The Pregnant Widow

by Martin Amis

  dread and black complexion smeared

  With heraldry more dismal; head to foot

  Now is he total gules; horridly tricked

  With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,

  Baked and impasted … roasted in wrath and fire,

  And thus o’ersized with coagulate gore,

  With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus

  Old grandsire Priam seeks.

  Anon he finds him …

  Keith stepped out. She was kneeling on the tiles, naked except for her velvet hat, her black veil, her crucifix.

  In ten minutes they’re taking me to a beguinage. A nunnery—Nostra Dama Immacolata. I’m to become a bride of Christ … Come here.

  I can’t.

  Come here in front of the mirror. Yes you can … You know, the vulgar call me Shesus. Because I can raise you from the dead.

  He went and stood dripping over her, dripping over her shoulders, her outcurved belly, her thighs: over the elastic soundness of Gloria Beautyman … Did he hear the scrape of wheels on gravel?

  Watch. There! Fuck me now and you’ll never die.

  Yes, it was good in the mirror, realer in the mirror. You could see what was happening very clearly. Uncluttered, unsullied by the other dimensions, which were those of depth and time.

  “Keith … Keith!”

  His eyes opened—Lily’s face, grey against the grey. Of her bones were coral made: those were pearls that were her eyes.

  “How can you sleep? Where’s the blue sky for God’s sake?”

  “There isn’t any. Not today.”

  “In ten minutes we’ll both be dead. Tell me—”

  The air hostess hurried by. “Seatbelt,” she said.

  “Can he still smoke?”

  “He can still smoke.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Lily. You’re keeping her from her work.”

  “… We’re both going to die. Tell me what happened with Gloria.”

  He said, with the assurance of perfect boredom, “Nothing happened. I was getting on with my trial review. She was sick.”

  “Okay, she was sick. Anyone could see that. But something happened. Sick as she was. You changed.”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “You changed.”

  “Why aren’t you asleep?”

  “Yes, why aren’t I asleep. Listen. I’ll help with Violet if you need me. But it’s over.”

  He felt his Adam’s apple rise and fall.

  “You know, I still loved you. At first. Till you started looking like an undertaker around bedtime. Then you changed. Staring like a stick insect. It was quite hard work, getting to hate you. But I managed it. Thanks for a horrible summer.”

  “Oh don’t be theatrical,” he said coolly. “It wasn’t all bad.”

  “No. It wasn’t all bad. I slept with Kenrik. That was the good part.”

  “Prove it.”

  “All right. I said, Tell him you can’t remember. Is that what he said? … I thought of you in the middle of it. I thought, Hysterical sex—that’s what this really is.”

  He lit another cigarette. On the night of their reunion, and at other times in the past, Keith had known hysterical sex with Lily. He had not known hysterical sex with Gloria Beautyman. Her voice changed, seeking a deeper and smoother register. But her composure was not otherwise inconvenienced (and around noon he himself stopped moaning and whimpering and started to concentrate). And it came to Keith now—her essential peculiarity. She went at it as if the sexual act, in all human history, had never even been suspected of leading to childbirth, as if everyone had immemorially known that it was by other means that you peopled the world. All the ancient colourations of significance and consequence had been bleached from it … Whenever he thought of her naked body (and this would go on being true), he saw something like a desert, he saw a beautiful Sahara, with its slopes and dunes and whorls, its shadows and sandy vapours and tricks of the light, its oases, its mirages. Keith said,

  “Fair enough, Lily. If you want to play it that way. Adriano’s been put down. All right? The rat’s been put to sleep. The woman in the shop—she didn’t mime cash. She put her finger to her throat and went like that. With a wet sound. Yes, I’m so horrible.”

  “Which is true?”

  “Oh go on. You decide.”

  “… You do have a bond with Conchita. Both her parents died on the same day.”

  “Please don’t say any more.”

  Three or four times Lily took his hand. But only out of fear. Then the plane levelled out into the blue.

