‘Po-russki,’ said Van, noticing that an English couple had ordered drinks and settled down to some quiet auditing.

‘Kak-to noch’yu (one night), when Andrey was away having his tonsils removed or something, dear watchful Dorochka went to investigate a suspicious noise in my maid’s room and found poor Brigitte fallen asleep in the rocker and Ada and me tryahnuvshih starinoy (reshaking old times) on the bed. That’s when I told Dora I would not stand her attitude, and immediately left for Monarch Bay.’

‘Some people are certainly odd,’ said Van. ‘If you’ve finished that sticky stuff let’s go back to your hotel and get some lunch.’

She wanted fish, he stuck to cold cuts and salad.

‘You know whom I ran into this morning? Good old Greg Erminin. It was he who told me you were around. His wife est un peu snob, what?’

‘Everybody is un peu snob,’ said Lucette. ‘Your Cordula, who is also around, cannot forgive Shura Tobak, the violinist, for being her husband’s neighbor in the telephone book. Immediately after lunch, we’ll go to my room, a numb twenty-five, my age. I have a fabulous Japanese divan and lots of orchids just supplied by one of my beaux. Ach, Bozhe moy — it has just occurred to me — I shall have to look into this — maybe they are meant for Brigitte, who is marrying after tomorrow, at three-thirty, a head waiter at the Alphonse Trois, in Auteuil. Anyway they are greenish, with orange and purple blotches, some kind of delicate Oncidium, "cypress frogs," one of those silly commercial names. I’ll stretch out upon the divan like a martyr, remember?’

‘Are you still half-a-martyr — I mean half-a-virgin?’ inquired Van.

‘A quarter,’ answered Lucette. ‘Oh, try me, Van! My divan is black with yellow cushions.’

‘You can sit for a minute in my lap.’

‘No — unless we undress and you ganch me.’

‘My dear, as I’ve often reminded you, you belong to a princely family but you talk like the loosest Lucinda imaginable. Is it a fad in your set, Lucette?’

‘I have no set, I’m a loner. Once in a while, I go out with two diplomats, a Greek and an Englishman, who are allowed to paw me and play with each other. A corny society painter is working on my portrait and he and his wife caress me when I’m in the mood. Your friend Dick Cheshire sends me presents and racing tips. It’s a dull life, Van.

‘I enjoy — oh, loads of things,’ she continued in a melancholy, musing tone of voice, as she poked with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies. ‘I love Flemish and Dutch oils, flowers, food, Flaubert, Shakespeare, shopping, sheeing, swimming, the kisses of beauties and beasts — but somehow all of it, this sauce and all the riches of Holland, form only a kind of tonen’kiy-tonen’kiy (thin little) layer, under which there is absolutely nothing, except, of course, your image, and that only adds depth and a trout’s agonies to the emptiness. I’m like Dolores — when she says she’s "only a picture painted on air."’

‘Never could finish that novel — much too pretentious.’

‘Pretentious but true. It’s exactly my sense of existing — a fragment, a wisp of color. Come and travel with me to some distant place, where there are frescoes and fountains, why can’t we travel to some distant place with ancient fountains? By ship? By sleeping car?’

‘It’s safer and faster by plane,’ said Van. ‘And for Log’s sake, speak Russian.’

Mr Sween, lunching with a young fellow who sported a bullfighter’s sideburns and other charms, bowed gravely in the direction of their table; then a naval officer in the azure uniform of the Gulfstream Guards passed by in the wake of a dark, ivory-pale lady and said: ‘Hullo Lucette, hullo, Van.’

‘Hullo, Alph,’ said Van, whilst Lucette acknowledged the greeting with an absent smile: over her propped-up entwined hands she was following with mocking eyes the receding lady. Van cleared his throat as he gloomily glanced at his half-sister.

‘Must be at least thirty-five,’ murmured Lucette, ‘yet still hopes to become his queen.’

(His father, Alphonse the First of Portugal, a puppet potentate manipulated by Uncle Victor, had recently abdicated upon Gamaliel’s suggestion in favor of a republican regime, but Lucette spoke of fragile beauty, not fickle politics.)

‘That was Lenore Colline. What’s the matter, Van?’

‘Cats don’t stare at stars, it’s not done. The resemblance is much less close than it used to be — though, of course, I’ve not kept up with counterpart changes. A propos, how’s the career been progressing?’

‘If you mean Ada’s career, I hope it’s also a flop, the same as her marriage. So my getting you will be all Demon gains. I don’t go often to movies, and I refused to speak to Dora and her when we met at the funeral and haven’t the remotest idea of what her stage or screen exploits may have been lately.’

‘Did that woman tell her brother about your innocent frolics?’

