The Complete Enderby (52 page)

‘If you killed me,’ Rawcliffe said, ‘you’d be doing me a very large favour. There might be a small obituary in
The Times
. The triumph of that early poem might be recalled, the poem itself reproduced, who knows? As for a weapon, there’s a till-protecting service revolver in that cupboard behind the bar. Or our steak-knives are pretty sharp. Or you could feed me, say, fifty sleeping-capsules, pellet by pellet. Oh, my dear Enderby, don’t be a bloody bore. Let me expiate in nature’s way, blast you.’

‘That’s not right,’ Enderby started to mumble. ‘Justice. What I mean is.’ What he meant was that he’d been quite looking forward to a life sentence, a bit of peace and quiet, get on with his. ‘I mean that if they’re going to get me it’d better be for something real.’ Then: ‘I didn’t mean that. What I meant to say was for a sheep as well as a lamb. Look, I will have a drink after all.’

‘Better, Enderby, much better. There’s a nice bottle of Strega behind the bar. Remember those brief sunny Strega-drinking days by the Tiber? Days of betrayal, you will say. Was I the only betrayer?’ He sat up with sudden alertness. ‘Do pass me that bottle of life-surrogate there, my dear Enderby. Cordon Bleu, a blue cordon to keep out that scrabbling crowd of clawers hungry for my blood. They must wait, must they not? We have things to see to, you and I, first.’ Enderby went to the bar, handed shaking Rawcliffe his bottle, unwilling anyway to pour for the sod, then looked at all the other bottles, embarrassed for choice. ‘Didn’t go well, that marriage, did it, Enderby? Not cut out for marriage, not cut out for murder. Tell me all about that. No, wait. Dear Auntie Vesta. Married now to some sharp Levantine with very good suits. But she failed really, you know, failed despite everything. She’ll never be in anybody’s biography, poor bitch. You’re a remarkable man, Enderby. It was in all the papers, you know, that marriage. There was a pop nuptial mass or something. Choreography round the altar, brought down-stage for the occasion. A lot of bloody ecumenical nonsense.’

‘That,’ grudgemumbled Enderby, ‘is just what I said. Not in that connection. I mean in the other one. That priest, I mean. The day it happened.’ Fundador. Not too bad a drink, despite that blasted
moon
woman. Rawcliffe clanked and clanked out his slug, then drank. Enderby, ashamed at his quieter coordination, did a real professional barman’s pour of his own. ‘What happened was this,’ he said, before drinking. ‘This yob got shot, Crewsy that is, was, and someone put the gun in my hand. I ran, you see. You’d have done the same.’

Rawcliffe frowned, made a shot at his lips with his glass, sprayed and dribbled cognac, sucked in a fair amount, gasped. ‘Let’s get all this straight, Enderby,’ he gasped. ‘I read the papers. I read nothing else. I’ve been hanging on to life, you know. The ephemeral, I mean, the sad, pretty, awful, tragic everyday, not the transcendencies of great art. I shall meet the eternal soon enough. I shall get my chamber music without the trouble of having to attend to profundities squeezed sweating from sheepgut. Or there will be nothing, like Sam Beckett. I read the papers – the pipe-smoking dogs, the topless weddings, the assassinations of pop-singers. Yod Crewsy I know all about. Dying, soon to die. Perhaps we shall die on the same day, he and I. That will be fitting, somehow. A barman shot him. I don’t remember the name. Wait: something porcine.’

‘Hogg,’ said Enderby with impatience. ‘Hogg, Hogg.’ There was a young wall-eyed man in a dirty apron, the cook Antonio probably, standing by the kitchen door, picking his teeth with a quill and frowning puzzled at Enderby’s get-up. ‘Hogg.’

‘That’s it. So you read the papers too. A poetical name, that I did know. A very Jacobitical poet, that one. Charlie he’s my darling. Wha the deil hae we goten for a King but a wee wee German lairdie. I like that weewee bit. He spoke out, Enderby. He didn’t give a worsted-stocking damn.’

‘Listen,’ Enderby hissed, coming from behind the bar with his glass of Fundador. ‘That was me. Hogg. That was my mother’s name. They turned me into a barman, Wapenshaw and the rest of them. Yes, yes, they did. A useful citizen, they said, poet no longer. You didn’t know, nobody knew.
That
was never in the papers.’ Rawcliffe was all rigidity now, staring. ‘But,’ Enderby said, ‘I got away. As Enderby. I’d got my passport. And then that bloody woman found out that Enderby and Hogg were the same. So I had to get rid of the passport. It’s a long story really.’ He drank some Fundador and tasted again that night of the bloody woman. Bloody women.

