Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle Read online

  A gong bronzily boomed on a terrace.

  For some odd reason both children were relieved to learn that a stranger was expected to dinner. He was an Andalusian architect whom Uncle Dan wanted to plan an ‘artistic’ swimming pool for Ardis Manor. Uncle Dan had intended to come, too, with an interpreter, but had caught the Russian ‘hrip’ (Spanish flu) instead, and had phoned Marina asking her to be very nice to good old Alonso.

  ‘You must help me!’ Marina told the children with a worried frown.

  ‘I could show him a copy, perhaps,’ said Ada, turning to Van, ‘of an absolutely fantastically lovely nature morte by Juan de Labrador of Extremadura — golden grapes and a strange rose against a black background. Dan sold it to Demon, and Demon has promised to give it to me on my fifteenth birthday.’

  ‘We also have some Zurbarán fruit,’ said Van smugly. ‘Tangerines, I believe, and a fig of sorts, with a wasp upon it. Oh, we’ll dazzle the old boy with shop talk!’

  They did not. Alonso, a tiny wizened man in a double-breasted tuxedo, spoke only Spanish, while the sum of Spanish words his hosts knew scarcely exceeded half a dozen. Van had canastilla (a little basket), and nubarrones (thunderclouds), which both came from an en regard translation of a lovely Spanish poem in one of his schoolbooks. Ada remembered, of course, mariposa, butterfly, and the names of two or three birds (listed in ornithological guides) such as paloma, pigeon, or grevol, hazel hen. Marina knew aroma and hombre, and an anatomical term with a ‘j’ hanging in the middle. In consequence, the table-talk consisted of long lumpy Spanish phrases pronounced very loud by the voluble architect who thought he was dealing with very deaf people, and of a smatter of French, intentionally but vainly italianized by his victims. Once the difficult dinner over, Alonso investigated by the light of three torches held by two footmen a possible site for an expensive pool, put the plan of the grounds back into his briefcase, and after kissing by mistake Ada’s hand in the dark, hastened away to catch the last southbound train.

  7

  Van had gone to bed, sandpaper-eyed, soon after ‘evening tea,’ a practically tea-less summertime meal which came a couple of hours after dinner and the occurrence of which seemed to Marina as natural and inevitable as that of a sunset before night. This routine Russian feast consisted in the Ardis household of prostokvasha (translated by English governesses as curds-and-whey, and by Mlle Larivière as lait caillé, ‘curdled milk’), whose thin, cream-smooth upper layer little Miss Ada delicately but avidly (Ada, those adverbs qualified many actions of yours!) skimmed off with her special monogrammed silver spoon and licked up, before attacking the more amorphous junkety depths of the stuff; with this came coarse black peasant bread; dusky klubnika (Fragaria elatior), and huge, bright-red garden strawberries (a cross between two other Fragaria species). Van had hardly laid his cheek on his cool flat pillow when he was violently aroused by a clamorous caroling — bright warbles, sweet whistles, chirps, trills, twitters, rasping caws and tender chew-chews — which he assumed, not without a non-Audubon’s apprehension, Ada could, and would, break up into the right voices of the right birds. He slipped into loafers, collected soap, comb and towel, and, containing his nudity in a terry-cloth robe, left his bedroom with the intention of going for a dip in the brook he had observed on the eve. The corridor clock tocked amid an auroral silence broken indoors only by the snore coming from the governess’ room. After a moment of hesitation he visited the nursery water closet. There, the mad aviary and rich sun got at him through a narrow casement. He was quite well, quite well! As he descended the grand staircase, General Durmanov’s father acknowledged Van with grave eyes and passed him on to old Prince Zemski and other ancestors, all as discreetly attentive as those museum guards who watch the only tourist in a dim old palace.

