The Pregnant Widow

  During one of their lulls, on that animal afternoon (Gloria was changing), Keith leafed through her sketchbook: Santa Maria as grand as St. Peter’s, village streets cleansed of accident and clutter; Lily with her beauty long-ensconced, Adriano with Mark Antony face but his torso misleadingly full-scale, topless Scheherazade unembarrassed by her “noble” breasts; and Keith himself, perfunctorily furnished with a Kenrik-like elaboration of the eyes and lips.

  Was that magnanimity or was it sentimentality? Was it perhaps even religious—an absolution that promised ascendance? To Keith, in any event, the prettification seemed inartistic. He thought, then, that art was meant to be truthful, and therefore unforgiving. But hand followed eye with uncanny facility. And that’s the way she was in the bedroom: phenomenal concordance of hand and eye. How, he wondered, would Gloria draw Gloria? Looking in the full-length mirror, naked, with pencil and pad, how would she choose to represent it? The physique of course would be standardised. And the face would be honest, and unsecretive.

  The cold breath of the cyclamens. Evanescent, like the season, now, a cold dissolution. This summer was the climax of his youth. It had come and gone, it was over, Lily, his first love, his only love, was probably over. Yet much had been gained (he felt, in the September silence) from the example of Gloria Beautyman. Now he thought of London and its million girls.

  Whittaker was arranging the white pieces on the table in the salon. He was doing this out of the goodness of his heart, because Keith no longer played chess with Whittaker. Whittaker was relieved about that, and so was Keith, at first. But Keith now played with Timmy.

  “Do you know what I am? I’m a frustrated parent. I’m not even a fruit. I’m a pop. Amen. There’s been a development.”

  Keith looked up: Whittaker, who so often seemed to fill the same space as his brother Nicholas. In seventy-two hours’ time, Keith would be in his brother’s arms, and would tell him everything …

  “Amen’s fallen in love—in his way. Not with me, of course. It’s one of those hopeless passions. And you know something? I couldn’t be more touched. I spoon him and nurse him. And he’s so sweet to me. I’m a frustrated parent.”

  “Who’s he in love with?”

  “In fact it’s awfully good,” said Whittaker. “Three days ago he took Ruaa to the bus. And I thought he’d escort her to Naples, like he always does. But no—he just slung her on board and came straight back. To be near the loved one. It’s a love that dare not speak its name. Gloria.”

  There was no longer any doubt. Keith had to get back to some normal people. And quickly too. “Gloria?”

  “Gloria. He says he’s going straight for Gloria’s arse.”

  “… Say again?”

  “I’ll rephrase that. Amen’s considering going straight—for the sake of Gloria’s arse.”

  “With, uh, does he have ambitions?”

  “No. It’s too exalted for that. He’s considering going straight in the name of Gloria’s arse. To honour Gloria’s arse.”

  “I think I see.”

  “He doesn’t like her face or anything. Or her personality. Or her knack with a pencil. Just her arse.”

  “Just her arse.”

  “Just her arse. Though he quite likes her hair.”

  Keith lit a cigarette. “Well I noticed he’s always down there suddenly.” Amen, poolside, legs neatly crossed, on a director’s chair, his dark glasses strangely prominent, like antennae. “And I was wondering. Has he made his peace with Scheherazade’s tits?”

  “On the contrary. He thinks they’re more violent than ever. But he braves Scheherazade’s tits—for Gloria’s arse. And now he’s in a kind of tender despair. It’s made him humble. He’s in despair. He says he’ll never find a guy with an arse like that.”

  “And he won’t, will he,” said Keith with confidence. “I mean it’s a very feminine arse.”

  “As feminine as Scheherazade’s tits. And it’s weird. The arses we like are muscular—kind of cuboid. And Gloria’s is …”

  Like a prize tomato, pronounced Scheherazade, that time—referring to the red corduroys so contentiously unleashed on the young men of Ofanto. Later that same day, playing solitaire, Keith made an exact visual match: the ace of hearts. In two dimensions, then. And hearts: hearts. Which wasn’t the right suit.

