19

With Lo’s knowledge and assent, the two post offices given to the Beardsley postmaster as forwarding addresses were PO Wace and PO Elphinstone. Next morning we visited the former and had to wait in a short but slow queue. Serene Lo studied the rogues’ gallery. Handsome Bryan Bryanski, alias Anthony Bryan, alias Tony Brown, eyes hazel, complexion fair, was wanted for kidnapping. A sad-eyed old gentleman’s faux pas was mail fraud, and, as if that were not enough, he was cursed with deformed arches. Sullen Sullivan came with a caution: Is believed armed, and should be considered extremely dangerous. If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look. And moreover there was a smudgy snapshot of a Missing Girl, age fourteen, wearing brown shoes when last seen, rhymes. Please notify Sheriff Buller.

I forget my letters; as to Dolly’s, there was her report and a very special-looking envelope. This I deliberately opened and perused its contents. I concluded I was doing the foreseen since she did not seem to mind and drifted toward the news-stand near the exit.

‘Dolly-Lo: Well, the play was a grand success. All three hounds lay quiet having been slightly drugged by Cutler, I suspect, and Linda knew all your lines. She was fine, she had alertness and control, but lacked somehow the responsiveness, the relaxed vitality, the charm of my – and the author’s – Diana; but there was no author to applaud us as last time, and the terrific electric storm outside interfered with our own modest off-stage thunder. Oh dear, life does fly. Now that everything is over, school, play, the Roy mess, mother’s confinement (our baby, alas, did not live!), it all seems such a long time ago, though practically I still bear traces of the paint.

‘We are going to New York after tomorrow, and I guess I can’t manage to wriggle out of accompanying my parents to Europe. I have even worse news for you. Dolly-Lo! I may not be back at Beardsley if and when you return. With one thing and another, one being you know who, and the other not being who you think you know, Dad wants me to go to school in Paris for one year while he and Fulbright are around.

‘As expected, poor Poet stumbled in Scene III when arriving at the bit of French nonsense. Remember? Ne manque pas de dire à ton amant, Chimene, comme le lac est beau car il faut qu’il t’y méne. Lucky beau! Qu’il t’y – What a tongue-twister! Well, be good, Lollikins. Best love from your Poet, and best regards to the Governor. Your Mona. PS. Because of one thing and another, my correspondence happens to be rigidly controlled. So better wait till I write you from Europe.’ (She never did as far as I know. The letter contained an element of mysterious nastiness that I am too tired today to analyse. I found it later preserved in one of the Tour Books, and gave it here a titre documentaire. I read it twice.)

I looked up from the letter and was about to – There was no Lo to behold. While I was engrossed in Mona’s witchery, Lo had shrugged her shoulders and vanished. ‘Did you happen to see – ’

I asked of a hunchback sweeping the floor near the entrance. He had, the old lecherer. He guessed she had seen a friend and had hurried out. I hurried out too. I stopped – she had not. I hurried on. I stopped again. It had happened at last. She had gone for ever.

In later years I have often wondered why she did not go for ever that day. Was it the retentive quality of her new summer clothes in my locked car? Was it some unripe particle in some general plan? Was it simply because, all things considered, I might as well be used to convey her to Elphinstone – the secret terminus, anyway? I only know I was quite certain she had left me for ever. The non-committal mauve mountains half encircling the town seemed to me to swarm with panting, scrambling, laughing, panting Lolitas who dissolved in their haze. A big W made of white stones on a steep talus in the far vista of a cross street seemed the very initial of woe.

The new and beautiful post office I had just emerged from stood between a dormant movie house and a conspiracy of poplars. The time was 9 a.m. mountain time. The street was Main Street. I paced its blue side peering at the opposite one: charming it into beauty, was one of those fragile young summer mornings with flashes of glass here and there and a general air of faltering and almost fainting at the prospect of an intolerably torrid noon. Crossing over, I loafed and leafed, as it were, through one long block: Drugs, Real Estate, Fashions, Auto Parts, Café, Sporting Goods, Real Estate, Furniture, Appliances, Western Union, Cleaners, Grocery. Officer, officer, my daughter has run away. In collusion with a detective; in love with a blackmailer. Took advantage of my utter helplessness. I peered into all the stores. I deliberated inly if I should talk to any of the sparse foot-passengers. I did not. I sat for a while in the parked car. I inspected the public garden on the east side. I went back to Fashions and Auto Parts. I told myself with a burst of furious sarcasm – un ricanement – that I was crazy to suspect her, that she would turn up in a minute.

