The Pregnant Widow Read online

  “No, it’s worse out there,” said Lily.

  “Mm. At least in here they’re too old to leap up and down.”

  “And too hoarse to yodel in your face.”

  “They hate us in here. They want to lock us up.”

  “They probably hate us out there too. But at least they want to fuck us.”

  “I don’t know how to break this to you,” said Whittaker, “but they don’t want to fuck you out there either. They’re fruits. They’re all terrified. Listen. I’m friends with the top model in Milan. Valentina Casamassima. Also a blonde. When she comes to Rome or Naples and they all go crazy, she turns on the biggest guy there and says, Come on, let’s fuck. I’ll suck your cock here in the street. I’m going down on you right now.”

  “And?”

  “They quail. They back off. They crumple.”

  Keith uneasily turned his head away. And felt a shadow cross the harlequinade—the harlequinade of his time. Near the centre of this shadow was Ulrike Meinhof, strolling nude in front of the Palestinian recruits (Fucking and shooting, she said—they’re the same), and even further in there was Cielo Drive, and Pinkie and Charles. He said,

  “That’s too high a price.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well they’re not really trying to pull you, are they, Lily. I mean, that’s not how you set about it, is it. Their only hope,” he said, “is to stumble on a girl who dates football teams.” This was perhaps obscure (and they were staring at him), so he went on, “That’s what Nicholas calls them. My brother. I mean, there aren’t many of them, but they do exist. Girls who like dating football teams.”

  “Ah,” said Lily, “but by pretending to like dating football teams, Valentina proves that they don’t even want girls who like dating football teams.”

  “Exactly,” said Keith (who was in fact quite confused). “Still. Valentina. Girls outtoughing the boys like that. It’s …” It was what? Overexperienced. Uninnocent. Because the young men of Montale were at least innocent—even their cruelty was innocent. He said helplessly, “Italians are play-actors. It’s all a game anyway.”

  “Well, Lily,” said Whittaker, “now you know what to do. When they whoop and leap, you know what to do.”

  “Vow to go down on them.”

  “Yeah. Vow to do that.”

  “I was in Milan in the spring, with Timmy,” said Scheherazade, leaning back. “And you didn’t have to vow to go down on them. You got stares and whistles and that gurgly sound they make. It wasn’t a … a circus, like here.”

  Yes, thought Keith, a circus—the highwire, the trapeze, the clowns, the tumblers.

  “You didn’t get crowds. You didn’t get queues.”

  “Walking backward,” said Lily. Who now turned to Scheherazade, and said with a solicitous, almost a motherly urge, “Yes. But you didn’t look like you look now. In the spring.”

  Whittaker said, “It isn’t that. It’s Franca Viola.”

  So the three of them attended to Whittaker, with the reverence due to his horn-rimmed gaze, his fluent Italian, his years in Turin and Florence, and his unimaginable seniority (he was thirty-one). There was also the fact of Whittaker’s orientation. What was their attitude to homosexuals, around then? Well, they accepted them utterly, while also congratulating themselves, every couple of minutes, for being so amazingly tolerant. But they were moving beyond that now, and homosexuality had the glamour of the vanguard.

  “Franca Viola. Incredible girl. She changed everything.”

  And with a proprietorial air Whittaker told the tale. Franca Viola, Keith learnt, was a Sicilian teenager who had been kidnapped and raped by a rejected suitor. Which was one thing. But kidnap and rape, in Sicily, provided the alternative route to confetti and wedding bells. Whittaker said,

  “Yeah, that’s right. What the penal code calls matrimonio riparatore. So, Keith, if you ever get tired of playing the guitar under the balcony with a flower in your mouth, and if the jumping jacks don’t work, remember there’s always another way. Kidnap and rape … Marrying the rapist. That’s what Franca Viola’s family was telling her to do. But Franca didn’t go to the church. She went to the police station in Palermo. And then it was national news. Incredible girl. Her people still wanted her to marry the rapist. So did the village, so did the islanders, so did half the mainland. But she didn’t. She pressed charges.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Scheherazade. “Why in the world would you marry the rapist? It’s prehistoric.”

