Dead Babies (7 page)

"Glug glug glug," whispered Giles to himself, swirling the lime juice in its prefrosted beaker and holding it up to the light. "Glug glug glug glug glug."

Seen from outside his window Giles Coldstream might have been mistaken for a crazy scientist were it not for the amiable blandness of his face. The desk over which he was hunched was a fizzing, gargling laboratory of martini shakers, electric stirrers, corkscrews, siphons, ice buckets, glass coolers, lemon peelers, spoons.

Without taking his eyes from the misted beaker Giles reached out gropingly with his right hand until it settled on the lumpy green bottle of Gordon's gin, which he then unscrewed, upturned, and frowned at. "Ah. Empty," he said.

Giles sauntered the length of the room, opened the double doors of his vast teak drinks cupboard, selected a bottle of gin from the off-license-sized rank on the top shelf, and returned to his desk. Giles filled the tall beaker almost to the brim, adding, by way of an afterthought, scolding himself for his forgetfulness, a squirt of tonic. He sipped quizzically. "Delicious." Giles sipped again, more candidly this time, and ambled back to the bed. A creased Penguin of Iris Murdoch's
The Black Prince,
the tale of a sixty-year-old man's romance with a twenty-year-old girl, lay open on his pillow. He read a few more pages before disappointment at Miss Murdoch's continual shirking of the question of the protagonists' difference in teeth caused him to toss the book scathingly under his bed. "You can't 'suspend disbelief forever," he remarked. From the pile of hardbacks which
The Black Prince
joined—
Teeth, Oral Hygiene: The Facts, The History of the Denture, A Dentist's Day, The Tooth
—our good Giles selected one at random and sank with foreboding into the deep pillows.

Twenty pages later there was a firm rap on his bedroom door. "Giles?"

He peered woefully over his book. "Yes?" "Telephone." "Who is it, actually?" "Some old woman." "No. I meant outside the door. Who are
you?”

:
"Celia."

"Ah. Now Celia—couldn't you just sort of—"

"What? Look—" Celia fought with the handle. "—I can't—"

"Hang on." Giles swung his body off the bed and toddled over to the door, whose three bolts he threw back and which he opened a few millimeters.

When Giles saw Celia he screamed.

"Gosh, sorry about that," he said afterward. "I didn't really recognize you." Celia had a lardlike cream pack on her face and had brushed her hair out tangentially from her big square head. She looked like an anemic golliwog. "Look, um, uh . . ." Giles snapped his fingers weakly.

"Celia."

"Celia.
Look—Celia—it may be my mother. In fact, it is. Do you think you could very kindly tell her I'm ill?"

"No, I'm afraid I couldn't. I've already told her you're well."

"I
see.
Am I right in thinking you've got a telephone in your room? May I take it in there?"

Celia swiveled and after a moment's hesitation Giles followed her across the landing.

"What's happened to your telephone?"

"I cut the wire," said Giles, not without pride.

Celia preceded him into the room and pointed to the telephone on the windowseat. "Whatever for?" she asked.

"The sudden ringing gives me such a fright sometimes. I thought I might fall over one of these days and knock out . . ."

Giles was going to say "some teeth," but he fell silent, blank and becalmed in the doorway.

"Well, you'd better answer it now you're here."

"Oh! Thank you . . .
Celia."

Celia repaired to her dressing table. She took up the hairbrush with a roll of her eyes. "You stink of gin, you know."

"Do I?" asked Giles, faintly intrigued. "No, I didn't know that." Giles then gave Celia one of his smiles, which is to say he compressed and elongated his lips. "Hello? Mother? Oh, hello. This is Giles here. I'm very well, indeed, thank you

—awfully well. Ah, no, now, today
isn't
a good day, actually.

Oh, I've got lots of things I must do. Jolly busy indeed. And tomorrow, do you see, is Sunday, and one can't very well— If it were Saturday tomorrow then nothing would be simpler
than to ... Are you sure?" Giles muffled the receiver and looked up groggily at Celia. "Today wouldn't be Friday, would it? Oh, dear." He contemplated the telephone unhappily. "What? Yes, mother, you were right. Saturday it is then. Perfect. Well! I suppose I shall be along to see you then. Good-bye. And I love
you."

Giles stood up; he gazed out of the window for a few seconds. "Look. Here come Andy and your husband on their motorbike," he murmured. He turned to leave.

"What's the matter with your mother these days, anyway?"

"Only mad. Just mad. Mad as anything."

Back at his desk Giles quickly prepared, and
as
readily swallowed, a tall, refreshing glass of lime, tonic, ice, gin and tears.

So now everyone else is beginning to gather in the kitchen. Adorno, still loosening up after his exertions with Kash-drahr Khoja, lumbers hungrily round the room, jogging, ducking, feinting. Diana, dressed in a white vest-and-panty scants suit, smoking a gold-tipped menthol cigarette, watches him with mild distaste. Little Keith sits at the table; he has a profound, all-pervasive testicular stomach ache, for which he thanks the corduroy trousers that miraculously contain the lower half of his body; he sports also a beige fishnet Fred Perry which smells of old cars, and boots so high heeled that he was required to lower himself into them from a chair: when the opportunity presents itself, little Keith pays his undivided attention to Diana's breasts. Owing to her pains at the altar of her dressing table, the wide-boned face of Celia Villiers enjoys a sleek, vinyl radiance, as fortuitously does her body, roped in a complex of floral bands which splay at the waist into a leather-lined jungle skirt. She halfheartedly berates her husband for vanishing just when his friends were due to arrive. Quentin, for his part, argues that Andy was in no state to be left alone with the mischievous blackie—whom he had half killed as it was. "Relax," says Andy, shadow-boxing in the corner. "I only batted him around a bit—keeps

the boy in line." It's midday, exactly twelve o'clock. The sun

sends planks of light in through the ribbed kitchen window.

The battered '78 Chevrolet sweeps up the pebbled, semicircular approach and drifts dustily to a halt, sending a squirt
:
of gravel into the oblong rosebed five yards from the front door. An ironic hush falls as the three Americans detach themselves from the car. Stretching, and now straightening up, hands on hips, to assess the house, they turn to one another with squinting smiles until a sudden movement from the kitchen alerts them to the presence of their observers. Three faces grow shrewd.

Everyone except little Keith moved instinctively out into the hall.

"The weekend starts here," said Quentin.

X: Quentin

"The only remotely vexing thing about the aeroplane crash that killed my parents," the Honorable Quentin Villiers is fond of saying, "—the only thing about the news that didn't make one simply weep with joy—is that my brother Neville survived it. ... Apart from vacs I led a rather somber and enclosed childhood—Christ's Hospital, Winchester, The House —and I knew Neville only as the overweight and generally hopeless young man who paid biannual visits to the seat in order to bore and rob my parents—who anyway deserved no better, I don't think I need add. Happily, though, Neville is eighteen years my senior, a homosexual, and an alcoholic. I was mightily cheered to learn recently, too, that while holidaying in nubile Indonesia (he pretends to be an agronomist), Neville contracted an admirably tenacious strain of syphilis, fore and aft, a strain which frequent calls on a reputedly rather depressing venue far south of the river have done nothing whatever to arrest, let alone cure. I dine with him as often as I think anyone well could at White's where I note his deterioration with a potent joy. He suffers appallingly also from gout, of course—a great Villiers infirmity, gout, an attractive complaint on the whole, though one that I have so far been spared. His blood pressure is alarmingly high; his heart capricious; I hourly await news of his death." (At this point Quentin usually takes Celia's hand or glances at her silkily.) "I shall inherit, then, in the none too distant future. At least—thank God—Neville had the gumption to wrest my father's money from him a decade before his timely death. I don't imagine for a moment that my brother will see out
another decade, so these ghastly death duties are sure to be levied this time. The estate should nevertheless be enough to keep us in tolerable comfort for the rest of our lives, and a title still helps. I wonder if I shan't fight to reverse this pernicious ten-year ruling when I come to sit in the Lords. . . . But until then I shall continue to live, firstly, off my wife— who has some money of her own, thank heaven—and, secondly, off my own modest salary, which, as everyone here knows, I never tire of finding means to supplement. Cheers!"

Obviously Quentin was an adept at character stylization, a master of pastiche, a connoisseur of verbal self-dramatization —and he needed to be. Although affiliated with London University Quentin was the only member of the household who wasn't supposed to be taking a degree there. Instead, he ran— more or less singlehanded—the university newspaper, a satirico-politico-literary magazine called
Yes.
Acquiring the editorship had been a singularly painless business. Quentin went along to the interview carrying a portfolio of anonymous learned articles which he hadn't written, a stack of laboriously forged references, and a mawkish panegyric from the homosexual literary editor of a Sunday newspaper. He needn't have bothered: the reviews were never checked, the references never taken up. When Quentin walked into the board room, a silver Lycidas in a clinging white chamois suit, a sigh of longing was heaved in unison by the entire committee. While Quentin outlined his editorial plans the delegates could only gaze meltingly into his champagne eyes; when he finished, a languid exchange of nods and smiles took place and Quentin was offered thanks for his attendance. No further candidates were seen.

And Quentin's editorial work was a
jeu d'esprit, a
personal
tour de force.

To begin with he wrote most of the book reviews himself. He would allow a cooling-off period after publication, collate and synthesize the notices of rival journals, find the points on which they agreed, and rewrite them in the inimitable Yes style. Hence, the unanimous verdict that the prose of a novel was ornate and self-conscious would lead Quentin to write;

So-and-so's sentences read like a frenzied collage of George Eliot at her most sententious and James Joyce at his most abstruse.

:
And when drunk:

So-and-so's book reads like a drunken compositor's rendering of the maddened yelps of Henry James and Gertrude Stein locked in verbal
soixante-neuf.

Or, if a biographer were generally held to have been insensitive in the handling of his subject's private life, Quentin would remark:

So-and-so's dirty little fingers rifle through his subject's private life like a hick detective investigating a pimp's account book.

When stoned:

So-and-so cavorts through the dignified hideaway of his subject's private life with all the tact and discretion of a lobotomized orang-utan which has just sat on a hedgehog.

Or, if a literary critic were widely felt to have been over-generous to his chosen author, Quentin would note:

If so-and-so were anyone to go by, Shakespeare would be reduced to an imitator of McGonagall when compared to the writer on whom he so shamelessly fawns.

And on speed?

So-and-so's drooling idolatry of his author makes Tennyson's praise of Wellington look like a neck-scissors and body-slam followed by a forearm-smash.

And so on. The reviews, seldom more than a couple of hundred words, didn't claim to be definitive; but they were, as you see, "lively," together with being basically "sound." Quentin inserted formidable bylines, such as O. Seltnizt and D. R. S. M. Mainwairing, names that tended to correspond to numbered bank accounts here and abroad. On the rare occasions on which Quentin felt bound to commission reviews he would get Celia to type them out and return them with a printed slip reading: