4
WHEN THEY HATE YOU ALREADY

And life, for its part, went on behaving impeccably right up to and including the last day of the summer. There were to be revelations, recognitions, about-turns, come-uppances, and so on. And life, generally indifferent to these things, went ahead and obliged.

After breakfast they swam, and there was the occasion for a final dark-spectacled glare at the two girls and their bodies, and he undertook it in the spirit of an archivist—to shore up memory. The face and breasts of Scheherazade filled him with grief; and the arse and the legs and the arms and the tits and the omphalos and the box of Gloria Beautyman filled him not with feelings so much as a set of impulses. The impulses of the raptor. From L., lit. “plunderer,” from rapere “seize.” Keith had entered the world again. Or so he liked to believe.

It was Timmy’s first time to go and get the coffee; and when he returned about an hour later, descending with the tray, he looked slightly more puzzled than usual, and he said, as he slouched by in his slippers,

“Someone telephoned. It was that chap Adriano. He’s in Nairobi. Very bad line.”

“Nairobi?”

“You know, big game. The Serengeti. And now he’s banged up in a hospital in Nairobi.”

“That’s terrible,” said Scheherazade.

Yes, true to character, Adriano had gone and coptered himself to Kenya. And now Keith was wondering which way it would go. Half eaten by headhunters or soldier ants? Or chomped practically in two by a hippopotamus. And for several seconds he thought that Adriano’s fate was an artistic disappointment, because Timmy was saying,

“No, nothing very dramatic. It happened last night. He checked into the Serengeti VIP. I stayed at the Serengeti VIP. Don’t you remember, old thing, when I came to rescue you in Bagamoyo? Marvellous place. Not Bagamoyo. I mean the Serengeti VIP. They wake you up at night with these little signals. Two chimes for a lion. You know, visible in the lit area. Three for a rhino. You know.”

“But what happened to Adriano?”

“Oh Adriano. Oh, he pranged his jeep. Trying to find the car park. You see, it’s on a hill, the Serengeti VIP. And it’s, it’s maddening because the car park … Anyway. He found it in the end, the car park. In a bit of a bait by then, no doubt. And he ran his jeep into a brick wall. And the poor chap’s gone and shattered both his knees.”

After a moment Keith’s head gave a jolt of consent. That was Adriano. Forever brought to grief by the mere furniture of the high life. Timmy said,

“Is there anyone staying here called Kitsch?”

“That must be me.”

“Sends his regards. As I say, it was a very bad line.”

Then there were farewells, down at the pool, with Whittaker and Amen, and then, up in the castle, with Oona, Jorquil, Prentiss, and Conchita. And with Madonna and Eugenio.

Now travel, and the business (hardly less onerous in art than in life) of getting people from one place to another place.

Their taxi came exactly an hour early, while the church-goers were still at Santa Maria; the driver, Fulgencio, who had no forehead at all (flat black hair sloped directly into his eyebrows), drove them down to the deserted village and then cheerfully disappeared.

“Let’s go and pay our last respects,” Keith told Lily, “to the rat.”

But when, on the sunken street, they drew level with the pet-shop window, they were greeted, not by the crimson eyes and the vermicular tail, but by a startling void.

“Sold!” said Lily.

“Maybe. Or maybe it just escaped.”

“It’s been bought. Somebody bought it.”

The sign on the door said chiuso. Keith peered in and saw a woman in black with a mop and a red plastic bucket. He said, “Give me the …” He reached into Lily’s bag for the pocket dictionary. “Here we are. Il roditore. The rodent.”

“You’re so horrible.”

“Stay here.” He went in to the sound of the chime. And he came out saying, “You’re right. The lady, she mimed it—doling out banknotes. Imagine. Someone paid good money for a rat.”

“Quite right. Poor little Adriano. Just think.”

“Just think. It’s lying on its back in some little parlour.”

“With all the children stroking its little tummy. Just think.”

And now the bells of Santa Maria declared peace in heaven, and Gloria and Scheherazade stepped out on to the leafy courtyard, their faces bright with immortality and joy, in their Sunday best. And with Timmy, too, sidling along behind.

