“You like the lingering death, that’s all.”
“… Does Scheherazade act like a boy? Is she promiscuous?”
“No. I’m far more promiscuous than she is. Numerically,” said Lily. “You know. She did the usual amount of necking and getting felt up. Then she took pity on a couple of dopes who wrote her poems. And regretted it. Then nothing for a while. Then Timmy.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. But now she’s blooming and restless and it’s given her ideas.”
According to Lily, Scheherazade had an explanation for her particular metamorphosis. I was a pretty sixteen-year-old, she apparently confided, but after my father got killed I turned plain—I suppose because I wanted to hide. So her exterior, her outward semblance, was depressed or retarded by the death of the father. Came the plane crash, and then the years passed. And the fog slowly thinned and cleared, and her physical talents, stacked and circling in the sky, could now approach and make their touchdown.
“What sort of ideas?”
“Spreading her wings. But she still doesn’t know she’s beautiful.”
“Does she know about her figure?”
“Not really. She thinks it’s going to go away. As quickly as it came. How come you’ve never read one?”
As well as a sexual trauma, Keith also had a suitcaseful of remedial reading ahead of him. “Never read what?”
“An English novel. You’ve read the Russians and the Americans. But you’ve never read an English novel.”
“I’ve read an English novel. The Power and the Glory. Vile Bodies. I’ve just never read Peregrine Pickle or Phineas Finn. I mean, why would you? And Clarissa’s killing me.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you changed subjects.”
“Mm. Well I was always more of a poetry man.”
“… A poetry man. Who tortures insects. Insects feel pain too, you know.”
“Yeah, but not much.” He looked on as his buzzing victim twirled and drilled on its axis. “We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys, Lily. They pluck us for their sport.”
“You say you don’t like the smear. But you just like to watch them squirm.”
Were all flies hated by Keith Nearing? He liked butterflies and fireflies. But butterflies were moths with antennae, and fireflies were soft-bodied beetles with luminescent organs. He imagined, sometimes, that Scheherazade would be like that. Her organs would glow in the dark.
Keith took to going up to the tower, around noon, to read an English novel—and to get a little peace. This visit to his bedroom tended to coincide with the shower that Scheherazade tended to take before lunch. He heard it, her shower. The heavy beads of water sounded like car tyres on gravel. He sat there, with the morbidly obese paperback on his lap. Then he waited for five pages before going in to wash his face.
On the third day he unlatched and pushed on the bathroom door and it didn’t give. He listened. After a moment he reached for the bell with a ponderous hand (why did this feel so significant?). More silence, the click of a distant latch, a shuffling tread.
Scheherazade’s warmed face now emanated out at him from the folds of a thick white towel.
“See?” she said. “I told you.”
The lips: the upper as full as the nether. Her brown eyes and the balance of their gaze, her level brows.
“It won’t be the last time either,” she said. “I promise.”
She swivelled, he followed. She turned left and he watched the three of them retreat, the real Scheherazade and the simulacra that slid across the glass.
Keith remained in the L of mirrors.
… Dud, Possible, Vision. How many hours, how many very happy hours he had spent, with his mother Tina, playing Dud, Possible, Vision, in the Wimpy Bar, the coffee bar (the Kardomah), the art-deco milk bar.
What about those two over there by the jukebox, Mum?
The boy or the girl? … Mm. Both of them are Low Possibles.
And they graded not just strangers and passers-by but everybody they knew. One afternoon, as Tina ironed, it was asserted by him, and confirmed by her, that Violet was a Vision—fit to take her place alongside Nicholas. And Keith, who was eleven, said,
Mum? Am I a Dud?
No, dear. Her head went back an inch. No my love. You’ve got a face face, that’s what you’ve got. It’s full of character. You’re a Possible. A High Possible.
… All right. Let’s do a womie.
Which womie?
Davina.
Oh a Vision.
Mm. A High Vision. What about Mrs. Littlejohn?
