Dr Wapenshaw now stomped over to kneeling Hogg and began to lift him by his collar. ‘Out!’ he cried again. ‘Get out of here, you immoral bastard!’ He thumped to the door, opened it and held it open. The patient by the gasfire was weeping quietly. ‘As for you, you scrimshanker,’ Dr Wapenshaw cried at him, ‘I’ll deal with you in a minute. I know you, leadswinger as you are.’ Hogg, in sorrowful dignity that would, he foreknew, become a brew of rage when he could get to somewhere nice and quiet, walked to the door and said:
‘You take too much on yourselves, if you don’t mind me saying so.’ He waved The Kvadrat’s Kloochy in a kind of admonition. ‘I’d say it was the job of people like you to set the rest of us a good example. It’s you who want a good going over, not this poor chap here.’
‘Out!’
‘Just going,’ said Hogg, just going. He went, shaking his head slowly. ‘And,’ he said, turning back to Dr Wapenshaw, though from a safe distance, ‘I’ll write what poetry I want to, thanks very much, and not you nor anybody else will stop me.’ He thought of adding ‘So there,’ but, before he could decide, Dr Wapenshaw slammed his consulting-room door; the patient by the gasfire went ‘Oh!’ as though clouted by his mother. Not a very good man after all, thought Hogg, leaving. He ought to have suspected that heartiness right at the beginning. There had always, he felt, been something a bit insincere about it.
3
Some short time later, Hogg sat trembling in a public lavatory. He could actually see the flesh of his inner thighs jellying with rage. Up above him diesel trains kept setting off to the west, for this was Paddington Station, whither he had walked by way of Madame Tussaud’s, the Planetarium, Edgware Road, and so on. He had put a penny in the slot and was having more than his pennyworth of anger out. The whole poetry-loathing world had the face of Dr Wapenshaw but, he felt, having soundly and legitimately bemerded that face in imagination and micturated on it also, the world was content merely to loathe, while Dr Wapenshaw had had to go further, deliberately liquidating the poet. Or trying to. He, Hogg, was maligning the world. The world was very bad, but not as bad as Dr Wapenshaw. But then again, was not the bloody Muse bad too, withholding her gifts as she had done and then coming forward with a most ill-timed bestowal? The point was, what was the position? What precisely and the hell did she want him to do? He caught a most agonizing and fragrant whiff of himself as he had once been, seated like this in the workroom of his seaside flat, scratching bared legs that were mottled by the electric fire, working away steadily at his verse, the Muse and he set in a calm and utterly professional relationship. Would she, coaxed (which meant, among other things, not calling her bad or bloody as he had done just then), be willing to return on a sort of chronic basis? An acute spasm like that one which there had just been the row about really did nobody anything but harm.
But, of course, in those days, before that bloody woman had married him and made him squander his capital, it had been possible for him to be a professional (i.e. non-earning, or earning very little) poet. Now he had to have a wage. Even if the gift returned properly it would have to be expended in the form of what was called a nice hobby. Of course, he had been able to save a little. He had a little bedroom in the hotel, his food, a few tips. His trousers being down, he was able to find out at once how much he had saved. He kept his money in cash in a sponge-bag whose string was wound about a fly-button. He trusted neither banks nor his colleagues at the hotel. Keys there were a mockery, because of pass-keys. Once he had entered his little bedroom to find Spanish John in it, with a shirt of Hogg’s in one hand and one of Hogg’s razor-blades in the other, and Hogg had been quite sure he had locked his door. John had smiled falsely and said that he had found the door unlocked and had entered to borrow a razor-blade, he being out of them, and at the same time had been filled with a desire to admire Hogg’s shirts, which he considered to be very good ones. Hogg did not believe that. Anyway, he kept his money in a bag in his trousers. It was a kind of testicle-protector, for there were some dirty fighters among the Maltese and Cypriot commis waiters. He now took his roll of five-pound notes out of the bag and counted them earnestly. A crude drawing of a man, a sort of naked god of fertility, looked down without envy.
