Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

‘They make fun of an old woman,’ said Marina, not without coquetry, and in the Russian manner kissed her guest on his inclined brow as he lifted her hand to his lips: ‘You’ll forgive me,’ she added, ‘for not going out on the terrace, I’ve grown allergic to damp and darkness; I’m sure my temperature has already gone up to thirty-seven and seven, at least,’

Demon tapped the barometer next to the door. It had been tapped too often to react in any intelligible way and remained standing at a quarter past three.

Van and Ada saw him off. The night was very warm and dripping with what Ladore farmers called green rain. Demon’s black sedan glinted elegantly among the varnished laurels in the moth-flaked porchlight. He tenderly kissed the children, the girl on one cheek, the boy on the other, then Ada again — in the hollow of the white arm that clasped his neck. Nobody paid much attention to Marina, who waved from a tangelo-colored oriel window a spangled shawl although all she could see was the sheen of the car’s bonnet and the rain slanting in the light of its lamps.

Demon pulled on his gloves and sped away with a great growl of damp gravel.

‘That last kiss went a little too far,’ remarked Van, laughing.

‘Oh well — his lips sort of slipped,’ laughed Ada and, laughing, they embraced in the dark as they skirted the wing of the house.

They stopped for a moment under the shelter of an indulgent tree, where many a cigar-smoking guest had stopped after dinner. Tranquilly, innocently, side by side in their separately ordained attitudes, they added a trickle and a gush to the more professional sounds of the rain in the night, and then lingered, hand in hand, in a corner of the latticed gallery waiting for the lights in the windows to go out.

‘What was faintly off-key, ne tak, about the whole evening?’ asked Van softly. ‘You noticed?’

‘Of course, I did. And yet I adore him. I think he’s quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible — and there is absolutely nobody like him.’

‘But what went wrong tonight? You were tongue-tied, and everything we said was fal’shivo. I wonder if some inner nose in him smelled you in me, and me in you. He tried to ask me... Oh it was not a nice family reunion. What exactly went wrong at dinner?’

‘My love, my love, as if you don’t know! We’ll manage, perhaps, to wear our masks always, till dee do us part, but we shall never be able to marry — while they’re both alive. We simply can’t swing it, because he’s more conventional in his own way than even the law and the social lice. One can’t bribe one’s parents, and waiting forty, fifty years for them to die is too horrible to imagine — I mean the mere thought of anybody waiting for such a thing is not in our nature, is mean and monstrous!’

He kissed her half-closed lips, gently and ‘morally’ as they defined moments of depth to distinguish them from the despair of passion.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s fun to be two secret agents in an alien country. Marina has gone upstairs. Your hair is wet.’

‘Spies from Terra? You believe, you believe in the existence of Terra? Oh, you do! You accept it. I know you!’

‘I accept it as a state of mind. That’s not quite the same thing.’

‘Yes, but you want to prove it is the same thing.’

He brushed her lips with another religious’ kiss. Its edge, however, was beginning to catch fire.

‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘I will ask you for a repeat performance. You will sit as you did four years ago, at the same table, in the same light, drawing the same flower, and I shall go through the same scene with such joy, such pride, such — I don’t know — gratitude! Look, all the windows are dark now. I, too, can translate when I simply have to. Listen to this:

Lights in the rooms were going out.

Breathed fragrantly the rozï.

We sat together in the shade

Of a wide-branched beryozï.’

‘Yes, "birch" is what leaves the translator in the "lurch," doesn’t it? That’s a terrible little poem by Konstantin Romanov, right? Just elected president of the Lyascan Academy of Literature, right? Wretched poet and happy husband. Happy husband!’

‘You know,’ said Van, ‘I really think you should wear something underneath on formal occasions.’

‘Your hands are cold. Why formal? You said yourself it was a family affair.’

‘Even so. You were in peril whenever you bent or sprawled.’

‘I never sprawl!’

‘I’m quite sure it’s not hygienic, or perhaps it’s a kind of jealousy on my part. Memoirs of a Happy Chair. Oh, my darling.’

‘At least,’ whispered Ada, ‘it pays off now, doesn’t it? Croquet room? Ou comme ça?’

‘Comme ça, for once,’ said Van.

39

Although fairly eclectic in 1888, Ladore fashions were not quite as free as taken for granted at Ardis.