The timpanists across the lake picked up their felt sticks and rolled for a few bars, while the coaches, as though they could thus escape from bad weather, sang off to the city. The lake underwent complex metallurgical changes and the sky, cloaking hot and fearsome lights, began to sweat, then cry. ‘Oh Jesus,’ called Vesta, ‘here it comes.’ And indeed there it came while they were still half a mile from shelter other than that of trees: the sky cracked open like a waterbutt, and the air became vertical glass down which pail after pail was poured. They dashed blindly towards the lake-side inn, Vesta tottering on her smart spikes, Enderby gripping her elbow as though her arm were a pair of blackboard dividers, already too wet really to be all that urgent about seeking shelter. The deluge made Enderby’s scalp prickle with dandruff, and his fawn summer suit was soaked. But she, poor girl, was already a wreck: hat comically flopping, hair in rat-tails, mascara running, her face that of a crying old crone as though she wept over the disintegration of her chic. ‘In here,’ gasped Enderby, steering her straight into a room smelling of size and new paint, empty chairs and tables in it, a sleek boy-waiter admiring the free show of the rain. ‘I think,’ panted Enderby, ‘that we’ll have to take a room, if they have one. The first thing to do is to get dry. Perhaps they’ll –’ The waiter called a name, then turned his young empty face back on these two wet ones. Enderby said, ‘Una camera. Si é possible.’ The boy called again, an unbroken boy’s yelp under the drumming water. A woman came, creamily fat in a flowered frock, clucked commiseration, took in in a swift look Vesta’s ringed finger, said there was a camera with one letto. Beside her smiling hugeness Vesta looked a snivelling waif. ‘Grazie,’ said Enderby. Lightning cracked momentarily the late-sky, the timpanists counted half a bar and came in with a fine peal, rolling cosmic Berlioz chords. Vesta made the sign of the cross. She was shivering.
‘What,’ asked Enderby, ‘did you do that for?’
‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘it scares me. I can’t stand thunder.’ Enderby felt his stomach turn over when she said that.
4
Up in the bedroom they confronted each other naked. Somehow, for some reason, Enderby had not expected that, when they had stripped off their drenched clothes and dumped them outside the door, they would confront each other naked. Naked confrontation was supposed to come about otherwise: deliberately, in desire or duty. Enderby had been trying to digest too many other things to foresee this prelapsarian picture (and there up the hill, so neatly fitting into the pattern, was a great postlapsarian witness), for the room was very much like his own as a boy – pictures of St John the Baptist, the Sacred Heart, the B.V.M., a melodramatic Golgotha; a smell of unclean bedclothes, dust, boots, and stale holy water; a stringy unbeaten carpet; a narrow bed. This reproduction of the main stage-set for so many adolescent monodramas, here in Italy under rain, did not depress him: that bedroom had always been an enclave of revolt in stepmother country. Very clearly, lines of an unpublished poem came back to him:
… There were times, misunderstood by the family,
When you, at fifteen, on your summer evening bed
Believed there were ancient towns you might anciently visit.
There might be a neglected platform on some station
And a ticket bought when the clock was off its guard.
Oh, who can dismember the past? The boy on the friendly bed
Lay on the unpossessed mother, the bosom of history,
And is gathered to her at last. And tears I suppose
Still hunger for that reeking unwashed pillow,
That bed ingrained with all the dirt of the past,
The mess and lice and stupidity of the Golden Age,
But a mother and loving, ultimately Eden …
He nodded several times, standing there naked in rainy Italy, thinking that it was a mother he had always wanted, not a stepmother, and he had made that mother himself in his bedroom, made her out of the past, history, myth, the craft of verse. When she was made she became slimmer, younger, more like a mistress; she became the Muse.
