The Pregnant Widow

  • • •

  Not until the year 2003 did the year 1970 catch up with him.

  The date was April 1, or April Fool’s Day, and he was fresh from the most extraordinary encounter with his first wife. Keith’s immediate response, when the encounter ended, was to call his second wife and tell her about it (his second wife thought it was outrageous). When he got home, he gave a more detailed version to his third wife, and his third wife, who was nearly always insanely cheerful, thought it was very funny.

  “How can you laugh? It means my whole life is meaningless.”

  “No it doesn’t. It just means your first marriage was meaningless.”

  Keith looked down at the backs of his hands. “My second marriage isn’t looking too clever either. Suddenly. Talk about a rebound.”

  “Mm. But you can’t say that. Think of the boys. Think of Nat and Gus.”

  “That’s true.”

  “What about your third marriage?”

  “That’s looking all right. Thanks to you, my darling. But all that time I was just … Now I’m feeling even worse. In my head.”

  The doorbell buzzed. “That’s Silvia,” she said (meaning her grown-up daughter). “Be positive about it. You should thank God you never had any children with that mad old bitch.”

  • • •

  There was a beautiful girl, called Echo, who fell in love with a beautiful boy. One day, when he was out hunting, the boy strayed apart from his companions. He called out to them: Where are you? I’m here. And Echo, watching him from a cautious distance, called back, I’m here. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

  I’ll stay, he said. You come to me.

  Come to me. To me, to me, to me.

  Stay there!

  Stay there, she said in tears. Stay there, stay there, stay there.

  He stopped and listened. Let’s meet halfway. Come.

  Come, she said. Come, come, come.

  • • •

  Our Marxist historian writes:

  Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central.

  What, then, was the sartorial commentary on the period under review? For the Italian trip, Keith was careful to standardise his not very extensive wardrobe: jeans, shirts, T-shirts, and his only suit. But you should have seen him in the spring, trolling up and down the King’s Road, with an identically dressed Kenrik, in high-heeled snakeskin boots, elephant loons, a belt as bulky as a grappling hook, paisley-patterned shirt, a military tunic with gilt epaulettes, and a grimy silk scarf knotted round the throat.

  As for the girls, well, take Scheherazade, for instance: the modest Cleopatra sandals (with kitten heels), and then a vast expanse of bare brown calf and thigh, the two firm stems going up and up and on and on, and up, and on, until, at the last possible instant (the suspense was killing everybody), the corolla, in the form of a light summer skirt hardly broader than a watchstrap; next, starting persuasively low on the hips, another expanse (the moist concavity of the navel), ending in the gathered loop of the transparent top, and finally the unsupported gulch of the cleavage.

  To summarise and approximate: the boys were dressed as clowns, as they eagerly (and quite rightly) signed away about a third of their estate without conditions. And the girls? Was it—all the display—was it meant to sweeten the pill of the transfer of power? No, because they were going to get the power anyway. Was it a form of saying thanks? Maybe, but they were going to get the power anyway. Now he thinks that the display was a display, not of female power, quite, but of female magnitude.

  • • •

  Keith stood over the sink in his study or studio at the far end of the garden, tending to the wound on the back of his hand. This wound had been sustained in early March, when his knuckle came into unemphatic contact with a brick wall. The injury was now on its third scab, but he was still tending to it, dabbing it, blowing on it, cherishing it—his poor hand. These little hurts were like little pets or potted plants you were abruptly given the care of, needing to be fed or walked or watered.

  As you pass the half-century, the flesh, the coating on the person, begins to attenuate. And the world is full of blades and spikes. For a year or two your hands are as nicked and scraped as a schoolboy’s knee. Then you learn to protect yourself. This is what you’ll go on doing until, near the end, you are doing nothing else—just protecting yourself. And while you are learning how to do that, a doorkey is a doornail, and the flap on the letterbox is a meat-slicer, and the very air is full of spikes and blades.