  “Then I don’t get it, Whittaker. Why’s the arse okay? The arse and not the tits?”

  “There’s a basic difference.”

  “… Ah Christ. Excuse me for a while. What’s the basic difference?”

  “Boys have arses.”

  Keith did not need reminding that boys have arses. All the slow burns inside him, the flickerings and reorderings, like logs succumbing to change in the core of a fire—these brought with them an upheaval in his gut. To the cold-sweat undertaste of the dungeon floor he added the smell, not of his dead concerns, his yesterdays: it was his present, and his stake in it, that he seemed to be evacuating. He crouched there. He waited. The last tugging reminder of pain. It was going away … And where does pain go, he wondered, when it goes away? Does it disappear, or does it go somewhere else? I know, he thought. It goes into the well of your weakness; and it waits.

  He lay in the pale green tub, in the wintry acre of the dungeon bathroom. This was a place for pain, for torture and trauma, with its pendent meathooks, its drainage channels, buckets, duckboards, and its great slum family of caked rubber boots. The bathroom in the cloudy tower was the place for pleasure (look at the human shapes in the glass), the place where, nonetheless, he had learnt that pleasure could burn and sting, could throb and stab.

  His talk with Whittaker had reopened a line of unease—the counter-intuition that his day with Gloria Beautyman was in some sense homoerotic. And the evidence for this was still mounting. First, Gloria was a sexual tomboy: she liked to climb all the trees and get her kneecaps scraped and dirty. Then there was the business (no small matter) of her being a cock. Jorquil had the nerve to call me a coquette, she said with what seemed to be genuine indignation. D’you know what that word means? It’s ridiculous. I’m five foot eight in my spikes. And, so saying, she got off the bed and walked naked from the room; and Keith imagined her buttocks as a pair of gigantic testicles (from L. testiculus, lit. “a witness”—a witness to virility), not oval, but perfectly round, and sloping upward into the hard-on of her torso and the helmet of her head. Third, her name: Beautyman. Fourth, and most obviously, there was the beast with one back. Plus the sinister refinement. He had heard and read that women could be masochists. Gloria, though, had no interest in pain. She was not a masochist. But it prompted a question. Could a woman be a misogynist—in bed?

  There was a sixth element too; it was revolutionary, and perhaps that was why he couldn’t yet grasp it … Her secret. Her middle, the omphalos, like the smelted convexity at the centre of a shield.

  Timmy, as White, played P-Q4; and so did black. White played P-QB4. The offered pawn: this was known as the Queen’s Gambit. Timmy’s long and shapely fingers, each with independent life, it seemed, now withdrew, and selected two items, a magazine and a pamphlet, from the stack of reading matter beside his chair. The pamphlet was called One God; the magazine was called Gun Dog. For the time being these periodicals remained unopened on his lap.

  “So how did it go in Jerusalem—your work?” asked Keith, who was already stalling for time. In their penultimate game he had accepted the Queen’s Gambit; and after Timmy pushed his king’s pawn to the fourth rank, Keith’s centre instantly disappeared; and five moves later his position—his mocking kingdom—was in ruins. Now he meekly played P-K3 and said, “Any joy?”

  Timmy played N-QB3. “Sorry?”

  “Converting the Jews.”

  “Well if you go by the figures, it all looks a bit of a frost. You see, our priority was to get those chaps with, you know, the chaps with the little berets on their heads. And the funny sideburns. And you see they’re very narrow-minded.”

  Keith asked him how he meant.
br />   “Well you go up to them, and you tell them, you know, there’s another way. There’s another way! And they just look at you as if you’re … Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “Touch.”

  “You see, they’re so narrow-minded. It’s amazing. You wouldn’t believe.”

  Which might have been all very well. Except that Keith, for the fifth game in a row, was being given a terrible time on the chessboard; except that Timmy, that same summer, had taken a starred first in mathematics at the University of Cambridge; except that those long fingers of his, the night before, had raced and wriggled over the shaft of his cello, while the other hand carved out an impossibly agonised fugue (by J. S. Bach; Oona listened to it with tears seeping from her closed eyes). Keith said,

  “Ooh that’s sharp.”

