4
TORQUERE “TO TWIST”

Go on, get your staring done with. The air shuddered and juddered around him in phonebox-sized volumes, it gonged and twanged around him, but he had to enter the kitchen. He had to enter the kitchen because he had to have coffee. And he had to have coffee to fuel the nicotine sobbed for by his foul mouth …

The three girls, as he approached, didn’t actually scream out loud, or climb up on their chairs, or fight their way, like little Miss Samsa, to the wide window for a lungful of breathable air. They stayed in their seats and stared. Get it done with. Lily looked at him with a kind of infinite weariness, Gloria with the contempt due to a crushed enemy, and Scheherazade’s flat glance made Keith feel invisible—morally invisible, in the way that poverty and sordor are said to be invisible to Hindus of the higher castes. Go on, get it done.

… He sat sweating and swearing and trembling and weeping, and smoking, in the loveseat on the west terrace, with Professor Meadowbrook, and Antinomianism, and Nottingham and Sardinia and Guadalajara, and D. H. Lawrence, and Frieda von Richthofen. If the terrible theory was true, and looks were shaped by happiness (if surface was determined by essence), then Keith did indeed have the six wavery limbs, the toothlessly drooling jaws, the vaulted brown belly, the metallic carapace, and the hurled apple rotting and reeking in his back. A storm was on its way, and too late. Not the sky but the air itself was a gangrenous green. The air itself was about to throw up. And he could hear the yellow birds in their tree—pissing themselves laughing.

So there was self-pity: in the mirror that morning he was foetal with it, his face a foetus of crapulent self-pity. And with regard to the other business, the business with Lily, he could smell about himself the effluent of ingratitude. And he felt his bastardy too. “Why bastard? wherefore base?” he kept whispering. “Why brand they us With base? bastardy? base, base?” Here, in Italy, Keith was Salò, in 1944—the republic of dissolution and defeat, of impotence and emptiness …

But men are shifty. Shiftier than they know. Shifty even within their own shifty beings. Life had pronounced him dead, but somewhere within, in his groin, perhaps, was a pulse of hope. And he felt the lucidity that comes with doom.

Keith had a stratagem for Lily. The back pocket of his jeans now contained Nicholas’s letter about their sister, Violet—still unread. Tactical prudence demanded that he acquaint himself with its contents; once or twice he unfolded the envelope and considered it. But his resolve could not survive the sadistic interdiction of his gut, his craw, and he simply took what courage he could from the firm curves of his brother’s hand.

So Keith had a stratagem for Lily. And he had a stratagem for Scheherazade.

It came again: from the far distance, the supposedly cleansing rumours of thunder.

A round noon he raised his head and saw that Lily was staring at him through the French windows. Her face wore a much more distilled version of the forensic look he had seen often enough the night before; and Keith could tell by the sharpness of her movements, as she opened the glass doors, that she came to him with a case much fortified by research. He felt reasonably frightened; but he somehow hugged it to himself, the airy clarity of doom.

“You—look—terrible,” she said. “Listen. I’m missing two. I count my pills, and I’m missing two. Now why’s that?”

He didn’t answer.

“You don’t answer. Two. You tried one out, didn’t you. And you thought it didn’t taste of anything. Because you smoke a carton of French cigarettes every day, you thought it didn’t taste of anything. You tried it out. And then you drugged me so you could sleep with Scheherazade.”

Keith lit a Disque Bleu. He had a tight balloon of gas—laughing gas and tear gas—in his solar plexus; this gas was sweetish and colourless and made him want to sob and cackle. For even he could see the quiet artistry, the hushed equipoise of his fate: here he sat, squaring up to the consequences of sleeping with Scheherazade—without sleeping with Scheherazade. And (he thought exhaustedly) is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some: some credit, some moral recompense on this earth, for not sleeping with Scheherazade?

“Lily, I mixed the glasses up. That’s all.”

“Mixed them up? How could you mix them up? They weren’t the same … I asked Gloria and she said you had a beer before dinner.”

He had not been looking forward to this thrust, but he had anticipated it—this thrust into the very crotch of his defence. Gloria was right. Beer, and in a hefty beaker, and not a long-stemmed flute of tempered glass. “That was later,” he said. “I had a prosecco first. Like I did the night before.”

