At an early stage in his religious period (eight to eleven), as he was collecting the bibles after class, his RI teacher, the hideous but compelling Miss Paul (a secret tippler, he had since decided), said dreamily, You see, Keith my love, every one of us has nine stars in the firmament. And each time you tell a lie, one of your stars go out. And a sober Miss Paul wouldn’t have said that (go out—a sober Miss Paul would have got that right). When all nine are dead—then your soul is lost. And over the years Keith somehow transferred this notion to his future: his future with girls and women. He had seven stars left. Of course, the wisdom of the drunken Welsh spinster was offered (and then distorted by him) long before the sexual revolution. And now, he felt, everyone would be needing many more stars than nine.
He hung around the fort, and he was safe with Lily … The mountains they looked out on configured themselves in three echelons, three strategies of distance. Nearest were the foothills, pocked and dappled and sparsely forested. Beyond the foothills were the humpbacked cliffs, ridged, tensed, like the spines of dinosaurs. And in the far distance stood a world of crests, of snowcaps and cloudcaps, of sun and moon, a world of crests and clouds.
SECOND INTERVAL
Find a mirror you like and trust, and stick to it. Correction. Find a mirror you like. Never mind about trust. It’s too late for that—it’s too late for trust. Stand by this mirror, and be true to it. Never so much as glance at another.
Actually things aren’t quite that bad. Correction. Actually they are. But this is a truth we will have to postpone for many pages and then creep up on …
Beyond a certain age you no longer know what you look like. Something goes wrong with mirrors. They lose the power to tell you what you look like. All right, they do tell you, probably. But you can’t see it.
Beyond a certain age, then, you have neither the means nor the opportunity to find out what you look like. All the mirror will give you (in at least two senses) is a rough idea.
• • •
The first clause in the revolutionary manifesto went as follows: There will be sex before marriage. Sex before marriage, for almost everyone. And not only with the person you were going to get married to.
It was very simple, everyone knew it, everyone had seen it coming for years. In certain quarters, though, sex before marriage was a distressing development. Who was distressed by it? Those for whom there had not been sex before marriage. Now they were saying to themselves, So suddenly there will be sex before marriage? On what basis, then, was I told that there will not be sex before marriage?
Nicholas, when he was coming of age in the mid-1960s, found himself involved in a series of long, boring, repetitive, and in fact completely circular arguments with his father. It began to happen about every other night. Why doesn’t he go away for ever? Nicholas used to say. Or, failing that, why doesn’t he go away for a very long time and then go away again as soon as he gets back? The same sort of thing was happening to Arn, to Ewan, and to all Keith’s other friends (except Kenrik, whose father died before Kenrik was born).
The circular arguments were ostensibly about various limits to be imposed on Nicholas’s freedom and independence. In fact they were about sex before marriage. But there was never any mention of sex before marriage (rendering the arguments circular). And this was Professor Karl Shackleton, sociologist, positivist, progressivist. Karl was all those things—but he hadn’t had sex before marriage. And, looking back, he liked the idea of having sex before marriage. We may parenthetically note that it is the near-universal wish of dying men that they had had much more sex with many more women.
Keith indulged himself by feeling slightly hurt when it became clear that Professor Shackleton was not going to repeat this pattern with his foster-child (and Karl, already embrittled by his first minor stroke, his first minor cancellation, wasn’t about to take on Violet). It was only Nicholas, his male flesh and blood, that Karl really envied. And envy, the dictionary suggests, takes us by a knight’s move to empathy. From L. invidere “regard maliciously,” from in- “into” + videre “to see.” Envy is negative empathy. Envy is empathy in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• • •
“The boys have won,” said his stepdaughter, Silvia. “Again.”
“I hate to hear it,” said Keith.
“I hate to say it.”
Silvia had studied Sex (in the sense of Gender) at Bristol University. And she was now one of those “child” journalists who already, at twenty-three, wrote a much-discussed weekly column in one of the broadsheets. Keith first met her when she was fourteen—1994, when he sold his large duplex in Notting Hill, and moved into the house above the Heath. Silvia had inherited her mother’s looks, but not her insane cheerfulness; she was one of those torpid wits who made everyone laugh except herself.
“So, against your better judgement,” she said torpidly, “you find yourself spending the night with a young man. And they’re all the same. Doesn’t matter who. Some replicant in a City suit. Some stinkbomb in an Arsenal shirt. And the next morning, out of habit, you say, you know, give me a call sometime. And he stares back. As if you’re a leper who’s just proposed marriage. Because give me a call is emotional blackmail, see. And commitment’s not allowed. The boys have won. Again.”
Had his sons won, Nat and Gus? Had his daughters lost—Isabel (nine) and Chloe (eight), had they lost?
Keith grieved for his own youth, but he didn’t envy his children. The erotic world they faced (Silvia had more to say about this) he would find unrecognisable. So he could partly understand the consternation of the fathers, as their own world fell away.
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.
He thought, Go forth, my children. Multiply as and when you please. But go forth. And thank you, you sea-nymphs, for your knells. And in your orisons, too, be all my sins remembered.
• • •
In an attempt to alleviate the chronic sexual problems he suffered throughout the 1970s (and throughout the 1980s, and beyond), Keith spent several lunchtimes in a succession of Mayfair escort agencies, where, hovered over by genteel madams, he sat in parlours resembling miniature airport lounges, with stacks of brochures on his lap. The girls, in their hundreds, were attractively photographed, and you could read about their vital statistics and other attributes. He was looking for a certain shape, a certain face. Keith didn’t go through with it in the end. But he learnt something, and something literary: why you can’t write about sex.
Leafing through the glossy pages, he felt the brothelgoer’s mad power—that of choice. Power corrupts: this is not a metaphor. And writers were instantly corrupted by the mad power of choice. Authorial omnipotence did not go well with the definingly fallible potency of the male creature.
But the summer in Italy wasn’t art, it was only life. No one made anything up. All this really happened.
• • •
It was April 19, 2003, and he was holed up, now, in the studio at the end of the garden. He didn’t want to come out, but he sometimes did come out. Then on April 23 he started sleeping there. His wife stood before him with her fists on her hips and her strong legs planted well apart; even so, he started sleeping there. He needed to escape from sanity—not just for eight, but for eighteen hours in every twenty-four. Rearrangements were being made in the sources of his being.
Opening his eyes, waking, taking leave of the mocking kingdom made by sleep, getting out of bed and standing upright: this seemed to consume the lion’s share of what remained of the day. As for getting shaved, shat, showered: this was a Russian novel.
• • •
Then, at the meeting point, Echo stepped carefully into the clearing. She raised her hands to greet the glassy boy. He
looked at her pretty body, but he shook his head and turned away, saying, No. I would rather die than let you touch me.
And what could Echo do, left alone? What could she say? Touch me, she said as she fell to her knees. Touch me, touch me, touch me.
• • •
How slowly time moves when it’s only twenty years old.
Keith was now well launched on the bullet train of his fifties, where the minutes often dragged but the years tumbled over one another and disappeared. And the mirror was trying to tell him something.
He was never a likely candidate for vanity, and had always thought himself free of it. But age, ever prodigal with its gifts, grants you vanity. It tricks you out with vanity, and just in time.
• • •
When he talked to his children Keith noticed that cool was pretty well the lone survivor from the lexicon of his youth. His sons used it, his daughters used it, but the word had lost its grace-under-pressure connotation and just meant good. Accordingly, you never heard its opposite: uncool.
For someone born in 1949 the word brings additional difficulties. Getting old is very uncool. Pouches and wrinkles are very uncool. Deaf aids and walking-frames are very uncool. Sunset homes are so uncool.
