The Complete Enderby (6 page)

Glows from the oven-door.

Lithe with the litheness of the kitchen cat,

Your image treads the floor

Ennobling the potato-peel, the lumps

Of fallen bread, the vulgar cabbage-stumps.

‘Love!’ cry the eggs a-whisk, and ‘Love!’ the beef

Calls from the roasting-tin.

The beetroot blushes love. Each lettuce-leaf

That hides the heart within

Is a green spring of love. Pudding and pie

Are richly crammed with love, and so am I.

But, after those first two painful stanzas, he found it hard to stop. He was led on ruthlessly, horrified by a growing facility, a veritable logorrhoea. At the end of the ode he had emptied Arry’s kitchen and filled ten closely written sheets. One point, he thought, he had very clearly established, and that was that Arry was in love.

It was the day of the London luncheon. Tremulous Enderby fell out of bed early to see snow staring through the morning dark. Shivering, he snapped every electric heater in the flat on, then made tea. Snow gawped blankly at him through all the windows, so he drew the curtains, turning raw morning into cosy muffiny toast-toe evening. Then he shaved. He had washed, fairly thoroughly, the night before the night before last. He had almost forgotten
what
it was like to shave with a new blade, having – for nearly a year now – used the old ones stacked up by the previous tenant on top of the bathroom cupboard. This morning he slashed cheeks, underlip, and Adam’s apple: shaving-soap froth became childhood ice-cream sprinkled with raspberry vinegar. Enderby found an old poem beginning
And if he did then what he’d said he’d do
, and with bits of this he stanched the flow. He started to dress, putting on a new pair of socks bought at a January sale and tucking the ends of his pyjama-trousers well inside them. He had a white shirt specially laundered, he had found a striped tie – lime and mustard – in a suitcase with the name PADMORE in marking-ink on white rag attached to its lining (who was, or had been, or might be in the unrealized future, Padmore?) and had cleaned with care his one pair of brown shoes. He had also, for show and blow respectively, saved two clean handkerchiefs. He would beat these city-slickers at their own game. The suit from Arry was sober grey, the most Eliotian one in his whole wardrobe.

He was pleasantly surprised by the decent gravity of the figure that bowed from the wardrobe mirror. Urban, respectable, scholarly – a poet-banker, a poet-publisher, teeth a flashing two double octaves in the electric firelight, spectacles drinking of the bedlamp’s glow. Satisfied, he went to get his breakfast – a special breakfast today, for God knew what ghastly sauced muck he might be coldly given in the great hotel. He had bought a Cornish pasty but had, coming out of the shop, slipped on an ice-patch. This had hurt him and flattened the pasty, but its edibility was hardly impaired. It was to be eaten with Branston pickle and, as an extra-special treat, washed down with Blue Mountain coffee. He felt an unwonted exultation as he prepared this viaticum, as if – after years of struggle – he had at last arrived. What should he buy with the prize-money? He couldn’t think what. Books? He had done reading. Clothes? Ha ha. There was nothing he really needed except more talent. Nothing in the world.

The coffee was disappointingly cool and weak. Perhaps he had not made it properly. Could he take lessons in that? Were there teachers of such things? Arry. Of course, he would ask Arry. At nine-fifteen (train at nine-fifty, ten minutes walk to station) he sat with a cigarette, hypnotized by the gash-gold-vermilion of the
electric
fire, waiting. He suddenly caught another memory like a flea. Far childhood. Christmas Day, 1924. Snow came down in the afternoon, transfiguring the slum street where the shop was. He had been given a magic lantern and, after dinner, he was to project slides of wild animals on to the sitting-room wall. Powered by a candle, the lantern had been fitted with a candle – a new one, its flame much too high for the lens. His Uncle Jimmy the plumber had said, ‘We’ll have to wait till it burns down. Give us a tune, Fred.’ And Fred, Enderby’s father, had sat at the piano and played. The rest of that dim gathering – only the stepmother bright in memory, belching away – had waited for the candle to burn down to lens level, the coloured animals suddenly to appear on the wall.

