‘Pete. Do it again, Pete. Och, Pete, that was bloody marvellous.’ It was a coarse accent, suggesting the Gorbals rather than Eskbank, and, to match it, the sleeping Vesta began to use coarse terms suggesting an extremity of abandon. Enderby listened horrified, at last calming his nerves by reflecting that anything, even necrophily, was allowed to the dreamer. He did not now try to extract the bag from under her silver arm; he could perhaps get into the flat without a key. Effect an entrance, as they say. He now wished to effect an exit, and quickly.
As he fumbled at the door-handle, hidden under the mink coat that hung from the door-hook, he had the impression that she was about to lift herself out of sleep, some warning bell having shrilled at the end of one of the long corridors of the cerebral cortex. He calmed her with words and a noise:
‘Brarrrkh. Just going to the lavatory.’ His last words to her as he softly folded the mink over his arm. She grunted, smacked her lips, then, seeming satisfied, started to lower herself into deeper levels of sleep. Enderby opened the door and went out. Standing an instant to quieten his loud heart, he felt cautiously elated that soon, on the aircraft, he would be able to feel fully and uninhibitedly elated.
A poem began to twitch as he weighed his suitcase and paid his embarkation fee and bought his bus ticket:
Stepmother of the West …
Enderby waited with excitement for the images to come into focus – Emperor and Pope the same pantomime dame, no more red meat since spate of it in snaring arena, old bitch she-wolf with hanging dugs, the big backyard of broken columns for the refuse-collector; Enderby waited with impatience for the rhymes to line up. City, titty. Beyond that was nothing.
Stepmother of the West, of venal cities
Most venal something something she-wolf bitch
Romulus Remus something something titties
Something something something something rich which ditch pitch
On the bus to Ciampino Enderby, frowning, called on his Muse to do something about this ragged donnée. On the aircraft, placed next to a Negro clergyman, Enderby muttered and grimaced so that the stewardess came up to ask if everything was all right. A suspicious character, muttering and frowning, a mink coat on the luggage rack overhead, Enderby looked down on Rome. He had forgotten all about Vesta already. He had expected that he would be able to recite, under his breath, at least a stanza of this poem in valediction. Thwarted and somewhat apprehensive, remembering the prophecy of the traitor Rawcliffe, he could only devise a farewell that went beyond words but which the Negro clergyman apparently took to be an adverse comment on his colour.
Fffffrrrrrerrrrrpshhhhhh.
Part Three
1
1
‘YOU’VE GOT ABSOLUTELY nothing to worry about there,’ said Dr Preston Hawkes. ‘The plates are negative: no TB, no carcinoma, nothing.’ He held up a couple of cloudy portraits of the inner Enderby. ‘That’s the lot, then.’ He had a loud Northern voice, some of the vowels home-made approximations to Received Standard. ‘You can go away with a contented mind.’ He was young and highly dentate, tanned, and tousled as though to advertise, for a side-line, the healthful properties of the resort where he practised. ‘If bicarb helps that dyspepsia, you just stick to bicarb. But fundamentally your stomach and guts are perfectly sound.’
‘You would say, would you,’ said Enderby, ‘that I’m quite unlikely to die in the near future?’
‘Oh, my dear fellow,’ said Dr Preston Hawkes, ‘none of us can ever know that. Apart from the normal hazards of living – getting run over or electrocuted or slipping in the bathroom – there must always be some unknown factor that doesn’t yield to examination. We know a lot,’ he confided, ‘but we don’t know everything. But, as far as I can see, you’re physically sound and likely to live for many years.’ He glowed at Enderby like a frying slice of potato. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘your tone isn’t as good as it might be. Take exercise: tennis, golf, walks. You could do with paring yourself down a bit. Keep off fried things; don’t eat too much starch. You’re a sedentary worker, aren’t you? A clerk or something?’
‘Perhaps in the older sense,’ said Enderby. ‘I am,’ he explained sadly, ‘a poet.’
‘You mean,’ said Dr Preston Hawkes incredulously, ‘that’s your job?’
