The Complete Enderby (51 page)

Here was a family that looked British. The wife was thin as from a long illness, the husband wore stern glasses, a boy and girl undressed for water-play chased and tried to hit each other.

‘Daft old Jennifer!’

‘Silly stupid Godfrey! You’ve got all sand in your tummy-button!’

Enderby addressed the father, saying, with begging hand: ‘
Allah allah. Baksheesh, effendi
.’

‘Here,’ said the man to his wife, ‘is an example of what I mean. You have a good look at him and what do you see? You see a
wog
layabout in the prime of life. He ought to be able to do a decent day’s work like I do.’

‘
Allah
,’ with less confidence.

‘They should be made to work. If I had the running of this tinpot little dictatorship I’d make sure that they did.’ He had a cheap-looking plastic-bodied camera dangling from a cord. His stare was bold and without humour.

‘He’s only a poor old man,’ said his wife. She was, Enderby could tell, a woman much put upon; the children too would be insolent to her, asking
why
all the time.

‘Old? He’s not much older than what I am. Are you? Eh? Speak English, do you? Old.’

‘No mash Ingrish,’ Enderby said.

‘Well, you should learn it, shouldn’t you? Improve yourself. Go to night-classes and that. Learn something, anyway. This is the modern world, no room for people that won’t work, unless, that is, they’ve been thrown out of it through no fault of their own. Don’t understand a blind bit of what I’m saying, do you? Trade, eh? Learn a trade. If you want money, do something for it.’

‘Come on, Jack,’ said the wife. ‘There’s a man there keeps looking at our Godfrey.’

Enderby had not previously met a response to mendicancy as hard-hearted and utilitarian as this. He looked grimly at this man of the modern world: a trade union man, without doubt; perhaps a shop steward. He wore a dark suit with, concession to holiday, wings of open-necked shirt apparently ironed on to lapels. ‘Trade,’ Enderby said. ‘I got trade.’ The sky seemed to be getting darker.

‘Oh, understand more than you let on you’re able to, eh? Well, what trade have you got, then?’

‘
Bulbul
,’ Enderby said. But that might not be the right word. ‘
Je suis
,’ he said, ‘
poète
.’

‘Poet? You say poet?’ The man’s mouth had opened into a square of small derision. He took from a sidepocket a ten-centime piece. ‘You say some poetry, then. Listen to this, Alice.’

‘Oh, let him alone, Jack.’

It might have been the word
bulbul
that did it. Suddenly Enderby, in a kind of scorn, found himself reciting a mock
ruba’iy
. Would
those
debauchees of the Doggy Wog laugh less at this than at his Horatian ode?

‘Kazwana ghishri fana kholamabu

Bolloka wombon vurkelrada slabu
,

Ga farthouse wopwop yairgang offal flow

Untera merb –’

A voice behind him said: ‘Better, Enderby. Much better. Not quite so obsessed with meaning as you used to be.’ It was an eroded dyspnoeal voice. Enderby turned in shock to see Rawcliffe being helped, by two Moorish youths in new black trousers and white shirts, up the three steps that led to the door of his bar-restaurant. Rawcliffe paused at the top, waiting for the door to be opened. He panted down ghastily at Enderby, his palsied grey head ashake. ‘Thou art translated,’ he wavered, ‘but not so much as thou thinkest. Full of surprises, though. I’ll concede so much.’ The door opened, and its glass panels mirrored momentarily the thickening sea-clouds. ‘
Gracias
,’ Rawcliffe said to the two Moors and trembled from his trouser-pocket a ten-dirham note for them. They hand-waved and grinned off. Then, to Enderby: ‘Come and drink with one about to die.’

‘All right,’ said the trade union man. ‘You win. Take your ackers.’ But Enderby ignored him and followed, with his own shaking, the broken frame of Rawcliffe from which an Edwardian suit bagged and hung. About to die, death, dying. That man Easy Walker had said something about his being crookidy dook. But was it rather that Rawcliffe, out of the vatic residuum of a failed poet’s career, knew that he was going to be killed? Enderby then realized that he’d done nothing, despite this long wait, about getting hold of a weapon. God knew the shops had offered him enough. Not cut out for murder perhaps really. Not really his trade.

