‘You know,’ said Enderby with wonder, ‘this is really an astonishing coincidence.’
‘Shhhhh,’ said Vesta. Enderby, his eyes now accustomed to the dark, looked round to find the cinema half-empty, but next to him was a huge man, jowled and bag-eyed in lightning from the screen, a cigar burning towards his fingers, already asleep and snoring slightly.
Day. Ruritanian palace, moustached handsome king in late middle age conferring with deferential bearded (false-bearded) counsellors. Fanfare. Palaver is ended. One counsellor stays behind, ingratiating Iago-type, to talk to the king. The king’s eyes cornily cloud with suspicion. Odd Italian words that Enderby can understand snap out from the sound-track: queen, cow, Dedalo. Dedalo ordered to be brought in. Cut to Dedalo’s workshop. Dedalo and Icaro, Dedalo’s crisp-haired son, are building aeroplanes. Dedalo very old skinny man. Summoned by servant, he pulls down shirt-sleeves, dons jacket period 1860, follows down labyrinthine corridors, a kind old man with clever eyes and deep face-furrows. He enters royal presence. Long unintelligible Italian colloquy with much eloquent arm-waving. Dedalo struck on aged face by angry king. Iago-type goes off, bowing, oily, leaving royal face in royal hands. Dedalo hauled off for torture.
Enderby now began to feel an emotion other than wonder; his stomach heaved and pricked with apprehension: this was more than coincidence. ‘Don’t you think,’ he said to Vesta, ‘this is just a little too much like my poem? Don’t you think –’
‘Shhhhh,’ she said. The snoring man next to Enderby said, in his sleep, ‘Tace.’ Enderby, reminded of the sleep-talking Raucliffo, said, ‘Tace your arse.’ And to Vesta, ‘This is just like The Pet Beast.’ He then remembered that she hadn’t yet read it, had not, in fact, yet shown any desire to read it. He grimly watched the screen, the further unwinding of Raucliffo’s infamy.
Day. Pregnant queen in exile, sitting in mean cottage with old crone. Colloquy. Labour-pains. Then dissolve to shot of doctor galloping in from afar. He enters cottage. From bedroom door come bellowing noises. He enters bedroom. Close-up of doctor’s face. Horror, incredulity, nausea, syncope. Close-up, with foul discord of what doctor sees: head of bull-calf on child’s body.
‘That’s mine,’ said Enderby. ‘It’s mine, I tell you. If I find that blasted Rawcliffe –’
‘It’s nobody’s,’ said Vesta. ‘It’s just a myth. Even I know that.’
‘Tace,’ snored Enderby’s pone.
Calf-child, in montage series, grows to bull-man, hideous, muscular, fire-breathing, gigantic. Having stolen piece of raw meat from kitchen, bull-man makes discovery of carnivorous nature. Kills old crone and eats her. Tries to kill mother, too, but mother escapes, falls over cliff screaming but uneaten. Good clean fun. Bull-man totters, tall as ten houses, to capital city, leaving bone-trail behind. Cut to palace gardens where Princess Ariadne, with sizeable bosom-show, is playing ball with giggling bosom-showing alleged maidens. Close-up of beast drooling through thicket. Screams, scatter, Ariadne carried off on beast’s back. Beast, drooling, carries her, screaming, to cellars of metropolitan museum. Shots of priceless pictures, rare books, stately sculptures, sounds of great music as bull-man bellows his-its way to hide-out deep beneath eternal monuments of culture. Ariadne shows more bosom, screams more loudly. Bull-man does not, however, wish to eat her, not yet anyway.
Enderby clenched his fists tight, their knuckles gleaming in the light that flashed, intermittently, from the screen.
Dénouement. Alpine-Italian hero, Mussolini-headed, crashes into deep cellars, wanders through dark, hears bull-bellow and princess-scream, finds monster and victim, shoots, finds bullets of no avail as bull-man is, on sire’s side, thing from outer space. Ariadne escapes, screaming, showing allowable limit of Roman bosom, as howling chest-beating beast advances on hero. Hero, like Count Belisarius, has pepper-bag. He hurls its contents, temporarily blinding beast. To sneezes-bellows-howls, hero escapes. Lo, a prodigy: Dedalo and Icaro in flying-machine some decades ahead of its time drop bomb on metropolitan museum. Howls of dying bull-man, crash of statuary, flap and rustle of books caught alight, Mona Lisa with burnt-out smile, harp-strings pinging as they crack. Death of culture, death of the past, a rational future, embracing lovers. Dedalo and Icaro have engine-trouble. They crash in sea, against glorious sunrise. Heavenly voices. End.