‘It was,’ said Enderby. ‘That’s really why I came to see you. You see, I’m not writing any more poems.’
‘Oh.’ Dr Preston Hawkes became agitated; he tapped contrary-motion five-finger exercises on his desk, his smile fixed and nervous. He spoke now slackly, bubbling. ‘Well, I hardly think – I mean, that’s nothing to do with me, is it? I mean, I should have thought – That is to say, if you don’t propose writing any more poetry, well, good luck to you. The very best of luck and all that sort of thing. But that’s entirely your own affair, isn’t it? That’s what I’d say, anyway.’ He now began to perform, though ineptly, the ritual of a man whose time is valuable: a syndrome of nervous grubbing among papers, looking at his watch, peering exophthalmically above Enderby’s head as though the next patient was due to squeeze in between door and lintel.
‘No,’ said Enderby, ‘you’ve got that wrong. What I mean is that I can’t write poetry any more. I try and try, but nothing happens, nothing will come. Can you understand what I mean?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said the doctor, smiling warily. ‘I quite see that. Well, I shouldn’t worry too much about it if I were you. I mean, there are other things in life, aren’t there? The sun is shining, the children are playing.’ That was literally true; Dr Preston Hawkes lifted a hand as if he himself were conjuring the warm evening shaft through the window, the noise of an infant squabble on the road to the beach. ‘I mean, writing poetry isn’t the whole of life, is it? You’re bound to find something else to do. Life is still all before you. The best is yet to be.’
‘What,’ asked Enderby, ‘is the purpose of life?’
The doctor brightened at this question. He was young enough to have answers to it, answers clearly remembered from pipe-puffing student discussions. ‘The purpose of life,’ he said promptly, ‘is the living of it. Life itself is the end of life. Life is here and now and what you can get out of it. Life is living by the square inch and the round minute. The end is the process. Life is what you make it. I know what I’m talking about, believe you me. I am, after all, a doctor.’ He smiled towards something framed on the wall, his duly certified twin baccalaureate.
Enderby shook his head in vigorous gloom. ‘I don’t think Keats would have given you that answer. Or Shelley. Or Byron. Or Chatterton. Man,’ said Enderby, ‘is a tree. He bears fruit. When he stops bearing fruit life cuts him down. That’s why I wanted to know whether I was going to die.’
‘Look,’ said the doctor sharply, ‘this is all a lot of morbid nonsense. It’s everybody’s duty to live. That’s what the National Health Service is for. To help people to live. You’re a healthy man with years of life ahead of you, and you ought to be very glad and very grateful. Otherwise, let’s face it, you’re blaspheming against life and God and, yes, democracy and the National Health Service. That’s hardly fair, is it?’
‘But what do I live for?’ asked Enderby.
‘I’ve told you what you live for,’ said the doctor, more sharply. ‘You weren’t paying attention, were you? You live for the sake of living. And, yes, you live for others, of course. You live for your wife and children.’ He granted himself a two-second smirk of fondness at the photograph on his desk: Mrs Preston Hawkes playing with Master Preston Hawkes, Master Preston Hawkes playing with teddy-bear.
‘I had a wife,’ said Enderby, ‘for a very short time. I left her nearly a year ago. In Rome it was. We just didn’t get on. I’m quite sure I have no children. I think I can say that I’m absolutely sure about that.’
‘Well, all right then,’ said the doctor. ‘But there are lots of other people who need you, surely. Friends and so on. I take it,’ he said cautiously, ‘that there are still people left who like to read poetry
.’
‘That,’ said Enderby, ‘is written. They’ve got that. There won’t be any more. And,’ he said, ‘I’m not the sort of man who has friends. The poet has to be alone.’ This platitude, delivered rhetorically in spite of himself, brought a glassy look to his eyes; he got up stiffly from his chair. The doctor, who had seen television plays, thought he descried in Enderby the lineaments of impending suicide. He was not a bad doctor. He said:
‘You don’t propose to do anything silly, do you? I mean, it wouldn’t do anybody any good, would it, that sort of thing? I mean, especially after you’ve been to see me and so on. Life,’ he said, less certainly than before, ‘has to be lived. We all have a duty. I’ll get the police on to you, you know. Don’t start doing anything you shouldn’t be doing. Look, I’ll arrange an appointment with a psychiatrist, if you like.’ He made the gesture of reaching at once for the telephone, of being prepared to tap, at once, all the riches of the National Health Service for the benefit of Enderby.
