In the King's Arms (14 page)

“Student, eh? Well, the world’s open to you, then; you’ve got all
the opportunities, don’t you? Have a seat, luv! Let me make you a cuppa tea! How d’you take it? Milk and sugar? I do!”

“Thanks.”

She bustled over to the electric kettle, humming. Lily looked around. The truth was, she felt more comfortable here than she ever had with the Kendalls. The furniture was battered and sagged. The walls were papered with trellises of flowers: roses and daisies, particularly.

Everything was made to lift the spirit: the plastic flowers in the plastic vases, the wall-to-wall shag carpet, the electric hearth with its fake coals in their fake brazier. The chipped cup from which she drank her tea bore a portrait of King George VI. Frilly curtains billowed at the window. Nothing matched, nothing was in fashion, and all was neat as a pin. Something in all this naive effort took her back to her home, to the Lower East Side, where the fiats of design had been ignored, perhaps unnoticed, by her own parents.

Rebekah began crying again. Mrs. Jenkins snatched her up and plopped her into Lily’s arms as she warmed up a bottle. The baby felt plump and sweet and strong.

“Nothing to them, babies! Had a few myself! Nice to be little, isn’t it, have the world servin’ you hand and foot! Ends soon enough, though, dunnit? How old are you?”

“Nearly twenty-two.”

“A good age, I do say! A good age indeed! Youth is wasted on the young, I always say! You’d agree? Well, here’s her milkies! Want to feed her?”

“Yes, please.” Mrs. Jenkins handed Lily the bottle and Rebekah reached for it, waving her hands in the air. Lily looked into her acute little face. Cocoa brown, and fringed with a dark curly nimbus of hair. I could have baby like this, she thought. If the father is
opposite to me, it does not matter; the baby is mine. Grows in me, takes my food and oxygen, linked to me by a cord of pulsing flesh. No matter who the father is, the baby is no stranger to its mother. Black or white, Christian or Jew: a baby, the link between strangers, between alien souls. A perfection of composition: halves. Half-man, half-woman: the birthright of the human race. Her secret dream was reconciliation, the dumb wisdom of married flesh. Seed-troth. Her own child could be half Jewish, and half not. All that spilled fratricidal blood, back in the veins of a living babe, coursing.

“What a miracle,” said Lily, softly.

“Eh? What’s that, dear? Oh, she eats like that all the time! No wonder to it at all! She’s gained half a stone, I’ll wager!”

Lily chuckled, then, without warning, began to shudder with tears. She felt astonished and ashamed, and tried to choke them back.

The last child she’d held had been Timothy Kendall.

Rebekah’s brown twinkling eyes traveled wonderingly around Lily’s contorted face, and her warm body began wriggling. Lily bent her head down toward her to hide from Mrs. Jenkins. She needn’t have bothered: Mrs. J. was throwing pots around. By the time she looked at Lily again, she was fairly under control, and the baby was lying back in the pram.

“I think I’ll make a nice hot stew for supper! Now, wouldn’t that be tasty! Wouldn’t it, now! Been crying, haven’t you?”

“A- a little,” she admitted.

“Well, then, blow your nose,” she ordered, shoving a napkin at her. “You’re all wet, you poor newt! How’s the baby? Nice and full, I expect! She’ll be wanting a burping, won’t she?” She took Rebekah up in her arms. “Time for a lie-down, innit? Nothin’ but sleep and eat, sleep and eat for that one, eh, luv? Shouldn’t mind trading with her!”

“Would it be all right if I took a nap, too? Mrs. Dancer said I could just stretch out on the sofa.”

“Right-O! Have a nice rest! It’s a nice settee, don’t you think? Always did like a nice pink! Have a rest! Pleasure meeting you! Fancy, all the way from America! Rebekah, say ‘bye to your new friend!”

“Goodnight.” Lily went into the sitting room and lay down. In a minute she was fast asleep.

When she awoke, Mrs. Dancer was there, sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room, cuddling and singing to Rebekah. When she saw that Lily was awake, she said, “I make my mixture for you. I bring it now.”