Why, wondered Enderby now, why had nobody thought to cut the candle? Why had they all, every single one of them, agreed to wait on the candle’s convenience? It was another mystery, but he wondered if it was really a mystery of a different order from this other waiting – waiting on Shakespeare’s time’s candle to burn down to time to dress warmly, time to leave for the station. Enderby suddenly passionately wished he could cut the whole long candle to its end – have written his poetry and have done. Then he grinned as his stomach, having slyly engineered this melancholy, plaintively subscribed to it.

Pfffrrrp. And then Brrrrrrr. But that, he realized, after surprise at his stomach’s achievement of such metallic ectophony, that, he heard with annoyance, was the doorbell. So early, whoever it was, and coming so inconveniently. Enderby went to his flat-door and saw, waddling down the hallway of the house itself, his landlady, Mrs Meldrum. Well. He paid her by post. The less he saw of her the better. ‘If I can trouble you for a moment, Mr E,’ she said. She was a woman of sixty, with pinched East Midland vowels. Her face was modelled on that of a tired but cheerful crescent moon in a bedtime-malted-milk-drink advertisement that even Enderby had seen often: Punch-nose meeting cusp-chin, but no jolly Punch plumpness. She had a full set of Tenniel-teeth of the colour of small chips of dirty ice, and these she showed to Enderby now as to a mirror. Enderby said:

‘I’ve got to go up to town.’ He thrilled gently, saying that, a busy man of affairs.

‘I shan’t keep you not more than one minute,’ said Mrs Meldrum, ‘Mr E.’ She waddled in past Enderby as if she owned the place, which she did. ‘It’s really to empty the shillings out of the electric meter,’ she said, ‘which is, in one way of speaking, why I called. In another way of speaking, it’s about the complaints.’ She went ahead of Enderby into the living-room. At the table she examined minutely the remains of Enderby’s breakfast, shook her head comically at them and then, picking up the pickle-jar, read from the label like a priest muttering the Mass: ‘Sugar cauliflower onions malt vinegar tomatoes carrots spirit vinegar gherkins dates salt marrow …’

‘What complaints?’ asked Enderby, as he was expected to.

‘New Year’s Eve,’ said Mrs Meldrum, ‘being a special occasion as calls for jollifications, nevertheless Mrs Bates down in the basement has complained about loud singing when she couldn’t go off to sleep with the backache. Your name came into it a lot, she says, especially in the very rude singing. On New Year’s Day you was seen running up and down the street with a carving-knife and all covered with blood. Well, Mr Enderby, fun’s fun as the saying goes, though I must confess I’m surprised at a man of your age. But the police had a quiet word with Mr Meldrum, unbeknownst to me, and I could only get it out of him last night, him being shy and retiring and not wanting to cause trouble. Anyway, we’ve had a talk about it and it can’t go on, Mr E.’

‘I can explain,’ said Enderby, looking at his watch. ‘It’s all really quite simple.’

‘And while we’re on the subject,’ said Mrs Meldrum, ‘that nice young couple upstairs. They say they can hear you in the night sometimes.’

‘I can hear
them
,’ said Enderby, ‘and they’re
not
a nice young couple.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Meldrum, ‘that’s all according as which way one looks at it, isn’t it? To the pure all things are pure, as you might say.’

‘What, Mrs Meldrum, is this leading to?’ Enderby looked again at his watch. In the last thirty seconds five minutes had gone by. Mrs Meldrum said:

‘There’s plenty as would like this nice little flat, Mr E. This is
a
respectable neighbourhood, this is. There’s retired schoolmasters and captains of industry retired along here. And I wouldn’t say as how you kept this flat all that clean and tidy.’

‘That’s my business, Mrs Meldrum.’

‘Well, it may be your business, Mr E, but then again it might not. And everybody’s putting the rents up this year, as you may as well know. What with the rates going up as well and all of us having to watch us own interests.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Enderby. ‘That’s it, is it? How much?’

‘You’ve had this very reasonable,’ said Mrs Meldrum, ‘as nobody can deny. You’ve had this at four guineas a week all through the season. There’s one gentleman as works in London as is very anxious to find respectable accommodation. Six guineas to him would be a very reasonable rent.’

‘Well, it’s not a very reasonable rent to me, Mrs Meldrum,’ said Enderby angrily. His watch-hand leapt gaily forward. ‘I have to go now,’ he said. ‘I’ve a train to catch. Really,’ he said, shocked, ‘do you realize that that would be eight guineas more a month? Where would I get the money?’

