The Pregnant Widow (27 page)

“With Thumbelina the second?”

Yes. The second. It was not Feliciana who acted as Adriano’s partner at dinner. It was Rachele. Lily said,

“It was a bit much, wasn’t it. Spoon-feeding him two whole bowls of crème brûlée.”

“And sitting on his lap for coffee.”

“With her dress yanked up. No. You’re completely wrong, as usual. Scheherazade couldn’t care less. Didn’t you notice how happy she was? I’ve been sworn to secrecy, but I can’t resist. Timmy rang from Tel Aviv. He’s en route.”

“… Ah. At last. And when will this be?”

“She thinks tomorrow night. But with Timmy you can never tell. You know Timmy. The happy-go-lucky type. She expects him to walk in the door any minute. With his knapsack on his back. You know Timmy.”

“With his knapsack on his back. Yes, we know Timmy. Yes, we know Jorq. They’re rich. So you’re supposed to accept them exactly as they are.”

“Mm. Well. Just think. They’ll have a lovely long weekend in the apartment before Jorquil comes. And now she’s saving herself up. No more handjobs. Conserving herself for Timmy.”

“That’s wise.”

T
he next day he kept to his room, and forced himself to finish
Jane Eyre
. He admired it, but resisted it: more orphans and wards and guardians, more ravings, blazings, blindings. Every twenty minutes he went and smoked on the battlements, and experienced what was technically known as
suicidal ideation
. He didn’t consider it, suicide; he just imagined it. Gravity, the greed of gravity, the gravity-well of the courtyard below. The doings of extinction were at his disposal. It would be like making a pass (a lunge, a pounce)—a pass at death. You would have no doubt about your reception. Scheherazade and Keith: it was over. He drily acknowledged this. And went back to Miss Eyre and Mr. Rochester.

•

Then came the turn.

Over the course of the afternoon he received three visits from three young women. And it turned.

“Oh,” said Scheherazade. She wore the full bikini and had a rolled towel under her arm with more clothes wrapped up in it. “I didn’t know you were here. Excuse me. Would you mind if I had a shower? There’s a shower upstairs but it’s—it isn’t quite as good.”

Less pressure, he thought.

“Less pressure,” she said sleepily. “I like a shower that leaves your skin tingling. Upstairs it’s just a drip. In comparison.”

He sat at the table trying not to: trying not to try to listen. Then came a knock. He got up. And found the stairwell empty. Her voice came from behind him.

“I have to know.”

It was Gloria, a shadowed shape in the passage between the turrets. “What?”

“Does Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr. Darcy?”

He told her.

“And does Jane marry Mr. Bingley? … Thank God for that. Sorry to bother.”

She turned. She turned again. She said, “Are there
grave
ups and downs? Warn me.”

He warned her in non-specific terms about the vicissitudes to be faced, in particular, by Eliza and Fitzwilliam.

“I used to read all the time, but there seemed no point,” said Gloria, “once we were poor.”

The bathtaps were running. At this distance it sounded like a seashell held to the ear.

“Is that Scheherazade in there? … Mm. Fancy that.”

He went back in, and there was silence. Then an hour silently passed. During it (Keith later realised), he read a page and a half of Charlotte Brontë.

“I had a soak in the end,” said Scheherazade. “And daydreamed.”

She now stood over him in her long white shirt; her hair was lank and citric and clung heavily to her neck and shoulders. Glazed yet also unsteady, her eyes reminded him of the encounter with the black silk dressing gown (bumping into things, and the rich smell of sleep). With a look of concern, she said,

“Keith, can I have a word with you later on?”

It was the first time she had used his name. Don’t die, he told himself. Not now. No, please don’t die.

She said, “Around five thirty? By the feminine fountain. While Lily’s in her bath.”

Late in the afternoon he had his third caller, who gave him a cup of tea and a kiss on the crown and a letter from his brother Nicholas. He opened the thing with his face at an angle to it. It was quite long, and its subject was Violet Shackleton.
My dear Little Keith, The foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense …

Yes, he thought.
As though of hemlock I had drunk
.

“Aren’t you going to read it?”

“Uh, not now,” he said. “I’m not in the mood.”

He put the letter back in the envelope, which he installed as his bookmark, three pages from the end of
Jane Eyre
.