Scheherazade (whom, very soon, Keith would touch—Keith would lightly kiss—for the first time), Scheherazade walked straight up and said, “You missed it. Oh, it was so tragic. So moving.” She turned to Gloria with pleading eyes. “Tell them.”

“Amen. At the pool.”

“He came up to her at the pool. With his dark glasses off. He has such soulful eyes.”

“And?”

“He told me he loved me,” said Gloria drily, “and would always be my friend.”

“And that he’d love her for the rest of his life. He looked so sad! Such spiritual eyes. And then Whittaker sort of helped him away.”

While Scheherazade and Lily wept and necked and whispered goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, Keith fell into step with Gloria Beautyman.

“Spiritual,” she said. “I humoured her, but really, Scheherazade’s a sap. Such soulful eyes … Amen’s just obsessed by my backside, that’s all. I can tell. That’s normal for queers—they’ve got some taste, God bless them. Spiritual. Spiritual, my arse … Well take a good look. You won’t see me again.”

They turned a corner and were miraculously alone—in a narrow square full of low-flying yellow birds and nothing and nobody else.

And the voice spoke. Don’t try and kiss her. Take her hand. And put it where? There. Go on. Just for a second. There? Are you sure? Is it all right? It’s all right. The black gloves and the church bells make it all right. What do I tell her? And the voice spoke.

“Gloria, that’s your power,” he said. “That’s you.”

She bared her teeth (those mysterious blue-tinged moonstones) and said, “… Ich.”

Then Italy was streaming past the windows with its strontian yellows and edenic greens and cobalt blues and madder-browns, madder-reds. At length Fulgencio’s humped shoulders straightened them out on to the highway, raw mile upon raw mile, and knots of contorted factories periodically grew slowly nearer, with their cuboid flatblocks, where you saw half-naked children playing happily in the dirt.

Just before take-off Lily called for a pillow in a thick voice, and reached for Keith’s hand. Then the plane trundled and raced, leant back and climbed, with the towers of the airport losing their balance and teetering over rearward, as Keith and Lily left behind them the land of Franca Viola …

They were not yet clear of the clouds when the plane seemed to settle. Lily’s head struggled for comfort in the cusp of the porthole. Keith lit a cigarette.

“Conchita had an abortion in Amsterdam.”

“What? Oh don’t tell me that, Lily … Please don’t say any more.”

“Conchita had an abortion in Amsterdam. Four months. You must’ve noticed the bump was gone.”

“I didn’t think it was a bump. I just thought she’d lost weight. Please. Enough.”

“Everyone was on tiptoe. I wondered if you’d ever twig. She was raped. Only Prentiss and Oona know who by.”

“Please don’t say any more.”

“You didn’t notice. You often don’t see things very clearly. Do you … Oh for God’s sake, why are we still in the clouds?”

He slumped back in his seat, and noticed, as an irrelevance now, that he was no longer afraid of flying. And this was just as well. When Keith closed his eyes he believed himself to be on an aircraft in heavy weather, with wind shear and muscular thermals; then he was on a boat, cresting up and sliding down, and scooping itself through violent seas; then he was in an express elevator that rocketed and plunged—but made no headway. On the horizontal line, they seemed, if anything, to be going backward. He looked out. The white wing strained, as if made of flesh and sinew. A winged horse, a horse with wings. Like the wings of the horse that took the Prophet to heaven. He again closed his eyes. Trying as hard as it could, the little plane laboured to take them up into the blue …

Keith … Keith!

It was eight fifteen in the evening, and he was in the shower of the significant bathroom. All the day’s work was on his flesh, as the old order gave way to the new—all the repudiations and alterations, the riots and mutinies, all his seraphic sins. Would they ever come off? Like Pyrrhus at the fall of Troy, his

Keith stepped out. She was kneeling on the tiles, naked except for her velvet hat, her black veil, her crucifix.

In ten minutes they’re taking me to a beguinage. A nunnery—Nostra Dama Immacolata. I’m to become a bride of Christ … Come here.

I can’t.

Come here in front of the mirror. Yes you can … You know, the vulgar call me Shesus. Because I can raise you from the dead.

