The Pregnant Widow (6 page)

“You’re going from one to the other,” Lily noted.

“Well it’s the only way of getting through it. Not
Tom Jones. Tom Jones
is great. And Tom’s my kind of guy.”

“In what way?”

“He’s a bastard. But
Clarissa’s
a nightmare. You won’t believe this, Lily,” he said (and he had, incidentally, decided to swear more), “but it’s taking him two thousand pages to fuck her.”

“Christ.”

“I know.”

“But honestly, listen to you. Usually, when you read a novel, you go on about things like, I don’t know, the level of perception. Or the depth of the moral order. Now it’s just fucks.”

“It’s not
just
fucks, Lily. One fuck in two thousand pages. That’s not
just
fucks.”

“No, but it’s all you go on about.”

There weren’t any serpents in this garden, but there were flies: in the middle distance, vague flecks of death—and then, up close, armoured survivalists with gas-mask faces. And there were silky white butterflies. And great drunken bees, throbbing orbs that seemed to carry their own electrical resonance; when they collided with something solid—tree bole, statuary, flowerpot—they twanged back and away, the positive charge repelled by the positive. Lily said,

“Two thousand pages was probably how long it took. When?”

“Uh—1750. Even then he has to get her stupefied on drugs. Guess what she does afterwards. Dies of shame.”

“And it’s meant to be sad.”

“Not really. She goes out babbling about how happy she is. I’ll be uh,
rejoicing in the blessed fruits of His forgiveness … in the eternal mansions
. She’s very literal about it. Her heavenly reward.”

“Her reward for getting fucked on drugs.”

“Lily, it was rape. Actually it’s pretty clear she fancied him something rotten from the start. They’re all in a fever about violation.” She was looking at him receptively, now, so he continued, saying, “Girls can fuck in
Tom Jones
—if they’re yobs or nobs. A milkmaid. Or a decadent hostess. But Clarissa’s bourgeois, so she has to get fucked on drugs.”

“Because then it’s not her fault.”

“Yeah. And she can go on claiming she didn’t want to. Anyway, she did hold out for two thousand pages. That’s a million words, Lily. Did you hold out for a million words? When you were acting like a boy?”

Lily sighed and said, “Scheherazade’s just been telling me how frustrated she is.”

“… Frustrated how?”

“Sexually.
Ob
viously.”

He lit a cigarette and said, “Does she know she’s beautiful yet?”

“Yes. And she knows about her tits too. In case you’re wondering.”

“And what does she think of them?”

“She thinks they’re just fine. But they’re very tender now and they’re making her extra frustrated.”

“She has my sympathy. Still. Timmy’ll be along in a chapter or two.”

“Maybe. She just got a letter. He can’t tear himself away from
Jerusalem. She’s cross with him now all right. And she has high hopes of Adriano.”

“Who’s Adriano?”

Lily said, “You’re not expressing yourself very clearly. Don’t you mean, Who the fuck is Adriano?”

“No I don’t. You’re following a false lead, Lily. Who’s Adriano? … All right. Who the fuck is Adriano?”

“There. It goes better with your scowl.” Lily laughed sharply and briefly. “He’s a notorious playboy. And a count. Or one day will be.”

“All Italians are counts.”

“All Italians are poor counts. He’s a rich count. He and his dad have a castle
each.”

“Big deal. I didn’t realise until yesterday. There are castles everywhere in Italy. I mean, there’s one every few hundred yards. Did they have uh, did they have a long brawling-baron period?”

“Not particularly,” said Lily, who was reading a book called
Italy: A Concise History
. “They kept getting invaded by barbarians. Hang on.” Methodical Lily consulted her notes. “The Huns, the Franks, the Vandals, the Visigoths, and the Goths. Then the Keiths. The Keiths were the worst.”

“Were they. And when do we meet Adriano?”

“That’s what she needs. Someone of her own station. And did you thrill,” said Lily, “to the Devil’s Pass?”

In the back seat of the Fiat, he was placed between Prentiss and Scheherazade—while Lily rode in what was called
the cabriolet
(a smart red convertible) with Oona and Conchita. In the back seat Prentiss stayed exactly where she was, but Scheherazade swayed into him, swooned into him, on every tight turn. It was raining hard, and all they did, in the Passo del Diavolo, was steer through it and stare out at it. Keith, anyway, was attending to a riot of sense impressions: he was like the young men of Montale, each of his glands and hormones a Jocopo, a Giovanni, a Giuseppe. Her arm and thigh coming to press against his arm and thigh. Her golden aromatic hair gathering, folding, for a moment, on his chest. Was this usual? Did it mean anything?
Hey, Prentiss
, he wanted to say.
You’ve been around. What’s all this then? Watch. Scheherazade keeps …

“It was good,” he said. “Very twisty and scary.”

