by Martin Amis
Rita had listened to him with her head rhythmically idling on her neck. She said,
“Ah, he’s after sympathy, is he. He’s after pity. Because he’s terrified. He wants his mummy. You’re just old-fashioned, love. You’re like second-hand furniture. See, for Rik, what he likes is a nice little simperer—a simperer with a sopping hanky. Ooh, you mustn’t. That’s rude, that’s bad. Oh go on then, you animal, do your worst. I promise I won’t enjoy it. God, were we ever as dull as that, us birds? Were we ever as bloody dull as that? … Now who’s coming dancing. I want to wag a hip. Time for me limbo.”
Italians are intriguers. Italy is a nation of intrigue. This axiom was coined, or passed on, by Adriano—who, in the mid-evening lull (the lull that follows every trespass, every trampling, as the contestants run their damage checks)—lingered in the dining hall: just the two of them, and Rita gazing into Adriano’s eyes as if he was the only man who had ever really understood her … Italy and intrigue: this was the land of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, of Niccolò Machiavelli, of Alessandro Cagliostro, of Benito Mussolini. Keith Nearing, all clogged up with the English novel, had recently entered into that obscure specialism known as nonfiction—specifically, modern Italian history; and he found there a world of make-believe.
Not until this summer had Keith tried his hand at manipulation, and his first finding was that it kept you occupied. Keith was busy. He was not as busy as Benito Mussolini, who claimed to have transacted 1,887,112 items of business in seven years (or a major decision every thirty-five seconds, with no days off), and logged 17,000 hours of cockpit aviation (as many as a full-time pilot over a whole career), while also reading 350 newspapers every morning, and always finding time, every afternoon, for a pentathlon of violent exercise, and, every evening, for an extended interlude alone with his violin. Keith didn’t have as much on his plate as Mussolini (and Mussolini, incidentally, was always wrong); but he had to make his rounds.
And the sensation persisted. He seemed to be floating, drifting in and out of himself …
Seated with a glass of prosecco on the swing sofa at the edge of the west terrace, Lily was uncharacteristically engaged. She was stargazing—with her face at an angle, and with a frown of mistrust. It was a mistrust he momentarily shared: the constellations looked as though they belonged to another hemisphere. He said,
“Strange to think that they’re there in the day. You just can’t see them.”
“They’re not there in the day. They come out at night. Are you going along?”
He said he thought he would.
“Well I’m not. Rita’s appalling. Still. At least we know why. Why you mustn’t.”
“Yes, I suppose we do know why you mustn’t.”
“You’d better apologise to Scheherazade. Since you had to sick her on us.”
“I wonder if you know this, Lily. Sick, in that sense, comes from an old dialect version of seek. It meant set a dog on.”
“You’re sick. And what are you looking so—so stoned about?”
“You’ll look after Kenrik, will you, Lily? You’ll take care of him.”
“Don’t go. Go on then. Did he mean sympathy? Or empathy?”
“Uh, it’s the same thing. Etymologically. Sympathy. With plus feeling.”
“Etymologically. Go on then. I’ll take care of him.”
“You looked wonderful at dinner, Lily. Your beauty is coming in. It’s here.”
Then of course he had to make it right with his hostess.
She was sitting at the backgammon board in the salon, and steadying with her hands a textbook (its subject was statistics) on the steep bluffs of her thighs.
“Phew,” she said. “That was … It was like one of those TV plays that carry a warning. So of course you’ve got to watch. Whittaker adored it too. What’s that language she speaks? Is it vernacular?”
Keith said, “It’s a sort of code. She talks to her friends in it, and they think you can’t understand. They just put an a and a g in the middle of everything. Day-ghed pay-gosh. Dead posh. Naygo. No. It’s easy. Except when they do whole sentences in it.”
“… God, the things people get up to. I had no idea. She makes me feel about three. It’s all working out perfectly, isn’t it. Rita and Adriano. Tonight I’ll sleep the sleep of the just.”
“You’re not coming?”
“I’m tempted, but I’d be in the way. Won’t you be?”
Well, the thing is, Scheherazade, I have to be out of the house. He said, “Maybe nothing’ll happen. Maybe Adriano’ll have the power to resist.”
“Naygo chan-cegg,” said Scheherazade.
And finally Kenrik. Who sat at the kitchen table, with a huge pot of coffee and a look of vacant equanimity on his face. He said,
“Sorry about all that. Now here’s an interesting theory. I just had a nice chat with uh, the one with the arse, and she said—Gloria—she said that I never had a hope once Rita started paying for everything. She said women hate men who don’t pay for everything. They even hate you if you go Dutch. Girls can’t help it. Bred in the bone. Guess what. Adriano just came in and shook me by the hand. They’re down in the car.”
“I’d better go. You know, maybe she’s just too old for you. It was good, your after-dinner speech. But it won’t put anyone off.”
