The Complete Enderby (56 page)

‘I don’t really know,’ said Enderby. ‘I don’t read the papers.’

‘Very wise too,’ said the senior elder. ‘Stay away from that world. Get on with your job, whatever it is.’

‘Sam Foote,’ said the goitrous old man. ‘A ridiculous name. Probably made up.’

‘Samuel Foote,’ said Enderby, ‘was an eighteenth-century actor and playwright. He was also an agent for small beer.
And they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots
.’

There was a silence. ‘They did, eh?’ said the senior. ‘Well, suppose I’d better be thinking about getting home for lunch. Takes me longer and longer. Walking, that is.’

‘He wrote that,’ said Enderby. ‘It was a test-piece. This other man said that he could recite anything hearing it once only.’

‘On my way too,’ said the ex-major. ‘Bit of a blow on the prom.’

The door opened and a girl came in, very tanned. She wore, as for high summer, a simple green frock well above her knees, deepcut at her young bosom, her golden arms totally bare. She carried a beach-bag. She smiled shyly and went up to Manuel at the bar. ‘I understand,’ she said, ‘that I can hire a changing-cubicle or whatever it’s called.’ Her voice was low in pitch, the accent classless. Susannah among the elders, Enderby thought. The ex-major said quietly:

‘Susannah among the elders.’ Enderby could see them feeling old, impotent, lust too tired within to rage at so many opportunities lost, the time gone, perhaps death to be their next season. And himself? He got up and said to the girl:

‘Well, you
can
actually, but –’ She looked at him from green eyes sprinkled, like a
sireh
quid, with gold. They were set apart but not too much: enough for beauty, perhaps honesty; not enough for the panic mindless world of the animals. Hair? Enderby at once, to his surprise, thought of the flower called montbretia. ‘What I mean is that, surely, it’s getting a bit cold now. This time of the year I mean.’

‘I don’t feel the cold. A cold sea doesn’t frighten me.’ As in an
allegory
or
Punch
title-page, the aged trundled off – winter or war or industrial depression or an all-round bad year – from the presence of youth as peace, spring, a change of government. They creaked and groaned, snorted, limped, winced at arteriosclerotic calf-ache, went. One or two waved tiredly at Enderby from beyond the closed glass door, a safe distance. ‘Could I have one then? For a couple of days. Do I pay in advance?’

‘No, no, no need – Certainly.
Un llave
, Manuel.’

‘
Numero ocho
,’ Manuel smiled.

They all – Tetuani clearing the old men’s whisky-glasses, Antonio at the kitchen door, Manuel from the arena with its furled umbrellas, Enderby turned in his chair – watched her prancing seawards over the deserted sand, in scanty crimson, her hair loose. Enderby turned back in rage to his table. He took paper and wrote fiercely: ‘You bitch, you know you ruined my life. You also stole my verse to give to that blasphemous false commercial Lazarus of yours. Well, you won’t get away with it. One of the stolen poems had already been published in one of my volumes. I’m going to sue, you’re all going to suffer.’ And then he could see Vesta standing there, cool, smart in spotless dacron, unperturbed, saying that
she
wouldn’t suffer, only that mouthing creature of hers, and he was going to be abandoned anyway, past his peak, the time for the chaotopoeic groups coming, or the duo called Lyserge and Diethyl, or Big D and the Cube and the Hawk and the Blue Acid. Or worse. Enderby took another sheet of paper and wrote:

Smell and fearful and incorrigible knackers

With the crouched pole under

And strings of his inner testes strewn

Over curried pancreas and where the

Hollowed afternoon vomits

Semen of ennui and

And and and. Send it round, signed, to the bloody Doggy Wog, showing that I can beat them at their own game if I want to, but the game isn’t worth the, in Walkerian locution, turn-the-handle. And,
amigo
with the onion, I know what’s in the
carta
you wanted to bring round to my lodgings where my razor and antisolar
spectacle
clip-on and few dirty handkerchiefs have been long snapped up by those who had not that night yet been betrayed to the police by fat Napo.
Khogh
. It was some word of their language, no deformed proper name from another. And the letter surely says that he saw who did it,
hombre
, and told Scotland Yard as much. A curious and perhaps suspicious lack of treachery from treacherous Spain. Enderby felt ungratefully gloomy. All was set for writing and yet he could not write. Draft after unfinished draft. Gloomily he read through his sonnet octave again.

