And Keith saw it all. Adriano’s girls were hired actresses. Luchino and Tybalt were hired actors: in reality, in kitchen-sink, Adriano came from a long and unbroken line of midgets—rich and noble midgets, no doubt, but necessarily non-combatant. Keith shrugged and said, “And then, Adriano?”
“Then suddenly love surprised me. It was as the proverbial lightning strike. Gusts of feeling such as I have never known. Scheherazade. Scheherazade is a work of art.”
“And now, Adriano?”
“What will I do? … I know that I cannot rest. Well then. I will go on a journey. In the wind I hear the word Africa …”
And Keith, steadying, thought, Oh yeah, you’re a “character,” aren’t you. Go on then: join the Foreign Legion, the Legion of the Lost … Who were these characters, with their applied eccentricity? Jorquil was a character, and Timmy was turning into a character. Was high birth a prerequisite of being a character—giving you the latitude? No. Rita was a character. Rita was rich. Did you, then, need money to be a character? No. Because Gloria was a character; and Gloria, as she herself put it, was as poor as a church mouse.
“Goodbye, my friend. And please convey my respects to Kenrik. We may never meet again. I thank you for your kind words.”
“Fare thee well, Adriano.”
Already self-dosed on Azium (she would take another on the way to the airport), Lily was in their room on the dungeon floor, reading and resting and polishing her packing (which, tomorrow morning, she would duly sub-edit). The clock said twenty to twelve: very soon, then, it would be time to start getting ready in the pool hut. In the thrumming, pumping heat of the pool hut. It was no longer snowing and was now only raining. But raining with diligence and drive.
In fact the day cleared at the very end of the afternoon, giving way, after a final curtsey of drizzle, to a rose-and-yellow dusk. Keith took more notice of the sky that evening, conscious, perhaps, of having recently neglected it. Its pouting pinks, its brothelly oranges. The sun put in a guest appearance, with a beaming smile, then exited stage left. Just before curtain-fall, a ripe, hot, fully limbed Venus climbed up into the darkening blue. And he was thinking that there should be a sky for every one of us. Every one of us should have our own peculiar sky. What would mine look like? What would yours?
Gloria was out there sketching the graph lines of the mountains, on the west terrace, and Keith went and joined her with his beer. He said,
“Good evening, Gloria.”
“Good evening, Keith.”
“…I was down there for four hours.”
She didn’t actually laugh, but she closed her eyes and tightened her lips and repeatedly cuffed her thigh with her hand. “Four hours. For four thrusts. No, that’s good.” She worked on with her head down.
“It’s warm again,” he said, and registered her low-cut emerald dress, the almost frivolous intricacy of her clavicles, and the warm hollows on either side of her throat.
“Now I wonder how it went,” she said musingly. “Let’s think. Down there nice and early, of course. Half past one? Making it all comfy with the towels. And quite hopeful until about half past three. Then less hopeful. Till you finally finished your wank,” she said, using the eraser and brushing the flecks away with her little finger, “and came back up and told Lily how much you loved swimming in the rain.”
In a voice of quiet concentration she went on,
“You’re lucky. You’re lucky she didn’t come down and give you a nasty surprise. You’d have had a bit of explaining to do. Sitting there with your cock out in the middle of the afternoon. But that’s your style, isn’t it.”
“My style?”
“Yes. Getting caught without even doing anything. Like with Scheherazade. And you didn’t even have the nous to see she’d changed her mind. Then a great smelly drug in a glass of prosecco. Pathetic.”
It was true: Lily’s witch radar was by now an obsolescent contraption—compared to the great array, the transcontinental NORAD deployed by Gloria Beautyman. And Keith himself? The radio ham with his lone aerial, his ginger beard, his weight problem, his diabetes … And he parenthetically wondered: In the whole post-Marconi period, worldwide, has a radio ham ever had a girlfriend? Gloria, still drawing, rubbing, shading, said quietly,
“Sometimes, at breakfast, Lily looks at you, and then looks at me, and then looks at you again. And not fondly. What are you doing to her at night?”
“Oh you know. Livening things up a bit.”
