10

Weekday lunch at Ardis Hall. Lucette between Marina and the governess; Van between Marina and Ada; Dack, the golden-brown stoat, under the table, either between Ada and Mlle Larivière, or between Lucette and Marina (Van secretly disliked dogs, especially at meals, and especially that smallish longish freak with a gamey breath). Arch and grandiloquent, Ada would be describing a dream, a natural history wonder, a special belletristic device—Paul Bourget’s “monologue intérieur” borrowed from old Leo—or some ludicrous blunder in the current column of Elsie de Nord, a vulgar literary demimondaine who thought that Lyovin went about Moscow in a nagol’nïy tulup, “a muzhik’s sheepskin coat, bare side out, bloom side in,” as defined in a dictionary our commentator produced like a conjurer, never to be procurable by Elsies. Her spectacular handling of subordinate clauses, her parenthetic asides, her sensual stressing of adjacent monosyllables (“Idiot Elsie simply can’t read”)—all this somehow finished by acting upon Van, as artificial excitements and exotic torture-caresses might have done, in an aphrodisiac sinistral direction that he both resented and perversely enjoyed.

“My precious” her mother called her, punctuating Ada’s discourse with little ejaculations: “Terribly funny!” “Oh, I adore that!” but also indulging in more admonitory remarks, such as “Do sit a wee bit straighter” or “Eat, my precious” (accenting the “eat” with a motherly urge very unlike the malice of her daughter’s spondaic sarcasms).

Ada, now sitting straight, incurving her supple spine in her chair, then, as the dream or adventure (or whatever she was relating) reached a climax, bending over the place from which Price had prudently removed her plate, and suddenly all elbows, sprawling forward, invading the table, then leaning back, extravagantly making mouths, illustrating “long, long” with both hands up, up!

“My precious, you haven’t tried the—oh, Price, bring the—”

The what? The rope for the fakir’s bare-bottomed child to climb up in the melting blue?

“It was sort of long, long. I mean (interrupting herself) … like a tentacle … no, let me see” (shake of head, jerk of features, as if unknotting a tangled skein with one quick tug).

No: enormous purple pink plums, one with a wet yellow burst-split.

“And so there I was—” (the tumbling hair, the hand flying to the temple, sketching but not terminating the brushing-off-strand stroke; then a sudden peal of rough-rippled laughter ending in a moist cough).

“No, but seriously, Mother, you must imagine me utterly speechless, screaming speechlessly, as I realized—”

At the third or fourth meal Van also realized something. Far from being a bright lass showing off for the benefit of a newcomer, Ada’s behavior was a desperate and rather clever attempt to prevent Marina from appropriating the conversation and transforming it into a lecture on the theater. Marina, on the other hand, while awaiting a chance to trot out her troika of hobby horses, took some professional pleasure in playing the hackneyed part of a fond mother, proud of her daughter’s charm and humor, and herself charmingly and humorously lenient toward their brash circumstantiality: she was showing off—not Ada! And when Van had understood the true situation, he would take advantage of a pause (which Marina was on the point of filling with some choice Stanislavskiana) to launch Ada upon the troubled waters of Botany Bay, a voyage which at other times he dreaded, but which now proved to be the safest and easiest course for his girl. This was particularly important at dinner, since Lucette and her governess had an earlier evening meal upstairs, so that Mlle Larivière was not there, at those critical moments, and could not be relied on to take over from lagging Ada with a breezy account of her work on a new novella of her composition (her famous Diamond Necklace was in the last polishing stage) or with memories of Van’s early boyhood such as those eminently acceptable ones concerning his beloved Russian tutor, who gently courted Mlle L., wrote “decadent” Russian verse in sprung rhythm, and drank, in Russian solitude.

Van: “That yellow thingum” (pointing at a floweret prettily depicted on an Eckercrown plate) “—is it a buttercup?”

Ada: “No. That yellow flower is the common Marsh Marigold, Caltha palustris. In this country, peasants miscall it ‘Cowslip,’ though of course the true Cowslip, Primula veris, is a different plant altogether.”

