In the King's Arms

by Sonia Taitz

  Everything was made to lift the spirit: the plastic flowers in the plastic vases, the wall-to-wall shag carpet, the electric hearth with its fake coals in their fake brazier. The chipped cup from which she drank her tea bore a portrait of King George VI. Frilly curtains billowed at the window. Nothing matched, nothing was in fashion, and all was neat as a pin. Something in all this naive effort took her back to her home, to the Lower East Side, where the fiats of design had been ignored, perhaps unnoticed, by her own parents.

  Rebekah began crying again. Mrs. Jenkins snatched her up and plopped her into Lily’s arms as she warmed up a bottle. The baby felt plump and sweet and strong.

  “Nothing to them, babies! Had a few myself! Nice to be little, isn’t it, have the world servin’ you hand and foot! Ends soon enough, though, dunnit? How old are you?”

  “Nearly twenty-two.”

  “A good age, I do say! A good age indeed! Youth is wasted on the young, I always say! You’d agree? Well, here’s her milkies! Want to feed her?”

  “Yes, please.” Mrs. Jenkins handed Lily the bottle and Rebekah reached for it, waving her hands in the air. Lily looked into her acute little face. Cocoa brown, and fringed with a dark curly nimbus of hair. I could have baby like this, she thought. If the father is opposite to me, it does not matter; the baby is mine. Grows in me, takes my food and oxygen, linked to me by a cord of pulsing flesh. No matter who the father is, the baby is no stranger to its mother. Black or white, Christian or Jew: a baby, the link between strangers, between alien souls. A perfection of composition: halves. Half-man, half-woman: the birthright of the human race. Her secret dream was reconciliation, the dumb wisdom of married flesh. Seed-troth. Her own child could be half Jewish, and half not. All that spilled fratricidal blood, back in the veins of a living babe, coursing.

  “What a miracle,” said Lily, softly.

  “Eh? What’s that, dear? Oh, she eats like that all the time! No wonder to it at all! She’s gained half a stone, I’ll wager!”

  Lily chuckled, then, without warning, began to shudder with tears. She felt astonished and ashamed, and tried to choke them back.

  The last child she’d held had been Timothy Kendall.

  Rebekah’s brown twinkling eyes traveled wonderingly around Lily’s contorted face, and her warm body began wriggling. Lily bent her head down toward her to hide from Mrs. Jenkins. She needn’t have bothered: Mrs. J. was throwing pots around. By the time she looked at Lily again, she was fairly under control, and the baby was lying back in the pram.

  “I think I’ll make a nice hot stew for supper! Now, wouldn’t that be tasty! Wouldn’t it, now! Been crying, haven’t you?”

  “A- a little,” she admitted.

  “Well, then, blow your nose,” she ordered, shoving a napkin at her. “You’re all wet, you poor newt! How’s the baby? Nice and full, I expect! She’ll be wanting a burping, won’t she?” She took Rebekah up in her arms. “Time for a lie-down, innit? Nothin’ but sleep and eat, sleep and eat for that one, eh, luv? Shouldn’t mind trading with her!”

  “Would it be all right if I took a nap, too? Mrs. Dancer said I could just stretch out on the sofa.”

  “Right-O! Have a nice rest! It’s a nice settee, don’t you think? Always did like a nice pink! Have a rest! Pleasure meeting you! Fancy, all the way from America! Rebekah, say ‘bye to your new friend!”

  “Goodnight.” Lily went into the sitting room and lay down. In a minute she was fast asleep.

  When she awoke, Mrs. Dancer was there, sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room, cuddling and singing to Rebekah. When she saw that Lily was awake, she said, “I make my mixture for you. I bring it now.”

  Mrs. Dancer stood up, shifting the baby to one hip, and smoothed the sweated hair away from Lily’s face with a dry palm. Lily had developed a fever, it seemed, from the minute she’d closed her eyes. She spent the next two weeks in a not unpleasant haze.

  29

  THE FOLLOWING TERM at Oxford was a vacuum to Lily. She lay in bed, not reading, not writing essays, missing all her classes and tutorials. Her friends thought she’d had a relapse of glandular fever; perhaps they were right. She received worried, admonishing and threatening notes from her tutors, which she crumpled and tossed at the bin. The threats referred to the diminishing likelihood of her catching up with her course load to the extent that she’d pass finals.