“Mm. On your birthday, I happened to bring off a perfect little crime. And now you’re trying to get caught after the event. Trying to get caught … what’s the word? Retroactively. Keith, you’re a proven incompetent … Getting the drinks mixed up. You should be grateful I went quiet about your beer.”
“Yes, thanks for that. I was surprised. I had no idea you even liked me.”
She said, “I don’t.”
“… You don’t?”
“No. You’re very annoying. I just thought, Oh, he’ll do. I had reasons of my own.”
“What reasons?”
“I had some mental scores to settle. Put it this way. I saw an opportunity. Call it …” They heard Jorq’s Jag on the gravel below. “Call it self-expression. Now I expect the stupid sod’ll just fling his tuxedo on over his sweaty jumper. I’m going in. Is there anything else?”
Keith had the use of Gloria—of her divinatory powers, of what she knew—for another two or three minutes. And he wanted to ask her about Violet. But he chose an analogue, a shorter short story: he gave her the unexpurgated version.
“And then Rita and Pansy,” he was soon saying, “kissed us goodbye in November and went back up north. Eight months later, Arn and I were going back to his place one night, and they were waiting for us on the street.” Girlless Arn, girlless Keith—and Rita and Pansy in the open-topped MGB, like starlets at the Motor Show, like a vulgar dream. “We went up. There’s only one room and one big bed and we all got into it.”
“And was it—communal?”
“No. Pairs. Though we were all naked … Except for Pansy. Who kept her pants on.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yes. Oh dear. Yes very much oh dear.”
“So you—so you cuddled Pansy, while inches away …”
“Yeah.” While inches away, Gloria, the Dog was fucking the arse off Arn. “For four hours.” It was the worst night of my life. Maybe it’s why I’m here. Here with Lily in Italy. “And they did it again in the morning. While Pansy and I pretended to be asleep.”
“Well what d’you want to know? Eight months up north. All the old stuff took hold. Not with Rita, obviously. With Pansy.”
“But why’d she do it in the first place? Earlier. When she didn’t want to.”
And Gloria, ever surprising, said, “Echolalia. The meaningless repetition of what others say and do. Sexual echolalia. Pansy slept with you for one reason. Because if she didn’t, Rita would sneer at her for not acting like a man.”
Keith sat back.
“I was just thinking,” she said as she closed her pad and sheathed her pencil. “Remember Whittaker? When he talked that night about the politicisation of bras? Well this was the politicisation of pants. The politicised pants were the ones that came off.”
They stood. “Let me call you in London. Please.”
She gathered the green dress around her. The square face with its pointed chin, the whiteness of eye, the whiteness of tooth. “Be sensible,” she said. “Whenever you think of me, just think of yourself—in the pool hut. D’you want more of that? Or less?”
“Well. Less pool hut. More birthday.”
“I thought so. Look at him. Wrecked for life. Keith, your birthday never happened. You imagined it. I went to the ruins.”
Dinner-jacketed, beige-jumpered Jorquil, after not much huffing and shouldering, succeeded in freeing the glass door.
“And they were so romantic in the rain. Ah, here he is. We were just admiring Venus. Isn’t she pretty tonight?” He sat o
n under a sky now crazed with stars—stars in such wild profusion that the night had no idea what to do with them all. Actually, it did. Actually of course it did. We don’t understand the stars, we don’t understand the galaxy (how it formed). The night is more intelligent than we are—many Einsteins more intelligent. And so he sat on, under the intelligence of the night.
Gloria had a point. No, Keith wasn’t at his most personable and convincing in the pool hut. Crouched on the bench with his swimsuit round his ankles. The pine cabinet as loud as an engine room. And as hot as a bakery …
She had a point about Pansy too. It was an important principle, and he assented to it: don’t do anything for the crowd. And not that, not that, especially not that: the intimate, the innermost. It worked both ways. With sex, don’t do it, and don’t don’t do it, for the crowd.
And Adriano—he was right too. When he said that Scheherazade was a work of art. In her whole being, in the way she looked, thought, and felt, ingenuous Scheherazade was like a work of art. And the same could not be said of Gloria Beautyman. Because a work of art has no designs on you. It may have its hopes, but a work of art has no designs.
