The Complete Enderby (9 page)

‘Anyway,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, ‘I think it would be an excellent thing for you to have a wider audience. Would you try it for, say, six months, a poem every week? Preferably set in the form of prose, so as not to offend anyone.’

‘I thought people didn’t actually find verse
offensive
,’ said Enderby. ‘I thought they just despised it.’

‘Be that as it may,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, ‘what do you say to the proposal?’ She shattered a sort of macaroon with a fork and, before eating, said, ‘The poems would have to be, shall I say, and I hope this is the right word, ephemeral. You know, dealing with everyday things that the average woman would be interested in.’

‘The dross of the workaday world,’ said Enderby, ‘transmuted to sheerest gold. I suppose I could do that. I know all about household chores and dishcloths and so on. Also lavatory brushes.’

‘Dear me,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, ‘you
have
got a cloacal obsession, haven’t you? No, not that sort of thing, and not too much of this sheerest gold, either. Womankind cannot bear very much reality. Love and dreams are wanted, also babies without cloacal obsessions. The mystery of the stars would come in quite nicely, especially if seen from the garden of a council-house. And marriage, perhaps.’

‘Tell me,’ said Enderby. ‘Are you Miss Cambridge or Mrs?’

‘Bainbridge, not Cambridge.
Fem
, not
Phlegm
. Mrs. Why do you want to know?’

‘I have to call you something,’ said Enderby, ‘don’t I?’ She seemed at last to have finished her meal, so Enderby offered his crumpled cigarette-packet.

‘I’ll smoke my own,’ she said, ‘if you don’t mind.’ She took from her handbag a packet of ship’s Woodbines and, before Enderby could find an unused match in his matchbox (he saved used matches, a long unfathomable habit), she had flicked her pearl-faced lighter on and then off. Her wide nostrils walrussed out two pretty blue jets.

‘I take it,’ said Enderby, ‘that your husband’s in the navy.’

‘My husband,’ she said, ‘is dead. It shows how cut off you are, really, doesn’t it? Everybody else seems to have heard of Pete Bainbridge.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Enderby. ‘Very sorry.’

‘What for? Because he’s dead, or because you’ve never heard of him? Never mind,’ said Widow Bainbridge. ‘He died in a smash four years ago, in the Monte Carlo Rally. I thought everybody knew that. It was a great loss, the papers said, to the motor-racing world. He left behind a beautiful young widow, a bride of only two years,’ she said, her tone half-mocking.

‘He did,’ said Enderby gravely. ‘He most certainly did. Beautiful, I mean. How much?’

‘How much what? How much did he leave, or how much did I love him?’ She seemed suddenly tired, perhaps from over-eating.

‘How much do I get for doing these poems?’

‘Mr Dick sets us all right,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, sighing and sitting up straighter. She brushed minimal crumbs off her lap and said, ‘Two guineas a poem. It’s not much, but we can’t manage more. We’re featuring the memoirs of a pop-singer, you see – not very long memoirs, of course, because he’s only nineteen – but those are costing us a pretty penny, believe me. And the memoirs have to be written for him as well. Still, the effect on the circulation should be, to say the least, stimulating. If that princely fee is all right by you I’ll send you a contract. And some back numbers of
Fem
, to show you what it’s like. Please remember that the vocabulary of our readers isn’t very extensive, so don’t go using words like ‘oriflamme’ or ‘inelectable’.’

‘Thank you,’ said Enderby. ‘I’m really most grateful that you should have thought of me like this. You’re really being most kind.’ He had been poking into the ashtray with a matchstick, breaking
up
cigarette-ends; this had necessitated a sort of crouching on the chair’s edge, his bald crown presented to Mrs Bainbridge. Now he looked up sincerely, his eyes rather wet behind their glasses. She smiled.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘you don’t believe me about my liking your poetry, do you? Well, I even know one or two of them by heart.’

