The Pregnant Widow (33 page)

“How far did you get?”

“Shoes,” she said.

They both looked down. White high heels. He said,

“So. Not very far.”

“No. Not very far at all.”

She tipped her head at an angle and gave him a flat smile. The polite cough:
“Huh-hm.”
Then she looked him up and down in a way that made him feel, for a moment, that he had come to fix the loose tiles or see to the plumbing. She turned and slowly walked.

Jesus Christ. Say
, No bee sting.
Say it. No bee sting
.

He said, “No bee sting.”

She halted, and ran a hand down the small of her back. “To tell you the truth, Keith, I put a dab on that too. While I was at it. You know. Concealer.”

He thought, I am in a very strange place: I am in the future. And this is the strangest thing of all: I know exactly what to do … Lit by the innards of the storm, all the colours in the room were lurid, torrid, morbid, even the whites. Another strange thought: the vulgarity of the colour white.
Step forward
.

Stepping forward, he said, after a while, “So pale. So cold.”

She moved her feet apart.

His towel seemed to make a lot of noise when it fell—like a collapsing marquee. Her dress made no sound at all. The first thing she did, with her gaze on the mirror, was attend to her breasts in a way he had never seen before. She said ardently,

“Oh, I love me. Oh I love me so.”

Neither blinked as thunder split the room. He went even closer in.

She brought her legs together. “Kadoink,” she said.

Make a joke. Make two jokes. It doesn’t matter what they are, but the first one has to be dirty
.

“You forgot to dry yourself.”

Her spine quivered and arched.

“Because you were distracted by higher things.”

“Look,” she said to the figures in the glass. “I’m a boy. I’ve got a cock too.”

Say
, You
are
a cock.
Say it. You
are
a cock
. “You
are
a cock,” he said.

“… How on
earth
did you know? I
am
a cock. And we’re very rare—girls who are cocks. Stand back a minute.”

She leant over with parted legs and her small left fist tightened on the towel rack.

“Look. The sting’s actually quite far in. Look.”

She was doing something, with her right hand, that he had seen before, but never at this angle.
Say something about money
.

“I want to buy it a present. Your arse. Silk. Mink.”

She was doing something, with her right hand, that he had never even heard about.

“Look what happens,” she said, “when I use two fingers.”

It was then that he had his moment of vertigo. I’m too young, he thought, to go to the future. Then the vertigo passed and the hypnosis returned. She said,

“Look what happens. Not to the arse. To the cunt.”

He stared on at it leadenly—at the far future.

“… Some might say that it’s a bit droll—to
start
with this. But we’re having a black mass, you and I. You know—backward. Everything the wrong way round. Stay still, and I’ll do it all. Understand? And try your hardest not to come.”

“Good,” she said, as, some minutes later, her knees settled on the bath-mat. “Now. The only way to spin this out is for me to be a bit of a chatterer for a while—do you mind? … You can talk while you do most other things … Often to no great purpose, in my opinion … But you can’t talk while you … while you … Now here’s something you’ve probably never seen before … Big as this is, and very hard. As hard as the towel rack. I can make it completely disappear. And then come back even bigger. Oh look. It’s even bigger already.”

Yeah, he thought. Yeah, that’s the spirit, Gloria. If you want it big, just
tell
it it’s big.

“Completely disappear. Watch. In the mirror … Again? … Again? … Right. In a minute I’m going to speed up. Now listen carefully.”

He listened carefully—as she issued a set of instructions. He had never heard about this either (he would later characterise it as the
sinister refinement)
. He said,

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Right. I’m going to speed up. I won’t be doing any more talking. But I will be making rather a lot of noise. And afterwards, Keith, we’ll have a light breakfast and go to my room. Agreed? Then at last you can feel my breasts. And kiss my lips. And hold my hand … We’ll make a day of it. Or would you rather get on with your trial review?”

They were the children of the Golden Age (1948?–73), elsewhere known as
Il Miracolo Economico, La Trente Glorieuses, Der Wirtschaftswunder
. The Golden Age, when they never had it so good.

