‘They thought they’d see it as parenthesis –
Only the naked statement to remember,
Cleaving no logic in their sentences,
Putting no feelers out to the waking dreamer –
So they might reassume untaken seats,
Finish their coffee and their arguments,
From the familiar hooks redeem their hats
And leave, with the complacency of friends.
But strand is locked with strand, like the weave of bread,
And this is part of them and part of time –’
‘Oh God God,’ Rawcliffe suddenly cried. ‘Ugly hell gape not come not Lucifer.’ He began to babble. ‘And if the eternal finds its figures in the temporal then they can find their inferno here.’ He screamed and then collapsed, his head lolling, his tongue out, blood coming from his left nostril. Antonio’s guitar clanged gently superposed fourths and my-dog-has-fleas as he put it down. He made the sign of the cross and prayed weeping. ‘A shot, Enderby, for Christ’s sake.’ Enderby started: a test; see if he could really kill? ‘A lot of shots.’ He saw then and went over to the coffee-table and the syringe and the morphine ampoules in their box. He hoped he could cope. Those Doggy Wog people would be able to cope all right.
4
Rawcliffe did not stay under for long. There was a powerful life-urge there, despite everything. ‘Brandy,’ he said. ‘I’ll beat them all yet, Enderby.’ Enderby filled the cup: the bottle was near its end. Rawcliffe sucked it all in like water. ‘What news?’ he asked. ‘What irrelevancies are proceeding in the big world?’
‘There’s nothing as far as I can see,’ Enderby said. ‘But we’ve only got the Spanish paper, and I can’t read Spanish very well.’
Enough, though. When Tetuani came back from posting that air-letter, he brought with him a copy of España, which Enderby took with him to a bar-table. Rawcliffe unconscious, though roaring terribly from deep in his cortex, Enderby sat with a large whisky, breathing the prophylactic of fresh air from an open window. ‘Quiere comer?’ Antonio asked. Enderby shook his head: he couldn’t eat anything just yet, not just yet, gracias all the same. He drank his drink and looked at the paper. It was better that he read what he was undoubtedly going to read not in English: he needed the cushioning of a foreign tongue, with all its associations of literature and tourism, despite his foreknowledge. Words had power of their own: dead would always be a horrible word. On the front page the Caudillo still howled for the Rock, and some Arab leader called vainly for the extermination of Israel. When, on the second page, he came to the headline YOD CREWSY MUERTO, his response was that of a printer who had set the type himself. The score was, say, 10–2, and you had to wait ten minutes, say, for the anti-climax of the final whistle. What it said under the headline was brief. It said, as far as Enderby could tell, that he had passed into a terminal coma after a moment of flickering his eyes open and that soon there were no further indications of cardiac activity. There would be a sort of lying in state somewhere and then a requiem mass at the Catholic Cathedral in London (they meant Westminster). Fr O’Malley would deliver the panegyric. Nothing about girls weeping, as over Osiris or Adonis or somebody. Nothing about Scotland Yard expecting immediate arrest.
‘Nothing at all,’ Enderby said.
What would Scotland Yard do about Rawcliffe’s letter? Enderby had two-fingered it himself to Rawcliffe’s dictation. It would do no good, Enderby had said, but Rawcliffe had insisted. Repentance, seeing the light, symbolic blow against anti-art. A guest (check guest-list) who had come with full cold-blooded intention of killing and then being arrested – dying of those encroaching claws, what had he to lose? – he had succumbed in reflex to panic and handed gun to an anonymous waiter. He was not sorry, oh no, far from it: so perish all art’s enemies, including (but with him it was the fullest blackest knowledge: he knew what he did) himself. Rawcliffe’s scrawl, two witnesses: Antonio Alarcón and Manuel Pardo Palma. Well, Enderby thought, it might resolve things one way or the other. It would welcome the police to one terminus or another. And your name, sir, señor? Enderby. Your passport, please, por favor. Well, a slight problem there, officer. Whispered consultation, sergeant calling inspector over, comparing photograph with. All right, Hogg then. I recognized the true murderer and pursued him. Doing the job of the police for them, really, in best fictional tradition. I say no more. All right, arrest me then. Obviously I say no more. No warning necessary.
