The Pregnant Widow (44 page)

What is happening to her face? What is happening to its sinews and tendons? Then he sees that she is in fact engaged in a more or less recognisable human activity. The first word that comes into his head is an adjective: talentless. The second is an intensifier: fantastically. Because what Violet is accomplishing, or imagines she’s accomplishing, is this: the sexual bewitchment of the bartender.

Who, with his ponytail, his sleeveless black T-shirt, his ugly muscles, keeps turning to glance at her, not in reciprocation, but in disbelief. To see if she’s still doing it. And she’s still doing it, still doing it, still hooding her eyes and leering and sneering and licking her lips. Keith steps forward.

“Violet.”

“Hi Key,” she says and slides from her stool.

“Oh Vi!”

Like a globule of yolk and albumen freed from its shell, Violet drops
all at once, and lies there, forming a circular pool—the egg-white now flat in the pan, with her yellow head in the middle of it. Five minutes later he has at last installed her in a leather armchair, and she is saying, “Home. Home.”

Keith goes and calls Nicholas, who gives him three different and widely separated addresses. As he is paying the bill (“Can this be right?”), he sees that the leather armchair is empty. The barman points. Keith swings the glass door open, and Violet is under his feet on her hands and knees, head tucked down, being copiously and noisily sick.

Soon afterwards they are in a series of taxis, going to Cold Blow Lane in the Isle of Dogs, going to the Mile End Road, going to Orpington Avenue, N19. She badly wants her bed, she badly wants her roommate, Veronique. But before she can go there she needs her key, they need to find the key.

    The bar bill at Khartoum—it was the kind of tab he might have settled after two hours with Nicholas or even Kenrik. “Can this be right?” The barman widened his eyes (and then pointed). Violet had drunk seven Martinis in less than half an hour.

Entering his bed, in the attractive maisonette, he parted Iris’s Irish hair (like thick marmalade) at the back of her neck—so that he could rest his cheek against her rusty down.

Apart from Violet (Violet’s shadow in his mind), was he happy? He wanted to say yes. But the two hearts, his upper (fixed or steady-state), his lower (extensile, or supposedly so), were unaligned. His had become a traitorous eros. The question, sad to say, of the
hard-on:
he couldn’t get one, or when he got one he couldn’t keep one. And he didn’t love them, his girls. And he used to love them all. I’ll say this for myself (he thought): I am no longer a bully in the bedroom, I no longer try to force girls out of their nature. You need a proper hard-on to do that. And so he subsisted, with his cross-purposed blood.

All these flowers, the irises, the pansies, the lilies, the violets. And himself—and his rose of youth. O rose, thou art sick …

… Keith rolled onto his back. Out in London that night, he and Violet had to find something. They had to find Violet’s key. That took until half past midnight. They found out where the key was, they found the key. Then they had to find out where it was the key to.

In July 1976 Keith hired Gloria Beautyman for a thousand pounds a week. Her job was to pretend to be his girlfriend …

It’s April, and Gloria is walking across Holland Park, with briskness and address, to get from one end of it to the other; whereas Keith is just walking, and going nowhere. He hails her. They fall into step.

“Nice
hat,”
she concedes (as he tips towards her his charcoal Borsalino). “Have you lost your bedsit blues?”

“I took your advice.” And he explains. His curriculum vitae, his course of life.

“Mm,” she says. “But earned money never lasts.”

“Are you married yet? … Well I expect you’ll be off to Canterbury anyway.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When that April, Gloria, with its showers sweet, the drought of March hath pierced to the root, then people long to go on pilgrimages.”

“Do they now.”

“No they don’t. Not any more. That’s the trouble. They just sigh and think, April is the cruellest month. Breeding lilacs out of the dead land, Gloria. Mixing memory and desire.”

“… You ought to stop all that, you know. It just makes girls feel ignorant.”

“You’re right. Anyway, I’ve given up poetry. It’s given me up.”

For the first time her pace slows, and she smiles his way—as if he’s done a good thing. And even Lily, utilitarian Lily, was saddened by this news. When he visited the part of his mind where the poems used to come from, he was met with the kind of silence that follows a violently slammed door.

“Because it only works if you’re penniless?” says Gloria. “There’ve been rich poets, surely.”

