Dead Babies by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page A

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