The Pregnant Widow

by Martin Amis

  Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but is Scheherazade wearing your pants?”

  “Due caffè, per favore … How did you see Scheherazade’s pants?”

  “How did I see Scheherazade’s pants? Lily, I’ll tell you. I glanced in her general direction when she was sitting on the sofa before dinner. That’s how I saw Scheherazade’s pants.”

  “Mm. All right.”

  “I mean it’s no great feat to see Scheherazade’s pants, is it. Or yours. I think you might have to get up a bit earlier in the morning to see Gloria’s pants. Or Oona’s. But it’s no great feat to see Scheherazade’s pants. Or yours.”

  “Stop wheedling … No, it’s true. Nowadays pants are part of what girls wear on the outside.”

  After breakfast in bed, followed by the boundary violation they both knew so well, Keith and Lily walked down to the village. Dating your sister, of course, was a synonym for boredom. Having sex with your sister, on the other hand (he assumed), would be unforgettably terrifying. Having sex with Lily was not unforgettably terrifying. Nor was it boring, once it began. And yet his mind and his body were not in concord. The only link he could find between his two sisters was low self-esteem. Lily loved Keith, or so she said; but Lily didn’t love Lily. And perhaps that was what girls would be needing, in the new order—a strenuous narcissism. It sounded weird, but it was quite possibly true: they had to want to go and fuck themselves. He said,

  “… I am a boy. This is a girl.”

  “Don’t do that,” said Lily.

  “Why are they staring? This is a shirt. This is a skirt. This is a shoe.”

  “Stop it! It’s rude.”

  “Staring’s rude too. Anyway. Is Scheherazade wearing your pants?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. It gave me a shock. There she sat, wearing what are arguably your coolest pants.”

  “I gave her a pair … I showed her my pants and she liked them. So I gave her a couple of pairs.”

  He now imagined the following sequence: Keith showing Kenrik his pants, and Kenrik liking them, and Keith giving Kenrik a couple of pairs. Lily went on,

  “She said my pants made hers look like gym knickers. Or female Y-fronts. Or bunion pads … You’ve got a thing about pants.”

  He said, “I have suffered much at the hands of pants.”

  It was actually a theme of some delicacy—Lily’s pants. When she left him, in March, she walked out of the door in functional underwear. When she returned, she returned in cool pants. What goes through a girl’s mind, he wondered, when she makes the switch to cool pants?

  “Doris,” he said with perhaps inordinate bitterness.

  “When was Doris?”

  “Long before your time. I went to bed with her every night for five months. It took me ten weeks to get her bra off. Then I came up against the pants. And they weren’t cool pants either. The cool thing about cool pants is you know they’re coming off. That’s all. They put your mind at rest.”

  “Even then you had a thing about pants.”

  “No, Doris had a thing about pants.” She rose with her pants on. She turned in with her pants on. Keith wanted to say to her: Doris, you have a thing about pants. You have pants on—different pants on, but pants on—twenty-four hours a day. “I kept telling her, It’s 1968, for Christ’s sake. I kept bending her ear about the sexual revolution … You know I gave up Psychology because of pants. When I read Freud on pants—as a fetish. He says your mother’s pants are the last thing you see before the trauma of discovering that she doesn’t have a penis. So you fetishise them.” And he thought at the time, If that’s true, then the whole human project should be quietly abandoned. “I changed to English the same day.”

  “That’s enough about pants.”

  “Agreed. But then there’s Pansy.”

  “Christ. Who’s Pansy?”

  “I told you. A friend of Rita’s. In fact a protégée of Rita’s.” With Pansy, Lily, I suffered the tragic night of the pants. “Don’t look like that. When are you going to tell me about Anthony? And Tom? And Gordon?”

  “… And all this,” said Lily, “because I happened to give Scheherazade a few pairs of pants.”

  He folded some banknotes under the saucer. “Let’s have a quick look at the rat.”

  “Perhaps it’s been sold. Perhaps, even as we speak, it’s being cherished in a lovely little home somewhere.”

