Enderby, with much groaning and a posterior blast or two, got creaking to his feet. At that moment the electric fire, like some Zoroastrian deity now, having been prayed at, done with, went out. Enderby, standing, turned, blowing, and saw Mrs Bainbridge. She dangled Enderby’s key in explanation of her entrance without Enderby’s more direct agency, saying, ‘Well, I never in all my life knew a man more capable of surprises.’ She was a dream of winter bourgeois elegance: little black town suit with tiny white jabot of lace-froth; pencil skirt; three-quarter-length coat with lynx collar; long green gloves of suède; suède shoes of dull green; two shades of green in her leafy velvet hat: slim, clean, lithe-looking, delicately painted. Walpole, Marx-man of God, was clearly entranced. He handed her a small yellow throwaway poster and then, as a second thought, gave one to Enderby as well. ‘GOD OR CAPITALISM?’ it read. ‘You Can’t Have Both. H. Walpole will speak on this VITAL topic at the Lord Geldon Memorial Hall, Thursday, February 11th. All Welcome.’
‘You come to that, lady,’ said Walpole, ‘and bring him along. There’s good in him if only we can get at it, as you yourself will know well enough. Work on him hard, make him a decent man and stop him sending poetry to women, that’s your job, I would say, and you look to me capable of tackling it.’
‘Poetry to women?’ said Vesta Bainbridge. ‘He makes a habit of that, does he?’ She gave Enderby a hard-soft green womanly look, holding her large shovel handbag in front of her, legs, as in a model pose, slightly astride.
H. Walpole was, for all his theophanic socialism, a decent man of bourgeois virtues who, now that Enderby had been thoroughly prayed for, did not want to put him in the bad with this fiancée of his here. ‘That’s only in a manner of speaking, as you might say,’ he said. ‘A very sexual man, you might say Mr Enderby is, with strong desires as must be kept down, and,’ he said, ‘you look to me like the one capable of doing it.’
‘Thank you very much,’ said Vesta Bainbridge.
‘Look here,’ said Enderby. The other two waited, listening. Enderby had really nothing to say. Walpole said:
‘Right. In his poetry if not in his private life, if you see what I mean. That’s where you’d come in, comrade madam, and would give him a bigger sense of reality. May the blessings of the God of all the workers bless your union till such times as society makes something better come about.’
‘Thank you very much,’ said Vesta Bainbridge.
‘And now,’ said Walpole cheerfully, ‘I take my leave. I’ve enjoyed our little dialectical conversation together and hope to have many more. Don’t show me out, I know the way. God keep you in His care,’ he said to Enderby. ‘You have nothing to lose but your chains.’ He blessed Enderby and his putative betrothed with a clenched fist, smiled once more, then went out. Enderby and his putative betrothed were left together, listening to Walpole’s marching footsteps and cheerful whistle recede.
‘Well,’ said Vesta Bainbridge.
‘This,’ said Enderby, ‘is where I live.’
‘So I see. But if you live here why are you moving?’
‘I don’t quite get that,’ said Enderby. ‘Would you say that again?’
‘I don’t quite get you,’ said Vesta Bainbridge. ‘You send me what I suppose you’d call a verse-letter, straining at the leash with quite unequivocal suggestions, then you take fright and decide to run away. Or is it as simple as that? Obviously you thought I wouldn’t get the letter till Monday morning, so it seems as though you planned to attack and retire at the same time. Actually, I always go into the office on Saturday mornings to see if there’s any mail, and there I found the letter-rack practically sizzling with your little effort. I got a train right away. I was puzzled, intrigued. Also worried.’
‘Worried?’
‘Yes. About you.’ She sniffed round the living-room with a wrinkle of distaste. ‘I can see one would have cause to be worried. This place is absolutely filthy. Does nobody come in to clean it?’
‘I do it myself,’ said Enderby, suddenly and shamefully seeing the squalor of his life more clearly against the foil of her frightful wholesomeness. ‘More or less.’ He hung his schoolboy head.
‘Exactly. And what, Harry, if I may call you that – indeed, I must call you that now, mustn’t I? – were you proposing to do? Where were you proposing to go?’
