Whittaker said, “That is disappointing.”
“I know. Still, she cried her heart out in the car. And she’s been suicidal ever since.”
Scheherazade rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, childishly … According to an English novel he had read, men understood why they liked women’s breasts—but they didn’t understand why they liked them so much. Keith, who liked them so much, didn’t even know why he liked them. Why? Come on, he told himself: soberly enumerate their strengths and virtues. And yet somehow they directed you towards the ideal. It must be to do with the universe, Keith thought, with planets, with suns and moons.
The young are perpetually running a light fever; and it is a mistake easily made by the memory, I think—to suppose that twenty-year-olds are always feeling good. Minutes after the conclusion of Scheherazade’s bedtime story, Keith arose (the simple act of straightening up, sometimes, gave him the bends) and made his excuses. Had he been back at home, in the old days, he would have called out piteously for Sandy, their gentle Alsatian, her coat grained in black and yellow; and Sandy would have joined him on the blanket with her frown, and licked the insides of his wrists … Twenty-year-olds are fighting the weight of gravity, and they suffer decompression, with classic symptoms. Pain in the muscles and joints, cramps, numbness, nausea, paralysis. After a tragic doze in the tower, Keith again straightened up, and went next door and put his head under the tap.
Any minute now, he was sure, he would resume being happy. Where did it come from, the happiness that reshaped his face? Unlike most people, Keith had had to fall in love with his family, and his family had had to fall in love with him. It worked with his mother Tina, it worked with Violet—Violet was easy. But it never really worked with Karl, his father. And, for almost ten years, it didn’t work with Nicholas. When Keith appeared, when he staggered on to the scene, aged eighteen months, the eyes of the five-year-old Nicholas, Tina told him, had the dead light of the betrayed. And Nicholas made a kind of hobby of it, the roughing up, in words or deeds, of his little brother. And Keith accepted this. This was life.
Two weeks after his eleventh birthday, Keith was doing his maths in the breakfast room. A sick wasp was climbing up the window pane, and always dropping down, and climbing up, and dropping down. He felt Nicholas materialise behind him. Things were better now (largely thanks to Violet, with her tearful intercessions); still, he tensed. And Nicholas said, I’ve decided I like having a younger brother. Keith nodded without turning, and all the figures on the page swam away and then swilled back again, and he started to be happy.
2
LOOK HOW HE LIT HER
“I can’t find my gyms. My tennis shoes.”
He was coming down from the tower (having left his headache behind, in the significant bathroom). Scheherazade wore her pale green skirt and her yellow top. And Keith received her penetrating address, and her tone of amused accusation, now, as if, in fact, Keith had hidden them—had hidden Scheherazade’s tennis shoes. He halted one step above. He was six foot two. He said,
“Who’re you playing with?”
“Local toff.” She shrugged. “Meant to be the great Italian playboy. So you know. The usual greaseboat.”
“You mean greaseball. Or do you mean dreamboat?”
She frowned and said, “I thought I meant greaseboat. Or do I mean dreamball?”
“Are you any good?”
“Not really. Quite decent form. I had lots of lessons and the chap said it was all to do with how you shaped. The important thing is how you look. Then it all follows.”
He was six foot two. He said, “By the way—rightly are you called Scheherazade. The disgrace of Gloria Beautyman. Gloria Beautyman’s day of shame. I hope you’ll tell me many more stories like that.”
“Oh I was very bad. She begged me not to. Gloria wept and begged me not to.”
For a moment Scheherazade’s eyes went liquid, as if she had brought Gloria’s tears with her all the way to Italy. Keith said,
“Well you couldn’t very well not tell.”
“No. We all want to hear about boundaries, don’t you think? She said, Please, oh please, don’t tell Oona. Mum was just off to the airport.” Scheherazade folded her arms and leant sideways against the wall. “But she knew about her being locked in the bathroom with the polo pro. Jorq was raging around the place. And it’s awkward, because they’re practically engaged. Don’t tell Oona. The lipstick stain and the hands inside the pants.”