She did.

I wheeled around and shook off the hand she had placed on my sleeve with a timid and imbecile smile.

‘Get into the car,’ I said.

She obeyed, and I went on pacing up and down, struggling with nameless thoughts, trying to plan some way of tackling her duplicity.

Presently she left the car and was at my side again. My sense of hearing gradually got tuned in to station Lo again, and I became aware she was telling me that she had met a former girl friend.

‘Yes? Whom?’

‘A Beardsley girl.’

‘Good. I know every name in your group. Alice Adams?’

‘This girl was not in my group.’

‘Good. I have a complete student list with me. Her name please.’

‘She was not in my school. She is just a town girl in Beardsley.’

‘Good. I have the Beardsley directory with me too. We’ll look up all the Browns.’

‘I only know her first name.’

‘Mary or Jane?’

‘No – Dolly, like me.’

‘So that’s the dead end’ (the mirror you break your nose against). ‘Good. Let us try another angle. You have been absent twenty-eight minutes. What did the two Dollys do?’

‘We went to a drugstore.’

‘And you had there – ’

‘Oh, just a couple of cokes.’

‘Careful, Dolly. We can check that, you know.’

‘At least, she had. I had a glass of water.’

‘Good. Was it that place there?’

‘Sure.’

‘Good, come on, we’ll grill the soda jerk.’

‘Wait a sec. Come to think it might have been further down – just around the corner.’

‘Come on all the same. Go in, please. Well, let’s see.’ (Opening a chained telephone book.) ‘Dignified Funeral Service. No, not yet. Here we are: Druggists-Retail. Hill Drug Store. Larkin’s Pharmacy. And two more. That’s all Wace seems to have in the way of soda fountains – at least in the business section. Well, we will check them all.’

‘Go to hell,’ she said.

‘Lo, rudeness will get you nowhere.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But you’re not going to trap me. Okay, so we did not have a pop. We just talked and looked at dresses in show windows.’

‘Which? That window there for example?’

‘Yes, that one there, for example.’

‘Oh, Lo! Let’s look closer at it.’

It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was vacuum-cleaning a carpet of sorts upon which stood two figures that looked as if some blast had just worked havoc with them. One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its comparatively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when clothed it had represented, and would represent when clothed again, a girl child of Lolita’s size. But in its present state it was sexless. Next to it, stood a much taller veiled bride, quite perfect and intacta except for the lack of one arm. On the floor, at the feet of these damsels, where the man crawled about laboriously with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three slender arms, and a blonde wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication.

‘Look, Lo,’ I said quietly. ‘Look well. Is not that a rather good symbol of something or other? However’ – I went on as we got back into the car – ‘I have taken certain precautions. Here (delicately opening the glove compartment), on this pad, I have our boy friend’s car number.’

As the ass I was I had not memorized it. What remained of it in my mind were the initial letter and the closing figure as if the whole amphitheatre of six signs receded concavely behind a tinted glass too opaque to allow the central series to be deciphered, but just translucent enough to make out its extreme edges – a capital P and a 6. I have to go into those details (which in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) because otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a blonde-bearded scholar with rosy lips sucking la pomme de sa canne as he quaffs my manuscript!) might not understand the quality of the shock I experienced upon noticing that the P had acquired the bustle of à Â and that the 6 had been deleted altogether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried shuttle smear of a pencil’s rubber end, and with parts of numbers obliterated or reconstructed in a child’s hand, presented a tangle of barbed wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the state – one adjacent to the state Beardsley was in.

I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics from the back seat and, mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the current adventure of some clout or clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone.

