The Kind of Stuff They All Got Up To in 1978
“Keith,” said the machine. “Gloria. I am to be found in room six-one-three of the Heathrow Hilton until about nine fifteen. My flight’s delayed. Kiss.”
“Keith,” said the machine. “Gloria. There’s a perfectly decent little inn called the Queen’s Head on the road from Bristol to Bath. Wait there on Saturday afternoon. They have rooms. I asked. Kiss.”
“Keith,” says the machine. “Gloria. Where—”
He picks up.
“Where on earth have you been? Anyway. Tonight’s the Shakespeare ball. I can’t be Viola. They’ve assigned everybody one play per group. They’re scared everyone’ll come as Romeo or Juliet. And we got Othello.”
“So you’re Desdemona.”
“No. Priscilla bagged Desdemona,” she says (Priscilla is Huw’s elder sister). “So I had to go to the library and read the whole thing. Because you were off somewhere.”
“Sorry, I had to go and bail out Violet. Nicholas is in Tehran. Where they’re having a revolution.”
“Stick to the point.”
“Well it’s a bit thin on women, Othello. I suppose you’d better be Emilia. Mrs. Iago.”
“Why would I want to be that old boot? I settled on Bianca. You know—Cassio’s slag. I want to show you my outfit. I’ll be there about six forty. And I’ll have to keep the cab at the door. Bianca was an inspiration. So much the better if I look as though I’ve just been had. Six forty. I’ll be covered in rags and grease. And d’you know what? Othello was queer for Cassio. Kiss.”
Six forty came and went. This happened about every other time. Keith once drove to Coedpoeth in North Wales, where he checked into the Gamekeeper’s Arms, ate lunch alone, and drove back again. On the other hand, he once flew to Monaco and had a whole hour with her in a golfing ranch in Cap d’Antibes …
That night he is awoken at four in the morning. So Violet’s dead, he decides as he reaches for the phone.
“They’ve just served the kedgeree and the porridge. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’ve got my keys. Kiss.”
Twenty minutes later she says, “Who was that biddy who passed me on the stairs? Bloody hell, that wasn’t Alexis was it?”
“I asked her to wait in the spare room, but she wouldn’t have it. And she didn’t have time to put her make-up on.”
“Oh God. I suppose I’ll send her flowers … They’re all down there in the car. Funny-looking lot we are too … Probert in blackface, Priscilla in a silk chemise … and Huw unconscious in a ginger wig. And Bianca at the wheel. Does my grease still shine? … Huw? Roderigo … Oh, I told Othello and Desdemona I had to pick up Roderigo’s drugs … No more questions. Concentrate, Cassio. Listen to your slag.”
This sort of thing went on for over a year.
Since 1970, Nicholas Shackleton had had two changes of girlfriend. In 1973, Jean was replaced by Jane. In 1976, Jane was replaced by Joan. Your future looks limitless, Keith kept telling him: there’s still the possibility of a Jan or a June.
“Or a Jen,” said Nicholas, over a glass of Scotch in Keith’s kitchen. “Or a Jin. I know a Jin. She’s Korean.”
“But Jen or Jin would have to be very left-wing, like Jean and Jane and Joan.”
“More than that. Jen or Jan or June or Jin would have to be terrorists. You should get a terrorist. Gloria—you call her the Future, but she’s retrograde. Non-independent. Man-pleasing. God-fearing. You should get a nice terrorist. A feminist with a job who screams at you.”
“Gloria’s not a screamer. But she can be terrifying. Listen to this,” says Keith with a nod. “She weaned Huw off heroin by having him switch to methamphetamine. ‘That way,’ she says, ‘I get the sex weapon back.’ Meth’s not like heroin. Meth gives you a permanent towel rack.”
“She certainly thinks these things through.”
“And she won’t let him near her until he agrees to go to Germany. Three months in a dungeon. Forty thousand quid. Ninety per cent success rate … She’s weird, Gloria, but she’s absolutely standard on marriage and children. In a panic. Because she’s turned thirty.”