Augustus on a guinea sat in state
. This is the eighteenth century, the Augustan age, and that guinea is a reduction of the sun.
The sun no proper study
. Exactly, the real sun being God and that urban life essentially a product of reason, which the sun melts. And no more sun-kings, only Hanoverians.
But each shaft of filtered light a column
. Meaning that you can’t really do without the sun, which gives life, so filter it through smoked glass, using its energy to erect neo-classic structures in architecture or literature (well,
The Rambler
, say or
The Spectator
, and there’s a nuance in ‘shaft’ suggesting wit).
Classic craft abhorred the arc or arch
. Yes, and those ships sailed a known world, unfloodable by a rational God, and the
arc-en-ciel
covenant is rejected. Something like that.
To circulate (blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight
. Clear enough. You need the roundness of the guinea only so that it can roll along the straight streets or something of commercial enterprise. The round bores of the pipes are not seen on the surface, the pipes in essence being means of linking points by the shortest or most syllogistical way. And, to return to that pipe business, remember that pipes were smoked in coffee-houses and that news and ideas circulated there. And that craft business ties up with Lloyd’s coffee-house.
As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed, Thyrsis was Jack
. A bit fill-in for rhyme’s sake, but, rejecting the sun, you reject life and can only accept it in stylized mythological or eclogue forms. But Jack leads us to Jean-Jacques.
Crousseau on a raft sought Johnjack’s rational island
– the pivot coming with the volta. Defoe started it off: overcome Nature with reason. But the hearer will just hear
Crusoe
. Jack is dignified to John, glorification of common, or natural, man. Then make Nature reason and you start to topple into reason’s antithesis, you become romantic. Why? A very awkward job, the continuation.

‘Lovely.’ She had come running in, wet. She wrung a hank of hair, wetting the floor. Fat drops broke on her gold limbs. Her high-arched foot left Man Friday spoors. Seeing her round jigging nates, Enderby could have died with regret and rage. ‘Like a fool I brought everything except a towel. Could you possibly –’ She smiled, her chin dripping as from a crunching of grapes.

‘Just a minute.’ He puffed to his bedroom and brought out a bath-towel, not yet, if ever to be, used by him, and also the gaudy robe, not greatly stained, that Rawcliffe had died in. He put it round her shoulders. Clear gold skin without a blemish and a flue of ridiculous delicacy. She rubbed her hair dry with vigour, smiling her thanks. Manuel hovered smiling. She smiled back. Enderby tried to smile.

‘Could I,’ she smiled, ‘have a drink? Something a bit astringent. Let me see –’ The bottles smiled. No, they bloody well didn’t: Enderby was not going to have that. ‘A whisky sour.’

‘Weeskee –?’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Enderby. ‘Fetch some white of egg.
Clara de huevo
.’ Manuel ran into the kitchen. She rubbed herself all over in, with dead Rawcliffe’s brilliant robe. ‘A difficult art,’ blabbed Enderby, ‘making a whisky sour.’ That sounded like boasting. ‘Americans are very fond of them.’ An egg cracked loudly off. She rubbed and rubbed. Enderby got behind the bar and looked for the plastic lemon that contained lemon-juice. Manuel, having brought a tea-cup with egg-white in it and some minute embedded triangles of shell, watched her rub instead of his master mix. ‘There,’ said Enderby, quite soon.

She took it and sipped. ‘Hm. Is nobody else drinking?’

‘About time,’ Enderby said, ‘I had my preprandial, if that’s the right word.’ He seemed to himself to simper, pouring out straight Scotch.

‘Do I pay now or do you give me a bill afterwards? And can I get lunch here, talking about preprandials?’