Lightning again shivered the firmament and then, after a careful count, the laughing drummers knocked hell out of their resonant membranes. Vesta gave a little scream, put her arms round Enderby’s trunk, and then seemed to try to push herself inside him as though he were a deviscerated rabbit of great size and she a mound of palpitating stuffing. ‘There, there,’ said Enderby, kindly but disturbed: she had no right to bring these stepmother terrors into his adolescent bedroom. Then he sweated, seeing more than a mere fear of thunder. Still, he clasped her to him and soothed her shoulderblades, thinking how such naked contacts had an essential unalluring core of heartiness: the slap of palm on buttock; the jelly sound of two moist segments of flesh drawing apart. She shivered: the air had cooled considerably.
‘You’d better,’ said Enderby, ‘get into bed.’
‘Yes,’ she shuddered, ‘yes. Into bed.’ And she pulled him towards bed, her grip on him unrelaxed, so that they shambled to it as though clumsily dancing. As soon as they were in it, a skein of lightning lay an instant against the sky, like a stunned man against a cliff, and then the drums whammed out from hi-fi loudspeakers all over the heavens. She again seemed to try to enter him in fear, a rather soft rock of ages, and he smelt her terror, as familiar a smell as that faintly oily one of the coverlet.
‘There,’ he said again, clasping her, stroking and soothing. It was a very narrow bed. This, he kept reminding himself, was his bride, an intelligent and desirable young woman and it was time, under the thunder and rain, to be thinking of performing, that is to say consummating, that is to say. He stealthily felt his way down to find out what was his body’s view of this constatation, but all was quiet there, as though he were calmly reading Jane Austen.
The rain eased and the thunder was trundled, grumbling, off. Enderby felt her body relax and seem, somehow, to grow moister and more expectant. She gripped him still, though there was no more thunder to fear. Enderby’s engines, rusty and sluggish, tried to wake up and respond to various quite unoriginal ganglionic stimuli, but there were certain difficulties which were secret and shameful. Enderby had been spoiled by too many pictures; it was a long time since he had held a real woman in his arms like this; he had possessed in imagination houri after houri of a beauty, passivity, voluptuousness no real woman could ever touch. Perhaps, he now felt, if this body he held could become – just for twenty or thirty seconds – one of those harem dreams of his, pampered, pouting, perfumed, steatopygous, he could, he was sure, achieve what it was a plain duty, apart from all questions of gratification, to achieve. But the body of his bride was spare, barely cushioned. With a desperate effort he conjured a gross tit-swinging image, saw whose image it was, then, making the retching noises of a child trying to disgust, he swung out of the bed with unwonted agility and stood shivering on the worn mat. ‘What’s the matter?’ she called. ‘What is it? Don’t you feel well?’ Forgetting that he was naked, Enderby dashed out of the room without replying. Two doors down the corridor was the sign Gabinetto, and Enderby, re-living the past, entered it and locked its door. To his horror he found that the lavatory was not a sane comfortable English WC but a Continental crouch-hole with a right-hand hand-rail and a toilet-roll-fitting on the same side. Once, many years ago, he had fallen into one of these holes. He almost cried for the security of his old seaside lavatory but, unlocking the door to leave, the tears froze as he heard two female Italian voices on the corridor. One of these, saying loud passing greetings to the other, was now right up against the gabinetto door and trying the handle. Enderby swiftly re-locked himself in. The voice spoke urgently, saying, for all Enderby knew, that its owner was in a bad way, desperate, and couldn’t wait too long. Enderby seated himself on the edge of the low crouch-hole dais, saying, ‘Go away. Go away,’ and, as an afterthought, ‘Io sono nudo, completamente nudo’, wondering if that was correct Italian. Correct or not, the voice was silenced and apparently carried back down the corridor. Enderby th
e completely naked sat on, in thinking pose, feeling at his lowest ebb.
5
Like an Arab thief, though not so slippery, Enderby darted back to the bedroom. Vesta was sitting up in the bed, smoking a ship’s (or export) Woodbine through a holder and, because of that, looking more naked than she was, though this, reflected Enderby, was not really possible. ‘Now then,’ she said. ‘We’re going to have this whole thing out.’
‘No,’ mumbled Enderby. ‘Not like this.’ He sat shamefacedly down on the cane chair in the corner, wriggling and wincing as odd prickly cane thorns assaulted his bottom. ‘Not,’ said Enderby, ‘with no clothes on. It’s not right.’ He joined his hands as for prayer and, with this frail cage of fingers, hid his genitals from the smoking woman in the bed. ‘I mean,’ said Enderby, ‘one can’t really talk about anything naked.’
