26

This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head – everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.

27

Still in Parkington. Finally, I did achieve an hour’s slumber – from which I was aroused by gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger. By then it was six in the morning, and it suddenly occurred to me it might be a good thing to arrive at the camp earlier than I had said. From Parkington I had still a hundred miles to go, and there would be more than that to the Hazy Hills and Briceland. If I had said I would come for Dolly in the afternoon, it was only because my fancy insisted on merciful night falling as soon as possible upon my impatience. But now I foresaw all kinds of misunderstandings and was all a-jitter lest delay might give her the opportunity of some idle telephone call to Ramsdale. However, when at 9.30 a.m. I attempted to start, I was confronted by a dead battery, and noon was nigh when at last I left Parkington. I reached my destination around half-past two; parked my car in a pine grove where a green-shirted, redheaded impish lad stood throwing horseshoes in sullen solitude; was laconically directed by him to an office in a stucco cottage; in a dying state, had to endure for several minutes the inquisitive commiseration of the camp mistress, a sluttish worn-out female with rusty hair. Dolly she said was all packed and ready to go. She knew her mother was sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean, Mr. Humbert, care to meet the camp counsellors? Or look at the cabins where the girls live? Each dedicated to a Disney creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be sent over to fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room for a dance. (And perhaps afterwards she would say to somebody or other: ‘The poor guy looked like his own ghost.’)

Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with a bright ‘…and five!’; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (‘nature study’); the framed diploma of the camp’s dietitian; my trembling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly Haze’s behaviour for July (‘fair to good; keen on swimming and boating’); a sound of trees and birds, and my pounding heart… I was standing with my back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heard her respiration and voice behind me. She arrived dragging and bumping her heavy suitcase. ‘Hi!’ she said, and stood still, looking at me with sly, glad eyes, her soft lips parted in a slightly foolish but wonderfully endearing smile.

She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me her face was less pretty than the mental imprint I had cherished for more than a month: her cheeks looked hollowed and too much lentigo camouflaged her rosy rustic features; and that first impression (a very narrow human interval between two tiger heartbeats) carried the clear implication that all widower Humbert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-looking though sun-coloured little orphan aux yeux battus (and even those plumbaceous umbrae under her eyes bore freckles) a sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends of her age among whom (if the fates deigned to repay me) I might find, perhaps, a pretty little mägdlein for Herr Doktor Humbert alone. But ‘in a wink’, as the Germans say, the angelic line of conduct was erased, and I overtook my prey (time moves ahead of our fancies!), and she was my Lolita again – in fact, more of my Lolita than ever. I let my hand rest on her warm auburn head and took up her bag. She was all rose and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham, with a pattern of little red apples, and her arms and legs were of a deep golden brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of coagulated rubies, and the rubbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down at the remembered level, and because of her childish gait, or because I had memorized her as always wearing heelless shoes, her saddle oxfords looked somehow too large and too high-heeled for her. Goodbye, Camp Q., merry Camp Q. Goodbye, plain unwholesome food, goodbye Charlie boy. In the hot car she settled down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her lovely knee; then, her mouth working violently on a piece of chewing gum, she rapidly cranked down the window on her side and settled back again. We sped through the striped and speckled forest.

‘How’s Mother?’ she asked dutifully.

I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway, something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdominal. We would have to hang around for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town of Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century and where we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy idea and wondered if we could make Lepingville before 9 p.m.

‘We should be at Briceland by dinner time,’ I said, ‘and tomorrow we’ll visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you have a marvellous time at the camp?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Sorry to leave?’

‘Un-un.’

‘Talk, Lo – don’t grunt. Tell me something.’

‘What thing, Dad?’ (she let the word expand with ironic deliberation).

‘Any old thing.’

‘Okay, if I call you that?’ (eyes slit at the road).

‘Quite.’

‘It’s a sketch, you know. When did you fall for my mummy?’

‘Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship.’

‘Bah!’ said the cynical nymphet.

Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape.

‘Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside.’

‘I think I’ll vomit if I look at a cow again.’

‘You know, I missed you terribly, Lo.’

‘I did not. Fact I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you, but it does not matter one bit, because you’ve stopped caring for me, anyway. You drive much faster than my mummy, mister.’

I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty.

‘Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?’

‘Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you?’

Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide shoulder of road ahead, and bumped and wobbled into the weeds, Remember she is only a child, remember she is only —

Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita positively flowed into my arms. Not daring, not daring let myself go – not even daring let myself realize that this (sweet wetness and trembling fire) was the beginning of the ineffable life which, ably assisted by fate, I had finally willed into being – not daring really kiss her, I touched her hot, opening lips with the utmost piety, tiny sips, nothing salacious; but she, with an impatient wriggle, pressed her mouth to mine so hard that I felt her big front teeth and shared in the peppermint taste of her saliva. I knew, of course, it was but an innocent game on her part, a bit of backfisch foolery in imitation of some simulacrum of fake romance, and since (as the psychotherapist, as well as the rapist, will tell you) the limits and rules of such girlish games are fluid, or at least too childishly subtle for the senior partner to grasp – I was dreadfully afraid I might go too far and cause her to start back in revulsion and terror. And, as above all I was agonizingly anxious to smuggle her into the hermetic seclusion of The Enchanted Hunters, and we had still eighty miles to go, blessed intuition broke our embrace – a split second before a highway patrol car drew up alongside.

Florid and beetlebrowed, its driver stared at me:

‘Happen to see a blue sedan, same make as yours, pass you before the junction?’

‘Why, no.’

‘We didn’t,’ said Lo, eagerly leaning across me, her innocent hand on my legs, ‘but are you sure it was blue, because – ’

The cop (what shadow of us was he after?) gave the little colleen his best smile and went into a U-turn.

We drove on.

‘The fruithead!’ remarked Lo. ‘He should have nabbed you.’

‘Why me for heaven’s sake?’

‘Well, the speed in this bum state is fifty, and – No, don’t slow down, you dull bulb. He’s gone now.’

‘We have still quite a stretch,’ I said, ‘and I want to get there before dark. So be a good girl.’

‘Bad, bad girl,’ said Lo comfortably. ‘Juvenile delickwent, but frank and fetching. That light was red. I’ve never seen such driving.’

We rolled silently through a silent townlet.

‘Say, wouldn’t Mother be absolutely mad if she found out we were lovers?’

‘Good Lord, Lo, let us not talk that way.’

‘But we are lovers, aren’t we?’

‘Not that I know of. I think we are going to have some more rain. Don’t you want to tell me of those little pranks of yours in camp?’

‘You talk like a book, Dad.’

‘What have you been up to? I insist you tell me.’

‘Are you easily shocked?’

‘No. Go on.’

‘Let us turn into a secluded lane and I’ll tell you.’

‘Lo, I must seriously ask you not to play the fool. Well?’

‘Well – I joined in all the activities that were offered.’

‘Ensuite?’

‘Ansooit, I was taught to live happily and richly with others and to develop a wholesome personality. Be a cake, in fact.’

‘Yes. I saw something of the sort in the booklet.’

‘We loved the sings around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under the darned stars, where every girl merged her own spirit of happiness with the voice of the group.’

‘Your memory is excellent, Lo, but I must trouble you to leave out the swear words. Anything else?’

‘The Girl Scout’s motto,’ said Lo rhapsodically, ‘is also mine. I fill my life with worth-while deeds such as – well, never mind what. My duty is – to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I obey orders. I am cheerful. That was another police car. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word and deed.’

‘Now I do hope that’s all, you witty child.’

‘Yep. That’s all. No – wait a sec. We baked in a reflector oven. Isn’t that terrific?’

‘Well, that’s better.’

‘We washed zillions of dishes. “Zillions” you know is school-marm’s slang for many-many-many-many. Oh yes, last but not least, as Mother says – Now let me see – what was it? I know: We made shadowgraphs. Gee, what fun.’

‘C’est bien tout?’

‘C’est. Except for one little thing, something I simply can’t tell you without blushing all over.’

‘Will you tell it me later?’

‘If we sit in the dark and you let me whisper, I will. Do you sleep in your old room or in a heap with Mother?’

‘Old room. Your mother may have to undergo a very serious operation, Lo.’

‘Stop at that candy bar, will you,’ said Lo.