“And the bikini bottoms getting sucked off by the jacuzzi. So what did you tell your mum in the end?”
“Well she grilled me the minute I got here. I’m not a very good liar, and it helps if a bit of it’s true. The cocaine was true. He was offering it to everyone. So I just said Gloria was taking cocaine in there. With the polo pro. And Mum didn’t particularly mind.”
“So Gloria’s in the clear.”
“But now I’ve gone and told all you lot. And when she comes we’ll be smirking. And she’ll know.”
“But we won’t do that. We won’t smirk. You train Whittaker not to.”
“All right. And you train Lily. All right. Good.”
She passed him. She turned. She was six foot six. He said,
“Have you actually seen those miniatures she did?”
“Yes I have. The sex tycoon had them up on the wall on the stairs. Ballet dancers floating around doing God knows what. An arm there, a leg here. I’ve seen them. And I thought they were rather sweet.”
Keith was trying to work out where he stood on the chain of being. She turned again and climbed yet higher. He shut his eyes and saw her complete, in her coating—in her catsuit of youth.
That afternoon they went down the steep little lane towards the village, to stroll and hold hands and be a couple together: Lily and Keith. The deep streets, the crushed cobbles, the fig-dark shadows, all silent in the siesta hour, which was given over to the faint trickles of digestion. The graffito, daubed in white: Mussolini Ha Sempre Ragione! Mussolini Is Always Right! Above their heads, visible from almost any vantage, stood the arthritic neck of Santa Maria. It was five o’clock, and the bells wagged and swung. A chance to stroll and hold hands and be a couple, while there was still time.
“Look at it,” he said. “It’s not a dog. It’s a rat.”
“No it’s not,” she said. “It’s a perfectly decent little dog.”
“It doesn’t even want to be a dog.”
“Don’t. You’re embarrassing it.”
“… Actually it does look a bit embarrassed.”
“It does. Poor little thing. Some sort of dachshund. Or a terrier. I think it might be a cross.”
“That’s possible. Its mum was a dog but its dad was a rat.”
The pet shop was proudly double-fronted: in the left window, a sectioned menagerie (kittens, squirming hamsters, a single stunned rabbit); in the right, with the whole bay to itself, the rat in its smart blue collar, plus the plastic bone, the wicker basket, and the red velvet cushion on which it habitually perched. This was not the first time they had paused to marvel at it. Rat-sized, its grey coat both close and coarse, with twitching whiskers, malarial eyes, rosy snout, and a tail like a fat garden worm. Keith asked,
“How many rats do you know that live in this kind of style? That’s why it looks so embarrassed.”
Lily said suddenly, “They’re playing on the court at his castle. He’s meant to be a great athlete. She says if she likes him even the tiniest bit she’s definitely going to consider it.”
Keith heard himself say, “No. Is this fair to Timmy?”
“Well it’s Timmy’s fault in a way. He ought to be here. I told you how frustrated she is. She’s desperate.”
“Desperate?”
“Desperate. Look. It’s embarrassed again.”
He said, “See? A dog wouldn’t be embarrassed. Then I don’t understand about Scheherazade. Only a rat would be embarrassed.”
“What don’t you understand? A dog would be embarrassed. If
everyone kept mistaking it for a rat.”
He turned and said, “Six months ago she was a lollipop girl helping schoolkids cross the road. And ferrying dinners around in a van. I wouldn’t even swear in front of her.”
“But she’s different. She’s changed. You should hear her now—sex, sex, sex. There’s so much more woman in her now.”
He remembered Lily’s description of her, Lily’s, first time, with the French student in Toulon, and her walking on the beach the next morning, and thinking, God, I’m a woman … Awakened to womanhood. This was what psychologists called an animal birthday: an animal birthday is when your body happens to you. It wasn’t like that for boys, the first time: the first time was just something you got out of the way. A feeling of helplessness went through him, and he reached for Lily’s hand.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “When Gloria Beautyman comes, you’ve got to pretend not to know about her day of shame.”