‘Who are you to say that?’ she said fiercely. ‘What do you know about the world? My first husband and I once belonged to a nudist camp –’ (Enderby whimpered at the sudden formality of ‘first husband’) ‘– and there used to be really prominent men and women there, and they didn’t have any pudeur about talking. And they, I might add,’ she added acidly, ‘could talk about rather more than lavatories and stomachs and how rotten the Roman Empire must have been.’ Enderby gazed glumly out of the window, seeing that the rain had stopped and the June warmth, encouraged, was creeping back into the Italian evening. Then he was granted a brief image of a fat sack-bellied middle-aged female nudist don, breasts hanging like tripe, discoursing on aesthetic values. This cheered him up a little, so he turned boldly on Vesta to say:
‘All right then. Let’s have it out, the whole damned thing. What exactly do you think you’re playing at?’
‘I don’t understand you,’ she said. ‘I’m playing at nothing. I’m working hard, with absolutely no co-operation from you, to try and build a marriage.’
‘And your idea of building a marriage is to try to drag me back into the Church, is that it?’ said Enderby, half-uncovering his genitals so as to gesticulate with one hand. ‘And in a nasty sly way too. Not saying anything about being a Catholic yourself, and even being quite ready to have a registry office wedding, even though you know that that sort of wedding means nothing at all.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you admit that, do you? You admit that it means nothing at all? In other words, you admit that a Catholic wedding is the only valid one?’
‘I don’t admit anything,’ cried Enderby. ‘All I’m saying is that I’m confused, completely confused about what’s supposed to be going on. What I mean is, we’ve only been married a couple of days, and everything seems to have changed. You weren’t like this before, were you? You weren’t like this when we were living in your flat in London, were you? Everything was all right then. You were on my side, and you were getting on with your job and I was getting on with mine, and it was all nice and pleasant and not a care in the world. But now look at things. Since we got married, and that’s only a couple of days ago, mind you, only a couple of days –’ (two fingers held up, five on his genitals) ‘– you’ve been doing your damnedest to turn into my stepmother.’
Vesta’s mouth opened and smoke wandered out. ‘To what, did you say? To turn into what?’
‘My stepmother, bitch as she was. You’re not fat yet, but I suppose you soon will be. You keep belching away all the time and saying “Och” and going on at me – natter and nag, nag and natter – and you’re scared of the bloody thunder and you’re trying to get me to go back into the Church. Why? That’s what I want to know. Why? What’s your motive? What are you getting at? What are you trying to do?’
‘This,’ she said heavily, ‘is fantastic. This is the most incredible – this is the most incredible fantastic –’ She started to get out of bed. Enderby, seeing this, saw that there would be too much visible nakedness about the room, so he lunged across from the cane chair, genitals swinging, and pushed her back into bed and pulled the clothes over her. He said:
‘We’ll have less frivolity, if you don’t mind, and less nonsense. Before we got married – listen to me, I’m talking – before we got married you were what I’d dreamed of, ever since I was a boy. You were everything she wasn’t; you were a release; you were a way out. You were something that would kill her for good and all. And now look at you.’ He pointed sternly. She, as though he were a stranger who had just broken in, pulled the grey sheet over her bosom and looked fearful. ‘You’re trying to drag me back into that old world, aren’t you? Back to the bloody Church and female smells all over the place –’
‘You’re drunk,’ she said. ‘You’re mad.’ There was a knock at the door and Enderby, gesticulating, went to answer it, now wearing his nakedness as unconsciously as if it were a suit. ‘Drunk, eh?’ he said. ‘Mad, eh? You’ve made me drunk, that’s what it is.’ He opened the door, and the lady of the house presented a pressed pile of dried clothes. ‘Tante grazie,’ said Enderby, and then, turning back on his wife, he presented his bottom to the signora; she slammed the door and went off speaking loud Italian. ‘Things,’ said Enderby, ‘already,’ dumping the clothes on the bed, ‘have not worked out at all as I expected. It’s been a bloody big mistake, that’s what it’s been.’
