Enderby stood up, saying, ‘Oh, no. Oh, most certainly bloody well no.’ He looked down at Vesta, before whom frothed a zabaglione. ‘I’m not,’ he said, ‘paying for what I didn’t order, and what I didn’t order was that pallid apology down there. I’m going to eat somewhere else.’
‘Harry,’ she ordered, ‘sit down. Eat what you’re given.’ She pinged her zabaglione glass pettishly with her spoon. ‘Don’t make such a fuss over nothing.’
‘I don’t like throwing money away,’ said Enderby, ‘and I don’t like being insulted by foreigners.’
‘You,’ said Vesta, ‘are the foreigner. Now sit down.’
Enderby grumpily sat down. The manager sneered in foreigner’s triumph, ready to depart, having resolved the stupid fuss, meat being veal anyway, no argument about it. Enderby saw the sneer and stood up again, angrier. ‘I won’t bloody well sit down,’ he said, ‘and he knows what he can do with his bloodless stuff here. If you’re staying, I’m not.’
Vesta’s eyes changed from expression to expression rapidly, like the number-indicator of a bus being changed by the conductor. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘dear. Leave me some money to pay for my own meal. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes in that open-air café place.’
‘Where?’
‘On the Piazza di what’s-its-name,’ she said, pointing.
‘Repubblica,’ said the waiter, helpful.
‘You keep your bloody nose out of this,’ said Enderby. ‘All right, then. I’ll see you there.’ He left with her a large note for several thousand or million lire. From it the face of some allegorical lady looked up at Enderby in mute appeal.
Fifteen minutes later Enderby, gazing glumly at the colour-lit fountain, watching the Vespas and the Fiats and the sober crowds, sat near the end of a bottle of Frascati. It had come to him warm, and he had said to the terrace waiter, ‘Non freddo.’ The waiter had agreed that the bottle was non freddo and had gone off smiling. Now the bottle was less freddo than ever. It was a warm evening. Enderby felt a sudden strong longing for his old life, the stewed tea, the poetry in the lavatory, onanistic sex. Then, wanting to blubber, he realized that he was being very childish. It was right that a man should marry and be honeymooning among the fountains of Rome; it was right to want to be mature. But Rawcliffe had said something about poetry being a youthful gift, hence immature, cognate with the gifts of speed and alertness that made a man into a racing-driver. Was it possible that the gift was already leaving him, having stayed perhaps longer than was right? If so, what was he, what would he turn into?
Vesta arrived, a Vogue vision of beauty against the floodlit fountain. Fluttered and suddenly proud, Enderby stood up. She sat down, saying, ‘I was really ashamed of you in there. You behaved absolutely disgracefully. Naturally, I paid for the meal you ordered. I hate these petty wrangles over money.’
‘My money,’ said Enderby. ‘You shouldn’t have done it.’
‘All right, your money. But, please remember, my dignity. I don’t allow you or any man to make a fool out of me.’ She softened. ‘Oh, Harry, how could you, how could you behave like that? On the first day of our honeymoon, too. Oh, Harry, you upset me dreadfully.’
‘Have some wine,’ said Enderby. The waiter inclined with a Roman sneer, bold eyes of admiration for the signora. ‘That last lot,’ said Enderby, ‘was bloody caldo. This time I want it freddo, see? Bloody freddo.’ The waiter went, sneering and leering. ‘How I hate this bloody town!’ said Enderby, suddenly shivering. Vesta began to snivel quietly. ‘What’s the trouble?’ asked Enderby.
‘Oh, I thought things would be different. I thought you’d be different.’ Suddenly she stiffened, staring straight ahead of her, as though waiting for some psychic visitation. Enderby looked at her, his mouth open. Her mouth opened, too, and, as from the mouth of a spiritualistic medium, there was emitted what sounded like the greeting of a Red Indian ‘control’:
Haaaaooooo.
Enderby listened in silent wonder, his mouth open wider. It was a belch.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘sorry. I couldn’t help that at all, really I couldn’t.’
‘Let it come,’ said Enderby kindly. ‘You can always say excuse-me.’
Barrrrrp.
‘I do beg your pardon,’ said Vesta. ‘You know, I don’t think I feel frightfully well. I don’t think this change of food is agreeing with me.’ Rorrrrp. Auuuuu.
