Vladimir Nabokov Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 15 страница

‘Oh, I know ‘em, ’ interrupted Demon:

‘Leur chute est lente. On peut les suivre

Du regard en reconnaissant

Le chê ne à sa feuille de cuivre

L’é rable à sa feuille de sang

‘Grand stuff! ’

‘Yes, that was Coppé e and now comes the cousin, ’ said Van, and he recited:

‘Their fall is gentle. The leavesdropper

Can follow each of them and know

The oak tree by its leaf of copper,

The maple by its blood-red glow. ’

‘Pah! ’ uttered the versionist.

‘Not at all! ’ cried Demon. ‘That " leavesdropper" is a splendid trouvaille, girl. ’ He pulled the girl to him, she landing on the arm of his Klubsessel, and he glued himself with thick moist lips to her hot red ear through the rich black strands. Van felt a shiver of delight.

It was now Marina’s turn to make her entré e, which she did in excellent chiaroscuro circumstances, wearing a spangled dress, her face in the soft focus sought by ripe stars, holding out both arms and followed by Jones, who carried two flambeaux and kept trying to keep within the limits of decorum the odd little go-away kicks he was aiming backwards at a brown flurry in the shadows.

‘Marina! ’ cried Demon with perfunctory enthusiasm, and patted her hand as he joined her on a settee.

Puffing rhythmically, Jones set one of his beautiful dragon-entwined flambeaux on the low-boy with the gleaming drinks and was about to bring over its fellow to the spot where Demon and Marina were winding up affable preliminaries but was quickly motioned by Marina to a pedestal near the striped fish. Puffing, he drew the curtains, for nothing but picturesque ruins remained of the day. Jones was new, very efficient, solemn and slow, and one had to get used gradually to his ways and wheeze. Years later he rendered me a service that I will never forget.

‘She’s a jeune fille fatale, a pale, heart-breaking beauty, ’ Demon confided to his former mistress without bothering to discover whether the subject of his praise could hear him (she did) from the other end of the room where she was helping Van to corner the dog — and showing much too much leg in the process. Our old friend, being quite as excited as the rest of the reunited family, had scampered in after Marina with an old miniver-furred slipper in his merry mouth. The slipper belonged to Blanche, who had been told to whisk Dack to her room but, as usual, had not incarcerated him properly. Both children experienced a chill of dé jà -vu (a twofold dé jà -vu, in fact, when contemplated in artistic retrospect).

‘Pozhalsta bez glupostey (please, no silly things), especially devant les gens, ’ said deeply flattered Marina (sounding the final ‘s’ as her granddams had done); and when the slow fish-mouthed footman had gone carrying away, supine, high-chested Dack and his poor plaything, she continued: ‘Really, in comparison to the local girls, to Grace Erminin, for example, or Cordula de Prey, Ada is a Turgenevian maiden or even a Jane Austen miss. ’

‘I’m Fanny Price, actually, ’ commented Ada.

‘In the staircase scene, ’ added Van.

‘Let’s not bother about their private jokes, ’ said Marina to Demon. ‘I never can understand their games and little secrets. Mlle Lariviè re, however, has written a wonderful screenplay about mysterious children doing strange things in old parks — but don’t let her start talking of her literary successes tonight, that would be fatal. ’

‘I hope your husband won’t be too late, ’ said Demon. ‘He is not at his best after eight p. m., summertime, you know. By the way, how’s Lucette? ’

At this moment both battants of the door were flung open by Bouteillan in the grand manner, and Demon offered kalachikom (in the form of a Russian crescent loaf) his arm to Marina. Van, who in his father’s presence was prone to lapse into a rather dismal sort of playfulness, proposed taking Ada in, but she slapped his wrist away with a sisterly sans-gê ne, of which Fanny Price might not have approved.

Another Price, a typical, too typical, old retainer whom Marina (and G. A. Vronsky, during their brief romance) had dubbed, for unknown reasons, ‘Grib, ’ placed an onyx ashtray at the head of the table for Demon, who liked to smoke between courses — a puff of Russian ancestry. A side table supported, also in the Russian fashion, a collection of red, black, gray, beige hors-d’oeuvres, with the serviette caviar (salfetochnaya ikra) separated from the pot of Graybead (ikra svezhaya) by the succulent pomp of preserved boletes, ‘white, ’ and ‘subbetuline, ’ while the pink of smoked salmon vied with the incarnadine of Westphalian ham. The variously flavored vodochki glittered, on a separate tray. The French cuisine had contributed its chaudfroids and foie gras. A window was open, and the crickets were stridulating at an ominous speed in the black motionless foliage.