It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls. Not to the boys—who were all like that anyway. The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose. And ingenuousness was probably over. Maybe, in this new age, girls needed designs.
4
WHEN THEY HATE YOU ALREADY
And life, for its part, went on behaving impeccably right up to and including the last day of the summer. There were to be revelations, recognitions, about-turns, come-uppances, and so on. And life, generally indifferent to these things, went ahead and obliged.
After breakfast they swam, and there was the occasion for a final dark-spectacled glare at the two girls and their bodies, and he undertook it in the spirit of an archivist—to shore up memory. The face and breasts of Scheherazade filled him with grief; and the arse and the legs and the arms and the tits and the omphalos and the box of Gloria Beautyman filled him not with feelings so much as a set of impulses. The impulses of the raptor. From L., lit. “plunderer,” from rapere “seize.” Keith had entered the world again. Or so he liked to believe.
It was Timmy’s first time to go and get the coffee; and when he returned about an hour later, descending with the tray, he looked slightly more puzzled than usual, and he said, as he slouched by in his slippers,
“Someone telephoned. It was that chap Adriano. He’s in Nairobi. Very bad line.”
“Nairobi?”
“You know, big game. The Serengeti. And now he’s banged up in a hospital in Nairobi.”
“That’s terrible,” said Scheherazade.
Yes, true to character, Adriano had gone and coptered himself to Kenya. And now Keith was wondering which way it would go. Half eaten by headhunters or soldier ants? Or chomped practically in two by a hippopotamus. And for several seconds he thought that Adriano’s fate was an artistic disappointment, because Timmy was saying,
“No, nothing very dramatic. It happened last night. He checked into the Serengeti VIP. I stayed at the Serengeti VIP. Don’t you remember, old thing, when I came to rescue you in Bagamoyo? Marvellous place. Not Bagamoyo. I mean the Serengeti VIP. They wake you up at night with these little signals. Two chimes for a lion. You know, visible in the lit area. Three for a rhino. You know.”
“But what happened to Adriano?”
“Oh Adriano. Oh, he pranged his jeep. Trying to find the car park. You see, it’s on a hill, the Serengeti VIP. And it’s, it’s maddening because the car park … Anyway. He found it in the end, the car park. In a bit of a bait by then, no doubt. And he ran his jeep into a brick wall. And the poor chap’s gone and shattered both his knees.”
After a moment Keith’s head gave a jolt of consent. That was Adriano. Forever brought to grief by the mere furniture of the high life. Timmy said,
“Is there anyone staying here called Kitsch?”
“That must be me.”
“Sends his regards. As I say, it was a very bad line.”
Then there were farewells, down at the pool, with Whittaker and Amen, and then, up in the castle, with Oona, Jorquil, Prentiss, and Conchita. And with Madonna and Eugenio.
Now travel, and the business (hardly less onerous in art than in life) of getting people from one place to another place.
Their taxi came exactly an hour early, while the church-goers were still at Santa Maria; the driver, Fulgencio, who had no forehead at all (flat black hair sloped directly into his eyebrows), drove them down to the deserted village and then cheerfully disappeared.
“Let’s go and pay our last respects,” Keith told Lily, “to the rat.”
But when, on the sunken street, they drew level with the pet-shop window, they were greeted, not by the crimson eyes and the vermicular tail, but by a startling void.
“Sold!” said Lily.
“Maybe. Or maybe it just escaped.”
“It’s been bought. Somebody bought it.”
The sign on the door said chiuso. Keith peered in and saw a woman in black with a mop and a red plastic bucket. He said, “Give me the …” He reached into Lily’s bag for the pocket dictionary. “Here we are. Il roditore. The rodent.”
“You’re so horrible.”
“Stay here.” He went in to the sound of the chime. And he came out saying, “You’re right. The lady, she mimed it—doling out banknotes. Imagine. Someone paid good money for a rat.”
“Quite right. Poor little Adriano. Just think.”