“The challenge, you mean? Mm. So. Boys are doomed to fuck the Dog. And they should fuck the Dog. But only if she’s going to Hawaii the next morning. For ever. Watch the way she dances.”
“You relax with Lily,” he said. “She’s nice and sensitive and demure.”
“Demure. Now that’s a turn-on.”
Keith made a further suggestion. And Kenrik said,
“Are you really serious? Why?”
Now he hurried down the stone steps, through the pale smell of sweat. You see, Scheherazade, I have to be out of the house. So that Kenrik can sleep with Lily. And then, with that out of the way, I can sleep with you … There were the stars, with their points looking cold and sharp: the visible tips of the pins God used to tack down the dark backing of the universe. And what of his own system, his personal galaxy, his Virgo, and the seven suns that remained to him? Before the summer is done, how many more will I extinguish?
The Rolls Royce gnashed and bristled. A clear view of the future would have sent Keith up the steps to Lily’s side, or into Montale, where he could start to thumb his way back to England. Keith reached for his packet of Disque Bleu. He thought, It’s a test of character. He paused. It’s my sentimental education. He lit a cigarette. He breathed in.
FOURTH INTERVAL
And breathed out, a third of a century later.
He cleared his throat, not with a growl (his usual method), but with a bark (like a rifle shot). Ten minutes earlier he had returned from an exceptional sortie to a place called the Smokeshack in Camden Town, and now, with a discoloured tongue boyishly extruded from the corner of his mouth, he was trying to attach various printed labels to the various packets, tins, cartons, and wallets that lay strewn all over his desk. Smoking Makes You Look Sexy, said one. If You Give Up Smoking, You Will Probably Go Insane, said another. Keith had broken up with nicotine in 1994, but now they were back together again, and very much in love.
Coughing and hoicking and retching and slightly out of breath, and again with much play of the smeared tongue and the trembling, haddocky fingers, he pasted a third label (in fact his own adaptation of a common health warning) to his current pouch of Golden Virginia. It said: Non-Smokers Outlive Smokers by Seven Years. And Guess Which Seven.
He stared at it with smarting, red-rinded eyes.
• • •
Recently, when he was out in the street, he used to think: Beauty is gone. He soon moved forward from this position, and thought: Beauty never was—there never was any. Both premises were resoundingly untrue. The draining of it, the draining of beauty, was taking place inside his own flesh and breast.
Beauty, present beauty, sat before him across the kitchen table.
“Well I’m bound to feel a bit of a prick, aren’t I,” he said to wife number three (they were discussing that encounter, in the Book and Bible, with wife number one). “Twenty-five years of cross purpose. A whole lifetime. If you hadn’t rescued me, my darling.” He sipped his coffee. “I could’ve been a poet.”
“You’re a respected critic. And a teacher.”
“Yeah, but I could’ve been a poet. And all for what? All for a—all for a session.”
“Look on the bright side,” she said. “It wasn’t just any old session, was it.”
“That’s an extremely positive way of thinking about it. Still.”
“It made your eyes come out on stalks for a whole year.”
“Two years. Longer. Three. That was part of the trouble.”
“Think of it as what you had to go through to get me.”
“I will. I do.”
“You’ve got your boys, your girls, and your womie.”
“I have my womie. You know, all this started weeks ago. There’s something else. There’s this other thing. I don’t know what it is. It can’t be to do with Violet, can it? How can it be?”
And he went back across the garden through the April shower. But now it was May.
• • •
Encrypted in mirror writing, and placed at the foot of the page, point three in the revolutionary manifesto was a kind of sleeper clause, implicit but unintended and still imperfectly understood. It was this: Surface will start tending to supersede essence. As the self becomes postmodern, how things look will become at least as important as how things are. Essences are hearts, surfaces are sensations …
As he opened his eyes that morning, Keith thought, When I was young, old people looked like old people, slowly growing into their masks of bark and walnut. People aged differently now. They looked like young people who had been around far too long. Time moved past them but they dreamt they stayed the same.
Waking in his studio, and getting out of bed, and all the rest of it—this was no longer a Russian novel. It was an American novel. So, not much shorter, but with perceptible gains: a general increase in buoyancy, and far less stuff about everyone’s grandfathers.
The bathroom area answered to all Keith’s sanitary needs. But it had a flaw: two mirror-fronted cabinets faced each other over the washbasin. He had to keep these cabinets firmly shut when he shaved. If he didn’t, he saw his bald patch receding into infinity.
• • •
A typical interlude of pleasure and profit with the girls. They played I Spy, and What Would You Rather. They played a card game called Go Fish. Then they counted the freckles on Chloe’s left arm (there were nine). She questioned him about his three favourite colours and his three least favourite colours. Isabel questioned him about his three favourite flavours of ice cream—and his three least favourite. Next, Chloe burped the alphabet, and Isabel told him about a swimming pool so deep that even the grown-ups had to wear floaties.