“Violet’s a bit like that when she drinks, isn’t she.”
“Yeah, but she’s a bit like that when she doesn’t drink too. Remember. We’re not to traduce Gloria. You know what that means, Lily—traduce?”
“Go on then.”
“From Latin traducere. ‘Lead in front of others, expose to ridicule.’” Traducement was what happened to tragic heroes. Get your laughing done with, get your staring done with. “So we won’t traduce Gloria.”
“See, it’s barking. It’s a dog.”
“What it wants is to go back to being a rat.” It wants to walk away from it all. No fanfare: a discreet return to the rodent kingdom. “It wants to walk away from the velvet cushion and the plastic bone. It wants to run up a drainpipe.”
“You’re so horrible. See, it’s barking. That proves it’s a dog.”
“That’s not a bark. That’s a squeak.”
“It’s a definite yap. You’re embarrassing it. You’re traducing it. It’s barking at you. That’s its way of telling you to fuck off.”
They had started along the lane that scrambled up the slope (and ducked under the road, and scrambled clear on the other side) when they saw Scheherazade, who was in the process of alighting from a cream Rolls Royce. She briefly bent herself over the window frame, with her green skirt outthrust; then she stood there waving at it as the machine surged onward. Keith thought for a moment that the car was driverless, but now a bronzed forearm appeared, and was lazily brandished, and then withdrew.
“So?” said Lily as they joined Scheherazade at the gates.
“He told me he loved me.”
“No. At what stage?”
“In the first game of the first set. It was fifteen-all. He’s coming to lunch tomorrow. And he’s full of plans.”
“And?”
“He’d be absolutely perfect,” said Scheherazade, with a cry-baby face. “Except for just this one little thing.”
Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed Into different bodies.
I agreed with Keith when he decided that her beauty was in, it was here, it was just off the boat … Seven or eight years ago Keith said to his sister, You’re growing so fast now, Vi. Let’s stare at your hand for a moment and try and catch it as it grows. And they stared and they stared, until her hand did seem to give a palpable outward throb. Scheherazade’s talent was still coming in, still pulsing in. It was just off the boat, but every day there was more of it. She turned to go, back up the wharf, and the stevedores cried, Signorina, signorina—and there was another trunkful of silks and dyes and spices. An English rose, but one invigorated by what was unmistakably the American—the American, something harder and brighter: the influx of precious metals from the New World. There was hardly enough room in her to put everything—no one knew how they were ever going to get it all in.
And Keith too was changing—but not outwardly … Here in the castle, when you walked down the length of its stone passages, the echo was louder than the footfall, and you faced the disjunctions caused by the pitiful sloth of the speed of sound. The syncopated footfall. Hello. Echo. And you kept seeing your reflection, too, in unexpected places, in rich and ripply mirrors, of course, but also in silver bowls and tureens, in the blades and tines of weighty cutlery, in sheets of armour, in thick leaded windows after dark.
Inwardly Keith was changing. There was something in him that wasn’t there before.
“Come on. What’s wrong with Adriano?” he asked Lily, that evening, in the salon.
“I’m not telling you. You’ll have to wait and see. All I’m saying is that he’s very handsome. With an exquisitely chiselled body. And very cultured.”
Keith’s eyes moved sideways in thought. “I know. He’s got a terrible laugh or a very high voice.” Solemnly Lily shook her head. He thought on, and said, “I know. He’s nuts.”
“No. You’re nuts. And you’re not even warm.”
Keith went to the kitchen. “What’s the thing that’s wrong with Adriano?” he asked Scheherazade.
“I promised Lily I wouldn’t tell.”
“Is it uh, insurmountable? The thing that’s wrong with him?”
“I’m not really sure. I suppose we’ll see.”