  “Guess what happens at the end of Northanger Abbey. Frederick fucks Isabella. He doesn’t marry her. He just fucks her.”

  “Was she drugged?”

  “No.” But he thought, Yes she was, Isabella, in a way: Isabella was drugged on money. “She persuades herself that he’s somehow going to marry her. After.”

  “So she’s ruined. She’s lost.”

  “Utterly. Anyway. Why does Scheherazade suddenly want cool pants? Why is she going around,” he persisted, “in what are debatably your coolest pants?”

  “To be at her very best for Tom Thumb.”

  And he allowed himself a silent chortle as they moved off down the sunken street. Still, it was also occurring to him that he and Adriano were caught in the same contradiction: they were retrograde, they were counter-revolutionary. Under the old regime, love preceded sex; it wasn’t that way round any more.

  “There it is. Grim as death. It knows it’s not going anywhere. Ever.”

  “You’re so unkind.”

  “I’m not unkind enough.”

  “It’s just a rather small dog with a funny face.”

  “You should give up on this dog angle, Lily. And praise it as a rat. With all the usual rat virtues.” Among these strengths would be a lustier embrace of life—a lustier embrace of life at the level of nostalgie. Nostalgie de la boue: the return-home pain for the mud, the trash, the shit. “Rats get around more.”

  “You’re so horrible. It’s a dog.”

  … When the binary moment came, and you chose between two futures, and you chose the unknown, and acted, something mysterious had to happen first. The wanted one, far from becoming more intensely herself, had to become generic. The body parts, the this and the that of her, had to retreat, and lose outline and individuality. She had to be everywoman, everygirl. And Scheherazade just wouldn’t do that.

  3

  MARTYR

  Adriano had many cars, including a racer that seated only one, like a canoe; at its wheel, in his goggles, he resembled a badger motoring its way through a children’s book. But today, at noon, it was the high-slung Land Rover that waited in the gravel drive at the castle’s gate—the size of a Sherman tank, it seemed, with Adriano standing on the driver’s seat, or the dashboard, and poking his head through the sunroof and waving his thick-gloved hands in the air. Scheherazade, Lily, and Whittaker climbed aboard; and off they drove to Rome.

  Keith went down to the pool with the idea of befriending Gloria Beautyman. Family history, after all, had conditioned him to be kind to girls in disgrace. Some might say (and Lily was among them) that this was part of the difficulty: Keith and his family were no good at disgrace. They had neither the talent nor the stamina for it. They found it less trouble to forgive. And some might say, further, that Violet, after transgressions far more chaotic and multiform than Gloria’s intriguing lapse—well, you could tell by her eyes: Violet was wondering how much more disgrace she’d have to sit through, before getting back to transgression.

  “May I? Do you mind?”

  “… No. No not at all.”

  Now he calmly and personably settled himself, and Northanger Abbey, at Gloria’s side. How do we explain the poised airiness of his mood? Well, Keith was looking forward to the disposal of Adriano (I’ll feel freer in my mind). And he had a new project or policy. Carnalisation. Falling out of love with the loved one. I can say (between ourselves) that this was going to be a very bad day indeed for Keith’s interests—his interests as he saw them. But for now he was happy, he was freshly showered, he was twenty years old. Gloria said,

&
nbsp; “You gave me a fright. I thought you might be Oona.” She drew in breath; and comprehensively exhaled. “Is it always this hot?”

  “It builds and builds. And then there’s a storm.”

  Gloria, too, had a book on her lap, which she now put aside, marking the page with the stub of a train ticket. She seemed to prepare herself for sleep, but after a while, with closed eyes, she was surprisingly saying,

  “Am I correct in thinking that Scheherazade has gone to Rome to buy a monokini this afternoon? I heard her announce such an intention.”

  Am I curraict in thinking … The voice itself was warm and civilised; and the strict enunciation—what they called cut-glass—seemed consonant with Edinburgh, the city of economics (and political philosophy, and engineering, and mathematics), the city of hard thought. He said,

  “Yes she did, didn’t she.”

  “I know—the gaiety of nations. And all that. But frivolity has its limits. It’s a three-hour drive. I’ve just done it.”