Mrs. Dancer stood up, shifting the baby to one hip, and smoothed the sweated hair away from Lily’s face with a dry palm. Lily had developed a fever, it seemed, from the minute she’d closed her eyes. She spent the next two weeks in a not unpleasant haze.

T
HE FOLLOWING TERM at Oxford was a vacuum to Lily. She lay in bed, not reading, not writing essays, missing all her classes and tutorials. Her friends thought she’d had a relapse of glandular fever; perhaps they were right. She received worried, admonishing and threatening notes from her tutors, which she crumpled and tossed at the bin. The threats referred to the diminishing likelihood of her catching up with her course load to the extent that she’d pass finals.

Mrs. Dancer seemed not a bit surprised when Lily told her she thought she must be pregnant. She lauded Lily for having been in love with a man who had powerful “juices.” Lily was amazed at herself and at Julian. They must have really let it go that night. For once she’d been totally open. She’d been stormed, endangered, and come out not only alive but life-giving. What do you know? she thought. The two of us added up to something, after all. Something bigger than either of us.

She thought that she’d better go home to have this baby. She would leave everything behind, she decided. Even Julian. It didn’t matter if she needed him or not; he wasn’t available. Had he ever called her, ever written? She realized that he had limitations; he was young, unformed, weak. Where had he been since that night? Safely at home, and not a word to her. He had gone, she decided, as far as he could go. Now
there was the baby to think about. The baby was more precious than anything to her, more precious than Julian’s attempts at loving her. It was the final and the only proof that they had once trusted each other.

Perhaps she was lying to herself. Perhaps she was furious to be alone and pregnant and exiled. Glad to have stolen a part of his self, a part of that family that they could not take away from her. Something she herself could take home to her own family. Away from Julian, and his doubts, and his fears. Away from the scene of her own greatest fears.

For Peter she felt something else, something very uncomplicated: she missed her friend. She did not like to think of leaving Oxford without seeing him again. There they were, in the same city, breathing the same air, practically, and they never saw each other.

She understood what he must be feeling. Apart from the horror of his little brother’s accident, Peter must have suffered, at least in part, from guilt. He had, in her presence, made Timothy the butt of his good-natured wit: “Half-breed,” he’d called him, “usurper,” “fetus.” The accident had made that harmless teasing, in retrospect, seem callous. And she’d witnessed it all.

She often thought of going to Christ Church and knocking on Peter’s door, but she couldn’t muster up the nerve. She wanted to be able to enjoy the sight of his funny, beaky face before he saw her own face and turned away in anger. The opportunity presented itself in a lucky way: a poster announced that Peter had won the starring role in Strindberg’s
The Father
. Shelagh Eveline Fanning was directing. The run had started last week, and would continue through the next. She could sit in the audience, anonymous, preparing her nerve for a meeting. She cravenly waited until the last night of the run, when at last she bought a ticket.

As Lily sat down in the little theater, she wondered if Peter’s
father ever did make good his promise to catch his son’s moment of glory. Nobody in the audience, at least on that night, looked as though they had fathered Peter and Julian. Nobody looked like the wandering satyr she’d never met but could vividly summon to mind, her baby’s grandfather.

The feeling she carried around, that she was going to be a mother, did not really unsettle her. She didn’t know why. She was animalistic, unintrospective. But this play, from the very first lines, attacked her nerves in a terrible way. All the squabbling, the desperate fighting for turf. She had read Keats only a few months ago. And he’d said that truth was beauty. But it wasn’t so. Truth wasn’t simply beautiful; the battle for truth was often ugly. She rubbed her stomach unconsciously, and listened.

All those angry words. Puzzles to her. Puzzles she had solved, or had forgotten to solve, or to which she’d forgotten the solution, or should one day solve. One day—though the knowledge itself could kill. Puzzles of history. Puzzles of legacy. Puzzles of trust.

