The Pregnant Widow (11 page)

“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.

B
ut 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.

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!”

And Impy and I stood there, unsmiling, while Violet lost herself in symphonic laughter … Soon afterwards she came into the garden with two glasses of fruit juice.

Me:
“Vi, listen.
Don’t
call Impy Impy.”
Violet:
“Why not? It’s better to make a joke of it, don’t you fink? Otherwise he’ll get a complex.”

This being her sense of what it was to be modern. She was sixteen. You know, I often used to wish I had a girlfriend who looked exactly like our sister. An idea unavailable to you. Blonde, soft-eyed, white-toothed, wide-mouthed, her features and their soft transitions.

Violet:
“He likes being called Impy. He thinks it’s funny.”
Me:
“No. He
says
he likes it. He
says
he thinks it’s funny. When did you start calling him that?”
Violet:
“On the first night.”
Me:
“Jesus. What’s his real name?”
Violet:
“Feo.”
Me:
“Well call Impy Feo. I mean Theo.”
Violet:
“If you say so, Key.”
Me:
“I say so, Vi.”

Why does she still have trouble with the
th
sound? Remember her transpositions?
Ackitt
for attic.
Kobbers
for because. Navilla ice cream.

Me
(thinking I had to spell it out): “Make a real effort, Vi, and call Impy Theo. You should build him up. Then you might find there’s no
reason
to call Theo Impy. Call Impy Theo.”
Violet
(quite wittily):
“… Should I start calling Impy Sexy?”
Me:
“It’s too late for that. Call him Theo.”
Violet:
“Feo. All right, I’ll try.”

And she was very good. During dinner that night, and all the next day, did you
once
hear her call Impy Impy? Me, I held out high hopes for Impy. Slender and tremulously Shelleyan, with vulnerable eyes. I could imagine him reading or even writing “Ozymandias.” I looked to Impy as a force for good. Then came Sunday afternoon.

You:
“What’s going on?”
Me:
“I’m not sure. Theo’s in tears upstairs.”
You:
“Yes, well some bloke, some shape, just knocked on the kitchen door. One of those guys who’s very fat but hasn’t got an arse. Vi said,
See you, Impy
, and off she went. What does
Impy
mean?”

Oh Nicholas, my dear—I’d been hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you.

Me:
“So that’s why she calls him Impy.”
You:
“… All right, she’s young. But you’d think
she’d
want to keep that reasonably quiet.”
Me:
“I know. I mean, if it was the other way round.”
You:
“Exactly. Meet my new girlfriend. I call her Fridgy. Would you like to know why?”
Me:
“Impy’s worse than Fridgy. I mean, a girl can pretend not to be frigid. And a boy …”
You:
“I’m going to talk to her.”
Me:
“I already have. She just keeps saying how keen she is for him not to get a complex.”
You:
“And what does she say when you tell her the obvious?”
Me:
“She says,
Well he is impotent.” You:
“Yeah I bet he is.”

And we agreed: no talent for it, no feel for it. So what does she want from it? What does she want from the modern?

And now, one year on, what does Violet do? She rapes fruits—or she tries. I’ll ask Whittaker about this.

Hear the sheep?

Dear Nicholas, oh, brother, the girl here she … When she dives, she dives into her own reflection. When she swims, she kisses her own reflection. She works her way up and down the pool, with dipping face, kissing her own reflection.

It’s hot at night. Hear the sheep, hear the dogs?

S
cheherazade was flat on her back in the garden—upper terrace. She held a book, interposed between her eyes and the evanescent sun. The book was about probability. Keith sat four or five yards away, at the stone table. He was reading
Northanger Abbey
. Several days had passed. Adriano was a good deal around.

“Are you enjoying that?”

“Oh yes,” he said.

“Why, particularly?”

“Well. It’s so … sane.” He yawned and, in a rare spasm of unself-consciousness or candour, he stretched, in his director’s chair, with pubic bone outthrust. “The beautiful intelligence,” he said. “And so sane. After Smollett and Sterne and all those other mad sods.” Keith couldn’t be doing with Sterne. He clapped
Tristram Shandy
shut on about page fifteen, when he came across the adjective
hobby-horsical
. But he forgave Smollett everything for his osmotic translation of
Don Quixote
. You see, he was still having these thoughts, for a little while longer. “No, I’m loving Jane.”

“Isn’t it all about marrying for money?”

