The Complete Enderby (58 page)

‘I’m flying off tomorrow evening. About six.’

Enderby gulped. ‘It’s been a short stay. You can get a very good dinner at a place called the
Parade
. I could get a taxi and pick you up about –’

‘Still curious, aren’t you? Bit of a change for you, isn’t it, this curiosity about people? You’ve never cared much for people, have you? From what you’ve told me, anyway. Your father let you down by marrying your stepmother, and your mother let you down by dying too young. And these others you’ve mentioned, men and women.’

‘My father was all right,’ Enderby said. ‘I never had anything against him.’ He frowned, though ungrudgingly.

‘Many years ago,’ she said, ‘you published a little volume at your own expense. Inevitably it was very badly printed. You had a poem in it called “Independence Day”.’

‘I’m damned if I remember.’

‘A rather bad poem. It started:

Anciently the man who showed

Hate to his father with the sword

Was bundled up in a coarse sack

With a frantic ape to tear his back

And the squawking talk of a parrot to mock

Time’s terror of air-and-light’s lack

Black

And the creeping torpor of a snake.’

‘I can’t possibly have written that,’ went Enderby, worried now. ‘I could never possibly have written anything as bad as that.’

‘No?’ she said. ‘Listen.

Then he was swirled into the sea.

But that was all balls and talk.

Nowadays we have changed all that,

Into a cleaner light to walk

And wipe that mire off on the mat.

So when I knew his end was near

My mind was freer

And snapped its thumb and finger then

At the irrelevance of birth,

And I had a better right to the earth

And knew myself more of a man,

Shedding the last squamour of the old skin.’

‘That’s somebody else,’ said Enderby urgently. ‘Honestly, it’s not me.’

‘And you love your mother because you never knew her. For all you know she might have been your stepmother.’

‘It’s different now,’ pleaded Enderby. ‘I forgive my stepmother, I forgive her everything.’

‘That’s very generous of you. And who do you love?’

‘I was just coming to that,’ said Enderby with approaching banners of wretchedness. ‘What I wanted to say was –’

‘All right, all right. Don’t pick me up in a taxi. You can’t anyway, because you don’t know where I am.
I’ll
pick
you
up about eight. Now go home and work on your bloody Horatian Ode. No, leave me here. I go in a different direction.’ She seemed needlessly irritable, and Enderby, having once, though briefly, lived with a woman, wondered if it was possibly – She was old enough, wasn’t she, to have –

‘Gin and hot water,’ he suggested kindly, ‘are said to work wonders.’ But she didn’t seem to hear. She seemed to have switched off Enderby like a television image, looking blankly at him as if he had become a blank screen. A very strange girl altogether. But he thought that, having got the better of the moon, he could perhaps this time live with his fear.

She was smartly dressed for the evening in bronze stockings and a brief, but not too brief, gold dress, a gold stole round her tanned
shoulders
, her hair up at the back. On her left wrist she had a gold chain from which miniscule figurines depended. It was a restaurant of subdued lights, and Enderby could not see what the figures were or meant. She was perfumed, and the perfume suggested something baked – a delicate but aphrodisiacal soufflé seasoned with rare liqueurs. Enderby was wearing one of Rawcliffe’s Edwardian suits – it did not fit too badly – and even Rawcliffe’s gold watch and chain. One thing Enderby did not like about this place was that the mortician
collage
man from the Doggy Wog was in it and was obviously a respected and regular customer. He sat at a table opposite and was eating with his fingers a brace of roast game birds. He had greeted this girl with a growl of familiarity but now, picking the meat from the backbone, he kept his eyes sternly on her. He did not apparently remember Enderby. She had returned his greeting with an American air-hostess’s ‘Hi’.

Tonight she was not going to have greasy stew and pickled onions and stepmother’s tea. She read the menu intently, as though it contained a Nabokovian cryptogram, and ordered a young hare of the kind called a capuchin, marinated in
marc
, stuffed with its own and some pig’s liver as well as breadcrumbs, truffles, and a little preserved turkey-meat, and served with sauce full of red wine and double cream. Before it she had a small helping of jellied boar. Enderby, confused, said he would have sheep’s tongue
en papillotes
, whatever they were, that was. And, after dry martinis which she sent back as neither dry nor cold enough, they had champagne – Bollinger ’53. She said it was not very exciting, but it seemed to be the best they had, so they put, at her demand, another bottle on ice while they were drinking this one. Enderby uneasily saw signs of a deliberate intention to get tight. Soon, clanking down her fork, she said:

‘A fancied superiority to women. Despise their brains so pretend to despise their bodies as well. Just because you can’t have their bodies.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Juvenilia. One of your.’ She belched gently. ‘Juvenilia.’

‘Juvenilia? But I never published any of my juvenilia.’ Several bar-customers were interested in the repeated word: a gland injection, a sexual posture, a synthetic holiday resort. She began to recite with mocking intensity:

‘They fear and hate

the Donne and Dante in him, this

cold

gift to turn heat to a flame, a kiss

to the gate

of a mons-

ter’s labyrinth. They hold

and anchor a thin thread –’

‘Not so loud,’ went Enderby with quiet force, blushing. The mortician was looking sardonic over a large dish of blood-coloured ice cream.