But in fact he had more or less resigned himself to ugliness (and he stoically answered to Beak in the schoolyard). Then this changed. The necessary event came to pass, and this changed. His face changed. The jaw and especially the chin asserted themselves, the upper lip lost its niblike rigidity, the eyes brightened and widened. Later he came up with a theory that would disquiet him for the rest of his life: looks depended on happiness. A disinclined, a hurt-looking little boy, he suddenly started to be happy. And now here was his face in the rippled and speckly mirror in Italy, pleasantly unexceptionable, firm, dry. Young. He was happy enough. Was he happy enough to survive—to live with—the ecstasy of being Scheherazade? He also believed that beauty was mildly infectious, given close and prolonged contact. It was a universal presumption, and he shared it: he wanted to experience beauty—to be legitimised by beauty.
Keith rinsed his face under the tap, and went down to the others.
Chill, moist clouds swirled above them, and all around them—and even beneath them. Slivers of grey vapour detached themselves from the mountaintop and slid lollingly down the slopes. They seemed to lie on their backs, resting, in the grooves and culverts, like exhausted genies.
Keith actually went and waded through one of these dropped cloudlets. Not much bigger than Scheherazade in her thick white towel, it reclined on a low terrace beyond the paddock. The steamy, smoky presence stirred and altered under his tread, and then flattened out again, with the back of its hand placed long-sufferingly across its brow.
A week went by, and the new arrivals had yet to avail themselves of the Olympian swimming pool in its grotto setting. Keith decided that it would do his heart good to see the girls enjoying themselves down there—particularly Scheherazade. Meanwhile, Clarissa was boring. But nothing else was.
I often wish,” said Lily in the dark, “I often … You know, I’d give up some of my intelligence for a bit more beauty.”
He believed her and he felt for her. And flattery was futile. Lily was too intelligent to be told she was beautiful. This was the form of words they had settled on: she was a late developer. He said,
“That’s—Lily, that’s old-fashioned. Girls are supposed to be clever careerists now. It doesn’t all depend on how good a husband you can pull.”
“You’re wrong. Looks matter even more. And Scheherazade makes me feel like a duck. I hate being compared. You wouldn’t understand, but she’s torturing me.”
Lily once told him that when girls turned twenty their beauty, if they were due any, would be coming in. Hers, she hoped, was on its way. But Scheherazade’s was in, it was here, it was just off the boat. The physical prizes being doled out to her—what Grammys and Tonys and Emmys, what Palmes d’Or. Keith said,
“Your beauty will be along very soon.”
“Yes but where is it?”
“Let’s think. Less intelligence, and more beauty. It’s like the line—What would you rather? Look cleverer than you are, or be stupider than you look?”
“I don’t want to look clever. I don’t want to look stupid. I want to look beautiful.”
He said slackly, “Well, given a choice, I’d like to be rougher and cleverer.”
“How about shorter and cleverer?”
“Uh, no. I’m already too short for Scheherazade. She’s way up there. How could I ever get it started?”
Lily came closer and said, “Easy. I’ll te
ll you how to do it.”
This was becoming the regular prelude to their nightly act. And necessarily or at least helpfully so, because Lily, here in Italy, for reasons that were not yet clear to him, seemed to be losing her sexual otherness. She was like a first cousin or an old family friend, someone he had played with as a child and known all his life. “How?” he said.
“You just lean across when you’re on the floor playing cards with her last thing. And start kissing her—her neck, her ears. Her throat. Then you know that loose little knot she has on her shirt when she’s showing off her brown midriff? You could just pluck at that. And it’ll all fall open. Keith, you’ve stopped breathing.”
“No, I was just suppressing a yawn. Go on. The little knot.”
“You pluck at that, and then her breasts’ll just tumble out at you. Then she’ll hoick up her skirt and lie back. And arch herself so you can peel off her pants. Then she’d go on her side and unbuckle your belt. And you can stand up, and it won’t matter that she’s taller than you. Because she’ll be safely down on her knees. So you needn’t worry.”
When it was over, she turned away from him, saying, “I want to be beautiful.”
