‘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.
3
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 malig
ned 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
At any man’s or country’s enemies.’
He said. ‘Slaughter will wreak a red relief.’
She said not no, not yes.
And so he went to marry mud and toil,
Swallow in general hell his private hell.
His salts have long drained into alien soil,
And she says nothing still.
Enderby looked up bitterly from the tenth selected anthology, his tenth reading of the poem. And in none of these books was there anything by Enderby.
Enderby pulled out a spilling palmful of coin from Arry’s right trouser-pocket. Snorting, he counted it: twelve and ninepence. In his wallet there was, he knew, one pound note. He muttered to himself as he moved doorwards, head down to count again. He bumped into a young salesman who said, ‘Whoops, sir. See nothing you fancy, sir?’
‘Books,’ said Enderby, with proleptic drunken thickness. ‘Waste of time and bloody money.’ He left, saying a soldier’s goodbye to Goodby’s, not one of Goodby’s good boys. There was a pub almost directly opposite, shedding cosy Christmas-card lights through its old-time bottle-glass windows. Enderby entered the public bar and ordered whisky.
4
Enderby entered the public bar and ordered whisky. This was some hours later, a different pub. Not the second or third pub, but somewhere well on in the series, the xth pub or something. On the whole, benevolent and swaying Enderby decided, he had had not too bad an evening. He had met two very fat Nigerians with wide cunning smiles and many blackheads. These had cordially invited him to their country and to write an epic to celebrate its independence. He had met a Guinness-drinker with a wooden leg which, for the delectation of Enderby, he had offered to unscrew. He had met a chief petty officer of the Royal Navy who, in the friendliest spirit in the world, had been prepared to fight Enderby and, when Enderby had demurred, had given him two packets of ship’s Woodbines and said that Enderby was his pal. He had met a Siamese osteopath with a collection of fighting fish. He had met a punch-drunk bruiser who said he saw visions and offered to see one then for a pint. He had met a little aggressive chinny chewing man, not unlike Rawcliffe, who swore that Shakespeare’s plays had been written by Sir William Knollys, Controller of the Queen’s Household. He had met a cobbler who knew the Old Testament in Hebrew, an amateur exegetist who distrusted all Biblical scholarship after 1890. He had met, seen, or heard many others too: a thin woman who had talked incessantly to a loll-tongued Alsatian; a man with the shakes who swallowed his own phlegm (Fem, Fem, remember that, Fem); a pair of hand-holding lesbians; a man who wore flower transfers on a surgical boot; callow soldiers drinking raw gin … Now it was nearing closing-time and Enderby was, he thought, fairly near to Charing Cross. That meant two stops on the Underground to Victoria. There must be a nice convenient after-closing-time train to the coast.
Enderby, paying fumblingly for his whisky, saw that he had very little money left. He estimated that he had managed to consume this evening a good dozen whiskies and a draught beer or so. His return ticket was snug in Arry’s left-hand inside jacket-pocket. He had cigarettes. One more drink and he would be right for home. He looked round the public bar smiling. Good honest British working-men, salt of the earth, bloodying and buggering their meagre dole of speech, horny-handed but delicate with darts. And, on a high-backed settle at right angles to the bar counter, two British working-women sat, made placid with the fumes of stout. One said:
‘Starting next week, it is, in Fem. With free gift picture in full colour. Smashing, he is.’ Enderby listened jealously. The other woman said:
‘Never take it, myself. Silly sort of name it is. Makes you wonder how they think of them sometimes, really it does.’
‘If,’ said Enderby, ‘you are referring to the magazine to which I myself am to be a contributor, I would say that that name is meant to be Frenchified and naughty.’ He smiled down at them with a whiskified smirk, right elbow on the counter, left fingers on right forearm. The two women looked up doubtfully. They were probably about the same age as Vesta Bainbridge, but they had an aura of back kitchens about them, tea served to shirt-sleeved men doing their pools, the telly flicking and shouting in the corner.
‘Pardon?’ said one, loudly.
‘Naughty,’ said Enderby, with great clarity. ‘Frenchified.’
‘What’s French frieds to do with it?’ said the other. ‘My friend and me was just talking, do you mind?’
‘Poetry is what I shall write for it,’ said Enderby, ‘every week.’ He nodded several times, just like Rawcliffe.
‘You keep your poetry to yourself, do you mind?’ and she took a sharp draught of Guinness. A man came from the dart-playing part of the room, a single dart in his hand, saying:
‘You all right, Edie?’ He wore a decently cut suit of poor serge, but no collar or tie. His gold-headed collar-stud caught the light and dazzled Enderby. He had a gaunt quick face and was as small and supple as a miner. He inspected Enderby as if invited to give an estimate on him. ‘You saying something to her that you shouldn’t?’ he said. ‘Mate?’ he added, provocatively.
‘He was saying,’ said Edie, ‘about naughty poetry. French, too.’
‘Was you saying naughty poetry to my wife here?’ said the man. Like Milton’s Death, he shook a dreadful dart.
‘I was just saying,’ said smirking Enderby, ‘that I was going to write for it. What they read, I mean. That is to say, Edie here, your wife, as I take it to be, doesn’t read, but the other one does, you see.’
‘We’ll have less of that about doesn’t read, do you mind?’ said Edie. ‘And less of using my name familiar, do you mind?’
‘Look here,’ said Edie’s husband. ‘You want to keep that for the saloon bar, where they pay a penny extra for the privilege, do you mind? We don’t want your sort in here.’
‘Doing no harm,’ said Enderby huffily. He then poured over the huff a trickle of sweet sauce of ingratiation. ‘I mean, I was just talking.’ He leered. ‘Just passing the time of day, if you see what I mean.’
‘Well,’ said the dart-man, ‘don’t you try to pass the time with my missis, do you mind?’
‘Do you mind?’ said Edie, in near-unison.
‘I wouldn’t want to pass the time with her,’ said Enderby, proudly, ‘I’ve other things to do, thank you very much.’
‘I’ll have to do you,’ said the man, sincerely. ‘Too much bloody hoot altogether, mate, to my way of thinking, that’s what you’ve got. You’d better get out of here before I get really nasty. Been smelling the barmaid’s apron, that’s your trouble.’
Prrrfffp.
‘Look,’ said Enderby, ‘that wasn’t intended, I really had no intention, that was not meant in any way to be a comment, I assure you that is the sort of thing that could happen to any man, or woman too, for that matter, even Edie here, your wife, that is to say, yourself included.’ Prrrfffp.
‘Do you mind?’ said Edie.
‘This here’s my fist,’ said the man, pocketing his dart. The other customers quietened and looked interested. ‘You’ll get it straight in the moosh, straight up you will, if you don’t get
out of my bleeding sight this instant, do you mind?’
‘I was just going anyway,’ said dignified swaying Enderby. ‘If you will allow me the privilege of finishing my drink here.’
‘You’ve had enough, you have, mate,’ said the man, more kindly. From the saloon bar came the call of ‘Last orders.’ ‘If you want to drown your secret sorrows don’t do it where me and my wife is, see, because I take the sort of thing that you’ve been saying very hard, see.’ Enderby put down his glass, gave the dart-man a glassy but straight look, then eructed strongly and without malice. He bowed and, pushing his way courteously through the long-swallowers anxious to get one last one in, made an exit that was not without dignity. Outside in the street the heady air of a Guinness-sharp refrigerated night hit him and he staggered. The dart-man had followed him out and stood there, gauging and weighing. ‘Look, mate,’ he said, ‘this is not for me really, because I’ve been like that myself often enough, God knows, but my wife insists, do you mind, and this is like for a keepsake.’ He bowed, and while bowing swerved his torso suddenly to the left as though listening to something from that side, then he brought left fist and torso right and up and let Enderby have one, not too hard, straight in the stomach. ‘There,’ he said, somewhat kindly, as if the blow had been intended purely therapeutically. ‘That’ll do, won’t it?’
The Complete Enderby Page 7