Pfffrrrummmp.
And a very happy New Year to you too, Mr Enderby!
The wish is, however, wasted on both sides, for this, to your night visitors, is a very old year. We, whispering, fingering, rustling, creaking about your bedroom, are that posterity to which you hopefully addressed yourself. Congratulations, Mr Enderby: you have already hit your ball smack over the pavilion clock. If you awaken now with one of the duodenal or pyloric twinges which are, to us, as gruesome a literature-lesson spicer as Johnson's scrofula, Swift's scatophobia, or Keats's gallop of death-warrant blood, do not fancy it is ghosts you hear sibilant and crepitant about the bed. To be a ghost one has first to die or, at least, be born.
Perrrrrp.
A posterior riposte from Mr Enderby. Do not touch, Priscilla. Mr Enderby is not a thing to be prodded; he is a great poet sleeping. Your grubby finger out of his mouth, please, Alberta. His mouth is open for no amateur dental inspection but to the end that he may breathe. That nose is, at forty-five, past its best as an organ, the black twitching caverns-each with its miniature armpit-stuffed and obtuse. The world of smell is visited by his early poems, remember (pages 1 to 17 of the Harvard University Press selection which is your set book). There we have washed hair, pickles, gorse, bath-salts, skin, pencil-shavings, tinned peaches, post offices, Mrs Lazenby at the corner-shop in his native slum, cloves, diabetes. But it has no existence in his maturer work; the twin ports are closed for ever. That gentle noise, Harold, is snoring. That is so, Christine; his teeth, both upper and lower, are removable: they have been removed to that plastic night-jar there. Child, child, you have spilt denture-fluid on to Mr Enderby's landlady's carpet. No, Robin, the carpet is neither beautiful nor rare, but it is Mrs Meldrum's property. Yes, Mr Enderby himself is our property, the world's property, but his carpet is his landlady's. Mrs Meldrum's.
Now. His hair goes a daily journey from head to brush, squad by tiny squad on a one-way ticket. Here on the dressing-table are the imitation-silver-backed brushes bequeathed by his father, the tobacconist. The bristles are indeed dirty, Mavis, but great poets have other things to do than attend to the calls of hygiene. See how the bristles have trapped their day's quota of Mr Enderby's few remaining hairs. Holy relics, children. Do not rush. One each for everybody. There. Keep it safe, each of you, in your little diary of posterity's present year. Shed hairs, Henry, become the property of the picker. They are of no use to Mr Enderby, but they are already fetching, at classical auction-rooms, a pound or so each if nicely mounted. It is not proper, Audrey, that you should try to pick your hair alive. Such a rough tug at the scalp is enough to wake Mr Enderby.
Querpkprrmp.
You see? He's disturbed. Let him settle as one lets churned water settle. Right. A better view of Mr Enderby, you will agree, children, as he flops on his back cruciform and sends the bedclothes sliding and plopping to the floor. His belly bulges in two gentle hills, one on either side of the cutting pyjama-cord. There is a wealth of hair, see. It is one of the abominable ironies of middle age that hair should march down from the noble summit, the eagle's lodge, to leave that bare as an eagle, in order that the camps and barracks and garrisons of the warm vulgar body be crammed with a growth that is neither useful nor pretty. The flabby chest too, see. Rich in hair, aflame with whorls and tendrils of it. And for good measure, chin and jowls bristling. Horrent, Milton might say.
Yes, Janice, I am constrained to agree that Mr Enderby does not make a pretty sight when sleeping, even in total darkness. Yes, we all remark the scant hair, the toothless jaws, the ample folds of flesh rising and falling. But what has prettiness to do with greatness, eh? There is something for you all to ponder on. You would not like to have been married to him, Alberta? Might not the reverse also have applied, even more so, you stupid giggling silly thing? Who are you to think that you would ever be meet to mate with a great poet?
The extremities. The feet that trod Parnassus. Callosities on the intricate map of the sole, see. Torn toenails, though that of the great toe too rocky to be tearable. They could both do with a long sudsy soaking, agreed. The outstretched right hand, like a beggar's, really a king's. Gaze with reverence on those fingers that rest now from writing. Tomorrow they will write again, continuing the poem that he considers to be his masterpiece. Ah, what these fingers have produced! Each of you kiss the hand, more gently, though, than a fly crawling. I realize that the act of kissing needs an effort of will to overcome a certain natural revulsion. Here, however, is a little lesson for you in scholastic philosophy. The grubby knuckles, the nails with black borders, the deep stains of tobacco-tar (the cigarette was held interdigitally, forgotten, while the poet's mind soared above the smell of burning), the coarse skin-these are the accidents, the outer aspects of the hand, their concession to the ordinary world of eating and dying. But the essence of the hand-what is that? A divine machine that has made our lives more blessed. Kiss it, come on, kiss it. Althea, stop making that vomiting noise. Your face, Charles, is ugly enough without contorting it to a rictus of nausea. That's right, kiss it.
It has hardly disturbed him at all. He scratches it gently in his sleep, the tickle of a questing alighting moth. Listen. In his sleep he is going to say something. Your kiss has prodded a sleeping inspiration. Listen.
My bedmate deep
In the heavy labour of unrequited sleep.
No more? No more. There, children, what a thrill! You have heard his voice, a mumbly sleepy voice, true, but still his voice. And now let us pass on to Mr Enderby's bedside table.
Books, children, Mr Enderby's bed-reading. Blondes Like Bullets, whatever that means; Who Was Who in the Ancient World, useful, no doubt; Raffity's Deal, with a brutish cover; How I Succeeded, by a tycoon who died of arteriosclerosis; Little Stories of the Marian Martyrs, sensational. And here, dears, is one of Mr Enderby's own: Fish and Heroes, his early poems. What a genius he had then! Yes, Denis, you may handle it but, please, with care. Oh, you stupid boy, you have sent a shower of things to the floor. What are these, that were hidden between the well-thumbed pages? Photographs? Don't touch, leave them, they are not for you! Merciful heavens, the weaknesses of the great. What shame we have unintentionally uncovered. Do not giggle, Brenda and Maureen, and hand that photograph back to me this instant. You will wake Mr Enderby with those obscene girlish noises. What, Charles, are they doing? The man and woman in the picture? They are minding their own business, that's what they're doing.
Bopperlop.
Rest, rest, perturbed spirit. That picture, please, Robin. I can see it in your blazer pocket. Thank you. Fellation, if you must know, is the technical term. And now, no more of that. Shall we tiptoe into Mr Enderby's bathroom? Here we are. This is where Mr Enderby writes most of his verse. Remarkable, isn't it? Here, he knows, he can be truly private. The bath is full of manuscripts and dictionaries and ink-milked ballpoint pens. In front of the W.C. is a low desk, just the right height. There is an electric heater to glow on to his bared legs. Why does he choose this meagre chamber? Poetry, he has already said in an interview, is appropriate to it; the poet is time's cleanser and cathartizer. But, one may be sure, there is much more to it than that. Some childhood agony not yet to be uncovered by us. But Educational Time Trips are already talking of pushing further back into the past. Who knows? Before you leave school you may yet visit Shakespeare struggling, in the parish of St Olave, with verse quantities and a quill. Nigel, leave those rusty razor-blades alone, stupid boy. Softly, softly, now. To the room where he eats and, when not writing, lives is but a step. No, Stephanie, Mr Enderby lives alone through choice. Love, love, love. That's all that some of you girls can think about. Mr Enderby's love-life up to this point is obscure and shrouded. His attitude to women? You have his poems, though they, admittedly, mention the sex but little.
Porripipoop.
The horns of Elfland. We have left him to his poet's peace. There is one thing, though. The poems of this year-which, of course, he has not yet written-show a shy stirring of a more than photographic interest in woman. But we have no biographical evidence of an affair, a change of manage. We have little biographical evidence of anything. He was essentially a man who lived inside himself. And this sandy seaside address is the only one we have. Can you hear the sea, children? It is the same sea that we know, cruel, green, corrupt.
And what of Mr Enderby do we find in this room? It is Mrs Meldrum, his landlady, who speaks out dear in all this ranged bric-à-brac. Yes, survey it with wonder: a geometrical series of baby ebony elephants, the sweetest of china shepherds flute-blowing to unseen lambs, a plaster toy toast-rack with ancient Blackpool gilding, a tea-caddy replica of tarnished Brighton Pavilion, an enmarbled papier-mâché candlestick, a china bitch and her china litter, a filigree sheet-iron button-box. Do you like the picture above the electric-fire mantelpiece? It shows men in rusty red preparing for the hunting morning, all men identical because, we presume, the pseudo-artist could afford only one model. And, on the opposite wall, British admirals of the eighteenth century unrolling maps of terra incognita, wine being poured for them in tankards that catch the fire's glow. Here, jolly monks fish on Thursday; there, they lap up their Friday feast. A pot head of a twentyish flapper, hatted and lipsticked, on that strip of wall past the kitchen door. Emily, leave your nostrils alone. To blow spittle-bubbles on your nether lip is, need I say, Charles, childish. The kitchen is hardly worth examining. Very well, if you insist.
What a strong stench of stale bread! See that fish glow in the dark. Pans on the high shelf. Do not touch, Denis, do not. Oh you damnable young idiot. The whole blasted flaming lot clanking and clashing and ringing down. You bloody young fool. You will all laugh on the other sides of your faces when I get you back to civilization. Oh God, a frying-pan has knocked the kettle over. The gas-stove is full of water. What a filthy, damnable, metal noise! Who has spilt the pepper? Stop sneezing, blast the lot of you. Aaaaaarch! Howrashyouare! Out of here, quickly.
You can't be trusted, any of you. This is the last time I arrange such an expedition. Look down on all those Victorian roofs, fishscaled under the New-Year moon. You will never see them again. Nor any of this town, in whose flats and lodgings the retired and dying wheeze away till dawn. It is all very much like a great hair-comb, isn't it?-the winking jewelled handle, the avenues of teeth combing the hinterland of downs, the hair-ball of smoke which is the railway station. Above us, the January sky: Scutum, Ophiuchus, Sagittarius, the planets of age and war and love westering. And that man down below, whom that clatter of cheap metal has aroused from dyspeptic and flatulent sleep, he gives it all meaning.
Enderby awoke, aware of both noise and heartburn. Clamped to his bedhead was a lamp in a plastic shade. He switched this on, realized he was shivering and saw why. He picked up the tangle of bedclothes from the floor, covered himself roughly, and lay back again to savour the pain. It had an inexplicable note of raw turnip about it. The noise? The kitchen-gods fighting. Rats. He needed bicarbonate of soda. He must, he reminded himself for at least the seven-thousandth time, remember to keep it ready-mixed and handy by his bed. The stab of sharpened raw turnip shattered his breastbone. He had to get up.
He saw himself in the wardrobe mirror as he slapped stiffly out of the room into the tiny hallway of his flat, a rheumatic robot in pyjamas. He entered the dining-room, switching on, sniffing like a dog as for a craftily hidden presence. Ghosts had been whimpering around, he was sure, ghosts of the dead year. Or perhaps, he smiled wryly at the conceit, posterity had been shyly looking in. He was astonished at the mess in the kitchen. Such things happened, though: a delicate balance upset by a micrometric subsidence of the old house, an earth tremor, self-willed monads in the utensils themselves. He took a cloudy glass from the draining-board, snowed in some sodium bicarbonate, stirred with two fingers, then drank. He waited thirty seconds, squinting at the glazed pane of the back door. A tiny hand hidden beneath his epiglottis gave a come-up signal. And then.
Delightful. Oh, doctor, the relief! I feel I must write to say thank you for the benefits I have obtained from your product. Aaaaaaarp. Almost immediately after the second spasm of release came a fierce and shameless hunger. He moved the three steps necessary from sink to food-cupboard and found himself freezingly sploshing in spilt water by the stove. He dried his feet in the dropped tea-towel, rearranged the fallen pans on their shelf, wincing with old man's bent pain as he picked them up. He then remembered that he needed his teeth, so he padded back to the bedroom for them, switching the living-room fire on on the way. He clacked a false gleam at the mirror when he returned to the living-room, then did a brief lumbering dance of rage at his reflection. In the food-cupboard were pellets of rocky cheddar, greasily wrapped. A lone midget cauliflower swam like a doll's brain in dense pickle. There was half a tin of sardines, soft plump knives in golden oil. He ate with fingers that he then wiped dry on his pyjamas.
Almost at once his bowels reacted. He ran like a man in a comic film, sat down with a sigh and clicked on the bathroom heater. He scratched his bare legs and read, thoughtfully, the confused draft he was working on. Pfffrumpfff. It was an attempt at allegory, a narrative poem in which two myths were fused-the Cretan and the Christian. A winged bull swooped from heaven in a howling wind. Wheeeeeee. The law-giver's queen was ravished. Big with child, called whore by her husband, she went incognita to a tiny village of the kingdom, there, in a cheap hotel, to give birth to the Minotaur. But the old gummy trot who tended her would keep no secret; she blazoned it about the village (and this spread beyond to the towns, to the capital) that a god-man-beast had come down to rule the world. Prrfrrr. In hope, the anarchic party of the state was now ready to rise against the law-maker: tradition had spoken of the coining of a divine leader. Civil war broke out, propaganda flashed in jagged lightnings from both sides. The beast was evil, said King Minos: capture it, kill it. The beast was God, cried the rebels. But nobody, except the queen-mother and the toothless midwife, had ever seen the beast. Brrrrbfrrr. The baby Minotaur was growing fast, bellowing lustily, hidden away safely with its dam in a lonely cottage. But, by treachery, the forces of Minos were given knowledge of its whereabouts. Manifestly, thought Minos, when it was brought to his palace, though technically a monster it was no horror: its gentle eyes were twin worlds of love. With the talisman and mascot of the rebels in his power, Minos was able to call for surrender. He had a labyrinth built, vast and marbly splendid, with the Minotaur hidden in its heart. It was a horror, unspeakable, reputedly fed on human flesh; it was the state's bogey, the state's guilt. But Minos was economical: the peripheral corridors of the labyrinth became a home of Cretan culture- university, museum, library, art gallery; a treasury of human achievement; beauty and knowledge built round a core of sin, the human condition. Prrrrf. (Enderby's toilet-roll span.) But one day, from the west, there flew in the Pelagian liberator, the man who had never known sin, the guilt-killer. Minos by now was long dead, along with his shameless queen and, long, long before, the midwife. Nobody living had seen the monster and survived, so it was said. Greeted with cheers, flowers and wine, the liberator went to his heroic work. Blond, bronzed, muscular, sinless, he entered the labyrinth and, a day later, emerged leading the monster on a string. Gentle as a pet, with hurt and forgiving eyes, it looked on humanity. Humanity seized it and reviled it and buffeted it. Finally it was nailed to a cross, where it died slowly. At the moment of giving up the ghost there was a sound of rending and crashing. The labyrinth collapsed; books were buried, statues ground to chalk-dust: civilization was at an end. Brrrrp.
The poem was to be called, tentatively, The Pet Beast. Enderby realized that a great deal of work had to be done on it, symbols clarified, technical knots unravelled. There was the disinterested craftsman, Daedalus, to be brought into it, the anti-social genius with the final answer of flight. There was Pasiphae's pantomime cow. He tried out, in his deep woollily inept voice, a line or two on a hushed audience of hanging dirty towels:
He, the cold king, judged cases in his dreams.
Awake, lithe at his task,
The other whistled, sawing pliant beams.
Law is what seems;
The Craftsman's place to act and not to ask.
The words, resounding in that tiny cell, acted at once like a conjuration. Just outside the flimsy door of Mr Enderby's ground-floor flat was the entrance-hall of the house itself. He heard the massive front door creak open and the hall seemed to fill with New Year revellers. He recognized the silly unresonant voice of the salesman who lived in the flat above, the stout-fed laugh of the woman who lived with him. There were other voices, not assignable to known persons but generic, voices of Daily Mirror-readers, ITV-viewers, HP-buyers, Babycham-drinkers. There were loud and cheerful greetings:
"Happy New Year, Enderby!"
"Prrrrrrrrp!"
The stout-fed woman's voice said, "I don't feel well. I'm going to be sick." She at once, by the sound of it, was. Someone called:
"Give us a poem, Enderby. 'Eskimo Nell' or 'The Good Ship Venus'."
"Sing us a song, Enderby."
"Jack," said the sick woman weakly, "I'm going straight up. I've had it."
"You go up, love," said the salesman's voice. "I'll be after you in a minute. Got to serenade old Enderby first." There was the noise of a staggering fall against the door of Enderby's flat, a choirmaster's "One two three", and then the vigorous ragged strains of "Ach Du Lieber Augustin", but with rude English words:
Balls to Mister Enderby, Enderby, Enderby;
Balls to Mister Enderby, ballocks to you.
For he keeps us waiting while he's masturbating, so -
Enderby stuffed moistened pellets of toilet-paper in his ears. Locked safely enough in his flat, he now locked himself safelier in his bathroom. Scratching a warmed bare leg, he tried to concentrate on his poem. The revellers soon desisted and dispersed. He thought he heard the salesman call out, "That's the enderby, Enderby."
Cosily muffled against the sharp marine morning, Enderby walked down Fitzherbert Avenue towards the sea. It was ten-thirty by the Town Hall clock and the pubs were just opening. He passed Gradeleigh ("for Gradely Folk"), Kia-Ora (retired Kiwis), Ty-Gwyn (couple from Tredegar), Channel View, White Posts, Dulce Domus, The Laurels, Ithaca (former classics master and convicted pederast). Converted to flats, humbled as guest-houses, all were owned by foreigners from north and west of the downs, bemused by an image of the glamour of the south coast: France winked at night across the water; here the air had a fancied mildness. Not today, thought Enderby, smacking his woolly bear-paw palms together. He wore a scarf coloured like a Neapolitan ice; his overcoat was a tightly-belted Melton; he was shielded from heaven by a Basque beret. The house wherein he had a flat was, he thanked that same heaven, nameless. Number 81, Fitzherbert Avenue. Would there ever, some day, be a plaque to mark that he had lived there? He was quite sure not. He was one of a dying race, unregarded by the world. Hurray.
Enderby turned on to the Esplanade, joined a queue of old women in a cake-shop, and came out with a seven-penny loaf. He crossed over to the sea-rail and leaned on it, tearing the loaf. The gulls wheeled screaming for the thrown bread, beady-eyed greedy creatures, while the sea whooped in, the green-grey winter Channel, then grumbled back, as at the lion-tamer's whip, grudgingly rattling many tambourines. Enderby tossed the last crumbs to the bitter air and its grey planing birds, then turned from the sea. He looked back on it before he entered the Neptune, seeing in it, as so often from a distance, the clever naughty green child which had learned to draw a straight line free-hand.
The saloon-bar of the Neptune was already half-filled with old people, mainly widows. "Morning," said a dying major-general, "and a happy New Year to you." Two male ancients compared arthritis over baby stouts. A bearded lady drank off her port and slowly, toothlessly, chewed the mouthful. "And to you too," said Enderby. "If I can live to see the spring," said the general, "that's all. That's as much as I can hope for." Enderby sat down with his whisky. He was at home with the aged, accepted as one of them, despite his ridiculous youth. Still, his recorded age was a mere actuarial cipher; his gullet burning as the whisky descended, his aches and pains, his lack of interest in action-these made him as old as the crocks among whom he sat.
"How," asked a gentle tremulous man made of parchment, "how," his hand shaking his drink like a dicebox, "how is the stomach?"
"Some quite remarkable twinges," said Enderby. "Almost visible, you know. And flatulence."
"Flatulence," said the major-general, "ah, yes, flatulence." He spoke of it as though it were a rare old vintage. "Many years since I've had that. Now, of course, I eat nothing. A little bread soaked in warm milk, morning and evening. I swear it's this rum that's keeping me alive. I told you, did I, about that contretemps over the rum ration at Bruder-stroom?"
"Several times," said Enderby. "A very good story."
"Isn't it?" said the general, painfully animated. "Isn't it a good story? And true. Incredible, but true."
A plebeian crone in dirty black spoke from a bar-stool. "I," she said, "have had part of my stomach removed." There was a silence. The aged males ruminated this gratuitous revelation, wondering whether, coming from a female and a comparative stranger, it was really in the best of taste. Enderby said kindly: "That must have been quite an experience." The old woman looked crafty, gripped the counter's edge with papery hands that grew chalky at the knuckles, canted her stool towards Enderby and said, very loudly, "Pardon?"
"An experience," said Enderby, "never to be forgotten."
"Six hours on the table," said the woman. "Nobody here can't beat that."
"Crump," called the major-general in an etiolated martinet's voice. "Crump. Crump." He was not reminiscing about the first World War; he wanted the barman to replenish his rum-glass. Crump came from behind the bar, seventyish, in a waiter's white jacket, with a false smile both imbecilic and ingratiating, his grey head cocked permanently to one side like that of a listening parrot. "Yes, General," he said. "Similar, sir? Very good, sir."
"I'm always telling him," said an ancient with the humpty-dumpty head of Sibelius, "about that use of the word. It's common among barmen and landlords. They say you can't have the same again. But it is, in fact, precisely the same again that one wants. One doesn't want anything similar. You deal in words, Enderby. You're a writer. What's your view of the matter?"
"It is the same," agreed Enderby. "It's from the same bottle. Something similar is something different."
"Professor Taylor used to argue that out very persuasively," said an old man mottled like salami, a dewdrop on the hook of his nose.
"What's happened to Taylor?" asked the major-general. "We haven't seen him for quite some time."
"He died," said the mottled man. "Last week. While drawing a cork. Cardiac failure."
"He'd just turned eighty," said a man just turned eighty. "Not all that old."
"Taylor gone," said the general. "I didn't know." He accepted rum from obsequious Crump. Crump accepted silver with an obsequious inclination of a broken and mended torso. "I thought I'd go before him," said the general, "but I'm still here."