Sitting on a high stool, a band of sunlight crossing her bare brown forearm, Lolita was served an elaborate ice-cream concoction topped with synthetic syrup. It was erected and brought her by a pimply brute of a boy in a greasy bow-tie who eyed my fragile child in her thin cotton frock with carnal deliberation. My impatience to reach Briceland and The Enchanted Hunters was becoming more than I could endure. Fortunately she dispatched the stuff with her usual alacrity.

‘How much cash do you have?’ I asked.

‘Not a cent,’ she said sadly, lifting her eyebrows, showing me the empty inside of her money purse.

‘This is a matter that will be mended in due time,’ I rejoined archly. ‘Are you coming?’

‘Say, I wonder if they have a washroom.’

‘You are not going there,’ I said firmly. ‘It is sure to be a vile place. Do come on.’

She was on the whole an obedient little girl and I kissed her in the neck when we got back into the car.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said looking at me with unfeigned surprise. ‘Don’t drool on me. You dirty man.’

She rubbed the spot against her raised shoulder.

‘Sorry,’ I murmured. ‘I’m rather fond of you, that’s all.’

We drove under a gloomy sky, up a winding road, then down again.

‘Well, I’m also sort of fond of you,’ said Lolita in a delayed soft voice, with a sort of sigh, and sort of settled closer to me.

(Oh, my Lolita, we shall never get there!)

Dusk was beginning to saturate pretty little Briceland, its phony colonial architecture, curiosity shops and imported shade trees, when we drove through the weakly lighted streets in search of the Enchanted Hunters. The air, despite a steady drizzle beading it, was warm and green, and a queue of people, mainly children and old men, had already formed before the box office of a movie house, dripping with jewel-fires.

‘Oh, I want to see that picture. Let’s go right after dinner. Oh, let’s!’

‘We might,’ chanted Humbert – knowing perfectly well, the sly tumescent devil, that by nine, when his show began, she would be dead in his arms.

‘Easy!’ cried Lo, lurching forward, as an accursed truck in front of us, its backside carbuncles pulsating, stopped at a crossing.

If we did not get to the hotel soon, immediately, miraculously, in the very next block, I felt I would lose all control over the Haze jalopy with its ineffectual wipers and whimsical brakes; but the passers-by I applied to for directions were either strangers themselves or asked with a frown ‘Enchanted what?’ as if I were a madman; or else they went into such complicated explanations, with geometrical gestures, geographical generalities and strictly local clues (…then bear south after you hit the courthouse…) that I could not help losing my way in the maze of their well-meaning gibberish. Lo, whose lovely prismatic entrails had already digested the sweetmeat, was looking forward to a big meal and had begun to fidget. As to me, although I had long become used to a kind of secondary fate (McFate’s inept secretary, so to speak) pettily interfering with the boss’s generous magnificent plan – to grind and grope through the avenues of Briceland was perhaps the most exasperating ordeal I had yet faced. In later months I could laugh at my inexperience when recalling the obstinate boyish way in which I had concentrated upon that particular inn with its fancy name; for all along our route countless motor courts proclaimed their vacancy in neon lights, ready to accommodate salesmen, escaped convicts, impotents, family groups, as well as the most corrupt and vigorous couples. Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer’s black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass!

The miracle I hankered for did happen after all. A man and a girl, more or less conjoined in a dark car under dripping trees, told us we were in the heart of The Park, but had only to turn left at the next traffic light and there we would be. We did not see any next traffic light – in fact, The Park was as black as the sins it concealed – but soon after falling under the smooth spell of a nicely graded curve, the travellers became aware of a diamond glow through the mist, then a gleam of lakewater appeared – and there it was, marvellously and inexorably, under spectral trees, at the top of a gravelled drive – the pale palace of The Enchanted Hunters.

A row of parked cars, like pigs at a trough, seemed at first sight to forbid access; but then, by magic, a formidable convertible, resplendent, rubous in the lighted rain, came into motion – was energetically backed out by a broad-shouldered driver – and we gratefully slipped into the gap it had left. I immediately regretted my haste for I noticed that my predecessor had now taken advantage of a garage-like shelter nearby where there was ample space for another car; but I was too impatient to follow his example.

