"You've got absolutely nothing to worry about there," said Dr Preston Hawkes. "The plates are negative: no TB, no carcinoma, nothing." He held up a couple of cloudy portraits of the inner Enderby. "That's the lot, then." He had a loud Northern voice, some of the vowels home-made approximations to Received Standard. "You can go away with a contented mind." He was young and highly dentate, tanned, and tousled as though to advertise, for a side-line, the healthful properties of the resort where he practised. "If bicarb helps that dyspepsia, you just stick to bicarb. But fundamentally your stomach and guts are perfectly sound."
"You would say, would you," said Enderby, "that I'm quite unlikely to die in the near future?"
"Oh, my dear fellow," said Dr Preston Hawkes, "none of us can ever know that. Apart from the normal hazards of living-getting run over or electrocuted or slipping in the bathroom-there must always be some unknown factor that doesn't yield to examination. We know a lot," he confided, "but we don't know everything. But, as far as I can see, you're physically sound and likely to live for many years." He glowed at Enderby like a frying slice of potato. "Of course," he said, "your tone isn't as good as it might be. Take exercise: tennis, golf, walks. You could do with paring yourself down a bit. Keep off fried things; don't eat too much starch. You're a sedentary worker, aren't you? A clerk or something?"
"Perhaps in the older sense," said Enderby. "I am," he explained sadly, "a poet."
"You mean," said Dr Preston Hawkes incredulously, "that's your job?"
"It was," said Enderby. "That's really why I came to see you. You see, I'm not writing any more poems."
"Oh." Dr Preston Hawkes became agitated; he tapped contrary-motion five-finger exercises on his desk, his smile fixed and nervous. He spoke now slackly, bubbling. "Well, I hardly think-I mean, that's nothing to do with me, is it? I mean, I should have thought-That is to say, if you don't propose writing any more poetry, well, good luck to you. The very best of luck and all that sort of thing. But that's entirely your own affair, isn't it? That's what I'd say, anyway." He now began to perform, though ineptly, the ritual of a man whose time is valuable: a syndrome of nervous grubbing among papers, looking at his watch, peering exophthalmically above Enderby's head as though the next patient was due to squeeze in between door and lintel.
"No," said Enderby, "you've got that wrong. What I mean is that I can't write poetry any more. I try and try, but nothing happens, nothing will come. Can you understand what I mean?"
"Oh, yes," said the doctor, smiling warily. "I quite see that. Well, I shouldn't worry too much about it if I were you. I mean, there are other things in life, aren't there? The sun is shining, the children are playing." That was literally true; Dr Preston Hawkes lifted a hand as if he himself were conjuring the warm evening shaft through the window, the noise of an infant squabble on the road to the beach. "I mean, writing poetry isn't the whole of life, is it? You're bound to find something else to do. Life is still all before you. The best is yet to be."
"What," asked Enderby, "is the purpose of life?"
The doctor brightened at this question. He was young enough to have answers to it, answers clearly remembered from pipe-puffing student discussions. "The purpose of life," he said promptly, "is the living of it. Life itself is the end of life. Life is here and now and what you can get out of it. Life is living by the square inch and the round minute. The end is the process. Life is what you make it. I know what I'm talking about, believe you me. I am, after all, a doctor." He smiled towards something framed on the wall, his duly certified twin baccalaureate.
Enderby shook his head in vigorous gloom. "I don't think Keats would have given you that answer. Or Shelley. Or Byron. Or Chatterton. Man," said Enderby, "is a tree. He bears fruit. When he stops bearing fruit life cuts him down. That's why I wanted to know whether I was going to die."
"Look," said the doctor sharply, "this is all a lot of morbid nonsense. It's everybody's duty to live. That's what the National Health Service is for. To help people to live. You're a healthy man with years of life ahead of you, and you ought to be very glad and very grateful. Otherwise, let's face it, you're blaspheming against life and God and, yes, democracy and the National Health Service. That's hardly fair, is it?"
"But what do I live for?" asked Enderby.
"I've told you what you live for," said the doctor, more sharply. "You weren't paying attention, were you? You live for the sake of living. And, yes, you live for others, of course. You live for your wife and children." He granted himself a two-second smirk of fondness at the photograph on his desk: Mrs Preston Hawkes playing with Master Preston Hawkes, Master Preston Hawkes playing with teddy-bear.
"I had a wife," said Enderby, "for a very short time. I left her nearly a year ago. In Rome it was. We just didn't get on. I'm quite sure I have no children. I think I can say that I'm absolutely sure about that."
"Well, all right then," said the doctor. "But there are lots of other people who need you, surely. Friends and so on. I take it," he said cautiously, "that there are still people left who like to read poetry."
"That," said Enderby, "is written. They've got that. There won't be any more. And," he said, "I'm not the sort of man who has friends. The poet has to be alone." This platitude, delivered rhetorically in spite of himself, brought a glassy look to his eyes; he got up stiffly from his chair. The doctor, who had seen television plays, thought he descried in Enderby the lineaments of impending suicide. He was not a bad doctor. He said:
"You don't propose to do anything silly, do you? I mean, it wouldn't do anybody any good, would it, that sort of thing? I mean, especially after you've been to see me and so on. Life," he said, less certainly than before, "has to be lived. We all have a duty. I'll get the police on to you, you know. Don't start doing anything you shouldn't be doing. Look, I'll arrange an appointment with a psychiatrist, if you like." He made the gesture of reaching at once for the telephone, of being prepared to tap, at once, all the riches of the National Health Service for the benefit of Enderby.
"You needn't worry," said Enderby soothingly. "I shan't do anything I'd consider silly. I promise you that."
"Get around a bit," said the doctor desperately. "Meet people. Watch the telly. Have the odd drink in a pub, all right in moderation. Go to the pictures. Go and see this horror film round the corner. That'll take you out of yourself."
"I saw it in Rome," said Enderby. "The world première."
