The Pregnant Widow (28 page)

“A rose-red city, Lily, half as old as time.” Keith’s watch was fake-antique but phosphorescent (with three black hands, prettily barbed, like gutting swords): it now asked him to believe that it was not even half past eleven. “What did you think of Claudia? There’s a definite pattern. Adriano’s girlfriends are getting taller. Not younger, though. They all look like ageing starlets.”

But Lily just went on angrily, “He hasn’t set eyes on her in three months. He wouldn’t even recognise her. Now that she’s oozing out all over.”

In five days’ time I’ll be twenty-one (he said to himself). Saturday will be the climax of my youth: the end of the first act. So it’s only to be expected—these thoughts of sins and wrongs (Dilkash, Pansy). It’s only to be expected—these little fears and enemies, these small fears and tiny enemies.

T
hinking about going down on Scheherazade, he had already discovered, made a change from thinking about being gone down on by Scheherazade, and thinking about the two things happening at the same time made a change from both, but now Thursday towered over him, and he felt like a man due to begin a prison term of fantastic duration (unambiguously unsurvivable, such as the half-millennium sentences handed down to the worst possible mass murderers in the USA), or like an ascetic backing into a pothole in Surinam, committed to remain within until the arrival of Christ or the Mahdi (or the End of Time), or like a … Keith rolled over and tried to steady his thoughts. He was carefully sunning himself in the garden (touching up the backs of his legs), with
Our Mutual Friend
pressed out on the grass
(Take off your bra, Miss Pettigrew. Why you’re …)
, and occasionally absorbing the
odd sentence, or clause
(Take off your pants, Miss Pettigrew … Who’d have thought it?):
he was reading about the scapegrace John Harmon, and that mercenary minx little Bella Wilfer …

The main thing he didn’t like about Timmy was this business about him being
happy-go-lucky
. I know Timmy. You know Timmy. And that would be just like him, wouldn’t it—to scrag a black bear or two, hail a jeep, catch the next plane out of Amman, and stroll in through the door with his knapsack on his back? Keith’s watch had now stopped even trying to keep the time. Wait. It gave a tick. And then, after a while, it gave another. Unbelievably, it was still only nine fifteen.

Anticipation,
looking forward
, not as a passive state, but as the busiest and brightest of activities: that was youth. And the waiting taught him something literary too. He now understood why
dying
was for centuries a poetic synonym for the completion of the male sexual act
(And so live ever—or else swoon to death)
. In that moment, but not before, it was all right to die.

“How much is that rat in the window?” said Whittaker. “The one with the slithery tail.”

“It’s not a rat. Maybe a terrier,” said Lily. “Crossed with a small dachshund.”

“No, it’s the eyes that give it away,” said Scheherazade. “And the whiskers.”

“That chow in its bowl,” said Whittaker. “It’s not its kind of thing. It wants a nice selection of garbage.”

“Served in a little can,” said Scheherazade, “that looks like a dustbin.”

“You’re so horrible,” said Lily.

“How much
is
that rat? I’m going to go ask,” said Whittaker, pronouncing
ask
like an Englishman and entering the shop to the sound of a chime.

“Lily, if it’s cheap you’ll have to buy it,” said Scheherazade. “You can keep it in a breadbin in your room.”

“You’re so mean. Dogs have feelings too you know.”

“Yeah, but not many,” said Keith, who heard the church bells tolling ten. “The humane thing would be to buy it and set it free.”

“Mm. The Blob—oops—could take it back to Naples,” said Scheherazade. “And set it loose on the wharf.”

“Stop it. Look—it hates you. Both of you. You’re torturing it.”

And indeed a ragged volley of squeaks or snaps now came echoing against the glass.

“Don’t laugh at it! That’s the worst thing you can do!”

This was Gloria, who stood a few yards away with her sketchbook held out in front of her; she was blinking across the square at the foolish grandeur of Santa Maria.

“You mustn’t ever do that,” she called out. “You mustn’t ever laugh at dogs.”

The door chimed again, and Whittaker was uncertainly saying, “It’s—it’s free. The rat doesn’t cost anything at all. It’s been there for a year and a half and no one’s ever even asked about it.”