‘Say one,’ begged Enderby. She took breath and recited, quite clearly but with few nuances of tone:

‘A dream, yes, but for everyone the same.

The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch;

The Absolute was anybody’s pitch

For, when a note was struck, we knew its name’.

‘Good,’ said Enderby. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever actually heard –’

‘– That dark aborted any urge to tame

Waters that day might prove to be a ditch

But then were endless growling ocean, rich

In fish and heroes, till the dredgers came.’

‘Excellent,’ said Enderby. ‘And now the sestet.’ It excited him to hear his own verses. She went on confidently:

‘
Wachet auf!
A fretful dunghill cock

Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires;

A martin’s nest clogged the cathedral clock,

But it was morning (birds could not be liars).

A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock;

Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.

There,’ she said, taking breath. ‘But I’ve no real idea what it means.’

‘Oh,’ said Enderby, ‘the meaning doesn’t matter all that much. I’m surprised at your liking that. It’s not what I’d thought of as a woman’s poem.’ Suddenly the poem seemed to find its place in the real world – overseas businessmen reading financial papers, the
scent
of
Miss Dior
or whatever it was, the noise of London waiting to pounce outside the hotel. Spoken by her, it seemed suddenly to have a use.

‘And what exactly do you mean by a woman’s poem?’ asked Mrs Bainbridge.

‘For you,’ said Enderby with disarming candour, ‘something softer and yet more elegant, something with less harshness and thought and history in it. That, you see, is about the Middle Ages and the coming of the Reformation. In the sestet you get Martin Luther and the beginning of dissolution, everybody beginning to be alone, a common tradition providing no tuning-fork of reference and no way of telling the time, because the common tradition has been dredged away. Nothing sure and nothing mysterious.’

‘I see,’ said Vesta Bainbridge. ‘I take it you’re a Catholic, then.’

‘Oh, no, no,’ protested Enderby. ‘I’m not, really I’m not.’

‘All right,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, smiling. ‘I heard you the first time.’ Protestant Enderby grinned and shut up. The Roman waiter came along, chewing gently but mournfully, with a bill. ‘For me,’ she said, and notes rustled in her bag like pork crackling. She paid the bill and, womanly, tipped the waiter merely adequately. Enderby said:

‘I’d ask you to dine with me this evening, but I’ve just realized that I didn’t bring very much money. I expected, you see, that I’d go straight back after lunch. I’m awfully sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ smiled Vesta Bainbridge. ‘I’m invited out. Somewhere in Hampstead. But it was nice of you to offer. Now,’ she said, looking at her tiny oyster watch, ‘goodness, the time, where do I write to?’ She took out a small notebook and poised a pencil to record what Enderby dictated. Somehow, the address seemed vulgar and even comic, endited primly by that slim hand. 81 Fitzherbert Avenue. He tried to hide from her the sound of the lavatory’s flush, the crusted milk-bottles on the doorstep, the mice scampering through the manuscripts. ‘Good,’ she said, closing the book. ‘Now I must go.’ She settled the ocelot over her shoulders, clipped her bag shut. Enderby stood. She stood. ‘It’s been awfully nice,’ she said. ‘Oh, that’s inadequate. But it’s been quite a privilege, really it has. Now I really must fly.’ She gave him an unexpected handshake, straight from the elbow. ‘Don’t bother to come to the door,’ she said. Then she was off, trimly and swiftly walking a tightrope across the carpet. For the first time Enderby caught a hint
of
colour of her hair, upswept at the nape, a sort of penny-colour. He sighed, and turned to see the waiter looking at him. The waiter made a gesture – quick frogmouth, shrug – to indicate (a) that she was certainly elegant but much too thin, (b) that she was off to meet somebody handsomer than Enderby, (c) that women were fundamentally ungenerous, (d) that this was a hell of a life but there were always the consolations of philosophy. Enderby nodded, the poet at ease with all classes of men, then realized with joy that he was once more alone and free. The wind that blew through him celebrated this fact.