‘If,’ trembled Enderby, ‘I could lay my hands on that bloody Rawcliffe –’
‘Stop it, do you hear?’ said Vesta very sharply indeed. ‘I can’t take you anywhere, can I? Nothing satisfies you, nothing. I thought it was quite a nice little horror film, and all you can do is to say that it’s been stolen from you. Are you getting delusions of grandeur or something?’
‘I tell you,’ said Enderby, with angry patience, ‘that that bastard Rawcliffe –’ The house-lights, all sick sweet orange, came gently up, disclosing applauding people crying bravo, brava, and bravi, as for the Pope’s whole family. The fat man next to Enderby, now radiantly awake, lighted his long-gone-out cigar and then openly laughed at Enderby’s clenched fists. Enderby prepared twelve obscene English words as a ground-row (variations and embellishments to follow), but, like a blow on the occiput, it suddenly came to him that he had had enough of words, obscene or otherwise. He smiled with fierce saccharinity on Vesta and said, so that she searched his whole face for sarcasm, ‘Shall we be going now, dear?’
3
Late at night, thought Enderby, meant in England after the shutting of the pubs. Here there were no pubs to shut, so it was not yet late. He and Vesta picked up a horse-cab or carrozza or whatever it was called on the Via Marmorata, and this clopped along by the side of the Tiber while Enderby fed sedative words to his wife, saying, ‘I’m honestly going to make an effort, really I am. My maturity’s been much delayed, as you realize. I’m really terribly grateful for everything you’ve done for me. I promise to try to grow up, and I know you’ll help me there as you’ve helped me in everything else. That film tonight has convinced me that I’ve got to make a real effort to live in public.’ Vesta, beautiful in the June Roman aromatic night, her hair stirred but gently by the bland wind of their passage, gave him a wary look but said nothing. ‘What I mean is,’ said Enderby, ‘that it’s no use living in the lavatory on a tiny income. You were quite right to insist on spending all my capital. I’ve got to earn a place in the world; I’ve got to come to terms with the public and give the public, within reason, what it wants. I mean, how many people would want to read The Pet Beast? A couple of hundred at the outside, whereas this film will be seen by millions. I see, I see it all.’ He reminded himself of the main protagonist of a drink-cure advertisement in Old Moore’s Almanac: the medicine cunningly mixed with the drunkard’s tea; the immediate result – the drunkard’s raising a hand to heaven, wife hanging, sobbing with relief, round his neck. Too much ham altogether. Vesta, still with the wary look, said:
‘I hope you mean what you say. I don’t mean about the film; I mean about trying to be a bit more normal. There’s a lot in life that you’ve missed, isn’t there?’ She gave him her hand as a cool token. ‘Oh, I know it must sound a little pretentious, but I feel that I’ve got a duty to you; not the ordinary duty of a wife to a husband, but a bigger one. I’ve been entrusted with the care of a great poet.’ The horse should, rightly, have neighed; massed trumpets should have brayed from the Isola Tiberina.
‘And you were quite right,’ said Enderby, ‘to bring me to Rome. I see that too. The Eternal City.’ He was almost enjoying this. ‘Symbol of public life, symbol of spiritual regeneration. But,’ he said, slyly, ‘when are we going back? I’m so anxious,’ he said, ‘to go back, so we can really start our life together. I long,’ he said, ‘to be with you in our own home, just the two of us. Let’s,’ he said, bouncing suddenly with schoolboy eagerness, ‘go back tomorrow. It should be possible to get a couple of seats on some plane or other, shouldn’t it? Oh, do let’s go back.’
She withdrew her hand from his, and Enderby had a pang of fear, not unlike hear
tburn, that perhaps she was seeing through this performance. But she said:
‘Well, no, we can’t go back. Not just yet. Not for a week or so, anyway. You see, I have something arranged. It was meant to be a surprise, really, but now I’d better tell you. I thought it would be a good idea for us to be married, here in Rome, married properly. I don’t mean a nuptial mass or anything, of course, but just the plain ceremony.’
‘Oh,’ gleamed Enderby, swallowing bolus after bolus of anger and nausea, ‘what a very good idea!’
‘And there’s a very good priest, Father Agnello I believe his name is, and he’ll be coming to see you tomorrow. I met him yesterday at Princess Vittoria Corombona’s.’ She trilled the name with relish, dearly loving a title.
False Enderby breathed hard with the effort of pushing True Enderby back into the cupboard. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘was a priest doing in a dress-shop?’
