The Pregnant Widow

by Martin Amis

One of the first things he did, after Gloria moved in, was take her to prison. “I don’t want to go to prison,” she said. But she came. They went to see Kenrik, who was in Brixton on remand. Gloria was strong throughout, but afterwards she wept. “So pretty,” she said in the car (with fellow feeling, Keith thought), “and so afraid.”

  Then he took her to the Church Army Hostel for Young Women. To see Violet (who had another black eye). Gloria was strong throughout, but afterwards she wept. “The place is like a library,” said Keith in the car. “Except no one’s reading. Why are the girls so silent?” And Gloria said, “Because they’ve been shamed beyond words.”

  The only thing they rowed about, in the first few months, was money. Oh yeah—and marriage. The two themes were related in her mind.

  “If we break up now,” she said, “I get nothing.”

  “I don’t want to break up now.”

  “But what if I meet Mr. Christmas?”

  “You’re being illogical. If you meet Mr. Christmas, you won’t need my money. Which is new money. You’ll have Mr. Christmas’s money. Which’ll be old money.”

  “I want to be able to put something aside. Triple my allowance. Most of it goes on bedroom stuff anyway. You’re so selfish.”

  “Oh all right.”

  In April she took him to Edinburgh to meet her parents (this was a preposterous occasion), and in May he took her to Spain to meet his.

  La casita de campo—the little house in the country. Travel is almost always art in motion (a journey is almost always a reasonable short story), so, first, there are animals. Edinburgh had its animals: the parrot in the kitchen, the elephant in the living room. And the campo has its animals: the birds and the bees, the busybody chickens with their strict neurotic faces, and their gaits, like clockwork nurses, the ursine Alsatian, old Coca, who nuzzles your groin and gives out great groans of debility and despair. All around and up above, the craters and graters of the sierras.

  “Can I help you with that?” says Gloria.

  “It won’t come out,” says Tina. “What on earth did she do?”

  Nicholas used to say that he got on so well with his mother because they were exactly the same age. But Tina is a little older than Keith: she is fifty-one. Karl, nine years her senior, has been placed in the shade.

  “How’d she do it?” wonders Tina, who has a plastic bucket before her, and is washing one of the dresses that Violet, after her recent visit, left behind. The dress has a deep coating of dirt all over its seat. “I suppose she might’ve fallen on her bum in the mud. But that looks really worked in …”

  There is a silence.

  “Where does she go, Mum? When she’s here?”

  “She just goes to the bars. She used to go to the Gypsy camp. For days, weeks. Until they threw her out.”

  Gloria says, “Gypsies are actually quite puritanical. People think they aren’t, but they are. And they’re not from Egypt either.”

  “… I’m her mother and she’s a complete mystery to me. When she’s here, she’s so sweet with Dad. Devoted. I think she’s got a very good heart. But then why?”

  In the garden of the Hotel Reina Victoria there is a statue of Rainer Maria Rilke, who took sanctuary here while sleeping out, while dreaming out, the First World War. The poet—his subject was “the decay of reality”—is here etched, chipped, out of black bronze, and looks jagged, frazzled, like someone undergoing electrocution. The statue makes him think of the later Kenrik, his face medieval, Druidical, and carved out of rock … Keith feels the reproachful gaze of Rainer Maria’s sightless eyes.

  “My oldest friend,” he says carefully, “is sharing a cell, and a toilet, with a man who probably knifed a family of five. Just a couple of days ago, my sister was screwed in a ditch. Gloria, nothing could possibly shock me. So go on. Tell.”

  A minute passes by. They stare out at the ramped mountains, with their three strategies of distance.

  “All right, I will. My father’s not my father.”

  And he thinks, That’s not a secret. The elephant in the living room: one feels it is important to know what the elephant is doing—when it’s in the living room. Is it jouncing and trumpeting and shivering its flanks? Or is it just standing there, as still as a cow under a tree in the rain? The Edinburgh elephant was house-trained. That was the trouble. Keith had been expecting one or both of Gloria’s parents to be Celt-Iberian. And they were both dairy products—pure and simple. And then there was the flurried visit from the younger sister, Mary: like the mother, she seemed to be two different women joined at the waist; but she too was flaxen-haired, and when she smiled she revealed, not Gloria’s strips of spearmint Chiclets, but the barnyard balcony of the unadulterated Scot. It was so palpable that Keith didn’t even mention it—the elephant in the living room, with its African ears.