‘You needn’t worry,’ said Enderby soothingly. ‘I shan’t do anything I’d consider silly. I promise you that.’
‘Get around a bit,’ said the doctor desperately. ‘Meet people. Watch the telly. Have the odd drink in a pub, all right in moderation. Go to the pictures. Go and see this horror film round the corner. That’ll take you out of yourself.’
‘I saw it in Rome,’ said Enderby. ‘The world première.’ Here in England L’Animal Binato or The Two-Natured Animal had become Son of the Beast from Outer Space. ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Enderby, ‘I wrote it. That is to say, it was stolen from me.’
‘Look,’ said Dr Preston Hawkes, now standing up. ‘It would be no trouble at all for me to fix up an appointment for you. I think you’d feel a lot happier if you talked with Dr Greenslade. He’s a very good man, you know, very good, very sympathetic. I could ring up the hospital now. No trouble at all. He could probably see you first thing in the morning.’
‘Now,’ said Enderby, ‘don’t worry. Take life as it comes. Live it by the square yard or whatever it was you said.’
‘I’m not at all happy about what you might do,’ said Dr Preston Hawkes. ‘It wouldn’t be fair for you to go back home and do yourself in straight after coming to see me. I’d feel happier if you’d see Dr Greenslade. I could ring up now. I could get a bed for you straight away. I’m not sure that it’s right for you to be going off on your own. Not in your present state of mind, that is.’ He stood confused and young, mumbling, ‘I mean, after all, we’ve all got a duty to each other –’
‘I’m perfectly sane,’ soothed Enderby, ‘if that’s what you’re worrying about. And I promise you again not to do anything silly. You can have that in writing if you like. I’ll send you a letter. I’ll write it as soon as I get back to my digs.’ Dr Preston Hawkes bit his lip from end to end and back again, as though testing it for durability. He looked darkly and uncertainly at Enderby, not liking the sound of ‘letter’ in this context. ‘Everything,’ said Enderby, with a great smile of reassurance, ‘is going to be all right.’ They had exchanged roles. It was with a doctor’s jauntiness that Enderby said, ‘Nothing to worry about at all.’ Then he left swiftly.
He passed through a waiting-room full of people who, from the look of them, could not write poetry either. Some were in sporting kit, as if prepared to be tried out at the nets by Dr Preston Hawkes, wearing their ailments as lightly as a blazer-badge; others, dressed more formally, saw disease as a kind of church. Enderby had to squint his way out. He had lost his contact-lenses somewhere; the glasses he had formerly worn were, he supposed, still in the Gloucester Road flat. Unless, of course, she had thrown out all that was his. Walking through the rich marine light he regurgitated the word ‘police’. If this doctor proposed to put the police on to him it would be necessary to act quickly. In imagination he heard what the world called sanity as something in heavy clumsy hoofing boots. He remembered the boots that chased him when, just back from Rome, he had tried to break into the flat by the window and been suddenly transfixed in the beam of a copper’s lantern. He could have stayed to explain, of course, but the police might well, with their professional tendency to suspicion, have held him till the eventual arrival of Vesta. That mink coat, left behind in the scamper, would have taken some explaining away. So he had swung his suitcase into the constable’s groin and, between a starting-line and finishing-tape of whistles, dodged about till – to his surprise, for he had thought such things only possible in films – he had managed to escape by skidding down a sidestreet and into an alley, waiting there till the whistles peeped, like lost tropical birds, forlornly in the distance.
