Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

‘Or better — come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now.’ He spoke, or thought he spoke, with the self-control and the clarity of enunciation which so frightened and mesmerized blunderers, blusterers, a voluble broker, a guilty schoolboy. Especially so now — when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im, of Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinati of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia (‘Bess’) to whom he bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter.

11

The dragon drug had worn off: its aftereffects are not pleasant, combining as they do physical fatigue with a certain starkness of thought as if all color were drained from the mind. Now clad in a gray dressing gown, Demon lay on a gray couch in his third-floor study. His son stood at the window with his back to the silence. In a damask-padded room on the second floor, immediately below the study, waited Ada, who had arrived with Van a couple of minutes ago. In the skyscraper across the lane a window was open exactly opposite the study and an aproned man stood there setting up an easel and cocking his head in search of the right angle.

The first thing Demon said was:

‘I insist that you face me when I’m speaking to you.’

Van realized that the fateful conversation must have already started in his father’s brain, for the admonishment had the ring of a self-interruption, and with a slight bow he took a seat.

‘However, before I advise you of those two facts, I would like to know how long this — how long this has been…’ (‘going on,’ one presumes, or something equally banal, but then all ends are banal — hangings, the Nuremberg Old Maid’s iron sting, shooting oneself, last words in the brand-new Ladore hospital, mistaking a drop of thirty thousand feet for the airplane’s washroom, being poisoned by one’s wife, expecting a bit of Crimean hospitality, congratulating Mr and Mrs Vinelander —)

‘It will be nine years soon,’ replied Van. ‘I seduced her in the summer of eighteen eighty-four. Except for a single occasion, we did not make love again until the summer of eighteen eighty-eight. After a long separation we spent one winter together. All in all, I suppose I have had her about a thousand times. She is my whole life.’

A longish pause not unlike a fellow actor’s dry-up, came in response to his well-rehearsed speech.

Finally, Demon: ‘The second fact may horrify you even more than the first. I know it caused me much deeper worry — moral of course, not monetary — than Ada’s case — of which eventually her mother informed Cousin Dan, so that, in a sense —’

Pause, with an underground trickle.

‘Some other time I’ll tell you about the Black Miller; not now; too trivial.’

Dr Lapiner’s wife, born Countess Alp, not only left him, in 1871, to live with Norbert von Miller, amateur poet, Russian translator at the Italian Consulate in Geneva, and professional smuggler of neonegrine — found only in the Valais — but had imparted to her lover the melodramatic details of the subterfuge which the kindhearted physician had considered would prove a boon to one lady and a blessing to the other. Versatile Norbert spoke English with an extravagant accent, hugely admired wealthy people and, when name-dropping, always qualified such a person as ‘enawmously rich’ with awed amorous gusto, throwing himself back in his chair and spreading tensely curved arms to enfold an invisible fortune. He had a round head as bare as a knee, a corpse’s button nose, and very white, very limp, very damp hands adorned with rutilant gems. His mistress soon left him. Dr Lapiner died in 1872. About the same time, the Baron married an innkeeper’s innocent daughter and began to blackmail Demon Veen; this went on for almost twenty years, when aging Miller was shot dead by an Italian policeman on a little-known border trail, which had seemed to get steeper and muddier every year. Out of sheer kindness, or habit, Demon bade his lawyer continue to send Miller’s widow — who mistook it naively for insurance money — the trimestrial sum which had been swelling with each pregnancy of the robust Swissess. Demon used to say that he would publish one day’ Black Miller’s’ quatrains which adorned his letters with the jingle of verselets on calendarial leaves:

My spouse is thicker, I am leaner.

Again it comes, a new bambino.

You must be good like I am good.

Her stove is big and wants more wood.