Enderby climbed those three steps like a whole flight, shaking and panting. When he entered the bar he found that Rawcliffe, helped now by a dark and curly pudding of a young man, had not yet
arrived
at the place he was groaning and yearning towards – a fireside-type chair at the end of the room, facing the main door, with the back door near it open for air. There was too much glass here altogether: it was to bake the summer customers and make them drink more. But now, in the expected pathetic fallacy, the sky was darkening fast, rain on its way. The bar-counter was to the right, facing the doorless entrance to the eating-conservatory. The pudding young man got behind the bar before starting to shoo Enderby out. Rawcliffe, now heavily sitting, said:
‘Oqué, oqué, Manuel. Es un amigo.’

‘That’s not,’ Enderby said, ‘quite what I’d call myself.’ There was an aloof interested inner observer, he was concerned to be interested to note, noting all this as possible material for a future poem, including the notation of the interest. That was not right: it was that inner observer, also creator, that had primarily been wronged. ‘The enemy,’ Enderby said. ‘Come to get you. You know what for.’ The inner observer tut-tutted.

‘I knew you’d give it up, Enderby,’ Rawcliffe said. ‘You did bloody well, really. All those years writing verse when, by rights, you should have flitted to the tatty Olympus of remembered potency.’ He wavered all this like an ancient don pickled in the carbon dioxide of his college rooms. Then he coughed bitterly, cursing with little breath. Recovering, he gasped: ‘Brandy, Manuel. Large.’

‘Doctor he say –’

‘Curse the bloody doctor and you and every bloody body. Who’s master here, God blast you? Brandy. Very very large.’ Manuel, his eyes on Rawcliffe, slopped much Cordon Bleu into a lemonade glass. ‘Bring it over, Enderby. Have one yourself.’

‘How did you know it was me?’ Enderby asked, interest much too active.

‘I can see through things. Poetic clairvoyance. Bring that brandy over.’

‘I’m not here –’

‘To be a bloody waiter. I know, I know. Bring it over just the same.’ Enderby shambled to where Rawcliffe was and splashed the glass down on a small table by the chair. This table had a mass of personal trash on it, as, Enderby thought, in that poem
by
Coventry Patmore: to comfort his sad heart. A pile of old newspapers, a Woolworth watch, a couple of stones (ha) abraded by the beach, an empty bottle, no bluebells, cigarette packets. Beware of pity, however. Pity spareth many an evil thing. Rawcliffe took the glass and, in an aromatic brandy tempest, put it to his starved lips. Bleeding to death, Enderby saw; he was near the end of his blood. Pity causeth the forests to fail.

‘Swine,’ Enderby said as Rawcliffe drank. ‘Filthy traitor and pervert.’

Rawcliffe surfaced from drinking. His face started to mottle. He looked up at Enderby from behind his Beetle goggles, his eyes bloodless like his mouth, and said: ‘I grant the latter imputation, Enderby,’ he said, ‘if you call a search for pure love perversion.’ As on cue, the negroid waiter in the tarboosh appeared from the kitchen, posed against the doorpost, and looked in a sort of loving horror at Rawcliffe. ‘There, my black beauty,’ cooed Rawcliffe’s abraded larynx. ‘Anybody noshing in there?
Quién está comiendo?
’ His head twitched towards the dining-room.

‘Nadie.’

‘Shut up bloody shop, Manuel,’ coughed Rawcliffe. ‘We’re closed till further notice. The bloody
baigneurs
and
baigneuses
– and a fat pustular lot they are, Enderby – can do key-business at the scullery door.’ Manuel began to cry. ‘Stop that,’ said Rawcliffe with a ghost of sharpness. ‘As for,’ he turned back to Enderby, ‘being a filthy traitor, I’ve done nothing to contravene the Official Secrets Act. The beastly stupid irony of sending you out here as a spy or whatever it is you are. That
maquillage
is ridiculous. It looks like boot-polish. Get it off, man. You’ll find turps in the kitchen.’

‘To me,’ Enderby said. ‘A traitor to me, bastard. You grew fat on the theft and travesty of my art.’ Pity slayeth my nymphs. ‘I mean metaphorically fat.’

‘Of course you do, my dear Enderby.’ Rawcliffe finished his brandy, tried to cough and couldn’t. ‘Better. A mere palliative, though. And that’s why you got yourself up like that, eh? My brain’s fuddled, such of it as has not yet been eaten away by this encroaching angel. I fail to see why you should dress up as whatever it is you’re supposed to be in order to tell me I’ve grown metaphorically fat on your whatever it is.’ He grew suddenly drowsy and then shook
himself
awake. ‘Have you locked those bloody doors yet, Manuel?’ he tried to shout.

‘Pronto, pronto.’

