The Pregnant Widow (29 page)

Gloria came wading through the shallows—to scattered applause. Five minutes later Scheherazade idled over to the rocks (Lily was lying on her front with her head facing the other way) and said evenly,

“The bedroom beyond the apartment. There’s a way to the north staircase … If the worst comes to the worst.”

He nodded.

“It won’t sound very good, but we can say we were out on the north terrace looking at the stars.”

She moved, again with the strange tread, levitational, the shoulder blades raised, the heels on the shingly sand …

How far away was the horizon? Keith supposed that it must be a constant, this distance, the same for every observer on every level shore: the point of curvature. And that was the awful thing. If you reached it, if you crossed it and looked back, then, as mariners said, you
sank
your point of departure—you sank the land, you sank Italy, and the castle, and the bedroom beyond the apartment.

I
t was during the journey back from the beach (Scheherazade drove, and fast, as if against time) that Keith got his next important idea: drugging Lily. Now this would be a brazenly purposive act, and a clear violation of the premium rule about not doing anything. But Keith had at last intuited it—the nature of his special scruple.

He thought that Scheherazade’s assessment was about right: there was a five per cent chance that as she trembled into unconsciousness Lily would feel a blip on her witch radar—and take up the lantern and come looking. And five per cent, Keith ascertained, was too high. It had also not escaped him that such a phantom, the lady with the lamp, might do more than abbreviate his time with Scheherazade: it might actually preclude it. One in twenty—when all else seemed consummate, when all else shimmered with perfection, wasn’t that exactly the kind of thought that reached down and blocked your blood? Reached down to thwart the instrument of yearning …

Besides. You see, he had now identified the peculiarity of the impediment, the obstruction, the glass wall. And it had to do with the young men of Ofanto, the young men of Montale. Keith could not add his yea and nay, he could not add his vote to those of the young men. That, in some inexpiable sense, would be to laugh while Lily cried. Betraying her by preferring another: this was something he fully intended to do. But the ballot must remain a secret ballot. The point being that he had to get away with it. Keith wasn’t going to hurt Lily. He was going to drug her instead.

There weren’t any rapist-style opiates or horse-stunning soporifics he could get his hands on. But Lily herself had some large and smelly brown pills (the label on the bottle said
Azium: for anxiety)
which she took when she travelled—and slept—by air. So on Friday evening Keith test-drove an Azium. He chopped it up with a razor blade, and secreted the shavings into a glass of
prosecco
(this was Lily’s aperitif of choice): it was utterly tasteless to his tongue. And as he picked at dinner he felt the dispersal of the little cares and enemies, and his fingertips hummed to the touch of soft materials, and he could barely stay awake during the punctual felony with his identical twin (10:40 to 10:55). Scheherazade, at the table, looked like the handiwork of a salacious but artistic robotician—and generic. Generic, at last, and not especially Scheherazade.

That Friday night, Tweedledum had sex with Tweedledee. Or was it the other way round? Did Tweedledee, in actual fact, have sex with Tweedledum?

“I love you,” said Lily in the dark.

“And I love you too.”

T
he drug gave him continuous sleep—and continuous dreams. And after a night spent losing his passport and failing to rescue Violet and missing trains and nearly going to bed with Ashraf (her aunt kept coming to tea) and sitting exams in the nude (with an empty fountain pen), Keith awoke to
criticism …

Where did the criticism come from? Not from Lily, who, as soon as she heard or sensed the freed latch, rose noiselessly from his side and slipped into the bathroom. The criticism, the unusually harsh and personal criticism, came from within. Its source was what he had learnt to call the
superego
. The superego—as opposed to the ego and the id, or the
egoid
. The egoid was the useful bit, faithfully devoting itself to socio-sexual advancement. The superego was the voice of conscience, and of culture. It was also the voice of the elders: his forebears (whoever they were) and his guardians, Tina and Karl, both of whom, naturally, were champions of Lily—and of honourable conduct between the sexes. Perhaps, then, the superego was the secret policeman.

In sarong and bikini top, Lily was saying, “Are you coming down? What’s the matter?”