‘Oh, silly,’ smiled Vesta. ‘Princess Vittoria Corombona doesn’t run a dress-shop. She does film-gossip for Fem. Father Agnello is very intellectual. He’s spent a lot of time in the United States and he speaks English perfectly. Strangely enough, he’s read one of your poems – the blasphemous one about the Virgin Mary – and he’s very anxious to have a couple of good long talks with you. Then, of course, he’ll hear your confession.’
‘Well,’ smiled Enderby, ‘it’s good to know that everything’s being taken care of. It’s such a relief. I am really, you know, most grateful.’ He squeezed her hand as they turned into the Via Nazionale: lights, lights; the Snack Bar Americano; the Bank of the Holy Spirit; shop after shop after shop; the air terminal, alight and busy; the hotel. The fat horse clomped to a ragged halt and snorted, not specifically at Enderby. The driver swore that his taxi-meter was wrong, a mechanical fault hard to repair, it showed too little. Enderby would not argue. He gave five hundred lire more than the clocked amount, saying ‘Sod you too’ to the driver. Rome; how he loved Rome!
Enderby watched and waited carefully in the hotel bar. There were late coffee-drinkers at the little tables, voluble speakers of fast foreign tongues, ten or a dozen all told, and Enderby would have given them all for Rawcliffe. He wished yesterday morning could be shunted back for just five minutes, he and Dante and Rawcliffe alone in the bar, one damned good crack on the proleptically bloody nose. L’Animal Binato, indeed. The Muse would be very annoyed now, fuming, a harpy, with all that work wasted. Enderby watched Vesta lovely over her glass of Pernod, waited till his third glass of Frascati, then writhed in simulated stomach-ache. ‘Ugggggh,’ said Enderby, ‘blast it. Arrrrgh.’ Vesta said:
‘You’ve been drinking too much, that’s your trouble. Come on, we’re going to bed.’ Enderby, artist to the end, made a harrowing borborygm, just like old times. Grerrrrkhrapshhhhh. She rose in concern. Enderby said:
‘No. You wait here. There’s a lavatory on the ground floor. Really, it’s nothing.’ He smiled, the liar, through his agony, motioning her to sit down again. He gargoyle-bulged his cheeks, nodded vigorously to show that this showed what it seemed to show, then left the bar smartly, urrping and arrrkhing to the surprise of the coffee-drinkers, into the lobby. To the insincerely gold-grinning dapper receptionist, framed in tubes of light at his desk, Enderby said urgently, ‘I have to return to London. Just for a couple of days. Business. My wife will stay on here. I don’t want you to think,’ added Enderby guiltily, ‘that I’m running away or anything like that. If you wish, I’ll pay my bill up to date. But I’m leaving my luggage. All except one small overnight case. I take it that that will be all right, will it?’ He almost prepared to give the receptionist a thousand-lire note of hush-money but, in time, thought better of it. The receptionist, with a graceful head-inclination as of one bending to hear the tick of a watch in an invisible man’s waistcoat pocket, said that everything would be quite all right, but Signor Enderby must understand that there could be no rebate in respect of the time that Signor Enderby would be away. Signor Enderby gladly understood. ‘I want,’ he said, ‘to ring up the air terminal, the one on this street. Could you give me the number?’ The receptionist would be only too pleased to ring up for him; he could take the call in one of those boxes over there.
From the box Enderby could just see Vesta eating a ham sandwich. It must be ham, because she was stroking each sliver with what must be, from the shape of the jar, mustard. Enderby tried, which was not difficult, to look very ill in case she should glance up and see him. If she came over he would have to pretend that he had blindly dashed in here because it had the outward appearance of a lavatory; if she saw him urgently mouthing into the telephone he would have to pretend he was calling a doctor. A voice now spoke in English to Enderby, and Enderby said furtively, ‘Enderby here.’ The name, understandably, meant nothing to the suave clerkly voice. Enderby said, ‘I want to travel to London by the next possible plane. Very urgent. I already have a first-class ticket, but my booking, you see, is for the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth or something – I can’t quite remember the exact date. This is very very urgent. Business. And my mother’s dying.’ There was no cluck of condolence: hard bastards these Romans. The voice said, above the rustle of ledger-pages, that it thought there might be empty seats on the BOAC plane from Cape Town, due at Rome at five-thirty in the morning. The voice would ring back to confirm or deny. ‘A matter of life and death,’ said Enderby. The voice, however, seemed to know that Enderby was about to run away from his wife.