"You're not all that old yourself," said the tremulous parchment man.
"I'm eighty-five," said the general in puffy indignation. "I call that very old."
Higher bids came from the corners. One woman confessed coyly to ninety. As if somehow to prove this, she performed a few waltz-twirls, humming from The Merry Widow. She sat down again to genteel shocked applause, her lips blue, her heart almost audibly thumping. "And," asked the Sibelius-man, "how old might you be, Enderby?"
"Forty-five."
There were snorts of both contempt and amusement.
One man in a corner piped, "If that's meant to be funny, I don't think it's in very good taste."
The major-general turned sternly and deliberately towards Enderby, both hands resting on the ivory bulldog-head of his malacca. "And what is it you do for a living?" he asked.
"You know that," said Enderby. "I'm a poet."
"Yes, yes, but what do you do for a living? Only Sir Walter made a living out of poetry. And perhaps that Anglo-Indian man who lived at Burwash."
"A few investments," said Enderby.
"What investments precisely?"
"I.C.I, and B.M.C. and Butlin's. And local government loans."
The major-general grunted, as though none of Enderby's replies was above suspicion. "What was your rank in the last war?" he asked, a last throw.
Before Enderby could give a lying answer, a widow in antique tweeds, a long thin woman with black-rimmed spectacles, fell from a low stool by a wicker table. Old men reached trembling for their sticks, that they might lever themselves up and help. But Enderby was there first. "Sho kind," said the woman genteelly. "Sho shorry to cauzhe all thish trouble." She had evidently been tanking up at home before opening-time. Enderby lifted her from the floor, as light and as stiff as a bundle of celery. "Thezhe thingzh," she said, "happen in the besht of familiezh."
His hands still hooked in her armpits, Enderby was shocked to see the image of his stepmother in the big Gilbey's Port mirror on the wall opposite. Shaken, he nearly dropped his burden to the floor again. The image nodded to him, as out of some animated painting in a TV commercial, raised its glass in New Year salutation, then seemed to hobble out of the picture, into the wings, thus disappearing.
"Get on with it, Enderby," said the peevish major-general. "Put her back on her seat."
"Sho very kind," said the woman, trying hard to focus on her gin-glass. Enderby looked in the room for a source of that mirror-image, but saw only a bent back hobbling to the Gents. That might be it, a trick of the light or the New Year. It was his stepmother, strangely enough, who had told him as a child that, on New Year's Day, a man walked the streets with as many noses on his face as there were days in the year. He had gone looking for this man, thinking of him fearfully as of the family of the Antichrist that walked the world before the day of judgement. Long after he had seen through the trick, New Year's Day still possessed for him an irritating macabre flavour, as a day of possible prodigies. His stepmother was, he was pretty sure, dead and buried. She'd done her work, as far as he was concerned. There was no point in her staying alive or coming back from the grave.
"Now," said the major-general, as Enderby sat down again with a new whisky, "what did you say your rank was?"
"Lieutenant-general," said Enderby. In speech a comma is as good as a hyphen.
"I don't believe you."
"Look it up." Enderby was almost sure he saw his step mother leave the jug-and-bottle department, a quarter-bottle of Booth's in her bag. The Neptune was the sort of pub in which any of the three parts-saloon, public, outdoor-is visible from any other. Enderby spilt whisky on his tie. An old man who had not previously spoken pointed at Enderby with shaky care and said, "You've spilt whisky on your tie." Enderby felt that fear would possibly make worse happen. The outer world was not safe. He must go back home and closet himself, work at his poem. He finished the driblet in his glass, buttoned himself up and donned his Basque beret. The major-general said, "I don't believe you, sir."
"You must please yourself, General," said Ex-lieutenant Enderby. And, with a general salute, he left.
"He's a liar," said the major-general. "I always knew he wasn't to be trusted. I don't believe he's a poet, either. A very shifty look about him this morning."
"I read about him in the public library," said the salami-mottled man. "There was a photograph, too. It was an article, and it seemed to think quite a lot of him."
"What is he? Where does he come from?" asked another.
"He keeps himself very much to himself," said the mottled man and, just in time, he snuffed up a perilous dewdrop.
"He's a liar, anyway," said the major-general. "I shall look up the Army List this afternoon."
He never did. A motorist, irritable and jumpy with a seasonal hangover, knocked him down as he was crossing Nollekens Avenue. Long before spring, the major-general was promoted to glory.
Out in the gull-clawed air, New-Year blue, the tide crawling creamily in, Enderby felt better. In this sharp light there was no room for ghosts. But the imagined visitation had acted as an injunction to honour the past before looking, as at every year's beginning, to the future.
Enderby first thought of his mother, dead at his birth, of whom there had seemed to be no record. He liked to imagine a young woman of gentle blondeness, sweetly refined and slenderly pliant. He liked to think of her swathed in gold, in a beeswax-breathing drawing-room, singing "Passing By" to her own accompaniment. The dying heat of a July day sang in sadness through the wide-open french windows from a garden that glowed with Crimson Glory, Mme L. Dieudonne, Ena Harkness and Golden Spectre. He saw his father, become bookish, wearing bookman's slippers, O-ing out smoke from an oval-bored Passing Cloud, nodding his head in quiet pleasure as he listened. But his father had never been quite like that. A wholesale tobacconist, ruling lines in the ledger with an ebony sceptre of a ledger-ruler, sitting in the office behind the shop in waistcoat and black bowler, always glad of opening-time. Why? To escape from that bitch of a second wife. Why in God's name had he married her? "Money, son. Her first one left her a packet. Her stepson will, we hope, reap the benefit." And, to some extent, it had turned out that way. Hence the few hundred a year from I.C.I., British Motors, and the rest. But had it been worth it?
Oh, she had been graceless and coarse, that one. A hundredweight of ringed and brooched blubber, smelling to high heaven of female smells, rank as long-hung hare or blown beef, her bedroom strewn with soiled bloomers, crumby combinations, malodorous bust-bodices. She had swollen finger-joints, puffy palms, wrists girdled with fat, slug-white upper arms that, when naked, showed indecent as thighs. She was corned, bunioned, calloused, varicose-veined. Healthy as a sow, she moaned of pains in all her joints, a perpetual migraine, a bad back, toothache. "The pains in me legs," she would say, "is killin' me." Her wind was loud, even in public places. "The doctor says to let it come up. You can always say excuse me." Her habits were loathsome. She picked her teeth with old tram-tickets, cleaned out her ears with hairclips in whose U-bend ear-wax was trapped to darken and harden, scratched her private parts through her clothes with a matchbox-rasping noise audible two rooms away, made gross sandwiches of all her meals or cut her meat with scissors, spat chewed bacon-rind or pork-crackling back on her plate, excavated beef-fibres from her cavernous molars and held them up for all the world to see, hooked out larger chunks with a soiled sausage-finger, belched like a ship in the fog, was sick on stout on Saturday nights, tromboned vigorously in the lavatory, ranted without aitches or grammar, scoffed at all books except Old Moore's Almanac, whose apocalyptic pictures she could follow. Literally illiterate all her life, she would sign cheques by copying her name from a prototype on a greasy piece of paper, drawing it carefully as a Chinese draws an ideogram. She provided fried meals mostly, ensuring first that the fat was tepid. But she brewed good tea, potent with tannin, and taught young Enderby the technique, that he might bring her a cup in the morning: three for each person and two for the pot, condensed milk rather than fresh, be lavish with the sugar. Enderby, sixth-form boy, would stand over her while she drank it in bed-tousled, wrinkled, puffed, ill-smelling, a wreck-though she did not really drink it: the tea seemed to soak into her as into parched earth. One day he would put rat-poison in her cup. But he never did, even though he bought the rat-poison. Hate? You've just no idea.
When Enderby was seventeen, his father went off to Nottingham to be shown over a tobacco factory, was away for the night. July heat (she showed up badly in that) broke in monsoon weather, with terrifying lightning. But it was only the thunder that scared her. Enderby awoke at five in the morning to find her in his bed, in dirty winceyette, clutching him in fear. He got up, was sick in the lavatory, then locked himself in, reading till dawn the scraps of newspaper on the floor.
Her death was reported to him when he was in the Army, L. of C. troops in Catania. She had died after drinking a morning cup of tea, brought by his father. Heart failure. The night of hearing the news, Enderby went with a woman of Catania (one tin of corned beef and a packet of biscuits) and, to her almost concealed laughter, could do nothing. Also, on arriving back at his billet, he was sick.
Well, there it was. His stepmother had killed women for him, emerging in a ladylike belch or a matchstick picking of teeth from behind the most cool and delectable façade. He had got on quite nicely on his own, locked in the bathroom, cooking his own meals (ensuring first that the fat was tepid), living on his dividends and the pound or two a year his poems earned. But, as middle-age advanced, his stepmother seemed to be entering slyly into him more and more. His back ached, his feet hurt, he had a tidy paunch, all his teeth out, he belched. He had tried to be careful about laundry and cleaning the saucepans, but poetry got in the way, raising him above worry about squalor. Yet dyspepsia would cut disconcertingly in, more and more, blasting like a tuba through the solo string traceries of his little creations.
The act of creation. Sex. That was the trouble with art. Urgent sexual desire aroused with the excitement of a new image or rhythm. But adolescence had prolonged its techniques of easy detumescence, normal activities of the bathroom. Walking towards the Freemason's Arms he felt wind rising from his stomach. Damn. Brerrrrp. Blast. He was, however, on the whole, taking all things into consideration, by and large, not to put too fine a point on it, reasonably well self-sufficient. Brrrrrp. Blast and damn.
Arry, head cook at the Conway, was standing by the bar of the Freemason's with a pint tankard of brown ale and bitter mixed. He said to Enderby, " 'Ere yar." He handed over a long bloody parcel, blood congealed on a newspaper headline about some woman's blood. "A said ad get it an a got it." Enderby said, "Thanks, and a happy New Year. What will you have?" He eased away some of the newspaper at one end, "Missing Persons", covered with blood, and the head of a mature hare stared at him with glass eyes. "Yer can joog it today," said Arry. He was in a brown sports-coat that reeked of old fat, a tout's cap on his head. His upper jaw had only two canines. These were gateposts between which his tongue, car-like, occasionally eased itself out and in. He came from Oldham. "Red coorant jelly," said Arry. "What a generally do is serve red coorant jelly on a art-shaped croutong. Coot out a art-shaped bitter bread with a art-cooter. Fry it in 'ot fat, quick. Boot, livin' on yer own, a don't suppose yer'll wanter go to that trooble." He drank down his brown ale and bitter and, on Enderby, had another pint. "Good job yer coom in when yer did," he said. " 'Ave to go now. Special loonch for South Coast Association of Car Salesmen." He swigged the pint in one lift of the tankard, had another, yet another, all in two minutes flat. Like most cooks he could eat little. He had ferocious gastric pains which endeared him to Enderby. "Seein' yer," he said, leaving. Enderby nursed his hare.
This bar was the haunt of all local lesbians over fifty. Most of them fulfilled the paradigms of marriage, a few were divorced, widowed or estranged. On a stool in the corner was a woman called Gladys, a peroxided Jewess of sixty with tortoise-shell spectacle-rims and leopard-skin jeans. She was kissing, more often and more passionately than seemed necessary, another woman in New-Year greeting. This woman wore a bristling old fur coat and was delicately cross-eyed. A fierce-looking thin woman in a dress as hairy and simple as a monk's habit, a nutria coat swinging open over it, crashed into the bar and greeted her too, long and gluily. "Prudence, my duck," she said. Prudence seemed to be a popular girl. The peculiar charm of strabismus. And then the fragments of a new poem came swimming with a familiar confidence into Enderby's head. He saw the shape, he heard the words, he felt the rhythm. Three stanzas, each beginning with birds. Prudence, prudence, the pigeons call. And, of course, that's what they did call, that's what they'd always called. Act, act, the ducks give voice. And that was true, too. What were the other birds? They weren't sea-gulls. The dyed-blonde Jewess, Gladys, suddenly, raucously, laughed. It was a bird like that. Caution, caution. Rooks, that was it. But why were they calling, giving voice, proclaiming?
He had a ball-point pen, but no paper. Only the wrapping of the hare. There was a long empty stop-press column, two forlorn football results at the head. He wrote the lines he had heard. Also other fragments that he could hear dimly. The meaning? Meaning was no concern of the poet. The widow in the shadow. The widow in the meadow. A voice, very clear and thin, spoke as though pressed to his ear: Drain the sacrament of choice. Gladys began to sing, pop garbage composed by some teenager, much heard on radio disc-programmes. She sang loudly. Excited, Enderby cried, "Oh, for Christ's sake shut up!" Gladys was indignant. "Who the bloody hell do you think you're telling to shut up?" she called across, with menace. "I'm trying to write a poem," said Enderby. "This," said someone, "is supposed to be a respectable pub." Enderby downed his whisky and left.
Walking home quickly he tried to call back the rhythm, but it had gone. The fragments ceased to be live limbs of some mystical body that promised to reveal itself wholly. Dead as the hare, meaningless onomatopoeia; a silly jingle: widow, shadow, meadow. The big rhythms of the nearing tide, the winter sea-wind, the melancholy gulls. A gust shattered and dispersed the emerging form of the poem. Oh, well. Of the million poems that beckoned, like coquettish girls, from the bushes, how very few could be caught!
Enderby stripped the hare of its bloody paper as he approached 81 Fitzherbert Avenue. There was a public litter basket attached to a lamp-post almost in front of the front-steps. He threw the crumpled mess of news, blood, inchoate poetry in, and got out his key. A tidy town, this. Must not let our standards relax even though there are no holiday visitors. He entered the kitchen and began to skin the hare. It would give him, he thought, stewed with carrots, potatoes and onions, seasoned with pepper and celery salt, the remains of the Christmas red wine poured in before serving, enough meals for nearly a week. He slapped the viscera on to a saucer, cut up the carcass, and then turned on the kitchen tap. Hangman's hands, he thought, looking at them. Soaked in blood up to the elbows. He tried out a murderer's leer, holding the sacrificial knife, imagining a mirror above the kitchen sink.
The water flowing from the faucet cast a faint shadow, a still shadow, on the splashboard. The line came, a refrain: The running tap casts a static shadow. That was it, he recognized, his excitement mounting again. The widow, the meadow. A whole stanza blurted itself out:
"Act! Act!" The ducks give voice.
"Enjoy the widow in the meadow.
Drain the sacrament of choice.
The running tap casts a static shadow."
To hell with the meaning. Where the hell were those other birds? What were they? The cuckoo? The sea-gull? What was the name of that cross-eyed lesbian bitch in the Freemason's? Knife in hand, steeped in blood to the elbows, he dashed out of his flat, out of the house, to the rubbish-basket clamped to the lamppost. Others had been there while he had been gutting and skinning and quartering. A Black Magic box, a Senior Service packet, banana-peel. He threw it all out madly into the gutter. He found the defiled paper which had wrapped the beast. Frantically he searched page after crumpled page. THIS MAN MAY KILL, POLICE WARN. NOW THIS BOY IS LOVED. Most people Stop Acid Stomach with Kennies. Compulsive reading. He read: "The pain-causing acid is neutralized and you get that wonderful sensation that tells you the pain is beginning to go. The antacid ingredients reach your stomach gradually and gently-drip by drip…"
"What's this? What's going on?" asked an official voice.
"Eh?" It was the law, inevitably. "I'm looking for these blasted birds," said Enderby, rummaging again. "Ah, thank God. Here they are. Prudence, pigeons. Rooks, caution. It's as good as written. Here." He thrust the extended sheets into the policeman's arms.
"Not so fast," said the policeman. He was a young man, apple-ruddy from the rural hinterland, very tall. "What's this knife for, where did all that blood come from?"
"I've been murdering my stepmother," said Enderby, absorbed in composition. Prudence, prudence, the pigeons call. He ran into the house. The woman from upstairs was just coming down. She saw a knife and blood and screamed. Enderby entered his flat, ran into the bathroom, kicked on the heater, sat on the low seat. Automatically he stood up again to lower his trousers. Then, all bloody, he began to write. Somebody knocked-imperious, imperative-at his front door. He locked the bathroom door and got on with his writing. The knocks soon ceased. After half an hour he had the whole poem on paper.
"Prudence! Prudence!" the pigeons call.
"Scorpions lurk in the gilded meadow.
An eye is embossed on the island wall.
The running tap casts a static shadow."
"Caution! Caution!" the rooks proclaim.
"The dear departed, the weeping widow
Will meet in you in the core of flame.
The running tap casts a static shadow."
The injunction of the last stanza seemed clear enough, privy enough. Was it really possible, he wondered, for him to follow it, making this year different from all others?
"Act! Act!" The ducks give voice.
"Enjoy the widow in the meadow.
Drain the sacrament of choice…"
In the kitchen, he could now hear, the water was still flooding away. He had forgotten to turn it off. Casting a static shadow all the time. He got up from his seat, automatically pulling the chain. Who was this blasted widow that the poem referred to?
While Enderby was breakfasting off reheated hare stew with pickled walnuts and stepmother's tea, the postman came with a fateful letter. The envelope was thick, rich, creamy; richly black the typed address, as though a new ribbon had been put in just for that holy name. The note-paper was embossed with the arms of a famous firm of chain booksellers. The letter congratulated Enderby on his last year's volume-Revolutionary Sonnets-and was overjoyed to announce that he had been awarded the firm's annual Poetry Prize of a gold medal and fifty guineas. Enderby was cordially invited to a special luncheon to be held in the banqueting-room of an intimidating London hotel, there to receive his prizes amid the plaudits of the literary world. Enderby let his hare stew go cold. The third Tuesday in January. Please reply. He was dazed. And, again, congratulations. London. The very name evoked the same responses as lung cancer, overdrawn, stepmother.
He wouldn't go, he couldn't go, he hadn't a suit. At the moment he was wearing glasses, a day's beard, pyjamas, polo-neck sweater, sports-jacket and very old corduroys. In his wardrobe were a pair of flannel trousers and a watered-silk waistcoat. These, he had thought when settling down after demobilization, were enough for a poet, the watered-silk waistcoat being, perhaps, even, an unseemly luxury of stockbroker-like extravagance. He had had it, by mistake, knocked down to him for five shillings at an auction.
London. He was flooded with horrid images, some derived from direct experience, others from books. At the end of the war, searching for William Hazlitt's tomb in its Soho graveyard, he had been abused by a constable and had up in Bow Street on a charge of loitering with intent. He had once slipped on the greasy pavement outside Foyle's and the man who had helped him up-stocky, elderly, with stiff grey hair-had begged five bob to 'elp aht a bit cos they was on strike that week, guv. That was just after he had bought the watered-silk waistcoat: ten bob down the drain. In the urinal of a very foggy pub he had, unbelievably, been invited to a fellation party by a handsome stranger in smart city wear. This man had become nasty at Enderby's polite refusal and threatened to scream that Enderby was assaulting him. Very unpleasant. Along with other memories that made him wince (including one excruciating one of a ten-shilling note in the Café Royal) came gobbets from Oliver Twist, The Waste Land, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. London was unnecessarily big, gratuitously hostile, a place for losing money and contracting diseases. Enderby shuddered, thinking of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. And there he was-as he emptied his cold plateful back into the saucepan-with his stepmother again. At the age of fifteen he had bought off a twopenny stall in the market a duodecimo book of recipes, gossip, and homilies, printed in 1605. His stepmother, able to read figures, had screamed at the sight of it when he had proudly brought it home. 1605 was "the olden days", meaning Henry VIII, the executioner's axe, and the Great Plague. She thrust the book into the kitchen fire with the tongs, yelling that it must be seething with lethal germs. A limited, though live, sense of history.
And history was the reason why she would never go to London. She saw it as dominated by the Bloody Tower, Fleet Street full of demon barbers, as well as dangerous escalators everywhere. As Enderby now turned on the hot-water tap he saw that the Ascot heater did not, as it should, flare up like a bed of pain. The meter needed a shilling and he was too lazy to go and look for one. He washed his soup-plate and mug in cold water, reflecting that his stepmother had been a great one for that (knives and forks wrapped in grease as if they were guns). She had been very lazy, very stupid, very superstitious. He decided, wiping the dishes, that he would, after all, go to London. After all, it wasn't very far-only an hour by electric train-and there would be no need to spend the night in a hotel. It was an honour really, he supposed. He would have to borrow a suit from somebody. Arry, he was sure, had one. They were much of a size.
Enderby, sighing, went to the bathroom to start work. He gazed doubtfully at the bathtub, which was full of notes, drafts, fair copies not yet filed for their eventual volume, books, ink-bottles, cigarette-packets, the remains of odd snacks taken while writing. There were also a few mice that lived beneath the detritus, encouraged in their busy scavenging by Enderby. Occasionally one would surface and perch on the bath's edge to watch the poet watching the ceiling, pen in hand. With him they were neither cowering nor timorous (he had forgotten the meaning of "sleekit"). Enderby recognized that the coming occasion called for a bath. Lustration before the sacramental meal. He had once read in some women's magazine a grim apothegm he had never forgotten: "Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace." On the other hand, Frederick the Great had never bathed in his life; his corpse had been a rich mahogany colour. Enderby's view of bathing was neither obsessive nor insouciant. ("Sans Souci", Frederick's palace, was it not?) He was an empiricist in such matters. Though he recognized that a bath would, in a week or two, seem necessary, he recoiled from the prospect of preparing the bathtub and evicting the mice. He would compromise. He would wash very nearly all over in the basin. More, he would shave with exceptional care and trim his hair with nail-scissors.