“I see,” said Van.

“Yes, indeed,” began Marina, “when I was playing Ophelia, the fact that I had once collected flowers—”

“Helped, no doubt,” said Ada. “Now the Russian word for marsh marigold is Kuroslep (which muzhiks in Tartary misapply, poor slaves, to the buttercup) or else Kaluzhnitsa, as used quite properly in Kaluga, U.S.A.”

“Ah,” said Van.

“As in the case of many flowers,” Ada went on, with a mad scholar’s quiet smile, “the unfortunate French name of our plant, souci d’eau, has been traduced or shall we say transfigured—”

“Flowers into bloomers,” punned Van Veen.

“Je vous en prie, vies enfants!” put in Marina, who had been following the conversation with difficulty and now, through a secondary misunderstanding, thought the reference was to the undergarment.

“By chance, this very morning,” said Ada, not deigning to enlighten her mother, “our learned governess, who was also yours, Van, and who—”

(First time she pronounced it—at that botanical lesson!)

“—is pretty hard on English-speaking transmongrelizers—monkeys called ‘ursine howlers’—though I suspect her reasons are more chauvinistic than artistic and moral—drew my attention—my wavering attention—to some really gorgeous bloomers, as you call them, Van, in a Mr. Fowlie’s soi-disant literal version—called ‘sensitive’ in a recent Elsian rave—sensitive!—of Mémoire, a poem by Rimbaud (which she fortunately—and farsightedly—made me learn by heart, though I suspect she prefers Musset and Coppée)”—

“…  les robes vertes et déteintes des fillettes …” quoted Van triumphantly.

“Egg-zactly” (mimicking Dan). “Well, Larivière allows me to read him only in the Feuilletin anthology, the same you have apparently, but I shall obtain his oeuvres completes very soon, oh very soon, much sooner than anybody thinks. Incidentally, she will come down after tucking in Lucette, our darling copperhead who by now should be in her green nightgown—”

“Angel moy,” pleaded Marina, “I’m sure Van cannot be interested in Lucette’s nightdress!”

“—the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into ‘the sky’s bed’ instead of ‘bed ceiler.’ But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d’or in that collection of fouled French is the trans formation of souci d’eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine ‘care of the water’—although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, marybud, maybubble, and many other nicknames associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.”

“On the other hand,” said Van, “one can well imagine a similarly bilingual Miss Rivers checking a French version of, say, Marvell’s Garden—”

“Oh,” cried Ada, “I can recite ‘Le jardin’ in my own trans-version—let me see—

“…  to win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes!” shouted Van.

“You know, children,” interrupted Marina resolutely with calming gestures of both hands, “when I was your age, Ada, and my brother was your age, Van, we talked about croquet, and ponies, and puppies, and the last fête-d’enfants, and the next picnic, and—oh, millions of nice normal things, but never, never of old French botanists and God knows what!”

“But you just said you collected flowers?” said Ada.

“Oh, just one season, somewhere in Switzerland. I don’t remember when. It does not matter now.”

The reference was to Ivan Durmanov: he had died of lung cancer years ago in a sanatorium (not far from Ex, somewhere in Switzerland, where Van was born eight years later). Marina often mentioned Ivan who had been a famous violinist at eighteen, but without any special show of emotion, so that Ada now noted with surprise that her mother’s heavy make-up had started to thaw under a sudden flood of tears (maybe some allergy to flat dry old flowers, an attack of hay fever, or gentianitis, as a slightly later diagnosis might have shown retrospectively). She blew her nose, with the sound of an elephant, as she said herself—and here Mlle Larivière came down for coffee and recollections of Van as a bambin angélique who adored à neuf ans—the precious dear!—Gilberte Swann et la Lesbie de Catulle (and who had learned, all by himself, to release the adoration as soon as the kerosene lamp had left the mobile bedroom in his black nurse’s fist).