Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

After tea Lucette remembered an appointment with the hairdresser and left in a hurry. Van peeled off his jersey and stayed on for a while, brooding, fingering the little green-gemmed case with five Rosepetal cigarettes, trying to enjoy the heat of the platinum sun in its aura of ‘film-color’ but only managing to fan, with every shiver and heave of the ship, the fire of evil temptation.

A moment later, as if having spied on his solitude the pava (peahen) reappeared — this time with an apology.

Polite Van, scrambling up to his feet and browing his spectacles, started to apologize in his turn (for misleading her innocently) but his little speech petered out in stupefaction as he looked at her face and saw in it a gross and grotesque caricature of unforgettable features. That mulatto skin, that silver-blond hair, those fat purple lips, reinacted in coarse negative her ivory, her raven, her pale pout.

‘I was told,’ she explained, ‘that a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale, the cootooriay — voozavay entendue? — had shaved his beard, in which case he’d look rather like you, right?’

‘Logically, no, ma’am,’ replied Van.

She hesitated for the flirt of a second, licking her lips, not knowing whether he was being rude or ready — and here Lucette returned for her Rosepetals.

‘See you aprey,’ said Miss Condor.

Lucette’s gaze escorted to a good-riddance exit the indolent motion of those gluteal lobes and folds.

‘You deceived me, Van. It is, it is one of your gruesome girls!’

‘I swear,’ said Van, ‘that’s she’s a perfect stranger. I wouldn’t deceive you.’

‘You deceived me many, many times when I was a little girl. If you’re doing it now tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’

‘You promised me a harem,’ Van gently rebuked her.

‘Not today, not today! Today is sacred.’

The cheek he intended to kiss was replaced by her quick mad mouth.

‘Come and see my cabin,’ she pleaded as he pushed her away with the very spring, as it were, of his animal reaction to the fire of her lips and tongue. ‘I simply must show you their pillows and piano. There’s Cordula’s smell in all the drawers. I beseech you!’

‘Run along now,’ said Van. ‘You’ve no right to excite me like that. I’ll hire Miss Condor to chaperone me if you do not behave yourself. We dine at seven-fifteen.’

In his bedroom he found a somewhat belated invitation to the Captain’s table for dinner. It was addressed to Dr and Mrs Ivan Veen. He had been on the ship once before, in between the Queens, and remembered Captain Cowley as a bore and an ignoramus.

He called the steward and bade him carry the note back, with the penciled scrawl: ‘no such couple.’ He lay in his bath for twenty minutes. He attempted to focus on something else besides a hysterical virgin’s body. He discovered an insidious omission in his galleys where an entire line was wanting, with the vitiated paragraph looking, however, quite plausible — to an automatic reader — since the truncated end of one sentence, and the lower-case beginning of the other, now adjacent, fitted to form a syntactically correct passage, the insipidity of which he might never have noticed in the present folly of his flesh, had he not recollected (a recollection confirmed by his typescript) that at this point should have come a rather apt, all things considered, quotation: Insiste, anime meus, et adtende fortiter (courage, my soul and press on strongly).

‘Sure you’d not prefer the restaurant?’ he inquired when Lucette, looking even more naked in her short evening frock than she had in her ‘bickny,’ joined him at the door of the grill. ‘It’s crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating jazzband. No?’

Tenderly she shook her jeweled head.

They had huge succulent ‘grugru shrimps’ (the yellow larvae of a palm weevil) and roast bearlet à la Tobakoff. Only half-a-dozen tables were occupied, and except for a nasty engine vibration, which they had not noticed at lunch, everything was subdued, soft, and cozy. He took advantage of her odd demure silence to tell her in detail about the late pencil-palpating Mr Muldoon and also about a Kingston case of glossolalia involving a Yukonsk woman who spoke several Slavic-like dialects which existed, maybe, on Terra, but certainly not in Estotiland. Alas, another case (with a quibble on cas) engaged his attention subverbally.