  Gloria’s voice changed, and once she bared her white teeth in what seemed to be savage indignation, and two or three times, as he lay waiting, she came towards him in some new combination of clothes and roles with a certain smile on her face. As if she had entered into a conspiracy with herself to make him happy …

  How would you explain it: why couldn’t you smoke in dreams? You could smoke almost anywhere you liked—except in churches, and rocket-refuelling bays, and most hospital delivery rooms, and so on. But dreams were non-smoking. Even when the situation would normally demand it, after moments of great tension (after a chase sequence, say, or while recovering from some horrific transformation); or after a long episode of strenuous swimming, or strenuous flying; or after a sudden bereavement, a sudden subtraction; or after successful sexual intercourse. And successful sexual intercourse in dreams, though rare, was not unknown. But you couldn’t smoke in dreams.

  They got off the bus at Victoria, and shallowly embraced, and went their different ways.

  What do you do in a revolution? This. You grieve for what goes, you grant what stays, you greet what comes.

  Nicholas always got there early.

  And he didn’t really like it if you got there early too. Half an hour, alone at the table with a book—this was also a component of his evening. Therefore Keith walked slowly. Kensington Church Street, Bayswater Road and the railing-girt northern border of Hyde Park, then Queensway—the Arab quarter, with its veiled women, its sceptical moustaches. And there were tourists (Americans), students, young mothers pushing on the crossbars of tall prams. It was now that Keith began to feel unfamiliar to himself, and faint, and disorganised in thought. But he shook his head with a shiver and blamed it on all the travel.

  It was eight o’clock, and bright as day, yet London had assumed a sheepish and apprehensive expression, as cities will, he supposed, when seen with new eyes. For a moment, but only for a moment, the roads and pavements and crossings appeared to him to be full of movement and thrilling variety, full of different people going from one place to a different place, needing to go from that different place to this different place.

  He wasn’t to know it, of course. He wasn’t to know it, but one humble and unsonorous adjective comprehensively described the London of 1970. Empty.

  I’ve taken you there before, said Nicholas on the phone. The restaurant that’s only big enough for one person. And his brother was already present, in the Italian grotto facing the cupola of the Greek Orthodox church in Moscow Road. Keith stayed outside for a moment and looked through the bloated glass—Nicholas, the single seated customer, at the central table, and doubtfully frowning over the page, with his drink, his olives. There was a time in Keith’s childhood when Nicholas was absolutely everything—he filled the sky like a Saturn; and he still looked godlike (Keith thought), with his solid height, his determined face and his thick and longish dirty-blond hair; and with the aspect of someone who, apart from everything else, knew all about Sumerian pottery and Etruscan sculpture. He looked like what he would soon become—the foreign correspondent.

  “My dear Little Keith. Yes. So sweet …”

  Then there was the usual hugging and kissing, which often went on long enough to draw stares, because there was of course no reason on earth why they should look like brothers—the two Lawrences, T. E. and D. H… Keith took his seat; he naturally intended to tell Nicholas everythin
g, everything, as promised, as always—every bra-clip and zip-notch. Keith took his seat. And he had a one-second warning before he picked up a paper napkin and sneezed. He said (as only a brother would),

  “Christ. Look at that. I came halfway by Tube. Two stops. And look at that. Black snot.”

  “That’s London. Black snot,” said Nicholas. “Welcome back. Listen. I was thinking—let’s leave the Violet stuff for a bit later. Do you mind? I want your Decameron. Only there’s …”

  He meant the distraction of the tall young couple in the middle of the room—the young man and the young woman, whom Keith had slipped past or between on his approach. The restaurant, no bigger than the pool hut, with its four or five tables, seemed stalled or immobilised by the couple in the middle of the room. Giving a smile of irritation, Nicholas said quietly,

  “Why don’t they go away or, failing that, why don’t they sit down? … Hearing about you and girls reminds me of reading Peyton Place when I was twelve. Or Harold Robbins. How long will you need?”

  “Oh about an hour,” he said. “It’s terribly good.”

  “And you got away with it.”

