17

Gros Gaston, in his prissy way, had liked to make presents – presents just a prissy wee bit out of the ordinary, or so he prissily thought. Noticing one night that my box of chessmen was broken, he sent me next morning, with a little lad of his, a copper case: it had an elaborate Oriental design over the lid and could be securely locked. One glance sufficed to assure me that it was one of those cheap money boxes called for some reason ‘luizettas’ that you buy in Algiers and elsewhere, and wonder what to do with afterwards. It turned out to be much too flat for holding my bulky chessmen, but I kept it – using it for a totally different purpose. In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself being enmeshed, I had decided – despite Lo’s visible annoyance – to spend another night at Chestnut Court; definitely waking up at four in the morning, I ascertained that Lo was still sound asleep (mouth open, in a kind of dull amazement at the curiously inane life we all had rigged up for her) and satisfied myself that the precious contents of the ‘luizetta’ were safe. There, snugly wrapped in a white woollen scarf, lay a pocket automatic: calibre .32, capacity of magazine eight cartridges, length a little under one-ninth of Lolita’s length, stock checked walnut, finish full blued. I had inherited it from the late Harold Haze, with a 1938 catalogue which cheerily said in part: ‘Particularly well adapted for use in the home and car as well as on the person.’ There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb. I was now glad I had it with me – and even more glad that I had learned to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and Charlotte’s glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an admirable marksman, and with his .38 actually managed to hit a humming bird, though I must say not much of it could be retrieved for proof – only a little iridescent fluff. A burly ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in the ‘twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us and bagged a tiny woodpecker – completely out of season, incidentally. Between these two sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything, though I did wound a squirrel on a later occasion when I went out alone. ‘You lie here,’ I whispered to my light-weight compact little chum, and then toasted it with a dram of gin.

18

The reader must now forget Chestnuts and Colts, and accompany us further west. The following days were marked by a number of great thunderstorms – or perhaps, there was but one single storm which progressed across country in ponderous frog-leaps and which we could not shake off just as we could not shake off detective Trapp: for it was during those days that the problem of the Aztec Red Convertible presented itself to me, and quite overshadowed the theme of Lo’s lovers.

Queer! I who was jealous of every male we met – queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom. Perhaps I had been lulled by Lo’s modest behaviour in winter, and anyway it would have been too foolish even for a lunatic to suppose another Humbert was avidly following Humbert and Humbert’s nymphet with Jovian fireworks, over the great and ugly plains. I surmised, done, that the Red Yak keeping behind us at a discreet distance mile after mile was operated by a detective whom some busybody had hired to see what exactly Humbert Humbert was doing with that minor stepdaughter of his. As happens with me at periods of electrical disturbance and crepitating lightnings, I had hallucinations. Maybe they were more than hallucinations. I do not know what she or he or both had put into my liquor but one night I felt sure somebody was tapping on the door of our cabin, and I flung it open, and noticed two things – that I was stark naked and that, white-glistening in the rain-dripping darkness, there stood a man holding before his face the mask of Jutting Chin, a grotesque sleuth in the funnies. He emitted a muffled guffaw and scurried away, and I reeled back into the room, and fell asleep again, and am not sure even to this day that the visit was not a drug-provoked dream: I have thoroughly studied Trapp’s type of humour, and this might have been a plausible sample. Oh, crude and absolutely ruthless! Somebody, I imagined, was making money on those masks of popular monsters and morons. Did I see next morning two urchins rummaging in a garbage can and trying on Jutting Chin? I wonder. It may all have been a coincidence – due to atmospheric conditions, I suppose.

Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day when I first knew with utter certainty that the red convertible was following us. I do remember, however, the first time I saw its driver quite clearly. I was proceeding slowly one afternoon through torrents of rain and kept seeing that red ghost swimming and shivering with lust in my mirror, when presently the deluge dwindled to a patter, and then was suspended altogether. With a swishing sound a sunburst swept the highway, and, needing a pair of new sunglasses, I pulled up at a filling station. What was happening was a sickness, a cancer, that could not be helped, so I simply ignored the fact that our quiet pursuer, in his converted state, stopped a little behind us at a café or bar bearing the idiotic sign: ‘The Bustle: A Deceitful Seatful’. Having seen to the needs of my car, I walked into the office to get those glasses and pay for the gas. As I was in the act of signing a travellers’ cheque and wondered about my exact whereabouts, I happened to glance through a side window, and saw a terrible thing. A broad-backed man, baldish, in an oatmeal coat and dark-brown trousers, was listening to Lo who was leaning out of the car and talking to him very rapidly, her hand with outspread fingers going up and down as it did when she was very serious and emphatic. What struck me with sickening force was – how should I put it? – the voluble familiarity of her way, as if they had known each other – oh, for weeks and weeks. I saw him scratch his cheek and nod, and turn, and walk back to his convertible, a broad and thickish man of my age, somewhat resembling Gustave Trapp, a cousin of my father’s in Switzerland – same smoothly tanned face, fuller than mine, with a small dark moustache and a rosebud degenerate mouth. Lolita was studying a road map when I got back into the car.

