The Pregnant Widow Read Online Free PDF Page A

social realism. The only novel she unreservedly praised was
Middlemarch
. Because Lily was a creature of the middleworld.
    Come with me to a castle in Italy with Scheherazade
. It should be said that the Scheherazade section of Lily’s proposal, so far as Keith was concerned, was neither here nor there. Scheherazade, when he last saw her, around Christmas, was as usual the frowning philanthropist in flatties and spectacles; she did community service, and CND and VSO, and drove a van for Meals on Wheels; and she had a loose-limbed boyfriend called Timmy, who liked killing animals and playing the cello and going to church. But then Scheherazade awoke from troubled dreams.
    Keith was assuming that social realism would hold, here in Italy. And yet Italy itself seemed partly fabulous, and the citadel they occupied seemed partly fabulous, and the transformation of Scheherazade seemed partly fabulous. Where was social realism? The upper classes themselves, he kept thinking, were not social realists. Their modus operandi, their way of operating, obeyed looser rules. He was, ominously, a K in a castle. But he was still assuming that social realism would hold.
    D oes she still do all that stuff with the old wrecks?”
    “… Yes, she does. She misses it.”
    “Where’s her bloke, anyway? Where’s ‘Timmy’? And when’s he coming?”
    “That’s what
she
wants to know. She’s quite cross with him. He’s supposed to be here by now. He’s in Jerusalem doing God knows what.”
    “… Her mum’s the one I fancy. Oona. Nice and little.” He thought about Pansy. And thinking about Pansy necessarily involved him in thinking about her mentor, Rita. So he said, “Uh, Lily. You know I said Kenrik may be coming down this way. He’s going camping with the Dog. Sardinia, supposedly.”
    “What’s the Dog’s real name? Is it Rita? … Describe.”
    “Well. From up north. Rich working-class. Very big eyes. Very wide mouth. A redhead. And no curves at all. Like a pencil. Could we put them up for a night, Kenrik and Rita?”
    “I’ll ask Scheherazade. And I’m sure we can make room,” she said, yawning, “for a nice titless ginge from up north. I’ll look forward to it.”
    “You’ll marvel at her. She’s a real expert at acting like a boy.”
    Lily turned on her side, making herself smaller, wholer, more complete and compressed. He always felt for her when she did this, and he followed the relays of her jolts and twitches, these tiny surprises on the way to oblivion. How could she find it, without embracing the irrational? … Lily sometimes liked to hear his voice as she trembled off, into the religion of sleep (he usually summarised the novels he was reading), so he moved up close, saying,
    “There’ll be enough novels later. Listen. The very first girl I ever kissed was taller than me. Probably just a few inches but it felt like about a yard. Maureen. We were at the seaside. I’d already kissed her in the bus shelter, sitting down, and I had no idea how we were going to kiss goodnight. But there was a drainage pipe on the ground by her caravan, and I stood on that. Nice kisses. No tongues or anything. We were too young for tongues. It’s important not to do things you’re too young for. Don’t you think?”
    “Scheherazade,” said Lily thickly. “Get her near a drainage pipe.” Then, more clearly, “How, how could you not be in love with her? You fall in love so easily and she’s … Goodnight. I sometimes wish …”
    “Goodnight.”
    “You. Such a slag for love.”
    When we wake up in the morning (he thought), it’s the first task that lies ahead of us: the separation of the true from the false. We have to dismiss, to erase the mocking kingdoms made by sleep. But at the close of the day it was the other way round, and we sought the untrue and the fictitious, sometimes snapping ourselves awake in our hunger for nonsensical connections.
    It was true what she said, or it used to be. Slag for love. To do