Part Three 9 страница

‘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.

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.

In the course of several tests conducted by R. S. and his colleagues, Muldoon explained that by stroking the pencils in turn he perceived a gamut of ‘stingles, ’ special sensations somehow allied to the tingling aftereffects of one’s skin contact with stinging nettles (he had been raised in the country somewhere between Ormagh and Armagh, and had often tumbled, in his adventurous boyhood, the poor thick-booted soul, into ditches and even ravines), and spoke eerily of the ‘strong’ green stingle of a piece of blotting paper or the wet weak pink tingle of nurse Langford’s perspiring nose, these colors being checked by himself against those applied by the researchers to the initial pencils. In result of the tests, one was forced to assume that the man’s fingertips could convey to his brain ‘a tactile transcription of the prismatic specter’ as Paar put it in his detailed report to Van.

When the latter arrived, Muldoon had not quite come out of a state of stupor more protracted than any preceding one. Van, hoping to examine him on the morrow, spent a delightful day conferring with a bunch of eager psychologists and was interested to spot among the nurses the familiar squint of Elsie Langford, a gaunt girl with a feverish flush and protruding teeth, who had been obscurely involved in a ‘poltergeist’ affair at another medical institution. He had dinner with old Paar in his rooms at Chose and told him he would like to have the poor fellow transferred to Kingston, with Miss Langford, as soon as he was fit to travel. The poor fellow died that night in his sleep, leaving the entire incident suspended in midair within a nimbus of bright irrelevancy.

Van, in whom the pink-blooming chestnuts of Chose always induced an amorous mood, decided to squander the sudden bounty of time before his voyage to America on a twenty-four-hour course of treatment at the most fashionable and efficient of all the Venus Villas in Europe; but during the longish trip in the ancient, plushy, faintly perfumed (musk? Turkish tobacco? ) limousine which he usually got from the Albania, his London hotel, for travels in England, other restless feelings joined, without dispelling it, his sullen lust. Rocking along softly, his slippered foot on a footrest, his arm in an armloop, he recalled his first railway journey to Ardis and tried — what he sometimes advised a patient doing in order to exercise the ‘muscles of consciousness’ — namely putting oneself back not merely into the frame of mind that had preceded a radical change in one’s life, but into a state of complete ignorance regarding that change. He knew it could not be done, that not the achievement, but the obstinate attempt was possible, because he would not have remembered the preface to Ada had not life turned the next page, causing now its radiant text to flash through all the tenses of the mind. He wondered if he would remember the present commonplace trip. An English late spring with literary associations lingered in the evening air. The built-in ‘canoreo’ (an old-fashioned musical gadget which a joint Anglo-American Commission had only recently unbanned) transmitted a heart-wounding Italian song. What was he? Who was he? Why was he? He thought of his slackness, clumsiness, dereliction of spirit. He thought of his loneliness, of its passions and dangers. He saw through the glass partition the fat, healthy, reliable folds of his driver’s neck. Idle images queued by — Edmund, Edmond, simple Cordula, fantastically intricate Lucette, and, by further mechanical association, a depraved little girl called Lisette, in Cannes, with breasts like lovely abscesses, whose frail favors were handled by a smelly big brother in an old bathing machine.

He turned off the canoreo and helped himself to the brandy stored behind a sliding panel, drinking from the bottle, because all three glasses were filthy. He felt surrounded by crashing great trees, and the monstrous beasts of unachieved, perhaps unachievable tasks. One such task was Ada whom he knew he would never give up; to her he would surrender the remnants of his self at the first trumpet blast of destiny. Another was his philosophic work, so oddly impeded by its own virtue — by that originality of literary style which constitutes the only real honesty of a writer. He had to do it his own way, but the cognac was frightful, and the history of thought bristled with cliché s, and it was that history he had to surmount.

He knew he was not quite a savant, but completely an artist. Paradoxically and unnecessarily it had been in his ‘academic career, ’ in his nonchalent and arrogant lectures, in his conduct of seminars, in his published reports on sick minds, that, starting as something of a prodigy before he was twenty, he had gained by the age of thirty-one ‘honors’ and a ‘position’ that many unbelievably laborious men do not reach at fifty. In his sadder moments, as now, he attributed at least part of his ‘success’ to his rank, to his wealth, to the numerous donations, which (in a kind of extension of his overtipping the haggard beggars who cleaned rooms, manned lifts, smiled in hotel corridors) he kept showering upon worthwhile institutions and students. Maybe Van Veen did not err too widely in his wry conjecture; for on our Antiterra (and on Terra as well, according to his own writings) a powerfully plodding Administration prefers, unless moved by the sudden erection of a new building or the thunder of torrential funds, the safe drabness of an academic mediocrity to the suspect sparkle of a V. V.

