The Pregnant Widow (15 page)

“Trust me,” said Adriano contentedly. “She suffers for love.”

“It
isn’t
love.”

“Ah. Then I must continue to suffer alone.
L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle
. Love that moves the sun and the other stars. Such is mine. Such is mine.”

“It’s the opposite of love.”

Keith went off after dinner to the pentagonal library with his notebook. And he made a list, headed “Reasons.” It went as follows:

… He had acquired some understanding of it, by now—this business of making passes at girls. You were alone in a room with the wanted one. And then two futures formed.

The first future, the future of inertia and inaction, was already grossly familiar: it was just like the present. It was the devil you knew.

The second future was the devil you knew nothing about. And it was a giant, with legs as tall as steeples, and arms as thick as masts, and eyes that beamed and burned like gruesome jewels.

It was your body that decided. And he was always awaiting its instructions. On the thick-rugged floor he sat with the wanted one, and as each game reached its climax they both rose to their knees, with their faces separated only by their breath.

At such a moment you needed despair—and that he had. He had despair. But his body wouldn’t do it. He needed that coating to seep down over his eyes; he needed to become reptilian, and receive the ancient juices and flavours of the carnivore.

Now he returned to his list, and added a sixth item: 6) Love. And he found the poem with no trouble at all.

The poem, which was essentially a religious poem, continued, and there was a happy ending. Forgiveness, and miraculous acquiescence:

But it was love that was the trouble. Because that was what he had, and that was what she didn’t want. He was shrinking and she was growing. He was the incredible shrinking man. The cat, the spider, and then the subatomic—the quark, the neutrino, something so tiny that it met no resistance as it passed through the planet and out the other side.

C
orrect me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but is Scheherazade wearing your pants?”

“Due caffè, per favore …
How did you see Scheherazade’s pants?”

“How did I see Scheherazade’s pants? Lily, I’ll tell you. I glanced in her general direction when she was sitting on the sofa before dinner. That’s how I saw Scheherazade’s pants.”

“Mm. All right.”

“I mean it’s no great feat to see Scheherazade’s pants, is it. Or yours. I think you might have to get up a bit earlier in the morning to see Gloria’s pants. Or Oona’s. But it’s no great feat to see Scheherazade’s pants. Or yours.”

“Stop
wheedling …
No, it’s true. Nowadays pants are part of what girls wear on the outside.”

After breakfast in bed, followed by the boundary violation they both knew so well, Keith and Lily walked down to the village.
Dating your sister
, of course, was a synonym for boredom. Having sex with your sister, on the other hand (he assumed), would be unforgettably terrifying. Having sex with Lily was not unforgettably terrifying. Nor was it boring, once it began. And yet his mind and his body were not in concord. The only link he could find between his two sisters was
low self-esteem
.
Lily loved Keith, or so she said; but Lily didn’t love Lily. And perhaps that was what girls would be needing, in the new order—a strenuous narcissism. It sounded weird, but it was quite possibly true: they had to want to go and fuck themselves. He said,

“… I am a boy. This is a girl.”

“Don’t do that,” said Lily.

“Why are they staring?
This is a shirt. This is a skirt. This is a shoe.”

“Stop it! It’s rude.”

“Staring’s rude too. Anyway. Is Scheherazade wearing your pants?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. It gave me a shock. There she sat, wearing what are arguably your coolest pants.”

“I gave her a pair … I showed her my pants and she liked them. So I gave her a couple of pairs.”

He now imagined the following sequence: Keith showing Kenrik his pants, and Kenrik liking them, and Keith giving Kenrik a couple of pairs. Lily went on,

“She said my pants made hers look like gym knickers. Or female Y-fronts. Or bunion pads … You’ve got a thing about pants.”

He said, “I have suffered much at the hands of pants.”

It was actually a theme of some delicacy—Lily’s pants. When she left him, in March, she walked out of the door in functional underwear. When she returned, she returned in cool pants. What goes through a girl’s mind, he wondered, when she makes the switch to cool pants?

“Doris,” he said with perhaps inordinate bitterness.

“When was Doris?”

“Long before your time. I went to bed with her every night for five months. It took me ten weeks to get her bra off. Then I came up against the pants. And they weren’t cool pants either. The cool thing about cool pants is you know they’re coming off. That’s all. They put your mind at rest.”

“Even then you had a thing about pants.”

“No,
Doris
had a thing about pants.” She rose with her pants on. She turned in with her pants on. Keith wanted to say to her: Doris, you have a thing about pants. You have pants on—different pants on, but pants on—twenty-four hours a day. “I kept telling her,
It’s 1968, for Christ’s sake
. I kept bending her ear about the sexual revolution … You know I gave up Psychology because of pants. When I read Freud on pants—as
a fetish. He says your mother’s pants are the last thing you see before the trauma of discovering that she doesn’t have a penis. So you fetishise them.” And he thought at the time, If that’s true, then the whole human project should be quietly abandoned. “I changed to English the same day.”

“That’s enough about pants.”

“Agreed. But then there’s Pansy.”

“Christ. Who’s Pansy?”

“I told you. A friend of Rita’s. In fact a protégée of Rita’s.” With Pansy, Lily, I suffered the tragic night of the pants. “Don’t look like that. When are you going to tell me about Anthony? And Tom? And Gordon?”

“… And all this,” said Lily, “because I happened to give Scheherazade a few pairs of pants.”

He folded some banknotes under the saucer. “Let’s have a quick look at the rat.”

“Perhaps it’s been sold. Perhaps, even as we speak, it’s being cherished in a lovely little home somewhere.”

“Guess what happens at the end of
Northanger Abbey
. Frederick fucks Isabella. He doesn’t marry her. He just fucks her.”

