by Martin Amis
“Did you? Thanks. But that’s just the other side of it, you see. Sentimental-brutal. Poor character.”
She lay back and closed her eyes. There was a five-minute silence, and Keith silently observed it, with increasing strain. He inspected his Italian cigarette, his Cavallo. There was the tube of paper, there was the filter; all it seemed to lack was tobacco. He lit it, and the flare scorched his nose for an instant, and then it was gone.
“That looks like a habit well worth sticking to,” said Scheherazade, with her smile, the smile in which her whole face participated. And she went on more lethargically, “Still, there’s no excuse for that … You see, she couldn’t retaliate, could she. Mm, I suppose she’ll retaliate when Jorq gets here … You know, I think she’s slightly on the make, Gloria. A bit of a gold-digger. In my opinion … You’ve met Jorq, haven’t you. It can’t be his looks that attracted her, can it.”
Lighting a Disque Bleu, he wordlessly but emphatically agreed. And it heartened him that Scheherazade’s spots of commonness (as George Eliot would very soon be identifying the weaknesses in an otherwise impressive young man) were still visible. She said,
“Her dad used to be a gentleman diplomat. And ended up earning a crust on the Census Board in Edinburgh. She used to be rich, and now she isn’t. She can’t help that. Any more than she can help her backside … The champagne, though. Horrible of me. I just showed I’m a worthless bitch. That’s all.”
And this too filled him with faith. But he said, “No. No. Come on, make allowances. It must’ve been very confusing, Adriano taking your hand. Like a child. It churned you up. You weren’t yourself.”
“… That’s nice of you to say, but it’s a bit elaborate, isn’t it? It was just vanity. Slut vanity. Those boys in Ofanto. I astonished myself. I minded. Because I’m supposed to be the centre of attention. Of undivided attention. It’s pathetic.”
He waited.
“I’ve never felt like this before and I don’t like it. This—catty agitation. Does everyone feel like that? Is that what all this is? A contest?”
What all this is. So it’s not just me, he thought. We all sense it: the reality of that frightening thing, social change. What all this is? A contest? Yes, he would have said if he’d known. Yes, my dear Emma, this is a contest that is coming, intersexual and intrasexual: a beauty contest, a popularity contest, and a talent contest. There is more display, comparison, staring, noting, assessing—and therefore more invidia. Invidia: that which is unfair, and likely to arouse resentment and anger in others. It is a contest, and therefore some will fail, some will lose. And we will find many new ways of failing and losing. He said,
“It’s a sea change.”
“And then,” she said with a roll of the eyes that took her whole head with it, “there’s still Adriano. Equally ridiculous. You can’t do that, can you. Sleep with someone because of an idea.”
People do, he thought. Pansy did. “Frieda Lawrence did. What will you tell him?”
“I’ll just say that I tried, but found that my heart lies elsewhere. Et cetera.”
Keith was finding all this very uplifting: absolute witch, worthless bitch, plus slut vanity—and how good it was to hear Timmy reduced to an et cetera. She said,
“Well with Adriano, at least, it never really started.”
“Didn’t it?”
“No. Just holding hands. Just holding hands—which is ironic, I suppose. He kissed my neck, but it was always then that I told him to stop.”
Now Keith reassessed the dependability, and the satiric gifts, of his girlfriend, whom he could see, coming forward in slip and flip-flops on the east terrace. Scheherazade said,
“I thought I’d suddenly relax one night and we’d see how we went. I thought I’d suddenly relax. But I never did. I felt I could’ve managed it physically, but I never really trusted him. Can’t think why … If only he’d get someone else. Then I’d feel easier.”
Lily moved through the grotto.
“Time to take Gloria her lunch, I suppose. And she’ll still hate me. Did you see it? Did you see the way she cried?”
Scheherazade went. Lily came. Keith hoped for instruction from Vanity Fair—at the feet of its effortlessly dishonest heroine, Becky Sharp, who lies, cheats, and whores around automatically and by instinct: another of nature’s infidels. So Becky helped. But the novel that would guide him into the next phase of his story was one he read six years earlier, when he was fifteen. Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The muscular little charcoal birds, thirteen of them, were working, climbing, far above the mountaintops. Nearer the ground, the yellow canarini (they were actually much bigger than canaries) gave a sudden unanimous cackle. They weren’t laughing at him, he realised, or not at him in particular. They were laughing at human beings. What was it about us that they found so funny?
