The Pregnant Widow (12 page)

“You can’t look away.”

“That’s true.” He lit a cigarette. “That’s true. But only because you’re so sure he’s about to fuck himself up—you know, he’s making me feel very left-wing.”

“That’s not what you were saying last night.”

“True.” Last night he was saying that every upper-class prick should model himself on Adriano. It would mean eternal peace in the class war. All that trouble and expense Adriano went to, in search of fresh damage—why bother to string up Adriano? Just give him a rope, and show him a tree or a lamp post. “Yeah. But he’s still walking, isn’t he, Tom Thumb. That’s the trouble. He’s not Tom Thumb. Or Mighty Mouse or Atom Ant. He’s Tom in
Tom and Jerry
. He’s got nine lives. He keeps recovering.”

Several pages passed.

“You’re upset about Violet.”

“Why should I be upset about Violet? Violet’s all right. She doesn’t date football teams or anything like that. Let’s not talk about Violet.”

Several pages passed.

“… The impression he gives of deserving it all—that’s what I can’t bear. You’d think that being four foot ten,” Keith went on, “would teach the little bastard a bit of humility.
Oh
no, not Tom Thumb.”

“God, you really don’t like him, do you.”

Keith confirmed that this was the case. Lily said,

“Come on, he’s sweet. Don’t be chippy.”

“And I hated his fucking castle. With an ancient footman behind every chair. With an old pez in a dragoon outfit standing behind your chair and hating your guts.”

“And all that yelling down the length of the table. Still. What about the starlets?”

In Adriano’s open-plan
piano nobile
(an area about the size of a London postal district) they were led to a deep sideboard on which were ranked a couple of dozen framed photographs: Adriano, seated or recumbent, with a succession of able-bodied beauties in various opulent or exotic settings. Keith now said,

“That didn’t mean anything. All he ever does is loll around with rich wasters. He’s bound to be quite near a girl every now and then. Someone takes a photograph. So what.”

“Then where does he get his confidence from? And come on. He
is
confident. And he has a reputation.”

“Mm … Frailty, thy name is woman, Lily—it’s the money and the title. And the bullshit charm … I hate the way he’s always kissing her on the hand and the arms and the shoulder. Scheherazade.”

“You’re not seeing it straight. He’s actually very tentative. He talks a lot, and he’s Italian, he’s tactile, but he hasn’t even made a pass. They’re never alone. You’re not seeing things clearly. You don’t always, you know.”

“Putting olive oil on her back …”

After a pause, Lily said, “All is explained. How predictable. Mm. I see it. You’re painfully in love with Scheherazade.”

“You sometimes amaze me,” he said, “by how wrong you get things.”

“Then it’s just class resentment. Pure and simple.”

“What’s the matter with class resentment?”

In fact it was not that painful, it was not yet all that painful. And he was often thinking, You have Lily. You’re safe with Lily … He was certainly disquietened by what had started going wrong with him in bed. Not only one-time students of psychology might notice the coincidence: Keith was worried about his sister, and his sister was what Lily had seemed to become. But the meaning of the connection, if any, eluded him. And he still looked at Lily ten times a day and felt grateful and surprised, gratefully surprised.

“She’s trying to drum up some charity work in the village. She says doing good makes you high, and she misses it.”

“There you are. Still a saint.” He tossed
Northanger Abbey
on to the table and said, “Uh, Lily, listen. I think you should go topless at the pool … Why not?”

“Why not? Why d’you think? How’d you like to sit there with your cock out? Next to Tom Thumb—with
his
cock out. Anyway. Why?”

Actually he had several reasons. But he said, “You’re nicely made up there. They’re shapely and elegant.”

“You mean they’re small.”

“Size doesn’t matter. And Adriano’s cock’s all bullshit.”

“Yes size does. That’s what it comes down to. She said it might be all right if he was just four inches taller.”

Four inches? he thought. That’s still only five foot
two
. He said, “Being five foot two, or six foot two, wouldn’t stop him being ridiculous. How can
you
bear him? You like social realism.”

