Keith supposed he felt strengthened in his view that it ought to be very easy to get divorced, and very difficult, boring, painful, and expensive to get married. But that’s Life, and we never learn. Divorcing Gloria was very difficult, boring, painful, and expensive. Divorcing Lily was easy; she wanted it, and he quite wanted it too.
A week later he had lunch with Conchita, and it was all decided in the first ten minutes.
“My father in a bus crash on his way to the hospital,” he said, “and my mother in childbirth.”
“My mother of leukaemia,” she said, “and my father, suicide, two hours later.”
He reached out a hand—to shake on it. Then she briefly told Keith what happened in between, between the death of the one and the death of the other: the event that took her to Amsterdam. They shook hands anyway. Within half an hour he briefly told Conchita what he had never told Lily (or anyone else), despite her bi-weekly interrogations over an entire decade: the truth about his birthday in Campania.
“This was how it’s been going for me,” he said as they were finishing up, “and it’s simple. I’m kind now. My vices got me absolutely nowhere. So for years I’ve been working on my virtues.”
“All right. Then give up smoking,” she said. “And give up your job at Derwent and Digby. All right?”
The next afternoon but one they met again, and he drove her to Heathrow to pick up Silvia, who had just spent the statutory month with her father in Buenos Aires. Silvia was fourteen.
So first Keith married Gloria, then he married Lily, then he married Conchita. He didn’t marry Scheherazade or Oona or Dodo. But he married all the others.
With Gloria it was just sex, with Lily it was just love. Then he married Conchita, and he was all right.
At the Book and Bible in 2003
It is April Fool’s Day, and he is sitting in the snug of a pub called the Book and Bible. After the kaleidoscopic detail of the street, with its beautiful flesh tones, the Book and Bible is like a groaning relict of a vanished England, all white, all middle-class, and all middle-aged—England before the invention of colour. The shove-ha’penny board, the Scotch eggs and pork scratchings, the sodden carpet, the furry wallpaper. Keith hates it in the Book and Bible; but this is where he has started coming, ever since the great heaviness descended on him, eight or nine weeks ago. He is fifty-three. He is drinking tomato juice, and smoking.
The unsuspected sensuality of stasis, of stillness, the expert caress of the cotton sheets. In normal times a combination of greed, boredom, and curiosity got him out of bed by nine o’clock (he wanted to know what had happened, while he slept, to the planet Earth). But now he stays horizontal until keeping his eyes shut is harder work than keeping them open. His body deeply needs this. And every night, for about an hour, he weeps and swears. He lies on the bed and swears with stinging eyes. When fully awake, he retains a stunned feeling. And he doesn’t know why. What has happened to him that he should have to carry all this weight?
He doesn’t understand. Because Violet is already dead. She died in 1999. And the last section of her life, spent in cohabitation with the last of her terrible boyfriends, was comparatively quiet, much of it dedicated to Karl. She spoon-fed him. She clipped his toenails. She would put on a swimsuit and guide him into the shower. Then Karl died, in 1998. Then Violet died. The woman doctor, in intensive care, spoke of “a failure cascade.” When Keith dragged his eyes over the autopsy report, the only phrase he registered was “purulent urine” (not just alliterative but somehow onomatopoeic), and then he read no more.
After Violet died, Nicholas went insane for a while, and Tina went insane for a while. Keith did not go insane. His symptoms were physical: the three-month collapse of his handwriting (the pen just shot about the page); and then the year-long sore throat. That’s where she got him, Violet—in the throat. And since then there were other deaths. Neil Darlington seventeen months ago, at the age of sixty-three, and Kenrik in 2000, at the age of fifty-one. Violet died in 1999, at the age of forty-six.
There is a palpitation, now, in the Book and Bible. Because someone ultramundane is entering it: a lady in a black veil (not the burkha, but the hijab, with the eyes stylishly displayed), hand in hand with an unexotic little boy of eight or nine—Isabel’s age. They come with their soft drinks and settle in the snug, and it is anomalous, he supposes, a child and a quite elderly Muslim woman in a public house made of taupe and ash.