  “I’ll go into detail,” says Gloria, under Rilke’s gaze, “so you’ll know I’m not lying. I usually tell everyone that my mother’s parents were swarthy, and it skipped a generation. I’ve even got a photograph I show.”

  “And it isn’t true.”

  “It isn’t true. Listen. In the Sixties there was only one other proper consulate in Iceland. Portuguese. Because of the fishing. There was a man who was always around. Marquez. Pronounced Markish. He kept looking at me oddly, and one day he stroked my hair and said, ‘I followed you from Lisbon.’ I was fourteen. And he wasn’t even Portuguese. He was Brazilian. So there.”

  “Why would I worry about your parentage? Or anyone else’s?”

  “No. You’re worried about my sanity. My father never held me as a real father would. So something’s missing. And all through my childhood it was dawning on me. He can’t be my father. So I’m not normal.”

  “Neither am I … Gloria, that isn’t your secret. It may be true, but it isn’t it.”

  “Oh shut up and marry me. Give me children.”

  He says, “I’d rather wait a while for children. And marriage is old-fashioned.”

  “Well so am I. It’s what women want.”

  And Edinburgh, black granite under the mean rain. As if, this far north, nature was itself an industry, a night shift that manufactured murk, and the sky was just the site where it dumped its waste … There was adoration, or worship, and there was addiction, but there wasn’t any love. That would be the state of true terror—loving Gloria. No.

  “I was thinking about Vi’s honeymoon,” said Tina. “They came here for their honeymoon.”

  “Oh yeah. Remind me?”

  “They arrived, and Vi went back to her Gypsy.”

  “What, quite soon?”

  “Oh immediately. The minute they got here. She went flying over the fields. I was shouting at her. But she had no more thought in her head than a puppy. She wanted Juan.”

  “Oh yeah. Juan. She loved him.”

  “He wasn’t quite right in the head either. He always had people with him in case he did himself an injury. But she seemed to love him. And he loved her.”

  “What did Francis do when she ran off?”

  “He just stood there holding his suitcase. Twenty minutes later Vi came running back, but she just ran past us. Running the other way. With her chest really heaving. Looking for Juan.”

  “But she loved him.”

  “Yes. Then she came crashing in five nights later. And then went back to Juan.”

  Keith drove Gloria up to town … By then he knew about the poetic content of mountains, but first he said, “I heard you crying in the bathroom. Again. Why?”

  “I was crying about Huw.”

  He waited.

  She said, “I cry with anger too, you know.”

  He thought for a moment. “Because he didn’t die.”

  “No, it’s better that he didn’t die. Because it tortures the mother. What makes me cry is the time. Ten years.”

  By then he knew about the poetic content of mountains. Young mountains are ridged and jagged. Old mountains are smooth and even, made sleek by billennia and weat
her. Mountains are not like human beings. The sierras were young mountains—no older, perhaps, than five million years: round about the time that Homo sapiens diverged from the apes. The young, the sky-shearing, the heaven-grating sierras.

  What Came About in 1980

  And very early in 1980 too.

  “What may I ask,” he asks, “is the meaning of those pants?”

  “You know perfectly well.”

  “… I don’t believe it. Ten years later, and I’m back on the pants!”

  “What d’you mean, back on the pants?”

  “I’m back on the pants! … Wait. Look. This is—the seventh night running. So it can’t just be your period, can it.”

  “God you’re disgusting. I told you. I’m off the coil.”

  “… It’s very you, that is, Gloria—the coil. It suits your nature.” With that mystery coiled up in her omphalos. “And the coil’s the best too. Better than the Pill. Let alone the fucking cap.”

  Over the past year Keith’s morals, I should stress, have undergone a certain … Wait. Is this the time to clear up the question of who I am? Not just yet, I don’t think. But I would like to put some distance between the “I” and the being propped up on the pillow—whose gaze now roams the cathouse of the shared bedroom, the screens, the outfits, the uniforms (nun, flight attendant, health visitor, policewoman), the wigs and hair-extensions, the two Polaroid cameras, the two camcorders, and mirrors everywhere.