  Mrs. Dancer seemed not a bit surprised when Lily told her she thought she must be pregnant. She lauded Lily for having been in love with a man who had powerful “juices.” Lily was amazed at herself and at Julian. They must have really let it go that night. For once she’d been totally open. She’d been stormed, endangered, and come out not only alive but life-giving. What do you know? she thought. The two of us added up to something, after all. Something bigger than either of us.

  She thought that she’d better go home to have this baby. She would leave everything behind, she decided. Even Julian. It didn’t matter if she needed him or not; he wasn’t available. Had he ever called her, ever written? She realized that he had limitations; he was young, unformed, weak. Where had he been since that night? Safely at home, and not a word to her. He had gone, she decided, as far as he could go. Now there was the baby to think about. The baby was more precious than anything to her, more precious than Julian’s attempts at loving her. It was the final and the only proof that they had once trusted each other.

  Perhaps she was lying to herself. Perhaps she was furious to be alone and pregnant and exiled. Glad to have stolen a part of his self, a part of that family that they could not take away from her. Something she herself could take home to her own family. Away from Julian, and his doubts, and his fears. Away from the scene of her own greatest fears.

  For Peter she felt something else, something very uncomplicated: she missed her friend. She did not like to think of leaving Oxford without seeing him again. There they were, in the same city, breathing the same air, practically, and they never saw each other.

  She understood what he must be feeling. Apart from the horror of his little brother’s accident, Peter must have suffered, at least in part, from guilt. He had, in her presence, made Timothy the butt of his good-natured wit: “Half-breed,” he’d called him, “usurper,” “fetus.” The accident had made that harmless teasing, in retrospect, seem callous. And she’d witnessed it all.

  She often thought of going to Christ Church and knocking on Peter’s door, but she couldn’t muster up the nerve. She wanted to be able to enjoy the sight of his funny, beaky face before he saw her own face and turned away in anger. The opportunity presented itself in a lucky way: a poster announced that Peter had won the starring role in Strindberg’s The Father. Shelagh Eveline Fanning was directing. The run had started last week, and would continue through the next. She could sit in the audience, anonymous, preparing her nerve for a meeting. She cravenly waited until the last night of the run, when at last she bought a ticket.

  As Lily sat down in the little theater, she wondered if Peter’s father ever did make good his promise to catch his son’s moment of glory. Nobody in the audience, at least on that night, looked as though they had fathered Peter and Julian. Nobody looked like the wandering satyr she’d never met but could vividly summon to mind, her baby’s grandfather.

  The feeling she carried around, that she was going to be a mother, did not really unsettle her. She didn’t know why. She was animalistic, unintrospective. But this play, from the very first lines, attacked her nerves in a terrible way. All the squabbling, the desperate fighting for turf. She had read Keats only a few months ago. And he’d said that truth was beauty. But it wasn’t so. Truth wasn’t simply beautiful; the battle for truth was often ugly. She rubbed her stomach unconsciously, and listened.

  LAURA: You don’t know whether you are Bertha’s father!

  CAPTAIN: Don’t I? [This was Peter!]

  LAURA: How can you know when no one else knows?

  CAPTAIN: Are you joking?

  LAURA: No I am
simply enjoying your teachings. Besides, how do you know that I have not been unfaithful to you?

  CAPTAIN: I can believe many things of you but not that. And if you had been unfaithful, you would not be talking about it now!

  LAURA: Suppose I was prepared to tolerate anything: to be an outcast, to be despised all for the sake of possessing and keeping my influence over my child and that I told the truth just now when I said: Bertha is my child, but not yours! Suppose—

  CAPTAIN: That’s enough!

  LAURA: Just suppose! Then your power would be over!

  All those angry words. Puzzles to her. Puzzles she had solved, or had forgotten to solve, or to which she’d forgotten the solution, or should one day solve. One day—though the knowledge itself could kill. Puzzles of history. Puzzles of legacy. Puzzles of trust.