He went and stood dripping over her, dripping over her shoulders, her outcurved belly, her thighs: over the elastic soundness of Gloria Beautyman … Did he hear the scrape of wheels on gravel?

Watch. There! Fuck me now and you’ll never die.

Yes, it was good in the mirror, realer in the mirror. You could see what was happening very clearly. Uncluttered, unsullied by the other dimensions, which were those of depth and time.

“Keith … Keith!”

His eyes opened—Lily’s face, grey against the grey. Of her bones were coral made: those were pearls that were her eyes.

“How can you sleep? Where’s the blue sky for God’s sake?”

“There isn’t any. Not today.”

“In ten minutes we’ll both be dead. Tell me—”

The air hostess hurried by. “Seatbelt,” she said.

“Can he still smoke?”

“He can still smoke.”

“Are you sure?”

“Lily. You’re keeping her from her work.”

“… We’re both going to die. Tell me what happened with Gloria.”

He said, with the assurance of perfect boredom, “Nothing happened. I was getting on with my trial review. She was sick.”

“Okay, she was sick. Anyone could see that. But something happened. Sick as she was. You changed.”

“Nothing happened.”

“You changed.”

“Why aren’t you asleep?”

“Yes, why aren’t I asleep. Listen. I’ll help with Violet if you need me. But it’s over.”

He felt his Adam’s apple rise and fall.

“You know, I still loved you. At first. Till you started looking like an undertaker around bedtime. Then you changed. Staring like a stick insect. It was quite hard work, getting to hate you. But I managed it. Thanks for a horrible summer.”

“Oh don’t be theatrical,” he said coolly. “It wasn’t all bad.”

“No. It wasn’t all bad. I slept with Kenrik. That was the good part.”

“Prove it.”

“All right. I said, Tell him you can’t remember. Is that what he said? … I thought of you in the middle of it. I thought, Hysterical sex—that’s what this really is.”

He lit another cigarette. On the night of their reunion, and at other times in the past, Keith had known hysterical sex with Lily. He had not known hysterical sex with Gloria Beautyman. Her voice changed, seeking a deeper and smoother register. But her composure was not otherwise inconvenienced (and around noon he himself stopped moaning and whimpering and started to concentrate). And it came to Keith now—her essential peculiarity. She went at it as if the sexual act, in all human history, had never even been suspected of leading to childbirth, as if everyone had immemorially known that it was by other means that you peopled the world. All the ancient colourations of significance and consequence had been bleached from it … Whenever he thought of her naked body (and this would go on being true), he saw something like a desert, he saw a beautiful Sahara, with its slopes and dunes and whorls, its shadows and sandy vapours and tricks of the light, its oases, its mirages. Keith said,

“Fair enough, Lily. If you want to play it that way. Adriano’s been put down. All right? The rat’s been put to sleep. The woman in the shop—she didn’t mime cash. She put her finger to her throat and went like that. With a wet sound. Yes, I’m so horrible.”

“Which is true?”

“Oh go on. You decide.”

“… You do have a bond with Conchita. Both her parents died on the same day.”

“Please don’t say any more.”

Three or four times Lily took his hand. But only out of fear. Then the plane levelled out into the blue.

Gloria’s voice changed, and once she bared her white teeth in what seemed to be savage indignation, and two or three times, as he lay waiting, she came towards him in some new combination of clothes and roles with a certain smile on her face. As if she had entered into a conspiracy with herself to make him happy …

How would you explain it: why couldn’t you smoke in dreams? You could smoke almost anywhere you liked—except in churches, and rocket-refuelling bays, and most hospital delivery rooms, and so on. But dreams were non-smoking. Even when the situation would normally demand it, after moments of great tension (after a chase sequence, say, or while recovering from some horrific transformation); or after a long episode of strenuous swimming, or strenuous flying; or after a sudden bereavement, a sudden subtraction; or after successful sexual intercourse. And successful sexual intercourse in dreams, though rare, was not unknown. But you couldn’t smoke in dreams.

They got off the bus at Victoria, and shallowly embraced, and went their different ways.

What do you do in a revolution? This. You grieve for what goes, you grant what stays, you greet what comes.