“What shall we play?” she asks him (in an accentless voice). “I Spy?”
“Let’s play What Would You Rather.”
Keith has three thoughts, and in the following order. First, that he no more wants to tell this woman to remove her veil than he wants to tell her to wear it in the first place. Second, that two major wars are now being fought between the believers and the infidels (and the first war, the older war, had “female equality” as one of its stated military goals). The third thought comes from the ex-poet in him: But we seemed to be getting on so well … He sentimentally has in mind Ashraf, and Dilkash, and Amen, and many others, including the widow Sahira. In 1980 Neil Darlington, limitlessly louche, converted to Islam, in order to marry Sahira—a Vision, a poet, and a Palestinian.
“What would you rather?” he hears the woman say. “Have twenty children or none at all?”
Which brings on a further thought. Silvia, the other night, said that Europe was destined to become a Muslim-majority continent by about 2110. “The feminised woman only has one child,” she said. “So the end result of your sexual revolution might be sharia and the veil … Of course it won’t work out like that. That’s a whole century away. Imagine what else’ll happen in between.” Now Keith rolls another cigarette and lights it, and wishes Violet had adopted Islam rather than Christianity. At least she’d be alive.
“Let’s play World’s Most Expensive Hotel,” he hears the boy say.
“Yes, that’s enough What Would You Rather. In the bar, the—”
“Me first … The peanuts all cost a million dollars each.”
“The olives are two million. Plus five hundred thousand if they’re on toothpicks. The toilet paper costs a hundred thousand dollars a segment. The coat hangers—”
“Auntie, who stays in the world’s most expensive hotel?”
“Oh. Well, when it opened, George Soros filed for bankruptcy after the very first night. On the second afternoon the Sheikh of Dubai was arrested because he couldn’t pay for his lunch. And on the third day even Bill Gates was out on his arse.”
Keith looks up. She winds off her veil, saying, “I was born in Cairo in nineteen thirty-seven.”
Gloria Beautyman. Who is now—how old?
His thoughts are not in order any more, as his past recalibrates like a Rubik’s cube. I that am with Phoebus’ am’rous pinches black, not dark enough for Cleopatra, I’m just years ahead of my time, Census Board (her father: birth certificate), Gypsies aren’t from Egypt either, there’s something unclean about drawing, the secret of eternal youth, and the lost, the stolen decade. Keith remembered what she said, in the car, in Andalucia (“I cry with anger too, you know … What makes me cry is the time. Ten years”). And the nightsweats and the animal birthday in Paris (“That’s the end of it”), when her body was suddenly happening to her.
“Reginald, you go and play shove-ha’penny for a minute,” she says, “while I make a little speech to this very nice young man.”
She watches the boy hurry off—her face is still square, her chin is still curved to a point, her eyes are still deep; but all of her is sixty-six.
“My great-nephew. Mary’s daughter’s boy … Oh, Keith! Can you imagine what heaven it was, living your twenties twice? Knowing what you know at thirty, and doing it all over again? It was like a dream come true. It was like a wonderful game.”
He finds he can speak. “That’s what it felt like. Like a game.” Yes, it was better in the mirror, realer in the mirror. “Like a game.” The body in the mirror, reduced to two dimensions. Withou
t depth and without time.
“A game, Keith, that you were too young for. I was like one of those chocolates. With the liqueur centres. Nice, but not good for the young. You needed another ten years on you. To even have a chance. I take what solace I can,” she says, “from the fact that I ruined you for life. I was right. It was time that was wrong.”
“Your plan. It had a weakness.”
“Yes. When my twenties were over—I was forty. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye. Kenrik’s dead. Neil’s dead. Vi’s dead.”