  The play ended at about ten o’clock. Afterwards, she wandered about town. She wandered up High Street and Broad Street, stopping in to have a drink at The Grapes. She tried to gather the courage to see Peter. She imagined him victorious, after his final performance. Blushing as he did when he felt delighted. Fanning would be crowing and glowing with the victory of her new protégé. Raising her arms outward and upward, beckoning him to enter, keeping a steady gaze. She’d grip him full around his thin body, hold him in her sturdy arms. Open her cape melodramatically to take him in. His head would be wedged between her breasts. She’d tremble and quiver; he would feel her heart. The light that entered Peter’s eyes through that green cape would be forest light. He’d hear her chest rumble as she spoke, and hear the crowd’s roar-laughter. Lost in the tropics, a star, amidst a chorus of chuckling creatures.

  Lily finished her drink, and made her way slowly to Christ Church. All the way to Christ Church like a pilgrim, hearing the sound of her boot-heels clacking on the pavement. The moon glowed golden over the medieval town. The world smelled of ale and yellow stone-dust. It wasn’t possible, it wasn’t, that the centuries had died away. From far off, from time to time, she heard the “ring-ring!!” of a bicycle bell. She wanted to stay planted right there forever. To be entombed in the thick town walls where no one could ever find her or pry her out. Like the wishes people stuff into the Western Wall of the ruined temple.

  30

  WHEN SHE GOT TO THE COLLEGE, she looked up at Peter’s window and saw a mass of exotics, celebrating. She plopped down on the bottom of his staircase and inhaled the warmth of the rotting wood. She saw the actors, one by one, make their exits from Peter’s room. They had to step over her.

  “’Scuse!”

  “Pardon! (You bloody oaf!)”

  “Passing through!”

  “A domani, Pietro; mio carissimo!”

  Finally, she mounted the stairs and knocked on his door. She waited a long time, then knocked again. She thought she could hear low laughter. Then a woman’s voice: “No, don’t, Peter!”

  After a moment, the doorknob turned and the door swung open. A thick aroma of incense and cigarettes bathed her from within the room. Peter stared at her for a good minute, stony yet wavering, like a statue about to topple.

  “Back . . . so soon?” he finally said. He tried to sound nasty, but there was a rusty note of hurt in his voice. He was mildly drunk, and looked very cool, wearing his sharply creased “Captain’s” trousers and a fire-red T-shirt. He was sipping a Buck’s Fizz. Lily looked up into his face and saw that she mattered to him.

  “I’ve decided to leave Oxford.”

  He gestured to the bed. Lily thought he wanted her to sit there, but just as she was about to, she pulled herself up sharply. He had been pointing to Julian. Julian was sprawled on the bed, very drunk, an arm flung across his brow, to which moist tendrils adhered. For some reason, Lily could not avoid thinking of Steerforth, the fallen hero of David Copperfield.

  Dead: she gazed at him as though he were a god.

  “Julian?” she said quietly. “Is it you?”

  His eyes were closed as though he were under a spell. On the edge of the bed sat Sabina.

  “Drunk,” said Peter. “Pissed out of his tiny brains. Seems he came up to Oxford to see my play, but he disappeared after Act I, as though he’d seen a ghost. We couldn’t imagine where he’d gone, Sabina and I. That’s Sabina.” He pointed with a long forefinger. “She’s my new Lady Jane.”

  “I’ve seen you, Sabina. I’ve seen you in The King’s Arms. And then at the OUDS party.”

  “I’ve seen you,” she replied, knowingly.

  “And that’s where we found him. In the bleeding King’s Arms. We had the whole cast up here in my room, feeling each other’s privates, and generally having a rather good time, when all of a sudden Sabina—did you know Julian shoved us together by way of recompense for stealing you—starts to worry. She gets quite nervous if she hasn’t been soundly fucked for a few hours.” He gave Sabina a kind look. “We shall remedy that very soon, dearest. So,” he returned to Lily, “I sent her round to all the pubs, searching for the Princeling. And how did I know he’d be pubbing? You might well ask. I’m blessed and accursed with more than my fair share of brains. She saw you, by the way. Saw you guzzling in the Grapes.

  “When I heard she’d seen you, I nearly became incontinent.”

  “Oh, I’ve really missed you!” blurted Lily.