“Was she drugged?”

“No.” But he thought, Yes she was, Isabella, in a way: Isabella was drugged on money. “She persuades herself that he’s somehow going to marry her. After.”

“So she’s ruined. She’s lost.”

“Utterly. Anyway. Why does Scheherazade suddenly want cool pants? Why is she going around,” he persisted, “in what are debatably your coolest pants?”

“To be at her very best for Tom Thumb.”

And he allowed himself a silent chortle as they moved off down the sunken street. Still, it was also occurring to him that he and Adriano were caught in the same contradiction: they were retrograde, they were counter-revolutionary. Under the old regime, love preceded sex; it wasn’t that way round any more.

“There it is. Grim as death. It knows it’s not going anywhere. Ever.”

“You’re so unkind.”

“I’m not unkind enough.”

“It’s just a rather small dog with a funny face.”

“You should give up on this dog angle, Lily. And praise it as a rat. With all the usual rat virtues.” Among these strengths would be a lustier embrace of life—a lustier embrace of life at the level of
nostalgie. Nostalgie de la boue:
the return-home pain for the mud, the trash, the shit. “Rats get around more.”

“You’re so horrible. It’s a dog.”

… When the binary moment came, and you chose between two futures, and you chose the unknown, and acted, something mysterious had to happen first. The wanted one, far from becoming more intensely herself, had to become generic. The body parts, the this and the that of her, had to retreat, and lose outline and individuality. She had to be everywoman, everygirl. And Scheherazade just wouldn’t do that.

Adriano had many cars, including a racer that seated only one, like a canoe; at its wheel, in his goggles, he resembled a badger motoring its way through a children’s book. But today, at noon, it was the high-slung Land Rover that waited in the gravel drive at the castle’s gate—the size of a Sherman tank, it seemed, with Adriano standing on the driver’s seat, or the dashboard, and poking his head through the sunroof and waving his thick-gloved hands in the air. Scheherazade, Lily, and Whittaker climbed aboard; and off they drove to Rome.

Keith went down to the pool with the idea of befriending Gloria Beautyman. Family history, after all, had conditioned him to be kind to girls in disgrace. Some might say (and Lily was among them) that this was part of the difficulty: Keith and his family were no good at disgrace. They had neither the talent nor the stamina for it. They found it less trouble to forgive. And some might say, further, that Violet, after transgressions far more chaotic and multiform than Gloria’s intriguing lapse—well, you could tell by her eyes: Violet was wondering how much more disgrace she’d have to sit through, before getting back to transgression.

“May I? Do you mind?”

“… No. No not at all.”

Now he calmly and personably settled himself, and
Northanger Abbey
, at Gloria’s side. How do we explain the poised airiness of his mood? Well, Keith was looking forward to the disposal of Adriano
(I’ll feel freer in my mind)
. And he had a new project or policy. Carnalisation. Falling out of love with the loved one. I can say (between ourselves) that this was going to be a very bad day indeed for Keith’s interests—his interests as he saw them. But for now he was happy, he was freshly showered, he was twenty years old. Gloria said,

“You gave me a fright. I thought you might be Oona.” She drew in breath; and comprehensively exhaled. “Is it always this hot?”

“It builds and builds. And then there’s a storm.”

Gloria, too, had a book on her lap, which she now put aside, marking the page with the stub of a train ticket. She seemed to prepare herself for sleep, but after a while, with closed eyes, she was surprisingly saying,

“Am I correct in thinking that Scheherazade has gone to Rome to buy a monokini this afternoon? I heard her announce such an intention.”

Am I curraict in thinking …
The voice itself was warm and civilised; and the strict enunciation—what they called
cut-glass
—seemed consonant with Edinburgh, the city of economics (and political philosophy, and engineering, and mathematics), the city of hard thought. He said,

“Yes she did, didn’t she.”

“I know—the gaiety of nations. And all that. But frivolity has its limits. It’s a three-hour drive. I’ve just done it.”

Keith agreed that it was a long way to go.

“A monokini. What did she think she had on this morning?”

Her eyes were still closed, and so he looked: the squarish face whose chin came to a delicate point, the narrow line of the mouth, the full Celt-Iberian nose, the boyish black bob. Her eyes opened suddenly and roundly. He said,

“Uh, she had a bikini on this morning.”

“Yes. A bikini that she’d thrown away the other half of. In other words, she had a monokini on this morning. Ninety-five miles. Are monokinis less dear than bikinis? Are they half the price? Perhaps I’m very old-fashioned. But honestly.”

A silence developed and he attended to
Northanger Abbey
. He was going back to check whether Frederick Tilney did, in point of fact, fuck Isabella Thorpe. The novel became partly epistolary, and it was hard to be exactly sure. And this was, after all, the novel’s one cataclysmic event. He tried to feel the weight of this: a single sexual act that held vicious meaning for your whole existence … Keith supposed that gallantry obliged him to stick up for Scheherazade, and tell Gloria that there were other reasons for the trip to Rome. For example, tea at the Ritz with Adriano’s father, Luchino. Keith happened to know, too, that Scheherazade, not content with the purchase of a monokini, planned to spend
a hundred dollars on underwear
(she would be giving Lily a few pairs). What’s happening? he thought. There was a time when he would have disapproved of this—would have looked up from the pages
of
The Common Pursuit
or
The Liberal Imagination
, and wondered aloud how the money could be more sensibly spent. Gloria said,

“Am I a prig or has it all gone a bit too far? This obsession with
display.”
And looking past him she said to herself with a flat smile, “Ah, here it is.
For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me …”

Keith turned. On the upper lawn, with a pair of secateurs in each hand, Oona was browsing through the roses.