‘We’ve never had any complaints before about passengers’ behaviour. I don’t want to be nasty, but it’s my duty as pilot of this aircraft to give you fair warning. Any more of this interfering with Miss Kelly and I must ask you to leave the tour. I’m sorry, but there it is.’
‘It’s a tissue of lies,’ said flushed Enderby. ‘I demand an apology.’
‘There it is. I take full responsibility. So no more messing about. Is that clear?’
‘I’ll give you messing about,’ cried Enderby. ‘If I could get off now I would. But I’m getting off at Marrakesh anyway. It’s an insult and an injustice, that’s what it is.’ Captain O’Shaughnessy jerked a salute at Miss Boland and went back to his engines. ‘That’s what one’s up against all the time,’ said Enderby to Miss Boland. ‘It makes me sick.’
‘All the time,’ said Miss Boland. ‘It makes you sick.’
‘That’s right. It was the wrong room, as I said.’
‘As you said. And now would you kindly sit somewhere else? Otherwise I shall scream. I shall scream and scream and scream. I shall scream and scream and scream and scream and scream.’
‘Don’t do that,’ said Enderby, very concerned. ‘Darling,’ he added.
‘How dare you. How dare you.’ She pressed the little bell-push up above.
‘What did you do that for?’ asked Enderby.
‘If you won’t go you must be made to go. I’m defiled just by sitting next to you.’ Miss Kelly, wisely, did not come to the summons. Mr Mercer came, sad and troubled in his woolly cap. ‘You,’ said Miss Boland. ‘Make this man sit somewhere else. I didn’t come on this tour to be insulted.’
‘Look,’ said Mr Mercer to Enderby. ‘I didn’t say anything about that other business. It’s the captain’s responsibility, not mine. But this sort of thing is something that I’m not supposed to let happen. I made a big mistake having you on this, I did that. Now will you be told?’
‘If you won’t do something,’ said Miss Boland, ‘I’ll scream.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Enderby. ‘I’ll go. I’ll go into that lavatory there.’ He got up and took his bag and beret from the rack. There were toys still in the bag. Enderby gravely dropped them into Miss Boland’s lap – tortoise, beakless goose, flamenco doll, cymbal-pawed clockwork brown bear. She at once became thin and evil and ready to throw these things at Enderby, crying:
‘He’s hateful. No woman is safe with him. Throw him out.’ Many of the passengers looked on with interest, though not well able to understand, or even hear, what was proceeding. Behind, the condom overweight man and his wife sat stiffly, still not on speaking terms. They refused to be interested in the Miss Boland-Enderby trouble, though it was just in front of them, since showing interest would have drawn them into a common area of attention, which would have been rather like, or indeed might have led to, being on speaking terms again. Enderby stood stony in the corridor, swaying with the plane in a slight air turbulence (the Mountains of the Moon perhaps, or something), waiting for instructions. To the condom man’s wife, who was in the outer seat, Mr Mercer said:
‘I wonder if you’d mind, Mrs er, changing places with this er. It’s only for a short while, really. We’re not all that far from Marrakesh now.’
‘Men on holiday. Brings the beast out as you might call it. I know. I have no objection if she there hasn’t.’ And, getting up, she gave Enderby a murderous look which he considered unfair, since he had, after all, been the instrument of disclosure of her husband’s beastliness, meaning the truth. As she sat down grunting next to Miss Boland, Enderby saw that she had an English newspaper folded to what looked like a simple crossword puzzle. She had a ballpoint, but she did not seem to have filled anything in yet. He leaned across her bosom to squint at the date and saw that, as far as he could judge, it was yesterday’s. That was all right, then. Before that lot happened. And then he saw that it was the Evening Standard and it was not all right. He said to this woman, leaning over more deeply:
‘Where did you get that? Give it me, quick. I must have it. Something I’ve got to see.’
‘Right,’ said Mr Mercer. ‘Go and sit down quietly behind next to this lady’s husband. We don’t want any more trouble, do we now?’
‘Cheek,’ said the woman. ‘It was left in the ladies at the airport by one of them Gibraltar people. I’ve as much right to it as what he has.’
‘Oh, please go on now,’ said Mr Mercer in distress. ‘If you can’t hold it you shouldn’t take it. A lot of this foreign stuff’s stronger than what many are used to.’