Here in England L'Animal Binato or The Two-Natured Animal had become Son of the Beast from Outer Space.
"As a matter of fact," said Enderby, "I wrote it. That is to say, it was stolen from me."
"Look," said Dr Preston Hawkes, now standing up. "It would be no trouble at all for me to fix up an appointment for you. I think you'd feel a lot happier if you talked with Dr Greenslade. He's a very good man, you know, very good, very sympathetic. I could ring up the hospital now. No trouble at all. He could probably see you first thing in the morning."
"Now," said Enderby, "don't worry. Take life as it comes. Live it by the square yard or whatever it was you said."
"I'm not at all happy about what you might do," said Dr Preston Hawkes. "It wouldn't be fair for you to go back home and do yourself in straight after coming to see me. I'd feel happier if you'd see Dr Greenslade. I could ring up now. I could get a bed for you straight away. I'm not sure that it's right for you to be going off on your own. Not in your present state of mind, that is." He stood confused and young, mumbling, "I mean, after all, we've all got a duty to each other -"
"I'm perfectly sane," soothed Enderby, "if that's what you're worrying about. And I promise you again not to do anything silly. You can have that in writing if you like. I'll send you a letter. I'll write it as soon as I get back to my digs." Dr Preston Hawkes bit his lip from end to end and back again, as though testing it for durability. He looked darkly and uncertainly at Enderby, not liking the sound of "letter" in this context. "Everything," said Enderby, with a great smile of reassurance, "is going to be all right." They had exchanged roles. It was with a doctor's jauntiness that Enderby said, "Nothing to worry about at all." Then he left swiftly.
He passed through a waiting-room full of people who, from the look of them, could not write poetry either. Some were in sporting kit, as if prepared to be tried out at the nets by Dr Preston Hawkes, wearing their ailments as lightly as a blazer-badge; others, dressed more formally, saw disease as a kind of church. Enderby had to squint his way out. He had lost his contact-lenses somewhere; the glasses he had formerly worn were, he supposed, still in the Gloucester Road flat. Unless, of course, she had thrown out all that was his. Walking through the rich marine light he regurgitated the word "police". If this doctor proposed to put the police on to him it would be necessary to act quickly. In imagination he heard what the world called sanity as something in heavy clumsy hoofing boots. He remembered the boots that chased him when, just back from Rome, he had tried to break into the flat by the window and been suddenly transfixed in the beam of a copper's lantern. He could have stayed to explain, of course, but the police might well, with their professional tendency to suspicion, have held him till the eventual arrival of Vesta. That mink coat, left behind in the scamper, would have taken some explaining away. So he had swung his suitcase into the constable's groin and, between a starting-line and finishing-tape of whistles, dodged about till-to his surprise, for he had thought such things only possible in films-he had managed to escape by skidding down a sidestreet and into an alley, waiting there till the whistles peeped, like lost tropical birds, forlornly in the distance.
The May sun whizzed over the sea, and spread over the sea was a sort of blinding silver-shred marmalade. It was not the sea near to whose roar he had laboured, to so little purpose, at The Pet Beast, but its north-western brother. It fed a louder and more vulgar resort than Enderby's former Channel home: there was more gusto in the pubs, the vowels were broader, jugs of tea could be bought to take on the sands, a pleasure-beach was hysterical with violent machines of pleasure, an open-air concert party had a comedian who told his feed that if his brains were elastic he wouldn't have enough to make a canary a pair of garters. "I've got blue blood in my veins," said the feed. "What do you think I've got in mine?" said the comedian. "Dandelion and burdock?" It was an odd place, so posterity might think, in which to choose to die.
On this lovely evening there were queues, Enderby peeringly noticed, for Son of the Beast from Outer Space. Next door but two to the cinema was a cool cavern of a chemist's, full of the smell of soap, holiday laughter in a place of medicines, the prints of beach snapshots being collected, sunburnt arms and necks. Enderby had to wait till a holiday woman had been served with hair-clips, skin-cream, hydrogen peroxide and other life-enhancers before he could ask for the means of death. At last the white-coated girl put her head on one side at him:
"Yes, sir?"
He felt as embarrassed as if he were buying condoms. "Aspirin, please."
"Which size, sir?" There were, it seemed, various sizes. Enderby said:
"Fairly small ones, please. I have to take rather a lot." She opened her mouth at him so he said, "Not a lethal dose, of course." He smiled winningly.
"Ha ha, sir. I should hope not. Not on a lovely evening like this." He was quite a one.
Enderby went out with a bottle of a hundred. He had exactly twopence left in the world. "Good," he thought, "timing."
"A queer year," reflected Enderby, potential death in his pocket, turning off the warm gay beery candy-flossy promenade into Boggart Road. It had been a queer empty year, or near-year.
June had been the month of marriage, honeymoon, desertion. He had drawn out from his London bank ninety pictures of clavigerous lions. He had bought a sponge-bag, stuffed the lions into it, wound the string of the bag round a trouser-button, then hung the bag inside his trousers. There it had walked and sat with him, a big comforting scrotum. Every man's fly his own bank; cheerful disbursements at all hours; no interest (though, of course, no overdrafts); frugal needs met without formality. He had travelled to this Northern resort once mentioned with approval by Arry (far from South, London, Vesta). He had found a homely attic with a gas-ring (share lavatory and bathroom) at Mrs Bamber's, Butterworth Avenue, a permanent apex above the transient holiday guests.