It was — to continue the novelistic structure — a long, joyful, delicious dinner, and although the talk consisted mainly of family quips and bright banalities, that reunion was to remain suspended in one’s memory as a strangely significant, not wholly pleasant, experience. One treasured it in the same way as when falling in love with a picture in a pinacoteca or remembering a dream style, the dream detail, the meaningful richness of color and contour in an otherwise meaningless vision. It should be observed that nobody, not even the reader, not even Bouteillan (who crumbled, alas, a precious cork), was at his or her best at that particular party. A faint element of farce and falsity flawed it, preventing an angel — if angels could visit Ardis — from being completely at ease; and yet it was a marvelous show which no artist would have wanted to miss.

The tablecloth and the candle blaze attracted timorous or impetuous moths among which Ada, with a ghost pointing them out to her, could not help recognizing many old ‘flutterfriends. ’ Pale intruders, anxious only to spread out their delicate wings on some lustrous surface; ceiling-bumpers in guildman furs; thickset rake-hells with bushy antennae; and party-crashing hawk-moths with red black-belted bellies, sailed or shot, silent or humming, into the dining room out of the black hot humid night.

It was a black hot humid night in mid-July, 1888, at Ardis, in Ladore county, let us not forget, let us never forget, with a family of four seated around an oval dinner table, bright with flowers and crystal — not a scene in a play, as might have seemed — nay, must have seemed — to a spectator (with a camera or a program) placed in the velvet pit of the garden. Sixteen years had elapsed from the end of Marina’s three-year affair with Demon. Intermissions of various length — a break of two months in the spring of 1870, another, of almost four, in the middle of 1871 — had at the time only increased the tenderness and the torture. Her singularly coarsened features, her attire, that sequin-spangled dress, the glittering net over her strawberry-blond dyed hair, her red sunburnt chest and melodramatic make-up, with too much ochre and maroon in it, did not even vaguely remind the man, who had loved her more keenly than any other woman in his philanderings, of the dash, the glamour, the lyricism of Marina Durmanov’s beauty. It aggrieved him — that complete collapse of the past, the dispersal of its itinerant court and music-makers; the logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance. Even these hors-d’oeuvres on the zakusochnï y stol of Ardis Manor and its painted dining room did not link up with their petits soupers, although, God knows, the triple staple to start with was always much the same — pickled young boletes in their tight-fitting glossy fawn helmets, the gray beads of fresh caviar, the goose liver paste, pique-aced with Perigord truffles.

Demon popped into his mouth a last morsel of black bread with elastic samlet, gulped down a last pony of vodka and took his place at the table with Marina facing him across its oblong length, beyond the great bronze bowl with carved-looking Calville apples and elongated Persty grapes. The alcohol his vigorous system had already imbibed was instrumental, as usual, in reopening what he gallicistically called condemned doors, and now as he gaped involuntarily as all men do while spreading a napkin, he considered Marina’s pretentious ciel-é toilé hairdress and tried to realize (in the rare full sense of the word), tried to possess the reality of a fact by forcing it into the sensuous center, that here was a woman whom he had intolerably loved, who had loved him hysterically and skittishly, who insisted they make love on rugs and cushions laid on the floor (‘as respectable people do in the Tigris-Euphrates valley’), who would woosh down fluffy slopes on a bobsleigh a fortnight after parturition, or arrive by the Orient Express with five trunks, Dack’s grandsire, and a maid, to Dr Stella Ospenko’s ospedale where he was recovering from a scratch received in a sword duel (and still visible as a white weal under his eighth rib after a lapse of nearly seventeen years). How strange that when one met after a long separation a chum or fat aunt whom one had been fond of as a child the unimpaired human warmth of the friendship was rediscovered at once, but with an old mistress this never happened — the human part of one’s affection seemed to be swept away with the dust of the inhuman passion, in a wholesale operation of demolishment. He looked at her and acknowledged the perfection of the potage, but she, this rather thick-set woman, goodhearted, no doubt, but restive and sour-faced, glazed over, nose, forehead and all, with a sort of brownish oil that she considered to be more ‘juvenizing’ than powder, was more of a stranger to him than Bouteillan who had once carried her in his arms, in a feigned faint, out of a Ladore villa and into a cab, after a final, quite final row, on the eve of her wedding.

