2
Enderby found Arry in white in his underground kitchen, brown ale frothing beside him, slicing pork into blade-thin shives. An imbecilic-looking scullion in khaki threw fistfuls of cabbage on to plates. When he missed he picked up the scattered helping carefully from the floor and tried again. Massive sides of beef were jocularly being unloaded from Smithfield – the fat a golden fleece, the flesh the hue of diluted Empire burgundy. Enderby said:
‘I’ve got to go up to London to be given a gold medal and fifty guineas. But I haven’t got a suit.’
‘Yer’ll be able to buy a good un,’ said Arry, ‘with that amount of mooney.’ He didn’t look too happy; he frowned down at his precise task like a surgeon saving the life of a bitter foe. ‘There,’ he said, forking up a translucent slice to the light, ‘that’s about as thin as yer can bloody get.’
‘But,’ said Enderby, ‘I don’t see the point of buying a suit just for this occasion. I probably shan’t want to wear a suit again. Or not for a long time. That’s why I’d like to borrow one of yours.’
Arry said nothing. He quizzed the forked slice and nodded at it, as though he had met its challenge and won. Then he returned to his carving. He said, ‘Yer quite right when yer suppose av got more than wan. Am always doin’ things for people, aren’t a? Boot what dooz any bogger do for me?’ He looked up at Enderby an instant, his tongue flicking out between its gateposts as if to lick up a tear.
‘Well,’ said Enderby, embarrassed, ‘you know you can rely on me. For anything I can do, that is. But I’ve only one talent, and that’s not much good to you. Nor, it seems,’ the mood of self-pity catching, ‘to anyone else. Except a hundred or so people here and in America. And one mad female admirer in Cape Town. She writes once a year, you know, offering marriage.’
‘Female admirers,’ said carving Arry, pluralizing easily. ‘Female admirers, eh? That’s wan thing a ’aven’t got. It’s me oo admires er, that’s the bloody trooble. It’s got real bad, that as.’ He became violently dialectal. ’Av getten eed-warch wi’ it,’ he said. Then, as an underling sniffed towards him with a cold, ‘Vol-au-vent de dindon’s in that bloody coopboard,’ he said.
‘Who?’ said Enderby. ‘When?’
‘Er oopstairs,’ said Arry. ‘Thelma as serves int cocktail bar. A new it definite ender the moonth. Bloody loovely oo is boot bloody cruel,’ he said, carving steadily. ‘Oo’s bloody smashin’,’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ said Enderby.
‘Don’t know what?’
‘Who’s bloody smashing.’
‘Oo is,’ said Arry, gesturing to the ceiling with his knife. ‘Oo oop thur. That Thelma.’
Enderby then remembered that two Anglo-Saxon feminine pronouns co-existed in Lancashire. He said ‘Well, why don’t you go in and win? Just put a few teeth in your mouth first, though. The popular prejudice goes in favour of teeth.’
‘What’s pegs to do with it?’ said Arry. ‘A don’t eat. Pegs is for eatin’. Am in loove, that’s bloody trooble, and what’s pegs to do with that?’
‘Women like to see them,’ said Enderby. ‘It’s more of an aesthetic than a functional thing. Love, eh? Well, well. Love. It’s a long time since I’ve heard of anybody being in love.’
‘Every boogger’s in loove nowadays,’ said Arry, ending his carving. He drank some brown ale. ‘There’s songs about it ont wireless. A used to laff at ’em. And now it’s me oo’s copped it. Loove. Bloody nuisance it is an’ all, what with bein’ busy at this timer year. Firms givin’ loonches an’ dinners till near the end of February. Couldn’t ’ave coom at a worse time.’
‘About this suit,’ said Enderby. He faced a vast carboy of pickled onions and his bowels melted within him. He wanted to be gone.
‘Yer can do summat for me,’ said Arry, ‘if am to do summat for you.’ He tasted this last pronoun and then decided that his revelation, his coming request, called for tutoyer intimacy. ‘Summat for thee,’ he amended. ‘Al lend thee that suit if tha’ll write to ’er for me, that bein’ thy line, writin’ poetry an’ all that mook. A keep sendin ’er oop special things as av cooked special, boot that’s not romantic, like. A nice dish of tripe doon in milk, which were always my favourite when a were eatin’. Sent it down, oontooched, oo did. A reet boogger. What would go down best would be a nice loove-letter or a bitter poetry. That’s where you’d coom in,’ said Arry, and his snake-tongue darted. ‘’Av a grey un, a blue un, a brown un, a fawn un an a ’errin-bone tweed. Tha’s welcome to any wan on ’em. Thee write summat an’ sign it Arry and send it to me an’ a’ll send it oop to ’er.’