Lily said, “He’s very fit. And she’s read somewhere that it’s quite different. With someone who’s very fit. And you know what a noodle Timmy is. I told her,
Small men try harder
. Imagine how hard
you’d
try if you were four foot ten. He wants to take her to St. Moritz. Not for the snow. Obviously. Mountaineering … Close your eyes for a second and imagine how hard he’d try.”

Keith disguised a soft groan in an exhalation of Disque Bleu. His squashy white packet carried no health warning. The fact that smoking was bad for human beings: this was now widely suspected. But he didn’t mind. Typically, I think, in this regard, Keith was still young enough to assume, in certain moods, that he wouldn’t live that long anyway … He closed his eyes for a second and saw Adriano—brutally shod, with alpenstock and alpenhorn, with pitons and eye bolts—readying himself to conquer the south face of Scheherazade. He glanced down at the flattened outline in the grass, where her shape had lain.

“Well tell her not to do anything hasty,” he said, picking up his book again. “She shouldn’t let herself down. It’s really Timmy I’m thinking of.”

S
o far, the new rhythm of the weather was answering quite accurately to his inner state. For four or five days the air would steadily thicken and congeal. And the storms—the storms, with their African vociferousness, were timed for his insomnias. He was making friends with hours he barely knew, the one called Three, the one called Four. They racked him, these storms, but he was left with a cleaner morning. Then the days began again to thicken, building to another war in heaven.

I don’t know what you’re complaining about
, Lily was on record as saying.
You still sit up half the night playing cards with her. I saw you that once—down on your knees together. I thought you were getting married. Plighting your troth
.

When we kneel, we’re the same height. Why’s that?

Because her legs are a foot longer than yours from the knee down. What d’you play anyway?
said Lily, who hated all games (and all sports).
Old Maid?

No, they played Pope Joan, they played Black Maria and Fan-Tan and Stud Poker. And now (better, much better), on the rug in the gunroom (the rug was a sprawled tiger), kneeling opposite one another, they played Racing Demon … Racing Demon was a kind of interactive Patience. As card games went, it was almost a contact sport. There was a lot of snatching and taunting and laughing and, almost always, a shimmer of hysteria towards the end. He wanted to play the games called Skin and Cheat. Is that what he wanted? He wanted to play Hearts. Hearts: that, perhaps, was the trouble.

Did they mean anything, those smiles and glances? Did they mean anything, those exhibitions, in the shared bathroom, those exhibitions of riveting disarray? Keith read, and sighed, and wished he was a yellow bird. Because it would have horrified him beyond computation—to take her undesigning friendliness and smear it with his hands, his lips.

Keith grew up in cities, in small coastal cities—Cornwall, Wales. Cornwall, where the island dips its toe into the English Channel; Wales, with its arms reaching out to embrace the Irish Sea. The only birds he knew well were city pigeons. When they took to the air at all (and it was invariably a last resort), they flew for fear.

Here in Italy the black
cornacchie
flew for hunger, the high
magneti
flew for destiny, and the yellow
canarini
flew for joy. When the wind
came, the dervish tramontana, the yellow birds neither rode the gusts nor fought them; they didn’t fly, they didn’t float, they just
hung
.

The castle received other male visitors during this anxious time. There was an unforgivably young and handsome army major called Marcello, who seemed much taken with Scheherazade; but he was instantly fingered by Whittaker
(Why can’t hets tell?
he said.
Marcello’s
unusually
gay)
. There was an eloquent and erudite apparition by the pool, Vincenzo, who seemed much taken with Scheherazade; but he talked a lot about church restoration, and when he sat down to lunch he was wearing a dog collar. Adriano’s only departure from gridiron stereotype was his mild anti-clericalism
(I think people who worship should worship alone)
. So did this constitute the historic opportunity? It was occurring to Keith that he was the only secular heterosexual in the entire region who was over four foot ten.