  The front door proved to be bolted and chained. He tried the glassed and grilled side door of a blue-garlanded gallery; it, too, did not yield. Being still unaware that under the stairs an in conspicuous recess concealed an assortment of spare keys (some very old and anonymous, hanging from brass hooks) and communicated though a toolroom with a secluded part of the garden, Van wandered through several reception rooms in search of an obliging window. In a corner room he found, standing at a tall window, a young chambermaid whom he had glimpsed (and promised himself to investigate) on the preceding evening. She wore what his father termed with a semi-assumed leer ‘soubret black and frissonet frill’; a tortoiseshell comb in her chestnut hair caught the amber light; the French window was open, and she was holding one hand, starred with a tiny aquamarine, rather high on the jamb as she looked at a sparrow that was hopping up the paved path toward the bit of baby-toed biscuit she had thrown to him. Her cameo profile, her cute pink nostril, her long, French, lily-white neck, the outline, both full and frail, of her figure (male lust does not go very far for descriptive felicities!), and especially the savage sense of opportune license moved Van so robustly that he could not resist clasping the wrist of her raised tight-sleeved arm. Freeing it, and confirming by the coolness of her demeanor that she had sensed his approach, the girl turned her attractive, though almost eyebrowless, face toward him and asked him if he would like a cup of tea before breakfast. No. What was her name? Blanche — but Mlle Larivière called her ‘Cendrillon’ because her stockings got so easily laddered, see, and because she broke and mislaid things, and confused flowers. His loose attire revealed his desire; this could not escape a girl’s notice, even if color-blind, and as he drew up still closer, while looking over her head for a suitable couch to take shape in some part of this magical manor — where any place, as in Casanova’s remembrances could be dream-changed into a sequestered seraglio nook — she wiggled out of his reach completely and delivered a little soliloquy in her soft Ladoran French:

  ‘Monsieur a quinze ans, je crois, et moi, je sais, j’en ai dixneuf. Monsieur is a nobleman; I am a poor peat-digger’s daughter. Monsieur a tâté, sans doute, des filles de la ville; quant à moi, je suis vierge, ou peu s’en faut. De plus, were I to fall in love with you — I mean really in love — and I might, alas, if you possessed me rien qu’une petite fois — it would be, for me, only grief, and infernal fire, and despair, and even death, Monsieur. Finalement, I might add that I have the whites and must see le Docteur Chronique, I mean Crolique, on my next day off. Now we have to separate, the sparrow has disappeared, I see, and Monsieur Bouteillan has entered the next room, and can perceive us clearly in that mirror above the sofa behind that silk screen.’

  ‘Forgive me, girl,’ murmured Van, whom her strange, tragic tone had singularly put off, as if he were taking part in a play in which he was the principal actor, but of which he could only recall that one scene.

  The butler’s hand in the mirror took down a decanter from nowhere and was withdrawn. Van, reknotting the cord of his robe, passed through the French window into the green reality of the garden.

  8

  On the same morning, or a couple of days later, on the terrace:

  ‘Mais va donc jouer avec lui,’ said Mlle Larivière, pushing Ada, whose young hips disjointedly jerked from the shock. ‘Don’t let your cousin se morfondre when the weather is so fine. Take him by the hand. Go and show him the white lady in your favorite lane, and the mountain, and the great oak.’

  Ada turned to him with a shrug. The touch of her cold fingers and damp palm and the self-conscious way she tossed back her hair as they walked down the main avenue of the park made him self-conscious too, and under the pretext of picking up a fir cone he disengaged his hand. He threw the cone at a woman of marble bending over a stamnos but only managed to frighten a bird that perched on the brim of her broken jar.

  ‘There is nothing more banal in the world,’ said Ada, ‘than pitching stones at a hawfinch.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Van, ‘I did not intend to scare that bird. But then, I’m not a country lad, who knows a cone from a stone. What games, au fond, does she expect us to play?’

  ‘Je l’ignore,’ replied Ada. ‘I really don�
�t care very much how her poor mind works. Cache-cache, I suppose, or climbing trees.’

  ‘Oh, I’m good at that,’ said Van, ‘in fact, I can even brachiate.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘we are going to play my games. Games I have invented all by myself. Games Lucette, I hope, will be able to play next year with me, the poor pet. Come, let us start. The present series belongs to the shadow-and-shine group, two of which I’m going to show you.’

  ‘I see,’ said Van.

  ‘You will in a moment,’ rejoined the pretty prig. ‘First of all we must find a nice stick.’