We’re birds! they were saying. And we fly! All day we do what you do in your dreams. We fly!
Lily was reading a book called Equity. She turned the page. They were all of them very young, they were all of them neither one thing nor the other, they were all of them trying to work out who they were. Scheherazade was beautiful, but she was just like everybody else. Tomorrow, thought Keith: the historic opportunity. Carpe noctem. Seize the night.
Gloria, in fact, rose up at five o’clock that afternoon. Rose up and came down—grand, ill-used, unblinking. It was impressive, the magnitude of her indignation, and its content ran as follows: this indignation is uncontainable, and you’re lucky that it’s Gloria Beautyman who’s containing it, because nobody else could. Keith, perhaps, and certainly Whittaker were excused from the full sweep of her disgust; but Lily wasn’t. She’s hating me too, she said. So I’m hating her back. Woman–woman diplomacy or statecraft was something that Keith knew he would never understand; it was like looking down on a bright sea from a clifftop, the million points of light pinging from droplet to droplet—untrackably. An arcane discipline, like molecular thermodynamics. Whereas male disaffection was mere male sullenness, with its Queensbury rules … It’ll all ease off, said Lily. And it did.
Otherwise, as the inhabitant of the next turret along, Gloria was an invisible and almost inaudible towermate. It became clear—perhaps it was always clear—that she would never forget to unlatch the bathroom door. And, within, no sopping flannels, no stuff in tubs and bottles to slap on your face and no stuff in tubs and bottles to take it all off again, no stockings or swimsuits drying on the rack (and no hot shape in white bathtowels). Lily herself, after a day or two, pronounced the bathroom usable. Gloria, seldom seen, and silent. Even her showers were whispers: so might a watering can weep over a flowerbed. And compare this to the mad gossip, the wild rumours, of the showers of Scheherazade.
… The stasis of the afternoon is the time for the thick and ponderous longing of the twenty-year-old. What to do with it all? It was everything and nothing, it subsumed death and infinity—what to do with the instrument of yearning? … The girls were down at the pool, and Whittaker was out sketching with Gloria, and Keith paid a call on the twin turret, hoping to find a scent or a residue of more interesting times. And the room was now utterly clutterless. Where were the heaps of shoes, the crumpled nighties, the blue jeans trampled out of and still holding, as if in cupped palms, Scheherazade’s loins and hips? Madonna hadn’t been in for half a week and yet Gloria’s sheets seemed ironed into place, with nautical severity, and the pillows looked as solid as slabs of chalk. Then Keith’s eyes picked up a bearing. Her passport’s still here, he thought—and there it was, beneath the triple mirror. But it was Gloria’s passport, of course, and not Scheherazade’s.
He flicked through it. Renewed in 1967; Gloria with hair, glossily curved round her smile; Distinguishing Features—none; 5′ 5″; not well-travelled (Greece, France, and now Italy, all this year). Wedged into the empty pages were her provisional driving licence and her birth certificate … Keith was always eccentrically stirred and moved by birth certificates (and Violet’s was a talism
an to him, because he was there to issue it and receive her). Your birth certificate was your BC—before Christ, before anything—and your proof of innocence. It was your ticket of entry; it put you inside history … Glasgow Infirmary; February 1, 1947; Girl; Gloria Rowena; Reginald Beautyman, Diplomat; Prunella Beautyman (née MacWhirr); If Married, Place and Date—Church of the Holy Virgin, Cairo, Egypt, June 11, 1935 …
After a moment he went next door and took out his own entry ticket, kept in a polythene sachet at the bottom of his spongebag, together with another document, in ordinary longhand, which said:
’65 Ella 1 ’68 Doris 5
’66 Jenny 5 ’68 Verity 12
’67 Deirdre 3 ’68 “Dewdrop” (Mary) 8
’67 Sarah D. 7 ’68 Sarah L. 11
’67 Ruth 10! ’69 Lily 12*+
’67 Ashraf 12! ’70 Rosemary 10
’68 Pansy 11 ’70 Patience 7
’68 Dilkash 2 ’70 Joan 11
The key to this chart was kept in Keith’s head. I can disclose it: the numeral 1 meant holding hands, 2 was kissing, and so on, and 10 was it (Lily’s asterisk could be glossed as fellatio unto orgasm, and the plus sign as plus swallowing). There. Sixteen girls, and eight clear successes, in five years … Keith’s birth certificate, with its two deceaseds, was more dramatic than Gloria’s. But this other thing, this record, rewritten with every update, also told him who he was.
