The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online

del Diavolo), and there were visitors. Like the current trio: the Dakotan divorcee, Prentiss; her quite recently adopted daughter, Conchita; and their friend and helpmate Dorothy, known as Dodo. It would not be seemly, I think, to give their vital statistics, but we can disclose the most vital statistic of all: Prentiss, Keith guessed, was “about fifty” (i.e., somewhere or other between forty and sixty), Conchita was twelve, and Dodo was twenty-seven. In addition, Prentiss was a Possible, Conchita was a Vision, and Dodo was a Dud. Little Conchita came from Guadalajara, Mexico, and wore clothes of mourning—for her father, Keith was told.
    Prentiss, who was waiting on the outcome of a will, her grandmother’s (on which their European tour partly depended), was tall and angular. Conchita was actually a bit on the tubby side (with a curvaceous pot belly). And Dodo, a trained nurse, was stunningly fat. Keith was dismayed by the size of Dodo’s head—by how small it was or seemed. Her head was almost an irrelevance, like a teacup on an iceberg. The visitors all slept up in Oona’s vast apartment.
    He was not a very typical twenty-year-old, Keith, but he was typical in this one regard: he thought that everyone was placidly static in their being—everyone except twenty-year-olds. But even he could tell that the lives of the three visitors were subject to drama and flux. There was of course the matter of Conchita’s bereavement. There was Prentiss’s legacy, and the resolution of various feuds and tensions with her parents, her many uncles and aunts, her three brothers and her six sisters. And there was even some suspense involving Dodo, whose corpulence, in tendency, was not deliquescent but all stretched and taut; her fleshhad the tensile quality of a stiffly inflated balloon. Would Dodo, during her stay, actually burst? Or just go on getting fatter and redder in the face? These were real questions.
    “If only the sun would come out,” said Scheherazade, as they ate breakfast in the kitchen. “Because seriously fat people adore swimming pools.”
    “Do they?” said Keith. “What for?”
    “Because they’re lighter by the weight of the water they displace.”
    “That’s a lot of water,” said Lily. “I can’t decide whether or not I want to see her in a swimsuit. Think of her poor knees.”
    There was a silence, spent in sympathy for Dodo’s knees. Then Keith said ponderously,
    “When I look at her, I feel I’m staring at the size of an unhappiness.”
    “Mm. Or d’you think it’s glands?”
    “It’s not glands,” said Lily, “it’s
food
. Did you see her last night with the goose? She had thirds.”
    “And Conchita tucked in too.”
    “It makes you think, though, doesn’t it. Dodo.”
    “Doesn’t it. It puts your own worries,” concluded Lily, “in some kind of proportion.”
    Servants served the castle, a team of them coming in every day from the village. Keith had never before been in the regular company of servants.
    Both his biological parents were of the servant class, his mother a maid, his father a gardener. Keith in any case had his leftist sympathies (very tame compared to those of the fiery Nicholas), so of course he had a kind of relationship with the castle servants, a relationship of nods and smiles and, surprisingly, bows (formal inclinations of the upper body), and a few words of Italian, especially with Madonna, who among other things made all the beds, and with Eugenio, number two with the roses and the lawns. They were both about twenty-five and were sometimes seen laughing when they were briefly alone together. And therefore Keith started to wonder if love would come to them, to the tender of beds and the tender of flowers. And Eugenio saw also to the terraces, and the growing of fruit.
    It was transparent, then, the style of his thinking. But by now he had read enough to know about the bitterness of servants, the helpless rage nursed by servants. And he hoped he hadn’t