‘Wow! Looks swank,’ remarked my vulgar darling squinting at the stucco as she crept out into the audible drizzle and with a childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that had stuck in the peach-cleft – to quote Robert Browning. Under the arclights enlarged replicas of chestnut leaves plunged and played on white pillars. I unlocked the trunk compartment. A hunchbacked and hoary Negro in a uniform of sorts took our bags and wheeled them slowly into the lobby. It was full of old ladies and clergymen. Lolita sank down on her haunches to caress a pale-faced blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swooning on the floral carpet under her hand – as who would not, my heart – while I cleared my throat through the throng to the desk. There a bald porcine old man – everybody was old in that old hotel – examined my features with a polite smile, then leisurely produced my (garbled) telegram, wrestled with some dark doubts, turned his head to look at the clock, and finally said he was very sorry, he had held the room with the twin beds till half-past six, and now it was gone. A religious convention, he said, had clashed with a flower show in Briceland, and ‘The name,’ I said coldly, ‘is not Humberg and not Humbug, but Herbert, I mean Humbert, and any room will do, just put in a cot for my little daughter. She is ten and very tired.’

The pink old fellow peered good-naturedly at Lo – still squatting, listening in profile, lips parted, to what the dog’s mistress, an ancient lady swathed in violet veils, was telling her from the depths of a cretonne easy chair.

Whatever doubts the obscene fellow had, they were dispelled by that blossom-like vision. He said, he might still have a room, had one, in fact – with a double bed. As to the cot —

‘Mr. Potts, do we have any cots left?’ Potts, also pink and bald, with white hairs growing out of his ears and other holes, would see what could be done. He came and spoke while I unscrewed my fountain pen. Impatient Humbert!

‘Our double beds are really triple,’ Potts cosily said tucking me and my kid in. ‘One crowded night we had three ladies and a child like yours sleep together. I believe one of the ladies was a disguised man [my static]. However – would there be a spare cot in 49, Mr. Swine?’

‘I think it went to the Swoons,’ said Swine, the initial old clown.

‘We’ll manage somehow,’ I said. ‘My wife may join us later – but even then, I suppose, we’ll manage.’

The two pink pigs were now among my best friends. In the slow clear hand of crime I wrote: Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, 342 Lawn Street, Ramsdale. A key (342!) was half-shown to me (magician showing object he is about to palm) – and handed over to Uncle Tom. Lo, leaving the dog as she would leave me some day, rose from her haunches; a raindrop fell on Charlotte’s grave; a handsome young Negress slipped open the elevator door, and the doomed child went in followed by her throat-clearing father and crayfish Tom with the bags.

Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death.

‘Say, it’s our house number,’ said cheerful Lo.

There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet door with mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a blue-dark window, a reflected bed there, the same in the closet mirror, two chairs, a glass-topped table, two bedtables, a double bed: a big panel bed, to be exact, with a Tuscan rose chenille spread, and two frilled, pink-shaded nightlamps, left and right.

I was tempted to place a five-dollar bill in that sepia palm, but thought the largesse might be misconstrued, so I placed a quarter. Added another. He withdrew. Click. Enfin seuls.

‘Are we to sleep in one room?’ said Lo, her features working in that dynamic way they did – not cross or disgusted (though plain on the brink of it) but just dynamic – when she wanted to load a question with violent significance.

‘I’ve asked them to put in a cot. Which I’ll use if you like.’

‘You are crazy,’ said Lo.

‘Why, my darling?’

‘Because, my dahrling, when dahrling Mother finds out she’ll divorce you and strangle me.’

Just dynamic. Not really taking the matter too seriously.

‘Now look here,’ I said, sitting down, while she stood, a few feet from me, and stared at herself contentedly, not unpleasantly surprised at her own appearance, filling with her own rosy sunshine the surprised and pleased closet-door mirror.

‘Look here, Lo. Let’s settle this once for all. For all practical purposes I am your father. I have a feeling of great tenderness for you. In your mother’s absence I am responsible for your welfare. We are not rich, and while we travel, we shall be obliged – we shall be thrown a good deal together. Two people sharing one room, inevitably enter into a kind – how shall I say – a kind – ’

‘The word is incest,’ said Lo – and walked into the closet, walked out again with a young golden giggle, opened the adjoining door, and after carefully peering inside with her strange smoky eyes lest she make another mistake, retired to the bathroom.

I opened the window, tore off my sweat-drenched shirt, changed, checked the pill vial in my coat pocket, unlocked the —

She drifted out. I tried to embrace her: casually, a bit of controlled tenderness before dinner.

