The Pregnant Widow

“Molly Sims? No.”

  “Yes. A pass so graphic, he claimed, that she wrote him a note of apology the next day.”

  “But she’s famous for hardly sleeping with anyone. Molly Sims? Bullshit.”

  “That’s what I said. He crashed at her place after a party and she came to say goodnight. In a babydoll. And she sat like this, with her knees up.”

  “So what could he see?”

  “A cassoulet of pussy. According to him.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “That’s what I said. But he insisted. A farting cassoulet of pussy. I didn’t believe him either. Then he showed me the note. That’s extreme, that is. As a pass.”

  “Very … You know, last night I dreamt you’d read Sex at Oxford. Everything was completely normal. In my dream. Except that you’d read Sex at Oxford.”

  “What degree did I get?”

  “A two-two. I hate dreams.”

  “You’re interrupting.”

  I collected her around ten from some wine bar in Notting Hill. I was with the poet Michael Underwood. Have you met him? Anyway, in the taxi (how can I put this?), I suddenly got the feeling that I’d grown a moustache. It wasn’t my moustache. It was Michael’s. So I just said, No thanks, Mike, and we went back to talking about William Empson and I. A. Richards. He’s gay, you see. Not prancing and whinnying, quite, but obviously and contentedly gay.

  Now. Violet had some girls with her, and we needed two cabs for the next leg, and she climbed in with Michael. At the other end (and it wasn’t that far) he scrambled out looking as though he’d just come through the Battle of Stalingrad. As he stood there, with his hair all over the place, and tucking his shirt back in and retrieving his tie from between his shoulder blades, he said (note: he rolls and swallows his rs, like Denisov in War and Peace), “I say, your sister’s jolly ghrandy, isn’t she?”

  “Ghrandy?”

  “Randy.” This was one of the things he liked about Lily: she read at the same speed he did (and she knew all there was to know about his little sister). “Randy. Like Scheherazade’s supposed to be. According to you.”

  It seemed quite funnily symmetrical at the time, and it was only the next day that it started preying on me. So I called Michael and we had a drink. Intermission:

  Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing. I Love Lucy. If music be the food of love. Love in a Cold Climate. Love is of man’s life a thing apart. Love Me Tender. God is love. The Spy Who Loved Me. Stop! In the name of—

  “Love is a … What’s he going on about now?”

  “Well with this one,” said Keith, “when love’s a verb, you substitute fuck, and when it’s a noun you substitute hysterical sex.”

  “Stop! In the name of … Can’t you finish this later? Then in a while we can join the turtle-doves in the grotto.”

  “Mm. I’m impatient to set eyes on him. Wait. Jesus.”

  “Finish it later. Adriano, close your eyes. I’m Scheherazade.”

  “Wait.”

  Lily said, “Stop! In the name of …”

  “Before you break my—”

  “Stop!”

  Afterwards, Keith and Lily went downstairs and were introduced to Adriano over coffee in the salon. They talked about castles. Adriano’s castle wasn’t like Jorquil’s castle—a fortress on a mountainside. Adriano’s castle (as Keith would soon see for himself) gathered a whole village in its arms. Then Keith returned to the tower.

  His mission, up there, did not befit a romantic hero—or even the anti-hero he was destined to become. It was beneath him, all this. Only what could he do? The man who occupies the highest throne on earth, said Michel Eyquem de Montaigne in—what?—1575, is still sitting on his arse. Human beings, atom-splitters and moon-striders, serenaders, sonneteers, they want to be gods, but they are animals, with bodies that once belonged to a fish. In short, Keith Nearing sat on the cold bowl. He was of course impatient to be with Adriano; still, Adriano would understand.

  Keith was not reading Sex at university—or not any more. These days he was reading Pamela and Shamela. And yet, for his first four terms, Sex was what he read. Not just Sex; he also read Death, he read Dreams, he read Shit. According to the neo-Freudianism that was dominant in his era, these were the cornerstones of the self—sex, death, dreams, and human ordure, or night soil. Montaigne could have gone further: the highest throne on earth has an oval cavity in it, and there’s a toilet roll close to hand.