“I seem to remember you just went and got a beer.”

He said, “Seem to remember, Lily? How would you remember? You were drugged. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

“Yes, drugged. For your sex date with Scheherazade.”

Keith exhaled and thought about male anger: male anger as a tactic. He had an opening phrase ready in his mind. Lily, how dare you even—and so on … The underexperienced but observant Nicholas once advised him that anger was still worth trying: when your position was truly dire, it was still worth trying male anger—because some women still instinctively feared it, even the best and the bravest of them. Even the most accomplished terrorists, Nicholas said, were still vulnerable to male anger—because it reminded them of their fathers. Keith, now, a bent shape on the loveseat, under the tundra of Lily’s stare—no, Keith was not about to reach for male anger. He had no talent for anger, anger, which is only in command of the power to postpone.

Lily said, “Not a date. Not a fuck. She isn’t like that. It’s not in her … No. You felt she’d been flirting with you, and you were planning to make your move. That’s why you were douching yourself in the bathroom for an hour and a half.”

Keith stirred. It was of course axiomatic, according to Nicholas, that you seized on it—the moment when the witch radar showed its first false reading. He said (having given a curlike sneeze that left his palm secretly coated in snot),

“Come on, Lily. You’re so proud of being rational. Think. I’ve had—what?—twenty evenings alone with Scheherazade. If I was that kind of … If I was that type, I’d have made my move long before now. Christ. I like her, she’s a lovely girl, but she’s not my type. You’re my type, Lily. You.”

She examined him. “And the pills?” She examined him further. “Mm. Your story’d sound better if you looked less suicidal.”

Now Keith chose to take the two necessary risks (did she inspect Jane Eyre last night? how often did she count her pills?). He said, he recited,

“So you have noticed. Listen. I took the first pill after I read the first letter from Nicholas. I took the second pill—or I tried—to prepare myself to read the second. Okay?”

“You haven’t even glanced at it. It’s still in Jane Eyre.”

“No it isn’t.” He reached into his back pocket. “I had it with me last night. I read it last night. That’s why I got drunk. I’m speechless, Lily. Violet. It’s really very seriously terrible. Help me. I need you to help me think it through, Lily. Help me.”

She consented to be led by the hand to the swing sofa, where he flattened the letter out on her lap.

My dear Little Keith,

The foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness Pains my sense. So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lieth.

“Yeats, Keats,” he murmured. “And Sir Walter Raleigh.” Keith was now in the curious position of hoping that the news about his sister would indeed be really very seriously terrible. “Those were Raleigh’s last words,” he said. “He was putting his neck on the block at the time.”

They began. And Violet, not always the most dependable of young women, didn’t let her brother down.

A little later Lily reappeared with a cup of coffee, meant for him, and he thanked her, and drank in silence, while she stood looking out, with her hands joined and a freshened sheen in her eyes.

“All right. Gloria said she wasn’t sure about the beer. Not at all sure. So I suppose I … Now what have we here? Well isn’t that a sight.”

In wasp-waisted charcoal suits, and arm in arm, Scheherazade and Gloria were making their way across the terrace, heading for the steps that led to the lane and the village.

“Church.”

“It’s pitiful, isn’t it,” said Keith. “Absolutely fucking pitiful. Gloria’s RC, right? Scheherazade isn’t. What’s Scheherazade?”

Lily told him that Timmy, at least, was Pentecostalist—and it should be admitted that this was something that Keith thought he still needed to know. He said,

“So. Santa Maria. Catholic. Any port in a fucking storm, eh?”

“Why are you so het up about it? You should have heard yourself last night. Groaning and wailing in your sleep.”

“All this hypocrisy.”

“Squealing you were. Like a pig having an operation.”

“Lily, it’s the principle of the thing. They believe in Father Christmas. Why? Because the present he brings is eternal life.”

“… What’s antinomianism?”

“It means doing whatever the fuck you want all the hours there are. With ‘should’ and ‘ought’ I have nothing to do.” Keith felt his body relax, and he went on, “It means anti-law, Lily. I’m surprised you didn’t know that. Frieda was the same. German, see. Nudism and yoghurts. Eros-worship. Nietzsche. Otto Gross. Repress nothing!”

