Martin Amis - Dead Babies

sex until four.

How foreign this was to her compliant and shockable nature Celia never realized until Quentin swept into her life. She had had no clue but her money, and this existence was: launched and kept afloat by money, was described and identified by money, was all about what money could do.

Celia didn't know her stepmother was in town until she rang from the Connaught. Aramintha had flown in from Rome to finalize her divorce, having a month before surprised Giovanni in bed with the bellboy and screwed a broken Fanta bottle into his startled face. She was now going under the name of Lady Aramintha Gormez.

"Darling, come to lunch," were Lady Gormez's opening words, as if Celia had dined with her the night before. Celia said she would and replaced the telephone on the bedside table. She gazed at the wall of clothes in the fitted closet opposite, wondering what to wear and whether her stepmother had changed much in two years.

"I'm never going back to Rome. And it's Barces up your Arces too," said Lady Gormez, referring to her Barcelona penthouse. "I just can't stand those honking little dagos. Franz and I rather think Switzerland. I must say, darling," Lady Gormez told her grapefruit, "you have improved enormously." She looked up. "You're not as fat as you were. your skin's improved, and your hair is really, really quite lustrous. London life must suit you."

Celia turned away. She thought that she probably didn't want to see her stepmother again.

An oblique glimpse, then, at Celia's sex life.

The day before she met Quentin Celia threw a small soiree at her Cheyne Walk flat: two actresses (good friends of hers), a personable interior decorator, and the loutish, sidling bass guitarist of a successfully retrograde pop-group. And so Celia straightens clumsily from the cushions, declines a joint from the interior decorator, takes the bass guitarist's hand, and says, "Are you going to come to my room for a little while?"

Jeff gets up and stumbles after her.

It is clear that Celia is naked beneath her smock, so old Jeff simply folds her onto the bed, hitching the material up

with his own body. Their lips joggle scummily. Then, with sharply flexed elbows, Celia pressures Jeffs head down over her breasts, stomach, until it lodges between her thighs. This is where she likes his head best to be.

Two minutes pass.

Downstairs, the interior decorator starts like a cat that has heard a distant meow in the night. Jeff rocks down the stairs, rubbing his mouth with his jean jacket sleeve.

"Christ, man, what am I doing?" He stops in the middle of the room and clamps his face between his hands. "Why'd you let me do it, man, plating a girl like that. My head must be really. really scrambled."

"Wow, what went on, man?" asked an actress.

"Oh, fuck, I don't know. Here."

An actress holds up a brandy glass.

"Jesus. Let's get out."

"We can go to my place," said an actress.

"Right," said the interior decorator.

Rigid, legs still apart, The Mandarin sniffing at her thighs, Celia hears the door slam shut.

"You're spreading yourself too thin, lovey," said her stepfather when she gave him a minimally bowdlerized version of the incident the following morning. He was on the way to a heavy mistress on the Embankment and had called in for tequila and sympathy. "Perhaps you shouldn't be spread that far. Just a suggestion."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, if you leave a little bit of yourself with everyone, you might find one day that there isn't much left. See?"

Celia said, "Then you'd have been used up long ago."

He laughed painfully through his hangover. "No, don't misunderstand, lovey, I've always thought that fucking was a godsend for us oldsters and a bane for you youngsters who came up with the idea in the first place. Bloody marvelous! All these people suddenly willing to do it, and no guilt! That was the really new thing for us." He coughed horribly.

"Yes," said Celia.

"Well, our sexual natures were formed, so we could never suffer from anything worse than ennui. I think that's why we let you do this to yourselves. To liberate ms. But your lot, lovey, you free libbers. you thought you'd get free. You didn't get free." He picked up his cigarette case. "I must be

off. Suki awaits. Give my cordial regards to the old bitch should you tangle with her again while she's here. Who's she: with now — nine-year-old Indonesians? Ta-ta, lovey. Take care."

Celia had not been intending to score that afternoon but the moment she saw Quentin she knew that she would have to have him. As he danced down Beauchamp Place, the breeze playing cheekily with the soft curls of his hair, the traffic seemed to wind to a halt and the very air to trail motionless in the sky. If necessary, she thought, she would simply present him with a blank check, waiving her more subtle last-ditch measures — the bland preludial offer of a tape recorder or silk robe, the ten-pound notes fanned on the hall table.

Oh, let him not be queer, she beseeched, bundling her shopping into the Jaguar and leaning negligently on its silver haunches.

"Hello," she said as he cruised past. "Didn't we meet at the Ormondes'?"

He paused and smiled lightly. "I have met a great many people at the Ormondes'," he said, "but I believe that you are not among that select band."

"Oh, dear. What a shame," said Celia.

"Yes. Isn't it," said Quentin.

She had wanted to roar back to her flat and beach him straightaway. As it was, she was led into beguiling the most adventurous and sensual few hours of her life: he took her for a walk. They promenaded via Kensington Gardens, along the Serpentine, to Speakers' Corner, and back through the park. For Celia it was a sweet, cocaine afternoon; she floated by his side, strummed by the resonant ease of his voice and the spectral beauty of his presence. At six o'clock, Quentin refused the offer of an introduction to The Mandarin and a Bellini at her Cheyne Walk flat, kissed her transiently on the forehead, and arranged to meet her for luncheon the following day. At Thor's she drank heavily to tame her sexual excitement. Quentin divined that it would not be hard for him to take advantage of Celia. He did so. As soon as she had finished a second Green Chartreuse, Quentin took Celia straight out and married her.

"I do," said Celia.

"Look!" she cried. "Here's my friend The Mandarin."

Celia turned and smiled into her husband's green eyes. Those present looked up blearily. "Isn't she in a good mood I"

She did seem to be. The Mandarin came jumping in from the kitchen. It spun round. Its tail hairbrushed and its body went tense. It leapt hissing in the air. Its body flattened out like a hunter. It ran galvanically round the room, on sofas, chairs, walls. It cuffed a champagne cork along the carpet. It lay on its back and indolently feinted at the air. It chased its tail. It ground and flexed its claws on the skirting board. It went into a series of soft little springs. It nosed about the floor in impossible caution. Its eyes closed. It edged into the lap-like convexity of a cushion. It curled up and—

"It curled up and then we all like flashed that it was dead," Roxeanne explained.

Andy knelt over The Mandarin's body. He raised its kittenish head — the creased eyelids, the folded-back, lupine ears. When he let go it fell at once into its dead posture.

"It just freaked," said Marvell.

"Yeah."

Andy crossed the room and gripped Celia's trembling shoulder. Quentin, in whose arms her head was buried, looked up hushedly at his friend.

"It was very old," he said.

"Yeah."

Andy returned for the last time to The Mandarin's body. "I loved that cat," he said unsteadily. "I did."