The Pregnant Widow (50 page)

He was now in his study, finishing up … His trouble with Violet, the hard, hard work with Violet, rested on this. Keith was someone who had to make his family love him. And with Violet alone he suffered no disadvantage, no displacement. It wasn’t difficult to make her love him. There he always was, the small, beaked, fascinated face staring and smiling over the brow of her crib; and then, like a personal trainer, helping her crawl, walk, talk. And reading to her, and telling her stories, the parables, the miracles. You see, Vi, they only had five loaves of bread and two little fishes … It wasn’t difficult for her. And for him it was easy. It was love at first sight.

So he was there at the beginning and he was there at the end. But where was he in between? He was following his strategy, his strategy of withdrawal. And then he went and had it anyway, later, and worse—his breakdown or crack-up. And there never was the slightest chance that he could evade the strength and also the violence of those early feelings (“If anyone ever touches her …”). Which began when he looked down at her newborn body and saw an angel. That’s what he actually saw, in his hallucinatory state—smashed on love and protectiveness. So all right. He was there when it began and he was there when it ended.

We live half our lives in shock, he thought. And it’s the second half. A death comes; and the brain makes chemicals to get us past it. They numb you, and numbness is an identifiable kind of calm: a false one. All it can do, numbness, is postpone. Then the drugs wear off, and the voids, the little oblivions, come and get you anyway. Where does pain go when it goes? Somewhere else? Or into the well of your weakness? I’ll tell you: the latter. And it’s the deaths of others that kill you in the end.

Time to go in. Venus was rising over the dark well of the Heath. Keith Nearing, Conchita, Isabel, and Chloe (often accompanied by Silvia) had by now spent several Christmases in southern South America (where Conchita had in-laws and dozens of cousins); and he was going to ask Nicholas about his time with its tutelary spirit. For two days running, in 1980, Nicholas read to the great Borges. When they parted, the blind seer, the living Tiresias, offered him “a present,” and recited this quatrain, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

In Keith’s peculiar case, he registered positive to the first question, and a negative to the second. But he believed that Borges universally understood about Time: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river …”

Venus: when he looked at her with his glasses on, she seemed to be wearing eyelashes. The daughter of Jupiter and Dione, the goddess of love, in false eyelashes. Its gossamer wings—what a fly would look like if born and raised in Elysium … The poet Quevedo described the planet Venus:
lucero inobediente, ángel amotinado
. Defiant star. Rebel angel.

Who were these extremists and self-destroyers, these despiters, the people who couldn’t stand it another second in heaven? Yes go on, Kenrik, get caught after a long chase for driving five times over the limit at nine o’clock in the morning for the fourth time in three weeks (and serve a year in Wormwood Scrubs). Yes go on, Gloria, place yourself outside history, and live your twenties twice, and do it as a game, while in that way somehow making yourself invaluably dear to the memory. Yes go on, Violet, let the honeymoon last at least half a minute, and then run out over the fields, with no more thought in your head than a puppy, panting, heaving, running, flying, looking for someone you love.

He drew the blinds and shut everything down, and went in.

First I offer my enraptured thanks to the memory of Ted Hughes. His
Tales from Ovid
is one of the most thrilling books I have ever read. My debt to it goes well beyond the exquisite “Echo and Narcissus,” which I quote from and paraphrase throughout.

The “distinguished Marxist historian” is Eric Hobsbawm, and the quotes are from his seminal
Age of Extremes
. The details about Mussolini are from Denis Mack Smith’s brilliant and quietly and persistently comical biography. “Action is transitory—a step, a blow. / The motion of a muscle”: this is from Wordsworth’s
The Borderers
. “Love bade me welcome”: George Herbert. “Words at once true and kind”: this (and much else) is from Philip Larkin (“Talking in Bed”). “The economic basis of society”: Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron.” The “aphoristic psychologist” is Adam Phillips. “The means by which love would be communicated if there
were
any” is from Saul Bellow’s
More Die of Heartbreak;
the line about the fig leaf and the price tag is from
Humboldt’s Gift
. “Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms” is of course from Keats. “The Sick Rose” is by William Blake. “The storm rolls through me as your mouth opens” is the last line of Ian Hamilton’s “The Storm.”

I would also like to give my thanks to Jane Austen. Childless, like so many of the great feminists, she is nonetheless the mother, I believe, of “the line of sanity” that so characterises the English novel. To demonstrate this penetrating sanity of hers, I quote her last words. Dying of unalleviable cancer, she was asked “what she needed.” She said, “Nothing but death.” Or, to put it another way: Nothing but nothing. D. H. Lawrence, whose last words I have also quoted, was forty-four when he uttered them. Jane Austen was forty-one when she uttered hers.

Shakespeare, defying all rules and proprieties as usual, needs no
thanks from this writer. As Matthew Arnold said of him (meaning something very slightly different), “Others abide our question. Thou art free.”

And this still strikes me, almost daily, as a magical fact: the most plangent evocation of the time I lived through (I, and hundreds of millions of others) was written in 1610. Ariel’s song appears in that masque-like romance
The Tempest
, Shakespeare’s last play, and I quote the second verse yet again:

London, 2010