The Pregnant Widow (42 page)

T
wo cups of coffee and two torched sambucas were now brought to their table. The conversation had already turned to Violet, and Keith was no longer feeling very frightened. There was no longer a screen, like a gossamer washing line, between himself and his brother, between himself and the foreign correspondent. There was no longer a plug of air in his chest. Nicholas absented himself, and Keith stared into the twinned flames of the glasses: one fire for each eye. Across the way, the young man and the young woman, entwined in one another’s limbs, presided over a party of ten …

One day in Italy Keith read about an alternative version of the myth of Narcissus. The variant set out to de-homosexualise the story, but introduced (as if in recompense) an alternative taboo: Narcissus had a twin sister, an
identica
, who died very young. When he leant over the untainted pool it was Narcissa whom he saw in the water. And it was thirst, and not self-love, that killed the glassy boy; he wouldn’t drink, he wouldn’t disturb that rapt reflection …

Keith now ran a check on his own reality. The person in the alcove with the telephone was his foster-brother. The book on the floor was about someone called Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The waiter was
fat. The young woman was kissing the young man, or the young man was kissing the young woman, and what was it like, when the other was the same, and you kissed yourself?

“Well let’s see if we can draw things together.” He regularly did this, Nicholas: he drew things together. “It’s in the air that girls should act like boys. Now. There are some girls who
try
to act like boys. But they’re old-school in their hearts. Your Pansy. Scheherazade perhaps. And there are girls who just—who just feel their way forward. Jean. Lily. And then there are girls who act more like boys than
boys
do. Molly Sims. And of course Rita. And—Violet.”

“Yeah but … The other girls are aware of a kind of wave. And Violet’s not a part of anything.”

“Unless it’s the wave of the healthy young girls. Violet marches with the healthy young girls.”

Keith said, “She probably got that out of a magazine at the hairdresser’s. Jesus, can she still read? Agony column. You know.”

“Yeah. Dear Daphne. I’m seventeen, and I’ve had ninety-two boyfriends. Is this normal?”

“Yeah. Dear Violet. Don’t worry. That’s normal.”

“Mm. It would’ve had to go something like,
A lively sexual appetite is normal. After all, you’re a healthy young girl.”

“You can see her staring at it. And feeling incredibly relieved. There it is in print.”

“It’s in print. It’s official. She’s a healthy young girl,” said Nicholas. “That’s all.”

“Is she just extreme? Or is she
sui generis?”

“Sui generis?
You mean nuts.”

“Well she’s not nuts, is she. She’s a lush, and a dyslexic, but she’s not nuts when it comes to anything else. Still. The fact remains that Vi rapes fruits and dates football teams.”

“She acts like a boy. Nature without nurture. Like Caliban. Like a Yahoo.”

Keith said, “She acts like a very
bad
boy. And it’s not in her interests. We’ve got to make her act more like a girl. And how do we do that? We can’t. She’s uncontrollable. We’d have to—we’d have to be the police.”

“The secret police. Like the Cheka or the Stasi. With informers. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Men with whips on street corners.”

“We’d have to do nothing else. Is that what you’re going to do? Do nothing else? Listen,” said Keith. “I’ve decided what
I’m
going to do about Violet.” I’m going to stop loving her, Nicholas. Because then it won’t hurt. “Look, I’ll muck in with my share, but I’m backing off. Emotionally. Don’t get angry.”

“I’m not. And I won’t say it’s because she isn’t your blood. Because I know for a fact that you love her more than I do.”

Keith sat there. Nicholas said,

“It won’t work. What do you think you’re going to do? You’re just going to watch. Unemotionally. While Vi gets fucked to death.”

“… I’m not even going to watch. If I can help it. I’m not as brave as you are. I’m going to close my eyes. I’m going to
withdraw.”

“What?”

“I’m going to withdraw.”

And Nicholas said, “Where to?”

There was a minute’s silence. Then Nicholas looked at the time and said,

“Give it some more thought. Anyway. I haven’t asked. How’s that Lily?”

