‘But that’s not him.’
‘Right. Not him. What proof is there that it was a him?’
Enderby breathed hard a few times and said: ‘Would you like what we English call elevenses? Cakes and tea and things? I could cook you a steak if you liked. Or, wait, I have some stew left over from yesterday. It wouldn’t take a minute to heat it up.’ That was the trouble with all of them, poor kids. Half-starved, seeing visions, poisoned with cokes and hamburgers.
3
‘DO YOU BELIEVE in God?’ she asked, a steak sandwich in one paw and the cassette thing in the other.
‘Is that tea strong enough for you?’ Enderby asked. ‘It doesn’t look potable to me. One bag indeed. Gnat piss,’ he added. And then: ‘Oh, God. Well, believing is neither here nor there, you know. I believe in God and so what? I don’t believe in God and so what again? It doesn’t affect his own position, does it?’
‘Why do you say his?’ she hissed.
‘Her, then. It. Doesn’t matter really. A matter of tradition and convention and so on. Needs a new pronoun. Let’s invent one, unique, just for himherit. Ah, that’s it, then. Nominative heshit. Accusative himrit. Genitive hiserits.’
‘But you’re still putting the masculine first. The heshit bit’s all right, though. Appropriate.’
‘I don’t mind what goes first,’ Enderby said. ‘Would you like something by Sara Lee? Please yourself then. All right. Shehit. Herimit. Herisits. It doesn’t affect herisits position whether I believe or not.’
‘But what happens when you die?’
‘You’re finished with,’ Enderby said promptly. ‘Done for. And even if you weren’t – well, you die then, gasp your last, then you’re sort of wandering, free of your body. You wander around and then you come into contact with a sort of big thing. What is this big thing? God, if you like. What’s it, or shehit, like? I would say,’ Enderby said thoughtfully, ‘like a big symphony, the page of the score of infinite length, the number of instruments infinite but all bound into one big unity. This big symphony plays itself for ever and ever. And who listens to it? It listens to itself. Enjoys itself for ever and ever and ever. It doesn’t give a bugger whether you hear it or not.’
‘Like masturbation.’
‘I thought it would come to that. I thought you’d have to bring sex into it sooner or later. Anyway, a kind of infinite Ninth Symphony. God as Eternal Beauty. God as Truth? Nonsense. God as Goodness. That means shehit has to be in some sort of ethical relationship with beings that are notGod. But God is removed, cut off, self-subsistent, not giving a damn.’
‘But that’s horrible. I couldn’t live with a God like that.’
‘You don’t have to. Anyway, what have you or anybody else got to do with it? God doesn’t have to be what people want shehit to be. I’m fed up with God,’ Enderby said, ‘so let’s get on to something else.’ And at once he got up painfully and noisily to find the whisky bottle, this being about the time for. ‘I haven’t got any glasses,’ he said. ‘Not clean ones, anyway. You’ll have to have it from the bottle.’
‘I don’t want any.’ She didn’t want her tea either. Quite right: gnat piss. Enderby got down again. ‘If there’s no life after death,’ she said, ‘why does it matter about doing good in this world? I mean, if there’s no reward or punishment in the next.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Enderby sneered. ‘Doing things because of what you’re bloody well going to get out of it.’ He took some whisky and did a conventional shudder. It raged briefly through the inner streets and then was transmuted into benevolent warmth in the citadel. Enderby smiled on the girl kindly and offered the bottle. She took it, raised it like a trumpet to the heavens, sucked in a millilitre or so. ‘And, while we’re at it,’ he said, ‘let’s decide what we mean by good.’
‘You decide. It’s you who are being interviewed.’
‘Well, there are some stupid bastards who can’t understand how the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp could go home after torturing Jews all day and then weep tears of joy at a Schubert symphony on the radio. They say: here’s a man dedicated to evil capable of enjoying the good. But what the imbecilic sods don’t realize is that there are two kinds of good – one is neutral, outside ethics, purely aesthetic. You get it in music or in a sunset if you like that sort of thing or in a grilled steak or in an apple. If God’s good, if God exists that is, God’s probably good in that way. As I said.’ He sipped from the bottle she had handed back. ‘Before.’