‘It’s a bit of a long story.’ Enderby saw no way out of seeming to make an excuse. ‘I’m hiding from the police, you see. Interpol and so on.’ He sat down on a stackable chair.

‘Make yourself comfortable, my dear old Enderby. Help yourself to a drink. You look sunken and hungry. There’s Antonio sleeping in his kitchen, a very passable past-master of short order cookery. We’ll shout him awake and he will, singing his not altogether trustworthy Andalusian heart out, knock you up his own idiosyncratic version of a mixed grill.’ He probed his throat for a cough but none came. ‘Better. I feel better. It must be your presence, my dear old Enderby.’

‘Murder,’ Enderby said. ‘Wanted for murder. Me, I mean.’ He couldn’t help a minimal smirk. The Woolworth watch ticked loudly. As in a last desperate gasp, the sun slashed the shelves of bottles behind the bar with fire and crystal, then retired. The clouds hunched closer. Bathers were running into Rawcliffe’s arena, after keys and clothes. Manuel was there shouting at them, jangling keys. ‘
Cerrado. Fermé. Geschlossen
. Shut up bloody shop.’

‘Like something from poor dear dead Tom Eliot,’ said Rawcliffe. ‘He always liked that little poem of mine. The one, you remember, that is in all the anthologies. And now the rain laying our dust. No more shelter in the colonnade and sun in the Hofgarten.’ He seemed ready to snivel.

‘Murder,’ Enderby said, ‘is what we were talking about. I mean me being wanted for murder.’

‘Be absolute for life or death,’ said Rawcliffe, fumbling a dirty handkerchief from one of the many pockets of his jacket-face. He gave the handkerchief to his mouth with both hands, coughed loosely, then showed Enderby a gout of blood. ‘Better up than down, out than in. So, Enderby,’ he said, folding in the blood like a ruby and stowing it with care, ‘you’ve opted for the fantasy life. The defence of pretence. I can’t say I blame you. The real world’s pretty horrible when the gift goes. I should know, God help me.’

‘It went but it came back. The gift, I mean. And now,’ Enderby said, ‘I shall write in prison.’ He crossed one leg over the other,
disclosing
much of his European trousers, and, for some reason, felt like beaming at Rawcliffe. ‘They don’t have the death penalty any more,’ he added.

Rawcliffe shook and shook. It was with anger, Enderby saw with surprise. ‘Don’t talk to me about the bloody death penalty,’

Rawcliffe shook. ‘Nature exacts her own punishments. I’m dying, Enderby, dying, and you burble away about writing verse in prison. It’s not the dying I mind so much as the bloody indignity. My underpants filling with bloody cack, and the agony of pissing, and the smell. The smell, Enderby. Can you smell the smell?’

‘I’ve got used to smells,’ Enderby apologized, ‘living as I’ve been doing. You don’t smell any different,’ he smelled, ‘than that time in Rome. You bloody traitor,’ he then said hotly. ‘You stole my bloody poem and crucified it.’

‘Yes yes yes yes.’ Rawcliffe seemed to have grown tired again. ‘I suppose the decay was always with me. Well, it won’t be long now. And I shall infect neither earth nor air. Let the sea take me. The sea, Enderby,
thalassa, la belle mer
. Providence, in whatever guise, sent you, in whatever guise. Because, delightful though these boys could often be in my violent-enough-smelling, though really Indian summer, days, they can’t altogether be trusted. With me gone, a mere parcel of organic sludge yumyumyummed away at by boring phagocytes, Enderby, the posthumous memory of my request will not move them to fulfil it. Oh, dear me, no. So that can be handed over to you with total confidence, a fellow-Englishman, a fellow-poet.’ The boys could be heard in the kitchen, hearty Mediterranean lip-smacking, the rarer and more sophisticated ping of a fork on a plate, Moghrabi conversation, laughter escaping from munches. Not altogether to be trusted. The rain now came down, and Rawcliffe, as if pleased that a complicated experimental process were under way, nodded. Enderby suddenly realized that that was who he’d got his own nod from: Rawcliffe.

‘Rawcliffe,’ he said, ‘bastard. I’m not here to do anything for you, bastard as you are. You’ve got to be killed. As a defiler of art and a bloody traitor.’ He noticed that he still had one leg comfortably crossed over the other. He disposed himself more aggressively, hands tensely gripping knees, though still seated. That tan polish
seemed
to be sweating off, a bit streaky. He’d better do something about that before killing Rawcliffe.