The Complete Enderby (5 page)

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 Arry. ‘Thelma as serves int cocktail bar. A new 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 Arry, ‘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 reet 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’ a’ll 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 reet 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 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,