Nightingales sang, when he arrived at his fabulous and ignoble destination. As usual, he experienced a surge of brutal elation as the car entered the oak avenue between two rows of phallephoric statues presenting arms. A welcome habitué of fifteen years’ standing, he had not bothered to ‘telephone’ (the new official term). A searchlight lashed him: Alas, he had come on a ‘gala’ night!

Members usually had their chauffeurs park in a special enclosure near the guardhouse, where there was a pleasant canteen for servants, with nonalcoholic drinks and a few inexpensive and homely whores. But that night several huge police cars occupied the garage boxes and overflowed into an adjacent arbor. Telling Kingsley to wait a moment under the oaks, Van donned his bautta and went to investigate. His favorite walled walk soon took him to one of the spacious lawns velveting the approach to the manor. The grounds were lividly illuminated and as populous as Park Avenue — an association that came very readily, since the disguises of the astute sleuths belonged to a type which reminded Van of his native land. Some of those men he even knew by sight — they used to patrol his father’s club in Manhattan whenever good Gamaliel (not reelected after his fourth term) happened to dine there in his informal gagality. They mimed what they were accustomed to mime — grapefruit vendors, black hawkers of bananas and banjoes, obsolete, or at least untimely, ‘copying clerks’ who hurried in circles to unlikely offices, and peripatetic Russian newspaper readers slowing down to a trance stop and then strolling again behind their wide open Estotskiya Vesti. Van remembered that Mr Alexander Screepatch, the new president of the United Americas, a plethoric Russian, had flown over to see King Victor; and he correctly concluded that both were now sunk in mollitude. The comic side of the detectives’ display (befitting, perhaps, their dated notion of an American sidewalk, but hardly suiting a weirdly illuminated maze of English hedges) tempered his disappointment as he shuddered squeamishly at the thought of sharing the frolics of historical personages or contenting himself with the brave-faced girlies they had started to use and rejected.

Here a bedsheeted statue attempted to challenge Van from its marble pedestal but slipped and landed on its back in the bracken. Ignoring the sprawling god, Van returned to the still-throbbing jolls-joyce. Purple-jowled Kingsley, an old tried friend, offered to drive him to another house, ninety miles north; but Van declined upon principle and was taken back to the Albania.

At five p. m., June 3, his ship had sailed from Le Havre-de-Grâ ce; on the evening of the same day Van embarked at Old Hantsport. He had spent most of the afternoon playing court tennis with Delaurier, the famous Negro coach, and felt very dull and drowsy as he watched the low sun’s ardency break into green-golden eye-spots a few sea-serpent yards to starboard, on the far-side slope of the bow wave. Presently he decided to turn in, walked down to the A deck, devoured some of the still-life fruit prepared for him in his sitting room, attempted to read in bed the proofs of an essay he was contributing to a festschrift on the occasion of Professor Counterstone’s eightieth birthday, gave it up, and fell asleep. A tempest went into convulsions around midnight, but despite the lunging and creaking (Tobakoff was an embittered old vessel) Van managed to sleep soundly, the only reaction on the part of his dormant mind being the dream image of an aquatic peacock, slowly sinking before somersaulting like a diving grebe, near the shore of the lake bearing his name in the ancient kingdom of Arrowroot. Upon reviewing that bright dream he traced its source to his recent visit to Armenia where he had gone fowling with Armborough and that gentleman’s extremely compliant and accomplished niece. He wanted to make a note of it — and was amused to find that all three pencils had not only left his bed table but had neatly aligned themselves head to tail along the bottom of the outer door of the adjacent room, having covered quite a stretch of blue carpeting in the course of their stopped escape.

The steward brought him a Continental breakfast, the ship’s newspaper, and the list of first-class passengers. Under ‘Tourism in Italy, ’ the little newspaper informed him that a Domodossola farmer had unearthed the bones and trappings of one of Hannibal’s elephants, and that two American psychiatrists (names not given) had died an odd death in the Bocaletto range: the older fellow from heart failure and his boy friend by suicide. After pondering the Admiral’s morbid interest in Italian mountains, Van clipped the item and picked up the passenger list (pleasingly surmounted by the same crest that adorned Cordula’s notepaper) in order to see if there was anybody to be avoided during the next days. The list yielded the Robinson couple, Robert and Rachel, old bores of the family (Bob had retired after directing for many years one of Uncle Dan’s offices). His gaze, traveling on, tripped over Dr Ivan Veen and pulled up at the next name. What constricted his heart? Why did he pass his tongue over his thick lips? Empty formulas befitting the solemn novelists of former days who thought they could explain everything.