‘Would you like to go back to the hotel?’ asked Enderby eagerly.
‘I think I’ll have to.’ Borrrrphhh. ‘We’re having the most unfortunate day, aren’t we?’
‘The Toby night,’ said Enderby with relief. ‘Like Tobias in the Apocrypha.’ He took her arm.
2
1
‘PIAZZA SAN PIETRO,’ said the guide. ‘St Peter’s Square.’ He was a young Roman with a crewcut, insolent, bold eyes for the ladies. ‘Place Saint Pierre. St Peter’s Platz.’ Vulgar, decided Enderby. Pretentious. The guide saw Enderby’s sourness, saw that he was not impressed. ‘Plaza San Pedro,’ he said, as though playing a trump card.
It was a real scorcher, and Vesta was dressed for a real scorcher in beige linen, something austere and expensive by Berhanyer. She had amazing powers of recuperation. Last night her stomach upset had jabbered and frothed away like an idiot child even when, eventually, she had got to sleep. Enderby had lain in clean pyjamas listening tolerantly, her slim back and haunches visible through the diaphanous nightdress, neat but unseductive, heaving occasionally with new accessions of wind, the bedclothes having been kicked away by Enderby because of the warmth of the night. The bedside lamp out, she had become a mere parcel of noises which had filled Enderby with weak nostalgia for his single days, so that he had gone to sleep to dream of stewpans and the craft of verse, the sea. At three-thirty by his luminous wristwatch (a wedding-present), he had awakened with his heart punch-balling desperately because of Strega and Frascati to hear her still fizzing and pooping healthily away. But, waking at nine o’clock to the peevish traffic of the Via Nazionale, he had seen her at the window, eating.
An essential task had not yet been accomplished. Enderby, blinking and squinting, noting that he had slept with his teeth in, wondering where he had put his contact lenses, was emboldened by morning chordee to say, ‘Oughtn’t you to come back to bed for a while? What I mean is, you ought really.’ Impromptu verses, wittily gross, came into his head to give the lie to Rawcliffe’s raised finger of doom; the Muse was still very much with him:
The marriage contract was designed,
Despite what all the notaries think,
To be by only one pen signed,
And that is mine, and full of ink.
Enderby hesitated about saying these verses aloud. Anyway, Vesta said:
‘I’ve been up for hours. I had a ham omelette in the restaurant and now I’m eating the breakfast I ordered for you. But it’s only croissants and jam and things. Look, we’re going on a little excursion. I thought it might be fun. We’re going to see Rome. The coach calls here at nine-thirty, so you’d better hurry.’ Waving the excursion tickets in a shaft of Roman sun, then cracking a kind of hard bread: ‘You don’t seem very enthusiastic. Don’t you want to see Rome?’
‘No.’ Ask a straight question and you get a straight answer.
‘You call yourself a poet. Poets are supposed to be full of curiosity. I don’t understand you at all.’
Anyway, here they were, stepping out of the coach in full noon, to inspect the Obelisk of Nero’s Circus. The guide, who had decided that Enderby was a Spaniard, said ingratiatingly, ‘Obelisco del Circo de Nerón.’ ‘Si,’ said Enderby, unenticed, ‘Look,’ he said to Vesta, ‘I’m parched. I must have a drink.’ It was all the solids they’d been forced to eat – the Pincian Gate and the Borghese Gallery and the Pincio Terrace and the Mausoleum of Caesar Augustus and the Pantheon and the Senate House and the Palace of Justice and the Castle of St Angelo and the Via della Conciliazione. Enderby remembered what the great poet Clough had said about Rome
. Rubbishy, he had called it. Enderby was always ready to defer to the judgement of a great poet. ‘Rubbishy,’ he quoted.
‘You know,’ said Vesta, ‘I do believe you’re really quite a philistine.’
‘A thirsty one.’
‘All right. It’s nearly the end of the tour, anyway.’ Enderby, who had developed in less than a day a sightless instinct for drinking shops, led Vesta down the Road of Conciliation. Soon they were sitting very cool and drinking Frascati. Vesta sighed and said:
‘Peace.’