‘Or sex. Sex is as good whether – I mean, you don’t have to be in what they used to call a state of grace to enjoy it.’
‘That’s good,’ Enderby said warmly. ‘That’s right. Though you’re still going on about sex. You mean lesbian sex, of course, in your case. Not that I have anything against it, naturally, except that I’m not permitted to experience it. The world’s getting narrower all the time. All little sects doing what they call their own thing.’
‘Why do you keep showing your balls all the time?’ she said boldly. ‘Don’t you have underpants or anything?’
Enderby flushed very deeply all over. ‘I had no intention,’ he said. ‘I can assure you. What I mean is, I’ll put something on. I was not trying to provoke – I apologize,’ he said, going off back to the bedroom. He came out again wearing nondescript trousers, something from an old suit, and a not overclean striped shirt. Also slippers. He said. ‘There.’ The hypocritical little bitch had been at the bottle in his brief absence. He could tell that from her slight slur. She said:
‘Evil.’
‘Who? Oh, evil.’ And he sat down again. ‘Evil is the destructive urge. Not to be confused with mere wrong. Wrong is what the government doesn’t like. Sometimes a thing can be wrong and evil at the same time – murder, for instance. But then it can be right to murder. Like you people going round killing the Vietnamese and so on. Evil called right.’
‘It wasn’t right. Nobody said it was right.’
‘The government did. Get this straight. Right and wrong are fluid and interchangeable. What’s right one day can be wrong the next. And vice versa. It’s right to like the Chinese now. Before you started playing ping pong with them it was wrong. A lot of evil nonsense. What you kids need is some good food (there you are, see: good in non-ethical sense) and an idea of what good and evil are about.’
‘Well, go on, tell us.’
‘Nobody,’ said Enderby, having taken a swig, ‘has any clear idea about good. Oh, giving money to the poor perhaps. Helping old ladies across the street. That sort of thing. Evil’s different. Everybody knows evil. Brought up to it, you see. Original sin.’
‘I don’t believe in original sin.’ She was taking the bottle quite manfully now. ‘We’re free.’
Enderby looked on her bitterly, also sweating. It was really too hot to wear anything indoors. Damned unchangeable central heating, controlled by some cold sadist somewhere in the basement. Bitterly because she’d hit on the damned problem that he had to present in the poem. She ought to go away now and let him get on with it. Still, his duty. One of his students. He was being paid. Those brown bastards in whose hands he had left La Belle Mer would be shovelling it all from till to pocket. Bad year we had, señor. Had to near shut up bloody shop. He said carefully:
‘Well, yes. Freeish. Wir sind ein wenig frei. Wagner wrote that. Gave it to Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger.’ And then: ‘No, to hell with it. Wholly free. Totally free to choose between good and evil. The other things don’t matter – I mean free to drink a quart of whisky without vomiting and so on. Free to touch one’s forehead with one’s foot. And so forth.’
‘I can do that,’ she said. The latter. Doing it. That was the whisky, God help the ill-nourished child.
‘But,’ Enderby said, ignoring the acrobatics. She didn’t seem to be bothering to use her cassette thing any more. Never mind. ‘But we’re disposed to do evil rather than good. History is the record of that. Given the choice, we’re inclined to do the bad thing. That’s all it mea
ns. We have to make a strong effort to do the good thing.’
‘Examples of evil,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ said Enderby. ‘Killing for the sake of doing it. Torturing for pleasure – it always is that, though, isn’t it? Defacing a work of art. Farting during a performance of a late Beethoven quartet. That must be evil because it’s not wrong. I mean, there’s no law against it.’
‘We believe,’ she said, sitting up seriously, checking the cassette machine and holding it out, ‘that a time will come when evil will be no more. She’ll come again, and that will be the end of evil.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘Jesus, of course.’
Enderby breathed deeply several times. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘If you get rid of evil you get rid of choice. You’ve got to have things to choose between, and that means good and evil. If you don’t choose, you’re not human any more. You’re something else. Or you’re dead.’