She said: ‘Look, let’s cut out the kissing game and get something to eat.’

It was then that I sprang my surprise.

Oh, what a dreamy pet! She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. (Was there something wrong, I wondered, with those great grey eyes of hers, or were we both plunged in the same enchanted mist?) She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her beautiful boy-knees while she walked through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream. Then she raised by the armlets a copper-coloured, charming and quite expensive vest, very slowly stretching it between her silent hands as if she were a bemused bird-hunter holding his breath over the incredible bird he spreads out by the tips of its flaming wings. Then (while I stood waiting for her) she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and tried it on.

Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes – for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate – while we moan and die.

‘What’s the katter with misses?’ I muttered (word-control gone) into her hair.

‘If you must know,’ she said, ‘you do it the wrong way.’

‘Show, wight ray.’

‘All in good time,’ responded the spoonerette.

Seva ascendes, pulsata, brulans, kitzelans, dementissima. Elevator clatterans, pausa, clatterans, poputus in corridoro. Hanc nisi mors mihi adimet niemo! Juncea puellula, jo pensavo fondissime, nobserva nihil quidquam; but, of course, in another moment I might have committed some dreadful blunder; fortunately, she returned to the treasure box.

From the bathroom, where it took me quite a time to shift back into normal gear for a humdrum purpose, I heard, standing, drumming, retaining my breath, my Lolita’s ‘oo’s’ and ‘gee’s’ of girlish delight.

She had used the soap only because it was sample soap.

‘Well, come on, my dear, if you are as hungry as I am.’

And so to the elevator, daughter swinging her old white purse, father walking in front (notabene: never behind, she is not a lady). As we stood (now side by side) waiting to be taken down, she threw back her head, yawned without restraint and shook her curls.

‘When did they make you get up at that camp?’

‘Half-past – ’ she stifled another yawn – ‘six’ – yawn in full with a shiver of all her frame. ‘Half-past,’ she repeated, her throat filling up again.

The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded smile. It was a spacious and pretentious place with maudlin murals depicting enchanted hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of pallid animals, dryads and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen, and a man in a sports coat were finishing their meals in silence. The dining room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving girls were, happily, in a desperate hurry to get rid of us.

‘Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?’ said Lo in a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room.

‘Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?’

Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her dancing glass.

‘Course not,’ she said with a splutter of mirth. ‘I meant the writer fellow in the Dromes ad.’

Oh, Fame! Oh, Femina!

When the dessert was plunked down – a huge wedge of cherry pie for the young lady and vanilla ice-cream for her protector, most of which she expeditiously added to her pie – I produced a small vial containing Papa’s Purple Pills. As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and monstrous moment, I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all seemed quite simple and inevitable to me. I glanced around, satisfied myself that the last diner had left, removed the stopper, and with the utmost deliberation tipped the philtre into my palm. I had carefully rehearsed before a mirror the gesture of clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and swallowing a (fictitious) pill. As I expected, she pounced upon the vial with its plump, beautifully coloured capsules loaded with Beauty’s Sleep.

‘Blue!’ she exclaimed. ‘Violet blue. What are they made of?’

‘Summer skies,’ I said, ‘and plums and figs, and the grape-blood of emperors.’

‘No, seriously – please.’

‘Oh, just Purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want to try one?’

Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously.

I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did. She had had a long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning with Barbara whose sister was Waterfront Director, as the adorable accessible nymphet now started to tell me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume – oh, how fast the magic potion worked! – and had been active in other ways too. The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time we watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator, she leaned against me, faintly smiling – wouldn’t you like me to tell you? – half-closing her dark-lidded eyes. ‘Sleepy, huh?’ said Uncle Tom who was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as two withered women, experts in roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail, tanned, tottering, dazed rose darling. I had almost to carry her into our room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull, long-drawn tones.

‘If I tell you – if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so sleepy – head lolling, eyes going out], promise you won’t make complaints?’

‘Later, Lo. Now go to bed. I’ll leave you here, and you go to bed. Give you ten minutes.’

‘Oh, I’ve been such a disgusting girl,’ she went on, shaking her hair, removing with slow fingers a velvet hair ribbon. ‘Lemme tell you – ‘

‘Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed – for goodness sake, to bed.’

I pocketed the key and walked downstairs.