Read Online Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov, John Banville - Free Book Online Page B

madman slashes a picture.” He wept, listened to make sure that Margot was not coming back and wrote on,sobbing and muttering to himself. He begged his wife’s forgiveness, but his letter gave no indication as to whether he was prepared to give up his mistress.
    He received no answer.
    Then he realized that, if he was not to go on tormenting himself, he must erase the image of his family from his memory and abandon himself utterly to the fierce, almost morbid passion which Margot’s gay loveliness excited in him. She on her part was always ready to respond to his love-making; it only refreshed her; she was playful and without a care; the doctor had told her two years before that she could never have a child, and she regarded this as a boon and a blessing.
    Albinus taught her to bathe daily instead of only washing her hands and neck as she had done hitherto. Her nails were always clean now, and polished a brilliant red, on both fingers and toes.
    He kept discovering new charms in her—touching little things which in any other girl would have seemed to him coarse and vulgar. The childish lines of her body, her shamelessness and the gradual dimming of her eyes (as if they were being slowly extinguished like the lights in a theater) roused him to such frenzy that he lost the last vestige of that diffidence which his prim and delicate wife had demanded of his embraces.
    He hardly ever left the house for fear of meeting acquaintances. It was with reluctance, and only in the mornings, that he let Margot go out—on her adventurous hunts after stockings and silk underwear. He was amazed at her lack of curiosity: she never questioned him about his former life. Sometimes he tried to interest her in his past, telling her of his childhood, his mother whom he remembered but vaguely, and his father, a full-blooded country squire, who had loved well his dogs and horses, his oaks and his corn, and who had died quite suddenly—of a fit of virile laughter in the billiard room where a guest was telling a bawdy story.
    “What was the story? Tell it to me,” Margot asked—but he had forgotten it.
    He told her about his early passion for painting, his works, his discoveries; he told her how a picture could be restored with the aid of garlic and crushed resin which converted the old varnish into dust and how, under a flannel rag moistened with turpentine, the smokiness or the coarse picture painted over would vanish and the original beauty blossom out.
    Margot was chiefly interested in the market value of such a picture.
    He told her about the War, and the cold mud of the trenches, and she asked him why, beingrich, he had not wangled himself into a post behind the lines.
    “What a funny darling you are!” he would cry, fondling her.
    She began to get bored in the evenings; she longed for the cinema, smart restaurants and negroid music.
    “You shall have everything, everything,” he said, “only let me recover first. I have all sorts of plans.… We’ll go to the seaside soon.”
    He looked round her drawing room and marveled how he, who prided himself on not being able to endure anything in bad taste, could tolerate this chamber of horrors. Everything, he mused, was beautified by his passion.
    “We’ve really fixed ourselves up very nicely—haven’t we, darling?”
    She agreed condescendingly. She knew that all this was only temporary: the memory of his luxurious flat lingered in her mind; but of course there was no need for haste.
    One day, in July, as Margot was returning from her dressmaker’s on foot, and was already nearing home, someone clutched her from behind above the elbow. She wheeled round. It was her brother Otto. He grinned unpleasantly. At a little distance two of his friends were standing and they grinned too.
    “Glad to meet you, Sis,” he said. “Not very nice of you to forget your folks.”
    “Let go,” said Margot quietly, drooping her eyelashes.
    Otto stuck his arms akimbo: “How fine you look,” he