Gloomily, Enderby reflected that most modern poets were not merely sufficiently clean but positively natty. T. S. Eliot, with his Lloyd's Bank nonsense, had started all that, a real treason of clerks. Before him, Enderby liked to believe, cleanliness and neatness had been only for writers of journalistic ballades and triolets. Still, he would show them when he went for his gold medal; he would beat them at their own game. Enderby sighed again as, with bare legs, he took his poetic seat. His first job was to compose a letter of gratitude and acceptance. Prose was not his métier.
After several pompous drafts which he crumpled into the waste-basket on which he sat, Enderby dashed off a letter in In Memoriam quatrains, disguised as prose. "The gratitude for this award, though sent in all humility, should not, however, come from me, but from my Muse, and from the Lord…" He paused as a bizarre analogue swam up from memory. In a London restaurant during the days of fierce post-war food shortage he had ordered rabbit pie. The pie, when it had arrived, had contained nothing but breast of chicken. A mystery never to be solved. He shrugged it away and went on disguising the chicken-breast of verse as rabbit-prose. A mouse, forepaws retracted like those of a kangaroo, came up to watch.
Enderby found Arry in white in his underground kitchen, brown ale frothing beside him, slicing pork into blade-thin shives. An imbecilic-looking scullion in khaki threw fistfuls of cabbage on to plates. When he missed he picked up the scattered helping carefully from the floor and tried again. Massive sides of beef were jocularly being unloaded from Smithfield-the fat a golden fleece, the flesh the hue of diluted Empire burgundy. Enderby said:
"I've got to go up to London to be given a gold medal and fifty guineas. But I haven't got a suit."
"Yer'll be able to buy a good un," said Arry, "with that amount of mooney." He didn't look too happy; he frowned down at his precise task like a surgeon saving the life of a bitter foe. "There," he said, forking up a translucent slice to the light, "that's about as thin as yer can bloody get."
"But," said Enderby, "I don't see the point of buying a suit just for this occasion. I probably shan't want to wear a suit again. Or not for a long time. That's why I'd like to borrow one of yours."
Arry said nothing. He quizzed the forked slice and nodded at it, as though he had met its challenge and won. Then he returned to his carving. He said, "Yer quite right when yer suppose av got more than wan. Am always doin' things for people, aren't a? Boot what dooz any bogger do for me?" He looked up at Enderby an instant, his tongue flicking out between its gateposts as if to lick up a tear.
"Well," said Enderby, embarrassed, "you know you can rely on me. For anything I can do, that is. But I've only one talent, and that's not much good to you. Nor, it seems," the mood of self-pity catching, "to anyone else. Except a hundred or so people here and in America. And one mad female admirer in Cape Town. She writes once a year, you know, offering marriage."
"Female admirers," said carving Arry, pluralizing easily. "Female admirers, eh? That's wan thing a 'aven't got. It's me oo admires er, that's the bloody trooble. It's got real bad, that as." He became violently dialectal. "Av getten eed-warch wi' it," he said. Then, as an underling sniffed towards him with a cold, "Vol-au-vent de dindon's in that bloody coopboard," he said.
"Who?" said Enderby. "When?"
"Er oopstairs," said Any. "Thelma as serves int cocktail bar. A knew it definite ender the moonth. Bloody loovely oo is boot bloody cruel," he said, carving steadily. "Oo's bloody smashin'," he said.
"I don't know," said Enderby.
"Don't know what?"
"Who's bloody smashing."
"Oo is," said Arry, gesturing to the ceiling with his knife. "Oo oop thur. That Thelma."
Enderby then, remembered that two Anglo-Saxon feminine pronouns co-existed in Lancashire. He said "Well, why don't you go in and win? Just put a few teeth in your mouth first, though. The popular prejudice goes in favour of teeth."
"What's pegs to do with it?" said Arry. "A don't eat. Pegs is for eatin'. Am in loove, that's bloody trooble, and what's pegs to do with that?"
"Women like to see them," said Enderby. "It's more of an aesthetic than a functional thing. Love, eh? Well, well. Love. It's a long time since I've heard of anybody being in love."
"Every boogger's in loove nowadays," said Arry, ending his carving. He drank some brown ale. "There's songs about it ont wireless. A used to laff at 'em. And now it's me oo's copped it. Loove. Bloody nuisance it is an' all, what with bein' busy at this timer year. Firms givin' loonches an' dinners till near the end of February. Couldn't 'ave coom at a worse time."
"About this suit," said Enderby. He faced a vast carboy of pickled onions and his bowels melted within him. He wanted to be gone.
"Yer can do summat for me," said Any, "if am to do summat for you." He tasted this last pronoun and then decided that his revelation, his coming request, called for tutoyer intimacy. "Summat for thee," he amended. "Al lend thee that suit if tha'll write to 'er for me, that bein' thy line, writin' poetry an' all that mook. A keep sendin 'er oop special things as av cooked special, boot that's not romantic, like. A nice dish of tripe doon in milk, which were always my favourite when a were eatin'. Sent it down, oontooched, oo did. A reel boogger. What would go down best would be a nice loove-letter or a bitter poetry. That's where you'd coom in," said Arry, and his snake-tongue darted. " 'Av a grey un, a blue un, a brown un, a fawn un an a 'errin-bone tweed. Tha's welcome to any wan on 'em. Thee write summat an' sign it Arry and send it to me an' all send it oop to 'er."
"How shall I spell Arry?" asked Enderby.
"With a haitch," said Arry. "Two a week should do the bloody trick. Shouldn't take yer not more than a coupler minutes to write the sort of thing that goes down all reel with women. You and yer bloody female hadmirers," he said.
Before going back to his flat, Enderby used-long, lavishly and painfully-the gentlemen's lavatory on the ground floor of the hotel. Then, shaken, he went to the cocktail bar for a whisky and to have a look at Thelma. It would not do if he dug up old poems, or wrote new ones, celebrating the glory of fair hair or pegs like margarite if she should chance to be black, grey, near-edentate. The bar seemed full, today, of car salesmen, and these chaffed and mock-courted, with ha-ha-ha and obsolete pilot's slang, a quite personable barmaid in her late thirties. She had all her front teeth, black hair, naughty eyes, ear-rings that jangled tinily-clusters of minute coins-a snub nose and a comfortable round chin. She was superbly bosomed and efficiently uplifted. She seemed to be a repository of old bar-wisdom, epigrams, radio-show catch-phrases. A car salesman bought her a Guinness and she toasted him with "May you live for ever and me live to bury you." Then, before drinking, she said, "Past the teeth and round the gums, look out, stomach, here it comes." She had a fair swallow. She had decorated her little bar with poker-work maxims: "Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore and you sleep alone." "Water is a good drink when taken with the right spirit." "When you're up to your neck in hot water be like the kettle and sing." There was also a Browningesque couplet (content if not technique) above the gin bottles:
For when the last great Scorer comes to write against your name,
He writes not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.
Enderby doubted whether he could achieve the same gnomic tautness in anything he wrote for her. Still, that wouldn't be called for, love being essentially imprecise and diffuse. He drank his whisky and left.
Enderby's attitude to love-poetry was dispassionate, impersonal, professional. The worst love-poems, he had always contended, were the most sincere: the lover's palpitating emotions-all too personal, with an all too particular object-all too often got in the way of the ideal, the universal. A love-poem should address itself to an idea of a loved one. Platonism could take in ideal breasts, an ideal underarm odour, an ideal unsatisfactory coitus, as well as the smooth-browed intellectual wraith of the old sonneteers. Back in his bathroom, Enderby rummaged for fragments and drafts that would serve to start off the Arry to Thelma cycle. He found, mouse-nibbled:
I sought scent and found it in your hair;
Looked for light, and it lodged in your eyes.
So for speech: it held your breath dear;
And I met movement in your ways.
That felt like the first quatrain of a Shakespearian sonnet. It wouldn't do, of course; the sprung rhythm and muffled rhymes would strike Thelma's world as technical incompetence. He found:
You were there, and nothing was said,
For words toppled over the edge or hovered in air.
But I was suddenly aware, in the split instant,
Of the constant, in a sort of passionless frenzy:
The mad wings of motion a textbook law,
Trees, tables, the war, in a fixed relation,
Moulded by you, their primum mobile,
But that you were there really was all I knew.
He couldn't remember writing that. The reference to the war dated it within six years. The place? Probably some town with avenues, outdoor tables for drinking. Addressed to? Don't be so bloody stupid; addressed to nobody, of course; pure ideal emotion. He continued rooting, his arms deep in the bathtub. The mice scuffled to their primary home, a hole. He found half of a priceless piece of juvenilia:
You are all
Brittle crystal,
Your hands
Silver silk over steel.
Your hair harvested
Sheaves shed by summer,
Your repose the flash
Of the flesh of a river-swimmer…
Then a jagged tear. He must have been, sometime, taken short. There was nothing in the bath that would do for Thelma, even an ideal Thelma. He would have to compose something new. Stripping his lower half for poetic action, he took his seat and got down to work. Here was a real problem, that of bridging the gap, of making something that should not seem eccentric to the recipient and at the same time not completely embarrass the author. After an hour he produced the following:
Your presence shines above the fumes of fat,
Glows from the oven-door.
Lithe with the litheness of the kitchen cat,
Your image treads the floor
Ennobling the potato-peel, the lumps
Of fallen bread, the vulgar cabbage-stumps.
"Love!" cry the eggs a-whisk, and "Love!" the beef
Calls from the roasting-tin.
The beetroot blushes love. Each lettuce-leaf
That hides the heart within
Is a green spring of love. Pudding and pie
Are richly crammed with love, and so am I.
But, after those first two painful stanzas, he found it hard to stop. He was led on ruthlessly, horrified by a growing facility, a veritable logorrhoea. At the end of the ode he had emptied Arry's kitchen and filled ten closely written sheets. One point, he thought, he had very clearly established, and that was that Arry was in love.
It was the day of the London luncheon. Tremulous Enderby fell out of bed early to see snow staring through the morning dark. Shivering, he snapped every electric heater in the flat on, then made tea. Snow gawped blankly at him through all the windows, so he drew the curtains, turning raw morning into cosy muffiny toast-toe evening. Then he shaved. He had washed, fairly thoroughly, the night before the night before last. He had almost forgotten what it was like to shave with a new blade, having-for nearly a year now-used the old ones stacked up by the previous tenant on top of the bathroom cupboard. This morning he slashed cheeks, underlip, and Adam's apple: shaving-soap froth became childhood ice-cream sprinkled with raspberry vinegar. Enderby found an old poem beginning And if he did then what he'd said he'd do, and with bits of this he stanched the flow. He started to dress, putting on a new pair of socks bought at a January sale and tucking the ends of his pyjama-trousers well inside them. He had a white shirt specially laundered, he had found a striped tie-lime and mustard-in a suitcase with the name PADMORE in marking-ink on white rag attached to its lining (who was, or had been, or might be in the unrealized future, Padmore?) and had cleaned with care his one pair of brown shoes. He had also, for show and blow respectively, saved two clean handkerchiefs. He would beat these city-slickers at their own game. The suit from Arry was sober grey, the most Eliotian one in his whole wardrobe.
He was pleasantly surprised by the decent gravity of the figure that bowed from the wardrobe mirror. Urban, respectable, scholarly-a poet-banker, a poet-publisher, teeth a flashing two double octaves in the electric firelight, spectacles drinking of the bedlamp's glow. Satisfied, he went to get his breakfast-a special breakfast today, for God knew what ghastly sauced muck he might be coldly given in the great hotel. He had bought a Cornish pasty but had, coming out of the shop, slipped on an ice-patch. This had hurt him and flattened the pasty, but its edibility was hardly impaired. It was to be eaten with Branston pickle and, as an extra-special treat, washed down with Blue Mountain coffee. He felt an unwonted exultation as he prepared this viaticum, as if-after years of struggle-he had at last anived. What should he buy with the prize-money? He couldn't think what. Books? He had done reading. Clothes? Ha ha. There was nothing he really needed except more talent. Nothing in the world.
The coffee was disappointingly cool and weak. Perhaps he had not made it properly. Could he take lessons in that? Were there teachers of such things? Arry. Of course, he would ask Arry. At nine-fifteen (train at nine-fifty, ten minutes walk to station) he sat with a cigarette, hypnotized by the gash-gold-vermilion of the electric fire, waiting. He suddenly caught another memory like a flea. Far childhood. Christmas Day, 1924. Snow came down in the afternoon, transfiguring the slum street where the shop was. He had been given a magic lantern and, after dinner, he was to project slides of wild animals on to the sitting-room wall. Powered by a candle, the lantern had been fitted with a candle-a new one, its flame much too high for the lens. His Uncle Jimmy the plumber had said, "We'll have to wait till it burns down. Give us a tune, Fred." And Fred, Enderby's father, had sat at the piano and played. The rest of that dim gathering-only the stepmother bright in memory, belching away-had waited for the candle to burn down to lens-level, the coloured animals suddenly to appear on the wall.
Why, wondered Enderby now, why had nobody thought to cut the candle? Why had they all, every single one of them, agreed to wait on the candle's convenience? It was another mystery, but he wondered if it was really a mystery of a different order from this other waiting-waiting on Shakespeare's time's candle to burn down to time to dress warmly, time to leave for the station. Enderby suddenly passionately wished he could cut the whole long candle to its end-have written his poetry and have done. Then he grinned as his stomach, having slyly engineered this melancholy, plaintively subscribed to it.
Pfffrrrp. And then Brrrrrrr. But that, he realized, after surprise at his stomach's achievement of such metallic ectophony, that, he heard with annoyance, was the doorbell. So early, whoever it was, and coming so inconveniently. Enderby went to his flat-door and saw, waddling down the hallway of the house itself, his landlady, Mrs Meldrum. Well. He paid her by post. The less he saw of her the better. "If I can trouble you for a moment, Mr E," she said. She was a woman of sixty, with pinched East Midland vowels. Her face was modelled on that of a tired but cheerful crescent moon in a bedtime-malted-milk-drink advertisement that even Enderby had seen often: Punch-nose meeting cusp-chin, but no jolly Punch plumpness. She had a full set of Tenniel-teeth of the colour of small chips of dirty ice, and these she showed to Enderby now as to a mirror. Enderby said:
"I've got to go up to town." He thrilled gently, saying that, a busy man of affairs.
"I shan't keep you not more than one minute," said Mrs Meldrum, "Mr E." She waddled in past Enderby as if she owned the place, which she did. "It's really to empty the shillings out of the electric meter," she said, "which is, in one way of speaking, why I called. In another way of speaking, it's about the complaints." She went ahead of Enderby into the living-room. At the table she examined minutely the remains of Enderby's breakfast, shook her head comically at them and then, picking up the pickle-jar, read from the label like a priest muttering the Mass: "Sugar cauliflower onions malt vinegar tomatoes carrots spirit vinegar gherkins dates salt marrow…"
"What complaints?" asked Enderby, as he was expected to.
"New Year's Eve," said Mrs Meldrum, "being a special occasion as calls for jollifications, nevertheless Mrs Bates down in the basement has complained about loud singing when she couldn't go off to sleep with the backache. Your name came into it a lot, she says, especially in the very rude singing. On New Year's Day you was seen running up and down the street with a carving-knife and all covered with blood. Well, Mr Enderby, fun's fun as the saying goes, though I must confess I'm surprised at a man of your age. But the police had a quiet word with Mr Meldrum, unbeknownst to me, and I could only get it out of him last night, him being shy and retiring and not wanting to cause trouble. Anyway, we've had a talk about it and it can't go on, Mr E."
"I can explain," said Enderby, looking at his watch. "It's all really quite simple."
"And while we're on the subject," said Mrs Meldrum, "that nice young couple upstairs. They say they can hear you in the night sometimes."
"I can hear them," said Enderby, "and they're not a nice young couple."
"Well," said Mrs Meldrum, "that's all according as which way one looks at it, isn't it? To the pure all things are pure, as you might say."
"What, Mrs Meldrum, is this leading to?" Enderby looked again at his watch. In the last thirty seconds five minutes had gone by. Mrs Meldrum said:
"There's plenty as would like this nice little flat, Mr E. This is a respectable neighbourhood, this is. There's retired schoolmasters and captains of industry retired along here. And I wouldn't say as how you kept this flat all that clean and tidy."
"That's my business, Mrs Meldrum."
"Well, it may be your business, Mr E, but then again it might not. And everybody's putting the rents up this year, as you may as well know. What with the rates going up as well and all of us having to watch us own interests."
"Oh, I see," said Enderby. "That's it, is it? How much?"
"You've had this very reasonable," said Mrs Meldrum, "as nobody can deny. You've had this at four guineas a week all through the season. There's one gentleman as works in London as is very anxious to find respectable accommodation. Six guineas to him would be a very reasonable rent."
"Well, it's not a very reasonable rent to me, Mrs Meldrum," said Enderby angrily. His watch-hand leapt gaily forward. "I have to go now," he said. "I've a train to catch. Really," he said, shocked, "do you realize that that would be eight guineas more a month? Where would I get the money?"
"A gentleman of independent means," said Mrs Meldrum smugly. "If you don't want to stay, Mr E, you could always give a week's notice."
Enderby saw with horror the prospect of sorting out the bathful of manuscripts. "I'll have to go now," he said. "I'll let you know. But I think it's an imposition."
Mrs Meldrum made no move. "You go off then and catch your train," she said, "and think about it in your first-class carriage. And I'll empty the shillings out of the meter, as has to be done now and again. And if I was you I should stack those plates in the sink before you leave."
"Don't touch my papers," warned Enderby. "There are private and confidential papers in that bathroom. Touch them at your peril."
"Peril, indeed," scoffed Mrs Meldrum. "And I don't like the sound of that at all, continental papers in my bathroom." Meanwhile Enderby wrapped his muffler on and fought his way-as if towards the light-into his overcoat. "I never heard of such a thing, and that's a fact," said Mrs Meldrum, "and I've been in the business a fair amount of time. I've heard of coals in the bath with some of them slummy people, though I thank the Almighty God I've never harboured any of them in my bosom. You're going out like that, Mr Enderby, with bits of paper stuck all over your face. I can read a word there, just by your nose: epileptical, or something. You're not doing yourself or me or any of the other tenants any good at all, Mr E, going out in that state. Peril, indeed."
Enderby dithered out, doubtful. He had not reckoned on having to search for new lodgings, not in the middle of The Pet Beast. And this town was becoming more and more a dormitory for bald young men from London. In one pub he had met the head of a news-reel company, a lavish gin-man with a light, fast voice. And there had been a processed-cheese executive heard, loud and unabashed, somewhere else. London was crawling southward to the Channel.
Enderby crawled northward to the station, picking off odd words from his razor-cuts. The snow had been trodden already, by people rushing earlier with insincere eagerness to get to work in London. Enderby teetered in tiny gavotte-steps, afraid of slipping, his rump still aching from last night's fall. Work-trains, stenographer-trains, executive-trains. Big deals over the telephone, fifty guineas nothing to them. Golfball-money. But, thought Enderby, that would provide for half a year's rent increase.
Looking up at the zinc sky he saw a gull or two flapping inland. He had neglected to feed the gulls for two days now; he was becoming careless. Perhaps, he thought vaguely, he could make it up to them by buying some special treat at the Army and Navy Stores. He passed a block of bright posters. One of them extolled domestic gas: a smiling toy paraclete called Mr Therm presided over a sort of warm Holy Family. Pentecostal therm; pentecostal sperm. Two men in dyed army overcoats marched, as in retreat, from the station, with demoralized thug faces. One said to the other, "Can't make up its bleeding mind. Rain one day, snow the next. Be pissing down again tomorrow." Enderby had to stop, short of breath, his heart martelling away as though he had just downed a half-bottle of brandy, his left hand clutching a snowcapped privet-hedge for support. The pentecostal sperm came pissing dawn. No, no, no. Hissing down. The line was dealt to him, like a card from a weighing-machine. He had a sudden image of the whole poem like a squat evil engine, weighing, waiting. The Holy Family, the Virgin Mary, the pentecostal sperm. He heard a train-whistle and had to rush.
Panting, he entered the little booking-hall and dug out his wallet from his right breast. There was still a Christmas tree by the bookstall. That was wrong: Twelfth Night was over, St Distaff's Day had set the working year spinning again. Enderby approached the stern shirt-sleeves behind the guichet. "A day return to London, please," he begged. He picked up his change with his ticket and sent a shilling over the floor. "Don't lose that, mister," said a lively old woman in black. "Need that for the gas." She cackled as Enderby chased the shining monocycle to the barrier. The ticket-collector flapped a heavy boot on to it, trapped. "Thank you," said Enderby. Rising from picking it up his eyes misted, and he saw a very clear and blue picture of the Virgin Mary at a spinning-wheel, a silver queen set in baby blue. This had nothing to do with The Pet Beast and its Mary-Pasiphae. This had something to do with his stepmother.
In this spinning womb, reduced to a common noun,
The pentecostal sperm came hissing down…
That was not it, the rhythm was wrong, it was not couplets. The couplets came from the doves in the Queen's speech in Hamlet. Doves, loves, leaves. Enderby clomped down the steps and up the steps to the up-train platform. The train was just arriving. There was an -eave rhyme somewhere. Enderby boarded the train. There were few passengers at this hour-women going up to fight in the January sales, a scholarly-looking police-inspector with a briefcase, two men looking much, Enderby thought distractedly, like himself-smart, normal, citified. Doves came from dove, dove meant paraclete. A dove in the leaves of life. Eve, leave, thieve, achieve, conceive.
"I beg your pardon?" said a woman sitting diagonally opposite to Enderby. They were the only two in the compartment. She was thin, blonde, washed-out, fortyish, smart with a mink cape-stole and a hat like a nest. "Peeve," said Enderby the city-man. "Believe. Weave." The train began to pant north-east with urgent love of London, a sperm to be swallowed by that giant womb. "Swallowed," announced Enderby, with loud excitement, "by the giant stomach of Eve. I knew Eve came somewhere into it." The woman picked up her folio-sized handbag and silver-grey couplet of gloves and left the compartment. "Eve leaves," said Enderby. Where was paper? None. He had not expected this to be a working day. Inkpencil he had. He rose and followed the woman out to the corridor. She scampered, with a kitten-scream, to the next compartment, which held a trio of talking and nodding wives drably dressed for sales-battle. Enderby, a homing dove, went straight to the lavatory.