“When the boys are here,” said Isabel, “do you feel ashamed?”
“Ashamed? Why, because they’re so tall and handsome? No. I’m proud.”
And the two girls laughed like the yellow birds …
He slipped away to his shed and spent an hour staring down into the thatchy crater of the Heath. Venus rose. What was it, this other thing?
• • •
It was better now—in society.
There used to be the class system, and the race system, and the sex system. The three systems are gone or going. And now we have the age system.
Those between twenty-eight and thirty-five, ideally fresh, are the super-elite, the tsars and tsarinas; those between eighteen and twenty-eight, plus those between thirty-five and forty-five, are the boyars, the nobles; all the others under sixty comprise the bourgeoisie; everyone between sixty and seventy represents the proletariat, the hoi polloi; and those even older than that are the serfs and the wraiths of slaves.
Hoi polloi: the many. And, oh, we will be many (he meant the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers). And we will be hated too. Governance, for at least a generation, Keith read, will be a matter of transferring wealth from the young to the old. And they won’t like that, the young. They won’t like the silver tsunami, with the old hogging the social services and stinking up the clinics and the hospitals, like an inundation of monstrous immigrants. There will be age wars, and chronological cleansing …
Perhaps this possible future explains a further anomaly of the age system: it meets no dissent. The old don’t agitate or propagandise, they don’t even complain about it, not any more. They used to, but they’ve stopped. They don’t want to draw attention to themselves. They’re old. They’re in enough trouble as it is.
But we think it good, we think it meet, the age system, and profoundly and fluidly democratic. Contemporary reality is the taste in the mouths of the ideally fresh. As we lie dying, not many of us will have enjoyed the inestimable privilege of being born with white skin, blue blood, and a male member. Each and every one of us, though, at some point in our story, will have been young.
• • •
The pure cold opal pool, cupped in soft grasses. No boar or stag had ever lapped and slurped at it, no insects had skated on its surface. And here he came, the glassy boy, and stretched himself out and bent his head, and quenched his thirst with his eyes …
From the first instant, when love came as swift as light, the boy became his own torturer. His hands sank into the surface, to embrace and caress the essence within—but it vanished in tremors of disquietened water.
“You laugh when I laugh.
I have watched your tears through my tears.
When I tell you my love, I see your lips
Seeming to tell me yours—though I cannot hear it.”
Then it happened, but too late: You are me. Now I see that … What I want, I am … Let death come quickly. And when he moaned, Alas, she moaned it too—Echo, or the ghost of Echo. Or Echo’s echo. Alas. Touch me, kiss me, touch me, kiss me, touch me.
Let death come quickly. This was his last wish. And it was granted.
• • •
Silvia said, “You’re a loser, Mum. Not you, but the whole first wave. You missed your chance, and it won’t come again.”
“We went Napoleonic.”
“You went Napoleonic.”
According to Silvia, the sexual revolution, like the French (perhaps), diffused its seminal energies in expansion, without pausing to secure its base. In her view, the first and possibly the only clause in the manifesto should have read as follows (and Keith could tell it was salient, because he feared it): Fifty-fifty in the home.
“Fifty-fifty. All the boring shite with the house and the kids. No hyphen. Fiftyfifty. But you didn’t nail that down. You spread your wings in the wrong way. You grabbed the wrong powers. Administration, decision-making. More shite. Some God-awful document comes in the mail, and Pop goes and stands beside you looking lost. And you snatch it from his hands. I’ve seen him … I know he’s struggling now, but even when he’s fully fit he never does a tenth of what you do. And you’re earning. And you don’t even scream at him. You just let him get away with it.”
“I’m not like you. It’s my background.”
“Yeah. So what’s your form of protest? Ten minutes of noisy washing-up. You’re a loser, Mum.”
Accustomed, by now, to being talked about as if he wasn’t in the room, Keith said, mildly, and (as usual) rather off the point, “Your mother’s very even-tempered. My second wife was slightly bipolar. Like Proserpina. One moment Gloomy as hell’s king, but the next Bright as the sun’s mass, bursting from clouds.”
“Here he goes,” said Silvia.
“My first wife turned out to be unusually changeable—moment by moment. You know, there’s a subatomic particle that turns into the exact opposite of itself three trillion times a second. She wasn’t as changeable as that, but she was changeable.”
Both
women sighed.
“The micro world is womanlike. You know what I mean. It’s not so proud of being rational. The macro world is womanlike too. You should be pleased. Vindicated. Reality is womanlike.”
“He’s slipping off to his shed.”
“It’s only the middle world that’s manlike.”
“But that’s the one we live in,” said Silvia.
• • •
Keith sat smoking. In it came, and out it went: the familiar blend of benzene, formaldehyde, and hydrogen cyanide. Amen once said that in Libya the cigarette is a unit of time. How far’s the village? Three cigarettes. How long will you be? One cigarette.
He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time? It won’t be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It’ll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.