‘– the tennis party, the parish dance:

stale pus out of dead

pores.’

Someone at the bar, unseen in the dimness, applauded. ‘I didn’t write that,’ said Enderby. ‘You’re getting me mixed up with somebody else.’

‘Am I? Am I? I suppose that’s possible. There’s so much minor poetry about.’

‘What do you mean – minor?’

She downed a long draught of Bollinger, as though the recitation had made her thirsty, belched with no excuse-me, and said: ‘There was that other nasty little thing about meeting a girl at a dance, wasn’t there? Juvenilia, again.’ Or a disease perhaps, one of those gruesomely pleasant-sounding ones like salmonella. She took more champagne and, with world-weary tone and over-sharp articulation, recited:

‘Semitic violins by the wailing wall

Gnash their threnody

For the buried jungle, the tangle of lianas –’

‘I think,’ Enderby said sternly, ‘that I have some right to know –’

‘Or say that was before, in the first flush,

And say that now

A handful of coins, image and milled edge worn,

Is spilled abroad to determine

Our trade of emotions.’

‘I mean, apart from how you know all that, and I don’t believe it’s mine anyway –’

‘On this background are imposed

Urges, whose precise nature it is difficult to define:

Shells shaped by forgotten surges.’

‘I’m not having any more of this,’ and Enderby grasped her thin wrist firmly. She shook herself free with little effort and said:

‘Too rich for you, is it?’ She sniffed at his half-eaten sheep’s tongue
en papillotes
. ‘A lot of things are too rich for you, aren’t they? Never mind, mumsy will ook after him den. Let me finish.’ Enderby, very wretched, let her.

‘One understands so little, having no words

To body forth thoughts, no axe

To reach flagged soil, no drills

To pierce to living wells. It would tax

My energies overmuch now to garner you

Out of worn coins, worn shells.’

She took another bumper of fuming wine, belched like an elfin trumpet of triumph, then waved smiling across to the mortician. He said:

‘That’s telling him.’

‘You’re being bloody unfair,’ said Enderby loudly and to the mortician, more loudly, ‘You keep your nose out of this, sod.’ The mortician looked at Enderby with very small interest and went on eating ice cream.

‘Big untrue postures,’ she delivered. ‘Pretence. You can’t make major poetry out of pretence.’

‘I tell you,’ said Enderby, ‘it was my stepmother’s fault, but that’s all over now. Pretence, you say,’ he added cunningly, ‘but very memorable pretence. Not,’ he super-added, ‘that I wrote that. I’m sure I didn’t.’ He was pretty sure, anyway.

‘I can remember anything,’ she said smugly. ‘It’s a gift.’ Then she went
phew
. ‘God, it’s warm in here.’ And she pulled her stole off roughly, showing her glowing young shoulders.

‘It’s not really warm, you know,’ said Enderby. And, hopefully: ‘Perhaps it’s all that champagne. Perhaps you’re not feeling too well.’

‘I feel fine,’ she said. ‘It’s the sun within me. I’m a beaker full of the warm south. Nice tension of opposites there: cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth.’ She had drunk most of the first bottle and was now doing very well with the second. ‘I won’t pretend that you wrote that, because you didn’t. Poor boy. But his name was
not
writ in water.’ Enderby felt chilled when he heard that. ‘Posterity,’ she then said. ‘The poet addresses posterity. And what is posterity? Schoolmarms with snotty kids trailing round the monuments. The poet’s tea-mug with an ingrained ring of tanninstain. The poet’s love-letters. The poet’s falling hair, trapped in brush-bristles rarely washed. The poet’s little failings – well-hidden, but not for ever. And the kids are bored, and their texts are covered with thumb-marks and dirty little marginalia. They’ve read the poems, oh yes. They’re posterity. Do you never think of posterity?’

Enderby looked warily at her. ‘Well, like everybody else –’

‘Minor poets hope that posterity will turn them into major ones. A great man, my dear, who suffered the critics’ sneers and the public’s neglect. Halitosic breathing over your corpse. Reverent treading through the poet’s cottage, fingering the pots and pans.’

Enderby started. ‘That’s brought back a dream. I think it was a dream. The pots and pans fell, and I woke.’

‘Oh, come on, let’s finish this champagne and go. I can’t eat any more of this muck. Creamed leveret’s bones, ugh. Let’s go and swim.’

‘At this hour? And it’s very cold, the sea I mean. And besides –’

‘You don’t swim, I know. You’re preparing your body for honoured corpsedom. You don’t do anything with it. All right, you can watch
me
swim.’ She filled both their flutes and downed hers, re-filled and downed again.

‘What I meant to say was – It’s a bit difficult, I know, but –’ He called for the bill. ‘
Cuento, por favor
,’ Quite the little Tangerine, he was thinking. Settling here for corpsedom. No, not that. He had
his
work, hadn’t he? And there was this other matter, and he’d better blurt it out now before the bill came. ‘I know,’ he said stiffly but urgently, ‘there’s a great disparity of age. But if you could see your way – I mean, we get on all right together. I would leave it to you to decide on the precise nature of the relationship. I ask nothing.’ The bill came: another flame-haired Goth of a Spanish waiter, flashing a gold tunthus. It was a lot of dirhams. Enderby counted out note after note after note, all from Rawcliffe’s mattress.