Enderby choked on his wine. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘That’s what we all want, isn’t it? Peace. Peace and order. Certitude. Certainty. The mind quiet and at peace in the presence of order.’ Her skin was so clear, so youthful, under the wide-brimmed hat (also from the Madrid workshop of the crafty young Berhanyer), and her body so elegantly decked; exquisite the stallion-flared nostrils and honest and yet clever the green eyes. ‘Peace,’ she said again, then sighed once more. ‘Och.’
‘What was that word?’ asked Enderby.
‘Peace.’
‘No, no, the one after.’
‘I didn’t say anything after. You’re hearing things, Harry boy.’
‘What did you call me then?’
‘Really, what is the matter with you? Rome’s peculiar magic seems to be having a curious influence … And you’re drinking far far more than you drink in England.’
‘You cured my stomach,’ said Enderby ungrudgingly. ‘I find I can down any quantity of this stuff without any ill effects. That diet you put me on certainly worked wonders.’ He nodded cheerily at her and poured more wine from the flask.
Vesta looked slightly disgusted; she flared her nostrils further, saying, ‘I talk about peace and you talk about stomachs.’
‘One stomach,’ said Enderby. ‘Poets talk about stomachs and Fem editors talk about peace. That seems a fair division.’
‘We can look forward to so much peace,’ said Vesta, ‘the two of us. That beautiful house in Sussex, overlooking the downs. It breathes peace, doesn’t it?’
‘You’re too young to want peace,’ said Enderby. ‘Peace is for the old.’
‘Och, we all want it,’ said Vesta fiercely. ‘And I feel it here, you know, in Rome. A big big peace.’
‘A big piece of peace,’ said Enderby. ‘Pax Romana. Where they made a desolation they called it a peace. What absolute nonsense! It was a nasty, vulgar sort of civilization, only dignified by being hidden under a lot of declensions. Peace? They didn’t know what peace was. The release of the vomitorium after fieldfares in syrup and quail’s brains in aspic and a go at a little slave-boy between courses. They knew that. They knew the catharsis after seeing women torn apart by mangy starved lions in an arena. But they didn’t know peace. If they’d been quiet and reposeful for thirty seconds they’d have heard too many voices telling them that the Empire was all a bloody swindle. Don’t talk to me about the bloody pax Romana.’ Enderby snorted, not quite knowing why he was so moved.
Vesta smiled in tolerance. ‘That’s not real Rome. That’s Hollywood Rome.’
‘Real Rome was Hollywood Rome, only more so,’ said Enderby. ‘And what’s really left of it now? Mouldering studio-lots. Big vulgar broken columns. The imperial publicity of P. Virgil Maro, yes-man to Augustus and all his triumphal arches, now dropped. Boots boots boots boots marching up and down again. Rome.’ Enderby made, appropriately but vulgarly, the old Roman sign. ‘A big maggoty cheese, with too many irregular verbs.’
Vesta was still smiling, somewhat like Our Lady in the vision Enderby had had that slippery day, travelling to London with a poem to give birth to. ‘You just don’t listen, do you? You just don’t give me a chance to say what I want to say.’
‘Bloody Roman peace,’ snorted Enderby.
‘I didn’t mean that Empire. I meant the other one being nourished in the catacombs.’
‘Oh God, no,’ murmured Enderby.
Vesta drank some wine and then, quite gently, belched. She did not say excuse me; she did not seem to notice. Enderby stared. She said, ‘Doesn’t it seem to you to be a bit like coming home? You know – the return of the prodigal? You opted out of the Empire and have regretted it ever since. It’s no good denying it; it’s there in your poems all the time.’
Enderby breathed deeply. ‘In a way,’ he said, ‘we all regret the death of universal order. A big smile of teeth. But that smile is a smile of dead teeth. No, not even just dead. False. It never began to be alive. Not for me, anyway.’
‘Liar.’
‘What do you know about it?’ said Enderby, truculent.
‘Oh, more than you think.’ She sipped her Frascati as though it were very hot tea. ‘You’ve never been much interested in me, have you? Not really. You’ve never troubled to find out anything about me.’
‘We haven’t known each other very long,’ said Enderby, somewhat guiltily.
‘Long enough to get married. No, be honest. To Enderby, Enderby’s always been the important thing. Enderby the end of Enderby.’
‘That’s not really true,’ said Enderby doubtfully. ‘I’ve regarded my work as important, I suppose. But not myself. I’ve not cared very much for my own comfort or honour or glory.’
