Ali Fathi sat on the other bed and pared his foot-soles with a table-knife honed to lethal sharpness on the window-sill. He was on the run from Alexandria, which he called Iskindiriyya, and was scornful of the Moors, whose language he considered debased. He himself spoke a sort of radio announcer's Arabic, full of assertive fishbone-in-the-throat noises and glottal checks that sounded like a disease. He was very thin, seemed to grow more and more teeth as time went on, and was always talking about food. "Beed madruub," he said to Enderby now. He had a passion for eggs. "Beeda masluugha." Enderby said, from his own bed:
"Mumtaaz." He was learning, though not very quickly. It was hardly worth while to learn anything new. Soon, he saw, he must give up giving money to Wahab to buy the English newspapers that were sold on the Boulevard Pasteur. They were a terrible price, and money was fast running out. When the hell was Rawcliffe going to come back to be killed? He read once more the latest Yod Crewsy news. It could not be long now, they reckoned. Yod Crewsy was in a coma. Day and night vigils of weeping fans outside the hospital. Stones hurled at windows of No. 10 Downing Street. Probability of National Day of Prayer. Mass of Intercession at Westminster Cathedral. In Trafalgar Square protest songs, some of them concerned with the Vietnam war. Attempted suttee of desperate girls in a Comprehensive School.
"Khanziir." That was not right, Ali Fathi being a Muslim, but Enderby himself would not have minded a nice plate of crisply grilled ham. His diet, and that of Ali Fathi and the other two men, Wahab and Souris, was very monotonous: soup of kitchen scraps and rice, boiled up by fat Napo in the snack-bar below, the odd platter of fried sardines, bread of the day before yesterday. Enderby was now sorry that he had exchanged his passport for a mere jolting trip from Marrakesh to Tangier. He had discovered that British passports fetched a very high price on the international market. Why, this Ali Fathi here had looked at Enderby as if he were mad when he had been told, in French, what small and uncomfortable (as well as to him hazardous) service in lieu of money Enderby had been willing to take in exchange for a valuable document. If he, Ali Fathi, had it he would not be here now. He would be in Marseilles, pretending to be an Arabic-speaking Englishman.
"Beed maghli." He was back on eggs again. Well, that valuable document, with its old identity razor-bladed and bleached out and new substituted, was now at its charitable work in the world of crime and shadiness. It was saving somebody from what was called justice. It could not, nor could its former guardian (Her Majesty's Government being the avowed owner, though it had not paid for it) ask better than that. Enderby nodded several times. Encouraged, Ali Fathi said:
"Bataatis mahammara." That meant, Enderby knew now, potato crisps. An inept term, soggy-sounding. It had been, Enderby admitted to himself, a boring trip on the move under the moon (courtesy of Miss treacherous bloody Boland), with Easy Walker reciting the collected works of Arthur Sugden, called Ricker Sugden because he had used, when composing his verses, to clash out the rhythm with the castanetting bones once a percussive staple of nigger, christy rather, minstral shows. Easy Walker had given Enderby not only a reprise of "The Song of the Dunnygasper" but also "The Ballad of Red Mick the Prancerprigger", "The Shotgun Wedding of Tom Dodge", "Willie Maugham's Visit to Port Butters", "My Pipe and Snout and Teasycan," and other specimens of the demotic literature of an apparently vigorous but certainly obscure British settlement.
"Kurumba." Some vegetable or other, that. Cabbage, probably. And then these American camps, off the main north-south motor route, with torches flashing through the Moorish dark, a rustling in the shadows and whispers as of love (money and goods changing hands), the loading-Enderby cajoled to help-of refrigerators, huge cans of butter, nitrited meatloaf, even military uniforms, all on to Easy Walker's truck. And then more of Ricker Sugden-The Ditty of the Merry Poddyman," "Wallop for Me Tomorrow Boys," "Ma Willis's Knocking Shop (Knock Twice and Wink for Alice)"-till the next call and, finally, what Easy Walker knew as Dear Old Tangey. Well, Easy Walker had at least found him what seemed a safe enough retreat off the Rue El Greco (many of the streets here were named for the great dead, as though Tangier were a figure of heaven)-no passports needed, no questions asked of guests or tolerated of casual visitors to bar below or brothel above, but, on the other hand, too much cash demanded in advance, too little to eat, the bedclothes never changed, not enough beds.
"Shurbit tamaatim," watered Ali Fathi, still slicing thin shives, as of restaurant smoked salmon, from a foot-sole. At once, as though he had spoken of the source of gingili or benne oil, the door-handle began to turn. He poised that knife at the ready. The door opened and Wahab came in. Smiling teeth popped and rattled as the two men embraced, full of loud throaty crooning greeting, yum yum yum and the voiced clearing of phlegm from pharyngeal tracts. Enderby looked with distaste on this, not caring much for sex of any kind these days really, for himself or for anybody else. Ali Fathi hugged his friend, knife still clutched in a hand that knuckled his friend's vertebrae, all his teeth displayed in glee to Enderby. Enderby said coldly:
"Le patron de l'Acantilado Verde, est-il revenu?"
"Pas encore," said Wahab's back. Wahab was a Moor, hence his mind was despised by Ali Fathi, but his body was apparently loved. He had fled from trouble in Tetuan and was lying low till things cooled. He spent much of the day trying to steal things. Now, as evening prepared to thud in, tally-hoed on by the punctual muezzin, he grinningly pushed All Fathi temporarily away, then took off his long striped nightshirt with hood attached. He was dressed underneath in blue jeans and khaki (probably American army) shirt. He had a marsupial bag knotted round his waist, and from this he produced his spoils, neither choice nor lavish, holding them up for Ali Fathi to admire. He was not a very good thief; it was evident that he was not on the run for thievery; perhaps he had merely spat on the King's picture. On the bed he placed, with a smile that was meant to be modest, a couple of gritty cakes of the kind dumped with the coffee on outside café tables, also a single Seville. Then he produced a small round tin labelled in English. Enderby could read that it was tan boot-polish, but Ali Fathi seized it with a kind of gastronome's croon, probably believing it to be a rare (hence the exiguity of the tinned portion) pâté.
"Pour les bottines," said Enderby helpfully. "Ou pour les souliers. Pas pour manger, vous comprenez." Soon Ali Fathi and Wahab saw that this was so, and then they started a kind of married wrangle. Enderby sighed. He hated these public homosexual carryings-on. Shortly Ali Fathi would have Wahab down on the bed, and they would perhaps indulge in the erotic refinement they called soixante-neuf, which reminded Enderby of the Pisces sign on newspaper horoscope pages. Or else there would be plain howling sodomy. And to them Enderby was only a piece of insentient furniture-the only piece indeed, save for the two beds, in the whole room. Souris, the other man, would not come in till very much later, often when Ali Fathi and Wahab were already in bed, and then what took place took place, mercifully, in the dark. The bed was not big enough for three of them, so there was a lot of crying and writhing on the floor and, if a synchronised triple crisis was reached, which happened occasionally, the window rattled and the beds, one of them with tired but sleep-deprived Enderby in it, shook from the legs up. Souris was not a murine man. He was very gross and he sweated what looked like crude oil. He had hurt somebody very badly on the outskirts of Casablanca-a totally unwilled act, he swore frequently, an ineluctable side-issue of a process designed mainly for pleasure. When the three of them had completed their Laocoon performance, they would sometimes (Enderby had seen this in the moonlight, Miss Boland also grimly seeming to look down from the moon) shake hands, though not heartily: it was like the end of a round in a wrestling bout, which in a sense it was, though three were involved and there was no purse. Once or twice, Souris had then tried to get into bed with Enderby, but Enderby would have none of that. So Wahab, the youngest, was often made to sleep in his robe on the floor, as though it were the desert. He would sometimes cry out in his uneasy sleep, seeming to roar like a camel. This was no life for anyone.
"Moi," said Enderby, pocketing the tan boot-polish, "J'essay-erai à le vendre ou, au mains, à l'échanger pour quelquechose de comestible."
"Tu sors? said Ali Fathi, who already had Wahab round the neck.
Enderby did not like this familiarity. He nodded frowning. Yes, he was going out. The time had come to find out what was going on with respect to himself as regards the impending death of Yod Crewsy. For nobody back there in Scotland Yard seemed to be doing anything. There was the usual odd statement about investigations still proceeding, but most of the newspaper concentration now seemed to be on Yod Crewsy as a dying god, not one of the daily victims of common murderous assault. The butcher had become somehow shadowy and august, a predestined and impersonal agent of the dark forces, proud and silent in a Frazerian grove. But the police back there in England were brought up on Moriarty, not Frazer, and Enderby felt sure they were slyly about something. They might be grilling Jed Foot in under-river cellars. Or they might be here, raincoated, holding on to their hats in the Tangerine sea-wind. It was time to go to this Fat White Doggy Wog Place and see if John the Spaniard had sent a letter to Enderby through his brother Billy Gomez, if Enderby had remembered the name right.
There were two other bedrooms on this floor, and these comprised the brothel part of the establishment, though, on busy nights, cubicles in the bar below were curtained off for the more urgent and perfunctory clients, and fat Napo's kitchen had once or twice been used, since it had a stout table for table-corner specialists. The room that Enderby shared with Ali Fathi, Wahab, and Souris had not, so far as Enderby knew, ever been desecrated by acts of a heterosexual nature, but it was understood that, normally in the late morning, an occasional sharp act of commercial pederasty might be consummated there, Enderby and Ali Fathi (who were not supposed to leave the premises, Napo apparently not trusting them not to be caught) going into the backyard with the scrawny hens, there to smoke a soothing marijuana fag or two, given to them by Napo as a little reward for temporarily and gratuitously leasing lodgings for which they had paid in advance.
Out now on the landing, which had a naked light-bulb and a portrait of the King of Morocco, Enderby saw disgustedly that one of these other bedrooms had its door open. A couple of laughing male friends, both of a Mediterranean complexion, were preparing to engage houris-whose giggles agitated their yashmaks-on adjacent beds. Enderby angrily slammed their door on them, then went down the carpetless stair grumbling to himself. A scratchy record of popular Egyptian music was playing in the bar-the same theme over and over again in unison on a large and wasted orchestra. Peering through a hole in the worn curtain of dirty Muslim pink, Enderby saw Napo behind his counter. A man grosser than Souris, he had modelled himself on the Winston Churchill he had once, he alleged, seen painting in Marrakesh, but the baby-scowl sat obscenely on a face bred by centuries of Maghreb dishonesty. He was now arguing about the magical properties of certain numbers with a customer Enderby could not see: something to do with a lottery ticket.
Enderby went loudly to the lavatory by the kitchen, then tiptoed through the kitchen to the back door. It was a blue evening but rather gusty. In the little yard the hens had gone to roost in the branches of a stunted tree that Enderby could not identify. They laid on a quiet crooning protest chorus, all for Enderby, and their feathers ruffled minimally in the wind. Enderby frowned up at the moon, then climbed to the top of the low wall by means of an empty Coca-Cola crate and a couple of broken-brick toeholds. He dropped easily, though panting, over the other side. It was an alley he was in now, and this led to a street. The street went downhill and led to other streets. If you kept going down all the time you eventually came to the Avenue d'Espagne, which looked at the plage. That dog place was down there, not far from the Hotel Rif.
It was very steep and not very well lighted. Enderby teetered past a crumbling theatre called the Miguel de Cervantes then, finding that the next turning seemed to take him some way uphill again, tried a dark and leafy passage which went unequivocally down. Here a little Moorish girl cried when she saw him, and a number of house-dogs started to bark. But he went gamely on, supporting himself by grasping at broken fences. Precipitous: that was the word. At last he emerged from the barking dark, finding himself on a street where a knot of Moorish boys in smart suits called to him:
"You want boy, Charlie?"
"You very hot want nice beer."
"For cough," said Enderby, in no mood for foreign nonsense, and a boy riposted with:
"You fuck off too, English fuckpig." Enderby didn't like that. He knew that this place had once belonged to the English, part of Charles II's Portuguese queen's dowry. It was not right that he should be addressed like that. But another boy cried:
"You fucking German. Kaput heilhitler." And another:
"Fucking Yankee motherfucker. You stick chewing-gum up fucking ass." That showed a certain ingenuity of invective. They were very rude boys, but their apparently indifferent despication of foreigners was perhaps a healthy sign, stirring in sympathy a limp G-string in his own nature. He nodded at them and, more kindly, said once more:
"For cough." They seemed to recognise his change of tone, for they merely pronged two fingers each in his direction, one or two of them emitting a lip-fart. Then they started to playfight, yelping, among themselves. Enderby continued his descent, coming soon to a hotel-and-bar on his left called Al-Djenina. The forecourt had bird cages in it, the birds all tucked up for the night, and Enderby could distinctly see, through the long bar-window, middle-aged men drunk and embracing each other. Those would, he thought, be expatriate writers. He was, of course, one of those himself now, but he was indifferent to the duties and pleasures of sodality. He was on his own, waiting. He had written, though. He was working on things. The wind from the sea upheld him as he tottered to level ground. Here it was then: the Avenue d'Espagne, as they called it.
He turned left. A fezzed man outside a shop hailed him, showing rugs and saddles and firearms. Enderby gravely shook his head, saying truthfully: "No tengo bastante dinero, hombre." He was becoming quite the linguist. A gormless-looking boy, thin and exhibiting diastemata in the shop-front lights, offered him English newspapers. This was different. Enderby drew out dirhams. He tried to control his heavy breathing as he looked for news. The wind breathed more heavily, seeming to leap on the paper from all four quarters, as though it was all the news Enderby could possibly want. Enderby took his paper into the doorway of the rug-and-saddle shop. The fezzed man said:
"You man like good gun. I see." That was not a discreet thing to say, and Enderby looked sharply at him. "Bang bang bang," added the man, indicating his rusty Rif arsenal of Crimean rifles and stage-highwayman pistols. Enderby read. All Hope Abandoned, a headline said Dantesquely. The end was very near now, a few days off at most. He was in a coma. Where the hell then, Enderby wondered, had that bullet struck him? Police would be treating case as murder, the paper said. Redoubling efforts, acting on valuable information, Interpol on job, arrest expected very soon. The wind pushed, with a sudden whoosh, those words into Enderby's open mouth. Enderby pushed back and then looked at the date of the newspaper. Yesterday's. He might be dead already, his gob, money-coining but not golden, shut for ever. The shopkeeper now showed a real golden mouth, like Spanish John's (and, there again, how far was he to be trusted?), as he softly placed, on the newsprint Enderby held tautly at chin-level like a communion cloth, a specimen pistol for his inspection and admiration. Enderby started and let it drop in the doorway. One of its fittings clattered free and the shopman got ready to revile Enderby. "No quiero," Enderby said. "I said that before, bloody fool as you are." And then he entered the wind, looking troubled at flickering lights on headlands. He didn't need his newspaper any more, so he threw it into the wind's bosom. The wind, like a woman, was clumsy with it. The sea. La belle mer. Why had he never realised that that was the same as la belle-mère, which-with some kind of French irony-had been forced into meaning "stepmother"? Well, he had come back to her for a brief time, belching and grousing over there, brewing strong green tea all day long, groaning in her bed at night. She had seen him taken off by a woman, and soon it would be by the police. Which was Rawcliffe's place? Street-lamps showed the Sun Trap, with a kosher inscription, and the Well Come. They were in the dark; people moved inland with the night, to fat belly-dancers and bottles of alum Valpierre. There it was: El Acantilado Verde, a tatty yellowish place. Rawcliffe had had, apparently, several little Tangerine bars and tea-shops. This would be his last.
Enderby mastered his breathing before entering the bar-restaurant that had a shagged dog sign swinging, with its lamp of low wattage, in the paper-ravaging wind. The crossword, pathetically unsolved, rode and span briefly on the air at Enderby's eye-level as he made for the closed door. There were deserted metal tables with chairs on top of them stretching along the pavement. From within came piano music. He pushed the door open.
The piano was an upright, in tone tinny, scarred in appearance, on a platform made of old beer-crates, and the man who played seemed to be a North European. He played slow jazz with sad authority, sadly chewing his lips. He had suffered, his blank face said, but had now passed beyond suffering. An American, Enderby decided. All Americans, he thought, looking shyly round: it was to do with sitting postures of insolent relaxedness. There was a herbal smell on the air, an autumn smell. Herbst was the German for autumn, was it not? A poem, like the transient randiness felt when coming upon a gratuitous near-nude set in the pages of a magazine article one finds absorbing, twitched. These Americans would call it the fall. A fall of herbs, of grace, herb of grace. No, there were other things to think of and do, and he already had a poem on the forge. Still, he sniffed. Drugs, he tingled; something stronger than that harmless marijuana (Mary Jane, that meant: a mere kitchenmaid of narcotics) he had been given to smoke. A very thin young man in dark glasses mouthed and mouthed in a trance. A white-haired cropped man, also young, sat reading a thin, or slim, volume. "Shit," he kept judging. Nobody took any notice; nobody took any notice of Enderby. There was a man in the corner in a skin-tight costume as for ballet practice writing words shakily on a blackboard. Brain-goose, he wrote, and, under it, Rape of Lesion. Enderby nodded with tiny approval. Literary exiles of a different sort. Which reminded him: that bloody book of that dying yob; here might they know? "Shit," said the white-haired man, turning a page, then laughed.
There seemed to be no waiter about. There was a wooden bar in the distant corner, its lower paint ruined by feet, and three bar-stools were empty before it. To get to it Enderby had to get past a dangerous-looking literary man who had arranged three tables about himself like an ambo. He had shears with which he seemed to be busy cutting strips out of newspaper-sheets, and he looked frowning at Enderby while he pasted some of these, apparently at random, on a pawed and sticky piece of foolscap. He looked like an undertaker, mortician rather; his suit was black and his spectacles had near-square black rims, like the frames of obituary notices in old volumes of Punch. Enderby approached diffidently, saying: "Pardon me -" (good American touch there) "- but can anybody?"
"If," said the man, "you mean aleatoric, that only applies to the muzz you embed the datum in." He sounded not unkind, but his voice was tired and lacked nuances totally.
"What I meant really was a drink, really." But Enderby didn't want to seem impolite; besides, this man seemed engaged on a kind of literature, correcting the sheet as he started to now with a felt-tipped inkpencil; he was a sort of fellow-writer. "But I think I see what you mean."
"There," said the man, and he mumbled what he had stuck and written down, something like: "Balance of slow masturbate payments enquiries in opal spunk shapes notice of that question green ass penetration phantoms adjourn." He shook his head. "Rhythm all balled up, I guess."
"I'm really looking," Enderby said, "for the waiter you have here. Gomez his name is, I believe." A man came out, somewhat dandyishly tripping, from behind a curtain of plastic strips in various primary colours. He had a greenish shirt glazed with never having been, for quite a time anyway, taken off, and thin bare legs that were peppered with tiny holes, as with woodworm. His face was worn to the bone and his hair was filthy and elflocked. To the scissored man he said:
He reckons he's through on the hot line now."
"Any message?"
"Fly's writing it down. May I enquire whom you are?" he then said to Enderby.
"Something about Gomez, I guess," said the mortician.
"Later." The other dabbled his fingers in air as in water. "He's off till un poco mas tarde." The pianist was now working on some high-placed old-time discords, school of Scriabin. "Crazy," the dabbler said.
"I'll have a drink," said Enderby, "if I may."
"British," nodded the mortician. "Guessed so. Goddamn town's lousy with British. Out here to write about tea with Miss Mitford, rose gardens in rectory closes, all that crap."
"Not me." Enderby made a noise which he at once realised was like what the cheaper novels called a gay laugh. He must be very ill-at-ease then. "I'll have a Bloody Mary, if you have it, that is." He clanked out a few dirhams. The tomato-juice would be nourishing; he needed nourishment.
"Sangre de Maria," shrugged the filthy-shirted man, who seemed to own this place, going to behind the bar. Enderby went to climb a stool.