“Just think. It’s lying on its back in some little parlour.”
“With all the children stroking its little tummy. Just think.”
And now the bells of Santa Maria declared peace in heaven, and Gloria and Scheherazade stepped out on to the leafy courtyard, their faces bright with immortality and joy, in their Sunday best. And with Timmy, too, sidling along behind.
Scheherazade (whom, very soon, Keith would touch—Keith would lightly kiss—for the first time), Scheherazade walked straight up and said, “You missed it. Oh, it was so tragic. So moving.” She turned to Gloria with pleading eyes. “Tell them.”
“Amen. At the pool.”
“He came up to her at the pool. With his dark glasses off. He has such soulful eyes.”
“And?”
“He told me he loved me,” said Gloria drily, “and would always be my friend.”
“And that he’d love her for the rest of his life. He looked so sad! Such spiritual eyes. And then Whittaker sort of helped him away.”
While Scheherazade and Lily wept and necked and whispered goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, Keith fell into step with Gloria Beautyman.
“Spiritual,” she said. “I humoured her, but really, Scheherazade’s a sap. Such soulful eyes … Amen’s just obsessed by my backside, that’s all. I can tell. That’s normal for queers—they’ve got some taste, God bless them. Spiritual. Spiritual, my arse … Well take a good look. You won’t see me again.”
They turned a corner and were miraculously alone—in a narrow square full of low-flying yellow birds and nothing and nobody else.
And the voice spoke. Don’t try and kiss her. Take her hand. And put it where? There. Go on. Just for a second. There? Are you sure? Is it all right? It’s all right. The black gloves and the church bells make it all right. What do I tell her? And the voice spoke.
“Gloria, that’s your power,” he said. “That’s you.”
She bared her teeth (those mysterious blue-tinged moonstones) and said, “… Ich.”
Then Italy was streaming past the windows with its strontian yellows and edenic greens and cobalt blues and madder-browns, madder-reds. At length Fulgencio’s humped shoulders straightened them out on to the highway, raw mile upon raw mile, and knots of contorted factories periodically grew slowly nearer, with their cuboid flatblocks, where you saw half-naked children playing happily in the dirt.
Just before ta
ke-off Lily called for a pillow in a thick voice, and reached for Keith’s hand. Then the plane trundled and raced, leant back and climbed, with the towers of the airport losing their balance and teetering over rearward, as Keith and Lily left behind them the land of Franca Viola …
They were not yet clear of the clouds when the plane seemed to settle. Lily’s head struggled for comfort in the cusp of the porthole. Keith lit a cigarette.
“Conchita had an abortion in Amsterdam.”
“What? Oh don’t tell me that, Lily … Please don’t say any more.”
“Conchita had an abortion in Amsterdam. Four months. You must’ve noticed the bump was gone.”
“I didn’t think it was a bump. I just thought she’d lost weight. Please. Enough.”
“Everyone was on tiptoe. I wondered if you’d ever twig. She was raped. Only Prentiss and Oona know who by.”
“Please don’t say any more.”
“You didn’t notice. You often don’t see things very clearly. Do you … Oh for God’s sake, why are we still in the clouds?”
He slumped back in his seat, and noticed, as an irrelevance now, that he was no longer afraid of flying. And this was just as well. When Keith closed his eyes he believed himself to be on an aircraft in heavy weather, with wind shear and muscular thermals; then he was on a boat, cresting up and sliding down, and scooping itself through violent seas; then he was in an express elevator that rocketed and plunged—but made no headway. On the horizontal line, they seemed, if anything, to be going backward. He looked out. The white wing strained, as if made of flesh and sinew. A winged horse, a horse with wings. Like the wings of the horse that took the Prophet to heaven. He again closed his eyes. Trying as hard as it could, the little plane laboured to take them up into the blue …
Keith … Keith!
It was eight fifteen in the evening, and he was in the shower of the significant bathroom. All the day’s work was on his flesh, as the old order gave way to the new—all the repudiations and alterations, the riots and mutinies, all his seraphic sins. Would they ever come off? Like Pyrrhus at the fall of Troy, his