October, November, brought a whiff of foreboding. This was getting past a joke. He had money enough still, of course, but less and less to do with his time. Walking through the sea-deafening deserted streets, overcoat-collar round his ears, trying to crank up a poem, returning to hopelessness, stew, Mrs Bamber insisting on coming up to his attic, sitting there, talking about her own past redolent of oyster-bars and Yates’s Wine Lodge.
If, he vowed at Christmas, if he were given some sort of token of assurance that he would be able to start writing again, then, when his money ran out, he would willingly take some futile occupation or other, becoming a part-time poet, keeping alive for his Muse.
Towards the end of January he awoke to a morning clamped in frost, a poem singing in his ears. Thank God, the relief. He wrote the gnomic telegraphic message down and spent the morning refining it to a final shape:
You being the gate
Where the army went through
Would you renew the triumph and have them decorate
The arch and stone again?
Surely those flowers are withered, the army
Now on a distant plain.
Reading it, he saw, his hair bristling, that it was a private message, a message from her to himself.
But some morning when you are washing up,
Or some afternoon, taking a cup
Of tea, possibly you will see
The heavens opening and a lot
Of saints singing, with bells swinging.
But then again, possibly not.
He had felt a clammy glair of sweat settle on him, his diaphragm start to liquefy. A poem of farewell.
In March came publication of The Circular Pavane. Reviews followed: '… Pleasant and lucid verse in the tradition …’; ‘Mr Enderby has lost none of his old cunning; it is a pity, however, that we see no signs of new cunning, new directions. It is a cunningly blended mixture, but it is very much the mixture as before …’; ‘… One remembers with a sigh the old lyrical perfection. It is a relief to turn to the work of two young Oxford poets …’ And one that was surely by Rawcliffe: ‘Mr Enderby is undoubtedly enough of a realist not to regret the passing of the lyric gift. It cannot last for ever, and with Mr Enderby it has lasted longer than with most. Many of his contemporaries have already elected for the dignified silence of remembered achievement, and one may predict that Mr Enderby, after this not unexpectedly disappointing volume, will join their cloistral seclusion …’ In Fem there was, of course, no review.
Enderby had spent April brooding over a pain in his chest. In May, now, this month, three days ago, he had decided to go to a doctor. The doctor, after palpation and auscultation, had more or less decided that nothing was really wrong but, to be on the safe side, had sent Enderby to the hospital for radiography. But, before that, with ‘nothing wrong’ in his ears, Enderby had sat down in his warm attic to write out a list of possible ways to die:
Slash wrists in warm bath
Overdose of sedative
Hang from picture rail in dining-room
Jump in sea from jetty
This was early summer, and Mrs Bamber’s house had a fair number of early summer visitors, mostly, as far as Enderby could judge from the noise, teams of galloping children ineptly driven by whoaing but disregarded young parents. It would not be right, Enderby thought, to make his suicide a public affair. It was no way to start a holiday morning to find a corpse swinging with its tongue out at the cornflakes laid the night before, or else dreaming cold in a bath of cold red ink. Too public, of course, to upset anyone might have been the jump from the jetty at the end of Central Pier, but some swimmer, bored already with his holiday, might have splashed too swiftly to the rescue. The overdose was best: clean and quiet, clean and quiet, by something something and dreamy something. Kingsley, jocular Christian.
Enderby, non-Christian stoic, climbed the vanilla-coloured steps of 17 Butterworth Avenue. The front door was open and on the hat-stand were buckets and spades, the smell of feet and sand in the whole dark seaweedy hall. All the guests were out, perhaps at Son of the Beast from Outer Space, but from her kitchen Mrs Bamber sang, the merry widow of a tram-driver, a song smelling of oysters and ruby port. Mounting the stairs, Enderby was suddenly transfixed by a line from, he thought, Ulysses, which seemed to him, with his lethal dose in his pocket, to be the most poignant line (though it was not really a line – only, so far as he could remember, a splinter of Bloom’s interior monologue), the most pregnantly regretful line he had ever heard:
… And lie no more in her warm bed.
He shook his head as images clustered round it, images he was no longer capable of translating into words and rhythms: the horses under starter’s orders, the champagne tent, the sun on the back of the neck, the omelette made with a hundred eggs and a bottle of Napoleon brandy, life.