Marina, essentially a dummy in human disguise, experienced no such qualms, lacking as she did that third sight (individual, magically detailed imagination) which many otherwise ordinary and conformant people may also possess, but without which memory (even that of a profound ‘thinker’ or technician of genius) is, let us face it, a stereotype or a tear-sheet. We do not wish to be too hard on Marina; after all, her blood throbs in our wrists and temples, and many of our megrims are hers, not his. Yet we cannot condone the grossness of her soul. The man sitting at the head of the table and joined to her by a pair of cheerful youngsters, the ‘juvenile’ (in movie parlance) on her right, the ‘ingé nue’ on her left, differed in no way from the same Demon in much the same black jacket (minus perhaps the carnation he had evidently purloined from a vase Blanche had been told to bring from the gallery) who sat next to her at the Praslin’s last Christmas. The dizzy chasm he felt every time he met her, that awful ‘wonder of life’ with its extravagant jumble of geological faults, could not be bridged by what she accepted as a dotted line of humdrum encounters: ‘poor old’ Demon (all her pillow mates being retired with that title) appeared before her like a harmless ghost, in the foyers of theaters ‘between mirror and fan, ’ or in the drawing rooms of common friends, or once in Lincoln Park, indicating an indigo-buttocked ape with his cane and not saluting her, according to the rules of the beau monde, because he was with a courtesan. Somewhere, further back, much further back, safely transformed by her screen-corrupted mind into a stale melodrama was her three-year-long period of hectically spaced love-meetings with Demon, A Torrid Affair (the title of her only cinema hit), passion in palaces, the palms and larches, his Utter Devotion, his impossible temper, separations, reconciliations, Blue Trains, tears, treachery, terror, an insane sister’s threats, helpless, no doubt, but leaving their tiger-marks on the drapery of dreams, especially when dampness and dark affect one with fever. And the shadow of retribution on the backwall (with ridiculous legal innuendos). All this was mere scenery, easily packed, labeled ‘Hell’ and freighted away; and only very infrequently some reminder would come — say, in the trickwork close-up of two left hands belonging to different sexes — doing what? Marina could no longer recall (though only four years had elapsed! ) — playing à quatre mains? — no, neither took piano lessons — casting bunny-shadows on a wall? — closer, warmer, but still wrong; measuring something? But what? Climbing a tree? The polished trunk of a tree? But where, when? Someday, she mused, one’s past must be put in order. Retouched, retaken. Certain ‘wipes’ and ‘inserts’ will have to be made in the picture; certain telltale abrasions in the emulsion will have to be corrected; ‘dissolves’ in the sequence discreetly combined with the trimming out of unwanted, embarrassing ‘footage, ’ and definite guarantees obtained; yes, someday — before death with its clap-stick closes the scene.

Tonight she contented herself with the automatic ceremony of giving him what she remembered, more or less correctly, when planning the menu, as being his favorite food — zelyonï ya shchi, a velvety green sorrel-and-spinach soup, containing slippery hard-boiled eggs and served with finger-burning, irresistibly soft, meat-filled or carrot-filled or cabbage-filled pirozhki — peer-rush-KEY, thus pronounced, thus celebrated here, for ever and ever. After that, she had decided, there would be bread-crumbed sander (sudak) with boiled potatoes, hazel-hen (ryabchiki) and that special asparagus (bezukhanka) which does not produce Proust’s After-effect, as cookbooks say.

‘Marina, ’ murmured Demon at the close of the first course. ‘Marina, ’ he repeated louder. ‘Far from me’ (a locution he favored) ‘to criticize Dan’s taste in white wines or the manners de vos domestiques. You know me, I’m above all that rot, I’m... ’ (gesture); ‘but, my dear, ’ he continued, switching to Russian, ‘the chelovek who brought me the pirozhki — the new man, the plumpish one with the eyes (s glazami) —’

‘Everybody has eyes, ’ remarked Marina drily.

