3
Hogg and John the Spaniard washed glasses companionably together, Hogg in a daze though, though he responded to John’s excited comments on the event still proceeding with his usual courtesy. John had been swigging from half-empty glasses and was more garrulous than usual.
‘You see that bloody thing, hombre? All ice cream and done like big monumento.’ It appealed to John’s baroque taste and prompted memories of the victorious group-effigies erected by the Caudillo: the Crewsy Fixers, with drums and guitar, in highly compressed frozen confectioner’s custard – whether really to be eaten or not was not clear, though the sound of laughing chiselling was coming through at that moment.
‘Oh?’ said Hogg.
‘See this bloody vaso? One párpado dropped in. Daft, hombre.’ It was not so much a false eyelid as a set of false eyelashes for one eye.
‘Ah,’ said Hogg. Some of the glasses were very filthy.
‘One thing,’ said John. ‘We not serve no coñac from in here. Bottles on the mesa already. Vasos too. Not bar job, hombre.’
‘No.’
John sang. It was a kind of flamenco without words. Soon he desisted. The rhythms, if not the sense, of an after-lunch speech were coming through. It was the Prime Minister. ‘He speak bloody good, man. But always same thing. I hear on telly.’ Hogg could tell exactly what the Prime Minister was saying: selling country short; legacy of misrule; determination to win through to solvency despite treacherous and frivolous opposition of opposition; team-work of these four boys here, not unfortunately his constituents but he would be proud to have them, example to all; people’s art; art of the people; the people in good art, heart; struggles to come; win through to solvency; legacy of misrule. After long clapping there was the sound of a kind of standing ovation. Suddenly the door of Piggy’s Sty was burst open. It was Jed Foot lurching in, very white. He said:
‘Give us something strong. Can’t stand it, I tell you. The bastard’s on his feet.’ Sympathetic, Hogg poured him a large brandy. Jed Foot downed it in one. ‘Taught him all he knows,’ he whined. ‘Bloody treachery. Give us another one of them.’ Hogg poured an even larger brandy. Jed Foot gave it, in one swig, to his gullet. John tut-tutted. He said:
‘We finish now here, hombre. I go see.’
‘I’m getting out,’ said Hogg. ‘Out. Bloody fed-up, that’s what I am.’
‘Bloody fed-up, mate?’ said Jed Foot, his mouth quivering. ‘You don’t know what bloody fed-upness is, I’ll have another one of them.’
‘I’m off duty now,’ Hogg said. He had already discarded that shameful wig. Now he took off his barman’s coat. His own mufti jacket was in the little store-room at the back of the bar. He went to get it. John was just opening the door that led to the exit-corridor; the door of the Wessex Saddleback was opposite. When Hogg, decently jacketed, was making his way out, he found that that door had been thrown wide open so that hotel employees could listen and look. The whole of Europe was represented there among the chambermaids and small cooks who, with open mouths, worshipped this global myth. Jed Foot was at the back of them; John had pushed to the front. Hogg, shambling in wretchedness towards the staff lift, suddenly heard familiar noises:
‘And so the car plunged in the singing green
Of sycamore and riot-running chestnut and oak
That squandered flame, cut a thousand arteries and bled
Flood after summer flood, spawned an obscene
Unquenched unstanchable green world sea, to choke
The fainting air, drown sun in its skywise tread.’
It was being read wretchedly, as though the reader were decoding it from ill-learnt Cyrillic. Yod Crewsy now said:
‘Me teeth is slipping a bit.’ Laughter. ‘I can write em but I can’t say em. Anyway, here’s how it finishes:
But the thin tuning-fork of one of the needs of men,
The squat village letter-box, approached, awoke,
Called all to order with its stump of red;
In a giant shudder, the monstrous organ then
Took shape and spoke.’
There was applause. Yod Crewsy said: ‘Don’t ask me what it means; I only wrote it.’ Laughter. ‘No, serious like, I feel very humble. But I put them poems together in this book just like to show. You know, show that we do like think a bit and the kvadrats, or squares which is what some of you squares here would like call yourselves, can’t have it all their own way.’ Cheers.
