How you feel to the touch (a hardness within a softness). And how you think, too, he thought, and worked on.
It’s just an extra. Being a cock. But it’s very rare.
When the whole thing was over Keith lay back and imagined a future almost blotted out by leisurely seminars on every heroine and anti-heroine in world literature, starting with The Odyssey (Circe, then Calypso). In a thickened voice he said,
I’m going to give you Sense and Sensibility.
How’re you going to do that? she asked in all innocence, her eyes directed upward while she smoothed her cheeks and temples with her hands. By fucking my arse off? … And would you mind not smoking in here. It’s evidential, and it’s a filthy habit anyway.
The delicate wafers of the tickets told them plain enough: their summer was coming to an end. Lily said,
“Then what’ll happen? To you and me? I suppose we’ll break up.”
Keith met her eye, and went back to Bleak House. Oh yeah, Christ—Lily, and all that. He applied himself to the question. Breaking up will be her idea all over again, said Scheherazade. After your friend Kenrik. It was like a chess problem: he (Keith) now thought that he (Kenrik) had let slip that he (Keith) wanted him (Kenrik) to sleep with her (Lily)—not so that he (Keith) could sleep with her (Scheherazade), but just to improve her sexual confidence. Or something like that. It was like a chess problem, a contrivance, quite separable from the dynamism of the actual game. He said,
“In some ways that’s a very frightening idea. Let’s not decide anything now.”
“Frightening?”
He shrugged and said, “Gaw, this Lady Dedlock. Honoria. She’s great. A proud schemer with a murky past.”
“So you fancy Lady Dedlock now.”
“She makes a nice change from Esther Summerson. Who’s a do-gooder. And such a fucking saint that she’s proud of being disfigured by smallpox. Imagine that.”
“Who was the other one you liked?”
“Bella Wilfer. Bella’s almost as good as Becky Sharp. Can you believe that Jorquil?”
“Jorquil? He’s not such a bad chap.”
“Yes he is. He is such a bad chap. I mean, who cares? But he is.”
The summer was over. They would be returning; and Jorquil, in his person, was a rumour of what they’d be returning to. In Keith’s eyes, old Jorq was a terrible compendium of Upper England, he was Ascot and Lord’s and the Henley Regatta, he was hay-wains and ha-has and cowpats and sheep dips. And it was in his scrutiny of Jorquil, over several days, that Keith discovered something extraordinary: the profound, the virtuoso, the almost hilarious fraudulence of Gloria Beautyman. She’s terribly good, he thought. She’s very clever. And she’s insane.
What genre did I visit, on my animal birthday? This was the question he couldn’t answer. What mode, what type, what kind?
In the bathroom with Gloria it wasn’t just the colours that were wrong—all Day-Glo and wax-museum. The acoustics were hopeless too. And so was the continuity. One moment the thunder felt no louder than a plastic dustbin being dragged across the courtyard; the next, it was all over you like a detonation. And the human figures—him, her? Gloria was much better at it than he was, naturally (she played the lead); but he kept having his doubts about the quality of the acting.
The light and the atmospherics were a bit more normal in the bedroom, later, but not much more normal, with the heavy yellow flashes, then darkness at noon, then intense silver sunshine, then biblical, world-drowning rain.
Again and again he thought, What category am I in? In its lustres and static facets it often reminded him of the pages of a glossy magazine—fashion, glamour. But what was its type as drama, as narrative? He was sure it wasn’t romance. Every few minutes it occurred to him that it might be science fiction. Or advertising. Or propaganda. But this was 1970 and he didn’t know it—he didn’t know the mode.
It seemed to make sense only when you watched it in the mirror.
Something had been separated out. He did know that.
Jorq? It can’t be his looks that attracted her, can it, Scheherazade had said. No, not his face (albinoid, with sore red lips), and not his body (fat-strong, with heavy bones). And it couldn’t be his mind either. For this clear reason: to be stimulated by Jorquil’s company, you would have to be abnormally interested in cheese. His boundless estates in the West Country produced great quantities of cheese. And that’s all he ever talked about: cheese.
During the day he looked like a cumbersome gentleman farmer (twills, trilby, tweeds, swagger stick); during the evening he looked like a cumbersome gentleman farmer in a tuxedo (his invariable dinner wear). Keith never once saw him when he wasn’t both eating and talking; and both activities produced in Jorquil a kind of oral inundation—a deluge of drool. On the other hand, old Jorq was wronged by Keith’s first impression. His chat wasn’t all of Double Gloucester, of Caerphilly, of Lymeswold—of torolone, of stracchino, of caciocavallo. As a kind of sideline, Jorq turned out to be laboriously right-wing.
Early afternoon was his chosen time for going upstairs with Gloria. As he forced a final reeking wedge of parmeigiano or Dorset Blue into his mouth, he maintained his slobbered diatribe about the wealth tax or the rise of the trades unions; then he held out a downturned hand, and Gloria would accompany him to the ballroom and its orbital staircase with an air of contrition and industriousness.
At that point Lily and Scheherazade always looked at each other with a lift of the chin.
Adriano was back. Back from pre-season training with I Furiosi. On his left cheek, from eye to jawline, he had a purple bruise that bore the faithful impression of a rugby boot (you could count the studs). It was gone the next day. Consolata, Adriano’s latest, incidentally, was the same height as Gloria Beautyman.
“What are you talking about? He doesn’t dribble. He just enjoys his food.”
Lily had embarked on the first, exploratory phase of her packing—the jerseys folded in their moth-proof polythene bags, the shoes berthed in their tissue paper … The conversation idled along at sixteen rpm.
“Enjoys his food?” Keith turned the page. “Show him a cheddar roll and it’s like that submarine film. Ice Station Zebra, remember?”
“Rock Hudson.”
“Yeah. Remember the best bit? The guy opens the fucked-up torpedo bay. And half the Arctic Ocean comes poling into the hold. Show Jorq a Dairylea and that’s what you get.”
“He just likes his food … You know what Adriano’s doing now? He’s playing it cool.”
“I ask again. How can four foot ten play it cool? Play what cool?”
“Well all these other girls seem to like him. And when they’re smoothing his thighs or giving him a kiss curl he turns to Scheherazade with a certain look.”
“What kind of look? Do it.” She did it. “Christ … Jorquil’s eyelashes.”
“His eyelashes? What about them?”
“They’re not eyelashes—they’re just two sets of whiteheads. Each of them speared by a bristle. And he’s a fascist. He voted for Heath.”
“He votes Liberal. He said.”
“Liberal … And his smutty jokes. When he takes her upstairs. Time for a visit to the Cape of Horn. Time for some Egyptian PT.”
“That’s just slang for sleep. Egyptian PT. That’s army slang. Because Arabs are meant to be lazy … Look. Rich men have a constituency with girls. It’s just a fact of life.”
“Agreed. But why are you sticking up,” he slowly asked, “for that fat brute?”
“He’s not even fat. Not particularly. He’s just big. And some girls like big men. It makes them feel secure. You’re just a chippy little guttersnipe. That’s all.”
Keith said, “It’s the aesthetics of it. Her all dark and small. Him like a huge loaf of white bread. I mean, who cares, but doesn’t it chill you to think of them lying down together?”
“She probably just isn’t very interested in sex. Not everyone is, you know. You think everyone is, and they aren’t.
Look at her background. Girls aren’t meant to enjoy it. So she just lies back and thinks of England.”
“Scotland.”
“And he doesn’t only talk about cheese.”
That night at dinner, Keith closely monitored him—the village idiot in the dinner jacket. And it seemed to Keith that, yes, Jorquil did indeed talk about cheese all the time (when he wasn’t being laboriously right-wing), and he looked outlandishly fat, too, and he came close to drowning in his own saliva, and he … Such an impression, if distorted, was not distorted by envy or possessiveness. He wished it was, in a way, but it wasn’t. The distortion remained eerily otherwise. When he gazed at Jorquil’s lips, chafed, flayed, peeled, he saw and felt those lips in the act of kissing. And Keith thought, He’s not kissing Gloria. He’s kissing me.