“Mm, the cusp of hell. I thought the sisters might’ve pushed that up a few years—say to thirty-three or thirty-four. But they’re all like that the minute they’re twenty-eight. Even the terrorists.”
“… She’s coming round at seven.”
“That’s all right,” says Nicholas (this has happened before). “I’ll go down the Shakespeare for half an hour.”
“No. Stay here. I’ll go down the Shakespeare for half an hour. With Gloria.”
“Oh. So. Not the usual.”
“I could be wrong. But I think the usual’s coming to an end.”
They talk on, about family matters, until they hear the keys in the door.
Nicholas says quietly, “I’ll slip off. You might get a going-away present. You never know.”
“Go to the restaurant that’s only big enough for one person. With your book. I’ll be paying tonight. You’ll have to hold my hand.”
“I hope you’re late. Don’t forget. She’s a surprising girl. The Future is surprising.”
Keith listens to their exchange in the entrance hall, which is full of comity, even gallantry, on both sides. Then she enters, with a smile he’s never seen before.
But his eyes were already going past her—and he saw the future plain enough. The inability to enter a bedroom without fear; fumbling, dreamlike, tramelled by strange impediments; and the deep weave, the deep stitch of self-doubt. Gloria, he wanted to say: Tell me your secret and whatever it is I’ll beg you to come and live with me. But he said nothing as she stepped towards him.
Nicholas of course is already there, with his book, and Keith comes in and drops his hat on the tablecloth.
“The Future’s fucking the dog.”
“Come on. She’s not that surprising.”
“Dog with a little dee. I mean in general. She’s making her move. Everything’s fixed. Huw’s sworn to go to Germany on the Bible. Jesus. I’m in shock. I’m also drunk. I had two huge glasses of vodka on my way out.”
“Vodka? You told me the last time you drank spirits was in Italy. After you fucked it all up with Scheherazade by shitting on God.”
“It’s true. But I was so scared. I’m so scared. And you know what? Gloria was happy. I’ve seen her cheerful before. But never happy.”
“A pretty sight.”
“Yes. And I told her so. You’d have been proud of me. I said, ‘I’m miserable, but it’s good to see you looking so happy and so young.’ And I got a kiss out of it too.”
“A sex kiss?”
“Sort of. For the record. And I felt her up. But that’s not how you do it with the Future.”
“How d’you do it?”
“I’m not telling you … Christ, I almost tried, but then I didn’t. Too demoralised. Oh yeah, and high-minded. I suppose I’ll have to go back to being high-minded. And to being a gimp in the boudoir. A high-minded gimp in the boudoir. Nice.”
“Call Alexis.”
“Call Alexis, and give myself a heart attack trying to finish. Call Iris. And give myself a heart attack trying to start.”
“That never happens to me—except, of course, when I’m unusually drunk.” Nicholas attends to the menu. “It’s no fun, all that. Cupping your hands over your shame. Or fighting to come. The trouble is, when that happens, they take it personally.”
“Mm. The only one I’m normal with is Lily.”
“And that’s what—an annual event? … Maybe you’re normal with Lily because she precedes your obsession with the Future. Wait. How did you get on with the two nutters from the Poetry Society?”
“I couldn’t raise it with them either.”
“But maybe there’s a simple explanation. They were two nutters from the Poetry Society. And John Cowper Powys?”
“… On the way here I thought, I’ll chuck my job and go back to being a poet. Which means going back to Joy and Patience. And John Cowper Powys. Christ, what is it, Nicholas? What went wrong with me and girls?”
“Mm. The other night I ran into your Neil Darlington. He’s delightful, isn’t he. Very drunk, of course. He said you should try and marry Gloria. ‘Enter the labyrinth.’”
“Typical Neil. He’s addicted to complication. The reason I’m normal with Lily is that there’s still some love. There’s no love with Gloria. No talk of love. No talk of like. In fifteen months the prettiest thing she’s ever said to me is ‘kiss.’”
“You say love frightens you. Well then. Settle for sex. Marry her.”
“She’d laugh in my face. I’m not rich enough. She curls her lip when she hears the word ‘salary.’ It has to be old money. Old money. What is old money?”