What you could hear in the background, during this period, was progress music. The sort of music you heard, for instance, in Cliff Richard’s
The Young Ones
(1961). We don’t mean the songs. We’re thinking of that long sequence when, with a tap-tap here and a knock-knock there, and to the sound of progress music, the young ones transform a derelict building into a thriving community centre—a youth club, for the young ones.

In the Golden Age progress music was heard in the background by nearly everybody. The first phone, the first car, the first house, the first summer holiday, the first TV—all to progress music. Then the arrival of sexual intercourse, in 1966, and the full ascendancy of the children of the Golden Age.

In the First World, now,
the greying of the globe
, as demographers put it,
will constitute the most significant population shift in history
. The Golden Age turned into the Silver Tsunami, the Sixties Crowd became the sixties crowd, and the young ones, now, were all old ones.

“With the sole exception,” he told his wife, “of Cliff Richard. He’s
still
a young one.”

.    .    .

“I used to have a birthday suit,” he continued. “But something’s gone wrong with it. It doesn’t fit any more. And it’s all worn out. I could take it to Jeeves’s, I suppose. But this needs to go to the invisible menders.”

“See the doctor again,” she said. “See the one you quite liked at St. Mary’s.”

“Great. From Club Med to Club Med.”

The first Club Med, or Club Mediterranean, was the name of the network of attractive resorts that dedicated itself to those between the ages of eighteen and thirty. The second Club Med, or Club Medico, was the name of the hospital cafeteria at St. Mary’s. There were no age restrictions at the second Club Med, though it did seem to cater to a more mature clientele. He said,

“I didn’t tell you. Last time I went, the guy said I might have CFS. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Uh, myalgic encephalo … encephalomyelitis. Or ME. A virus in the cerebellum. But apparently I don’t. Anyway. You know, Pulc, I think I’m getting better.” He hadn’t called her that for some time (a diminutive of Pulchritude). “It was just psychological.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Not sure. Touch wood. And it
is
depressing. Think. From the Me Decade to the ME Decade. From Club Med to Club Med. Great.”

• • •

We come to item four in the revolutionary manifesto, and, yes, this was the one that caused most of the grief.

… In the seventeenth century, it is said, there was a
dissociation of sensibility
. The poets could no longer think and feel at the same time. Shakespeare could do it, the Metaphysicals could do it; they could write brainily about feeling and sex. But it went. The poets could no longer naturally think and feel at the same time.

All we are saying is that something analogous happened while the children of the Golden Age were becoming men and women. Feeling was already separated from thought. And then feeling was separated from sex.

So the position of feeling found itself (again) shifted. This was the one that almost did for him, and for scores of thousands—perhaps tens of millions—of others.

• • •

When the end came, and closed the eyes that had loved themselves too much, the glassy youth entered the Land of the Dead
.

A shadowsmear: that was all. That was all the mirroring water was ever going to give him—a shadowsmear
.

The nymphs of the forests and fountains cropped their hair and wailed. And Echo, or Echo’s ghost, or Echo’s echo, echoed his last words:
Farewell, farewell. Alas, alas, alas.
No one found his body. What they found was a flower: a yellow heart in a ruff of white petals
.

We are given to understand that the dissolution—the fading, the shrivelling—of the glassy youth was completed in the course of a day and a night. In this he differed from his children, the children of the Golden Age.

• • •

Silvia said she’d be dropping in to show them her new uniform. Her new uniform—as a feminist. And Keith prepared himself for a surprise, because Silvia was like that. In the kitchen, with a torpid flourish, she removed her woollen overcoat (it was May 15, 2003), and said torpidly,

“It’s a joke, isn’t it.” She was wearing a white miniskirt daubed with the red cross of St. George, a halter top with HOOKER stamped across the chest—plus several items of (detachable) jewellery in her navel, in her lower lip, and in both nostrils. “I give it six months. But it’s a
joke.”

“I hope that washes off.”