  “I got away with it. Christ. I’d given up hope and then all my birthdays came at once. See, she was the—”

  “Wait.” He meant the young couple. “… Well let’s get my side of it out of the way. Oh yeah.” And Nicholas said stoically, “The Dog made a pass at me last night. And no sign of your Kenrik.”

  “He’s back. We talked.” And Kenrik, who was very dishonest but utterly undevious (a combination that would not serve him well), merely reiterated, on the phone, that he couldn’t remember. Keith was happy to leave it at that—though he remembered Lily’s light-footedness as she came across the lawn and kissed Kenrik on the lips … But the disquiet Keith felt was not connected to Kenrik or Lily. It was new. He had the sense that he would soon be pushing on a door, pushing on a door that wouldn’t open. He sat up and said, “Kenrik did fuck the Dog, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “In the tent on the very first night. And now at last we know why you mustn’t. What kind of pass?”

  “Oh. Oh, she just rammed her hand up my skirt, so to speak, and said, Come on darling, you know you love it.”

  “She’s a bloke, the Dog. And you made your excuses.”

  “Of course I made my excuses. I’m not going to fuck the Dog.” He looked out (the young couple) and said, “Nothing’s changed really. Still very happy with Jean. I’m a bit more famous now. I’ve decided I’m perfect for television.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Very well informed. Handsomer than any man has the right to be. And more left-wing than ever, by the way. Even more committed to putting the berks in the saddle.”

  “Rule by berks.”

  “Berk rule. I live for that day. Jean and I live for that day.”

  “You’re interested in the wrong revolution, mate,” said Keith. “Mine’s the one that makes the world go round.”

  “So you keep saying. Christ.”

  He meant the young man and the young woman. Who must now be described, because they wouldn’t sit down and they wouldn’t go away. Like Nicholas, they were in their early-middle twenties: the man tall and long-haired and wearing a waisted black velvet suit, the woman tall and long-haired and wearing a waisted black velvet gown. They were unignorably tiptoeing and signalling and pointing and whispering, with their seating-plan and their questions for the solitary waiter. An evolved air was what they disseminated, and conscious gracefulness, and something of the lambent light of the fairy tale. Their shapely faces were of similar cast and you might have taken them for brother and sister if it wasn’t for the way they touched, with long and lingering fingers … The tiny restaurant knew it was being found wanting, and the expression it wore was increasingly strained.

  “Here they come.”

  Here they came, here they were. Stylishly they both sank to their haunches and gazed up at Nicholas and Keith, the woman with her second-best smile, the man—the man seeming to pout through the fine strands of his fringe. The crouch, the smile, the fringe, the pout: these had clearly enjoyed many successes in the matter of bending others to their will.

  After a flirtatious pause the young man said, “You’re going to hate us for this.”

  And Nicholas said, “We hate you already.”

  She was in disgrace, see—Gloria. She’d made a spectacle of herself at this lunch at the sex tycoon’s.” Keith itemised Gloria’s trespasses. “But when she came she seemed incredibly prim. You know—Edinburgh. Old-fashioned. And not topless, like the others. These Victorian swimsuits. She told me later she’d made her mother bring them down from Scotland. Severe little thing with short black hair and an absolutely stupendous arse. Like you’d see on a billboard just before Valentine’s Day …”

  The foster-brothers, quite good-naturedly in the end, had obliged the tall young couple, and moved to a corner table—where they took delivery, five minutes later, of a terrified bottle of Valpolicella. So Keith was drinking a bit of that, and eating olives, and smoking (and Nicholas was of course smoking). And talking. But he was also experiencing a difficulty he did not understand. It was something like a liver attack—a thick presence had rigged itself up in the air above them. Keith could look at it, this presence. Keith could even look at himself. Keith saw Keith, sipping, gesturing, urging his narrative forward—the tight red cords, the young men of Ofanto, the bee sting by the pool, and then he was saying,

  “I thought I was alone. With the castle all to myself. And I got out of bed and I … I got out of bed and I … She was in the bathroom.”

  What was it? He felt he had a bolt or a plug of hard air in his chest. He gulped, and gulped again.