… And lie no more in her warm bed.
Enderby climbed higher, climbed to the top, where there was only a roof between him and the sun. This garret of his was, like the sea, warming up for the summer. He entered and sat on his bed, panting after the climb. Then his stomach, living its own life, decided it was hungry, so Enderby put to warm on the gas-ring the remains of a simple stew. While it bubbled, he turned over and over the sizeable bottle of aspirin he had bought: he had read, or heard, that a hundred should be enough. Mrs Bamber, he felt sure, would be efficient at coping with the unexpected corpse of Enderby: she was a Lancashire woman, and Lancashire people rather enjoyed death. It would, anyway, be a clean corpse lying, jaw dropped as in astonishment at being dead, between the sheets. (He reminded himself to effect, as far as was possible, a total evacuation of his body before making it a corpse.) The holiday guests would not be disturbed; the Chief Constable and the Town Clerk would want no publicity; everything would be done quietly at night, and then cornflakes would be shuffled on to plates for the morning. Enderby now sat down, with something like appetite, to his last supper, a thin but savoury viaticum. He felt excited, as though after supper he were going to see a film that everybody had been talking about and the critics had highly praised.
3
Enderby was in his pyjamas. It was still light, a May evening, and he had a fugitive impression of being a child again, sent to bed while the life of day was beating strongly without. He had washed his feet and scrubbed his dentures, scoured his few pots and pans, eaten a piece of chocolate left over from some weeks back, and poured water from the jug on the wash-stand into a clean milk-bottle. (He had no tumbler, and would need a good long draught to speed the aspirin down.) Now, with the cottonwool stopper removed and the tablets clinking discreetly, the aspirin bottle began to dramatize itself, drawing evening light from all angles, becoming almost grail-like, so that the hand that held it shook. Enderby carried it over to his bed, and it made a tiny dry castanet-noise all the way. From the bed, which he now entered, he could look down on Mrs Bamber’s back-yard. He dredged it hungrily, squinting, for symbols of life, but there were only a dustbin, a cardboard box full of cinders, dandelions growing up from the flag-cracks, an old bicycle discarded by Mrs Bamber’s son, Tom. Beyond were three-storey houses with bathing costumes drying on window-sills, beyond again the sea, above all a primrose sky. ‘Now,’ said Enderby aloud.
One shaking hand shook out a shaking palmful of aspirin. He gave the white seeds to his mouth like a golly-wog money-box feeding in a penny. He drank water from the milk-bottle, still shaking. Aspen, aspirin. Was there a connection?
An aspen hand aspiring now to death
He finished off the bottle in six or seven more handfuls, washing them down carefully. Then, sighing, he lay back. There was nothing to do now except wait. He had committed suicide. He had killed himself. Self-slaughter was of all sins the most reprehensible, being the most cowardly. What punishment awaited suicide? If Rawcliffe were there now he would be able to quote from the Inferno, lavishly, that man who had added to Italian art. Enderby could vaguely remember that suicide belonged to Nether Hell, the Second Rin
g, between those who had been violent against their neighbours and those who had been violent against God and art and nature. There, in that Third Ring, Rawcliffe rightly belonged, perhaps there already. All these were, Enderby thought, Sins of the Lion. He closed his eyes and saw, quite clearly, the bleeding trees that were the suicides, harpies fluttering about with a rattle of dry wings like the magnified noise of a shaken aspirin bottle. He frowned. All this seemed very unfair. He had, after all, chosen the way of the Second Ring to avoid the way of the Third, and yet both sins were tucked together in the same round slice of Nether Hell.
With infinite care and delicacy the day wormed itself through a continuum of darker and darker greys. The watch on his wrist ticked on healthily, the too-efficient servant that would announce death as coldly as day and breakfast. Enderby began to feel a great tiredness and to hear a loud buzzing in his ears.
