The Pregnant Widow

by Martin Amis

  Yeah, he thought. Yeah, that’s the spirit, Gloria. If you want it big, just tell it it’s big.

  “Completely disappear. Watch. In the mirror … Again? … Again? … Right. In a minute I’m going to speed up. Now listen carefully.”

  He listened carefully—as she issued a set of instructions. He had never heard about this either (he would later characterise it as the sinister refinement). He said,

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Right. I’m going to speed up. I won’t be doing any more talking. But I will be making rather a lot of noise. And afterwards, Keith, we’ll have a light breakfast and go to my room. Agreed? Then at last you can feel my breasts. And kiss my lips. And hold my hand … We’ll make a day of it. Or would you rather get on with your trial review?”

  FIFTH INTERVAL

  They were the children of the Golden Age (1948?–73), elsewhere known as Il Miracolo Economico, La Trente Glorieuses, Der Wirtschaftswunder. The Golden Age, when they never had it so good.

  What you could hear in the background, during this period, was progress music. The sort of music you heard, for instance, in Cliff Richard’s The Young Ones (1961). We don’t mean the songs. We’re thinking of that long sequence when, with a tap-tap here and a knock-knock there, and to the sound of progress music, the young ones transform a derelict building into a thriving community centre—a youth club, for the young ones.

  In the Golden Age progress music was heard in the background by nearly everybody. The first phone, the first car, the first house, the first summer holiday, the first TV—all to progress music. Then the arrival of sexual intercourse, in 1966, and the full ascendancy of the children of the Golden Age.

  In the First World, now, the greying of the globe, as demographers put it, will constitute the most significant population shift in history. The Golden Age turned into the Silver Tsunami, the Sixties Crowd became the sixties crowd, and the young ones, now, were all old ones.

  “With the sole exception,” he told his wife, “of Cliff Richard. He’s still a young one.”

  . . .

  “I used to have a birthday suit,” he continued. “But something’s gone wrong with it. It doesn’t fit any more. And it’s all worn out. I could take it to Jeeves’s, I suppose. But this needs to go to the invisible menders.”

  “See the doctor again,” she said. “See the one you quite liked at St. Mary’s.”

  “Great. From Club Med to Club Med.”

  The first Club Med, or Club Mediterranean, was the name of the network of attractive resorts that dedicated itself to those between the ages of eighteen and thirty. The second Club Med, or Club Medico, was the name of the hospital cafeteria at St. Mary’s. There were no age restrictions at the second Club Med, though it did seem to cater to a more mature clientele. He said,

  “I didn’t tell you. Last time I went, the guy said I might have CFS. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Uh, myalgic encephalo … encephalomyelitis. Or ME. A virus in the cerebellum. But apparently I don’t. Anyway. You know, Pulc, I think I’m getting better.” He hadn’t called her that for some time (a diminutive of Pulchritude). “It was just psychological.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Not sure. Touch wood. And it is depressing. Think. From the Me Decade to the ME Decade. From Club Med to Club Med. Great.”

  • • •

  We come to item four in the revolutionary manifesto, and, yes, this was the one that caused most of the grief.

  … In the seventeenth century, it is said, there was a dissociation of sensibility. The poets could no longer think and feel at the same time. Shakespeare could do it, the Metaphysicals could do it; they could write brainily about feeling and sex. But it went. The poets could no longer naturally think and feel at the same time.

  All we are saying is that something analogous happened while the children of the Golden Age were becoming men and women. Feeling was already separated from thought. And then feeling was separated from sex.

  So the position of feeling found itself (again) shifted. This was the one that almost did for him, and for scores of thousands—perhaps tens of millions—of others.

  • • •

  When the end came, and closed the eyes that had loved themselves too much, the glassy youth entered the Land of the Dead.

  He ran straight to the banks of the Styx

  And gazed down at the smear of his shadow

  Trembling on the fearful current.

  A shadowsmear: that was all. That was all the mirroring water was ever going to give him—a shadowsmear.

