With Bosco gone Cale considered what he felt. Alarm and delight in equal measure. Delight at the shock of seeing Vague Henri, alarm at the depth of that delight. His anger at Arbell Materazzi had swamped the dreadful loneliness that her absence caused him. But it had also hidden the loss he felt for his friend. Until that moment he had believed that he could take or leave Vague Henri though he’d got used to having him around. Now he was alarmed at the realization at how much he’d missed him. The excitement at the idea of his return was unbearable. He was a soul made out of great dams connected by great canals and constructed with great locks. But there’s nothing built that doesn’t leach or seep.
And what had happened to Kleist? Dead probably, he thought.
11
But Kleist was about as far from death as it’s possible for a human being to be.
‘Do you think,’ said a naked Daisy, sitting astride Kleist and leaning back on his knees, ‘that sexual intercourse with me is better than heaven?’
Kleist considered her breasts carefully. Why, he wondered, were they so wonderful? Even his short enough time in Memphis and his previous lack of experience of pleasure had made it clear you could get tired of anything if you got used to having it often enough: lemon curd, chess, tormenting Koolhaus, having nothing to do, too much sun or wine. But naked women? This was something he’d never get used to. His sense of amazement at women’s bodies had certainly changed: he was more familiar with them but it was like eating and being satisfied – a few hours later and you were as hungry as the first time you were ever hungry. But why wouldn’t you get used to it?
Lying back he pretended to close his eyes so that she would not realize he was looking at her so closely. It was not that she minded his intense scrutiny of her but that he himself felt something shameful about the intensity of his fascination. Because she was leaning back and kneeling astride him her thighs were tensed slightly, stretched over the bone and revealing the powerful muscles. They were not like the long and slender legs of the Materazzi girls he’d been able to glimpse as they insolently strode into a great ball sometimes with dresses slashed to the upper thigh revealing that elegant smoothness you could never be allowed to possess. If the harlots in Kitty Town were less coltishly refined and more various in size and shape, plump Mukie girls, the tiny but cheerful Gascons with enormous brown eyes, still none of them had the great muscularity of Daisy’s thighs, oddly out of proportion to the rest of her, like those of an unusually strong young man. And then the hair and folded skin between her legs, the source of so much wonder and astonishment. Unimaginable until a few months ago except that he had assumed that the inhabitants of the mythical Devil’s Playground would have had something familiar like a pair of balls and a cock but more pointy and ferocious befitting something so infernal. The reality of something so hidden and so soft still made him catch his breath with shame and joy. What an idea? What a thing? Then her belly with just a barely perceptible belt of fat. Then the roundness of the breasts and the harder brown and pink, the strong neck, the wide lips tinged with that waxy red stuff that she almost always liked to wear. Then the happy, smiling eyes and the long hair.
‘Do you notice anything different about me?’ she said. ‘If you’ve finished gawping.’
He opened his eyes fully.
‘You don’t like me to look at you?’
‘I love it. But you don’t have to hide.’
‘I wasn’t hiding,’ he said, irritable and ashamed.
‘Don’t be angry. You can look at me any time you like. Anyway you haven’t answered my question. Well?’
Obviously there was something that he ought to have seen but hadn’t.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, after looking her up and down. ‘Tell me.’
‘You’ve no idea?’
He noticed that her tone and expression had changed. She was not annoyed with him for having failed to appreciate a braiding in her hair or a more elaborately decorated middle fingernail. She was naked after all. What could possibly be different?
‘I’m pregnant.’
He stared at her as if he didn’t understand. Which in fact he didn’t.
‘I don’t know what that means.’ She stared back at him in equal bewilderment; this was going to be more difficult or at least much stranger than she had thought.
‘I’m going to have a baby.’
Although his expression changed to one of astonishment, it didn’t seem to Daisy to suggest any greater understanding.
‘But how?’ he said, appalled.
‘What do you mean?’
‘How can you be having a baby?’
‘You don’t know how babies are made?’
‘No.’
‘They didn’t tell you at that Sanctuary of yours?’
‘I never even saw a woman until this year. No. No I don’t know anything. What are you talking about?’
‘You didn’t think to ask?’
‘About babies? Why would I?’
‘How did you think they got here?’
‘I don’t know. Why would I think anything about babies?’
‘I don’t believe this.’
‘Why would I lie to you?’
She looked at him, bewildered and bothered.
‘No, I don’t mean you’re lying. I just can’t believe you had no idea about ...’