The May sun whizzed over the sea, and spread over the sea was a sort of blinding silver-shred marmalade. It was not the sea near to whose roar he had laboured, to so little purpose, at The Pet Beast, but its north-western brother. It fed a louder and more vulgar resort than Enderby’s former Channel home: there was more gusto in the pubs, the vowels were broader, jugs of tea could be bought to take on the sands, a pleasure-beach was hysterical with violent machines of pleasure, an open-air concert party had a comedian who told his feed that if his brains were elastic he wouldn’t have enough to make a canary a pair of garters. ‘I’ve got blue blood in my veins,’ said the feed. ‘What do you think I’ve got in mine?’ said the comedian. ‘Dandelion and burdock?’ It was an odd place, so posterity might think, in which to choose to die.
On this lovely evening there were queues, Enderby peeringly noticed, for Son of the Beast from Outer Space. Next door but two to the cinema was a cool cavern of a chemist’s, full of the smell of soap, holiday laughter in a place of medicines, the prints of beach snapshots being collected, sunburnt arms and necks. Enderby had to wait till a holiday woman had been served with hair-clips, skin-cream, hydrogen peroxide and other life-enhancers before he could ask for the means of death. At last the white-coated girl put her head on one side at him:
‘Yes, sir?’
He felt as embarrassed as if he were buying condoms. ‘Aspirin, please.’
‘Which size, sir?’ There were, it seemed, various sizes. Enderby said:
‘Fairly small ones, please. I have to take rather a lot.’ She opened her mouth at him so he said, ‘Not a lethal dose, of course.’ He smiled winningly.
‘Ha ha, sir. I should hope not. Not on a lovely evening like this.’ He was quite a one.
Enderby went out with a bottle of a hundred. He had exactly twopence left in the world. ‘Good,’ he thought, ‘timing.’
2
‘A queer year,’ reflected Enderby, potential death in his pocket, turning off the warm gay beery candy-flossy promenade into Boggart Road. It had been a queer empty year, or near-year.
June had been the month of marriage, honeymoon, desertion. He had drawn out from his London bank ninety pictures of clavigerous lions. He had bought a sponge-bag, stuffed the lions into it, wound the string of the bag round a trouser-button, then hung the bag inside his trousers. There it had walked and sat with him, a big comforting scrotum. Every man’s fly his own bank; cheerful disbursements at all hours; no interest (though, of course, no overdrafts); frugal needs met without formality. He had travelled to this Northern resort once mentioned with approval by Arry (far from South, London, Vesta). He had found a homely attic with a gas-ring (share lavatory and bathroom) at Mrs Bamber’s, Butterworth Avenue, a permanent apex above the transient holiday guests.
In July and August he had put together laboriously a volume of fifty lyric poems (the fair copies and late drafts had fortunately been in his suitcase taken to and from Rome; a mass of other, rougher, material was still in, or else had been thrown out of, the Gloucester Road flat and was, presumably, no longer recoverable). The title of the volume was The Circular Pavane. Having been turned into typescript by a little woman at a typing bureau in Manchester, it had been delivered to, and received with little enthusiasm by, his publisher. In public lavatory cabinets, where privacy could be bought for a penny, he had planned a
long autobiographical poem in blank verse, a sort of Prelude. The spongebag inside trousers still fat, he was able to afford to wait for the torpid or sulking Muse to wake up and see sense. The few autobiographical poetic lines achieved had been destroyed, re-written, destroyed, re-written, destroyed, re-written, slept on, read, re-read, re-written, destroyed. Through August and September the resort had been big-mouthed with cheerful visitors wearing comic caps with slogans (Try Me I’m The Easy Sort; Have A Go Joe Your Mother Won’t Know), sticky with kisses, brine, ale, candy, rock. There had been no news of Vesta or anyone. Sitting in a public lavatory one sunny morning, hearing the cheerful bucket-and-spade-clanking children on their way to the beach, he had savoured, like Frascati, his renewed aloneness. It was a pity he could not write anything, however. He had abandoned the idea of the long autobiographical poem; how about an epic on King Arthur or Lord Rutherford or Alcock and Brown? A verse drama, perhaps? He had spent long grubbing hours in the public library, pretending that he was really working, building foundations, gathering material. He had written nothing.
The Complete Enderby Page 20