“True. But the Earl of Rochester didn’t work at Derwent and Digby.” Whose corridors, he reflects, are thick with silenced poets, blocked novelists, concussed playwrights.

“And how’s it going with the girls?”

“Not too bad. But I can’t get the girls I really want. Girls like you.”

“What are girls like me like?”

“Girls who look in the mirror and say ‘I love me so.’ Girls with glossy black hair. Shoeshine hair. Your hair’s like a mirror. I could see my face in it. This is the first time you’ve shown it to me, your hair. Girls with glossy hair and a secret.”

“Just as I foretold. Ruined for life.”

“You spoilt me, but I’m over you now. I want Penny in Public Relations. I want Pamela in Personnel. Are you married yet? My sister’s getting married. Are you?”

“It’s hot suddenly.”

And suddenly she stops, turns, and opens her coat … In novels, weather and landscape answer to mood. Life isn’t like that. But now a warm breeze, a hot wind, sweeps past them, and there is minute precipitation, like a humid vapour, and within seconds Gloria’s white cotton top is a clinging transparency, the complementary breasts the shape of teardrops, the artistic omphalos. Memory and desire come up from the ground, from the paved path, from the dead land, and take him by the back of the knees. He says,

“Remember—remember you told me something. You could walk me round the room, and girls would look at me differently. Remember?”

And he made his offer.

“Penny. Pamela. There are two office parties coming up. I want Penny in Public Relations, I want Pamela in Personnel. Come to the summer parties. And come and have lunch with me in Berkeley Square—just once or twice. Collect me from work. Pretend to be my girlfriend.”

“It’s not enough money.”

“I’ll double it. Let me give you my card.”

By now he had been to America—to New York, to Los Angeles—and he knew much more about the genre (the type, the mode) that Gloria in some sense belonged to.

Here is the youngish woman, apparently held together by the cords of her scars and the lattice of her cellulite, and sometimes tattooed to the thickness of a tarot card. Here is the youngish man, with his brute tumescence, his lantern jaw, his ignoble brow.

Now fade. Here is Keith, a towel round his waist. Here is Gloria, holding up a blue dress as if assessing it for length. Then the look she gives him just before she turns. As if he has come to deliver the pizza or drain the swimming pool. Then the physical interchange—“the act by which love would be transmitted,” as one observer put it, “if there
were
any.”

Of course, Gloria was non-generic in two vital respects. The first was her use of the humorous, the droll (with Gloria sex had been
funny
—because of what it told you about their natures, his, hers). Up there on the screen, with its gruesome colours, Day-Glo and wax-museum, a single genuine smile and the whole illusion would flee with a shriek. Gloria’s second anomaly was her beauty. She combined beauty and dirt, like city snow. And then there was the religion.

“We have a deal,” she said on the phone. “The thing is, Huw’s seeing too much of an old girlfriend. Not what you think, but he needs a good fright. Now when should I start pretending?”

Keith replaced the receiver and thought of the white T-shirt in Holland Park. The meteorological or heavenly connivance. No-see-um raindrops, and her torso moulded by the pornodew.

    Violet was a June bride.

Karl Shackleton, all atremble on his walking sticks, gave her away. There was a lunch at the house of her faithful admirer, unexceptionable Francis, kind, educated. “We’ve no choice,” said Nicholas, “but to see him as a force for good.” Francis’s widowed mother was present, among furnishings as gaunt as her person. Then they all waved the newly-weds off on their honeymoon—the Austin Princess with its white streamers. Violet was twenty-two.

There were some difficulties early on, Keith heard. Then the marriage seemed to settle. But by July the house was undergoing renovation. Violet had the builders in.

    
“Huh-hm,”
says Gloria, by way of polite introduction, as he drives her to the first summer party—whose setting is an opulent “hermaphrodite
brig” (a two-masted sailing ship) on the River Thames. “It may embarrass you to learn what the trick is. I’ll do all the usual stuff like stroking and nuzzling. But this is the trick. I have to stare adoringly all the time in the general direction of your cock.”

