The Pregnant Widow (34 page)

“… Oh, God. Just—just think of it as your weekly essay.”

He paused and said, “Yeah. Yeah, like my weekly essay. No, that’s good, Lily. I feel better about it already. How were the ruins?”

“Oh, completely miserable. You couldn’t even tell what they were ruins
of
. Baths, supposedly. And it poured. What about Gloria?”

You see, it was Gloria’s contention that Elizabeth Bennet was a …
She can’t be
, Keith objected.
There weren’t any then. Surely
. But Gloria insisted it was so. And as she led him through the novel (with her pertinent emphases, her telling quotations) Keith began to feel that even a Lionel Trilling or an F. R. Leavis would be reluctantly obliged to take the Beautyman interpretation on board. And the outfit, too, was deeply convincing—she even had a bonnet, an inverted wicker fruit bowl, kept in place by a white silk scarf that fastened under her chin.

“I’ll do what Lawrence kept doing with whole novels,” he told Lily. “I’ll chuck it out and start again. Gloria? What about her? I didn’t even know she was here.” He recalled Gloria’s lesson on lying
(Never elaborate. Just pretend it’s all boringly true)
, but he nonetheless heard himself say, “Not till she came limping over to get herself a cup of broth. In a duffel coat. She looked terrible.”

“Well she dodged a bullet with the ruins.”

You see, in their discussion of Jane Austen, Gloria rested her case on two key scenes: Elizabeth’s physical appearance on her arrival at Mr. Bingley’s (in the early pages), and the much later exchange when Mr. Bennet warns his daughter against a loveless marriage.
No
, Gloria decided, as if washing her hands of the matter.
She’s as bad as I am, she is. Ooh, I bet she is
. The dressing-up was followed by a session of what might be called practical criticism. Then she said, Now
do you believe me? I was right and you were wrong. Say it. Elizabeth’s a …

No, okay. You’ve proved your point
.

“Well I haven’t got any choice, have I,” he told Lily. “I’ll just have to stick with it till it’s done.”

“I suppose I’d better make you something. To keep you going. Anyway. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you, Lily.”

H
e finished his review not that late—a little after one. A little after one, and Keith felt wise and happy and proud, and rich, and beautiful, and obscurely frightened, and slightly mad. And unbelievably tired. Jorquil was expected in twelve hours’ time. And how did our hero feel
about that? Only this: Jorq, in his eyes, stood for tradition, for social realism as he knew it, for the past. Keith, after all, had spent the day in a genre that belonged to the future.

Lily—Lily had waited up.

“Can’t close my eyes. Don’t know why.”

All day (he imagined) Lily’s probes and sensors, her magnetic needles, had been about their work; and now she wanted reassurance. Keith, to his surprise, was able to give it. And the act, the interchange, while pleasurable (in very faint continuation), and emotional (in utter contrast), was almost satirically antique, like a round of morris dancing, or like rubbing two sticks together—in one of the very earliest attempts to create fire.

“Scheherazade took her a tray,” said Lily as she trembled off into sleep. “Lying there with a thermometer in her mouth. And an ice pack on her head … Hear her sneezing? It’s a bit … You watch. Tomorrow she’ll be fit as a fiddle.”

The next day Keith looked around for at least some sedimentary suspicion—and there wasn’t any. Because Gloria, in her own phrase, was
terribly good
. Keith already knew that he was in another world; knew, too, that he was in quite serious trouble—but only psychologically. And for the time being he just lay back and thought, with pure admiration, This is more like it. This is how duplicity’s
supposed
to be done.

For example, at breakfast he had the pleasure of hearing Scheherazade say,

“Quite frankly, I admire her pluck. Well I do. You know, she was talking about the ruins all afternoon? Even in church. She kept reading out bits from her guidebook. And right through dinner she seemed to think she’d somehow be able to manage it. Half dead and still trying to be a sport. I call that game.”

And with Lily herself, on the subject of Gloria and her indisposition, Keith had the mindless luxury of being rebuked for his incuriosity (and self-centredness): Gloria’s Sunday—hadn’t he even noticed?—was a continuous stop-start of dizzy spells, hot flushes, and woeful hastenings to the bathroom.

