The couple looked at him with proper suspicion. They were decent fattish short people in late middle age, unused to kindness without a catch in it. The man groused: ‘It means I’ll have to shove it all in again.’
‘That’s right,’ said Hogg. ‘Shove it all in again.’ The man, shaking his head, once more got down heavily on his knees.
‘It’s very kind, Mr er,’ said the wife, grudgingly.
They never took their eyes off Hogg as he swung the reconstituted bag to the weighing. Charlie and the ginger official had seen nothing: they were busy doing a split on Hogg’s money. The raincoated paper-reader, Hogg noticed, had gone. Perhaps to buy a later edition. Hogg was glad to be herded to the bus.
5
This Charlie seemed to be what they called a dragoman. He counted his charges on, and then, when they were on, counted them again. He frowned, as if the numbers did not tally. Hogg was seated next to a rather dowdy woman in early middle age, younger than himself, that was. She smiled at him as to a companion in adventure. She wore churchgoing clothes of sensible district-nurse-type hat and costume in a kind of underdone pie-crust colour. Her stockings, of which the knees just about showed, were of some kind of lisle material, opaque gunmetal. Hogg smiled back tentatively, and then warily surveyed the other members of the party. They were mostly unremarkable people subduedly thrilled at going off to exotic places. The men were already casting themselves for parts, as if the trip were really going to be full of enforced privations and they had, somehow, to make their own entertainment. One beef-necked publican-type was pointing out the sights on the way to the airport and inventing bogus historical associations, like ‘Queen Lizzy had a milk stout there’. There was cautious fencing for the role of low comedian, and one man who, his teeth out, could contort his face in a rubbery manner seemed likely to win. There was a loud and serious man, a frequenter presumably of public libraries, who was giving a preliminary account of the more hurtful fauna of North Africa. Another man could reel off exchange rates. Hogg’s seat-companion smiled again at him, as if with pleasure that everything was going to be so nice and cosy. Hogg closed his eyes in feigned (but was it feigned?) weariness.
When they got to the airport the news was still unbroken. Perhaps the management, on the instructions of the police, had sealed everything off, and it was no good the Prime Minister saying he had to get back to the House. Twenty minutes before take-off. Hogg spent most of that time in one of the lavatories, sitting gloomily on the seat. Could he do anything about disguising himself? With teeth out he would be expected to compete for the part of cruise comedian perhaps. Spectacles off? He tried that; he could just about see. Rearrange hair-style? Too little hair really, but he combed what he had down in a Roman emperor arrangement. Walk with a limp? Easy enough, if he could remember to keep on doing it. He heard ladylike intonations from a loudspeaker, so he pulled the chain and went to join his party. The man with the overweight luggage had suddenly woken up to the fact of Hogg’s kindness; he did not seem to notice any change in Hogg’s appearance. With bleary unfocused eyes, top denture out (a compromise that a sudden feeling of nausea had forced upon him on leaving the lavatory), and scant imperial coiffure, Hogg nodded and nodded that that was really quite all right, only too glad to oblige.
They all walked to the aircraft. Wind blew grit across the tarmac. Farewell, English autumn. It did not seem to Hogg to be a very elegant aircraft. There was a button missing from the stewardess’s uniform jacket, and she herself, though insipidly and blondly pretty, had a look of vacancy that did not inspire confidence. Things done on the cheap, that was about it. Hogg sat down next to a starboard window, taking his last look of England. Somebody sat next to him, a woman. She said, in a semi-cultured Lancashire accent:
‘We seem destined, don’t we?’ It was the one who had sat next to him on the bus. Hogg grunted. The unavoidable happening. In the elastic-topped pocket on the back of the seat in front of him, Hogg sadly found reading-matter, very cheerful and highly coloured stuff. No need to worry if we go down into the sea. We have a fine record for air safety. Keep calm, the stewardess will tell you what to do. But who, wondered Hogg, would tell her? There were brochures about the ports of call on the air cruise.
‘This is my first time,’ said the woman next to Hogg. ‘Is it yours?’ Her teeth seemed to be all her own. She had taken off her hat. Her hair was prettily mousy.
‘First time to do what?’ said Hogg dourly.
‘Oh, you know, go on one of these things. It’s funny really, I suppose, but I know all about the moon yet I’ve never seen the Mountains of the Moon.’
‘A stronger telescope,’ said Hogg. He was leafing through a booklet, full of robes, skies of impossible blue, camels, palms, the wizened faces of professional Moorish beggars, which told him of the joys of Tangier.
‘No, no, I mean the Mountains of the Moon in Africa.’ She giggled.