  • • •

  It was April 10, 2003, and in the caff Keith was reading the paper. Baghdad had fallen. This new struggle, between Islam and Christendom: Keith’s infantile but persistent thought (which came from the squashed poet in him) was something like, But we used to get on so well, the believers and the infidels … It wasn’t really a fight between different religions, or between different countries. It was a fight between different centuries. What would future historians call it? The Time War, perhaps, or the War of the Clocks.

  The secret police of the regime that had just been deposed went by the name of Jihaz al-Haneen. This included the torture corps—whose operatives were scholars of pain. Yet Jihaz al-Haneen translated as the instrument of yearning. The only way the phrase made any sense to him was as a description of the human body.

  • • •

  He had his wound coming, a different kind of wound, in the castle in Italy. It was the sensory opposite of torture: her pincers of bliss, her lips, her fingertips. And what remained in the aftermath? Her manacles, her branding irons.

  It was here and all around them. What were they to do, the young ones? The response to the sea change, the realignment of power: this was the thing they were beginning to feel their way through, along with hundreds of millions of others. It was a revolution. And we all know what happens in a revolution.

  You see what goes, you see what stays, you see what comes.

  Book Two

  Dreamball

  1

  WHERE WERE THE POLICE?

  Under the burning axle of the parent star, he sat topless, poolside, his face inclined over the pages of Peregrine Pickle. Peregrine had just attempted (and failed) to drug (and ravish) Emily Gauntlet, his wealthy fiancée … Keith kept looking at his watch.

  “You keep looking at your watch,” said Lily.

  “No I don’t.”

  “Yes you do. And you’ve been down here since seven.”

  “Eight thirty, Lily. Beautiful morning. And I wanted to say goodbye to Conchita. You know, I have a bond with Conchita. And it’s more than us both being adopted … Anyway, I wasn’t thinking about the time. I was thinking about drugging girls. They’re all at it.”

  Lily said, “What’s the time got to do with drugging girls? I suppose drugging girls was your only hope—back then. That was how you did it.”

  “Yeah.” He thought, now, of another ex-girlfriend: Doris. “Yeah. Instead of going on at them about the sexual revolution. Bending their ear about the sexual revolution … Have you decided yet? Whether to get your top brown?”

  “Yes. And the answer’s no. Put yourself in my position. How would you like to sit here naked with Tarzan?”

  He stood up and strolled to the water’s edge. Oona and Amen had independently come and gone—their morning lengths; and Keith was wondering about the unreliable optics of the swimming pool. Its walls and floor were a metallic grey. When the water was still, its surface shone solidly and impenetrably, like a mirror; when the water rippled, or when the light changed (from shadow to dazzle, but also from dazzle to shadow), it became translucent, and you could see the fat plug at the bottom of the deep end, and even the odd coin or hairclip. He wondered at it, this grey new world of glass and opacity, and not the wobbly, slippery, ribbony blue of the pools o
f his youth.

  “Here she comes.”

  Scheherazade was decanting herself downward through the three tiers of the terraced gradient, and now moved through a bower-and-hothouse setting as she neared the water, barefoot but in tennis wear—a quilted skirt of pale green, and a yellow Fred Perry. She twirled off the lower half of it (he thought of an apple being pared) and tugged herself out of the upper; and then she made wings of her long arms and unclipped the upper half of her bikini (and it was gone—with the merest shrug it was gone), saying,

  “Here’s another boring thing.”

  Of course, this wasn’t boring either. On the other hand, it would have been disgracefully callow and bourgeois (and uncool) to take the slightest notice of what was now on view; so Keith had the difficult task of looking at Lily (in housecoat and flip-flops and still in the shade) while simultaneously communing with an image that was fated, for now, to remain in the loneliest wilderness of his peripheral vision. After thirty seconds or so, to ease the trapped nerves in his trapped neck, Keith stared up and out—at the gold slopes of the massif, echoing in the pale blue. Lily yawned, saying,

  “What’s the other boring thing?”

  “Well, I have just been informed—”

  “No, what was the other boring thing?”

  Lily was looking at Scheherazade. So Keith did too … And this was the thought, this was the question they awakened in him, Scheherazade’s breasts (the twinned circumferences, interproximate, interchangeable): Where were the police? Where on earth were the police? It was a question he was often asking himself, in these uncertain times. Where were they, the police? Scheherazade said,

  “Sorry, I’m not with you.”