In July and August he had put together laboriously a volume of fifty lyric poems (the fair copies and late drafts had fortunately been in his suitcase taken to and from Rome; a mass of other, rougher, material was still in, or else had been thrown out of, the Gloucester Road flat and was, presumably, no longer recoverable). The title of the volume was The Circular Pavane. Having been turned into typescript by a little woman at a typing bureau in Manchester, it had been delivered to, and received with little enthusiasm by, his publisher. In public lavatory cabinets, where privacy could be bought for a penny, he had planned a long autobiographical poem in blank verse, a sort of Prelude. The sponge-bag inside trousers still fat, he was able to afford to wait for the torpid or sulking Muse to wake up and see sense. The few autobiographical poetic lines achieved had been destroyed, re-written, destroyed, re-written, destroyed, re-written, slept on, read, re-read, re-written, destroyed. Through August and September the resort had been big-mouthed with cheerful visitors wearing comic caps with slogans (Try Me I'm The Easy Sort; Have A Go Joe Your Mother Won't Know), sticky with kisses, brine, ale, candy, rock. There had been no news of Vesta or anyone. Sitting in a public lavatory one sunny morning, hearing the cheerful bucket-and-spade-clanking children on their way to the beach, he had savoured, like Frascati, his renewed aloneness. It was a pity he could not write anything, however. He had abandoned the idea of the long autobiographical poem; how about an epic on King Arthur or Lord Rutherford or Alcock and Brown? A verse drama, perhaps? He had spent long grubbing hours in the public library, pretending that he was really working, building foundations, gathering material. He had written nothing.
October, November, brought a whiff of foreboding. This was getting past a joke. He had money enough still, of course, but less and less to do with his time. Walking through the sea-deafening deserted streets, overcoat-collar round his ears, trying to crank up a poem, returning to hopelessness, stew, Mrs Bamber insisting on coming up to his attic, sitting there, talking about her own past redolent of oyster-bars and Yates's Wine Lodge.
If, he vowed at Christmas, if he were given some sort of token of assurance that he would be able to start writing again, then, when his money ran out, he would willingly take some futile occupation or other, becoming a part-time poet, keeping alive for his Muse.
Towards the end of January he awoke to a morning clamped in frost, a poem singing in his ears. Thank God, the relief. He wrote the gnomic telegraphic message down and spent the morning refining it to a final shape:
You being the gate
Where the army went through
Would you renew the triumph and have them decorate
The arch and stone again?
Surely those flowers are withered, the army
Now on a distant plain.
Reading it, he saw, his hair bristling, that it was a private message, a message from her to himself.
But some morning when you are washing up,
Or some afternoon, taking a cup
Of tea, possibly you will see
The heavens opening and a lot
Of saints singing, with bells swinging.
But: then again, possibly not.
He had felt a clammy glair of sweat settle on him, his diaphragm start to liquefy. A poem of farewell.
In March came publication of The Circular Pavane. Reviews followed: "… Pleasant and lucid verse in the tradition…"; "Mr Enderby has lost none of his old cunning; it is a pity, however, that we see no signs of new cunning, new directions. It is a cunningly blended mixture, but it is very much the mixture as before…"; "… One remembers with a sigh the old lyrical perfection. It is a relief to turn to the work of two young Oxford poets…" And one that was surely by Rawcliffe: "Mr Enderby is undoubtedly enough of a realist not to regret the passing of the lyric gift. It cannot last for ever, and with Mr Enderby it has lasted longer than with most. Many of his contemporaries have already elected for the dignified silence of remembered achievement, and one may predict that Mr Enderby, after this not unexpectedly disappointing volume, will join their cloistral seclusion…" In Fem there was, of course, no review.
Enderby had spent April brooding over a pain in his chest. In May, now, this month, three days ago, he had decided to go to a doctor. The doctor, after palpation and auscultation, had more or less decided that nothing was really wrong but, to be on the safe side, had sent Enderby to the hospital for radiography. But, before that, with "nothing wrong" in his ears, Enderby had sat down in his warm attic to write out a list of possible ways to die:
Slash wrists in warm bath
Overdose of sedative
Hang from picture rail in dining-room
Jump in sea from jetty
This was early summer, and Mrs Bamber's house had a fair number of early summer visitors, mostly, as far as Enderby could judge from the noise, teams of galloping children ineptly driven by whoaing but disregarded young parents. It would not be right, Enderby thought, to make his suicide a public affair. It was no way to start a holiday morning to find a corpse swinging with its tongue out at the cornflakes laid the night before, or else dreaming cold in a bath of cold red ink. Too public, of course, to upset anyone might have been the jump from the jetty at the end of Central Pier, but some swimmer, bored already with his holiday, might have splashed too swiftly to the rescue. The overdose was best: clean and quiet, clean and quiet, by something something and dreamy something. Kingsley, jocular Christian.
Enderby, non-Christian stoic, climbed the vanilla-coloured steps of 17 Butterworth Avenue. The front door was open and on the hat-stand were buckets and spades, the smell of feet and sand in the whole dark seaweedy hall. All the guests were out, perhaps at Son of the Beast from Outer Space, but from her kitchen Mrs Bamber sang, the merry widow of a tram-driver, a song smelling of oysters and ruby port. Mounting the stairs, Enderby was suddenly transfixed by a line from, he thought, Ulysses, which seemed to him, with his lethal dose in his pocket, to be the most poignant line (though it was not really a line-only, so far as he could remember, a splinter of Bloom's interior monologue), the most pregnantly regretful line he had ever heard:
… And lie no more in her warm bed.
He shook his head as images clustered round it, images he was no longer capable of translating into words and rhythms: the horses under starter's orders, the champagne tent, the sun on the back of the neck, the omelette made with a hundred eggs and a bottle of Napoleon brandy, life.
… And lie no more in her warm bed.
Enderby climbed higher, climbed to the top, where there was only a roof between him and the sun. This garret of his was, like the sea, warming up for the summer. He entered and sat on his bed, panting after the climb. Then his stomach, living its own life, decided it was hungry, so Enderby put to warm on the gas-ring the remains of a simple stew. While it bubbled, he turned over and over the sizeable bottle of aspirin he had bought: he had read, or heard, that a hundred should be enough. Mrs Bamber, he felt sure, would be efficient at coping with the unexpected corpse of Enderby: she was a Lancashire woman, and Lancashire people rather enjoyed death. It would, anyway, be a clean corpse lying, jaw dropped as in astonishment at being dead, between the sheets. (He reminded himself to effect, as far as was possible, a total evacuation of his body before making it a corpse.) The holiday guests would not be disturbed; the Chief Constable and the Town Clerk would want no publicity; everything would be done quietly at night, and then cornflakes would be shuffled on to plates for the morning. Enderby now sat down, with something like appetite, to his last supper, a thin but savoury viaticum. He felt excited, as though after supper he were going to see a film that everybody had been talking about and the critics had highly praised.