Enderby was late returning home that evening. Though his perversely independent soul – the conscious Enderby shocked and gaping – had rejected the sweets of recognition, he felt that he and London had achieved more of a
rapprochement
than he could have thought possible, scratching paper and bared legs, the day before. A smart and worldly woman admired his work and had said so frankly. Lips that had been kissed by a prominent racing-driver and, Enderby presumed, by others whose teeth habitually gleamed at cameras, had recited from the
Revolutionary Sonnets
in a rich-smelling place whose denizens had passed beyond the need for the solace of poetry. Enderby, wandering the streets, was restless and had an obscure longing for adventure. Here the snow had long disappeared, but the tang of snow on the air bit sharply from the furthermost stretch of the river. London yearned back to gasflares and geese sold cheap at the end of the trading day amid raucous Cockney voices, Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street, a widow at Windsor, all’s right with the world. That was from
Pappa Pisses
. Enderby grinned sadly to himself, standing outside a music-shop, as he remembered the disastrous lecture he had once given to a Women’s Institute. Victorian Literature. That was one spoonerism that his audience had passed over. But
A Sale of Two Titties
had struck Lady Fennimore as something like calculated insolence. Never again. Never, never again. He was safer in retirement, shut away in his creative lavatory. But still, this one evening, the desire for adventure was strong. Yet what did one mean by adventure
these
days? He gazed at the shop-window, as if for an answer. Various pictures of young louts sneered out at him from song-covers and record-sleeves – simian-foreheaded, prehensile fingers on guitar-strings, lips twisted in a song of youth. Enderby had heard of secondary modern schools and now assumed that these flat-eyed little monsters must represent their end-product. Well, for two guineas a week he was going to serve the world that these loose-lipped leerers served. What was the name of the magazine again?
Flim
or
Flam
or something. Not
Phlegm
, that was quite certain. Within the consonantal frame he tried out various vowels. And there, next door but one, outside one of Sir George Goodby’s own shops, a poster put him right: ‘Exclusive to
Fem
,
FOR YOU
, Lenny Biggs tells his own personal life story. Order your copy
NOW
.’ And there was a picture of Lenny Biggs – a face hardly distinguishable from others of the pantheon Enderby had just viewed, though perhaps more particularly baboon-like than generally simian, with teeth as manifestly false as those of Enderby himself, sniggering with confidence at the world.

Enderby saw a man in a peaked cap dump a couple of parcels in a van lettered
GOODBY’S FOR GOOD BOOKS
. This van then started up contemptuously and insolently pierced the traffic. ‘So,’ thought Enderby, ‘Sir George has already started his reprisals, has he? All copies of Enderby’s poems to be withdrawn from sale, eh? Petty, a very petty-minded man.’ Enderby entered the shop and was depressed to see people buying gardening books. Display studio-portraits of groomed youthful bestsellers topped piles of their bestselling novels. Enderby felt that he wanted to flee; this was as bad as reading Sunday reviews. And, to brim his misery, he realized that he had maligned Sir George: two soiled Enderby volumes sulked there on the unvisited poetry shelves. He was beneath the notice of that wealthy knight, too mean for the meanness of retaliation. Oh, well. The name Rawcliffe suddenly hurled itself, along with a pang of dyspepsia, at Enderby’s breastbone. In all the anthologies, did he say? Enderby would see.

Enderby looked through
Poetry Now, A Tiny Garner of Modern Verse, Best Poets of Today, They Sing for You, Soldier’s Solace
(an anthology of verse by Lieutenant-General Phipps,
V.C., D.S.O.,
etc., sixtieth thousand),
Voices Within
, and other volumes, and found that
in
all of them Rawcliffe was represented by the following artless lyrics:

‘Perhaps I am not wanted then,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I’d better go,’

He said. Motionless her eyes, her head,

Saying not yes, not no.

‘I will go then, and aim my gun of grief