The Pregnant Widow

  Three weeks later, the envelope containing the second half of her honorarium (Gloria’s preferred term for it) gets handed over in the BMW. Keith in white tie, Gloria in a starkly abbreviated version of her Sunday best. The second works outing consists of cocktails and dinner in the revolving carvery on top of the Post Office Tower.

  “That was wonderful. You know, for an hour or two I really and truly believed you were my girlfriend.”

  “Mm, and then you came on so suave. Right. To summarise. Forget Penny. She’s tight-lipped, but I can tell she’s wearing down a married man. And Pamela, I think, is borderline gay.”

  “You and her in the bathroom. How could you tell? The kissing?”

  “No, they all do the kissing. No. The breathing. Maybe you’d be better off with Alexis.”

  “Alexis?” Alexis is Digby’s secretary. “She’s too—isn’t she too worldly for me? She’s married.”

  “No she’s not. She’s advantageously divorced. She’s a very decent forty, and by now she’s good fun in the way we mean. Ooh, I bet she is. But remember: she’s not a cock.”

  Keith says that he’ll bear this in mind. “But I’d never get off with Alexis.”

  “You might. She likes books. And I don’t know if she reads it, but she sees that guff you write in the Lit Supp. Send her some flowers and ask her to lunch. Now. When you drop me off, we’ll stand at the garden gate and you’re to give me a sex kiss lasting about a minute. Because Huw’ll be watching. Actually no. A minute can be an absolute age, don’t you find? Ten or fifteen seconds. But make sure you put your hand up the back of my skirt.”

  Conclusions. It wasn’t long before everyone at Derwent and Digby knew that Derwent had left his wife and moved in with Penny. Pamela came back from her summer holiday in New York with her head shaved. Soon afterwards, Keith started seeing Alexis. He felt as if Gloria was directing his life, like a general on a hill.

  And he had no complaints. Something new was going wrong sexually, but he had no complaints. What he couldn’t forget was that his sex kiss with Gloria went on for at least an absolute age.

  What Came Down in 1977

  Violet’s marriage was already over. An improbable sister and an impossible daughter, Violet turned out to be an inconceivable wife.

  “She fucked the builder?”

  “No,” said Nicholas on the phone. “She fucked the builders. With an ess.”

  “She fucked two builders.”

  “No. She fucked all the builders.”

  “But there were lots of builders.”

  “I know.”

  It’s spring again (May), and now Keith is at his desk, with Ed looking over his shoulder. Ed (short for Ahmed) is the visual wunderkind from Communications, and the two of them are “midwifing” an original product (a kind of choc-ice sandwich). Keith’s new secretary, Judith, buzzes through to say that a Mrs. H. Llewellyn is here to see him.

  “No, I’m not married,” says Gloria when they’re alone. “Not quite. Not yet. And do you realise I’m thirty?” She pauses while Judith brings in her tea. “There’s a problem with Huw.”

  “He’s keen on drugs,” says Keith, repeating the rumour.

  “Huw’s not keen on drugs. He’s a heroin addict.”

  This makes perfect sense. Huw is tall, handsome, and rich—so naturally he can’t bear it. He can’t bear it another second.

  “Every couple of months,” Gloria continues, “he checks into the Parsonage for a fruit juice and a back rub. Then it happens all over again. He won’t go to the place in Germany.” She describes the place in Germany—its bedstraps, its singleted male nurses. “We haven’t had sex for over a year.”

  Keith’s interest becomes acute. “So what do you do about that?” he asks her. “I mean, you’re a healthy young girl.”

  “I relied on Probert,” she explains (Probert is Huw’s younger brother). “And that’s what I’ve come to see you about.”

  He lights a cigarette. She assumes a long-suffering expression.

  “Now Probert’s gone and knocked up one of the milkmaids at Llangollen. And he’s religious. So that’s that.”

  “… Are you still religious?”

  “More than ever. Actually I’m getting fed up with Rome. It asks so little of you. I need something with a bit more bite.”

  “… Did you ever think of switching to Probert?”

  “Good God no. The way they do it, Huw gets it all. Probert lives in the castle but he’s like a farmhand. Humping bags of manure about the place. Rescuing sheep.”

