The Pregnant Widow

  The Desiderata

  I

  GIRLS AND THE BUTCHERS

  There were comings and goings, now, and additions and subtractions, and rearrangements. Kenrik and Rita were coming, and Ruaa was coming, and Oona, after a short absence, was again going. Would Prentiss, Dodo, and Conchita be returning? Jorquil was quite possibly coming, and Timmy, perhaps, was coming. Most inauspiciously, for now, Scheherazade would soon be vacating her turret, on the far side of the shared bathroom, to be replaced by Gloria, summoned up from her vault. Scheherazade would occupy the apartment—to be replaced in her turn, quite possibly, by Gloria and Jorquil.

  They were sitting at the bar’s only pavement table and he was telling her that everything would be fine so long as Kenrik and Rita, when they came, were still just good friends.

  “What type of person,” asked Lily, “is the Dog?”

  “Wait,” he said. “I’m getting overloaded with all these nicknames. One night it’ll just pop out.” He was thinking of the trackless voids that now opened up over the dinner table. “I’ll say, Junglebum, tell Tom-Thumb about the time you drank the … Let’s get used to calling her Rita.”

  “Okay. What kind of person is Rita?”

  “Type?” And he told her: rich working-class (the daughter of a coin-op king), sports car, she ran a large stall (costume jewellery) in Kensington Antique Market. “She’s older than us,” he said, “and very experienced at acting like a boy. It’s her mission. She’s like an anti-policewoman. There to make sure everyone breaks the law.”

  “Well, if Kenrik doesn’t fuck the Dog,” said Lily, “maybe he can fuck the Blob.”

  “Lily!”

  “Or maybe he can fuck me.”

  “Lily!”

  “Well someone’s got to.”

  “Lily!”

  Someone’s got to … This was a not very erotic remark about a not very erotic situation, and Keith’s reply to it was not very erotic.

  “Come on, someone does it almost every night. Me. Or in the morning.”

  “Yes, but not properly.”

  “Not properly.” His fingernails craved his armpits. “I still love you, Lily.”

  “Mm. You may love me. But your—”

  “Don’t come out with it. That’s what Rita always does. She always comes out with it.”

  He ducked into the bar—a kind of carpentry workshop, with a fridge and a line of dust-greyed brandy bottles up on the shelf. Yes, and what have we here: Italians other than Adriano. In their black fleeces they stood in silence at the counter, like slabs of granite to which the local sculptors had yet to apply their tools, their bodies asleep, their minds and faces formed, it seemed, in the brief interval between two crushing blows to the head. Keith sympathised. Making love to Lily was no longer repetitive, exactly, because it got more treacherous every night. Men have two hearts, he thought, the over, the under. And as Hansel applied himself to Gretel, his overheart was full, it beat, it loved, but his underheart was merely (and barely) functional—anaemic, insincere. And this, of course, was getting noticed.

  “Rita’s a character,” he said as he set Lily’s sparkling wine before her.

  “A real character.”

  “Not another one. And with Jorquil on the way. Not to mention Tom Thumb. And you were wrong about the war.” She tapped the book in front of her. “Italy surrendered in 1943. Then the Germans invaded.”

  “Did they? Shit … No. Nothing.”

  “The fighting was the partisans against the fascists. Luchino fought the fascists while the mum starved in prison. So Adriano was on the right side. And Scheherazade can fuck him for the troops.”

  Keith lit a cigarette. “How’s that actually going? They stay up late enough.”

  “She says it’s like being fifteen again. You know. Stages.”

  Keith knew all about stages. With his teeth locked together, he said, “Which one are they on?”

  “Just kisses so far. With tongues now. She’s building up to tits.”

  Keith drank his beer. Lily said,

  “You know. First with his hands outside her top. Then inside. She’s quite looking forward to it if she can keep her nerve.”

  Keith asked why this was.

  “Well they’ve grown a lot in the last six weeks. They feel different. Much more sensation. All throbby and tickly. And she wants to try them out.”

  “Try out her tits.”

  “Try out her tits. On Adriano.” Lily paused and said, “Then go forward bit by bit and do the same with her box.”