“Mm. Scary. I bet. With Dodo wedged into the front seat.”

“And always on the side of the precipice—thanks very much.”

“God. You must’ve been terrified.”

In the car Keith was telling himself that Scheherazade was simply half-asleep. And for a couple of minutes, just before they turned back, she did go under—with her head resting trustfully on his shoulder. Then she snapped to, coughed, and glanced up at him through her lashes with her unreadably generous smile … And it all began again, her arm against his arm, her thigh against his thigh.
What d’you think, Lily? Gaw, you should have seen her in the bathroom the other day. Another lapse with the lock, Lily, and there she was in blue jeans and bra. Is she trying to tell me something?
Or maybe her habits of thought had not quite drawn level with the facts of her transformation. In the full-length mirror she still sometimes saw the mousy philanthropist in sensible shoes and spectacles. And not a winged horse in blue jeans, and a white brassiere with the narrowest trim of blue. He said,

“Whittaker seemed always to be fighting the wheel over to the left.”

“That’s why I went with Oona. Your front right tyre looked completely flat.”

“I kept thinking the car’d just give up and flip over. How was it for you, the Devil’s Pass?”

“All right. Conchita dozed. And the roof leaked.”

He closed his eyes. The bruiser bees twanged and fizzed. He sat up. A crouched fly on the stone tabletop was staring at him. He waved it away but it returned, and crouched there, and stared. Little skull and crossbones … In this matter of Scheherazade, the butterflies, as Keith saw it, took his side. The butterflies: party toys, doll-scale fans and hankies—hopeless optimists, twittering dreamers.

Unusually for a twenty-year-old (the privilege followed from his peculiar situation), Keith was aware that he was going to die. More than that, he knew that when the process began, the only thing that would matter was how it had gone with women. As he lies dying, the man will search his past for love and life. And this is true, I think. Keith was good on the big picture. But the immediate situation, the immediate process—this he often saw with unreliable eyes.

M
y God, they’ve got
everything
here,” he said. He meant the library, from whose shelves he extracted a copy of
Pamela
(subtitle:
Virtue Rewarded)
, by the author of
Clarissa
, and a copy of
Shamela
, by the author of
Tom Jones. Shamela
was a parodic attack on
Pamela
, and sought to expose its false piety, its penny-wise vulgarity, and its incompetently sublimated lechery—
lechery
, ult. of W. Gmc origin and rel. to
lick
.

“So Prentiss’s rich now,” he said. “Or richer.”

“Richer. I think,” said Conchita.

She got up from the desk and went and stood by the window. The shapely curve of her abdomen in the shapeless black smock. In her anomalously deep voice she said,

“I want to get the exact colour of the roses.”

Thea sacked collar …
He said, “How did you come here from America, Conchita? I mean by boat or by plane. Plane? What class?”

“Prentiss in the front. Us in the back.”

“So how did Dodo manage? I’m thinking of the meals. The tray.”

The twelve-year-old returned to her desk and picked up the pencils of mauve and purple, saying, “Dodo pulls it down as far as she can, and fills the”—she made the shape of a V with her straightened hand—“and fills the gap with magazines. And puts the tray on that.”

Maga-sceence …
Keith looked forward to passing this on to Lily (fatso know-how for the jets), but not as keenly as he would have done—before. He still owed Lily a great debt of gratitude. Gratitude was what he was good at. It was his one emotional talent, he believed. Sitting, now, he was grateful for the chair beneath him, the book before him. Grateful, and pleasantly surprised. He was grateful for the ballpoint in his hand, pleasantly surprised by the cap on the ballpoint. Conchita said,

“Then she eats everything. Even all the butter.”

As he had intended to say, he said, “I might not see you tomorrow before you go. Did you know I’m adopted? Being adopted—it’s all right.”

Her head didn’t move but her irises came up off the page, and he was immediately ashamed, because he realised that being adopted (as a minor existential burden) was not very high on the schedule of Conchita’s troubles. She said,

“It’s all right.”