‘You’re sweating just terribly,’ she said. ‘There’s no need to wear all that. Don’t you have swimming trunks?’
‘I don’t swim,’ Enderby said.
‘It is hot,’ she said. And she began to remove her coke-and-hamburger-stained sweater. Enderby gulped and gulped. He said:
‘This is, you must admit, somewhat irregular. I mean, the professor and student relationship and all that sort of thing.’
‘You exhibited yourself. That’s somewhat irregular too.’ By now she had taken off the sweater. She was, he supposed, decently dressed by beach standards, but there was a curious erotic difference between the two kinds of top worn. This was austere enough – no frills or representations of black hands feeling for the nipples. Still, it was undress. Beach dress was not that. He said:
‘An interesting question when you come to think of it. If somebody’s lying naked on the beach it’s not erotic. Naked on the bed is different. Even more different on the floor.’
‘The first one’s functional,’ she said. ‘Like for a surgical operation. Nakedness is only erotic when it’s obviously not for anything else.’
‘You’re quite a clever girl,’ Enderby said. ‘What kind of marks have I been giving you?’
‘Two Cs. But I couldn’t do the sestina. Very old-fashioned. And the other one was free verse. But you said it was really hexameters.’
‘People often go into hexameters when they try to write free verse,’ Enderby said. ‘Walt Whitman, for instance.’
‘I have to get As. I just have to.’ And then: ‘It is hot.’
‘Would you like some ice in that? I can get you some ice.’
‘Have you a cold coke?’
‘There you go again, with your bloody cokes and seven ups and so on. It’s uncivilized,’ Enderby raged. ‘I’ll get you some ice.’ He went into the kitchen and looked at it gloomily. It was a bit dirty, really, the sink piled high. He didn’t know how to use the washing-up machine. He crunched out ice-cubes by pulling a lever. Ice-cubes went tumbling into dirty water and old fat. He cleaned them on a dishrag. Then he put them into the GEORGIA tea mug and took them in. He gulped. He said: ‘That’s going too far, you know.’ Topless waitresses, topless students. And then: ‘I forgot to wash a glass for you. Scatch on the racks,’ he added, desperately facetious. He went back to the kitchen and at once the kitchen telephone rang.
‘Enderby?’ It was an English voice, male.
‘Professor Enderby, yes.’
‘Well, you’re really in the shit now, aren’t you, old boy?’
‘Look, did you put her up to this? Who are you, anyway?’
‘Ah, something going on there too, eh? This is Jim Bister from Washington. I saw you in Tangier, remember. Surrounded by all those bitsy booful brown boys.’
‘Are you tight?’
‘Not more than usual, old boy. Look, seriously. I was asked by my editor to get you to say something about this nun business.’
‘What nun business? What editor? Who are you, anyway?’ He was perhaps going too far in asking that last question again, but he objected to this assumption that British expatriates in America ought to be matey with each other, saying in the shit and so forth at the drop of a hat.
‘I’ve said who I am. I thought you’d remember. I suppose you were half-pissed that time in Tangier. My newspaper is the Evening Banner, London if you’ve forgotten, what with your brandy and pederasty, and my editor wants to know what you –’
‘What did you say then about pederasty? I thought I caught something about pederasty. Because if I did, by Jesus I’ll be down there in Washington and I’ll –’
‘I didn’t. Couldn’t pronounce it even if I knew it. It’s about this nun business in Ashton-under-Lyne, if you know where that is.’
‘You’ve got that wrong. It’s here.’
‘No, that’s a different one, old man. This one in Ashton-under-Lyne – that’s in the North of England, Lancashire, in case you don’t know – is manslaughter. Nunslaughter. Maybe murder. Haven’t you heard?’
‘What the hell’s it to do with me anyway? Look, I distinctly heard you say pederasty –’
‘Oh, balls to pederasty. Be serious for once. These kids who did it said they’d seen your film, the Deutschland thing. So now everybody’s having a go at that. And one of the kids –’
‘It’s not mine, do you hear, and in any case no work of art has ever yet been responsible for –’
‘Ah, call it a work of art, do you? That’s interesting. And you’d call the book they made it from a work of art too, would you? Because one of the kids said he’d read the book as well as seen the film and it might have been the book that put the idea into his head. Any comments?’