"Very baroque, that is," he pronounced. "They all call it that, I believe. They lack a knowledge of English history, naturally, the Spaniards, I mean, so they make a kind of Crashaw conceit out of it, though, of course, the Crashavian style derives, so they tell me, from Spanish models. Or that statue of St Teresa, I think it is, with the dart going through her. But this, of course, is the Virgin Mary, bleeding. A virgin, you see: blood. The same sort of thing, though. Professor Empson was very interested in that line of Crashaw-you know: "He'll have his teat ere long, a bloody one. The mother then must suck the son." Two lines, I mean. Baroque, anyway." All who were not in a drug-trance looked at Enderby. He wondered why his nerves babbled like that; he must be careful; he would start blurting everything out if he wasn't. "And your Gomez," he said, "is, I am credibly informed, something of an expert on Spanish poetry."
"Gomez," said the mortician, "is an expert only on the involutions of his own rectum."
The man with the blackboard shakily wrote Comings in the skull. The white-haired reader said, very seriously:
"Now, this, I reckon, is not shit. Listen." And he read out:
"Society of solitary children -
Stilyagi, provo, beat, mafada,
Nadaista, energumeno, mod and rocker -
Attend to the slovos of your psychedelic guides -
Swamis, yogins and yoginis,
Amerindian peyote chiefs, Zen roshis.
Proclaim inner space, jolting the soft machine
Out of its hypnosis conditioned by
The revealed intention of the Senders -"
"But," said Enderby unwisely, dancing the bloody drink in his hand, smiling, "we don't have mods and rockers any more." He had read his Daily Mirror, after all, to some purpose. "That's the danger, you see, of trying to make poetry out of the ephemeral. If you'll forgive me, that sounded to me very old-fashioned. Of course, it isn't really clear whether it is actually poetry. Back to the old days," he smiled, "of vers libre. There were a lot of tricks played by people, you know. Seed catalogues set out in stanzas. Oh, a lot of the soi-disant avant-garde were taken in."
There were low growls of anger, including, it appeared, one from a man who was supposed to be in a trance. The white-haired reader seemed to calm himself through a technique of rhythmic shallow breathing. Then he said:
"All right, buster. Let's hear from you."
"How? Me? You mean -?" They were all waiting.
"You know the whole shitting works," went the mortician. "You've not quit talking since you came in. Who asked you to come in, anyway?"
"It's a bar, isn't it?" said Enderby. "Not private, I mean. Besides, there's this matter of Gomez."
"The hell with Gomez. Crap out with your own." The atmosphere was hostile. The owner air-dabbled from behind the bar, sneering. The pianist was playing something deliberately silly in six-eight time. Enderby said:
"Well, I didn't really come prepared. But I'm working on something in the form of an Horatian ode. I've not got very far, only a couple of stanzas or so. I don't think you'd want to hear it." He felt doubt itching like piles. All that stuff about swamis and inner space. A sonnet, yet. Horatian ode, yet. He was not very modern, perhaps. A critic had once written: "Enderby's addiction to the sonnet-form proclaims that the "thirties are his true home." He did not like the young very much and he did not want to take drugs. He was supposed to have killed a quintessential voice of the new age. But that voice had not been above garbling Enderby's own work and getting a fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature for it. Enderby now recited stoutly:
"The urgent temper of the laws,
That clips proliferation's claws,
Shines from the eye that sees
A growth is a disease.
Only the infant will admire
The vulgar opulence of fire
To tyrannise the dumb
Patient continuum
And, while the buds burst, hug and hold
A cancer that must be controlled
And moulded till it fit
These forms not made for it."
Out of a trance somebody farted. "That last couplet," Enderby said trembling, "needs a bit of a going over, I see that, but I think you'll get the general idea." In confusion he swigged his Bloody Mary and presented the flecked glass (splash of some small slaughtered animal on a windscreen) for another. When Enderby had been a boy he had gone to sleep on the upper deck of the last tram of the night and had wakened in the tramshed. Leaving in shame he had noticed uniformed men looking at him in the quiet wonder which was the proper tribute to an act of an imbecile. He seemed to be getting that same look now. He said: "I stand for form and denseness. The seventeenth-century tradition modified. When is this man Gomez coming in?" The mortician resumed snipping and gumming, shaking his head, grinning like a clown. The white-headed cropped man hid his own grin in a new slim volume. The entranced offered the loudest criticism, great lip-farts cometing through inner space. "Well," said Enderby, growing angry, "what about that bloody act of plagiarism of bloody Yod Crewsy?"
A man came limping from behind the blackboard (which now had, very vulgar, My cuntry is the yoniverse scrawled on it) and said: "I'll tell you about that, friend." He was totally bald but luxuriantly bearded and spoke in an accent Enderby had hitherto associated with cowboy films on television. "That was pure camp. Is, I guess. A new frame of awareness. It's not the poems as such so much as how he looks at them. Like you get these good pictures with shitty Victoriana in them, a frame inside a frame. Man, it's called the Process."
"I'd very much like to see -" Enderby's nausea was complicated. And if that sonnet-draft was in there, the Satan one. And, whether it was there or not, could he control himself, handling richly rewarded flagrant sneering theft?
"You can learn any place," said the bald bearded man. "You'll find it in the John library." He pointed beyond the curtain of many-coloured plastic strips with a finger that seemed half-eaten, a kindly man really. "And as for plagiarism, everything belongs to everybody. Man, that's called the Lesson." He returned to behind the blackboard, limping. On the blackboard was now written Vinegar strokes through magnified sebacities. Enderby went, his heart fainting, towards the John. There was a dark passage, sibilant with the wind, and crunchy rubbish underfoot. In a kind of alcove a man lay on a camp-bed under a dull bulb, another man beside him with a notebook. The supine man, on a drugged trip, sent reports up from the unconscious. Down there ghostly scissors were at work on newspapers out of eternity. It was a lot of nonsense.
The lavatory was small and dirty, but there was a red light of the kind used in electric log-fires. There were a lot of books, many of them eaten by mould. Enderby sat heavily on the hollow seat and disturbed the books with a paddling right hand, panting. That sinful volume was not too far from the top. The title was Fixes; there was a bold leering portrait of the pseudo-author. The sixteenth impression, Enderby noted with gloom. He noted too that many of the poems were not his own; it was a case of multiple theft, perhaps, unless bloody Vesta or that Wittgenstein man had written some of them. Enderby found six unpublished poems by himself and, a small mercy in a world of filth, not one of them was that sonnet. There was, as Miss Kelly had said, a poem entitled "Sonnet," but that had twelve bad unrhyming lines and might well be something that Yod Crewsy himself had composed at his secondary modern school. Enderby read it shuddering:
My mum plonks them on the table for Susie and Dad and I
Plonk plonk and dull clanks the sauce bottles
And Susie reads their names to herself
Her mouth is open but that is not for reading aloud
The fact is that her nose is stopped up like those sauce bottles are
Like OK and HP and AI and FU and CK and O
I mean oh red red tomato
And I dream while the frying goes on and Dad has his mouth open too at the TV
How I would like catsup or ketchup splattering
All over the walls and it would be shaken from these open mouths
And hers in the kitchen all her open mouths
And it would be red enough but not taste of tomato
"God," said Enderby to his shrinking bowels. "God God God." So they had come to this, had they? And his own finely wrought little pieces desecrated by contact. He dropped the book on the floor; it remained open, but a sharp draught from under the far from snugly fitting door pushed at the erect fan of its middle pages and disclosed a brief poem that Enderby, squinting in the dim red light, seemed thumped on the back into looking at. Something or somebody thumped him: an admonitory goblin that perhaps lived wetly in the lavatory cistern. He had not noticed this poem before, but, by God, he knew the poem. He felt a terrible excitement mounting. He grabbed the book with both hands.
Then the door opened. Enderby looked, expecting to see the wind, but it was a man. Excited though he was, he began to deliver a standard protest against invasion of privacy. The man waved it away and said: "Gomez."
"The fact that the door isn't locked is neither here nor there. All right then, I've finished anyway." Something in the spread sound of his words seemed to tell him that he was smiling. He felt his mouth, surprised. It was the excitement, it was the first rehearsal of triumph. Because, by God, he had them now. By the short hairs, as they said. But was he sure, could he be sure? Yes, surely he was sure. Or was it just a memory of having foreseen it in print? He could check, he was bound to be able to check, even in this bloody heathen place. There might be some really cultivated man here among the expatriate scribblers.
"Gomez. Billy Gomez." He was a bit rodent-like and, so Enderby twitched at once, might be dangerous. But in what context? Gomez finned out his paws in a kind of cartoon-mouse self-depreciation. He had a dirty white barman's jacket on but no tie. He seemed also to be wearing tennis-shoes.
"Ah." That other structure of urgency was suddenly reilluminated. Heavy as an ivied tower, it crashed the blackness, decollated, to the sound of brass, like something in son et lumière. "Sí," Enderby said. "Su hermano. In London, that is. Mi amigo. Or colleague, shall I say. Has he sent anything for me?" That sonnet by Wordsworth, on the sonnet. Key becomes lute becomes trumpet. This book he now thrust into his side-pocket. Load of filthy treachery becomes, quite as improbably, sharp weapon of revenge.
"You come." He led Enderby out of the lavatory down a passage that took them to stacked crates of empties and then to a garlicky kind of still-room, brightly lighted with one bare bulb. Enderby now saw Gomez very clearly. He had red hair. Could he possibly be the true brother of swarthy John? Gomez was a Goth or perhaps even a Visigoth: they had had them in Spain quite a lot, finishing off the Iberian part of the Roman Empire: they had had a bishop who translated bits of the Bible, but that was much later: coarse people but very vigorous and with a language quite as complicated as Latin: they were perhaps not less trustworthy than, say, the Moors. Still, Enderby was determined to be very careful.
In this still-room a small brown boy in a striped nightshirt was cutting bread. Gomez cuffed him without malice, then he took a piece of this bread, went over to a stove maculate with burnt fat, sloshed the bread in a pan of what looked like sardine-oil, folded it into a sandwich and, drippingly, ate. He took in many aspects of Enderby with darting pale eyes. The boy, still cutting bread, as it were clicked his eyes into twin slots that held them blazing on to Enderby's left ear. Enderby, embarrassed, changed his position. The eyes stayed where they were. Drugs or something. Gomez said to Enderby:
"You say your name." Enderby told him what he had been called in his regenerate, barman's, capacity, but only in the Spanish version. Enderby said:
"He said he'd send a letter through you. Una carta. He promised. Have you got it?" Gomez nodded. "Well," said Enderby, "how about handing it over, then, eh? Very urgent information."
"Not here," dripmunched Gomez. "You say where you stay. I come with letter."
"Ah," Enderby said, with something like satisfaction. "I see your little game." He smiled, it seemed to him, and to his astonishment, brilliantly: it was that triumph pushing up. "Perhaps it would be more convenient if we could go to your place and pick up the letter there. It would be quicker, wouldn't it?"
Gomez, who had eaten all his oiled bread and licked some fingers, now took an onion from a small sack. He looked at the boy, who still cut bread but whose eyes had now clicked back down to the operation, and seemed to relent of cuffing him, however unmaliciously. He stroked the boy's griskin, grinning. Spanish poetry, thought Enderby. This man was supposed to know all about it. Was a knowledge of poetry, even a nominal one, a sort of visa for entry into the small world of Enderby-betrayal? Gomez topped and tailed the onion with his teeth (tunthus, Enderby suddenly remembered for some reason, was the Gothic for a tooth, but this man would know nothing of his ancestral language), then, having spat the tufts on to the floor, he tore off the onion's scarf-skin and some of the subcutaneous flesh and started to crunch what was pearlily revealed. There was a faint spray of zest. It smelt delicious, just as chunks of grilled human flesh might smell delicious. Enderby knew he had to get out. Fast Gomez said:
"Tonight I work. You say where you live."
The boy left off bread-cutting (who the hell would want all that bread, anyway?) and ran the knife-blade across his brown thumb. Enderby said:
"It doesn't matter, after all. Thanks for your help. Or not help, as the case may be. Muchas gracias, anyway." And he got out of the room, clanking loose bottles on the floor of the dark corridor. Gomez called after him something ending with hombre. Enderby passed the man on the couch and in the next world and the amanuensis who sat by him. Then he breasted the plastic strips and blinked into the bar. There was a new man there, a Scot apparently, for he talked of "a wee bit fixie." The man at the blackboard had just finished writing Hot kitchens of his ass. Salami, Enderby thought in his confusion, salami was made of donkeys. The white-cropped man was reciting:
"Archangels blasting from inner space,
Pertofran, Tryptizol, Majeptil,
Parstelin and Librium.
And a serenace for all his tangled strings."
Romantic, thought Enderby distractedly, better than that other stuff. Remembering that he had stolen a book from their John, he clapped his hand to his pocket. A dithery young man in dark glasses recoiled, pushing out his palms against the expected gunshot. Enderby smiled at everybody, thinking that he had ample cause to smile, even when carted off. But not yet, not just yet. He yearned towards solitary confinement as to a lavatory, but duty, like an engaged sign, clicked its message. The mortician did not smile back. The dithering young man had recovered: all a joke, his manic leer seemed to say. Enderby held that book in, as if it might leap out. Out, out. Into the windy Moroccan night.
It was a slow and panting climb, and Enderby had to keep stopping suddenly, holding himself in shadow against whatever wall offered, listening and watching to find out if he was being followed. It was hard to tell. There were plenty of little Moorish boys about, any one of whom could be that bread-cutting lad, but none seemed furtive: indeed, one pissed frankly in the gutter (but that might be his cunning) and another hailed a smartly dressed elderly Moor who was going downhill, running after him then, crying unheeded certain complicated wrongs. Enderby passed dirty coffee-shops and then came to a hotly arguing group of what seemed beggars at a street corner. They had thin though strong bare legs under swaddling bands and ragged European jackets, and all were turbaned. Enderby stood with them a space, peering as best he could between their powerful gestures. Things seemed to be all right; there was nobody following; he had given that treacherous Gomez the slip. Two treacherous Gomezes. That bloody John in London was, after all, the rotten bastard Enderby had always known him to be. Enderby, filling his lungs first like a dog running to the door in order to bark, turned left for a steeper hill. Half way up was a very loud cinema with what he took from posters to be an Egyptian film showing (an insincerely smiling hero like Colonel Nasser). He felt somehow protected by all that row, which was mostly the audience. A tooth-picking dark-suited young man by the pay-desk looked at Enderby. The manager probably. "Alors, ça marche, hein?" Enderby panted. If anybody asked that man if he had seen an Englishman going that way he would say no, only a Frenchman. Now he said nothing, merely looked, tooth-picked. Enderby climbed on.
When, dying and very wet, he came to the Rue El Greco, he realised he was not too sure what would be the right back wall. Fowls, stunted trees: they all probably had them round here. He should have chalked a sign: he was new to this business. He would have to risk going in the front way. After all, there would be a lot of customers at this hour and fat Napo would be too busy hitting the rotten ancient coffee-machine to notice. Enderby caught a sudden image of El Greco himself, transformed into his own Salvador, peering down in astigmatic woe at the deplorable street that bore his name. There were some very nasty-looking places called snack-bars, as well as upper windows from which small boys thrust their bottoms, either in invitation or contempt. You could also hear very raucous female laughter-wrong, wrong; should not Islam's daughters be demure?-from down dark passageways. An old man sat by deserted and boarded-up premises. Inside, Enderby saw with poetic insight, would be rats and the memories of foul practices, the last fleshly evidence of outrage being gnawed, gnawed; the man cried his wares of tiny toy camels with here and there a dromedary.
Enderby gave his sweated spectacles a good wipe with his tie before approaching El Snack-Bar Albricias. By conceiving an image of fat Napo waiting for him on the doorstep, as a tyrannical father his precocious debauched son, he was able to forestall any such reality. Indeed, scratched Cairo music was coming out very loud, but not so loud as the noise of customers. Enderby peered before entering and was satisfied to see Napo fighting the coffee-machine before a thick and applauding bar-audience. "Pardon," said a bulky fezzed would-be entrant to Enderby, Enderby being in the way. "Avec plaisir," Enderby said, and was happy to use this man as a shield for his own ingress. To be on the safe side, he tried to make himself look Moorish, flattening his feet, imagining his nose bigger, widening his eyes behind their glasses. There were girls, giggling, yashmaks up like beavers, drinking the local bottled beer with real Moorish men. Enderby tut-tutted like one in whom the faith burned hot. Then he noticed something he had not seen before-little verse couplets hanging on the wall behind the bar. He had time to read one only before going to the lavatory before going upstairs. It said:
Sí bebes para olvidar,
Paga antes de empezar.
That, thought Enderby, meant that if you drank to forget you'd better pay before you began. Drinking and forgetting, that was. Enderby felt a bit cold. Verse and treachery went together. He hadn't thought of it before, but Napo had, in the nature of things, to be a traitor. Fugitives had sooner or later to be kicked out from upstairs; no criminal could afford to stay for ever; the quickest way of getting rid of a guest who'd outstayed his welcome was to-But no, no. There had to be someone you could trust. Wasn't Napo, especially when a customer gave him a cigar, an admirer of Winston Churchill? But when you thought of political coat-turning and the guns pointing the wrong way at Singapore, and some rumour of ultimate perfidy in the Straits of Gibraltar-No, no, no. Napo was all right. Well in with the police, too. Enderby felt colder.
He came to full wakefulness in the middle of the night, the Boland moon looking grimly in on him. He had gone to sleep early, so that his eyes could avoid a very complicated and laborious (with hand-spitting beforehand) bout of triple sodomy on the floor. He had had enough sleep, then, but his room-mates were hard at it, snoring, Wahab on his back, mouth open to the spiders, in his robe on the bare boards. But what really seemed to have jolted him awake was the Muse, pushing lines at him. It was a bit more of that Horatian Ode:
And something something something can
Take partners for a plonk pavane,
The bunded giant's staff
Tracing a seismograph.
Accompanying this was a burbling of unhappy tomato-juice, together with, in the throat, a metallic suspicion that it had not been all that fresh. And then. And then. The derision of that bloody merry crowd (ha) in that place at what had seemed to him, Enderby, and still seemed very respectable verses. Was it then possible that art that was good for one time was not good for another, the laughter justified, himself out of date? There was a Canadian professor who had once been in Piggy's Sty with fawning hosts, going on burringly about new modes of communication and how words were all finished or something and everybody was too much bemused by Gutenberg and not wide enough awake to the revolution in electronics, whatever that was. And there were also these people who, by taking drugs, were vouchsafed visions of the noumenon, and this made them scornful of art that used merely phenomenal subject matter. But what could you do about a noumenal medium, mused Enderby, putting his glasses on. The moon defined itself in sharper craters and ridges, as though the spectacles themselves were in the service of Miss bloody Boland. And, while bloody came into things, that Bloody Mary was dancing about very obscenely inside, and that vodka had probably not been vodka at all but something merely sold as vodka. Enderby winced on a sour vague image of the noumenon behind the label. Diluted surgical spirit, homemade potato-fire, meths. He had better get up and go to the lavatory.
He was fully dressed, except for his shoes, which he now painfully put on. It seemed to him to be cold tonight, and he shivered. He also, despite the shattering evidence that had been granted him this evening, felt depressed. Was anything he could now do as a poet of any value to the world or God the ultimate noumenon? Graaarp, answered his stomach, like some new mode of communication. Behind the door on a nail was hanging the hooded nightshirt garment, djebala or whatever they called it, that Souris, now snoring on top of Ali Fathi, wore when he essayed the streets. Enderby took it and wrapped it round himself, but he saw that his shivering came from the expense of body-fuel in the service of the visceral bubbling that oppressed him. He went downstairs to the lavatory, hearing nothing from either brothel-dormitory, calm of brerrrrgh mind all aaaaarfph passion gockle spent.
But from below he heard quiet but somehow urgent talking, and he saw that a dim lamp, apt for furtive colloquy, was on. He tiptoed down, suppressing his inner noises by some obscure action of the epiglottis and diaphragm. When he got to the bottom of the stairs, he saw, from shadow, that Napo was with a couple of men in the pretentious uniform of the local police. These men, lean, moustached, mafia-swarthy, crafty-eyed, were each taking from Napo a glass of something gold and viscid in the lamplight. Alcohol, against the tenets of the faith, they ought to be had up for that, police and upholders of Islamic law as they were supposed to be. Enderby, flat against his dark wall, listened, but the language was Moghrabi Arabic. It was a serious discourse, though, evidently, and Napo's part in it sounded a bit breathy, even whining. Enderby listened for certain illuminative international or crassly onomatopoeic words, but the only word that was made much of was something sounding like khogh. It was, as Enderby's viscera quietly attested, parroting and nipping him like a parrot, a very visceral sound. Khogh, the viscera went. And then, somewhat louder, Genggergy. Enderby suddenly saw, and then he panicked.
