Free The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis Page B

Emily Gauntlet, when drugged, were behaving
truthfully?
No. But when the girl raised the potion to her own lips (Gloria, Violet), then you could claim that it was
veritas
. He said uneasily, “You’d think she’d know that about herself. Gloria Beautyman.”
    “You would. There’s more. The bathroom upstairs with the polo pro.”
    Over the poolside a pensive silence formed.
    “Bit of a disappointment, frankly, after all that. Jorquil came, around four, and no one could
find
her. We went upstairs and all the bedrooms were locked. House policy. Then—in the passage. There were these two huge bunnies or pets or playmates. Ex-centrefolds, these huge madams. Incredible creatures. Like retired racehorses. They’d been trying to control her all day. They were banging on the bathroom door saying things like,
Are you
coming,
Gloria? Have you
flushed
yet, Gloria?
Then the door opened and she stumbled out. Followed by the polo pro.”
    “… How did Jorquil like that?”
    “He stormed off. He didn’t see it.”
    They waited.
    “Well they were only in there for a couple of minutes. The polo pro said it was all perfectly innocent. You know, a bit of cocaine. I think they just had a snog. There was lipstick on the polo pro’s neck. Not a smear, either. A little smiling mouth. You could even imagine the little smiling teeth …”
    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.
    T he 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