  The nymphs of the forests and fountains cropped their hair and wailed. And Echo, or Echo’s ghost, or Echo’s echo, echoed his last words: Farewell, farewell. Alas, alas, alas. No one found his body. What they found was a flower: a yellow heart in a ruff of white petals.

  We are given to understand that the dissolution—the fading, the shrivelling—of the glassy youth was completed in the course of a day and a night. In this he differed from his children, the children of the Golden Age.

  • • •

  Silvia said she’d be dropping in to show them her new uniform. Her new uniform—as a feminist. And Keith prepared himself for a surprise, because Silvia was like that. In the kitchen, with a torpid flourish, she removed her woollen overcoat (it was May 15, 2003), and said torpidly,

  “It’s a joke, isn’t it.” She was wearing a white miniskirt daubed with the red cross of St. George, a halter top with HOOKER stamped across the chest—plus several items of (detachable) jewellery in her navel, in her lower lip, and in both nostrils. “I give it six months. But it’s a joke.”

  “I hope that washes off.”

  “Come on, Mum, of course it washes off. D’you think I want a nest of snakes all over my hips when I’m ninety? I’m going on a strip-club crawl. With the sisters. We’re all got up like this. I hope you’re proud.”

  Before she left, she asked Keith something—how he learnt about the birds and the bees.

  “Uh, in stages. And different versions. A shitty little kid at school who scared the life out of me. Then Nicholas. Then a biology class. While we were dissecting a worm.”

  “And you know how I got my sex education? How Nat and Gus got theirs? How Isabel and Chloe’ll get theirs? We’re porny.”

  He said, “Can’t we improve on porny, Silvia? … How about pornoid?”

  “All right. Pornoid. Yeah, that’s good. It’s more like paranoid. And when you’re with a new guy, that’s what you are. You’re paranoid about how pornoid he’s going to be. You know, Pop, we’re the spiders of the Web. We got everything we know from the infinity of filth. He’s better, Mum, don’t you think? Pop’s a bit better.”

  He used to admire them, but Keith was no longer sure how he felt about spiders. Spiders ate flies; and flies ate shit. And if, in any sense, you were what you ate—if you were what you consumed every day—then what were spiders?

  And yet spiders were alive and flies were not, somehow. And Keith still thought that killing a fly was a creative act—because a fly was a fleck of death. Little skull and crossbones, little jolly roger. Armoured survivalist with gas-mask face: but not here in London, perhaps, in the twenty-first century. There was only one instance so far—when the fly snarled up at him from a patch of birdshit on the garden paving, and applied its suckers, and stood its ground, and just snarled up at him through the spray.

  Silvia left. Husband and wife processed their young daughters, and Keith, prolonging his experiment with fiftyfifty, helped assemble a modest dinner—salad, spaghetti bolognese, red wine.

  He said, “I don’t want to think about me any more.” About my self: two words. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it? And it’s physically easier too.”

  “How?”

  Well, I could put it this way. Two months ago, Pulc, waking, and then getting up, was a Russian novel. One month ago, it was an American novel. And now it’s only an English novel. An English novel of about 1970—concerning itse
lf with the ups and downs of the middle classes, and never any longer than two hundred and twenty-five pages.

  “That’s progress. And beauty is returning. Thanks to you. As always.”

  • • •

  Sex is bad enough, as a subject, and the self is pretty glutinous too. The I, the io, the yo, the je, the Ich. The Ich: Freud’s preferred term for the ego, for the I. Sex is bad enough (but someone’s got to do it); and then there’s the Ich. And what does that sound like—Ich, the Ich?

  Book Six

  The Problem of Re-entry

  I

  ELIZABETH BENNET IN BED

  We’ll have a light breakfast, and then go to my room. And make a day of it. Or would you rather get on with your trial review? … I’m very rare, you know. We’re awfully rare.

  Thirteen hours later, in the pentagonal library, Lily was saying,

  “You’re no good? What d’you mean you’re no good?”

  “I’m no good. I’m just no good. Look.”