  “Forgive me, but does Huw know you fuck his brother?” She gives a sideways nod, and Keith is suddenly aware of how very passionately he doesn’t want Gloria to fuck his brother, or any of his friends, or indeed anybody at all. Ever. “And now the farmhand is marrying the milkmaid.”

  “Yes. So there’s a kind of opening for you here. It’ll be temporary. Are you free tomorrow evening between six thirty and eight? Come and see me. Primrose Hill.”

  “I’ll be there,” he says, as she gets up to go. “What does seeing you mean?” He hopes it just means having an affair without going to restaurants. She says,

  “You’ll see what seeing me means.”

  Violet was still religious. But she no longer consorted with young builders. To win Violet’s favour, or so it seemed for a while, you needed to be in your twenties, with a visible bumcrack, a hod in one hand and a trowel in the other. But Violet no longer consorted with young builders. She consorted with old builders. The latest builder, Bill, was sixty-two.

  Nicholas maintained that builders weren’t just cheats and botchers and all the rest of it. He said that builders were violent criminals at one remove, or psychopaths manqué. They devoted their lives to the torture of inanimate objects—the banging, the clacking, the whining, the grinding. Keith and Nicholas didn’t need to say that Violet would soon discover this.

  • • •

  At Primrose Hill she receives him in a black satin housecoat and gold sandals with kitten heels, and leads him at once into a bedroom. And through the bedroom into a bathroom.

  “Sit on that chair. There’s some wine in the bucket if you want.” She unfurls the sheath at her waist. “This is what seeing me means.”

  And there it is again, seven years later: the elastic soundness of Gloria Beautyman. She attends to her breasts, and stands stock still for a second. Keith’s eyes make the expected tour but then settle on the oval convexity, the creature or genie that lived in the core of her—and he almost looks for the staple in the middle of its static sheen.

  “You’re more muscular.”

  “Am I?” She steps into the filled tub and sinks back with a moan. “I need your help. Coming up there’s a fancy-dress ball at Mansion House, and you’ve got to be someone from Shakespeare. And you’re the very man to ask.”

  He says in a voice gone deep, “I am that man. Well.” For some reason the first name that comes into his head is Hermione—the wronged Hermione. “From The Winter’s Tale. She spends sixteen years as a statue in a chapel.”

  “Are there any other religious ones?”

  Against the background of soft sluice and splash, as Gloria raises small handfuls of water to her shoulders, her throat, he says, “Ophelia. She’s not really religious. But there’s talk of her going to a nunnery.”

  “Pretty name. But I think I’ve seen that one and doesn’t she go mad?”

  “She drowns herself in the end. ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook …’ Sorry.”

  “No. Go on.”

  “‘There with fantastic garlands did she come, Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies …’” And, no, Gloria doesn’t go all still and silent. Her splashes and sluices grow louder (“‘When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook’”), and then there comes the drop-rush of water as she stands (“‘Her clothes spread wide, And, mermaidlike, awhile they bore her up’”), and then she was wielding the hissing serpent of the showerhead (“‘but long it could not be??
?”), with dips of the knees and the widening of the angles between her thighs.

  “‘Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.’”

  “I hate mad people. Don’t you? … Apart from ‘To be or not to be’ there’s only one line of Shakespeare I know. ‘I that am with Phoebus’ am’rous pinches black.’”

  “Cleopatra. You could go as her. You’re dark enough.”

  “I am not dark enough.”

  “All right. You could go as Viola or Rosalind and dress up as a boy. She’s pretending to be a boy. Passing as a boy. Wear a sword.”

  “Now that’s a brilliant idea.” With her back to him she reaches for the white bathrobe in the avocado light. “I’d be a very good boy.”

  The second half of seeing Gloria consisted of a reverse striptease that lasted for almost an hour. But he didn’t feel like a teased man. She was showing him things—this was how they washed, this was how they dressed. And there were moments of near-innocence in it: he remembered how he felt as a boy of ten, reading Violet’s copies of Bunty.

  “It’s soft-core this time,” she said, showing her blue-white teeth. “But it’s still a black mass. We’re doing everything the wrong way round.”