‘Harry’s not my name,’ said Not-Harry Enderby. ‘It’s just the name at the end of the poem.’
‘I know, of course, it can’t really be your name, because your initials don’t have an aitch in them. Still, you signed yourself Harry and Harry seems to suit you.’ She surveyed him with a cocked parrot head, as though Harry were a hat. ‘I repeat, Harry, what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ said pseudoharry wretched Enderby. ‘That was all to be thought out, you see. Where to go and whatnot. What to do and so on and so forth.’
‘Well,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, ‘a few days ago I gave you a tea and you offered me a dinner which I couldn’t accept. I think it would be a good idea if you took me out to lunch somewhere now. And after that –’
‘There’s one place I shan’t take you,’ said Enderby, betrayed and angry. ‘That’s quite certain. It would poison me. It would choke me. Every mouthful.’
‘Very well,’ soothed Vesta Bainbridge. ‘You shall take me wherever you choose. And after that I’m taking you home.’
‘Home?’ said Enderby with sudden fear.
‘Yes, home. Home, home home. You know, the place where the heart is. The place that there’s no place like. You need looking after. I’m taking you home, Harry.’
Part Two
1
1
ERRRRRRRRP.
Enderby was in a very small lavatory, being sick. He was also married, just. Enderby the married man. A vomiting bridegroom.
When his forehead was cooler he sat, sighing, on the little seat. All below him was June weather, June being the month for weddings. Alone in this buzzing and humming tiny lavatory he had his first leisure to feel both gratified and frightened. The bride, though only in a severe suit suitable for a registry office, had looked lovely. Sir George had said so. Sir George was friendly again. All was forgiven.
Almost the first thing she had insisted on was an apology to Sir George. Enderby had written: ‘So sorry I should seem to rate your sirship as a stupid dolt, but thought you would appreciate that feeble gesture of revolt. For you yourself have tried, God wot, the awful agonizing art, and though, as poet, you are not worth the least poetaster’s fart, yet you’re equipped to understand what clockwork makes the poet tick and how he hates the laden hand below the empty rhetoric …’ That, she had said, was not really suitable, so he had tried something briefer in genuine prose, and Sir George had only been too delighted to accept the formal creaking apology.
Oh, she had begun to reorganize his life, that one. From the start, taking breakfast together in the large dining-room of her large flat, February Gloucester Road sulking outside, it was clear that things could only go one way. For what other relationship could be viable in the world’s eyes than this one they were beginning now? Enderby had been forced to reject that of landlady and tenant, for he had paid no rent. The step-relationship was, with women, practically the only other one he had experienced. She was, he knew, and for this he valued her, antipodeal to a stepmother, being clean and beautiful. His father’s remarriage had introduced brief squibs of step-aunts-in-law and the fable of a paragon stepsister, too good for this world and hence soon dead of a botulism, whom Enderby had always visualized as a puppet doll-dangling parody of his stepmother. Vesta was not, he had felt, a stepsister. A female Friend? He had rung that on his palate several times, upper case and all, and savoured a melancholy twilit aquarelle of Shelley and Godwin, with chorusmen’s calves as if limned by Blake, holding reading-parties in a moored boat with high-waisted rather silly ladies, lovers of Gothic romances, while midges played fiddles in the sad air. Epipsychidion. Epithalamion. Ah God, that word had really
started things off, for it had started off a poem.
The cry in the clouds, the throng of migratory birds,
The alien planet’s heaven where seven moons
Are jasper, agate, carbuncle, onyx, amethyst and blood-ruby and bloodstone.