Keith, at the wheel, says, “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Funnily enough there was a … I thought I was the only one who knew about this, but funnily enough there was a programme about it the other night. They wired up everyone’s eyes with laser beams or whatever it was. When a girl is introduced to a boy at a social gathering, she glances at his cock about every ten seconds. He does the same, only he includes her tits. Newly-weds’ eyes are
glued
to each other that way. Which are the girls you like?”

“Penny and Pamela.”

“I’ll be flirting with them too. Don’t be alarmed if you see me kissing them or feeling them up. People don’t know this yet either, but girls go weak for that if it’s done in the right way. Even the straightest of them.”

“Really?”

“Trust me.”

At midnight he pulls up outside Huw’s double-fronted townhouse in Primrose Hill. A tuxedoed Keith Nearing opens the passenger door and extends his hand towards a cheongsamed Gloria Beautyman.

“That was rather fun,” she says. “Now. What are you doing wrong?”

“I think all girls with bedroom bodies are cocks.”

“That’s right. And as I was at pains to tell you, long ago, hardly
any
girls are cocks. Here. Shake my glove.”

“Cocks. Staring at cocks. Don’t be offended, but are there boys who are cunts?”

“No. It’s all cocks. Goodnight.”

Smoothed, pawed, squeezed, nibbled, and adoringly stared at, Keith drove home and had an unqualified fiasco with Iris.

Three weeks later, the envelope containing the second half of her honorarium (Gloria’s preferred term for it) gets handed over in the BMW. Keith in white tie, Gloria in a starkly abbreviated version of her Sunday best. The second works outing consists of cocktails and dinner in the revolving carvery on top of the Post Office Tower.

“That was wonderful. You know, for an hour or two I really and truly believed you were my girlfriend.”

“Mm, and then you came on so suave. Right. To summarise. Forget Penny. She’s tight-lipped, but I can tell she’s wearing down a married man. And Pamela, I think, is borderline gay.”

“You and her in the bathroom. How could you tell? The kissing?”

“No, they all do the kissing. No. The
breathing
. Maybe you’d be better off with Alexis.”

“Alexis?” Alexis is Digby’s secretary. “She’s too—isn’t she too worldly for me? She’s married.”

“No she’s not. She’s advantageously divorced. She’s a very decent forty, and by now she’s good fun in the way we mean. Ooh, I bet she is. But remember: she’s not a cock.”

Keith says that he’ll bear this in mind. “But I’d never get off with Alexis.”

“You might. She likes books. And I don’t know if she reads it, but she sees that guff you write in the
Lit Supp
. Send her some flowers and ask her to lunch. Now. When you drop me off, we’ll stand at the garden gate and you’re to give me a sex kiss lasting about a minute. Because Huw’ll be watching. Actually no. A minute can be an absolute age, don’t you find? Ten or fifteen seconds. But make sure you put your hand up the back of my skirt.”

Conclusions. It wasn’t long before everyone at Derwent and Digby knew that Derwent had left his wife and moved in with Penny. Pamela came back from her summer holiday in New York with her head shaved. Soon afterwards, Keith started seeing Alexis. He felt as if Gloria was directing his life, like a general on a hill.

And he had no complaints. Something new was going wrong sexually, but he had no complaints. What he couldn’t forget was that his sex kiss with Gloria went on for at least an absolute age.

Violet’s marriage was already over. An improbable sister and an impossible daughter, Violet turned out to be an inconceivable wife.

“She fucked the builder?”

“No,” said Nicholas on the phone. “She fucked the builders. With an ess.”

“She fucked two builders.”

“No. She fucked
all
the builders.”

“But there were lots of builders.”

“I know.”

It’s spring again (May), and now Keith is at his desk, with Ed looking over his shoulder. Ed (short for Ahmed) is the visual wunderkind from Communications, and the two of them are “midwifing” an original product (a kind of choc-ice sandwich). Keith’s new secretary, Judith, buzzes through to say that a Mrs. H. Llewellyn is here to see him.

“No, I’m not married,” says Gloria when they’re alone. “Not quite. Not yet. And do you realise I’m
thirty?”
She pauses while Judith brings in her tea. “There’s a problem with Huw.”

“He’s keen on drugs,” says Keith, repeating the rumour.

“Huw’s not keen on drugs. He’s a heroin addict.”