“How could it’ve passed you by?”

“Well it did.”

“Christ,” said Lily. “I thought I was watching
Emergency Ward 10.”

Not satisfied with that, Gloria was now putting it about that her condition had deteriorated overnight. She asked for, and duly received, a visit from the doctor, who drove over from Montale; claiming to detect the presence of a famous Campanian virus, he sluiced out her ears with garlic and olive oil. And when Jorq arrived, and at once insisted on the change of rooms, Gloria was more or less stretchered from the tower to the apartment.

“Poor Gloria,” said Scheherazade. “Such a slender reed.”

W
ould it actually happen? Would he one day open his copy of
Critical Quarterly
, and see the article entitled “A Reassessment of
Pride and Prejudice:
Elizabeth Bennet Considered as a Cock”? By Gloria Beautyman—
and
(or perhaps
with
, or possibly
as told to)
Keith Nearing. And he believed that her exegesis, while certainly controversial, could not be easily dismissed.

Can’t you read English?
she asked him.
Listen. This comes ten pages from the end. Concentrate
.

“I know your disposition,”
Gloria reiterated.
“Your lively talents.” “Discredit and misery.” “Neither happy nor respectable.” Not respectable. What d’you think
that
means? I ask again. Can’t you read English?

Yeah. Mm. There’s nothing remotely like that in any of the others. So does Mr. Bennet
know
she’s a cock?

Not exactly. He knows she’s unusually interested in sex. He doesn’t know she’s a
cock,
but he does know that
.

I think I see
.

And when she causes a scandal by walking three miles across country to Mr. Bingley’s. Unaccompanied, mind. The fine eyes, the face “glowing with warmth of exercise,” looking “blowsy” and “almost wild.” Then the soiled stockings
.

And her petticoat “six inches deep in mud.” Her underwear covered in dirt … Bloody hell, aren’t you supposed to be quite good at this kind of thing? “Symbols” and so on?

Keith lay there and listened.

And the very good teeth. That’s a sign of virility. Look at mine … So we’re agreed. Elizabeth’s a cock. And the only way to deal with being a cock, then, was marrying for love. Good sex had to follow the emotions. It’s not like that now
.

… So on their first night?

I’ll show you. Go and amuse yourself for ten minutes. And I’ll start looking for some wedding wear
.

On his return—the white cotton dress with its improvised empireline bust, the white shawl, the bonnet fastened by the white silk scarf.

I pray you remember, sir, I am not yet one and twenty
.

A few minutes later he was near the bottom of the bed, working his way through a phenomenal density of slips and underslips and clasps and hasps, and she leant up on her elbows and said,

All Mr. Bennet knows for sure is if she married for money then she’d certainly stray. The cock bit’s really just an extra. It’s to do with what you’re like naked. How you look
.

How you feel to the touch (a hardness within a softness). And how you think, too, he thought, and worked on.

It’s just an extra. Being a cock. But it’s very rare
.

When the whole thing was over Keith lay back and imagined a future almost blotted out by leisurely seminars on every heroine and anti-heroine in world literature, starting with
The Odyssey
(Circe, then Calypso). In a thickened voice he said,

I’m going to give you
Sense and Sensibility.

How’re you going to do that?
she asked in all innocence, her eyes directed upward while she smoothed her cheeks and temples with her hands.
By fucking my arse off? … And would you mind not smoking in here. It’s evidential, and it’s a filthy habit anyway
.

T
he delicate wafers of the tickets told them plain enough: their summer was coming to an end. Lily said,

“Then what’ll happen? To you and me? I suppose we’ll break up.”

Keith met her eye, and went back to
Bleak House
. Oh yeah, Christ—
Lily, and all that. He applied himself to the question.
Breaking up will be her idea all over again
, said Scheherazade.
After your friend Kenrik
. It was like a chess problem: he (Keith) now thought that he (Kenrik) had let slip that he (Keith) wanted him (Kenrik) to sleep with her (Lily)—not so that he (Keith) could sleep with
her
(Scheherazade), but just to improve her sexual confidence. Or something like that. It was like a chess problem, a contrivance, quite separable from the dynamism of the actual game. He said,

“In some ways that’s a very frightening idea. Let’s not decide anything now.”