  “Gloria was in the bathroom. Holding up this light-blue dress. And she turned … But she was sick, see, Gloria. Reaction to the bee sting. That’s what the doctor said. She turned and walked. And she wasn’t wearing anything except her shoes. Amazing sight.”

  “Could you see it?”

  “Her arse?”

  “Well I’m assuming you could see her arse. The bee sting.”

  “Oh. No. I think it must have been quite far in. No. No, the real saga of the summer was something else. Me having my cock teased off,” he said, “by Scheherazade.”

  And he told Nicholas about that, the glimpses of Scheherazade in T-shirt and ball gown, and about Lily giving her the cool pants, and about Dracula, and about the time he apparently fucked it all up by shitting on God—and he also managed to enliven things a bit, he thought, with some stuff on Kenrik and the Dog, and on the Dog and Adriano, and, oh yeah, on why you mustn’t fuck the Dog.

  “That’s all?” said Nicholas, and glanced at his watch. “I don’t understand. Forgive me, but what was it you got away with?”

  Keith leant forward with sharp interest and heard Keith say, “I was leading up to that. There was another chick there all along—little Dodo.”

  Two cups of coffee and two torched sambucas were now brought to their table. The conversation had already turned to Violet, and Keith was no longer feeling very frightened. There was no longer a screen, like a gossamer washing line, between himself and his brother, between himself and the foreign correspondent. There was no longer a plug of air in his chest. Nicholas absented himself, and Keith stared into the twinned flames of the glasses: one fire for each eye. Across the way, the young man and the young woman, entwined in one another’s limbs, presided over a party of ten …

  One day in Italy Keith read about an alternative version of the myth of Narcissus. The variant set out to de-homosexualise the story, but introduced (as if in recompense) an alternative taboo: Narcissus had a twin sister, an identica, who died very young. When he leant over the untainted pool it was Narcissa whom he saw in the water. And it was thirst, and not self-love, that killed the glassy boy; he wouldn’t drink, he wouldn’t disturb that rapt reflection …

  Keith now ran a check on his own reality. The pe
rson in the alcove with the telephone was his foster-brother. The book on the floor was about someone called Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The waiter was fat. The young woman was kissing the young man, or the young man was kissing the young woman, and what was it like, when the other was the same, and you kissed yourself?

  “Well let’s see if we can draw things together.” He regularly did this, Nicholas: he drew things together. “It’s in the air that girls should act like boys. Now. There are some girls who try to act like boys. But they’re old-school in their hearts. Your Pansy. Scheherazade perhaps. And there are girls who just—who just feel their way forward. Jean. Lily. And then there are girls who act more like boys than boys do. Molly Sims. And of course Rita. And—Violet.”

  “Yeah but … The other girls are aware of a kind of wave. And Violet’s not a part of anything.”

  “Unless it’s the wave of the healthy young girls. Violet marches with the healthy young girls.”

  Keith said, “She probably got that out of a magazine at the hairdresser’s. Jesus, can she still read? Agony column. You know.”

  “Yeah. Dear Daphne. I’m seventeen, and I’ve had ninety-two boyfriends. Is this normal?”

  “Yeah. Dear Violet. Don’t worry. That’s normal.”

  “Mm. It would’ve had to go something like, A lively sexual appetite is normal. After all, you’re a healthy young girl.”

  “You can see her staring at it. And feeling incredibly relieved. There it is in print.”

  “It’s in print. It’s official. She’s a healthy young girl,” said Nicholas. “That’s all.”

  “Is she just extreme? Or is she sui generis?”

  “Sui generis? You mean nuts.”

  “Well she’s not nuts, is she. She’s a lush, and a dyslexic, but she’s not nuts when it comes to anything else. Still. The fact remains that Vi rapes fruits and dates football teams.”

  “She acts like a boy. Nature without nurture. Like Caliban. Like a Yahoo.”

  Keith said, “She acts like a very bad boy. And it’s not in her interests. We’ve got to make her act more like a girl. And how do we do that? We can’t. She’s uncontrollable. We’d have to—we’d have to be the police.”