‘Well, his look as if they were about to octopus the food he serves. But that’s not the point. He pants, Marina! He suffers from some kind of odï shka (shortness of breath). He should see Dr Krolik. It’s depressing. It’s a rhythmic pumping pant. It made my soup ripple. ’

‘Look, Dad, ’ said Van, ‘Dr Krolik can’t do much, because, as you know quite well, he’s dead, and Marina can’t tell her servants not to breathe, because, as you also know, they’re alive. ’

‘The Veen wit, the Veen wit, ’ murmured Demon.

‘Exactly, ’ said Marina. ‘I simply refuse to do anything about it. Besides poor Jones is not at all asthmatic, but only nervously eager to please. He’s as healthy as a bull and has rowed me from Ardisville to Ladore and back, and enjoyed it, many times this summer. You are cruel, Demon. I can’t tell him " ne pï khtite, " as I can’t tell Kim, the kitchen boy, not to take photographs on the sly — he’s a regular snap-shooting fiend, that Kim, though otherwise an adorable, gentle, honest boy; nor can I tell my little French maid to stop getting invitations, as she somehow succeeds in doing, to the most exclusive bals masqué s in Ladore. ’

‘That’s interesting, ’ observed Demon.

‘He’s a dirty old man! ’ cried Van cheerfully.

‘Van! ’ said Ada.

‘I’m a dirty young man, ’ sighed Demon.

‘Tell me, Bouteillan, ’ asked Marina, ‘what other good white wine do we have — what can you recommend? ’ The butler smiled and whispered a fabulous name.

‘Yes, oh, yes, ’ said Demon. ‘Ah, my dear, you should not think up dinners all by yourself. Now about rowing — you mentioned rowing... Do you know that moi, qui vous parle, was a Rowing Blue in 1858? Van prefers football, but he’s only a College Blue, aren’t you Van? I’m also better than he at tennis — not lawn tennis, of course, a game for parsons, but " court tennis" as they say in Manhattan. What else, Van? ’

‘You still beat me at fencing, but I’m the better shot. That’s not real sudak, papa, though it’s tops, I assure you. ’

(Marina, having failed to obtain the European product in time for the dinner, had chosen the nearest thing, wall-eyed pike, or ‘dory, ’ with Tartar sauce and boiled young potatoes. )

‘Ah! ’ said Demon, tasting Lord Byron’s Hock. ‘This redeems Our Lady’s Tears. ’

‘I was telling Van a moment ago, ’ he continued, raising his voice (he labored under the delusion that Marina had grown rather deaf), ‘about your husband. My dear, he overdoes the juniper vodka stuff, he’s getting, in fact, a mite fuzzy and odd. The other day I chanced to walk through Pat Lane on the Fourth Avenue side, and there he was coming, at quite a spin, in his horrid town car, that primordial petrol two-seater he’s got, with the tiller. Well, he saw me, from quite a distance, and waved, and the whole contraption began to shake down, and finally stopped half a block away, and there he sat trying to budge it with little jerks of his haunches, you know, like a child who can’t get his tricycle unstuck, and as I walked up to him I had the definite impression that it was his mechanism that had stalled, not the Hardpan’s. ’ But what Demon, in the goodness of his crooked heart, omitted to tell Marina was that the imbecile, in secret from his art adviser, Mr Aix, had acquired for a few thousand dollars from a gaming friend of Demon’s, and with Demon’s blessings, a couple of fake Correggios — only to resell them by some unforgivable fluke to an equally imbecile collector, for half a million which Demon considered henceforth as a loan his cousin should certainly refund him if sanity counted for something on this gemel planet. And, conversely, Marina refrained from telling Demon about the young hospital nurse Dan had been monkeying with ever since his last illness (it was, by the way, she, busybody Bess, whom Dan had asked on a memorable occasion to help him get ‘something nice for a half-Russian child interested in biology’).