A fanfare of loud farts, a cosmic swish of lavatory-flushings. The dark in front of his eyes was cut away in rough slice after rough slice, like black bread, right down to the heel of the loaf. This then began to turn slowly, brightening with each revolution until it became blinding like the sun. Enderby found it an insuperable effort to interpose blankets or hands or eyelids. The circle cracked with intolerable luminosity, and then Enderby seemed to be dragged, with hearty, though somehow archangelic, tug-of-war cries towards some ineffable hidden Presence. Suddenly this Presence, at first humorously offering Itself as a datum for mere intellection, erupted into a tingling ultimate blow at all the senses, and Enderby staggered back.
There she was, welcoming him in, farting prrrrrrp like ten thousand earthquakes, belching arrrp and og like a million volcanoes, while the whole universe roared with approving laughter. She swung tits like sagging moons at him, drew from black teeth an endless snake of bacon-rind, pelted him with balls of ear-wax and snuffled green snot in his direction. The thrones roared and the powers were helpless. Enderby was suffocated by smells: sulphuretted hydrogen, unwashed armpits, halitosis, faeces, standing urine, putrefying meat – all thrust into his mouth and nostrils in squelchy balls. ‘Help,’ he tried to call. ‘Help help help.’ He fell, crawled, crying, ‘Help, help.’ The black, which was solid laughter and filth, closed on him. He gave one last scream before yielding to it.
2
1
‘AND,’ SAID DR GREENSLADE the psychiatrist, ‘we won’t try that sort of thing again, will we? For, as we can now see, it only causes lots and lots of worry and trouble to other people.’ He beamed, a fat youngish man in a white coat not too clean, with the unhealthy complexion of a sweet-eater. ‘For example, it didn’t do our poor old landlady’s heart any good, did it? She had to run up the stairs and then down the stairs’ – he illustrated this with up-and-then-down-the-air wiggling fingers – ‘and she was most agitated when the ambulance finally got there. We must consider others, mustn’t we? The world wasn’t made just for us and nobody else.’
Enderby cringed from the nanny-like substitution of first plural for second singular. ‘Everybody gives trouble when they’re dying,’ he mumbled. ‘That can’t be avoided.’
‘Ah,’ pounced Dr Greenslade, ‘but you didn’t die. When people die in the normal decent way they give a normal decent leisurely kind of trouble which harms no one. But you were just caught more or less in the act of sailing off. That meant rushing about and worry for everybody, particularly for your poor old landlady. Besides’ – he leaned forward, hushed – ‘it wasn’t just a matter of straight-forward dying with you, was it? It was’ – he whispered the dirty words – ‘attempted suicide.’
Enderby bowed his head, this being the required stock response. Then he said, ‘I’m sorry I made a mess of it. I don’t know what came over me. Well, I do in a way, of course, but if I’d been braver, if I’d stuck it out, I think I could have sailed straight through, if you see what I mean. What I mean is that that was just a vision of Hell meant to frighten me. Bogies and so on. It wasn’t real.’
Dr Greenslade rubbed his hands discreetly. ‘I can see,’ he said, ‘that a lot of fun lies ahead. Though not for me, unfortunately. Still, I’ll be getting Wapenshaw’s reports. It’s a lovely place,’ he said dreamily, ‘especially lovely at this time of year. You’ll like it.’
‘Where?’ said Enderby with suspicion. ‘What?’ Dr Greenslade had sounded like some Dickens character talking about a beloved idiot-child’s grave. ‘I thought I was being discharged.’
‘Oh, dear me, no,’ said shocked Dr Greenslade. ‘Healthy people don’t try to commit suicide, you know. Not coldly and deliberately they don’t. And you’d planned this, you know. Preston Hawkes told me you’d planned it. It wasn’t just a mad impulse.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Enderby stoutly. ‘It was logical. I knew perfectly well what I was doing and I’ve given you perfectly logical reasons for doing it.’ He belched acidulously: Greeeeekh. ‘This hospital food’s bloody awful,’ he said.
‘The food at Flitchley is excellent,’ dreamed Dr Greenslade. ‘Everything’s excellent there. Lovely grounds to walk in. Table tennis. Television. A library of sedative books. Congenial company. You’ll be sorry to leave.’
‘Look,’ said Enderby quietly, ‘I’m not going, see? You’ve got no right to keep me here or send me anywhere. I’m perfectly all right, see? I demand my freedom.’