  ‘Look,’ said Van, still smarting a bit, ‘there goes another haw-haw finch.’

  By then they had reached the rond-point — a small arena encircled by flowerbeds and jasmine bushes in heavy bloom. Overhead the arms of a linden stretched toward those of an oak, like a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father hanging by his feet from the trapeze. Even then did we both understand that kind of heavenly stuff, even then.

  ‘Something rather acrobatic about those branches up there, no?’ he said, pointing.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I discovered it long ago. The teil is the flying Italian lady, and the old oak aches, the old lover aches, but still catches her every time’ (impossible to reproduce the right intonation while rendering the entire sense — after eight decades! — but she did say something extravagant, something quite out of keeping with her tender age as they looked up and then down).

  Looking down and gesturing with a sharp green stake borrowed from the peonies, Ada explained the first game.

  The shadows of leaves on the sand were variously interrupted by roundlets of live light. The player chose his roundlet — the best, the brightest he could find — and firmly outlined it with the point of his stick; whereupon the yellow round light would appear to grow convex like the brimming surface of some golden dye. Then the player delicately scooped out the earth with his stick or fingers within the roundlet. The level of that gleaming infusion de tilleul would magically sink in its goblet of earth and finally dwindle to one precious drop. That player won who made the most goblets in, say, twenty minutes.

  Van asked suspiciously if that was all.

  No, it was not. As she dug a firm little circle around a particularly fine goldgout, Ada squatted and moved, squatting, with her black hair falling over her ivory-smooth moving knees while her haunches and hands worked, one hand holding the stick, the other brushing back bothersome strands of hair. A gentle breeze suddenly eclipsed her fleck. When that occurred, the player lost one point, even if the leaf or the cloud hastened to move aside.

  All right. What was the other game?

  The other game (in a singsong voice) might seem a little more complicated. To play it properly one had to wait for p.m. to provide longer shadows. The player —

  ‘Stop saying "the player." It is either you or me.’

  ‘Say, you. You outline my shadow behind me on the sand. I move. You outline it again. Then you mark out the next boundary (handing him the stick). If I now move back —’

  ‘You know,’ said Van, throwing the stick away, ‘personally I think these are the most boring and stupid games anybody has ever invented, anywhere, any time, a.m. or p.m.’

  She said nothing but her nostrils narrowed. She retrieved the stick and stuck it back, furiously, where it belonged, deep into the loam next to a grateful flower to which she looped it with a silent nod. She walked back to the house. He wondered if her walk would be more graceful when she grew up.

  ‘I’m a rude brutal boy, please forgive me,’ he said.

  She inclined her head without looking back. In token of partial reconciliation, she showed him two sturdy hooks passed into iron rings on two tulip-tree trunks between which, before she was born, another boy, also Ivan, her mother’s brother, used to sling a hammock in which he slept in midsummer when the nights became really sultry — this was the latitude of Sicily, after all.

  ‘A splendid idea,’ said Van. ‘By the way, do fireflies burn one if they fly into you? I’m just asking. Just a city boy’s silly question.’

  She showed him next where the hammock — a whole set of hammocks, a canvas sack full of strong, soft nets — was stored: this was in the corner of a basement toolroom behind the lilacs, the key was concealed in this hole here which last year was stuffed by the nest of a bird — no need to identify it. A pointer of sunlight daubed with greener paint a long green box where croquet implements were kept; but the balls had been rolled down the hill by some rowdy children, the little Erminins, who were now Van’s age and had grown very nice and quiet.

  ‘As we all are at that age,’ said Van and stooped to pick up a curved tortoiseshell comb — the kind that girls use to hold up their hair behind; he had seen one, exactly like that, quite recently, but when, in whose hairdo?

  ‘One of the maids,’ said Ada. ‘That tattered chapbook must also belong to her, Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor.’

  ‘Playing croquet with you,’ said Van, ‘should be rather like using flamingoes and hedgehogs.’

