The Pregnant Widow (48 page)

…
Kenrik, just out of Pentonville for living off immoral earnings, was best man.

Violet, six months pregnant by she wasn’t sure who, served as bridesmaid.

No one gave Gloria away.

    Sample declarations by Violet on the phone. “I’m going to adopt it, Key. I fink that’s the best fing, don’t you?” And: “Nuffing’s going to take that baby away from me, Keith! Nuffing!
Nuffing!”
And: “I’m going to adopt it, Key. I fink that’s the best fing, don’t you?”

Keith and Gloria went to see the baby, who was named Heidi (after Heidi, Violet’s alcoholic housemate). Another alcoholic, a young man in a City suit, came to dinner, and another alcoholic, a middle-aged woman in a kaftan, looked in for coffee. And the baby was beautiful, Keith thought or imagined; but her nappy was soiled and cold, and she was pale, with chapped lips (Violet was giving her milk straight out of the fridge). And everyone was drunk. The house, a normal-seeming house, was drunk.

“I think you’d better adopt her, Vi,” he said, up in Vi’s room.

“But it hurts,” said Violet. “It hurts. I feel it in my froat.”

Heidi was not submitted for adoption. When she was six weeks old the social services came and took her away.

    Three months after the wedding, the pants treatment was resumed.

Gloria said, “I told you. A year
or
two. Well I’ve chosen. And it’s not two. It’s one. It’ll be exactly a year.”

Ten nights later, after much sophistical evasion about the secret, and after renewed threats about Neil and Nicholas, she said,

“Please. Oh
please …”

“Oh all right.” Come to think of it (and he was thinking of Heidi), I
do
want to see a fresh face around the house. “It’s agreed. Now let’s have normal reproductive intercourse.”

“Yes let’s. Would you help me off with these? … And I know you won’t have any objection,” she said, arching her back, “to the child being raised in the faith.”

    Well anyway. There was a further month on the pants; and then she left him. Three months later she returned, but different.

This particular married couple, in its time, had tried out many modes and genres, many different ways of going about things—pornotheological farce, cat-and-mouse, sex-and-shopping, Life. They saved the worst for last: psychohorror, in la Place de la Contrescarpe, in Paris.

“And she never threatens to commit suicide?” Nicholas says on the phone (from Beirut).

“No. She won’t do anything unoriginal. Like she never got pregnant on the sly or anything unoriginal like that. She doesn’t threaten to commit suicide. That’s unoriginal. So what she does is, she threatens to go to a nunnery.”

“Christ. Are you still sleeping together?”

“Once in a blue moon she lets me. And it’s completely straight. Not that I mind that, funnily enough. The only extra is the sinister refinement. Which, it goes without saying, is the only one I never liked. All she talks about is money, and religion and how I’m going to hell.”

“… In a way, religion’s the most interesting subject on earth.”

“Yeah but not if you believe in it. Here she is. Talk soon.”

Keith and Gloria were staying for a week in the rented flat where they spent their long honeymoon, two springtimes ago. Only now they had no maid (as Gloria kept reminding him), and the weather remained uniformly dreadful. It was quite an achievement, to quench Paris of all its light, but God or some such artist had managed it. That afternoon they were drinking coffee in a bar on la rue Mouffetard. They had just come in from under the dripping tarp …

“Remember when we were arrested in here?”

“Arrested? What can you mean?”

“What can I mean by arrested? I mean arrested by the police. The plainclothes man, remember?
Il faut prendre votre passeport
. And he slung us in the van. Then you explained, in your perfect French, Gloria, and he let us out again. You said,
C’est incroyable, ça!
Remember?”

“I wish you’d never been born. No. I wish you’d die. You’re going to go to hell. Shall I tell you how it is in hell? What they do to you?”

He listens for a while and says, “All right. I understand. There I am all scorched and peed-on. And to what end exactly?”

“To punish you. To scourge you. You ruined my life.”

Because of course he never did give in—about the child being raised in the faith. About the child being raised without courage, without having to understand what death really means. She left him that time; and when she returned it was in defeat (you see, she didn’t have anywhere else to go); and there was no more talk of children.

He said, “You should’ve settled for a baby agnostic.”