‘Oh,’ said Enderby, ‘have this one on me. It’s a kind of custom here, the first drink of a new customer on the house.’ And ‘Oh, yes. You can have steak and salad or something like that. Or spaghetti with something or other. Anything you like, really. Within reason, that is.’ Reason. That brought him back to that bloody poem. To his shock, he saw her bending over his table, looking openly at his papers.

‘Hm,’ she said, having sipped again. ‘You’ve certainly got it in for this person, bitch rather.’

‘That,’ went flustered Enderby, coming round from the counter, ‘is of no consequence. I’m not sending it. It was just an idea, that’s all. Really,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t, you know. Private.’ But it was your privates you were only too ready to expose, wasn’t that so, when you – He felt a kind of tepid pleasure promising warmth, not outrage at all. She sat down in his fireside-type chair. She started reading his octave frowning a little. A curiously tutorial aura seemed to be forming. Enderby went to sit down on one of the stackable chairs near his table.

‘Bring it closer,’ she said. ‘What’s all this about?’

‘Well,’ babbled Enderby, ‘it’s a sonnet, very strict. It’s an attempt, really, to tie up the Age of Reason with the French Revolution. Or on another level, the rational and the romantic can be regarded as aspects of each other, if you see what I mean.’ Sitting, he moved towards her without getting up, as though this were an invalid chair. ‘What I have to do is to show that romantic curves are made out of classical straightness. Do you see what I mean?’ And then, gloomily, to himself: Probably not. She was young. She had perhaps mourned Yod Crewsy’s death, gone to some open-air evangelical meeting on his resurrection.

She closed her eyes tight. ‘Keep a triplet pattern in your sestet,’ she said. ‘A breath between your cdc and your dcd. How will classical pillars become Gothic arches? The sun will melt them, I suppose. And then you ought to have the guillotine. A very rational machine – sorry about the rhyme, but it’s rhymes you’re after, isn’t it?’

‘What,’ Enderby asked gravely, ‘would you like for lunch? There’s Antonio, you see, waiting there ready to cook it.’ Antonio stood at the kitchen door, trying to smile while chewing something. She nodded, not smiling but puckered charmingly, thoughtful. Guillotine, machine, seen, scene.

‘What are you going to eat?’ she asked. ‘I’ll eat what you eat. Not fish, though. I can’t stand fish.’

‘Well,’ Enderby mumbled, ‘I don’t normally till – We close for the siesta, you see, and then I usually have –’

‘I hate eating on my own. Besides, we’ve got to work this thing out. Is it something with meat in it?’

‘Well,’ Enderby said, ‘I have a sort of stew going most of the
time
. Beef and potatoes and turnips and things. I don’t know whether you’d like it, really.’

‘With pickled onions,’ she said. ‘And Worcestershire sauce, plenty of it. I like gross things sometimes.’ Enderby blushed. ‘I like to come down to earth sometimes.’

‘Here with your family?’ She didn’t answer. Monied, probably. ‘Where are you staying? The Rif? The El Greco?’

‘Oh, vaguely. It’s right up the hill. Now, then. Try it.’

‘Eh?’ And, while Tetuani set places in the conservatory, he tried it.

Sought Johnjack’s rational island, loath to wait

Till the sun, slighted, took revenge so that

The pillars nodded, melted, and were seen

As Gothic shadows where a goddess sat –

‘Volta not strong enough. The rhyme-words are far too weak. That
that
is shocking.’

Then, over the thick stew, grossly over-sauced, with pickled onions crunched whole on the side and a bottle of thick red eely alumy local wine, they, he rather, literally sweated over the rest of the sestet.

For, after all, that rational machine

Imposed on all men by the technocrat

Was patented by Dr Guillotine.

‘This is terrible,’ she said. ‘Such bloody clumsiness.’ She breathed on him (though a young lady should not eat, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions. ‘I’d like a bit of cheese now,’ she crunched. ‘Have you any Black Diamond cheddar? Not too fresh, if that’s possible. I like it a bit hard.’

‘Would you also like,’ asked Enderby humbly, ‘some very strong tea? We do a very good line in that.’

‘It must be really strong, though. I’m glad there’s something you do a very good line in. These lines are a bloody disgrace. And you call yourself a poet.’