He was indifferent, really. All he wanted was a small room and a table to write verse on and freedom from the necessity to earn a living. But there remained self-doubt. Was the Muse so generous now only because she was dispensing rubbish? The future, perhaps, lay with those Doggy Wog people. He didn’t really know; he wanted to be told, shown. But was he being reserved for something? Why did not everybody know that Hogg was Enderby? Why had that moon-bitch been silent? If John the Spaniard had blown the gaff, why was Tangier not milling with Interpol, demanding to see all foreign passports, combing? What force had struck down Wapenshaw, if it was Wapenshaw they’d been talking about, and rendered him dumb?
Enderby wondered now, sitting on the Rif saddle, keeping away from the putridity, whether he should ask Rawcliffe (meaning the still not foundered intelligence in the penthouse above the demolition squads), as a dying man who had nothing to gain by mendacity, what he thought of his, Enderby’s, work and (what he really meant) whether he should go on with it. But heaving and groaning Rawcliffe gave him an answer without being asked, without speaking. Go on with anything so long as you’re alive; nothing matters except staying alive. Enderby could see that now, but had not always thought so. Rawcliffe said:
‘Get on to Walker. It’s going to be it soon, Enderby. Never mind what he asks. Money money money. All money these days. Fortunately it’s stuffed in here, mine I mean, by my feet. No danger, Enderby, of ultimate incontinence fouling it. Clean money, most. The dirty part did not really harm my country. Hashish a harmless enough drug. More brandy.’
‘I’ll have to get a new bottle.’
‘Get it then, blast you. What are those bloody boys doing?’
‘The siesta.’
‘Something in the Bible about that. What, could ye not watch with me one hour? This night, before the cock crow.’ Rawcliffe took breath, rattling, and went feebly cocorico. Then he coughed and coughed. Blood bubbled from both nostrils and some trickled from his right mouth-corner. ‘Good Christ,’ he panted, ‘I won’t have this. Bewrayed, beshitten. Die in one’s own bloody dung.’ He tried to shift his body away from the new foulness but rolled back on to it. ‘I’m getting up,’ he said. ‘I’m going to die on my feet. Help me, blast you, Enderby.’
‘You can’t, you mustn’t, you –’
‘Best to be shot, knifed, standing.’ He threw his blanket off. He was naked except for a safety-pinned towel like a baby’s diaper. ‘I insist, Enderby, you bastard. I’ll drink my terminal liquor in a bar, like a man. My viaticum, you swine.’ He started, cursing, to get up. Enderby had to help, no way out of it. He went further than he’d gone for anybody. He pulled off Rawcliffe’s diaper and wiped him clean with the clean part of it. He forgave his stepmother everything. There was a bathrobe on a nail behind the door. He put his arm round bare shivering Rawcliffe and shuffle-danced him towards it. ‘Better, Enderby, better,’ as he was clothed in gay yellow and blue. ‘Take me to the bar. Wake those bloody boys. They must be my crutch.’
Pushing Rawcliffe before him, Enderby yelled. Antonio peered out from the kitchen first, startled, naked as Rawcliffe had been. He went back in to get the others, himself yelling. Rawcliffe tried to yell but collapsed into coughing. He collapsed against the bar-counter, coughing, trying to curse. Soon Antonio and Manuel were holding him up, an arm each about him, in dirty white shirts; Manuel’s trousers were already black. ‘Now, Enderby,’ Rawcliffe gasped at last. ‘You say you’ve been a bloody barman. Mix me something. A cocktail called Muerte. Stop that blasted snivelling, you two.’ Tetuani,
tarboosh on, came out, frightened.
And I will, thought Enderby. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said, adding, in desperate facetiousness, ‘sir.’ He took a large beer glass and slopped brandy in, then white rum, gin, whisky, vodka. The bottles flashed in the fair afternoon light. It was like celebrating something.