“Is it because he’s—”
“No more questions. Don’t tempt me. Or I’ll crack. I’ve done it once before today already. Blabbed.”
At dinner that night he conducted a thought experiment, or a feel experiment: he looked at Scheherazade, for the first time, with eyes of love. As if he loved her and she loved him back. While he made himself agreeable to Lily and Oona and Whittaker, as often as he dared he looked at Scheherazade, with eyes of love. And what do they see, those eyes? They see the equivalent of a work of art, they see wit and talent and gripping complication; for minutes on end he believed himself to be in a private screening room, bearing witness to a first performance of unforgettable spontaneity. Behind the scenes of this motion picture, the director, a troubled genius (and probably Italian), would be wisely sleeping with his great discovery. Of course he was. Look how he lit her. You could tell.
Keith dropped his head and gazed at the grainy murk in the bottom of his coffee cup. There was something in him that wasn’t there before. It was born when Lily said the word desperate.
It was hope.
Here they were in the She Decade—but they were all of them in the cusp of Narcissus. They were not like their elders and they would not be like their youngers. Because they could remember how it was before: the lighter weight on the individual, when you lived your life more automatically … They were the first that ever burst into that silent sea, where the surface is a shield that burns like a mirror. Down by the grotto, down by the bower, they lay there near-naked, in their instruments of yearning. They were the Eyes, they were the Is, they were reflections, they were fireflies with their luminescent organs.
3
THE HIGHEST THRONE ON EARTH
My dear Little Keith,
I send bad news about our unbelievable little sister (how bad is it, would you say?), so I’ll try to put a smile on your face before I take it off again:
My heart leaps up when I behold. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Heart of Oak. Heart of Darkness. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Then burst his mighty—
“What’s so funny?” said Lily, who was putting marmalade on the toast and pouring herself a second cup of tea.
“It’s a game we play. Me and Nicholas. Come and look.”
“… I ask again. What’s so funny?”
“You’ve got to substitute dick for heart. As in, now cracks a noble …”
She said, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Isn’t that by a woman?”
“Ah, but you don’t use dick when it’s a woman. You use box instead.”
“Bury My … It’s a bit puerile, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Very.” He explained that when you grew up in an enlightened household, where everything was allowed and forgiven, where nothing was judged, except judging, you got keen on the subversive. “We’ve always done it. And there a
re tons more.”
“Maybe they should have been less enlightened. With your unbelievable little sister.”
“Mm. Maybe.”
The letter was on the breakfast tray. And the breakfast tray—laid and heroically borne aloft by Lily—carried information of its own. There was no longer any doubt about it: Lily and Keith were now in a sibling relationship—a sibling relationship only marginally enlivened by the nightly crime of incest. And no crime, no act of applied endogamy, had been perpetrated the night before. It was rescheduled—this being the paraphrasable content of the tea, the toast, the quartered oranges. He said,
“I suppose you want to read the rest of it now. Leaning over my shoulder. Well you can’t.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“All right. But not until you tell me what’s wrong with Adriano. And why Scheherazade feels so unbearably sorry for him.”
“We all have a little blemish.”
“That’s true. And his is?”
“But I want it to be a lovely surprise.”
He said, “Okay. But no interrupting.”
The night before last I took Violet to a party at Sue and Mark’s. Among other points of interest, there was a duck waddling round the floor and shitting everywhere, and there was a witchy girl waddling after it, in a crouch, with a toilet roll in her hand. So, the standard hippie hell (and freakfest and goons’ rodeo), and Vi behaved much as we’ve come to expect. The unusual thing was what happened on the way there.
“Oh and I suppose Nicholas never messes around in hippie hells.”
“Sexually? No. He doesn’t. Hardly. Because he’s so left-wing. I keep telling him. You’re interested in the wrong revolution, mate. But does he listen?”
“And you think he ought to. Mess around.”
“No, I’m just surprised. Girls are always making passes at him. And he never comes across. Molly Sims made a pass at him.”