  “I want children. And I’m not going to have a bastard, thank you very much. We’ve already got a bastard. Therefore … no contraception.”

  “Oh don’t worry. There must be an old pack of dunkers around here somewhere.”

  “God you’re disgusting.”

  “We hardly ever do it there anyway.”

  “God you’re disgusting. And that’s off the menu, all that. The only thing on the menu is normal intercourse.”

  “Fine. I’ll take it out at the last minute.”

  “God you’re disgusting. Normal reproductive intercourse. Marry me.”

  And his thought was: Girls who are cocks are very rare and very great. But you can’t marry a cock.

  “Okay, I will. If you tell me your secret.”

  Seven nights later she said,

  “Have you got Neil Darlington’s number?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “He’s very attractive. I thought he might like a fuck. Is Nicholas in the country?”

  There was a lot of He Said, She Said. Then she said,

  “A major concession. We needn’t have children immediately. Say in a year or two. All right? But you’ve got to make an honest woman of me now.”

  … Kenrik, just out of Pentonville for living off immoral earnings, was best man.

  Violet, six months pregnant by she wasn’t sure who, served as bridesmaid.

  No one gave Gloria away.

  Sample declarations by Violet on the phone. “I’m going to adopt it, Key. I fink that’s the best fing, don’t you?” And: “Nuffing’s going to take that baby away from me, Keith! Nuffing! Nuffing!” And: “I’m going to adopt it, Key. I fink that’s the best fing, don’t you?”

  Keith and Gloria went to see the baby, who was named Heidi (after Heidi, Violet’s alcoholic housemate). Another alcoholic, a young man in a City suit, came to dinner, and another alcoholic, a middle-aged woman in a kaftan, looked in for coffee. And the baby was beautiful, Keith thought or imagined; but her nappy was soiled and cold, and she was pale, with chapped lips (Violet was giving her milk straight out of the fridge). And everyone was drunk. The house, a normal-seeming house, was drunk.

  “I think you’d better adopt her, Vi,” he said, up in Vi’s room.

  “But it hurts,” said Violet. “It hurts. I feel it in my froat.”

  Heidi was not submitted for adoption. When she was six weeks old the social services came and took her away.

  Three months after the wedding, the pants treatment was resumed.

  Gloria said, “I told you. A year or two. Well I’ve chosen. And it’s not two. It’s one. It’ll be exactly a year.”

  Ten nights later, after much sophistical evasion about the secret, and after renewed threats about Neil and Nicholas, she said,

  “Please. Oh please …”

  “Oh all right.” Come to think of it (and he was thinking of Heidi), I do want to see a fresh face around the house. “It’s agreed. Now let’s have normal reproductive intercourse.”

  “Yes let’s. Would you help me off with these? … And I know you won’t have any objection,” she said, arching her back, “to the child being raised in the faith.”

  Well anyway. There was a further month on the pants; and then she left him. Three months later she returned, but different.

  What Came to Pass in 1982

  This particular married couple, in its time, had tried out many modes and genres, many different ways of going about things—pornotheological farce, cat-and-mouse, sex-and-shopping, Life. They saved the worst for last: psychohorror, in la Place de la Contrescarpe, in Paris.

  “And she never threatens to commit suicide?” Nicholas says on the phone (from Beirut).

  “No. She won’t do anything unoriginal. Like she never got pregnant on the sly or anything unoriginal like that. She doesn’t threaten to commit suicide. That’s unoriginal. So what she does is, she threatens to go to a nunnery.”

  “Christ. Are you still sleeping together?”

  “Once in a blue moon she lets me. And it’s completely straight. Not that I mind that, funnily enough. The only extra is the sinister refinement. Which, it goes without saying, is the only one I never liked. All she talks about is money, and religion and how I’m going to hell.”

  “… In a way, religion’s the most interesting subject on earth.”

  “Yeah but not if you believe in it. Here she is. Talk soon.”

  Keith and Gloria were staying for a week in the rented flat where they spent their long honeymoon, two springtimes ago. Only now they had no maid (as Gloria kept reminding him), and the weather remained uniformly dreadful. It was quite an achievement, to quench Paris of all its light, but God or some such artist had managed it. That afternoon they were drinking coffee in a bar on la rue Mouffetard. They had just come in from under the dripping tarp …

  “Remember when we were arrested in here?”

