The Pregnant Widow (43 page)

1974 was seven days away (it was Christmas Eve) when he had his first re-encounter with Gloria Beautyman.

•

It is the kind of gathering convened by the more bohemian sector of the moneyed young—the kind of gathering at which Keith is by now very seldom to be seen. I won’t describe it (humid pools of velvet and luxurious heads of hair). Gloria arrives late, and tours the room, moving through a thoroughly grasped and mastered milieu. Physically she makes you think of Viola in
Twelfth Night
or Rosalind in
As You Like It:
a girl transparently and playfully disguised as a boy. Hair up under the cocked hat, a tight silk trouser suit of Lincoln green.

He is waiting in a passageway. And this is their opening exchange.

“Are you pretending you don’t remember me? Is that what you’re doing?”

“…I find I fail to understand your tone.”

“Did you get my messages? Did you get my letters? How about dinner one night? Or lunch. Keep the afternoon free. Suppose there’s no chance of that.”

“… No. None. To be honest, I’m astounded you’ve got the nerve to ask.”

“Yeah, stick to your own kind. Okay. Tell me. How’s the world of cheese?” She takes a step back. And for four or five excruciating seconds he feels himself being
painted
by her radar—not just scanned, but exactly targeted. “Wait,” he says. “I’m sorry. Don’t.”

“My God. The curse of Onan is upon him. My God. You can almost smell it.”

Keith’s new suit (which cost six quid from Take Six) hugs him in its fire.

“Ooh, I want to talk to you,” she says. “Stay here. This is fascinating. I feel—I feel like someone slowing down to look at a car crash. You know. Ghoulish curiosity.”

Gloria turns and walks … And yes, it is too big,
much
too big, as Lily always insisted; but it now strikes his famished gaze as an achievement on an epic and terrifying scale, like the Chinese Revolution or the rise of Islam or the colonisation of the Americas. He watches her move from guest to guest. Men looked at Gloria, now, and automatically wondered what was happening on the other side of her clothes—the concavities and convexities on the other side of her clothes. And yes, she is astronomically remote from him, now, far, far beyond the capabilities of his naked eye.

She keeps going away and coming back again, but she tells him many things that night.

“Oh
dear …
And you were quite sweet to girls in Italy. Because girls were quite sweet to you. But it’s all gone terribly wrong, hasn’t it. With you and girls. And this is only the beginning.”

Beyond a certain level of sexual failure, she goes on to explain, a part of the male mind gets to work on hating women. And women sense this. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophesy, she says. And this he already knew. Larkinland, it self-fulfils, it self-perpetuates, it self-defeats.

“And it can only get worse. Ah. Now see that beautiful youth who’s just come in, the tall one with the golden hair? That’s Huw. The one with the castle in Wales.”

“Typical, that is. Yeah. The economic basis of society.”

“… You can’t help yourself, can you. You only
sound
as if you’re being a nightmare on purpose. One’s instinct is to walk away. My legs want to walk away. But it’s the festive season. Goodwill to all men. Are you ready for some advice?”

He stands there, smoking, with his head down. “Tell me. Help me.”

“All right. Take a turn round the room. Hover near the girls you like most. I’m going to go and kiss my fiancé, but I’ll be watching.”

Ten minutes later she’s telling him something that at least sounds quite symmetrical: the prettier the girls are, the uglier he looks—the more furtive, the more rancorous.

“You seemed perfectly at ease near Petronella. The one in the smock with the port-wine stain. And Monica. The one with the slight harelip. Mm. Your eyes aren’t fizzy like they were, but something’s gone wrong with your mouth.”

“Show me,” he says. She shows him. “Christ. Gloria, how can I get out?”

“Well you’re so far gone, that’s the trouble. Are you still a student? No? Then I’m sorry, but I’m assuming you’re a complete flop at what you do.”

This was actually very far from being the case. On graduation, with his exceptional degree, Keith applied for jobs more or less at random—he worked in an antique shop, an art gallery; for two months he worked in an advertising agency, Derwent and Digby, in Berkeley Square. Then he stopped being a trainee copywriter, and became a trainee assistant at the
Literary Supplement
. He was now a full editor there, while also publishing
uncannily mature pieces on critical theory in the
Observer
, the
Listener
, and the
Statesman and Nation
. About a dozen of his poems had appeared in various periodicals, and he was the recipient of an encouraging note from Neil Darlington, editor of
The Little Magazine
and co-publisher of a series of pamphlets called Slim Volumes …

“Oh I see. Hopeless,” she says. “You’ve got to earn more, Keith. And lose that dank look. There are exceptions, but girls want to go up in the world, not down. Do you remember that touching ballad? ‘If I were a carpenter and you were a lady.’”