In this spinning room, reduced to a common noun,
Swallowed by the giant stomach of Eve,
The pentecostal sperm came hissing down.
Enderby sat, fully dressed, on the seat of the W.C., swaying as on a father's rocking knee, a cock-horse to Charing Cross. No, London Bridge. No, Victoria. An electric sperm plunging towards Our Lady of Victories, Enderby astride. He had removed the toilet-roll from its holder and scratched away on panel after panel of paper with his ink-pencil. The poem was definitely a song for the Blessed Virgin.
Whence this Marianism? Enderby knew. He remembered his bedroom with its devotional pictures by Italian commercial artists: Pius XI with triple tiara and benedictory gesture; Jesus Christ with radioactive heart exposed and-for good measure-indicated by a divine delicate index-finger; saints (Anthony, John the Baptist, Bernadette); the Virgin Mary with tender smile and winsome wimple:
I was nowhere, for I was anyone -
The grace and music easy to receive:
The patient engine of a stranger son.
Outside the bedroom door had been a holy-water stoup, dried up with the drought of Enderby's boyish disbelief. All over the house, as far as the frontier of the shop's neutral or Protestant territory, there had been other stoups, also crucifixes, plaster statuettes, withered Holy-Land palm-leaves, rosaries blessed in Rome, an Agnus Dei or two, decorative pious ejaculations (done in Dublin in pseudo-Celtic script) as brief as snarls. That was his stepmother's Catholicism, imported from Liverpool-relics and emblems and hagiographs used as lightning-conductors; her religion a mere fear of thunder.
The Catholicism of the Enderbys had come from a small Catholic pocket not far from Shrewsbury, a village which the Reformation had robbed only of its church. Weak in the tobacconist-father (his pan scraped on Holy Saturday, a drunken midnight Mass at Christmas-no more), it had died in the poet-son, thanks to that stepmother. It had been too late now for more than twenty years to look at it afresh-its intellectual dignity, its cold coherent theology. He had struggled out of it with bitter tears in adolescence, helped by Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Rousseau, and the struggle to create his own myths had made him a poet. He couldn't go back to it now, even if he wanted to. If he did, he would be seeking the converts who wrote thrillers out of a sense of damnation or who, forming an exclusive club out of the converts of Oxford and pretending that that was the Church, would not let Enderby join. Publicly known as an apostate, Enderby would have to be bracketed along with various wild Irish. It was best, therefore, to be quiet about his faith or loss of it (asked for his religion when joining the army, he had said "Hedonist" and been made to attend parades of the United Board); the only trouble seemed to be that his art refused to be quiet.
His laughter was fermenting in the cell,
The fish, the worm were chuckling to achieve
The rose of the disguise he wears so well.
Ultimately religious belief didn't matter; it was a question of what myths still carried enough emotional weight to be used. So the Virgin Mary now spoke her final triplet, smiling faintly in elegant blue at the distaff:
And though, by dispensation of the dove,
My flesh is pardoned of its flesh, they leave
The rankling of a wrong and useless love.
There was too much love in the air, worried Enderby, as he read over this poem with displeasure. He saw that, apart from the obvious surface myth, there was something there about the genesis of the poet. He wrote on a final panel of toilet-paper: Every woman is a stepmother, then committed it to the lavatory-pan. That, he thought, has general validity. And now, judging from the loud darkness outside the cell where his poem had been an hour fermenting, they had arrived. Roars of seals in a circus, collapse of crates, high heels on the platform, a hiss, shudder and recoil as the train, in Elizabethan locution, died.
Some hours later Enderby sat under a magnificent ceiling, bemused by food and drink and insincere laudations. A not very choice cigar shook between fingers which, he now saw, he had neglected to pumice. In a winter afternoon's dream he failed to register many of the words of orating Sir George Goodby. Across the table and at either side twenty-odd fellow-writers were suspended from the ceiling by cigarette-smoke, their faces flapping before Enderby's eyes like two lines of drying smalls. Very solid in his stomach there pawed and pranced a sort of equestrian statue that symbolized both Time and London. He desired to pick his nose. A Hangman's Blood cocktail of all the liquids he had so far taken that day was swiftly mixed in a deep visceral shaker and then shot up to his mouth for tasting. There had been an oily mock turtle with very fresh rolls and rose-shaped butter-pats. Roast duck, of which Enderby had been served with one of the greasier segments, peas and sauté potatoes, acid orange sauce and a thick warmish gravy. Cranberry pie, the pastry soggy, with rich whipped cream-substitute. Cheese.
Cheese. Enderby smiled across back at some woman who had smiled at him. I have always admired your poetry but to see you in the flesh is a revelation. I bet it bloody well is. Perrrrrp.
"A revelation," said Sir George, "of the purest beauty. The magical power of poetry to transmute the dross of the everyday workaday world into the sheerest gold." Sir George Goodby was an ancient man whose visible parts were made mostly of sewn bits of well-tanned skin. He had founded the firm which bore his name. This firm had become rich mainly by selling rude books which other firms had been too squeamish to handle. Knighted by Ramsay MacDonald for services to the cause of mass-literacy, Sir George had always desired to serve literature otherwise than by selling it: he had aspired from youth to be a starving poet recognized only after death. Starved poetry he had continued to write long after fate had condemned him to the making of money, and this he had blackmailed one small miserable firm into publishing, brandishing the threat of a chain-boycott of all its publications. He had paid all costs of printing, publicizing, and distributing, but the firm's reputation had been ruined. The volumes of Sir George's doggerel most memorable for badness were Metrical Yarns of a Pipeman, A Dream of Merrie England, Roseleaves of Memory and An Optimist Sings. He could not, of course, force people into buying or even reading these atrocious collections, but once a year, presenting a cheque and medal to, as he coyly termed him, a brother-singer, he would lard his speech richly with gobbets of his own work and render his auditors sick with embarrassment.
"The giants of my youthful days," Sir George was saying, "Dobson, Watson, Sir Edward Arnold the mystic, Bridges the revolutionary, Calverley for laughter, Barry Pain for the profounder sigh." Enderby took a shallow draught of his cigar and felt it bite rawly. A childhood image again: the woman teacher in the elementary school explaining the soul and sin's carious effect upon it. She had chalked on the blackboard a big whitish shape like a cheese (the soul) and then, using a spit-wet finger, had spotted it like a Dalmatian (sins). For some reason, Enderby had always been able to taste that chalk-soul-a sharp vinegary raw potato-and he could taste it strongly now. "The soul," said Sir George appropriately, "which is a fair field for the poet's wandering, the sea whereon he sails his barque of rhyme, his mistress of whom he sings. The soul, which is the parson's Sunday concern, is the poet's daily bread." His daily raw potato. Enderby felt a borborygm rising.
Brrrfffp.
"I shall inflict," twinkled Sir George, "one of my own sonnets on you, on a theme appropriate to the occasion." He read out, with a voice pitched high and on one tuning-fork note, a poem of fourteen lines which was certainly no sonnet. It had verdant meads in it and a sun with effulgent rays, also-for some reason-a rosy-bosomed earth. Enderby, preoccupied with the need to suppress his body's noises, heard only fragments of an exquisitely bad poem and he nodded approvingly to show that he considered Sir George to have made a very good choice of an illustrative example of very bad poetry. As the last line scrannel-piped wretchedly out, Enderby felt a particularly loud noise coming, so he covered it with a laugh.
Ha ha (perrrpf) ha.
Sir George was rather surprised than displeased. He gaped down at Enderby for five seconds and then scanned his typescript tremblingly, as if fearful that something scatological had stolen ambiguously in. Reassured, he frowned on Enderby, his patches of skin shaking, and then took breath for the peroration. As he opened his mouth, Enderby, with infelicitous timing, gave vent.
Brrrbrrrpkrrrk.
Shem Macnamara said, "And as good and succinct a piece of criticism as ever I heard." He had a double-chinned stormy Irish face and was shag-haired and black-shirted (to save laundry). Enderby, in his daily poet's garb, was seedy-looking, but this man was a barn-sleeping hedge-dragged sturdy beggar. The white tired faces of the other guests-which Enderby could see but dimly-moved in titters. And suddenly Sir George himself seemed to grow tired. He smiled weakly, frowned, opened his mouth as in silent joy, frowned, swallowed, said in non sequitur:
"And it is for this reason that it gives me pleasure to bestow on our fellow singing-bird here, er er Enderby, the Goodby gold medal." Enderby rose to applause loud enough to drown three crackling intestinal reports. "And a cheque," said Sir George, with nostalgia of poet's poverty, "that is very very small but, one trusts, will stave off pangs for a month or two." Enderby took his trophies, shook hands, simpered, then sat down again. "Speech," said somebody. Enderby rose again, with a more subdued report, then realized that he was unsure of the exordial protocol. Did he say, "Mr Chairman"? Was there a chairman? If Sir George was the chairman should he say something other than "Mr Chairman"? Should he just say, "Sir George, ladies and gentlemen"? But, he noticed, there seemed to be somebody with a chain of office gleaming on his chest, hovering in the dusk, a mayor or lord mayor. What should he say-"Your Worship"? In time he saw that this was some sort of menial in charge of wine. Holding in wind, a nervously smiling Aeolus, Enderby said, loud and clear:
"St George." There was a new stir of tittering. "And the dragon," Enderby now had to add. "A British cymbal," he continued, seeing with horror that orthographical howler in a sort of neon lights before him. "A cymbal that tinkles in unsound brass if we are without clarity." There were appreciative casings of buttocks and shoulders: Enderby was going to make it brief and humorous. Desperately Enderby said, "As most of us are or are not, as the case may be. Myself included." Sir George, he saw, was throwing up wide face-holes at him, as though he, Enderby, were on a girder above the street. "Clarity," said Enderby, almost in tears, "is red wine for yodellers. And so," he gaped aghast at himself, "I am overjoyed to hand back this cheque to St George for charitable disposal. The gold medal he knows what he can do with." He could have died with shock and embarrassment at what he was saying; he was hurled on to the end in killing momentum, however. "Dross of the workaday world," he said, "as our fellow-singer Goodby so adequately disproves. And so," he said, back in the Army giving a talk on the British Way and Purpose, "we look forward to a time when the world shall be free of the shadow of oppression, the iron heel with its swastika spur no longer grinding into the face of prone freedom, democracy a reality, a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, adequate health services and a bit of peace hovering dovelike in the declining days of the aged. And in that belief and aspiration we move forward." He found that he could not stop. "Forward," he insisted, "to a time when the world shall be free of the shadow of oppression." Sir George had risen and was tottering out. "A fair day's work," said Enderby feebly, "for a fair day's pay. Fair play for all," he mumbled doubtfully. Sir George had gone. "And thereto," ended Enderby wretchedly, "I plight thee my truth."
The party broke up at once. Two men turned bitterly on Enderby. "If," said Shem Macnamara, "you didn't want the bloody money you might at least have remembered that there's others as do. Myself included," he mocked. He breathed, bafflingly, onions on Enderby, for onions had not formed any part of the meal. "I didn't mean it," said Enderby, near crying. "I didn't know what I was saying." Enderby's publisher said, "Want to ruin us you do?" in a sharp rising intonation. He was a young bright man from Newport. "Put your foot in it you have bloody nicely, man, make no mistake about it." A small man moustached like Kipling, with the same beetle-spectacles and a heavy watch-chain, came up to Enderby and took him firmly by Arry's lapels. "I'm Rawcliffe," he announced. He dragged Enderby away from the table in short dance-steps, lapels still held hard." Rawcliffe nodded many times, stopped nodding/cocked an ear, nodded in satisfaction, then just nodded, chewing. "Very fibrous duck," said Rawcliffe. "You know me. I'm in all the anthologies. Now then, Enderby, tell me, tell me in all sincerity what you're doing at the present time."
"Just writing, you know," said Enderby. He was trying to think who Rawcliffe was. Uneasily he heard behind him debates in small groups on his speech and its consequences for the retail book trade.
"One would have supposed," said Rawcliffe, tugging Arry's lapels like cow-teats, "mildly supposed, I suppose, that you would be writing." He chuckled, swallowed, and nodded. "Now then, Enderby, what? What are you writing? Tell me, elm," he laughed. "Tale told of stem or stone, eh? James Joyce, that is. Myth-maker, what?"
"Well," said Enderby, and, with babbling nerves, he blurted out a detailed synopsis of The Pet Beast.
"And the beast is really Original Sin, eh?" saw Rawcliffe. "Without Original Sin there is no civilization, is that it? Good, good. And the title, let's have that title again." He released the lapels, found a short pencil in a waistcoat pocket, licked the point, took out a cigarette-packet, shook it ruefully, then block-lettered Enderby's title on its bottom flap. "Good," he said again. "Infinitely obleeged." And he made off nodding. Enderby sadly watched him join a group of important poets who had not been above cynically taking a free meal-P.S. ffolliott, Peter Pitts, Albert Death-Stabbes, Rupert Tombs, or some such names. They had mostly murmured "Well done" to him at the pre-prandial sherry-bibbing. Now he was left alone with his wind, companionless. Medalless also, and chequeless. Rather a wasted trip, really.
"Mr Enderby?" The lady panted slightly and very prettily. "Oh, thank goodness I was in time."
"I knew," said Enderby, "that Sir George would realize it was all a joke. Do, please, convey my apologies to him."
"Sir George? Oh yes, I know who you mean. Apologize? I don't understand." She was perhaps thirty, with fashionable stallion-flared nostrils and a model-girl's swan-neck. She wore with grace a Cardin sugar-scoop hat of beige velours, and, from the same master, a loose-jacketed suit with only a hint of flare to the peplum. An ocelot coat swung open over this. Chic shone from her demurely. Such cleanness and fragrance (Miss Dior), thought Enderby with deep regret, such slender and sheer-hosed glamour. A face, he decided, devoid of all obvious sensuality-no lusciousness of the underlip, the cat-green eyes very cool and intelligent, a calm high forehead shaded by the sugar-scoop brim. Enderby tightened his tie-knot and smoothed his side-pockets, saying: "I'm sorry." And then, "I thought. That is to say." She said:
"Oh." They stood looking at each other under the glowing glass-slab signs of the hotel passage, their feet sunk in burgundy carpel. "Well. I would like, before anything else, to tell you that I genuinely admire your work." She spoke with the intonation of one expecting an incredulous snort. The voice was quiet, though the consonants had the sharpness of some speaker too close to a microphone, and there was the faintest tang of educated Scots. "I wrote to you care of your publishers, ages ago. I don't think the letter could ever have reached you. If it had reached you I'm sure you would have replied."
"Yes," said flustered Enderby. "Oh yes, I would. But perhaps that was forwarded by them to my old address because I'd forgotten to tell them about my new address and also, for that matter, the Post Office. Cheques," said blabbing Enderby, "are normally paid straight into my bank. I don't know why I'm telling you all this." She stood in a model pose, listening coolly with lips parted, handbag hanging from right forearm, gloved left hand's thumb and index-finger lightly ringing ungloved right hand's ring-finger. "I'm terribly sorry," said humble Enderby. "That may explain why I never got it."
She finished her quiet listening and suddenly became brisk. "Look," she said, "I had an invitation to that luncheon-party but I couldn't make it. Could we, do you think," she suggested, with a kind of movement on the fringe of non-movement which was a sort of apotheosis of a working-girl's jigging up and down in a winter-day bus-queue, infinitely feminine, "sit down somewhere for a few minutes, if you can spare the time, that is? Oh," she said, "I'm so stupid," the gloved hand striking the lips in mea culpa, "not telling you who I am. I'm Vesta Bainbridge. From Fem."
"From what?"
"Fem."
"What," asked Enderby, with great and suspicious care, "is that?" He had heard it as, though hardly believing it possible, something like Phlegm, and wondered what could be the purpose of an organization (if it was an organization) so named.
"Yes, of course, I see, of course you probably wouldn't know about that, would you? It's a magazine for women. And I," said Vesta Bainbridge, "am the Features Editress. Could we then, do you think? I suppose it's too early to have tea, isn't it, or is it?"
"If you would care for some tea," said gallant Enderby, "I should be only too happy, I should be only too delighted."
"Oh, no," said Vesta Bainbridge, "you have to have it with me, you see, because it goes on my expense account. And this is a business thing, you see, connected with Fem."
Enderby had once, as a poor soldier, been treated to a tea of poached egg on haddock and shortbread by a kind old lady in an Edinburgh restaurant. But by anyone so glamorous, so alluring as this, he had never thought, never dreamed. He was both shocked and awed. "Do you, by any chance, come from Edinburgh?" he asked. "Something in your voice -"
"Eskbank," said Vesta Bainbridge. "How remarkable! But, of course, you're a poet. Poets can always dig out things like that, can't they?"
"If," said Enderby, "you really like my poetry, which you said you did, I should really ask you to have tea with me, not you me with you. The least I could do," said generous Enderby, fingering a half-crown in Arry's trouser-pocket.
"Come," said Vesta Bainbridge, and she made the wraith of a gesture of taking Enderby by the arm. "I do admire your work, really," she insisted. She led him on sure high heels past the dainty boutiques that sold flowers and jewellery, the air-travel kiosk where there was busy telephoning about flights to New York and Bermuda, past the ugly and rich cocooned in an enchantment of wine-coloured snow underfoot, perfumed air all about, light drifting, dust-soft, from unseen sources in the delicate golds of fine white bordeaux. Here every breath, every footfall, thought thrifty Enderby, must cost at least a tanner. Vesta Bainbridge and he entered a vast room of huge scooped cubes of biscuit-coloured softness in which people lounged warmly cushioned. Laughter tinkled, teatrays tinkled. Enderby felt with horror his bowels prepare to comment on the scene. He looked up at a baroque ceiling with many fat-arsed cherubim in evidence. This did not help. They sank down, Vesta Bainbridge exhibiting the delicacy of exquisite shinlines, a fine moulding of ankle. A Roman waiter, lantern-jawed, took her order. Scots, she asked for a substantial spread: anchovy toast, egg sandwiches, pikelets, cakes, China tea with lemon. "And," said Enderby, "do you manage to eat dinner after a tea like that?"
"Oh, yes," said Vesta Bainbridge. "I can't put on weight, however hard I try. The lemon tea's because that's the way I like tea, not for slimming reasons. Obviously," she added.
"But," said Enderby, drawn to the obvious weary compliment, "you're surely perfect as you are." Suddenly he saw himself, boulevardier Enderby, witty with women, graceful in flattery, roguish eyes atwinkle, taking tea. At the same time wind fought, as a picked-up naughty kitten fights, to be free. Tea free. A free tea. "And," he said, "if I may ask, what precisely is this business with Phlegm?"
"Oh," she said, "isn't that funny? That's what Godfrey Wainwright calls it. He does covers, you know. Fem. Not, perhaps, a very good choice of name. But, you know, the market's saturated with magazines for women-Feminocrat, Goodwife, Lilith, Glamourpuss. The straightforward names with Woman in them were worked out long ago. It's so difficult for them to think of anything new, as you'll appreciate. But Fem isn't too bad, is it? It's short and sweet, and it sounds Frenchified and a bit naughty, wouldn't you agree?"
Enderby eyed her warily. Frenchified and a bit naughty, eh? "Yes," he said. "And where would I come in with something like that?" Not very good, she'd said, and not too bad-both in the same breath. Perhaps not a very sincere sort of woman. Before she could answer his question the tea arrived. The Roman waiter laid it down gently on the fretted claw-footed low table-silver dish-covers steaming, tiny cakes oozing cream. He rose, bowing with sneering jowls, retiring. Vesta Bainbridge poured. She said:
"I thought somehow you'd prefer your tea like this-sugarless, milkless, lemony. Your poems are a little, shall we say, astringent, if that's the right word." Enderby looked down sourly at the sour cup. He preferred stepmother's tea really, but she'd ordered without consulting him. "Very nice," he said. "Just right." Vesta Bainbridge began to eat with great appetite, showing fine small teeth as she bit into her anchovy toast. Enderby's heart warmed to this: he liked to see women eat, and this gusto mitigated, somehow, her lean perfection. But, he thought, she had no right, with such a figure, to have such an appetite. He felt a desire to invite her out to dinner, that same evening, to see how she would tuck into minestrone and pork chops. He feared her.
"Now," said Vesta Bainbridge, and a rosy tongue-point darted out, picked up a toast-crumb, then darted in again. "I want you to know that I admire your work, and what I propose now is entirely my own idea. It's met with some opposition, mind you, because Fem is essentially a popular magazine. And your poetry, as you'll be proud to admit, is not exactly popular. It's not unpopular either, of course; it's just not known. Pop-singers are known and TV interviewers are known and disc-jockeys are known, but you're not known."
"What," asked Enderby, "are these things? Pop-singers and so on?" She looked askance at him and noticed that his bewilderment was genuine. "I'm afraid," said Enderby, "that since the war I've rather shut myself off from things."
"Don't you have a radio or a television set?" said Vesta Bainbridge, her green eyes wide. He shook his head. "Don't you read newspapers?"
"I used to read certain Sunday papers," said Enderby, "for the sake of the book reviews. But it made me so very depressed that I had to stop. The reviewers seemed so," he frowned, "so very big, if you see what I mean. They seemed to enclose us writers, so to speak. They seemed to know all about us, and we knew nothing about them. There was one very kind and very knowledgeable review of a volume of mine, I remember, by a man who, I suppose, is a very good man, but it was evident that he could have written my poems so much better if only he'd had the time. Those things make one feel very insignificant. Oh, I know one is insignificant, really, but you've got to ignore that if you're to get any work done at all. And so I've tended to cut myself off a bit, for the sake of the work. Everybody seems to be so clever, somehow, if you see what I mean."
