One: Fat men beat their wives, it is said, and he certainly looked fierce when he caught her riffling though his papers. Actually she was searching for a silly business letter – and not trying to decipher his mysterious manuscript. Oh no, it was not a work of fiction, it was a mad neurologist's testament, but the thing was, of course, an absolute secret. If she mentioned it at all, she added, it was because she was drunk. And because the Nabokov estate was too greedy not to pass off the barely intelligible marginalia of a dying writer, long past his best, as an unpublished masterpiece.
 
Unsure of to which particular he the opening referred, Flora demanded to lie down, as this enabled her to surrender to one of her many lovers and for her nymphean form – her cup-sized breasts and pale squinty nipples seemed a dozen years younger than this impatient beauty's – to be described with erotic longing, while Paul de G ogled some boys. "Have you finished?" she inquired. He nodded in flaccidity. "Not even a quickie? Tant pis! Then I must go home to my morbidly obese husband and our mulatto charwoman."
 
Two: Her grandfather had emigrated from Moscow with his son Adam in 1920. Adam had married the ballerina Lanskaya, who took lovers mostly of Polish extraction. Three years after their daughter Flora was born, Adam filmed himself committing suicide while pining for a boy who had strangled another boy. Lanskaya was confused: what had been meant to be sensational was just tired and desperate. But having no other options now that she was past 16, she found a new lover, Hubert L Hubert, who had dropped the m's from his name in a sad 20-year migration from Lolita while maintaining his penchant for pre-pubescent girls. Flora took exception to his caresses and kicked him in the testicles. "You naughty girl," her mother said. "Mr Nabokov – I mean, Mr Hubert – is a very nice man". There is little to add.
 
Three: Flora lost her virginity at 14 to a ball boy with an enormous member. She and her friends like to compare the dimensions of their lovers while bycycling. This, then, is Flora, the artistic enigma, the DELTA and the SLIT. At 11 she had read Freud and wondered how people could get away with writing so badly. But then, she had never read this. Perhaps we should mention the sweet Japanese girls and French writers beginning with M. Perhaps not.
 
Four: Mrs Lanskaya died on the day her daughter graduated – a passage that for no earthly reason ressembles the rythym of another novel, My Laura, and a hideously fat man stared at Flora's white legs.
 
Five For no good reason, Flora determined to marry this immensely fat man, the eminent neuroscientist Dr Philip Wild, though she regretted her decision when she discovered he was a miser.
 
Five – or should it be six?: The novel My Laura was begun soon after the end of the love affair it depicts. And, like this, was torn apart by every reviewer. The I of the book is a neurotic who set out to destroy his lover while annotating her. Philip Wild quite liked the descriptions of himself.
 
Six: Suicide made a pleasure. It would be after this.
 
D1, D2, Aurora, Wild 1, Wild 2: Philip Wild could no longer maintain any pretence of coherence. He could manage the odd well-turned phrase and repeated masturbatory emblazements, yet he could not yet persuade Mr Nabokov to abandon his attempts to impose an order when there was none. I, Philip Wild, he said, slipping into the first person, hereby begin a programme of self deletion. I hate my fat stomach and the noises I make on the lavatory, so I will start by cutting off my toes. Then my hands. Then my head. Till there is nothing left. Effacement. Annihilation. "That, too, is what faces me if anyone were ever to read this card index," cried Mr Nabokov. "Too bad," said his son.
 
Digested read, digested: A reputation in fragments