Enderby was in his pyjamas. It was still light, a May evening, and he had a fugitive impression of being a child again, sent to bed while the life of day was beating strongly without. He had washed his feet and scrubbed his dentures, scoured his few pots and pans, eaten a piece of chocolate left over from some weeks back, and poured water from the jug on the wash-stand into a clean milk-bottle. (He had no tumbler, and would need a good long draught to speed the aspirin down.) Now, with the cottonwool stopper removed and the tablets clinking discreetly, the aspirin bottle began to dramatize itself, drawing evening light from all angles, becoming almost grail-like, so that the hand that held it shook. Enderby carried it over to his bed, and it made a tiny dry castanet-noise all the way. From the bed, which he now entered, he could look down on Mrs Bamber's back-yard. He dredged it hungrily, squinting, for symbols of life, but there were only a dustbin, a cardboard box full of cinders, dandelions growing up from the flag-cracks, an old bicycle discarded by Mrs Bamber's son, Tom. Beyond were three-storey houses with bathing costumes drying on window-sills, beyond again the sea, above all a primrose sky. "Now," said Enderby aloud.
One shaking hand shook out a shaking palmful of aspirin. He gave the white seeds to his mouth like a golly-wog money-box feeding in a penny. He drank water from the milk-bottle, still shaking. Aspen, aspirin. Was there a connexion?
An aspen hand aspiring now to death
He finished off the bottle in six or seven more handfuls, washing them down carefully. Then, sighing, he lay back. There was nothing to do now except wait. He had committed suicide. He had killed himself. Self-slaughter was of all sins the most reprehensible, being the most cowardly. What punishment awaited suicide? If Rawcliffe were there now he would be able to quote from the Inferno, lavishly, that man who had added to Italian art. Enderby could vaguely remember that suicide belonged to Nether Hell, the Second Ring, between those who had been violent against their neighbours and those who had been violent against God and art and nature. There, in that Third Ring, Rawcliffe rightly belonged, perhaps there already. All these were, Enderby thought, Sins of the Lion. He closed his eyes and saw, quite clearly, the bleeding trees that were the suicides, harpies fluttering about with a rattle of dry wings like the magnified noise of a shaken aspirin bottle. He frowned. All this seemed very unfair. He had, after all, chosen the way of the Second Ring to avoid the way of the Third, and yet both sins were tucked together in the same round slice of Nether Hell.
With infinite care and delicacy the day wormed itself through a continuum of darker and darker greys. The watch on his wrist ticked on healthily, the too-efficient servant that would announce death as coldly as day and breakfast. Enderby began to feel a great tiredness and to hear a loud buzzing in his ears.
A fanfare of loud farts, a cosmic swish of lavatory-flushings. The dark in front of his eyes was cut away in rough slice after rough slice, like black bread, right down to the heel of the loaf. This then began to turn slowly, brightening with each revolution until it became blinding like the sun. Enderby found it an insuperable effort to interpose blankets or hands or eyelids. The circle cracked with intolerable luminosity, and then Enderby seemed to be dragged, with hearty, though somehow archangelic, tug-of-war cries towards some ineffable hidden Presence. Suddenly this Presence, at first humorously offering Itself as a datum for mere intellection, erupted into a tingling ultimate blow at all the senses, and Enderby staggered back.
There she was, welcoming him in, farting prrrrrrp like ten thousand earthquakes, belching arrrp and og like a million volcanoes, while the whole universe roared with approving laughter. She swung tits like sagging moons at him, drew from black teeth an endless snake of bacon-rind, pelted him with balls of ear-wax and snuffled green snot in his direction. The thrones roared and the powers were helpless. Enderby was suffocated by smells: sulphuretted hydrogen, unwashed armpits, halitosis, faeces, standing urine, putrefying meat-all thrust into his mouth and nostrils in squelchy balls. "Help," he tried to call. "Help help help." He fell, crawled, crying, "Help, help." The black, which was solid laughter and filth, closed on him. He gave one last scream before yielding to it.
"And," said Dr Greenslade the psychiatrist, "we won't try that sort of thing again, will we? For, as we can now see, it only causes lots and lots of worry and trouble to other people." He beamed, a fat youngish man in a white coat not too clean, with the unhealthy complexion of a sweet-eater. "For example, it didn't do our poor old landlady's heart any good, did it? She had to run up the stairs and then down the stairs"-he illustrated this with up-and-then-down-the-air wiggling fingers-"and she was most agitated when the ambulance finally got there. We must consider others, mustn't we? The world wasn't made just for us and nobody else."
Enderby cringed from the nanny-like substitution of first plural for second singular. "Everybody gives trouble when they're dying," he mumbled. "That can't be avoided."
"Ah," pounced Dr Greenslade, "but you didn't die. When people die in the normal decent way they give a normal decent leisurely kind of trouble which harms no one. But you were just caught more or less in the act of sailing off. That meant rushing about and worry for everybody, particularly for your poor old landlady. Besides"-he leaned forward, hushed-"it wasn't just a matter of straight-forward dying with you, was it? It was"-he whispered the dirty words-"attempted suicide."
Enderby bowed his head, this being the required stock response. Then he said, "I'm sorry I made a mess of it. I don't know what came over me. Well, I do in a way, of course, but if I'd been braver, if I'd stuck it out, I think I could have sailed straight through, if you see what I mean. What I mean is that that was just a vision of Hell meant to frighten me. Bogies and so on. It wasn't real."