Lily said, “Aren’t you hungry? I was just thinking. You’ve lost weight. You haven’t eaten all week.”

“Yeah, come on. While they’re down there on their lousy knees. Jesus. On their knees. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

Left alone for a moment, he went to the wall and peered over it. You could see the two tight and bustly little forms moving over the cobblestones. Children criss-crossed their path, but no swirling coils of young men took shape in the rear of Gloria or in the van of Scheherazade.

In the library he put Professor Meadowbrook aside and pored over a semi-literate paperback called Religions of the World, which eventually referred him to the Book of John. Then he unsheathed the Olivetti and typed out a note on it: Dear Scheherazade, May I say something to you? I’ll be reading in the gunroom after dinner. Just a few words. K. With that accomplished, he crept out into the salon, and moved through the precincts of his demotion—like an intruder, or like some menial and futile phantom, one worthy of a decrepit cottage, perhaps, but not a fortress on a mountainside in Italy … It seemed that eternal excommunication was the sentence he’d been given, and it came like a summons from outer darkness when Gloria turned in the corridor and said with a matronly air,

“Oh, Keith.”

“Yes, Gloria.”

“There’s a choice tonight—meat or fish. I tried the fish earlier, and I thought it was a bit off. Have the meat.”

“Thank you, Gloria, That’s very thoughtful of you. I will.”

“Do,” she said.

And that was all. Fractionally emboldened, Keith offered Scheherazade his folded note as they passed in an anteroom, and she accepted it without meeting his eye.

The four of them took their seats in the kitchen: one Catholic, one Protestant, one Atheist, and one Agnostic. Yes, Keith, unlike Lily, was an agnostic: he knew that he would die all right, and that heaven and hell were vulgar insults to human dignity, but he also knew that the universe was very imperfectly understood. In his opinion, it would be an outcome mainly notable for its banality—but God might turn out to be true. Claiming otherwise, as he told Lily when they argued about it, was crabbed, presumptuous, and not rational, Lily. I’m teetering on the edge of it—of godlessness, Lily. But that’s what you have to do. Teeter. Now he said to her,

“Not for me.” And covered his wine glass with his hand. During the salad course Gloria said to Scheherazade, “When shall we swap rooms? Not tonight. I’m too … weak. I think I’ve got what you had last night. Queasy.”

“It soon passes. I’m fine now. Tuesday morning. Eugenio can help.”

“Jorquil’s in Florence. Poor you. Oh I do wish Timmy were here.”

Keith’s stratagem for Scheherazade, then, was only ninety-nine-point-nine per cent dishonest: it contained its mote-sized blind spot. He was going to tell her that he had experienced a change of heart and mind. Yes, Scheherazade, I have. And is there, perhaps, some vicar … No, not vicar. Luminary? … perhaps some spiritual counsellor I could go and talk to, when we all get back to London? Keith knew that success was not much more likely than the cosmic manifestation, that same night, of an omnipotent being. But he had to try. And now he sought comfort in harmonial themes, how they spring eternal, the tender leaves of hope—and so on.

“Mmm,” said Lily as she tasted her sole.

“Mmm,” said Scheherazade as she tasted hers.

“I’m sure the fish is perfectly fresh,” said Gloria. “But Keith and I are very happy with the lamb. Now Whittaker said half past seven. An early night, I think. So that we’re all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” she concluded, “for the ruins.”

Antinomianism in D. H. Lawrence was finished with and tossed aside by a quarter to twelve.

Scheherazade had in fact stuck her head round the door of the gunroom, on her way upstairs, and Keith did in fact manage to announce, from a seated posture, that he was suddenly open to persuasion about the existence of God and, more particularly, the merits of the Pentecostalist persuasion (with its emphasis on prophecy, miracles, and exorcism).

“I know the Bible quite well,” he said, “and I’ve always been very moved by that verse in John. And it’s central, isn’t it, to the born-again idea. You know—The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit. That resonates, I find.”

He kept this up for a couple of minutes. Scheherazade frowned levelly at him. As if his words were not necessarily implausible but merely obtuse and irrelevant. And boring—don’t forget boring. Keith couldn’t construe her: the one visible hand on the one visible hip, her shifts of stance. Her indifference. There was something—there was something almost un-Christian in it. He said,

“I was very wrong to be dismissive like that. That was trivial of me. And I’d like to give the whole thing a lot more thought.”

“Well,” she said with a dutiful shrug, “since you ask, there’s a man called Geoffrey Wainwright at St. David-in-the-Field. I’ll drop him a line about you. If you like.”

“Right. Fine.”

Right. Fine. And now we’ve got all the religious shit out of the way, Scheherazade, how about a game of cards and a glass of champagne? This much at least was clear. In fact it had never in his life struck him with such force: religion was the antichrist of eros. No, the two themes, Racing Demon and God, God and Racing Demon, did not combine. Or so he then thought.

“Timmy swears by Geoffrey Wainwright,” said Scheherazade. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight. Don’t tell Lily,” he said as she closed the door on him. “She wouldn’t approve.”

So to round out the panoply of the weekend’s achievements, its moral and intellectual breakthroughs and triumphs, he reached into his back pocket and read the thing again, without Lily’s breath on his neck.

And then Keith crossed the expectantly starless courtyard and climbed the steps of the tower.

“Hear that?” said Lily in the dark. “Not the rumbling. Santa Maria. At a stroke you’re—twenty-one.”

He did not respond. She kissed his ear, his neck. He did not respond. Her hand caressed his shoulders, his chest, and moved downward. Now would be the time to show gratitude to Lily. Now would be the time to be grateful to Lily. But Keith wasn’t grateful any more.

“I can’t,” he said. “Violet.”

His body, now embarking on its twenty-second year, gave its reflex. Yet Keith did not respond. Lily held it. Then she flung it aside.

“Do you know something? Your cock,” she said, “is much smaller than average.”

He at once resolved not to take this too seriously. Then again, he knew that anything a girl said to you on this subject was by definition unforgettable.

“Oh really,” he said. “Fascinating. Much smaller than everyone else’s. That’s well worth knowing.”

“Yes, much smaller,” she said, turning over. “Much.”

Up above in the firmament, great weights were being wheeled around on sets of titanic castors: the rolling stock of heaven, mobilised for civil strife …

Lily’s quiet flurry; in the dawn—he was intermittently aware of it; and there was a small packet of time (he sensed) when she stood over him and looked down, and not with liking either. There had just been a disastrous spillage (he had accidentally poured a two-pound bag of sugar into the intimate workings of a grandfather clock)—but someone else could clear it up, the dream could clear it up, he left it there for the dream …

Now Keith heard the car doors slam shut and the slow and monstrous snarl of rubber on gravel. And he began the task of separating the real from the imaginary, separating fact from fiction. Feminine shapes and configurations, then thoughts like the clues of cryptic crosswords—these slowly scattered, and he reversed himself, with many misanglings, into his opening sentence. It must have been a considerable relief to D. H. Lawrence—the formulation of a … The formulation of a creed of unadorned self-centredness must have come as a … Keith reared up and sat there with his feet on the floor. All was bare. He was neuter, loveless, sexless; and he was twenty-one years old.

Naked, he pushed at the bathroom door. It was locked. He listened to the silence. Then he fastened a towel round his waist and rang the bell. He heard ticking footsteps.

“Ah there you are. Good morning,” said Gloria Beautyman.

With pinched thumbs and fingertips she was holding up a light-blue summer dress at shoulder height, as if assessing it for length in front of a mirror.

“You didn’t go,” he said.

“Mm. I pretended to be ill. I hate ruins. I mean they’re ruins.”

“Exactly.” He said, with prescience, “You’re made-up.”

“Well I had to retouch it. I wanted to look all feverish. A bit of purple eyeshadow usually does the trick.”

“You find?”

“Mm. I even hid a rotten apple under the bed. For the tang of the sickroom. I’m airing it even as we speak … I’m terribly good, you know. No one will ever guess.”

“Well.”

“Well. I’m sorry I kept you waiting. I was just saying my prayers before putting some clothes on. You see I always pray naked.”

“And why’s that?”

“For the humility. Do you have any objection?”

“No. None.”

“I thought you might have some objection …”

And a voice said to him, There’s no need to hurry. Everything is as it should be. Everything is just as it should be.

“Yes, I thought you might have some objection.”

“To praying, or praying naked?”

“To both.”

“What do you say in your prayers?”

“Well first I praise Him. Then I thank Him for what I’ve got. Then I ask for a little bit more. But it’s probably pointless, don’t you think?”

“Is it?”

“Tell me. If you had to give just one reason. What is your quarrel with those of us who believe?”

Never worry. Proceed. It has all been decided.

“All right. It’s a failure of courage.”

“Not true in my case.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s simple. I believe. And I know I’m going to hell.”

Remain silent. Go on looking into her eyes, and remain silent.

“So!” she said. “Then I had a quick shower and I was just putting on some clothes.”

“How far did you get?”

“Shoes,” she said.

They both looked down. White high heels. He said,

“So. Not very far.”

“No. Not very far at all.”

She tipped her head at an angle and gave him a flat smile. The polite cough: “Huh-hm.” Then she looked him up and down in a way that made him feel, for a moment, that he had come to fix the loose tiles or see to the plumbing. She turned and slowly walked.

Jesus Christ. Say, No bee sting. Say it. No bee sting.

He said, “No bee sting.”

She halted, and ran a hand down the small of her back. “To tell you the truth, Keith, I put a dab on that too. While I was at it. You know. Concealer.”

He thought, I am in a very strange place: I am in the future. And this is the strangest thing of all: I know exactly what to do … Lit by the innards of the storm, all the colours in the room were lurid, torrid, morbid, even the whites. Another strange thought: the vulgarity of the colour white. Step forward.

Stepping forward, he said, after a while, “So pale. So cold.”

She moved her feet apart.

His towel seemed to make a lot of noise when it fell—like a collapsing marquee. Her dress made no sound at all. The first thing she did, with her gaze on the mirror, was attend to her breasts in a way he had never seen before. She said ardently,

“Oh, I love me. Oh I love me so.”

Neither blinked as thunder split the room. He went even closer in.

She brought her legs together. “Kadoink,” she said.

Make a joke. Make two jokes. It doesn’t matter what they are, but the first one has to be dirty.

“You forgot to dry yourself.”

Her spine quivered and arched.

“Because you were distracted by higher things.”

“Look,” she said to the figures in the glass. “I’m a boy. I’ve got a cock too.”

Say, You are a cock. Say it. You are a cock. “You are a cock,” he said.

“… How on earth did you know? I am a cock. And we’re very rare—girls who are cocks. Stand back a minute.”

She leant over with parted legs and her small left fist tightened on the towel rack.

“Look. The sting’s actually quite far in. Look.”

She was doing something, with her right hand, that he had seen before, but never at this angle. Say something about money.

“I want to buy it a present. Your arse. Silk. Mink.”

She was doing something, with her right hand, that he had never even heard about.

“Look what happens,” she said, “when I use two fingers.”

It was then that he had his moment of vertigo. I’m too young, he thought, to go to the future. Then the vertigo passed and the hypnosis returned. She said,

“Look what happens. Not to the arse. To the cunt.”

He stared on at it leadenly—at the far future.

“… Some might say that it’s a bit droll—to start with this. But we’re having a black mass, you and I. You know—backward. Everything the wrong way round. Stay still, and I’ll do it all. Understand? And try your hardest not to come.”

“Good,” she said, as, some minutes later, her knees settled on the bath-mat. “Now. The only way to spin this out is for me to be a bit of a chatterer for a while—do you mind? … You can talk while you do most other things … Often to no great purpose, in my opinion … But you can’t talk while you … while you … Now here’s something you’ve probably never seen before … Big as this is, and very hard. As hard as the towel rack. I can make it completely disappear. And then come back even bigger. Oh look. It’s even bigger already.”

Yeah, he thought. Yeah, that’s the spirit, Gloria. If you want it big, just tell it it’s big.

“Completely disappear. Watch. In the mirror … Again? … Again? … Right. In a minute I’m going to speed up. Now listen carefully.”

He listened carefully—as she issued a set of instructions. He had never heard about this either (he would later characterise it as the sinister refinement). He said,

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Right. I’m going to speed up. I won’t be doing any more talking. But I will be making rather a lot of noise. And afterwards, Keith, we’ll have a light breakfast and go to my room. Agreed? Then at last you can feel my breasts. And kiss my lips. And hold my hand … We’ll make a day of it. Or would you rather get on with your trial review?”