Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

‘Oh Van, I’m not! In fact, I’m delighted you won. But I’m sixteen today. Sixteen! Older than grandmother at the time of her first divorce. It’s my last picnic, I guess. Childhood is scrapped. I love you. You love me. Greg loves me. Everybody loves me. I’m glutted with love. Hurry up or she’ll pull that cock off — Lucette, leave him alone at once!’

Finally the carriage started on its pleasant homeward journey.

‘Ouch!’ grunted Van as he received the rounded load — explaining wrily that he had hit his right patella against a rock.

‘Of course, if one goes in for horseplay…’ murmured Ada — and opened, at its emerald ribbon, the small brown, gold-tooled book (a great success with the passing sun flecks) that she had been already reading during the ride to the picnic.

‘I do fancy a little horseplay,’ said Van. ‘It has left me with quite a tingle, for more reasons than one.’

‘I saw you — horseplaying,’ said Lucette, turning her head.

‘Sh-sh,’ uttered Van.

‘I mean you and him.’

‘We are not interested in your impressions, girl. And don’t look back all the time. You know you get carriage-sick when the road —’

‘Coincidence: "Jean qui tâchait de lui tourner la tête…,"’ surfaced Ada briefly.

‘— when the road "runs out of you," as your sister once said when she was your age.’

‘True,’ mused Lucette tunefully.

She had been prevailed upon to clothe her honey-brown body. Her white jersey had filched a lot from its recent background — pine needles, a bit of moss, a cake crumb, a baby caterpillar. Her remarkably well-filled green shorts were stained with burnberry purple. Her ember-bright hair flew into his face and smelt of a past summer. Family smell; yes, coincidence: a set of coincidences slightly displaced; the artistry of asymmetry. She sat in his lap, heavily, dreamily, full of foie gras and peach punch, with the backs of her brown iridescent bare arms almost touching his face — touching it when he glanced down, right and left, to check if the mushrooms had been taken. They had. The little footboy was reading and picking his nose — judging by the movements of his elbow. Lucette’s compact bottom and cool thighs seemed to sink deeper and deeper in the quicksand of the dream-like, dream-rephrased, legend-distorted past. Ada, sitting next to him, turning her smaller pages quicker than the boy on the box, was, of course, enchanting, obsessive, eternal and lovelier, more somberly ardent than four summers ago — but it was that other picnic which he now relived and it was Ada’s soft haunches which he now held as if she were present in duplicate, in two different color prints.

Through strands of coppery silk he looked aslant at Ada, who puckered her lips at him in the semblance of a transmitted kiss (pardoning him at last for his part in that brawl!) and presently went back to her vellum-bound little volume, Ombres et couleurs, an 1820 edition of Chateaubriand’s short stories with hand-painted vignettes and the flat mummy of a pressed anemone. The gouts and glooms of the woodland passed across her book, her face and Lucette’s right arm, on which he could not help kissing a mosquito bite in pure tribute to the duplication. Poor Lucette stole a languorous look at him and looked away again — at the red neck of the coachman — of that other coachman who for several months had haunted her dreams.

We do not care to follow the thoughts troubling Ada, whose attention to her book was far shallower than might seem; we will not, nay, cannot follow them with any success, for thoughts are much more faintly remembered than shadows or colors, or the throbs of young lust, or a green snake in a dark paradise. Therefore we find ourselves more comfortably sitting within Van while his Ada sits within Lucette, and both sit within Van (and all three in me, adds Ada).

He remembered with a pang of pleasure the indulgent skirt Ada had been wearing then, so swoony-baloony as the Chose young things said, and he regretted (smiling) that Lucette had those chaste shorts on today, and Ada, husked-corn (laughing) trousers. In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes (nodding gravely), sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose — and that not owing to some blessed pill or potion (indicating the bedside clutter) or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug.