The Pregnant Widow (22 page)

G
loria, in fact, rose up at five o’clock that afternoon. Rose up and came down—grand, ill-used, unblinking. It was impressive, the magnitude of her indignation, and its content ran as follows: this indignation is uncontainable, and you’re lucky that it’s Gloria Beautyman who’s containing it, because nobody else could. Keith, perhaps, and certainly Whittaker were excused from the full sweep of her disgust; but Lily wasn’t.
She’s hating me too
, she said.
So I’m hating her back
. Woman–woman diplomacy or statecraft was something that Keith knew he would never understand; it was like looking down on a bright sea from a clifftop, the million points of light pinging from droplet to droplet—untrackably. An arcane discipline, like molecular thermodynamics. Whereas male disaffection was mere male
sullenness, with its Queensbury rules …
It’ll all ease off
, said Lily. And it did.

Otherwise, as the inhabitant of the next turret along, Gloria was an invisible and almost inaudible towermate. It became clear—perhaps it was always clear—that she would never forget to unlatch the bathroom door. And, within, no sopping flannels, no stuff in tubs and bottles to slap on your face and no stuff in tubs and bottles to take it all off again, no stockings or swimsuits drying on the rack (and no hot shape in white bathtowels). Lily herself, after a day or two, pronounced the bathroom
usable
. Gloria, seldom seen, and silent. Even her showers were whispers: so might a watering can weep over a flowerbed. And compare this to the mad gossip, the wild rumours, of the showers of Scheherazade.

… The stasis of the afternoon is the time for the thick and ponderous longing of the twenty-year-old. What to do with it all? It was everything and nothing, it subsumed death and infinity—what to do with the instrument of yearning? … The girls were down at the pool, and Whittaker was out sketching with Gloria, and Keith paid a call on the twin turret, hoping to find a scent or a residue of more interesting times. And the room was now utterly clutterless. Where were the heaps of shoes, the crumpled nighties, the blue jeans trampled out of and still holding, as if in cupped palms, Scheherazade’s loins and hips? Madonna hadn’t been in for half a week and yet Gloria’s sheets seemed ironed into place, with nautical severity, and the pillows looked as solid as slabs of chalk. Then Keith’s eyes picked up a bearing. Her passport’s still here, he thought—and there it was, beneath the triple mirror. But it was Gloria’s passport, of course, and not Scheherazade’s.

He flicked through it. Renewed in 1967; Gloria with hair, glossily curved round her smile; Distinguishing Features—none; 5′ 5″; not well-travelled (Greece, France, and now Italy, all this year). Wedged into the empty pages were her provisional driving licence and her birth certificate … Keith was always eccentrically stirred and moved by birth certificates (and Violet’s was a talisman to him, because he was there to issue it and receive her). Your birth certificate was your
BC
—before Christ, before anything—and your proof of innocence. It was your ticket of entry; it put you inside history … Glasgow Infirmary; February 1, 1947; Girl; Gloria Rowena; Reginald Beautyman, Diplomat; Prunella Beautyman (née MacWhirr); If Married, Place and Date—Church of the Holy Virgin, Cairo, Egypt, June 11, 1935 …

After a moment he went next door and took out his own entry ticket, kept in a polythene sachet at the bottom of his spongebag, together with another document, in ordinary longhand, which said:

The key to this chart was kept in Keith’s head. I can disclose it: the numeral 1 meant holding hands, 2 was kissing, and so on, and 10 was
it
(Lily’s asterisk could be glossed as
fellatio unto orgasm
, and the plus sign as
plus swallowing)
. There. Sixteen girls, and eight clear successes, in five years … Keith’s birth certificate, with its two
deceaseds
, was more dramatic than Gloria’s. But this other thing, this record, rewritten with every update, also told him who he was.

A
t five thirty Scheherazade drove in the cabriolet from castle to castle and returned after an hour, looking childishly contrite, with her shoulders raised and locked. Dinner unfolded, its surface tension, its meniscus, casually qualified by Whittaker. After Gloria had proudly taken her leave, Scheherazade told of Adriano, saying,

“He was very correct. Quiet. Rather angry, I think. I don’t blame him. I asked him to keep coming over. I stressed that we’re still good friends.”

“That’s what we’re hoping Kenrik and Rita will be,” said Lily. “Still good friends.”

“You’re hoping,” said Whittaker, “that they stayed in the right sleeping bags.”

Keith watched as Whittaker went off. Keith watched as Lily went up …

It was now just before midnight in the gunroom. The moose, with its marble eyes, stared out inexorably. On the floor, on the tiger rug, Indian-fashion faced side-saddle: Keith faced the forbidding
approachability, the illegible openness of Scheherazade. What was this alphabet that he couldn’t read? She wore a close dress of murky pink, with five white buttons down the front at six-inch intervals; she kept scratching at the little red swell on the paler side of her forearm where, the night before, a mosquito had inserted its syringe. Keith was in his usual state, which was this. Every other minute, he could hear heaven snickering at his forebearance; and every minute in between, he blushed white sweat at the thought of the sulphurous tar pit in his soul.

The night was probably about to end, and Keith was blithely (and ignorantly) saying something about the castle, about how the exterior sometimes struck him as more Transylvanian than Italianate (with a haunted slant to it), and he went on,

“The best bit in
Dracula
is when he climbs down the rampart—head first. Coming down to feast on the girl.”

“Head first?”

“Head first. He sticks to the wall like a fly. He’s already done for Lucy Westenra. He savaged her—in the form of a wild animal. Now it’s Wilhelmina’s turn. He bites her three times. And he makes her drink his blood. And from then on she’s under his control.”

“I’m scared now.” She lowered her voice. “What if I’m attacked on my way up? I’m scared now.”

And
his
blood—it altered thickly. “But I’ll protect you,” he said.

They stood. They climbed the staircase that wound its way round the ballroom. On the recessed half-landing she said,

“I suppose this is far enough.”

“Wait,” he said, and placed the three-branched candelabrum on the floor, and straightened slowly. “You stand betrayed. I’m the undead. I’m the prince of darkness.”

So he was pretending to be Dracula (his hands were vampirically raised and tensed), and she was pretending to be his victim (her hands were clasped in obeisance or prayer), and he was moving in on her, and she was backing off and even half sat herself on the curved lid of a wooden trunk, and their faces were level, eye to eye and breath to breath. And now they were given a ticket of entry to another genre … the world of the heaving bosom and the drooling canine, of bats and screech owls, of fluids and straight razors and blinded mirrors, where everything was allowed. He looked down the length of her: the
stretched gaps between her buttons were mouths of smiling flesh. From throat to thigh, it was all before him.

She raised a palm halfway towards his chest—and, as if pushed, he staggered sideways, and something clattered, and there were three rolling tubes of tallow with flickering wicks, and they laughed, fatally, and suddenly it was over.

Then Scheherazade went on up and Keith went on down. He crossed the courtyard under the ridiculous innocence of the moon. He climbed the tower.

And entered the insanity of night.

Oh, I know
now
what I should have said and done.
Count Dracula would want your throat, your neck. But I—I want your mouth, your lips
. Then onward, and all would have followed and flowed. Wouldn’t it?

Esprit de l’escalier:
spirit of the staircase, wishing you’d said, wishing you’d done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was
the staircase that led to the bedroom …

Gathering, shadowing, boding, closing over Scheherazade, he felt a near-irresistible force. And an immovable object. What was the nature of the impediment, what was its shape and mass? He turned to the sleeping form at his side and whispered,

How could you
do
this to me?

For weeks Keith had known that his chosen project was something like the opposite of self-improvement. But he honestly never dreamt that he had so far to go.

I
expect you’re wondering if I’m a genuine redhead. Well I destroyed the evidence, didn’t I. Naygo traygace. I’m real enough: look at the stipple on me oxters. Here. You know,
I
know a girl who’s
never
had pubic hair. No, never. She—”

—Forgive me, Rita, for this brief interruption, but I’ve just noticed a vein pulsing its way from left to right across Keith’s brow: an idea is being born in him. And I must begin to stand off, to go back, to withdraw … Now, as for Dilkash, I made my position clear; and I gave him a truly terrible time about Pansy. If, last night, he had closed on
Scheherazade, well, there would have been one prompt repercussion that he has so far wilfully refused to weigh. But what he is contemplating as I speak (see the vermicular movement, east to west, across his lineless forehead) … To put it in words he would plainly understand, he is launched on his own corruption: from L.
corrumpere
, Keith, “mar, bribe,” my friend, from
cor-
“altogether” +
rumpere
“to break.” Forgive me, Rita, I’m sorry—please proceed.

“No, never. She made war on it the instant it appeared. She never let it get a hold. That’s the future, that is. Sorry, girls, but the days of the beaver are over. No more jungle combat. Eh, Rik, it’s all right here, isn’t it. Day-ghed paygosh. We were on the road all night, and I’m filthy, me. I want a lovely long bath. A long bath,” she said, “and I’ll be as sound as the mail.”

Rita had not been among them half a minute before she was mother naked—she approached the pool drawing her frock over her head and scraping off her shoes; Rita, in her birthday suit; then came the ear-to-ear grin and the racing dive. Kenrik was following slowly in her path with his head set well down.

And where were the police? Where were they? Although Scheherazade, Keith felt, could probably be processed by the constabulary forces (and Lily let off with a warning), Rita, surely, merited a visit from the Serious Crimes Squad. Rita: 5′ 8″, 32-30-31, not just topless, not just bottomless, but depilated too—pre-adolescent, at twenty-five … And Keith himself might have attracted the attention of the authorities, had there been any. His new inkling throbbed like a black flower with a bee feeding on it. Lily, her upper teeth bared, looked on as Rita said,

“So can we go round again? Now you’re … Say it slow.”

“Scheherazade.”

“Hey, bird, that goes on a bit, don’t you think—the suspense! And after that tongue-twister, after that gobful—it’s Adriano, isn’t it. Oh and you’re a big fella for a little fella, aren’t you love. What’s your middle name, sweetheart?”

“… Sebastiano,” said Adriano (eventually remembering to be proud about it).

“Then that’s what I’ll call you. D’you mind? See, Seb, I had me heart broken by an Adrian. He was a fucking animal, he was … And you’re
Whittaker. Charmed. And you’re Gloria. And you, kid—you, of course, are Lily. So. What wickedness have you all been up to under the sun?”

“… Nothing,” said Scheherazade. “It’s a bit feeble, but there it is. Nothing.”

I
n a menacing undertone Kenrik had asked to be taken to the nearest bar.

More than once, on the steep path, Keith turned to him with the beginnings of a simple declarative sentence, only to be silenced by a raised hand. And Kenrik called for halts, and sat on a rock, smoking, then on a tree stump, smoking, and kneaded his hair with eight stiffened fingers …

Kenrik, too, was the child of a pregnant widow. It happened early in the second trimester (fast convertible, summer rain). So, for five months—the vanished father, the unborn son, and the mother both lamenting and expecting. The black weeds or threads, but also the familiar curve of the silhouette, with the profile poised like a question mark between life and death. And the old order gives way to the new, not immediately, though, not yet: the filled breasts and weakened knees, the cravings, the broken waters, the pumping womb, and labour, labour, labour.

For five months the growing baby was rinsed in the juices of mourning. And this was the difference between the two friends. As she gave birth, Keith’s mother believed that the father was still alive; so in his round bath the unborn child never tasted the excretions of grief. Widow—OE
widewe
“be empty;” but they weren’t empty, these two women, these two widows.

Kenrik said, “What’s that mean?”

“Mussolini is always right.”

“The thing is, man, I haven’t been alone for twenty days, and I … Do you ever get that—when you don’t know who you are?”

Well, no, thought Keith. Though I’m feeling, now, as if I’m floating in and out of myself. “Sort of,” he said.

“… All right. I’m in your hands. Lead on.”

They entered the cave of carpentry across the alley from the pet shop. The drinkers, in their fleeces, as if disguised as sheep. Kenrik said,

“I’m quite good at this by now.
Buon giorno. Due cognac grandes, per favore
. That’s for me. What’re you having?”