He held her. Hold to Lily, he told himself. Hold to your level. Don’t—don’t—fall in love with Scheherazade … Yes, it was safest to walk the middle ground, content to be a Possible. That was the thing to hope for. Possibility.
“You know, Lily, with you I’m myself. With everyone else I seem to be acting. No. Working. With you I’m myself,” he said. “Effortlessly myself.”
“Mm, but I don’t want to be myself. I want to be someone else.”
“I love you, Lily. I owe you everything.”
“And I love you too. I’ve got that at least … Girls need looks even more now. You’ll see,” she said. Then she slept.
4
THE DEVIL’S PASS
So there were trips (a resort and then a fishing village on the Med, some ruined temple, some national park, the Passo del Diavolo), and there were visitors. Like the current trio: the Dakotan divorcee, Prentiss; her quite recently adopted daughter, Conchita; and their friend and helpmate Dorothy, known as Dodo. It would not be seemly, I think, to give their vital statistics, but we can disclose the most vital statistic of all: Prentiss, Keith guessed, was “about fifty” (i.e., somewhere or other between forty and sixty), Conchita was twelve, and Dodo was twenty-seven. In addition, Prentiss was a Possible, Conchita was a Vision, and Dodo was a Dud. Little Conchita came from Guadalajara, Mexico, and wore clothes of mourning—for her father, Keith was told.
Prentiss, who was waiting on the outcome of a will, her grandmother’s (on which their European tour partly depended), was tall and angular. Conchita was actually a bit on the tubby side (with a curvaceous pot belly). And Dodo, a trained nurse, was stunningly fat. Keith was dismayed by the size of Dodo’s head—by how small it was or seemed. Her head was almost an irrelevance, like a teacup on an iceberg. The visitors all slept up in Oona’s vast apartment.
He was not a very typical twenty-year-old, Keith, but he was typical in this one regard: he thought that everyone was placidly static in their being—everyone except twenty-year-olds. But even he could tell that the lives of the three visitors were subject to drama and flux. There was of course the matter of Conchita’s bereavement. There was Prentiss’s legacy, and the resolution of various feuds and tensions with her parents, her many uncles and aunts, her three brothers and her six sisters. And there was even some suspense involving Dodo, whose corpulence, in tendency, was not deliquescent but all stretched and taut; her flesh had the tensile quality of a stiffly inflated balloon. Would Dodo, during her stay, actually burst? Or just go on getting fatter and redder in the face? These were real questions.
“If only the sun would come out,” said Scheherazade, as they ate breakfast in the kitchen. “Because seriously fat people adore swimming pools.”
“Do they?” said Keith. “What for?”
“Because they’re lighter by the weight of the water they displace.”
“That’s a lot of water,” said Lily. “I can’t decide whether or not I want to see her in a swimsuit. Think of her poor knees.”
There was a silence, spent in sympathy for Dodo’s knees. Then Keith said ponderously,
“When I look at her, I feel I’m staring at the size of an unhappiness.”
“Mm. Or d’you think it’s glands?”
“It’s not glands,” said Lily, “it’s food. Did you see her last night with the goose? She had thirds.”
“And Conchita tucked in too.”
“It makes you think, though, doesn’t it. Dodo.”
“Doesn’t it. It puts your own worries,” concluded Lily, “in some kind of proportion.”
Servants served the castle, a team of them coming in every day from the village. Keith had never before been in the regular company of servants.
Both his biological parents were of the servant class, his mother a maid, his father a gardener. Keith in any case had his leftist sympathies (very tame compared to those of the fiery Nicholas), so of course he had a kind of relationship with the castle servants, a relationship of nods and smiles and, surprisingly, bows (formal inclinations of the upper body), and a few words of Italian, especially with Madonna, who among other things made all the beds, and with Eugenio, number two with the roses and the lawns. They were both about twenty-five and were sometimes seen laughing when they were briefly alone together. And therefore Keith started to wonder if love would come to them, to the tender of beds and the tender of flowers. And Eugenio saw also to the terraces, and the growing of fruit.
