Keith looked at the shadowsmear in the mirror. And the most amazing thing of all was that this, this in the glass (the perfect, the finished ghoul), would be remembered by him as something actually not that bad—comparatively. This, even this, very this … The video nasty, to put it in plain words, the horror film, was set to become a snuff movie, but long before that he would be its trailer. He would be an ad for death.
Death—the dark backing a mirror needs before it can show us ourselves.
It isn’t vanity, it was never vanity. It was always death. This was the true and universal metamorphosis: the agonising transfiguration from one state to another—from the state of life to the state of death.
Yes, we’re close again, he and I.
… I? Well, I’m the voice of conscience (which made such a dramatic comeback between his first and second marriages), and I perform other duties compatible with those of the superego. No, I am not the poet he never was. Keith could have been a poet. But not a novelist. His provenance was too peculiar for that. He couldn’t hear what others hear—the reverberation, the echo of humanity. Confined by truth, by Life, I’m nonetheless the part of him that always tried to listen out for that.
“My breasts are getting smaller,” said Conchita in the bathroom.
This was not said insanely cheerfully—though Conchita continued, in general, to be insanely cheerful, Keith thought. And that was the more remarkable, in his view, because it was given to her, and not to him: the hourly nightmare of living with someone who was born in 1949.
“They are. My breasts are getting smaller.”
“But that’s all right,” he said. “Because mine are getting bigger.”
“… So it all works out in the end.”
Yeah. Fifty’s nothing, Pulc. Me, I’m as old as NATO. And it all works out. Your hams get skinnier—but that’s all right, because your gut gets fatter. Your eyes get hotter—but that’s all right, because your hands get colder (and you can soothe them with your frozen fingertips). Shrill or sudden noises are getting painfully sharper—but that’s all right, because you’re getting deafer. The hair on your head gets thinner—but that’s all right, because the hair in your nose and in your ears gets thicker. It all works out in the end.
There will be guests tonight. Silvia and her husband, Lily and her husband, Nat, Gus, and Nicholas and his wife. Lily’s third husband. Nicholas’s second wife. His first marriage lasted until 1989 (one daughter). Then for fourteen years Nicholas lived the youth he had somehow deferred, and the women no longer needed to be left-wing, and Keith became the listener, and not the teller. Then Nicholas married again, in 2003; and they have a five-year-old son. The occasion, tonight, is a dinner party in celebration of Keith’s recent birthday.
He was now in his study, finishing up … His trouble with Violet, the hard, hard work with Violet, rested on this. Keith was someone who had to make his family love him. And with Violet alone he suffered no disadvantage, no displacement. It wasn’t difficult to make her love him. There he always was, the small, beaked, fascinated face staring and smiling over the brow of her crib; and then, like a personal trainer, helping her crawl, walk, talk. And reading to her, and telling her stories, the parables, the miracles. You see, Vi, they only had five loaves of bread and two little fishes … It wasn’t difficult for her. And for him it was easy. It was love at first sight.
So he was there at the beginning and he was there at the end. But where was he in between? He was following his strategy, his strategy of withdrawal. And then he went and had it anyway, later, and worse—his breakdown or crack-up. And there never was the slightest chance that he could evade the strength and also the violence of those early feelings (“If anyone ever touches her …”). Which began when he looked down at her newborn body and saw an angel. That’s what he actually saw, in his hallucinatory state—smashed on love and protectiveness. So all right. He was there when it began and he was there when it ended.
We live half our lives in shock, he thought. And it’s the second half. A death comes; and the brain makes chemicals to get us past it. They numb you, and numbness is an identifiable kind of calm: a false one. All it can do, numbness, is postpone. Then the drugs wear off, and the voids, the little oblivions, come and get you anyway. Where does pain go when it goes? Somewhere else? Or into the well of your weakness? I’ll tell you: the latter. And it’s the deaths of others that kill you in the end.
Time to go in. Venus was rising over the dark well of the Heath. Keith Nearing, Conchita, Isabel, and Chloe (often accompanied by Silvia) had by now spent several Christmases in southern South America (where Conchita had in-laws and dozens of cousins); and he was going to ask Nicholas about his time with its tutelary spirit. For two days running, in 1980, Nicholas read to the great Borges. When they parted, the blind seer, the living Tiresias, offered him “a present,” and recited this quatrain, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
In Keith’s peculiar case, he registered positive to the first question, and a negative to the second. But he believed that Borges universally understood about Time: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river …”
Venus: when he looked at her with his glasses on, she seemed to be wearing eyelashes. The daughter of Jupiter and Dione, the goddess of love, in false eyelashes. Its gossamer wings—what a fly would look like if born and raised in Elysium … The poet Quevedo described the planet Venus: lucero inobediente, ángel amotinado. Defiant star. Rebel angel.
Who were these extremists and self-destroyers, these despiters, the people who couldn’t stand it another second in heaven? Yes go on, Kenrik, get caught after a long chase for driving five times over the limit at nine o’clock in the morning for the fourth time in three weeks (and serve a year in Wormwood Scrubs). Yes go on, Gloria, place yourself outside history, and live your twenties twice, and do it as a game, while in that way somehow making yourself invaluably dear to the memory. Yes go on, Violet, let the honeymoon last at least half a minute, and then run out over the fields, with no more thought in your head than a puppy, panting, heaving, running, flying, looking for someone you love.