  There was one boring thing about the bathroom—the bathroom that linked him with Scheherazade. It had no window. Only a skylight, hopelessly distant. Compared to the average male inhabitant of England, Keith was, he considered, positively debonair about defecation. But its meaning could not but sadden him. And he assented to the valiant condolence offered by the great Auden in the final stanza of “The Geography of the House”:

  Mind and Body run on

  Different timetables:

  Not until our morning

  Visit here can we

  Leave the dead concerns of Yesterday behind us,

  Face, with all our courage,

  What is now to be.

  That helped. And so did this: as he would one day say to his two growing sons, Boys? Here’s some fatherly advice about shits when you’re sharing a bathroom with a girl. Light a match afterwards. Light two. Because it wasn’t the smell, really, that humiliated you; it was the humiliating emanation of decay.

  Keith lit his third match. While it would be inaccurate to say that he didn’t mind if Lily had to breathe his heat, his dead concerns, his yesterdays, he was quite unable to bear the thought of Scheherazade and her delicately alerted nostrils. So he stayed on afterwards, with Roderick Random or Peregrine Pickle, sometimes for half an hour, just to make sure. He was twenty, remember, and still young enough—still osmoting with his fluids and nostalgias. Nostalgia, from Gk nostos “return home” + algos “pain.” The return-home pain of twenty years old.

  Also young enough (he was taking his leave of the bathroom with a final dubious sniff) to have all but an hour or two of every day quite poisoned by the awareness of a physical insufficiency. Oh, how the young suffer for a nose, a neck, a chin, a pair of ears … The bit of his body Keith hated was the bit that wasn’t there. He suffered for his height.

  Poet and seeker, farting air-gasper and blood-pumper (cosmic champion, cringing cur), he slipped into his trunks and climbed on to his flip-flops, and strolled down the descending terraces to the pool, ready to face, with all his courage, what was now to be.

  Ah,” said Adriano, addressing Scheherazade with an elegant undulation of his open palm, “bring me the sunflower mad with light!”

  The open palm withdrew, and closed on the bunny-eared bow of the silk cord that secured the waist of his creamy trousers (the creamy colour, perhaps, was meant to match his car). Keith sat on a metal chair and watched—as il Conte showily disrobed.

  When he first got wind of Adriano, Keith imagined a grand seducer, a purple genius of the chamber and the boudoir—glutinously virile, with heavy lids, plump lips, and sebum visibly pooling in every pore. Then came Scheherazade’s proviso: He’d be absolutely perfect, she said. Except for this one little thing. And Keith spent a happy night defacing his posterboy, the greaseboat or dreamball. Dribble, stutter, asphyxiating BO. But Adriano wasn’t like that.

  He disrobed, Adriano: off came the snowy slacks, the bobbled loafers, the shantung shirt, all the way down to the curious ribbing of his sky-blue swimsuit, which, nonetheless, bulged eventfully … Adriano was equipped with perfect English, or near-perfect English: he sometimes said as instead of like (and for some reason he couldn’t say Keith—he never once got it right). Adriano would inherit an ancient title and a limitless fortune. Adriano was densely muscular and classically handsome, with something coinlike, something silvery and Caesary, in his noble brow.

  On he came, to the sunbed of Scheherazade. Adriano sat, and with formidable insouciance he slid his hand between her moistened calves.

  “Ah,” he resumed
. “I know how Tereus felt when he first spied Philomela. As a forest when a drought wind turns it into a firestorm.”

  It was not the voice of a small man, which was remarkable in its way. Because guess what. Adriano was four foot ten inches tall.

  “I thought you’d’ve finished that,” said Lily, as Keith joined her in the shade, “while you were having your shit.”

  “Lily!” Nobody was supposed to know for sure about his shits. “Actually I tried, but I lost my nerve. Come on, read it with me. No interrupting.”

  When I woke up the next day, feeling very seedy indeed, I found 1) a strange girl in my bed (fully dressed, including gumboots), 2) Violet, under an old curtain and a tattoo-bespattered skinhead on the sitting-room floor, and, most derangingly, 3) a fucking duck doing laps in the bathtub. Yes, well, an average kind of evening. But what stayed with me was the business with Michael Underwood.

  We—

  “The duck,” said Lily (he could feel her breath on his neck). “That must have been very bad. Ooh. See? He’s making progress.”