‘How shall I spell Arry?’ asked Enderby.
‘With a haitch,’ said Arry. ‘Two a week should do the bloody trick. Shouldn’t take yer not more than a coupler minutes to write the sort of thing that goes down all reet with women. You and yer bloody female hadmirers,’ he said.
Before going back to his flat, Enderby used – long, lavishly and painfully – the gentlemen’s lavatory on the ground floor of the hotel. Then, shaken, he went to the cocktail bar for a whisky and to have a look at Thelma. It would not do if he dug up old poems, or wrote new ones, celebrating the glory of fair hair or pegs like margarite if she should chance to be black, grey, near-edentate. The bar seemed full, today, of car salesmen, and these chaffed and mock-courted, with ha-ha-ha and obsolete pilot’s slang, a quite personable barmaid in her late thirties. She had all her front teeth, black hair, naughty eyes, ear-rings that jangled tinily – clusters of minute coins – a snub nose and a comfortable round chin. She was superbly bosomed and efficiently uplifted. She seemed to be a repository of old bar-wisdom, epigrams, radio-show catch-phrases. A car salesman bought her a Guinness and she toasted him with ‘May you live for ever and me live to bury you.’ Then, before drinking, she said, ‘Past the teeth and round the gums, look out, stomach, here it comes.’ She had a fair swallow. She had decorated her little bar with poker-work maxims: ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore and you sleep alone.’ ‘Water is a good drink when taken with the right spirit.’ ‘When you’re up to your neck in hot water be like the kettle and sing.’ There was also a Browningesque couplet (content if not technique) above the gin bottles:
For when the last great Scorer comes to write against your name,
He writes not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.
Enderby doubted whether he could achieve the same gnomic tautness in anything he wrote for her. Still, that wouldn’t be called for, love being essentially imprecise and diffuse. He drank his whisky and left.
3
Enderby’s attitude to love-poetry was dispassionate, impersonal, professional. The worst love-poems, he had always contended, were the most sincere: the lover’s palpitating emotions – all too personal, with an all too particular object – all too often got in the way of the ideal, the universal. A love-poem should address itself to an idea of a loved one. Platonism could take in ideal breasts, an ideal underarm odour, an ideal unsatisfactory coitus, as well as the smooth-browed intellectual wraith of the old sonneteers. Back in his bathroom, Enderby rummaged for fragments and drafts that would serve to start off the Arry to Thelma cycle. He found, mouse-nibbled:
I sought scent and found it in your hair;
Looked for light, and it lodged in your eyes.
So for speech: it held your breath dear;
And I met movement in your ways.
That felt like the first quatrain of a Shakespearian sonnet. It wouldn’t do, of course; the sprung rhythm and muffled rhymes would strike Thelma’s world as technical incompetence. He found:
You were there, and nothing was said,
For words toppled over the edge or hovered in air.
But I was suddenly aware, in the split instant,
Of the constant, in a sort of passionless frenzy:
The mad wings of motion a textbook law,
Trees, tables, the war, in a fixed relation,
Moulded by you, their primum mobile,
But that you were there really was all I knew.
He couldn’t remember writing that. The reference to the war dated it within six years. The place? Probably some town with avenues, outdoor tables for drinking. Addressed to? Don’t be so bloody stupid; addressed to nobody, of course; pure ideal emotion. He continued rooting, his arms deep in the bathtub. The mice scuffled to their primary home, a hole. He found half a priceless piece of juvenilia:
You are all
Brittle crystal,
Your hands
Silver silk over steel.
Your hair harvested
Sheaves shed by summer,
Your repose the flash
Of the flesh of a river-swimmer …
Then a jagged tear. He must have been, sometime, taken short. There was nothing in the bath that would do for Thelma, even an ideal Thelma. He would have to compose something new. Stripping his lower half for poetic action, he took his seat and got down to work. Here was a real problem, that of bridging the gap, of making something that should not seem eccentric to the recipient and at the same time not completely embarrass the author. After an hour he produced the following:
Your presence shines above the fumes of fat,
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.
4
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.’
The Complete Enderby Page 4