Twenty-five drawings of a clavigerous lion guarding a rather imbecile teenage Britannia. That was not bad. That was one hundred and twenty-five pounds. And, in his trouser pocket, there was about thirty shillings in silver, made up of mostly very mean gratuities. The value of certain other gratuities, dispensed in foreign notes, he had not yet troubled to ascertain. These – dirhams, lire, new-francs, deutschmarks, and so on – he kept folded in his passport, which was in the inside pocket of his sports jacket, now hanging from the door-hook. It was necessary, he had learned, for every employee of the hotel to keep close guard on his passport, because of the thievery and shady trade in passports that went on among the dark scullions, outcasts of the islands, creatures of obcure ethnic origin, cunning, vicious, and unscrupulous. Despite Britain’s new despised status in the world, a British passport was still prized. So there it was, then. Enough to buy time to write, say, some really careful sestinas or rambling Pound-type cantos, if the Muse would be willing to cooperate. He blew very faint wind. That was not, he told her, in case she were around, acting silly, meant in any spirit of acrimony or impatience: it was legitimate efflation, paid for in advance.
He was calmer now. He looked with sympathy at the graffiti on the walls and door. Some of these must, he thought, be considered a kind of art, since they were evidently attempts to purge powerful emotion into stylized forms. There were also wild messages, pleas for assignations at known places, though the dates were long gone; there were boasts too extravagant to be capable of fulfilment, also succinct desiderations of sexual partners too complaisant to be of this world. Sex. Well, he, Hogg, had tried, following the rehabilitatory pattern imposed by Dr, now bloody, Wapenshaw, to go in for sex like everybody else, but it had not been very successful. In any case, you really had to be young nowadays to go in properly for sex: that had been made fairly clear to him by such of the young – Italian chambermaids and so on – as he had met, as also by some of the popular art he had, again in fulfilment of the Wapenshaw bloody pattern, tried glumly to appreciate. So there it was, then. He must stop himself saying that to himself all the time.
On the walls there were also little verses, most of them set – like those works of Faith Fortitude – as prose. They were all traditional verses, mostly on cloacal subjects, but it was somehow warming to find that verse was still in regard for its gnomic mnemonic properties. Among the common people, that was. He could not imagine bloody Wapenshaw writing or drawing anything in a lavatory. There was, Hogg noticed, a nice little patch of naked wall by his right arm. He did not need his Muse for what he now took out his ballpoint pen to write. He wrote:
Think, when you ease your inner gripe
Or stand with penis in your paw,
A face is lodged within the pipe
And it belongs to Wapenshaw.
That, perhaps, would be learned by heart and reproduced elsewhere underground, imperfect memory blurring the sharp elegance but perhaps not wholly losing that name, in some allomorph or other. Enderby, folk poet. Enderby, not Hogg. And Wapenshaw given proper immortality.
Hoggerby now felt hungry. He girded himself, pulled the chain, donned his jacket, and went out. He nodded kindly at the wash-and-brush-up man, who was reading the Evening Standard by his glazed partition, then mounted to the light. He walked out of the station and found a sufficiently dirty-looking little eating-hell in a side-street, nearly filled with slurping men. He knew the sort of meal he wanted: a rebellious meal. From the tooth-sucking man with glasses behind the counter he ordered a mug of very strong tea, eggs and fat bacon, marged doorsteps. He was going to give himself indigestion. That would show bloody Wapenshaw.
2
1
‘A GREAT HONOUR, ja,’ said Mr Holden from behind massed flowers of the season. In the ad
joining office typewriters clacked. Standing before Mr Holden were Hogg and John the Spaniard, respectively flashing gold-and-caries and looking dour about the great honour. ‘Smallish and very select, and the Saddleback is just about the right-sized pitch, ja. So it’ll be cocktails in the Sty, and this is where you, brother Hogg, show your batting strength. We’ll be having some waiters from the Sweet Thames Run Softly bar, sort of extra cover. You’d better start boning up on your cocktails, fella, read up your sort of bartender’s Wisden. Horse’s necks, sidecars, manhattans, snowballs, the lot. You reckon you can carry your bat?’
‘I know them all,’ said Hogg, ‘including some that haven’t been thought of yet.’
‘I show him,’ said John, ‘if he not know.’
‘A pop-group, you say?’ said Hogg.