‘It’s not a book, it’s a poem. And I don’t believe that it would be possible for a poem to – In any case, I think he’s lying.’
‘They’ve been reading it out in court. I’ve got some bits here. May have got a bit garbled over the telex, of course. Anyway, there’s this: “From life’s dawn it is drawn down, Abel is Cain’s brother and breasts they have sucked the same.” Apparently that started him dreaming at night. And there’s something about “the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his lovescape crucified.” Very showy type of writing, I must say. They’re talking about the danger to susceptible young minds and banning it from the Ashton-under-Lyne bookshops.’
‘I shouldn’t imagine there’s one bloody copy there. This is bloody ridiculous, of course. They’re talking of banning the collected poems of a great English poet? A Jesuit priest, as well? God bloody almighty, they must all be out of their fucking minds.’
‘There’s this nun dead, anyhow. What are you going to do about it?’
‘Me? I’m not going to do anything. Ask the buggers who made the film. They’ll say what I say – once you start admitting that a work of art can cause people to start committing crimes, then you’re lost. Nothing’s safe. Not even Shakespeare. Not even the Bible. Though the Bible’s a lot of bloodthirsty balderdash that ought to be kept out of people’s hands.’
‘Can I quote you, old man?’
‘You can do what the hell you like. Pederasty, indeed. I’ve got a naked girl in here now. Does that sound like pederasty, you stupid insulting bastard?’ And he rang off, snorting. He went back, snorting, to his whisky and pouffe. The girl was not there. ‘Where are you?’ he cried, ‘you and your bloody Jesus-was-a-woman nonsense. Do you know what they’ve done now? Do you know what they’re trying to do to one of the greatest mystical poets that English poetry has ever known? Where are you?’
She was in his bedroom, he found to no surprise, lying on the circular bed, though still with her worker’s pants on. ‘Shall I take these off?’ she said. Enderby, whisky bottle in hand, sat down heavily on a rattan chair not too far from the bed and looked at her, jaw dropped. He said:
‘Why?’
‘To lay me. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You don’t get much of a chance, do you, you being old and ugly and kind of fat. Well, anyway, you can if you want.’
/> ‘Is this,’ asked Enderby carefully, ‘how you work for this bloody blasphemous Jesus of yours?’
‘I’ve got to have an A.’
Enderby started to cry noisily. The girl, startled, got off the bed. She went out. Enderby continued crying, interrupting the spasm only to swig at the bottle. He heard her, presumably now sweatered again and clutching her cassette nonsense that was partially stuffed with his woolly voice, leaving the apartment swiftly on sneakered feet. Then she threw in her face, as it were, for him to look at now that her body had gone – a lost face with drowned hair of no particular colour, green eyes set wide apart like an animal’s, a cheeseparing nose, a wide American mouth that was a false promise of generosity, the face of a girl who wanted an A. Enderby went on weeping and, while it went on, was presented intellectually with several bloody good reasons for weeping: his own decay, the daily nightmare of many parcels (too many cigarette-lighters that wouldn’t work, too many old bills, unanswered letters, empty gin-bottles, single socks, physical organs, hairs in the nose and ears), everyone’s desperate longing for a final refrigerated simplicity. He saw very clearly the creature that was weeping – a kind of Blake sylph, a desperately innocent observer buried under the burden of extension, in which dyspepsia and sore gums were hardly distinguishable from past sins and follies, the great bloody muckheap of multiplicity (make that the name of the conurbation in which I live) from which he wanted to escape but couldn’t. I’ve got to have an A. The sheer horrible innocence of it. Who the hell didn’t feel he’d got to have an A?
It was still only eleven-thirty. He went to the bathroom and, mixing shaving-cream with tears not yet dried, he shaved. He shaved bloodily and, in the manner of ageing men, left patches of stubble here and there. Then he shambled over to the desk and conjured Saint Augustine.
He strode in out of Africa, wearing a
Tattered royal robe of orchard moonlight
Smelling of stolen apples but otherwise
The Complete Enderby Page 48