  Keith stared out into the yellow glitter. Adriano had worked his way up the sunbed, and now sat face to face with the supine Scheherazade; he was leaning forward and his right hand rested on the far side of her waist.

  “He’s torturing her,” said Keith. “Look at her face.”

  And it was true, he thought. Scheherazade had the expression of a woman cajoled on to the stage by a professional magician or hypnotist or knife-thrower. Amused, embarrassed, deeply unconvinced, and about to be sawn in half. Lily said,

  “I see a smile. Look. He’s almost resting his chin on her tits.”

  “Wait till they stand up at the same time. That’ll put things in perspective. Now shsh. You’re interrupting.”

  “Adriano—what happened to his neck?”

  We met after work, and Michael was unusually quiet—all loath and diffident. I had to sneak up on the subject. A couple of drinks later he said—Christ—he said he’d never been set upon so wildly and so insensately (this was the word he used) in all his life. And he reminded me, again with some diffidence, that during his art-school years he was known as Dockyard Doreen. And consider this. Michael isn’t pretty. So, my dear Little Keith, please, your thoughts.

  “Insensate?”

  “Senseless. Without sense. Or sensibility. Without feeling.” And he thought: Impy! He thought of the Violet boyfriend called Impy. “Maybe I’ll talk to Whittaker …”

  “What happened to Adriano’s thigh?”

  You do see the weirdness of it, don’t you? When I felt Michael’s moustache on my lips, all I had to say was no thanks. Imagine if he’d kept on coming all the way there. So, Keith, please, your thoughts.

  PS. A jiffy bag came for you from the Lit Supp. I’ll get the office to smother it in stamps and send it on. PPS. It looks as though Kenrik will be going camping with Rita. Their destination is Sardinia, and I suppose it’s conceivable that they’ll get as far as Montale. I gave him the number. Is it really a castle? Kenrik insists that he and Rita are just good friends and he intends to keep it that way. I dutifully—but I think pointlessly—repeated your words of advice. I said, “Whatever you do, don’t fuck the Dog.”

  “Why shouldn’t he?” said Lily. “If he wants to. I’m not sure I understand.”

  “No one understands. Not really. But everyone knows that you mustn’t.”

  “Ah, but Rita’ll be having a say in that, won’t she. And she acts like a boy. She’s bound to try her luck. Kenrik’s heaven—he’s a dream. He’s like the young Nureyev. Mmm … What’s this thing from the Lit Supp?”

  “When you left me, Lily, I—”

  “I didn’t leave you. It was mutual.”

  “When you left me, Lily, I began to think about my future.” And he wrote to the Lit Supp, asking for a book to review on trial. He wanted to become a literary critic. And a poet (but that was a secret). He knew he could never become a novelist. To become a novelist, you had to be the silent presence at the gathering, the one on whom nothing is lost. And he was not that kind of observer, not that kind of I. He couldn’t read a situation; he was always misconstruing it. “Scheherazade!” he called out. “A parcel sent here from England! How long?”

  “It varies!” she called back. “Between a week and a year!”

  “Look,” said Lily. “He’s reading her palm now. She’s laughing.”

  “Yeah. He’s tracing her loveline. Hah. Some hope.”

  “Short men try harder. What happened to his foot? Are you going to tell your mum?”

  “About Violet? Let’s not talk about Violet. It’ll be an absolute disaster,” Keith said thoughtfully, “if Kenrik and Rita get here and they aren’t just good friends.”

  At noon Whittaker arrived with the coffee tray, and the party re-gathered in the sun. Beyond, three columns of smoke fumed skyward from the valley, olive-coloured and silvery-blue at the edges. Below, on the upper slope of the nearest foothill, you could see the two monks who often walked there—in impassioned conversation but without gesture, walking, pausing, turning, with hidden hands. Whittaker said,

  “Adriano. I hear you’re a man of action.”

  “It would be futile to deny it. Why, my body, as the map of a battle, itself tells the tale of my love of adventure.”

  And it was true: all over his ripply little frame Adriano bore the wounds of his commitment to the good life.

  “So your left foot, Adriano. What happened there?”

  Two lesser toes had been sheared clean off by the propeller of a speedboat in the waters of Ceylon.