Hogg heard the door of the aircraft slam. It did not slam properly. Charlie the dragoman, who now wore a little woolly highly coloured cap, helped the stewardess to give it a good hard slam, and then it seemed to stay shut. Engines and things began to fire and backfire or something. They were going to take off. Hogg felt safe for an instant, but then realized that there was no escape. They had things like Interpol and so on, or some such things. Spanish police, with teeth all bits of gold like John, waiting for him at Seville. But perhaps not, he thought with a little rising hope. Perhaps Spain would consider the murder of a pop-singer a very nugatory crime, which of course it was. Not really a crime at all if you took the larger view. Well then, landed in Spain, let him stay in Spain, el señor inglés. But how live there? With his little bit of money he could not, even in that notoriously cheap (because poverty-stricken) country, find a retreat or lavatory that would accommodate him long enough to coax, like a costive bowel, the art of verse back. The Muse had still made no real sign. There was a poem still to be completed. And, besides, there was terrible repression in Spain, a big dictator up there in the Escorial or wherever it was, directing phalanges of cruel bruisers (no, not bruisers; thin sadists, rather) with steel whips. No freedom of expression, poets suspect, foreign poets arrested and eventually handed over to Interpol. No, better to go to a country full of men on the run and smugglers and (so he had heard) artistic homosexuals, where English, language of international shadiness, was spoken and understood, and where at least he might hide (even out of doors; the nights were warm, weren’t they?) and work out the future. One step at a time.
‘You haven’t fastened your safety-belt,’ said the woman. Hogg grumbled, fumbling for the metal-tipped tongues of dirty webbing. The airfield, his last view of England, was speeding as a grey blur back into the past. Speed increased; they were getting off the ground. You in that high-powered car. Perhaps an old-fashioned image, really. Hogg leafed through the Tangier brochure absently, noticing little box advertisements for restaurants and bars. He frowned at one of these, wondering. It said:
AL-ROKLIF
English Spoken Berber Dances
Wide Range of Exotic Delights
A Good British Cup of Tea
‘IN ALL THE ANTHOLOGIES!’
He wondered, he wondered, he wondered. Artistic, which included literary, homosexuals. The name, rationalized into mock-Arabic. The slogan. Well. He began to breathe hard. If they caught him, and he would surely know if they were going to catch him, he would not be punished gratuitously. There was something very just but highly punishable he would do before Interpol dragged him off in handcuffs. When you came to think of it, Tangier sounded like just the sort of place a man of Rawcliffe’s type would end up in. Moorish catamites. Drinking himself to death. Drinking was too slow a process.
Hogg came to to find the woman gently unclicking his safety-belt for him. ‘You were miles away,’ she smiled. ‘And we’re miles up. Look.’ Hogg, mumbling sour thanks, surveyed without much interest a lot of clouds lying below them. He had seen such things before, travelling to Rome on his honeymoo
n. He gave the clouds the tribute of a look of weary sophistication. It was the Romantic poets really who should have flown; Percy Shelley would have loved to see all this lot from this angle. How did that thing go now? He chewed a line or two to himself.
‘Did you say something?’ asked the woman.
‘Poetry,’ said Hogg. ‘A bit of poetry. About clouds.’ And, as if to make up for his neglect of her, kind and friendly as she was, he recited, in his woolly voice:
‘I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.’
‘Oh, I do love poetry,’ this woman smiled over the engines. ‘It was a toss-up whether I did literature or astronomy, you know. But it was the moon that won.’
‘How do you mean,’ asked Hogg carefully, ‘it was the moon that won?’
‘That’s what I do,’ she said. ‘That’s what I lecture in. The moon. Selenography, you know.’
‘Selene,’ said learned Hogg. ‘A fusion of Artemis and Hecate.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t know about that,’ she said. ‘Selenography is what it’s called. I’d better introduce myself, I suppose. My name’s Miranda Boland.’
Miranda: a wonder to her parents: poor woman, all alone as she was. ‘Well,’ said Hogg cautiously, ‘my name –’
Charlie the dragoman suddenly boomed through a crackling speaker. ‘My name,’ he announced, ‘is Mr Mercer.’ No familiarity, then; he was no longer to be thought of as Charlie. ‘My job,’ he said, ‘is to look after you on this cruise, show you around and so on.’
‘Come wiz me to ze Kasbah,’ said the rubbery man. He had made it, then. It was his début as resident comedian. ‘Shut up, George,’ his wife said, delightedly. Members of the party grinned and made their bottoms and shoulders more comfortable. The holiday was really beginning now.
