The Pregnant Widow

by Martin Amis

  “… She’s coming round at seven.”

  “That’s all right,” says Nicholas (this has happened before). “I’ll go down the Shakespeare for half an hour.”

  “No. Stay here. I’ll go down the Shakespeare for half an hour. With Gloria.”

  “Oh. So. Not the usual.”

  “I could be wrong. But I think the usual’s coming to an end.”

  They talk on, about family matters, until they hear the keys in the door.

  Nicholas says quietly, “I’ll slip off. You might get a going-away present. You never know.”

  “Go to the restaurant that’s only big enough for one person. With your book. I’ll be paying tonight. You’ll have to hold my hand.”

  “I hope you’re late. Don’t forget. She’s a surprising girl. The Future is surprising.”

  Keith listens to their exchange in the entrance hall, which is full of comity, even gallantry, on both sides. Then she enters, with a smile he’s never seen before.

  But his eyes were already going past her—and he saw the future plain enough. The inability to enter a bedroom without fear; fumbling, dreamlike, tramelled by strange impediments; and the deep weave, the deep stitch of self-doubt. Gloria, he wanted to say: Tell me your secret and whatever it is I’ll beg you to come and live with me. But he said nothing as she stepped towards him.

  Nicholas of course is already there, with his book, and Keith comes in and drops his hat on the tablecloth.

  “The Future’s fucking the dog.”

  “Come on. She’s not that surprising.”

  “Dog with a little dee. I mean in general. She’s making her move. Everything’s fixed. Huw’s sworn to go to Germany on the Bible. Jesus. I’m in shock. I’m also drunk. I had two huge glasses of vodka on my way out.”

  “Vodka? You told me the last time you drank spirits was in Italy. After you fucked it all up with Scheherazade by shitting on God.”

  “It’s true. But I was so scared. I’m so scared. And you know what? Gloria was happy. I’ve seen her cheerful before. But never happy.”

  “A pretty sight.”

  “Yes. And I told her so. You’d have been proud of me. I said, ‘I’m miserable, but it’s good to see you looking so happy and so young.’ And I got a kiss out of it too.”

  “A sex kiss?”

  “Sort of. For the record. And I felt her up. But that’s not how you do it with the Future.”

  “How d’you do it?”

  “I’m not telling you … Christ, I almost tried, but then I didn’t. Too demoralised. Oh yeah, and high-minded. I suppose I’ll have to go back to being high-minded. And to being a gimp in the boudoir. A high-minded gimp in the boudoir. Nice.”

  “Call Alexis.”

  “Call Alexis, and give myself a heart attack trying to finish. Call Iris. And give myself a heart attack trying to start.”

  “That never happens to me—except, of course, when I’m unusually drunk.” Nicholas attends to the menu. “It’s no fun, all that. Cupping your hands over your shame. Or fighting to come. The trouble is, when that happens, they take it personally.”

  “Mm. The only one I’m normal with is Lily.”

  “And that’s what—an annual event? … Maybe you’re normal with Lily because she precedes your obsession with the Future. Wait. How did you get on with the two nutters from the Poetry Society?”

  “I couldn’t raise it with them either.”

  “But maybe there’s a simple explanation. They were two nutters from the Poetry Society. And John Cowper Powys?”

  “… On the way here I thought, I’ll chuck my job and go back to being a poet. Which means going back to Joy and Patience. And John Cowper Powys. Christ, what is it, Nicholas? What went wrong with me and girls?”

  “Mm. The other night I ran into your Neil Darlington. He’s delightful, isn’t he. Very drunk, of course. He said you should try and marry Gloria. ‘Enter the labyrinth.’”

  “Typical Neil. He’s addicted to complication. The reason I’m normal with Lily is that there’s still some love. There’s no love with Gloria. No talk of love. No talk of like. In fifteen months the prettiest thing she’s ever said to me is ‘kiss.’”

  “You say love frightens you. Well then. Settle for sex. Marry her.”

  “She’d laugh in my face. I’m not rich enough. She curls her lip when she hears the word ‘salary.’ It has to be old money. Old money. What is old money?”

  “It’s what you get when you did all your gouging and skanking a couple of centuries ago.”

  “Huw’s lot were Catholic grandees. Mine were servants. And they weren’t even married. I’m shit.”

  “… You know, I’ve only heard you talk like this once before. When they were teasing you at school. Before Mum put a stop to it. Think of Edmund in Lear. ‘Why brand they us With base?’ Remember, Little Keith. You’ve got more in you than a whole tribe of fops, Got ’tween asleep and wake.”