  “And this … discolouration on your neck and shoulder?”

  The result of a helium blaze on a hot-air balloon, six miles above the Nubian Desert.

  “How about these black studmarks on your hip and thigh?”

  Out hunting wild boar in Kazakhstan, Adriano succeeded in graping himself with his own shotgun.

  And the knee, Adriano?

  A toboggan smash on the elevated run at Lucerne … Other mementoes of hazard were written on his body, most of them the result of numberless tramplings on the polo field.

  “Some call me accident-prone,” Adriano was saying. “Only the other day—well, I was recovering from a forty-floor elevator plunge in the Sugar Loaf Plaza in Johannesburg. Then some friends bundled me onto a jet to Heidelberg. We survived the landing, in dense fog, thanks to heroic work by my co-pilot. And we were just taking our seats for Parsifal when the balcony collapsed.”

  There was a silence, and Keith felt himself being taken, being slid out of genre. He thought the upper classes had ceased to be this—had ceased to be the source of unsubtle social comedy. But here, contending otherwise, was Adriano. Keith said, “You should be more careful, mate. You should just stay indoors and hope for the best.”

  “Ah, Keethe,” he said, trailing a little finger down Scheherazade’s forearm, “but I live for hazard.” He took her hand, kissed it, smoothed it, returned it with slow care. “I live to scale the impossible heights.”

  Now Adriano rose up. With some pomp he approached the diving board.

  “It’s very bendy,” warned Scheherazade.

  He marched to the end of it, turned, measured out three long paces, and turned again. Then the two-step advance, the springing leap (with right leg coyly cocked). And like a missile catapulted by a siege engine, with a rending twang Adriano shot sunward. There was a moment, halfway up, when you glimpsed a look of swollen-eyed alarm, but then he bunched and balled and twirled, and vanished with an almost inaudible splash—a gulp, a swallow.

  “… Thank God for that,” said Lily.

  “Yes,” said Scheherazade. “I thought he was going to miss. Didn’t you?”

  “And hit the concrete on the far side.”

  “Or the hut. Or the rampart.”

  “Or the tower.”

  After another twenty seconds the board stopped juddering and the four of them climbed spontaneously to their feet. And stared. The surface was
almost entirely undisturbed by Adriano’s ramrod splashdown, and all they saw was sky.

  “What’s he doing down there?”

  “Do you think he’s all right?”

  “Well he did land in the shallow end.”

  “It was quite a drop anyway. Can you see any blood?”

  Another minute passed and the colour of the day had time to change.

  “I saw something.”

  “Where?”

  “Should I go and look?”

  Adriano burst up like the Kraken, with a tremendous snort and a tremendous swipe of his silvery quiff. And he didn’t seem like a small thing, the way he stirred the whole pool as he pounded back and forth, the way he whisked the whole pool with his golden limbs.

  But it was true—what Lily said in the dark that night. And Keith wondered how the two of them managed it. Thereafter, during lunch, tea, drinks, dinner, coffee, cards, Scheherazade and Adriano never once stood up at the same time.

  As they were trying to go to sleep Keith said,

  “Adriano’s cock’s all balls. I mean his cock’s all bullshit.”

  “It’s the material. Or it’s just the contrast of scale.”

  “No. He’s got something down there.”

  “Mm. As if he’d upended a fruitbowl into it.”

  “No. He’s got a hi-fi set down there.”

  “Yes. Or a drumkit.”

  “It’s just the contrast. His cock’s all balls.”

  “Or maybe it’s not.”

  “He’d still be ridiculous.”

  “There’s nothing ridiculous about a big cock. Believe me. Sleep well,” said Lily.

  4

  STRATEGIES OF DISTANCE

  Dear Nicholas, he thought, as he insomniated by Lily’s side. Dear Nicholas. Do you remember Impy? Of course you do.

  It was this time last year, and we had the house to ourselves for the weekend, and Violet came earlier than you did, on Friday afternoon, with her new beau.

  Violet: “Keith, say hello to Impy.” Me: “Hello, Impy. Why are you called Impy?” Violet (in whom, as you’re aware, there is no aggression, no malice, no ill will): “Because he’s impotent!”