“‘Would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby.’”

“Well the answer to that question is
certainly not
. The funny thing is, all you need is one pretty girlfriend and the others’ll follow.”

He asks why this is.

“Why? Because the rules of attraction are vaguer with girls. Because men’s looks matter less. So we keep an eye out for the smoke signals. We listen to the tom-toms. If one of us—a pretty one—thinks you’ll do, then we take notice. Here and now I could make you halfway attractive. A walk round the room would do it.”

He sighs. “Oh Robin Hood. In your Sherwood green. You take from the rich and give to the poor. Walk me round … I’ll pay you a hundred quid.”

And Gloria, ever surprising, says, “Have you got it on you? Mm. No. It’s quite a performance, and Huw’d get vexed.”

“Then I’m going home. So it’s to be Huw, is it?”

“Probably. He’s perfect. Apart from the hellhag mother. Who hates me … I’m twenty-six you know. Tick-tock goes the clock.”

“Which reminds me.” And in a weak voice he tells her about Scheherazade. Already married (to Timmy), already the mother of two (Jimmy and Millie), already devout (according to Lily). She shrugs, and he says, “Time to go.” The voice within him (Christ, what a croak it is) makes a suggestion. It doesn’t sound much to Keith, but he says, “Well, festive wishes. Uh, it’s traditional, isn’t it, to leave something out for Santa. Don’t bother with a mince pie. Just give him a beautiful sight. You praying naked on your knees.”

Her colour, her shadowy bronze, intensifies. “How d’you know I pray naked?”

“You told me. In the bathroom.”

“What bathroom?”

“You remember. You turned, holding the blue dress. And I said, ‘No bee sting.’”

“Oh what nonsense. Then what?”

“You bent over the towel rack and said, ‘It’s actually quite far in.’”

“So you still think that really happened? No, Keith, you dreamt it. I remember the bee sting, though. How could I forget? And it’s true that I really do genuinely hate ruins. Good luck. You know, all this stuff is like conkers. Do you remember conkers? A mere oner beats a twenty-fiver, and suddenly it’s a twenty-sixer. You see, you can’t get a pretty girlfriend until you get a pretty girlfriend. I know. It’s a right bastard.”

“Yes, isn’t it. And how’s your secret? Still well?”

“Happy Christmas to you.”

He walked in the snow down Kensington High Street. What kind of poet was Keith Nearing, so far? He was a minor exponent of humorous self-deprecation (was there any other culture on earth that went in for this?). He wasn’t an Acmeist or a surrealist. He was of the school of the Sexual Losers, the Duds, the Toads, whose laureate and hero was of course Philip Larkin. Celebrated poets could get girls, sometimes many girls (there were poets who looked like Quasimodo and behaved like Casanova), but they seemed to evade prettiness, or shied away from it because it was just too obvious. Larkin’s women had their world,

So, with a kind of slothful heroism, Larkin inhabited Larkinland, and wrote the poems that sang of it. And I’m not going to do that, Keith decided, as he turned left towards Earls Court. Because otherwise I’ll have nothing to think about when I’m old. Anyway, he didn’t
want
to be that kind of poet. He wanted to be romantic, like Neil Darlington (“The storm rolls through me as your mouth opens”). But Keith didn’t have anything to be romantic about.

In those days the capital shut down for a week, at midnight, on Christmas Eve. It went
black
. God had his hand poised above the switch: any second the lights would go out and wouldn’t come on again until 1974.

To his personal assistant, and then to his secretary, Keith bids goodbye, and rides down in the soundless cube of mirrors from the fourteenth floor of Derwent and Digby. On the flat plain of the atrium Digby in his bomber jacket and Derwent in his silk poncho are waiting for their car. Derwent and Digby are first cousins, and wrote a first novel each, long ago …

“No, I can’t,” says Keith. “I’m meeting a pretty girl. My sister Violet. In Khartoum.”

“Wise man. Try the Zombie.”

And Keith steps out into the sparsity and human colourlessness of rush-hour London in 1975.

