The Pregnant Widow

  “Yes, isn’t it. And how’s your secret? Still well?”

  “Happy Christmas to you.”

  He walked in the snow down Kensington High Street. What kind of poet was Keith Nearing, so far? He was a minor exponent of humorous self-deprecation (was there any other culture on earth that went in for this?). He wasn’t an Acmeist or a surrealist. He was of the school of the Sexual Losers, the Duds, the Toads, whose laureate and hero was of course Philip Larkin. Celebrated poets could get girls, sometimes many girls (there were poets who looked like Quasimodo and behaved like Casanova), but they seemed to evade prettiness, or shied away from it because it was just too obvious. Larkin’s women had their world,

  where they work, and age, and put off men

  By being unattractive, or too shy,

  Or having morals …

  So, with a kind of slothful heroism, Larkin inhabited Larkinland, and wrote the poems that sang of it. And I’m not going to do that, Keith decided, as he turned left towards Earls Court. Because otherwise I’ll have nothing to think about when I’m old. Anyway, he didn’t want to be that kind of poet. He wanted to be romantic, like Neil Darlington (“The storm rolls through me as your mouth opens”). But Keith didn’t have anything to be romantic about.

  In those days the capital shut down for a week, at midnight, on Christmas Eve. It went black. God had his hand poised above the switch: any second the lights would go out and wouldn’t come on again until 1974.

  A Certain Occasion in 1975

  To his personal assistant, and then to his secretary, Keith bids goodbye, and rides down in the soundless cube of mirrors from the fourteenth floor of Derwent and Digby. On the flat plain of the atrium Digby in his bomber jacket and Derwent in his silk poncho are waiting for their car. Derwent and Digby are first cousins, and wrote a first novel each, long ago …

  “No, I can’t,” says Keith. “I’m meeting a pretty girl. My sister Violet. In Khartoum.”

  “Wise man. Try the Zombie.”

  And Keith steps out into the sparsity and human colourlessness of rush-hour London in 1975.

  When he tendered his resignation at Derwent and Digby, in early 1972, first Digby and then Derwent took him out to lunch and spoke of their sadness at losing someone “so exceptionally gifted”—i.e., someone so good at peddling non-essentials. “The money’s the same at the Lit Supp,” he said, for something to say. “Believe me,” said Derwent, and Digby, “it won’t go on being.” There was truth in this. Keith now had a mortgage on a sizeable maisonette in Notting Hill, he drove a new German car, he wore—this night—a scarf and overcoat of black cashmere.

  By far the worst bit of the transition was telling Nicholas. Oh, no, Keith wouldn’t want to go through that again. Part of the trouble was that he couldn’t quite tell Nicholas why. “Well. You’re still my brother,” said Nicholas, at four o’clock in the morning. Keith, these days, still wrote criticism, but the verse stopped coming almost immediately, as he knew it would. He was still a rhymer, of sorts. You don’t have to wait—till After Eight. Hey, fella, Fruitella. His salary had octupled in nineteen months. The only poet who still gave him the time of day was the charming, handsome, litigious, drink-drenched, debt-ridden, women-infested Neil Darlington, the editor of The Little Magazine. Keith told Neil why. Why might not have impressed Nicholas anyway.

  There were girls now. There almost always was a girl. Colleagues—a temp, a market researcher, a typist, a junior account manager … This remained the import of Gloria’s imitation of him (of his mouth) on Christmas Eve, 1973: the beak was back. Now the beak was gone again. Out of Dud-dom, he was gradually surfacing as a Low Possible, but a Low Possible equipped with patience, humility, and cash.

  He was out of Larkinland. Sometimes he felt like an ecstatic refugee. He had sought asylum, and found it. A lengthy process, getting out of Larkinland (he dispensed many bribes). The months in the border holding-camp, the hostile interrogations and health checks; and for many hours they frowned at his documents and his visa. He walked through the gates under the watchtower, the searchlights and the razor wire. He could still hear the dogs. Someone blew a whistle and he turned. He kept walking. He was out.