Dr Greenslade rubbed his hands discreetly. "I can see," he said, "that a lot of fun lies ahead. Though not for me, unfortunately. Still, I'll be getting Wapenshaw's reports. It's a lovely place," he said dreamily, "especially lovely at this time of year. You'll like it."
"Where?" said Enderby with suspicion. "What?" Dr Greenslade had sounded like some Dickens character talking about a beloved idiot-child's grave. "I thought I was being discharged."
"Oh, dear me, no," said shocked Dr Greenslade. "Healthy people don't try to commit suicide, you know. Not coldly and deliberately they don't. And you'd planned this, you know. Preston Hawkes told me you'd planned it. It wasn't just a mad impulse."
"No, it wasn't," said Enderby stoutly. "It was logical. I knew perfectly well what I was doing and I've given you perfectly logical reasons for doing it." He belched acidulously: Greeeeekh. "This hospital food's bloody awful," he said.
"The food at Flitchley is excellent," dreamed Dr Greenslade. "Everything's excellent there. Lovely grounds to walk in. Table tennis. Television. A library of sedative books. Congenial company. You'll be sorry to leave."
"Look," said Enderby quietly, "I'm not going, see? You've got no right to keep me here or send me anywhere. I'm perfectly all right, see? I demand my freedom."
"Now," said Dr Greenslade harshly, changing from nanny to schoolmaster, "let's get one or two things absolutely dear, shall we? There are certain laws in this country appertaining to mental derangement, laws of restraint, certificates and so on. Those laws have, in your case, already been invoked. We can't have people wandering all over the country trying to kill themselves." Enderby closed his eyes to see England swarming, as a log swarms with woodlice, with peripatetic suicides. "You're a danger to yourself," said Dr Greenslade, "and a danger to the community. A man who doesn't respect his own life isn't likely to respect anybody else's. That's logical, isn't it?"
"No," said Enderby promptly.
"Oh, well," said Dr Greenslade sarcastically, "you, of course, are the big expert on logic."
"I don't pretend to be anything," said Enderby loudly, "except a poet whose inspiration has departed. I'm an empty eggshell."
"You are," said Dr Greenslade sternly, "a man of education and culture who can be of great value to the community. When you're made fit again, that is. Empty eggshells, indeed," he poohed. "Poets," he near-sneered. "Those days are past, those wide-eyed romantic days. We're living in a realistic age now," he said. "Science is making giant strides. And as for poets," he said, with sudden bubbling intimacy, "I met a poet once. He was a nice decent fellow with no big ideas about himself. He wrote very nice poetry, too, which was not too difficult to understand." He looked at Enderby as though Enderby's poetry was both not nice and not intelligible. "This man," said Dr Greenslade, "didn't have your advantages. No private income for him, no cosy little flat in a seaside resort. He had a wife and family, and he wasn't ashamed of working for them. He wrote his poetry at week-ends." He nodded at Enderby, week-day poet. "And there was nothing abnormal about him, nothing at all. He didn't go about with a lobster on a string or marry his own sister or eat pepper before drinking claret. He was a decent family man whom nobody would have taken for a poet at all." Enderby groaned frightfully. "And," added Dr Greenslade, "he had a poem in all the anthologies." Enderby held back a loud howl. Then he said:
"If he was so normal, why did you have anything to do with him?"
"This," smiled Dr Greenslade in large triumph, "was a purely social acquaintance. Now," he said, looking at the clock above Enderby's head, "you'd better get back to your ward." Enderby stood up. He was in hospital pyjamas, dressing-gown, slippers, and felt grey, shrunken, a pauper. He shambled out of the electro-cardiogram room into the corridor, hesitated at the stairs with their WAY OUT notice, remembered that they had locked his clothes away, and then, resigned, shuffled into the Medical Ward. He had been brought here to sleep it off after the stomach-pumping in the Emergency Ward, had lain for two days starved in a sort of big cot with iron bars at the sides, and now was allowed to pout about the ward in his dressing-gown. If a fellow-patient said, "What's wrong with you, mate?" he replied, on the ward sister's instructions, "Acetyl-salicylic poisoning." But these rough men, all with impressively visible illnesses, knew better than that. This here one had had a go at doing himself in. As Enderby, hands in dressing-gown pockets, bowed towards his bed (ringworm to the left of it, to the right a broken femur), a dwarf of a working-man hopped towards him on crutches. " 'Ere," said the dwarf.
"Yes?" said Enderby. The dwarf cleared his nasopharynx via his oesophagus and said, conspiratorially:
"Trick cyclist been 'avin a go at you, eh? I seen 'im come in. Ridin' all over you, eh?"
"That's right," said Enderby.
"Should be a law against that, I reckon. Draggin' out secrets from the back of your mind, like. Not decent, way I see it. 'Ad a go at me once. Know what that was for?"
"No," said Enderby. The dwarf hopped nearer, his eyes ashine. He said, low:
"Wife and kids was out at the pictures, see. I 'ad nowt to do, not bein' much on the telly, and I'd washed up after my supper and put the kitchen straight. I'd read the paper too, see, and there wasn't much in that, all murders and suchlike and these 'ere summit conferences. Anyway, know what I'd got in my overall pocket?"
"No," said Enderby.
"One of these big nuts," said the dwarf. "Don't know 'ow it got there, but there it was. Big one," he insisted, making an illustrative ring with thumb and finger. "A nut, you know. Not a nut you can eat, but one of these nuts you put a bolt through." He showed, with the index-finger of his other hand, how exactly this was done. "Do you see my meaning?" he asked.
"Yes," said Enderby.
"Well," said the dwarf, "I got to lookin' at it and thinkin' about it, and then an idea come into me 'ead. Know what the idea was?"
"No," said Enderby.
The dwarf came very close, awkward on his crutches, and seemed about to eat Enderby's ear. "Put it in," he said. "Wife was out, see, and there was nowt else to do. It fitted real snug, too, you'd be surprised. Anyway, there it was, and you know what 'appened then?"