Nicholas always got there early.

And he didn’t really like it if you got there early too. Half an hour, alone at the table with a book—this was also a component of his evening. Therefore Keith walked slowly. Kensington Church Street, Bayswater Road and the railing-girt northern border of Hyde Park, then Queensway—the Arab quarter, with its veiled women, its sceptical moustaches. And there were tourists (Americans), students, young mothers pushing on the crossbars of tall prams. It was now that Keith began to feel unfamiliar to himself, and faint, and disorganised in thought. But he shook his head with a shiver and blamed it on all the travel.

It was eight o’clock, and bright as day, yet London had assumed a sheepish and apprehensive expression, as cities will, he supposed, when seen with new eyes. For a moment, but only for a moment, the roads and pavements and crossings appeared to him to be full of movement and thrilling variety, full of different people going from one place to a different place, needing to go from that different place to this different place.

He wasn’t to know it, of course. He wasn’t to know it, but one humble and unsonorous adjective comprehensively described the London of 1970. Empty.

I’ve taken you there before, said Nicholas on the phone. The restaurant that’s only big enough for one person. And his brother was already present, in the Italian grotto facing the cupola of the Greek Orthodox church in Moscow Road. Keith stayed outside for a moment and looked through the bloated glass—Nicholas, the single seated customer, at the central table, and doubtfully frowning over the page, with his drink, his olives. There was a time in Keith’s childhood when Nicholas was absolutely everything—he filled the sky like a Saturn; and he still looked godlike (Keith thought), with his solid height, his determined face and his thick and longish dirty-blond hair; and with the aspect of someone who, apart from everything else, knew all about Sumerian pottery and Etruscan sculpture. He looked like what he would soon become—the foreign correspondent.

“My dear Little Keith. Yes. So sweet …”

Then there was the usual hugging and kissing, which often went on long enough to draw stares, because there was of course no reason on earth why they should look like brothers—the two Lawrences, T. E. and D. H… Keith took his seat; he naturally intended to tell Nicholas everything, everything, as promised, as always—every bra-clip and zip-notch. Keith took his seat. And he had a one-second warning before he picked up a paper napkin and sneezed. He said (as only a brother would),

“Christ. Look at that. I came halfway by Tube. Two stops. And look at that. Black snot.”

“That’s London. Black snot,” said Nicholas. “Welcome back. Listen. I was thinking—let’s leave the Violet stuff for a bit later. Do you mind? I want your Decameron. Only there’s …”

He meant the distraction of the tall young couple in the middle of the room—the young man and the young woman, whom Keith had slipped past or between on his approach. The restaurant, no bigger than the pool hut, with its four or five tables, seemed stalled or immobilised by the couple in the middle of the room. Giving a smile of irritation, Nicholas said quietly,

“Why don’t they go away or, failing that, why don’t they sit down? … Hearing about you and girls reminds me of reading Peyton Place when I was twelve. Or Harold Robbins. How long will you need?”

“Oh about an hour,” he said. “It’s terribly good.”

“And you got away with it.”

“I got away with it. Christ. I’d given up hope and then all my birthdays came at once. See, she was the—”

“Wait.” He meant the young couple. “… Well let’s get my side of it out of the way. Oh yeah.” And Nicholas said stoically, “The Dog made a pass at me last night. And no sign of your Kenrik.”

“He’s back. We talked.” And Kenrik, who was very dishonest but utterly undevious (a combination that would not serve him well), merely reiterated, on the phone, that he couldn’t remember. Keith was happy to leave it at that—though he remembered Lily’s light-footedness as she came across the lawn and kissed Kenrik on the lips … But the disquiet Keith felt was not connected to Kenrik or Lily. It was new. He had the sense that he would soon be pushing on a door, pushing on a door that wouldn’t open. He sat up and said, “Kenrik did fuck the Dog, of course.”

“Of course.”

“In the tent on the very first night. And now at last we know why you mustn’t. What kind of pass?”

“Oh. Oh, she just rammed her hand up my skirt, so to speak, and said, Come on darling, you know you love it.”

“She’s a bloke, the Dog. And you made your excuses.”