  As he walked over Primrose Hill and across Regent’s Park, Keith thought of India, of Bollywood, where films with religious themes were called “theologicals.” Maybe that was the genre he had entered. The pornotheological farce.

  August. Keith enters the office and has his secretary place a call.

  “I have just got out of a bed,” he says, “that contained Gloria Beautyman.”

  “My dear Little Keith.”

  “Now I’m going to tell you everything, okay? Wherever in the world you are. Everything.”

  “Don’t you always?”

  “I don’t tell you much about my failures. Like the fact that I can’t come with Alexis.”

  “Oh. So not like with Iris.”

  “No, not like with Iris. I can commence, with Alexis, but I can’t conclude. And I get a completely different kind of hard-on with Gloria. A different order of hard-on. It’s like a towel rack. Anyway. I need to tell you everything about Gloria. To help keep my grip.”

  “Well tell.”

  “It was surprising. She’s a very surprising girl. She came to my place and she said, ‘Right. Where d’you want it?’ I said I wanted it in the bedroom. And I didn’t get it.”

  “That is surprising.”

  “We got into bed and guess what. No tomfoolery about keeping her pants on or anything like that. But we got into bed and guess what. Just a handjob.”

  “… What kind of handjob?”

  “Well, Nicholas, you know there are certain poets who are—who’re so plangent and yet technically advanced that they’re known as poet’s poets? It was like that. A handjob’s handjob. But just a handjob.”

  “She gave you a handjob. And your rights and privileges, Little Keith?”

  “I had rights and privileges. I gave her a handjob. First.”

  In the morning he brought Gloria breakfast in bed, tea, toast, yoghurt, a quartered orange. He said, “Believe me, I’m not complaining. But it seems almost quaint. After Italy.”

  “Italy,” said Gloria, holding the teacup with both hands (the upper sheet across her chest like a bed-wide bra), “was a holiday fling. And whatever this is, it isn’t that. Now lie back.”

  She said he could go on seeing Alexis (who knew about and accepted Gloria)—but no one else. “I’m a terrible hypochondriac,” she said. “And I need to know where you’ve been.”

  That was the only time she ever spent the night.

  September. “Gloria just left. She came over for a light dinner.”

  “Oh,” says Nicholas. “So I suppose you’re well whacked off.”

  “We’ve moved beyond that. I go down on her. And then she goes down on me. She disapproves of soixante-neuf. She says, ‘You can’t give the thing the undivided attention it so richly deserves.’”

  “What could be more agreeable? A swallower, I presume.”

  Keith tells him about the sinister refinement.

  “Christ.”

  October.

  “Gloria popped round again. For a mineral water.”

  “Oh. So I suppose you’re well sucked off.”

  “We’ve moved beyond that. Now you can do whatever you like. As long as you can do it in thirty-five minutes.” He talks on for quite a while. “She said, ‘An arse like mine soon learns to take its chances.’ Imagine … Do you think the police know about Gloria?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “No. Because otherwise …”

  “They would’ve acted. They’re bound to catch up with her in the end.”

  “I suppose that’s true. Poor Gloria. We’ll visit her.”

  Nicholas says, “No, I’ll visit her. I’ll visit you too. You’ll be in a different prison. One for men.”

  This was Gloria’s considered verdict on poetry: “In my view that kind of thing is best left to the Old Man. Honestly. With all that in your head, I don’t know why you’re not in floods of tears all the hours there are.”

  In late November he visited Violet in the Church Army Hostel for Young Women on the corner of Marylebone Road and Cosway Street. Church Army: he thought that this denoted a joint effort. But Church Army was a specific sect, the Church Militant—the body of living Christian believers striving to combat evil on earth. Violet sat in the common room, a silenced girl among all the other silenced girls, and wearing an enormous and very black black eye. She was out by Christmas, and the process of her life resumed.

  There is a—there is a willow. There is a willow … There is a willow grows aslant a brook.

  The Kind of Stuff They All Got Up To in 1978

  “Keith,” said the machine. “Gloria. I am to be found in room six-one-three of the Heathrow Hilton until about nine fifteen. My flight’s delayed. Kiss.”