‘A gentleman of independent means,’ said Mrs Meldrum smugly. ‘If you don’t want to stay, Mr E, you could always give a week’s notice.’

Enderby saw with horror the prospect of sorting out the bathful of manuscripts. ‘I’ll have to go now,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know. But I think it’s an imposition.’

Mrs Meldrum made no move. ‘You go off then and catch your train,’ she said, ‘and think about it in your first-class carriage. And I’ll empty the shillings out of the meter, as has to be done now and again. And if I was you I should stack those plates in the sink before you leave.’

‘Don’t touch my papers,’ warned Enderby. ‘There are private and confidential papers in that bathroom. Touch them at your peril.’

‘Peril, indeed,’ scoffed Mrs Meldrum. ‘And I don’t like the sound of that at all, continental papers in
my
bathroom.’ Meanwhile Enderby wrapped his muffler on and fought his way – as if towards the light – into his overcoat. ‘I never heard of such a thing, and that’s a fact,’ said Mrs Meldrum, ‘and I’ve been in the business a fair amount of time. I’ve heard of coals in the bath with some of
them
slummy people, though I thank the Almighty God I’ve never harboured any of them in
my
bosom. You’re going out like that, Mr Enderby, with bits of paper stuck all over your face. I can read a word there, just by your nose:
epileptical
, or something. You’re not doing yourself or me or any of the other tenants any good at all, Mr E, going out in that state. Peril, indeed.’

Enderby dithered out, doubtful. He had not reckoned on having to search for new lodgings, not in the middle of
The Pet Beast
. And this town was becoming more and more a dormitory for bald young men from London. In one pub he had met the head of a news-reel company, a lavish gin-man with a light, fast voice. And there had been a processed-cheese executive heard, loud and unabashed, somewhere else. London was crawling southward to the Channel.

Enderby crawled northward to the station, picking off odd words from his razor-cuts. The snow had been trodden already, by people rushing earlier with insincere eagerness to get to work in London. Enderby teetered in tiny gavotte-steps, afraid of slipping, his rump still aching from last night’s fall. Work-trains, stenographer-trains, executive-trains. Big deals over the telephone, fifty guineas nothing to them. Golfball-money. But, thought Enderby, that would provide for half a year’s rent increase.

Looking up at the zinc sky he saw a gull or two flapping inland. He had neglected to feed the gulls for two days now; he was becoming careless. Perhaps, he thought vaguely, he could make it up to them by buying some special treat at the Army and Navy Stores. He passed a block of bright posters. One of them extolled domestic gas: a smiling toy paraclete called Mr Therm presided over a sort of warm Holy Family. Pentecostal therm; pentecostal sperm. Two men in dyed army overcoats marched, as in retreat, from the station, with demoralized thug faces. One said to the other, ‘Can’t make up its bleeding mind. Rain one day, snow the next. Be pissing down again tomorrow.’ Enderby had to stop, short of breath, his heart martelling away as though he had just downed a half-bottle of brandy, his left hand clutching a snowcapped privet-hedge for support.
The pentecostal sperm came pissing down
. No, no, no.
Hissing down
. The line was dealt to him, like a card from a weighing-machine. He had a sudden image of the whole
poem
like a squat evil engine, weighing, waiting. The Holy Family, the Virgin Mary, the pentecostal sperm. He heard a train-whistle and had to rush.

Panting, he entered the little booking-hall and dug out his wallet from his right breast. There was still a Christmas tree by the bookstall. That was wrong: Twelfth Night was over, St Distaff ’s Day had set the working year spinning again. Enderby approached the stern shirt-sleeves behind the
guichet
. ‘A day return to London, please,’ he begged. He picked up his change with his ticket and sent a shilling over the floor. ‘Don’t lose that, mister,’ said a lively old woman in black. ‘Need that for the gas.’ She cackled as Enderby chased the shining monocycle to the barrier. The ticket-collector flapped a heavy boot on to it, trapped. ‘Thank you,’ said Enderby. Rising from picking it up his eyes misted, and he saw a very clear and blue picture of the Virgin Mary at a spinning-wheel, a silver queen set in baby blue. This had nothing to do with
The Pet Beast
and its Mary-Pasiphae. This had something to do with his stepmother.