  “I mean, what was the first boring thing?”

  “The bathroom,” said Keith. “You know. Sharing it. The bell.”

  “Ah. Now what’s the second boring thing?”

  “Let me just get wet.”

  Scheherazade stepped forward and kept going and dived … Yes, the inexpressible tedium of the shared bathroom, where, the previous afternoon, Scheherazade appeared with her bent knees pressed together, and her fists closed tight on the hem of a pink T-shirt, as with short shuffling steps she backed laughingly away … Now she surfaced and climbed out with tensed tendons, covered in bright beads of water. And it was all laid before you. Topless as nature intended. And yet to Keith the spectacle seemed anti-natural—seemed unsound, like a slippage of genre. The cicadas turned their volume up, and the sun glared. She said,

  “Just cold enough. I hate it when it’s soupy. You know. Blood-heat.”

  Lily said, “Is the second boring thing more boring than the first boring thing?”

  “About the same—no, more boring. We’re being joined. Oh well. These things are sent to try us. Gloria,” said Scheherazade, lying back with her hands behind her head. “Gloria. Jorquil’s great throb. She’s in disgrace and she’s being packed off to purdah—here. With us. Gloria Beautyman. Beautyman. Spelt like beauty, spelt like man. She’s older than us. Twenty-two. Or twenty-three. Oh well, what can we do? It’s Jorq’s castle.”

  Keith had encountered Jorquil, or been in his presence for a minute or two—Jorquil, Scheherazade’s thirty-year-old uncle (it was that kind of family). Now Keith said, “Good name. Gloria Beautyman.”

  “Yes it is,” said Lily cautiously. “But does she live up to it? Does she carry it off?”

  “Sort of. I don’t know. I think she’s an acquired taste. Rather peculiar figure. Jorq’s besotted. He says she’s the best thing out. He calls her Miss Universe. Why is Miss Universe always from Earth? He wants to marry her. I don’t quite get it. Jorq’s normal girls look like film stars.”

  “Jorq?”

  “Yes, I know. He’s no Adonis, Jorq, but he is very rich. And very keen. And Gloria … She must have hidden depths. Still. Poor Gloria. After two weeks at death’s door from a single glass of champagne, she can almost sit up in bed.”

  “What’s she in disgrace for? What kind of disgrace? Do we know?”

  “Sexual disgrace,” said Scheherazade with a greedy look as her teeth caught the light. “And I was there.”

  “Oh do tell.”

  “Well I did vow not to. I really oughtn’t. No, I can’t.”

  “Scheherazade!” said Lily.

  “No. I really can’t.”

  “Scheherazade!”

  “Oh all right. But we mustn’t … God, I’ve never seen anything like it. And it was so out of character. She comes across as a bit prim. She’s from Edinburgh. Catholic. Ladylike. And she almost died of shame. Let’s wait for Whittaker. He loves this kind of thing.”

  In espadrilles, khaki shorts, and a frazzled straw hat, Whittaker advanced down the path, leaving behind him, among the saplings on the second level, the barely distinguishable but plainly terrified figure of Amen. Keith considered. Obsession—positive, negative. From L. obsidere “besiege.” Amen, beleaguered by Scheherazade’s breasts.

  “I thought they’d gone to Naples,” said Lily, “to pick up Ruaa. You know. The Blob.”

  Scheherazade said, “You’re not to call her the Blob in front of Whittaker. He thinks it’s disrespectful … What’s wrong with Amen, Whittaker? He looks so haunted.”

  But Whittaker answered her nothing, and just sighed and sat.

  “Sexual disgrace, Whittaker,” said Keith soothingly. “Someone ladylike almost dies of shame.”

  “Oh she’s all right, Gloria,” said Scheherazade. “The thing was, she did these paintings for a sex tycoon. And we—”

  “No, wait,” said Lily. “How do you mean, a sex tycoon?”

