The Pregnant Widow (16 page)

“And that which I was afraid of is come unto me
. Watch. Watch how she’s spinning it out. Ooh, I’m for it now. You know why, of course?”

Lily was always telling him, as if in sincere reproach, that he had no talent for lying.
You’re hopeless
, she would say, throwing her hands in the air and slowly shaking her head.
It’s truly pathetic. And that’s why you’re no good at flattery and you’re so easy to tease …
Keith stayed silent (he was planning to say something artful), and Gloria said,

“Should I just wait? Or should I go up and present myself for execution?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about Oona. Oona doesn’t mind about a bit of cocaine.”

For a moment he felt great powers of scrutiny coming to bear on him.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, sorry. I heard you got caught taking cocaine in some bathroom at a party. That wouldn’t bother Oona. She’s seen it all, that one.”

Again, the shaft of intense examination. Then this passed, and she sat back.

“All right. Let the time be of her choosing.” She picked up her book again. She even started to hum. Minutes, pages, went by. She said, “Where were we?”

“Uh, display. It’s all gone too far … What has? Sexual—emancipation?”

“There’s just been a fuss in London,” she said, “because they’ve started showing pubic hair.”

“Who have?”

“Women. Oh you know. In the men’s magazines.”

“That’s hardly a feminist decision.”

“I never said it was. I think it demeans everyone, don’t you? But there it is. It’s a sign of the times … Gentle Jesus. Meek and mild. All right—do your worst.”

Oona was descending. She came to a halt on the middle terrace, then
turned with a sharp inclination of her head. Gloria gathered herself in a towel; her small feet inched—crept, stole—into their flip-flops.

“Pray for me,” she said, and shuffled off in her white pleats.

The book on the empty chair turned out to be a popular biography of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc, a warrior and a standard-bearer—leading armies, capturing cities, lifting sieges—at the age of seventeen. Violet’s age … He turned to the last chapter. The Maid of Orleans, he learnt, was put to death for heresy, but the judicial pretext had to do with a biblical stricture about clothing. Her crime of the wardrobe was perpetrated in order to thwart another kind of crime: rape. They incinerated her, in Rouen in 1431 (she was not yet twenty), for dressing as a boy.

Keith moved into the shade. His talk with Gloria had given him his first pang of homesickness. He wanted to go back to England, and get hold of a men’s magazine … And again he felt it, the tremor in the air, the wind-borne scent that makes the wildebeest flock and hurtle. It kept astonishing him—how weak the prohibitions always turned out to be, and how ready everyone was to claim the new ground, every inch of it. An automatic annexation. What was called, in children,
self-extension
, as they stockpiled each dawning power and freedom, without gratitude, without thought. And now: where were the hinderers, the wet blankets, where were the miseries, where were the police?

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the angles of the shadows had discreetly steepened, and Amen was in the pool, gliding through it soundlessly. Just the head, and its mirror image. When Adriano swam, he seemed to fight the water, kicking and kneeing it with his legs, smashing it with his fists (and moving through it, you had to admit, at an unbelievable speed). Perhaps it was his own reflection Adriano wanted to destroy … Now at the far end Amen rose, smooth and silent. He paused. He called out,

“Ça va?”

“Bien. Et toi?”

Would there be cards tonight? And how far would he get with his other new project? His other new project or policy: willed reptilianisation. He would summon it, the raptor, with its locked eyes, its moronically acquisitive grin, its dripping teeth. Once conjured and activated, of course, the tyrannosaur would then be dismissed. And Keith could
love. He would change his shape, no longer reptilian or even mammalian, no longer a man, even, but the gentlest of angels.

The cherubim, they said, were full and perfect in their worship of God. It was the seraphim who were the gentlest of angels, who eternally trembled and aspired, like tongues of flame. So that’s what he’d be. The rapt seraph, that adores and burns. Keith slept.

It wasn’t Amen, drifting across the grey surface, now, but Gloria. The black orb swivelled, and he could see at once that she was lighter. Lighter, of course, by the weight of the water her body displaced; but lighter in the eyes, lighter in the line of her mouth. She dipped under and then surfaced beneath the shadow of the diving board.