“Of course I made my excuses. I’m not going to fuck the Dog.” He looked out (the young couple) and said, “Nothing’s changed really. Still very happy with Jean. I’m a bit more famous now. I’ve decided I’m perfect for television.”

“How’s that?”

“Very well informed. Handsomer than any man has the right to be. And more left-wing than ever, by the way. Even more committed to putting the berks in the saddle.”

“Rule by berks.”

“Berk rule. I live for that day. Jean and I live for that day.”

“You’re interested in the wrong revolution, mate,” said Keith. “Mine’s the one that makes the world go round.”

“So you keep saying. Christ.”

He meant the young man and the young woman. Who must now be described, because they wouldn’t sit down and they wouldn’t go away. Like Nicholas, they were in their early-middle twenties: the man tall and long-haired and wearing a waisted black velvet suit, the woman tall and long-haired and wearing a waisted black velvet gown. They were unignorably tiptoeing and signalling and pointing and whispering, with their seating-plan and their questions for the solitary waiter. An evolved air was what they disseminated, and conscious gracefulness, and something of the lambent light of the fairy tale. Their shapely faces were of similar cast and you might have taken them for brother and sister if it wasn’t for the way they touched, with long and lingering fingers … The tiny restaurant knew it was being found wanting, and the expression it wore was increasingly strained.

“Here they come.”

Here they came, here they were. Stylishly they both sank to their haunches and gazed up at Nicholas and Keith, the woman with her second-best smile, the man—the man seeming to pout through the fine strands of his fringe. The crouch, the smile, the fringe, the pout: these had clearly enjoyed many successes in the matter of bending others to their will.

After a flirtatious pause the young man said, “You’re going to hate us for this.”

And Nicholas said, “We hate you already.”

She was in disgrace, see—Gloria. She’d made a spectacle of herself at this lunch at the sex tycoon’s.” Keith itemised Gloria’s trespasses. “But when she came she seemed incredibly prim. You know—Edinburgh. Old-fashioned. And not topless, like the others. These Victorian swimsuits. She told me later she’d made her mother bring them down from Scotland. Severe little thing with short black hair and an absolutely stupendous arse. Like you’d see on a billboard just before Valentine’s Day …”

The foster-brothers, quite good-naturedly in the end, had obliged the tall young couple, and moved to a corner table—where they took delivery, five minutes later, of a terrified bottle of Valpolicella. So Keith was drinking a bit of that, and eating olives, and smoking (and Nicholas was of course smoking). And talking. But he was also experiencing a difficulty he did not understand. It was something like a liver attack—a thick presence had rigged itself up in the air above them. Keith could look at it, this presence. Keith could even look at himself. Keith saw Keith, sipping, gesturing, urging his narrative forward—the tight red cords, the young men of Ofanto, the bee sting by the pool, and then he was saying,

“I thought I was alone. With the castle all to myself. And I got out of bed and I … I got out of bed and I … She was in the bathroom.”

What was it? He felt he had a bolt or a plug of hard air in his chest. He gulped, and gulped again.

“Gloria was in the bathroom. Holding up this light-blue dress. And she turned … But she was sick, see, Gloria. Reaction to the bee sting. That’s what the doctor said. She turned and walked. And she wasn’t wearing anything except her shoes. Amazing sight.”

“Could you see it?”

“Her arse?”

“Well I’m assuming you could see her arse. The bee sting.”

“Oh. No. I think it must have been quite far in. No. No, the real saga of the summer was something else. Me having my cock teased off,” he said, “by Scheherazade.”

And he told Nicholas about that, the glimpses of Scheherazade in T-shirt and ball gown, and about Lily giving her the cool pants, and about Dracula, and about the time he apparently fucked it all up by shitting on God—and he also managed to enliven things a bit, he thought, with some stuff on Kenrik and the Dog, and on the Dog and Adriano, and, oh yeah, on why you mustn’t fuck the Dog.

“That’s all?” said Nicholas, and glanced at his watch. “I don’t understand. Forgive me, but what was it you got away with?”

Keith leant forward with sharp interest and heard Keith say, “I was leading up to that. There was another chick there all along—little Dodo.”