Unshaped, unprompted by him, it was hardening into a certainty. All he had to do, from now on, was keep his mouth shut. All he had to do, from now on, was not do anything.

H
e sat by the feminine fountain, around five fifteen, while Lily was in her bath.

In the myths, distressed or aberrant beauties could be transformed into a variety of things and beings. A flower, a bird, a tree, a star, a weeping statue—or a fountain. The fountain in the centre of the courtyard had its own vital statistics, approximately 7′ 6″, 44-18-48. Water gathered in the topmost bowl or basin, then folded its tresses downward, gathering at the waist, and then folding again, hipward. The shape-change from woman to living ornament seemed to have taken place very recently; but this was the fountain that Frieda Lawrence had leant herself against, fifty years ago. Keith had a book with him. He didn’t open it. He just sat there by the feminine fountain, and did the waiting.

She came at him slenderly, in her full peel of youth. So she was wearing that—the bronzed finish of twenty years old; and blue jeans, and white shirt; and an accessory he had seen only once before, in London, that time, as she moved across the lightly puddled parquetry of some college corridor, in her tasselled mortar board and short black gown: a pair of rimless spectacles.

“That’s not quite right, is it? Mutual.”

“No, not quite,” he said. She was referring to the book he had with him—
Our Mutual Friend
. It was possibly the only example in world literature of a solecism enshrined in a title; and it was the author’s last novel, not his first. He said, “It should be our
common
friend. Strictly.”

“Mm. Strictly.”

Don’t do anything, he told himself. He was equally half-convinced that, when it came to interlocution with Scheherazade, all he had to do from now on was not say anything. And yet he felt many consecutive sentences massing and jostling, lobbying, in his throat.

“I’m going to intersperse him with George Eliot,” he said. “But I thought with Dickens I’d start at the end and work backward. It’s strange reading a man. After all those girls. Jane, Emily, Charlotte, Anne. And now George.”

Scheherazade sat back and said, “Gloria thinks George Eliot’s a man. She said,
Would I like him?
Uh, listen … I’ll come to the point in a minute. But before I forget. Rita. I know they liked her in the club. How did they like her in the street? The young men of Montale.”

Keith took stock. He’d told Lily that Rita was more or less ignored by the young men of Montale. But now he spoke the truth: Rita, in town, provoked the sort of commotion that called for cordons and
mounted officers—but not for the water-cannons and rubber bullets demanded by the transit of Scheherazade … He said minimally,

“A considerable disturbance. Still, not like you.” After a moment he said, “Glasses.”

“Glasses. I cleaned my contact lenses and I’m too blind to see where they went. And I wanted to feel studious. It’s like the romantic comedy.
Take off your glasses, Miss Pettigrew. Why, you’re … Who’d have thought it?
All right. Deep breath.”

Her bosom rose and so did his, and the castle itself, standing behind her, seemed to inflate while also losing mass and substance. From her top pocket she took a brown envelope and offered it to him. Keith read: “ETA PPONED 8 DAYS STOP YOU SEE THE THING IS …” Keith read on. Scheherazade said,

“The other night—why didn’t the count kiss me the other night?”

“The count?”

“Count Dracula.”

No, don’t die—please don’t die. He waited. “The count wanted to kiss you,” he then said, and registered the abrupt licence of the third person—the proxy being. “He very much wanted to.”

She glanced away and said, “It’s Lily. Obviously. I hear how things are between you and our mutual friend. When you broke up before, that was mainly her doing, wasn’t it?”

He nodded.

“Well it’s going to be mainly her doing all over again. As I’m sure you know. After your friend Kenrik. But you don’t want to hurt Lily. And neither do I. And she would be hurt. So here’s a suggestion for you. How are your feelings? About me.”

“I think—under control. Now.”

“Are they? I used to sense something coming from you. I liked it in a way. I didn’t, I didn’t return it, but I liked it … Now, I don’t know you very well. But I do know this about you. If we, if you and I started something, something open-ended, it wouldn’t be in you to disguise it from Lily. Would it.”

He saw that this was crucially and forcefully true, and he just said, “No.”

“Then here’s a suggestion for you.”