"No," said Enderby.
"Wouldn't come out," said the dwarf, reliving the horror in his eyes. "There it was, stuck in, and it wouldn't come out. Right bloody fool I must 'ave looked to the cat when it come in through the window. A 'ot night, see, and the window was open. There I was, with this thing of mine stuck in this nut, and it wouldn't come out. I tries all sort of things-puttin' it under the cold water tap and gettin' a file at it, but it wasn't no good. Then the wife comes back from the pictures and she sees what I've done and she sends the kids straight upstairs. Bad enough the cat seein' it, but it wasn't right the kids should know what was goin' on. So you know what she does?"
"No," said Enderby.
"She sends for the ambulance and they takes me to 'ospital. Not this one, though. We was livin' somewhere else at the time. Well, they tries and tries, but it's no good. All sorts of things they tries. Know what they 'as to do at the finish?"
"No," said Enderby.
"Send for the fire brigade. I'm not tellin' you a word of a lie, but they 'as to do that. On my God's honour, they send for the fire brigade, and you know what the fire brigade 'as to do?"
"No," said Enderby.
"They gets one of their special saws to saw through metal and they as a 'ose-pipe playin' on it all the time. Know why that was?"
"To keep it cool," said Enderby.
"You've got it," said the dwarf. "There's not many as would give the right answer like you done. To keep it cool. Anyway, they gets it off, and that's when they ask me to see this trick cyclist like what you've seen. Didn't do no good though." He looked gloomy.
"Is that why you're back in again?" said Enderby.
"Naw," said the working-dwarf with scorn. "Broke my leg at work this time. Always somethin' though, int there?"
From this moment Enderby thought that, with a certain measure of help and encouragement, he might conceivably decide that it might be possible for him to want, with certain inevitable reservations, to go on living. He woke up in the middle of the night laughing at some dream-joke. The sister had to give him a sedative.
Flitchley, surrounded by the pink snow of apple-blossom, cuckoo-(appropriately)-echoing, green, quiet with a quiet that the clack and clock of table-tennis only emphasized the more, Flitchley was all that Dr Greenslade had said it would be. Several weeks later Enderby sat on a bird-loud terrace reading a harmless boy's book of violence ("… The Chink, with a sinister Oriental smile on his inscrutable yellow countenance, wrenched the knife from the back of his dead companion and threw it straight at Colonel Bill. Bill ducked, hearing the evil weapon twang in the door. He had ducked only just in time. 'Now,' he said, a cold smile on his clean-cut features, 'I think I've had more than enough of your treachery for one day, Mr John Chinaman.' He advanced on the Chink, who now gibbered in his own outlandish language what was evidently a prayer for mercy…"). In the day-room was the cheerful music of the table being set for luncheon. Beyond the haha a gardener bent at work. Fellow-patients of Enderby walked the grounds or, like himself, sat at rest with sedative literature. Occasionally Enderby would lower his book to his lap, close his eyes, and say softly to himself, many times over, "My name is Enderby-Hogg, my name is Enderby-Hogg." It was part of the process of his cure; a gently contrived change of identity. Hogg had been his mother's maiden name; soon, the Enderby silenced, it would be altogether his.
The bell rang for luncheon and, from the day-room radio, news refinedly boomed. Enderby-Hogg sat down, one of a mess of six, having first shaken hands with a Mr Barnaby. Mr Barnaby, like a dog, insisted on shaking hands with everybody at all hours of the day and sometimes, waking everybody gently up for the purpose, in the night. He had a sweet wrinkled face, and, like that Enderby soon to disappear, was something of a poet. He had written verses on the Medical Superintendent beginning:
You have certainly got it in for me and no
Question about that, you fierce-eyed man.
Your wife no more loves you than that black crow
Up in the tree loves you, or that can
Which whilom held baked beans of the brand of Heinz,
Or that dog belonging to the lodge-keeper which so sorely whines
At the same table was Mr Trill, one of the symptoms of whose derangement was an ability to name the winner of any major horse-race run in the last sixty years. He was a man of venerable appearance who, he swore, hated racing. Enderby-Hogg now said to him, in automatic greeting, "Thousand Guineas, 1910." Mr Trill looked up mournfully from his soup and said, "Winkipop, owned Astor, trained W. Waugh, ridden Lynham. Starting price five to two." There was Mr Beecham, a master plumber who, on psychiatric instructions, spent all his day painting pictures: black snakes, red murder, his wife with three heads. Mr Shap, insurance agent, with dark glasses and a black hole for a mouth, said nothing, did nothing, but at times would scream one word: PASTE. Finally there was Mr Killick who preached, in an undertone, to the birds. He had the look of a successful butcher.
This company of six drank its soup and then was served, by two cheerful nurses of radiant complexion, with slabs of meat pie and scooped spuds. There were spoons and forks, but no knives. The meal chewed itself by pleasantly and quietly, except that at one point a dressing-gowned man at another table cried to the ceiling:
"Sink her, Number One!"
He was soothed quickly by one of the nurses, a homely Lancashire lass with a strong sense of humour. She said, "You sink that meat pie quick, my lad. Treacle duff's coming alongside." Enderby-Hogg laughed with the rest at this typical bit of Lancashire badinage. The treacle duff, with liberal custard, was then wheeled in, and Mr Killick, hungry after a morning preaching to the birds, had three helpings. After the meal some went back to bed, while Enderby-Hogg and others sat in the solarium. Enderby-Hogg had no money, but some obscure charitable fund invoked by the almoner supplied him with a sufficiency of cigarettes. A nurse came round with matches to light up for the smokers: no patient was allowed matches of his own, not since one Jehovah-minded G.P.I, sufferer had called Flitchley Sodom and set fire to it.
After a quiet smoke and lazy rambling chat, Enderby-Hogg went to the lavatory. The little cabinets, without doors could be looked in on from the corridor through a thick glass wall: even here there was no sense of aloneness.