  “And your bishop’s en prise … You don’t mind, do you? Some people find it offensive.”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  And Timmy sank back—and opened Gun Dog with a sudden grunt of interest … Keith, after much hesitation, put another helpless bodyguard in front of his king. Then Timmy looked up and instantly gave him the dreadful present, the dreadful friend, of his next move.

  They heard the call for dinner.

  “Draw?” said Timmy.

  Keith took a last look at his position. The black pieces were huddled or scattered; and all of them broken-winged. Whereas White was in full array, like the massed hosts of heaven, burning with beauty and power.

  “Resign,” he said.

  Timmy shrugged, and bent down to restore cohesion to his pile of periodicals. Periodicals of urgent interest to the born-again crowd, to the hook-and-bullet community … Chess and maths and music: these were the only spheres, Keith had read, in which you encountered prodigies. Human beings, that is to say, who were capable of creative originality before the onset of adolescence. There were no prodigies anywhere else. Because these closed systems did not depend on life: on experience of life. Religion too, maybe, was prodigious, when children dreamt, with all their authentic force, of Father Christmas and his sleigh.

  Scheherazade came for Timmy’s arm, and bore him off: her stately tread, his loutishly elegant sidle. Oona, Prentiss, and Gloria Beautyman were the last to filter from the room.

  “Are you making progress,” Keith asked, “with Sense and Sensibility?”

  “No,” said Gloria (in brocaded black velvet trousers, in waisted silk shirt), “I gave up after seven pages.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “She makes me feel like a child. All that truth. It frightens me. What she knows.”

  Oona was still half listening, as she moved off, so Keith said, “Can you believe she was younger than you when she wrote it? They think she wrote her first three novels when she was not yet one and twenty. The first at eighteen.”

  “Impossible.”

  “With so little experience of life. Why do you pinch your tits like that?” he said. “In the mirror. Why d’you do that? Because it feels nice?”

  “No. Because it looks nice. The maid’s room,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s pretty well perfect for us. We could slip in there and I could do that thing we talked about. Where I push them together. Or are you too frightened of me? You should be, you know.”

  “I’m not too frightened of you.”

  “Yes, well there’s only one catch with the maid’s room,” she said, and smiled. “It’s got a maid in it. Madonna. Count your blessings. Think of yourself as Adriano to my Rita. You’ve had your birthday present.”

  He watched her go, in tight black: the ace of spades, this time. But now the ace was upside down …

  The serial, day-long saturnalia with Gloria had not reminded him of anything in his past—except for that moment of disconnection, early on, in the bathroom, when the vertigo came (Look what happens when I use two fingers) and he felt the evaporation of all his courage. For just a moment, he couldn’t face what was now to be. It reminded him of a much-pondered episode, in another bathroom, in 1962, with a certain Lizzyboo, the magically transgressive daughter of one of his mother’s older friends. He was thirteen; and Lizzyboo was the same age as the emergent, the dawning Jane Austen. And she locked the door from the inside and said she was going to strip him for the shower. Little Keith was weeping and giggling as she went for his buttons—it was like being tickled to death. Then Lizzyboo put the key down the V of her sweater and leant towards him: If you’re in such a panic to run away, you can reach in and take it. He sent out his hand on its mission—its mission to enter the future—and it wouldn’t go. His hand was the hand of the mime artist when it runs up against the wall of invisible glass. He was thirteen, then; and she spared him (he was allowed to flee). And now he was twenty-one.

  “Timmy’s about to say grace,” said Lily from the doorway. “And you wouldn’t want to miss that.”

  Keith’s attitude to religion was evolving, it seemed. He now had cause to thank God—to thank religion. Ah, mille grazie, Dio. Aw, tantissime grazie, religione. Many times, in her themed fantasies, Gloria returned to the idea of blasphemy. In half an hour they’re taking me to the church, she soliloquised, slipping into her white cotton dress. I’m getting married to an older man. How very fortunate that I’m still a virgin. Just so long as I don’t crack now. Oh, hello. I didn’t see you lying there … And then again, at the very last, in the bathroom, in front of the mirror. Religion aroused Gloria Beautyman. And who could quarrel with it if it did that?