  His celibate nights with Lily had evolved into weekends—not dirty weekends exactly, but not celibate either—in Brighton, Paris, Amsterdam.

  As he walks through Mayfair and then across trafficless Piccadilly and past the Ritz, to St. James’s, swinging a pair of soft leather gloves in his right hand (it is early October), he finds himself looking forward to seeing his younger sister. More in his heart than in his person, he has been keeping his regulated, geometrical distance, unlike his brother, who actually had Violet come and live with him in his two-room flat in Paddington for three terrible months in 1974.

  “Every morning—the crowbar,” said Nicholas. In other words, the first thing you did each day was lever her out from under the burglar/builder/beggar/bouncer (or—last resort—the cabbie) she’d brought home with her the night before. Violet, it seemed, was moving on from the proletariat and heading for the underclass (or what used to be called the residuum). Next, early in the summer that had just ended, she turned the colour of English mustard (jaundice). There was a hospitalisation followed by a costly convalescence at a dry-out spa in Kent called the Parsonage, paid for by Keith. Keith paid for all the shrinks and therapists too (until Violet put her foot down and said it was a waste of time). He was always giving Violet money. He did it eagerly. Writing a cheque only took a few seconds, and it didn’t hurt.

  He had gone to visit her in September, the train, the fields, the motionless cows like pieces of a jigsaw waiting to be put together, the manor house with the green gables, Violet in the refectory playing Hangman with a fellow recoverer, the walk in the grounds under the alerting blue, where she took his hand, as of course she used to do in childhood … Whereas Keith’s minimal handsomeness had been entirely erased by his years of famine (his years of want), Violet’s beauty was fully restored, her nose, her mouth, her chin, smoothly eliding into one another. There was even talk of a possible marriage—to someone twice her age (forty-three), an admirer, a protector, a redeemer.

  Tonight there would be fruit cocktails, a show (she loved a show, and he had good tickets for The Boy Friend), then dinner at Trader Vic’s.

  Now Keith enters Khartoum, pushing on the tinted glass door. Their evening, as a familiar and intelligible event, will last a single minute. And the single minute isn’t any good either. No, untrue, unfair: the opening three seconds are perfectly fine, as he spots her soft blonde shape (a whiteclad profile) on a stool at the circular steel counter.

  What is happening to her face? What is happening to its sinews and tendons? Then he sees that she is in fact engaged in a more or less recognisable human activity. The first word that comes into his head is an adjective: talentless. The second is an intensifier: fantastically. Because what Violet is accomplishing, or imagines she’s accomplishing, is this: the sexual bewitchment of the bartender.

  Who, with his ponytail, his sleeveless black T-shirt, his ugly muscles, keeps turning to glance at her, not in reciprocation, but in disbelief. To see if she’s still doing it. And she’s still doing it, still doing it, still hooding her eyes and leering and sneering and licking her lips. Keith steps forward.

  “Violet.”

  “Hi Key,” she says and slides from her stool.

  “Oh Vi!”

  Like a globule of yolk and albumen freed from its shell, Violet drops all at once, and lies there, forming a circular pool—the egg-white now flat in the pan, with her yellow head in the middle of it. Five minutes later he has at last installed her in a leather armchair, and she is saying, “Home. Home.”

  Keith goes and calls Nicholas, who gives him three different and widely separated addresses. As he is paying the bill (“Can this be right?”), he sees that the leather armchair is empty. The barman points. Keith swings the glass door open, and Violet is under his feet on her hands and knees, head tucked
down, being copiously and noisily sick.

  Soon afterwards they are in a series of taxis, going to Cold Blow Lane in the Isle of Dogs, going to the Mile End Road, going to Orpington Avenue, N19. She badly wants her bed, she badly wants her roommate, Veronique. But before she can go there she needs her key, they need to find the key.

  The bar bill at Khartoum—it was the kind of tab he might have settled after two hours with Nicholas or even Kenrik. “Can this be right?” The barman widened his eyes (and then pointed). Violet had drunk seven Martinis in less than half an hour.