‘You ought to know these things,’ said Mr Holden. ‘You get plenty of time for reading the papers. A sort of belated celebration, a kind of late cut to the off. They’ve been making this movie in the Bahamas, as you should know, and only now have they been able to get this fixture organized. There’s a lot to celebrate. A new golden disc, the birthday honours, and now Yod Crewsy gets this F.L.R.S. thing. Ja, plenty to celebrate. Mucho,’ he added for John’s benefit.
‘Usted habla bien español.’
‘F.R.S.L.?’ Hogg queried. ‘Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature?’
‘Not bad, not bad, fella. Keep on like that, eye on the ball and all that palooka. Ja, he got the Hangman award for some book of poems he wrote and the F.S. thing sort of automatically followed.’
‘Heinemann award?’ frowned Hogg. ‘And what do you say this lot are called?’
‘Ah, Jesus, you’ll never get off the reserve list,’ said Mr Holden. ‘The Crewsy Fixers. You mean to say you never heard of the Crewsy Fixers? England’s best ambassadors they’ve been termed, a little Test team all on their own, ja, doing all in their power to protect the wicket of your shattered economy. Foreign earnings, that is, an export drive to the boundary, and Her Majesty the Queen’ (Mr Holden bowed his head) ‘is no doubt dooly grateful. Hence, fella, those medals. So now you know, but I guess you should have known already.’
‘Sí sí sí sí,’ agreed John. ‘Already he should know.’
‘I would call that a very blasphemous name,’ said Hogg coldly. ‘Not,’ he added hastily, ‘that I’m at all a religious man, you understand. What I mean is, it seems to me in very bad taste.’
‘To the pure,’ said Mr Holden, ‘all things are pure. There’s Yod Crewsy and his Fixers, so they become the Crewsy Fixers. Right? If you’re thinking it sounds like something else, then you’re on a very shaky wicket yourself, fella, so far as taste goes. And they’re very very religious boys, which again you should have known. Molto religioso,’ he added to John.
‘Lei parla bene italiano.’
‘I bet,’ divined Hogg, ‘that he called himself Crewsy just so he could make up that blasphemous name. And that Yod bit doesn’t sound Christian to me. Yod,’ he told Mr Holden, ‘is a letter of the Hebrew alphabet.’
‘Now you’d better watch that,’ said Mr Holden very sternly. ‘Because that sounds to me very much like racial prejudice. And if there’s one thing the policy of this hotel group says out out out to, it’s racial prejudice. So watch it.’
‘He say too,’ intimated John, ‘about Spanish people not good.’
‘Right, then,’ said Mr Holden. ‘We’ll have harmony, efficiency, and team spirit. A very special luncheon for very special people. The confectionery chefs are working out a very special ice pudding for the occasion. And there’s going to be a very exotic dish not before served here. It’s called –’ He consulted a draft menu on his desk. ‘– lobscowse. Something Arabic, I guess. Those boys sure scored big in Saudi-Arabia.’
Hogg stood transfixed. ‘Ice pudding,’ he said. ‘In Saudi-Arabia. It melts as it is made. Like time, you know.’
‘You feeling all right, Hogg?’ While Mr Holden frowned, John the Spaniard poked his right temple with a brown finger, shaking his head in sad glee. ‘You sure you feel up to this, fella? If not, we can always get Juanito here to take over. I reckon he can face the bowling if you can’t.’
‘It has to be Hogg,’ said Hogg, distracted. ‘He may be a pig but he’s not a Hogg. It’s coming,’ he added. ‘There’s something there all right. The gift’s coming back. Something special. I’ll have to go and put it down on paper.’ Somebody else seemed to be in the room. She?
‘Ah, a cocktail,’ nodded Mr Holden, relieved. ‘That’s okay, then. Something special, eh? You go right off and get it down, fella. And don’t forget that we own the copyright. One more thing. Wigs. There’s got to be wigs. They needn’t fit too good, but there’s got to be wigs. Okay. Back to the pavilion.’
Hogg left in a small daze. ‘Useless to hope to hold off,’ he muttered, ‘the unavoidable happening.’ What the hell was it all about? She was there all right; she was playing silly hide-and-seek, finger in mouth, up and down the corridors. She was wearing a very short dress. John the Spaniard said:
‘What you mean, hombre? You call me pig.’