“I think that must be a myth. This heroine says that marrying for money is
the wickedest thing in existence
. Catherine. And she’s only sixteen. Isabella Thorpe wants to marry for money. Isabella’s great. She’s the bitch.”

“Gloria Beautyman was supposed to come today. But she’s had a relapse.”

“Another glass of champagne.”

“No, she’s still recovering from the first one. She’s not faking it either. Jorq’s got her in the Harley Street Clinic. She lacks a chemical. Diogenes. It’s obviously not diogenes. But something that sounds nearly the same as diogenes.”

“Mm. Like the Eskimos. Like the Red Indians. One shot of whisky and that was it. All they could do was hang around the forts. There was a kind of sub-tribe of them. Known as the Hang Around the Forts.”

“That’s all we do, isn’t it. Hang around the forts.”

Scheherazade was referring to their recent outing—from one castle to another castle, from Jorquil’s castle to Adriano’s castle. Keith said,

“And you, are you enjoying yours? What is it?”

“It’s about probability. Quite. The paradoxes. Or do I just mean the surprises? It’s fascinating in its way. But a bit low on human interest.” Scheherazade herself now yawned hungrily. “Time for a shower, I think.”

She stood. “Ow,” she said, and for a moment she examined her upturned foot. “Trod on a burr. Adriano’s coming to dinner again. With a hamper. Meals on Wheels. Do you mind him?”

“Mind him?”

“Well he can be a bit much. And you … Sometimes I think you mind him.”

Keith felt it for the first time: the flooding need for passionate speech, for poetry, for avowals, for tears of tenderness—for confession, above all. It was official, it was authorised. He was painfully in love with Scheherazade. But these abstract adorations were part of his history, and by now he felt he could manage them. He cleared his throat and said, “He
is
a bit much. But I don’t mind him.”

She looked up towards the shoulder of the field, where the three horses grazed. “Lily tells me you hate flies.”

“This is true.”

“In Africa,” she said in profile, “all day you’re looking at these poor black faces. They have flies on their cheeks and their lips. Even in their eyes. And they don’t brush them away. Just used to them, I suppose. Human beings get used to them. But horses never do. See their tails.”

And of course he watched as she turned and moved off—the mannish khaki shorts, the mannish white shirt only half tucked in, the tall walk. Her shirt was damp and there were grass halms on her shoulder blades. Grass halms gleamed in her hair. He sat back. The frogs, massed in the wet ground between the walled flowerbeds, gurgled and comfortably grunted. It came to his ears as a stupor of self-satisfaction—like a clutch of fat old men reviewing a lifetime of probity and profit. The frogs in their shallow swamp, in their stupor.

The yellow birds laughed in the garish tenement of the elm. Higher up, the crows, with famished and bitter faces, faces half carved away (he thought of the black knights on the chessboard). Higher still, the Homeric strivers of the upper air, dense and solid as magnets, and in formation, like the blade of a spear, aimed at a land far beyond the horizon.

Twenty pages passed. Odd how a watched sky seems changeless; but then a paragraph later that swordfish has disappeared, to be replaced by the British Isles (an arrangement surprisingly popular with Italian clouds) … Lily now sat silently opposite.
Public Order and Human Dignity
lay unopened on her lap. She sighed. He sighed back. The two of them, Keith realised, were diffusing a dingy and neglected air. On top of everything else, they were experiencing the demotion that a settled couple will tend to feel when there are romantic awakenings near by. Lily said frowsily,

“She’s still toying with the idea.”

Keith said even more frowsily, “It’s grotesque.”

“… Tom Thumb wants to take her to a bullfight in Barcelona. In his helicopter.”

“No, Lily, you mean his aeroplane.”

“Not his aeroplane. His helicopter. Tom Thumb’s got a helicopter.”

“A helicopter. That would be certain death. As you well know.”

“… If you could stretch him out he’d be very attractive.”

“But you can’t stretch him out. And besides. He’s not just a midget. He’s a ridiculous midget. I can’t think why we don’t all just laugh him off the property.”

“Come on. He’s got a lovely little face. And he’s charismatic. It’s impossible to take your eyes off him, don’t you find? When he’s diving or on the exercise bar.”

The exercise bar was a fixture that Keith had barely noticed until now. He’d assumed it was some kind of towel rack. These days, Adriano was always twirling and snorting around on the exercise bar. Lily said,