“Oh. Lily. The trial reunion was a mistake. Italy was a mistake.” He looked around. The fishing nets tacked to the walls, the thatched Chianti bottles, the fat waiter with the outlandish pepper-grinder (the size of a supergalactic telescope), the framed photographs—churches, hunting scenes. “I wouldn’t have missed it, not for the world. But Italy was a mistake. In the end. Anyway Lily dumped me. On the plane.”

“My dear …”

“She said I’d changed. And she upped and dumped me on the plane. Don’t worry—I’m relieved. I’m delighted. I’m free.”

“Lily will always love her Keith.”

“I don’t want love. No, I do. But I want hysterical sex.”

“As with Dodo.”

“Forget Dodo … Why’re you frowning like that? Listen, Nicholas, do I
look any
different?”

“Well you’re lovely and brown …”

“My eyes.” Keith felt himself tauten. Conchita, Lily, Gloria herself:
Look at him, with his new eyes
. And what about the eyes of Gloria Beautyman? Her ulterior eyes: from L., lit. “further, more distant.” Gloria’s ulterior eyes. “Has anything happened to them, my eyes?”

“They look—very clean. Against the tan. I don’t know, slightly more protuberant. Now you mention it.”

“Christ. More protuberant. You mean like a fucking stick insect?”

“Well they’re not actually on stalks, your eyes. It’s probably just because the whites are brighter. So no more Lily. Now a cleansing beer, and then …”

Nicholas drank his beer, called for the bill, queried it, paid it, and left. Keith sat on.

S
ome wine remained in the second bottle, and he poured himself a little of that. He leant forward, with his brow cupped in a cold hand. He supposed he was very tired …

The story about Gloria, the Beautyman myth, it just collapsed in his head, like a mocking kingdom made by sleep, and now all he had was its echo, a reverberating pang in the core of his mind.

Across the way, the table of ten, like a single creature, got to its feet. Out they all processed, in three pairs and a quartet. The waiter, in his tormented waistcoat, stood nodding and bowing at the door. Last to leave was the tall couple, the twins, in their ebony velvet.

Narcissus’s sister. That version was not only incestuous—it was literalistic, and sentimental. The older story was the one that hurt and connected. Was he, was Keith, guilty of the disgusting vice of self-love? Well, he loved the rose of youth in himself, such as it was. That was forgivable. On the other hand, a surface, something of two dimensions, had transfixed him—not his own shape in the mirror but the shape that loomed at his side.
Oh, I love me
. Through her, for a day, he had loved himself, which he had never done before. Because there he was in the mirror too, standing behind her. The reflection—and also the echo:
Oh I love me so …

With his broad back turned and a fat little fist on his hip, the waiter was staring at the abandoned tablecloth, which stared back up at him, soiled and conscience-stricken, now, with dozens, scores, of dirty glasses, with cigarettes crushed out in coffee saucers, with wrinkled napkins dropped in half-eaten ice creams … The waiter shook his head, sat down hard, and unbuttoned his vest. Then all fell still.

Gloria was
sui generis
, probably, no, come on, she was: not just a cock
but a religious cock—and a religious cock with an exorbitant secret. Now Keith, too, had a secret, also unrevealable. Could this be called trauma? A trauma was a secret you kept from yourself. And Gloria knew her secret; and he knew his … She had taught him much, he believed, about the place of sensibility in this new world. She had promoted him, he believed, in the chain of being. He was a laureate, he believed, a valedictorian, of the academy of Gloria Beautyman; and he was now poised to pass on her teachings to the young women of a grateful capital. I’m free, he thought.

The waiter’s shadow told him that it was time to leave. I’m very tired, he said to himself. Italy, the castle, the summer months, and the events of that same morning (the church bells, the black gloves, the bared teeth, the
Ich)
seemed inconceivably distant, like childhood. Or like the time still earlier than childhood—infancy, babyhood. Or like 1948, when he wasn’t even born.

B
ut now Keith Nearing had freedom.

And so it was that he went out among the young women of London. Over the coming days, weeks, months, years, he went out into London, the streets, the lecture halls, the offices, the pubs, the caffs, the gatherings, under its roofs and chimneys. Under the urban trolls of the trees, under the city skies. And it was the strangest thing.

He went out among the young women of London. And it was the strangest thing. Each and every one of them hated him already.