‘I hope you will enjoy this cruise,’ crackled Mr Mercer. ‘Lots of people do enjoy these cruises. They sometimes come again. And if there’s anything you don’t like about this cruise, tell me. Tell me. Don’t bother to write a letter to Panmed. Let’s have it out at once, man to man, or to woman should such be the case. But I think you’ll like it. Anyway, I hope so. And so does Miss Kelly, your charming air-hostess, and Captain O’Shaughnessy up front. Now the first thing is that we can expect a bit of obstruction at Seville. It’s this Gibraltar business, which you may have read about. The Spanish want it and we won’t let it go. So they get a bit awkward when it comes to customs and immigration and so on. They try and delay us, which is not very friendly. Now it’s quicker if I show your passports all in one lump, so I’m coming round to collect them now. And then Miss Kelly here will serve tea.’
Miranda Boland (Mrs? Miss?) opened a stuffed handbag to get her passport out. She had a lot of things in her bag: tubes of antibiotics and specifics against diarrhoea and the like. Also a little Spanish dictionary. That was to help her to have a good time. Also a small writing case. This put into Hogg’s head an idea, perhaps a salvatory one. Hogg, without fear, produced his own passport.
‘Miss Boland?’ said Mr Mercer, coming round. Miss, then. ‘Quite a nice photo, isn’t it?’ And then: ‘Mr Enderby, is it?’
‘That’s right.’ Mr Mercer examined a smirking portrait of an engaged man, occupation not yet certain at that time but given as writer; a couple of official Roman chops: in and then, more quickly, out again.
‘And what do you do, Mr Enderby?’ asked Miss Boland.
‘I,’ said Enderby, ‘am a poet. I am Enderby the Poet.’ The name meant nothing to this poetry-loving selenographer. The clouds below, Shelley’s pals, were flushed with no special radiance. ‘The Poet,’ repeated Enderby, with rather less confidence. They pushed on towards the sun. Enderby’s stomach quietly announced that soon, very soon, it was going to react to all that had happened. Delayed shock said that it would not be much longer delayed. Enderby sat tense in his seat, waiting for it as for an air-crash.
3
1
‘COPERNICUS,’ MISS BOLAND POINTED. ‘And then a bit to the west there’s Eratosthenes. And then farther west still you get the Apennines.’ Her face shone, as if she were (which in a sense she really was) a satellite of a satellite. Enderby looked very coldly at the moon which, for some reason to do with the clouds (Shelley’s orbèd maiden and so on), he had expected to lie beneath them. But it was as high up as it usually was. ‘And down there, south, is Anaxagoras. Just under the Mare Frigoris.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Enderby, not very interested. He had not himself ever made much use of the moon as a poetic property, but he still thought he had more claim on it than she had. She behaved very familiarly with it.
‘And Plato, just above.’
‘Why Plato?’ They had had not only tea but also dinner, spilt around (hair fallen over her right eye and her tongue bitten in concentration) by that Miss Kelly. It had not been a very good dinner, but Enderby, to quieten his stomach, had wolfed his portion and part of (smilingly donated; she did not have a very big appetite) Miss Boland’s. It had been three tepid fish fingers each, with some insufficiently warmed over crinkle-cut fresh frozen potato chips, also a sort of fish sauce served in a plastic doll’s bucket with a lid hard to get off. This sauce had had a taste that, unexpectedly in view of its dolly-mixture pink and the dainty exiguity of even a double portion, was somehow like the clank of metal. And, very strangely or perhaps not strangely at all, the slab of dry gâteau that followed had a glutinous filling whose cold mutton fat gust clung to the palate as with small claws of rusty iron. Enderby had had to reinsert his top teeth before eating, doing this under cover of the need to cough vigorously and the bright pamphlet on Tangerine delights held to his left cheek. Now, after eating, he had to get both plates out, since they tasted very defiled and bits of cold burnt batter lodged beneath or above them, according to jaw. He should really get to the toilet to see about that, but, having first had doubts as to whether this aircraft possessed a toilet and then found these dispelled by the sight of the rubbery comedian called Mr Guthkelch coming back from it with theatrical relief, he felt then superstitiously that, once he left the cabin, even for two minutes, a stowaway newsboy might appear and distribute copies of a late edition with his photograph in it, and then they would, Mr Guthkelch suddenly very serious, truss him against the brutal arrest of the Seville police. So he stayed where he was. He would wait till Miss Boland had a little doze or they got to moonlit Seville. The moon was a very fine full one, and it burnt framed in the window to be tickled all over with classical names by Miss Boland.
‘I don’t know why Plato. That’s what it’s called, that’s all. There’s a lot of famous people commemorated all over the lunar surface. Archimedes, see, just above Plato, and Kepler, and right over there on the edge is Grimaldi.’
‘The clown Grimaldi?’