"I do and I don't," said Vesta Bainbridge, smartly. So far she had eaten all the anchovy toast, five egg sandwiches, a couple of pikelets and one squelchy little pastry, and yet contrived to look ethereal, mountain-cool. Enderby, on the other hand, who, because of his heartburn, had only nibbled mouse-like at a square inch of damp bread and an egg-ring, was aware of himself as gross, sweating, halitotic, his viscera loaded like a nightsoil-collector's bucket. "I don't feel insignificant," said Vesta Bainbridge, and "I'm just nothing compared with you."
"But you don't have to feel insignificant, do you?" said Enderby. "I mean, you've only to look at yourself, haven't you?" He said this dispassionately, frowning.
"For a man," said Vesta Bainbridge, "who's cut himself from the world, you're not doing too badly. I should have thought," she said, pouring more tea, "that it was very unwise for a poet to do that. After all, you need images, themes, and so on, don't you? You've got to get those from the outside world."
"There are quite enough images," said Enderby, speaking with firm authority, "in half a pound of New Zealand cheddar. Or in the washing-up water. Or," he added, with even greater authority, "in a new toilet-roll."
"You poor man," said Vesta Bainbridge. "Is that how you live?"
"Everybody," said Enderby, with perhaps diminishing dogmatism, "uses toilet-paper." A man in spectacles, very tall and with an open mouth, looked across from his chair as if to dispute this assertion, thought better of it, then returned to his evening paper. Poet Refuses Medal, said a tiny headline which Enderby caught sight of. Some other bloody fool shooting his mouth off, some other toy trumpet singing to battle.
"Anyway," said Vesta Bainbridge, "I think it would be an excellent thing for you to have a wider audience. Would you try it for, say, six months, a poem every week? Preferably set in the form of prose, so as not to offend anyone."
"I thought people didn't actually find verse offensive," said Enderby. "I thought they just despised it."
"Be that as it may," said Vesta Bainbridge, "what do you say to the proposal?" She shattered a sort of macaroon with a fork and, before eating, said, "The poems would have to be, shall I say, and I hope this is the right word, ephemeral. You know, dealing with everyday things that the average woman would be interested in."
"The dross of the workaday world," said Enderby, "transmuted to sheerest gold. I suppose I could do that. I know all about household chores and dishcloths and so on. Also lavatory brushes."
"Dear me," said Vesta Bainbridge, "you have got a cloacal obsession, haven't you? No, not that sort of thing, and not too much of this sheerest gold, either. Womankind cannot bear very much reality. Love and dreams are wanted, also babies without cloacal obsessions. The mystery of the stars would come in quite nicely, especially if seen from the garden of a council-house. And marriage, perhaps."
"Tell me," said Enderby. "Are you Miss Cambridge or Mrs?"
"Bainbridge, not Cambridge. Fem, not Phlegm. Mrs. Why do you want to know?"
"I have to call you something," said Enderby, "don't I?" She seemed at last to have finished her meal, so Enderby offered his crumpled cigarette-packet.
"I'll smoke my own," she said, "if you don't mind." She took from her handbag a packet of ship's Woodbines and, before Enderby could find an unused match in his matchbox (he saved used matches, a long unfathomable habit), she had nicked her pearl-faced lighter on and then off. Her wide nostrils walrussed out two pretty blue jets.
"I take it," said Enderby, "that your husband's in the navy."
"My husband," she said, "is dead. It shows how cut off you are, really, doesn't it? Everybody else seems to have heard of Pete Bainbridge."
"I'm sorry," said Enderby. "Very sorry."
"What for? Because he's dead, or because you've never heard of him? Never mind," said Widow Bainbridge. "He died in a smash four years ago, in the Monte Carlo Rally. I thought everybody knew that. It was a great loss, the papers said, to the motor-racing world. He left behind a beautiful young widow, a bride of only two years," she said, her tone half-mocking.
"He did," said Enderby gravely. "He most certainly did. Beautiful, I mean. How much?"
"How much what? How much did he leave, or how much did I love him?" She seemed suddenly tired, perhaps from over-eating.
"How much do I get for doing these poems?"
"Mr Dick sets us all right," said Vesta Bainbridge, sighing and sitting up straighter. She brushed minimal crumbs off her lap and said, "Two guineas a poem. It's not much, but we can't manage more. We're featuring the memoirs of a pop-singer, you see-not very long memoirs, of course, because he's only nineteen-but those are costing us a pretty penny, believe me. And the memoirs have to be written for him as well. Still, the effect on the circulation should be, to say the least, stimulating. If that princely fee is all right by you I'll send you a contract. And some back numbers of Fem, to show you what it's like. Please remember that the vocabulary of our readers isn't very extensive, so don't go using words like 'oriflamme' or 'ineluctable'."
"Thank you," said Enderby. "I'm really most grateful that you should have thought of me like this. You're really being most kind." He had been poking into the ashtray with a matchstick, breaking up cigarette-ends; this had necessitated a sort of crouching on the chair's edge, his bald crown presented to Mrs Bainbridge. Now he looked up sincerely, his eyes rather wet behind their glasses. She smiled.
"Look," she said, "you don't believe me about my liking your poetry, do you? Well, I even know one or two of them by heart."
"Say one," begged Enderby. She took breath and recited, quite clearly but with few nuances of tone:
"A dream, yes, but for everyone the same.
The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch;
The Absolute was anybody's pitch
For, when a note was struck, we knew its name."
"Good," said Enderby. "This is the first time I've ever actually heard -"
"- That dark aborted any urge to tame
Waters that day might prove to be a ditch
But then were endless growling ocean, rich
In fish and heroes, till the dredgers came."
"Excellent," said Enderby. "And now the sestet." It excited him to hear his own verses. She went on confidently:
"Wachet auf! A fretful dunghill cock
Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires;
A martin's nest clogged the cathedral clock,
But it was morning (birds could not be liars).
A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock;
Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.
There," she said, taking breath. "But I've no real idea what it means."
"Oh," said Enderby, "the meaning doesn't matter all that much. I'm surprised at your liking that. It's not what I'd thought of as a woman's poem." Suddenly the poem seemed to find its place in the real world-overseas businessmen reading financial papers, the scent of Miss Dior or whatever it was, the noise of London waiting to pounce outside the hotel. Spoken by her, it seemed suddenly to have a use.
"And what exactly do you mean by a woman's poem?" asked Mrs Bainbridge.
"For you," said Enderby with disarming candour, "something softer and yet more elegant, something with less harshness and thought and history in it. That, you see, is about the Middle Ages and the coming of the Reformation. In the sestet you get Martin Luther and the beginning of dissolution, everybody beginning to be alone, a common tradition providing no tuning-fork of reference and no way of telling the time, because the common tradition has been dredged away. Nothing sure and nothing mysterious."
"I see," said Vesta Bainbridge. "I take it you're a Catholic, then."
"Oh, no, no," protested Enderby. "I'm not, really I'm not."
"All right," said Vesta Bainbridge, smiling. "I heard you the first time." Protestant Enderby grinned and shut up. The Roman waiter came along, chewing gently but mournfully, with a bill. "For me," she said, and notes rustled in her bag like pork crackling. She paid the bill and, womanly, tipped the waiter merely adequately. Enderby said:
"I'd ask you to dine with me this evening, but I've just realized that I didn't bring very much money. I expected, you see, that I'd go straight back after lunch. I'm awfully sorry."
"Don't be," smiled Vesta Bainbridge. "I'm invited out. Somewhere in Hampstead. But it was nice of you to offer. Now," she said, looking at her tiny oyster watch, "goodness, the time, where do I write to?" She took out a small notebook and poised a pencil to record what Enderby dictated. Somehow, the address seemed vulgar and even comic, endited primly by that slim hand. 81 Fitzherbert Avenue. He tried to hide from her the sound of the lavatory's flush, the crusted milk-bottles on the doorstep, the mice scampering through the manuscripts. "Good," she said, closing the book. "Now I must go." She settled the ocelot over her shoulders, clipped her bag shut. Enderby stood. She stood. "It's been awfully nice," she said. "Oh, that's inadequate. But it's been quite a privilege, really it has. Now I really must fly." She gave him an unexpected handshake, straight from the elbow. "Don't bother to come to the door," she said. Then she was off, trimly and swiftly walking a tightrope across the carpet. For the first time Enderby caught a hint of colour of her hair, upswept at the nape, a sort of penny-colour. He sighed, and turned to see the waiter looking at him. The waiter made a gesture-quick frog-mouth, shrug-to indicate (a) that she was certainly elegant but much too thin, (b) that she was off to meet somebody handsomer than Enderby, (c) that women were fundamentally ungenerous, (d) that this was a hell of a life but there were always the consolations of philosophy.
Enderby nodded, the poet at ease with all classes of men, then realized with joy that he was once more alone and free. The wind that blew through him celebrated this fact.
Enderby was late returning home that evening. Though his perversely independent soul-the conscious Enderby shocked and gaping-had rejected the sweets of recognition, he felt that he and London had achieved more of a rapprochement than he could have thought possible, scratching paper and bared legs, the day before. A smart and worldly woman admired his work and had said so frankly. Lips that had been kissed by a prominent racing-driver and, Enderby presumed, by others whose teeth habitually gleamed at cameras, had recited from the Revolutionary Sonnets in a rich-smelling place whose denizens had passed beyond the need for the solace of poetry. Enderby, wandering the streets, was restless and had an obscure longing for adventure. Here the snow had long disappeared, but the tang of snow on the air bit sharply from the furthermost stretch of the river. London yearned back to gasflares and geese sold cheap at the end of the trading day amid raucous Cockney voices, Sherlock Holmes in Baker Stret, a widow at Windsor, all's right with the world. That was from Pappa Pisses. Enderby grinned sadly to himself, standing outside a music-shop, as he remembered the disastrous lecture he had once given to a Women's Institute. Victorian Literature. That was one spoonerism that his audience had passed over. But A Sale of Two Titties had struck Lady Fennimore as something like calculated insolence. Never again. Never, never again. He was safer in retirement, shut away in his creative lavatory. But still, this one evening, the desire for adventure was strong. Yet what did one mean by adventure these days? He gazed at the shop-window, as if for an answer. Various pictures of young louts sneered out at him from song-covers and record-sleeves-simian-foreheaded, prehensile fingers on guitar-strings, lips twisted in a song of youth. Enderby had heard of secondary modern schools and now assumed that these flat-eyed little monsters must represent their end-product. Well, for two guineas a week he was going to serve the world that these loose-lipped leerers served. What was the name of the magazine again? Film or Flam or something. Not Phlegm, that was quite certain. Within the consonantal frame he tried out various vowels. And there, next door but one, outside one of Sir George Goodby's own shops, a poster put him right: "Exclusive to Fem, FOR YOU, Lenny Biggs tells his own personal life story. Order your copy NOW." And there was a picture of Lenny Biggs-a face hardly distinguishable from others of the pantheon Enderby had just viewed, though perhaps more particularly baboon-like than generally simian, with teeth as manifestly false as those of Enderby himself, sniggering with confidence at the world.
Enderby saw a man in a peaked cap dump a couple of parcels in a van lettered GOODBY'S FOR GOOD BOOKS. This van then started up contemptuously and insolently pierced the traffic. "So," thought Enderby, "Sir George has already started his reprisals, has he? All copies of Enderby's poems to be withdrawn from sale, eh? Petty, a very petty-minded man." Enderby entered the shop and was depressed to see people buying gardening books. Display studio-portraits of groomed youthful bestsellers topped piles of their bestselling novels. Enderby felt that he wanted to flee; this was as bad as reading Sunday reviews. And, to brim his misery, he realized that he had maligned Sir George: two soiled Enderby volumes sulked there on the unvisited poetry shelves. He was beneath the notice of that wealthy knight, too mean for the meanness of retaliation. Oh, well. The name Rawcliffe suddenly hurled itself, along with a pang of dyspepsia, at Enderby's breastbone. In all the anthologies, did he say? Enderby would see.
Enderby looked through Poetry Now, A Tiny Garner of Modern Verse, Best Poets of Today, They Sing for You, Soldier's Solace (an anthology of verse by Lieutenant-General Phipps, V.C., D.S.O., etc., sixtieth, thousand), Voices Within, and other volumes, and found that in all of them Rawcliffe was represented by the following artless lyrics:
"Perhaps I am not wanted then," he said.
"Perhaps I'd better go,"
He said. Motionless her eyes, her head,
Saying not yes, not no.
"I will go then, and aim my gun of grief
At any man's or country's enemies."
He said. "Slaughter will wreak a red relief."
She said not no, not yes.
And so he went to marry mud and toil,
Swallow in general hell his private hell.
His salts have long drained into alien soil,
And she says nothing still.
Enderby looked up bitterly from the tenth selected anthology, his tenth reading of the poem. And in none of these books was there anything by Enderby.
Enderby pulled out a spilling palmful of coin from Arry's right trouser-pocket. Snorting, he counted it: twelve and ninepence. In his wallet there was, he knew, one pound note. He muttered to himself as he moved door-wards, head down to count again. He bumped into a young salesman who said, "Whoops, sir. See nothing you fancy, sir?"
"Books," said Enderby, with proleptic drunken thickness. "Waste of time and bloody money." He left, saying a soldier's goodbye to Goodby's, not one of Goodby's good boys. There was a pub almost directly opposite, shedding cosy Christmas-card lights through its old-time bottle-glass windows. Enderby entered the public bar and ordered whisky.
Enderby entered the public bar and ordered whisky. This was some hours later, a different pub. Not the second or third pub, but somewhere well on in the series, the xth pub or something. On the whole, benevolent and swaying Enderby decided, he had had not too bad an evening. He had met two very fat Nigerians with wide cunning smiles and many blackheads. These had cordially invited him to their country and to write an epic to celebrate its independence. He had met a Guinness drinker with a wooden leg which, for the delectation of Enderby, he had offered to unscrew. He had met a chief petty officer of the Royal Navy who, in the friendliest spirit in the world, had been prepared to fight Enderby and, when Enderby had demurred, had given him two packets of ship's Woodbines and said that Enderby was his pal. He had met a Siamese osteopath with a collection of fighting fish. He had met a punch-drunk bruiser who said he saw visions and offered to see one then for a pint. He had met a little aggressive chinny chewing man, not unlike Rawcliffe, who swore that Shakespeare's plays had been written by Sir William Knollys, Controller of the Queen's Household. He had met a cobbler who knew the Old Testament in Hebrew, an amateur exegetist who distrusted all Biblical scholarship after 1890. He had met, seen, or heard many others too: a thin woman who had talked incessantly to a loll-tongued Alsatian; a man with the shakes who swallowed his own phlegm (Fem, Fem, remember that, Fem); a pair of hand-holding lesbians; a man who wore flower transfers on a surgical boot; callow soldiers drinking raw gin… Now it was nearing closing-time and Enderby was, he thought, fairly near to Charing Cross. That meant two stops on the Underground to Victoria. There must be a nice convenient after-closing-time train to the coast.
Enderby, paying fumblingly for his whisky, saw that he had very little money left. He estimated that he had managed to consume this evening a good dozen whiskies and a draught beer or so. His return ticket was snug in Arry's left-hand inside jacket-pocket. He had cigarettes. One more drink and he would be right for home. He looked round the public bar smiling. Good honest British working-men, salt of the earth, bloodying and buggering their meagre dole of speech, horny-handed but delicate with darts. And, on a high-backed settle at right angles to the bar counter, two British working-women sat, made placid with the fumes of stout. One said:
"Starting next week, it is, in Fem. With free gift picture in full colour. Smashing, he is." Enderby listened jealously. The other woman said:
"Never take it, myself. Silly sort of name it is. Makes you wonder how they think of them sometimes, really it does."
"If," said Enderby, "you are referring to the magazine to which I myself am to be a contributor, I would say that that name is meant to be Frenchified and naughty." He smiled down at them with a whiskified smirk, right elbow on the counter, left fingers on right forearm. The two women looked up doubtfully. They were probably about the same age as Vesta Bainbridge, but they had an aura of back kitchens about them, tea served to shirt-sleeved men doing their pools, the telly flicking and shouting in the corner.
"Pardon?" said one, loudly.
"Naughty," said Enderby, with great clarity. "Frenchified."
"What's French frieds to do with it?" said the other. "My friend and me was just talking, do you mind?"
"Poetry is what I shall write for it," said Enderby, "every week." He nodded several times, just like Rawcliffe.
"You keep your poetry to yourself, do you mind?" and she took a sharp draught of Guinness. A man came from the dart-playing part of the room, a single dart in his hand, saying:
"You all right, Edie?" He wore a decently cut suit of poor serge, but no collar or tie. His gold-headed collar-stud caught the light and dazzled Enderby. He had a gaunt quick face and was as small and supple as a miner. He inspected Enderby as if invited to give an estimate on him. "You saying something to her that you shouldn't?" he said. "Mate?" he added, provocatively.
"He was saying," said Edie, "about naughty poetry. French, too."
"Was you saying naughty poetry to my wife here?" said the man. Like Milton's Death, he shook a dreadful dart.
"I was just saying," said smirking Enderby, "that I was going to write for it. What they read, I mean. That is to say, Edie here, your wife, as I take it to be, doesn't read, but the other one does, you see."
"We'll have less of that about doesn't read, do you mind?" said Edie. "And less of using my name familiar, do you mind?"
"Look here," said Edie's husband. "You want to keep that for the saloon bar, where they pay a penny extra for the privilege, do you mind? We don't want your sort in here."
"Doing no harm," said Enderby huffily. He then poured over the huff a trickle of sweet sauce of ingratiation. "I mean, I was just talking." He leered. "Just passing the time of day, if you see what I mean."
"Well," said the dart-man, "don't you try to pass the time with my missis, do you mind?"
"Do you mind?" said Edie, in near-unison.
"I wouldn't want to pass the time with her," said Enderby, proudly. "I've other things to do, thank you very much."
"I'll have to do you," said the man, sincerely. "Too much bloody hoot altogether, mate, to my way of thinking, that's what you've got. You'd better get out of here before I get really nasty. Been smelling the barmaid's apron, that's your trouble."
Prrrfffp.
"Look," said Enderby, "that wasn't intended, I really had no intention, that was not meant in any way to be a comment, I assure you that is the sort of thing that could happen to any man, or woman too, for that matter, even Edie here, your wife, that is to say, yourself included." Prrrfffp.
"Do you mind?" said Edie.
"This here's my fist," said the man, pocketing his dart. The other customers quietened and looked interested. "You'll get it straight in the moosh, straight up you will, if you don't get out of my bleeding sight this instant, do you mind?"
"I was just going anyway," said dignified swaying Enderby. "If you will allow me the privilege of finishing my drink here."
"You've had enough, you have, mate," said the man, more kindly. From the saloon bar came the call of "Last orders." "If you want to drown your secret sorrows don't do it where me and my wife is, see, because I take the sort of thing that you've been saying very hard, see." Enderby put down his glass, gave the dart-man a glassy but straight look, then eructed strongly and without malice. He bowed and, pushing his way courteously through the long-swallowers anxious to get one last one in, made an exit that was not without dignity. Outside in the street the heady air of a Guinness-sharp refrigerated night hit him and he staggered. The dart-man had followed him out and stood there, gauging and weighing. "Look, mate," he said, "this is not for me really, because I've been like that myself often enough, God knows, but my wife insists, see, do you mind, and this is like for a keepsake." He bowed, and while bowing swerved his torso suddenly to the left as though listening to something from that side, then he brought left fist and torso right and up and let Enderby have one, not too hard, straight in the stomach. "There," he said, somewhat kindly, as if the blow had been intended purely therapeutically. "That'll do, won't it?"
Enderby gasped. The procession of the evening's whiskies and beers passed painfully through a new taste-organ that had been erected specially for this occasion. They grimaced in pain, making painful obeisance as they passed. Gas and fire shot up as from a geyser, smiting rudely the crystalline air. Premonitions of the desire to vomit huddled and fluttered. Enderby went to the wall.
"Now then," said the man, "where is it you want to go, eh? Kennington you are now, see, if you didn't know."
"Victoria," said Enderby's stomach-gas, shaped into a word by tongue and lips. He had, at the moment, no air.
"Easy," said the kind man. "First to the right second to the left keep straight on brings you to Kennington Station, see. Get a train to Charing Cross, that's the second stop, Waterloo's the first, change at Charing Cross, see, Circle Line. Westminster St James's Park and then you're there, see. And the very best of luck and no hard feelings." He patted Enderby's left shoulder and re-entered the public bar.
Enderby still gasped. This sort of thing had not happened since his student-days when he had once been beaten up by a pub pianist and his friend for being bloody sarky about the sort of pseudo-music the pub pianist had been playing. Enderby filled his coughing lungs in draught after draught, then wondered whether he really wanted to vomit. He thought, for the moment, not. The punch in the stomach still glowed and smouldered, and the name london fluttered in fearful flames, a warning, as in the trailer of some film about call-girls or the end of the world. He saw himself safe in his own lavatory, at work on his poems. Never again. Never never again. Women's Institutes. Gold medals. London pubs. Traps set for poor Enderby, gins waiting for him to trip.