Are you better? At last you’re venturing out of doors.”
“Quite recovered, thank you.”
“You had some of us very worried there for a while.”
“Yes. It was touch-and-go, I admit.”
“… God he’s a Dud.”
Keith had caught her alone, with her patchwork quilt (the squares and triangles of cardpaper, the scraps of satin and velvet), on the south terrace. She now looked up and said, quite unintimately (an observer on the far side of the French windows might have thought she was talking about the morning weather—which was fresh and brilliant—or the price of yarn),
“Yes, isn’t he. Monstrous. Those lips. Those lashes. Like a row of pimples.”
Keith carefully sat himself down on the swing sofa. “So we see eye to eye on Jorq,” he said. Was that what was happening? Was he seeing Jorquil with Gloria’s eyes? “And the drool.”
“And the drool. And the cheese … Of course, that’s why I prolonged my uh, my ailment. To stay out from under him for another day or two. But I was pushing it. As far as he’s concerned I’ve been ill for months.”
“Months?”
“Ever since I drank that glass of champagne. Remember? And got caught messing around with the polo pro.” Slowly and solemnly she shook her head. “I’ll never forgive myself for that. Never. It was so unlike me.”
“Messing around with the polo pro?”
“No. Getting caught. I mean it’s unheard of.”
Keith continued to swing on the swing sofa, and there seemed no reason not to ask (because everything was now allowed), “What’s he like? Up in the apartment?”
Gloria reached for another shaped template, another scrap of plush. “The same as he is everywhere else. Jorq’s a bore. And bores don’t listen … I was going to say that he’s not too bad in bed when he’s fast asleep. But of course he snores. He’s like a great white whale. And he saturates all the pillows.”
“Still. Come on. It’s hardly a blind date, is it. And aren’t you two getting engaged? Well I suppose old Jorq has other attractions.”
She said quietly, “Listen, you fool. Moving down to London costs money—and I haven’t got any, you fool. You boring fool.”
“All right. I hear. I listen.”
Now Jorq’s face (which was chewing something) established itself on the other side of the glass. Gloria rippled her fingers at it; and gave it a startling false smile. She said,
“Well originally I thought I’d make him marry me and then get the divorce going as soon as possible after the honeymoon. But I don’t think I can even bring myself to do that … There’s already someone else.”
“Who?”
“You,” she seemed to say.
She seemed to say, You. Keith had misapprehended, and it was quickly cleared up. But we might step back from him here, at this revolutionary moment … Men have two hearts—the upper, the nether; and convention tells us that when all is well they act in concert. But here, in this case, the two hearts responded antithetically. Keith’s upper heart sank, quailed, sickened; or it fearfully subsided into a certain kind of future. It was his underheart that felt poetic—not bursting, as hearts are said to do, but filling, rising, aching. He said,
“Me?”
“You? No, not you. Huw. Aitch you doubleyou.”
“Huw.”
“Huw. He’s Welsh. He’s got a castle too. Now isn’t that a coincidence. You see, the trick is to find someone who’s rich and pretty. And who listens.”
“I thought for a moment you meant me.”
“You? Well you listen, I suppose … You’re just a student.”
“That’s what you are too.”
“I know, but I’m a girl.”
Jorq started rattling at the handle. Gloria said,
“Can’t the stupid sod see the catch?”
“It’s tricky. You have to pull then push. It’s an IQ test.”
“Then he won’t pass it. God, help the stupid sod out, somebody.” She gestured at Jorquil’s baffled image—pointing, tugging, shoving. “And I’ve got to keep him happy. If you please. Or I get the gorgon look from Oona. Oona scares the hell out of me. I sometimes have the terrible feeling she knows what I’m really like.”
After a moment he said, “Elizabeth Bennet.”
“Yes? What?”
“You’re not really the same, you two. She’s from the past. And you’re from the future.”
“Well,” she said. “Cocks naturally adapt. Down through the ages.”
Jorquil was now beating the door frame with the flat of his hand.