‘She may be drunk,’ said Enderby, shoulder-jerking towards Miss Boland, ‘but I’m not, thank you very much. All I want to see is that paper. Something in it. A book review, very important. And then I’ll go to that lavatory and sit there quietly.’ Seeing Miss Boland gasp in a lot of air to revile him further, he made a grab for the newspaper. The condom man’s wife strengthened her hold.
‘For God’s sake,’ said Mr Mercer, uncourierlike, ‘let him see what he wants to see and then let’s get him out of the way.’
‘I want to find it myself,’ said Enderby. ‘I don’t need her to show it me.’
‘And who’s her when she’s at home?’ said the woman. Miss Boland looked cunning and said:
‘Let me see. There’s something very fishy about all this. Running away from his wife, so he said.’
‘Really? Told you, did he?’
‘Let me see.’ And Miss Boland, unhandily in the manner of all women with a newspaper, unfolded the Evening Standard, and the safe backwater of small ads and cartoons and crossword gave place, after a rustling tussle, to the horrid starkness of front page news. There it was, then. Enderby gulped it all in like ozone.
‘Oh,’ said the woman, ‘I never seen that. Oh terrible, that, oh my word.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Boland. ‘Terrible.’
A screaming banner announced the shooting of Yod Crewsy. In hour of triumph. In Premier’s presence. Waiter believed assailant. There was a large blurred photograph of Yod Crewsy with stretched gob or cakehole, but whether shot or just singing was not indicated. There was also a still photograph of the Prime Minister looking aghast, probably taken from stock. No picture, thank God, of waiter believed assailant. But Miss Boland was reading avidly on. Enderby had to now or never. He leaned over the condom man’s wife and grabbed. The paper did not tear: he got the thing whole. He said:
‘Very important review. Book page, book page,’ rustling tremulously through. ‘Oh, stupid of me. Wrong day for book page.’ And then, as though an issue without the book page were an insult to the literate, he crumpled the Evening Standard into a ball.
‘That’s going too far,’ said Mr Mercer.
‘You mannerless thing,’ said the woman. ‘And that poor lad dead, too.’
‘Not yet,’ said Enderby unwisely. ‘Not dead yet.’
‘Hogg.’ That was Miss Boland.
‘Eh?’ Enderby looked at her with bitter admiration. He had been right, then; he had known all along this would happen.
‘Hogg. Puerco. That’s why you’re on the run.’
‘She’s mad,’ Enderby told Mr Mercer. ‘I’m going to the lavatory.’ He began to unball the paper and smooth it out. She had seen the name Hogg; the only thing to do now was to insist that he was not Hogg. There was no point in hiding the fact that Hogg was wanted to assist in a police inquiry. If, that is, one were oneself not Hogg. And one was not, as one’s passport clearly showed. Enderby nearly drew out his passport, but that would look too suspiciously eager to prove that he was not Hogg. A lot of people were not Hogg, and they did not have to keep presenting their passports to prove it.
‘The police,’ said Miss Boland. ‘Send a radio message to the airport. He did it. That’s why he’s run away.’
‘I don’t have to put up with all this, do I?’ said Enderby with a show of weariness.
‘He said all the time that he hated pop-singers.’
‘That’s not true,’
said Enderby. ‘All I said was that you mustn’t necessarily regard me as an enemy of pop-art.’
‘Jealousy,’ said Miss Boland. ‘A bad poet jealous of a good one. And what was that you said just then about a gun? I’m quite sure I didn’t dream it.’ She seemed very calm now, glinting, though breathing heavily.
‘I’ll give you bad poet,’ said Enderby, preparing to shout. ‘If there’s any good in that book of his, it’s because it’s been pinched from me. That bitch. Plagiarism. I hope he dies, because he deserves to die.’
‘Look,’ said Mr Mercer. ‘We don’t want any trouble, right? This is supposed to be for pleasure, this cruise is. Will you both stop shouting the odds? If there’s anything to be seen to I’ll see to it, right?’
‘If you don’t,’ said Miss Boland, ‘I will. I will in any case. He killed him, no doubt about it. He’s as good as admitted it.’
‘Who’s a bitch?’ said the condom wife, belatedly. ‘Who was he saying was a bitch? Because if he was meaning me –’
‘I’m going to the lavatory,’ said Enderby. Mr Mercer did not attempt to stop him; indeed, he followed him. The crumpled Evening Standard had somehow reached Miss Kelly. She was spelling all that front page out, reserving her reaction till she had taken everything in. Just by the lavatory door Mr Mercer said:
‘What’s going on with her down there? Is she potty or what?’