After an ample healthy movement, Enderby-Hogg went to the ward he shared with eleven others, there to lie on his bed till summoned for his afternoon session with Dr Wapenshaw. He finished his boy's book ("… 'And,' grinned Colonel Bill, 'despite all the dangers and hazards, it was a jolly good adventure which I'd be happy to undertake again.' But, as he pulled the throttle and the mixture exploded sweet and strong, little did he think that adventure of an even more thrilling kind awaited him. That adventure, chaps, we shall learn about in our next story-the ninety-seventh!-of Colonel Bill and the faithful Spike."). Enderby-Hogg looked forward, without undue excitement, to reading that story.
At three o'clock a smiling nurse summoned him to Dr Wapenshaw. Dr Wapenshaw said, "Ah, hallo there, old man. Things going all right, eh? Jolly good, jolly good," for all the world like Colonel Bill or his creator. Dr Wapenshaw was a big man whose superfluous fat proclaimed, like medals, his former Rugby football triumphs. He had large feet and a moustache and a voice like Christmas pudding. But he was a clever and original psychiatrist. "Sit down," he invited. "Smoke if you want to." Enderby-Hogg sat down, smiling shyly. He adored Dr Wapenshaw.
"Enderby-Hogg, Enderby-Hogg," said Dr Wapenshaw, as though beginning a nursery rhyme. A thick file was open on the desk before him. "Enderby-Hogg. Bit of a mouthful, isn't it? I think we might drop the Enderby, don't you? Keep it, of course, in the background as an optional extra if you like. How do you feel about the Hogg?"
"Oh, fine," said Hogg. "Perfectly all right."
"What do you associate the name with? Pigs? Filth?" smiling. "Gluttony?" Humorously, Dr Wapenshaw pig-snorted.
"Of course not," said Hogg, smiling too. "Roses. A lawn in summer. A sweet-smelling woman at the piano. A silver voice. The smoke from a Passing Cloud."
"Excellent," said Dr Wapenshaw. "That will do very well indeed." He sat back in his swivel-chair, swivelling boyishly from side to side, looking kindly at Hogg. "That beard's coming along all right," he said. "You should have a pretty good one in a couple of weeks. Oh, yes, I've made a note about glasses. We're sending you to the oculist on Thursday."
"Thank you very much," said Hogg.
"Don't thank me, my dear fellow," said Dr Wapenshaw. "After all, it's what we're here for, isn't it? To help." Tears came into Hogg's eyes. "Now," said Dr Wapenshaw, "I've explained to you already just what it is we're trying to do and why we're trying to do it. Could you recap"-he smiled-"in your own words?"
"Enderby," said Hogg, "was the name of a prolonged adolescence. The characteristics of adolescence were well-developed and seemed likely to go on for ever. There was, for instance, this obsession with poetry. There was masturbation, liking to be shut up in the lavatory, rebelliousness towards religion and society."
"Excellent," said Dr Wapenshaw.
"The poetry was a flower of that adolescence," said Hogg. "It still remains good poetry, some of it, but it was a product of an adolescent character. I shall look back with some pride on Enderby's achievement. Life, however, has to be lived."
"Of course it has," said Dr Wapenshaw, "and you're going to live it. What's more, you're going to enjoy living it. Now, let me tell you what's going to happen to you. In a month's time-perhaps less if you continue to make the excellent progress you're already making-we're sending you to our Agricultural Station at Snorthorpe. It's really a convalescent home, you know, where you do a little gentle work-not too much, of course: just what you feel you can do and nothing more-and lead a very pleasant simple social life in beautiful surroundings. Snorthorpe," said Dr Wapenshaw, "is a little town on a river. There are summer visitors, swans, boating, nice little pubs. You'll love it. A group of you-under supervision, of course, if you can really call it supervision-will be allowed out to pubs and dances and cinemas. In the home itself there'll be chess competitions and sing-songs. Once a week," smiled Dr Wapenshaw, "I myself like to come down and lead a singsong. You'll like that, won't you?"
"Oh yes," breathed Hogg.
"Thus," said Dr Wapenshaw, "you'll gradually adjust yourself to living in society. You'll even meet women, you know," he smiled. "Some day, you know, I look forward to your making a real go of marriage. Enderby made rather a mess of that, didn't he? Still, it's all over now. The annulment's going through, so they tell me, quite smoothly."
"I can't even remember her name," frowned Hogg.
"Don't worry about that," said Dr Wapenshaw. "That's Enderby's affair, isn't it? You'll remember it in your own good time. And, moreover, you'll remember it with amusement." Hogg smiled tentatively, as in anticipation. "Now, as far as your future generally is concerned, I don't want you to think about that at the moment. There's going to be no worry about getting a really congenial job for you-we have our own department, you know, which sees to all that, and very efficient they are. The thing for you to do at the moment is to enjoy being this new person we're trying to create. After all, it is great fun, isn't it? I'm getting no end of a kick out of it all, and I want you to share that kick with me. After all," he smiled, "we've grown very close, haven't we, these last few weeks? We've embarked on a real adventure together, and I'm enjoying every minute of it."
"Oh, me too," said Hogg eagerly. "And I'm really most awfully grateful."
"Well, it's really awfully nice of you to say that," said Dr Wapenshaw. "But you've helped no end, yourself, you know." He smiled once more and then became genially gruffly business-like. "I'll be seeing you," he said, looking at his diary, "on Friday morning. Now off you go and have your tea or whatever it is and leave me to see my next victim." He sighed humorously. "Work, work, work." He shook his head. "No end to it. Run along now," he grinned. Hogg grinned back and ran along.