The level of the water slanted and swayed in his bath imitating the slow seesaw of the bright-blue, white-flecked sea in the porthole of his bedroom. He rang up Miss Lucinda Veen, whose suite was on the Main Deck amidships exactly above his, but she was absent. Wearing a white polo-neck sweater and tinted glasses, he went to look for her. She was not on the Games Deck from where he looked down at some other red-head, in a canvas chair on the Sun Deck: the girl sat writing a letter at passionate speed and he thought that if ever he switched from ponderous factitude to light fiction he would have a jealous husband use binoculars to decipher from where he stood that outpour of illicit affection.

She was not on the Promenade Deck where blanket-swathed old people were reading the number-one best seller Salzman and awaiting with borborygmic forebubbles the eleven o’clock bouillon. He betook himself to the Grill, where he reserved a table for two. He walked over to the bar and warmly greeted bald fat Toby who had served on the Queen Guinevere in 1889, and 1890, and 1891, when she was still unmarried and he a resentful fool. They could have eloped to Lopadusa as Mr and Mrs Dairs or Sardi!

He espied their half-sister on the forecastle deck, looking perilously pretty in a low-cut, brightly flowered, wind-worried frock, talking to the bronzed but greatly aged Robinsons. She turned toward him, brushing back the flying hair from her face with a mixture of triumph and embarrassment in her expression, and presently they took leave of Rachel and Robert who beamed after them, waving similarly raised hands to her, to him, to life, to death, to the happy old days when Demon paid all the gambling debts of their son, just before he was killed in a head-on car collision.

She dispatched the pozharskiya kotletï with gratitude: he was not scolding her for popping up as some sort of transcendental (rather than transatlantic) stowaway; and in her eagerness to see him she had botched her breakfast after having gone dinnerless on the eve. She who enjoyed the hollows and hills of the sea, when taking part in nautical sports, or the ups and oops, when flying, had been ignominiously sick aboard this, her first liner; but the Robinsons had given her a marvelous medicine, she had slept ten hours, in Van’s arms all the time, and now hoped that both he and she were tolerably awake except for the fuzzy edge left by the drug.

Quite kindly he asked where she thought she was going.

To Ardis, with him — came the prompt reply — for ever and ever. Robinson’s grandfather had died in Araby at the age of one hundred and thirty-one, so Van had still a whole century before him, she would build for him, in the park, several pavilions to house his successive harems, they would gradually turn, one after the other, into homes for aged ladies, and then into mausoleums. There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up’ above dear Cordula’s and Tobak’s bed, in the suite ‘wangled in one minute flat’ from them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks’ love life during sea voyages. Van interrupted Lucette’s nervous patter by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain!

They met again in the afternoon.

To most of the Tobakoff’s first-class passengers the afternoon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Iceland and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial gusts, and the wash of an old-fashioned swimming pool rhythmically flushed the green tiles, but Lucette was a hardy girl used to bracing winds no less than to the detestable sun. Spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island, had given a nectarine hue to her limbs, which looked lacquered with it when wet, but re-evolved their natural bloom as the breeze dried her skin. With glowing cheekbones and that glint of copper showing from under her tight rubber cap on nape and forehead, she evoked the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse.

She returned after a brief swim to the sun terrace where Van lay and said:

‘You can’t imagine’ — (‘I can imagine anything, ’ he insisted) — ‘you can imagine, okay, what oceans of lotions and streams of creams I am compelled to use — in the privacy of my balconies or in desolate sea caves — before I can exhibit myself to the elements. I always teeter on the tender border between sunburn and suntan — or between lobster and Obst as writes Herb, my beloved painter — I’m reading his diary published by his last duchess, it’s in three mixed languages and lovely, I’ll lend it to you. You see, darling, I’d consider myself a pied cheat if the small parts I conceal in public were not of the same color as those on show. ’

‘You looked to me kind of sandy allover when you were inspected in 1892, ’ said Van.