‘What did that man ask you, Lo?’

‘Man? Oh, that man. Oh, yes. Oh, I don’t know. He wondered if I had a map. Lost his way, I guess.’ We drove on, and I said:

‘Now listen, Lo. I do not know whether you are lying or not, and I do not know whether you are insane or not, and I do not care for the moment; but that person has been following us all day, and his car was at the motel yesterday, and I think he is a cop. You know perfectly well what will happen and where you will go if the police find out about things. Now I want to know exactly what he said to you and what you told him.’

She laughed.

‘If he’s really a cop,’ she said shrilly but not illogically, ‘the worst thing we could do, would be to show him we are scared. Ignore him, Dad.’

‘Did he ask where we were going?’

‘Oh, he knows that’ (mocking me).

‘Anyway,’ I said, giving up, ‘I have seen his face now. He is not pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp.’

‘Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you – Oh, look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid,’ she continued unexpectedly, ‘I used to think they’d stop and go back to nines, if only my mother agreed to put the car in reverse.’

It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick; and silently we travelled on, unpursued.

But next day, like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the drug and hope wear off, there it was again behind us, that glossy red beast. The traffic on the highway was light that day; nobody passed anybody; and nobody attempted to get in between our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow – as if there were some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glass-like virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind me, with his stuffed shoulders and Trappish moustache, looked like a display dummy, and his convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it with our shabby vehicle. We were many times weaker than his splendid, lacquered machine, so that I did not even attempt to outspeed him. O lente currite noctis equi! O softly run, nightmares! We climbed long grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black wiggles of curves on their yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet. And all the time I was aware of a private blaze on my right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek.

A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets – at 4.30 p.m. in a factory town – was the hand of chance that interrupted the spell. He beckoned me on, and then with the same hand cut off my shadow. A score of cars were launched in between us, and I sped on, and deftly turned into a narrow lane. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo breadcrumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb.

When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had disappeared.

Lola snorted and said: ‘If he is what you think he is, how silly to give him the slip.’

‘I have other notions by now,’ I said.

‘You should – ah – check them by – ah – keeping in touch with him, fahther deah,’ said Lo, writhing in the coils of her own sarcasm. ‘Gee, you are mean,’ she added in her ordinary voice.

We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling above us.

‘I am not a lady and do not like lightning,’ said Lo, whose dread of electric storms gave me some pathetic solace.

We had breakfast in the township of Soda, population 1,001.

‘Judging by the terminal figure,’ I remarked, ‘Fatface is already here.’

‘Your humour,’ said Lo, ‘is sidesplitting, deah fahther.’

We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas gave way to real mountains, and, on time, we drove into Wace.

Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread a date in the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave ceremonies were over! She took it bravely, I must admit – and, when we discovered there was in kurortish Wace a summer theatre in full swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June evening. I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, bare-limbed – seven bemused pubescent girls in coloured gauze that had been recruited locally (judging by the partisan flurry here and there among the audience) and were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this idea of children-colours had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colours were quite exasperatingly lovely – Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector.

As soon as the thing was over, and manual applause – a sound my nerves cannot stand – began to crash all around me, I started to pull and push Lo toward the exit, in my so natural amorous impatience to get her back to our neon-blue cottage in the stunned, starry night: I always say nature is stunned by the sights she sees. Dolly-Lo, however, lagged behind, in a rosy daze, her pleased eyes narrowed, her sense of vision swamping the rest of her senses to such an extent that her limp hands hardly came together at all in the mechanical action of clapping they still went through. I had seen that kind of thing in children before but, by God, this was a special child, myopically beaming at the already remote stage where I glimpsed something of the joint authors – a man’s tuxedo and the bare shoulders of a hawk-like, black-haired, strikingly tall woman.

‘You’ve again hurt my wrist, you brute,’ said Lolita in a small voice as she slipped into her car seat.

‘I am dreadfully sorry, my darling, my own ultraviolet darling,’ I said, unsuccessfully trying to catch her elbow, and I added, to change the conversation – to change the direction of fate, oh God, oh God: ‘Vivian is quite a woman. I am sure we saw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda pop.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Lo, ‘you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married and has Negro blood.’

‘I thought,’ I said kidding her, ‘Quilty was an ancient flame of yours, in the days when you loved me, in sweet old Ramsdale.’

‘What?’ countered Lo, her features working. ‘That fat dentist? You must be confusing me with some other fast little article.’

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy.