“No, Lily. That’s not a proper one.” He thought for a moment and said, “Hysterical Sex Story. With Ali MacGraw. That’s a proper one.”
“But she died. And anyway, we hated it.”
“I know we hated it. Is Tom Thumb coming to dinner?”
“Don’t call him that. Yes. By helicopter.”
“Christ, I’m going to talk to him about this. The sheep are just about halfway back to normal.”
“Talk to Scheherazade. She says she loves to think of Adriano flying free …”
Keith said, “You know, I reckon that’s how he pulls, Adriano. If four foot ten doesn’t do it on its own, he takes them to his dad’s and wheels out Tybalt.”
“… 1945’s the key. The war’s the key. Then she can tell herself she’s doing it for the troops.”
“For the troops?” he said with a crack in his voice. “But he was on the wrong side!”
“What?”
“Italy was an Axis power. So Tom Thumb was a fascist.” Keith went on to impart the two remaining facts in his possession about Italy and the Second World War. “Mussolini introduced the goose step. And when they finally strung him up, he was in a German uniform. Nazi to the last.”
“Calm down … And don’t tell Scheherazade all that.”
The evening began noisily enough. First, the grinding turmoil of Adriano’s rotors. And then they were all heckled and barracked off the west terrace, in the rosy dusk, by the screams of the sheep. But dinner was in fact strangely quiet—or did he mean quietly strange? Whittaker, Gloria, and Keith, facing Lily, Adriano, and Scheherazade. Adriano, then, was not at the head of the table, but he seemed to lead the talk, with his sense of entitlement fully refreshed, saying,
“We clinched the championship with a bitterly fought victory in Foggio. Yet more silverware for our trophy room! Now soon we face the rigours of pre-season training. I’m chafing to begin.”
Keith, again, happened to know that Scheherazade had instructed Adriano to stop talking about love, which Adriano, ominously, had at once agreed to do. On the other hand, this left him short of conversation. So he spoke, at perhaps exorbitant length, about his rugby team, I Furiosi, and its reputation, in what was already the harshest of leagues, for exceptionally uncompromising play.
“Where do you go, Adriano? On the field.”
This was Scheherazade, who wore a new smile on her face. Meek, sorrowful, all-comprehending, all-forgiving. Keith listened on.
“Ah. My position. In the very centre of the fray.”
Adriano was the hooker, and did his work in the fulcrum of the pack. How he especially relished it, he said, at the commencement of a scrum, when the six heads came smashing together! It was normally the hooker’s job, Keith knew, to backheel the ball into the tread of the ten-legged melee that strained at his rear. But it was a different story, apparently, with I Furiosi: as the clash began, Adriano simply raised and crossed his little legs, so that the men behind him (the second row) could rake their studs down the knees and shins of the opposing front line. He said,
“Most effective. Oh, I can promise you. Most effective.”
“… But doesn’t anyone put a stop to it?” said Scheherazade. “And don’t they take their revenge?”
“Ah, but we are equally famed for our indifference to injury. I am the only Furiosi forward with an unbroken nose. The lock is blind in one eye. And neither prop has a tooth in his head. Also, both my ears still hold their shape. Not yet even calcified. Which, again, makes me stick out as a sore thumb from my confrères.”
“And after the match, Adriano?” said Lily.
“We celebrate our victory. And in no uncertain fashion, rest assured. Or, once in a blue moon, we are consigned … to drown our sorrows. All night—always. There is much broken glass. We are veritable lords of misrule!”
“… Who was it who said,” said Whittaker, “that rugby is a game for hooligans played by gentlemen?”
And Keith said, “Yes, I’ve heard that. And football is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans.”
“I lived in Glasgow till the age of ten.”
This was Gloria, and they all turned to her because she so seldom spoke. Meeting no one’s eye, she said,
“One thing is clear. Football is a game watched by hooligans … When Celtic play Rangers it’s a war of religion. Unbelievable. They should go in the army. Adriano. You should go in the army.”
“Oh, Gloria, don’t think I didn’t try! But there are certain restrictions and, alas …”
Falling silent, he bunched the white napkin in his bronzed fists. And for five minutes the room silently churned. Then Adriano straightened his back and said,
“A game for hooligans? How wrong you are, Whittaker. How very wrong you are.”
And Adriano proceeded to assure the gathering, with possibly excessive chapter and verse, that I Furiosi were all of gentle birth, belonging to exclusive sports clubs that charged very high entrance fees; when they drove to their away fixtures, he said, why, they did so in a fleet of Lamborghinis and Bugattis; he even took the trouble to note the deluxe, five-star quality of the hotels they despoiled and the restaurants they wrecked. Adriano sat back, his point made.
They then sat through the gradual formation of a hopeless vacuum. Lily’s stare implored him, and so Keith said,
“Uh, I used to be just like you, Adriano. I was mad about rugby until I was thirteen. Then one day …” There was the usual maul. Exactly the sort of thing he used to love diving into and coming out of covered in blood. “And I …”
“You lost your nerve,” said Adriano understandingly, and even reached out and patted Keith’s hand. “Oh, my friend, it happens!”
“Yeah. I lost my nerve.” But there was another thought in his mind, on the significant Saturday morning—and a thought behind that, and a thought behind that. He said to himself, in 1963: From now on, nothing is renewed. You will be needing everything. You will be needing everything. For the girls. “So I stopped diving in. People noticed. I was dropped.”
Adriano said, “But Kev. How did you tolerate the shame? And the universal contempt?”
Lily said, “I think that’s very funny, Adriano. If I may say so.”
“How did I tolerate it? I told everyone I did it for my sister.” Violet was eight, nine; she used to get upset when he came home covered in welts. I’ll give it up because of you, Vi … This was true, in a sense. He did it for the girls. “Anyway. She was very grateful.”
“It’s straightforward,” said Scheherazade, folding her mat. “You didn’t want to be hurt any more.”
Adriano stayed in his seat as the table cleared around him, to be rejoined, in due course, by Scheherazade.
He sank back, his fraternal duty done. Lily said,
“That was fantastic.”
“Wasn’t it. Stunning. Will it be like that every night?”
“Impossible. We’ll all die or go mad. I kept pinching myself. Not to stay awake. To make sure I wasn’t asleep. And dreaming.”
“You don’t get dreams as mad as that.”
He lay there, and ran an errand of love—but for the last time. For the last time he conjured Scheherazade and imagined that all his thoughts were her thoughts and that all her feelings were his feelings. But as love said its farewells, lingering, kissing its fingertips, it told him that someone as solid, someone as broadly convincing as Scheherazade would not, could not, entwine herself with someone as unbelievable—and obscurely fraudulent—as Adriano. While Lily wafted off in search of sane dreams, Keith hoped and believed that Adriano too would waft off, would melt as the dawn melts the stars, and that Scheherazade would go on being more and more desperate.
But it was the war that presided over his insomnia. For the first time in his life, perhaps, he felt its size and weight. That was not a war in heaven. It was a war of the world.
How near the war was, and how vast.
The war was so near to them and they never really thought about it—the six-year
earthquake that killed a million a month (and took Italy, and ground and pestled its mountains against one another).
The war had made its application to the courage of their mothers and fathers, and they were all its children, its tiny ghosts, like the enwombed Adriano.
The war was so near to them and it was not a shadow. It was a light. The colour of the light was a fecal brown.
THIRD INTERVAL
Like everyone else alive during the period under review, Keith was a vet of the Nuclear Cold War (1949–91): the contest of nightmares. In 1970, a twenty-year tour lay behind him. A twenty-year tour lay ahead of him.
He was conscripted—he was impressed—on August 29, 1949, when he was ninety-six hours old. This was the date of the birth of the Russian bomb. As he lay sleeping, historical reality stole into the ward at the infirmary, and gave him the rank of private.
Growing up, he didn’t feel resentful about military service exactly, because everyone else alive was in the army too. Apart from crouching under his desk at school, when they practised for central thermonuclear exchange, he didn’t seem to have any duties. Or no conscious ones. But after the Battle of Cuba, in 1962 (for its duration, its thirteen days, his thirteen-year-old existence became a swamp of nausea), he entered into the spirit of the contest of nightmares. In his mind—oh, the obstacle courses, the sadistic NCOs, the fatigues, the lousy chow, the twirling potato skins of kitchen patrol. In the Nuclear Cold War, you only saw action when you were sound asleep.
During this period, physical violence was somehow consigned to the Third World, where about twenty million died in about a hundred military conflicts. In the First and Second Worlds, the shaping strategy was Mutual Assured Destruction. And everyone lived. There, the violence was all in the mind.
Keith lay in his bed, trying to understand. What was the outcome of the dream war and all that silent combat? Everything could vanish, at any moment. This disseminated an unconscious but pervasive mortal fear. And mortal fear might make you want to have sexual intercourse; but it wouldn’t make you want to love. Why love anyone, when everyone could vanish? So maybe it was love that took the wound, in the Passchendaele of mad dreams.
• • •
What a very compassionate book it is, the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Take, for example, the entry on neurosis. He rang his wife and read it out to her.
“Now listen. A relatively mild mental illness, my love, not caused by organic disease. Here’s an even better bit. Involving depression, anxiety, obsessive behaviour, etc.—that et cetera’s great—but not a radical loss of touch with reality. There. That’s so understanding, don’t you think?”
“… Come to the house.”
He went to the house. It was April 28, 2003, and he crossed the garden under a dishevelled sky. And things were going fairly well, he thought: he was sitting at the table with a glass of orange juice, and doing a reasonable impersonation of Keith Nearing. Then the girls came down for their lunch.
He and his wife had four main epithets for their daughters: the flowers, the fools, the poems, and the rats. Keith chose the third.
“There you are, my poems.”
And they greeted him and came to him, little Isabel, tiny Chloe.
Now, there was a domestic tradition: when the girls were freshly bathed, and had washed their hair, Keith would offer up his nose to the thick wet coils and say (as he savoured the cleanliness, the youth, the scent of pine), Mmmmm …
So Isabel meant it kindly enough, no doubt. Keith was just out of the shower, so she leant over her father’s scalp (rapidly greying and radically thinning, its few remaining shreds rigidified by styling gel) and said,
“Mmmmm … No, in fact, Daddy, I think you’d better go and have another try.”
And that’s what he did. That’s what he did—even though he was quite drunk and very frightened of falling over in the shower. You’d think that being a stone or two overweight might give you some extra ballast; but it’s hard, he told himself, to balance a potato on toothpicks, especially when you’re dealing with a slippery surface. He got through that all right. But he didn’t go back to the house.
“So you’re smoking,” said his wife as he slipped out of the back door (he quit in 1994, on the day after their wedding). “Isabel said you smelled like the bus station in Kentish Town.”
“All this won’t last too long,” he said.
• • •
The second item of business on the revolutionary manifesto ran as follows: Women, also, have carnal appetites.
Immemorially true, and now of course inalienably obvious. But it took a while for this proposition to be absorbed. In the no-sex-before-marriage community, the doctrine was that good girls didn’t do it for lust—and bad girls didn’t do it for lust either (they did it for fleeting leverage or for simple gain, or out of a soiled and cobwebbed lunacy). And some of the young ones themselves never quite came to sober terms with it, with female lust. Kenrik, Rita, and others, as we shall soon discover.
There will be sex before marriage. Women, also, have carnal appetites. So far, so good. But there were other clauses in the manifesto, some of them written in fine print or invisible ink.