‘No, silly. The Grimaldi that wrote a book on the diffraction of light. A priest I believe he was. But,’ she added, ‘I often thought it might be nice if some newer names could be put up there.’
‘There are a lot of new Russian ones at the back, aren’t there?’ said well-informed Enderby.
‘Oh, you know what I mean. Who’s interested in the Rabbi Levi and Endymion, whoever he was, any more? Names of great modern people. It’s a daring idea, I know, and a lot of my colleagues have been, you know, aghast.’
‘The trouble is,’ said Enderby, ‘that nobody knows who’s really great till they’ve been a long time dead. The great ones, I mean. Dead, that is.’ Mount Enderby. ‘Like some of these Russian towns. One minute they’re one thing and the next another. Stalingrad, I mean. Now it’s something else.’
‘Volgograd.’
‘Yes, and that’s another. You’d be having pop-stars up there perhaps, and then in ten years’ time everybody would be wondering who the hell they were.’ Pop-stars. He shouldn’t have mentioned that. He felt very and metallically sic
k. Then it passed. ‘Sorry I said “hell”,’ he said.
‘People who give pleasure to the world,’ said Miss Boland. And then: ‘There’s a Hell on the moon, did you know that? A bit old-fashioned really, but that’s true of a lot of lunar nomenclature, as I say.’ And then: ‘Of course, you being a poet wouldn’t like pop-stars much, would you? I can quite see that. Very inferior art, you’d say. I know.’
Enderby wished he could get his teeth out and then back again. But he said quickly: ‘No, no, no, I wouldn’t say that. Some of them are very good, I’m sure. Please,’ he begged, ‘don’t consider me an enemy of pop-art.’
‘All right, all right,’ she smiled, ‘I won’t. All these long-haired young singers. It’s a matter of age, I suppose. I have a nephew and niece who are mad on that sort of thing. They call me a kvadrat.’
‘Because I’m not, you see.’
‘But I was able to say to them, you know, that this special idol of theirs seemed very unkvadrat, if that’s the right expression, publishing this book of quite highbrow verse. Now that ought to change your opinion of pop-artists, if not of pop-art. I take it you saw the book? One of our junior English lecturers was quite gone on it.’
‘I’ve got to get out,’ said Enderby. She looked surprised. This was not, after all, a bus. ‘If you’ll excuse me –’ It wasn’t just a matter of teeth any more; he really had to go. A fat beaming woman was just coming away from it now. ‘A matter of some urgency,’ Enderby explained and prepared to go into further, plausible, details. But Miss Boland got up and let him out.
The stewardess, Miss Kelly, was sitting at the back with Mr Mercer. Mr Mercer still had his woolly cap on but he was sleeping with his mouth open. Miss Kelly seemed totally content with an expression and posture of sheer vacancy. Enderby nodded grimly at her and entered the toilet. Why hadn’t he known these things – kvadrats and so on and that lout publishing a book of verse, and who blasted Vesta had got married to? He had read the Daily Mirror every day with positively adenoidal attention. Very little had got home, then: his rehabilitation had never had a hope of being perfect. He quietened his stomach via his bowels and, the while, rinsed his clogged teeth under the tap, and scrubbed them with the nailbrush. Then he reinserted them and, with hands gently folded on his bared lap, cried bitterly for a minute or two. Then he wiped his eyes and his bottom with the same pink paper and committed both lots of wrapped excreta to the slipstream, as he supposed it was called. He blinked at himself in the little mirror, very recognizable Hogg. If he had still had that beard which, in the intensive phase of personality change, he had been made to grow, he could be shaving it off now, having borrowed a razor from somebody, perhaps even Miss Boland, who must surely have one for leg-hair and so on in her crammed bag. Ha ha, you and the start of a holiday make me feel quite young again: I can’t wait to divest myself of this fungus, ha ha. But that beard had had to go when he became a barman. So there was nothing between him and the urgently telegraphed photographs (straight from Holden’s bloody secret-police dossier) now being handled by swarthy Interpol Spaniards. Nothing except the name. But damnable and treacherous Wapenshaw would already be talking away, baling out what were properly secrets of the confessional. And tomorrow morning copies of the Daily Mirror, which was notoriously on sale before other newspapers, as if unable to wait to regale egg-crackers with the horrors of the world, would be circulating among British holidaymakers on the Costa Brava or whatever it was called. There would be a stern portrait of Hogg on the front page, under a very insulting headline. On the back page would be great air disasters and bombs in Vietnam and avalanches and things. But on the front page would be the murderer Hogg. He did not, it seemed, read the Daily Mirror closely enough, but he had a sufficient appreciation of its editorial philosophy.
The Complete Enderby Page 28
