There was not much to remember about that first tea. He noticed Ada's trick of hiding her fingernails by fisting her hand or stretching it with the palm turned upward when helping herself to a biscut. She was bored and embarrassed by everything her mother said and when the latter started to talk about the Tarn, otherwise the New Reservoir, he noted that Ada was no longer sitting next to him but standing a little way off with her back to the tea table at an open casement with the slim-waisted dog on a chair peering over splayed front paws out into the garden too, and she was asking it in a private whisper what it was it had sniffed.

``You can see the Tarn from the library window,'' said Marina. ``Presently Ada will show you all the rooms in the house. Ada?'' (She pronounced it the Russian way with two deep, dark ``a''s, making it sound rather like ``ardor.'')

``You can catch a glint of it from here too,'' said Ada, turning her head and, pollice verso, introducing the view to Van who put his cup down, wiped his mouth with a tiny embroidered napkin, and stuffing it into his trouser pocket, went up to the dark-haired pale-armed girl. As he bent toward her (he was three inches taller and the double of that when she married a Greek Catholic, and his shadow held the bridal crown over her from behind), she moved her head to make him move his to the required angle and her hair touched his neck. In his first dreams of her this re-enacted contact, so light, so brief, invariably proved to be beyond the dreamer's endurance and like a lifted sword signaled fire and violent release.

``Finish your tea, my precious,'' called Marina.

Presently, as Marina had promised, the two children went upstairs. ``Why do the stairs creak so desperately, when two children go upstairs,'' she thought, looking up at the balustrade along which two left hands progressed with strikingly similar flips and glides like siblings taking their first dancing lesson. ``After all, we were twin sisters; everybody knows that.'' The same slow heave, she in front, he behind, took them over the last two steps, and the staircase was silent again. ``Old-fashioned qualms,'' said Marina.

From Nabokov, Ada.

I would never eat a horse.

prose / map / carton's page / Miles Nordin <carton@Ivy.NET>
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