• • •
He had other things on his mind, but he kept thinking about the encounter with his first wife—in the public house called the Book and Bible. What a price he had paid for everything, for the summer of 1970. What a price he had paid.
Book Three
The Incredible Shrinking Man
I
EVEN IN HEAVEN
“Amen,” said Whittaker, “can understand companionship. He can understand sex with a stranger in the afternoon. But he cannot understand the love affair.”
“Well, they’re tricky,” said Keith. “Love affairs.”
“Among fruits I’m a freak. I want monogamous cohabitation. On the het model. A quiet dinner. Sex every other night. And Amen—Amen says you should never even think of sleeping with anyone twice. So, as you see, our views subtly diverge.”
Keith said, “I keep glimpsing him on the terrace. He’s edging nearer. What’s happening? Is he coming to terms, at last, with Scheherazade’s breasts?”
“No. Not at all. In fact it’s worse than ever. But he braves Scheherazade’s breasts for the sake of Adriano.”
“… Amen fancies Adriano.” Keith lit a cigarette. Earlier, the complacent gurgle of the frogs; now, the settled neurosis of the cicadas …
“He doesn’t fancy him exactly. As you so charmingly put it. He admires him as a specimen. I do too. Adriano’s perfection, in his way.”
“Mm. Well he’s worked at it, hasn’t he.”
“I guess they all tend to do that. Little people. They can’t make themselves taller. So they make themselves wider … I keep thinking I’m watching The Incredible Shrinking Man. At about the point where he starts getting scared of the cat.”
“Early on, remember, when he goes to kiss his wife and now she’s taller than he is?”
“Mm. Some say The Incredible Shrinking Man’s an anxiety dream about the American hard-on. Potency. The rise of women.”
They played on, exchanging, simplifying.
“Okay,” said Whittaker. “How gay was the gay poet?”
“How gay? Well, obviously gay, Nicholas said. Contentedly and obviously gay.”
“Mm-hm. And does he have the gay coloratura? The drawly singsong. Like me.”
“I don’t know. The fruit accent …”
“The fruit accent’s no mystery. Bear in mind that our lovelives have only just been legalised. We need the fruit accent. To make things clear to other fruits. Now uh, Violet. There’s no aggression in her?”
“None. I mean, I don’t know about her in bed.” And he leadenly resolved to ask Kenrik about it, if and when Kenrik came. “But otherwise—none.”
“Low self-esteem. That’s what a professional would say. She seeks reassurance by the quickest path. You know all that. But coming on so hard to a fruit … I’m sorry. And I’ll go on thinking about it. But I keep coming up against a dead end.”
“That’s what I keep coming up against. Draw? This board’s so quiet.”
“Yeah. Our games aren’t good. Why is that?” He looked up and his horn-rims were full of curved light. “It’s because we’re both in love. Nothing left over.”
“I’m not sure I’m in love.” What is it, this “love”? “You’re in love.”
“Yes I’m in love. Amen, when he plays, Amen’s ferocious. He smashes the pieces down. Amen’s definitely not in love.”
The mad, ratcheting cackle of the cicadas—was that how insects laughed? Keith said, “Amen in the garden. He reminds me of Bagheera in The Jungle Book. The panther. Staring anxiously through the leaves. Monitoring Mowgli.”
“And if he’s Bagheera,” said Whittaker, “you’re Bambi. When you gaze at Scheherazade. No. You’re Lady, gazing at the Tramp.”
“Lady and the Tramp. Remember their first date—the Italian restaurant? Dinner for two at an Italian restaurant.”
“That’s not a very typical first date for dogs. Then Lady and the Tramp go and gaze at the moon. No howling, just gazing … Keith, a word of fatherly advice. When you gaze at her at dinner. Your eyes get wet. And you have a wronged look. Careful with that.”
Keith said, “This is nothing. I used to get myself bedridden with crushes when I was a kid. The teacher’d call, and my mother’d have to nurse me through it. This is nothing.”
