‘Don’t trust him. He’s a spy pretending to be on his honeymoon. Made me drunk to shteal official shecretsh. Overthrow of Italian government plot dishcovered, alleged. Bombs shecreted in Foro Traiano and Tempio di Vesta.’
‘You leave my wife out of this,’ threatened Enderby.
‘Ah, wife,’ said one of the men. ‘Capito.’ All was clear. Enderby had knocked Rawcliffe down in wronged husband’s legitimate anger. A matter of honour. Rawcliffe now snored. The two men returned to their lobby to see about a taxi for him. Dante said to Enderby, tentatively: ‘Strega?’
‘Si,’ said Enderby. He signed the chit and counted the number of other chits he had signed, all for Strega. Amazing. He would have to go easy, he hadn’t all the money in the world. But, of course, he reflected, after this honeymoon he would start earning money. The capital was there to be spent; Vesta had said so.
Rawcliffe ceased snoring, smacked his lips, and said: ‘Thou hast wrongedst me, O Enderby.’ His eyes did not open. ‘I wished no harm. Merely desired to crown your nuptials in appropriate manner.’ He then gave a loud snore. A taxi-driver with a square of moustache dead under his nose entered, shook his head tolerantly, and started to lift Rawcliffe by the shoulders. Members of the hotel staff appeared, including menials in off-white jackets, and Dante struck a pose behind the bar. All were waiting for Enderby to lift Rawcliffe’s feet.
Enderby said: ‘I know he’s Inglese and I’m Inglese, but it bloody well stops there. I can’t stand him, see? Io,’ he said, piecing the sentence together painfully, ‘non voglio aiutare.’ Everybody inclined, with smiles, to show that they appreciated this attempt on the part of an Englishman to use their beautiful language, but they ignored the meaning, perhaps having been well schooled by this snoring Rawcliffe. ‘I won’t help,’ repeated Enderby, picking up Rawcliffe’s feet. (There was a hole in the left sole.) ‘This is no way to be spending a bloody honeymoon,’ said Enderby, helping, very awkwardly, to carry Rawcliffe out. ‘Especially in Rome.’ As he passed, now panting, the ranked officials of the hotel, these bowed fully or gently inclined, all with smiles.
The Via Nazionale was afire with sun and brilliant with people. The taxi throbbed, waiting, by the kerb, Enderby and the driver sweated as they pushed their way, Rawcliffe still snoring. A sort of begging friar rattled his box at Enderby. ‘For cough,’ said Enderby. An American, not the john one, poised his camera to shoot. ‘For cough,’ snarled expiring Enderby. The driver, raising his knee to support the snoring body, freed his hand to open the passenger-door. Rawcliffe, like six months’ laundry, was bundled in. ‘There,’ said Enderby. ‘All yours.’
‘Dove?’ asked the driver.
‘Oh, God, yes, where to?’ Enderby manhandled, still panting, the loud, still Rawcliffe, trying to shout, ‘Where do you live, you bastard? Come on, tell us where.’
Rawcliffe came awake with startling briskness, as though he had merely pretended to pass out so that he might be carried. His blue eyes, quite clear, flashed patches of Roman sky at Enderby. ‘Tiber, Father Tiber,’ he said, ‘on whom the Romans prey. The Via Mancini by the Ponte Matteotti.’
The driver eagerly drank that in. ‘O world, O life, O time,’ intoned Rawcliffe. ‘Here lies one whose name was not writ in water. In all the anthologies.’ He returned to a heavy sleep with louder snores than before. Enderby hesitated, then, since the whole waiting world seemed to expect it of him, roughly made room next to Rawcliffe. They drove off. The driver honked down the Via Nazionale and turned abruptly into the Via IV Novembre. Then, as they sped north up the Via del Corso, Rawcliffe came quite alive again, sat up sedately, and said:
‘Have you such a thing as a cigarette on you, my dear Enderby? An English cigarette, preferably.’
‘Are you all right now?’ asked Enderby. ‘Can I get out here and let you go home on your own?’
‘Over there on the left,’ pointed Rawcliffe, ‘you’ll find the Pantheon if you look carefully. And there’ – his hand swished right, striking Enderby – ‘down the street of humility, at the end, is the Fontana di Trevi. There you will throw your coin and be photographed by touts in berets. Do give me a cigarette, there’s a good fellow.’ Enderby offered a single crushed Senior Service. Rawcliffe took it steadily without thanks, lighting up as firm as a rock. ‘We come now, Enderby, to the Piazza Colonna. There it is, the column itself, and at the top Marcus Aurelius, see.’