The police and Napo had heard. Enderby saw, in addition to who Khogh was, opened mouths and wide eyes turned on to his patch of dark. He thought he heard a safety-catch clicking off. His first instinct was to run to the lavatory, but they would, he knew, soon have that door shot open. Still, his insides, like spoilt cats demanding milk as lava begins to engulf the town and the cats with it, complained and switched on a kind of small avant-garde chamber piece for muted brass. Enderby, like, with that gown on his shoulders, a student late for a lecture, ran through the kitchen, sufficiently lighted by Miss bloody Boland, and out into the yard. The roosting fowls crooned at him, and the stunted tree raised, like some outworn Maeterlinck property, a gnarled fist. He got over the wall with agility he marvelled at and then panted a second or two in the alleyway. They were after him all right, though they seemed first to be, from a sudden meagre uprush of lunated feathers and a squawked track of conventional gallinaceous protest, abusing the fowls for letting him get away. Enderby ran a yard or two downhill and tried a back door on the opposite side of the alley. It was locked, so he padded, in frightful borborygms and breathlessness, to the next. This was open. He got in, finding himself alone with a tethered white ruminating goat who surveyed Enderby with no surprise, and closed the door, a very warped one, gently. Very usefully, a dog next door made a deep chest-bay once only, as though Enderby had entered a frame or two of his dream, and this sparked off a small violent yapper further up the hill and, further up again, what, very improbable, could only be a pet hyena. Towards these noises, Enderby could tell, four feet were now, with a sketch of urgency, proceeding. The voice of Napo, back at base, made a brief speech with elements of controlled Churchillian outrage in it, then turned into grumbling coughs going back to the kitchen. Good. This would do very well.
Enderby was, in a sense, pleased that a new phase was beginning, perhaps the last phase of the fugitive. It was all a question now of how long Rawcliffe would be in rendering himself available for death. And that was absurd, when one came to think of it, he, Enderby, killing Rawcliffe. But, if one accepted that killing was a legitimate and sempiternal human activity, authorised by the Bible, was there any better motive than Enderby's own? The State made no provisions for the punishment of the perversion of art; indeed, it countenanced such perversion. God, whose name had so often been invoked in the name of bad art, was, at bottom, a Philistine. So it was up to him, Enderby, to strike a blow for art. Was he not perhaps by some considered to have done so already? The popular press might be against him, but surely some letters, suppressed by editors, must have been written on his behalf? There might even be a fund started by Earl Russell or somebody to provide cates and art for him in prison and set him up on his distant release. He was, he was convinced, not alone. His stomach felt easier.
Watched by the chewing goat, Enderby put the djebala or whatever it was on properly, so that, what with the hood, he became a kind of capuchin. He had slept in his teeth as usual, fearing their theft if he did not, but now he removed and stowed them. Remembering the tin of boot-polish in his pocket, he allowed his heart to leap in awe at the poetry which existence itself sometimes contrived: the fusion, or at least meaningful collocation, of disparates-as, for example, a tin of tan boot-polish and himself, Enderby. He removed his spectacles and bedded them with his teeth. Now he disposed his hood in the academic position, pushed up all available sleeves to near the elbow, got out the tin and his handkerchief, then began to dye himself, all that was likely to be visible, by dipping his handkerchief in the tin and thinly spreading the polish. He did not forget nape and ear-crevices. The smell of the stuff was not unpleasant-astringent, vaguely military. Why, there had been that man Lawrence, colonel and scholar, got up like this. He had been viciously debauched by Turks, but his country had honoured him. He too, like Enderby, had had to change his name. He had died in lowly circumstances, riding a motorcycle.
What, when he had finished, he now looked like there was no means of finding out. In the moonlight his hands seemed of a richer colour than nature herself might allow, a richness that suggested dye, or perhaps thinly spread tan boot-polish. Still, it would serve, sleeves well down, hood well over. The goat, with the blessed impartiality granted to animals, saw no difference between the two Enderbys. It took without gratitude the empty polish tin and began to crunch it up roundly, its goatee wagging. Enderby took his leave, Ali bin Enderbi or some such name.
Whither? The Boland moon, asked, would not answer. His true place was that Kasbah, high up at the end of the town, where beggars slept at night in the doorways of shark shops, all Rif rifles from the iron-founding Midlands. But it was necessary that he stay near Rawcliffe's beach-place, not to let his quarry slip out of his tan-polished hands. It was not windy now, but it was not warm. Autumnal Morocco. He could doze, all hunched up, in the shadow of the Acantilado Verde. In the morning he could drink coffee and eat a piece of bread (there was a dirham or so still in his pocket) and then, an eye open for Rawcliffe, get down to begging. There was a lot of begging here: no shame in it. There were a couple of rich hotels near the Acantilado Verde-the Rif and the Miramar: good begging pitches.
He padded gently down the hill-alley, silently rehearsing the Koranic name of God. Properly enunciated, it could serve for many things-disgust, gratitude, awe, admiration, pain. Enderby had heard the name several times a day in his hideout: he thought he could manage the gymnastics of its articulation. You had to try to swallow the tip of your tongue, growling, then pretend you had to give up the attempt because you had to expel a fragment of matter lodged in your glottis. Easy: Allah. He allahed quietly towards the sea under a frowning moon.
"Heart. He let himself get upset about something. Blowing his top. Ranting and raving. Carrying too much weight, of course. That's what comes of building up rugger-muscle in youth."
"Where's he been sent?"
"That place of Otto Langsam's. Out in the wilds. Cut off from the great world. Not even a daily newspaper."
"They say he was going on about some piece of pottery. Abusive. Lines written in a public lavatory. Obviously needed a rest. Good job they got him in time."
"Oh, very good job. Look, emshi emshi or whatever the word is. All right, take this. Now bugger off and buy yourself a shave."
"Allah."
President of the moon's waning, Enderby was not too cold at night. He slept uncertainly, however, in the lee provided by the suntrap arena of El Acantilado Verde, a sandyard for torso-bronzing with a couple of umbrella-topped tables. The seaward-looking gate was easily climbed over. Crouched in an angle, he would see at first light two walls made of bathers' changing-cubicles, a corner of the kitchen, the back door of the bar-restaurant. Mercifully, so far, there had been no night rain. Rawcliffe could bring the rain with him if he wished. Nobody seemed to be sleeping on the premises, and Enderby moved away at dawn. Dawn brought the diamond weather of a fine autumn. Skirring his fast-growing grey face-bristles with a tanned hand, Enderby would gum-suck his way to a small dirty shop off the esplanade, sticking out the other hand for alms (Allah) if any untimely European were about, and then take breakfast of coffee-in-a-glass and a fatty Moorish pastry. He feigned mostly dumb, except for the holy name. A holy man perhaps, above dirt and toothlessness, once granted a vision of the ultimate garden (houris, nectar-sherbet, a crystal stream) and then struck speechless except for the author's signature.
Up the cobbled street tottered the saint-eyed donkeys, most cruelly panniered, driven by bare-legged Moors in clouts, ponchos, and immense straw sombreros. Biblical women with ancient hard eyes and no yashmaks carried hashish-dreaming fowls in upside-down bundles, scaly legs faggoted together. They climbed, in a whirl of wind-blown feathers, up to the dirty small hotels for long haggling on the pavement outside, then the leisurely halal slaughter, blood sluggishly rolling downhill, the chickens dying on a psychedelic vision. And just along there was that treacherous White Doggy Wog place. Were its denizens right? Was it right that art should mirror chaos? What kind of art would it be proper for him to produce in his coming cell?
His brain, aloof from his begging hand, worked away at one poem or another. Was it perhaps a kind of holiness that gathered the disparate arbitrarily together, assuming that God or Allah-at the bottom of the mind's well, a toad with truth's jewel in its brow-could take care of the unifying pattern, that it was blasphemy for the shaping human mind to impose one of its own? Shatter syntax also, and with it time and the relationships of space. That Canadian pundit had said something about the planet itself, earth, becoming, as perceived by a new medium which would be no more than heightened consciousness, a kind of work of art, so that every aspect would be relevant to every other aspect. Fish, spit, toe, antenna, cognac, spider, perspex, keyboard, grass, helmet. Helmeted in grass, the perspex spider spits with toed antenna, a noise like fish, the cognac keyboard. Too elegant that, too much like Mallarmé or somebody. Old-fashioned too, really. Surrealist.
Allah.
Up there the white huddled Medina on the hill, once watchful of the sea-invaders. Blood and buggery, the Koranic cry of teeth as the scimitar slashed. And now a pretty cram of stucco for the visiting painter. Donkeys, palms, the odd insolent Cadillac with a sneering wealthy young Moor in dark glasses. This bilious sea. There were not, thank Allah, many police about and, in any case, they did not greatly molest beggars. "Give him something, George, go on. Poor old man." And the plebeian tourist, in open-necked shirt and double-breasted town suit, handed Enderby a tiny clank of centimes. His wife, growing a lobster colour that was vulgarly Blackpool, smiled in pity. Enderby bowed and allahed. It was really surprising what you could pick up on this game-handfuls of small tinkle that often added up to well over a dirham, filthy torn notes that the donors probably thought carried plague, the absurd largesse of holiday drunks. He was eating, if not sleeping, well on it all. Arab bread with melon-and-ginger confiture, yummiyum couscous (better than Easy Walker's), fowl-hunks done with saffron, thin veal-shives in a carraway sauce-all at a quiet fly-buzzing incurious shop near the little Souk or Succo, one that had, moreover, a Western WC instead of a hazardous wog crouch-hole. He was also drinking a fair quantity of mint-tea, good for his stomach.
"Pauvre petit bonhomme. Georges, donne-lui quelque chose."
It was a living. For occupation he had the working-out, though not on paper (there would be paper in prison), of a sonnet concerned with the relationship of the Age of Reason and the so-called Romantic Revival:
Augustus on a guinea sat in state-
The sun no proper study but each shaft
Of filtered light a column: classic craft
Abhorred the arc or arch. To circulate
(Blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight
As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed -
A difficult form, most exigent. Those drug-takers in the Doggy Wog place didn't have all that to worry about: no octaves and sestets in the free wide-open unconscious. A load of bloody rubbish, of course, but he couldn't quell his new self-doubt. As for reading, he would glance shyly at foreign papers left on outdoor café tables: there seemed to be nothing about Yod Crewsy.
And then, outside the Rif, he had heard these two men, talking loudly about someone who could only be Wapenshaw. The Turkish Delight commercial doorman was whistling a taxi to come over for them from the taxi-stand opposite the Miramar. And one of the two men, his belly pushed out to keep up his unbelted long shorts, had said to the other (both had spatulate scrubbed and shaven-looking fingers): "Heart. He let himself get upset about something." It was as they were climbing into their petit taxi or taxi chico that the other one, oldish but thin and strong like a surgical instrument, had said: "Now bugger off and buy yourself a shave," handing Enderby a fifty-centime piece.
"Allah."
Retribution, justice: that was what it was. Serve Wapenshaw right. He had grinned and then seen his grin reflected in the glass door of the Rif, the back of a fat woman in black rompers making a temporary mirror-back. He had looked pretty horrible-a face without margins peering from the cave of the capuchin hood, toothless. He could not see his grey whiskers, but he felt them: skirr skirr. He grinned in horror.
At this moment another beggar, sturdy and genuine, had come up to remonstrate loudly. He had been crouched in the entrance to the hotel garage, but now, seeing the grin, he had risen, it seemed, in reproach of one not taking the business seriously enough. He was darker than Enderby, more of a Berber, and had plenty of teeth. He gnashed these in execration, starting to push Enderby in the chest. "Take your hands off," Enderby cried, and a visitor in a Palm Beach suit turned in surprise at the British accent. "For cough," Enderby added, preparing to push back. But careful, careful; respectable beggary only: the police might conceivably come. He saw then what the trouble was: pitch-queering. "Iblis," he swore mildly at this colleague or rival. "Shaitan. Afrit." He had learned these words from Ali Fathi. And then, the real beggar calling terms less theological after him, he began to cross the road rather briskly. Perhaps he ought, anyway, to haunt the beach more, specifically that segment near El Acantilado Verde, even though so many people on it had their clothes off and locked away, able with a good conscience to grin (more kindly than Enderby had grinned) and show empty hands and armpits filled only, in the case of the men, with hair. The restaurant part of Rawcliffe's establishment was glassed like an observatory. The rare eaters sweated on to their food, brought to them by an amiable-looking negroid boy in an apron and tarboosh. Windows were open, and Enderby would shyly squint in, but Rawcliffe did not seem to be about yet. He would justify the peering by shoving in a hand for alms, and, on the first day of this new pitch, he had had a squashy egg-and-salad sandwich plopped on to his paw. Palms, alms. Was there a poem there? But he gained also the odd bit of small change when customers-mostly German, needing a substantial bever between meals-paid their bills.
These last two days had yielded a sufficiency, and the fine weather held. Padding the sand, on which the sea, clever green child but never clever at more than a child's level, had sculpted its own waves, he breathed in salt, iodine, the sea's childish gift of an extra oxygen molecule, and thought in quiet sadness of old days-bucket and spade, feet screaming away from jellyfish, Sam Brownes of seaweed and the imperial decoration of a starfish (belly thrust out like that Wapenshaw-talking man, chest sloped to keep it on). And El Acantilado Verde reminded him of later days by the sea, betrayed and ruined by so many. "Baksheesh," he suggested now to a mild German-looking couple who, in heavy walking dress except for bare feet, drank the wind, strolling. They shook their heads regretfully. "German bastards," Enderby said quietly to their well-fed backs. The light was thicker, less heat was coming today from the piecrust cloud. There might be rain soon.
Here was a family that looked British. The wife was thin as from a long illness, the husband wore stern glasses, a boy and girl undressed for water-play chased and tried to hit each other.
"Daft old Jennifer!"
"Silly stupid Godfrey! You've got all sand in your tummy-button!"
Enderby addressed the father, saying, with begging hand: "Allah allah. Baksheesh, effendi."
"Here," said the man to his wife, "is an example of what I mean. You have a good look at him and what do you see? You see a wog layabout in the prime of life. He ought to be able to do a decent day's work like I do."
"Allah," with less confidence.
"They should be made to work. If I had the running of this tinpot little dictatorship I'd make sure that they did." He had a cheap-looking plastic-bodied camera dangling from a cord. His stare was bold and without humour.
"He's only a poor old man," said his wife. She was, Enderby could tell, a woman much put upon; the children too would be insolent to her, asking why all the time.
"Old? He's not much older than what I am. Are you? Eh? Speak English do you? Old."
"No mash Ingrish," Enderby said.
"Well, you should learn it, shouldn't you? Improve yourself. Go to night-classes and that. Learn something, anyway. This is the modern world, no room for people that won't work, unless, that is, they've been thrown out of it through no fault of their own. Don't understand a blind bit of what I'm saying, do you? Trade, eh? Learn a trade. If you want money, do something for it."
"Come on, Jack," said the wife. "There's a man there keeps looking at our Godfrey."
Enderby had not previously met a response to mendicancy as hard-hearted and utilitarian as this. He looked grimly at this man of the modern world: a trade-union man, without doubt; perhaps a shop steward. He wore a dark suit with, concession to holiday, wings of open-necked shirt apparently ironed on to lapels. "Trade," Enderby said. "I got trade." The sky seemed to be getting darker.
"Oh, understand more than you let on you're able to, eh? Well, what trade have you got, then?
"Bulbul," Enderby said. But that might not be the right word. "Je suis," he said, "poète."
"Poet? You said poet?" The man's mouth had opened into a square of small derision. He took from a side-pocket a ten-centime piece. "You say some poetry, then. Listen to this, Alice."
"Oh, let him alone, Jack."
It might have been the word bulbul that did it. Suddenly Enderby, in a kind of scorn, found himself reciting a mock ruba'iy. Would those debauchees of the Doggy Wog laugh less at this than at his Horatian Ode?
"Kazwana ghishri fana kholamabu
Bolloka wombon vurkelrada slabu,
Ga jarthouse wopwop yairgang offalftow
Untera merb --"
A voice behind him said: "Better, Enderby. Much better. Not quite so obsessed with meaning as you used to be." It was an eroded dyspneal voice. Enderby turned in shock to see Rawcliffe being helped, by two Moorish youths in new black trousers and white shirts, up the three steps that led to the door of his bar-restaurant. Rawcliffe paused at the top, waiting for the door to be opened. He panted down ghastlily at Enderby, his palsied grey head ashake. "Thou art translated," he wavered, "but not so much." The door opened, and its glass panels mirrored momentarily the thickening sea-clouds. "Gracias," Rawcliffe said to the two Moors and trembled from his trouser-pocket a ten-dirham note for them. They hand-waved and grinned off. Then, to Enderby: "Come and drink with one about to die."
"All right," said the trade-union man. "You win. Take your ackers." But Enderby ignored him and followed, with his own shaking, the broken frame of Rawcliffe from which an Edwardian suit bagged and hung. About to die, death, dying. That man Easy Walker had said something about his being crookidy dook. But was it rather that Rawcliffe, out of the vatic residuum of a failed poet's career, knew that he was going to be killed? Enderby then realised that he'd done nothing, despite this long wait, about getting hold of a weapon. God knew the shops had offered him enough. Not cut out for murder perhaps really. Not really his trade.
Enderby climbed those three steps like a whole flight, shaking and panting. When he entered the bar he found that Rawcliffe, helped now by a dark and curly pudding of a young man, had not yet arrived at the place he was groaning and yearning towards a fireside-type chair at the end of the room, facing the main door, with the back door near it open for air. There was too much glass here altogether: it was to bake the summer customers and make them drink more. But now, in the expected pathetic fallacy, the sky was darkening fast, rain on its way. The bar-counter was to the right, facing the doorless entrance to the eating-conservatory. The pudding young man got behind the bar before starting to shoo Enderby out. Rawcliffe, now heavily sitting, said: "Oqué, oqué, Manuel. Es un amigo."
"That's not," Enderby said, "quite what I'd call myself." There was an aloof interested inner observer, he was concerned to be interested to note, noting all this as possible material for a future poem, including the notation of the interest. That was not right: it was that inner observer, also creator, that had primarily been wronged. "The enemy," Enderby said. "Come to get you. You know what for." The inner observer tut-tutted.
"I knew you'd give it up, Enderby," Rawcliffe said. "You did bloody well, really. All those years writing verse when, by rights, you should have flitted to the tatty Olympus of remembered potency." He wavered all this like an ancient don pickled in the carbon dioxide of his college rooms. Then he coughed bitterly, cursing with little breath. Recovering, he gasped: "Brandy, Manuel. Large."
"Doctor he say -"
"Curse the bloody doctor and you and every bloody body. Who's master here, God blast you? Brandy. Very very large." Manuel, his eyes on Rawcliffe, slopped much Cordon Bleu into a lemonade glass. "Bring it over, Enderby. Have one yourself."
"How did you know it was me?" Enderby asked, interest much too active.
"I can see through things. Poetic clairvoyance. Bring that brandy over."
"I'm not here -"
"To be a bloody waiter. I know, I know. Bring it over just the same." Enderby shambled to where Rawcliffe was and splashed the glass down on a small table by the chair. This table had a mass of personal trash on it, as, Enderby thought, in that poem by Coventry Patmore: to comfort his sad heart. A pile of old newspapers, a Woolworth watch, a couple of stones (ha) abraded by the beach, an empty bottle, no bluebells, cigarette packets. Beware of pity, however. Pity spareth many an evil thing. Rawcliffe took the glass and, in an aromatic brandy tempest, put it to his starved lips. Bleeding to death, Enderby saw; he was near the end of his blood. Pity causeth the forests to fail.
"Swine," Enderby said as Rawcliffe drank. "Filthy traitor and pervert."
Rawcliffe surfaced from drinking. His face started to mottle. He looked up at Enderby from behind his Beetle goggles, his eyes bloodless like his mouth, and said: "I grant the latter imputation, Enderby," he said, "if you call a search for pure love perversion." As on cue, the negroid waiter in the tarboosh appeared from the kitchen, posed against the door-post, and looked in a sort of loving horror at Rawcliffe. "There, my black beauty," cooed Rawcliffe's abraded larynx. "Anybody noshing in there? Quién está comiendo? His head twitched towards the dining-room.