• • •
Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me …
These were Echo’s last words, but it took her a long time to die. Love was fixed in her body, envenoming everything. Her pretty form faded away. But she wasn’t turned into something else (a very common and not necessarily unpleasant fate in the world where she lived)—into a bird, say, or a flower. She just faded away. All that remained was her voice and her bones.
Her stony bones became part of the humus. Her voice wandered off by itself, invisible in the forest and on the bare mountainside. Touch me, touch me, touch me …
Of course, the glassy youth lived on in his glassy beauty. Until another boy, another supplicant (also once mocked and spurned), lifted his head to heaven. “Let him love and suffer, as he has made us love and suffer.”
“Let him, like us, love and know it is hopeless.
And let him, like Echo, perish of anguish.”
Nemesis, the corrector,
Heard this prayer and granted it.
• • •
Keith’s stepdaughter Silvia once said (having listened to him complain about his exercise class) that old age wasn’t for sissies. But the suspicion was building in him that it was all much simpler than that. Old age wasn’t for old people. To cope with old age, you really needed to be young—young, strong, and in peak condition, exceptionally supple and with very good reflexes. Your character, too, should be of no common stamp, but should blend the fearlessness of youth with age-old tenacity and grit.
He said, “Literature, why didn’t you tell me?” Old age may bring you wisdom. But it doesn’t bring bravery. On the other hand, you’ve never had to face anything as terrifying as old age.
Actually, war was more terrifying—and just as unavoidable, it seemed, for human beings. In the local caff he sat with The Times trembling in his hands. This was avoidable (or at least postponable). Why was no one identifying the true casus belli? It was obvious. American presidents, in wartime, are always re-elected. There would be regime change in Baghdad, in 2003, so that there would be no regime change in Washington, in 2004.
Nicholas, who supported it, tried to instil in him some courage about the Mesopotamian experiment, but Keith, just now, couldn’t begin to bear the thought of flying iron and mortal flesh, and what happened when the hard machine met the soft.
• • •
Like rats, flies love war, love battlefields. At Verdun (1916), there were donkeys, mules, oxen, dogs, pigeons, canaries, and two hundred thousand horses. But only the rats and the flies (the flies in their scores of millions) were there because they liked it. The flies were huge, black, silent. Huge. The rats, too, were bloated, like war profiteers …
In his studio Keith stared at the colourless sky and enjoyed “the view”: the vista of his own corneal crud
, asperities, excrescences, which swilled and slopped when he moved his head. His eyes were Petri dishes, with their cultures of dirt and death.
What to do, he thought, now that the flies live inside my eyes?
• • •
Oona told them that all her life she had instinctively headed south. But now, she said, I feel the wrongness of the sun.
They didn’t heed her (and they all got away with it, so far as he knew).
For them, it was a cook-out or a fry-up. They sat in the sun, slick with extra virgin, the whole day long. And how resinous they became, in their gold peel of youth.
Another time Oona said to him, with what seemed to be unalloyed admiration and respect, “You’re young.” And even then he wondered about it, the drastic promotion of youth … There was 1914–18, then 1939–45—with a twenty-one-year gap. Thus in 1966, according to the schedule established over two generations, it was time to send the youth of Europe up the line to death: into the winepress of death. But history broke the pattern. The young weren’t going to die; they were going to be loved. Youth sensed this, and became self-aware. The only war they knew was the one they fought when they were asleep. Everything and everyone might suddenly disappear. So, yes, tutto e subito. All and Now.
“Well, thanks, Oona,” he said, and gazed across the terrace at the fireflies—little visitors from another dimension. The fireflies, the luminescent beetles, were the colour of Venus. Fire, with a photon of lemon in it.
His entire life, he was already sure, would be determined here.
• • •
When he went out into the streets of London, he had the near-continuous feeling that all beauty was gone. And what had taken its place?
Beauty is truth, truth beauty. This was beautiful, perhaps. But how could it be beautiful? It wasn’t true. As he saw it. Beauty, that rare thing, had gone. What remained was truth. And truth was in endless supply.
Book Four