She reached over for her clothes, angrily fussily trembling, saying, ‘A mistake, you say? That’s gratitude, I must say, gratitude.’ She paused, one hand on her clothes, breathing deeply as if a stethoscope had begun to wander down her back, eyes downcast, seeking self-control. Then she said, calmly, ‘I’m keeping my temper, you notice. Somebody has to be rational.’ Enderby began, in a sort of hopping dance, to put on his underpants. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, ‘listen. You’re like a child, you know so little about life. When I first met you, it looked horrible that a man of so much talent should be living the way you did. No, let me speak, let me keep my temper.’ Enderby, from inside his shirt was mumbling something. ‘You had nothing to do with women,’ she continued, ‘and no faith in anything, and no sense of responsibility to society. Oh, I know you had substitutes for all those things,’ she said bitterly. ‘Dirty photographs instead of flesh and blood.’ Enderby repeated the hopping dance, this time with his trousers, scowling and blushing. ‘Society,’ she said, with loud eloquence, ‘shrunk to the smallest room in the house. Is that any life for a man?’ she asked strongly. ‘Is that any life for a poet? Is that the way you expect to make great poetry?’
‘Poetry,’ said Enderby. ‘Don’t you start telling me about poetry. I know all about poetry, thank you very much,’ he said with a bull-snort. ‘But let me tell you this. There’s no obligation to accept society or women or religion or anything else, not for anyone there isn’t. And as for poetry, that’s a job for anarchs. Poetry’s made by rebels and exiles and outsiders, it’s made by people on their own, not by sheep baaing bravo to the Pope. Poets don’t need religion and they don’t need bloody little cocktail-party gossip either; it’s they who make language and make myths. Poets don’t need anybody except themselves.’
Vesta picked up her brassière and wearily dropped herself into it as though it were some necessary instrument of penance. ‘You seemed,’ she said, ‘to like going to parties. You seemed to think it was a good thing to wear a decent suit and talk with people. You said it was civilized. You gave me, one evening you may have forgotten, a long dull lecture on the Poet and Society. You even went to the trouble of thanking me for having rescued you from your old life. Some day,’ she sighed, ‘you’ll make it absolutely clear to people what exactly you do want.’
‘Oh,’ said Enderby, ‘it was all right, I suppose. It made a nice change. It was nice to be clean and smart, you see, and hear educated accents. It was, you see, so different from my stepmother.’ Now fully dressed, he sat with greater confidence on the cane-bottomed chair in the corner. ‘But,’ he said, ‘if society means going back to the Church, I don’t want anything to do with society. As far as I’m concerned, the Church is all tied up with that bitch, superstitious and nasty and u
nclean.’
‘Oh, you’re so stupid,’ said Vesta, having put on her dress swiftly and neatly. ‘You’re so uneducated. Some of the best modern brains are in the Church – poets, novelists, philosophers. Just because a silly illiterate woman made a nonsense out of it for you doesn’t mean that it is a nonsense. You’re a fool, but you surely aren’t such a fool as all that. Anyway,’ she said, clicking her handbag open and rummaging for a comb, ‘nobody’s asking you to go back into the Church. The Church, presumably, can get on very well without you. But if I’m going back, you might at least have the courtesy and decency to go through the form of going back with me.’
‘You mean,’ said Enderby, ‘that we’ll have to get properly married? By a priest in a church? Look,’ he said, folding his arms and crossing his legs, ‘why didn’t you think about all this before? Why do you have to wait till our honeymoon before you decided to baa back to the fold? Don’t answer, because I know the answer. It’s because you want to go down to posterity as the woman who reorganized Enderby’s life, faith and works. It’s what Rawcliffe said, and I hadn’t thought of it before, because I really believed that you had some affection for me, but, looking at it more soberly, I can see now that was impossible, me being ugly and middle-aged and, as you’re kind enough to say, stupid. All right, then; now we know how we stand.’
The Complete Enderby Page 17