  “Arrested? What can you mean?”

  “What can I mean by arrested? I mean arrested by the police. The plainclothes man, remember? Il faut prendre votre passeport. And he slung us in the van. Then you explained, in your perfect French, Gloria, and he let us out again. You said, C’est incroyable, ça! Remember?”

  “I wish you’d never been born. No. I wish you’d die. You’re going to go to hell. Shall I tell you how it is in hell? What they do to you?”

  He listens for a while and says, “All right. I understand. There I am all scorched and peed-on. And to what end exactly?”

  “To punish you. To scourge you. You ruined my life.”

  Because of course he never did give in—about the child being raised in the faith. About the child being raised without courage, without having to understand what death really means. She left him that time; and when she returned it was in defeat (you see, she didn’t have anywhere else to go); and there was no more talk of children.

  He said, “You should’ve settled for a baby agnostic.”

  “What, and raise someone disgusting like you? Someone who thinks that killing and eating animals, and fucking and dreaming and shitting, and then dying, is good enough all by itself? … Quite ruined. Utterly. Merci pour tout ce que tu m’as donné. Cher ami.”

  That night they had sex for the first time in nearly a month, and there was a sour caloricity to it, as if they both had fevers and all their bones ached, with savoury breath and savoury sweat. It drew to an end. And with embarrassing copiousness he followed her four-word instruction. Gloria rose and went to the bathroom, and when she returned she was dressed in black.
>
  “Notre Dame,” she said through her veil. “Midnight mass.”

  He awoke at three in an empty bed with the image of a black shape in the brown Seine, the drifting tresses, the open eyes … She was in the other room, kneeling naked on the window seat and looking out at the moonlit square. She turned. Her face was a deathmask, encrusted with dried white.

  “I need it to be stronger,” she said. “Much stronger. It’s just not strong enough.”

  Gloria wanted a stronger god. One who would strike her down, there and then, for what she wore behind her veil.

  We would like this to be over quickly: this particular cosmology of two.

  The next day she was all ice and electricity, all electricity and ice. In a white cotton dress and with narrow white ribbons in her hair, she darkly established herself on the white sofa. She neither spoke nor stirred. She stared.

  He sat at the mirror-topped dining table, bent over The Denial of Death (1973), a book about psychology by Ernest Becker. Who argued, inter alia, that religions were “hero systems.” Which, in the modern setting, could only be revitalised if they set out to work “against the culture, [and to] recruit youth to be anti-heroes to the ways of life of the society they live in” …

  Just after one o’clock Gloria stood up suddenly. Her mouth opened and stayed open in disbelief and what seemed to be glee as she looked down at the sudden sarong of scarlet that swathed her hips. And on the sofa behind her, not a shapeless patch but a burning orb, like a sunset.

  “That’s all finished with,” she said. “I’m going to go.”

  “Yes, go.” He took her in his arms and, doubly, triply hatefully, whispered in her ear, “Get thee to a nunnery … Why woulds’t thou be a breeder of sinners? Get thee to a nunnery, and quickly too. To a nunnery, go.”

  1994

  They were all there, pretty much. Timmy and Scheherazade with their four grown-up children, in perfect-family formation—girl, boy, girl, boy. Born-again Scheherazade looked unglamorous but very young, as you would do, no doubt, if you thought you were going to live for ever. Whittaker was fifty-six; his friend/son/protégé Amen, now a quite celebrated photographer (with good Americanised English), was forty-two. Oona was perhaps seventy-eight, superfat Jorquil (already married six times, Keith learnt, to a succession of grasping starlets) was fifty-three, and Conchita was thirty-seven. Keith was there with his second ex-wife, Lily: they were both forty-five. The occasion was the memorial service for Prentiss. Amen asked tenderly after Gloria, who (the last Keith heard) was in Utah. And Adriano wasn’t there either. Adriano had married a Kenyan nurse; then he divorced her, and then (after another much more serious accident) remarried her—the nurse who had tended to his shattered knees in Nairobi, back in 1970.