Dead Babies (22 page)

"Check. Not all of it. But love
can't
mean anything any
more. That's hippie talk. Love's through. Love's all fucked up."

"Yeah, it's had it."

"Well, it hasn't had me," said Quentin with finality as Celia's hand crept toward his. "I know what love is, I know when I'm in love, and I'm in love. Is that clear?"

Marvell hung his head again. "Babies," he muttered. "Dead, dead babies."

38: Placements

The room reshuffled from time to time and people began to break away from the main group. Skip was probing, methodically but without success, for signs of conversational life in the couchant Giles. Andy talked to Lucy on the unmade divan that had served as her bed. Diana, accordingly, remained alone on the club armchair wondering up whom to sex: Quentin was engrossed in a new critical appreciation of Rimbaud, however, and Giles, the only other male she could conceivably approach, had roamed to a distant windowseat. With a picturebook on her lap, Celia sat on one of the ogre's cushions in the L of the larger drawing room. These last placements did not evade Marvell's notice. He caught Roxe-anne's eye. They exchanged glances.

Giles was, actually, sitting in two places: in the windowseat alcove and in his own brown study. But this was one of his very favorite nooks, comfortable, cushioned, contained. He especially enjoyed it when, as now, the sun spanned him with its warmth, lulling his shoulders and hair. Sometimes his mind would go quite blank and Giles would briefly escape, returning with a soft sigh of gratitude.

"Hi. Want another cocktail, Giles?" It was Roxeanne.

"No, I ... the actually gin," he mumbled.

"Okay. Okay if I sit here, Giles?"

"No, I, in fact."

Partly of necessity, the windowseat being the size of most windowseats, Roxeanne sat close to Giles. She sat so close, indeed, that Giles felt as if proximity were a concept to which he had hitherto been a stranger. Surely, Giles thought, I've
:
never in my life been this close to
anyone.
She smelled, for a start, really tremendously strongly—a smell he identified dimly, and with reluctance, as a mixture of fresh sweat and of vaginal fluid of no less recent provenance. By way of corroboration he noticed that glistening red hair coiled both from her exposed armpits and from the eventful crotch of her pants. Within her transparent body stocking her breasts lapped and teemed. Giles gulped.

"Have a good time last light?"

"Gosh. Well I— It wasn't—"

"I can't hear you, Giles."

Is she on my lap, thought Giles, or am I on hers? The all-inclusiveness of her presence seemed to mantle them from the others and the rest of the room talked in a faraway rumble.

"It
was jolly good fun, yes."
He readjusted. "I didn't think it was going to be."

"How come you didn't think so, Giles?"

Her eyes were half closed and her voice, while intense and fully awake, appeared to be constantly on the point of slipping away. Her treasure cave of teeth was inches from his tightened stripe. With difficulty Giles said, "Just worries, worries. Just little things."

"That what you wanted the drug for, Giles? Why worry? Why worry? Why do you have to worry?"

Roxeanne's face was now completely glazed, her body irreducibly, suffocatingly close. The odor of her body, not unpleasant in itself, had become overpoweringly rank; it didn't remind Giles of anything now.

"Can I fuck you, Giles?"

". . . Well, d'you know, I'm not very keen on all that. . . ."

Circling her wet tongue round her lips, she had trailed her hand up Giles's taut thigh.

"Then can I blow you, Giles?"

"I don't like
that,
either, much, actually."

"Do you want to come upstairs with me for a little time, Giles?" her voice moaned distantly at him. "For a little time, so I can kiss you. See my tongue?" It slipped like new meat from her mouth and looped to wetten the tip of her nose. "Kiss you, kiss you, wrap it right round your teeth—"

"No!" Giles sat up straight and burped into her face.

Roxeanne's expression did not change. Drowsily, moonily,
she leaned close to his ear and said in a voice just as gentle and caressing as before,

"Eat shit. You ugly little fuck."

"Hi. Want another cocktail, Celia?" It was Marvell.

"No; honestly. Two would make me feel funny so early."

"Okay. Okay if I sit here, Celia?"

"I don't mind."

"Hey, what have you got there?"

"My picture book."

"Hey!"

"Oops! I'll move up."

Celia had what's known as two sides to her character— her docility would become girlish ingenuousness, her lack of imagination would phase into blinking naivete—and it was the smaller, more junior side that she was now letting out to play. Although the disparity between these personae was considerable, at times even grotesque, Celia seemed to be aware of no incongruity, slipping friskily between them with as little fuss as a child changing her toys. Marvell sensed her mood and for five minutes they discussed in equable undertones the adventures of Oily the Sailor, of Harry Hare, of Pig the Whistle and Small Stanley, of Water-Rat Reginald and Trap the Goat. Then Marvell wiped away the jewel of yellow-flecked blood that hung from his left nostril and said, "See Giles? Looks like he's doing just great with Rox."

Celia looked up.

"Yeah. Rox knows what the hell it's all about."

Celia did not answer.