  Keith threw his pen on to the metal tabletop and said, “You know, this whole thing’s completely sick. And she’s miserable—you can tell. She can’t drug herself with pity. It’s, it’s … You ought to use your influence.”

  “Where’s that bloody fool Timmy? It’s so hurtful, because he’s obviously just having a marvellous time. He loves the work with the born-again people, but the thing is, every weekend he goes hunting.”

  “What’s there to hunt in Jerusalem?”

  “He goes to Jordan. He hunts with the Jordanian royal family.”

  “Oh I see. Why didn’t you say? Well, we mustn’t begrudge Timmy his fun. Killing animals with a king.”

  “I did think about sending him a telegram. Saying she’s pining.”

  Keith said from under his eyebrows, “I don’t think you need go that far … You know, I sometimes feel Adriano’s not what he seems.” And what he seemed seemed outrageous enough. “Him on her lap. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy. It’s unreal.”

  “Poor little chap.”

  “Rich little chap. Come on.” He rose and said dutifully, “I suppose we ought to go and pay our usual respects to the rat. Just talk to her, Lily. You ought to, you know. You owe it to her. Don’t forget she’s your best friend.”

  Scheherazade was miserable, and you could tell. The superstitious castle, the fierce mountain, the raw blue sky—everything was numbed by it. Aware of the terrible rule about looks and happiness, Keith expected her to suffer a loss of light in the face, a slight crimping, perhaps, of the mouth. There was a new frown, a new fold (which formed the shape, incidentally, of a corporal’s double stripes). But suffering just made her more painterly. In painterly Italy. You felt the weight, the downward tug on her heart. Compared to Scheherazade, even Gloria, with her cropped head, her dun smocks, her workshirts and tartan trews, her bricklike leather sandals with the inch-thick toe holes, seemed merely professionalised in her penitence and grief.

  Oona left for Rome in a chauffeur-driven jeep. Whittaker went to Naples in the Fiat to pick up Amen and Ruaa. Conchita sent a postcard, with very round as and os, from the Hague.

  On their upper lips, on their brows, plump globules of sweat, like strips of translucent bubble wrap. Even their sweat was plump. It gathered under their eyes like the tears of inconsolable five-year-olds. Glands seeped, eyes saw, hearts beat, flesh glowed. They were the colour of peanut butter. But when Keith closed his eyes he saw himself as a scarecrow, stalled in a standstill of frost.

  What next?”

  “What next? What honestly will be next?”

  Lily and Scheherazade, down by the pool, were discussing Gloria’s latest swimsuit.

  “I know,” said Lily. “A frogman outfit. A—what are they called? A bathysphere.”

  “Yes. Or a kayak. Or a submarine,” said Scheherazade. “Gloria wearing a whole submarine.”

  Every five or six seconds you heard a wrenching creak with a whump in the middle of it. This was Adriano, plunging and then soaring to treetop height on the new trampoline—his personal gift to the property. Adriano’s trampoline had in fact received mixed reviews. Scheherazade herself disdained all use of it (Don’t tell him, she said to Lily, but it hurts. And I bet it’s very unflattering), and Lily asked to have it explained to her—the point of just jumping about like that; Gloria somehow managed to look quite elegant as she dropped and rose (landing on her split legs and scissoring back again); and Amen, on his return, became an
enthusiast (he had long and noisy sessions in the very early morning); and Keith once or twice clambered up and messed around on it for five minutes. But the principal exponent and virtuoso of the trampoline was of course none other than Adriano, twanging and twirling himself into extraordinary altitudes, his veins and tendons like cords and cleats, the human being lashed together very tight.

  Lily said, “Miss Scotland, no, Miss Glasgow. 1930.”

  “My God, where does she find them?”

  Gloria’s latest swimsuit, for the record, was grey and featured a pale orange skirt of petal-shaped panels; the top half was made out of wool, the bottom half out of plastic.

  “It’s not even plastic,” said Lily.

  “No, it’s not even plastic,” said Scheherazade. “It’s lino.”

  “Why? What’s the point? It’s as if we’re all absolutely dying,” said Lily, “to see the exact shape of her arse.”

  Keith read on for fifteen pages (Wuthering Heights). When he looked up again, Lily had replaced Gloria under the poolhouse shower, Adriano was still on the trampoline—and Scheherazade was working two handfuls of olive oil into her breasts … Well she was. This had the humble merit of being true.

