“The secret police. Like the Cheka or the Stasi. With informers. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Men with whips on street corners.”
“We’d have to do nothing else. Is that what you’re going to do? Do nothing else? Listen,” said Keith. “I’ve decided what I’m going to do about Violet.” I’m going to stop loving her, Nicholas. Because then it won’t hurt. “Look, I’ll muck in with my share, but I’m backing off. Emotionally. Don’t get angry.”
“I’m not. And I won’t say it’s because she isn’t your blood. Because I know for a fact that you love her more than I do.”
Keith sat there. Nicholas said,
“It won’t work. What do you think you’re going to do? You’re just going to watch. Unemotionally. While Vi gets fucked to death.”
“… I’m not even going to watch. If I can help it. I’m not as brave as you are. I’m going to close my eyes. I’m going to withdraw.”
“What?”
“I’m going to withdraw.”
And Nicholas said, “Where to?”
There was a minute’s silence. Then Nicholas looked at the time and said,
“Give it some more thought. Anyway. I haven’t asked. How’s that Lily?”
“Oh. Lily. The trial reunion was a mistake. Italy was a mistake.” He looked around. The fishing nets tacked to the walls, the thatched Chianti bottles, the fat waiter with the outlandish pepper-grinder (the size of a supergalactic telescope), the framed photographs—churches, hunting scenes. “I wouldn’t have missed it, not for the world. But Italy was a mistake. In the end. Anyway Lily dumped me. On the plane.”
“My dear …”
“She said I’d changed. And she upped and dumped me on the plane. Don’t worry—I’m relieved. I’m delighted. I’m free.”
“Lily will always love her Keith.”
“I don’t want love. No, I do. But I want hysterical sex.”
“As with Dodo.”
“Forget Dodo … Why’re you frowning like that? Listen, Nicholas, do I look any different?”
“Well you’re lovely and brown …”
“My eyes.” Keith felt himself tauten. Conchita, Lily, Gloria herself: Look at him, with his new eyes. And what about the eyes of Gloria Beautyman? Her ulterior eyes: from L., lit. “further, more distant.” Gloria’s ulterior eyes. “Has anything happened to them, my eyes?”
“They look—very clean. Against the tan. I don’t know, slightly more protuberant. Now you mention it.”
“Christ. More protuberant. You mean like a fucking stick insect?”
“Well they’re not actually on stalks, your eyes. It’s probably just because the whites are brighter. So no more Lily. Now a cleansing beer, and then …”
Nicholas drank his beer, called for the bill, queried it, paid it, and left. Keith sat on.
Some wine remained in the second bottle, and he poured himself a little of that. He leant forward, with his brow cupped in a cold hand. He supposed he was very tired …
The story about Gloria, the Beautyman myth, it just collapsed in his head, like a mocking kingdom made by sleep, and now all he had was its echo, a reverberating pang in the core of his mind.
Across the way, the table of ten, like a single creature, got to its feet. Out they all processed, in three pairs and a quartet. The waiter, in his tormented waistcoat, stood nodding and bowing at the door. Last to leave was the tall couple, the twins, in their ebony velvet.
Narcissus’s sister. That version was not only incestuous—it was literalistic, and sentimental. The older story was the one that hurt and connected. Was he, was Keith, guilty of the disgusting vice of self-love? Well, he loved the rose of youth in himself, such as it was. That was forgivable. On the other hand, a surface, something of two dimensions, had transfixed him—not his own shape in the mirror but the shape that loomed at his side. Oh, I love me. Through her, for a day, he had loved himself, which he had never done before. Because there he was in the mirror too, standing behind her. The reflection—and also the echo: Oh I love me so …
With his broad back turned and a fat little fist on his hip, the waiter was staring at the abandoned tablecloth, which stared back up at him, soiled and conscience-stricken, now, with dozens, scores, of dirty glasses, with cigarettes crushed out in coffee saucers, with wrinkled napkins dropped in half-eaten ice creams … The waiter shook his head, sat down hard, and unbuttoned his vest. Then all fell still.