‘Of course not! She drozhit (trembles) over his bliss. But I’m sure it was she who forced Ada to write me that I "must never try again to wreck a successful marriage" — and this I forgive Daryushka, a born blackmailer, but not Adochka. I don’t care for your cabochon. I mean it’s all right on your dear hairy hand, but Papa wore one like that on his hateful pink paw. He belonged to the silent-explorer type. Once he took me to a girls’ hockey match and I had to warn him I’d yell for help if he didn’t call off the search.’

‘Das auch noch,’ sighed Van, and pocketed the heavy dark-sapphire ring. He would have put it into the ashtray had it not been Marina’s last present.

‘Look, Van,’ she said (finishing her fourth flute). ‘Why not risk it? Everything is quite simple. You marry me. You get my Ardis. We live there, you write there. I keep melting into the back ground, never bothering you. We invite Ada — alone, of course — to stay for a while on her estate, for I had always expected mother to leave Ardis to her. While she’s there, I go to Aspen or Gstaad, or Schittau, and you live with her in solid crystal with snow falling as if forever all around pendant que je shee in Aspenis. Then I come back like a shot, but she can stay on, she’s welcome, I’ll hang around in case you two want me. And then she goes back to her husband for a couple of dreary months, see?’

‘Yes, magnificent plan,’ said Van. ‘The only trouble is: she will never come. It’s now three o’clock, I have to see a man who is to renovate Villa Armina which I inherited and which will house one of my harems. Slapping a person’s wrist that way is not your prettiest mannerism on the Irish side. I shall now escort you to your apartment. You are plainly in need of some rest.’

‘I have an important, important telephone call to make, but I don’t want you to listen,’ said Lucette searching for the key in her little black handbag.

They entered the hall of her suite. There, firmly resolved to leave in a moment, he removed his glasses and pressed his mouth to her mouth, and she tasted exactly as Ada at Ardis, in the early afternoon, sweet saliva, salty epithelium, cherries, coffee. Had he not sported so well and so recently, he might not have withstood the temptation, the impardonable thrill. She plucked at his sleeve as he started to back out of the hallway.

‘Let us kiss again, let us kiss again!’ Lucette kept repeating, childishly, lispingly, barely moving her parted lips, in a fussy incoherent daze, doing her best to prevent him from thinking it over, from saying no.

He said that would do.

‘Oh but why? Oh please!’

He brushed away her cold trembling fingers.

‘Why Van? Why, why, why?’

‘You know perfectly well why. I love her, not you, and I simply refuse to complicate matters by entering into yet another incestuous relationship.’

‘That’s rich,’ said Lucette, ‘you’ve gone far enough with me on several occasions, even when I was a kid; your refusing to go further is a mere quibble on your part; and besides, besides you’ve been unfaithful to her with a thousand girls, you dirty cheat!’

‘You shan’t talk to me in that tone,’ said Van, meanly turning her poor words into a pretext for marching away.

‘I apollo, I love you,’ she whispered frantically, trying to cry after him in a whisper because the corridor was all door and ears, but he walked on, waving both arms in the air without looking back, quite forgivingly, though, and was gone.

4

A teasy problem demanded Dr Veen’s presence in England.

Old Paar of Chose had written him that the ‘Clinic’ would like him to study a singular case of chromesthesia, but that given certain aspects of the case (such as a faint possibility of trickery) Van should come and decide for himself whether he thought it worth the trouble to fly the patient to Kingston for further observation. One Spencer Muldoon, born eyeless, aged forty, single, friendless, and the third blind character in this chronicle, had been known to hallucinate during fits of violent paranoia, calling out the names of such shapes and substances as he had learned to identify by touch, or thought he recognized through the awfulness of stories about them (falling trees, extinct saurians) and which now pressed on him from all sides, alternating with periods of stupor, followed invariably by a return to his normal self, when for a week or two he would finger his blind books or listen, in red-lidded bliss, to records of music, bird songs, and Irish poetry.

His ability to break space into ranks and files of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ things in what seemed a wallpaper pattern remained a mystery until one evening, when a research student (R.S. — he wished to remain that way), who intended to trace certain graphs having to do with the metabasis of another patient, happened to leave within Muldoon’s reach one of those elongated boxes of new, unsharpened, colored-chalk pencils whose mere evocation (Dixon Pink Anadel!) make one’s memory speak in the language of rainbows, the tints of their painted and polished woods being graded spectrally in their neat tin container. Poor Muldoon’s childhood could not come to him with anything like such iridian recall, but when his groping fingers opened the box and palpated the pencils, a certain expression of sensual relish appeared on his parchment-pale face. Upon observing that the blind man’s eyebrows went up slightly at red, higher at orange, still higher at the shrill scream of yellow and then stepped down through the rest of the prismatic spectrum, R.S. casually told him that the woods were dyed differently — ‘red,’ ‘orange,’ ‘yellow,’ et cetera, and quite as casually Muldoon rejoined that they also felt different one from another.