‘Big, I said big,’ said Hogg, distracted. ‘Look, the bar doesn’t open for another hour. I’ve got to go to my room.’
‘Big pig, you say? I hear. Not bloody daft, man.’
Hogg made a dash for the staff lift which, he saw, was just about to land. It opened, and a very natty though puffy young man came out, bearing what looked like the disgorgements of one of the hotel computers. He seemed to look direly at Hogg, as though it was his character that had been programmed. Hogg got in frowning, his brain full of words that were trying to marshal themselves into an ordered, though cryptic, statement. John the Spaniard tried to follow, but the puffy young man was in the way. Hogg pressed the right button and saw the door slice fist-shaking John laterally until there was nothing left of him save the after-image of the glow of his fillings. The lift-car seemed to remain where it was, and only the flash of the floor-numbers spoke of rising to 34A, a floor not accessible to the hotel guests. A high-powered car rushing on to it, whether you will or not. Hogg nearly fainted.
He got out blindly when the door automatically opened, fumbled for his key, almost tumbled into his cheerless cell. Paper. He had a lined writing-pad, in keeping with his new image. He sat panting heavily on his cot and began to scribble. She breathed hard into his left ear; her voice had become, for some reason, a lisping child’s one. He wrote:
Useless to hope to hold off
The unavoidable happening
With that frail barricade
Of week, day or hour
Which melts as it is made,
For time himself will bring
You in his high-powered car,
Rushing on to it,
Whether you will or not.
And then sudden silence. What was it all about? What did it mean? Too much meaning in your poetry, Enderby. Someone had said that once. You worry, my dear Enderby, far too much about meaning. Rawcliffe, one of the special trinity of enemies. And there was Wapenshaw, trying to crush his skull. He saw the strong hairy fingers, but the skull only grinned. The consolation of bone, the bone’s resignation. But what thing was going to happen that he had to resign himself to? A handshake of finality, the welcome of whole fields of empty time. No, no, it was not quite that. With a rush like blood it came:
So, shaking hands with the grim
Satisfactory argument,
The consolation of bone
Resigned to the event,
Making a friend of him,
He, in an access of love,
Renders his bare acres
Golden and wide enough.
The prophetic tingling, as of something thrilling to welcome and then to lose and not to mind losing. He could have wept. The Muse stood by his wash-basin. What, then? What was the covenant to be? He might have to wait for a dream for the full disclosure. There was a hammering on the door. She hid, sliding through its door, in his tiny
clothes-cupboard.
‘Puerco, puerco!’ called John the Spaniard. ‘You get tonic water for bloody bar, man!’
‘For cough!’ cried Hogg. ‘Go away, you garlicky bastard!’ And then, radiating from the clothes-cupboard, it announced itself as the last stanza:
And this last margin of leaving
Is sheltered from the rude
Indiscreet tugging of winds.
‘You bastard! You pull pudding in there! I bloody know!’
Hogg wrote, like a dying message:
For parting, a point in time,
Cannot have magnitude
And cannot cast shadows about
The final
John’s thudding drowned the final whatever it was. The Muse, hidden in the cupboard, shook her sad child’s head. Hogg-Enderby, enraged, got up and unlocked his door. Then he pulled it open. John almost fell in.
‘Right,’ Hogg-Enderby clenched. ‘You’ve had this coming a long time, bloody hombre. You and bloody Franco and wanting bloody Gibraltar. Right.’ Well, Wapenshaw and the rest wished him to be involved in the world, didn’t they – low, vulgar, an ordinary citizen ungiven to civilized restraints? John grinned dirty gold and put out mean claws. Hogg, as low barman, at once kicked him on the shin. While John was hopping mad, Hogg pushed him on to the bed. John sat there nursing his pain and trying to kick at the same time, mouthing the foulest bodega provincial Spanish with no refined lisp in it. Hogg looked for something to hit him with and picked up the cheap bedroom chair from near the clothes-cupboard. By the time he had raised it John was on his feet again. He leered very terribly and said:
The Complete Enderby Page 25