Hogg stood frozen like an ice cream monumento. He had left, when he had run away from that bitch in there, several manuscript poems in her Gloucester Road flat. They had been written; later they had been written off. The holograph of The Pet Beast had been among them. Unable to reconstitute them from memory, he could not now be absolutely sure – But wait. A painter friend of that bitch, his name Gideon Dalgleish, had said something on some social occasion or other about driving with a friend through green summer England and being overwhelmed with its somehow, my dear, obscene greenness, a great proliferating green carcinoma, terrifying because shapeless and huge. And then the sudden patch of red from a letter-box concentrated and tamed the green and gave it a comprehensible form. Nature needs man, my dear. The words CURTAL SONNET had flashed before his, Hogg’s, Enderby’s, eyes, and the rhymes had lined up for inspection. And then – He stood gaping at nothing, unable to move. He heard Yod Crewsy’s voice again, calling microphonically over loud cheers:
‘Right. So much for the F.S.L.S. lot, or whatever it is. And I’d like to say a artfelt ta to our mum here, who like encouraged me. Now we’re going to do our new disc, and not mime neither. I see the lads is all ready up there. All they want is me.’ Ecstasy.
Hogg painfully turned himself about. Then, as against a G science-fictionally intensified twentyfold, he forced his legs to slide forward towards the open door of the Wessex Saddleback. Jed Foot was trembling. Across the smoky luncheon-room, now darkened by drawn curtains, he saw, glorious in floodlighting, the Crewsy Fixers ranged grinning on a little dais. Yod Crewsy held a flat guitar with flex spouting from it. In front of each of the others was a high-mounted sidedrum. They poised white sticks, grinning. Then they jumped into a hell of noise belched out fourfold by speakers set at the ceiling’s corners.
‘You can do that, ja, and do this. Ja.
You can say that you won’t go beyond a kiss. Ja.
But where’s it goin to get ya, where’s
It goin to get
Ya ( ja), babaaah?’
Where was she, that was the point! Where was she, so that he could go in there and expose her, the whole blasphemous crew of them, before high heaven, which did not exist? Hogg squinted through the dark and thought he saw that cruel feathered hat. Then, in that little group by the open door, there seemed to be violent action, noise, the smell of a sudden pungent fried breakfast. A couple of chambermaids screamed and clutched each other. The sidedrums on the dais rimshotted like mad. Yod Crewsy did a crazy drunken dance, feet uplifted as if walking through a shitten byre. His autonomous mouth did a high scream, while his eyes crossed in low comedy. The crowd clapped.
‘Here yare,’ panted Jed Foot, and he handed something to Hogg. Hogg automatically took it, a barman used to taking things. Too heavy for a brandy glass. Jed Foot hared off down the corridor.
‘Lights! Lights!’ called somebody, the king in Hamlet. ‘He’s shot, he’s hurt!’ Yod Crewsy was down, kicking. The dullest of the Crewsy Fixers still leered, singing inaudibly. But drums started to go over. Hogg was being started back from, John incredulous, the chambermaids pointing and screaming, a minor cook, like a harvest-caught rabbit, wondering whither to run, whimpering. Hogg looked down at his hand and saw a smoking gun in it. Shem Macnamara was yelling: ‘Him! Stop him! I knew that voice! Sworn enemy of pop-art! Murderer!’ John the Spaniard was quick, perhaps no stranger to such southern public violence. He yapped like a dog, most unspanishly, at Hogg: ‘Out out out out out out!’ It was like a Mr Holdenish nightmare of umpires. Hogg, with an instinct le
arnt from the few films he had seen, pointed the gun at Shem Macnamara, marvelling. Some of the guests still thought this part of the show. Others called for a doctor. Hogg, gun in hand, ran. He ran down the corridor to the service lift. The indicator said it was on another floor, resting. He called it and it lazily said it was coming. He kept the gun pointing. John was in everybody’s way, but some were thinking of coming for him. Vesta now would be weeping over her favourite client, the impersonal and opportunist camera-lights cracking. The lift arrived and Hogg entered, still marvelling. Armed. Dangerous. The lift-door snapped off the sound of running feet. Drunk, that was the trouble with them: all drunk. Hogg stood dazed in a fancied suspension of all movement, while the lighted floor-pointer counted down. He had pressed, for some reason, the button marked B for basement. As low as you could get. He landed on a stone corridor, full of men trundling garbage bins. Useless to hope to hold off. It was a matter of running, if he could, up a short dirty flight to a ground-level back entrance. He remembered, near-dead with breathlessness, to drop the gun at the top of the stairs. It clanked down and, the safety-catch still off, somehow managed to fire itself at nothing. El acaso inevitable. With that frail barricade. Would the frozen monument be melting now up there, Yod Crewsy dissolving first? Men were coming to the noise of firing. He was out. It was a staff car-park, very unglamorous. For time himself will bring. You in that high-powered car. A taxi. London lay in autumn after-lunch gloom, car-horns bellowing and yapping. Rushing on to it. Air, air. Hogg gasped for it. ‘Taxi,’ he breathed, waving like mad, though feebly. Amazingly, one stopped. ‘Air,’ he said. ‘Air.’