At five thirty Scheherazade drove in the cabriolet from castle to castle and returned after an hour, looking childishly contrite, with her shoulders raised and locked. Dinner unfolded, its surface tension, its meniscus, casually qualified by Whittaker. After Gloria had proudly taken her leave, Scheherazade told of Adriano, saying,
“He was very correct. Quiet. Rather angry, I think. I don’t blame him. I asked him to keep coming over. I stressed that we’re still good friends.”
“That’s what we’re hoping Kenrik and Rita will be,” said Lily. “Still good friends.”
“You’re hoping,” said Whittaker, “that they stayed in the right sleeping bags.”
Keith watched as Whittaker went off. Keith watched as Lily went up …
It was now just before midnight in the gunroom. The moose, with its marble eyes, stared out inexorably. On the floor, on the tiger rug, Indian-fashion faced side-saddle: Keith faced the forbidding approachability, the illegible openness of Scheherazade. What was this alphabet that he couldn’t read? She wore a close dress of murky pink, with five white buttons down the front at six-inch intervals; she kept scratching at the little red swell on the paler side of her forearm where, the night before, a mosquito had inserted its syringe. Keith was in his usual state, which was this. Every other minute, he could hear heaven snickering at his forebearance; and every minute in between, he blushed white sweat at the thought of the sulphurous tar pit in his soul.
The night was probably about to end, and Keith was blithely (and ignorantly) saying something about the castle, about how the exterior sometimes struck him as more Transylvanian than Italianate (with a haunted slant to it), and he went on,
“The best bit in Dracula is when he climbs down the rampart—head first. Coming down to feast on the girl.”
“Head first?”
“Head first. He sticks to the wall like a fly. He’s already done for Lucy Westenra. He savaged her—in the form of a wild animal. Now it’s Wilhelmina’s turn. He bites her three times. And he makes her drink his blood. And from then on she’s under his control.”
“I’m scared now.” She lowered her voice. “What if I’m attacked on my way up? I’m scared now.”
And his blood—it altered thickly. “But I’ll protect you,” he said.
They stood. They climbed the staircase that wound its way round the ballroom. On the recessed half-landing she said,
“I suppose this is far enough.”
“Wait,” he said, and placed the three-branched candelabrum on the floor, and straightened slowly. “You stand betrayed. I’m the undead. I’m the prince of darkness.”
So he was pretending to be Dracula (his hands were vampirically raised and tensed), and she was pretending to be his victim (her hands were clasped in obeisance or prayer), and he was moving in on her, and she was backing off and even half sat herself on the curved lid of a wooden trunk, and their faces were level, eye to eye and breath to breath. And now they were given a ticket of entry to another genre … the world of the heaving bosom and the drooling canine, of bats and screech owls, of fluids and straight razors and blinded mirrors, where everything was allowed. He looked down the length of her: the stretched gaps between her buttons were mouths of smiling flesh. From throat to thigh, it was all before him.
She raised a palm halfway towards his chest—and, as if pushed, he staggered sideways, and something clattered, and there were three rolling tubes of tallow with flickering wicks, and they laughed, fatally, and suddenly it was over.
Then Scheherazade went on up and Keith went on down. He crossed the courtyard under the ridiculous innocence of the moon. He climbed the tower.
And entered the insanity of night.
Oh, I know now what I should have said and done. Count Dracula would want your throat, your neck. But I—I want your mouth, your lips. Then onward, and all would have followed and flowed. Wouldn’t it?
Esprit de l’escalier: spirit of the staircase, wishing you’d said, wishing you’d done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was the staircase that led to the bedroom …
Gathering, shadowing, boding, closing over Scheherazade, he felt a near-irresistible force. And an immovable object. What was the nature of the impediment, what was its shape and mass? He turned to the sleeping form at his side and whispered,
How could you do this to me?