"Nadie."
"Shut up bloody shop, Manuel," coughed Rawcliffe. "We're closed till further notice. The bloody baigneurs and baigneuses-and a fat pustular lot they are, Enderby-can do key-business at the scullery door." Manuel began to cry. "Stop that," said Rawcliffe with a ghost of sharpness. "As for," he turned back to Enderby, "being a filthy traitor, I've done nothing to contravene the Official Secrets Act. The beastly stupid irony of sending you out here as a spy or whatever it is you are. That maquillage is ridiculous. It looks like boot-polish. Get it off, man. You'll find turps in the kitchen."
"To me," Enderby said. "A traitor to me, bastard. You grew fat on the theft and travesty of my art." Pity slayeth my nymphs. "I mean metaphorically fat."
"Of course you do, my dear Enderby." Rawcliffe finished his brandy, tried to cough and couldn't. "Better. A mere palliative, though. And that's why you got yourself up like that, eh? My brain's fuddled, such of it as has not yet been eaten away by this encroaching angel. I fail to see why you should dress up as whatever it is you're supposed to be in order to tell me I've grown metaphorically fat on your whatever it is." He grew suddenly drowsy and then shook himself awake. "Have you locked those bloody doors yet, Manuel?" he tried to shout.
"Pronto, pronto."
"It's a bit of a long story." Enderby saw no way out of seeming to make an excuse. "I'm hiding from the police, you see. Interpol and so on." He sat down on a stackable chair.
"Make yourself comfortable, my dear old Enderby. Help yourself to a drink. You look sunken and hungry. There's Antonio sleeping in his kitchen, a very passable pastmaster of short-order cookery. We'll shout him awake and he will, singing his not altogether trustworthy Andalusian heart out, knock you up his own idiosyncratic version of a mixed grill." He probed his throat for a cough but none came. "Better. I feel better. It must be your presence, my dear old Enderby."
"Murder," Enderby said. "Wanted for murder. Me, I mean." He couldn't help a minimal smirk. The Woolworth watch ticked loudly. As in a last desperate gasp, the sun slashed the shelves of bottles behind the bar with fire and crystal, then retired. The clouds hunched closer. Bathers were running into Rawcliffe's arena, after keys and clothes. Manuel was there shouting at them, jangling keys. "Cerrado, Fermé. Geschlossen. Shut up bloody shop."
"Like something from poor dear dead Tom Eliot," said Rawcliffe. "He always liked that little poem of mine. The one, you may remember, that is in all the anthologies. And now the rain laying our dust. No more shelter in the colonnade and sun in the Hofgarten." He seemed ready to snivel.
"Murder," Enderby said, "is what we were talking about. I mean me being wanted for murder."
"Be absolute for life or death," said Rawcliffe, fumbling a dirty handkerchief from one of the many pockets of his jacket-face. He gave the handkerchief to his mouth with both hands, coughed loosely, then showed Enderby a gout of blood. "Better up than down, out than in. So, Enderby," he said, folding in the blood like a ruby and stowing it with care, "you've opted for the fantasy life. The defence of pretence. I can't say I blame you. The real world's pretty horrible when the gift goes. I should know, God help me."
"It went but it came back. The gift, I mean. And now," Enderby said, "I shall write in prison." He crossed one leg over the other, disclosing much of his European trousers, and, for some reason, felt like beaming at Rawcliffe. "They don't have the death penalty any more," he added.
Rawcliffe shook and shook. It was with anger, Enderby saw with surprise. "Don't talk to me about the bloody death penalty," Rawcliffe shook. "Nature exacts her own punishments. I'm dying, Enderby, dying, and you burble away about writing verse in prison. It's not the dying I mind so much as the bloody indignity. My underpants filling with bloody cack, and the agony of pissing, and the smell. The smell, Enderby. Can you smell the smell?"
"I've got used to smells," Enderby apologised, "living as I've been doing. You don't smell any different," he smelled, "than that time in Rome. You bloody traitor," he then said hotly. "You stole my bloody poem and crucified it."
"Yes yes yes yes." Rawcliffe seemed to have grown tired again. "I suppose the decay was always with me. Well, it won't be long now. And I shall infect neither earth nor air. Let the sea take me. The sea, Enderby, thalassa, la belle mer. Providence, in whatever guise, sent you, in whatever guise. Because, delightful though these boys could often be in my violet-enough-smelling though really Indian summer, days, they can't altogether be trusted. With me gone, a mere parcel of organic sludge yumyumyummed away at by boring phagocytes, Enderby, the posthumous memory of my request will not move them to fulfil it. Oh, dear me, no. So that can be handed over to you with total confidence, a fellow-Englishman, a fellow-poet." The boys could be heard in the kitchen, hearty Mediterranean lip-smacking, the rarer and more sophisticated ping of a fork on a plate, Moghrabi conversation, laughter escaping from munches. Not altogether to be trusted. The rain now came down, and Rawcliffe, as if pleased that a complicated experimental process were under way, nodded. Enderby suddenly realised that that was who he'd got his own nod from: Rawcliffe.
"Rawcliffe," he said, "bastard. I'm not here to do anything for you, bastard as you are. You've got to be killed. As a defiler of art and a bloody traitor." He noticed that he still had one leg comfortably crossed over the other. He disposed himself more aggressively, hands tensely gripping knees, though still seated. That tan polish seemed to be sweating off, a bit streaky. He'd better do something about that before killing Rawcliffe.
"If you killed me," Rawcliffe said, "you'd be doing me a very large favour. There might be a small obituary in The Times. The triumph of that early poem might be recalled, the poem itself reproduced, who knows? As for a weapon, there's a till-protecting service revolver in that cupboard behind the bar. Or our steak-knives are pretty sharp. Or you could feed me, say, fifty sleeping-capsules, pellet by pellet. Oh, my dear Enderby, don't be a bloody bore. Let me expiate in nature's way, blast you."
"That's not right," Enderby started to mumble. "Justice. What I mean is." What he meant was that he'd been quite looking forward to a life sentence, a bit of peace and quiet, get on with his. "I mean that if they're going to get me it'd better be for something real." Then: "I didn't mean that. What I meant to say was for a sheep as well as a lamb. Look, I will have a drink after all."
"Better, Enderby, much better. There's a nice bottle of Strega behind the bar. Remember those brief sunny Strega-drinking days by the Tiber? Days of betrayal, you will say. Was I the only betrayer?" He sat up with sudden alertness. "Do pass me that bottle of life-surrogate there, my dear Enderby. Cordon Bleu, a blue cordon to keep out that scrabbling crowd of clawers hungry for my blood. They must wait, must they not? We have things to see to, you and I, first." Enderby went to the bar, handed shaking Rawcliffe his bottle, unwilling anyway to pour for the sod, then looked at all the other bottles, embarrassed for choice. "Didn't go well, that marriage, did it, Enderby? Not cut out for marriage, not cut out for murder. Tell me all about that. No, wait. Dear Auntie Vesta. Married now to some sharp Levantine with very good suits. But she failed really, you know, failed despite everything. She'll never be in anybody's biography, poor bitch. You're a remarkable man, Enderby. It was in all the papers, you know, that marriage. There was a pop nuptial mass or something. Choreography round the altar, brought downstage for the occasion. A lot of bloody ecumenical nonsense."
"That," grudgemumbled Enderby, "is just what I said. Not in that connection. I mean in the other one. That priest, I mean. The day it happened." Fundador. Not too bad a drink, despite that blasted moon woman. Rawcliffe clanked and clanked out his slug, then drank. Enderby, ashamed at his quieter co-ordination, did a real professional barman's pour of his own. "What happened was this," he said, before drinking. "This yob got shot, Crewsy that is, was, and someone put the gun in my hand. I ran, you see. You'd have done the same."
Rawcliffe frowned, made a shot at his lips with his glass, sprayed and dribbled cognac, sucked in a fair amount, gasped. "Let's get all this straight, Enderby," he gasped. "I read the papers. I read nothing else. I've been hanging on to life, you know. The ephemeral, I mean, the sad, pretty, awful, tragic everyday, not the transcendencies of great art. I shall meet the eternal soon enough. I shall get my chamber music without the trouble of having to attend to profundities squeezed sweating from sheepgut. Or there will be nothing, like Sam Beckett. I read the papers-the pipe-smoking dogs, the topless weddings, the assassinations of pop-singers. Yod Crewsy I know all about. Dying, soon to die. Perhaps we shall die on the same day, he and I. That will be fitting, somehow. A barman shot him. I don't remember the name. Wait: something porcine."
"Hogg," said Enderby with impatience. "Hogg, Hogg." There was a young wall-eyed man in a dirty apron, the cook Antonio probably, standing by the kitchen door, picking his teeth with a quill and frowning puzzled at Enderby's get-up. "Hogg."
"That's it. So you read the papers too. A poetical name, that I did know. A very Jacobitical poet, that one. Charlie he's my darling. Wha the deil hae we goten for a King but a wee wee German lairdie. I like that weewee bit. He spoke out, Enderby. He didn't give a worsted-stocking damn."
"Listen," Enderby hissed, coming from behind the bar with his glass of Fundador. "That was me. Hogg. That was my mother's name. They turned me into a barman, Wapenshaw and the rest of them. Yes, yes, they did. A useful citizen, they said, poet no longer. You didn't know, nobody knew. That was never in the papers." Rawcliffe was all rigidity now, staring. "But," Enderby said, "I got away. As Enderby. I'd got my passport. And then that bloody woman found out that Enderby and Hogg were the same. So I had to get rid of the passport. It's a long story really." He drank some Fundador and tasted again that night of the bloody woman. Bloody women.
"It must be, it must be. But," said Rawcliffe, "it's a man called Hogg they were looking for." Enderby borrowed Rawcliffe's rigidity, staring. "Oh yes. Nothing about may be travelling under an alias. Ill-known minor poet who mysteriously disappeared, nothing like that. Nobody blew the gaff, my dear Enderby."
"She must have done. Selenographer, she called herself. The police scouring Morocco. Me in hiding. And then there's John the Spaniard."
"Yes yes yes." Rawcliffe spoke soothingly. "The world's full of traitors, isn't it? But tell me, Enderby, why did you shoot him?"
"He deserved to be shot. Plagiarism. A travesty of art. He stole my poems. The same as you."
"Oh, for God's sake," said Rawcliffe with emphatic weariness, "get it over with. Shoot everybody. Shoot the whole damned treacherous world, then get behind bars and write your bloody self-pitying doggerel."
"Doggerel," Enderby sneered. "You're a right bastard to talk about me writing doggerel."
"Wait, though, wait. Didn't you say something about not having shot him at all? About someone putting the smoking gun in your innocent paw? That figures, as the smoking gun films put it. Spaghetti Westerns. They had me writing those, Enderby. But I got out. I didn't do too badly out of L'Animal Binato. That was a bloody good idea of yours." He shook himself back to the immediate topic. "You're no killer, Enderby, be sure of that. You're not even the predestined victim. You wriggle out of the real striking of the blow by the operation of a time-warp or space-woof or something. You fall on your feet. You'll have to rename the Acantilado Verde, of course."
"Eh?"
"Green cliff, raw cliff. You've got somebody on your side. Who? There you stand, absurd but vigorous. And Auntie Vesta is vanquished and poor Rawcliffe is dying. Is there anything more you want? Oh, yes. I shall dictate a letter to Scotland Yard-there's an old office Oliver in my bedroom behind the bar-and confess all. After all, Enderby, I could quite easily have done it. I even had an invitation. After all, I have been one of the great diluters, worthy to be asked. And I was in London, seeing the last of my head-shaking consultants. Very grave he was. Prepare to meet thy God. My Goddess, rather. Yes yes yes, the mockers and diluters and travestists deserve to die." Enderby frowned, unsure whether this was all drunkenness or the start of terminal delirium. Rawcliffe closed his eyes, his head lolled, his trouser-fly darkened and then his crotch dripped. Enderby saw barman and waiter and cook all crammed in the kitchen doorway, open-mouthed.
"Get him to bed," he ordered. "Come on, jump to it." Antonio crossed himself, quill still in his teeth. They did not exactly jump to it, but Manuel and the tarbooshed waiter grabbed each an oxter of Rawcliffe. Rawcliffe was dimly roaring. Enderby took the legs. He had done that before for Rawcliffe, he remembered. In Rome, honeymooning. Rawcliffe was lighter now than then. Antonio pointed where the bedroom was. The rain was easing a bit.
"You one of his friends, then?" asked the doctor. "Didn't know he had any British ones." He looked at Enderby with little favour, despite the restored teeth and shaved pinkness (that tan stuff had been hard to get off, the solvents painful), hair scant but washed and brushed, serious spectacles catching the pale after-rain Tangerine light. He was also wearing one of Rawcliffe's neo-Georgian suits, grey and hairy and not too tight in the armpits. The three boys, who were growing pimples and mannerisms as Enderby got to know them better (the tarbooshed waiter had also grown a name-Tetuani, after his hometown Tetuan), had been helpful with the restoration. They had even made up a sort of bed for him with the fireside-type chair and two or three stackable ones. It seemed to them to be a relief to have an Englishman around who was not dying.
"Not in that sense," Enderby said sternly. "A sort of friend, but not in the sense you mean."
"What do you mean, in what sense I mean?" The doctor was an upright tall man in his hale sixties, with a lot of wavy silver hair; he looked like a military medical officer who, on the repatriation of a superior garrison, had elected to stay behind. Liked the place or something. But probably secrets of his own; shadiness. He was a bit too sharp with his "What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean," Enderby said, blushing. "I'm finished with sex, anyway," he blabbed, ill at ease, unhappy with doctors. As if this declaration were a clue to identity, the doctor said:
"Seen you before somewhere, haven't I?"
"My picture in the papers perhaps. Or rather," Enderby emended with haste, "the picture of a man who looks very much like me, or so I'm told. A man called Hogg."
"I wouldn't know. Never read the papers. A lot of lies mostly. As for that sex business, I'm not all that interested in what people do in that line so long as they don't come moaning to me about the consequences. This one," he said, shouldering towards Rawcliffe, who lay feebly snorting under a blanket, "has favoured the dirty and diseased. But you know that, of course, being his friend. Nostalgie de la boue, if you know what that means. But what he's dying of could happen to anybody. To you," he said. "To your maiden aunt in Chichester or wherever it is."
"I haven't got -"
"He's riddled with it, no respecter of persons. All we can do is to ease the end. You can pay me for the hypodermic and the morphine now if you like. And for this and two previous consultations. Call me in again when you think he's gone. I'll have to sign the death certificate."
"The body," said Enderby. There's the question of -"
"He should have done what most of the British do out here. Fifty quid or thereabouts for a patch at St Andrew's. Burial service, resurrection and the life, the lot. Told me once he was a conscientious hedonist, though. Pleasure the end of life, that means. Very unwise, look where it's got him."
"But you said it could happen to -"
"He'll have to be interred at Bubana. I daresay they'll say a few words over the grave. Somebody from the consulate usually turns up. Leave all that to you."
"Look here -"
"I usually get paid in cash. Out of the till." He marched ahead of Enderby into the bar and, nodding at Antonio and Manuel, who were playing Spanish Scrabble, helped himself to what looked like forty-five dirhams.
"ELLA."
"ELLAS."
"He says," Enderby said, "that he wants to be dropped into the sea. It's in writing, signed and witnessed. That he's to be dropped into the sea. Is there any law against that?"
"Damned irregular," the doctor said, helping himself to a snifter of Bell's. "The thing ought to be done properly. What must they think of the white man here, I often ask myself. Pederasty, if you know the term, and drunkenness. Also drugs and writing. You're new here so you wouldn't know half that goes on. Keep away from that stupidly-named Dog place across the road. Americans of the worst type. Still, autres temps autres moeurs. I need not, I hope, translate. I leave everything to you, his friend. Don't neglect to get me on the blower when the time comes."
"Enby." It was Rawcliffe, very feeble.
"You'd better go in and see what he wants. Don't excite him. He's in your hands now."
"Look here -"
"DIOS."
"ADIOS."
"Little poem in itself, that, you could call it I suppose," said the doctor. He smacked off the last of his Bell's. "Still, I leave poetry to you and your kind. I must be off now."
"What do you mean by -"
"Enby." Rawcliffe had pumped up a few extra teaspoonsful of painful air to strengthen his call. No compassion in his march, the doctor let himself out. "Bgr you Enby. Comere." Enderby went back into the sickroom. It was small but cool. Rawcliffe's bed was a double mattress laid on a worn Bokhara; thrown about all over the floor were local goat-skins, of different degrees of off-whiteness; there were cheap ornaments from the bazaar-a hand of Fatma, a cobra which was really an iron spring-it throbbed and jumped and burred on the Moorish coffee table if you touched it, a Rif saddle, a hubble-bubble, scimitars and daggers on the walls. One wall was all books in army cartridge-boxes disposed like shelf-units. Enderby had not yet had time to look through those books: there might conceivably be a copy of-The smell of dying Rawcliffe fought against an incense-burner and an aerosol lavender spray. Rawcliffe, naked under his blanket, said: "Brandy. Vry lrge."
"He said you're to have morphine," Enderby said uneasily. "Alcohol won't help the pain, he said."
"Bgrim. Wanna talk. Bndy." Enderby tried to harden his heart against him, traitor, traducer, diluter, sinner against literature. He went to get a new bottle of Cordon Bleu. Could Rawcliffe cope with a lemonade glass?
"CACA."
"CACAO."
There was a china feeding-cup next to the iron cobra. Enderby poured cognac in, sat on Rawcliffe's bed and helped him to drink. Rawcliffe spluttered, coughed, tried to say Christ, but he got down what Enderby estimated to be about a bar quintuple. He had once, in Piggy's Sty, had to serve one of those to a Cabinet Minister: it had come to thirty shillings, taxpayers' money.
"Better, Enderby, much better. Taken that letter to the post, has he? Loiters on the way sometimes, wayward. Good fundamentally, though. A bottom of good sense. Dr Johnson or somebody said that, Enderby."
"It was about a woman."
"Woman, was it? Well, of course, that's more your line, isn't it? God God God God, the bloody pain. The thing to do is to try to see the bloody pain as working in something out there. The body is not me. No transubstan. But Christ Christ, there's a hot line to the brain. Snip the nerve-endings, is there a me still there when all have been snipped? Psychoneural paral paral parallelism ism. Very popular that, before the war. The new immortality."
"There's this morphine here," Enderby said.
"More your line. Two lines there, though, hot and cold. Sun and moon. Moon's no power over you, Enderby. Me, I sinned against the Muse, all woman, and she took her revenge. And now to be sacrificed to her. But she'll be partly cheated, Enderby. New moon coming up about now. But eastward there are tideless waters. Drop this exterior thing in the tideless waters, Enderby. More brandy."
"Do you think you -"
"Yes, I do. Got to tell you. Give instructions." Enderby poured more cognac into the feeding-cup. Obscene, somehow, that festive gold and heady vapour in bland invalid china. Rawcliffe sucked more in avidly. "There's a man called Walker, Enderby. Useful sort of man, British colonial. His precise terry territory uncertain. He's in Casablanca now. Get in touch with him, his phone number's behind the bar. He knows how to get a small aircraft, borrows it from Abdul Krim or somebody, bloody rogue whoever he is. Bloody rogue. What was I saying? Tight, a bit, that's the trouble. Empty stomach, that's the trouble."
"I know this Walker. Easy Walker he calls himself." And then: "Can you eat something? An egg or something?"
It's not your job to keep me alive, is it, Enderby? What's the bloody use of nutriment to me? Listen. The money's in this mattress. For Christ's sake don't let anybody burn it. It's not that I don't trust the banks. It's the buggers in the banks I don't trust, Enderby. Tattle tattle tattle about how much he's got, then coming along for a loan, then beat you up in a back-alley if they can't have it. I know them all too well. You know them all too well. You know Easy Walker. Always said you'd fall on your feet, Enderby. Get that bloody Antonio in here."
"What for?"
"Tell him to bring his guitar. Want to hear. To hear. In all the anthol. He sings it."