He drew the blinds and shut everything down, and went in.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First I offer my enraptured thanks to the memory of Ted Hughes. His Tales from Ovid is one of the most thrilling books I have ever read. My debt to it goes well beyond the exquisite “Echo and Narcissus,” which I quote from and paraphrase throughout.
The “distinguished Marxist historian” is Eric Hobsbawm, and the quotes are from his seminal Age of Extremes. The details about Mussolini are from Denis Mack Smith’s brilliant and quietly and persistently comical biography. “Action is transitory—a step, a blow. / The motion of a muscle”: this is from Wordsworth’s The Borderers. “Love bade me welcome”: George Herbert. “Words at once true and kind”: this (and much else) is from Philip Larkin (“Talking in Bed”). “The economic basis of society”: Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron.” The “aphoristic psychologist” is Adam Phillips. “The means by which love would be communicated if there were any” is from Saul Bellow’s More Die of Heartbreak; the line about the fig leaf and the price tag is from Humboldt’s Gift. “Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms” is of course from Keats. “The Sick Rose” is by William Blake. “The storm rolls through me as your mouth opens” is the last line of Ian Hamilton’s “The Storm.”
I would also like to give my thanks to Jane Austen. Childless, like so many of the great feminists, she is nonetheless the mother, I believe, of “the line of sanity” that so characterises the English novel. To demonstrate this penetrating sanity of hers, I quote her last words. Dying of unalleviable cancer, she was asked “what she needed.” She said, “Nothing but
death.” Or, to put it another way: Nothing but nothing. D. H. Lawrence, whose last words I have also quoted, was forty-four when he uttered them. Jane Austen was forty-one when she uttered hers.
Shakespeare, defying all rules and proprieties as usual, needs no thanks from this writer. As Matthew Arnold said of him (meaning something very slightly different), “Others abide our question. Thou art free.”
And this still strikes me, almost daily, as a magical fact: the most plangent evocation of the time I lived through (I, and hundreds of millions of others) was written in 1610. Ariel’s song appears in that masque-like romance The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, and I quote the second verse yet again:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell …
London, 2010
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2010 by Martin Amis
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
www.randomhouse.ca
Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a division of the Random House Group Ltd., London.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Geography of the House” from Collected Poems by W.H. Auden, copyright © 1965 by W.H. Auden.
Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amis, Martin.
The pregnant widow / by Martin Amis.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. College students—Sexual behavior—Fiction. 2. British—Italy—Fiction. 3. Nineteen seventy, A.D.—Fiction. 4. Memory—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6051.M5P74 2010
823′.914—dc22 2009041689
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Amis, Martin
The pregnant widow / Martin Amis.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59357-3
I. Title
PR6051.M58P74 2010 823.′914 C2009-905307-1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
2006: Introductory
Book One: Where We Lay Our Scene
Chapter 1 - Franca Viola
Chapter 2 - Social Realism (Or Slag for Love)
Chapter 3 - Possibility
Chapter 4 - The Devil’s Pass
Chapter 5 - First Interval
Book Two: Dreamball
Chapter 1 - Where were the Police?
Chapter 2 - Look How he Lit her
Chapter 3 - The Highest Throne on Earth
Chapter 4 - Strategies of Distance
Chapter 5 - Second Interval
Book Three: The Incredible Shrinking Man
Chapter 1: Even in Heaven
Chapter 2 - Body Parts
Chapter 3 - Martyr
Chapter 4 - Sane Dreams
Chapter 5 - Third Interval
Book Four: The Desiderata
Chapter 1: Girls and the Butchers
Chapter 2 - The Fall of Adriano
Chapter 3 - Ticket of Entry
Chapter 4 - Sentimental Education
Chapter 5 - Fourth Interval
Book Five: Trauma
Chapter 1 - The Turn
Chapter 2 - The Waiting
Chapter 3 - The Metamorphoses
Chapter 4 - Torquere “To Twist”
Chapter 5 - Fifth Interval
Book Six: The Problem of Re-entry
Chapter 1: Elizabeth Bennet in Bed
Chapter 2 - Omphalos
Chapter 3 - The Pool Hut
Chapter 4 - When they Hate you Already
Chapter 5 - Coda. Life.
Chapter 6 - Some of the Things That Happened Between: 1970 and 1974
Chapter 7 - A Certain Occasion in 1975
Chapter 8 - A Couple of Developments in 1976
Chapter 9 - What Came Down in 1977
Chapter 10 - The Kind of Stuff They All Got Up To in 1978
Chapter 11 - The Way it Panned Out in 1979
Chapter 12 - What Came About in 1980
Chapter 13 - What Came to Pass in 1982
Chapter 14 - 1994
Chapter 15 - At the Book and Bible in 2003
Chapter 16 - 2009 Valedictory
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow
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