And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement, grovelling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation. In the velvet night, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed the yellowish soles of her long-toed feet, I immolated myself… But it was all of no avail. Both doomed were we. And soon I was to enter a new cycle of persecution.

In a street of Wace, on its outskirts… Oh, I am quite sure it was not a delusion. In a street of Wace, I had glimpsed the Aztec Red convertible, or its identical twin. Instead of Trapp, it contained four or five loud young people of several sexes – but I said nothing. After Wace a totally new situation arose. For a day or two, I enjoyed the mental emphasis with which I told myself that we were not, and never had been followed; and then I became sickeningly conscious that Trapp had changed his tactics and was still with us, in this or that rented car.

A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched from one vehicle to another. This technique implied the existence of garages specializing in ‘stage-automobile’ operations, but I never could discover the remises he used. He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Grey and Driftwood Grey. Then he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades, and one day I found myself attempting to cope with the subtle distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue Oldsmobile he had rented; greys, however, remained his favourite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler’s Shell Grey, Chevrolet’s Thistle Grey, Dodge’s French Grey…

The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little moustache and open shirt – or for his baldish pate and broad shoulders – led me to a profound study of all cars on the road – behind, before, alongside, coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun: the quiet vacationist’s automobile with the box of Tender-Touch tissues in the back window; the recklessly speeding jalopy full of pale children with a shaggy dog’s head protruding, and a crumpled mudguard; the bachelor’s tudor sedan crowded with suits on hangers; the huge fat house trailer weaving in front, immune to the Indian file of fury boiling behind it; the car with the young female passenger politely perched in the middle of the front seat to be closer to the young male driver; the car carrying on its roof a red boat, bottom up… The grey car slowing up before us, the grey car catching up with us.

We were in mountain country, somewhere between Snow and Champion, and rolling down an almost imperceptible grade, when I had my next distinct view of Detective Paramour Trapp. The grey mist behind us had deepened and concentrated into the compactness of a Dominion Blue sedan. All of a sudden, as if the car I drove responded to my poor heart’s pangs, we were slithering from side to side, with something making a helpless plap-plap-plap under us.

‘You got a flat, mister,’ said cheerful Lo.

I pulled up – near a precipice. She folded her arms and put her foot on the dashboard. I got out and examined the right rear wheel. The base of its tyre was sheepishly and hideously square. Trapp had stopped some fifty yards behind us. His distant face formed a grease spot of mirth. This was my chance. I started to walk towards him – with the brilliant idea of asking him for a jack though I had one. He backed a little. I stubbed my toe against a stone – and there was a sense of general laughter. Then a tremendous truck loomed from behind Trapp and thundered by me – and immediately after, I heard it utter a convulsive honk. Instinctively I looked back – and saw my own car gently creeping away. I could make out Lo ludicrously at the wheel, and the engine was certainly running – though I remembered I had cut it but had not applied the emergency brake; and during the brief space of throb-time that it took me to reach the croaking machine which came to a standstill at last, it dawned upon me that during the last two years little Lo had had ample time to pick up the rudiments of driving. As I wrenched the door open, I was goddam sure she had started the car to prevent me from walking up to Trapp. Her trick proved useless, however, for even while I was pursuing her he had made an energetic U-turn and was gone. I rested for a while. Lo asked wasn’t I going to thank her – the car had started to move by itself and – Getting no answer, she immersed herself in a study of the map. I got out again and commenced the ‘ordeal of the orb’, as Charlotte used to say. Perhaps I was losing my mind.

We continued our grotesque journey. After a forlorn and useless dip, we went up and up. On a steep grade I found myself behind the gigantic truck that had overtaken us. It was now groaning up a winding road and was impossible to pass. Out of its front part a small oblong of smooth silver – the inner wrapping of chewing gum – escaped and flew back into our windshield. It occurred to me that if I were really losing my mind, I might end by murdering somebody. In fact – said high-and-dry Humbert to floundering Humbert – it might be quite clever to prepare things – to transfer the weapon from box to pocket – so as to be ready to take advantage of the spell of insanity when it does come.