“What, and raise someone disgusting like you? Someone who thinks that killing and eating animals, and fucking and dreaming and shitting, and then dying, is good enough all by itself? … Quite ruined. Utterly.
Merci pour tout ce que tu m’as donné. Cher ami.”

That night they had sex for the first time in nearly a month, and there was a sour caloricity to it, as if they both had fevers and all their bones ached, with savoury breath and savoury sweat. It drew to an end. And with embarrassing copiousness he followed her four-word instruction. Gloria rose and went to the bathroom, and when she returned she was dressed in black.

“Notre Dame,” she said through her veil. “Midnight mass.”

He awoke at three in an empty bed with the image of a black shape in the brown Seine, the drifting tresses, the open eyes … She was in the other room, kneeling naked on the window seat and looking out at the moonlit square. She turned. Her face was a deathmask, encrusted with dried white.

“I need it to be stronger,” she said. “Much stronger. It’s just not strong enough.”

Gloria wanted a stronger god. One who would strike her down, there and then, for what she wore behind her veil.

We would like this to be over quickly: this particular cosmology of two.

The next day she was all ice and electricity, all electricity and ice. In a white cotton dress and with narrow white ribbons in her hair, she darkly established herself on the white sofa. She neither spoke nor stirred. She stared.

He sat at the mirror-topped dining table, bent over
The Denial of Death
(1973), a book about psychology by Ernest Becker. Who argued, inter alia, that religions were “hero systems.” Which, in the modern setting, could only be revitalised if they set out to work “against the culture, [and to] recruit youth to be anti-heroes to the ways of life of the society they live in” …

Just after one o’clock Gloria stood up suddenly. Her mouth opened and stayed open in disbelief and what seemed to be glee as she looked down at the sudden sarong of scarlet that swathed her hips. And on the sofa behind her, not a shapeless patch but a burning orb, like a sunset.

“That’s all finished with,” she said. “I’m going to go.”

“Yes, go.” He took her in his arms and, doubly, triply hatefully, whispered in her ear, “Get thee to a nunnery … Why woulds’t thou be a breeder of sinners? Get thee to a nunnery, and quickly too. To a nunnery, go.”

They were all there, pretty much. Timmy and Scheherazade with their four grown-up children, in perfect-family formation—girl, boy, girl, boy. Born-again Scheherazade looked unglamorous but very young, as you would do, no doubt, if you thought you were going to live for ever. Whittaker was fifty-six; his friend/son/protégé Amen, now a quite celebrated photographer (with good Americanised English), was forty-two. Oona was perhaps seventy-eight, superfat Jorquil (already married six times, Keith learnt, to a succession of grasping starlets) was fifty-three, and Conchita was thirty-seven. Keith was there with his second ex-wife, Lily: they were both forty-five. The occasion was the memorial service for Prentiss. Amen asked tenderly after Gloria, who (the last Keith heard) was in Utah. And Adriano wasn’t there either. Adriano had married a Kenyan nurse; then he divorced her, and then (after another much more serious accident) remarried her—the nurse who had tended to his shattered knees in Nairobi, back in 1970.

Keith supposed he felt strengthened in his view that it ought to be very easy to get divorced, and very difficult, boring, painful, and expensive to get married. But that’s Life, and we never learn. Divorcing Gloria was very difficult, boring, painful, and expensive. Divorcing Lily was easy; she wanted it, and he quite wanted it too.

A week later he had lunch with Conchita, and it was all decided in the first ten minutes.

“My father in a bus crash on his way to the hospital,” he said, “and my mother in childbirth.”

“My mother of leukaemia,” she said, “and my father, suicide, two hours later.”

He reached out a hand—to shake on it. Then she briefly told Keith
what happened in between, between the death of the one and the death of the other: the event that took her to Amsterdam. They shook hands anyway. Within half an hour he briefly told Conchita what he had never told Lily (or anyone else), despite her bi-weekly interrogations over an entire decade: the truth about his birthday in Campania.

“This was how it’s been going for me,” he said as they were finishing up, “and it’s simple. I’m kind now. My vices got me absolutely nowhere. So for years I’ve been working on my virtues.”

“All right. Then give up smoking,” she said. “And give up your job at Derwent and Digby. All right?”