“Vi? Oh. You must feel so horribly guilty! … But that’s all right, because you never loved her anyway. And you never loved me.”
“No. And you never loved me. Of course. You never even liked me.”
“No. As I took the trouble to tell you, years ago. You’re very annoying.”
“… All right. But I’ll tell you something. And it’s true. My memory loves you. Goodbye.”
And he dazedly wondered (and went on wondering): Did it mean anything, historically? That Gloria was born a Muslim, that Gloria Beautyman was born in the land of Hasan al-Banna, and Ayman al-Zawahri, and Sayyid Qutb? Did it connect to anything? To New York, Madrid, Bali, London, Baghdad, Kabul? Only in this, perhaps. Gloria was a visit from outside history. She was a visit from another clock.
2009
Valedictory
There is a—there is a willow. There is a willow grows aslant a brook … But long it could not be. Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.
And so it was that on this night (September 7), ten years ago, Keith was alone in the room with a panting corpse.
She had been unconscious for over a hundred hours, and he told his mother and brother that there was no point in coming, she would not be waking up and there was no point in coming, coming from Andalucia, from Sierra Leone … It was nearly midnight. Her body was flat, sunken, on the raised bed, all buoyancy gone; but the lifeline on the monitor continued to undulate, like a childish representation of the ocean, and she continued to breathe—to breathe with preternatural force.
Yes Violet looked forceful. For the first time in her life, she seemed to be someone it would be foolish to treat lightly or underestimate, ridge-faced, totemic, like a squaw queen with orange hair.
“She’s gone,” said the doctor and pointed with her hand.
The wavering line had levelled out. “She’s still breathing,” said Keith. But of course it was the machine that was still breathing. He stood over a breathless corpse, the chest filling, heaving, and he thought of her running and running, flying over the fields.
“Why should Vi have been interested in Woman’s Liberation?” he said to Silvia late one night.
Silvia was now twenty-nine, and married to a journalist called David Silver (she used her maiden name), and they had an infant daughter, Paula (pron. Powla), and it was fiftyfifty.
“Vi wasn’t a woman,” he said. “She was a child.” A grown child in a world of adults: a very terrifying situation. You would need all the false courage you could possibly find. And she offered herself to men (at least at first) for childish reasons: she wanted them to keep her safe from harm. “That’s why she talked like a little girl. She wasn’t even a woman.”
They sat on for another hour; and Silvia, as she often did late at night, returned them to what she felt was the great subterranean question. With her dark rose colour somehow not affecting her lunar purity of brow, she said, “Violence. Against the gentler sex. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Even here, in England. We’re always going on about the other stuff. Honour killing and genital mutilation and all that. And nine-year-old brides.”
“Mm. Who aren’t marrying nine-year-old grooms. Imagine Isabel, at nine, getting married to anyone, let alone an old man. That’s violent. I can’t think of anything more violent. More richly violent.”
“Yes, but what about here? I saw it the other day. I quote. ‘The most common form of death for women between sixteen and forty-five,’ here, now, ‘is murder by the male partner.’ Now that’s really weird. That they only need to kill us when we’re of childbearing age.”
“I don’t understand. I never have. I suppose those are the men who’ve just run out of words. Long ago. But I don’t understand.”
“Well it’s the caveman asset, isn’t it. It underlies everything. Bigger and stronger. What are we going to do about that?”
One night a week, David took Paula to his parents’ house. One night a week, Silvia came with Paula to the house above the Heath. It was all fiftyfifty. None of this twentyeighty or thirtyseventy or fortysixty. None of this forty-fivefifty-five.
“Your fiftyfifty,” said Keith. “I could tell it was good because I feared it. It hurt. I’ve got another one for you … There’s more wine in the fridge. Screw-top wine—screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten per cent, wouldn’t you say? But it’s not a screw-top. It’s late. You’re young. Would you mind?”
And Silvia rose lightly from her chair, saying, “And I’ll check baby.”
Fiftyfifty, he thought, must hurt a lot, because twentyeighty hurt like hell. Everyone, now, was talking about torture. Well, Keith would be easy to torture. Make him show up at a PTA meeting, make him spend fifteen minutes with his accountant, make him go with a list to Marks & Spencer—and he’d tell you everything he knew … Children feel boredom—childish boredom, once described by an aphoristic psychologist (and corroborated, years ago, by Nat and Gus) as “the absence of a wish.” Nothing bores the twenty-year-old, the thirty-year-old, the forty-year-old. Keith, in 2009, felt that boredom was as strong as hate. There was of course another very popular kind of torture: non-judicial, and preludial to death. That kind of torture, he was confident, would show up later on.
“Thank you,” he said. “Okay. There’s this other asymmetry.” A little girl who vows to marry her father, he said, is smiled at and chucked under the chin. In most cultures. In most cultures, a little boy who vows to marry his mother will wake up in hospital, or recover from his beating or at least his bawling-out, and then decide never to renew that offer. “You know,” he said, “Chloe’s first declarative sentence was ‘My yoff Daddy.’” Perhaps better rendered as “mI yoff Daddy.” “Why? What was she doing? Thanking me for twentyeighty? … You love Daddy.”
And Silvia said, “I do. He wasn’t always kind to Mum, but he was always kind to me. It’s the way they hold you when you’re tiny. Your milky mum’s one thing—she’s you, and you’re her. But your father. He’s bigger and stronger, and you smell a man. It’s the way they hold you when you’re tiny. You never in your entire life feel as safe as that.”
“Yes, but we’ve got to work on this special love for the fathers.” Karl died in 1998, Violet a year later. And if those two events were closely connected, then he thought it the saddest thing in the universe. “The fathers have got to stop holding the daughters and making them feel so safe.”
“That’ll hurt,” she said. “Mm. I suppose it’s no good unless it hurts.”
With a ragged groan of the tenderest despair, Keith still thinks, Keith still briefly broods, about that night in Italy with Dracula and Scheherazade. But nowhere near as often as he used to. Only a few times a week. One morning long ago, he was in the local caff with Isabel (then not quite six), and as he was paying at the till she made the unprecedented announcement that she would wait for him in the street. She walked to the door with that same levitational tread—not on tiptoe, but levitational: just like Scheherazade in the time of the waiting. Isabel walked to the door; she did not go through it.
And the other year he ran into Rita. He was in the household-goods warehouse in Golders Green, buying a circular shower mat (it looked like a steamrollered octopus, with gaping suckers). “You just watch out for your first big fall,” Tina said to him in the year 2000, sitting outside her casita (where she still sits, now newly widowed, at eighty-one).
In the year 2000, I’m pleased to add, Keith was accompanied, not only by the usual three girls, but also by Heidi, now named Catherine (she emerged at Violet’s funeral, with her foster-parents), and filling the same physical space (in what he thought was a kind of remission) as her mother used to do …
So here was Rita: the mouth, the jaw, the powerful bones were all there, but her biomass had increased by about a factor of three. She was looking for various playroom accoutrements to send to Pansy’s first granddaughter.
Keith said, “And you, did you have your ten? One a year?”
“I never did. No babies … I never did.”
And he hugged the new slab of her body as she started to weep, among the breadbins and fleeces, the Thermoses and abacuses.
“I sort of forgot to.” She kept trying to wipe her nose. “I just seemed to miss it.”
He quite often met women his age who had just seemed to miss it.
A topic sentence. Pornographic sex is a kind of sex that can be described. Which told you something, he felt, about pornography, and about sex. During Keith’s time, sex divorced itself from feeling. Pornography was the industrialisation of that rift …
And how was it going with the mirror?
It is the fate of all of us to fall out of love with our own reflections. Narcissus took a day and a night to die—but we take half a century. It isn’t vanity, it was never vanity. It was always something else.