‘That’s my business, Mrs Meldrum.’
‘Well, it may be your business, Mr E, but then again it might not. And everybody’s putting the rents up this year, as you may as well know. What with the rates going up as well and all of us having to watch us own interests.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Enderby. ‘That’s it, is it? How much?’
‘You’ve had this very reasonable,’ said Mrs Meldrum, ‘as nobody can deny. You’ve had this at four guineas a week all through the season. There’s one gentleman as works in London as is very anxious to find respectable accommodation. Six guineas to him would be a very reasonable rent.’
‘Well, it’s not a very reasonable rent to me, Mrs Meldrum,’ said Enderby angrily. His watch-hand leapt gaily forward. ‘I have to go now,’ he said. ‘I’ve a train to catch. Really,’ he said, shocked, ‘do you realize that that would be eight guineas more a month? Where would I get the money?’
‘A gentleman of independent means,’ said Mrs Meldrum smugly. ‘If you don’t want to stay, Mr E, you could always give a week’s notice.’
Enderby saw with horror the prospect of sorting out the bathful of manuscripts. ‘I’ll have to go now,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know. But I think it’s an imposition.’
Mrs Meldrum made no move. ‘You go off then and catch your train,’ she said, ‘and think about it in your first-class carriage. And I’ll empty the shillings out of the meter, as has to be done now and again. And if I was you I should stack those plates in the sink before you leave.’
‘Don’t touch my papers,’ warned Enderby. ‘There are private and confidential papers in that bathroom. Touch them at your peril.’
‘Peril, indeed,’ scoffed Mrs Meldrum. ‘And I don’t like the sound of that at all, continental papers in my bathroom.’ Meanwhile Enderby wrapped his muffler on and fought his way – as if towards the light – into his overcoat. ‘I never heard of such a thing, and that’s a fact,’ said Mrs Meldrum, ‘and I’ve been in the business a fair amount of time. I’ve heard of coals in the bath with some of them slummy people, though I thank the Almighty God I’ve never harboured any of them in my bosom. You’re going out like that, Mr Enderby, with bits of paper stuck all over your face. I can read a word there, just by your nose: epileptical, or something. You’re not doing yourself or me or any of the other tenants any good at all, Mr E, going out in that state. Peril, indeed.’
Enderby dithered out, doubtful. He had not reckoned on having to search for new lodgings, not in the middle of The Pet Beast. And this town was becoming more and more a dormitory for bald young men from London. In one pub he had met the head of a news-reel company, a lavish gin-man with a light, fast voice. And there had been a processed-cheese executive heard, loud and unabashed, somewhere else. London was crawling southward to the Channel.
Enderby crawled northward to the station, picking off odd words from his razor-cuts. The snow had been trodden already, by people rushing earlier with insincere eagerness to get to work in London. Enderby teetered in tiny gavotte-steps, afraid of slipping, his rump still aching from last night’s fall. Work-trains, stenographer-trains, executive-trains. Big deals over the telephone, fifty guineas nothing to them. Golfball-money. But, thought Enderby, that would provide for half a year’s rent increase.
Looking up at the zinc sky he saw a gull or two flapping inland. He had neglected to feed the gulls for two days now; he was becoming careless. Perhaps, he thought vaguely, he could make it up to them by buying some special treat at the Army and Navy Stores. He passed a block of bright posters. One of them extolled domestic gas: a smiling toy paraclete called Mr Therm presided over a sort of warm Holy Family. Pentecostal therm; pentecostal sperm. Two men in dyed army overcoats marched, as in retreat, from the station, with demoralized thug faces. One said to the other, ‘Can’t make up its bleeding mind. Rain one day, snow the next. Be pissing down again tomorrow.’ Enderby had to stop, short of breath, his heart martelling away as though he had just downed a half-bottle of brandy, his left hand clutching a snowcapped privet-hedge for support. The pentecostal sperm came pissing down. No, no, no. Hissing down. The line was dealt to him, like a card from a weighing-machine. He had a sudden image of the whole poem like a squat evil engine, weighing, waiting. The Holy Family, the Virgin Mary, the pentecostal sperm. He heard a train-whistle and had to rush.