‘No need for ice,’ Rawcliffe gasped. ‘Get that, maybe, soon. That thing in bloody Shakespeare. Measure for measure, eh? Altogether fitting. Thrilling regions of ribbed ice. Top it, Enderby, with something spumous. Asti, memories of Rome. Add, for old times sake, a dollop of Strega. Strega, a witch. Witchbitch. That bloody man in Mallorca, Enderby, says the day of the moon goddess is done. The sun goddess takes over.’ Enderby found a bottle of Asti on the shelf, very warm, favoured of the sun. He cracked its neck against the counter-edge. ‘Good, Enderby.’ There was a fine gush. The stench of Rawcliffe was now well overlaid with powerful yea-saying aromas. But, admired Enderby, those boys’ stomachs were strong. He gave the full spuming glass to both Rawcliffe’s claws. ‘A toast,’ Rawcliffe said. ‘What shall it be, eh? La sacra poesía? The sun goddess? The survival of the spirit? to the,’ he began to droop, ‘impending dissolution,’ to snivel; the strong-handed boys began to snivel with him, ‘of this, of this –’ Enderby became stern: he didn’t like this snivelling. He cried:
‘Ah, shut up. Get that bloody drink down and shut up.’ It was strong fatherly talk; the medicine was wholesome; had not he, Enderby, once dared death, though dragged gurgling back? ‘Get on with it, Rawcliffe. Bloody traitor.’
‘Good, Enderby, good, good. No false compassion there. Excellent.’ Rawcliffe braced himself, pumped air into his lungs like a parody of a dog’s panting, then took his medicine. It spilled and rilled, the mousse got up his nose, he coughed some back into the glass, but he went gamely on to the dregs. Antonio put the flecked glass down for him. Rawcliffe gasped and gasped. ‘Put. That. On. The.’ He coughed, like payment, a coin of bloody sputum on to the counter. ‘I mean. Muerte. The. Ult. Ult. Ultmte. Cktl.’ He yearned towards his chair, feebly turning. The boys took him over, only his bare toes touching the floor. Rawcliffe collapsed next to his chair-side table, full of toys. Coventry Patmore. ‘Lil slp now.’ He at once began to snore. The boys put his feet up on the stackable. Enderby thought he had better now telephone Casablanca.
5
It was growing dark when Rawcliffe surfaced for the last time. Enderby had sent the boys out, sick of the hand-wringing and snivelling. He sat at the other side of Rawcliffe’s chair, smoking the local cigarettes that were called Sporl, not drinking. The thought of drink made him shudder. When Rawcliffe surfaced, it was with an accession – that condemned man’s supper – of clarity and calm. He said:
‘Who’s that there?’
‘Me. Enderby.’
‘Ah yes, Enderby. Know your poetry well. Stole one of your ideas once, a bloody good one. No regrets. Now I give you something in return. My last poem. It came to me in sleep. Listen.’ He cleared his throat like an elocutionist and intoned slowly but with vigour:
‘The benison of lights and the
Hides of asses and the
Milk of the tide’s churns.
She should not have
Rejected me like any copulative
Of the commonalty.
Too much light, Enderby. Turn one of those lights off.’
There were no lights on. ‘I’ve done that,’ Enderby said.
‘Good. Now where was I? Ah, I know. Listen.
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers. There I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said and died.’
‘That,’ Enderby said, ‘is George Herbert.’
Rawcliffe suddenly began to rage. ‘It’s not it’s not it’s not you fucking swine. It’s me. Me.’ In the dusk his head rolled. Quietly, ‘Your suit is granted,’ he said, and died. With the conventional accompaniment of rattle and postlude of rictus and liquidity.
3
1
‘AND,’ EASY WALKER cried above the engine, ‘real donk dirt-bibles. Got a jarvey, brad, all towsermouth for that variety of how’s-your-Auntie-Doris-and-little-Nora-and-the-twins. So we’ll march on markers when this lot’s dooby-dooed.’
The physical assumption of Rawcliffe. His body, in clean pyjamas and wrapped in a Union Jack that Manuel had bought for a few dirhams in, of all places, the Big Fat White Doggy Wog, sat next to Easy Walker in what Enderby took to be the co-pilot’s seat. At least a kind of half-eaten steering-wheel or joystick in front of Rawcliffe twitched and turned in sympathy with Easy Walker’s. And also dead Rawcliffe had his share of very lively dials and meters and emergency instructions, exclamation-pointed. His arms were pinioned beneath the flag, and he was corded at neck, waist, thighs, and ankles. No danger of his, its, flailing around if ithe came back to life.
‘You sure he’s footed the old garbage-can proper?’ Easy Walker had asked while they had been bundling him in. ‘Because there’s been cases. There’s this case now, brad. Tell you after. Maybe you minced it all masterman.’