‘It must be, it must be. But,’ said Rawcliffe, ‘it’s a man called Hogg they were looking for.’ Enderby borrowed Rawcliffe’s rigidity, staring. ‘Oh yes. Nothing about may be travelling under an alias. Ill-known minor poet who mysteriously disappeared, nothing like that. Nobody blew the gaff, my dear Enderby.’

‘She must have done. Selenographer, she called herself. The police scouring Morocco. Me in hiding. And then there’s John the Spaniard.’

‘Yes yes yes.’ Rawcliffe spoke soothingly. ‘The world’s full of traitors, isn’t it? But tell me, Enderby, why did you shoot him?’

‘He deserved to be shot. Plagiarism. A travesty of art. He stole my poems. The same as you.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Rawcliffe with emphatic weariness, ‘get it over with. Shoot everybody. Shoot the whole damned treacherous world, then get behind bars and write your bloody self-pitying doggerel.’

‘Doggerel,’ Enderby sneered. ‘You’re a right bastard to talk about me writing doggerel.’

‘Wait, though, wait. Didn’t you say something about not having shot him at all? All about someone putting the smoking gun in your innocent paw? That figures, as the smoking gun films put it. Spaghetti Westerns. They had me writing those, Enderby. But I got out. I didn’t do too badly out of
L’ Animal Binato
. That was a bloody good idea of yours.’ He shook himself back to the immediate topic. ‘You’re no killer, Enderby, be sure of that. You’re not even the predestined victim. You wriggle out of the real striking of the blow by the operation of a time-warp or space-woof or something. You fall on your feet. You’ll have to rename
El Acantilado Verde
, of course.’

‘Eh?’

‘Green cliff, raw cliff. You’ve got somebody on your side. Who? There you stand, absurd but vigorous. And Auntie Vesta is vanquished and poor Rawcliffe is dying. Is there anything more you want? Oh, yes. I shall dictate a letter to Scotland Yard – there’s an old office Oliver in my bedroom behind the bar – and confess all. After all, Enderby, I could quite easily have done it. I even had an invitation. After all, I have been one of the great diluters, worthy to be asked. And I was in London, seeing the last of my
hand
-shaking consultants. Very grave he was. Prepare to meet thy God. My Goddess, rather. Yes yes yes, the mockers and diluters and travestists deserve to die.’ Enderby frowned, unsure whether this was all drunkenness or the start of terminal delirium. Rawcliffe closed his eyes, his head lolled, his trouser-fly darkened, and then his crotch dripped. Enderby saw barman and waiter and cook all crammed in the kitchen doorway, open-mouthed.

‘Get him to bed,’ he ordered. ‘Come on, jump to it.’ Antonio crossed himself, quill still in his teeth. They did not exactly jump to it, but Manuel and the tarbooshed waiter grabbed each an oxter of Rawcliffe. Rawcliffe was dimly roaring. Enderby took the legs. He had done that before for Rawcliffe, he remembered. In Rome, honeymooning. Rawcliffe was lighter now than then. Antonio pointed where the bedroom was. The rain was easing a bit.

‘You one of his
friends
, then?’ asked the doctor. ‘Didn’t know he had any
British
ones.’ He looked at Enderby with little favour, despite the restored teeth and shaved pinkness (that tan stuff had been hard to get off, the solvents painful), scant hair but washed and brushed, serious spectacles catching the pale after-rain Tangerine light. He was also wearing one of Rawcliffe’s neo-Georgian suits, grey and hairy and not too tight in the armpits. The three boys, who were growing pimples and mannerisms as Enderby got to know them better (the tarbooshed waiter had also grown a name – Tetuani, after his home-town Tetuan), had been helpful with the restoration. They had even made up a sort of bed for him with the fireside-type chair and two or three stackable ones. It seemed to them to be a relief to have an Englishman around who was not dying.

‘Not in that sense,’ Enderby said sternly. ‘A sort of friend, but not in the sense you mean.’

‘What do you mean, in what sense I mean?’ The doctor was an upright tall man in his hale sixties, with a lot of wavy silver hair; he looked like a military medical officer who, on the repatriation of a superior garrison, had elected to stay behind. Liked the place
or
something. But probably secrets of his own; shadiness. He was a bit too sharp with his ‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean,’ Enderby said, blushing. ‘I’m finished with sex, anyway,’ he babbled, ill at ease, unhappy with doctors. As if this declaration were a clue to identity, the doctor said:

‘Seen you before somewhere, haven’t I?’