Panting, he entered the little booking-hall and dug out his wallet from his right breast. There was still a Christmas tree by the bookstall. That was wrong: Twelfth Night was over, St Distaff ’s Day had set the working year spinning again. Enderby approached the stern shirt-sleeves behind the guichet. ‘A day return to London, please,’ he begged. He picked up his change with his ticket and sent a shilling over the floor. ‘Don’t lose that, mister,’ said a lively old woman in black. ‘Need that for the gas.’ She cackled as Enderby chased the shining monocycle to the barrier. The ticket-collector flapped a heavy boot on to it, trapped. ‘Thank you,’ said Enderby. Rising from picking it up his eyes misted, and he saw a very clear and blue picture of the Virgin Mary at a spinning-wheel, a silver queen set in baby blue. This had nothing to do with The Pet Beast and its Mary-Pasiphae. This had something to do with his stepmother.
In this spinning womb, reduced to a common noun,
The pentecostal sperm came hissing down …
That was not it, the rhythm was wrong, it was not couplets. The couplets came from the doves in the Queen’s speech in Hamlet. Doves, loves, leaves. Enderby clomped down the steps and up the steps to the up-train platform. The train was just arriving. There was an -eave rhyme somewhere. Enderby boarded the train. There were few passengers at this hour – women going up to fight in the January sales, a scholarly-looking police-inspector with a briefcase, two men looking much, Enderby thought distractedly, like himself – smart, normal, citified. Doves came from dove, dove meant paraclete. A dove in the leaves of life. Eve, leave, thieve, achieve, conceive.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said a woman sitting diagonally opposite to Enderby. They were the only two in the compartment. She was thin, blonde, washed-out, fortyish, smart with a mink cape-stole and a hat like a nest. ‘Peeve,’ said Enderby the city-man. ‘Believe. Weave.’ The train began to pant north-east with urgent love of London, a sperm to be swallowed by that giant womb. ‘Swallowed,’ announced Enderby, with loud excitement, ‘by the giant stomach of Eve. I knew Eve came somewhere into it.’ The woman picked up her folio-sized handbag and silver-grey couplet of gloves and left the compartment. ‘Eve leaves,’ said Enderby. Where was paper? None. He had not expected this to be a working day. Inkpencil he had. He rose and followed the woman out to the corridor. She scampered, with a kitten-scream, to the next compartment, which held a trio of talking and nodding wives drably dressed for sales-battle. Enderby, a homing dove, went straight to the lavatory.
5
In this spinning room, reduced to a common noun,
Swallowed by the giant stomach of Eve,
The pentecostal sperm came hissing down.
Enderby sat, fully dressed, on the seat of the W.C., swaying as on a father’s rocking knee, a cock-horse to Charing Cross. No, London Bridge. No, Victoria. An electric sperm plunging towards Our Lady of Victories, Enderby astride. He had removed the toilet-roll from its holder and scratched away on panel after panel of paper with his inkpencil. The poem was definitely a song for the Blessed Virgin.
Whence this Marianism? Enderby knew. He remembered his bedroom with its devotional pictures by Italian commercial artists: Pius XI with triple tiara and benedictory gesture; Jesus Christ with radioactive heart exposed and – for good measure – indicated by a divine delicate index-finger; saints (Anthony, John the Baptist, Bernadette); the Virgin Mary with tender smile and winsome wimple:
I was nowhere, for I was anyone –
The grace and music easy to receive:
The patient engine of a stranger son.
Outside the bedroom door had been a holy-water stoup, dried up with the drought of E
nderby’s boyish disbelief. All over the house, as far as the frontier of the shop’s neutral or Protestant territory, there had been other stoups, also crucifixes, plaster statuettes, withered Holy-Land palm-leaves, rosaries blessed in Rome, an Agnus Dei or two, decorative pious ejaculations (done in Dublin in pseudo-Celtic script) as brief as snarls. That was his stepmother’s Catholicism, imported from Liverpool – relics and emblems and hagiographs used as lightning-conductors; her religion a mere fear of thunder.
The Catholicism of the Enderbys had come from a small Catholic pocket not far from Shrewsbury, a village which the Reformation had robbed only of its church. Weak in the tobacconist-father (his pan scraped on Holy Saturday, a drunken midnight Mass at Christmas – no more), it had died in the poet-son, thanks to that stepmother. It had been too late now for more than twenty years to look at it afresh – its intellectual dignity, its cold coherent theology. He had struggled out of it with bitter tears in adolescence, helped by Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Rousseau, and the struggle to create his own myths had made him a poet. He couldn’t go back to it now, even if he wanted to. If he did, he would be seeking the converts who wrote thrillers out of a sense of damnation or who, forming an exclusive club out of the converts of Oxford and pretending that that was the Church, would not let Enderby join. Publicly known as an apostate, Enderby would have to be bracketed along with various wild Irish. It was best, therefore, to be quiet about his faith or loss of it (asked for his religion when joining the army, he had said ‘Hedonist’ and been made to attend parades of the United Board); the only trouble seemed to be that his art refused to be quiet.