  ‘Our reading lists do not match,’ replied Ada. ‘That Palace in Wonderland was to me the kind of book everybody so often promised me I would adore, that I developed an insurmountable prejudice toward it. Have you read any of Mlle Larivière’s stories? Well, you will. She thinks that in some former Hindooish state she was a boulevardier in Paris; and writes accordingly. We can squirm from here into the front hall by a secret passage, but I think we are supposed to go and look at the grand chêne which is really an elm.’ Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas. They rhymed. Should he mention it?

  ‘And now,’ she said, and stopped, staring at him.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, ‘and now?’

  ‘Well, perhaps, I ought not to try to divert you — after you trampled upon those circles of mine; but I’m going to relent and show you the real marvel of Ardis Manor; my larvarium, it’s in the room next to mine’ (which he never saw, never — how odd, come to think of it!).

  She carefully closed a communicating door as they entered into what looked like a glorified rabbitry at the end of a marble-flagged hall (a converted bathroom, as it transpired). In spite of the place’s being well aired, with the heraldic stained-glass windows standing wide open (so that one heard the screeching and catcalls of an undernourished and horribly frustrated bird population), the smell of the hutches — damp earth, rich roots, old greenhouse and maybe a hint of goat — was pretty appalling. Before letting him come nearer, Ada fiddled with little latches and grates, and a sense of great emptiness and depression replaced the sweet fire that had been consuming Van since the beginning of their innocent games on that day.

  ‘Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe (I’m crazy about everything that crawls),’ she said.

  ‘Personally,’ said Van, ‘I rather like those that roll up in a muff when you touch them — those that go to sleep like old dogs.’

  ‘Oh, they don’t go to sleep, quelle idée, they swoon, it’s a little syncope,’ explained Ada frowning. ‘And I imagine it may be quite a little shock for the younger ones.’

  ‘Yes, I can well imagine that, too. But I suppose one gets used to it, by-and-by, I mean.’

  But his ill-informed hesitations soon gave way to esthetic empathy. Many decades later Van remembered having much admired the lovely, naked, shiny, gaudily spotted and streaked sharkmoth caterpillars, as poisonous as the mullein flowers clustering around them, and the flat larva of a local catocalid whose gray knobs and lilac plaques mimicked the knots and lichens of the twig to which it clung so closely as to practically lock with it, and, of course, the little Vaporer fellow, its black coat enlivened all along the back with painted tufts, red, blue, yellow, of unequal length, like those of a fancy toothbrush treated with certified colors. And that kind of simile, with those special trimm
ings, reminds me today of the entomological entries in Ada’s diary — which we must have somewhere, mustn’t we, darling, in that drawer there, no? you don’t think so? Yes! Hurrah! Samples (your round-cheeked script, my love, was a little larger, but otherwise nothing, nothing, nothing has changed):

  ‘The retractile head and diabolical anal appendages of the garish monster that produces the modest Puss Moth belong to a most uncaterpillarish caterpillar, with front segments shaped like bellows and a face resembling the lens of a folding camera. If you gently stroke its bloated smooth body, the sensation is quite silky and pleasant — until the irritated creature ungratefully squirts at you an acrid fluid from a slit in its throat.’

  ‘Dr Krolik received from Andalusia and kindly gave me five young larvae of the newly described very local Carmen Tortoiseshell. They are delightful creatures, of a beautiful jade nuance with silvery spikes, and they breed only on a semi-extinct species of high-mountain willow (which dear Crawly also obtained for me).’

  (At ten or earlier the child had read — as Van had — Les Malheurs de Swann, as the next sample reveals):

  ‘I think Marina would stop scolding me for my hobby ("There’s something indecent about a little girl’s keeping such revolting pets…," "Normal young ladies should loathe snakes and worms," et cetera) if I could persuade her to overcome her old-fashioned squeamishness and place simultaneously on palm and pulse (the hand alone would not be roomy enough!) the noble larva of the Cattleya Hawkmoth (mauve shades of Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch-long colossus flesh colored, with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head in a stiff "Sphinxian" attitude.’

  (Lovely stuff! said Van, but even I did not quite assimilate it, when I was young. So let us not bore the boor who flips through a book and thinks: ‘what a hoaxer, that old V.V.!’)