  Entering his bed, in the attractive maisonette, he parted Iris’s Irish hair (like thick marmalade) at the back of her neck—so that he could rest his cheek against her rusty down.

  Apart from Violet (Violet’s shadow in his mind), was he happy? He wanted to say yes. But the two hearts, his upper (fixed or steady-state), his lower (extensile, or supposedly so), were unaligned. His had become a traitorous eros. The question, sad to say, of the hard-on: he couldn’t get one, or when he got one he couldn’t keep one. And he didn’t love them, his girls. And he used to love them all. I’ll say this for myself (he thought): I am no longer a bully in the bedroom, I no longer try to force girls out of their nature. You need a proper hard-on to do that. And so he subsisted, with his cross-purposed blood.

  All these flowers, the irises, the pansies, the lilies, the violets. And himself—and his rose of youth. O rose, thou art sick …

  Oh rose, thou art sick;

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night,

  In the howling storm,

  Hath found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy,

  And her dark secret love

  Doth thy life destroy.

  … Keith rolled onto his back. Out in London that night, he and Violet had to find something. They had to find Violet’s key. That took until half past midnight. They found out where the key was, they found the key. Then they had to find out where it was the key to.

  A Couple of

  Developments in 1976

  In July 1976 Keith hired Gloria Beautyman for a thousand pounds a week. Her job was to pretend to be his girlfriend …

  It’s April, and Gloria is walking across Holland Park, with briskness and address, to get from one end of it to the other; whereas Keith is just walking, and going nowhere. He hails her. They fall into step.

  “Nice hat,” she concedes (as he tips towards her his charcoal Borsalino). “Have you lost your bedsit blues?”

  “I took your advice.” And he explains. His curriculum vitae, his course of life.

  “Mm,” she says. “But earned money never lasts.”

  “Are you married yet? … Well I expect you’ll be off to Canterbury anyway.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When that April, Gloria, with its showers sweet, the drought of March hath pierced to the root, then people long to go on pilgrimages.”

  “Do they now.”

  “No they don’t. Not any more. That’s the trouble. They just sigh and think, April is the cruellest month. Breeding lilacs out of the dead land, Gloria. Mixing memory and desire.”

  “… You ought to stop all that, you know. It just makes girls feel ignorant.”

  “You’re right. Anyway, I’ve given up poetry. It’s given me up.”

  For the first time her pace slows, and she smiles his way—as if he’s done a good thing. And even Lily, utilitarian Lily, was saddened by this news. When he visited the part of his mind where the poems used to come from, he was met with the kind of silence that follows a violently slammed door.

  “Because it only works if you’re penniless?” says Gloria. “There’ve been rich poets, surely.”

  “True. But the Earl of Rochester didn’t work at Derwent and Digby.” Whose corridors, he reflects, are thick with silenced poets, blocked novelists, concussed playwrights.

  “And how’s it going with the girls?”

  “Not too bad. But I can’t get the girls I really want. Girls like you.”

  “What are girls like me like?”

  “Girls who look in the mirror and say ‘I love me so.’ Girls with glossy black hair. Shoeshine hair. Your hair’s like a mirror. I could see my face in it. This is the first time you’ve shown it to me, your hair. Girls with glossy hair and a secret.”

  “Just as I foretold. Ruined for life.”

  “You spoilt me, but I’m over you now. I want Penny in Public Relations. I want Pamela in Personnel. Are you married yet? My sister’s getting married. Are you?”

  “It’s hot suddenly.”

  And suddenly she stops, turns, and opens her coat … In novels, weather and landscape answer to mood. Life isn’t like that. But now a warm breeze, a hot wind, sweeps past them, and there is minute precipitation, like a humid vapour, and within seconds Gloria’s white cotton top is a clinging transparency, the complementary breasts the shape of teardrops, the artistic omphalos. Memory and desire come up from the ground, from the paved path, from the dead land, and take him by the back of the knees. He says,

  “Remember—remember you told me something. You could walk me round the room, and girls would look at me differently. Remember?”

  And he made his offer.

