The Pregnant Widow (20 page)

“Butcher’s?” said Whittaker.

Keith told him it was rhyming slang. Butcher’s hook: look. “Why’s that funny?”

“I’m just thinking.
Give us a butcher’s
. Not the most obvious inducement to a Muslim. I mean, they have a different approach to butchers. They—”

“D’you want to hear this story or not? No offence and I know you’re gay and everything, but there’s Ashraf—big girl, mind—coming out of a mountain lake half-naked, and you want to talk about butchers.”

Whittaker opened his hands and asked Keith to proceed.

“Well.
Come on, sweetheart, come on, give us a gander
. And she reached behind her back and …” Then came a shrug, and a silence. “And there were these two fucking volcanoes staring you out. And this was years ago. Long before they all started doing it.” 1967, Spain, Franco, and the Guardia Civil policing the beach (and the ban on bikinis) with their half-raised machine guns. “Okay. Now where does it say a Muslim chick can do that?”

Whittaker said urbanely, “Oh, there’s probably some obscure teaching
somewhere or other. You know. When infidels gather as you bathe, and cry out for a butcher’s, reach behind your back and … So what moral is Amen supposed to take from Ashraf?”

“Uh, it’ll make him loosen up about the Blob. Sorry. Ruaa. Jesus. I’m a little the worse for … I was raised to respect all cultures. And I respect Ruaa. But religion—religion’s always been my enemy. It teaches girls to be a drag about sex.”

“You know, Keith, there might be a moral in Ruaa for
you
. Actually I like having her here. It means he can’t just disappear. That’s my situation. I love someone who could just disappear.”

Keith thought of Ashraf—a Muslim of discos and miniskirts, a cool-pants Muslim whose evening drink was Chivas Regal. He thought of Dilkash, with her orangeade and her sensible trouser suits. Yet she too had powers of surprise. The shock of Ashraf’s presentation, at the lake, was not that much greater, relatively, than the shock Dilkash had given him, after a month of chaste friendship, when she took off her cardigan and revealed her bare arms … Had he humiliated Dilkash? Humiliated Pansy? He couldn’t get any of them out of his mind, any of them—he was like the very sick old man he would one day become, needing to know how it had gone, all his life, with women and love.

“What about the Ruaa approach to Violet? With you as Amen. Never leave her alone with any man who isn’t a close relative. Shame and honour, Keith. Shame and honour.”

“A different approach,” he said. “Draw?”

… Don Quixote, talking of his imaginary girlfriend, Dulcinea del Toboso, told Sancho Panza,
I paint her in my fancy, according to my wish
. Keith had done too much of this with Scheherazade, and made her into someone above his reach to know. She would have to come down, to condescend, in his imagination.

Love did have the power to transform—as it had once transformed his newborn sister. He remembered that page, that short chapter of his being, with all his body. Not only his mind remembered it. His fingers remembered it, his breastbone remembered it, his throat remembered it.

And he had read that men were beginning to see women as
objects
. Objects? No. Girls were teemingly alive. Scheherazade: the inseparable sisters who were her breasts, the creatures that dwelt behind her eyes, the great warm beings of her thighs.

Mid-morning, now, and Scheherazade was packing her things: Keith had already sadly helped her with a suitcase and a stack of books. At noon, he came up with a mug of coffee and heard the clatter of the shower … He reached for his novel (he was still listlessly rooting for Catherine and the fixed lour called Heathcliff) … Now came a flurrying, rustling sound, and just then, too, the cicadas started up. The rhythmless marracas of the cicadas … As he listened, Keith felt his face go damp and flabby, like a face marooned and immobilised over a critically hot bath. Now silence.

He tried the door. Thank God, he thought wearily; and he pressed a fatalistic forefinger to the bell.

“You know what I suffer from? Clinical amnesia. Well what d’you think? Next week there’s an official dinner he wants to take me to, and Mum said I ought to go to anything like that if I can bear it. Adriano. Will there be dancing? Imagine.”

Scheherazade was in a gown that her great-aunt Betty might have worn, or actually did wear, in New York, in 1914. Heavy silk of Sherwood green, with the deep pleats starting just above the waist. He said,

“Give it up, Scheherazade. For your own good.”