  “It’s tribal. Shame and honour. It’s like Afghanistan. Or Somalia. Marry the rapist, or your menfolk’ll kill you. She didn’t do that. She didn’t marry him—she put him in jail. And she changed everything. Now Milan and Turin are partly civilised. Rome is beginning to get better. Naples is still a nightmare. But all that shit is draining southward. Sicily will be the last to go. Franca was sixteen when it happened. Incredible girl.”

  Keith was thinking that his sister Violet, another incredible girl, was also sixteen. In any kind of shame-and-honour arrangement, Violet would have been murdered long ago—by Keith himself, and his brother Nicholas, and his father, Karl, with the moral and logistical support of Uncle Mick and Uncle Brian. He said,

  “What happened to her, Franca?”

  “She got married properly a couple of months ago. To a lawyer. She’s your age now.” Whittaker shook his head. “Incredible girl. The balls on that girl. So when we go outside again, and the boys swoop down on you, you’ll have two choices. Go with Valentina Casamassima. Or think of Franca Viola.”

  They drank one last beer and talked about the May Events, in France in 1968, and the Hot Autumn, in Italy in 1969—and the slogans. Never Work. Never trust anyone over twenty-five. Never trust anyone who hasn’t been to prison. The Personal is Political. When I think of revolution, I want to make love. It is forbidden to forbid. Tutto e subito: All and Now. The four of them agreed that they would settle for that. They would all now settle for All and Now.

  “That’s how babies feel,” said Keith. “Apparently. They think: I am nothing and I should be everything.”

  Then it came over them that it was now time to go, to go out there, and Whittaker said,

  “Oh yeah. Another thing that drives them crazy is that you’re almost certainly on the Pill. They can’t get over it—what that means. Contraception is still illegal. And abortion. And divorce.”

  “How do they get around that?” said Scheherazade.

  “Easy. Hypocrisy,” said Lily. “Mistresses. Backstreet abortions …”

  “How do they get around contraception?”

  Whittaker said, “They’re meant to be great experts at coitus interruptus. Great artists of timely withdrawal. Oh, sure. I know what that means.”

  “What?”

  “They come up your arse.”

  “Whittaker!”

  “Or all over your face.”

  “Whittaker!”

  And Keith felt it again (he felt it several times a day): the tingle of licence. Everyone could swear now, if they wanted to. The word fuck was available to both sexes. It was like a sticky toy, and it was there if you wanted it. He said,

  “Yeah, Whittaker, I’ve been meaning to ask you. You say ass just like we say arse. Without sounding the r—ahce. Lily and Scheherazade say it like that, but they grew up in England. Like you say lahndscape. And those aunts that bothered you at the picnic. Those aunts crawling up your shorts. That gave me the horrors. What’s that accent?”

  “Boston Brahmin,” said Scheherazade. “Posher than the Queen. Now if we may be excused …”

  As the girls moved off again Whittaker said,

  “I think I see how it’s going to go. Out there. What happened? Earlier. Tell.”

  “You know, boys are so cruel. And so fucking rude.” Keith said that the mimed rampage, out there, the sexual revolution, was also a kind of plebiscite. “On the girls. And guess who won. I found myself thinking, Would you please insult Lily too?”

  “Mm.
Would you have the common courtesy to treat Lily like a stripper in a bear pit?”

  “Scheherazade’s the people’s choice. By acclamation … She’s transformed, isn’t she. I haven’t seen her for a few months, and I barely recognised her.”

  “Scheherazade, in general, is absolutely glorious. But let’s face it. It’s her breasts.”

  “… So you understand about Scheherazade’s breasts.”

  “I like to think so. I paint, after all. And it’s not the size, is it. It’s almost despite the size. On that wandlike frame.”

  “Yeah. Precisely so.”

  “I read something the other day,” said Whittaker, “that made me warm to breasts. I saw them in a different light. In evolutionary terms, this guy says, breasts are there to imitate the arse.”

  “The arse?”

  “The breasts ape the arse. As an inducement to having sex face to face. When women evolved out of oestrus. You must know what oestrus is.”

  Keith knew. From Gk oistros “gadfly or frenzy.” Heat. Whittaker said,

  “So arselike breasts sweetened the bitter pill of the missionary position. Just a theory. No, I understand about Scheherazade’s breasts. The secondary sexual characteristics in their Platonic form. Plan A for the tits. I understand—in principle.” He looked at Keith with affectionate contempt. “I don’t want to squeeze them or kiss them or bury my sobbing face in them. What d’you guys do with breasts? I mean they don’t lead anywhere, do they.”

  “I suppose that’s true. They’re sort of a mystery. An end unto themselves.”

  Whittaker glanced over his shoulder. “I can tell you they’re not universally admired. Someone I know had a very bad reaction to them. Amen.”

  “Amen?” Amen—pronounced Ahmun—was Whittaker’s reclusive Libyan boyfriend (who was eighteen). Keith said, “What’s Amen got against Scheherazade’s breasts?”

  “That’s why he never goes down to the pool any more. He can’t take her breasts. Wait. Here they come.”

  Did this mean—could this truly mean—that Scheherazade, down by the pool (as Lily had hinted), sunbathed topless? There was still time for Keith to say, “Are you seriously telling me her tits look like an arse?”

  He himself paid a quick visit to the basement—before they all filed out into the street … The Italian toilet, and its negative sensual adventure: what was it trying to say? Southern Europe in its entirety had it like this, even France, the grime-scored crouchpads and flowing knee-high stopcocks and the fistfuls of yesterday’s newspaper wedged between pipe and brickwork. The stench that threaded acid into the tendons of the jaw, and made the gums sting. Don’t flatter yourself, the toilet was saying. You are an animal, made of matter. And something in him responded to this, as if he sensed the proximity of a beloved beast, moist and leathery in the spiced darkness.

  Then they all filed out into it—past the female mannequins in the boutique windows, and into the swirling oestrus, the pitiless verdict, the mortifying unanimity of the young men of Montale.

  So they drove from town to village—to the castle, perched like a roc on the mountainside.

  You know, I used to have a lot of time for Keith Nearing. We were once very close. And then we fell out over a woman. Not in the usual sense. We had a disagreement over a woman. I sometimes think he could have been a poet. Bookish, wordish, letterish, with a very peculiar provenance, a committed romantic who, nonetheless, found it fairly difficult to get any kind of girlfriend—yes, he could have been a poet. But then came his summer in Italy.

  2

  SOCIAL REALISM

  (OR SLAG FOR LOVE)

  Keith lay between the sheets, up in the south tower. He was thinking, not very constructively, about the frayed burlap sack Whittaker had slung over his shoulder as they left the bar. What’s that? Keith asked. Mail? Italian mailbags, he assumed, like English mailbags, were manufactured in the nation’s prisons; and Whittaker’s burlap sack did indeed look felon-woven (it seemed most disaffectedly thrashed together), with a sociopathic, faintly purplish tint somewhere in its weft. Keith found, these days, that his thoughts often turned to law enforcement. Or, rather, to its absence, its inexplicable laxity … Not mail, said Whittaker. Mail gets delivered direct. In here is—the world. See? And there it was, the world: Times, Lifes, Nations, and Commentarys, New Statesmans, Listeners, Spectators, Encounters. So it was still out there—the world. And the world already seemed very quiet and very distant.

  “So I suppose you agree,” said Lily in the dark, “with the young men of Montale.”

  “No I don’t,” said Keith. “I wanted to do a jumping jack at you. To tell you so.”

  “… Have you any idea what that was like? For me?”

  “Yeah, I think I have. I get that when I’m with Kenrik. They don’t do jumping jacks at him, but they—”

  “Well he is beautiful.”

  “Mm. It’s hard to take, but remember. The world has bad taste. It goes for the obvious.”

  “What’s obvious?”

  “Come on, you know what I mean. The superficial. Her looks may please the vulgar, Lily. But you’re much cleverer and more interesting.”

  “Mm. Thanks. But I know what’s going to happen. You’re going to fall in love with her. Not that you’ve got a hope, of course. But you will. How could you not? You. You fall in love with anything that moves. You’d fall in love with female football teams. And Scheherazade. She’s beautiful and sweet and funny. And madly grand.”

  “That’s what puts me off. She’s irrelevant. She’s from another world.”

