The Complete Enderby (30 page)

‘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 sing-song. 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:

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, fullfed, 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 significant 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 sing-song 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.

To Deborah

Esperad todavía.

El bestial elemento se solaza

En el odio a la sacra poesía

Y se arroja baldón de raza a raza.

– Rubén Darío

‘IT’S,’ SAID THIS
customer at the bar, ‘what I personally would want to call – and anyone else can call it what the hell they like for all I care –’ Hogg listened respectfully, half-bowed, wiping dry a glass from which a noisy woman, an actress or something, had drunk and eaten a Pimm’s Number One. ‘But it’s what I, speaking for myself, would call –’ Hogg burnished an indelible veronica of lipstick, waiting for some highly idiosyncratic pay-off, not just the just word but the word just with just this customer’s personal brand of justness. ‘A barefaced liberty.’ Hogg bowed deeper in tiny dissatisfaction. He had been a wordman himself once (nay, still – but best to lock all that up: they had said those days were past, trundled off by time’s rollicking draymen, empties, and they knew best, or said they did. Still –) ‘A man’s name’s his name, all said and done.’ You couldn’t say what this man had just said. A liberty was diabolical; it was lies that were barefaced. Hogg had learned so much during his season with the salt of the earth, barmen and suchlike. But he said blandly:

‘It’s very kind of you, sir, to feel that way about it.’

‘That’s all right,’ said this customer, brushing the locution towards Hogg as though it were a tip.

‘But they didn’t call it after me, sir, in a manner of speaking.’ That was good, that was: genuine barman. ‘They brought me in here, as you might say, because the place was already called what it is.’

‘There’s been plenty named Hogg,’ said the customer sternly. ‘There was this man that was a saint and started these schools where all these kids were in rags. They had to be in rags or they wouldn’t have them in. It was like what they call a school uniform.
And
there’s this Hogg that was a lord and gave it up to be prime minister but he didn’t get it so he goes round ringing bells and telling them all off.’

‘There was also James Hogg, the poet,’ said Hogg unwisely.

‘You leave poets out of it.’

‘The Ettrick shepherd he was known as, in a manner of speaking. Pope in worsted stockings.’

‘And religion as well.’ This customer, who had had no lunch except whisky, grew louder. ‘I might be an Arsee, for all you know. Respect a man’s colour and creed and you won’t go far wrong. I take a man as I find him.’ He spread his jacket like wings to show green braces. Hogg looked uneasily across the near-empty bar. The clock said five to three. John, the tall sardonic Spaniard who waited on, the Head Steward’s nark, he was taking it all in all right. Hogg sweated gently.