The play ended at about ten o’clock. Afterwards, she wandered about town. She wandered up High Street and Broad Street, stopping in to have a drink at The Grapes. She tried to gather the courage to see Peter. She imagined him victorious, after his final performance. Blushing as he did when he felt delighted. Fanning would be crowing and glowing with the victory of her new protégé. Raising her arms outward and upward, beckoning him to enter, keeping a steady gaze. She’d grip him full around his thin body, hold him in her sturdy arms. Open her cape melodramatically to take him in. His head would be wedged between her breasts. She’d tremble and quiver; he would feel her heart. The light that entered Peter’s eyes through that green cape would be forest light. He’d hear her chest rumble as she spoke, and hear the crowd’s roar-laughter. Lost in the tropics, a star, amidst a chorus of chuckling creatures.

Lily finished her drink, and made her way slowly to Christ Church. All the way to Christ Church like a pilgrim, hearing the sound of her boot-heels clacking on the pavement. The moon glowed golden over the medieval town. The world smelled of ale and yellow stone-dust. It wasn’t possible, it wasn’t, that the centuries had died away. From far off, from time to time, she heard the “ring-ring!!” of a bicycle bell. She wanted to stay planted right there forever. To be entombed in the thick town walls where no one could ever find her or pry her out. Like the wishes people stuff into the Western Wall of the ruined temple.

W
HEN SHE GOT TO THE COLLEGE, she looked up at Peter’s window and saw a mass of exotics, celebrating. She plopped down on the bottom of his staircase and inhaled the warmth of the rotting wood. She saw the actors, one by one, make their exits from Peter’s room. They had to step over her.

“’Scuse!”

“Pardon! (You bloody oaf!)”

“Passing through!”

“
A domani, Pietro; mio carissimo!
”

Finally, she mounted the stairs and knocked on his door. She waited a long time, then knocked again. She thought she could hear low laughter. Then a woman’s voice: “No, don’t, Peter!”

After a moment, the doorknob turned and the door swung open. A thick aroma of incense and cigarettes bathed her from within the room. Peter stared at her for a good minute, stony yet wavering, like a statue about to topple.

“Back . . . so soon?” he finally said. He tried to sound nasty, but there was a rusty note of hurt in his voice. He was mildly drunk, and looked very cool, wearing his sharply creased “Captain’s” trousers and a fire-red T-shirt. He was sipping a Buck’s Fizz. Lily looked up into his face and saw that she mattered to him.

“I’ve decided to leave Oxford.”

He gestured to the bed. Lily thought he wanted her to sit there, but just as she was about to, she pulled herself up sharply. He had been pointing to Julian. Julian was sprawled on the bed, very drunk, an arm flung across his brow, to which moist tendrils adhered. For some reason, Lily could not avoid thinking of Steerforth, the fallen hero of David Copperfield.

Dead: she gazed at him as though he were a god.

“Julian?” she said quietly. “Is it you?”

His eyes were closed as though he were under a spell. On the edge of the bed sat Sabina.

“Drunk,” said Peter. “Pissed out of his tiny brains. Seems he came up to Oxford to see my play, but he disappeared after Act I, as though he’d seen a ghost. We couldn’t imagine where he’d gone, Sabina and I. That’s Sabina.” He pointed with a long forefinger. “She’s my new Lady Jane.”

“I’ve seen you, Sabina. I’ve seen you in The King’s Arms. And then at the OUDS party.”

“I’ve seen you,” she replied, knowingly.

“And that’s where we found him. In the bleeding King’s Arms. We had the whole cast up here in my room, feeling each other’s privates, and generally having a rather good time, when all of a sudden Sabina—did you know Julian shoved us together by way of recompense for stealing you—starts to worry. She gets quite nervous if she hasn’t been soundly fucked for a few hours.” He gave Sabina a kind look. “We shall remedy that very soon, dearest. So,” he returned to Lily, “I sent her round to all the pubs, searching for the Princeling. And how did I know he’d be pubbing? You might well ask. I’m blessed and accursed with more than my fair share of brains. She saw you, by the way. Saw you guzzling in the Grapes.

“When I heard she’d seen you, I nearly became incontinent.”