‘A matter of sex,’ Enderby said. ‘I spurned her advances. I don’t think it’s decent the way she carries on, and me with my mother dying in Marrakesh.’
‘Look,’ said Mr Mercer without sympathy. ‘You shouldn’t rightly be on this plane at all, as you well know, and I’m bloody sorry I let you come on it. It was a bit of a fiddle, and I think I’ve learned my lesson now about that sort of thing. Now she’s going on about you being a dangerous criminal, which sounds to me like a load of balls. You’ve not been killing anybody, have you?’
‘I have enough on my hands,’ said Enderby gravely, ‘with a dying mother.’
‘Right then. I’ll get her calmed down and I’ll tell her that I’m doing whatever has to be done. The police and that. The customers have got to be satisfied, that’s laid down in the rules. Now it won’t be long to Marrakesh now, so I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you. You nip off before everybody else, see, because I’ll let you.’
‘Thanks very much,’ said Enderby.
‘I’ll keep them all back till you have time to get away. I don’t want her on the job again, howling murder and upsetting the other mugs,’ said Mr Mercer frankly. ‘So you’ll find three taxis laid on specially for the tour. They take one lot to the Hotel Maroc and then keep coming back for the rest. Well, you get into one and get the driver to drop you wherever it is you want to be dropped and then send him back to the airport, right? How far is it you have to go?’
‘Near that place where Winston Churchill used to stay,’ said Enderby with sudden inspiration.
‘Not too far then, that isn’t. And then,’ said Mr Mercer, ‘that’ll be the end as far as you and me and everybody else is concerned. Got that?’
‘That suits me well enough,’ said Enderby.
‘You’d better get in there, then. Look, she looks like getting up to start asking for immediate action. Summary execution and that. You thrown out into the bleeding slipstream. You sure you done nothing wrong?’
‘Me,’ said Enderby, ‘with a dying mother?’
‘You don’t look the type, anyway. Get in there. If anybody else wants to go I’ll have to tell them to let it bake till we get to Marrakesh. I wish,’ said Mr Mercer with large sincerity, ‘I’d never bloody well set eyes on you.’ Enderby bowed his head. ‘Mysterious fascination for women, eh? Now get yourself locked in there.’
It was better in the lavatory, an interim of most delectable peace and quiet. All Enderby could hear was the engines except for a brief phase of shock and howling from Miss Kelly. She was, it seemed, sorry that Yod Crewsy had been shot. Then she appeared to have got over it.
3
Mint, mint, mint. It was too easy to think that, though the immigration official waved him through when he cried: ‘Ma mère est mortellement malade,’ though the leading taxi opened up smartly for him when he mentioned Monsieur Mercer, he was destined for the butcher’s block. The sun was about half way down the sky, but it was still up to Regulo Mark 4 and there was all this mint. The memory fumed in of his once trying out a small leg of fatty New Zealand in Mrs Meldrum’s gas oven. It had emerged not well-cooked, and he had made a stew out of it. You could not really go wrong with a stew. There had been a lot of grease to skim off, though. The driver, a Moor as Enderby took him to be, was stewy in the armpits – no, more like a tin of Scotch Broth. But he was fumigating himself and his cab with a home-rolled cigarette that reeked of decent herbs, though possibly hallucinogenic. He also rolled his eyes. Soon, Enderby considered, the time must come for jettisoning his Enderby passport. Miss Boland would soon be uncovering aliases to the police. He could not be Hogg, he could not be Enderby. The nasty world outside had succeeded in taking pretty well everything away from him. Except his talent, except that.
A well-made road with trees, probably bougainvillea and eucalyptus and things. And plenty of mint. Also people in turbans, caftans, nightgowns with stripes, and what-you-call-them djelabas. The driver drove with the automatism of a pony pulling a trap, though much faster, his being not to reason why Enderby had to reach the tour hotel before everyone else. It was time to tell him some other place to go. Enderby said:
‘Je veux aller à Tanger.’
‘Demain?’
‘Maintenant.’
‘Impossible.’
‘Regardez,’ Enderby said, ‘I’m not going to that bloody hotel. Une femme. Une question d’une femme. Il faut que j’évite une certaine femme.’