It was transparent, then, the style of his thinking. But by now he had read enough to know about the bitterness of servants, the helpless rage nursed by servants. And he hoped he hadn’t inherited it; he reasoned that the bitterness solidified later in servant life, when they got older, which his parents had failed to do … Keith was brought up to think that all this—his provenance—was not that important, was not that important. And for the time being he agreed. He had always known, incidentally, that Tina was not his mother, that Karl was not his father. This information was his lullaby. You are adopted and we love you, crooned Tina, for at least a year before he began to understand. Provenance wasn’t so very important. And he thought he’d say a word or two to Conchita about it before she went on her way north.
Conchita had two cuddly animals, Patita (a duck) and Corderito (a lamb), and she loved to colour; she was twelve and she still loved to colour. I’m dying to colour (pron. collar), she would say as lunch drew to an end. May I be excused (pron. ess-cuced)? I’m dying to colour. And she would go to the library with her colouring books. Seasides, cars and buses, girls’ clothes, and of course all kinds of flowers.
Lily approached him as he sat at the circular stone table on the uppermost shelf of the east garden. It was warmer now, but still overcast, with the bilious, low-pressure light that augurs thunder. Scents were detectable in the sallow air: il gelsomino (jasmine), il giacinto (hyacinth), l’ibisco, and narcissus, narcissus … Keith was still processing the events, or non-events (he couldn’t tell), of the journey through the Passo del Diavolo with Scheherazade at his side. He couldn’t tell. Who could he ask?
“You’re going from one to the other,” Lily noted.
“Well it’s the only way of getting through it. Not Tom Jones. Tom Jones is great. And Tom’s my kind of guy.”
“In what way?”
“He’s a bastard. But Clarissa’s a nightmare. You won’t believe this, Lily,” he said (and he had, incidentally, decided to swear more), “but it’s taking him two thousand pages to fuck her.”
“Christ.”
“I know.”
“But honestly, listen to you. Usually, when you read a novel, you go on about things like, I don’t know, the level of perception. Or the depth of the moral order. Now it’s just fucks.”
“It’s not just fucks, Lily. One fuck in two thousand pages. That??
?s not just fucks.”
“No, but it’s all you go on about.”
There weren’t any serpents in this garden, but there were flies: in the middle distance, vague flecks of death—and then, up close, armoured survivalists with gas-mask faces. And there were silky white butterflies. And great drunken bees, throbbing orbs that seemed to carry their own electrical resonance; when they collided with something solid—tree bole, statuary, flowerpot—they twanged back and away, the positive charge repelled by the positive. Lily said,
“Two thousand pages was probably how long it took. When?”
“Uh—1750. Even then he has to get her stupefied on drugs. Guess what she does afterwards. Dies of shame.”
“And it’s meant to be sad.”
“Not really. She goes out babbling about how happy she is. I’ll be uh, rejoicing in the blessed fruits of His forgiveness … in the eternal mansions. She’s very literal about it. Her heavenly reward.”
“Her reward for getting fucked on drugs.”
“Lily, it was rape. Actually it’s pretty clear she fancied him something rotten from the start. They’re all in a fever about violation.” She was looking at him receptively, now, so he continued, saying, “Girls can fuck in Tom Jones—if they’re yobs or nobs. A milkmaid. Or a decadent hostess. But Clarissa’s bourgeois, so she has to get fucked on drugs.”
“Because then it’s not her fault.”
“Yeah. And she can go on claiming she didn’t want to. Anyway, she did hold out for two thousand pages. That’s a million words, Lily. Did you hold out for a million words? When you were acting like a boy?”
Lily sighed and said, “Scheherazade’s just been telling me how frustrated she is.”
“… Frustrated how?”
“Sexually. Obviously.”
He lit a cigarette and said, “Does she know she’s beautiful yet?”
“Yes. And she knows about her tits too. In case you’re wondering.”
“And what does she think of them?”
“She thinks they’re just fine. But they’re very tender now and they’re making her extra frustrated.”