The Pregnant Widow (47 page)

“It wasn’t a good time to have a very bad dream. I was getting married in the morning.”

Gloria and Huw, she briskly explains, were the occupants of the bridal suite at the Grand, in the border city of Chester. Huw had his stag night, and Gloria had her doe night, in two different dining rooms at the hotel. She went to bed at nine—for, as everybody knew, Beautyman must have her beautysleep. Briefly waking her, Huw came in at a quarter to ten.

“You yourself have remarked on how hot my breasts get in the night. I went to cool them against his back. And it stung, it burned. Like dry ice. And you know what he was doing? He was dying. Keith, stay
where you are … No, unfortunately not. They found a pulse. The two words they’re using to describe his condition are ‘serious’ and ‘stable.’ And when you think about it, that’s really very funny. Huw? Serious? Stable? … As I imagine it, his heart stopped beating for nine minutes. One for every year he stole from me. He’s damaged his brain. Not that anyone’ll see the difference. Now what’ve you got to say to all that? … I’ll think about it. Come here. I wish Huw could watch me doing this. But he’s probably blind.”

    Nicholas was in South East Asia, and it was a couple of weeks before they spoke. He called collect from a sepulchral echo chamber in Calcutta.

“Imagine that,” said Keith. “You wake up on your wedding day. You’re trying to separate fact from fiction. And there’s this snowman lying beside you. Your groom.” There was a silence. “Nicholas?”

“I’m still here. Well she bounced back quick enough.”

“Look, uh, ethically it’s far from ideal, I admit, but it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. God, that night I was petrified. And so was she. Her eyes were as hard as rocks. Like jewels. But it makes sense in a way.”

“Does it? How?”

“See, she’s not a woman bereaved. She’s a woman scorned.” See, Nicholas, her body, with its hollows and rises, its feminine exaggerations, was passed over for something the shape of a needle. “In her heart she’s been hating him for years. Ever since he first went on it. A woman scorned. She’s had, she says, ‘dozens of flings,’ but she’s been nursing Huw along since 1970. The lost decade. She’s in a deep frenzy about the lost decade.”

“And don’t tell me. This has made her
more
religious. They all do that. Something shitty happens and they just double their bet.”

“Yeah, but not in the way you’d think. She believes God’s punishing him—to her specifications. Or she did. Huw’s all fucked up and can’t walk or talk or anything. And she was ticking off his faculties one by one. Then suddenly he was out of danger.”

“And that shook her faith.”

“It did a bit. The poor little thing was very low for a day or two. But she’s rallied.”

“I can’t tell whether you’re being ironic or not.”

“Neither can I. Not any more. And get this. Huw’s been disinherited,
right? I mean, he’s a vegetable. And get this. The other morning we had sex—topped off with the sinister refinement. And she’s sitting at breakfast with it all over her face. Eating toast. Drinking tea. And she looks up and says, ‘This should’ve happened two years ago. Then Probert would’ve been perfectly fine.’” There was a silence. “Nicholas?”

“I’m still here. So she’s in residence.”

“Yeah, on one condition. She said, ‘We’ll have to get engaged. It doesn’t commit you to anything. Or me either. It’s just for my parents.’ I said okay. She’s here. She’s penniless. And she’s desperate. It’s great.”

“Keith. Don’t marry the Future.”

“No. You know, she never levels with you. Her secret’s still brewing away in there. And I don’t get it. What’s left to be ashamed about in this day and age?”

“Don’t marry Miss Towel Rack.”

“Of course I won’t. You think I’m nuts?”

    One of the first things he did, after Gloria moved in, was take her to prison. “I don’t want to go to prison,” she said. But she came. They went to see Kenrik, who was in Brixton on remand. Gloria was strong throughout, but afterwards she wept. “So pretty,” she said in the car (with fellow feeling, Keith thought), “and so afraid.”

Then he took her to the Church Army Hostel for Young Women. To see Violet (who had another black eye). Gloria was strong throughout, but afterwards she wept. “The place is like a library,” said Keith in the car. “Except no one’s reading. Why are the girls so silent?” And Gloria said, “Because they’ve been shamed beyond words.”

The only thing they rowed about, in the first few months, was money. Oh yeah—and marriage. The two themes were related in her mind.

“If we break up now,” she said, “I get nothing.”

