Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

‘We understand,’ said Robert Robinson going for another supply to his portable fridge, ‘we understand perfectly that Dr Veen is deeply immersed in his Inter Resting Work — personally, I sometimes regret having retired — but do you think, Lucy, prosit! that he might accept to have dinner tomorrow with you and us and maybe Another Couple, whom he’ll certainly enjoy meeting? Shall Mrs Robinson send him a formal invitation? Would you sign it, too?’

‘I don’t know, I’m very tired,’ she said, ‘and the rock and roll are getting worse. I guess I’ll go up to my hutch and take your Quietus. Yes, by all means, let’s have dinner, all of us. I really needed that lovely cold drink.’

Having cradled the nacred receiver she changed into black slacks and a lemon shirt (planned for tomorrow morning); looked in vain for a bit of plain notepaper without caravelle or crest; ripped out the flyleaf of Herb’s Journal, and tried to think up something amusing, harmless, and scintillating to say in a suicide note. But she had planned everything except that note, so she tore her blank life in two and disposed of the pieces in the W.C.; she poured herself a glass of dead water from a moored decanter, gulped down one by one four green pills, and, sucking the fifth, walked to the lift which took her one click up from her three-room suite straight to the red-carpeted promenade-deck bar. There, two sluglike young men were in the act of sliding off their red toadstools, and the older one said to the other as they turned to leave: ‘You may fool his lordship, my dear, but not me, oh, no.’

She drank a ‘Cossack pony’ of Klass vodka — hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff; had another; and was hardly able to down a third because her head had started to swim like hell. Swim like hell from sharks, Tobakovich!

She had no purse with her. She almost fell from her convex ridiculous seat as she fumbled in her shirt pocket for a stray bank note.

‘Beddydee,’ said Toby the barman with a fatherly smile, which she mistook for a leer. ‘Bedtime, miss,’ he repeated and patted her ungloved hand.

Lucette recoiled and forced herself to retort distinctly and haughtily:

‘Mr Veen, my cousin, will pay you tomorrow and bash your false teeth in.’

Six, seven — no, more than that, about ten steps up. Dix marches. Legs and arms. Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne, after too much exercise, gulps twice and quietly vomits, a pink pudding onto the picnic nappe. Après quoi she waddles off. These steps are something.

While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave.

Although Lucette had never died before — no, dived before, Violet — from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair — t,a,c,l — she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note.

Got it.

The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes — telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression — that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.