  “You’re an imbecile. So where was I? Oh, yes, the Princeling. I’m sure you’ll find that topic far more stimulating than the one about how you missed me.”

  “I did miss you, Peter.”

  “O.K., you souse. I believe you. Now let me finish my story. Finally, my darling located Julian in The King’s Arms, and brought him tumbling home.”

  “Babbling and sobbing,” laughed Sabina, her mouth wide open. Lily remembered those strong white horse-teeth of hers. If she’d ever had a crush on Julian, she’d gotten over it. She seemed on top of the world now. While Sabina filled the room with the sounds of hilarity, Lily caught a look at Peter’s face. It was lonely and sad. He saw her looking, and quickly turned away. When he faced her again, he was cool again. Breezy.

  “You were very good tonight, Peter. I saw your final performance.”

  So that was why Julian had run out, he thought.

  “Oh, did you? How very Christian!” An old joke.

  “It was great, Peter. You have a lot of talent. And you finally got a starring role! I couldn’t believe it!”

  “Finally. I suppose it’s at least partly because I let Fanning stick a vibrating dildo up my arse. Eight feet long and ticking like a Geiger counter.”

  “No, really, Peter. You were wonderful. I had chills. Did your father ever show up?”

  “Oh,” he sighed, and turned it into a weak little laugh. “My father. Very preoccupied. Perhaps he doesn’t fancy this particular little play. Reminds him of his long-forgotten paternity. Or perhaps he doesn’t fancy this particular son of his. He’s all gung ho to see Julian in a play, isn’t he, Sabina? Yes, he is. Real chip off the old sod’s block, and recently discovered by the great Fanning as well. Apparently she thinks he has what Dad has: what they call ‘sha-reees-mah.’ Well, sod him and sod all the witches who fall for him.

  “We all have our little idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, you see. I, for instance, don’t like you very much. For example.”

  He had grown depressed and angry at the mention of his father. Lily understood. She knew Peter would always like her—here he was, sharing his insecurities. She looked over at Julian: was he listening to their conversation? He looked dead to the world, still.

  “Peter,” she said, “can I wake him?” Peter shrugged. She touched Julian’s face and he grimaced, pushed her hand away, and loudly smacking his lips, turned over. His skin was very hot.

  “Anyway, now we can be sure he’ll be here for my next play. Dad, I mean. He’s weak for Shakespeare. It’s Tempest. Next term. Eighth week. I’m playing Prospero. Sabina’s been cast as well. She’ll be Miranda. It’s sort of sweet having my nubile Nubian cast as the fruit of my loins. Such as they are. Shelagh th
inks of every little twist!” After a moment he added, casually, “And Julian’s got Caliban, the beast-man. It’s a showy role of course, and amateurs fake it beautifully. And who do you think counseled him for his audition?”

  “It’s my favorite play, Peter. I practically know it by heart. I did Ariel once. In high school.”

  “Please,” said Peter, pressing his forehead with the heels of both hands. “Please don’t bore me.”

  He went over to his liquor collection and poured himself another drink.

  “She nearly got Ariel,” he said, gesturing at Sabina, “but someone said her teats were too pendulous for androgyny. Do you agree or disagree?”

  “I totally agree.” said Lily. Sabina looked her challengingly in the eye.

  Lily took a good look at her. She wore a flamingo sarong and ankle-straps. Her thighs were strong and long; she had a lush, fat bottom. Her thick hair was made for tossing from side to side in ecstasy. Sexy as ever; sexy as hell. She gave limits to Peter’s effeminate moue: he seemed to stop short and collect virile tension around her rolling flanks. Sabina sat on the edge of the bed upon which Julian lay. She looked like a lioness.

  “Peter, I came to apologize to you. For everything I did. For upsetting you over Julian. For . . .”

  “Yes, right. I understand. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. And I do understand. I understand the meaning of it all, now that Sabina and I are connubial Olympians. I can only fault your taste, darling. Why do all you women surrender to such gaudy lures? Black hair and blue eyes. A broad back. Long torso. Strong thighs.

  “Look at your lover now. Soused. Wept for a good incoherent hour, spoke gibberish about love, I think it was, then dropped like a shit-ball. I just pray he doesn’t vomit on my shantung.”