‘My picture in the papers perhaps. Or rather,’ Enderby amended with haste, ‘the picture of a man who looks very much like me, or so I’m told. A man called Hogg.’

‘I wouldn’t know. Never read the papers. A lot of lies mostly. As for that sex business, I’m not all that interested in what people do in that line so long as they don’t come moaning to me about the consequences. This one,’ he said, shouldering towards Rawcliffe, who lay feebly snorting under a blanket, ‘has favoured the dirty and diseased. But you know that, of course, being his
friend. Nostalgie de la boue
, if you know what that means. But what he’s dying of could happen to anybody. To you,’ he said. ‘To your maiden aunt in Chichester or wherever it is.’

‘I haven’t got –’

‘He’s riddled with it, no respecter of persons. All we can do is to ease the end. You can pay me for the hypodermic and the morphine now if you like. And for this and two previous consultations. Call me in again when you think he’s gone. I’ll have to sign the death certificate.’

‘The body,’ said Enderby. ‘There’s the question of –’

‘He should have done what most of the British do out here. Fifty quid or thereabouts for a patch at St Andrew’s. Burial service, resurrection and the life, the lot. Told me once he was a conscientious hedonist, though. Pleasure the end of life, that means. Very unwise, look where it’s got him.’

‘But you said it could happen to –’

‘He’ll have to be interred at Bubana. I daresay they’ll say a few words over the grave. Somebody from the consulate usually turns up. Leave all that to you.’

‘Look here –’

‘I usually get paid in cash. Out of the till.’ He marched ahead of Enderby into the bar and, nodding at Antonio and Manuel, who
were
playing Spanish Scrabble, helped himself to what looked like forty-five dirhams.

‘ELLA.’

‘ELLAS.’

‘He says,’ Enderby said, ‘that he wants to be dropped into the sea. It’s in writing, signed and witnessed. That he’s to be dropped into the sea. Is there any law against that?’

‘Damned irregular,’ the doctor said, helping himself to a snifter of Bell’s. ‘The thing ought to be done properly. What must they think of the white man here, I often ask myself. Pederasty, if you know the term, and drunkenness. Also drugs and writing. You’re new here so you wouldn’t know half that goes on. Keep away from that stupidly-named Dog place across the road. Americans of the worst type. Still,
autres temps autres moeurs
. I need not, I hope, translate. I leave everything to you, his
friend
. Don’t neglect to get me on the blower when the time comes.’

‘Enby.’ It was Rawcliffe, very feeble.

‘You’d better go in and see what he wants. Don’t excite him. He’s in your hands now.’

‘Look here –’

‘DIOS.’

‘ADIOS.’

‘Little poem in itself, that, you could call it I suppose,’ said the doctor. He smacked off the last of his Bell’s. ‘Still, I leave poetry to you and your kind. I must be off now.’

‘What do you mean by –’

‘Enby.’ Rawcliffe had pumped up a few extra teaspoonfuls of painful air to strengthen his call. No compassion in his march, the doctor let himself out. ‘Bgr you Emby. Comere.’ Enderby went back into the sickroom. It was small but cool. Rawcliffe’s bed was a double mattress laid on a worn Bokhara; thrown about all over the floor were local goatskins, of different degrees of off-whiteness; there were cheap ornaments from the bazaar – a hand of Fatma, a cobra which was really an iron spring – it throbbed and jumped and burred on the Moorish coffee table if you touched it, a Rif saddle, a hubble-bubble, scimitars, and daggers on the walls. One wall was all books in army cartridge-boxes disposed like shelf-units. Enderby had not yet had time to look through those books: there
might
conceivably be a copy of – The smell of dying Rawcliffe fought against an incense-burner and an aerosol lavender spray. Rawcliffe, naked under his blanket, said: ‘Brandy. Vry lrge.’

‘He said you’re to have morphine,’ Enderby said uneasily. ‘Alcohol won’t help the pain, he said.’

‘Bgrim. Wanna talk. Bndy.’ Enderby tried to harden his heart against him, traitor, traducer, diluter, sinner against literature. He went to get a new bottle of Cordon Bleu. Could Rawcliffe cope with a lemonade glass?

‘CACA.’

‘CACAO.’

There was a china feeding-cup next to the iron cobra. Enderby poured cognac in, sat on Rawcliffe’s bed, and helped him to drink. Rawcliffe spluttered, coughed, tried to say
Christ
, but he got down what Enderby estimated to be about a bar quintuple. He had once, in Piggy’s Sty, had to serve one of those to a Cabinet Minister: it had come to thirty shillings, taxpayers’ money.