  “… You’re a good brother to me.”

  “Please don’t cry. You look eight years old again.”

  “This time next week … this time next week, he’ll be pegged out on a cellar floor in Munich. Bind fast his corky arms. And I’ll be … Fuck Huw. Fuck Huw. I hope something very horrible happens to him before his wedding day.”

  Raising his glass, Keith summons the gothic, the Grand Guignol.

  And Nicholas says, “That’s the spirit. Now, gods, stand up for bastards.”

  In September the two of them went to Essex to see Violet, who was shacked up with a comprehensively humourless ex-sailor in Shoeburyness. His name was Anthony—or, in Violet’s rendering, Amfony or Anfony. Nicholas, who had been there before, called him Unfunny (with the stress on the first syllable). Keith drove. He was hungover. He was drinking more. That week he had spent two lunchtimes in a Mayfair escort agency, with catalogues, with Who’s Whos of young women on his lap. He was looking for a certain face and a certain shape …

  “So how long’s she been with Unfunny?”

  “A whole three months. He’s a hero. You’ll see. A whole free mumfs in Unfunny’s arms.”

  Scrawny, bearded, and bald, in a typhoon-proof rollneck sweater, and with eyes of Icelandic blue, Anthony lived in the cabin of a boat called The Little Lady. His sea-roving days were at an end, and he was permanently and grimly moored up a tributary of the Mersea River. The Little Lady was in fact no longer water-borne, but wedged porthole-deep in a great expanse, like a solid ocean, of riverine slime; you boarded her by means of a warped gangplank as twangy as the diving board at the castello. They had electricity (and a noisy generator), and the taps quite often worked.

  Anthony no longer sought adventure on the high seas; but he could somehow manage Violet. How? Well, as an able-bodied swabbie of twenty years’ service, he was used to entrusting his life to a monster. He knew the contrary currents, the heaving swells. And he needed to. Because every morning Violet walked the plank and continued on into town, where she picked up men in pubs, returning in various stages of undress and incapacity in the early evening, to be bathed and fed.

  There would be a surprise, or a reversal, but Violet was very good on the day her brothers came. Now let’s see—what do normal people do? The three siblings went to Clacton and had lunch at an Angus Steak House; they waved off Nicholas on the train to Cambridge (a Union debate about Cambodia); and Keith took Violet to the funfair. Then there was a hearty fish stew on The Little Lady, fondly prepared by Anthony. Who talked all evening about his years as a maritimer (all of them spent gutting fish in the hold of a North Sea trawler). The two men got through most of a bottle of rum, while Violet drank pop.

  At eleven Keith readied himself to drunk-drive back to London. He gave thanks and farewells, started off down the gangplank, and, with a perceptible spring, as if helped on his way by the toe of a boot, leapt into the brown ocean of riverine slime … Which wasn’t so remarkable, perhaps—except that an hour later, after Violet, with buckets and towels, had stripped him and sluice
d him and somehow reassembled him, he went out and did it again.

  Hooked out by Anthony for a second time, Keith sits reeking in the tiny galley while Violet refills the buckets.

  “Vi, you must’ve done that once or twice by now.”

  “Oh I lost count ages ago,” she says.

  And attends to him, with patience, with humour, with infinite forgivingness. With sisterly love, in short. And it makes him think that if their roles were reversed then Violet would go all the way—that it would be possible, all your life, to do nothing else but lift someone out of the mire, clean them up, lift them out again, and clean them up again.

  On October 15 Keith received an embossed invitation to Gloria’s wedding (he would not attend), and also received, that same morning, a phone call from a tearful Anthony (who couldn’t take it any more). Violet disappeared for a while, but she was back in London in time for Halloween.

  The Way It Panned Out in 1979

  It is 7 p.m. on the day of Gloria Beautyman’s marriage, and Keith is halfway through his fourth game of Scrabble—his opponent is Kenrik. And all this time Gloria has been desperately trying to reach him. But he isn’t to know that, is he (nor is he to know that she is now alone on the platform of the train station in Llangollen—the fine rain, the cold, the floating haloes of the lights): as Keith places his moves, and lays out the letters on his rack, and occasionally consults the dictionary, he is also on the phone with Violet.

  “So Gary said go on then, scrub the bloody floor. And I said no fanks mate, you scrub the bloody floor if you love it so clean. And he beat me up! Wiv a cricket bat fanks very much.”