He had never been unfaithful to Lily. He had never been unfaithful to anyone. I think it is important to remember that Keith, at this stage (and for the very short-term future), was a principled young man. With girls, his transgressions, his known wrongs, were so far derisory in number. There was his commonplace negligence (a sin of omission) in his dealings with Dilkash. There was the far more complicated felony (a sin of commission, this time, and often repeated) in his dealings with Pansy—Pansy, acolyte of Rita. He thought about them hourly, the two girls, the two wrongs.

At an early stage in his religious period (eight to eleven), as he was collecting the bibles after class, his RI teacher, the hideous but compelling Miss Paul (a secret tippler, he had since decided), said dreamily,
You see, Keith my love, every one of us has nine stars in the firmament. And each time you tell a lie, one of your stars go out
. And a sober Miss Paul wouldn’t have said that
(go out
—a sober Miss Paul would have got that right).
When all nine are dead
—
then your soul is lost
. And over the years Keith somehow transferred this notion to his future: his future with girls and women. He had seven stars left. Of course, the wisdom of the drunken Welsh spinster was offered (and then distorted by him) long before the sexual revolution. And now, he felt, everyone would be needing many more stars than nine.

He hung around the fort, and he was safe with Lily … The mountains they looked out on configured themselves in three echelons, three
strategies of distance. Nearest were the foothills, pocked and dappled and sparsely forested. Beyond the foothills were the humpbacked cliffs, ridged, tensed, like the spines of dinosaurs. And in the far distance stood a world of crests, of snowcaps and cloudcaps, of sun and moon, a world of crests and clouds.

Find a mirror you like and trust, and stick to it. Correction. Find a mirror you like. Never mind about trust. It’s too late for that—it’s too late for trust. Stand by this mirror, and be true to it. Never so much as glance at another.

Actually things aren’t
quite
that bad. Correction. Actually they are. But this is a truth we will have to postpone for many pages and then creep up on …

Beyond a certain age you no longer know what you look like. Something goes wrong with mirrors. They lose the power to tell you what you look like. All right, they do tell you, probably. But you can’t see it.

Beyond a certain age, then, you have neither the means nor the opportunity to find out what you look like. All the mirror will give you (in at least two senses) is a rough idea.

• • •

The first clause in the revolutionary manifesto went as follows:
There will be sex before marriage
. Sex before marriage, for almost everyone. And not only with the person you were going to get married to.

It was very simple, everyone knew it, everyone had seen it coming for years. In certain quarters, though, sex before marriage was a distressing development. Who was distressed by it? Those for whom there had
not
been sex before marriage. Now they were saying to themselves,
So suddenly there
will
be sex before marriage? On what basis, then, was I told that there will
not
be sex before marriage?

Nicholas, when he was coming of age in the mid-1960s, found himself involved in a series of long, boring, repetitive, and in fact completely circular arguments with his father. It began to happen about
every other night.
Why doesn’t he go away for ever?
Nicholas used to say.
Or, failing that, why doesn’t he go away for a very long time and then go away again as soon as he gets back?
The same sort of thing was happening to Arn, to Ewan, and to all Keith’s other friends (except Kenrik, whose father died before Kenrik was born).

The circular arguments were ostensibly about various limits to be imposed on Nicholas’s freedom and independence. In fact they were about sex before marriage. But there was never any mention of sex before marriage (rendering the arguments circular). And this was Professor Karl Shackleton, sociologist, positivist, progressivist. Karl was all those things—but he hadn’t had sex before marriage. And, looking back, he liked the idea of having sex before marriage. We may parenthetically note that it is the near-universal wish of dying men that they had had much more sex with many more women.

Keith indulged himself by feeling slightly hurt when it became clear that Professor Shackleton was not going to repeat this pattern with his foster-child (and Karl, already embrittled by his first minor stroke, his first minor cancellation, wasn’t about to take on Violet). It was only Nicholas, his male flesh and blood, that Karl really envied. And
envy
, the dictionary suggests, takes us by a knight’s move to
empathy
. From L.
invidere
“regard maliciously,” from
in-
“into” +
videre
“to see.” Envy is negative empathy. Envy is empathy in the wrong place at the wrong time.

• • •

“The boys have won,” said his stepdaughter, Silvia. “Again.”