For weeks Keith had known that his chosen project was something like the opposite of self-improvement. But he honestly never dreamt that he had so far to go.
I expect you’re wondering if I’m a genuine redhead. Well I destroyed the evidence, didn’t I. Naygo traygace. I’m real enough: look at the stipple on me oxters. Here. You know, I know a girl who’s never had pubic hair. No, never. She—”
—Forgive me, Rita, for this brief interruption, but I’ve just noticed a vein pulsing its way from left to right across Keith’s brow: an idea is being born in him. And I must begin to stand off, to go back, to withdraw … Now, as for Dilkash, I made my position clear; and I gave him a truly terrible time about Pansy. If, last night, he had closed on Scheherazade, well, there would have been one prompt repercussion that he has so far wilfully refused to weigh. But what he is contemplating as I speak (see the vermicular movement, east to west, across his lineless forehead) … To put it in words he would plainly understand, he is launched on his own corruption: from L. corrumpere, Keith, “mar, bribe,” my friend, from cor- “altogether” + rumpere “to break.” Forgive me, Rita, I’m sorry—please proceed.
“No, never. She made war on it the instant it appeared. She never let it get a hold. That’s the future, that is. Sorry, girls, but the days of the beaver are over. No more jungle combat. Eh, Rik, it’s all right here, isn’t it. Day-ghed paygosh. We were on the road all night, and I’m filthy, me. I want a lovely long bath. A long bath,” she said, “and I’ll be as sound as the mail.”
Rita had not been among them half a minute before she was mother naked—she approached the pool drawing her frock over her head and scraping off her shoes; Rita, in her birthday suit; then came the ear-to-ear grin and the racing dive. Kenrik was following slowly in her path with his head set well down.
And where were the police? Where were they? Although Scheherazade, Keith felt, could probably be processed by the constabulary forces (and Lily let off with a warning), Rita, surely, merited a visit from the Serious Crimes Squad. Rita: 5′ 8″, 32-30-31, not just topless, not just bottomless, but depilated too—pre-adolescent, at twenty-five … And Keith himself might have attracted the attention of the authorities, had there been any. His new inkling t
hrobbed like a black flower with a bee feeding on it. Lily, her upper teeth bared, looked on as Rita said,
“So can we go round again? Now you’re … Say it slow.”
“Scheherazade.”
“Hey, bird, that goes on a bit, don’t you think—the suspense! And after that tongue-twister, after that gobful—it’s Adriano, isn’t it. Oh and you’re a big fella for a little fella, aren’t you love. What’s your middle name, sweetheart?”
“… Sebastiano,” said Adriano (eventually remembering to be proud about it).
“Then that’s what I’ll call you. D’you mind? See, Seb, I had me heart broken by an Adrian. He was a fucking animal, he was … And you’re Whittaker. Charmed. And you’re Gloria. And you, kid—you, of course, are Lily. So. What wickedness have you all been up to under the sun?”
“… Nothing,” said Scheherazade. “It’s a bit feeble, but there it is. Nothing.”
In a menacing undertone Kenrik had asked to be taken to the nearest bar.
More than once, on the steep path, Keith turned to him with the beginnings of a simple declarative sentence, only to be silenced by a raised hand. And Kenrik called for halts, and sat on a rock, smoking, then on a tree stump, smoking, and kneaded his hair with eight stiffened fingers …
Kenrik, too, was the child of a pregnant widow. It happened early in the second trimester (fast convertible, summer rain). So, for five months—the vanished father, the unborn son, and the mother both lamenting and expecting. The black weeds or threads, but also the familiar curve of the silhouette, with the profile poised like a question mark between life and death. And the old order gives way to the new, not immediately, though, not yet: the filled breasts and weakened knees, the cravings, the broken waters, the pumping womb, and labour, labour, labour.
For five months the growing baby was rinsed in the juices of mourning. And this was the difference between the two friends. As she gave birth, Keith’s mother believed that the father was still alive; so in his round bath the unborn child never tasted the excretions of grief. Widow—OE widewe “be empty;” but they weren’t empty, these two women, these two widows.