“It’s what you get when you did all your gouging and skanking a couple of centuries ago.”
“Huw’s lot were Catholic grandees. Mine were servants. And they weren’t even married. I’m shit.”
“… You know, I’ve only heard you talk like this once before. When they were teasing you at school. Before Mum put a stop to it. Think of Edmund in Lear. ‘Why brand they us With base?’ Remember, Little Keith. You’ve got more in you than a whole tribe of fops, Got ’tween asleep and wake.”
“… You’re a good brother to me.”
“Please don’t cry. You look eight years old again.”
“This time next week … this time next week, he’ll be pegged out on a cellar floor in Munich. Bind fast his corky arms. And I’ll be … Fuck Huw. Fuck Huw. I hope something very horrible happens to him before his wedding day.”
Raising his glass, Keith summons the gothic, the Grand Guignol.
And Nicholas says, “That’s the spirit. Now, gods, stand up for bastards.”
In September the two of them went to Essex to see Violet, who was shacked up with a comprehensively humourless ex-sailor in Shoeburyness. His name was Anthony—or, in Violet’s rendering, Amfony or Anfony. Nicholas, who had been there before, called him Unfunny (with the stress on the first syllable). Keith drove. He was hungover. He was drinking more. That week he had spent two lunchtimes in a Mayfair escort agency, with catalogues, with Who’s Whos of young women on his lap. He was looking for a certain face and a certain shape …
“So how long’s she been with Unfunny?”
“A whole three months. He’s a hero. You’ll see. A whole free mumfs in Unfunny’s arms.”
Scrawny, bearded, and bald, in a typhoon-proof rollneck sweater, and with eyes of Icelandic blue, Anthony lived in the cabin of a boat called The Little Lady. His sea-roving days were at an end, and he was permanently and grimly moored up a tributary of the Mersea River. The Little Lady was in fact no longer water-borne, but wedged porthole-deep in a great expanse, like a solid ocean, of riverine slime; you boarded her by means of a warped gangplank as twangy as the diving board at the castello. They had electricity (and a noisy generator), and the taps quite often worked.
Anthony no longer sought adventure on the high seas; but he could somehow manage Violet. How? Well, as an able-bodied swabbie of twenty years’ service, he was used to entrusting his life to a monster. He knew the contrary currents, the heaving swells. And he needed to. Because every morning Violet walked the plank and continued on into town, where she picked up men in pubs, returning in various stages of undress and incapacity in the early evening, to be bathed and fed.
There would be a surprise, or a reversal, but Violet was very good on the day her brothers came. Now let’s see—what do normal people do? The three siblings went to Clacton and had lunch at an Angus Steak House; they waved off Nicholas on the train to Cambridge (a Union debate about Cambodia); and Keith took Violet to the funfair. Then there was a hearty fish stew on The Little Lady, fondly prepared by Anthony. Who talked all evening about his years as a maritimer (all of them spent gutting fish in the hold of a North Sea trawler). The two men got through most of a bottle of rum, while Violet drank pop.
At eleven Keith readied himself to drunk-drive back to London. He gave thanks and farewells, started off down the gangplank, and, with a perceptible spring, as if helped on his way by the toe of a boot, leapt into the brown ocean of riverine slime … Which wasn’t so remarkable, perhaps—except that an hour later, after Violet, with buckets and towels, had stripped him and sluiced him and somehow reassembled him, he went out and did it again.
Hooked out by Anthony for a second time, Keith sits reeking in the tiny galley while Violet refills the buckets.
“Vi, you must’ve done that once or twice by now.”
“Oh I lost count ages ago,” she says.
And attends to him, with patience, with humour, with infinite forgivingness. With sisterly love, in short. And it makes him think that if their roles were reversed then Violet would go all the way—that it would be possible, all your life, to do nothing else but lift someone out of the mire, clean them up, lift them out again, and clean them up again.
On October 15 Keith received an embossed invitation to Gloria’s wedding (he would not attend), and also received, that same morning, a phone call from a tearful Anthony (who couldn’t take it any more). Violet disappeared for a while, but she was back in London in time for Halloween.