They stood in silence. To spend your life in a pet-shop window, thought Keith. On sale, with no one buying or even asking. The occlusion, the
virginity …

“And there’s worse to come,” said Whittaker. “Its name’s Adriano.”

This wasn’t at all funny either.

“… What’s
that?”
said Gloria, who had just approached, with the pad clutched to her chest. “I don’t understand. I thought it was supposed to be a dog.”

“And oh look, it’s crying.”

“Those are old tears, Lily,” said Keith. “They dried long ago.”

While Gloria lingered, the others moved off; and on their way up the steep ascent they got stuck behind a herd of goats. They crept along behind, and the old rams jinked and tinkled to the rhythm of their slowly shuffling shoulders. And what you couldn’t help seeing was a truly atrocious array of genital mishaps and deformations.
Look at that one
, they were all silently saying.
Jesus, look at that one
. Seen from the rear, the herd was a lurching pageant of string bags, each containing some blighted vegetable—a rotten tuber, a cratered spud, two black avocados.
Christ Almighty, look at
that
one
.

“The wages of sin,” said Gloria, catching up. “Well there you are you see.”

Later, much later, much, much later, as they made the coffee, Gloria came into the kitchen with a single sheet of white paper.

“A drawing,” she said on her way out, “of your rat.”

And there was Adriano, uncannily present, every ripple of close coarse hair, the static energy of the umbilical tail, the white loop of its collar, the pomp of its padded perch.

“… She’s good,” said Scheherazade.

“Yes,” said Keith, “but it’s not quite right, is it.”

“No.”

“No,” said Lily. “You see what she’s done? She’s made it look like a dog.”

They considered this. Scheherazade said,

“Still. Not just a pretty face.”

“A pretty face,” said Lily. “And a gigantic—”

“Yes, I keep thinking I’m going to start taking it for granted,” said Scheherazade. “But every time she turns round, I hear myself saying,
God …”

A
nd just when you thought they might start talking about something else—about (for instance) the currents and mass emotions that still swayed them, about the systems of thought and belief they were not yet free of, about the fact that they all contained crowds within their own being, crowds in conflict that marched, bore placards, chanted slogans, and sang their old, old songs—Gloria Beautyman, down by the pool, sat on a bee.

Unprecedentedly (and she would immediately revert), Gloria was wearing a normal onepiece swimsuit, without the additional skirts or shorts or pleats. And for that liberty she was at once repaid—with a devilish sting on the arse.

This’ll get us through the next few minutes, thought Keith, as they all gathered round, he and the girls and Whittaker, and Adriano (and Pia).

“It felt like a
burn,”
Gloria was saying. With her ring finger she wiped away a single tear. “Like a really bad
burn.”

The thick dark roots of her hair bathed with moisture her pained forehead; and Keith had the leisure to observe that she looked strangely serious as well as exotic, as if she’d just swum a relay race in a kibbutz on the Golan Heights, or rescued a child from the shallows in some decadent Middle Eastern capital—Beirut, Bahrain. She frowned down and sideways, and with her hooked thumb revealed the quarter-moon. Four colours: the black of the suit, the incensed plume of the sting’s circumference, the teak of her tanned thigh, and the paler flesh everlastingly deprived of sun—which wasn’t white, by any means (whatever she liked to think), but the colour of damp sand.

“Keith, I’m disgusted with you,” said Whittaker quietly, as they settled in the shade. “And you call yourself a het. Even I could barely stop myself. Why didn’t you offer to give it a bite and suck the poison out?”

“Yeah well I was distracted.” Didn’t you see, Whittaker, how Scheherazade’s tits looked when she bent over Gloria’s arse like that? Squeezed even closer together, as she leant forward to admire the work of the dying bee. “I thought I’d leave that to Adriano. It’s his kind of thing.”

“You could’ve at least offered to kiss it better. Mm. Interesting. Maybe you need to be gay. It’s a peach, Gloria’s arse, but maybe you need to be a fruit to see it.”

“Maybe.” But the new angle—the new
elevation
—of the tits, Whittaker. “It was widely admired in Ofanto, Gloria’s arse.”

“I bet. By the local faggots. But you don’t get the picture. That is one beautiful arse.”

And here she came again, Scheherazade, and her tits were hurrying down the terraces with a bottle of calamine lotion—for Gloria’s arse.