“Frightening?”

He shrugged and said, “Gaw, this Lady Dedlock. Honoria. She’s great. A proud schemer with a murky past.”

“So you fancy Lady Dedlock now.”

“She makes a nice change from Esther Summerson. Who’s a do-gooder. And such a fucking saint that she’s
proud
of being disfigured by smallpox. Imagine that.”

“Who was the other one you liked?”

“Bella Wilfer. Bella’s almost as good as Becky Sharp. Can you believe that Jorquil?”

“Jorquil? He’s not such a bad chap.”

“Yes he is. He is such a bad chap. I mean, who cares? But he is.”

The summer was over. They would be returning; and Jorquil, in his person, was a rumour of what they’d be returning to. In Keith’s eyes, old Jorq was a terrible compendium of Upper England, he was Ascot and Lord’s and the Henley Regatta, he was hay-wains and ha-has and cowpats and sheep dips. And it was in his scrutiny of Jorquil, over several days, that Keith discovered something extraordinary: the profound, the virtuoso, the almost hilarious fraudulence of Gloria Beautyman. She’s terribly good, he thought. She’s very clever. And she’s insane.

What genre did I visit, on my animal birthday? This was the question he couldn’t answer. What mode, what type, what
kind?

In the bathroom with Gloria it wasn’t just the colours that were wrong—all Day-Glo and wax-museum. The acoustics were hopeless too. And so was the continuity. One moment the thunder felt no louder than a plastic dustbin being dragged across the courtyard; the next, it
was all over you like a detonation. And the human figures—him, her? Gloria was much better at it than he was, naturally (she played the lead); but he kept having his doubts about the quality of the acting.

The light and the atmospherics were a bit more normal in the bedroom, later, but not much more normal, with the heavy yellow flashes, then darkness at noon, then intense silver sunshine, then biblical, world-drowning rain.

Again and again he thought, What category am I in? In its lustres and static facets it often reminded him of the pages of a glossy magazine—fashion, glamour. But what was its type as drama, as narrative? He was sure it wasn’t romance. Every few minutes it occurred to him that it might be science fiction. Or advertising. Or propaganda. But this was 1970 and he didn’t know it—he didn’t know the mode.

It seemed to make sense only when you watched it in the mirror.

Something had been separated out. He did know that.

J
orq?
It can’t be his looks that attracted her, can it
, Scheherazade had said. No, not his face (albinoid, with sore red lips), and not his body (fat-strong, with heavy bones). And it couldn’t be his mind either. For this clear reason: to be stimulated by Jorquil’s company, you would have to be abnormally interested in cheese. His boundless estates in the West Country produced great quantities of cheese. And that’s all he ever talked about: cheese.

During the day he looked like a cumbersome gentleman farmer (twills, trilby, tweeds, swagger stick); during the evening he looked like a cumbersome gentleman farmer in a tuxedo (his invariable dinner wear). Keith never once saw him when he wasn’t both eating and talking; and both activities produced in Jorquil a kind of oral inundation—a deluge of drool. On the other hand, old Jorq was wronged by Keith’s first impression. His chat wasn’t all of Double Gloucester, of Caerphilly, of Lymeswold—of
torolone
, of
stracchino
, of
caciocavallo
. As a kind of sideline, Jorq turned out to be laboriously right-wing.

Early afternoon was his chosen time for going upstairs with Gloria. As he forced a final reeking wedge of
parmeigiano
or Dorset Blue into his mouth, he maintained his slobbered diatribe about the wealth tax or the rise of the trades unions; then he held out a downturned hand, and
Gloria would accompany him to the ballroom and its orbital staircase with an air of contrition and industriousness.

At that point Lily and Scheherazade always looked at each other with a lift of the chin.

Adriano was back. Back from pre-season training with
I Furiosi
. On his left cheek, from eye to jawline, he had a purple bruise that bore the faithful impression of a rugby boot (you could count the studs). It was gone the next day. Consolata, Adriano’s latest, incidentally, was the same height as Gloria Beautyman.