    When he tendered his resignation at Derwent and Digby, in early 1972, first Digby and then Derwent took him out to lunch and spoke of their sadness at losing someone “so exceptionally gifted”—i.e., someone so good at peddling non-essentials. “The money’s the same at the
Lit Supp,”
he said, for something to say. “Believe me,” said Derwent, and Digby, “it won’t go on being.” There was truth in this. Keith now had a mortgage on a sizeable maisonette in Notting Hill, he drove a new German car, he wore—this night—a scarf and overcoat of black cashmere.

By far the worst bit of the transition was telling Nicholas. Oh, no, Keith wouldn’t want to go through that again. Part of the trouble was that he couldn’t quite tell Nicholas
why
. “Well. You’re still my brother,” said Nicholas, at four o’clock in the morning. Keith, these days, still wrote criticism, but the verse stopped coming almost immediately, as he knew it would. He was still a rhymer, of sorts. You don’t
have to wait—till After Eight. Hey, fella, Fruitella. His salary had octupled in nineteen months. The only poet who still gave him the time of day was the charming, handsome, litigious, drink-drenched, debt-ridden, women-infested Neil Darlington, the editor of
The Little Magazine
. Keith told Neil why.
Why
might not have impressed Nicholas anyway.

There were girls now. There almost always was a girl. Colleagues—a temp, a market researcher, a typist, a junior account manager … This remained the import of Gloria’s imitation of him (of his mouth) on Christmas Eve, 1973: the beak was back. Now the beak was gone again. Out of Dud-dom, he was gradually surfacing as a Low Possible, but a Low Possible equipped with patience, humility, and cash.

He was out of Larkinland. Sometimes he felt like an ecstatic refugee. He had sought asylum, and found it. A lengthy process, getting out of Larkinland (he dispensed many bribes). The months in the border holding-camp, the hostile interrogations and health checks; and for many hours they frowned at his documents and his visa. He walked through the gates under the watchtower, the searchlights and the razor wire. He could still hear the dogs. Someone blew a whistle and he turned. He kept walking. He was out.

His celibate nights with Lily had evolved into weekends—not dirty weekends exactly, but not celibate either—in Brighton, Paris, Amsterdam.

    As he walks through Mayfair and then across trafficless Piccadilly and past the Ritz, to St. James’s, swinging a pair of soft leather gloves in his right hand (it is early October), he finds himself looking forward to seeing his younger sister. More in his heart than in his person, he has been keeping his regulated, geometrical distance, unlike his brother, who actually had Violet come and live with him in his two-room flat in Paddington for three terrible months in 1974.

“Every morning—the crowbar,” said Nicholas. In other words, the first thing you did each day was lever her out from under the burglar/builder/beggar/bouncer (or—last resort—the cabbie) she’d brought home with her the night before. Violet, it seemed, was moving on from the proletariat and heading for the underclass (or what used to be called the residuum). Next, early in the summer that had just ended, she turned the colour of English mustard (jaundice). There was a hospitalisation
followed by a costly convalescence at a dry-out spa in Kent called the Parsonage, paid for by Keith. Keith paid for all the shrinks and therapists too (until Violet put her foot down and said it was a waste of time). He was always giving Violet money. He did it eagerly. Writing a cheque only took a few seconds, and it didn’t hurt.

He had gone to visit her in September, the train, the fields, the motionless cows like pieces of a jigsaw waiting to be put together, the manor house with the green gables, Violet in the refectory playing Hangman with a fellow recoverer, the walk in the grounds under the alerting blue, where she took his hand, as of course she used to do in childhood … Whereas Keith’s minimal handsomeness had been entirely erased by his years of famine (his years of want), Violet’s beauty was fully restored, her nose, her mouth, her chin, smoothly eliding into one another. There was even talk of a possible marriage—to someone twice her age (forty-three), an admirer, a protector, a redeemer.

Tonight there would be fruit cocktails, a show (she loved a show, and he had good tickets for
The Boy Friend)
, then dinner at Trader Vic’s.

    Now Keith enters Khartoum, pushing on the tinted glass door. Their evening, as a familiar and intelligible event, will last a single minute. And the single minute isn’t any good either. No, untrue, unfair: the opening three seconds are perfectly fine, as he spots her soft blonde shape (a whiteclad profile) on a stool at the circular steel counter.