Gloria was sui generis, probably, no, come on, she was: not just a cock but a religious cock—and a religious cock with an exorbitant secret. Now Keith, too, had a secret, also unrevealable. Could this be called trauma? A trauma was a secret you kept from yourself. And Gloria knew her secret; and he knew his … She had taught him much, he believed, about the place of sensibility in this new world. She had promoted him, he believed, in the chain of being. He was a laureate, he believed, a valedictorian, of the academy of Gloria Beautyman; and he was now poised to pass on her teachings to the young women of a grateful capital. I’m free, he thought.
The waiter’s shadow told him that it was time to leave. I’m very tired, he said to himself. Italy, the castle, the summer months, and the events of that same morning (the church bells, the black gloves, the bared teeth, the Ich) seemed inconceivably distant, like childhood. Or like the time still earlier than childhood—infancy, babyhood. Or like 1948, when he wasn’t even born.
But now Keith Nearing had freedom.
And so it was that he went out among the young women of London. Over the coming days, weeks, months, years, he went out into London, the streets, the lecture halls, the offices, the pubs, the caffs, the gatherings, under its roofs and chimneys. Under the urban trolls of the trees, under the city skies. And it was the strangest thing.
He went out among the young women of London. And it was the strangest thing. Each and every one of them hated him already.
CODA. LIFE.
I suppose it’s only human. It’s only human—the need to know what happened to them all.
Well, in 1971, Scheherazade … Wait. The old order gave way to the new—not easily, though; the revolution was a velvet revolution, but it wasn’t bloodless; some came through, some more or less came through, and some went under. Some were all right, some were not all right, and some were somewhere in between. There were three orders, it seemed, like Dud, Possible, Vision, like the three grades of distance chosen by the mountains, like the three kinds of birds, the black, the yellow, and the magnets of the upper air, shaped like the head of an arrow … Some came through, some more or less came through, and some went under, but they all had their sexual trauma—all those present. All those who took the strange ride with the pregnant widow.
There will be more on their particular fates, but here, for now, are the abridged versions. Scheherazade was all right (with one qualification), and Timmy was all right, and Jorquil was more or less all right, and Conchita (he hoped and trusted) was all right, and Whittaker and Amen were all right, and Nicholas was all right, and Lily was all right in the end.
On the other hand, Adriano was somewhere in between, and Rita was not quite all right (and Molly Sims, incidentally, was not quite all right in the same way), and Kenrik was definitely not all right, and Violet was definitely not all right, and Gloria, too, was not all right. Dodo (this is only a guess, because nobody ever saw her again) was not all right. Prentiss and Oona were all right until 1994 and 1998 respectively. Then they were dead.
As for Keith … Well, it is 2009, now, not 2003, when, reasonably novelistically, 1970 caught up with him, all at once. This unfortunate crisis—his “N. B.,” as his third wife so gently and aptly called it—was in the past, and he was all right.
The Italian summer—that was the only passage in his whole existence that ever felt like a novel. It had chronology and truth (it did happen). But it also boasted the unities of time, place, and action; it aspired to at least partial coherence; it had some shape, some pattern, with its echelons, i
ts bestiaries. Once that was over, all he had was truth and chronology—and, oh yes, the inherently tragic shape (rise, crest, fall), like the mouth on a tragic mask: and this is a face that is common to everybody who doesn’t die young.
But it turns out that there’s another way of doing things, another mode, another genre. And I hereby christen it Life.
Life is the world of Well Anyway, and Which Reminds Me, and He Said, She Said.
Life has no time for the exalted proprieties, the ornate contrivances, and the intense stylisations of kitchen-sink.
Life is not a court shoe, with its narrowing heel and arched sole; Life is the tasteless trotter down there at the other end of your leg.
Life is made up as it goes along. It can never be rewritten. It can never be revised.
Life comes in the form of sixteen-hour units, between waking up and going to sleep, between escaping from the unreal and re-embracing the unreal. There are over three hundred and sixty such units in every year.
Gloria Beautyman, at least, will be giving us something that Life badly needs. Plot.