“I don’t want to break up now.”

“But what if I meet Mr. Christmas?”

“You’re being illogical. If you meet Mr. Christmas, you won’t need my money. Which is new money. You’ll have Mr. Christmas’s money. Which’ll be old money.”

“I want to be able to put something aside. Triple my allowance. Most of it goes on bedroom stuff anyway. You’re so selfish.”

“Oh all right.”

In April she took him to Edinburgh to meet her parents (this was a preposterous occasion), and in May he took her to Spain to meet his.

    
La casita de campo
—the little house in the country. Travel is almost always art in motion (a journey is almost always a reasonable short story), so, first, there are animals. Edinburgh had its animals: the parrot in the kitchen, the elephant in the living room. And the
campo
has its animals: the birds and the bees, the busybody chickens with their strict neurotic faces, and their gaits, like clockwork nurses, the ursine Alsatian, old Coca, who nuzzles your groin and gives out great groans of debility and despair. All around and up above, the craters and graters of the sierras.

“Can I help you with that?” says Gloria.

“It won’t come out,” says Tina. “What on earth did she do?”

Nicholas used to say that he got on so well with his mother because they were exactly the same age. But Tina is a little older than Keith: she is fifty-one. Karl, nine years her senior, has been placed in the shade.

“How’d she do it?” wonders Tina, who has a plastic bucket before her, and is washing one of the dresses that Violet, after her recent visit, left behind. The dress has a deep coating of dirt all over its seat. “I suppose she might’ve fallen on her bum in the mud. But that looks really
worked in …”

There is a silence.

“Where does she go, Mum? When she’s here?”

“She just goes to the bars. She used to go to the Gypsy camp. For days, weeks. Until they threw her out.”

Gloria says, “Gypsies are actually quite puritanical. People think they aren’t, but they are. And they’re not from Egypt either.”

“… I’m her mother and she’s a complete mystery to me. When she’s here, she’s so sweet with Dad. Devoted. I think she’s got a very good heart. But then why?”

    In the garden of the Hotel Reina Victoria there is a statue of Rainer Maria Rilke, who took sanctuary here while sleeping out, while dreaming out, the First World War. The poet—his subject was “the decay of reality”—is here etched, chipped, out of black bronze, and looks jagged, frazzled, like someone undergoing electrocution. The statue
makes him think of the later Kenrik, his face medieval, Druidical, and carved out of rock … Keith feels the reproachful gaze of Rainer Maria’s sightless eyes.

“My oldest friend,” he says carefully, “is sharing a cell, and a toilet, with a man who probably knifed a family of five. Just a couple of days ago, my sister was screwed in a ditch. Gloria, nothing could possibly shock me. So go on. Tell.”

A minute passes by. They stare out at the ramped mountains, with their three strategies of distance.

“All right, I will. My father’s not my father.”

And he thinks, That’s not a secret. The elephant in the living room: one feels it is important to know what the elephant is
doing
—when it’s in the living room. Is it jouncing and trumpeting and shivering its flanks? Or is it just standing there, as still as a cow under a tree in the rain? The Edinburgh elephant was house-trained. That was the trouble. Keith had been expecting one or both of Gloria’s parents to be Celt-Iberian. And they were both dairy products—pure and simple. And then there was the flurried visit from the younger sister, Mary: like the mother, she seemed to be two different women joined at the waist; but she too was flaxen-haired, and when she smiled she revealed, not Gloria’s strips of spearmint Chiclets, but the barnyard balcony of the unadulterated Scot. It was so palpable that Keith didn’t even mention it—the elephant in the living room, with its African ears.

“I’ll go into detail,” says Gloria, under Rilke’s gaze, “so you’ll know I’m not lying. I usually tell everyone that my mother’s parents were swarthy, and it skipped a generation. I’ve even got a photograph I show.”

“And it isn’t true.”

“It isn’t true. Listen. In the Sixties there was only one other proper consulate in Iceland. Portuguese. Because of the fishing. There was a man who was always around. Marquez. Pronounced Markish. He kept looking at me oddly, and one day he stroked my hair and said, ‘I followed you from Lisbon.’ I was fourteen. And he wasn’t even Portuguese. He was Brazilian. So there.”

“Why would
I
worry about your parentage? Or anyone else’s?”

