The Pregnant Widow (38 page)

“Timmy’s about to say grace,” said Lily from the doorway. “And you wouldn’t want to miss that.”

Keith’s attitude to religion was evolving, it seemed. He now had cause to thank God—to thank religion.
Ah, mille grazie, Dio. Aw, tantissime grazie, religione
. Many times, in her themed fantasies, Gloria returned to the idea of blasphemy.
In half an hour they’re taking me to the church
, she soliloquised, slipping into her white cotton dress.
I’m getting married to an older man. How very fortunate that I’m still a virgin. Just so long
as I don’t crack now. Oh, hello. I didn’t see you lying there …
And then again, at the very last, in the bathroom, in front of the mirror. Religion aroused Gloria Beautyman. And who could quarrel with it if it did that?

On his way to the dining room he remembered something else about Lizzyboo. It wasn’t relevant to anything, he supposed; it was, on the other hand, true. She had a special skill—demonstrated on three or four occasions, in front of the family and other visitors, and once at a party (students, academics, professors of sociology and history), to general admiration and applause. Seated on the carpet, with her arms folded at shoulder height, with legs raised and bent, and using muscle power alone, Lizzyboo could bounce at speed across the length of the room on her arse. All the other girls tried it; and none of them could even get off the ground. Lizzyboo had a different relationship with gravity—gravity, whose desire is to get you down there in the centre of the earth.

Shaking his head (experience of life, life!), Keith took his place at the table between Gloria and Conchita, facing Jorquil, Lily, and Adriano.

Mysteriously blasé about Frieda (and, later, about the likes of Scheherazade and Rita and Gloria Beautyman), the police were always abnormally interested in D. H. Lawrence. It wasn’t only
Lady Chatterley
that caught their attention: so did
The Rainbow
(obscenity), and so did
Women in Love
(libel). And so did a very late book of verse
(grossly indecent
, according to the Home Secretary;
nauseous and disgusting
, according to the Director of Public Prosecutions). Sufficiently gay, deep down, to be thrown behind bars in the first place, Lawrence nonetheless ignored the ridicule of his friends and called this collection
Pansies
—a pun, he said, on
pensées
. There were two editions of
Pansies:
the expurgated and the original, in which the eleven dirtiest poems were preserved.

It was of course the unexpurgated version that Keith was looking for—and he found it, high up in the infinite library. Down below, Conchita sat at the davenport with her colouring books. He surveyed her: the tight black bun of her hair, the round shoulders, one hand flat on the sloping leather surface, the other reaching out to the simple prism of her pencils and crayons. Colouring books—seasides, ball gowns, flowers.

“Found it … How was Berlin?”

She shrugged and said, “We went to the Wall.”

Unlike everyone else, Conchita had grown younger during the course of the summer. The precocious luminosity had passed over, and it no longer looked unusual—when she hastened to her colouring books, or when she attended, with the tenderest and most pitying of smiles, to Ducky and Lamby, to Patita and Corderito.

He climbed down, saying, “And how was Copenhagen? I’ve been there.”

“Cold. And expensive. That’s what—that’s what Prentiss said.”

“… Say
expensive
again?”

“Expensive.”

“Two months ago you’d have said
esspensive
. Say
magazines.”

“Magazines.”

“You’ve changed. You’re an American now. And you’re slimmer. It suits you.”

The example of the apoplectic Dodo, he imagined, had taught caution to Conchita’s appetite (at meal times she no longer asked for more). Yet the loss of weight, he thought, was also a loss of trouble, of inner heaviness; she no longer wore the weeds of mourning; Conchita wore white.

“Thanks … You’ve changed too.”

“Oh really? Better or worse? … Worse, right? In what way?”

She was smiling as she dipped her head. “Your eyes are funny.”

“… Oh yeah. Conchita. Up in the tower. Does Scheherazade sometimes forget to unlock the bathroom door?”

“All the time.”

After a moment Keith took his leave, and stepped out into the garden. The bees were gone, and nearly all the butterflies. The frogs no longer gurgled in their swamp. The sheep were gone, but the horses loyally remained. Keith flexed his brow. Beyond the paddock and on a higher slope he could see the figure of Adriano, slowly walking, with his neck bent down and his hands joined behind the small of his back.

“Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,”
Keith whispered—

I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever-dew …
The vines were bare and the lemon-houses shut. The squirrel’s granary was full.

T
here’s nothing
sinister
about it,” said Gloria. “You’re obsessed by this.”

“No I’m not. I remarked on it at the time, and I’m mentioning it now.”

“You’ve got a thing about it. What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t think
I’ve
got a thing about it.”

“Oh and I have, have I? God, you can certainly drone on … It’s something a lot of girls do.”

“In my limited experience,” said Keith, giving a terrified thought to how the
refinement
would be greeted by, say, Lily, “it’s not something a lot of girls do.”

“Well that must be pure ignorance on their part. And they’re fools if they don’t know about it. They’re fools. You’re obsessed by this. All right. Ejaculate,” she said, with a full-circle roll of the eyes, “con—”

“Wait. Isn’t it
ejacu-late?
You say
ejacu-lut
.”

“That’s because it’s the noun, not the verb. You fool. I’m
surrounded
by fools …”

Which was quite possibly the case. But this was certain: Gloria was surrounded by Italians—and Italians of the provincial bourgeoisie. Keith was in Montale, at the
casa signorile
of the
sindaco
, or the mayoral mansion. It was a lunch for fifty or sixty. Oona had prevailed on them to make up a contingent (Prentiss and Jorquil were paired together about twenty Italians away). They had all just sat through two long speeches, one by a hoary dignitary (whose chin was the size of a medium-length beard), and one by a fat soldier in full uniform (whose oxbow moustache reached up to the whites of his eyes). Now, with great weariness, Gloria was saying,

“Ejaculate …
contains many of the same ingredients as face cream. And I mean expensive face cream. Lipids, amino acids, and proteins that tighten the skin. It’s not a good moisturiser, which is why I wash it off after ten or fifteen minutes. But it’s a very good exfoliant. And what does
exfoliant
mean?”

“I’m not sure. De-leafing?”

“Wrong again. The walking dictionary is wrong again. An
exfoliant
is something that removes dead cells. Ejaculate is the secret of eternal youth.”

“I suppose that’s logical in a way.”

She said vindictively,
“Now
are you satisfied? … Oh, see that? Oh
no
. He’s having the fish.” And she rapped her palm on the cloth. “I give up. The stupid sod’s having the fish!”

Keith glanced out across the diagonal length of the table. Jorq was watching with an appreciative loll of the chin as the waiter spoon-forked a wedge of salmon on to his plate.

“I despair. He just doesn’t
listen.”

Feeling a frown forming on his face, Keith said, “The fish. Why …?”

“Don’t you know anything? Fish makes ejaculate smell
awful
. There. You didn’t know that either, did you. Well then.”

“Christ. I remember.
I’m sure the fish is perfectly fresh. But Keith and I are very happy with the lamb.”

“What are you banging on about now?”

“You planned that part of it too. The night before my birthday. You planned it.”

“Of course I planned it. Otherwise you’d have had the fish. Of course I planned it.”

He said, “Well, planning’s very important. You’ve shown me that.”

“Naturally you can’t control everything,” she said sleepily (and even more affectlessly than usual). “It’s a mistake to think you can. You know I get so furious, I get
so
furious when I go to a dinner party and they serve fish. And you’re not given a choice. It means all the men are
hors de combat
. In effect. And of course you can’t
say
anything. You just have to sit there and seethe. The presumption of it—it’s unbelievable. Don’t you think?”

“You make me see it in a new way. You often make me see things in a new way.”

“Lord Jesus meek and mild. He’s having seconds.”

Keith finished his glass of champagne and said, “I tell you what, Gloria, you ought to have a drop of this. Then we can go in that room over there.”

“… Yes. Yes, you’re well on your way. You’re well on your way to being a thoroughly repellent young man. With your fizzy new eyes.”

“Do you secretly work for the CIA or the KGB?”

“No.”

“Are you secretly from another planet?”

“No.”

“Are you secretly a boy?”

“No. I’m secretly a cock … In the future every girl will be like me. I’m just ahead of my time.”