‘I could get off here,’ suggested Enderby, ‘and go back to the hotel. My wife isn’t too good, you know.’
‘Isn’t she?’ said Rawcliffe. ‘Not too good at what? A great admirer of poets, though. I’ll say that for her. She always liked my little poem in the anthologies. It’s quite likely, you know, Enderby, that you’re going to be a great man. She likes to back winners. She backed one very good one, but that was in the field of sport. Poets don’t get killed as racing-drivers do, you know. Look, the Piazza del Popolo. And now we’re coming up to the Via Flaminia and there, you can just see, is Father Tiber himself, into whom the Romans spit.’
‘What do you know about my wife?’ asked Enderby. ‘Who told you I’d married Vesta Bainbridge?’
‘It was in the popular papers,’ said Rawcliffe. ‘Didn’t you see? Perhaps she kept them from you. Pete Bainbridge’s widow to remarry, they said. The popular papers didn’t seem to know very much about you. But when you’re dead there’ll be biographies, you know. There haven’t been any biographies of Pete Bainbridge, so there’s a lot to be said for not being known to the readers of the Daily Mirror. Ah, here is the Via Mancini.’ He banged the glass partition and made grotesque boxing gestures at the driver. The driver nodded, swerved madly, and came to rest before a small drinking-shop. ‘This is where I have my humble lodging,’ said Rawcliffe. ‘Above here.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ asked Enderby. ‘I thought perhaps I appealed to a sort of protective instinct in her. And I’m very fond of her. Very, very fond. In love,’ said Enderby. Rawcliffe nodded and nodded, paying the driver. He seemed to have recovered completely from his Strega-bout. The two poets stood in the warm street, cooled by river air. Enderby let the taxi go and said, ‘Damn. I’ve let that taxi go. I ought to get back to my wife.’ He reminded himself that he disliked Rawcliffe because he was in all the anthologies. ‘It strikes me,’ said Enderby, ‘that you were swinging the bloody lead. I needn’t have come with you at all.’
‘Strega,’ said Rawcliffe, nodding, ‘passes through my system very quickly. I think, now we’re here, we’ll have some more. Or perhaps a litre or so of Frascati.’
‘I must get back. She may be all right now. She may be wondering where I am.’
‘There’s no hurry. The bride’s supposed to wait, you know. Supposed to lie in cool sheets smelling of lavender while the bridegroom gets drunk and impotent. The Toby night, you know. That’s what it used to be called. After Tobias in the Apocrypha. Come on, Enderby, I’m lonely. A brother poet is lonely. And I have things to tell you.’
‘About Vesta?’
‘Oh, no. Much more interesting. About you and your poetic destiny.’
They entered the little shop. It was dark and warm. On the walls were vulgar mosaics, pseudo-Etruscan, of prancing men and women in profile. There were glass jars of wine and cloudy tumblers. An old man from the age of Victor Emmanuel sucked an ample moustache; two sincere-eyed rogues, round-faced and, despite the heat, in overcoats, whispered roguery to each other. A champing old woman, each step an effort, brought a litre of urine to two English poets. ‘Salute,’ said Rawcliffe. He shuddered at the first draught, found the second blander. ‘Tell me, Enderby,’ he said, ‘How old would you say I am?’
‘Old? Oh, about fifty.’
‘Fifty-two. And when do you think I stopped writing?’
‘I didn’t know you had stopped.’
‘Oh, yes, a long time, a long, long time. I haven’t written a line of verse, Enderby, since I was twenty-seven. There, that surprises you, doesn’t it? But writing verse is so difficu
lt, Enderby, so so difficult. The only people who can write verse after the age of thirty are the people who do the competitions, you know, in the week-end papers. You can add to that, of course, the monkey-gland boys, of whom Yeats was one, but that’s not playing the game, by God. The greatest senile poet of the age, by God, by grace of this bloody man Voronoff. But the rest of us? There are no dramatic poets left, Enderby, and, ha ha, certainly no epic poets. We’re all lyric poets, then, and how long does the lyric urge last? No bloody time at all, my boy, ten years at the most. It’s no accident, you know, that they all died young, mainly, for some reason, in Mediterranean lands. Dylan, of course, died in America, but the Atlantic’s a sort of Mediterranean, when you come to think of it. What I mean is, American civilization’s a sort of sea-board civilization, when you come to think of it, and not a river civilization at all.’ Rawcliffe shook his head in a fuddled gesture, the Frascati having wakened the sleeping Strega. ‘What I mean is, Enderby, that you’re bloody lucky to be writing poetry at all at the age of – what is your age?’