Or else binary suns
Wrestle like lions to a flame that we can stand,
Bound, twisted and conjoined
To an invertebrate love where selves are melted
To the primal juice of a creator’s joy,
Before matter was made,
Two spheres in a single orbit …
They had drunk Orange Pekoe with breakfast and she, in a rust-coloured suit with a heavy clip of hammered pewter on the left lapel, had just gone off to work. Enderby, in the kitchenette whose pastel beauty made him feel particularly dirty and gross, had put on the kettle for stepmother’s tea, and the word ‘epithalamion’, like the announcement of a train’s approach, had set the floorboards trembling with thunder. Panting at the dining-table, he had set down words, seeing his emergent poem as a song for the celebration of the consummation of the passion of the mature – Gertrude and Claudius in Hamlet, red-bearded lips on a widow’s white neck. The leafy tea had cooled beside him. Mrs Opisso the daily woman had come in, dusky, hippy, bosomy, garlicky, moustached, leering brilliantly, a wartime Gibraltarian evacuee in whose blood seethed Genoese, Portuguese Jewish, Saracen, Irish, and Andalusian corpuscles, to say, interrupting sweeping, ‘What are you in this house, eh? You not going out, not doing work, true? What are you to her, eh? You tell.’ It had not been easy to tell; it was not enough to say that it was none of her business.
… Swollen with cream or honey,
The convalescent evening launches its rockets,
Soaring above the rich man’s gala day,
In the thousand parks of the kingdom
Which radiate from this bed …
Vesta would not necessarily think that this epithalamion was intended for her and her guest-Male Friend-protégé, for she had already said sardonically, ‘if you intend to write any love poetry this morning make sure you don’t send it to Sir George by mistake. This carelessness of yours will land you into big trouble one of these days, you mark my words.’ Enderby had hung his head. She had been irritable that morning, tired, rubbing her brow tiredly, as in a TV commercial for some quack analgesic, under her green eyes delicate blue arcs of tiredness. She had stood by the door, in neat rust, a chiffon scarf in two tones of green, a minute brown beret aslant, brown suède gloves to match her shoes, slender, elegant and (so Enderby had divined) menstruating quietly. Enderby had said:
‘Menstruation hits some women more than others, you know. Try gin and hot water. That’s said to work wonders.’
She had blushed faintly and said, ‘Where did you learn that?’
‘In Fem.’
Sighing, she had said, ‘It’s all very confusing. I must work out, when I have time, the precise nature of our relationship.’
Anoint the ship with wine! On ample waters,
Which always wear this ring, that the earth be humbled
Only away from cities, let it dance and ride …
And again, another time, the precise nature still not worked out, ‘The question is, what’s to be done with you?’
‘Done with me?’
‘Yes, that’s the question.’
‘Nothing is to be done with me.’ He had looked across at her in fear, over the shattered fragments of toast which he had been feeding, as to a pet bird, to his mouth. ‘I am, after all, a poet.’ A lorry had backfired the world’s answer.
‘I want to know,’ Vesta had said, chill morning hands round her breakfast-cup, ‘exactly how much money you’ve got.’
‘Why do you want to know that?’ cunning Enderby had asked.
‘Oh, please. I’ve got a busy day ahead of me. Let’s not have any nonsense. Please.’ Enderby had begun to tell out the contents of his left trouser-pocket. ‘Not that sort of money,’ she had cut in, sharply. Enderby had said, with care:
‘Ten thousand pounds in local government loans at five and a half per cent. For dividends. Two thousand pounds in ICI, BMC, Butlin’s. For capital appreciation.’
‘Ah. And what income does all that yield?’
‘About six hundred. Not a lot, really, is it?’
‘It’s nothing. And I suppose your poetry brings in less than nothing.’
‘Two guineas a week. From Fem, God bless it.’ For he had at last signed the contract and already seen in print, over the name of Faith Fortitude, hogwash beginning, ‘A baby’s cheeks, a baby’s limbs are prayers to God and holy hymns; a little baby’s toothless smile does the holy saints beguile …’
‘An income like yours isn’t worth having, really it isn’t. So we’ve got to work out what’s to be done with you.’
‘Done with me?’ prompt Enderby had flashed.
‘Look,’ she had said, ‘I know you’re a poet. But there’s no need to regale us with poetic drama in the style of early Mr Eliot, is there? Not at breakfast there isn’t.’
‘Stichomythia,’ had been learned Enderby’s comment. ‘But it’s you who keep starting it off.’