Some of the Things That Happened Between
1970 and 1974
For forty months, beginning with that September when his eyes were very clear, Keith lived in Larkinland—fish-grey, monkey-brown, the land of sexual dearth. The most salient feature of Larkinland is that all women, after a few seconds, can tell that that’s where you live—in Larkinland.
At first, all his moves on girls were met by a rearing-back or a twisting-away or an emphatic shake of the head. One very articulate postgraduate, having rebuffed him, went on to say that he exuded a strange mixture of electricity and ice. “As if you’ve got PMT,” she said. That phase passed. His advances became tentative (he reached out a hand), then quietly vocal, then impotently telepathic. That opposites attract is not among the rules of amatory physics. In 1971, and again in 1973, he had successive entanglements with two nervous wrecks from the Poetry Society (round the corner from his dank flat in Earls Court): its treasurer, Joy, and then Patience, the most glazed and tenacious attendee of its twice-weekly readings. In 1972, and again in 1973, he became familiar with the narrow staircase that led to a certain attic flat in Fulham Broadway. Inside it was a publisher’s reader of a certain age called Winifred, with her cardigan, her sweet sherry, her John Cowper Powys, her tic.
He trolled through his past of course, but Ashraf was in Isfahan, Dilkash was in Islamabad, and Doris was in Islington (and he had a drink with her there, in a pub—with her and her boyfriend). Every five or six months he spent a celibate night with Lily (while she was briefly between affairs). He tried to get her back, naturally, and she pitied him; but she wasn’t coming back.
1974 was seven days away (it was Christmas Eve) when he had his first re-encounter with Gloria Beautyman.
•
It is the kind of gathering convened by the more bohemian sector of the moneyed young—the kind of gathering at which Keith is by now very seldom to be seen. I won’t describe it (humid pools of velvet and luxurious heads of hair). Gloria arrives late, and tours the room, moving through a thoroughly grasped and mastered milieu. Physically she makes you think of Viola in Twelfth Night or Rosalind in As You Like It: a girl transparently and playfully disguised as a boy. Hair up under the cocked hat, a tight silk trouser suit of Lincoln green.
He is waiting in a passageway. And this is their opening exchange.
“Are you pretending you don’t remember me? Is that what you’re doing?”
“…I find I fail to understand your tone.”
“Did you get my messages? Did you get my letters? How about dinner one night? Or lunch. Keep the afternoon free. Suppose there’s no chance of that.”
“… No. None. To be honest, I’m astounded you’ve got the nerve to ask.”
“Yeah, stick to your own kind. Okay. Tell me. How’s the world of cheese?” She takes a step back. And for four or five excruciating seconds he feels himself being painted by her radar—not just scanned, but exactly targeted. “Wait,” he says. “I’m sorry. Don’t.”
“My God. The curse of Onan is upon him. My God. You can almost smell it.”
Keith’s new suit (which cost six quid from Take Six) hugs him in its fire.
“Ooh, I want to talk to you,” she says. “Stay here. This is fascinating. I feel—I feel like someone slowing down to look at a car crash. You know. Ghoulish curiosity.”
Gloria turns and walks … And yes, it is too big, much too big, as Lily always insisted; but it now strikes his famished gaze as an achievement on an epic and terrifying scale, like the Chinese Revolution or the rise of Islam or the colonisation of the Americas. He watches her move from guest to guest. Men looked at Gloria, now, and automatically wondered what was happening on the other side of her clothes—the concavities and convexities on the other side of her clothes. And yes, she is astronomically remote from him, now, far, far beyond the capabilities of his naked eye.
She keeps going away and coming back again, but she tells him many things that night.
“Oh dear … And you were quite sweet to girls in Italy. Because girls were quite sweet to you. But it’s all gone terribly wrong, hasn’t it. With you and girls. And this is only the beginning.”
Beyond a certain level of sexual failure, she goes on to explain, a part of the male mind gets to work on hating women. And women sense this. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophesy, she says. And this he already knew. Larkinland, it self-fulfils, it self-perpetuates, it self-defeats.
“And it can only get worse. Ah. Now see that beautiful youth who’s just come in, the tall one with the golden hair? That’s Huw. The one with the castle in Wales.”