‘Forty-five.’
‘At the age of forty-five, Enderby. What I mean is, what are you looking forward to now? Eh?’ He let more Frascati stagger into his glass. Outside, the Roman daylight flashed and rippled. ‘Don’t kid yourself, my dear boy, about long bloody narrative poems, or plays, or any of that nonsense. You’re a lyric poet, and the time is coming for the lyric gift to die. Who knows? Perhaps it’s died already.’ He looked narrowly at Enderby over the glass flask of Frascati swimming and dancing in his grip. ‘Don’t expect any more epiphanies, any more mad dawn inspirations, Enderby. That poem of mine, the one in the anthologies, the one I’ll live by if I’m going to live at all, I wrote that bugger, you know, Enderby, at the age of twenty-one. Youth. It’s the only thing worth having.’ He nodded sadly. As in a film, an easy symbol of youth orchestrated his words, passing by outside, a very head-high girl of Rome with black hair and smoky sideburns, thrust breasts, liquid waist like Harry Ploughman’s, animal haunches. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Rawcliffe, ‘youth.’ He drank Frascati and sighed. ‘Haven’t you felt, Enderby, that your gift is dying? It’s a gift appropriate to youth, you know, owing nothing to experience or learning. An athletic gift, really, a sportif gift.’ Rawcliffe dropped his jaw at Enderby, disclosing crooked teeth of various colours. ‘What are you going to do, Enderby, what are you going to do? To the world, of course, all this is nothing. If the world should enter and hear us mourning the death of Enderby’s lyric gift, the world, Enderby, would deem us not merely mad. They would consider us, Enderby, to be, Enderby’ – he leaned forward, hissing – ‘really talking about something else in the guise of the harmless. They would think us, perhaps, to be Communists.’
‘And,’ said Enderby, frightened by this vision of coming impotence, impotence perhaps already arrived, ‘what do you do?’
‘I?’ Rawcliffe was already drunk again. He shoulder-jerked spastically and munched the air like spaghetti. ‘I, Enderby, am the great diluter. Nothing can be taken neat any more. The question is this: do we live, or do we partly live? Or,’ he said, ‘do we,’ and he was suddenly blinking in the killing lights, before the cranking cameras, jerking upright to stand against the wall, as against, with spread thin arms, a rockcliff, a rawface, ‘die?’ He then collapsed on the table, like a Hollywood absinthe-drinker, but none of the Romans took any notice.
4
‘And,’ said Vesta, ‘what exactly do you think you’ve been doing? Where exactly do you think you’ve been?’ Enderby felt a sort of stepson’s guilt, the only kind he really knew, looking at her, head hung. She was brilliant in a wide-skirted daffodil-yellow dress, penny-coloured hair smooth and shining, skin summer-honeyed, healthy again, her eyes green, wide, nasty, a most formidable and desirable woman. Enderby said, mumbling: ‘It was Rawcliffe, you see.’
She folded her bare arms. ‘You know Rawcliffe,’ chumbled Enderby and, a humble and hopeful attempt at palliation of his crime or crimes, ‘he’s in all the anthologies.’
‘In all the bars, most likely, if I know anything about Rawcliffe. And you’ve been with him. I’m giving you fair warning, Harry. You keep out of the way of people like Rawcliffe. What’s he doing in Rome, anyway? It all sounds very suspicious to me. What did he say? What was he telling you?’
‘He said that being a lyric poet was really like being a racing motorist and that you’ve only lowered yourself to marry me because you’ll be in all the biographies and will share in my eternal fame and glory, and he said that my poetic gift was dying and then what was I going to do? Then he passed out and I had to help carry him upstairs and that made me very thirsty. Then I couldn’t find a taxi for a long time and I couldn’t remember the name of the hotel. So that’s why I’m late. But,’ said Enderby, ‘you didn’t say anything about what time to be back, did you? You didn’t say anything at all.’
‘You said you were going to cash traveller’s cheques,’ said Vesta. ‘It was your duty to stay here, with me. A fine start to a honeymoon this is, isn’t it, you going off with people like Rawcliffe to get drunk and listen to lies about your wife.’
‘What lies?’
‘The man’s a born liar. He was always trying to make passes at me.’
‘When? How do you know him?’