‘Exactly. You’ve been too interested in yourself to be interested in those things. Enderby in a void. Enderby spinning round and round in an eternal lavatory.’
‘That’s not fair. That’s not true at all.’
‘You see? You’re getting really interested. You’re prepared for a good long talk about Enderby. Supposing we talk about me instead.’
‘Gladly,’ said Enderby, settling himself in resignation. Vesta pushed her wine-glass away and, with slim hands folded on the table, said:
‘How do you think I was brought up?’
‘Oh,’ said Enderby, ‘we know all about that, don’t we? Good Scottish home. Calvinist. Another imperial dream to be opted out of.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Vesta, ‘not at all. Not Calvinist. Catholic. Just like you.’ She smiled sweetly.
‘What?’ squawked Enderby, aghast.
‘Yes,’ said Vesta, ‘Catholic. There are Catholics in Scotland, you know. Lots and lots of them. It was intended that I should be a nun. There, that’s a surprise for you, isn’t it?’
‘Not really,’ said Enderby. ‘Granted that original premiss, which I’m still trying to digest, not at all a surprise. You wear your clothes like a nun.’
‘What a very odd thing to say!’ said Vesta. ‘What, I wonder, do you mean by that?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ asked Enderby, agitated. ‘I mean, we’ve lived under the same roof for, oh, for months, and you’ve never breathed a word about it.’
‘Why should I have done? It never seemed relevant to anything we ever talked about. And you never showed any curiosity about me. As I’ve already said, you have, for a poet, surprisingly little curiosity.’
Enderby looked at her, definitely curiously: by rights, this revelation should have modified her appearance, but she still seemed a slim Protestant beauty, cognate with his adolescent vision, an angel of release.
She said, ‘Anyway, it makes no difference. I left the Church when I was, oh, when I married Pete. He, as everybody but you knows, had already been married and divorced. I was drifting anyway; I didn’t believe any more. Pete believed in motor engines, I’ll say that for him, and he used to pray before racing, though I don’t know what to; perhaps to some archetypal internal combustion engine. Pete was a nice boy.’ She drained her glass.
‘Have some more wine,’ said Enderby.
‘Yes, I will, just a little. Rome has a peculiar atmosphere, hasn’t it? Don’t you feel that? It makes me, somehow, feel that I’m empty, empty of belief and so on.’
‘Be careful,’ said Enderby, very clearly, leaning across. ‘Be very careful indeed of feeling like that. Rome’s just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I’d say. It trades on belief just as Stratfor
d trades on Shakespeare. But don’t you start thinking that it’s a great pure mother calling you home. You can’t go home, anyway. You’re living in sin. We were only married in a registry office, remember.’
‘And are we living in sin?’ asked Vesta coolly. ‘I haven’t noticed particularly.’
‘Well,’ said Enderby, confused, ‘that’s what the world would think if the world happened to know and to be Catholic. We’re not, of course, really, as you say, living in sin at all.’
‘You’ve contracted out of everything in your time, haven’t you? Out of the Church, out of society, out of the family –’
‘Damn it all, I am, after all, a poet –’
‘Everything goes into the lavatory, everything. Even the act of love.’
Enderby flushed flea-coloured. ‘What do you mean by that? What do you know about that? I’m just the same as anybody else, except that I’m not accustomed, except that it’s been a long time, except that I’m ugly and shy and –’
‘Everything’s going to be put right. You just wait. You’ll see.’ She gave him, forgiving, a kind cool hand. Anything he might then have wanted to say was snatched from his very lungs by a massive silver plunging of claws, swallowed, as all sounds of angelic noontime were swallowed, by a sudden boisterous revelry of bells, huge throats of white metal baying, snarling, hurling, fuming at the sky, the heavens of Rome a nickel and aluminium flame of bells.
2
After sauced pasta and a straw-harnessed globe of Chianti, Vesta’s proposal seemed reasonable enough. Because she spoke of the process rather than the end: cool breezes stirred by the fan of the moving coach; the stop for tasting the wines of the Frascati vineyards; the wide sheet of lake and the albergo on its shore. And then the rolling back to Rome in early evening. It was more than a proposal, anyway. When Enderby said yes she promptly pulled the tickets out of her handbag. ‘But,’ said Enderby, ‘are we to spend all our time in Rome riding in coaches?’
The Complete Enderby Page 15
