Chapter Four
Mrs Lanskaya died on the day her daughter graduated from Sutton College. A new fountain had just been bequeathed to its campus by a former student, the widow of a shah. Generally speaking, one should carefully preserve in transliteration the feminine ending of a Russian surname (such as -aya, instead of the masculine -iy or -oy) when the woman in question is an artistic celebrity. So let it be “Landskaya”— land and sky and the melancholy echo of her dancing name. The fountain took quite a time to get correctly erected after an initial series of unevenly spaced spasms. The potentate had been potent till the absurd age of eighty. It was a very hot day with its blue somewhat veiled. A few photographers moved among the crowd as indifferent to it as specters doing their spectral job. And certainly for no earthly reason does this passage ressemble in rhythm another novel, My Laura, where the mother appears as “Maya Umanskaya”, a fabricated film actress.
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