‘Oh, he’s been a journalist of sorts,’ said Vesta. ‘Always messing round on the fringes of things. He’s probably here in films, I should think, just messing round. Look,’ she said very sternly, ‘in future you’re not to go anywhere without me, do you understand? You just don’t know the world, you’re just too innocent to live. My job is to look after you, take charge of things for you.’
‘And my job?’ said Enderby.
She smiled faintly. Enderby noticed that the bottle of Frascati, three-quarters full when he had left the bedroom, was now empty. She had certainly recovered. Outside was gentle Roman early evening. ‘What do we do now?’ asked Enderby.
‘We go and eat.’
‘It’s a bit early for that, isn’t it? Don’t you think we ought to drink a little before eating?’
‘You’ve drunk enough.’
‘Well,’ said Enderby, looking again at the empty Frascati bottle, ‘you haven’t done too badly yourself. On an empty stomach, too.’
‘Oh, I sent down for some pizza and then a couple of club sandwiches,’ said Vesta. ‘I was starving. I still am.’ She took from the wardrobe a stole, daffodil-yellow, to cover her bare shoulders against evening cold or Italian lust. She had unpacked, Enderby noticed; she couldn’t have been ill for very long. They left the bedroom and went down by the stairs, mistrusting the frail filigree charm of the lift. In the corridors, in the hotel lobby, men frankly admired Vesta. Bottom-pinchers, suddenly realized Enderby, all Italians were blasted bottom-pinchers; that raised a problem. And surely duels of honour were still fought in this backward country? Out on the Via Nazionale, Enderby walked a pace behind Vesta, smiling sourly up at the SPQR shields on the lamp standards. He didn’t want any trouble. He hadn’t before quite realized what a responsibility a wife was. ‘I was told,’ said Vesta, ‘that there’s a little place on the Via Torino. Harry, why are you walking behind? Don’t be silly; people are looking at you.’
Enderby skipped to her side, but, invisible to her, his open hand was spread six inches behind her walking rump, as though warming itself at a fire. ‘Who told you?’
‘Gillian Frobisher.’
‘That,’ said Enderby, ‘is the woman who nearly killed me with her Spaghetti Surprise.’
‘It was your own fault. We turn right here.’
The restaurant was full of smeary mirrors and smelt strongly of cellar-damp and very old breadcrumbs. Enderby read the menu in gloom. The waiter was blue-jawed, lantern-jawed, untrustworthy, trying to peer, slyly, into Vesta’s décolletage. Enderby wondered why such glamour surrounded the Italian cuisine. After all, it consisted only of a few allomorphs of paste, the odd sauce or so; the only Italian meat was veal. Nevertheless Enderby
read ‘bifstek’ and, with faint hope, ordered it. Vesta, starving, had worked through minestrone, a ravioli dish, some spaghetti mess or other, and was dipping artichoke leaves into oily vinegar, Enderby had begun to glow on a half-litre of Frascati when the alleged steak arrived. It was thin, white, on a cold plate. Enderby said to the waiter:
‘Questo é vitello.’ He, who had, before his life with Vesta, subsisted on ghastly stews and dips in the jampot, now became steak-faced with thwarted gastronome’s anger.
‘Si, é vitello, signore.’
‘I ordered beefsteak,’ cried furious Enderby, uncouth Englishman abroad, ‘not bloody veal. Not that it is bloody veal,’ he added, with poetic concern for verbal accuracy. ‘Fetch the manager.’
‘Now, Harry,’ rebuked Vesta. ‘We’ve had enough naughtiness for one day, haven’t we? See, people are looking at you.’ The Roman eaters all round were shovelling away, swollen-eyed, sincerely voluble with each other. They ignored Enderby; they had seen his type before. The manager came, fat, small, shiftily black-eyed, breathing hard with suppressed indignation at Enderby.
‘I ordered,’ said Enderby, ‘a steak. This is veal.’
‘Is a same thing,’ said the manager. ‘Veal is a cow. Beef is a cow. Ergo, beef is a veal.’
‘Are you,’ said Enderby, enraged by this syllogism, ‘trying to teach me what is a beefsteak and what is not? Are you trying to teach me my own bloody language?’
‘Language, Harry, language,’ said Vesta ineptly.
‘Yes, my own bloody language,’ cried Enderby. ‘He thinks he knows better than I do. Are you going to stick up for him?’
‘Is a true,’ said the manager. ‘You not a eat, you pay just a same. What a you a order you a pay.’
The Complete Enderby Page 14