Enderby went out to the bar and said: "Antonio. Señor Rawcliffe quiere que tu, listed canta, cante, subjunctive there somewhere, whatever it is. Su canción, él dice." Antonio and Manuel both looked up from a Scrabble board now nearly full of words, their eyes ready to brim. Enderby went back to Rawcliffe. "That letter to Scotland Yard," he said. "It won't do any good. There must be a lot who send in letters like that." And where was he to go, where? He had reconciled himself, hadn't he? But that was when it had seemed possible to be able to murder Rawcliffe. Rawcliffe's eyes were closed. He had started snorting again. His body writhed feebly. And then he started violently awake.
"You've no bloody idea," he said with slow seriousness, "of the bloody agony. You wouldn't think it possible. Don't leave it too long, Enderby."
"Morphine?"
"Brandy. Insult to the brain. Poor Dylan. Kill me with bloody kindness." Enderby sighed, then recharged the feeding-cup. Antonio came in, trying his strings, crying. "Sing, blast you," said Rawcliffe, spluttering out cognac. The smell of it was fast overcoming his own. Antonio sat on the Rif saddle and twanged his thumb from E to e, sniffing his tears back. It was a well-worn guitar; Enderby could see the abrasions of fingers that, in Andalusian style, had drummed its body. Antonio gave out a thrummed major chord that, with the smell of cognac, seemed to affirm life (sun, zapateados, death in the afternoon). He wailed:
"Per ap sa yamna tuonti diri seyed,
Per ap sayid beter go,
Ji seyed. Mocionles jer ayis, jer jeyed,
Seyin not yes, not no."
"In all the anthologies," Rawcliffe cried, then coughed and coughed. Antonio did not go on. "Put that, death, in your bloody pipe," said Rawcliffe more weakly when the racking had subsided. "Exegi monumentum. And what of yours, Enderby?" He was so faint that Enderby had to drop his ear towards him. "Better to be the one-poem man. But she left me then. Opened up heaven of creativity and then closed it. All right, Antonio. Later, later. Muchas gracias." Antonio blew his nose on his cook's apron. "Read me something of yours, Enderby. They're there, your slender volumes, somewhere. I bought your books at least. Least I could do. I am not all badness."
"Well, really, this is hardly-What I mean is -"
"Something appropriate. Something to one about to die or one dead."
Enderby felt grimly in his left jacket pocket. He had transferred that stolen horror thither. "I can," he said, "without going to your shelves." But there was here at last, and his heart began to climb as with muscular pseudopodia, the chance of checking. Auntie Vesta. He strode over Rawcliffe's hidden feet towards the wall of books. A lot of cheap nasty stuff there: Bumboy, Mr Wigg's Fancy, Lashmaster. He thought, from the shape and size, he saw a copy of his own Fish and Heroes, but it turned out to be a small collection of glossy photographs: men and boys complicatedly on the job, with idiot eyes. But here it was, that other volume, the one the critics had trounced: The Circular Pavane. He flicked and flicked through the pages. There weren't many. And then. "Right," he said. Rawcliffe's eyes were closed again but he could tell Enderby was smiling. He said:
"Glee, eh? The creator's glee? You've found something that recalls the actual ecstasy of its making. Don't exass exacerbate my agony. Read it."
"Listen." Enderby tried to be gruff, but his reading made the poem sound sneering, as though the emotions of the mature were being mocked by some clever green child:
"They thought they'd see it as parenthesis -
Only the naked statement to remember,
Cleaving no logic in their sentences,
Putting no feelers out to the waking dreamer -
So they might reassume untaken seats,
Finish their coffee and their arguments,
From the familiar hooks redeem their hats
And leave, with the complacency of friends.
But strand is locked with strand, like the weave of bread,
And this is part of them and part of time -"
"Oh God God," Rawcliffe suddenly cried. "Ugly hell gape not come not Lucifer." He began to babble. "And if die eternal finds its figures in the temporal then they can find their inferno here." He screamed and then collapsed, his head lolling, his tongue out, blood coming from his left nostril. Antonio's guitar clanged gently superposed fourths and my-dog-has-fleas as he put it down. He made the sign of the cross and prayed weeping. "A shot, Enderby, for Christ's sake." Enderby stared: a test; see if he could really kill? "A lot of shots." He saw then and went over to the coffee-table and the syringe and the morphine ampoules in their box. He hoped he could cope. Those Doggy Wog people would be able to cope all right.
Rawcliffe did not stay under for long. There was a powerful life-urge there, despite everything. "Brandy," he said. "I'll beat them all yet, Enderby." Enderby filled the cup: the bottle was near its end. Rawcliffe sucked it all in like water. "What news?" he asked. "What irrelevancies are proceeding in the big world?"
"There's nothing as far as I can see," Enderby said. "But we've only got the Spanish paper, and I can't read Spanish very well."
Enough, though. When Tetuani came back from posting that air-letter, he brought with him a copy of España, which Enderby took with him to a bar-table. Rawcliffe unconscious, though roaring terribly from deep in his cortex, Enderby sat with a large whisky, breathing the prophylactic of fresh air from an open window. "Quiere comer?" Antonio asked. Enderby shook his head: he couldn't eat anything just yet, not just yet, gracias all the same. He drank his drink and looked at the paper. It was better that he read what he was undoubtedly going to read not in English: he needed the cushioning of a foreign tongue, with all its associations of literature and tourism, despite his foreknowledge. Words had power of their own: dead would always be a horrible word. On the front page the Caudillo still howled for the Rock, and some Arab leader called vainly for the extermination of Israel. When, on the second page, he came to the headline YOD CREWSY MUERTO, his response was that of a printer who had set the type himself. The score was, say, 10-2, and you had to wait ten minutes, say, for the anticlimax of the final whistle. What it said under the headline was brief. It said, as far as Enderby could tell, that he had passed into a terminal coma after a moment of flickering his eyes open and that soon there were no further indications of cardiac activity. There would be a sort of lying in state somewhere and then a requiem mass at the Catholic Cathedral in London (they meant Westminster). Fr O'Malley would deliver the panegyric. Nothing about girls weeping, as over Osiris or Adonis or somebody. Nothing about Scotland Yard expecting immediate arrest.
"Nothing at all," Enderby said.
What would Scotland Yard do about Rawcliffe's letter? Enderby had two-fingered it himself to Rawcliffe's dictation. It would do no good, Enderby had said, but Rawcliffe had insisted. Repentance, seeing the light, symbolic blow against anti-art. A guest (check guest-list) who had come with full cold-blooded intention of killing and then being arrested-dying of those encroaching claws, what had he to lose?-he had succumbed in reflex to panic and handed gun to an anonymous waiter. He was not sorry, oh no, far from it: so perish all art's enemies, including (but with him it was the fullest blackest knowledge: he knew what he did) himself. Rawcliffe's scrawl, two witnesses: Antonio Alarcón and Manuel Pardo Palma. Well, Enderby thought, it might resolve things one way or the other. It would welcome the police to one terminus or another. And your name, sir, señor? Enderby. Your passport, please, por favor. Well, a slight problem there, officer. Whispered consultation, sergeant calling inspector over, comparing photograph with. All right, Hogg then. I recognised the true murderer and pursued him. Doing the job of the police for them, really, in best fictional tradition. I say no more. All right, arrest me then. Obviously I say no more. No warning necessary.
He was indifferent, really. All he wanted was a small room and a table to write verse on and freedom from the necessity to earn a living. But there remained self-doubt. Was the Muse so generous now only because she was dispensing rubbish? The future, perhaps, lay with those Doggy Wog people. He didn't really know; he wanted to be told, shown. But was he being reserved for something? Why did not everybody know that Hogg was Enderby? Why had that moon-bitch been silent? If John the Spaniard had blown the gaff, why was Tangier not milling with Interpol, demanding to see all foreign passports, combing? What force had struck down Wapenshaw, if it was Wapenshaw they'd been talking about, and rendered him dumb?
Enderby wondered now, sitting on the Rif saddle, keeping away from the putridity, whether he should ask Rawcliffe (meaning the still not foundered intelligence in the penthouse above the demolition squads), as a dying man who had nothing to gain by mendacity, what he thought of his, Enderby's, work and (what he really meant) whether he should go on with it. But heaving and groaning Rawcliffe gave him an answer without being asked, without speaking. Go on with anything so long as you're alive; nothing matters except staying alive. Enderby could see that now, but had not always thought so. Rawcliffe said:
"Get on to Walker. It's going to be it soon, Enderby. Never mind what he asks. Money money money. All money these days. Fortunately it's stuffed in here, mine I mean, by my feet. No danger, Enderby, of ultimate incontinence fouling it. Clean money, most. The dirty part did not really harm my country. Hashish a harmless enough drug. More brandy."
"I'll have to get a new bottle."
"Get it then, blast you. What are those bloody boys doing?"
"The siesta."
"Something in the Bible about that. What, could ye not watch with me one hour? This night, before the cock crow." Rawcliffe took breath, rattling, and went feebly cocorico. Then he coughed and coughed. Blood bubbled from both nostrils and some trickled from his right mouth-corner. "Good Christ," he panted, "I won't have this. Bewrayed, beshitten. Die in one's own bloody dung." He tried to shift his body away from the new foulness but rolled back on to it. "I'm getting up," he said. "I'm going to die on my feet. Help me, blast you, Enderby."
"You can't, you mustn't, you -"
"Best to be shot, knifed, standing." He threw his blanket off. He was naked except for a safety-pinned towel like a baby's diaper. "I insist, Enderby, you bastard. I'll drink my terminal liquor in a bar, like a man. My viaticum, you swine." He started, cursing, to get up. Enderby had to help, no way out of it. He went further than he'd gone for anybody. He pulled off Rawcliffe's diaper and wiped him clean with the clean part of it. He forgave his stepmother everything. There was a bathrobe on a nail behind the door. He put his arm round bare shivering Rawcliffe and shuffle-danced him towards it. "Better, Enderby, better,” as he was clothed in gay yellow and blue. “Take me to the bar. Wake those bloody boys. They must be my crutch."
Pushing Rawcliffe before him, Enderby yelled. Antonio peered out from the kitchen first, startled, naked as Rawcliffe had been. He went back in to get the others, himself yelling. Rawcliffe tried to yell but collapsed into coughing. He collapsed against the bar-counter coughing, trying to curse. Soon Antonio and Manuel were holding him up, an arm each about him, in dirty white shirts; Manuel's trousers were already black. "Now, Enderby," Rawcliffe gasped at last. "You say you’ve been a bloody barman. Mix me something. A cocktail called Muerte. Stop that blasted snivelling, you two." Tetuani, tarboosh on, came out, frightened.
And I will, thought Enderby. "Leave it to me," he said, adding, in desperate facetiousness, "sir." He took a large beer-glass and slopped brandy in, then white rum, gin, whisky, vodka. The bottles flashed in the fair afternoon light. It was like celebrating something.
"No need for ice," Rawcliffe gasped. "Get that, maybe, soon. That thing in bloody Shakespeare. Measure for measure, eh? Altogether fitting. Thrilling regions of ribbed ice. Top it, Enderby, with something spumous. Asti, memories of Rome. Add, for old time's sake, a dollop of Strega. Strega, a witch. Witchbitch. That bloody man in Mallorca, Enderby, says the day of the moon goddess is done. The sun goddess takes over." Enderby found a bottle of Asti on the shelf, very warm, favoured of the sun. He cracked its neck against the counter-edge. "Good, Enderby." There was a fine gush. The stench of Rawcliffe was now well overlaid with powerful yea-saying aromas. But, admired Enderby, those boys’ stomachs were strong. He gave the full spuming glass to both Rawcliffe's claws. "A toast," Rawcliffe said. "What shall it be, eh? La sacra poesía? The sun goddess? The survival of the spirit? To the," he began to droop, "impending dissolution," to snivel; the strong-handed boys began to snivel with him, "of this, of this -" Enderby became stern: he didn't like this snivelling. He cried: "Ah, shut up. Get that bloody drink down and shut up." It was strong fatherly talk; the medicine was wholesome; had not he, Enderby, once dared death, though dragged gurgling back? "Get on with it, Rawcliffe. Bloody traitor."
"Good, Enderby, good, good. No false compassion there. Excellent." Rawcliffe braced himself, pumped air into his lungs like a parody of a dog's panting, then took his medicine. It spilled and rilled, the mousse got up his nose, he coughed some back into the glass, but he went gamely on to the dregs. Antonio put the flecked glass down for him. Rawcliffe gasped and gasped. Tut. That. On. The." He coughed, like payment, a coin of bloody sputum on to the counter. "I mean. Muerte. The. Ult. Ult. Ultmte. Cktl." He yearned towards his chair, feebly turning. The boys took him over, only his bare toes touching the floor. Rawcliffe collapsed next to his chairside table, full of toys. Coventry Patmore. "Lil sip now." He at once began to snore. The boys put his feet up on a stackable. Enderby thought he had better now telephone Casablanca.
It was growing dark when Rawcliffe surfaced for the last time. Enderby had sent the boys out, sick of the hand-wringing and snivelling. He sat at the other side of Rawcliffe's chair, smoking the local cigarettes that were called Sport, not drinking. The thought of drink made him shudder. When Rawcliffe surfaced, it was with an accession-that condemned man's supper-of clarity and calm. He said:
"Who's that there?"
"Me. Enderby."
"Ah yes, Enderby. Know your poetry well. Stole one of your ideas once, a bloody good one. No regrets. Now I give you something in return. My last poem. It came to me in sleep. Listen." He cleared his throat like an elocutionist and intoned slowly but with vigour:
"The benison of lights and the
Hides of asses and the
Milk of the tide's churns.
She should not have
Rejected me like any copulative
Of the commonalty.
Too much light, Enderby. Turn one of those lights off."
There were no lights on. “I’ve done that," Enderby said.
"Good, Now where was I? Ah, I know. Listen.
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers. There I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died."
“That," Enderby said, "is George Herbert."
Rawcliffe suddenly began to rage. "It's not it's not it's not you fucking swine. It's me. Me." In the dusk his head rolled. Quietly, "Your suit is granted," he said, and died. With the conventional accompaniment of rattle and postlude of rictus and liquidity.
“And," Easy Walker cried above the engine, "real donk dirt-bibles. Got a jarvey, brad, all towsermouth for that variety of how's your Auntie-Doris-and-little-Nora-and-the-twins. So we'll march on markers when this lot's dooby-dooed."
The physical assumption of Rawcliffe. His body, in clean pyjamas and wrapped in a Union Jack that Manuel had bought for a few dirhams in, of all places, the Big Fat White Doggy Wog, sat next to Easy Walker in what Enderby took to be the copilot's seat. At least a kind of half-eaten steering-wheel or joystick in front of Rawcliffe twitched and turned in sympathy with Easy Walker's. And also dead Rawcliffe had his share of very lively dials and meters and emergency instructions, exclamation-pointed. His arms were pinioned beneath the flag, and he was corded at neck, waist, thighs, and ankles. No danger of his, its, flailing around if it-he came back to life.
“You sure he's footed the old garbage-can proper?" Easy Walker had asked while they had been bundling him in. "Because there's been cases. There's this case now, brad. Tell you after. Maybe you minced it all masterman."
Enderby sat behind Rawcliffe, an empty seat next to him. It was a small but neat aircraft, American-made, though there was a spelling mistake, Enderby noted, in one of the instructions on the instrument-panel: jetison. That did not make him doubt the airworthiness of the craft, for it was always a matter of every man to his own trade. This one of piloting seemed as much a trade of Easy Walker's as any of the others he professed. He had cried conversationally above the engine even as, tearing down the runway, he brought the speed up to air-speed:
"A real donk passy too, there'll be there. Left the whole bim-bang kadoozer to you then, has he, brad?"
"There's the question of," Enderby had shouted. “That one of mine, I mean."
"Welcome to Bird County," Easy Walker had yelled as the craft nosed into the old-gold Moroccan air. The late afternoon sky to themselves, except for rare gulls and, far to port, a migrant exaltation of brownish birds that, after a rest on the top of Gibraltar, were crossing the Straits for their African wintering. No Air Maroc flight till very much later. Below on the cabochon-cut Mediterranean very few boats, though what looked like a rich man's yacht gleamed to starboard. It was still the sun's time. The moon, thin last night, was not watching over Rawcliffe's ascension into heaven. Fattened, she would draw at him vainly from the deep, gnawed by fishes, his flag defiled. Over the aircraft wireless strange English crackled from Tangier, control tower. Easy Walker ignored it. Aft lay Ceuta.
“There was one," he yelled without effort, "Ricker Sugden did for like his booze brad when he kicked. Do too for this jarvey, I reckon." He recited, drowning the engine:
"Dragged from his doings in the roar of youth,
Snipped like the stem of a caldicot flower,
Snarled time's up ere he'd quaffed his hour,
Tossed to the tearing of the dour dog's tooth."
“That's not quite right for Bawcliffe," Enderby shouted. It wasn't, either. The right one was in all the anthologies, but Enderby's calling of it would never prevail against this of Ricker Sugden's. It was the right one only because it was the only one.
"Bye, my brad, let the bright booze pour
That is suds of stars in the Milky Way,
And its door swing open all the joylit day
And the heavenlord landlord cry you time no more."
"Not one of his best," called Enderby, but he was not heard. Not obscure enough, too much meaning. Poor Rawcliffe. Traitor Rawcliffe rather, but he had paid. Your suit is granted. What suit? To be granted a cell, smallest unit of life. Enderby feebly tried to give out to sea, sky and Easy Walker that last stanza ("His salts have long drained into alien soil"), and then saw how inappropriate it really was. His soil would drain soon into alien salt. There was nothing for Rawcliffe. But it was something to rest in bones, rags of flag fluttering, at the sea's bottom between two continents. It was a kind of poem. Easy Walker cried:
"Nowsy wowsy. You right for the shove, brad?" Enderby nodded, forgetting that Easy Walker's eyes were ahead and there was no driving mirror. The corpse of Rawcliffe had lolled to rest against the perspex of the starboard door. Enderby roughly pushed it so that it began to topple gracefully against Easy Walker. "Watch it, watch it, brad." Leaning over, Enderby turned the door-handle, panting. It was rather stiff. Suddenly it opened and swung, and the huge roaring air without seemed to pull at him, but he dug his nails into Rawcliffe's seat-back. "Nowsy wowsy powsy." Easy Walker made the craft list hard to starboard. A torrent of frozen air was rushing in up diagonally now. Enderby clawed at the corpse through its flag-shroud, heaving it out, but, falling to the air, it seemed to be merely buoyed up by it. "Blast you, Rawcliffe," went Enderby for the last time. "Righty right," Easy Walker sang, and he kicked out at a dead shin. Then he listed further. Enderby pounded and pushed. As it were reluctantly, Rawcliffe's body launched itself into this quite inferior region of the sky, lower, surely, than Parnassus. "Got him, brad," meaning space had. The tricolor, crude in this sapphire and turquoise ambience, span slowly down. "Gone." Without sound, and with lips parted only as for a cigarette, the sea took him. Here lies one whose name was not writ in water, he had once said in his cups.
It was hard to get that door, which had swung open to its limit, back in place. But Easy Walker lurched violently to port and the door hurtled in and, on a lurch that brought them both lying on their sides as at a Roman supper, it slammed to. Then he righted the craft and, widely circling in the air, its nose sniffed round towards home. Home: what else could you call it? Green Africa ahead, then the geometry of the little airport, then a sudden urgent love for the runway. A three-point landing of the kind called insolently skilled, a taxiing towards Easy Walker's waiting Volkswagen.
“Talking about passports,” Enderby said as they sped through the brown country outside town, "I'd like that back if you’ve still got it. I let it go too soon."
"Not poss, brad. Swallowed up, that, in the great dirty passy-hungry what-does-your-dad-do. Have his, though, your need being greater than. Dead jarveys help the living from their heart of darkness. Still. A pig of a pity."
"What I mean is," said Enderby, “I’m entitled to an official identity of some sort." But was he? And, if so, why? He might yet be taken somewhere, but he had no intention of making a move of his own. And, anyway, did bearing a name matter? Rawcliffe would be glad to be called anything or nothing if he could be alive again.
"There was the time I got this passy just as the jarvey as todded it seemed like as to take off. But he came to, yes he did, when it was already swapping tumblers. Well, you’re all right, I'd say, with this Rawcliffe jarvey. He won't come up, no, not never no more. Different from this jarvey back in Great Dirty Mum."