‘I’m a brand-new girl now, ’ she whispered. ‘A happy new girl. Alone with you on an abandoned ship, with ten days at least till my next flow. I sent you a silly note to Kingston, just in case you didn’t turn up. ’

They were now reclining on a poolside mat face to face, in symmetrical attitudes, he leaning his head on his right hand, she propped on her left elbow. The strap of her green breast-cups had slipped down her slender arm, disclosing drops and streaks of water at the base of one nipple. An abyss of a few inches separated the jersey he wore from her bare midriff, the black wool of his trunks from her soaked green pubic mask. The sun glazed her hipbone; a shadowed dip led to the five-year-old trace of an appendectomy. Her half-veiled gaze dwelt upon him with heavy, opaque greed, and she was right, they were really quite alone, he had possessed Marion Armborough behind her uncle’s back in much more complex circumstances, what with the motorboat jumping like a flying fish and his host keeping a shotgun near the steering wheel. Joylessly, he felt the stout snake of desire weightily unwind; grimly, he regretted not having exhausted the fiend in Villa Venus. He accepted the touch of her blind hand working its way up his thigh and cursed nature for having planted a gnarled tree bursting with vile sap within a man’s crotch. Suddenly Lucette drew away, exhaling a genteel ‘merde. ’ Eden was full of people.

Two half-naked children in shrill glee came running toward the pool. A Negro nurse brandished their diminutive bras in angry pursuit. Out of the water a bald head emerged by spontaneous generation and snorted. The swimming coach appeared from the dressing room. Simultaneously, a tall splendid creature with trim ankles and repulsively fleshy thighs, stalked past the Veens, all but treading on Lucette’s emerald-studded cigarette case. Except for a golden ribbon and a bleached mane, her long, ripply, beige back was bare all the way down to the tops of her slowly and lusciously rolling buttocks, which divulged, in alternate motion, their nether bulges from under the lamé loincloth. Just before disappearing behind a rounded white corner, the Titianesque Titaness half-turned her brown face and greeted Van with a loud ‘hullo! ’

Lucette wanted to know: kto siya pava? (who’s that stately dame? )

‘I thought she addressed you, ’ answered Van, ‘I did not distinguish her face and do not remember that bottom, ’

‘She gave you a big jungle smile, ’ said Lucette, readjusting her green helmet, with touchingly graceful movements of her raised wings, and touchingly flashing the russet feathering of her armpits.

‘Come with me, hm? ’ she suggested, rising from the mat.

He shook his head, looking up at her: ‘You rise, ’ he said, ‘like Aurora, ’

‘His first compliment, ’ observed Lucette with a little cock of her head as if speaking to an invisible confidant.

He put on his tinted glasses and watched her stand on the diving board, her ribs framing the hollow of her intake as she prepared to ardis into the amber. He wondered, in a mental footnote that might come handy some day, if sunglasses or any other varieties of vision, which certainly twist our concept of ‘space, ’ do not also influence our style of speech. The two well-formed lassies, the nurse, the prurient merman, the natatorium master, all looked on with Van.

‘Second compliment ready, ’ he said as she returned to his side. ‘You’re a divine diver. I go in with a messy plop. ’

‘But you swim faster, ’ she complained, slipping off her shoulder straps and turning into a prone position; ‘Mezhdu prochim (by the way), is it true that a sailor in Tobakoff’s day was not taught to swim so he wouldn’t die a nervous wreck if the ship went down? ’

‘A common sailor, perhaps, ’ said Van. ‘When michman Tobakoff himself got shipwrecked off Gavaille, he swam around comfortably for hours, frightening away sharks with snatches of old songs and that sort of thing, until a fishing boat rescued him — one of those miracles that require a minimum of cooperation from all concerned, I imagine, ’

Demon, she said, had told her, last year at the funeral, that he was buying an island in the Gavailles (‘incorrigible dreamer, ’ drawled Van). He had ‘wept like a fountain’ in Nice, but had cried with even more abandon in Valentina, at an earlier ceremony, which poor Marina did not attend either. The wedding — in the Greek-faith style, if you please — looked like a badly faked episode in an ‘old movie, the priest was gaga and the dyakon drunk, and — perhaps, fortunately — Ada’s thick white veil was as impervious to light as a widow’s weeds. Van said he would not listen to that.

‘Oh, you must, ’ she rejoined, ‘hotya bï potomu (if only because) one of her shafer’s (bachelors who take turns holding the wedding crown over the bride’s head) looked momentarily, in impassive profile and impertinent attitude (he kept raising the heavy metallic venets too high, too athletically high as if trying on purpose to keep it as far as possible from her head), exactly like you, like a pale, ill-shaven twin, delegated by you from wherever you were, ’

At a place nicely called Agony, in Terra del Fuego. He felt an uncanny tingle as he recalled that when he received there the invitation to the wedding (airmailed by the groom’s sinister sister) he was haunted for several nights by dream after dream, growing fainter each time (much as her movie he was to pursue from flick-house to flick-house at a later stage of his life) of his holding that crown over her.

‘Your father, ’ added Lucette, ‘paid a man from Belladonna to take pictures — but of course, real fame begins only when one’s name appears in that cine-magazine’s crossword puzzle. We all know it will never happen, never! Do you hate me now? ’