For tea they had Marmite sandwiches, fish-paste sandwiches (Mr Shap cried out PASTE with such exquisite appropriateness that everybody had to laugh), fancy cakes and a small plum cake to each mess of six. After tea Hogg walked the grounds and surprised Mr Killick whispering to some bread-guzzling starlings beyond the haha, "Come on now, you birdies, be good and kind to each other and love God who made you all. He was a bird just like you." Hogg returned to the sunny solarium to find Mr Barnaby triumphantly finishing another stanza of his Ode to the Medical Superintendent. He read this aloud with great feeling, having first shaken hands heartily with Hogg:
I saw you the other night out on the field
Walking with a big stick with which you struck the grass
Repeatedly, but the dumb grass would not yield
To your importunities. So it will come to pass
That that piece of china standing on your shelf
Will fall on your head and give quite a shock to your evil-smelling self.
For dinner there were fish and a rice pudding with sultanas embedded in it. Mr Beecham, his hands vermilion from his day's work on a large symbolical canvas, slowly picked out all the sultanas from his portion and arranged them in a simple gestalt on his bread-plate. After dinner there was television: amateur boxing which excited two patients so much that one of the nurses had to switch over to the other channel. On the other channel was a simple morality of good and evil set in the West of North America in the eighteen-sixties. It was interrupted at intervals by asthenic women demonstrating washing-machines, though some patients evidently could not see these as interpolations, taking them rather as integral to the plot. Integration was the theme: the building of a new human society under the sheriff's steadfast bright star. Hogg nodded frequently, seeing all this (conquest of new territory, death to the evil antisocial) as an allegory of his own reorientation.
High summer in Snorthorpe. Boats for hire by the bridge, by the bridge a hotel called the White Hart, much favoured by summer visitors. Drinkers squinting happily in moonlight on the terrace. Dogs yapping in glee, chased by children. Ducks and swans, full-fed, pampered. Willows. An old castle on a height far above the river.
A knot of men came walking, in loose formation though evidently a supervised gang, in the direction of the little town from the sunbrown fields of the Agricultural Station. They were men who looked as burnt and fit as the boating visitors, each carrying some such tool as a hoe or fork. By the bridge they halted at the cheerful command of their leader. "All right," he called. "Rest for five minutes. Old Charlie here says he's got a stone in his boot." Mr Peacock was a decent brown man, squat and upright, who treated his charges like young brothers. Old Charlie sat on the parapet and Mr Peacock helped him off with his road-dusty boot.
"Fag?" said Piggy Hogg (as he was jocularly called) to his companion. Bob Curran took one, nodding his thanks. He pulled out a cheap cylindrical lighter and struck it, the flame invisible in noon air that was all flame. Piggy Hogg bent over, sucking his fag alight.
"Won't be long for you now," said Bob Curran.
"Won't be long," said Piggy Hogg, taking in the long receding bank of willows. "Next week, they reckon." He detached a tobacco fibre from his lower lip. The lips were framed in brown beard pied with grey; his skin was tanned; he wore steel spectacles. He had something of the look of Hemingway, but there his association with literature ended. A moderately well-spoken middle-aged man evidently not used to manual work, but a good trier, respected by his ward-mates, helpful as a letter-writer. Some had said that it was a waste of an educated man, putting him like they said they were going to as bar-tender in training at a Midland hotel. But Piggy Hogg knew it was no waste.
A couple of nights back he had, after lights out, slipped on his bedroom headphones. Rejecting, with a click of the plastic dial on the wall, first the Light, then the Home, he had notched into the Third. A bored-sounding young man had been talking about Modern Poetry: "… Enderby, before his unaccountable disappearance… established as a good minor poet in the tradition… perhaps little to say to our generation… the more significent work of Jarvis, Sime and Cazalet…" He had listened with absolutely no interest. One was used, one was thrown away; Enderby had come out of it better than many; Hogg was looking forward to being a bar-tender. A bar-tender, moreover, who would be different from most, quite a character with his odd lines of poetry thrown out over the frothing pints. Behind the words and rhythms lay the sensations. Time for those.
"What did the old sky-pilot have to say to you?" asked Bob Curran.
"Him?" said Piggy Hoggy vaguely. "Oh, I thought he made out quite a reasonable case for the Church of England. It's a communion of sorts. It doesn't make too many demands. He lent me some books to read, but I told him I'm not much of a reading man. If it'll give him any pleasure, I'll join."
"I've never been much of a man for religion myself," said Bob Curran. "My dad was a tinker and all tinkers are atheists. We used to have a lot of fun, I remember, on Thursday evenings in the old days. You know, belly of pork and cider and somebody would give a talk about Causal Necessity and then there'd be one hell of a discussion afterwards. All in our front parlour, you know, with The Death of Nelson above the Joanna." Bob Curran was a very lean man of fifty-seven, a radio salesman recovering from schizophrenia. "It seems to me," he said, "that people had more faith in those days. They believed more. Why, I do believe that my old man, who was nothing more than an ignorant old tinker, believed more in there not being a God than some of these religious sods today believe in there being one. It's a funny old world," he concluded, as he always did.
"Oh, yes," agreed Piggy Hogg, "but it's not without interest." After lunch there was to be a cricket match between the Home and the local St John Ambulance. Piggy Hogg had been persuaded to umpire. He had always been flustered by l.b.w. but, he had decided, when in doubt over any appeal except an obvious clean bowl or catch, always to say, "Not out". That night there was to be a singsong led by Dr Wapenshaw, with beer from the canteen-two bottles a man. Piggy Hogg led the winning quiz-team. He had beaten Alfred Breasley at chess.
"Right, my tigers," called Mr Peacock. "Old Charlie's boot's free from stones." (Old Charlie grinned without teeth.) "God's in his heaven, all's right with the etcetera etcetera. On our merry way. Let me see, it's Saturday, isn't it? Corned beef and mashed and beetroot and treacle tart to follow. Right, Piggy old man, stop slavering at the chops. Let's march."
Piggy Hogg glanced up at the tiny clouds (cotton-wool stoppers from heavenly aspirin-bottles) and down at the sun-warmed boats on the shore that looked like chicken-carcasses. A swan opened an archangelic wing. Shouldering his hoe, chucking away his fag-butt, he marched.