  “Oh, Scheherazade,” he said with a sigh. Yes, he was a moral being, apparently. He was still a moral being. “I think I might’ve misled you the other day,” he began. “Adriano was on the right side in the war. I’ve just spent an hour in the library. See, fascism was discredited, and Mussolini fell in the summer of 1943. Then the Germans …”

  But bear in mind, Scheherazade, that it was not among Italy’s war aims (he kept wanting to stress); it was not among the war aims of the Axis powers, Scheherazade, that you, one day, would try out your tits on Adriano. He concluded,

  “The country suffered horribly. 1945 was its year of sorrow.”

  She said, “History terrifies me … Our parents were the ones who had to go through all that. We’re lucky. The only thing we’ve got to worry about is the end of the world. Everything might just—stop.”

  He reminded himself that Scheherazade actually did things about the end of the world—marches, rallies. Whereas all his protests were subliminal. Everything stopping. Now, for instance, he looked out at the grotto, daubed with its flesh and youth, and for a moment the grotto was grotesque. Grotesque, from Ital. grottesca “a painting resembling something found in a grotto;” grotto, from Gk krupte- (see CRYPT). “And how are we supposed to feel about that?” he said. “I mean everything stopping.”

  “Mum says that’s why the young are at it all the time. You know, carpe diem. Gather ye rosebuds.”

  He was seeing her avid teeth for the first time in days; but then the smile flattened out into meekness as Adriano sternly returned to her side.

  … Keith excused himself and went up to her room to say goodbye to it. Scheherazade would be moving the next day. And the bathroom: was that the last time—a couple of afternoons ago, when she appeared in the short silk housecoat (limply fastened at the waist), and she looked dazed and bumped into things and didn’t seem to notice him and was giving off a thick sleepy warmth of womanhood? Probably. There would be no more encounters, no more spectacles of disarray, in the intervening compartment. She was never as naked, there, as she was by the pool; but she seemed much more so, because only his eyes saw her …

  He entered Scheherazade’s Tudorbethan chamber with the leaded windows and the splintery black beams. As before, it was eloquent of hurry, absent-mindedness, of better things to do. The temptation to snivel over her discarded clothes, to slide, for a moment, into her unmade bed, to sit at the dressing table and usurp her reflections in the triple mirror—the temptation was there, but no. On the bed was a towel, still damp and indented, and shaped in a semicircle with a shallow ridge round the back of it, where she must have sat and dried, not an hour ago. This he passed over and, instead, half smothered himself in one of her pillows.

  As he was leaving, he consulted her royal-blue passport—renewed as recently as October, 1969. And the photo. For a while he seemed to be staring at something in a provincial newspaper. The face of a girl who had distinguished herself on the harpsichord, or clocked up five thousand miles for Meals on Wheels, or rescued a cat from that great oak behind the guildhall.

  Ruaa,” said Whittaker, “does not ‘meet,’ as they put it. She hasn’t even ‘met’ me. Except when she’s sent up here to get something, she’s confined to the kitchen. Where I’m no longer allowed to go unless he comes too.”

  Whittaker attended to his glass: Black was drinking Tio Pepe. White (who was also smoking) sipped on an experimental glass of Scotch.

  “Incredible,” said Keith, who genuinely found it so. “Incredible. Even little Dilkash ‘met’ all right. She had a job. Temping. And as for Ashraf … Okay,” he said (he was trying to cultivate or encourage a certain brashness in his attitude to women). “Okay. I’ve got a true story for you. Pass it on to Amen.”

  “Amen’ll profit from it?”

  “Yeah, it’ll put things in perspective about the—about his sister.” Keith squared up. “Now. A couple of summers ago, in Spain, a gang of us, we had a picnic with a lot of wine and went swimming in this mountain lake.” Keith, Kenrik, Arn, Ewan. Yes, and Violet, who had just turned fourteen. “And Ashraf came wading out of the water in her white two-piece. And we all called out, Come on darling, give us a flash. Come on, gorgeous, give us a butcher’s. And she—”

  “Butcher’s?” said Whittaker.

  Keith told him it was rhyming slang. Butcher’s hook: look. “Why’s that funny?”