“Yeah.” He knew this sometimes happened. The present disquiet focused on something that was a knight’s move away from its cause; and it was to do with Ruaa, maybe, and it was to do with
time …
It was eight o’clock,
ante meridiem;
soon his fateful delectation would slip out of the penumbra of the twelve hours. Scheherazade was coming up on the East Pacific, and heading west over the Yellow Sea. He said, “This is weird. I’m feeling bad about
Dil
kash. All of a sudden.”

“Dilkash? Listen. Have you read your letter yet?” Lily had a T-shirt over her head (its neck was snagged on a hairclip) and you could see her smothered lips saying, “But you didn’t even fuck Dilkash.”

“Of
course
I didn’t.”

“Well then. So you’re innocent of the worst thing. Sex once or twice
and then not even a phone call. What does Nicholas say?
Screwed and scrapped. Fucked and forgotten.”

“… Of
course
I didn’t fuck Dilkash. Christ.” He lifted a hand to his brow. “The very idea. But I did—I did forget her. I did that part of it. I did do that.”

“Well you needn’t look quite so stricken.”

“It was Nicholas,” he said, “who introduced me to her. He had a holiday job at the
Statesman
and Dilkash was a temp. He said,
Dilkash—so
sweet
. Come and meet Dilkash
. She was in the—”

“Why d’you think I want to hear about Dilkash? And after Dilkash we’ll have an hour on Doris and her pants. Tea or coffee? Are you coming down?”

“In a while,” he said, and turned over, trying to ease the ache in his neck … Dilkash, Lily, was allowed to “meet” but she was forbidden to “mingle”—to be in public with a man who was not a relative. She was allowed to entertain me in her room, which she did most evenings (six thirty to nine) for almost two months. We feared no interruption, no, Lily, none, from her festively welcoming parents, the senior Khans, who watched TV and drank pop in the big sitting room upstairs. Anyway, at first, there was nothing to interrupt. We just sat and talked.

You’re sad
, she once said.
You seem happy, but you’re sad
.

Do I? I had a—I had a confusing time with a girl. In the summer. She’s gone back up north. But I’m happy now
.

Are you? Good, then I’m happy too
.

Her older sister, bespectacled Perrin, sometimes knocked, Lily, and waited, and then looked in for a chat. But the one we had to watch out for was Pervez, her seven-year-old brother. Little Pervez, richly handsome, ever silent: he threw the door open, he came in and it was always a serious chore getting him out again; he would bunch himself up on the sofa with his arms tightly folded. Pervez hated me, Lily, and I hated him back; but it was impressive, Pervez’s frown, made redoubtable by his luxuriant eyebrows—the frown, the scowl (Keith would later think), of the rejectionist.

There came a night—it was perhaps my twentieth visit … Her room was dark anyway, Lily (that sodden garden wall), and it darkened another shade as I reached out across a great distance and took her hand. For some time we sat there side by side, staring straight ahead, speechless,
and full of emotion. And it was almost a deliverance when, without any warning at all, the door was wrenched open by Pervez.

As she was seeing me out, Lily, and our hands again touched, I said,

I could feel your heart beating
.

And she said,
And I could feel yours
.

There was more, Lily. And this will be a good way of timing the night as it moves across Siberia. And Pakistan. There was not much more, Lily; but there was more.

Now Keith climbed naked from the bed and resumed being happy. It was the day all boys love best. It was Saturday.

Apart from the pitifully crippled clock on the wall above the open window, the castle kitchen, that morning, presented a scene of crystallised normality. Scheherazade with her vast bowl of cereal, Lily with her grapes and clementines, Gloria with her toast and marmalade. Until recently, Keith himself was starting the day with a cooked breakfast; but he feared the microbes in the gamey bacon, just as he feared H-bombs,
ejaculatio praecox
, revolution, dysentery, the man strolling in through the door with his knapsack on his back … As he leant into the fridge for a plain yoghurt, Scheherazade reached past him for the milk. There were no words or smiles or gestures, yet his eyes were somehow directed to the bottle of champagne half hidden by peaches and tomatoes on the lowest ledge.

“Yesterday we swam the marathon,” she said. “Let’s have a lazy day today.”