  He gestured at the page of foolscap, held upright by the crossed struts of the Olivetti. During a brief interlude, around five, Keith ran barefoot from the tower (under the skyquake, the zig and zag, the sudden cracks in heaven’s floor) and rattled out a couple of paragraphs. The break had been called because Gloria Beautyman needed ten minutes to dress up as Elizabeth Bennet. You see, they’d had a difference of opinion about Pride and Prejudice, and Gloria wanted to prove her point.

  “Read that bit,” he told Lily. “It’s been like this all day. Read that bit. Does it make any sense?”

  “… Lawrence believed,” she said, “that the great disaster of the civilisation he inhabited was its poisonous hatred of sex, and this hatred carried with it the morbid fear of beauty (the fear best epitomised, in Lawrence’s view, by psychoanalysis), fear of ‘alive’ beauty which causes the atrophy of our intuitive faculty and our intuitive power.”

  “Does it make any sense at all?”

  “No. Are you insane? … And your hair’s wet.”

  “Yeah, I had a cold shower. To try and clear my head. I’m no good. I can’t do it.”

  “… Oh, God. Just—just think of it as your weekly essay.”

  He paused and said, “Yeah. Yeah, like my weekly essay. No, that’s good, Lily. I feel better about it already. How were the ruins?”

  “Oh, completely miserable. You couldn’t even tell what they were ruins of. Baths, supposedly. And it poured. What about Gloria?”

  You see, it was Gloria’s contention that Elizabeth Bennet was a … She can’t be, Keith objected. There weren’t any then. Surely. But Gloria insisted it was so. And as she led him through the novel (with her pertinent emphases, her telling quotations) Keith began to feel that even a Lionel Trilling or an F. R. Leavis would be reluctantly obliged to take the Beautyman interpretation on board. And the outfit, too, was deeply convincing—she even had a bonnet, an inverted wicker fruit bowl, kept in place by a white silk scarf that fastened under her chin.

  “I’ll do what Lawrence kept doing with whole novels,” he told Lily. “I’ll chuck it out and start again. Gloria? What about her? I didn’t even know she was here.” He recalled Gloria’s lesson on lying (Never elaborate. Just pretend it’s all boringly true), but he nonetheless heard himself say, “Not till she came limping over to get herself a cup of broth. In a duffel coat. She looked terrible.”

  “Well she dodged a bullet with the ruins.”

  You see, in their discussion of Jane Austen, Gloria rested her case on two key scenes: Elizabeth’s physical appearance on her arrival at Mr. Bingley’s (in the early pages), and the much later exchange when Mr. Bennet warns his daughter against a loveless marriage. No, Gloria decided, as if washing her hands of the matter. She’s as bad as I am, she is. Ooh, I bet she is. The dressing-up was followed by a session of what might be called practical criticism. Then she said, Now do you believe me? I was right and you were wrong. Say it. Elizabeth’s a …

  No, okay. You’ve proved your point.

  “Well I haven’t got any choice, have I,” he told Lily. “I’ll just have to stick with it till it’s done.”

  “I suppose I’d better make you something. To keep you going. Anyway. Happy birthday.”

  “Thank you, Lily.”

  He finished his review not that late—a little after one. A little after one, and Keith felt wise and happy and proud, and rich, and beautiful, and obscurely frightened, and slightly mad. And unbelievably tired. Jorquil was expected in twelve hours’ time. And how did our hero feel about that? Only this: Jorq, in his eyes, stood for tradition, for social realism as he knew it, for the past. Keith, after all, had spent the day in a genre that belonged to the future.

  Lily—Lily had waited up.

  “Can’t close my eyes. Don’t know why.”

  All day (he imagined) Lily’s probes and sensors, her magnetic needles, had been about their work; and now she wanted reassurance. Keith, to his surprise, was able to give it. And the act, the interchange, while pleasurable (in very faint continuation), and emotional (in utter contrast), was almost satirically antique, like a round of morris dancing, or like rubbing two sticks together—in one of the very earliest attempts to create fire.

  “Scheherazade took her a tray,” said Lily as she trembled off into sleep. “Lying there with a thermometer in her mouth. And an ice pack on her head … Hear her sneezing? It’s a bit … You watch. Tomorrow she’ll be fit as a fiddle.”