For me? I, the unkind, ungrateful? He looked out sentimentally at his friends: the ethereal castanets of the butterflies. Keith had the
deeply warming sense that Scheherazade was much older—and much wiser—than he was. She put her glasses back on (the brown eyes were now lost in ellipses of white light), saying,

“All summer, what is it—once?—she’s come across the courtyard with her lamp? Lily. And found us playing cards. She’s had a funny feeling and come looking. Once in—what?—about twenty nights? One in twenty?”

He nodded.

“So. So if it’s just once, there’s a five per cent chance that Lily’ll find out. If it’s twice, then that number rises. And not to ten. Because you’ll change, and she’ll know. There’s a maid’s room beyond the apartment. She’d have to be awfully curious to find her way up there. So. That’s my suggestion. Once.”

“Once.”

She stood. She turned. She turned her whole body round but went on looking at him through her oval sheets of white.

“What are we now—Wednesday? Saturday, then, Saturday. No Adriano. No Jorquil, yet. And of course no Timmy. Just me and you. And when we play Racing Demon, I’ll start with a glass of champagne … Quite tiring, saying all that. But you understand. I don’t want love. I just want a fuck. Now that didn’t sound at all right, did it? But you know what I mean.”

Keith thought he might have to be sick; and then it passed. He lit a cigarette, in this green setting, and watched her walk away. With a curious short-stepped tread, risen up in the shoulders, as if on tiptoe; but her heels and soles, and their grass halms, stayed firmly on the earth … And now the feminine fountain, punctually overflowing.

It is straightforward, Keith soon thought. It was a necessary adjustment, and he was halfway there anyway. He would have to avail himself of what was already waiting for him: a lower order of being.

“All right,” he said.

All right. A lower order of angel. Not the rapt seraph, that adores and burns. A lower order of angel. No, just a man. Adam, and after the Fall.

Seventy-two hours lay ahead of him. And he noticed almost immediately that something was the matter with time.

W
hy are you staring at your watch like that? You were doing it at dinner. Like an old yokel. As if you’ve never seen one before.”

“It’s gone wrong.” He shook it and listened to it. “It’s almost stopped. Look. It’s on the blink. See? The second hand.”

“What about it?”

“It’s stopped moving. It’s hardly moving … You mean it’s
meant
to be like that?”

The thing he was most worried about doing was this: dying. Apart from not dying, though, all he had to do was not do anything. And keep his mouth shut. He went back to worrying about acts of God, and earthquakes, and nuclear war, and extraterrestrial invasion, and plagues and volcanoes. And Timmy. The unannounced eruption of Timmy—the rolling orange smoke and scarlet hellflames, far more terrible than any Etna or Stromboli. Keith knew that it was only the world that stood in his way. Would the world let him, that was the point. Would the planet permit it?

On Wednesday night, up in the tower, Jupiter and Juno were nowhere to be seen, and Branwell Brontë (somehow located and brought to his senses) made love to his sister Charlotte. No. Charlotte made love to her sister Emily. No. Emily made love to her sister Anne—the sickliest and most enfeebled combination possible, with Emily dead at thirty, and Anne
(Agnes Grey)
dead at twenty-nine … Keith made love to Lily—a performance, such as it was, that he vowed to repeat on Thursday night and Friday night. And on Saturday afternoon, to insulate and pre-prolong his time with Scheherazade. He would make love to Lily on Saturday afternoon, he decided. Either that, or he’d have an episode of applied narcissism. Yeah. Either that or a handjob.

She said later, “He didn’t even have the nerve to ring her up and tell her. Then he added insult to injury with the telegram. You should’ve seen it.”

In fact Keith found he knew Timmy’s telegram by heart. Lily said,

“I could barely keep a straight face.”

And yes, Keith too had had difficulty not laughing or at least not smiling. ETA PPONED 8 DAYS STOP YOU SEE THE THING IS OLD THING THAT ABDULLAH HAS OFFERED ME A ONCE IN A LIFETIME CHANCE TO TAKE ON THE BLACK BEAR
REPEAT THE BLACK BEAR IN THE RESERVE JUST BEYOND AZ ZARQA STOP YOU SEE THE THING IS OLD ABDULLAH IS PRETTY SURE THAT THEY … And so on. But Keith’s smile, now, in the dark, was one of awe and infinite gratitude, even before Lily said feelingly,

“And she was
so
full of plans. The first thing she was going to do was sort of squidge her tits over every inch of his body. Then at least an hour of
soixante-neuf
. And there he is messing around in, where is it? Petra?”