NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

The Prince did not heed this rather kitschy prattle (all, probably, directed by her
mother) and, let it be repeated, regarded her merely as a sibling, fragrant and
fashionable, with a painted pout and a maussade, blurry, Gallic way of expressing the
little she wished to express. Her unruffled rudeness toward the nervous and garrulous
Countess amused him. He liked dancing with her - and only with her. He hardly
squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open
lips to his cheek which the haggard after-the-ball dawn had already sooted. She did
not seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures; and she met him
again in the dark of a car or in the half-glow of a cabaret with the subdued and
ambiguous smile of a kissing cousin.
The forty days between Queen Blenda's death and his coronation was perhaps the
most trying stretch of time in his life. He had had no love for his mother, and the
hopeless and helpless remorse he now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of
her phantom. The Countess, who seemed to be near him, to be rustling at his side, all
the time, had him attend table-turning seances with an experienced American medium,
seances at which the Queen's spirit, operating the same kind of planchette she had
used in her lifetime to chat with Thormodus Torfaeus and A. R. Wallace, now briskly
wrote in English: "Charles take take cherish love flower flower flower." An old
psychiatrist so thoroughly bribed by the Countess as to look, even on the outside, like
a putrid pear, assured him that his vices had subconsciously killed his mother and
would continue "to kill her in him" if he did not renounce sodomy. A palace intrigue
is a special spider that entangles you more nastily at every desperate jerk you try. Our
Prince was young, inexperienced, and half-frenzied with insomnia. He hardly
struggled at all. The Countess spent a fortune on buying his kamergrum (groom of the
chamber), his bodyguard, and even the greater part of the Court Chamberlain. She
took to sleeping in a small antechamber next to his bachelor bedroom, a splendid
spacious circular apartment at the top of the high and massive South West Tower.
This had been his father's retreat and was still connected by a jolly chute in the wall
with a round swimming pool in the hall below, so that the young Prince could start the
day as his father used to start it by slipping open a panel beside his army cot and
rolling into the shaft whence he whizzed down straight into bright water. For other
needs than sleep Charles Xavier had installed in the middle of the Persian rug-covered
floor a so-called patifolia, that is, a huge, oval, luxuriously flounced, swansdown
pillow the size of a triple bed. It was in this ample nest that Fleur now slept, curled up
in its central hollow, under a coverlet of genuine giant panda fur that had just been
rushed from Tibet by a group of Asiatic well-wishers on the occasion of his ascension
to the throne. The antechamber, where the Countess was ensconced, had its own inner
staircase and bathroom, but also communicated by means of a sliding door with the
West Gallery. I do not know what advice or command her mother had given Fleur;
but the little thing proved a poor seducer. She kept trying, as one quietly insane, to
mend a broken viola d'amore or sat in dolorous attitudes comparing two ancient flutes,
both sad-tuned and feeble. Meantime, in Turkish garb, he lolled in his father's ample
chair, his legs over its arm, flipping through a volume of Historia Zemblica, copying
out passages and occasionally fishing out of the nether recesses of his seat a pair of
old-fashioned motoring goggles, a black opal ring, a ball of silver chocolate wrapping,
or the star of a foreign order.
http://www.en8848.com.cn/『原版英语』