‘Vous me comblez, ’ said Demon in reference to the burgundy, ‘though’ pravda, my maternal grandfather would have left the table rather than see me drinking red wine instead of champagne with gelinotte. Superb, my dear (blowing a kiss through the vista of flame and silver). ’

The roast hazel-hen (or rather its New World representative, locally called ‘mountain grouse’) was accompanied by preserved lingonberries (locally called ‘mountain cranberries’). An especially succulent morsel of one of those brown little fowls yielded a globule of birdshot between Demon’s red tongue and strong canine: ‘La fè ve de Diane, ’ he remarked, placing it carefully on the edge of his plate. ‘How is the car situation, Van? ’

‘Vague. I ordered a Roseley like yours but it won’t be delivered before Christmas. I tried to find a Silentium with a side car and could not, because of the war, though what connection exists between wars and motorcycles is a mystery. But we manage, Ada and I, we manage, we ride, we bike, we even jikker. ’

‘I wonder, ’ said sly Demon, ‘why I’m reminded all at once of our great Canadian’s lovely lines about blushing Irè ne:

‘Le feu si dé licat de la virginité

Qui something sur son front...

‘All right. You can ship mine to England, provided —’

‘By the way, Demon, ’ interrupted Marina, ‘where and how can I obtain the kind of old roomy limousine with an old professional chauffeur that Praskovia, for instance, has had for years? ’

‘Impossible, my dear, they are all in heaven or on Terra. But what would Ada like, what would my silent love like for her birthday? It’s next Saturday, po razschyotu po moemu (by my reckoning), isn’t it? Une riviè re de diamants? ’

‘Protestuyu! ’ cried Marina. ‘Yes, I’m speaking seriozno. I object to your giving her kvaka sesva (quoi que ce soit), Dan and I will take care of all that. ’

‘Besides you’ll forget, ’ said Ada laughing, and very deftly showed the tip of her tongue to Van who had been on the lookout for her conditional reaction to ‘diamonds. ’

Van asked: ‘Provided what? ’

‘Provided you don’t have one waiting already for you in George’s Garage, Ranta Road. ’

‘Ada, you’ll be jikkering alone soon, ’ he continued, ‘I’m going to have Mascodagama round out his vacation in Paris. Qui something sur son front, en accuse la beauté! ’

So the trivial patter went. Who does not harbor in the darkest gulf of his mind such bright recollections? Who has not squirmed and covered his face with his hands as the dazzling past leered at him? Who, in the terror and solitude of a long night —

‘What was that? ’ exclaimed Marina, whom certicle storms terrified even more than they did the Antiamberians of Ladore County.

‘Sheet lightning, ’ suggested Van.

‘If you ask me, ’ said Demon, turning on his chair to consider the billowing drapery, ‘I’d guess it was a photographer’s flash. After all, we have here a famous actress and a sensational acrobat. ’

Ada ran to the window. From under the anxious magnolias a white-faced boy flanked by two gaping handmaids stood aiming a camera at the harmless, gay family group. But it was only a nocturnal mirage, not unusual in July. Nobody was taking pictures except Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder. In expectation of the rumble, Marina started to count under her breath, as if she were praying or checking the pulse of a very sick person. One heartbeat was supposed to span one mile of black night between the living heart and a doomed herdsman, felled somewhere — oh, very far — on the top of a mountain. The rumble came — but sounded rather subdued. A second flash revealed the structure of the French window.

Ada returned to her seat. Van picked up her napkin from under her chair and in the course of his brief plunge and ascent brushed the side of her knee with his temple.

‘Might I have another helping of Peterson’s Grouse, Tetrastes bonasia windriverensis? ’ asked Ada loftily.

Marina jangled a diminutive cowbell of bronze. Demon placed his palm on the back of Ada’s hand and asked her to pass him the oddly evocative object. She did so in a staccato arc. Demon inserted his monocle and, muffling the tongue of memory, examined the bell; but it was not the one that had once stood on a bed-tray in a dim room of Dr Lapiner’s chalet; was not even of Swiss make; was merely one of those sweet-sounding translations which reveal a paraphrast’s crass counterfeit as soon as you look up the original.

Alas, the bird had not survived ‘the honor one had made to it, ’ and after a brief consultation with Bouteillan a somewhat incongruous but highly palatable bit of saucisson d’Arles added itself to the young lady’s fare of asperges en branches that everybody was now enjoying. It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce orally from some heavenly height the voluptuous ally of the prim lily of the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers, not unlike the reformed ‘sign of the cross’ for protesting against which (a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves. Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then ‘everyone has his own taste, ’ as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, ‘A Great Good Man’ — according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion.