  Keith cups the receiver and says, “‘Wrentit?’ First, ‘krait,’ then ‘wrentit.’ Seven letters.”

  “I said. Krait’s a little shit of a snake. Wrentit’s a little dope of a bird,” says Kenrik, who, the next day, will attend preliminary criminal proceedings on the charge of assaulting his mother—the diminutive yet remorseless Roberta.

  “And he called me a slag and I’m not a slag! I’m an elfy young girl! Then he says guiss your money. And muggins here give it him. And what’s he do? He buggers up!”

  “Off,” Keith reflexively reminds her. It really is remarkable: to attempt so little in the way of language—and to bugger that up. Wiv, fanks, elfy: the explanation for all this would belatedly occur to him. “Off, Vi. Buggers off.”

  “Pardon? Yeah he goes and buggers up!”

  The call somehow comes to an end. They play three more games (like Timmy at the chessboard, Kenrik always wins), and they walk out to dinner—just as Gloria changes trains at Wolverhampton and is once more speeding south-east.

  “So what happened with Bertie?”

  “The usual. Bertie was screaming in my face, I gave her a push, and she threw herself down the stairs. No. She did a backward somersault. I might get off with a warning, but I’ll need a cool judge. It’s just a domestic.”

  This is not the first time Kenrik has faced trial: credit fraud, VAT-avoidance, drunk-driving … Believing as he does that all magistrates are a) right-wing and b) homosexual, he always stands in the dock with a Daily Telegraph under his arm, and gives the magistrate a steady pout of conspiratorial submissiveness.

  “I’ll be all right. Unless Bertie comes to court in a wheelchair. Or on a stretcher. She wants me in jail, you see.”

  “… Are you still with Olivia?”

  Now things take a prophetically pertinent turn (as things, in Life, very seldom do), and Kenrik says, “No, she kicked me out. See, she’s very pretty, Olivia, so she gave me an ultimatum. The rougher ones don’t bother with ultimatums, because they’re used to being passed over. Olivia says: me or booze. Then she screamed in my face about something else, so I got drunk. And she kicked me out. She loathes me now. The very pretty ones can’t believe, cannot believe, they’ve been passed over. For something the shape of a bottle.”

  “You’re a very pretty one,” says Keith, and thinks of Kenrik in Pentonville, in Wormwood Scrubs. Kenrik would not go on being a very pretty one.

  “It made me realise something. How much Bertie must’ve hated my dad when he died. Bertie was a very pretty one. And he went on a three-day bender and killed himself in his car. And made her a widow.”

  “A pregnant widow. Mm. Mine never knew she was a widow.”

  “I suppose all widows grieve. But some widows hate.”

  And Keith thinks of all that hatred coursing through fierce little pretty Roberta. And Kenrik inside her, drinking it.

  “That’s why she wants me in jail,” says Kenrik. “To punish him. Because he’s me.”

  They are eating their main course as Gloria’s train enters the thickening city.

  •

  Keith walked home through a fog the colour of withered leaves—through the sere fog, and its smell of the churchyard. He was remembering the time Kenrik rang him at two in the morning: Kenrik was in the process of getting arrested for the first time. You could hear the voices in the background. Put the phone down, sir. Come on now, sir. That was a phone call from another genre—another way of doing things.

  She is standing, now, a solid but altered shape, in the cold darkness of the porch outside his building.

  “Mrs. Llewellyn. Are you very pregnant?”

  “No, I’m still Miss Beautyman. And no again. I’ve just got all my clothes on. The train was like a fridge. Feel my suitcase. There’s nothing in it. I’ve got all my clothes on. Are you going to take pity on me?”

  “Why aren’t you in Wales?”

  She says, “I’ve had a very bad dream.”

  For this hinge moment, then, Gloria is disarmed, or neutralised: not just with all her clothes on, but with all her clothes on.

  These she now takes off, or fights her way out of, standing in front of the ornamental coal fire, overcoat, leather jacket, two sweaters, shirt, T-shirt, long skirt, short skirt, long skirt, jeans, stockings, socks. Then she turns, her flesh stippled and goosebumped, and marked by indentations and crenellations, like scars. He hands her the warmed robe … She bathes, and drinks two pots of sugary tea. Now she sits folded on the sofa; he crouches on the facing chair, and listens to the wintriness of her voice.

  “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?”

&
nbsp; “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?”