Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

‘Lower. Now let’s look at those snapshots — before settling his monthly salary.’

The first item in the evil series had projected one of Van’s initial impressions of Ardis Manor at an angle that differed from that of his own recollection. Its area lay between the shadow of a calèche darkening the gravel and the white step of a pillared porch shining in the sun. Marina, one arm still in the sleeve of the dust coat which a footman (Price) was helping her to remove, stood brandishing her free arm in a theatrical gesture of welcome (entirely at variance with the grimace of helpless beatitude twisting her face), while Ada in a black hockey blazer — belonging really to Vanda — spilled her hair over her bare knees as she flexed them and flipped Dack with her flowers to check his nervous barks.

Then came several preparatory views of the immediate grounds: the colutea circle, an avenue, the grotto’s black O, and the hill, and the big chain around the trunk of the rare oak, Quercus ruslan Chat., and a number of other spots meant to be picturesque by the compiler of the illustrated pamphlet but looking a little shabby owing to inexperienced photography.

It improved gradually.

Another girl (Blanche!) stooping and squatting exactly like Ada (and indeed not unlike her in features) over Van’s valise opened on the floor, and ‘eating with her eyes’ the silhouette of Ivory Revery in a perfume advertisement. Then the cross and the shade of boughs above the grave of Marina’s dear housekeeper, Anna Pimenovna Nepraslinov (1797-1883).

Let’s skip nature shots — of skunklike squirrels, of a striped fish in a bubble tank, of a canary in its pretty prison.

A photograph of an oval painting, considerably diminished, portrayed Princess Sophia Zemski as she was at twenty, in 1775, with her two children (Marina’s grandfather born in 1772, and Demon’s grandmother, born in 1773).

‘I don’t seem to remember it,’ said Van, ‘where did it hang?’

‘In Marina’s boudoir. And do you know who this bum in the frock coat is?’

‘Looks to me like a poor print cut out of a magazine. Who’s he?’

‘Sumerechnikov! He took sumerographs of Uncle Vanya years ago.’

‘The Twilight before the Lumières. Hey, and here’s Alonso, the swimming-pool expert. I met his sweet sad daughter at a Cyprian party — she felt and smelt and melted like you. The strong charm of coincidence.’

‘I’m not interested. Now comes a little boy.’

‘Zdraste, Ivan Dementievich,’ said Van, greeting his fourteen-year-old self, shirtless, in shorts, aiming a conical missile at the marble fore-image of a Crimean girl doomed to offer an everlasting draught of marble water to a dying marine from her bullet-chipped jar.

Skip Lucette skipping rope.

Ah, the famous first finch.

‘No, that’s a kitayskaya punochka (Chinese Wall Bunting). It has settled on the threshold of a basement door. The door is ajar. There are garden tools and croquet mallets inside. You remember how many exotic, alpine and polar, animals mixed with ordinary ones in our region.’

Lunchtime. Ada bending low over the dripping peach improperly peeled that she is devouring (shot from the garden through the french window).

Drama and comedy. Blanche struggling with two amorous tsigans in the Baguenaudier Bower. Uncle Dan calmly reading a newspaper in his little red motorcar, hopelessly stuck in black mud on the Ladore road.

Two huge common Peacock moths, still connected. Grooms and gardeners brought Ada that species every blessed year; which, in a way reminds us of you, sweet Marco d’Andrea, or you, red-haired Domenico Benci, or you, dark and broody Giovanni del Brina (who thought they were bats) or the one I dare not mention (because it is Lucette’s scholarly contribution — so easily botched after the scholar’s death) who likewise might have picked up, at the foot of an orchard wall, not overhung with not-yet-imported wisteria (her half-sister’s addition), on a May morning in 1542, near Florence, a pair of the Pear Peacock in copula, the male with the feathery antennae, the female with the plain threads, to depict them faithfully (among wretched, unvisualized insects) on one side of a fenestral niche in the so-called ‘Elements Room’ of the Palazzo Vecchio.

Sunrise at Ardis. Congs: naked Van still cocooned in his hammock under the ‘lidderons’ as they called in Ladore the liriodendrons, not exactly a lit d’édredon, though worth an auroral pun and certainly conducive to the physical expression of a young dreamer’s fancy undisguised by the network.

‘Congratulations,’ repeated Van in male language. ‘The first indecent postcard. Bewhorny, no doubt, has a blown-up copy in his private stock.’

Ada examined the pattern of the hammock through a magnifying glass (used by Van for deciphering certain details of his lunatics’ drawings).