“Uh, Gloria—you know there’s a maid’s room beyond and above the apartment.”
“How did you hear about the maid’s room?”
“I could come up the north staircase. We might be able to slip in there for a minute or two. When he’s out.”
“Whatever for? Look at you,” she said, and laughed, “you’re terrified. You’re already out of your depth. And you know it.” She turned to watch Jorquil throwing his shoulder against the glass. “When they’re that stupid, I hate rich people, don’t you? I hate rich people. But the trouble is, they’re the ones who’ve got all the money. I’ll look into it. The maid’s room. Ah, here he is!”
Jorquil stumbled out and steadied and straightened up; he surveyed the sky, the slope, the descents, the grotto, the white sheet of the pool; his chins settled and he gave a soft grunt of ponderous entitlement. Keith saw that Jorq had a scattering of cheese puffs in his cupped left palm. Now he smeared the remainder into his mouth and said,
“Airy nothings, that’s all they are.” He licked his hand. “Like so much in life. Airy nothings. Come on, my darling. To the pool with you.”
“I don’t think I’m quite well enough for the pool.”
“No no. On with your togs. Or should I say off with them.”
“Jorquil’s brought me some decent clothes at least.”
“Oh here,” said Keith, passing it over. And Sense and Sensibility disappeared into Gloria’s straw bag.
“Now come along. I want you turning all heads,” said Jorq, “with your pretty titties. Those pretty titties of yours. I want everyone to see them and weep.”
Could he really have said that, Jorquil? But what Keith was left with, on the terrace, was a sudden memory of his sister. Vi, he asked her, in the wood-framed Morris 1000, why are you sticking your feet out of the window? And Violet (eight, nine) said, Because I want everyone to see my lovely new shoes. I want everyone to see them and weep.
And then haphazardly came other memories. Like the time she ran the length of the garden and returned to him the lofted cricket ball, and then ran back again, and weeping throughout—weeping about something else.
And then came other memories. Needing to be rescued. What was he to do with them all? In this new world he had entered (it was very developed, very far advanced), thinking and feeling were rearranged. And this, he thought and felt, might show him another way.
Oona was back. On that much everyone agreed: Oona was back—with Prentiss and Conchita (Dodo having been jettisoned somewhere over the Alps). With difficulty Keith made room for them in his mind. Oona, yes, quietly watchful, and her
experienced eyes did indeed closely follow the movements of Miss Beautyman. Perpendicular Prentiss, all joints and hinges, like an Amish hatstand. And Conchita, who had changed. With Jorquil here, and Whittaker back, and Timmy due, and all the servants present, the castle no longer felt spacious. Or perhaps he just meant that there seemed to be no room for manoeuvre.
They had to vacate their turret, Lily and Keith, and were transferred to a forbiddingly dark but curiously congenial room on the dungeon floor. Here Keith threw himself into his work, itemising, systematising, and eventually alphabetising the vast archive of his twenty-first birthday. He wanted to enter it now, in the list that lived with his birth certificate, under Jean 7. Not Scheherazade 10 or even Scheherazade 12a, but Gloria 99z*! There were so many things he hadn’t known you were allowed to do.
“But I feel defenceless,” said Lily, “when you pin my arms.”
“That’s the point … And if it’s so small, why can’t you get it all in your mouth?”
“… Why should I want it all in my mouth?”
“Go on. Keep trying.”
“Now my head’s upside down … No. I won’t. You even look different. What’s happened to you?”
Lily said these things, but not in the dark—not any more.
Gloria Beautyman had a secret. A secret of titanic dimensions. Gloria was secretly married with three children. It was something of that size. Gloria was secretly a boy. It was something of that size.
2
OMPHALOS
“What would you call it? A monokini, I suppose.”
“But it’s not like yours, is it. Yours just looks like a bikini without the top.”
“She does it to humour Jorq. He insists. But she’s come on at least a generation, hasn’t she. It’s like having a whole new guest around the place. A thong?”
“It’s very narrow at the front … Does she wax it? Has she done a Rita?”
“A G-string? No, you can sometimes see a little fringe just above the band.”