  “I’m just thinking. Give us a butcher’s. Not the most obvious inducement to a Muslim. I mean, they have a different approach to butchers. They—”

  “D’you want to hear this story or not? No offence and I know you’re gay and everything, but there’s Ashraf—big girl, mind—coming out of a mountain lake half-naked, and you want to talk about butchers.”

  Whittaker opened his hands and asked Keith to proceed.

  “Well. Come on, sweetheart, come on, give us a gander. And she reached behind her back and …” Then came a shrug, and a silence. “And there were these two fucking volcanoes staring you out. And this was years ago. Long before they all started doing it.” 1967, Spain, Franco, and the Guardia Civil policing the beach (and the ban on bikinis) with their half-raised machine guns. “Okay. Now where does it say a Muslim chick can do that?”

  Whittaker said urbanely, “Oh, there’s probably some obscure teaching somewhere or other. You know. When infidels gather as you bathe, and cry out for a butcher’s, reach behind your back and … So what moral is Amen supposed to take from Ashraf?”

  “Uh, it’ll make him loosen up about the Blob. Sorry. Ruaa. Jesus. I’m a little the worse for … I was raised to respect all cultures. And I respect Ruaa. But religion—religion’s always been my enemy. It teaches girls to be a drag about sex.”

  “You know, Keith, there might be a moral in Ruaa for you. Actually I like having her here. It means he can’t just disappear. That’s my situation. I love someone who could just disappear.”

  Keith thought of Ashraf—a Muslim of discos and miniskirts, a cool-pants Muslim whose evening drink was Chivas Regal. He thought of Dilkash, with her orangeade and her sensible trouser suits. Yet she too had powers of surprise. The shock of Ashraf’s presentation, at the lake, was not that much greater, relatively, than the shock Dilkash had given him, after a month of chaste friendship, when she took off her cardigan and revealed her bare arms … Had he humiliated Dilkash? Humiliated Pansy? He couldn’t get any of them out of his mind, any of them—he was like the very sick old man he would one day become, needing to know how it had gone, all his life, with women and love.

  “What about the Ruaa approach to Violet? With you as Amen. Never leave her alone with any man who isn’t a close relative. Shame and honour, Keith. Shame and honour.”

  “A different approach,” he said. “Draw?”

  … Don Quixote, talking of
his imaginary girlfriend, Dulcinea del Toboso, told Sancho Panza, I paint her in my fancy, according to my wish. Keith had done too much of this with Scheherazade, and made her into someone above his reach to know. She would have to come down, to condescend, in his imagination.

  Love did have the power to transform—as it had once transformed his newborn sister. He remembered that page, that short chapter of his being, with all his body. Not only his mind remembered it. His fingers remembered it, his breastbone remembered it, his throat remembered it.

  And he had read that men were beginning to see women as objects. Objects? No. Girls were teemingly alive. Scheherazade: the inseparable sisters who were her breasts, the creatures that dwelt behind her eyes, the great warm beings of her thighs.

  2

  THE FALL OF ADRIANO

  Mid-morning, now, and Scheherazade was packing her things: Keith had already sadly helped her with a suitcase and a stack of books. At noon, he came up with a mug of coffee and heard the clatter of the shower … He reached for his novel (he was still listlessly rooting for Catherine and the fixed lour called Heathcliff) … Now came a flurrying, rustling sound, and just then, too, the cicadas started up. The rhythmless marracas of the cicadas … As he listened, Keith felt his face go damp and flabby, like a face marooned and immobilised over a critically hot bath. Now silence.

  He tried the door. Thank God, he thought wearily; and he pressed a fatalistic forefinger to the bell.

  “You know what I suffer from? Clinical amnesia. Well what d’you think? Next week there’s an official dinner he wants to take me to, and Mum said I ought to go to anything like that if I can bear it. Adriano. Will there be dancing? Imagine.”

  Scheherazade was in a gown that her great-aunt Betty might have worn, or actually did wear, in New York, in 1914. Heavy silk of Sherwood green, with the deep pleats starting just above the waist. He said,

  “Give it up, Scheherazade. For your own good.”

  She turned her back to him. “I’m not thinking of my own good. Could you uh …?”