His laughter was fermenting in the cell,
The fish, the worm were chuckling to achieve
The rose of the disguise he wears so well.
Ultimately religious belief didn’t matter; it was a question of what myths still carried enough emotional weight to be used. So the Virgin Mary now spoke her final triplet, smiling faintly in elegant blue at the distaff:
And though, by dispensation of the dove,
My flesh is pardoned of its flesh, they leave
The rankling of a wrong and useless love.
There was too much love in the air, worried Enderby, as he read over this poem with displeasure. He saw that, apart from the obvious surface myth, there was something there about the genesis of the poet. He wrote on a final panel of toilet-paper: Every woman is a stepmother, then committed it to the lavatory-pan. That, he thought, has general validity. And now, judging from the loud darkness outside the cell where his poem had been an hour fermenting, they had arrived. Roars of seals in a circus, collapse of crates, high heels on the platform, a hiss, shudder and recoil as the train, in Elizabethan locution, died.
3
1
SOME HOURS LATER Enderby sat under a magnificent ceiling, bemused by food and drink and insincere laudations. A not very choice cigar shook between fingers which, he now saw, he had neglected to pumice. In a winter afternoon’s dream he failed to register many of the words of orating Sir George Goodby. Across the table and at either side twenty-odd fellow-writers were suspended from the ceiling by cigarette-smoke, their faces flapping before Enderby’s eyes like two lines of drying smalls. Very solid in his stomach there pawed and pranced a sort of equestrian statue that symbolized both Time and London. He desired to pick his nose. A Hangman’s Blood cocktail of all the liquids he had so far taken that day was swiftly mixed in a deep visceral shaker and then shot up to his mouth for tasting. There had been an oily mock turtle with very fresh rolls and rose-shaped butter-pats. Roast duck, of which Enderby had been served with one of the greasier segments, peas and sauté potatoes, acid orange sauce and a thick warmish gravy. Cranberry pie, the pastry soggy, with rich whipped cream-substitute. Cheese.
Cheese. Enderby smiled across back at some woman who had smiled at him. I have always admired your poetry but to see you in the flesh is a revelation. I bet it bloody well is. Perrrrrp.
‘A revelation,’ said Sir George, ‘of the purest beauty. The magical power of poetry to transmute the dross of the everyday workaday world into the sheerest gold.’ Sir George Goodby was an ancient man whose visible parts were made mostly of sewn bits of well-tanned skin. He had founded the firm which bore his name. This firm had become rich mainly by selling rude books which other firms had been too squeamish to handle. Knighted by Ramsay MacDonald for services to the cause of mass-literacy, Sir George had always desired to serve literature otherwise than by selling it: he had aspired from youth to be a starving poet recognized only after death. Starved poetry he had continued to write long after fate had condemned him to the making of money, and this he had blackmailed one small miserable firm into publishing, brandishing the threat of a chain-boycott of all its publications. He had paid all costs of printing, publicizing, and distributing, but the firm’s reputation had been ruined. The volumes of Sir George’s doggerel most memorable for badness were Metrical Yarns of a Pipeman, A Dream of Merrie England, Roseleaves of Memory and An Optimist Sings. He could not, of course, force people into buying or even reading these atrocious collections, but once a year, presenting a cheque and medal to, as he coyly termed him, a brother-singer, he would lard his speech richly with gobbets of his own work and render his auditors sick with embarrassment.
‘The giants of my youthful days,’ Sir George was saying, ‘Dobson, Watson, Sir Edward Arnold the mystic, Bridges the revolutionary, Calverley for laughter, Barry Pain for the profounder sigh.’ Enderby took a shallow draught of his cigar and felt it bite rawly. A childhood image again: the woman teacher in the elementary school explaining the soul and sin’s carious effect upon it. She had chalked on the blackboard a big whitish shape like a cheese (the soul) and then, using a spit-wet finger, had spotted it like a Dalmatian (sins). For some reason, Enderby had always been able to taste that chalk-soul – a sharp vinegary raw potato – and he could taste it strongly now. ‘The soul,’ said Sir George appropriately, ‘which is a fair field for the poet’s wandering, the sea whereon he sails his barque of rhyme, his mistress of whom he sings. The soul, which is the parson’s Sunday concern, is the poet’s daily bread.’ His daily raw potato. Enderby felt a borborygm rising.