“Typical, that is. Yeah. The economic basis of society.”
“… You can’t help yourself, can you. You only sound as if you’re being a nightmare on purpose. One’s instinct is to walk away. My legs want to walk away. But it’s the festive season. Goodwill to all men. Are you ready for some advice?”
He stands there, smoking, with his head down. “Tell me. Help me.”
“All right. Take a turn round the room. Hover near the girls you like most. I’m going to go and kiss my fiancé, but I’ll be watching.”
Ten minutes later she’s telling him something that at least sounds quite symmetrical: the prettier the girls are, the uglier he looks—the more furtive, the more rancorous.
“You seemed perfectly at ease near Petronella. The one in the smock with the port-wine stain. And Monica. The one with the slight harelip. Mm. Your eyes aren’t fizzy like they were, but something’s gone wrong with your mouth.”
“Show me,” he says. She shows him. “Christ. Gloria, how can I get out?”
“Well you’re so far gone, that’s the trouble. Are you still a student? No? Then I’m sorry, but I’m assuming you’re a complete flop at what you do.”
This was actually very far from being the case. On graduation, with his exceptional degree, Keith applied for jobs more or less at random—he worked in an antique shop, an art gallery; for two months he worked in an advertising agency, Derwent and Digby, in Berkeley Square. Then he stopped being a trainee copywriter, and became a trainee assistant at the Literary Supplement. He was now a full editor there, while also publishing uncannily mature pieces on critical theory in the Observer, the Listener, and the Statesman and Nation. About a dozen of his poems had appeared in various periodicals, and he was the recipient of an encouraging note from Neil Darlington, editor of The Little Magazine and co-publisher of a series of pamphlets called Slim Volumes …
“Oh I see. Hopeless,” she says. “You’ve got to earn more, Keith. And lose that dank look. There are exceptions, but girls want to go up in the world, not down. Do you remember that touching ballad? ‘If I were a carpenter and you were a lady.’”
“‘Would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby.’”
“Well the answer to that question is certainly not. The funny thing is, all you need is one pretty girlfriend a
nd the others’ll follow.”
He asks why this is.
“Why? Because the rules of attraction are vaguer with girls. Because men’s looks matter less. So we keep an eye out for the smoke signals. We listen to the tom-toms. If one of us—a pretty one—thinks you’ll do, then we take notice. Here and now I could make you halfway attractive. A walk round the room would do it.”
He sighs. “Oh Robin Hood. In your Sherwood green. You take from the rich and give to the poor. Walk me round … I’ll pay you a hundred quid.”
And Gloria, ever surprising, says, “Have you got it on you? Mm. No. It’s quite a performance, and Huw’d get vexed.”
“Then I’m going home. So it’s to be Huw, is it?”
“Probably. He’s perfect. Apart from the hellhag mother. Who hates me … I’m twenty-six you know. Tick-tock goes the clock.”
“Which reminds me.” And in a weak voice he tells her about Scheherazade. Already married (to Timmy), already the mother of two (Jimmy and Millie), already devout (according to Lily). She shrugs, and he says, “Time to go.” The voice within him (Christ, what a croak it is) makes a suggestion. It doesn’t sound much to Keith, but he says, “Well, festive wishes. Uh, it’s traditional, isn’t it, to leave something out for Santa. Don’t bother with a mince pie. Just give him a beautiful sight. You praying naked on your knees.”
Her colour, her shadowy bronze, intensifies. “How d’you know I pray naked?”
“You told me. In the bathroom.”
“What bathroom?”
“You remember. You turned, holding the blue dress. And I said, ‘No bee sting.’”
“Oh what nonsense. Then what?”
“You bent over the towel rack and said, ‘It’s actually quite far in.’”
“So you still think that really happened? No, Keith, you dreamt it. I remember the bee sting, though. How could I forget? And it’s true that I really do genuinely hate ruins. Good luck. You know, all this stuff is like conkers. Do you remember conkers? A mere oner beats a twenty-fiver, and suddenly it’s a twenty-sixer. You see, you can’t get a pretty girlfriend until you get a pretty girlfriend. I know. It’s a right bastard.”