  “The one who does sex revues but not Oh! Calcutta! … You see, Gloria’s mainly a dancer. Royal Ballet. But she’s also a painter. And she did these little paintings for the sex tycoon. Ballet dancers at it in mid-air.”

  “In mid-air?” said Lily, with some impatience. “In mid-air?”

  “Ballet dancers at it in mid-air. And the sex tycoon had a big lunch party in Wiltshire, and Gloria was asked, and we were only sixty miles away, so we went. And she disgraced herself. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Keith sank back. The sun, the cicadas, the breasts, the butterflies, the caustic taste of coffee in his mouth, the fiery treat of his French cigarette, the narrative of sexual disgrace that did not involve his sister … He said,

  “Spin this out, Scheherazade, if you wouldn’t mind. Any chance details. Don’t stint us.”

  “Well. The first thing she did was almost drown in the indoor pool. Wait. Jorquil dropped us off. He said, You be chaperone. And for God’s sake don’t let her drink anything. Because she doesn’t. She can’t. But she seemed very flustered. And so of course I went to the loo and when I came back she was finishing a huge flute of champagne. I’ve never seen anything like it. She was unrecognisable.”

  “Is she little?” said Keith. “That can sometimes happen when they’re little.”

  “She’s quite little. She’s not that little. Afterwards she was violently sick for days and then completely bedridden. We really did. We really did think poor Gloria was going to die of shame.”

  “And I suppose the whole place anyway,” said Lily, “was crawling with slags.”

  “Not really. I mean, there were a good few hunks and pin-ups round the pool. You know. People who look like they’re made of pale chocolate. But there were rules. No toplessness. No sex. And Gloria wasn’t topless. Not topless. Oh no. She was bottomless. She lost her bikini bottoms just before she nearly drowned. She said they got sucked off by the jacuzzi.”

  “… They got sucked off by the jacuzzi,” said Whittaker. “That’s awfully good.”

  “Her exact words. They got sucked off by the jacuzzi. So the chap, the polo pro, when he fished her out, he had to hold her upside down by the ankles and give her a good shake. That was a sight. Then the minute we got her clothes back on she was off upstairs. And on the dance floor they were swinging her from man to man and feeling her up. And she look
ed like someone in a dream. And they were feeling her up. I mean really feeling her up.”

  Keith said, “Really feeling her up how?”

  “Well. When I went back in she had her dress round her waist. Not just that—it was tucked into her garter belt. To keep it there. And guess what. The man with his tongue in her ear was stroking her arse with both his hands inside her pants.”

  There was a pause.

  Whittaker said, “That’s also first-rate. Inside her pants.”

  “These two great hairy mitts inside her pants … And it was so out of character.”

  “In vino veritas,” said Lily.

  “No,” said Keith. But he said nothing more. Truth in wine? Truth in Special Brew and Southern Comfort, truth in Pink Ladies? So Clarissa Harlowe and Emily Gauntlet, when drugged, were behaving truthfully? No. But when the girl raised the potion to her own lips (Gloria, Violet), then you could claim that it was veritas. He said uneasily, “You’d think she’d know that about herself. Gloria Beautyman.”

  “You would. There’s more. The bathroom upstairs with the polo pro.”

  Over the poolside a pensive silence formed.

  “Bit of a disappointment, frankly, after all that. Jorquil came, around four, and no one could find her. We went upstairs and all the bedrooms were locked. House policy. Then—in the passage. There were these two huge bunnies or pets or playmates. Ex-centrefolds, these huge madams. Incredible creatures. Like retired racehorses. They’d been trying to control her all day. They were banging on the bathroom door saying things like, Are you coming, Gloria? Have you flushed yet, Gloria? Then the door opened and she stumbled out. Followed by the polo pro.”

  “… How did Jorquil like that?”

  “He stormed off. He didn’t see it.”

  They waited.

  “Well they were only in there for a couple of minutes. The polo pro said it was all perfectly innocent. You know, a bit of cocaine. I think they just had a snog. There was lipstick on the polo pro’s neck. Not a smear, either. A little smiling mouth. You could even imagine the little smiling teeth …”