Well, that was something not yet started off: useful employment, a deuxième métier for a poet. From Valentine to Pentecost he had been allowed, though not in the lavatory, to work at The Pet Beast peaceably. But after the honeymoon things would have to be different.
And you whose fear of maps
Set buzzing the long processes of power,
Resign your limbs at length to elements
Friendly or neutral at least,
Mirrors of the enemy …
His own bit of money had not, even before they’d started on capital purchases, been going very far (‘Call in at the Lion, will you, and buy a couple of bottles of gin. Pay Mrs Opisso; I’m clean out of cash.’). And the greedy maws of Fortnum and Mason and the Army and Navy Stores. And a new wardrobe for himself, London not really favouring the casual valetudinarian garb of the seaside. Enderby’s capital was going now. She, a thriftless Scot, did not believe in money, only in things. Hence the seven-thousand-pound house in Sussex in her name, this being his marriage settlement, also furniture, also a bright new Velox for Vesta to drive, Enderby when most sober managing a car like the drunkest drunk. And a mink coat, a wedding present.
Who had proposed marriage, and when? Who loved whom, if at all, and why? Enderby, in thinker’s pose on the lavatory seat, frowned back to an evening when he had sat finishing his epithalamion in her twin dining-room, facing a piece of furniture he admired – a sideboard, massive and warped, proclaiming its date (1685) among carved lozenges and other tropes, fancies of the woodworker signifying his love of the great negroid ship-oak he had shaped and smoothed. Above that sideboard hung a painting of Vesta done by Gideon Dalgleish, she pearly-shouldered and haughty in a ballgown, seeming about to fly off, centrifugally, back into waiting but invisible paint-tubes. Above open book-shelves was a photograph of the late Pete Bainbridge. He grinned handsomely in a helmet, seated at the wheel of the Anselm 2.493 litre (six-cylinder; 250 b.h.p. Girling disc brakes; Weber 58 DCO carburettors, etc.) in which he had met his messy death. Enderby had started his last stanza:
And even the dead may bring blue lips to this banquet
And twitter like mice or birds down their corridors
Hung with undecipherable blazons …
He had felt a sudden and unwonted surge of personal, as opposed to poet’s, strength: he, unworthy and ugly as he was, was at least alive, while this bright and talented handsome one had been blown to pieces. He had grinned, borrowing the shape of the grin from the dead man, in a sort of triumph. Vesta, reading some new brilliant novel by an undergraduate, had looked up from her Parker-Knoll and caught the grin. She had said:
‘Why are you grinning? Have you written something funny?’
‘Me? Funny? Oh, no.’ Enderby had covered his manuscript with clumsy paws, as one protects one’s
dinner-plate from an importunate second scooping of mashed potato. ‘Nothing funny at all.’
She had got up, so graceful, to see what he was writing, asking: ‘What are you writing?’
‘This? Oh, I don’t think you’d like it. It’s – Well, it’s a sort of –’
She had picked up the sheet of scrawled lines and read aloud:
‘… For two at least can deny
That the past has any odour. They can witness
Passion and patience rooted in one paradigm; in this music recognize
That all the world’s guilt can sit like air
On the bodies of these living.’
‘You see,’ Enderby had said, over-eagerly, ‘it’s an epithalamion. For the marriage of two mature people.’ Inexplicably she had lowered her head with its sweet-smelling penny-coloured hair and kissed him. Kissed him. Him, Enderby.
‘Your breath,’ she had said, ‘is no longer unhealthy. Sometimes it’s hard for the body and mind to come to terms. You’re looking better, much better.’ What could he say but, ‘Thanks to you’?
Airsick, seated in this aerial lavatory, he had to admit that a new Enderby had emerged out of the spring and early summer – a younger Enderby with less fat and wind, new teeth imperfect enough to look real, several smart suits, hair cunningly dressed by Trumper’s of Mayfair and breathing delicately of Eucris, less gauche in company, his appetite healthier with no dyspeptic lust for spices and bread-and-jam, more carefully shaven, his skin clearer, his eyeballs glassy with contact lenses. If only Mrs Meldrum could see him now!
The Complete Enderby Page 12