Pull the other one, and tell it to the marines, and don’t make me laugh, and fuck off out of it, and all that, but the fact remained that it was still only two forty-five. Keith resolved to kill some more time, as best he could, by being very considerate to Lily.

They even went for a walk.

“And she hates him killing birds or fish or foxes, let alone
bears
. Timmy’s on a knife-edge. She’s got a good mind to let him get here and then boot him straight out again.”

And Keith allowed himself to imagine how nice he’d find it, later on—being in love with Scheherazade, living with Scheherazade, marrying Scheherazade, brimming Scheherazade with his children. It was Lily who steered him back to earth, saying,

“God, and what he’s missing … You know, I think she’s picked up some ideas from Rita. Scheherazade’s not the Dog, obviously, but still. Remember what Kenrik said about her eyelashes? Using her eyelashes to tickle his tip? She thought that sounded rather sweet.”

Adriano’s devoted dinner guest that night, Nerissa, was five foot five, and most affectionate. After coffee, Adriano wiped his mouth and confirmed his intention to drive all night, in his Maserati, to Piacenza—pre-season training with
I Furiosi
.

O
n Friday morning they prepared a picnic and went to the sea.

Not to the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean, literally the world’s middle and, metaphorically (according to a famous novel), also its box—the Mediterranean had already tried and failed to impress Keith Nearing. Yes, this’ll take a minute: the Italian Mediterranean. Duckboards, open-air washrooms, foot buckets, deckchairs, parasols, the weary little waves—and the Italians, half amused, half scandalised, and maintaining a careful distance between themselves and the sun and the sand and the saltwater (how they writhed and wriggled under the showers). Everybody, Keith thought, seemed to have far too many clothes on. Only Gloria, coming out on to the porch of the changing-hut in her linoleum petals, looked at ease in it all.

So on Friday, after breakfast, they made the longer journey east—to the Adriatic.

Keith steered the old Fiat. It was just him and the three girls. Lily said,

“Can’t you go any faster?”

“Craters,” he said. “And mad Italians everywhere.”

“We’ve hardly seen a car all morning. Look. His knuckles are white. At this rate we won’t even ever get there.”

As they came down the last of the slopes, under sudden cloud, Keith felt he was driving on level land—and felt that the sea was steeply rising, ramping up like a dark cliff … They found the place Scheherazade knew. The deserted shore, the towering softness of the air, the sinking softness of the sand. One by one they entered the glitter of a colder brine.

“Let’s not just splash around in the waves,” said Scheherazade. “Come on, I dare everyone. Come on. Let’s go—out there.”

So they went—they went out there, way, way out … They pushed off and swam and swam, four trusting amphibians heading for the distant systems—the clouds that lived where the sky met the sea. Keith swam at Lily’s side. He paid as little attention as he could to all the sharks, barracuda, giant octopi, swordfish, crocodiles, leviathans, and so on, squirming around directly beneath; these creatures, he soon imagined, were now playing eenie-meenie-minie-mo with the four pairs of legs—their legs, toasted, succulent. And soon the terror became abstract, and was qualified by hilarity: the very weight of the water that
supported him, the insane distance from the strand, the horizon as sharp and straight as a razor but trying to send an awful message about the curvature of the earth.

It seemed they would swim their way to Albania and its golden sands. But Scheherazade turned back, then Lily, then Keith; and when he finally hauled his great weight out of the water (it was like stepping down from the trampoline), Gloria was still out there, way, way out, a black dot in the greenish blue.

“She’s turned,” said Scheherazade. “I think she’s turned.”

Keith sat on the rocks and incredulously reattached the manacle of his wristwatch (it was barely noon) and smoked a Disque Bleu much enhanced by the salt and the ozone … His mother Tina: she used to go
out there
—way, way out. On every fine summer day she took the children to the beach, and at some point she would rise from her towel, and go out there, way, way out. Keith always watched with admiration and not anxiety, her self-sufficient breaststroke, as she moved beyond the hulk of the anchored tanker and disappeared from sight just below the edge of the world. Nicholas was seven, and Keith was four, and the sleeping sister, whom they were to guard, was perhaps eleven months. Violet, whom they were to guard, as their mother went—out there, way, way out. And Tina, then, was just twenty-five. Twenty-five years old …