‘Airport?’ The driver wore sinister dark glasses. ‘Air terminal? Cromwell Road?’ Hogg’s head sunk to his chest; the driver took it for a nod. ‘Right, gav. Hop in.’ Hogg hopped in. Fell in, rather.
4
So they were trying to go west, Gloucester Road way, despite the opposition (frivolous and treacherous) of contrary traffic and stultified red signals. There, he supposed, his days of misery had really begun, in the flat of that woman. And now the unavoidable happening was rushing him (well, hardly rushing) to the same long street to make his escape from not merely Vesta’s world but Wapenshaw’s as well. Well, they were the same world, they had to be the same. They were not the poet’s world. Did such a world really exist? Where, anyway, did he think he was going to? He had better make up his mind. He could not say, ‘What planes do you have, please?’ Quite calm now, iced by his wrongs, he got his five-pound notes out of their hiding-place. His passport rode in hard protectiveness over his right pap. It was decidedly an ill wind. About passports, he meant. He had nothing in the way of luggage, which was a pity. Airlines, he thought, must be like hotels as far as luggage was concerned. But you had to pay in advance, didn’t you? Still, there must be nothing to arouse suspicion. The newspapers would be cried around the streets shortly. Man answering to this description. May be using an alias. Was he being followed? He looked out of the rear window. There were plenty of vehicles behind, but from none of them were hands and heads broadcasting agitation. He would be all right, he was sure he would be all right. He was innocent, wasn’t he? But he hadn’t behaved innocent. Who would speak up for him? Nobody could. He had pointed a loaded gun at Shem Macnamara. Besides, if that ghastly yob was dead he was glad he was dead. He had desire and motive and opportunity.
The taxi was now going up the ramp that led into the air terminal, a stripped-looking and gaudy place like something from a very big trade exhibition. He paid off the driver, giving a very unmemorable tip. The driver looked at it with only moderate sourness. Would he remember when he saw the evening papers? Yus yus, I picked him ap ahtside the otel. Fought vere was something a bit fishy. Flyin orf somewhere he was. Hogg entered the terminal. Where the hell was he going to go to? He suddenly caught the voice of John the Spaniard, talking of his brother Billy Gomez. In some bar or other, very exotic, knifing people. Where was that now? Hogg had a confused image of the Moorish Empire: dirty men in robes, kasbahs without modern sanitation, heartening smells of things the sun had got at, muezzins, cockfights, shady men in unshaven hiding, the waves slapping naughty naughty at boats full of contraband goods. Hogg noticed a raincoated man pretending to read an evening paper near an insurance-policy machine. The news would not be in yet, but it wouldn’t be long. There was a crowd of people having its luggage weighed. Hogg got in there. One married man was unpacking a suitcase on the floor, almost crying. His wife was angry.
‘You should have read it proper. I leave them sort of things to you. Well, it’s your stuff that’ll have to stay behind, not mine.’
‘How was I to know you couldn’t take as much on a charter flight as on one of them ordinary uns?’ He laid a polythene-wrapped suit, like a corpse, on the dirty floor. Hogg saw a yawning official at a desk. Above him stretched a title in neon Egyptian italic: PANMED AIRWAYS. Panmed. That would mean all over the Med or Mediterranean. He went up and said politely:
‘A single to Morocco, please.’ Morocco was, surely, round the Mediterranean or somewhere like that. Hogg saw the raincoated paper-reader looking at him. Lack of luggage, no coat over arm, a man obviously on the run.
