The Pregnant Widow Read Online Free PDF

with his peculiar provenance. He fell in love with girls so easily—and he went on loving them. He still loved Maureen: he thought of her every day. He still loved Pansy. Is that why I’m here? he wondered. Is that why I’m here with Lily in the castle in Campania? Because of the tragicnight with Pansy, what it said, what it meant? Keith closed his eyes and searched for troubled dreams.
    The dogs in the valley barked. And the dogs in the village, not to be outdone, barked back.
    Just before dawn he went up and smoked a cigarette on the watchtower. The day was coming in like a current. And there it was suddenly, over the flank of the massif, God’s red rooster.

3
POSSIBILITY
    We are trapped by the truth, and the truth was that it all built
very slowly …
    “There’s one boring thing,” Scheherazade said on the first afternoon as she led him up the tower.
    But it wasn’t boring yet. For some fifteenth-century reason, the steps were bracingly steep, and on the half-landings, when she swivelled, Keith could see up her skirt.
    “What’s that?”
    “I’ll show you when we get to the top. We’ve got a while to go. It’s endless.”
    High-mindedly, Keith averted his gaze. Then he looked. Then he looked away (and beheld, through the slit in the stone wall, a pale horse with its flanks shuddering). He looked, and looked away—until, with an audible click of the neck, he locked into position and went ahead and
looked
. How was it that he had never taken due note of this—the beauty, power, wisdom, and justice of women’s thighs?
    Scheherazade said over her shoulder, “Are you a great seer of sights?”
    “I’m on for anything.”
    “What, mad keen?”
    He already seemed to be in a film—a salacious thriller, perhaps—in which every line of intersexual dialogue was an irresistibly smutty pun. They kept climbing. Now he searched for a single entendre. “Keen enough. I’ve got all this reading to do,” he said. “Catching up.
Clarissa. Tom Jones.”
    “Poor you.”
    For the record, Scheherazade’s lower undergarment was workaday and pale brown (rather like the kind of pants Lily used to wear—before). As against that, its hem was loosely neglectful of the right buttock, providing a slice of white in the crux of all that churning bronze. She said,
    “There’s talk of the Passo del Diavolo.”
    “What’s that?”
    “The Devil’s Pass. Very twisty and scary. So I’m told. Right. Now you two are in this turret. And I’m in that turret.” She gestured on down the passage. “And we share the bathroom in between. That’s the boring thing.”
    “… Why’s it boring?”
    “Lily refuses to share a bathroom with me. We’ve tried it. I’m just too messy. So she’ll have to go halfway down the tower and turn right. But I don’t see why
you
should. Unless you’ve got a thing about messiness too.”
    “I haven’t got a thing about messiness.”
    “Look.”
    The skylit bathroom was long and narrow and L-shaped, its left-hand turn presided over by a burnished towel rack and two wall-sized mirrors. They moved through it. Scheherazade said,
    “We share. So here’s the drill. When you come in from your room, you lock the door to my room. And when you leave you unlock it. And I do the same … This is me. God I’m a slob.”
    He took it in, the white nightdress aslant the tousled bed, the heaps of shoes, the pair of starched jeans, trampled out of, all agape, but still on its knees and still cupping the form of her waist and hips.
    “It always staggers me,” he said. “Girls’ shoes. Girls and shoes. So many. Lily’s brought a whole suitcaseful. Why are girls like that about shoes?”
    “Mm, well, I suppose the feet are the only bit of you that can’t possibly be pretty.”
    “You think that’s it?”
    They looked down at the ingenuous occupants of Scheherazade’s flip-flops: the curve of the insteps, the visible flex of the ligaments, the ten daubs of crimson in five different sizes. He always