‘Now,’ said Dr Greenslade harshly, changing from nanny to schoolmaster, ‘let’s get one or two things absolutely clear, shall we? There are certain laws in this country appertaining to mental derangement, laws of restraint, certificates and so on. Those laws have, in your case, already been invoked. We can’t have people wandering all over the country trying to kill themselves.’ Enderby closed his eyes to see England swarming, as a log swarms with woodlice, with peripatetic suicides. ‘You’re a danger to yourself,’ said Dr Greenslade, ‘and a danger to the community. A man who doesn’t respect his own life isn’t likely to respect anybody else’s. That’s logical, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Enderby promptly.
‘Oh, well,’ said Dr Greenslade sarcastically, ‘you, of course, are the big expert on logic.’
‘I don’t pretend to be anything,’ said Enderby loudly, ‘except a poet whose inspiration has departed. I’m an empty eggshell.’
‘You are,’ said Dr Greenslade sternly, ‘a man of education and culture who can be of great value to the community. When you’re made fit again, that is. Empty eggshells, indeed,’ he poohed. ‘Poets,’ he near-sneered. ‘Those days are past, those wide-eyed romantic days. We’re living in a realistic age now,’ he said. ‘Science is making giant strides. And as for poets,’ he said, with sudden bubbling intimacy, ‘I met a poet once. He was a nice decent fellow with no big ideas about himself. He wrote very nice poetry, too, which was not too difficult to understand.’ He looked at Enderby as though Enderby’s poetry was both not nice and not intelligible. ‘This man,’ said Dr Greenslade, ‘didn’t have your advantages. No private income for him, no cosy little flat in a seaside resort. He had a wife and family, and he wasn’t ashamed of working for them. He wrote his poetry at week-ends.’ He nodded at Enderby, week-day poet. ‘And there was nothing abnormal about him, nothing at all. He didn’t go about with a lobster on a string or marry his own sister or eat pepper before drinking claret. He was a decent family man whom nobody would have taken for a poet at all.’ Enderby groaned frightfully. ‘And,’ added Dr Greenslade, ‘he had a poem in all the anthologies.’ Enderby held back a loud howl. Then he said:
‘If he was so normal, why did you have anything to do with him?’
‘This,’ smiled Dr Greenslade in large triumph, ‘was a purely social acquaintance. Now,’ he said, looking at the clock above Enderby’s head, ‘you’d better get back to your ward.’ Enderby stood up. He was in hospital pyjamas, dressing-gown, slippers, and felt grey, shrunken, a pauper. He shambled out of the electro-cardiogram room into the corridor, hesitated at the stairs with their WAY OUT notice, remembered that they had locked his clothes
away, and then, resigned, shuffled into the Medical Ward. He had been brought here to sleep it off after the stomach-pumping in the Emergency Ward, had lain for two days starved in a sort of big cot with iron bars at the sides, and now was allowed to pout about the ward in his dressing-gown. If a fellow-patient said, ‘What’s wrong with you, mate?’ he replied, on the ward sister’s instructions, ‘Acetylsalicylic poisoning.’ But these rough men, all with impressively visible illnesses, knew better than that. This here one had had a go at doing himself in. As Enderby, hands in dressing-gown pockets, bowed towards his bed (ring-worm to the left of it, to the right a broken femur), a dwarf of a working-man hopped towards him on crutches. ‘’Ere,’ said the dwarf.
‘Yes?’ said Enderby. The dwarf cleared his nasopharynx via his oesophagus and said, conspiratorially:
‘Trick cyclist been ’avin a go at you, eh? I seen ’im come in. Ridin’ all over you, eh?’
‘That’s right,’ said Enderby.
‘Should be a law against that, I reckon. Draggin’ out secrets from the back of your mind, like. Not decent, way I see it. ’Ad a go at me once. Know what that was for?’
‘No,’ said Enderby. The dwarf hopped nearer, his eyes ashine. He said, low:
‘Wife and kids was out at the pictures, see. I ’ad nowt to do, not bein’ much on the telly, and I’d washed up after my supper and put the kitchen straight. I’d read the paper too, see, and there wasn’t much in that, all murders and suchlike and these ’ere summit conferences. Anyway, know what I’d got in my overall pocket?’
The Complete Enderby Page 21