‘Eh?’ The official stopped yawning. He was young and ginger with eyes, like a dog’s, set very wide apart. ‘Single? Oh, one person you mean.’
‘That’s right. Just me. Rather urgent, actually.’ He shouldn’t have said that. The young man said:
‘You mean this air cruise? Is that what you mean? A last-minute decision, is that it? Couldn’t stand it any longer? Had to get away?’ It was as though he were rehearsing a report on the matter; he was also putting words into Hogg’s mouth. Hogg said:
‘That’s right.’ And then: ‘I don’t have to get away, of course. I just thought it would be a good idea, that’s all.’
‘Charlie!’ called the young official. To Hogg he said: ‘It looks as though you’re going to be in luck. Somebody died at the last minute.’
Hogg showed shock at the notion of someone dying suddenly. The man called Charlie came over. He was thin and harassed, wore a worn suit, had PANMED in metal on his left lapel. ‘They won’t ever learn,’ said Charlie. ‘There’s one couple there brought what looks like a cabin-trunk. They just don’t seem able to read, some of them.’
‘The point is,’ said the young ginger man, ‘that you’ve had this cancellation, and there’s this gentleman here anxious to fill it. Longing to get to the warmth, he is. Can’t wait till the BEA flight this evening. That’s about it, isn’t it?’ he said to Hogg. Hogg nodded very eagerly. Too eagerly, he then reflected.
Charlie surveyed Hogg all over. He didn’t seem to care much for the barman’s trousers. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know really. It’s a question of him being able to pay in cash.’
‘I can pay in nothing else,’ said Hogg with some pride. He pulled out a fistful in earnest. ‘I just want to be taken to Morocco, that’s all. I have,’ he said, improvising rapidly, ‘to get to my mother out there. She’s ill, you see. Something she ate. I received a telegram just after lunch. Very urgent.’ Very urgent: the type-setters would be setting up the type now; the C.I.D. would be watching the airports.
Charlie had a fair-sized wart on his left cheek. He fiddled with it as though it activated a telegraphic device. He waited. Hogg put his money back in his trouser-pocket. A message seemed to come through. Charlie said: ‘Well, it all depends where in Morocco, doesn’t it? And how fast you want to get there. We’ll be in Seville late tonight, see, and not in Marrakesh till tomorrow dinner-time. This is an air-cruise, this is. If it’s Tangier you want to get to, we shan’t be there for another fortnight. We go round the Canaries a bit, you see.’
‘Marrakesh would do very nicely,’ said Hogg. ‘What I mean is, that’s where my mother is.’
‘You won’t get anybody else, Charlie,’ said the young ginger official. ‘That seat’s going begging, all paid for by the bloke who snuffed it. He’s got cash.’ He spoke too openly; he see
med to know that Hogg was making a shady exit. ‘The bus,’ he looked at the big clock, ‘leaves in ten minutes.’
‘Shall we say fifty?’ Charlie licked his lips; the young official picked up the gesture. ‘In cash, like I said.’
‘Done,’ said Hogg. He lick-counted the money out. A good slice of his savings. Savings. The word struck, like a thin tuning-fork (he was glad Yod Crewsy was dead, if he was dead), a pertinent connotation. He put the money on the counter.
‘Passport in order, sir?’ said the ginger official. Hogg showed him. ‘Luggage, sir?’
‘Wait,’ said Hogg. ‘I’ve got it over there.’ He pierced the waiting crowd. That unpacking man had finished unpacking. In the big suitcase lay only a pair of Bermuda shorts, some shaving gear, and two or three paperbacks of a low sort. The unpacked garments were on his arm. ‘They said I could leave them in their office here,’ he puffed. ‘Collect them on the way back. Still, it’s a bloody nuisance. I’ve practically only got what I stand up in.’ Hogg said:
‘Saw you were in a bit of trouble over weight.’ He smiled at the couple as if they were going to do him a favour, which they were. ‘That suitcase could go with mine, if you like. I’m taking practically nothing, you see.’
The Complete Enderby Page 27