She turned her back to him. “I’m not thinking of my own good. Could you uh …?”

So Keith stood behind Scheherazade, whom he had never reached out and touched—the babyish fist of her coccyx, the long range of her spine, the wing-cases of her shoulder blades. And for a moment he thought he might honestly be capable of reaching in and around with his warm young hands; but then she drew aside the main body of her hair, between finger and thumb, revealing the long, downy, aromatic
nape (exactly level with his nose). And all he wanted to do was rest his brow against her shoulder, rest it, cool it, ease it.

“What do I do—I just …?”

He slid the zip northward; he joined the plush little buttons; he fixed the clasp. The clasp of her gown, no bigger than a fairy’s paperclip, presiding over that empire of green and all it contained.

Keith said, “I suppose this is the last time. You forgetting.”

“I suppose.” She turned. “But if Jorq comes I’ll be moving back. So you never know.”

After two or three seconds she turned again, and walked. He locked the door after her—Scheherazade, in Sherwood green, and rustling like a tree. Green giantess of the frightening forest. Maid Marian. Who takes from the rich and gives to the poor.

He offered a sigh—a sigh directed, perhaps, as far as the Moho: the discontinuity between the lower mantle and the oceanic crust … Instead of helping her out of her clothes, he was helping her into them. It will happen, he thought. It won’t go on being the wrong way round.

Keith stood there among hooks and racks. The tub, he saw, contained two inches of barely tepid water, very slightly clouded yet almost mirror-like with its slick of oil. He thought about climbing into it; he thought about drinking it; but he just pulled the plug and watched the little maelstrom writhe into being.

N
ow the real heat began. The shadows, rich, sharp, and (he thought) distinctly furtive, yes, with a distinctly paranoid look about them—the shadows could no longer hold their ranks, and cowered inward, while the sun bulged and dropped and repositioned itself directly overhead as if to stare and listen. In the afternoons the gustatory and intestinal odours of the village rose up in layers of salt and gravy. A metal chair, down by the pool, would clasp you in its fire like an instrument of torture; coffee spoons could bite or sting. The nights were still damp but the air was thick and motionless. The dogs no longer barked (they whimpered) and the sheep’s blares of rage and boredom quailed and dried in their throats.

“He’s normal,” said Lily in the dark.

“… No he isn’t. What’s normal about Adriano?”

“His arrangements. Down there.”

“You mean she’s seen it?” He swallowed as silently as he could. “I thought he was still outside her top.”

“He is, or outside her bra. He’s in between her top and her bra. Which is coming off any night now. But she saw the shape in his white trousers. And it’s normal. It’s not like it seems in his swimsuits. She thinks his swimsuits are made out of baseball mitts. Don’t be alarmed by his driving.”

“What? Why should I be?”

“He’s one of those people who think they have to look at you when they talk to you. So he memorises the road ahead and turns around and has a chat. He hardly took his eyes off Scheherazade all the way to Rome. I was in the back. And he drove all the way in profile. Did you know she’s never gone down on anyone? Even on Timmy?”

“No, Lily, I didn’t know. How could I tell?”

“That’s part of it, you see. She just got
three
letters from college friends, and they’re all busy acting like boys. She wants to try new things. Which for her means anything that isn’t the missionary position.”

“… Why’s it called the missionary position?”

“Because the missionaries,” said Lily, “told the natives to stop doing it like dogs and start doing it like missionaries.”

“Christ, the nerve of it. No, really. The nerve of it. Still. Fascinating. You mean in all this time she’s never once gone down on Timmy?”

“That’s sort of why she’s feeling left out. She’s kissed it. She says she’s kissed it, whatever that means.”

“Yeah. What’s that mean?”

“Just a peck, I suppose. Or maybe she French-kissed it—on the tip.”

“Lily …”

“She’s kissed it but she’s never sucked it. She’s never put it in her mouth and really sucked it. She said,
Is that how you do it? You put it in your mouth and you suck it as hard as you possibly can? …
What’ll happen if Kenrik and Rita aren’t still just good friends?”

“If they’re lovers? Simple. They’ll be hating each other.”

“Mm. Which we could never do.”

O
n Sunday, under a percussive sky that seemed to hum like a cymbal, Adriano kept his promise and took the four of them out to lunch—Keith, Lily, Gloria, Scheherazade—at a starred restaurant in a place called Ofanto, which was twenty miles away.

They went there in the motorised drawing room of the Rolls Royce, eerily piloted by Adriano. Keith’s unease seemed to be more basic than Lily’s. Even on the return journey he failed to convince himself that Adriano could actually see over the dashboard, except perhaps through the upper segment of the steering wheel. And when he talked to Scheherazade in the back seat, screwing his head around the full half-circle without moving his shoulders (as Linda Blair was soon to do in
The Exorcist)
, all you could make out was one arched eyebrow and the expanse of his silvery frown.

“The truffles,” he kept turning and saying. “You must have the truffles, Scheherazade. Mmm—as a taste of ambrosia.” The head creaked round again. “The truffles, Scheherazade. Quite divine.”

Ofanto drew near. Confirming his ability to see out of the side window at least, Adriano muttered wonderingly (and you could tell that this was most retrograde to his hopes and wishes),

“So many people! It used to be a market town. Just a sleepy market town. And now?”

And now there is industry, and clumps of workers, each with his singlet and his cigarette, and cuboid medium-rise flatblocks, and insect nests of aerials, and distantly swearing dogs aswivel on trapped balconies—and where there is all this, all that, there is also the presence of young men …

“Just a sleepy market town. And now—I don’t know. I don’t know.”

At this point we should jump ahead to six thirty that evening. There are sour drinks on the castle’s west terrace. Sour drinks in the sour dusk. Adriano, perfunctorily asked up, had perfunctorily declined, and drove on. So the four of them are arranged out there, their faces averted in the private trials of digestion. The usual sunset colours, with a shading or grading of turbulence, as Jupiter’s stomach rumbles, in some other valley, under some other mountain.

“Well,”
said Scheherazade.

And Keith turned to her. Because something was the matter with the film she used to be starring in. Was it the light? Was it the continuity? Was it the dialogue—was the whole thing dubbed all along?

Well what?

“Well,”
said Scheherazade.

For a moment, sitting there on the swing sofa, she seemed average—average in the eyes. There was a good reason for this. And Keith partly understood her need to go to the table and pour out that second helping of white wine; her glass, already half empty, rested at an angle on her print-flowered lap … Those average eyes of hers were fixed on Gloria Beautyman, who stood by the French windows, poking with her finger at the ice cubes in her Pellegrino. Scheherazade said,

“Well
. Your backside gathered quite a following this afternoon.”

Gloria seemed to swallow something suddenly. She said, “Meaning?”

“Meaning? Meaning your rear end and the stir it caused.”

“And the same went for you,” said Gloria, swallowing again, “and your—your
bust.”

“Well if you’re going to cram it into those cords …”

“You
told me to. I was going to go in a smock but you said wear something else. So I wore cords. They’re just
cords.”

“Cords. Skintight and bright red. With your arse like a prize tomato.”

“Hark who’s talking. With
that
top on.”

And Keith was wondering. What were heroines allowed to do?

As Lily, Keith, Scheherazade, Adriano and Gloria walked across the dusty grey piazza, and down the length of the endless avenue, the young men of Ofanto staged their choreographic referendum on the attractions of the three girls. Here they came again. Drawn like iron filings in obedience to magnets of varying power, the young men squirmed and milled and then divided—with graphic candour—into two columns: one in front of Scheherazade, and one behind Gloria Beautyman. One group walking forward. One group walking backward. And Lily? … I can say that her figure, when it came, turned out to be impeccably symmetrical, not top-heavy, not bottom-heavy—classic, without fetish. But this of course would have pulled little weight with the young men of Campania, faithful to the sacrament of the twinned and rolling orbs.
It was here that Adriano made his terrible mistake. It was such a little thing. All he did was reach out with his hand.

“What are we supposed to do?” asked Gloria on the rosy terrace. “Swaddle ourselves like Ruaa?”

And Scheherazade laughed tinnily and said, “At least you had the sense to refuse that glass of champagne. Otherwise—well I shudder to think.”

Gloria glanced quickly from face to face. And two tears leapt from her eyes: you could see them whitely glitter as they leapt and fell …

Now Lily stood up into the silence.