When they arrived back at El Acantilado Verde, Rawcliffe's other verbal monument, Easy Walker was eager to see what shady treasures there might be to buy cheap and sell dear. The three boys sat, in clean white, at a table by the bar-counter, playing some game which involved the linking of little fingers. They had some difficulty in composing their faces to a funeral look. "All finished," Enderby said. "Finito." But there must be a better Spanish word than that. Consommado? It sounded soupish. "Consummation," he said, pushing down to the roots.
"March on markers," said Easy Walker. He was very deft. The amount of pornography he uncovered was shocking. It was mostly in the cartridge-box book-shelves, though previously-because of the austerity of the binding-unsuspected by Enderby. "Here," said Easy Walker, "is some right donk fladge for such as takes a swizzle to it," showing Enderby Victorian steel-engravings of bloody wounds, lovingly detailed, and knobbed whips and knotted thongs. "And here's them shoving up the old kazerzy with it, very painful for my shekels and sherbet. And here," Easy Walker said, shock on his unshockable, "is what I would not have if it was my own Aunt Ada as did it, brad. Cause there's limitations to all bozzles, has to be, stands." In his hands trembled a leather-bound folio of what, to squinting Enderby, seemed at first to be illustrations to the Bible. But they were very perverted illustrations, and there was one that made Enderby feel sick. "I mean," Easy Walker said, slamming the book shut, "that was bad enough in itself without making it worse and dirty sexual." It was the first time Enderby had heard him use plain language. "Making a mock of it like that jarvey I said. When a jarvey snuffs it's not up to him to come back, up-your-piping and that. All right for him in here," he bowed his head, "because he was what he was and no up-my-tickle. But this jarvey like I said. And there was like that saucepan-lid, Lazarus his all-the-same. And crucifixions too in this one, very dirty. Very clear that came off."
"What?" said Enderby. "Who?" Time himself will bring you in his high-powered car. And supposing the car doesn't go on to pick someone else up but, instead, goes back to the garage. Things as they were before, or as near as you could get them. He would not be surprised, he would not be surprised at anything. “You mean," said Enderby, “Tod Crewsy. You mean he's not dead after all."
Easy Walker nodded and nodded. "Laid out, brad, in some arsee plum-and-apple in the Smoke. Then all them teens brooping round, going sniff sniff. Turn-the-handles lighted all about him in his best whistle. And his three brads keeping double-scotch, two at his toots and one behind his uncle. Then he flicks open and says "Where am I?" Got it this morning on the talkbox, in the near-and-far, coming here."
Enderby nodded and nodded. Bitch. Blasphemous bitch. Very clever. Easily done, bribed doctors or not even that. Genuine error. Clinical death and real death. And now sermons about miracles and popsters flocking to give thanks. Our Thammuz, Adonis, Christ for that matter. "And," Enderby said, “I suppose there was one sly pseudo-mourner, come to see, his only chance his handiwork, lurking in the shadows of the chapel, and, when this body rose from the dead, he screamed. Screamed that the times have been that, when the brains were out, the man would die, and there an end, but now they rise again, this is more strange than such a murder is."
Easy Walker shook his head, baffled. "Don't get that at all, brad. Forked me on the cobbles and no rare-with-Worcester. Have to mince the papers when they come out, not out yet, not with that, pennywise."
Enderby shook his bead, not baffled. "No more papers. Bugger the outside world," he said violently. "If not that way, some other. I'll hear about it, only a question of waiting. No resurrection for Rawcliffe, not of any kind. They'll crumple his letter up at Scotland Yard, another crank."
"I'll ghoul these off now," Easy Walker said, "dirt-bibles." He showed new shock on the realisation that his slang had, for once slung at the gold and pierced it. Enderby then had an intuition that he was going to throw off what must be a home-stitched patchwork of patois and, strayed sheep or remittance-man, speak a true language that was far more middle-class than his, Enderby's. "It's all dirt and cheating," he said, and only on the last word (cheadn) did the innominate colonial really sound out. He seemed for an instant as feeble as in a plonk hangover. Enderby nodded. He said kindly:
"Come back tomorrow or the next day for the rest of the stuff. Except for what I want, that is. Any heterosexual pornography I'll keep. I’ve finished with women."
"Finish with them." It was clear and bitter. And then: "What's all them there sling-your-hooks there, brad?" He headed at a set of cartridge-boxes set aside, special.
"Those," said Enderby, "are all the anthologies."
When Easy Walker had left, Enderby ripped open Rawcliffe's mattress with a tarnished curved dagger. There were bundles of dirty notes, high and low in denomination: about, he reckoned, fifteen thousand dirhams. He would buy a new mattress tomorrow; tonight he would make a dog's bed of rugs and cushions. Then he went thoughtfully to examine Rawcliffe's bath and lavatory, rather well-appointed; for the customers there was only a stark, though regularly sluiced, WC off the dining-conservatory. Then he went to the bar. All three boys looked at him in expectation, a composition, as for an early Picasso, of coffee-mug handlers: Antonio sipped wide-eyed; Tetuani warmed both dark brown hands on the mug's belly; Manuel, finished drinking, swung his gently, handle on little finger. "No," Enderby said firmly. "I sleep alone. Yo duermo solo." They nodded with degrees of vigour: they had merely wanted to know. Manuel said:
"Open up bloody shop?"
"Mañana."
"Quiere café?" asked Antonio.
Enderby did not resist his yearning towards a resumption of chronic self-imposed dyspepsia. He had convinced himself that he could be healthy enough if he wanted to be. "Make," he said slowly, “very strong tea. Muy fuerte. Not tea-bags but spoonfuls of the real stuff. Comprendido? Tinned milk. Leche condensada." And later he would eat-What? Something stepmotherly gross-a corned beef stew with bacon added to make floating flowers of grease, a grumbling huddle of boiled spuds, pickled onions. He nodded with relaxed kindness then went for his first for a hell of a long time leisurely session in the lavatory.
“What I say is," said the oldest of the men, his skin of broken veins and capillaries like an enlargement of a microscopic picture of motor oil, "there couldn't have been any conspiracy. They choose crack shots. A political assassination is, in our country at least, a rather serious undertaking."
"It's altogether possible," said a dried ancient, goitrous thyroid colloidally distended, eyes popping, voice hoarse, "that it was the act of a private entrepreneur. More enthusiasm than skill. They should never have got rid of National Service."
“Well, that's just what I said, isn't it?"
"Implied, if you will. Hardly said."
"He too," said a brisk barking small ex-major, the youngest, about seventy-five, "might have been resurrected. Wouldn't put anything past them. An everlasting premier."
"Or he was just a liar." This was a dithering man with twittering toothless mouth. "Jealousy of the bug for the flea. Shot at him. Failed to kill. Now tries to make himself a political hero. What do you think, Rawcliffe?"
"I really have no opinion on the matter," said Enderby. He sat in the fireside-type chair, the table in front of him, paper and ballpoint on the table, not a line added to the lines already there:
As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed,
Thyrsis was Jack, but Crousseau on a raft
Sought Johnjack's rational island -
The sun was weakish, what Tangier called winter inching up. The bottles behind the bar caught that meagre light as if to store anew what was already long stored. Manuel measured out whisky for the old men, retired here for the warmth and fancied cheapness. Manuel was cheerful and honest, to be trusted with the till. Honesty was a Tangerine luxury, to be enjoyed. There were bright pin-up calendars, promising, after the mild though windy winter, torrid abandon renewed, golden flesh, the heartbreaking wagging cruppers of the bikinied young over the golden beaches. And there were plaques advertising Byrrh, Rivoli, Royal Anjou, Carlier, a British beer called Golden Fleece. The Coca-Cola ice-box had been freshly polished by Tetuani. Marie Brizard's name was on the water-jugs, Picon's on the ashtrays. Antonio sang, preparing tapas in the kitchen. "Both politicians and pop-singers," Enderby said, "are boils on the bottom of the communal body." The oldest elder went aaaaargh. He liked that. Writer fellow this Rawcliffe. The apt phrase.
Enderby was not pushing on with the sonnet, nor with the letter he still had to write. The question was, he was thinking, how he was to address her. When he wrote. If he wrote. Dear Vesta: never. Dear Mrs-He'd forgotten her new name. (The address was easy: the publisher of this filthy volume.) An abusive salutation, that would be letting himself down. He had written to his own publisher, for he thought he might need him, them, again. Tiny royalties had accrued: they had been keeping them for him (£5. 7. 9.); they were glad, they said, to know where he was at last. As for this business of plagiarism, that was his affair, since he owned copyright. They themselves were not willing to take action, since they were in the bidding for resurrected Yod Crewsy's next book-a brief prose volume, they understood, humorous, inspirational, even religious. And they enclosed a personal letter, still in its envelope, only recently arrived at the office. Enderby had frowned over the handwriting, female. You and your female hadmirers. With a thudding heart he had opened it up.
Dear Piggy or Hoggy or Dirty (for I don't know what else to call you, do I?),
I was sorry about things and still am. And now this is the only way I can get in touch with you. Because I got it out of that silly girl on the plane that it was all really a mistake and you had gone to the wrong room without meaning to do what that silly captain of the plane thought (you know what I'm talking about, don't you). They choose too many of these air-hostesses for their looks, though hers weren't much to write home about really, and not their intelligence, and that silly captain was a bit too quick to draw conclusions, and I certainly shan't fly with them again, that courier with the stupid woolly cap on was also very rude, I thought. The number of wrongs that seem to have been done you! I was stupid too, wasn't I, thinking you could have anything to do with that shooting, it must have been my inflamed holiday imagination. I’ve been thinking about you a lot and am sure you must have been thinking very bad thoughts about me. But could you blame me really? I mean, you were a bit mysterious, no luggage and all. What I had to do to try and make amends was to get some of your poems from the library-very difficult, the library had to send off for them-and I found some of them rather obscure and others very sad. Very modern, of course. I can't make up my mind yet about whether I really like them-that sounds ungrateful, doesn't it, but I do like to think of myself as an Honest Person, but one of our junior English lecturers-did I tell you about him? Harold Pritchard, he's trying to get a little book of criticism published-was quite gone on them. He said there were curious resemblances to the poems of Yod Crewsy (the more I think of this whole scandalous business the more convinced I am it was a big publicity stunt and in the presence of the Prime Minister as well and that makes me think less of him). Then Harold found the same poem in both books, and that gave him an unholy thrill, he loves anything like a literary scandal. There was no doubt, he said, who stole from whom. So he's written a letter to the Times Literary Supplement and thinks the sparks will fly. Where are you, dear Piggy? I wish I could make proper amends. Looking back I see that despite everything that Seville night was really romantic-love and your sudden inspiration and my dear moon and even your mistake when, bless you, you were looking for me. Write to me and accept my love if you will and forgive me.
Your
Miranda
Sitting here on this quiet week-day, the train from royal Rabat just going by on the single-tracked line that separated the Spanish Avenue from the beach cafés, the ink-paint congealing in his ballpoint, the harmless winter approaching, he thought that, despite the luck that had been granted (said, and died), the autumn should, for the sake of justice, flame out with a last act of vengeance. But he could not write the letter and, the letter unwritten, the poem would never flood into the estuary of its sestet. What did he really want from her? His money back? No, this place made enough, even in winter. Her humiliation, her smartness wrecked once more but by more devastating waters than the rain of Castel whatever-it-was, the snivelling, the running eye-shadow, the smooth face collapsed into that of a weary crone? No, not that either. Rawcliffe had taught him pity, that maketh the forests to fail.
“It will die down," said the goitrous old man, "and new sensations will come up. That new shiftless generation must be fed with fresh novelties." He took some Wilson's snuff, then hawked, carked and shivered with the dour pleasure of it.
"Not a religious man," said the snapping ex-major. "But when I see a central tenet of my father's faith-he held it, poor devil, through all his suffering-when I see that, I say, turned to a trick or gimmick or whatever the fashionable word is, then I wonder. I wonder what new blasphemy they can devise." He shuddered his whisky down in one.
“No morals," said the twittering man. "No loyalty. They will turn on their friends as if they were enemies. It was at a private party that this youth with the gun boasted in his cups. Isn't that so, Rawcliffe?"
"I don't really know," said Enderby. "I don't read the papers."
“Very wise too," said the senior elder. "Stay away from that world. Get on with your job, whatever it is."
"Sam Foot," said the goitrous old man. "A ridiculous name. Probably made up."
"Samuel Foot," said Enderby, "was an eighteenth-century actor and playwright. He was also an agent for small beer. And they all jell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots."
There was a silence. “They did, eh?" said the senior. “Well suppose I'd better be thinking about getting home for lunch. Takes me longer and longer. Walking, that is."
"He wrote that," said Enderby. "It was a test-piece. This other man said that he could recite anything after hearing it once only."
"On my way too," said the ex-major. "Bit of a blow on the prom."
The door opened and a girl came in, very tanned. She wore, as for high summer, a simple green frock well above her knees, deep-cut at her young bosom, her golden arms totally bare. She carried a beach-bag. She smiled shyly and went up to Manuel at the bar. "I understand," she said, "that I can hire a changing-cubicle or whatever it's called." Her voice was low in pitch, the accent classless. Susannah among the elders, Enderby thought. The ex-major said quietly:
"Susannah among the elders." Enderby could see them feeling old, impotent, lust too tired within to rage at so many opportunities lost, the time gone, perhaps death to be their next season. And himself? He got up and said to the girl:
"Well, you can actually, but -" She looked at him from green eyes sprinkled, like a sireh quid, with gold. They were set wide apart but not too much: enough for beauty, perhaps honesty; not enough for the panic mindless world of the animals. Hair? Enderby at once, to his surprise, thought of the flower called montbretia. "What I mean is that, surely, it's getting a bit cold now. This time of the year I mean."
"I don't feel the cold. A cold sea doesn't frighten me." As in an allegory or Punch title-page, the aged trundled off-winter or war, industrial depression or an all-around bad year-from the presence of youth as peace, spring, a change of government. They creaked and groaned, snorted, limped, winced at arterio-sclerotic calf-ache, went. One or two waved tiredly at Enderby from beyond the closed glass door, a safe distance. "Could I have one then? For a couple of days. Do I pay in advance?"
"No, no, no need-Certainly. Un llave, Manuel."
"Numero ocho," Manuel smiled.
They all-Tetuani clearing the old men's whisky-glasses, Antonio at the kitchen-door, Manuel from the arena with its furled umbrellas, Enderby turned in his chair-watched her prancing seawards over the deserted sand, in scanty crimson, her hair loose. Enderby turned back in rage to his table. He took paper and wrote fiercely: "You bitch, you know you ruined my life. You also stole my verse to give to that blasphemous false commercial Lazarus of yours. Well, you won't get away with it. One of the stolen poems had already been published in one of my volumes. I'm going to sue, you’re all going to suffer." And then he could see Vesta standing there, cool, smart in spotless dacron, unperturbed, saying that she wouldn't suffer, only that mouthing creature of hers, and he was going to be abandoned anyway, past his peak, the time for the chaotopoeic groups coming, or the duo called Lyserge and Diethyl, or Big D and the Cube and the Hawk and the Blue Acid. Or worse. Enderby took another sheet of paper and wrote:
Smell and fearful and incorrigible knackers
With the crouched pole under
And strings of his inner testes strewn
Over curried pancreas and where the
Hollowed afternoon vomits
Semen of ennui and
And and and. Send it round, signed, to the bloody Doggy Wog, showing that I can beat them at their own game if I want to, but the game isn't worth the, in Walkerian locution, turn-the-handle. And, amigo with the onion, I know what's in the carta you wanted to bring round to my lodgings where my razor and antisolar spectacle clip-on and few dirty handkerchiefs have been long snapped up by those who had not, that night, yet been betrayed to the police by fat Napo. Khogh. It was some word of their language, no deformed proper name from another. And the letter surely says that he saw who did it, hombre, and told Scotland Yard as much. A curious and perhaps suspicious lack of treachery from treacherous Spain. Enderby felt ungratefully gloomy. All was set for writing and yet he could not write. Draft after unfinished draft. Gloomily he read through his sonnet octave again.
Augustus on a guinea sat in state. This is the eighteenth century, the Augustan age, and that guinea is a reduction of the sun. The sun no proper study. Exactly, the real sun being God and that urban life essentially a product of reason, which the sun melts. And no more sun-kings, only Hanoverians. But each shaft of filtered light a column. Meaning that you can't really do without the sun, which gives life, so filter it through smoked glass, using its energy to erect neo-classic structures in architecture or literature (well, The Rambler, say, or The Spectator, and there's a nuance in "shaft" suggesting wit). Classic craft abhorred the arc or arch. Yes, and those ships sailed a known world, unflood-able by a rational God, and the arc-en-ciel covenant is rejected. Something like that. To circulate (blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight. Clear enough. You need the roundness of the guinea only so that it can roll along the straight streets or something of commercial enterprise. The round bores of the pipes are not seen on the surface, the pipes in essence being means of linking points by the shortest or most syllogistical way. And, to return to that guinea, impress on it the straight line of royal descent. And, to return to that pipe business, remember that pipes were smoked in coffee-houses and that news and ideas circulated there. And that craft business ties up with Lloyd's coffee-house. As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed, Thyrsis was Jack. A bit fill-in for rhyme's sake, but, rejecting the sun, you reject life and can only accept it in stylised mythological or eclogue forms. But Jack leads us to Jean-Jacques. Crousseau on a raft sought Johnjack's rational island-The pivot coming with the volta. Defoe started it off: overcome Nature with reason. But the hearer will just hear Crusoe. Jack is dignified to John, glorification of common, or natural, man. Then make Nature reason and you start to topple into reason's antithesis, you become romantic. Why? A very awkward job, the continuation.
"Lovely." She had come running in, wet. She wrung a hank of hair, wetting the floor. Fat drops broke on her gold limbs. Her high-arched foot left Man Friday spoors. Seeing her round jigging nates, Enderby could have died with regret and rage. "Like a fool I brought everything except a towel. Could you possibly -" She smiled, her chin dripping as from a crunching of grapes.
"Just a minute." He puffed to his bedroom and brought out a bath towel, not yet, if ever to be, used by him, and also the gaudy robe, not greatly stained, that Rawcliffe had died in. He put it round her shoulders. Clear gold skin without a blemish and a flue of ridiculous delicacy. She rubbed her hair dry with vigour, smiling her thanks. Manuel hovered, smiling. She smiled back. Enderby tried to smile.
"Could I," she smiled, “have a drink? Something a bit astringent. Let me see -" The bottles smiled. No, they bloody well didn't: Enderby was not going to have that. "A whisky sour."
“Weeskee-?"
“I’ll do it," said Enderby. "Fetch some white of egg. Clara de huevo." Manuel ran into the kitchen. She rubbed herself all over in, with, dead Rawcliffe's brilliant robe. "A difficult art," blabbed Enderby, "making a whisky sour." That sounded like boasting. "Americans are very fond of them." An egg cracked loudly off. She rubbed and rubbed. Enderby got behind the bar and looked for the plastic lemon that contained lemon-juice. Manuel, having brought a tea-cup with egg-white in it and some minute embedded triangles of shell, watched her rub instead of his master mix. "There," said Enderby, quite soon.
She took it and sipped. "Hm. Is nobody else drinking?"
"About time," Enderby said, "I had my preprandial, if that's the right word." He seemed to himself to simper, pouring out straight Scotch.
“Do I pay now or do you give me a bill afterwards? And can I get lunch here, talking about preprandials?"
"Oh," said Enderby, "have this one on me. It's a kind of custom here, the first drink of a new customer on the house." And "Oh, yes, you can have steak and salad or something like that. Or spaghetti with something or other. Anything you like, really. Within reason, that is." Reason. That brought him back to that bloody poem. To his shock, he saw her bending over his table, looking openly at his papers.
"Hm," she said, having sipped again. "You’ve certainly got it in for this person, bitch rather."
"That," went flustered Enderby, coming round from the counter, "is of no consequence. I'm not sending it. It was just an idea, that's all. Really," he said, "you shouldn't, you know. Private." But it was your privates you were only too ready to expose, wasn't that so, when you-He felt a land of tepid pleasure promising warmth, not outrage at all. She sat down in his fireside-type chair. She started reading his octave, frowning a little. A curiously tutorial aura seemed to be forming. Enderby went to sit down on one of the stackable chairs near his table.