  On his way to the dining room he remembered something else about Lizzyboo. It wasn’t relevant to anything, he supposed; it was, on the other hand, true. She had a special skill—demonstrated on three or four occasions, in front of the family and other visitors, and once at a party (students, academics, professors of sociology and history), to general admiration and applause. Seated on the carpet, with her arms folded at shoulder height, with legs raised and bent, and using muscle power alone, Lizzyboo could bounce at speed across the length of the room on her arse. All the other girls tried it; and none of them could even get off the ground. Lizzyboo had a different relationship with gravity—gravity, whose desire is to get you down there in the centre of the earth.

  Shaking his head (experience of life, life!), Keith took his place at the table between Gloria and Conchita, facing Jorquil, Lily, and Adriano.

  3

  THE POOL HUT

  Mysteriously blasé about Frieda (and, later, about the likes of Scheherazade and Rita and Gloria Beautyman), the police were always abnormally interested in D. H. Lawrence. It wasn’t only Lady Chatterley that caught their attention: so did The Rainbow (obscenity), and so did Women in Love (libel). And so did a very late book of verse (grossly indecent, according to the Home Secretary; nauseous and disgusting, according to the Director of Public Prosecutions). Sufficiently gay, deep down, to be thrown behind bars in the first place, Lawrence nonetheless ignored the ridicule of his friends and called this collection Pansies—a pun, he said, on pensées. There were two editions of Pansies: the expurgated and the original, in which the eleven dirtiest poems were preserved.

  It was of course the unexpurgated version that Keith was looking for—and he found it, high up in the infinite library. Down below, Conchita sat at the davenport with her colouring books. He surveyed her: the tight black bun of her hair, the round shoulders, one hand flat on the sloping leather surface, the other reaching out to the simple prism of her pencils and crayons. Colouring books—seasides, ball gowns, flowers.

  “Found it … How was Berlin?”

  She shrugged and said, “We went to the Wall.”

  Unlike everyone else, Conchita had grown younger during the course of the summer. The precocious luminosity had passed over, and it no longer looked unusual—when she hastened to her colouring books, or when she attended, with the tenderest and most pitying of smiles, to Ducky and Lamby, to Patita and Corderito.

  He climbed down, saying, “And how was Copenhagen? I’ve been there.”

 
“Cold. And expensive. That’s what—that’s what Prentiss said.”

  “… Say expensive again?”

  “Expensive.”

  “Two months ago you’d have said esspensive. Say magazines.”

  “Magazines.”

  “You’ve changed. You’re an American now. And you’re slimmer. It suits you.”

  The example of the apoplectic Dodo, he imagined, had taught caution to Conchita’s appetite (at meal times she no longer asked for more). Yet the loss of weight, he thought, was also a loss of trouble, of inner heaviness; she no longer wore the weeds of mourning; Conchita wore white.

  “Thanks … You’ve changed too.”

  “Oh really? Better or worse? … Worse, right? In what way?”

  She was smiling as she dipped her head. “Your eyes are funny.”

  “… Oh yeah. Conchita. Up in the tower. Does Scheherazade sometimes forget to unlock the bathroom door?”

  “All the time.”

  After a moment Keith took his leave, and stepped out into the garden. The bees were gone, and nearly all the butterflies. The frogs no longer gurgled in their swamp. The sheep were gone, but the horses loyally remained. Keith flexed his brow. Beyond the paddock and on a higher slope he could see the figure of Adriano, slowly walking, with his neck bent down and his hands joined behind the small of his back.

  “Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,” Keith whispered—

  Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge is wither’d from the lake,

  And no birds sing.

  I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever-dew … The vines were bare and the lemon-houses shut. The squirrel’s granary was full.

  There’s nothing sinister about it,” said Gloria. “You’re obsessed by this.”

  “No I’m not. I remarked on it at the time, and I’m mentioning it now.”

  “You’ve got a thing about it. What’s the matter with you?”