“Every girl will be a cock?”

“Oh no. It’s given to very few,” she said, “to be a cock. Now shut up and eat your meat.”

He said, “The pool hut.”

“Shut up and eat your meat.”

Later, as he drank his coffee, he said,

“That was the best birthday present I ever had.” He spoke for about five minutes, ending, “It was unforgettably wonderful. Thank you.”

“Ah, a hint of appreciation at last … The pool hut, you say. Mm. It’d have to rain.”

O
f the many things Dodo suffered from (Dodo was a good example), narcissism would not be among them, Keith reflected, as he sat by the feminine fountain with
Pansies
on his lap. In all his adult life Lawrence never drew a breath without pain, and his lungs throttled him out of existence at the age of forty-four (last words:
Look at
him
on the bed there!)
. The late poems in
Pansies
were about the opposite of narcissism, the end of narcissism—the human closing of it. Self-dissolution, and the feeling that his own flesh was no longer fit to be touched.

Lawrence was once handsome. Lawrence was once young. But to how many is it given, to stand naked before the mirror and say, with ardour,
Oh, I love me. Oh I love me so
—to how many?

Now Lily was asking if she could take the uniform off (and she also found fault with the blazing overhead light). The uniform, that of a French maid, was in many ways a success. But it left something to be desired. What? This. It didn’t matter, in the new world, whether Lily loved Keith Nearing. The thing that mattered was whether Lily loved Lily. And she didn’t—or not enough.

“Yeah go on then,” he said.

“You didn’t exert yourself, I notice,” said Lily, throwing the fluffy duster aside and plucking at the bow of her white apron. “You didn’t pretend to be a butler or a footman.”

“No,” he said. “I’m normal.”

Why are uniforms good?

Two reasons
, said Gloria.
It makes you less specific. I’m not Gloria Beautyman. I’m an air hostess. I’m a nurse. Nuns are best, but it’s a lot of effort and hopeless without the buckly shoes and the wimple
.

“Lily. Let me tell you about Pansy. See if you think
that’s
normal. I
want your legal opinion.” The expurgated Pansy, or the unexpurgated? He would see. “And in return,” he said, “you can tell me about your switch to cool pants. Who suggested it? Harry? Tom?”

What’s the other reason uniforms are good?

Well she’s supposed to be doing something else, isn’t she. She’s already being very bad just by talking to you. You’re keeping her from her work
.

“No one suggested it,” said Lily in the dark. “I decided.”

“So you just thought, I know—I’ll switch to cool pants.”

Lily, during the sexual act (in her uptugged black skirt, her black stockings), did some sighing. Not high sighs, not low sighs—sighs at ground level. But now she was doing her sighing on the dungeon floor. She said,

“Well if you’re going to go to bed with people just for the hell of it … If you’re going to act like a man. You want to show you’ve thought it through. The pants send a signal.”

He said, “And the signal is—we’re coming off. Only uncool pants stay on.” And this wasn’t strictly true, he realised. Gloria herself had introduced him to a new technique: the retention of the lower undergarment during full intercourse. And Pansy also (in the unexpurgated version) contravened this rule. He said, “There’s the self-cosseting as well. A signal of self-love. That’s good.”

“Funny,” said Lily, “that Scheherazade had to be told about cool pants.”

“And didn’t just wisely decide on them. As you did, Lily. Pansy probably had to be told about cool pants—by Rita.”

“Was she pretty, Pansy?”

“Not conventionally. But sweet. Long brown hair and a sweet face. Like a woodland creature.” And a powerful body, Lily. With long brown legs in the incredibly short dresses and skirts mandated by Rita. “And it was the most amazing moment, Lily. In this entire …” He meant the revolution or the sea change. “In this entire thing, it was the most amazing moment of all.”

Lily sighed and said, “Go on then.”

“Well. Arn took me round to their place. And on the third date, Lily, I helped Pansy undress. And as I scrolled down her pants—she arched her back and I scrolled them down, and guess what.”

“I knew it. She’s one who never had pubic hair.”

“No
, Lily … The strange thing was—I could tell she didn’t want to.
Even as she arched her back. She was going to. But she didn’t want to. No volition. No I-wish.”