Two cups of coffee and two torched sambucas were now brought to their table. The conversation had already turned to Violet, and Keith was no longer feeling very frightened. There was no longer a screen, like a gossamer washing line, between himself and his brother, between himself and the foreign correspondent. There was no longer a plug of air in his chest. Nicholas absented himself, and Keith stared into the twinned flames of the glasses: one fire for each eye. Across the way, the young man and the young woman, entwined in one another’s limbs, presided over a party of ten …

One day in Italy Keith read about an alternative version of the myth of Narcissus. The variant set out to de-homosexualise the story, but introduced (as if in recompense) an alternative taboo: Narcissus had a twin sister, an identica, who died very young. When he leant over the untainted pool it was Narcissa whom he saw in the water. And it was thirst, and not self-love, that killed the glassy boy; he wouldn’t drink, he wouldn’t disturb that rapt reflection …

Keith now ran a check on his own reality. The person in the alcove with the telephone was his foster-brother. The book on the floor was about someone called Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The waiter was fat. The young woman was kissing the young man, or the young man was kissing the young woman, and what was it like, when the other was the same, and you kissed yourself?

“Well let’s see if we can draw things together.” He regularly did this, Nicholas: he drew things together. “It’s in the air that girls should act like boys. Now. There are some girls who try to act like boys. But they’re old-school in their hearts. Your Pansy. Scheherazade perhaps. And there are girls who just—who just feel their way forward. Jean. Lily. And then there are girls who act more like boys than boys do. Molly Sims. And of course Rita. And—Violet.”

“Yeah but … The other girls are aware of a kind of wave. And Violet’s not a part of anything.”

“Unless it’s the wave of the healthy young girls. Violet marches with the healthy young girls.”

Keith said, “She probably got that out of a magazine at the hairdresser’s. Jesus, can she still read? Agony column. You know.”

“Yeah. Dear Daphne. I’m seventeen, and I’ve had ninety-two boyfriends. Is this normal?”

“Yeah. Dear Violet. Don’t worry. That’s normal.”

“Mm. It would’ve had to go something like, A lively sexual appetite is normal. After all, you’re a healthy young girl.”

“You can see her staring at it. And feeling incredibly relieved. There it is in print.”

“It’s in print. It’s official. She’s a healthy young girl,” said Nicholas. “That’s all.”

“Is she just extreme? Or is she sui generis?”

“Sui generis? You mean nuts.”

“Well she’s not nuts, is she. She’s a lush, and a dyslexic, but she’s not nuts when it comes to anything else. Still. The fact remains that Vi rapes fruits and dates football teams.”

“She acts like a boy. Nature without nurture. Like Caliban. Like a Yahoo.”

Keith said, “She acts like a very bad boy. And it’s not in her interests. We’ve got to make her act more like a girl. And how do we do that? We can’t. She’s uncontrollable. We’d have to—we’d have to be the police.”

“The secret police. Like the Cheka or the Stasi. With informers. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Men with whips on street corners.”

“We’d have to do nothing else. Is that what you’re going to do? Do nothing else? Listen,” said Keith. “I’ve decided what I’m going to do about Violet.” I’m going to stop loving her, Nicholas. Because then it won’t hurt. “Look, I’ll muck in with my share, but I’m backing off. Emotionally. Don’t get angry.”

“I’m not. And I won’t say it’s because she isn’t your blood. Because I know for a fact that you love her more than I do.”

Keith sat there. Nicholas said,

“It won’t work. What do you think you’re going to do? You’re just going to watch. Unemotionally. While Vi gets fucked to death.”

“… I’m not even going to watch. If I can help it. I’m not as brave as you are. I’m going to close my eyes. I’m going to withdraw.”

“What?”

“I’m going to withdraw.”

And Nicholas said, “Where to?”

There was a minute’s silence. Then Nicholas looked at the time and said,

“Give it some more thought. Anyway. I haven’t asked. How’s that Lily?”