Brrrfffp.
‘I shall inflict,’ twinkled Sir George, ‘one of my own sonnets on you, on a theme appropriate to the occasion.’ He read out, with a voice pitched high and on one tuning-fork note, a poem of fourteen lines which was certainly no sonnet. It had verdant meads in it and a sun with effulgent rays, also – for some reason – a rosy-bosomed earth. Enderby, preoccupied with the need to suppress his body’s noises, heard only fragments of an exquisitely bad poem and he nodded approvingly to show that he considered Sir George to have made a very good choice of an illustrative example of very bad poetry. As the last line scrannel-piped wretchedly out, Enderby felt a particularly loud noise coming, so he covered it with a laugh.
Ha ha (perrrpf) ha.
Sir George was rather surprised than displeased. He gaped down at Enderby for five seconds and then scanned his typescript tremblingly, as if fearful that something scatological had stolen ambiguously in. Reassured, he frowned on Enderby, his patches of skin shaking, and then took breath for the peroration. As he opened his mouth, Enderby, with infelicitous timing, gave vent.
Brrrbrrrpkrrrk.
Shem Macnamara said, ‘And as good and succinct a piece of criticism as ever I heard.’ He had a double-chinned stormy Irish face and was shag-haired and black-shirted (to save laundry). Enderby, in his daily poet’s garb, was seedy-looking, but this man was a barn-sleeping hedge-dragged sturdy beggar. The white tired faces of the other guests – which Enderby could see but dimly – moved in titters. And suddenly Sir George himself seemed to grow tired. He smiled weakly, frowned, opened his mouth as in silent joy, frowned, swallowed, said in non sequitur:
‘And it is for this reason that it gives me pleasure to bestow on our fellow singing-bird here, er er Enderby, the Goodby gold medal.’ Enderby rose to applause lou
d enough to drown three crackling intestinal reports. ‘And a cheque,’ said Sir George, with nostalgia of poet’s poverty, ‘that is very very small but, one trusts, will stave off pangs for a month or two.’ Enderby took his trophies, shook hands, simpered, then sat down again. ‘Speech,’ said somebody. Enderby rose again, with a more subdued report, then realized that he was unsure of the exordial protocol. Did he say, ‘Mr Chairman’? Was there a chairman? If Sir George was the chairman should he say something other than ‘Mr Chairman’? Should he just say, ‘Sir George, ladies and gentlemen’? But, he noticed, there seemed to be somebody with a chain of office gleaming on his chest, hovering in the dusk, a mayor or lord mayor. What should he say – ‘Your Worship’? In time he saw that this was some sort of menial in charge of wine. Holding in wind, a nervously smiling Aeolus, Enderby said, loud and clear:
‘St George.’ There was a new stir of tittering. ‘And the dragon,’ Enderby now had to add. ‘A British cymbal,’ he continued, seeing with horror that orthographical howler in a sort of neon lights before him. ‘A cymbal that tinkles in unsound brass if we are without clarity.’ There were appreciative easings of buttocks and shoulders: Enderby was going to make it brief and humorous. Desperately Enderby said, ‘As most of us are or are not, as the case may be. Myself included.’ Sir George, he saw, was throwing up wide face-holes at him, as though he, Enderby, were on a girder above the street. ‘Clarity,’ said Enderby, almost in tears, ‘is red wine for yodellers. And so,’ he gaped aghast at himself, ‘I am overjoyed to hand back this cheque to St George for charitable disposal. The gold medal he knows what he can do with.’ He could have died with shock and embarrassment at what he was saying; he was hurled on to the end in killing momentum, however. ‘Dross of the workaday world,’ he said, ‘as our fellow-singer Goodby so adequately disproves. And so,’ he said, back in the Army giving a talk on the British Way and Purpose, ‘we look forward to a time when the world shall be free of the shadow of oppression, the iron heel with its swastika spur no longer grinding into the face of prone freedom, democracy a reality, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, adequate health services and a bit of peace hovering dovelike in the declining days of the aged. And in that belief and aspiration we move forward.’ He found that he could not stop. ‘Forward,’ he insisted, ‘to a time when the world shall be free of the shadow of oppression.’ Sir George had risen and was tottering out. ‘A fair day’s work,’ said Enderby feebly, ‘for a fair day’s pay. Fair play for all,’ he mumbled doubtfully. Sir George had gone. ‘And thereto,’ ended Enderby wretchedly, ‘I plight thee my truth.’
The Complete Enderby Page 5