"Bring it closer," she said. "What's all this about?"
"Well," babbled Enderby, "it's a sonnet, very strict. It's an attempt, really, to tie up the Age of Reason with the French Revolution. Or, on another level, the rational and the romantic can be regarded as aspects of each other, if you see what I mean." Sitting, he moved towards her without getting up, as though this were an invalid chair. “What I have to do is to show that romantic curves are made out of classical straightnesses. Do you see what I mean?” And then, gloomily, to himself: Probably not. She was young. She had perhaps mourned Yod Crewsy's death, gone to some open-air evangelical meeting on his resurrection.
She closed her eyes tight. "Keep a triplet pattern in your sestet," she said. "A breath between your cdc and your dcd. How will the classical pillars become Gothic arches? The sun will melt them, I suppose. And then you ought to have the guillotine. A very rational machine-sorry about the rhyme, but it's rhymes you’re after, isn't it?"
"What," Enderby asked gravely, "would you like for lunch? There's Antonio, you see, waiting there ready to cook it." Antonio stood at the kitchen-door, trying to smile while chewing something. She nodded, not smiling but puckered charmingly, thoughtful. Guillotine, machine, seen, scene.
“What are you going to eat?" she asked. “I’ll eat what you eat. Not fish, though. I can't stand fish."
“Well," Enderby mumbled, "I don't normally till-We close for the siesta, you see, and then I usually have -"
"I hate eating on my own. Besides, we’ve got to work this thing out. Is it something with meat in it?”
“Well," Enderby said, "I have a sort of stew going most of the time. Beef and potatoes and turnips and things. I don't know whether you'd like it, really."
“With pickled onions," she said. "And Worcestershire sauce, plenty of it. I like gross things sometimes." Enderby blushed. "I like to come down to earth sometimes."
"Here with your family?" She didn't answer. Monied, probably. “Where are you staying? The Rif? The El Greco?"
"Oh," vaguely. "It's right up the hill. Now, then. Try it."
"Eh?" And, while Tetuani set places in the conservatory, he tried it.
Sought Johnjack's rational island, loath to wait
Till the sun, slighted, took revenge so that
The pillars nodded, melted, and were seen
As Gothic shadows where a goddess sat -
"Volta not strong enough. The rhyme-words are far too weak. That that is shocking."
Then, over the thick stew, grossly over-sauced, with pickled onions crunched whole on the side and a bottle of thick red eely alumy local wine, they, he rather, literally sweated over the rest of the sestet.
For, after all, that rational machine,
Imposed on all men by the technocrat,
Was patented by Dr Guillotine.
"This is terrible," she said. "Such bloody clumsiness." She breathed on him (though a young lady should not eat, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions. "I'd like a bit of cheese now," she crunched. "Have you any Black Diamond cheddar? Not too fresh, if that's possible. I like it a bit hard."
“Would you also like," asked Enderby humbly, "some very strong tea? We do a very good line in that."
"It must be really strong, though. I'm glad there's something you do a very good line in. These lines are a bloody disgrace. And you call yourself a poet."
"I didn't-I never -" But she smiled when she said it.
Enderby dreamt about her that night. It was a nightmare really. She was playing the piano in her scanty green dress for a gang of near-closing-time pot-swinging male singers. But it was not a pub so much as a long dark gymnasium. On top of the piano lay a yawning black dog, and Enderby, knowing it was evil, tried to warn her against it, but she and the singers only laughed. At last, though, he dragged her out protesting into the winter night (but she did not seem to feel the cold) of a grimy Northern industrial town. They had to get away quickly, by bus or tram or cab, or the dog would be out after her. He rushed her, still protesting, to a main road, and he stopped, with no difficulty, a southbound truck. She began to think the adventure funny and she made jokes to the driver. But she did not see that the driver was the dog. Enderby had to open the truck cabin-door while the vehicle was in motion and get her on to the road again to thumb a new lift. Again it was the dog. And again. And again. The new drivers were always the old dog and, moreover, though they barked they were southbound, they would almost at once turn left and left again, taking their passengers back north. Finally Enderby lost her and found himself in a town very much like Tangier, though in a summer too scorching for North Africa. He had a room but it was at the top of a high stair. Entering, he met with no surprise this girl and her mother, an older Miss Boland. His heart pounded, he was pale, they kindly gave him a glass of water. But then, though there was no wind, the shutters of the window began to vibrate, and he heard a distant rather silly voice that somehow resembled his own. “I’m coming," it said. The girl screamed now, saying that it was the dog. But he swam up through leagues of ocean, gasping for air. Then he awoke.
He had foul dyspepsia, and, switching on the bedside lamp, he took ten Bisodol tablets. But the word love, he noticed, was in his mouth in the form of a remotish pickled-onion aftertaste, and he resented that. The moon was dim. Some Moorish drunks quarrelled in the distance and, more distant, real dogs started a chain of barking. He was not having it, it was all over. He drank from a bottle of Vittel, went brarrgh (and she had done that too, just once and with no excuse-me), then padded in his pyjama top to the bathroom. The striplight above the mirror suddenly granted him a grousing image of The Poet. He sat down on the lavatory seat and, a big heterosexual pornographic volume on his knees as writing-board, he tried to get the dream into a poem, see what it was all about. It was a slow job.
At the end of the dark hall he found his love
Who, flushed and gay,
Pounded with a walking hand and flying fingers
The grinning stained teeth for a wassail of singers
That drooped around, while on the lid above
The dog unnoticed, waiting, lolling lay.
She had been unwilling to give her name, saying it was not relevant. She had gone off about three o’clock, back in green, swinging her towelless beach-bag, giving no clue where she was going. Manuel, out later to pick up the cigarette order, said he had seen her coming out of the Doggy Wog. Enderby was jealous about that: was she helping those filthy drug-takers with their filthy drugged verses? Who was she, what did she want? Was she an anonymous agent of the British Arts Council, sent out to help with culture in, in Blake's phrase, minute particulars?
He noticed, cried, dragged her away from laughter.
Lifts on the frantic road
From loaded lorries helpful to seek safe south
Slyly sidestreeted north. Each driver's mouth,
Answering her silly jokes, he gasped at after
The cabin-door slammed shut: the dogteeth showed.
She had better stop being a dream of boyhood, for it was all too late. He had reached haven, hadn't he? He would not be in the bar tomorrow morning (this morning really); he would be out taking a walk.
At last, weary, out of the hot noon's humming,
Mounting his own stair,
It was no surprise to find a mother and daughter,
The daughter she. Hospitable, she gave him water.
Windless, the shutters shook.
This was all messed up. The story wouldn't run to another stanza, and this stanza was going to be too long. And the rhythm was atrocious.
A quiet voice said: “I’m coming."
"Oh God God it's the dog," screamed the daughter,
But he, up the miles of leaden water,
Frantically beat for air.
A good discussion about that with somebody, over whisky or stepmother's tea: that was what was needful. The realisation suddenly shocked him. Had not the poet to be alone? He converted that into bowel language and noised it grimly in the still night, clenching the appropriate muscles, but the noise was hollow.
And so she was there again in the lemony Tangerine sunlight of near-winter, this time bringing her towel. The old men, perhaps frightened of the gunpowder running out of the heels of their boots, had stayed away, but there were other customers. Two youngish film-men, in Morocco to choose locations that might serve for Arizona, kept going ja at each other and greedily scoffing Antonio's tapas-fat black olives; hot fried liver on bread; Spanish salad of onion, tomato, vinegar, chopped peppers. An Englishman, in fluent but very English Spanish, expressed to Manuel his love of baseball, a game he had followed passionately when he lived three miles outside Havana. A quiet man, perhaps a Russian, sat at the corner of the counter, steadily and to no effect downing raw Spanish gin.
"Not worth writing," she said, "a poem like that." She had changed back into a crimson dress even briefer than the green one. The baseball aficionado, greying vapidly handsome, kept giving her frank glances, but she did not seem to notice. "You yourself may be moved by it," she said, "because of the emotional impact of the dream itself. But it's dreary old sex images, isn't it, no more. The dog, I mean. North for tumescence. And you’re trying to protect me from yourself, or yourself from me-both silly." Enderby looked at her bitterly, desirable and businesslike as she was. He said:
“That love in the first line. I'm sorry about that. I don't mean it, of course. It was just in the dream."
"All right, we’re scrapping it anyway." And she crumpled the work of three hours of darkness and threw it on the floor. Tetuani gladly picked it up and bore it off to nest with other garbage. "I think," she said, "we'll go for a walk. There's another sonnet we have to work out, isn't there?"
"Another?"
"One you mentioned yesterday. About the Revolt of the Angels or something."
“I’m not sure that I -" He frowned. She punched him vigorously on the arm, saying:
"Oh, don't dither so. We haven't much time." She led him out of the bar, stronger than she looked, and the customers, all of whom were new, assumed that Enderby was an old customer who had had enough.
"Look," Enderby said, when they stood on the esplanade, “I don't understand anything about this at all. Who are you? What right have you? Not," he added, "that I don't appreciate-But really, when you come to consider it -"
The wind whipped rather coldly, but she felt no cold, arms akimbo in her ridiculously brief dress. “You do waste time, don't you? Now how does it begin?"
They walked in the direction of the Medina, and he managed to hit some of it out into the wind. It was as though she were telling him to get it all up, better up than down.
Sick of the sycophantic singing, sick
Of every afternoon's compulsory games -
Sturdy palms set all along the sea-front, the fronds stirred by that wind. The donkeys with loaded panniers, an odd sneering camel.
“That's the general idea, isn't it? Heaven as a minor public school. Did you go to a minor public school?"
"I went,” said Enderby, "to a Catholic day-school." It was Friday, and the devout were shuffling to mosque. The imam or bilal or whatever he was was gargling over a loudspeaker. Brown men, of Rif or Berber stock, followed the voice, looking at her legs, though, with bright-eyed frank but hopeless desire. "It's a lot of superstitious nonsense," she said. "Don't, whatever the temptation, go back to it. Use it as mythology, pluck it bare of images, but don't ever believe in it again. Take the cash in hand and waive the rest."
"An indifferent poet, Fitzgerald." Enderby loved her for saying what she had said.
"Very well, let's have something better."
Sick of the little cliques of county names,
The timebomb in his brain began to tick -
Luncheon in a little restaurant crammed with camp military gear, not too far from the Hotel El Greco. It was run by two men in love with each other, one American, the other English. A handsome Moorish boy who waited on seemed himself in love with the Englishman, who was flaxen, bronzed, petulant and given to shouting at the cook. The Moor was not adept at hiding emotion: his big lower lip trembled and his eyes swam. Enderby and she had a thin dull goulash which she said loudly was bloody terrible. The English lover tossed his head and affricated petulantly against his alveolum, then turned up the music-a sexy cocksure American male voice singing, against a Mahlerian orchestra, thin dull café society songs of the ‘thirties. She prepared to shout that the bloody noise must be turned off: it was interfering with their rhythm. Enderby said:
"Don't. Please. I’ve got to live in this town."
“Yes," she said, her green eyes, their gold very much metal, hard on him. “You lack courage. You’ve been softened by somebody or something. You’re frightened of the young and the experimental and the way-out and the black dog. When Shelley said what he said about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he wasn't really using fancy language. It's only by the exact use of words that people can begin to understand themselves. Poetry isn't a silly little hobby to be practised in the smallest room of the house."
He blushed. “What can I do?”
She sighed. "Get all these old things out of your system first. Then push on."
Beating out number. As arithmetic,
As short division not divided aims,
Resentment flared. But then, carved out in flames,
He read: That flower is not for you to pick.
“It's time," she said, "you started work on a long poem."
"I tried that once. That bastard stole it and vulgarised it. But," and he looked downhill, seaward, "he's paid. Wrapped in a Union Jack, being gently gnawed." “You can get something here. This is a junction. Deucalion's flood and Noah's. Africa and Europe. Christianity and Islam. Past and future. The black and the white. Two rocks looking across at each other. The Straits may have a submarine tunnel. But it was Mallarmé who said that poetry is made with words, not ideas."
"How do you know all this? You're so young."
She spat out breath very nastily. "There you go again. More interested in the false divisions than the true ones. Come on, let's have that sestet."
The sestet ended in a drinking-shop not far from the Souk or Socco, over glasses of warmish pastis. Drab long robes, hoods, ponchos, ass-beaters, loud gargling Moghrabi, nose-picking children who used the other hand to beg. Sympathetic, Enderby gave them little coins.
Therefore he picked it. All things thawed to action,
Sound, colour. A shrill electric bell
Summoned the guard. He gathered up his faction,
Poised on the brink, thought and created hell.
Light shimmered in miraculous refraction
As, like a bloody thunderbolt, he fell.
"That bloody," Enderby said. "It's meant really to express grudging admiration. But that only works if the reader knows I've taken the line from Tennyson's poem about the eagle."
"To hell with the reader. Good. That needs a lot of going over, of course, but you can do that at leisure. When I'm gone, I mean. Now we'd better take a look at that Horatian Ode thing. Can we have dinner at your place?"
"I'd like to take you out to dinner," Enderby said. And, "When you're gone, you said. When are you going?"
"I'm flying off tomorrow evening. About six."
Enderby gulped. "It's been a short stay. You can get a very good dinner at a place called the Parade. I could get a taxi and pick you up about -"
"Still curious, aren't you? Bit of a change for you, isn't it, this curiosity about people? You've never cared much for people, have you? From what you've told me, anyway. Your father let you down by marrying your stepmother, and your mother let you down by dying too young. And these others you've mentioned, men and women."
"My father was all right," Enderby said. "I never had anything against him." He frowned, though ungrudgingly.
"Many years ago," she said, "you published a little volume at your own expense. Inevitably it was very badly printed. You had a poem in it called 'Independence Day'."
"I'm damned if I remember."
"A rather bad poem. It started:
Anciently the man who showed
Hate to his father with the sword
Was bundled up in a coarse sack
With a frantic ape to tear his back
And the squawking talk of a parrot to mock
Time's terror of air-and-light's lack
Black
And the creeping torpor of a snake."
"I can't possibly have written that," went Enderby, worried now. "I could never possibly have written anything as bad as that."
"No?" she said. "Listen.
Then he was swirled into the sea.
But that was all balls and talk.
Nowadays we have changed all that,
Into a cleaner light to walk
And wipe that mire off on the mat.
So when I knew his end was near
My mind was freer
And snapped its thumb and finger then
At the irrelevance of birth,
And I had a better right to the earth
And knew myself more of a man,
Shedding the last squamour of the old skin."
"That's somebody else," said Enderby urgently. "Honestly, it's not me."
"And you love your mother because you never knew her. For all you know she might have been like your stepmother."
"It's different now," pleaded Enderby. "I forgive my stepmother, I forgive her everything."
"That's very generous of you. And who do you love?"
"I was just coming to that," said Enderby with approaching banners of wretchedness. "What I wanted to say was -"
"All right, all right. Don't pick me up in a taxi. You can't anyway, because you don't know where I am. I'll pick you up about eight. Now go home and work on your bloody Horatian Ode. No, leave me here. I go in a different direction." She seemed needlessly irritable, and Enderby, having once, though briefly, lived with a woman, wondered if it was possibly-She was old enough, wasn't she, to have -
"Gin and hot water," he suggested kindly, "are said to work wonders." But she didn't seem to hear. She seemed to have switched off Enderby like a television image, looking blankly at him as if he had become a blank screen. A very strange girl altogether. But he thought that, having got the better of the moon, he could perhaps this time live with his fear.
She was smartly dressed for the evening in bronze stockings and a brief, but not too brief, gold dress, a gold stole round her tanned shoulders, her hair up at the back. On her left wrist she had a gold chain from which miniscule figurines depended. It was a restaurant of subdued lights, and Enderby could not see what the figurines were or meant. She was perfumed, and the perfume suggested something baked-a delicate but aphrodisiacal soufflé seasoned with rare liqueurs. Enderby was wearing one of Rawcliffe's Edwardian suits-it did not fit too badly-and even Rawcliffe's gold watch and chain. One thing Enderby did not like about this place was that the mortician collage man from the Doggy Wog was in it and was obviously a respected and regular customer. He sat at a table opposite and was eating with his fingers a brace of roast game-birds. He had greeted this girl with a growl of familiarity but now, picking the meat from a backbone, he kept his eyes sternly on her. He did not apparently remember Enderby. She had returned his greeting with an American air-hostess's "Hi."
Tonight she was not going to have greasy stew and pickled onions and stepmother's tea. She read the menu intently, as though it contained a Nabokovian cryptogram, and ordered a young hare of the kind called a capuchin, marinated in marc, stuffed with its own and some pig's liver as well as breadcrumbs, truffle, and a little preserved turkey-meat, and served with a sauce full of red wine and double cream. Before it she had a small helping of jellied boar. Enderby, confused, said he would have sheep's tongue en papillotes, whatever they were, that was. And, after dry martinis which she sent back as neither dry nor cold enough, they had champagne-Bollinger '53. She said it was not very exciting, but it seemed to be the best they had, so they put, at her demand, another bottle on ice while they were drinking this one. Enderby uneasily saw signs of a deliberate intention to get tight. Soon, clanking down her fork, she said:
"A fancied superiority to women. Despise their brains so pretend to despise their bodies as well. Just because you can't have their bodies."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Juvenilia. One of your," she belched gently, "juvenilia."
"Juvenilia? But I never published any of my juvenilia." Several bar-customers were interested in the repeated word: a gland injection, a sexual posture, a synthetic holiday resort. She began to recite with mocking intensity:
They fear and hate
the Donne and Dante in him, this
cold
gift to turn heat to a flame, a kiss
to the gate of a mons-
ter's labyrinth. They hold
and anchor a thin thread -"
"Not so loud," went Enderby with quiet force, blushing. The mortician was looking sardonic over a large dish of blood-coloured ice cream.
"- the tennis party, the parish dance:
stale pus out of dead
pores."
Someone at the bar, unseen in the dimness, applauded. "I didn't write that," said Enderby. "You're getting me mixed up with somebody else."
"Am I? Am I? I suppose that's possible. There's so much minor poetry about."
"What do you mean-minor?"
She downed a long draught of Bellinger, as though the recitation had made her thirsty, belched with no excuse-me, and said:
"There was that other nasty little thing about meeting a girl at a dance, wasn't there? Juvenilia, again." Or a disease perhaps, one of those gruesomely pleasant-sounding ones like salmonella. She took more champagne and, with world-weary tone and over-sharp articulation, recited:
"Semitic violins by the wailing wall
Gnash their threnody
For the buried jungle, the tangle of lianas -"
"I think," Enderby said sternly, "that I have some right to know-"
"Or say that was before, in the first flush,
And say that now
A handful of coins, image and milled edge worn,
Is spilled abroad to determine
Our trade of emotions."
"I mean, apart from how you know all that, and I don't believe it's mine anyway-"
"On this background are imposed
Urges, whose precise nature it is difficult to define:
Shells shaped by forgotten surges."
"I'm not having any more of this," and Enderby grasped her thin wrist firmly. She shook herself free with little effort and said:
"Too rich for you, is it?" She sniffed at his half-eaten sheep's tongue en papillotes. "A lot of things are too rich for you, aren't they? Never mind, mumsy will ook after him den. Let me finish." Enderby, very wretched, let her.
"One understands so little, having no words
To body forth thoughts, no axe
To reach flagged soil, no drills
To pierce to living wells. It would tax
My energies overmuch now to garner you
Out of worn coins, worn shells."
She took another bumper of fuming wine, belched like an elfin trumpet of triumph, then waved smiling across to the mortician. He said:
"That's telling him."
"You're being bloody unfair," said Enderby loudly and, to the mortician, more loudly, "You keep your nose out of this, sod." The mortician looked at Enderby with very small interest and went on eating ice cream.
"Big untrue postures," she delivered. "Pretence. You can't make major poetry out of pretence."
"I tell you," said Enderby, "it was my stepmother's fault, but that's all over now. Pretence, you say," he added cunningly, "but very memorable pretence. Not," he super-added, "that I wrote that. I'm sure I didn't." He was pretty sure, anyway.
"I can remember anything," she said smugly. "It's a gift." Then she went phew. "God, it's warm in here." And she pulled her stole off roughly, showing her glowing young shoulders.