“Oh. Lily. The trial reunion was a mistake. Italy was a mistake.” He looked around. The fishing nets tacked to the walls, the thatched Chianti bottles, the fat waiter with the outlandish pepper-grinder (the size of a supergalactic telescope), the framed photographs—churches, hunting scenes. “I wouldn’t have missed it, not for the world. But Italy was a mistake. In the end. Anyway Lily dumped me. On the plane.”

“My dear …”

“She said I’d changed. And she upped and dumped me on the plane. Don’t worry—I’m relieved. I’m delighted. I’m free.”

“Lily will always love her Keith.”

“I don’t want love. No, I do. But I want hysterical sex.”

“As with Dodo.”

“Forget Dodo … Why’re you frowning like that? Listen, Nicholas, do I look any different?”

“Well you’re lovely and brown …”

“My eyes.” Keith felt himself tauten. Conchita, Lily, Gloria herself: Look at him, with his new eyes. And what about the eyes of Gloria Beautyman? Her ulterior eyes: from L., lit. “further, more distant.” Gloria’s ulterior eyes. “Has anything happened to them, my eyes?”

“They look—very clean. Against the tan. I don’t know, slightly more protuberant. Now you mention it.”

“Christ. More protuberant. You mean like a fucking stick insect?”

“Well they’re not actually on stalks, your eyes. It’s probably just because the whites are brighter. So no more Lily. Now a cleansing beer, and then …”

Nicholas drank his beer, called for the bill, queried it, paid it, and left. Keith sat on.

Some wine remained in the second bottle, and he poured himself a little of that. He leant forward, with his brow cupped in a cold hand. He supposed he was very tired …

The story about Gloria, the Beautyman myth, it just collapsed in his head, like a mocking kingdom made by sleep, and now all he had was its echo, a reverberating pang in the core of his mind.

Across the way, the table of ten, like a single creature, got to its feet. Out they all processed, in three pairs and a quartet. The waiter, in his tormented waistcoat, stood nodding and bowing at the door. Last to leave was the tall couple, the twins, in their ebony velvet.

Narcissus’s sister. That version was not only incestuous—it was literalistic, and sentimental. The older story was the one that hurt and connected. Was he, was Keith, guilty of the disgusting vice of self-love? Well, he loved the rose of youth in himself, such as it was. That was forgivable. On the other hand, a surface, something of two dimensions, had transfixed him—not his own shape in the mirror but the shape that loomed at his side. Oh, I love me. Through her, for a day, he had loved himself, which he had never done before. Because there he was in the mirror too, standing behind her. The reflection—and also the echo: Oh I love me so …

With his broad back turned and a fat little fist on his hip, the waiter was staring at the abandoned tablecloth, which stared back up at him, soiled and conscience-stricken, now, with dozens, scores, of dirty glasses, with cigarettes crushed out in coffee saucers, with wrinkled napkins dropped in half-eaten ice creams … The waiter shook his head, sat down hard, and unbuttoned his vest. Then all fell still.

Gloria was sui generis, probably, no, come on, she was: not just a cock but a religious cock—and a religious cock with an exorbitant secret. Now Keith, too, had a secret, also unrevealable. Could this be called trauma? A trauma was a secret you kept from yourself. And Gloria knew her secret; and he knew his … She had taught him much, he believed, about the place of sensibility in this new world. She had promoted him, he believed, in the chain of being. He was a laureate, he believed, a valedictorian, of the academy of Gloria Beautyman; and he was now poised to pass on her teachings to the young women of a grateful capital. I’m free, he thought.

The waiter’s shadow told him that it was time to leave. I’m very tired, he said to himself. Italy, the castle, the summer months, and the events of that same morning (the church bells, the black gloves, the bared teeth, the Ich) seemed inconceivably distant, like childhood. Or like the time still earlier than childhood—infancy, babyhood. Or like 1948, when he wasn’t even born.

But now Keith Nearing had freedom.

And so it was that he went out among the young women of London. Over the coming days, weeks, months, years, he went out into London, the streets, the lecture halls, the offices, the pubs, the caffs, the gatherings, under its roofs and chimneys. Under the urban trolls of the trees, under the city skies. And it was the strangest thing.

He went out among the young women of London. And it was the strangest thing. Each and every one of them hated him already.