s real favorite, pas petite moi and my little crest. She (Ada) had, hadn’t she, a way of always smoothing out the folds of the past — making the flutist practically impotent (except with his wife) and allowing the gentleman farmer only one embrace, with a premature eyakulyatsiya, one of those hideous Russian loanwords? Yes, wasn’t it hideous, but she’d love to play Scrabble again when they’d settled down for good. But where, how? Wouldn’t Mr and Mrs Ivan Veen do quite nicely anywhere? What about the ‘single’ in each passport? They’d go to the nearest Consulate and with roars of indignation and/or a fabulous bribe have it corrected to married, for ever and ever.

‘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.