‘Well, I don’t.’
They looked at each other, Kleist white with horror, Daisy pale with confusion. There was a brief silence.
‘So tell me why you’re having a baby,’ he said.
‘Because of you.’
‘Me? I don’t know anything about babies.’
‘You gave me a baby.’
‘How could I?’
She realized slowly just how unfathomably deep his ignorance was. She sat down, lost.
‘When your penis is inside me and you have the conniptions. That’s how you make babies.’
‘My God! Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t know you didn’t know.’
‘I don’t know anything.’
This was not an unreasonable claim. Before he went to Memphis he knew nothing much except about religion, which he hated and feared, and killing, which he was good at but also feared because he feared to be killed back. In Memphis knowledge about all sorts of things had been poured over him and like the great dry sponge of ignorance he was he had soaked up enormous quantities of stuff. Sadly he had yet to put it all in order and make the kinds of connections which even a very stupid fifteen- or sixteen-year-old might have made long before. In some respects he wasn’t much more than a baby himself.
‘What are we going to do?’ he said hopelessly.
‘You’ve already done it,’ she replied, unfair and bad-tempered.
‘You knew about this. It’s your fault.’
‘Mine?’
‘Yes. Your father will kill me.’
‘No, he won’t.’
‘Thank God. Are you sure?’
‘Only,’ she said, ‘if you don’t marry me.’
‘Marry you?’
‘Now you’re going to pretend you’ve never heard of marriage.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘It’s no more ridiculous than not knowing how babies get made.’
This was too much to hear.
‘People get married in front of you. They talk about it. Nobody ever talked about babies and how to get them.’
‘Well,’ she said, miserably, ‘now you know.’
Daisy’s father was neither as pleased as she expected nor as murderously angry as Kleist feared. Her father was well disposed towards him because he had saved both his daughter’s life, probably true, and her honour, definitely not true. But this had happened elsewhere and they only had Daisy’s word that her description of events concerning her rescue was to be relied on. But even if they had taken her account of his physical courage and martial skill at face value the problem was that the Klephts did not particularly value these qualities. As a result, beyond their willingness to accept a stranger who had done a great kindness to one of their own, he had no significant status among the Klephts. Daisy was the daughter of a man of considerable wealth and importance based upon a talent for theft much admired even amongst a people whose name was a byword for larceny. Kleist’s offer, set on by Daisy, to be involved in Klepht raids after the revelations about the pregnancy only added to the problem. It was made so lightly and with such a clear belief that stealing on the scale practised by the Klephts was obviously not difficult that he caused offence, especially among those who had been sympathetic to his situation until his enforced clumsy proposal. This so undermined his request for permission to marry Daisy that she accused him of doing it deliberately. He had now offended everyone but especially the girl he now realized that he loved very much. Once over his astonishment at the means and fact of becoming a father, he became astonished all over again at how wonderful an idea it seemed. Babies as far as he could see from those around him were lovely and beautiful and, mostly, happy. Given that they were whisked away as babies usually are when they became a noisy nuisance and that he merely observed them at their best through a thick veil of total ignorance, his optimism was, perhaps, forgivable, however unjustified. But there were also many buried feelings growing in the depths of his tough young soul. Fatherhood, an unthought-of impossibility, now seemed like a wonderful adventure. However, his clumsiness concerning the offer to accompany the Klephts on one of their raids seemed to have tied the feet of his own happiness. Something drastic was called for. First he offered everything he owned to Daisy’s father, namely everything he had looted from Memphis and then stolen back from Lord Dunbar’s gang. This managed to please him and to mollify Daisy. Next he proposed a demonstration of just how very useful his brutally won skills as an archer could be and in such a way that did not imply any disrespect for the Klephts’ talents as thieves. Listening to the Klephts boasting about their almost, so they claimed, invariably successful raids it nevertheless became clear that their reluctance to stand and fight led them to pursue a dangerously simple policy once they’d deprived their neighbours of horses, cattle, preserved fruit and meat, cases of wine, chairs, money, sheep, goats, pigs, ornaments and anything else that could be driven or carried. The principle they always obeyed was simply to leg it out of wherever they were to the safety of the mountains as quickly as possible. The outright refusal of any Klepht to take a risk greater than any other Klepht and their general lack of enthusiasm for combat meant that no provisions were made for fighting rearguard actions or creating mobile defensive positions which could be used to slow pursuers no matter how determined.