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

kiss her in the shelter of a porch. The fire of this kiss was still around him like a colored glory when he returned home. He could not lay it aside in the hall as he did his black felt hat, and when he came into the bedroom he thought that his wife must see that halo.
    But it never even occurred to Elisabeth, placid, thirty-five-year-old Elisabeth, that her husband might deceive her. She knew that he had had little adventures before his marriage, and she remembered that she herself, as a small girl, had been secretly in love with an old actor who usedto visit her father and enliven dinner with beautiful imitations of farmyard sounds. She had heard and read that husbands and wives constantly deceived one another; indeed, adultery was the core of gossip, romantic poetry, funny stories and famous operas. But she was quite simply and steadfastly convinced that her own marriage was a very special, precious and pure tie that could never be broken.
    Her husband’s evenings out, which, he explained, were spent with some artists interested in that cinema idea of his, never afforded her the least suspicion. His irritability and jumpiness she put down to the weather, which was quite unusual for May: at one moment it was hot, at the next there would be icy torrents of rain, mixed with hailstones that bounced on the window sills like tiny tennis balls.
    “Shall we go for a trip somewhere?” she suggested casually one day. “Tyrol? Rome?”
    “You go, if you want to,” replied Albinus; “I have lots to do, my dear.”
    “Oh, no, it was just a fancy,” she said, and set off with Irma to the Zoo to see the baby elephant, which turned out to have hardly any trunk at all and a fringe of short hair standing on end all along its back.
    With Paul it was a different matter. The episodeof the locked door had left him with a strange uneasiness. Albinus had not only failed to notify the police, but he was actually annoyed when Paul returned to the subject. So Paul could not help brooding over the thing. He tried to recall whether he had, perhaps, seen any suspicious character when he came into the house and walked toward the lift. He was very observant, he thought: he had, for instance, noticed a cat which sprang as he passed, and slithered between the bars of the garden railings, a schoolgirl in red for whom he had held open the door, broadcast laughter and song from the porter’s lodge where the wireless was turned on as usual. Yes, the burglar must have run down while he was going up in the lift. But what gave him that nasty feeling?
    His sister’s married happiness was to him a sacred thing. When, some days later, he was put through on the telephone to Albinus, while the latter was still talking, and so overheard certain words (fate’s classical method: eavesdropping), he almost swallowed a piece of matchwood with which he was picking his teeth.
    “Don’t ask me, just buy what you like.”
    “But don’t you see, Albert …” said a vulgar, capricious feminine voice.
    With a shudder Paul hung up the receiver asthough he had inadvertently caught hold of a snake.
    That evening, as he sat with his sister and brother-in-law, he could not think of anything to talk about. He just sat there, self-conscious and fidgety, rubbing his chin, crossing and re-crossing his plump legs, looking at his watch and putting the blank handless thing back into his waistcoat pocket. He was one of those sensitive beings who blush guiltily when someone else makes a blunder.
    Could this man whom he loved and revered be deceiving Elisabeth? “No, no, it’s a mistake, some silly misunderstanding,” he kept telling himself, as he glanced at Albinus who was reading a book with unruffled countenance, clearing his throat now and then, and very carefully cutting the pages with an ivory paper knife … “Impossible! That locked bedroom door put it into my mind. The words I heard doubtless admit of some innocent explanation. How could anyone deceive