Scheherazade in nightdress and flip-flops. She filled her vast bowl yet again. The legs crossed, calf on shin; the innocence of the flip-flops. More constructive, at this stage, to think about the inner thighs, softer and moister than the outer … He left her there beneath the slow, creaking loop of the overhead fan. And we don’t quite trust the overhead fan, do we. Because it always seems to be unscrewing itself.

K
eith sat alone at the stone table, where he unexpectedly succeeded in getting through an hour’s worth of
The Mill on the Floss:
the adorable, the irresistible Maggie Tulliver was being led astray by the foppish Stephen Guest. Maggie’s reputation—and so her life—was about to be
destroyed. The two of them were alone on a punt together, floating down the river on the current, floating down the Floss …

So
, he asked huskily, drawing deep on his Disque Bleu,
how was it for you?

And Dilkash said,
It was … Of course, I was a bit frightened at first
.

Of course. Only natural
.

That’s true
.

More frightened or less frightened than you expected?

Oh, less
.

You’re eighteen. You couldn’t postpone it for ever. The next time it won’t seem such a big thing
.

That’s true. The next time. And thank you for being so gentle
.

What they were talking about, these two, was Dilkash’s first kiss—her first kiss ever. He had just administered it. Keith didn’t take her by surprise. They discussed the whole question beforehand … Her lips were the same colour as her skin, with the transition marked only by the change in texture. These lips did not part, and neither did his, as he kissed the flesh-hued mouth in the mouth-hued face.

The next time
, he began—

But then the door was yanked open—by the implacable Pervez, who came and stood over them, satanically handsome, with folded arms. And there was no second kiss. He stopped calling. He never saw her again.

Now Keith sneezed, yawned, and stretched. The frogs and their gurgle of satisfaction. The ratcheting cicadas with their ratcheted question and answer, trying to stutter it out—always the same answer, always the same question.

W
here was your father posted?”

The girls were foraging in the kitchen. After the Old Testament of breakfast, the Mahabharata of lunch. The clock, once in a blue moon, ticked. Or tocked. Or clocked. Or clicked, or clucked, or clacked. Gloria said,

“Cairo before the war. Then Lisbon. Then Helsinki. Then Reykjavik. Iceland.”

How to sum up this particular diplomatic career? Keith, who welcomed
the distraction, was searching his lexicon for the opposite of
meteoric
. He said neutrally (from now on he would confine his remarks to the self-evident—commonplaces, tautologies), “Heading north. Do you remember Lisbon?”

“I was an infant in Lisbon. I remember Helsinki,” she said, and gave a genuine shiver. “Colder than Iceland. Cairo’s the part he talks about. Mm. The royal wedding.”

“What royal wedding?” said Scheherazade. “Who between?”

Gloria sat back in her chair. She said contentedly (Jorquil, in contrast to Timmy, was already racing to her arms, Dover, Paris, Monaco, Florence), “King Farouk’s sister, Fawzia, and the future Shah of Iran. Very unpopular in both countries. Because they’re different sects. And Fawzia’s mother stormed off—something about the dowry. The party lasted five weeks.”

Keith watched as Gloria lowered her head beneath the table; it soon reappeared (the straw bag), and she placed before him his corrugated copy of
Pride and Prejudice
.

“Thanks. I enjoyed that. And it’s
not
about marrying for money. Who told me it was? Was it you, Scheherazade?”

“No. It was me.”

“You? And aren’t you supposed to be good at this kind of thing? Reading books? You’re quite wrong. Elizabeth turns Darcy down flat the first time, remember. And her father forbids her to marry him if it’s just because he’s rich—really near the end too. I was aghast.”

Pride and Prejudice
, Keith could have said, had but a single flaw: the absence, towards the close, of a forty-page sex scene. But of course he kept quiet and only waited. Every ten minutes the clock on the dresser managed another arthritic jolt. Which, he supposed, was
relativity
. Scheherazade said,

“Anyway, it’s a happy ending.”

“Yes,” said Gloria.

“Except for that slag who fucks the dragoon,” said Lily.

He took his mug of coffee up on to the battlements. It was half past three.

You can start coming to the office again
, said Nicholas on the phone.
Dilkash has packed up her biros and her stencils and has gone on her way. After a month of staring at the phone. Pining. Pining its little heart out for her Keith
.