  “Mm. Actually you do know when you’re outclassed,” she said, making herself more comfortable on the bolster of his arm. “An A-one berk like you. A chippy little guttersnipe like you.” She kissed his shoulder. “It’s all in the names, isn’t it. Scheherazade—and Keith. Keith’s probably the most plebeian name there is, don’t you think?”

  “Probably … No. No,” he said. “The earl mareschals of Scotland were Keiths. There was a line of them, each called Lord Keith. Anyway, it’s better than Timmy.” He thought of gangly, lackadaisical Timmy, in Milan, with Scheherazade. “Timmy. Call that a name? Keith’s a better name than Timmy.”

  “All names are better names than Timmy.”

  “Yeah. It’s impossible to think of a Timmy ever doing anything cool. Timmy Milton. Timmy Keats.”

  “… Keith Keats,” she said. “Keith Keats doesn’t sound very likely either.”

  “True. But Keith Coleridge? You know, Lily, there was a poet called Keith Douglas. He was posh. His middle name was Castellaine and he went to the same prep school as Kenrik. Christ’s Hospital. Oh yeah. And the K in G. K. Chesterton stands for Keith.”

  “What’s the G stand for?”

  “Gilbert.”

  “Well there you are then.”

  Keith thought of Keith Douglas. A war poet—a warrior poet. The fatally wounded soldier: Oh mother, my mouth is full of stars … He thought of Keith Douglas, dead in Normandy (a shrapnel wound to the head) at twenty-four. Twenty-four. Lily said,

  “All right. What would you do if she vowed to go down on you?”

  Keith said, “I’d be surprised, but I wouldn’t be shocked. Just disappointed. I’d say, Scheherazade!”

  “Yeah, I bet. You know, I sometimes wish …”

  Keith and Lily had been together for over a year—with a recent, term-long hiatus, variously known as the Interregnum, the Intermission, or simply Spring Break. And now, after the trial separation, the trial reunion. Keith owed her a great debt of gratitude. She was his first love, in this particular sense: he had loved many girls, but Lily was the first who loved him back.

  “Lily, it’s you I love.”

  The nightly interaction, the indescribable deed, now took place, by candlelight.

  “Was it fun?”

  “What?”

  “Pretending I’m Scheherazade.”

  “… Lily, you keep forgetting how high-minded I am. Matthew Arnold. The best which ha
s been thought and said. F. R. Leavis. Felt life in its full creative force. Besides, she’s much too tall for me. She’s not my type. You’re my type, Lily.”

  “Mm. You aren’t as high-minded as you used to be. Anything like.”

  “Yes I am … It’s her character. She’s sweet and kind and funny and bright. And she’s good. That’s the real turn-off.”

  “I know. It’s nauseating. And she’s grown about a foot too,” said Lily, now indignantly wide awake. “And almost all of it’s in her neck!”

  “Yeah, it’s quite a neck all right.” Lily had already said a good deal about Scheherazade and her neck. She compared her to a swan and sometimes—depending on her mood—an ostrich (and, on one occasion, a giraffe). Lily said,

  “Last year she was … What’s happened to Scheherazade?”

  Scheherazade awoke one morning from troubled dreams to find herself changed in her bed into a … According to the famous story, of course, Gregor Samsa (pron. Zamza) was transformed into an enormous insect, or alternatively a giant bug, or alternatively—and this was the best translation, Keith felt sure—a monstrous vermin. In Scheherazade’s case, the metamorphosis was a radical ascension. But Keith couldn’t fix on the right animal. A doe, a dolphin, a snow leopard, a winged mare, a bird of paradise …

  But first the past. Lily and Keith broke up because Lily wanted to act like a boy. That was the heart of the matter, really: girls acting like boys was in the air, and Lily wanted to try it out. So they had their first big row (its theme, ridiculously, was religion), and Lily announced a trial separation. The words came at him like a jolt of compressed air: such trials, he knew, were almost always a complete success. After two days of earnest misery, in his terrible room in the terrible flat in Earls Court, after two days of desolation, he phoned her and they met up, and tears were shed—on both sides of the café table. She told him to be evolved about it.

  Why should boys have all the fun? said Lily, and blew her nose into the paper napkin. We’re anachronisms, you and me. We’re like childhood sweethearts. We should’ve met ten years from now. We’re too young for monogamy. Or even for love.