I suppose it’s only human. It’s only human—the need to know what happened to them all.

Well, in 1971, Scheherazade … Wait. The old order gave way to the new—not easily, though; the revolution was a velvet revolution, but it wasn’t bloodless; some came through, some more or less came through, and some went under. Some were all right, some were not all right, and some were somewhere in between. There were three orders, it seemed, like Dud, Possible, Vision, like the three grades of distance chosen by the mountains, like the three kinds of birds, the black, the yellow, and the magnets of the upper air, shaped like the head of an arrow … Some came through, some more or less came through, and some went under, but they all had their sexual trauma—all those present. All those who took the strange ride with the pregnant widow.

There will be more on their particular fates, but here, for now, are the abridged versions. Scheherazade was all right (with one qualification), and Timmy was all right, and Jorquil was more or less all right, and Conchita (he hoped and trusted) was all right, and Whittaker and Amen were all right, and Nicholas was all right, and Lily was all right in the end.

On the other hand, Adriano was somewhere in between, and Rita was not quite all right (and Molly Sims, incidentally, was not quite all right in the same way), and Kenrik was definitely not all right, and Violet was definitely not all right, and Gloria, too, was not all right. Dodo (this is only a guess, because nobody ever saw her again) was not all right. Prentiss and Oona were all right until 1994 and 1998 respectively. Then they were dead.

As for Keith … Well, it is 2009, now, not 2003, when, reasonably
novelistically, 1970 caught up with him, all at once. This unfortunate crisis—his “N. B.,” as his third wife so gently and aptly called it—was in the past, and he was all right.

    The Italian summer—that was the only passage in his whole existence that ever felt like a novel. It had chronology and truth (it did happen). But it also boasted the unities of time, place, and action; it aspired to at least partial coherence; it had some shape, some pattern, with its echelons, its bestiaries. Once that was over, all he had was truth and chronology—and, oh yes, the inherently tragic shape (rise, crest, fall), like the mouth on a tragic mask: and this is a face that is common to everybody who doesn’t die young.

But it turns out that there’s another way of doing things, another mode, another
genre
. And I hereby christen it Life.

Life is the world of Well Anyway, and Which Reminds Me, and He Said, She Said.

Life has no time for the exalted proprieties, the ornate contrivances, and the intense stylisations of kitchen-sink.

Life is not a court shoe, with its narrowing heel and arched sole; Life is the tasteless trotter down there at the other end of your leg.

Life is made up as it goes along. It can never be rewritten. It can never be revised.

Life comes in the form of sixteen-hour units, between waking up and going to sleep, between escaping from the unreal and re-embracing the unreal. There are over three hundred and sixty such units in every year.

Gloria Beautyman, at least, will be giving us something that Life badly needs. Plot.

For forty months, beginning with that September when his eyes were very clear, Keith lived in Larkinland—fish-grey, monkey-brown, the land of sexual dearth. The most salient feature of Larkinland is that all women, after a few seconds, can tell that that’s where you live—in Larkinland.

At first, all his moves on girls were met by a rearing-back or a twisting-away or an emphatic shake of the head. One very articulate postgraduate, having rebuffed him, went on to say that he exuded a strange mixture of electricity and ice. “As if you’ve got PMT,” she said. That phase passed. His advances became tentative (he reached out a hand), then quietly vocal, then impotently telepathic. That opposites attract is not among the rules of amatory physics. In 1971, and again in 1973, he had successive entanglements with two nervous wrecks from the Poetry Society (round the corner from his dank flat in Earls Court): its treasurer, Joy, and then Patience, the most glazed and tenacious attendee of its twice-weekly readings. In 1972, and again in 1973, he became familiar with the narrow staircase that led to a certain attic flat in Fulham Broadway. Inside it was a publisher’s reader of a certain age called Winifred, with her cardigan, her sweet sherry, her John Cowper Powys, her tic.

He trolled through his past of course, but Ashraf was in Isfahan, Dilkash was in Islamabad, and Doris was in Islington (and he had a drink with her there, in a pub—with her and her boyfriend). Every five or six months he spent a celibate night with Lily (while she was briefly between affairs). He tried to get her back, naturally, and she pitied him; but she wasn’t coming back.