CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

Rorschach, 4

OLIVIA RORSCHACH’S bedroom is a bright, pleasant room hung with pale wallpaper patterned in Japanese style, and with furniture in agreeably light-coloured wood. The bed, covered with a patchwork-pattern cotton bedspread, stands on a broad woodblock platform which serves on each side as a bedside table: on the right-hand side, a tall alabaster vase filled with yellow roses; on the other side, a tiny night-light with a black metal cube for a base, a secondhand copy of The Valley of the Moon by Jack London, bought the day before for fifteen centimes at the flea market at Place d’Aligre, and a photograph of Olivia at the age of twenty: in a check shirt, fringed suede waistcoat, riding trousers, high-heeled boots, and cowboy hat, she is sitting astride a wooden fence with a bottle of Coca-Cola in her hand; behind her, a muscular streetseller waves a tray heavily laden with multicoloured fruit with a single strong sweep of his forearm: it is a rostrum photograph from her penultimate feature film – Right On Lads! – in which she starred in 1949, when she left Australia after her much-publicised separation from Jeremy Bishop and courageously attempted a new career in the United States. Right On Lads! didn’t last long. Her following film, entitled by cruel coincidence Don’t Leave the Cast, Baby!, in which she plays the part of a waitress (the fair Amandine) in love with a seventeen-year-old acrobat who juggles lighted torches, wasn’t even edited, since the producers reckoned after seeing the rushes that they wouldn’t be able to make anything out of them. After that Olivia became the star of a tourist serial, where she was the apple-pie American girl from a good home all full of good will off water-skiing in the Everglades, sunning herself in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, or the Canaries, having a ball at the Carnival in Rio, cheering the toreros in Barcelona, acquiring culture at the Escurial, spirituality at the Vatican, sipping champagne at the Moulin-Rouge, swigging beer at the Oktoberfest in Munich, etc., etc. From this she acquired a taste for travel, and she was doing her fifty-eighth short (Unforgettable Vienna. . .) when she met her second husband, whom she left on her fifty-ninth (The Magic of Bruges).

Olivia Rorschach is in her bedroom. She is a very short, rather podgy little woman with her hair in curls; she is wearing a beautifully tailored, severe, white linen two-piece, a raw-silk blouse, and a broad decorative neckscarf. She is seated next to her bed beside various things she will take with her – a handbag, a sponge bag, a light coat, a beret decorated with a medal bearing the old crest of the Order of Saint Michael, showing the Archangel slaying the Dragon, Time magazine, Le Film Français, What’s On in London – and she is rereading the list of instructions she is leaving for Jane Sutton:

       –  get in a delivery of Coca-Cola

       –  change the water for the flowers every other day, put in half an aspirin each time, throw them out when they wilt

       –  get the big crystal chandelier cleaned (call Salmon’s)

       –  take back to the municipal library the books that should have been returned two weeks ago and especially Love Letters of Clara Schumann, From Agony to Ecstasy, by Pierre Janet, and Bridge over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle

       –  buy cooked Edam for Polonius* and don’t forget to take him once a week to Monsieur Lefèvre for his domino lesson

       –  check daily that the Pizzicagnolis have not broken the blown-glass grapes in the entrance hall.

The pretext for this fifty-sixth world tour is an invitation to attend the world premiere, in Melbourne, of The Olivia Norvell Story, a film composed of old clips from most of her best performances, including film sequences made of her great stage hits; the voyage will begin with an ocean cruise from London to the West Indies, thence by air to Melbourne with stop-overs of a few days planned for New York, Mexico, Lima, Tahiti, and Nouméa.

* Polonius is the 43rd descendant of a pair of tame hamsters which Rémi Rorschach gave Olivia as a present shortly after he met her: the two of them had seen an animal-trainer at a Stuttgart music hall and were so impressed by the athletic exploits of the hamster Ludovic – disporting himself with equal ease on the rings, the bar, the trapeze, and the parallel bars – that they asked if they could buy him. The trainer, Lefèvre, refused, but sold them instead a pair – Gertrude and Sigismond – which he had trained to play dominoes. The tradition was maintained from generation to generation, with each set of parents spontaneously teaching their offspring to play. Unfortunately, the previous winter an epidemic had almost wiped out the little colony: the sole survivor, Polonius, could not play solo, and, worse, was condemned to waste away if he was prevented from indulging in his favourite pastime. Thus he had to be taken once a week to Meudon to his trainer, who, though now retired, continued to raise little circus animals for his own amusement.