  Keith agreed that it was a long way to go.

  “A monokini. What did she think she had on this morning?”

  Her eyes were still closed, and so he looked: the squarish face whose chin came to a delicate point, the narrow line of the mouth, the full Celt-Iberian nose, the boyish black bob. Her eyes opened suddenly and roundly. He said,

  “Uh, she had a bikini on this morning.”

  “Yes. A bikini that she’d thrown away the other half of. In other words, she had a monokini on this morning. Ninety-five miles. Are monokinis less dear than bikinis? Are they half the price? Perhaps I’m very old-fashioned. But honestly.”

  A silence developed and he attended to Northanger Abbey. He was going back to check whether Frederick Tilney did, in point of fact, fuck Isabella Thorpe. The novel became partly epistolary, and it was hard to be exactly sure. And this was, after all, the novel’s one cataclysmic event. He tried to feel the weight of this: a single sexual act that held vicious meaning for your whole existence … Keith supposed that gallantry obliged him to stick up for Scheherazade, and tell Gloria that there were other reasons for the trip to Rome. For example, tea at the Ritz with Adriano’s father, Luchino. Keith happened to know, too, that Scheherazade, not content with the purchase of a monokini, planned to spend a hundred dollars on underwear (she would be giving Lily a few pairs). What’s happening? he thought. There was a time when he would have disapproved of this—would have looked up from the pages of The Common Pursuit or The Liberal Imagination, and wondered aloud how the money could be more sensibly spent. Gloria said,

  “Am I a prig or has it all gone a bit too far? This obsession with display.” And looking past him she said to herself with a flat smile, “Ah, here it is. For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me …”

  Keith turned. On the upper lawn, with a pair of secateurs in each hand, Oona was browsing through the roses.

  “And that which I was afraid of is come unto me. Watch. Watch how she’s spinning it out. Ooh, I’m for it now. You know why, of course?”

  Lily was always telling him, as if in sincere reproach, that he had no talent for lying. You’re hopeless, she would say, throwing her hands in the air and slowly shaking her head. It’s truly pathetic. And that’s why you’re no good at flattery and you’re so easy to tease … Keith stayed silent (he was planning to say something artful), and Gloria said,

  “Should I just wait? Or should I go up and present myself for execution?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about Oona. Oona doesn’t mind about a bit of cocaine.”

  For a moment he felt great powers of scrutiny coming to bear on him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, sorry. I heard you got caught taking cocaine in some bathroom at a party. That wouldn’t bother Oona. She’s seen it all, that one.”

  Again, the shaft of intense examination. Then this passed, and she sat back.

  “All right. Let the time be of her choosing.” She picked up her book again. She even started to hum. Minutes, pages, went by. She said, “Where were we?”

  “Uh, display. It’s all gone too far … What has? Sexual—emancipation?”

  “There’s just been a fuss in London,” she said, “because they’ve started showing pubic hair.”

  “Who have?”

  “Women. Oh you know. In the men’s magazines.”

  “That’s hardly a feminist decision.”

  “I never said it was. I think it demeans everyone, don’t you? But there it is. It’s a sign of the times … Gentle Jesus. Meek and mild. All right—do your worst.”

  Oona was descending. She came to a halt on the middle terrace, then turned with a sharp inclination of her head. Gloria gathered herself in a towel; her small feet inched—crept, stole—into their flip-flops.

  “Pray for me,” she said, and shuffled off in her white pleats.

  The book on the empty chair turned out to be a popular biography of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc, a warrior and a standard-bearer—leading armies, capturing cities, lifting sieges—at the age of seventeen. Violet’s age … He turned to the last chapter. The Maid of Orleans, he learnt, was put to death for heresy, but the judicial pretext had to do with a biblical stricture about clothing. Her crime of the wardrobe was perpetrated in order to thwart another kind of crime: rape. They incinerated her, in Rouen in 1431 (she was not yet twenty), for dressing as a boy.