  “Penny. Pamela. There are two office parties coming up. I want Penny in Public Relations, I want Pamela in Personnel. Come to the summer parties. And come and have lunch with me in Berkeley Square—just once or twice. Collect me from work. Pretend to be my girlfriend.”

  “It’s not enough money.”

  “I’ll double it. Let me give you my card.”

  By now he had been to America—to New York, to Los Angeles—and he knew much more about the genre (the type, the mode) that Gloria in some sense belonged to.

  Here is the youngish woman, apparently held together by the cords of her scars and the lattice of her cellulite, and sometimes tattooed to the thickness of a tarot card. Here is the youngish man, with his brute tumescence, his lantern jaw, his ignoble brow.

  Now fade. Here is Keith, a towel round his waist. Here is Gloria, holding up a blue dress as if assessing it for length. Then the look she gives him just before she turns. As if he has come to deliver the pizza or drain the swimming pool. Then the physical interchange—“the act by which love would be transmitted,” as one observer put it, “if there were any.”

  Of course, Gloria was non-generic in two vital respects. The first was her use of the humorous, the droll (with Gloria sex had been funny—because of what it told you about their natures, his, hers). Up there on the screen, with its gruesome colours, Day-Glo and wax-museum, a single genuine smile and the whole illusion would flee with a shriek. Gloria’s second anomaly was her beauty. She combined beauty and dirt, like city snow. And then there was the religion.

  “We have a deal,” she said on the phone. “The thing is, Huw’s seeing too much of an old girlfriend. Not what you think, but he needs a good fright. Now when should I start pretending?”

  Keith replaced the receiver and thought of the white T-shirt in Holland Park. The meteorological or heavenly connivance. No-see-um raindrops, and her torso moulded by the pornodew.

  Violet was a June bride.

  Karl Shackleton, all atremble on his walking sticks, gave her away. There was a lunch at the house of her faithful admirer, unexceptionable Francis, kind, educated. “We’ve no choice,” said Nicholas, “but to see him as a force for good.” Francis’s widowed mother was present, among furnishings as gaunt as her person. Then they all waved the newly-weds off on their honeymoon—the Austin Princess with its white streamers. Violet was twenty-two.

  There were some difficulties early on, Keith heard. Then the marriage seemed to settle. But by July the house was undergoing renovation. Violet had the builders in.

  “Huh-hm,” says Gloria, by way of polite introduction, as he drives her to the first summer party—whose setting is an opulent “hermaphrodite brig” (a two-masted sailing ship) on the River Thames. “It ma
y embarrass you to learn what the trick is. I’ll do all the usual stuff like stroking and nuzzling. But this is the trick. I have to stare adoringly all the time in the general direction of your cock.”

  Keith, at the wheel, says, “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Funnily enough there was a … I thought I was the only one who knew about this, but funnily enough there was a programme about it the other night. They wired up everyone’s eyes with laser beams or whatever it was. When a girl is introduced to a boy at a social gathering, she glances at his cock about every ten seconds. He does the same, only he includes her tits. Newly-weds’ eyes are glued to each other that way. Which are the girls you like?”

  “Penny and Pamela.”

  “I’ll be flirting with them too. Don’t be alarmed if you see me kissing them or feeling them up. People don’t know this yet either, but girls go weak for that if it’s done in the right way. Even the straightest of them.”

  “Really?”

  “Trust me.”

  At midnight he pulls up outside Huw’s double-fronted townhouse in Primrose Hill. A tuxedoed Keith Nearing opens the passenger door and extends his hand towards a cheongsamed Gloria Beautyman.

  “That was rather fun,” she says. “Now. What are you doing wrong?”

  “I think all girls with bedroom bodies are cocks.”

  “That’s right. And as I was at pains to tell you, long ago, hardly any girls are cocks. Here. Shake my glove.”

  “Cocks. Staring at cocks. Don’t be offended, but are there boys who are cunts?”

  “No. It’s all cocks. Goodnight.”

  Smoothed, pawed, squeezed, nibbled, and adoringly stared at, Keith drove home and had an unqualified fiasco with Iris.