Marina helped herself to an Albany from a crystal box of Turkish cigarettes tipped with red rose petal and passed the box on to Demon. Ada, somewhat self-consciously, lit up too.

‘You know quite well, ’ said Marina, ‘that your father disapproves of your smoking at table. ’

‘Oh, it’s all right, ’ murmured Demon.

‘I had Dan in view, ’ explained Marina heavily. ‘He’s very prissy on that score. ’

‘Well, and I’m not, ’ answered Demon.

Ada and Van could not help laughing. All that was banter — not of a high order, but still banter.

A moment later, however, Van remarked: ‘I think I’ll take an Alibi — I mean an Albany — myself. ’

‘Please note, everybody, ’ said Ada, ‘how voulu that slip was! I like a smoke when I go mushrooming, but when I’m back, this horrid tease insists I smell of some romantic Turk or Albanian met in the woods. ’

‘Well, ’ said Demon, ‘Van’s quite right to look after your morals. ’

The real profitrol’ (very soft ‘l’) of the Russians, as first made by their cooks in Gavana before 1700, consists of larger puffs coated with creamier chocolate than the dark and puny ‘profit rolls’ served in European restaurants. Our friends had finished that rich sweetmeat flooded with chocolat-au-lait sauce, and were ready for some fruit, when Bout followed by his father and floundering Jones made a sensational entry.

All the toilets and waterpipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions. This always signified, and introduced a long-distance call. Marina, who had been awaiting for several days a certain message from California in response to a torrid letter, could now hardly contain her passionate impatience and had been on the point of running to the dorophone in the hall at the first bubbling spasm, when young Bout hurried in dragging the long green cord (visibly palpitating in a series of swells and contractions rather like a serpent ingesting a field mouse) of the ornate, brass-and-nacre receiver, which Marina with a wild ‘A l’eau! ’ pressed to her ear. Itwas, however, only fussy old Dan ringing her up to inform everybody that Miller could not make it that night after all and would accompany him to Ardis bright and early on the following morning.

‘Early but hardly bright, ’ observed Demon, who was now glutted with family joys and slightly annoyed he had missed the first half of a gambling night in Ladore for the sake of all that well-meant but not quite first-rate food.

‘We’ll have coffee in the yellow drawing room, ’ said Marina as sadly as if she were evoking a place of dreary exile. ‘Jones, please, don’t walk on that phonecord. You have no idea, Demon, how I dread meeting again, after all those years, that dislikable Norbert von Miller, who has probably become even more arrogant and obsequious, and moreover does not realize, I’m sure, that Dan’s wife is me. He’s a Baltic Russian’ (turning to Van) ‘but really echt deutsch, though his mother was born Ivanov or Romanov, or something, who owned a calico factory in Finland or Denmark. I can’t imagine how he got his barony; when I knew him twenty years ago he was plain Mr Miller. ’

‘He is still that, ’ said Demon drily, ‘because you’ve got two Millers mixed up. The lawyer who works for Dan is my old friend Norman Miller of the Fainley, Fehler and Miller law firm and physically bears a striking resemblance to Wilfrid Laurier. Norbert, on the other hand, has, I remember, a head like a kegelkugel, lives in Switzerland, knows perfectly well whom you married and is an unmentionable blackguard. ’

After a quick cup of coffee and a drop of cherry liqueur Demon got up.

‘Partir c’est mourir un peu, et mourir c’est partir un peu trop. Do tell Dan and Norman I can give them tea-and-cake any time tomorrow at the Bryant. By the way, how’s Lucette? ’

Marina knitted her brows and shook her head acting the fond, worried mother though, in point of fact, she bore her daughters even less affection than she had for cute Dack and pathetic Dan.

‘Oh, we had quite a scare, ’ she replied finally, ‘quite a nasty scare. But now, apparently —’

‘Van, ’ said his father, ‘be a good scout. I did not have a hat but I did have gloves. Ask Bouteillan to look in the gallery, I may have dropped them there. No. Stay! It’s all right. I left them in the car, because I recall the cold of this flower, which I took from a vase in passing... ’

He now threw it away, discarding with it the shadow of his fugitive urge to plunge both hands in a soft bosom.