  The next day Keith looked around for at least some sedimentary suspicion—and there wasn’t any. Because Gloria, in her own phrase, was terribly good. Keith already knew that he was in another world; knew, too, that he was in quite serious trouble—but only psychologically. And for the time being he just lay back and thought, with pure admiration, This is more like it. This is how duplicity’s supposed to be done.

  For example, at breakfast he had the pleasure of hearing Scheherazade say,

  “Quite frankly, I admire her pluck. Well I do. You know, she was talking about the ruins all afternoon? Even in church. She kept reading out bits from her guidebook. And right through dinner she seemed to think she’d somehow be able to manage it. Half dead and still trying to be a sport. I call that game.”

  And with Lily herself, on the subject of Gloria and her indisposition, Keith had the mindless luxury of being rebuked for his incuriosity (and self-centredness): Gloria’s Sunday—hadn’t he even noticed?—was a continuous stop-start of dizzy spells, hot flushes, and woeful hastenings to the bathroom.

  “How could it’ve passed you by?”

  “Well it did.”

  “Christ,” said Lily. “I thought I was watching Emergency Ward 10.”

  Not satisfied with that, Gloria was now putting it about that her condition had deteriorated overnight. She asked for, and duly received, a visit from the doctor, who drove over from Montale; claiming to detect the presence of a famous Campanian virus, he sluiced out her ears with garlic and olive oil. And when Jorq arrived, and at once insisted on the change of rooms, Gloria was more or less stretchered from the tower to the apartment.

  “Poor Gloria,” said Scheherazade. “Such a slender reed.”

  Would it actually happen? Would he one day open his copy of Critical Quarterly, and see the article entitled “A Reassessment of Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth Bennet Considered as a Cock”? By Gloria Beautyman—and (or perhaps with, or possibly as told to) Keith Nearing. And he believed that her exegesis, while certainly controversial, could not be easily dismissed.

  Can’t you read English? she asked him. Listen. This comes ten pages from the end. Concentrate.

  “Lizzy,” said her father, “I have given [Mr. Darcy] my consent … I now give it to you, if you are resolved on having him. But let me advise you to think better of it. I know your disposition, Lizzy. I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband … Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape discredi
t and misery.”

  “I know your disposition,” Gloria reiterated. “Your lively talents.” “Discredit and misery.” “Neither happy nor respectable.” Not respectable. What d’you think that means? I ask again. Can’t you read English?

  Yeah. Mm. There’s nothing remotely like that in any of the others. So does Mr. Bennet know she’s a cock?

  Not exactly. He knows she’s unusually interested in sex. He doesn’t know she’s a cock, but he does know that.

  I think I see.

  And when she causes a scandal by walking three miles across country to Mr. Bingley’s. Unaccompanied, mind. The fine eyes, the face “glowing with warmth of exercise,” looking “blowsy” and “almost wild.” Then the soiled stockings.

  And her petticoat “six inches deep in mud.” Her underwear covered in dirt … Bloody hell, aren’t you supposed to be quite good at this kind of thing? “Symbols” and so on?

  Keith lay there and listened.

  And the very good teeth. That’s a sign of virility. Look at mine … So we’re agreed. Elizabeth’s a cock. And the only way to deal with being a cock, then, was marrying for love. Good sex had to follow the emotions. It’s not like that now.

  … So on their first night?

  I’ll show you. Go and amuse yourself for ten minutes. And I’ll start looking for some wedding wear.

  On his return—the white cotton dress with its improvised empireline bust, the white shawl, the bonnet fastened by the white silk scarf.

  I pray you remember, sir, I am not yet one and twenty.

  A few minutes later he was near the bottom of the bed, working his way through a phenomenal density of slips and underslips and clasps and hasps, and she leant up on her elbows and said,

  All Mr. Bennet knows for sure is if she married for money then she’d certainly stray. The cock bit’s really just an extra. It’s to do with what you’re like naked. How you look.