"Knows how to get it all—from her body, her sensations. Knows how to make her senses
work
for her. She uses her senses like—like you'd use colors to make a pretty picture, Celia. Or like you'd do a jigsaw or dress a little doll. She knows what the brush is for, what all the colors do, how the surface likes it. That's how she regards her senses—as tools to make something full of joy and wonder. Would you like to express your body like that, Celia? See her with Giles? Know what she'd like to make with him?"

Celia shook her dipped head.

"No? D'you know what I'd like to make with you?"

Marvell cupped her far cheek with his fibrous right hand.

:
He whispered moltenly in her ear. Beneath nickering lids Celia's eyes raced.

She stood up and said evenly, the woman again, "And to think my husband knows someone like
you."

Marvell laughed drunkenly as she stumbled toward the door.

Quentin swept into the room. Celia was sitting on the bed. He knelt before her. "Dearest, dearest, don't," he honed tenderly.

"Oh, darling, I don't want them to be here."

"My poor bunny. What on earth did he say?"

"I couldn't ever tell you. It was ... I couldn't tell you.
Ever."

Obscure relief showed in Quentin's eyes. "Oh, some silly sex thing. Darling, you must . . . that's just the way they
are."

Celia struggled. "I won't have people here like that. I
won't.
Make them go away now—why won't you make them go
away
now."

He held her. "Tomorrow. They'll be gone tomorrow."

"Too late then."

"There there."

She looked up and sniffed. "Tomorrow? It'll all be over by tomorrow? Promise?"

"I promise," promised Quentin.

39: cunning stunts

"How many bloody times do I have to tell you, Mrs. Tuckle, I don't take sugar in my tea."

"So sorry, sir, I'll—"

"Don't bother." Whitehead placed a heavy damp slipper on a nearby poof. "And I suppose you've drunk all that gin I brought you," he said, looking at the unopened bottle on the sideboard.

"No, sir. I don't think we've even—"

"I can see that. Well, I think I'll have some now. You wouldn't have any ice or tonic, of course, would you."

"I'm afraid the electricity's not—"

"Well, put some water in it then, for Christ's sake.”

"Yes, sir, of course. You will remember to thank Mr. Coldstream for us, sir, won't you?"

"As I said before," Keith reiterated, "I will if I remember to."

"Thank you, sir. If you don't mind me asking, sir . . ."

Keith waved a hand.

"If you don't mind me asking, who are your houseguests this weekend, sir?"

Whitehead reached out and accepted the glass of gin that was being waved cautiously around in front of his face. "About time," he said. "Well, I've asked just the four friends along. There's Lucy Littlejohn, an old ... an old 'friend' of mine from my London days. And three Americans I met when I toured the States last year."

"I see, sir. Very interesting. Tell me, sir, what was the purpose of your visit to America? Was it your commercial concerns took you there, sir, or was it a purely pleasurable trip?"

Keith sipped his gin. "Mind your own bloody business," he said.

Whitehead walked back across the lawn with something less than his customary vim. The novelty of the Tuckles was palling. It wasn't the timbre of their remarks which bored him so much as the crude monotony of his own. Well, he would just have to think up more ways of being disagreeable to them, that's all.

Narrowing his eyes at the bay-windowed rear of Apple-seed Rectory, little Keith established that activity was still centered in the drawing room. On all fours, he crawled behind the derelict well, waited, then snaked quickly into the garage.

Keith squirmed past his door, wedged it shut behind him, and stopped
dead.
Protruding from the thin brown top blanket of his bunk was the face of a girl. Keith recognized the face at once: it belonged to Miss See-See della Gore, the wonderful showgirl who had posed with her legs open on the centerfold of
Cunning Stunts,
a recent specialist purchase of his. What was she doing there? The effect was curiously disturbing. The color photograph, with its luminescent, undersized face, rested on his pillow, disappearing into the bed, which bulged as if some amorphous body were actually shrouded there. Keith approached the bunk. The rabid eyes glared up at him. He
:
twitched back the top blanket a few inches, disclosing See-See's starfished body. He pulled the blanket off. Her spread legs seemed symbolically to enclose the debris of the rest of his pornographic library, torn to streamers, stained with what looked like semen and other obscure liquids—in his bed.

With agitated but determined movements Keith gathered the remains into a large pile. He turned, deciding to get a sack from the garage. He hardly registered the crude poster bearing the legend
JOHNNY
tacked to his door. He wondered how the photographs could most unobtrusively be destroyed. He started to cry. A whole way of life was coming to an end for Keith Whitehead.

xl: whitehead

The Whiteheads have several claims to being the fattest family alive. At the time of writing you could just go along to Parky Street, Wimbledon, any Sunday, one o'clock in the afternoon —and you'd see them, taking their seats in the Morris for the weekly Whitehead jaunt to Brighton.

"Get your huge fat arse out of the way"—"Whose horrible great leg is this?"—"Is this bit your bum, Keith, or Aggie's?"— "I don't care whose guts these are, they've got to be moved"— "That's not Dad's arm, you stupid great bitch, it's my leg!"

"It's no good," says Whitehead, Sr., eventually, slapping his trotters on the steering wheel. "The Morris can't be expected to cope with this. You can take it in turns staying behind from now on."