He reached Kennington Station without much difficulty and booked to Victoria. In the train, sitting opposite a cross-eyed man who spoke Scots to a complacent terrier on his knee, Enderby felt a shipboard motion and knew that soon he must dash to the rails. Further along on the side where he was sitting, he had the illusion that a couple of gum-chewing teenagers were discussing a play by Calderón. He strained to listen and nearly fell on his right ear. At Waterloo he was sure that the Scotsman with strabismus said "morne plaine" to his dog. A drum beat and a bugle brayed in Enderby's stomach; here, perhaps, he must admit defeat, stagger off, be sick in a fire-bucket. Too late. The train and time marched on from Waterloo, under the river, and, thank God, there was Charing Cross. The charing-cross-eyed man got out here too, with terrier. "A drop taken," he said confidentially to Enderby and then marched off to the Bakerloo Line, dog trotting with twinkletoes behind, fat rump, joyous tail. Enderby now felt decidedly unwell and bewildered. He had a confused notion that the southbound platform of this Northern Line would take him whither he wanted. He staggered over and sat on a bench. Across the rail a poster showed an outdoor man draining a milk stout, his fine muscular throat corded with stout-drinker's strength. Next to that was a colourwash sketch, vivid with steam and laughter, of a confident young man wrestling with a delighted girl for a portion of pie made with meat-extract. Next to that a ginger child, macrocephalic, went "Ooooo!" with pleasure, his cheek gumboiled with a slab of extra-creamy toffee. Enderby retched, but memory saved him with four lines of a drinker's poem he had written in his drunken youth:
And I have walked no way I looked
And multitudinously puked
Into the gutter, legs outstretched,
Holding my head low as I…
That threw his present queasiness back into the past and also depersonalized it. The solace of art. And now the distant Minotaur roar of the tube-train alerted the others waiting on that platform. One man folded his evening paper and stuck it into the side-pocket of his greatcoat. Poet Speaks Out for Fair Play, read Enderby. Field-day for poets, this. The tube-train slammed itself into the clearing, bringing a fine gale of Arctic air which did Enderby good. He stood and felt giddy but steeled himself to travel to Victoria, seeing that, in his muzzy state, as a very large and desirable lavatory of blasts and sulphuretted hydrogen. He straddled before a not-yet-opened double-door of the train, trying to hold the unquiet platform steady, while the passengers waiting to alight stood as though for a curtain call. Then a panic of doubt clouted Enderby as the doors slid open and the alighters flooded off. "Is this," he called, "all right for Victoria?" Many of the emergent did not speak English and made apologetic gestures, but a cool woman's voice said:
"This, Mr Enderby, is most certainly not all right for Victoria." Enderby blinked at this apparition, Mrs What's-her-name of Fem, racing ace's widow, in semi-formal pale apple-green taffetas, sheathed at the front, and three-quarter-length Persian lamb jacket, marcasite clip as single fine dress-embellisher, tiny hoop ear-rings of marcasite, marcasite-coloured glacé kid high-heels, penny-coloured hair cleanly glowing. Enderby's mouth opened sheepishly. "If you got this train," she said, "you would be travelling to Waterloo and Kennington, Tooting Bee, ultimately Morden. From the look of you, you would probably be awakened at Morden. You wouldn't like Morden very much."
"You," said Enderby, "should not be here. You should be at dinner somewhere."
"I was at dinner," she said. "I've just come back from Hampstead." The train-doors slid together and the train moved off into its tunnel, its wind stirring her hair and making her raise her voice, so that the Scots intonation became clearer than before. "And," she said, her sober green eyes appraising swaying Enderby, "I'm on my way home to Gloucester Road. Which means we can take the same train and I can make quite sure that you alight at Victoria. From Victoria on you must be commended to the protection of whatever gods look after drunken poets." She had in her something of the thin-lipped Calvinist; in her tone was no element of amused indulgence. "Come," she said, and she took Enderby's arm.
"If you don't mind," said Enderby. "If you'll excuse me just a moment -" Green looked at green. Enderby managed to trap the brief flow in his show handkerchief. "Oh, God," he said. "Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph."
"Come on," she said. "Walk. Take deep breaths." She led him firmly towards the Circle Line. "You are in a bad way, aren't you?" All her perfume could not sweeten Enderby's shame.
Enderby was back in 81 Fitzherbert Avenue, thoroughly sobered at last by two slips on to his bottom on the frozen way from the station. On that same sore bottom he sat on the stairs, crying. This flight ran up, starting at the side of Enderby's flat's front door, to a landing with mirror and potted palm. Then came a dark and sinister stairway, uncarpeted, to the flat above, the home of the salesman and his woman. Enderby sat crying because he had forgotten his key. He had neglected, perhaps because flustered by Mrs Meldrum's visit that morning, to transfer the key from his sports-coat pocket to the corresponding pocket of the jacket of Arry's suit. It was now after one in the morning, too late to call on Mrs Meldrum to open up for him with her master. He had no money for a hotel room; it was too cold to sleep in a shelter on the esplanade; he did not fancy begging a cell at the police station (there were criminal-looking coppers there, with wide-boy tashes). It was best to sit here on the third step up, overcoated and muffled, crying and smoking alternately.
Not that he had much left to smoke. Mrs Whatever-her-name-was of Fem had taken his remaining packet of ship's Woodbines (she was out of them and smoked nothing else) as a reward for her stoic Scots toleration of his wanting to be sick on the deck of the train all the way to Victoria. Enderby had five Senior Service to last him till the late winter dawn. He cried. He was weary, far beyond sleepiness. It had been a long and eventful day, excruciatingly attritive. Even on his homeward coastward train journey the entire coach had seemed to be full of wet-mouthed Irishmen singing. And now the cold stair, the long vigil. He howled like a moon-bemused hound-dog.
The door of the flat above opened creakily. "Is that you, Jack?" whispered the woman's voice, huskily. "Have you come back, Jack?" Her vowels were not unlike Arry's: uvyer coom buck juck. "I'm sorry, Jack," she said. "I didn't mean what I said, love. Come on to bed, Jack."
"It's me," said Enderby. "Not him. Me. Without a key," he added.
"Who are you?" asked the woman. The bulb of the landing light had long burnt out, months ago, unreplaced by Mrs Meldrum. Neither could see the other.
"Him from downstairs," said Enderby, falling easily into demotic. "Not him as you live with."
"He's gone off," came the voice down the stair-well. "He's always said he would and now he's done it. We had a bit of a barney."
"That's right," said Enderby.
"What do you mean that's right? We had a bit of a barney and now he's gone off. I bet he's gone to that bitch down by the Ornamental Gardens."
"Never mind," said Enderby. "He'll come back. They always do."
"He won't. Not tonight he won't. And I'm frightened up here on my own."
"What are you frightened of?"
"Of being on my own. Like I said. In the dark, too. It went out while we was having this barney and I couldn't see to hit him. Have you got a bob you can let me have till first thing tomorrow morning?"
"Not a sausage," said Enderby proudly. "I blued it all on booze in town. I think I'd better come up there," he added, bold. "I could sleep on the couch or something. I forgot my key, you see. It's a damn nuisance."
"If you come up here you'd better not let Jack get hold of you."
"Jack's gone off with this bitch down by the Ornamental Gardens," said Enderby.
"Ah. So you seen him, did you? I thought as much. You can see the black at her roots, bitch as she is."
"I'm coming up now," said Enderby. "Then you won't be frightened of being on your own. You've got a couch up there, have you?" said Enderby, rising in pain and crawling up the stairs.
"If you think you're going to get in bed with me you've got another think coming. I've finished with all men."
"I've no intention of getting into bed with you," said indignant Enderby. "I just want to lie down on the couch. I don't really feel all that good."
"You needn't be so bloody well on your bloody high horse. I've been in bed with better men than what you'll ever hope to be. Careful," she said, as Enderby kicked the metal pot of the palm on the landing. He clambered blind up the second flight, hugging the banister. At the top he collided with a warm bosomy shape. "You can cut that out for a start," she said. "A bit too forward you are for a start." She sniffed briskly. "That scent's very expensive," she said. "Who you been with, eh? Still waters run deep, if you're really who you say you are, meaning him that lives down there."
"Where is it?" groped Enderby. "I just want somewhere to lie down." His hands felt the softness and width of a sofa, the continuum broken by bottle-shapes (they clanked) and a half-full chocolate box (rustled). "Lay down," he corrected himself, to be more matey.
"Make yourself comfortable," she said, bloody sarky. "If you want anything don't hesitate to ring. At what hour of the morning would you like your morning tea?" she said, in a hot-potato chumble. "Men," she said, going apparently, to her bedroom. She made a contemptuous noise, worthy of Enderby himself, leaving him to the dark.
He awoke with first light to the xylophone of milk bottles and impotent rasping of self-starters. He smacked his lips and clacked his tongue on his hard palate, feeling his mouth like-the vulgar simile swam up from his vulgar pub-crawl-an all-in wrestler's jock-strap. The vulgar simile put fingers to its nose in the gesture his stepmother had called "fat bacon", made the old Roman sign, raspberried, and clambered off up the wall like a lizard. Enderby in his overcoat felt cold and grubby, matching the room that now emerged like a picture on a television screen when the set has at last warmed up. With the picture, noise: that woman's snoring from the next room. Enderby listened, interested. He had never realized that women could snore so loud. His stepmother had, of course, been able to blast a roof off, but she had been unique. Unique? He remembered some lavatorial writing or other about all stepmothers being women or all women stepmothers or something, and then the whole day came back, certainly not a dull day, and he caught quite clearly the name of the widow who had given him tea and taken him to the Victoria tube-stop: Vesta Bainbridge. Shame warmed all Enderby's body and then hunger hammered at him, as at a door. The shameful day marched by briskly, its nostrils widened in a silly smirk, and it carried a banner of St George. It noisily tramped off to stand at ease behind the gimcrack sideboard. Enderby put on his spectacles, seeing beer bottles and old Daily Mirrors with painful clarity, then creaked, groaning, to the kitchenette. This was full of small square platters that had held TV meals, also empty milk bottles with crusty archipelagoes inside them. Enderby drank water from the tap. He opened the cupboard, wiping his mouth on a dish-cloth, and found gherkins. He ate some of these crisp slugs and soon felt better.
Before leaving he called on his hostess, but she lay sprawled over the double bed, uncovered, working hard at sleep. Her bubs, like blancmanges not properly set, shivered gently under the translucent nightgown as a lorry went by. Black smoke of hair over her face lifted and fell, obedient to her snore. Enderby covered her with the eiderdown, bowed, and left. She was not so old, he decided. A fat stupid girl not really capable of ill-nature. She had given Enderby shelter; Enderby would not forget.
As Enderby went downstairs he met his own milkman: a pint for Enderby's door, a half-pint for the foot of the stairs. The milkman leered and double-clacked his tongue. So many dawns, so many betrayers. Enderby had an idea. "Had to sleep up there," he said. "Locked myself out. Do you know anything about locks?"
"Love laughs at locksmiths," said the milkman sententiously. "I'll just see if I've got a bit of wire."
A minute later the postman came with Littlewood's coupons for upstairs, nothing for Enderby. "That's not quite the way," he said critically. "Let me have a try." He breathed heavily over the lock, probing and fiddling. "Coming," he panted. "Half a tick." The lock sprang, Enderby turned the knob, the door opened.
"Very much obliged," he said, "to both you gentlemen." He had not relished the prospect of going to see Mrs Meldrum. He gave them his last coppers and entered.
Ah, but it was a relief to be back. Enderby stripped off his overcoat and hung it by its left shoulder on the hook in the tiny hall. He took off, with slightly greater care, the suit he had borrowed from Any and rolled it neatly in a ball. He placed this, pending the returning of it, on the unmade bed, and then he put on his turtle-neck sweater. He was dressed now for work. His bare legs twinkled into the living-room and at once he scented change. There was a letter on the table, unstamped, and the table itself had been cleared of yesterday morning's dirty dishes. Enderby kicked on the electric fire and sat down to read, his brow troubled. The letter was from Mrs Meldrum.
Dear Mr E,
You will forgive me taking a look round when you was out, as I have every right being the landlady when all said and done. Well, you have got the place disgraceful no two ways about it, what with the bath full of pieces of poetry which was never the intention of them who make baths and have them fitted in. And the carpets not swept neither, I would be ashamed to have to show anybody round it. Well, what I said still hold water, that the rent goes up from next month and you been lucky to have it so cheap for so long, what with prices of things going up everywhere. If you dont like it you know what to do, I have others who will keep the place proper only too anxious to move in next week. You need somebody to look after you and no mistake, it is not natural for a man of your age and with your education as you say you have, living on his own and nobody to look after the house. To be blunt about it and not to shut up about what needs to be spoke out loud you need to get married before you sink to rack and ruin, which is the true opinion of many as I have spoke to.
Yours respctfly
W. Meldrum. (Mrs)
So. Enderby scratched his knee bitterly. That's what they wanted, was it? Enderby looked after, the dishes washed properly, the beds made regularly, the bathroom a pretty dream of a place with glaucous curtains and brushes for back and nails, nylon bristles with plastic fish-shape handles, the bath always waiting for a pink healthy tubber singing la-la-la through the steam. And, for hubby Enderby, a den to write his precious poetry in, a hobby for hubby. No. Bird-voices started in his head: prudence-preaching pigeons, cautioning rooks: beware of meadows, widows. Act act act, called the ducks: drain the sacrament of choice. "This is my choice," said Enderby firmly, as he went to the kitchen to get breakfast (that bitch Mrs Meldrum had washed his dishes!) and brew up stepmother's tea. He would be true to that archetypal bitch, his father's second wife. She had made his life a misery; he would give no other woman that privilege.
And yet. And yet. Enderby had his breakfast of dry bread, strawberry jam, and tea, then went to his workshop. His papers lay untouched by Mrs Meldrum; his table with its legs specially shortened awaited him by the hollow seat. The Pet Beast was growing slowly; the volume of fifty poems, planned for the autumn, was nearly complete. The first job to be cleared out of the way was the composing of a new love lyric for the Arry to Thelma sequence. Enderby felt guilty about the state of Arry's suit. It had, inexplicably, collected mud round the knees; a lapel had been incontinently soiled; the knife-crease had, with incredible speed, become blunted. Arry should be mollified with something really good. He had been complaining about the subject-matter of Enderby's offerings: too many kitchen similes, the appeal to her hard heart too indirect. She had, Arry swore, been reading these poems aloud to the car salesmen, and they had been yak-yakking at them. Enderby must write something very direct, not crude, mind, but direct, telling her what Arry desired to do with her, something that she would keep under her pillow and blush when she drew it (scented with her scent) out. Enderby thought, sitting on his throne, that he might have something suitable in stock. He rummaged in the bath and found certain very early lyrics. Here was one he had written at the age of seventeen. "The Music of the Spheres", it was called.
I have raised and poised a fiddle
Which, will you lend it ears,
Will utter music's model:
The music of the spheres.
By God, I think not Purcell
Nor Arne could match my airs.
Perfect beyond rehearsal
My music of the spheres.
Not that its virtue's vastness -
The terror of drift of stars.
For subtlety and softness
My music of the spheres.
The spheres that feed its working,
Their melody swells and soars
On thinking of your marking
My music of the spheres.
This musing and this fear's
Work of your maiden years.
Why shut longer your ears?
Look, how the live earth flowers!
The land speaks my intent:
Bear me accompaniment.
That, addressed to a supposed virgin, was manifestly absurd for Thelma. And was not that spherical imagery perhaps too gross for a barmaid brought up, one presumed, respectably? Dirty jokes in the bar were one thing, but dirty literature, even the most factitious suggestion of its presence, was another. His stomach, still sore, attested this.
Seventeen. The date of composition was at the foot of the manuscript. To whom had he written that? He brooded, scratching. To nobody, he decided glumly. But had he not dreamed, at that romantic age, of some willow-wand creature who, though of infinite refinement and smelling sweet as May, would not be offended by this all too decipherable symbolism of importunacy? He had shaped this girl in his heart, as mystics shape God, in terms of what she should not be, namely his stepmother; then her positive image had arisen by dint of long brooding on her negative attributes. She had come in a dream then, slender and laughing and, above all, clean. Not a widow: he refused to allow this re-issue of the image to take on the colours and scents of Mrs Bainbridge.
He sighed, then began, very deliberately and coldly, as a pure poetic exercise, to write a very erotic poem from Arry to Thelma, full of breasts and thighs and panting longing.
When he had finished he set it aside to cool, then he went on with his building of the labyrinth, home of the Pet Beast.
This was the order of a usual Enderby day: he would rise at dawn or just after, winter and summer alike; he would breakfast, defecate, and then work, sometimes beginning his work while actually defecating; at ten-fifteen he would shave and prepare to go out, sometimes with a shopping-reticule; at ten-thirty he would leave the flat, walk seawards, buy a loaf, feed the gulls; immediately after that he would take his morning whisky with the aged and dying or, if Arry were not at work, with Arry in the Freemason's Arms; sometimes he would visit Arry in his kitchens, and Arry would give him scraps for his larder-a turkey-carcass, a few slices of fat pork, a bit of scrag-end for Sunday's meal; Enderby would then do such shopping as was needed-a loaf for himself, potatoes, ten cigarettes, pickles, a small meat-pie, a fourpenny custard; back home he would prepare his meal, or, if something cold was left over from the day before, eat at once, working while he ate; he would then loll somnolent in a chair or even, rolling dressed into bed, deliberately sleep. Then back to the lavatory for the last long stint of the day; after that the remains of his earlier meal, or bread with some cheap relish; stepmother's tea as a nightcap; bed. A way of life which harmed no one. Sometimes the caprices of the Muse would disrupt this pattern by hurling poems-fragmentary or fully-formed-at Enderby; then, in mid-whisky, in bed, cooking, toiling at the structures of non-lyrical works, he would have to write down at once to her hysterical or coldly vatic or telegraphic dictation. He respected his Muse but was frightened of her whims: she could be playful kitten or tiger fully-clawed, finger-sucking idiot child or haughty goddess in Regency ball-gown; her moods, like her visits, were unpredictable. More predictable were his other visitants-dyspepsia in its various forms, wind, hiccoughs. Between dispensations of celestial and visceral afflation he lived his quiet days, a solitary man, harmless. Letters and visitors rarely disturbed his door, news from the dangerous world never intruded. His dividends and tiny royalties were paid straight into the bank; the bank he visited once a month only, humbly waiting with his cash cheque made out neatly for twenty-odd pounds behind bull-necked publicans and ascetic-faced butchers who paid in, inexplicably, dull mounds of copper that took long to count. He envied nobody except the great proved dead.
His routine, already disturbed by the disastrous London trip, was further disturbed by a consequence of that trip, namely the arrival of a big parcel. The address-panel had Fem printed on it and the picture of a well-groomed though moronic-faced young woman, evidently a typical Fem-reader. Enderby, who had been deep in his poem, received the parcel trouserless and open-mouthed, then ran into the living-room with a thudding heart to open it up. There was a contract for him to sign and a brief letter from Mrs Bainbridge telling him that here was a contract to sign and here were copies of past issues of Fem. She wrote in thick long-strokes, was formal and business-like, but had allowed her scent to inspissate, most delicately, the writing-paper. Enderby had little nose, but he caught her very feminine image very clearly. So.
Enderby knew little of magazines. As a boy he had read Film Fun and Funny Wonder. As a young man he had known poetry periodicals and waspish left-wing week-end reviews. In the Army he had seen such things as the troops read. In professional waiting-rooms he had sat stony-faced over Punch. He was aware of a postwar rash of cheap journals and wondered at their range of specialization and at the number of cults they seemed to serve. There were two or three, he knew, wholly devoted to some dead filmstar who had become a sort of corn-god; he had seen others which, severally, glorified young living louts with guitars-presumably what Mrs Bainbridge had called pop-singers. There was evidently a strong religious hunger among young girls which these poor simulacra and their press-priests alone seemed available to feed. There was also, among these same young girls, money crying to be spent, for it seemed that in this age of specialists only the unskilled and witless were at a premium. But the dreaming wives had money also. Fem fought screaming for their sixpences, trying to elbow out Womanly, kick Lovely in the teeth, rip the corsets off Wifey and tear out the hair of Blondie by its black roots.
He sat down eagerly to read Fem. Time passed, lost for ever, never to be redeemed, as he snorted adenoidally over its contents. The cover had a girl's face, generically and boringly lovely. The cover of each issue, he noted, flicking through the pile on his knees, had a young woman's face, probably always the same one, though he could not be certain. The covers of magazines for men, he fancied, preferred to exploit woman from the neck down. A fair division. Enderby read readers' letters: somebody's little girl asked if God lived in an aeroplane; how to turn an old jam-jar into an elegant vase by using four different shades of nail-varnish (total cost 8s. 6d.); that sweet grateful smile was all the reward she could ask for her act of charity; the budgerigar of Mrs F. (Rotherham) could say "Dolly loves Mummy"; how stupid men could be, couldn't they, wanting to keep potatoes in a kitchen-drawer! (Enderby read this gravely puzzled: why was that stupid?) There was a serial story called "For Ever and a Day", illustrated opulently with a ravishing but doubtful bride. A five-page article demonstrated that it did not cost very much more to make your own disc-cabinet (or to get husband or boyfriend to make it) than to buy it in a shop. There were short stories called "Heart Afire". "Why Did You Leave Me?", "I Thee Wed", "Hello, Romance", mostly garnished with pictures of couples glued together, upright. A vital-warming religious column by a popular young pop-singing parson was followed by a feature on "Our Queen's Dogs".
There was a chilling clinical chat on tumours, there were articles on stiletto heels, marmalade-making, being a radiant bride. Enderby sat absorbed for a long time in a Special Cookery Supplement, seeing at last a means of improving his diet (he would try Orange Goody tomorrow). He was shocked and touched by letters sent to Millicent Goodheart, a blue-haired lady with sharp red talons and a gentle smile: "He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child"; "I have only been married three months but I have fallen in love with my husband's father". Enderby nodded approvingly at the good sense of the replies. She should not have done it; I'm terribly sorry for you, my dear, but you must remember marriage is for keeps.