"It's not really warm, you know," said Enderby. And, hopefully: "Perhaps it's all that champagne. Perhaps you're not feeling too well."
"I feel fine," she said. "It's the sun within me. I'm a beaker full of the warm south. Nice tension of opposites there: cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth." She had drunk most of the first bottle and was now doing very well with the second. "I won't pretend that you wrote that, because you didn't. Poor boy. But his name was not writ in water." Enderby felt chilled when he heard that. "Posterity," she then said. The poet addresses posterity. And what is posterity? Schooknarms with snotty kids trailing round the monuments. The poet's tea-mug with an ingrained ring of tannin-stain. The poet's love-letters. The poet's falling hair, trapped in brush-bristles rarely washed. The poet's little failings-well-hidden, but not for ever. And the kids are bored, and the texts are covered with thumb-marks and dirty little marginalia. They've read the poems, oh yes. They're posterity. Do you never think of posterity?"
Enderby looked warily at her. "Well, like everybody else -"
"Minor poets hope that posterity will turn them into major ones. A great man, my dear, who suffered the critics' sneers and the public's neglect. Halitotic breathing over your corpse. Reverent treading through the poet's cottage, fingering the pots and pans."
Enderby started. "That's brought back a dream. I think it was a dream. The pots and pans fell, and I woke."
"Oh, come on, let's finish this champagne and go. I can't eat any more of this muck. Creamed leveret's bones, ugh. Let's go and swim."
"At this hour? And it's very cold, the sea I mean. And besides -"
"You don't swim. I know. You're preparing your body for honoured corpsedom. You don't do anything with it. All right, you can watch me swim." She filled both their flutes and downed hers, re-filled and downed again.
"What I meant to say was-It's a bit difficult, I know, but -" He called for the bill. "Cuenta, par favor." Quite the little Tangerine, he was thinking. Settling here for corpsedom. No, not that. He had his work, hadn't he? And there was this other matter, and he'd better blurt it out now before the bill came. "I know," he said stiffly but urgently, "there's a great disparity of age. But if you could see your way-I mean, we get on all right together. I would leave it to you to decide on the precise nature of the relationship. I ask nothing." The bill came: another flame-haired Goth of a Spanish waiter, flashing a gold tunthus. It was a lot of dirhams. Enderby counted out note after note after note, all from Rawcliffe's mattress.
"You only ask me," she said. The champagne was done, and she upturned the bottle to hold it like a thyrsus. "Come on, I'm burning."
The mortician growled something about that being okay then. She smiled and nodded. "What do you do over there?" asked Enderby jealously. "You go over there. The dog place, I mean. I know you do."
"I go to a lot of places. I'm a beezy leetle girl. The world's bigger than you could ever imagine."
The doorman whistled a petit taxi or taxi chico. It was a windy night in a hilly street, no more. But a dirty old Moor shuffled to them to offer a small parcel of marijuana for five dirhams. "Shit," she said. "Dilutions for the tourists. All teased out of fag-ends collected from the gutters." She gave the old man a brief mouthful of what sounded like fluent Arabic. He seemed shocked. Enderby was past being surprised. In the taxi he said:
"What do you say then? The precise nature of the relationship -"
"You leave to me. Right. I heard you the first time." They rolled seawards. The driver, a moustached thin Moor with a skullcap, kept turning round to have a look at her. She banged him on the shoulder, saying: "Keep your fucking eyes on the road." And to Enderby: "All I want at the moment is my swim. I don't want avowals and the precise nature of the relationship." She was silent then, and Enderby thought it prudent also to be silent. They came to near the gate, only the single track to cross, which opened on to the beach steps and the-But El Acantilado Verde had been painted out and the new name as yet only lightly stencilled. Manuel had a brother who did that sort of thing.
The bar looked grim and functional under the plain lights. "Come in here," Enderby invited, leading her to his own room. There were table-lamps, shaded in warm colours, that all came on together when he clicked the switch by the door. Many of Rawcliffe's Moorish curiosa were still around, but there was now a lot of naked shelf-space to be clothed. But with what? He didn't read much. Perhaps he ought to read more, keep in touch with the posterity of which she, all said and done, was very nearly a member. Read about media and the opening up of the psyche with drugs. All sorts of things. Enderby had bought a bedspread of camel-hair, its design undistinguished, as well as new sheets and a new mattress. There was still something raffish, riffish, Rawcliffesque about the bed on the floor, in the middle of the floor. Enderby had not yet sufficiently breathed on things.
"Hm," she said. "How about calling that cook-boy of yours to see about some coffee? I'd like some coffee afterwards."
"Oh, he's not here. They all sleep out. Yo," Enderby said, with painful roguery, "duermo solo." And then: "Of course, you can't swim, can you? You forgot, I forgot. You've nothing to swim in." He smiled.
"That's right," she said. "Nothing. I shall swim in nothing." And, before Enderby could say anything, she darted over to his book-shelves and picked on a gilt-backed folio.
"That," said Enderby, "isn't mine. It was left by him. Don't look at it, please." Fool, he should have thought. "And don't swim with nothing on. It's too cold, there are laws against it, the police will come along, this is a Muslim country, very strict about indecency."
"Indecency," she said, looking through the volume. "Yes. Dear dear dear. That seems more painful than pleasurable."
"Please don't." He meant two things. He felt he wanted to wring his hands. But she dropped the book on the floor and then started to take her dress off. "I'll make coffee myself," he said, "and there's some rather good cognac. Please don't."
"Good, we'll have that afterwards." And she kicked off her spiky shoes and began to peel down her stockings, sitting on Enderby's bedside chair to do it more easily. And then. He gulped, wondering whether to turn his back, but that somehow, after that book, might seem hypocritical. Bold Enderby, unmoved, watching. But:
"Go in as you are, by all means, but -" But going in as she was now meant going in very nearly as she wanted to go in. And now entirely. Oh God. Enderby saw her totally naked, all gold, with no shocking leprous bands where they might, beach decency being observed, be expected to be. He just stood there, a butler called in by her eccentric ladyship. She looked him hard, though soft, in the eyes. He gnashed his teeth at her ghastly young beauty, all revealed. She said:
"Time enough." Huskily. Then she lay on the camel-hair, eyes not leaving his, and said: "Love. You meant to say love. Come on, take me. Darling. I'm yours, all yours. When I give I give. You know that." He did know it. And she held out gold blades of arms, gold foil gleaming in her oxters. And gold below on the mount. "You said," she said, "I must decide on the precise nature of the relationship. Well, I'm deciding. Darling, darling. Come on."
"No," gasped Enderby. "You know I can't. That isn't what I meant."
"Just like Mr Prufrock. Darling, darling, you can do anything you like. Come, don't keep me waiting."
"It won't do," said Enderby, dying. He saw himself there with her, puffing in his slack whiteness. "I'm sorry I said what I said."
She suddenly drew her knees up to her chin, embracing her shins, and laughed, not unkindly. "Minor poet," she said. "We know now where we stand, don't we? Never mind. Be thankful for what you've got. Don't ask too much, that's all." And she leapt from the bed, brushing his hand with the smoothness of her gold flank, just for a fraction of time, as she ran past him to the door, out of the door, out of the building, out of the arena, towards the sea.
Enderby sat on the bed, blood forming patterns in his eyes. His heart growled as it thumped. Off to the bloody sea, where Rawcliffe was. But no. Rawcliffe was in the Mediterranean, east of here. She was out in the fringes of the Atlantic, a bigger sea. One sometimes forgot that it was the Atlantic here, the Atlantic and Africa and all the big stuff. Minor poet in Africa, facing the Atlantic. There would undoubtedly be phosphorescence all round her as she plunged further into the Atlantic.
She didn't come in the following morning, and he didn't expect her. Yet there had been no good-bye, not yet. She had high-heeled into the kitchen, glowing, clothed, even perfumed (yet smelling somehow, to his fancy, of drowned poets) to see him watching the bubbling coffee as if it were an alchemical experiment. And she hadn't liked the coffee: too weak, too minor-poetic. Well, he had never been good at coffee. Tea, now, was altogether a different matter. Anyway, she had to fly: so much to see to before really flying. And then, lightly and without satire, a kiss on each cheek for him, as at the award of some prix for minor poetry. And off.
Tossing in his bed, he had wondered about minor poets. There was T. E. Brown, three legs of Man, who had said: "O blackbird, what a boy you are, how you do go it," and given to British gardens pot or plastic godwottery. And Leigh Hunt, whom Jenny had kissed. And the woman who'd seen Faunus in Flush, later married to a poet deemed major. Minor Poets of the Twentieth Century (OUP, 84s), with a couple or three of his well separated, because of the alphabetical order, from that one of Rawcliffe. But once they had thought Aurora Leigh the greatest thing since Shakespeare, and Hopkins to be just Jesuitical hysteria. It all depended on posterity. One kiss, two kisses. And he saw that her name didn't matter.
He sighed, but not hopelessly. He had gone back to the Horatian Ode this morning, in a rather crowded bar.
So will the flux of time and fire,
The process and the pain, expire,
And history can bow
To one eternal now.
He had to get behind the counter, expert, Hogg of the Sty (When you say gin, Piggy knows you mean Yeoman Warder. False smile flashing over the shaker in some glossy advertisement), to mix a Manhattan for a dour Kansan who believed the drink was named for the university town in his own state. And a young but archaic what-what haw-haw Englishman, doggy scarf in his open shirt, had brought in two girls, one of them called Bunty, and said that nobody in this town knew how to mix a hangman's blood. But he, Enderby, Hogg, knew, and the man was discomfited. Three old men had been in, the fourth, the one with skin like microscope slides, not being too well, confined to his room. Doubt if he'll see another spring. Won the Bisley shoot in, let me see, when was it? MC and bar, but never talked about it much.
What was emerging, Enderby saw, was a long poem based on the characters in Hamlet. The Horatian Ode was for the King, type of the absolute ruler who would seal a timeless Denmark off from the flux of history. An epithalamium for him and Gertrude, the passion of the mature. He'd written a good deal of that in Gloucester Road, when Vesta went off to work for the day, bitch.
The greenstick snaps, the slender goldenrod
Here cannot probe or enter. Thin spring winds
Freeze blue lovers in unprotected hollows, but
Summer chimes heavy bells and flesh is fed
Where fruit bursts, the ground is crawling with berries.
Something like that. It would come back to him in time. A long soliloquy for Hamlet. Marsyas, was he, he Enderby, risking a minor poet's flaying? Never mind. On with bloody job is best way, hombre.
She came in when he was ready for his stew, followed by tea and siesta. She was dressed rather demurely, not unlike Miss Boland, beige suit, skirt to her knees, stockings of a gunmetal colour, shoes sensible and well-polished. There were blue rings, half-rings really, under her eyes. She wore a hat like a Victorian sailor's. She said:
"I've got a cab waiting outside." Meaning over the sand, up the steps, across the railway line and pavement, by the kerb with a palm strongly clashing above. The wind was high. "You're not to worry too much about anything," she said. "Do what you can do. Don't try and tame dogs or enter a world of visions and no syntax." This was very sybilline talk.
"I'm doing a long poem based on the characters in Hamlet. I don't quite know yet what the overall theme is, but I daresay it'll come out in time. Could I make you a cup of tea? Antonio's got the day off. He's gone to see a man in Rabat."
"Good. No, thanks. I'll be back to visit you. Next year perhaps. I suppose I should have come before, but I have so much to do." Enderby was aware now that there was no point in asking further questions: taking your degree in English, are you; doing a thesis on contemporary poetry, is that it? These things didn't apply, no more than curiosity, which he no longer felt, about her identity or origin or age. All things to all poets, but to this poet perhaps less than to some others. No envy. Posterity would sort things out. But, of course, posterity was only those snotnosed schoolkids.
"I'm grateful," he said, though, out of habit, grudgingly. "You know I am."
"You can't be blamed," she said, "if you've opted to live without love. Something went wrong early. Your juvenilia days." Enderby frowned slightly. "Look," she said, "I really must rush now. I only came to say good-bye. But not good-bye really," grimacing at her watch. Enderby stood up, wincing a bit. A spasm in the right calf, altogether appropriate to middle age. "So," she said, and she walked the three paces up to him and gave him one brief kiss on the lips. His share, his quota, what he was worth. Her mouth was very warm. The final kiss and final-As if she knew, she gave him the referent, leaving the words to him, very briefly grasping his writing fingers, pressing them. Her gloves were beige, of some kind of soft and expensive skin. Tight pressure of hands. That was it then, the poem finished. But the whole thing was a lie (opted to live without love), though it would not be a lie to anybody who could use it, somebody young and in love, saying an enforced good-bye to the beloved. Poets, even minor ones, donated the right words, and the small pride might swallow the large envy.
"Right, then," she said. They went together to the door, almost with the formality of distinguished customer and bowing patron. He watched her climb up to her taxi, feeling a spasm of hopeless rage, briefer than a borborygm, at the last sight of her neatly moving buttocks. But he had no right to that feeling, so the feeling quickly modulated, as a nettle-sting modulates to warmth (the bare-legged legionaries had kept themselves warm in British winters by lashing themselves with nettles: might there not be a poem there?), to something which had, as one of its upper partials, that very pride. She waved before getting in, and then called something that sounded a bit like all the anthologies, anyway, but a passing coach, full of sightseers collected from the Rif, roared at it. The gear ground, for time himself will bring, but this was only a decrepit Moroccan taxi. The wind blew hard. She was gone; like a hypodermic injection it was all over. He wondered if it might not be a pious duty to find out more about Rawcliffe's slender and thwarted oeuvre, edit, reprint at expense of mattress. There might be odd things, juvenilia even, concealed about the place, perhaps even in those tomes of pornography. But no, best keep away. He had enough work of his own to do, the duty of at least being better than T. E. Brown or Henley or Leigh Hunt or Sir George Goodby or Shem Macnamara. Whatever the future was going to be about, things ought to be all right, namely not too good, with enough scope for guilt, creation's true dynamo. It would be polite to reply to Miss Boland's letter, perhaps. If she proposed visiting him he could, if he wished, always put her off. He would go in now to his gross stew and stewed tea, then sleep for a while. The C major of this life. Was Browning minor? He turned to face the Atlantic but, going brrrrrr, was glad to be able to hurry in to escape from it.
This, children, is Morocco. Does it not give you a thrill, seeing what you have all heard or read about so often? Pashas and the Beni-Quarain and camels. Mulai Hafid and Abd-el-Kadir. The light-coloured Sherifians, who claim descent from the Prophet. Palmetto and sandarach and argan and tizra. You say it does not give you a thrill, Sandra? Well, child, you were never strong on imagination, were you? And I do not wish to hear any of these silly giggly whispers about what does give you a thrill. Some of you girls have very few thoughts in your heads. Yes, I mean you too, Andrea. And, Geoffrey, because that elderly Berher is picking his nose you need not feel impelled to do the same. Lions, Bertrand? Lions are much much further south. Leopards here, bears, hyenas and wild pigs. Bustard, partridge and water-fowl. Dromedaries and dashing Barbary horses.
This is Tangier, which, you may not know this, once actually belonged to the British. Part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, Portuguese queen of a merry monarch. A pleasant enough town, no longer very distinguished, with some deplorable specimens of architecture. The beach is deserted. This is not the tourist season and, besides, it is the hour of the siesta. The beach cafés are garish, the paint peeling on many, but some of their names are rather charming. The Winston Churchill, the Sun Trap, the Cuppa, the Well Come. Those Hebrew letters there mean kosher (it is three consonants, the Semitic languages not greatly favouring the alphabetisation of vowels. Yes, Donald, Arabic too is a Semitic language and is similarly vowel-shy. Why then do not the Jews and Arabs, aware of a common origin in speech and alphabetic method as well as genes, taboos and mythology, get on better together? There, child, you have the eternal mystery of brotherhood. As Blake might have said, Let me hate him, or let me be his brother. But a good question, Donald, and thank you for asking it) which means, of food, not forbidden by religion. A holiday, you see, condones no relaxations of fundamental covenants. Stop grinning, Andrea. I shall lose my temper in a minute.
That one there is having its name repainted. You can see what it will be, in tasteful ultramarine. La Belle Mer. Very pretty. Some Frenchman probably, offering a most delicate cuisine, but now neatly sleeping. Listen, you can hear them sleep. Zrrrzzz. Ghraaaaaakh. Ong. Sleep possesses so many of the better sort, and it is sleep that sustains our visitation, to be fractured and fantasticated on waking, perhaps even totally forgotten.
Why are we here? A fair question, Pamela. What has all this to do with literature? I am very glad you asked that. Well, let me say this. Here you have expatriates of Northern stock, water to the oil of the Moors and Berbers and Spanish. Many of them have fled their native lands to escape the rigour of the law. Yes, alas, crimes. Expropriation of funds, common theft, sexual inversion. I thought you would ask that, Sandra. That term sexual effects, in your case, an almost voltaic connection. The term means nothing more than philoprogenitive urges deflected into channels that possess no generative significance. What's all that when it's at home? I expected that remark from you, ignorant girl. I shall ignore it. Ignoration is the only rational response to ignorance. Think that one over, you over-developed little flesh-pot.
And among the exiles from the North are artists, musicians, writers. They have sinned, but they have talent. Desperately they exercise their talent here, dreaming of bitter ale and meadowsweet but cut off for ever, yes for ever, from the Piccadilly flyover and the Hyde Park State Museum and the Communal Beerhall on Hammersmith Broadway. Those are the British. The Americans weep too nightly into their highballs for the happy shopping evenings in the Dupermarket, the drive-in colour stereovideo, the nuclear throb of the fully automated roadglobe. But they practise their arts. It is writers mostly. Up that hill lives a man who has already produced twenty-five volumes of autobiography: he tears at each instant of his pre-exilic past as though it were a prawn. Another man, on the Calle Larache, eats into his unconscious heart and mounts the regurgitated fragments on fragments of old newspaper. Another man again writes sneering satire, in sub-Popean couplets, on an England already dead. They are small artists, all. Here there is a rue Beethoven, also an avenida Leonardo da Vinci, a plaza de Sade. But no artist here will have a square or thoroughfare named for him. They are nothing.
And yet think what, on three sides, surrounds them, though the fierce Atlantic will give a right orchestration to the muscularity of what, to the sun's own surprise, has sprung out of sunbaked Africa and Iberia. The glory of the Lusiad (George, you will please not yawn) and the stoic bravery and heartbreak of the Cid, and the myth of Juan and the chronicle of the gaunter Don on the gaunt horse. Clash of guitars up there and the drum-roll of hammering heels in the dance, and down there the fever of native timpani. And, east, the tales told to the cruel Sultan Shahriyar, and the delicate verse-traceries of Omar this and Abdul that (all right, Benedict, there is no need to snigger: Islamic poetry is not my subject) and Sayid the other thing.
Yawwwwww. Ogre. Uuuuuugh.
The pain of their awakening, not all of them alone, to the coming of the Tangerine evening. All right, we all know that a tangerine is a small orange, much flattened at the poles. Very funny, Geoffrey. But perhaps now you will consider why it is called what it is called. The calligraphic neons will glow-fa and kaf and kaf and nun and tok-and the shops resume their oil-lit trades. Ladies in yashmaks and caftans will stroll the rues or calles, and the boys will jeer and giggle at the few male tourists and point at their younger brothers as if they were carcasses of tender lamb. And the writers will groan at their words of the forenoon and despair.
So away! Our camels sniff the evening and are glad. A quotation, if you must know, Benedict. Let us leave them, for men must be left to, each, the dreeing of his own weird. A man must contrive such happiness as he can. So must we all. So must we all, Geoffrey and Benedict and George and Donald and Andrea and Pamela and that horrid Sandra and-Oh, get into line there. We take off, into the Atlantic wind. The moon, sickle of Islam, has risen. The planets Marikh and Zuhrah and Zuhal shine. The stars, in American issue army boots, slide silently to their allotted posts. And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax and glitter, as with atmospheric dust, with those impurities which we call meaning. Away, children! Leave them to it.
Until the final glacier grips
Each island, with its dream of ships
And and and and. Keep on. It will come out right, given time and application. You can, when depressed, pluck your own sweet bay or laurus nobilis. It grows here. Nobody will pluck it for you. The aromatic leaves are useful in cookery, and you can cure your sick cat with the berries.