Vesta had finished her sandwiches and was picking her front teeth with an old London tube ticket she had taken from her bag. The bag was open, very untidy, but in it Enderby saw a bunch of keys. Those keys he would require: in the Gloucester Road flat were certain things he needed. Seeing the teeth-picking, Enderby nodded: another thing marshalling him the way that he was going. ‘How do you feel now?’ she asked.
‘A good deal better,’ smiled Enderby. ‘I got a lot of it up.’ With what was still in the bank, with what he thought he could legitimately filch from her (mink, chiefly), he considered it was possible for him to return for a year or two to something like his old life: the lone poet in some sordid attic or other with thin stews and bread, trying to make it up to his Muse. He did not repine at the loss of his capital. Not any longer. It was, after all, his stepmother’s money, and here, now pulling a ham-fibre from her molars, though with grace and without ostentation, sat his stepmother, all too able to use that money. The interest, of course, was another matter. The Church had always condemned the lending out of money at interest, so no good Catholic had a right to claim the increment it had earned when the return of the loan was made. Enderby, though determined to be just, was also determined to be strictly Protestant here. As he smiled to himself he was suddenly jolted by the calling of his name over a loudspeaker.
‘Who on earth,’ said Vesta, ‘can be ringing you up at this hour of the evening? You stay there, I’ll take it. You’re still looking a bit pale.’ And she rose.
‘No, no, no,’ protested Enderby, pushing her roughly back into her cane armchair. ‘It’s something you’re not supposed to know about. A surprise,’ he tried to smile. She grimaced and, taking a hair-clip from her bag, began to clean her left ear. Enderby was delighted to see that.
The clerkly voice was pleased to be able to confirm a booking on the plane from Cape Town. Enderby was to report at the terminal at four; the clerk then on duty would alter his ticket for him. ‘Deo gratias,’ breathed Enderby, meaning grazie. But only that liturgical gratitude, he reflected, could express his relief at the prospect of getting out of, with all its detonations and connotations, Rome.
‘It’s arranged,’ he smirked at Vesta. ‘Don’t ask me what, but it’s all arranged.’ As they rose to go to their room he saw on the table a hair-clip; its bend of bifurcation was stuffed with ear-wax. He took Vesta’s arm with something like love.
4
Staying awake till three-thirty was not really difficult. Really difficult was getting the packing done on a night when Vesta, normally a go
od solid Scots sleeper, had decided to be restless and somniloquent. Enderby watched her warily as she lay prone, having kicked the clothes off the bed, her nates silvered by the Roman moonlight to the likeness of a meringue. Delectable, yes, but from now on for somebody else’s delectation. Enderby stole about the silvered room in his socks, suddenly stiffening as in a statue dance each time she burbled in her sleep, rushing to the dark corner by the window to stand as if for his height to be taken when she pettishly whisked from the prone to the supine. Supine, she uttered strange words to the ceiling and then chuckled, but Enderby would not permit himself to be scared. Taking his passport and air ticket from the top drawer of the chest of drawers he also, after a few seconds of ethical thought, decided to take hers. Thus, if she woke to a realization of Enderby’s desertion, she would not be able to follow at once. But he placed several thousand or million lire on the mantelpiece, and he knew that she had traveller’s cheques of her own. Although she and Rome went so beautifully together, he could not, in all decency, condemn her to too long an enforced stay; he hoped he still had enough humanity not to wish that on his worst enemy.
One suitcase was enough for Enderby’s clothes and shaving gear. The lotions and creams and sprays she had made him buy – these he decided to leave behind: no one would ever want to smell him any more. Now there was the question of that key to the flat; he had left a couple of boxes there, stuffed with drafts and notes. The typescript of The Pet Beast was locked in the drawer of her own escritoire, and there it could stay. Its interest, he admitted glumly, was one of content more than form, and the content had been filched and distorted. Let that be a lesson to him. Enderby now squinted in the moonlight for Vesta’s bag, a flat silver envelope into which, that evening, she had poured the entire load of rubbish from a black bag from a grey bag from a white bag from a blue bag, a woman who, with residual Scots thrift, could not bear to throw anything away. Enderby saw this silver bag, further silvered by the light, lying on her bedside table. He stalked over for it, like some clumsy ballerina on her points, and, as he made to pick it up, Vesta swiftly pronated, diagonal across the bed, and a bare slim arm flopped over the table to hold the bag down like a silver bar. Enderby hesitated now, standing with breathing suspended, wondering whether he dare risk. But then she, with the same swiftness, lurched her body to the supine, though with her left arm still across the table, and began to speak out of some profound dream. She said:
The Complete Enderby Page 19