Dusk fell while he was still reading, with much more reading still to do. He stole to the light-switch, feeling guilty, excusing himself for this long soaking: after all, he was going to write for them, he had to know their tastes. His belly growled its neglect. Enderby had nothing in the flat except bread, jam, pickles; he must go out and buy something. He rather fancied a dish concocted by Gillian Frobisher, Head of Fem's Cookery Department: Spaghetti Fromaggio Surprise.
Enderby went out with his shopping-net and returned with a pound of spaghetti, a quarter of cheese, and a large garlic for fourpence. (The recipe gave the alternative of two large onions, but Enderby had an obscure repugnance to entering a greengrocer's just to ask for two onions; garlic was a different matter, being exotic.) Panting with excitement, he took the relevant issue of Fem into the kitchen and followed the instructions slavishly. "Enough for four", he read. He was but one man alone, himself, he, hungry Enderby. He must divide everything, then, by four. He took the pound of spaghetti and broke the brittle sticks into small pieces. He took his frying pan (pity that the recipe asked for a large deep one; still, never mind) and poured one tablespoonful of olive oil. (He had about a cupful of this in his cupboard, saved from sardine tins.)
He threw in about a quarter of the spaghetti, lit the gas, and cooked it slowly, turning and stirring. He then added two cupfuls of water, remembering that he was to divide by four, so threw some of the water out again. He turned, breathing heavily, to Fem, while the pan gently simmered. Grated cheese. He grated some with Mrs Meldrum's nutmeg-grater and threw it into the mixture. Now this question of onion or garlic. "Two large onions chopped", said Gillian Frobisher, or "garlic to taste". Enderby looked at his garlic, stronger, he knew, than onions; perhaps this one would be equivalent to two of those. Should he skin it? No. The goodness was in the skin: potatoes, for instance. He sliced the garlic warpwise, then woofwise, then threw the bits into the simmering pan. And now. A greased dish. He found a cloudy Pyrex on the shelf, and he liberally coated its inside with margarine. He now had to transfer the stuff from the pan into the Pyrex. He had some difficulty in turning it out: it had stuck to the pan for some reason, and he had to gouge vigorously to detach what was willing to be detached. He flopped the mixture into the dish. "Top with sour cream", said Gillian. There was no sour cream, but plenty of sour milk, greenish on top. He crowned the dish with generous curds, then lit the oven. It had to cook to a slow heat therein, about twenty minutes. Groaning, he placed the dish on the oven shelf, kicked the black door shut, wiped one hand on the other. There.
Damn. He had not, he realized, consistently divided by four. Never mind. And perhaps the spaghetti was meant to turn black. He had heard of smart restaurants where things were deliberately burned before one's eyes, as one sat cool and well-dressed at table. He went back to the electric fire to continue his reading of yet another issue of Fem. After gazing transfixed at a soup advertisement showing a cup of cold blood, and an egg advertisement in which a pallid yolk hung over the edge of the fish-slice that lifted it aslant from the pan, ready to flop in pale yellow, Enderby settled to a story called "You're Not My Darling". This was about an air-hostess who fell in love with the captain of her aircraft, a theme new to Enderby. He gawped on long past Gillian Frobisher's twenty minutes of cooking-time, came to with a hiccoughing start, then drew his Spaghetti Fromaggio Surprise out of the oven. Its name was not inept. He sat down to it, and savoured mingled hues of burnt farinacity and shouting brutal garlic, loud and hot as an acetylene blast; the tone of these hues was a tired tepidity. He had not quite expected this; still presumably Gillian Frobisher knew what she was doing. He ate dutifully, with many draughts of cold water. He must learn the tastes of his prospective readers.
Enderby awoke in the middle of the night, jerked with sergeant's roughness out of an odd dream about pokers. The pain was ghastly though it did not feel dangerous. Enderby's head was clear enough as he crawled out; he even remembered the name of the bloody woman. Gillian Frobisher. There was a photograph of her in one of the Cookery Supplements: a crisp handsome Jewish girl with an impossibly clean frying-pan. If he ever got hold of her, Enderby vowed, he would dirty that frying-pan and no mistake. He had been taken advantage of.
Bicarb shattered the pain and sent its fragments flying on the wind. Enderby sat down in his living-room and switched on the electric fire. It was, said his watch, three-ten. A ghastly hour. There was noise upstairs, a woman's voice shouting as through a muslin strainer, "Get out, do you hear? Get out, you pig." Then the rumble of a man's voice and the tread of heavy shoes. Jack was, apparently, back. Soon the woman's abuse grew fainter and was curiously articulated, as though from the side of the mouth, in brief bursts. Later the springs began to bounce. Enderby picked up the contract from the sofa, wondering whether he ought to sign or not. To produce a block of rhymed cliches weekly, sententious vapourings about the stars so far away, the feel of chubby baby arms round mummy's neck, being kind to those in trouble-was not this prostitution? The poems he was writing to Thelma from Arry were not that, whatever they were. Where they were not straight-forwardly sensual they were gently ironical: he needn't be ashamed of them. But this proposal of Mrs Bainbridge-was it not the fiend luring him away from proper art with the chink of guineas that, anyway, would be all for Mrs Meldrum? Enderby walked into the bathroom to survey all the tumbled years' work in the bath. He had moved, over the last decade and a half, from town to town and flat to flat, but he had thought that here he could settle it. It was not good to change one's workshop in the middle of a major creation. The mood altered under the subtle influence of a new place, the continuity was broken. And then the thought of packing all this bathful into suitcases-mice, breadcrusts and all. One lost things, one was tempted to throw things away. But Enderby, standing in bare feet, thinking hard, wondered whether perhaps he ought to make the sacrifice, move on up or down the coast, away from Mrs Meldrum and-a much more dangerous person, the widow to be enjoyed in the meadow-Mrs Bainbridge, coolly elegant, self-confessed admirer of his poems.
He saw that to some extent he was rationalizing his fear of a relationship with a woman, the possibility that what was now finishing upstairs might soon start downstairs. And yet a worry that had often nagged him-especially after scurrying away from the verge of other relationships-was that this very desire to remain uncommitted might impair his work. Love of woman had always, traditionally, played a large part in the lives of the poets. Look at Goethe, for instance, who had to have a new love affair before he could begin a new lyric. Enderby, in so far as German culture had played any part in his development, had chosen to be influenced by a much dourer personality-Schopenhauer. Spengler, too, with his promise of the undergoing of evening lands, had had something to say to him. He had needed to invoke both philosophers before writing a poem about sex and other people. He remembered the typical evening of wartime, blackout in the garrison town, horny hands groping for giggling bodies in the dark.
Nymphs and satyrs, come away.
Faunus, laughing from the hill,
Rips the blanket of the day
From the paunch of dirty Will.
Each projector downs its snout,
Truffling the blackened scene,
Till the Wille's lights gush out
Vorstellungen on the screen.
Doxies blanch to silverwhite;
All their trappings of the sport,
Lax and scattered, in this light
Merge and lock to smooth and taut.
See! The rockets shoot afar!
Ah! The screen was tautest then.
Tragic the parabola
When the sticks reel down again.
That was no romantic attitude to sex. Love, Schopenhauer had seemed to say, was one of the perpetual cinema performances or Vorstellungen organized by the evil Will, projectionist as well as manager, and these slack bodies of gum-chewing gigglers were made into stiff shining screens for the projection of what looked like reality, value. But the deflation, the reeling to earth after coitus, was frightful, and one saw the inflated words of desire-so soon after their utterance-for what they really were. The casual images of onanism could not be hurt, could not be lied to.
Enderby went back to the living-room. Heartburn, like labour pains, had started again. There was plenty of bicarbonate solution still in the glass, so, in less than half a minute, Enderby was able to growl it away hollowly:
Grerrrbrogharrrgawwwwwpfffffh.
There was an immediate response from upstairs: a shoe of admonition was banged three times. Enderby looked up to the noise meekly, as to chiding God. It was time that he left. He heard what sounded like, "Shut up, Enderby," and then the woman's voice said, "Leave him alone. He can't help it." A row of indistinguishable words then began, ending with Jack shouting, "Oh, he did, did he? And whose idea was that? False little bitch, aren't you?" The sadness, see, after coition. Enderby shook his head sadly and went back to bed. He would give a week's notice to Mrs Meldrum; he would sign no contract with Mrs Bainbridge. Mrs Meldrum could have her smiling bald bath-taking young man on an expense account; if there was no weekly poem from Enderby it was not likely that the strong-stomached readers of Fem would pine away.
That settled it. Morning brought a letter from Vesta Bainbridge:
Dear Mr Enderby,
Well, you do seem to have been beating it up pretty tidily on your visit to London. I have only now managed to get hold of an evening paper of that memorable day which, albeit briefly, makes it reasonably clear that you went out of your way to antagonize a certain knightly patron of your art. I must confess that, in some ways, I admire your independent attitude, though God knows how any poet nowadays can afford that Byronic luxury. Sir George, I hear, is very angry and hurt. What came over you? I just don't understand, but then I'm only a very ordinary person with no great claim to intellect, and I would never be so presumptuous as to think myself capable of fathoming a poet's brain. The fact is, and I daresay you'll hear this from your own publisher fairly soon, that your name smells to heaven with Goodby's for Good Books, so watch out.
In the circumstances, I think it would be a good plan to print your weekly effusion under or over a pseudonym. This would also give us a chance to prettify the feature with a photograph of some long-haired male model with a quill in his hand and his dreamy eyes up to heaven-you know what I mean: The Poet: what every housewife thinks a poet ought to look like. Can you suggest a pseudonym? Do sign that contract and return it. I did enjoy our tea together.
Yours,
Vesta Bainbridge
Enderby trembled with rage as he crushed the good quality writing-paper. He hurled the letter into the lavatory-pan and then pulled the chain, but the thing was too thick to flush down. He had to pick it out wet and then take it into the kitchen and put it in an old cardboard rubbish-box along with condensed-milk tins, fishbones, potato peelings and tea leaves. After an hour of brooding and trying to carry on with his work, he felt a compulsion to read it again and did so, all smothered with tea-leaves as it was. Beating pretty tidily London memorable day albeit briefly independent attitude Byronic what every housewife thinks Vesta Bainbridge. He stood frowning, reading it in the tiny hallway, squinting at the words because it was dark there. There was a sudden double-beating on the door, as on a gorilla's chest, and Enderby looked up, surprised. "Come out, Enderby," cried the voice of Jack. "I want a word with you, Enderby, you bloody poet."
"For cough," snarled Enderby, with much of his stepmother's spirit and intonation.
"Come out of there, Enderby. Come out and fight like a man. Open that door and let me bash you, you bastard."
"No," said Enderby, "I won't. If I opened that door I'd regret it. I know I would. I don't want your blood on my hands."
"Enderby," shouted Jack, "I'm giving you fair warning. Open up there and let me do you in, you fornicating poet. I'll give you sleeping with my wife, you false sod."
"It's not your wife," said Enderby. "And I slept on the couch. Somebody's been telling lies about me. Now you clear off before I get angry."
"Open that door, Enderby, please," pleaded Jack's voice. "I want to do you in, it's only right and fair as I should, you bastard, and I'm already late for work. Open up and let's get it over." And he thumped with both hands on the door. From above the woman's voice could be heard, and there was something about it to show clearly the image of a woman in nightdress and curlers. "Stop it, Jack," she cried. "You're only making a fool of yourself."
"Fool of myself, eh? We'll soon see. Now you shut up. You've had your turn and now it's going to be Enderby's turn." He renewed the thundering. Enderby went to the kitchen and came back with his hare-eviscerating knife. "Open up, Enderby. Time's getting on, you bastard." Enderby opened up.
Jack was a youngish tough man with lined cheeks and eyes the colour of urine. If hairs be wires, black wires grew in his head. He had both fists ready, with the thumbs pitiably tucked inside. Enderby had been punched in London; he was not going to be punched here. He raised his knife. "For cough," he said.
"That's playing unfair," said Jack. "I meant clean bashing. That's not right when you get on to that stabbing lark. All I'm saying is, you leave her upstairs alone, see, and one bloody good bash in the chops and call it a day. You've no call to go fornicating with what's mine, as you ought to be first to admit. Now put that knife down like a man and take what's coming to you."
"For cough," said Enderby, in a murderer's stance. "I hadn't got my key, that was all, and she let me sleep on the sofa. If you don't believe that you'll never believe anything."
"I'll believe what I want to believe," said Jack with great candour. "I'm coming back to see you again. Don't think you've got away with this, because you haven't, Enderby, poet or no poet. I tell you that straight. I'm off to work now and late too, which is your fault and makes things worse." With a sudden brisk jerk and stylish follow-through he wrested the knife from the grasp of Enderby.
"There," he said proudly. "Now you've had it." Enderby swiftly slammed the door. "I'll be back, Enderby," called Jack. "Make no mistake about it. You'll be done, no two ways about that, as you'll see." He kicked Enderby's door and then thumped out of the house, crashing the great outer portal shut.
Enderby locked himself in the lavatory, trembling. Canaille, canaglia, with their bloody sex and blasted jealousy. Well, the time had come; all things pointed to it: out, out, out. Where to now? He sat on the seat and began to scribble: (a) Draw cash from bank; (b) Get map of south coast; (c) Send cheque and week's notice Mrs M.; (d) Write to Mrs B.; (e) see Arry. With this need to plan and the thought of the nightmare of packing still to come, he grew flustered. He tried to calm himself by writing a final consummatory poem for Arry, the end of the whole cycle. It reeked with hot hands, white flesh, hoarse desire, love, love, love. It had a certain cathartic effect on Enderby, like loud blasphemous obscenities.
… And in that last delirium of lust
Your image glows. Love is a blinding rain,
Love crow all the cocks, love lays the dust
Of this cracked crying throat whose thirst is pain…
He wrote out a cheque for Mrs Meldrum, composed the curtest of farewells: "Thank you for your unwanted solicitude. Take a week's notice. Yours etc." To Mrs Bainbridge he wrote a courteous acknowledgement of her communications and regretted that, on maturer consideration, he found himself unable to find it in himself to meet the meagre poetic needs, if even these existed, of the readers of Fem. His compliments to Miss or Mrs Frobisher, if Mrs Bainbridge would be good enough to pass them on, and congratulations on possessing so tough-stomached a gang of followers of her culinary columns. He, Enderby, had, if it was of any interest to anyone, suffered greatly from her Spaghetti Fromaggio Surprise. He proposed to destroy the contract and distribute the copies of Fem to the poor. He was hers sincerely. P.S. He was moving from the above address forthwith, whither he knew not yet. No point in her replying. Calmer now, Enderby shaved and prepared to go out. He would be safe so long as that shouter Jack was still at work.
Arry, in grubby cook's white, complete with white necktie and white mushroom hat, stood at the bar of the Freemason's Arms, taking time off from his kitchens. He greeted Enderby with no enthusiasm but, without asking or being asked, ordered a double whisky for him. "That suit," he said, "were a right bloody mess. Ad to send it tert cleaner's." He drank off a good three-quarters of a pint of brown ale mixed with bitter.
"I'm sorry," said Enderby. "It won't happen again. I shan't have to borrow from you again. I'm leaving."
"Leavin'? Goin'? Not coomin' back 'ere naw mawr?"
"That's right."
Arry looked solemn, but that stiff crust of his expression seemed to be hiding a tiny feeling of relief; a whiff of relief escaped as through a steam-hole in the crust. He said:
"Where to?"
"I don't know," said Enderby. "Somewhere else along the coast. It doesn't matter where, really."
"Thee get as far aweeeeeh," advised Arry, prolonging his vowels, as in some primitive language, "far aweeeeeh," to emphasize the distance, "far aweeeeeh," by onomatopoeic suggestion, "as tha can bloody get. That's naht 'ere, naht for nobody. Coom back 'ere," he said, "never naw mawr." He looked with gloom at the lesbians in the corner-Gladys in glasses and leopard-skin pants sly-cuddling crosseyed Prudence-and then with compassion at Enderby.
"This is to say good-bye, really," said Enderby, "and to hope that your suit prospers."
"It'll be aw right when it cooms back fromt cleaner's."
"I meant the other suit," said Enderby, "the Arry to Thelma suit. I've brought one more poem for you, the very last of the cycle. If this doesn't do the job, nothing will." He took the folded sheet from his pocket.
Any shook his head. "Naht doin'," he said, "naht doin' at all. It were a bloody wester mah tahm."
"My time, too," said Enderby.
"Wan 'and int till," said Any, "and toother betwinner legs. No good to man nor flamin' beast that Thelma. Oo's tecken no notice er naht av doon forrer."
"Well," sighed Enderby, "that's how it is. Nobody wants poetry nowadays. All wasted." He prepared to rip up his final fiery offering.
"Weren't wested," said Arry. "Ot stooff, wan or two were. Ah lakhed 'em. Boot oo," he said, "didn't 'ave bloody intelligence." He put out a clean cook's hand to rescue Enderby's poem. He took the folded sheet and unfolded it with wan interest. He pretended to read it, then put it into his trouser-pocket. Enderby bought him a pint of brown ale and bitter. Enderby said:
"Since I've lived here you're the only one I've been in any way friendly with. That's why I wanted to shake hands with you before I go."
"All sheck 'ands wi' thee," said Arry, and did so. "When will yer be clearin' off?"
"I've got to pack," said Enderby. "And then I've got to decide where I'm going to. Tomorrow, I should think. While Jack's out at work."
"Oo's Jack?"
"Oh, yes, sorry. The chap who lives upstairs. He thinks I've been carrying on with the woman he lives with."
"Ah," said Arry, shaking his head, then looking at Enderby with renewed compassion. "Get away as soon as yer can," said Arry. "Shoove yer things in a bag and then get to Victoria Station. On Victoria Station there's nameser places stoock oop on indiketters. Teck thy choice, lad. There's plenty on 'em. You choose wanner them and go straight to it. All places is the same nowadays," he said. "The big thing to do is to kip movin'. And," he asked, "what will yer do when yeu've getten wherever yer goin'? Wilt kip on wi' same game?"
"It's all I can do," said Enderby. "Writing verse is all I'm cut out for."
Arry nodded and finished his pint, the fourth since Enderby's entrance. "Dawn't write too mooch abaht spaghetti, then," he said, frothily. "Leave spaghetti to them as knaws summat abaht it." He shook hands with Enderby once more. "Moost get back now," he said, "tert bloody job. Special loonch for Daughters of Temperance." He spaced out the words like a poster. "Luke after yerself," said Arry. He waved a white cook's arm from the door and then went out. Spaghetti coiled, puzzled, in Enderby's brain. Then a horrid thought struck him. He finished his whisky palpitating but then calmed down. He might have sent it to Mrs Meldrum. But no, he distinctly remembered pinning a cheque to a quarter-sheet of writing-paper. But that made no difference, did it? That might still have got into the wrong envelope. He'd better get out of here very, very quickly.
As he panted towards his packing down the esplanade, the gulls wheeled and wailed and climbed the blue wall of the marine winter day. For two days now he had forgotten to feed them. They planed, complained. Greedy beady eyes. Ungrateful birds. They mewed no farewell to Enderby; they would be there, waiting for his doles of bread, further up or down the coastline.
Of what the world would call essentials, Enderby had few to pack. It was the bathful of verse that was the trouble. Kneeling in front of it, as though-and here he laughed sardonically-he worshipped his own work, he began to bundle it into the larger of his two suitcases, separating-with reasonable care-manuscripts from sandwich-crusts, cigarette-packets, and the cylinders of long-used toilet-rolls. But he found so many old poems which he had quite forgotten that he could not resist reading them through, open-mouthed, as afternoon ticked on towards dusk. He had modified drastically his original plan of departure, his aim now being to catch some evening train (Jack permitting) to Victoria, spend the night in a hotel, and then, about midday, follow some new spoke to the south coast. He had, he felt, to live near the sea, this being a great wet slobbering stepmother or green dogmatic Church which he could keep his eye on; nothing, at least, insidious about it.
It was amazing what things he had written, especially in his youth: pastiches of Whitman, Charles Doughty, an attempted translation of the Duino Elegies, limericks, even the beginning of a verse-play about Copernicus. There was one sonnet in sprung rhythm and Alexandrines which dated from the days of his love and envy of the proletariat. He read the sestet with horror and wonder:
When the violet air blooms about him, then at last he can wipe
His hands sheerfree of swink, monarch of hours ahead;
Hearty he eats and, full, he sits to pull at his pipe,
Warm at the kitchen glow. The courts- and sports-news read,
He argues, sups, in the Lion vault; to a plate of tripe
Or crisp chips home returns, then climbs to a dreamless bed.
Dead on this homecoming cue Jack came home, his hands sheerfree of salesman's swink, ready for Enderby. Enderby was aroused from the past by the gorilla two-fist beat on the door.
"Come on, Enderby, out of it. On the job, Enderby. Come and be bashed, you poetic bloody nuisance."
"Have you got my knife?" asked Enderby, standing now behind his punished door.
"Your knife, eh? That's been put in a refuse-bin, you dirty mess as you are, you. There's going to be clean bashing only, you nasty deceitful thing. I'm giving you fair warning, Enderby. If you don't open up I'm going to get old Ma Meldrum's key. I'll say that you lost yours, lying like you lied, you nasty liar. Then I'll come in and do you. So open up like a sportsman and play the game and be bashed, you bugger, you."
Enderby shivered with rage and immediately began to roam the flat, trembling, looking for some weapon. Meanwhile Jack, who should, by rights, have been fatigued by his work, hammered at the door and execrated nastily. In the bathroom Enderby cast around and his eyes momentarily softened as they lighted on his old friend, the lavatory-seat. It had always been somewhat loose; it was not difficult to wrench it from the pin that had held it to the pedestal. "Coming," called Enderby. "Shan't be a minute." He apologized to the wooden O as he pulled it roughly away, promising that soon he would write it a small ode of reparation. Armed with it he went to the door, pulled the door open and saw Jack's thumb-protecting fists ready for a fierce double-bang at the empty air.