  “Keith,” said the machine. “Gloria. There’s a perfectly decent little inn called the Queen’s Head on the road from Bristol to Bath. Wait there on Saturday afternoon. They have rooms. I asked. Kiss.”

  “Keith,” says the machine. “Gloria. Where—”

  He picks up.

  “Where on earth have you been? Anyway. Tonight’s the Shakespeare ball. I can’t be Viola. They’ve assigned everybody one play per group. They’re scared everyone’ll come as Romeo or Juliet. And we got Othello.”

  “So you’re Desdemona.”

  “No. Priscilla bagged Desdemona,” she says (Priscilla is Huw’s elder sister). “So I had to go to the library and read the whole thing. Because you were off somewhere.”

  “Sorry, I had to go and bail out Violet. Nicholas is in Tehran. Where they’re having a revolution.”

  “Stick to the point.”

  “Well it’s a bit thin on women, Othello. I suppose you’d better be Emilia. Mrs. Iago.”

  “Why would I want to be that old boot? I settled on Bianca. You know—Cassio’s slag. I want to show you my outfit. I’ll be there about six forty. And I’ll have to keep the cab at the door. Bianca was an inspiration. So much the better if I look as though I’ve just been had. Six forty. I’ll be covered in rags and grease. And d’you know what? Othello was queer for Cassio. Kiss.”

  Six forty came and went. This happened about every other time. Keith once drove to Coedpoeth in North Wales, where he checked into the Gamekeeper’s Arms, ate lunch alone, and drove back again. On the other hand, he once flew to Monaco and had a whole hour with her in a golfing ranch in Cap d’Antibes …

  That night he is awoken at four in the morning. So Violet’s dead, he decides as he reaches for the phone.

  “They’ve just served the kedgeree and the porridge. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’ve got my keys. Kiss.”

  Twenty minutes later she says, “Who was that biddy who passed me on the stairs? Bloody hell, that wasn’t Alexis was it?”

&
nbsp; “I asked her to wait in the spare room, but she wouldn’t have it. And she didn’t have time to put her make-up on.”

  “Oh God. I suppose I’ll send her flowers … They’re all down there in the car. Funny-looking lot we are too … Probert in blackface, Priscilla in a silk chemise … and Huw unconscious in a ginger wig. And Bianca at the wheel. Does my grease still shine? … Huw? Roderigo … Oh, I told Othello and Desdemona I had to pick up Roderigo’s drugs … No more questions. Concentrate, Cassio. Listen to your slag.”

  This sort of thing went on for over a year.

  Since 1970, Nicholas Shackleton had had two changes of girlfriend. In 1973, Jean was replaced by Jane. In 1976, Jane was replaced by Joan. Your future looks limitless, Keith kept telling him: there’s still the possibility of a Jan or a June.

  “Or a Jen,” said Nicholas, over a glass of Scotch in Keith’s kitchen. “Or a Jin. I know a Jin. She’s Korean.”

  “But Jen or Jin would have to be very left-wing, like Jean and Jane and Joan.”

  “More than that. Jen or Jan or June or Jin would have to be terrorists. You should get a terrorist. Gloria—you call her the Future, but she’s retrograde. Non-independent. Man-pleasing. God-fearing. You should get a nice terrorist. A feminist with a job who screams at you.”

  “Gloria’s not a screamer. But she can be terrifying. Listen to this,” says Keith with a nod. “She weaned Huw off heroin by having him switch to methamphetamine. ‘That way,’ she says, ‘I get the sex weapon back.’ Meth’s not like heroin. Meth gives you a permanent towel rack.”

  “She certainly thinks these things through.”

  “And she won’t let him near her until he agrees to go to Germany. Three months in a dungeon. Forty thousand quid. Ninety per cent success rate … She’s weird, Gloria, but she’s absolutely standard on marriage and children. In a panic. Because she’s turned thirty.”

  “Mm, the cusp of hell. I thought the sisters might’ve pushed that up a few years—say to thirty-three or thirty-four. But they’re all like that the minute they’re twenty-eight. Even the terrorists.”