“Mm.
I
could do with a sleep … And by the way. Forget what I said about Scheherazade. She can have her monokini. With my blessing.”

He watched her dripping form as it climbed the metal steps; and it briefly occurred to him that she was two different women joined at the waist. Yes, a dancer’s body, he supposed, with the muscles of the calves, the thighs, pushing upward, striving upward … Gloria’s poolwear: today’s swimsuit (Lily and Scheherazade agreed) was even worse than yesterday’s; the lower boundary resolved itself, not in a beltlike skirt, but in the beginnings of a loose and fibrous pair of shorts.

“Let
her be a prodigal,” she said, dabbing an ear with her towel, “and an exhibitionist.”

He lit a cigarette. “What explains this radical change of heart?”

“Oh, irony, is it. Oh yes. You clever young men. No. The dear girl’s been a better friend to me than I thought she’d be. That’s all.”

“Well I’m glad.”

And for the first time Gloria smiled (showing teeth of savage strength, and ideally white, with the very faintest tinge of blue). She said,

“What’s it like for you then? All this looking. Come on. At your age. She’s a bit of an eyeful, isn’t she?”

“Who? Scheherazade?”

“Yes. Scheherazade. You know, the tall one with the very long legs and neck and the highly developed chest. Scheherazade. You’ve got Lily, of course, but you’re used to Lily. What is it, a year? Yes, you’re used to Lily. Scheherazade. What does she imagine is going through your mind? What?”

“You’re amused.”

“Don’t you see what I’m saying? There’s you. And that Italian. You’re young men. The sun is hot. What are you supposed to be thinking?”

“You get used to it.”

“Do you? And how does uh, Whittaker like it? And that other one I saw skulking about? Who’s obviously a Muslim. If one’s going to flaunt oneself like that, then one should consider one’s audience.”

“And that’s why you’re more discreet. You yourself.”

“Well partly,” she said, settling on the wicker chair, and reaching for Joan of Arc. “It only came up about a year ago, all this. It wasn’t something you had to think about before. Jorquil insists sometimes, but I decided I wouldn’t. Display.”

“Modesty.”

“There’s another reason. Also to do with one’s boyfriend.”

He said cautiously, “If it’s the reason I think it is, then I see your point.”

“What’s the reason you think it is?”

“I don’t know. Devaluation. Demystification.”

“Well yes,” she said, and yawned. “You do lose the element of surprise. But it isn’t that.” She gave him a friendly but scornful glance. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling
you
. How old are you? ‘Nineteen’?”

“I’ll be twenty-one in a couple of weeks.”

“Then perhaps we should wait until you’re of age. Oh all right.” And she gave a cough of polite introduction:
“Huh-hm
. Some women want to get their breasts brown. And I don’t.”

“And why’s that?”

“I want to be able to prove I’m a white woman … I’m not horrible and prejudiced or anything. And of course I’m devoted to Jorq. But when I’m starting up with a
new
boyfriend, I might want to prove I’m a white woman. You’ll see how dark I get.”

“You’re already very dark,” he said, and crossed his legs. They were talking about degrees of bodily display, and Gloria was pretty, perhaps very pretty. But she was in purdah (“veil, curtain”), in occultation, and she transmitted no sexual charge. None. He said, “I don’t understand. Gloria, unless you sunbathe naked, you’ll always be able to prove you’re a white woman.”

“Yes, but I might want to prove it sooner than that. You know. At an earlier stage.”

They read in silence for half an hour.

“It’s vulgar,” she said. “It’s just vulgar. And anyway, who
told
them to?”

B
y half past nine he was out on the loveseat of the west terrace, with the transient fireflies (like cigarette butts flicked through the air), and, by his standards, fairly drunkenly reading
Mansfield Park
. Taking the smoothest route to the reptile house, he thought, might involve a certain amount of medication. He couldn’t drug Scheherazade—but himself he could disorder and anaesthetise. And two whole glasses of wine, perhaps, would lead to the rediscovery of his glorious reptilian heritage … Oona, earlier, had taken a sandwich up to the apartment; and Gloria Beautyman, in a housecoat of brown duffel, wordlessly picked at a bowl of green salad while she stood over the kitchen sink.