“No. You’re worried about my sanity. My father never held me as a real father would. So something’s missing. And all through my childhood it was dawning on me.
He can’t be my father
. So I’m not normal.”

“Neither am I … Gloria, that isn’t your secret. It may be true, but it isn’t
it.”

“Oh shut up and marry me. Give me children.”

He says, “I’d rather wait a while for children. And marriage is old-fashioned.”

“Well so am I. It’s what women want.”

And Edinburgh, black granite under the mean rain. As if, this far north, nature was itself an industry, a night shift that manufactured murk, and the sky was just the site where it dumped its waste … There was adoration, or worship, and there was addiction, but there wasn’t any love. That would be the state of true terror—loving Gloria. No.

    “I was thinking about Vi’s honeymoon,” said Tina. “They came here for their honeymoon.”

“Oh yeah. Remind me?”

“They arrived, and Vi went back to her Gypsy.”

“What, quite soon?”

“Oh immediately. The minute they got here. She went flying over the fields. I was shouting at her. But she had no more thought in her head than a puppy. She wanted Juan.”

“Oh yeah. Juan. She loved him.”

“He wasn’t quite right in the head either. He always had people with him in case he did himself an injury. But she seemed to love him. And he loved her.”

“What did Francis do when she ran off?”

“He just stood there holding his suitcase. Twenty minutes later Vi came running back, but she just ran past us. Running the other way. With her chest really heaving. Looking for Juan.”

“But she loved him.”

“Yes. Then she came crashing in five nights later. And then went back to Juan.”

Keith drove Gloria up to town … By then he knew about the poetic content of mountains, but first he said, “I heard you crying in the bathroom. Again. Why?”

“I was crying about Huw.”

He waited.

She said, “I cry with anger too, you know.”

He thought for a moment. “Because he didn’t die.”

“No, it’s better that he didn’t die. Because it tortures the mother. What makes me cry is the time. Ten years.”

By then he knew about the poetic content of mountains. Young mountains are ridged and jagged. Old mountains are smooth and even, made sleek by billennia and weather. Mountains are not like human beings. The sierras were young mountains—no older, perhaps, than five million years: round about the time that
Homo sapiens
diverged from the apes. The young, the sky-shearing, the heaven-grating sierras.

And very early in 1980 too.

“What may I ask,” he asks, “is the meaning of those pants?”

“You know perfectly well.”

“… I don’t believe it. Ten years later, and I’m back on the pants!”

“What d’you mean,
back
on the pants?”

“I’m back on the pants! … Wait. Look. This is—the seventh night running. So it can’t just be your
period
, can it.”

“God you’re disgusting. I told you. I’m off the coil.”

“… It’s very you, that is, Gloria—the coil. It suits your nature.” With that mystery coiled up in her omphalos. “And the coil’s the best too. Better than the Pill. Let alone the fucking cap.”

Over the past year Keith’s morals, I should stress, have undergone a certain … Wait. Is this the time to clear up the question of who
I
am? Not just yet, I don’t think. But I would like to put some distance between the “I” and the being propped up on the pillow—whose gaze now roams the cathouse of the shared bedroom, the screens, the outfits, the uniforms (nun, flight attendant, health visitor, policewoman), the wigs and hair-extensions, the two Polaroid cameras, the two camcorders, and mirrors everywhere.

“I want children. And I’m not going to have a bastard, thank you very much. We’ve already got a bastard. Therefore … no contraception.”

“Oh don’t worry. There must be an old pack of dunkers around here somewhere.”

“God you’re disgusting.”

“We hardly ever do it there anyway.”

“God you’re disgusting. And that’s off the menu, all that. The only thing on the menu is normal intercourse.”

“Fine. I’ll take it out at the last minute.”

“God you’re disgusting. Normal reproductive intercourse. Marry me.”

And his thought was: Girls who are cocks are very rare and very great. But you can’t
marry
a cock.

“Okay, I will. If you tell me your secret.”

Seven nights later she said,

“Have you got Neil Darlington’s number?”

“Why do you ask?”

“He’s very attractive. I thought he might like a fuck. Is Nicholas in the country?”

There was a lot of He Said, She Said. Then she said,

“A major concession. We needn’t have children immediately. Say in a year or two. All right? But you’ve got to make an honest woman of me
now.”