"That's not fair," he said, backing. "You're not playing the game, Enderby. All I ask is a fair apology for ill-treating me as regards my own property." ("Is that you back, Jack?" came the voice from above. "Don't hurt him too hard, love.")
"There's nothing to apologize for," said Enderby. "If you don't believe what I told you you must take the consequences of your disbelief. I'm going to clonk you on the head with this seat here."
"Not that," said Jack, trying, on dancing feet, to get in odd punches. "That's comic, that is, that's not decent. That's making a farce out of the whole thing." Enderby parried the weak blows, slamming Jack's wrists hard with his wooden weapon. He drove him down the hallway towards the front door of the house, past the two spotted pictures on the wall, both of Highland scenery in wretched weather. Enderby raised the seat high, intended to hit Jack's wiry head with its hard border. He misjudged somewhat, and the seat came down to encircle Jack's face, so that Jack was framed like a most animated portrait in a bottom-shaped ring. His hands clawed at it, forgetting to chop at Enderby's own, which tugged down and down, Enderby's obscure aim being to pull Jack to the floor and then stamp on him. "You bastard, you," cried Jack. "This isn't funny, this isn't, you sod." He tried to lift off the wooden lei of bottom-polished smoothness, but Enderby's weight pulled down and down. "All I ask," panted Jack, "is an apology for what you done, did. Give me that and I'll let you go." Enderby swung round, still clinging to Jack's round pillory, and saw Jack's woman at the foot of the stairs. She was dressed like Hamlet in black tights, a black sweater above, inside which her bubs danced still from her descent.
"You," sobbed Enderby, at his last gasp with all this effort, "started all this. Tell him the truth."
"He bashed me," she said, "and I did nothing wrong. Now it's only right that you get bashed."
"Tell him the truth," cried Enderby's dying voice.
"That won't make no difference to Jack," she said. "You've got to get done by Jack. Jack's like that, you see."
"I want him to apologize," cried Jack, still framed.
"There's nothing to apologize for," gurgled Enderby's fading ration of air.
"Apologize for what you're doing now, then."
"I'll stop it," said Enderby. He let go of the wooden seat, and Jack, now pulling at nothing, went hurtling back to the hallstand, crashing into it and sending it over, still horse-collared. The little inlaid mirror tinkled; from the glove-drawer, suddenly opened, there issued letters, unforwarded, for people long shadily departed, and also highly coloured coupons representing, each, a fivepence rebate off a packet of soap-powder.
"Call it," Enderby, bent double as though air were something to be sucked up from the floor, tried to say, "Call it," seeing Jack on the floor with lavatory collar still on lying beside, as a wooden mate, the crashed hall-stand, "a day."
"You come upstairs, love," said the woman to Jack. "You'll be tired after your hard day's work. I'll make you a nice cuppa."
Jack got up, removed the collar and, panting still, handed it to Enderby. "You got what was coming to you," he said. "I'm not one of those vindictive buggers, Enderby. Fair's fair's what I stand or fall by." He dusted himself down with the hall-stand brush, still in his overcoat which was of a dull plum colour. "Don't do it again, that's all I'm going to say now, and let it be a warning." The woman, soothing, put her arms about him and began to lead him upstairs. Enderby, exhausted, entered his own flat, holding the lavatory-seat like a victor's wreath. It was a long long time since he'd exerted himself so much. He lay down for at least an hour on the floor of the living-room, seeing how dirty the carpet was. Under the couch were walnuts and bits of paper. He lay until the town-hall clock struck, from from afar, over the chill evening air of late January, the hour of seven. There was now no hope of leaving tonight.
When he felt better he got up from the floor and went into the kitchen to examine his store-cupboard. There was little point in, and little room for, taking these half-empty jars and bits of lard in paper, potatoes, cut spaghetti-sticks, mustard. He took down Mrs Meldrum's largest saucepan and prepared a stew of meat-paste, Oxo cubes, spaghetti, olive oil, spuds in jackets with dirt and all, pickled onions, cheese-heels, bread-crusts, dripping, half a meat pie, Branston sweet pickle, margarine, celery salt, water. At the back of the fast-emptying cupboard he found a neglected chicken carcass, a gift from Airy, which would go well. He left the stew to bubble, thrifty Enderby, and went back to the sorting and packing of his papers.
Enderby, fagged out by fighting, packing, and the thin and over-savoury stew he had cooked, slept later the following morning than he had intended. The work of packing and clearing-up was not yet finished. Both suitcases were crammed, but there were still many manuscripts to bundle together and put safe somewhere. Enderby, yawning, creased, and with hair in sleepy spikes, made tea with the remaining half-packet of Typhoo and coffee with the last few spoons of Blue Mountain. Taking in the milk he left a note of farewell for the milkman, several empty bottles, and a cash cheque for five shillings and fourpence. He then drank one cup of tea and emptied the rest down the lavatory, feeling the sense of virtue he always felt when he knew he had used what another man might well have wasted. Then he heated up last night's stew and felt further virtue when the gas failed half-way through the process. No waste there either. He switched on all the electric fires in the flat, ate breakfast, drank coffee, smoked. Then, in shirt and underpants (last night's nightwear, his pyjamas having been packed) he emptied the rubbish out of its cardboard box into a small dustbin outside the backdoor. (Sunny, piercingly cold, gulls high-screaming.) He cleaned out this box with a copy of Fem, finding difficulty in dislodging corner-hugging mush of decayed peel and odd tea-leaf hieroglyphics, then lined it with two or three copies of the same magazine, collected handfuls of poems from the bath and packed them in tightly, covered with further Fems then tied the box about with a discarded pair of braces and a long knotty link he made out of odd pieces of string that were lying around. He washed all dishes in (necessarily) cold water and packed them on their shelves. Then he had a cold and excruciating shave, washed quickly, and dressed in his daily working garb with corduroy trousers and a tie. The time was eleven-thirty. He could, he thought, soon now be off. The keys, of course. He went out into the hallway of the house, found that someone, probably Jack, had righted the crashed hall-stand, and then he put the keys in the glove-compartment. On a letter addressed to a long-left Mrs Arthur Porceroy (postmark 8.VI-51) he wrote, in inkpencil, KEYS ENDERBY, and leaned this notice upright on the hallstand. While he was doing this the front door opened. A man looked in. He seemed to play an elaborate game of looking for someone everywhere except where someone was, his sad eyes roaming the entire hallway and then appearing at last to find Enderby. He nodded and smiled bleakly, as in modest self-congratulation on his success, and then said, "Would I be addressing one of the name of Enderby?" Enderby bowed. "Could I have the pleasure of a word with you?" the man asked. "A question of poetry," he added. He had a thin Uriah Heep voice. He was of less than medium height, had a long face and a fluff of whitish hair, wore a raincoat, was about Enderby's age.
"Who are you from?" asked Enderby sharply.
"From?" repeated the man. "From nobody except me. Me being the name of Walpole. And coming to see you on a question of poetry. It's cold here in the hall," he said. Enderby led the way into the flat.
Walpole sniffed the warm dry air, the lingering sour stew-smell, the raised dust, and then noticed Enderby's packed bags. "Leaving, eh?" he said. "Well, I only just got you in time, didn't I?"
"I've got to catch a train," said Enderby, "any minute now. Would you -?"
"Oh, I'll be quick," said Walpole, "very quick. What I want to say is that I won't have you writing poetry to my wife."
Enderby saw rush and then fade a quite unreasonable possibility. Then he smiled and said, "I don't write poetry to anybody's wife."
Walpole drew from his raincoat pocket a carefully folded and smoothed sheaf of sheets. "This poetry," he said. "Look at it carefully and then tell me whether or not you wrote it."
Enderby looked at it quickly. His handwriting. The Thelma poems. "I wrote these, yes," he said, "but not on my own behalf. I wrote them at the request of another man. I suppose you could call him a client, really. You see, poetry is my profession."
"If it's a profession," said Walpole in all seriousness, "does it have what you might call rules of professional etty kwett? More important than that, in a way of speaking, does it have a union?"
Enderby suddenly saw that he had been made a party to a proposed bed-breach. He said that he saw, ignoring Walpole's questions, saying, "I see, I see. I'm really very sorry about all this. I knew nothing about it. I'm even more innocent than Arry. It just never crossed my mind-and I take it that it never crossed Arry's-that Thelma was a married woman."
"Mrs Walpole," said Walpole tautologically, "is my wife. Thelma may or may not be her name, all according to whether she is on duty or not. At the moment she is not on duty. And this question of Harry"-he stressed the aitch pedantically-"is a question that brings you in as a hypocrite and a liar, if you don't mind me saying so." Walpole held up his hand as if taking the oath. "I make use of those terms," he said, "out of reference to the conventionalities you yourself, as a boor Joyce, probably uphold. To me, in one manner of speaking, they have no proper relevance, being relics of boor Joyce morality."
"I," said Enderby warmly, "object very strongly to being called a hypocrite and a liar, especially in my own house."
"Clear your mind of cant," said Walpole, whose reading was evidently wide. He straddled comfortably, raincoat-tails spread, in front of the electric fire. "You are just leaving this place which is not a house and not, I presume, your property, and, moreover, what difference should it make to the effect of certain words on the individual brain whether those words are spoke in a church or in a lavatory, if you'll pardon the term, or, as it might be, here?" He made the knees-bend gesture of freeing a trouser-seat stuck in a rump-cleft.
The mention of church and lavatory went straight to Enderby's heart, also the invocation of logic. "All right, then," he said. "In what way am I a hypocrite and a liar?"
"A fair question," admitted Walpole. "You are a hypocrite and a liar"-he pointed a j'accuse finger with forensic suddenness-"because you hid your own desires under another man's cloak. Ah, yes. I have spoke to this man Harry. He admits to having sent up to Mrs Walpole plates of stewed tripe and, on one occasion, eels-both,dishes to which she is not partial-but it was clear that that was in the way of colleagual friendliness, them both working in the same establishment. Both are workers, even though the place of their work is boor Joyce. Can you say the same for yourself?"
"Yes," said Enderby, "no."
"Well, then," continued Walpole, "I have it on the word of Harry, who is a worker, that he had no adulterating intention in mind. To him it came as a shock, and I was there and I saw the shock as it came, that another man should be sending poetry to a married woman and signing it with another man's name, the name of a man who, still living in a capitalist society, is not in the same position to hit back as what you are." Again the accusatory finger darted out like a chameleon's tongue.
"Why," said stunned Enderby, aghast at such treachery on Arry's part, "should not he be the liar and hypocrite? Why should you not believe me? Damn it all, I've only seen this woman once, and that was only to order a single whisky."
"Single or double makes no difference," said Walpole sagely. "And there have been occasions when men, especially poets, have only seen a woman once (and I will thank you not to use that term in connexion with Mrs Walpole) or even not at all, and yet they have written reams and reams of poetry to her. There was the Italian poet who you may have heard of who wrote about Hell, and there again it was a married woman. He wrote about Hell, Mr Enderby, and not what you wrote in those shameful verses you have there and I would trouble you to hand back. There you have wrote about buttocks and breasts, which is not decent. I spent some time reading those poems, putting aside my other reading work to do so." Enderby now detected, surfacing from the thin starved East Midland accent, the stronger tones of Anglo-Welsh. "Indecencies," said Walpole, "that any man using to a married woman should be heartily ashamed of and should fear a judgement for."
"This is absurd," said Enderby. "This is bloody nonsense. I wrote those poems at Arry's request. I wrote them in exchange for the loan of a suit and a few gifts of chicken and turkey carcasses. Does that not sound reasonable?"
"No," said Walpole reasonably. "It does not. You wrote these poems. You wrote of breasts and buttocks and even navels in connexion with Mrs Walpole and nobody else. And there the sin lies."
"But damn it," said angry Enderby, "she's got them, hasn't she? She's the same as any other woman in that respect, isn't she?"
"I do not know," said Walpole, stilling Enderby's rage with a choir-conductor's hand. "I am no womanizer. I have had to work. I have had no time for the fripperies and dalliances of poetry. I have had to work. I have had no time for the flippancies and insincerities of women. I have had to work, night after night, after the labours of the day, reading and studying Marx and Lenin and the other writers who would lead me to a position to help my fellow-workers. Can you say as much? Where has your poetry led you? To this." He swept a hand round Enderby's dusty living-room. "Where have my studies led me?" He did not answer his own question; Enderby waited, but the question was definitely established as rhetorical.
"Look," said Enderby, "I've got to catch a train. I'm sorry that this has happened, but you can see it was all a misunderstanding. And you must take my assurance that I've had nothing to do socially with Mrs Walpole and very little more professionally. By 'professionally'," added Enderby carefully, spying a possible misinterpretation, "I mean, of course, in connexion with her profession as a barmaid."
"That," said Walpole, shaking his head, "is not salaried, it is not a profession. Well," he said, "the question of a punishment arises. I think, to some extent, that should be a matter to let rest between you and your Maker."
"Yes, yes," said Enderby, too eagerly, with too much relief, "I agree."
"You agree, do you?" said Walpole. "A more intelligent and more well-read man and who follows political theories would there be tempted to ask a certain simple question. What would that certain simple question be, Comrade Enderby?"
The chill honorific, with its suggestion of brain-washing and salt-mines, made Enderby's bowels react strongly: they seemed to liquefy; at the same time a solid blast prepared itself for utterance. Nevertheless he said bravely, "People who accept dialectical materialism don't usually accept the proposition of a divine first cause."
"And very well put, too," said Walpole, "though a bit old-fashioned in its circumloquaciousness. God is what you mean, Comrade Enderby, God, God, God." He raised his eyes to the ceiling, his mouth opening and shutting on the divine name as though he were eating it. "God, God, God," said Walpole. As in response to a summons there was a knock on the flat-door. "Ignore it," said Walpole sharply.
"Here we have important things on hand and not the fripperies of visitors. I have done it," said Walpole, with sudden craftiness. "I have achieved it," he said more softly, his eyes shining with bright dementedness. "I have discovered the sin thesis." The knock came again. "Ignore it," said Walpole. "Now then, Comrade Enderby, you should now by rights ask the question 'What sin thesis?' Go on," he said, with clenched fierceness, "ask it."
"Why aren't you at work?" asked Enderby. Again the knock.
"Because," said Walpole, "today is Saturday. Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God's. The sixth day is for football and spreading the word and punishing and suchlike. Go on. Ask it."
"What sin thesis?" asked Enderby.
"A sin thesis of everything," said Walpole. "The others left God out, but I put Him in. I found a place for Him in the universe."
"What place?" asked Enderby, fascinated despite his bowels, his fear, the knock at the door.
"What place could it be," said Walpole, "except His own place? God's place is God's place, and you can't say fairer than that. Now," he said, "on your knees, Comrade Enderby. We're going to pray together to this same God, and you're going to ask for forgivenesss for all sins of fornication." The knock came again, louder. "QUIET," bawled Walpole.
"I won't pray," said Enderby. "I've committed no fornication."
"Who hasn"t," said Walpole, "in his heart?" And, like Enderby's boyhood picture of the Saviour, he pointed to his own. "On your knees," he said, "and I shall pray with you."
"No," said Enderby. "I don't accept the same God as you. I'm a Catholic."
"All the more reason," said Walpole. "THERE IS ONLY ONE GOD, COMRADE! " he suddenly bawled. "On your knees and pray and you will be let off by me, if not by the Comrade Almighty. If you don't pray I shall be the Hound of Heaven and get some of the lads from the works on the job, and bloody quick, too, even if you do think you're going off this morning. ON YOUR KNEES!" he ordered.
Enderby sighed and obeyed. His knees were stiff. Walpole knelt with the stage-fall ease of more practice. He did not close his eyes; he kept them full on Enderby. Enderby faced the electric fire's tabernacular gold. Walpole prayed:
"Comrade God, forgive the boor Joyce transgressions of Comrade Enderby here, who has been led astray by the lusts of his own body into writing phonographic poetry to Mrs Walpole, who You know, though she is stiff-necked and not one of Thy chosen. Let Your light shine upon him to make him a decent worker and good member of his union, when, him being a poet, such shall be formed. Better still, make him stop writing filthy poetry altogether and take up some decent trade at correct union rates and live in Godly righteousness, if that be Thy holy will, with some decent woman of Thy choosing in the state of holy matrimony, till such time as this boor Joyce institution is replaced by something better and more in keeping with what the proletariat will require." Enderby now saw Walpole smile winningly at some apparition to his left, behind Enderby, at about picture-rail level. Enderby, presuming that this was God, felt no new fear. "Just a tick," said Walpole. "Marvellous what prayer can do, innit? A bloody miracle, that's what it is. To finish up with, then," he prayed, eyes now back on Enderby, "stop this Thy comrade servant womanizing and messing about and bring him back to Your holy ways in the service of the classless society which Thou hast promisedest in the fullness of the workers' time. Thank you, Comrade God," he said finally. "Amen."
Enderby, with much groaning and a posterior blast or two, got creaking to his feet. At that moment the electric fire, like some Zoroastrian deity now, having been prayed at, done with, went out. Enderby, standing, turned, blowing, and saw Mrs Bainbridge. She dangled Enderby's key in explanation of her entrance without Enderby's more direct agency, saying, "Well, I never in all my life knew a man more capable of surprises." She was a dream of winter bourgeois elegance: little black town suit with tiny white jabot of lace-froth; pencil skirt; three-quarter-length coat with lynx collar; long green gloves of suede; suede shoes of dull green; two shades of green in her leafy velvet hat: slim, clean, lithe-looking, delicately painted. Walpole, Marx-man of God, was clearly entranced. He handed her a small yellow throwaway poster and then, as a second thought, gave one to Enderby as well. "GOD OR CAPITALISM?" it read. "You Can't Have Both. H. Walpole will speak on this VITAL topic at the Lord Geldon Memorial Hall, Thursday, February nth. All Welcome."
"You come to that, lady," said Walpole, "and bring him along. There's good in him if only we can get at it, as you yourself will know well enough. Work on him hard, make him a decent man and stop him sending poetry to women, that's your job, I would say, and you look to me capable of tackling it."
"Poetry to women?" said Vesta Bainbridge. "He makes a habit of that, does he?" She gave Enderby a hard-soft green womanly look, holding her large shovel handbag in front of her, legs, as in a model pose, slightly astride.
H. Walpole was, for all his theophanic socialism, a decent man of bourgeois virtues who, now that Enderby had been thoroughly prayed for, did not want to put him in the bad with this fiancée of his here. "That's only in a manner of speaking, as you might say," he said. "A very sexual man, you might say Mr Enderby is, with strong desires as must be kept down, and," he said, "you look to me like the one capable of doing it."
"Thank you very much," said Vesta Bainbridge.
"Look here," said Enderby. The other two waited, listening. Enderby had really nothing to say. Walpole said:
"Right. In his poetry if not in his private life, if you see what I mean. That's where you'd come in, comrade madam, and would give him a bigger sense of reality. May the blessings of the God of all the workers bless your union till such times as society makes something better come about."
"Thank you very much," said Vesta Bainbridge.
"And now," said Walpole cheerfully, "I take my leave. I've enjoyed our little dialectical conversation together and hope to have many more. Don't show me out, I know the way. God keep you in His care," he said to Enderby. "You have nothing to lose but your chains." He blessed Enderby and his putative betrothed with a clenched fist, smiled once more, then went out. Enderby and his putative betrothed were left together, listening to Walpole's marching footsteps and cheerful whistle recede.
"Well," said Vesta Bainbridge.
"This," said Enderby, "is where I live."
"So I see. But if you live here why are you moving?"
"I don't quite get that," said Enderby. "Would you say that again?"
"I don't quite get you," said Vesta Bainbridge. "You send me what I suppose you'd call a verse-letter, straining at the leash with quite unequivocal suggestions, then you take fright and decide to run away. Or is it as simple as that? Obviously you thought I wouldn't get the letter till Monday morning, so it seems as though you planned to attack and retire at the same time. Actually, I always go into the office on Saturday mornings to see if there's any mail, and there I found the letter-rack practically sizzling with your little effort. I got a train right away. I was puzzled, intrigued. Also worried."
"Worried?"
"Yes. About you." She sniffed round the living-room with a wrinkle of distaste. "I can see one would have cause to be worried. This place is absolutely filthy. Does nobody come in to clean it?"
"I do it myself," said Enderby, suddenly and shamefully seeing the squalor of his life more clearly against the foil of her frightful wholesomeness. "More or less." He hung his schoolboy head.
"Exactly. And what, Harry, if I may call you that-indeed, I must call you that now, mustn't I?-were you proposing to do? Where were you proposing to go?"
"Harry's not my name," said Not-Harry Enderby. "It's just the name at the end of the poem."
"I know, of course, it can't really be your name, because your initials don't have an aitch in them. Still, you signed yourself Harry and Harry seems to suit you." She surveyed him with a cocked parrot head, as though Harry were a hat. "I repeat, Harry, what are you going to do?"
"I don't know," said pseudoharry wretched Enderby. "That was all to be thought out, you see. Where to go and whatnot. What to do and so on and so forth."
"Well," said Vesta Bainbridge, "a few days ago I gave you a tea and you offered me a dinner which I couldn't accept. I think it would be a good idea if you took me out to lunch somewhere now. And after that -"
"There's one place I shan't take you," said Enderby, betrayed and angry. "That's quite certain. It would poison me. It would choke me. Every mouthful."
"Very well," soothed Vesta Bainbridge. "You shall take me wherever you choose. And after that I'm taking you home."
"Home?" said Enderby with sudden fear.
"Yes, home. Home, home home. You know, the place where the heart is. The place that there's no place like. You need looking after. I'm taking you home, Harry."