“Come on, Mum, of course it washes off. D’you think I want a nest of snakes all over my hips when I’m ninety? I’m going on a strip-club crawl. With the sisters. We’re all got up like this. I hope you’re proud.”

Before she left, she asked Keith something—how he learnt about the birds and the bees.

“Uh, in stages. And different versions. A shitty little kid at school who scared the life out of me. Then Nicholas. Then a biology class. While we were dissecting a worm.”

“And you know how I got
my
sex education? How Nat and Gus got theirs? How Isabel and Chloe’ll get theirs? We’re
porny.”

He said, “Can’t we improve on
porny
, Silvia? … How about
pornoid?”

“All right. Pornoid. Yeah, that’s good. It’s more like
paranoid
. And
when you’re with a new guy, that’s what you are. You’re paranoid about how pornoid he’s going to be. You know, Pop, we’re the spiders of the Web. We got everything we know from the infinity of filth. He’s better, Mum, don’t you think? Pop’s a bit better.”

He used to admire them, but Keith was no longer sure how he felt about spiders. Spiders ate flies; and flies ate shit. And if, in any sense, you were what you ate—if you were what you consumed every day—then what were spiders?

And yet spiders were alive and flies were not, somehow. And Keith still thought that killing a fly was a creative act—because a fly was a fleck of death. Little skull and crossbones, little jolly roger. Armoured survivalist with gas-mask face: but not here in London, perhaps, in the twenty-first century. There was only one instance so far—when the fly snarled up at him from a patch of birdshit on the garden paving, and applied its suckers, and stood its ground, and just snarled up at him through the spray.

Silvia left. Husband and wife processed their young daughters, and Keith, prolonging his experiment with fiftyfifty, helped assemble a modest dinner—salad, spaghetti bolognese, red wine.

He said, “I don’t want to think about
me
any more.” About my self: two words. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it? And it’s physically easier too.”

“How?”

Well, I could put it this way. Two months ago, Pulc, waking, and then getting up, was a Russian novel. One month ago, it was an American novel. And now it’s only an English novel. An English novel of about 1970—concerning itself with the ups and downs of the middle classes, and never any longer than two hundred and twenty-five pages.

“That’s progress. And beauty is returning. Thanks to you. As always.”

• • •

Sex is bad enough, as a subject, and the
self
is pretty glutinous too. The
I
, the
io
, the
yo
, the
je
, the
Ich
. The
Ich:
Freud’s preferred term for the
ego
, for the
I
. Sex is bad enough (but someone’s got to do it); and then there’s the
Ich
. And what does that sound like—
Ich
, the
Ich?

We’ll have a light breakfast, and then go to my room. And make a day of it. Or would you rather get on with your trial review? … I’m very rare, you know. We’re awfully rare
.

Thirteen hours later, in the pentagonal library, Lily was saying,

“You’re no good? What d’you mean you’re no good?”

“I’m no good. I’m just no good. Look.”

He gestured at the page of foolscap, held upright by the crossed struts of the Olivetti. During a brief interlude, around five, Keith ran barefoot from the tower (under the skyquake, the zig and zag, the sudden cracks in heaven’s floor) and rattled out a couple of paragraphs. The break had been called because Gloria Beautyman needed ten minutes to dress up as Elizabeth Bennet. You see, they’d had a difference of opinion about
Pride and Prejudice
, and Gloria wanted to prove her point.

“Read that bit,” he told Lily. “It’s been like this all day. Read that bit. Does it make any sense?”

“… Lawrence believed,”
she said,
“that the great disaster of the civilisation he inhabited was its poisonous hatred of sex, and this hatred carried with it the morbid fear of beauty (the fear best epitomised, in Lawrence’s view, by psychoanalysis), fear of ‘alive’ beauty which causes the atrophy of our intuitive faculty and our intuitive power.”

“Does it make any sense at all?”

“No. Are you
insane? …
And your hair’s wet.”

“Yeah, I had a cold shower. To try and clear my head. I’m no good. I can’t do it.”