  Keith moved into the shade. His talk with Gloria had given him his first pang of homesickness. He wanted to go back to England, and get hold of a men’s magazine … And again he felt it, the tremor in the air, the wind-borne scent that makes the wildebeest flock and hurtle. It kept astonishing him—how weak the prohibitions always turned out to be, and how ready everyone was to claim the new ground, every inch of it. An automatic annexation. What was called, in children, self-extension, as they stockpiled each dawning power and freedom, without gratitude, without thought. And now: where were the hinderers, the wet blankets, where were the miseries, where were the police?

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the angles of the shadows had discreetly steepened, and Amen was in the pool, gliding through it soundlessly. Just the head, and its mirror image. When Adriano swam, he seemed to fight the water, kicking and kneeing it with his legs, smashing it with his fists (and moving through it, you had to admit, at an unbelievable speed). Perhaps it was his own reflection Adriano wanted to destroy … Now at the far end Amen rose, smooth and silent. He paused. He called out,

  “Ça va?”

  “Bien. Et toi?”

  Would there be cards tonight? And how far would he get with his other new project? His other new project or policy: willed reptilianisation. He would summon it, the raptor, with its locked eyes, its moronically acquisitive grin, its dripping teeth. Once conjured and activated, of course, the tyrannosaur would then be dismissed. And Keith could love. He would change his shape, no longer reptilian or even mammalian, no longer a man, even, but the gentlest of angels.

  The cherubim, they said, were full and perfect in their worship of God. It was the seraphim who were the gentlest of angels, who eternally trembled and aspired, like tongues of flame. So that’s what he’d be. The rapt seraph, that adores and burns. Keith slept.

  It wasn’t Amen, drifting across the grey surface, now, but Gloria. The black orb swivelled, and he could see at once that she was lighter. Lighter, of course, by the weight of the water her body displaced; but lighter in the eyes, lighter in the line of her mouth. She dipped under and then surfaced beneath the shadow of the diving board.

  “Mm. I could do with a sleep … And by the way. Forget what I said about Scheherazade. She can have her monokini. With my blessing.”

  He watched her dripping form as it climbed the metal steps; and it briefly occurred to him that she was two different women joined at the waist. Yes, a dancer’s body, he supposed, with the muscles of the calves, the thighs, pushing upward, striving upward … Gloria’s poolwear: today’s swimsuit (Lily and Scheheraza
de agreed) was even worse than yesterday’s; the lower boundary resolved itself, not in a beltlike skirt, but in the beginnings of a loose and fibrous pair of shorts.

  “Let her be a prodigal,” she said, dabbing an ear with her towel, “and an exhibitionist.”

  He lit a cigarette. “What explains this radical change of heart?”

  “Oh, irony, is it. Oh yes. You clever young men. No. The dear girl’s been a better friend to me than I thought she’d be. That’s all.”

  “Well I’m glad.”

  And for the first time Gloria smiled (showing teeth of savage strength, and ideally white, with the very faintest tinge of blue). She said,

  “What’s it like for you then? All this looking. Come on. At your age. She’s a bit of an eyeful, isn’t she?”

  “Who? Scheherazade?”

  “Yes. Scheherazade. You know, the tall one with the very long legs and neck and the highly developed chest. Scheherazade. You’ve got Lily, of course, but you’re used to Lily. What is it, a year? Yes, you’re used to Lily. Scheherazade. What does she imagine is going through your mind? What?”

  “You’re amused.”

  “Don’t you see what I’m saying? There’s you. And that Italian. You’re young men. The sun is hot. What are you supposed to be thinking?”

  “You get used to it.”

  “Do you? And how does uh, Whittaker like it? And that other one I saw skulking about? Who’s obviously a Muslim. If one’s going to flaunt oneself like that, then one should consider one’s audience.”

  “And that’s why you’re more discreet. You yourself.”

  “Well partly,” she said, settling on the wicker chair, and reaching for Joan of Arc. “It only came up about a year ago, all this. It wasn’t something you had to think about before. Jorquil insists sometimes, but I decided I wouldn’t. Display.”

  “Modesty.”

  “There’s another reason. Also to do with one’s boyfriend.”