“I thought—aren’t adopted people supposed to be cautious about love?”
“Yeah, they usually are. But I’d had this huge success early on, with Violet. And I must’ve thought, I don’t know, I must’ve thought I could make girls love me. All I had to do was love them, and they’d love me back … Scheherazade’s nothing. I just admire her from afar.”
“Look on the bright side,” said Whittaker, with some amused cruelty in the line of his lips. “She’s Lily’s best friend. So at least Lily wouldn’t mind.”
Keith coughed and said, “She’s Lily’s second-best friend. There’s Belinda. She’s at Dublin. It’s academic anyway. But Scheherazade’s Lily’s second-best friend.”
Amen, Keith learnt, was back on the bus. And heading furiously for Naples. He was very exercised about his sister. And who wouldn’t be? Amen had heard that Ruaa sometimes loosened her veil in the market, disclosing her mouth and her forelock. Whittaker said,
“Do that one more time and it’s over.”
“Good. Stalemate.”
“Uh, no. Stalemate is an endgame thing. Where the king can’t move except into check. This is just a draw by repetition.”
You’ve got to try, Keith thought. A draw by repetition: you don’t want that. They’re laughing at you, the cicadas, the crazy little scientists in the garden. The yellow birds are laughing at you. When a girl looks like Scheherazade, and she’s desperate, you’ve got to at least try.
So you’re not sleeping, Lily told him, and you’re not eating. You’re just wasting away.
At the end, of course, the incredible shrinking man, having survived the cat and the spider, just gets smaller and smaller, and wanders off—into the cosmos of the subatomic.
So, Oona,” said Lily. “What do you think? Will Adriano win the heart of Scheherazade?”
“Adriano?”
This was a change of subject. Oona sat correcting proofs on the cleared dining-room table, and she was taking it seriously (she deployed a style manual, a dictionary, and a stack of diaries and photographs). Her maternal aunt, Betty, had completed a memoir before her recent death; and Oona was seeing it into print—for a vanity house, she said. But it turned out that old Betty had much to recommend her: a patron of the written arts, a traveller, an erotic adventurer. Keith had earlier spent half an hour with it, Betty’s life and times. Yachts, diabolical divorces, tycoons, drunken geniuses, car crashes, spangled, stratospheric suicides … Whittaker and Scheherazade were in the nea
rest anteroom, playing backgammon with great violence (there was much use of the doubling-dice), for a lira per point. Adriano was not of the company, having been called away to some fresh deathtrap (featuring potholes or parachutes). Oona, who had the most experienced eyes Keith had ever seen, said meticulously,
“Well he’s very keen, Adriano. And persistent. And we’re impressed by persistence—women are. But he’s wasting his time.”
And Lily said, “Because he’s too um, petit?”
“No. She might even look kindly on that. Being so soft-hearted. It’s the Italian extravagance that offends her. Too theatrical. She says Timmy needs teaching a lesson. But she’ll forgive Timmy. Times change, but types stay the same, and she’s not the type. I was the type. And I know. Keith dear, what’s the literal meaning of pandemonium? Is it like pantheon but the opposite?”
During dinner Keith had made a conscious effort not to gaze at Scheherazade, and he was surprised by how straightforward he found it—and surprised by how suavely he jawed and quipped and wielded his irons. Until he did in fact take an angled glance. Her face was already fixed on his: unblinking, decidedly particular, as always, decidedly personal, and (he thought) quietly enquiring. With her mouth in the shape of a levelled longbow. And from then on, and throughout, not gazing at her became as onerous as anything he had ever attempted. How to deny yourself vital essence? When it’s there in front of you. How to do it? Now he said,
“Oona, why do you keep slashing away at the tops and the bottoms?”
“Widows and orphans,” she said. “The lone word at the top of the page. The lone line at the bottom. I’m a widow.”
“And I’m an orphan.”