Enderby sat behind Rawcliffe, an empty seat next to him. It was a small but neat aircraft, American-made, though there was a spelling mistake, Enderby noted, in one of the instructions on the instrument-panel: jetison. That did not make him doubt the airworthiness of the craft, for it was always a matter of every man to his own trade. This one of piloting seemed as much a trade of Easy Walker’s as any of the others he professed. He had cried conversationally above the engine even as, tearing down the runway, he brought the speed up to air-speed:
‘A real donk passy too, there’ll be there. Left the whole bimbang kadoozer to you then, has he, brad?’
‘There’s the question of,’ Enderby had shouted. ‘That one of mine, I mean.’
‘Welcome to Bird County,’ Easy Walker had yelled as the craft nosed into the old-gold Moroccan air. The late afternoon sky to themselves, except for rare gulls and, far to port, a migrant exaltation of brownish birds that, after a rest on the top of Gibraltar, were crossing the Straits for their African wintering. No Air Maroc flight till very much later. Below on the cabochon-cut Mediterranean very few boats, though what looked like a rich man’s yacht gleamed to starboard. It was still the sun’s time. The moon, thin last night, was not watching over Rawcliffe’s ascension into heaven. Fattened, she would draw at him vainly from the deep, gnawed by fishes, his flag defiled. Over the aircraft wireless strange English crackled from Tangier control tower. Easy Walker ignored it. Aft lay Ceuta.
‘There was one,’ he yelled without effort, ‘Ricker Sugden did for like his booze brad when he kicked. Do too for this jarvey, I reckon.’ He recited, drowning the engine:
‘Dragged from his doings in the roar of youth,
Snipped like the stem of a caldicot flower,
Snarled time’s up ere he’d quaffed his hour,
Tossed to the tearing of the dour dog’s tooth.’
‘That’s not quite right for Rawcliffe,’ Enderby shouted. It wasn’t either. The right one was in all the anthologies, but Enderby’s calling of it would never prevail against this of Ricker Sugden’s. It was the right one only because it was the only one.
‘Bye, my brad, let the bright booze pour
That is suds of stars in the Milky Way,
And its door swing open all the joylit day
And the heavenlord landlord cry you time no more.’
‘Not one of his best,’ called Enderby, but he was not heard. Not obscure enough, too much meaning. Poor Rawcliffe. Traitor Rawcliffe rather, but he had paid. Your suit is granted. What suit? To be granted a cell, smallest unit of life. Enderby feebly tried to give out to sea, sky, and Easy Walker that last stanza (‘His salts have long drained into alien soil’), and then saw how inappropriate it really was. His soil would drain soon into alien salt. There was nothing for Rawcliffe. But it was something to rest in bones, rags of flag fluttering, at the sea’s bottom between two continents.
It was a kind of poem. Easy Walker cried:
‘Nowsy wowsy. You right for the shove, brad?’ Enderby nodded, forgetting that Easy Walker’s eyes were ahead and there was no driving mirror. The corpse of Rawcliffe had lolled to rest against the perspex of the starboard door. Enderby roughly pushed it so that it began to topple gracefully against Easy Walker. ‘Watch it, watch it, brad.’ Leaning over, Enderby turned the door-handle, panting. It was rather stiff. Suddenly it opened and swung, and the huge roaring air without seemed to pull at him, but he dug his nails into Rawcliffe’s seat-back. ‘Nowsy wowsy powsy.’ Easy Walker made the craft list hard to starboard. There was a torrent of frozen air rushing in up diagonally now. Enderby clawed at the corpse through its flag-shroud, heaving it out, but, falling to the air, it seemed to be merely buoyed up by it. ‘Blast you, Rawcliffe,’ went Enderby for the last time. ‘Righty right,’ Easy Walker sang, and he kicked out at a dead shin. Then he listed farther. Enderby pounded and pushed. As it were reluctantly, Rawcliffe’s body launched itself into this quite inferior region of the sky, lower, surely, than Parnassus. ‘Got him, brad,’ meaning space had. The tricolour, crude in this sapphire and turquoise ambience, span slowly down. ‘Gone.’ Without sound, and with lips parted only as for a cigarette, the sea took him. Here lies one whose name was not writ in water, he had once said in his cups.
The Complete Enderby Page 40