Fiction was kitchen-sink, he was deciding. This was the conclusion he was coming to. Social realism was kitchen-sink. The thing being that some sinks, and some kitchens, were much more expensive than others.

He heard the gravel scrape, and then the jeep with its moody rumble, he heard the doors open and then gulp shut again, Whittaker’s low tenor, the rattle of gravel. He read on. It seemed most unlikely, at this point, that Henry Crawford would fuck Fanny Price. So far, though, there tended to be one fuck per book. At any rate,
one fuck per book
was how he expounded it to Lily. But it would be more accurate to say that in every book you
heard
about a fuck. This never happened to the heroines. Heroines weren’t allowed to do that, Fanny wasn’t allowed to do that. And no one had any drugs …

Ten minutes later, with an inconvenienced expression on his face, Keith was pacing down the stone staircase. Its damp slate again diffused the cold sweat of late June. In the hallway he could make out the dropped shopping bags, which gleamed with rigid expensiveness, ice-white. He stepped into the courtyard, where the chill, joining a palpable dew, thickened into mist. Would it hold, kitchen-sink—would social realism hold? He was a K in a castle, after all: he had to be ready for change, for category mistakes and shape-shiftings and bodies becoming different bodies …

For a moment the figure on the far side of the fountain loomed like a large and complicated animal, of uneven mass, and many-limbed. And
he had the brief impression that it was feeding, giving or transferring sustenance … It was Lily and Scheherazade in a static but urgent embrace. They weren’t kissing or anything like that. They were crying. He moved forward. Then Lily opened her eyes and closed them again with a shiver of her chin.

“Why?”
he repeated in the dark. “Come on, Lily, this is … How bad can it be?
What?”

By now, Lily was no longer shedding tears; she merely rasped and groaned every few seconds. How bad could it be? What desolation had awaited them in the bijou boutique, in the Ritz?

“It was the most awful thing ever.”

Keith was concluding that there must have been an accident: the world reduced to what happens in headlights, the school bus and the express train … He heard a thick gulp, a bubbling sniff, and Lily spoke again. It was a thin, circling sound—the voice of a little girl, helplessly circling her bitterest care.

“And it’s
so
much more terrible for Scheherazade …”

“Why?”

“… Because it means she
has
to now.”

“Has to what?”

“… There’s no choice. Everything’s changed with Adriano.”

He waited.

Another groan, another gummy, sticky sniff, and then she said miserably, “He’s a martyr. He was born in 1945. So she has to.”

L
ate the next morning Keith left behind him a decidedly quietened castle and went past the pool and down the slope to apply to Whittaker.

“Let’s take a walk.”

“Where to?”

“You should get out more, Keith, and breathe some fresh air. Instead of sitting in your room all day reading English novels. Just a stroll.”

“Yeah but where to? … Begin from the beginning. Imagine I don’t know anything at all.”

“It was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen … Okay. We did the shopping.”

They did the shopping. And went to the hotel to be reunited with
Adriano. They rode the elevator to the penthouse—Whittaker, and Lily and Scheherazade, with their creels and caskets, their monokini, their gaiety, their youth, in summer dresses. The door slid open and there was Luchino.

“I don’t know what we were expecting exactly. It’s funny. None of us had given it a moment’s thought. Isn’t that odd. Anyway.”

Luchino was six foot three. Also present was Adriano’s younger brother, Tybalt. Tybalt was six foot six. Also present, of course, was Adriano. Adriano was four foot ten. Whittaker went on,

“And you wanted to say,
Hi. What the fuck happened to
him
?
”

“And you couldn’t do that.”

“You couldn’t do that. It was like a stage set. Or a tableau. Or a dream. I kept expecting to get over it. Or get used to it.”

“That’s what Lily said.”

“But none of us did. The tension, the pressure, was beyond anything. You could
hear
it.”

“Then the tea.”

Keith lit a cigarette. They were following the path that encircled the foothills of the opposite mountain, where the valley crashed like a wave against the heights.

“Where are we going?”

“Nowhere. We’re walking. The tea was all laid out on the roof—very Anglo-style, like they are. Lace doilies. Cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. And there were tables but no chairs. No chairs. Luchino, Tybalt—both disgustingly handsome. And then you thought how handsome Adriano was too. But he was all the way down there.”