The next afternoon but one they met again, and he drove her to Heathrow to pick up Silvia, who had just spent the statutory month with her father in Buenos Aires. Silvia was fourteen.

So first Keith married Gloria, then he married Lily, then he married Conchita. He didn’t marry Scheherazade or Oona or Dodo. But he married all the others.

With Gloria it was just sex, with Lily it was just love. Then he married Conchita, and he was all right.

It is April Fool’s Day, and he is sitting in the snug of a pub called the Book and Bible. After the kaleidoscopic detail of the street, with its beautiful flesh tones, the Book and Bible is like a groaning relict of a vanished England, all white, all middle-class, and all middle-aged—England before the invention of colour. The shove-ha’penny board, the Scotch eggs and pork scratchings, the sodden carpet, the furry wallpaper. Keith hates it in the Book and Bible; but this is where he has started coming, ever since the great heaviness descended on him, eight or nine weeks ago. He is fifty-three. He is drinking tomato juice, and smoking.

The unsuspected sensuality of stasis, of stillness, the expert caress of the cotton sheets. In normal times a combination of greed, boredom, and curiosity got him out of bed by nine o’clock (he wanted to know what had happened, while he slept, to the planet Earth). But now he stays horizontal until keeping his eyes shut is harder work than keeping them open. His body deeply needs this. And every night, for about an hour, he weeps and swears. He lies on the bed and swears with stinging eyes. When fully awake, he retains a stunned feeling. And he doesn’t know why. What has happened to him that he should have to carry all this weight?

He doesn’t understand. Because Violet is already dead. She died in 1999. And the last section of her life, spent in cohabitation with the last of her terrible boyfriends, was comparatively quiet, much of it dedicated to Karl. She spoon-fed him. She clipped his toenails. She would put on a swimsuit and guide him into the shower. Then Karl died, in 1998. Then Violet died. The woman doctor, in intensive care, spoke of “a failure cascade.” When Keith dragged his eyes over the autopsy report, the only phrase he registered was “purulent urine” (not just alliterative but somehow onomatopoeic), and then he read no more.

After Violet died, Nicholas went insane for a while, and Tina went insane for a while. Keith did not go insane. His symptoms were physical: the three-month collapse of his handwriting (the pen just shot about the page); and then the year-long sore throat. That’s where she got him, Violet—in the throat. And since then there were other deaths. Neil Darlington seventeen months ago, at the age of sixty-three, and Kenrik in 2000, at the age of fifty-one. Violet died in 1999, at the age of forty-six.

There is a palpitation, now, in the Book and Bible. Because someone ultramundane is entering it: a lady in a black veil (not the burkha, but the hijab, with the eyes stylishly displayed), hand in hand with an unexotic little boy of eight or nine—Isabel’s age. They come with their soft drinks and settle in the snug, and it is anomalous, he supposes, a child and a quite elderly Muslim woman in a public house made of taupe and ash.

“What shall we play?” she asks him (in an accentless voice). “I Spy?”

“Let’s play What Would You Rather.”

Keith has three thoughts, and in the following order. First, that he no more wants to tell this woman to remove her veil than he wants to tell her to wear it in the first place. Second, that two major wars are now being fought between the believers and the infidels (and the first war, the older war, had “female equality” as one of its stated military goals). The third thought comes from the ex-poet in him: But we seemed to be getting on so well … He sentimentally has in mind Ashraf, and Dilkash, and Amen, and many others, including the widow Sahira. In 1980 Neil Darlington, limitlessly louche, converted to Islam, in order to marry Sahira—a Vision, a poet, and a Palestinian.

“What would you rather?” he hears the woman say. “Have twenty children or none at all?”

Which brings on a further thought. Silvia, the other night, said that Europe was destined to become a Muslim-majority continent by about 2110. “The feminised woman only has one child,” she said. “So the end result of your sexual revolution might be sharia and the veil … Of course it won’t work out like that. That’s a whole century away. Imagine what else’ll happen in between.” Now Keith rolls another cigarette and lights it, and wishes Violet had adopted Islam rather than Christianity. At least she’d be alive.

“Let’s play World’s Most Expensive Hotel,” he hears the boy say.

“Yes, that’s enough What Would You Rather. In the bar, the—”