“I meant later on.” For a moment he contemplated her, the lunar purity of her brow, the hectic dusk-and-rose of her cheeks. “I meant later on. I’m sorry about your parents. Goodbye.”

“Adiós. Hasta luego
. I think we’re coming back.”

M
a’s out, Pa’s out, let’s talk dirt. Pee po belly bottom drawers. That’s what his mother and her sisters used to chant (she told him), back in 1935 …

“I can assure you I’m no stranger,” said Keith, “to Islamic talent. They’re the best-looking people on earth, don’t you think?”

“Yes I do. The whole crescent.”

He and Whittaker were playing chess on
the sunset terrace
—facing west. Whittaker had been telling him about the dos and don’ts of being in love with Amen. The don’ts were by far the more numerous. Keith said,

“Me, I went out with two Muslim chicks. Ashraf. And little Dilkash.”

“What nationalities? Or don’t you distinguish.”

“Ashraf from Iran, Dilkash from Pakistan. Ashraf was great. She liked a drink and she came across on the first night. Dilkash wasn’t like that at all.”

“So Ashraf was a do. And Dilkash was a don’t.”

“Yeah. Dilkash didn’t.” Keith twisted in his seat. The truth was that he had a bad conscience about Dilkash. “I never asked Nicholas and I still can’t work it out. So I’ll ask you.”

Whittaker in fact bore close affinities with Nicholas. They both talked in formed sentences—even in formed paragraphs. They both knew everything. And at first you thought they looked not unalike. As a pupil for many years in a British boarding school, Nicholas had naturally had his gay period. But there was political will in Nicholas, now: what politicians, at least, called
steel
. And this didn’t hold for Whittaker, with his elbow patches and his thick glasses. Keith said,

“Ashraf, Dilkash. Iran, Pakistan—what’s the diff? I mean, they’re both Arabs. Aren’t they? No. Wait. Ashraf’s an Arab.”

“No, Ashraf’s not an Arab either. She’s a Persian. And the diff, Keith,” said Whittaker, “is that Iran is a decadent monarchy and Pakistan
is an Islamic republic. At least in name. More wine. Oh, sorry. You don’t, do you.”

“I do a bit. Go on then … Round at Dilkash’s place her parents drank pop in the evenings. Can you credit it. A grown man and woman, in the evenings, drinking pop. Does Amen drink?”

“Drink? To him that’s just—oh, unbelievably gross. He smokes hash. On the other hand.”

“Ashraf was great, but with Dilkash I never …” Keith paused. “Now what’s this drama,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “about Amen and Scheherazade’s breasts?”

“Amen,” said Whittaker, with his face low over the chessboard, “is much queerer than I am.
Much.”

“So there are degrees. Yeah, that makes sense. Of course there are.”

“Of course there are. And Amen’s
very
queer. Hence the seriousness of the problem he’s having with Scheherazade’s breasts.”

“I never see him any more.”

“Nor do I. It’s worse than ever.”

“The exercises.”

“The exercises.”

“Too thin.”

“Too fat. He was too thin until about Monday afternoon. Now he’s too fat.”

Whittaker ate most of his meals with them, but he was not a castledweller. He and Amen shared a modern studio further down the slope. Keith thought of Amen, eighteen years old, and piratically handsome with his missing upper incisor; and the fuzzy eyelashes that scrolled all the way up and over, like harem slippers. He didn’t want to say so—but Keith quite fancied Amen. Whenever he saw him he felt a fleeting pressure on his chest. It was nothing like the alpweight continuously applied by the presence of Scheherazade; still, it was there. Keith said,

“He’s such a lovely colour. And with those muscles, he looks like he’s wearing armour. Golden armour.
Lily
thinks she’s not thin enough. Puppy fat. Six months ago she had what she called
a puppy-fat attack.”

“She should come over. Amen’s turned the whole upper floor into an orthopaedic ward. All these weights on strings. There are bits of his body he doesn’t like. He’s
furious
with bits of his body.”

“Which bits?”

“It’s his goddamned forearms, it’s his goddamned calves. It’s the proportions. He’s artistic and it’s the proportions. The relationship.”

“Is that his quarrel with Scheherazade’s breasts? The relationship?”

“No. It’s more basic than that.”

They sat under the shadow of their sister mountain. Above and beyond, the clouds sought the gothic colours and buffoonish configurations they would be needing, in readiness for the thunderstorm—now long-awaited. Whittaker said,