With care the driver steered his cab round the next corner and stopped by the kerb. His hand-brake ground painfully. ‘Une femme?’ It was a pleasant little residential avenue full of mint. But down it a bare-legged man in Sancho Panza hat and loose brown clouts urged a laden donkey. ‘Tu veux une femme?’
‘Just the opposite,’ said Enderby, frowning at the familiarity. ‘J’essaie à éviter une femme, comme j’ai déjà dit.’
‘Tu veux garçon?’
‘Let’s get this straight,’ cried Enderby. ‘I want to get away. Comment puis-je get to bloody Tangier?’
The driver thought about that. ‘Avion parti,’ he said. ‘Chemin de fer –’ He shrugged. Then he said: ‘You got money, Charlie?’
‘I thought it would come to that,’ said Enderby. He brought out his small bundle of old international tips. What was the currency here? There were a couple of notes with a bland capped and robed ruler on them, Banque du Maroc, and a lot of Arabic. What were these? Dirhams. He had, it seemed, ten dirhams. He didn’t know how much they were worth. Still, resourceful Enderby. Ready cash for all emergencies of travel. The driver was quick to grab the ten dirhams. He pushed them, as if he were a woman, into his unbuttoned hair-whorled brown breast. Then he cheerfully started up his cab again. ‘Where are we going?’ Enderby wanted to know. The driver didn’t answer; he just drove.
Enderby was past being uneasy, though. After all, what was he trying to do except borrow time against the inevitable? If Yod Crewsy died, well then, he, his supposed murderer, could only be put in jail for a long period, the death penalty having kindly been abolished. And in jail poetry could be written. There would be ghastly stews, but he knew all about those. Great things had been written in jail – Pilgrim’s Progress, De Profundis, even Don Quixote. Nothing to worry about there. Slops out. Here’s your skilly, you horrible murderer, you. Snout-barons. What you in for, matey? I murdered a practitioner of foul and immoral art. You done a good job, then, you did. But, sheep for a lamb (all this mint, mint everywhere), he had things to do first. They had to catch him first, and it was up to him, rules of the game, to make things difficult. They drove down a great smooth highway, then turn
ed right. It was all French colonialism, with decent official buildings, green lawns, palms. Little Moroccan girls were coming out of school, gaily shrieking, and some were sped off home to their mint tea, as Enderby supposed, in haughty squat automobiles. But soon the road changed its character. Instead of shooting cleanly along an artery, the cab began to engage a capillary that was pure, and dirty, Moorish.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Enderby again.
‘Djemaa el Fna,’ said the driver. This meant nothing to Enderby. They were now honking among fruit-barrows, donkey-whippers, brown and black vociferators in pointed hoods and barmcake turbans and even little woolly caps like Mr Mercer’s. The faecal-coloured houses and windowless shops (loaves, strangled fowls, beads, egg-plants) bowed in towards each other at the top. Somebody wailed about Allah in the near distance. It was what was known as very picturesque, all laid on for Winston Churchill as amateur painter. Then, shouted at through gold or no teeth, the cab-flanks resonantly fisted, they drove into a great square which was full of robed people and very loud. There seemed to be native shows going on: Enderby glimpsed a fire-swallower and a man who let snakes crawl all over his person. Then, above the heads of the crowd, a small black boy went up into the air, wiggled his fingers from his ears, then sailed down again. Enderby did not really like any of this. The driver stopped and, with a vulgar thumb, pointed to where Enderby should go. It seemed to be a soft-drink stall, one of many set all about the square. He shooed Enderby out. Enderby got out, bag on arm, groaning. The driver did an urgent and insolent turn, butting bare shins with deformed fenders and, cursed at by some but greeted toothily and, Enderby presumed, with ribaldry by others, probed the crammed barefoot alley whence he had come. He honked slowly among thudded drums and weak pipe-skirls, fowl-squawks and ass-brays, then was smothered by nightshirts and most animated robes, pushing his way back to a world where an airport, complete with waiting Miss Boland, might be possible. Enderby encountered blind men howling for baksheesh. He brutally ignored them and made his shoes pick their way among great splay brown feet towards this soft-drink stall that had been thumbed at him. He would have a soft drink, anyway. No harm in that. And that climbed hill of an act would show the next one. But just by the stall, newly disclosed by a small mob that came away chewing things, probably nasty, he saw a patriarch tending a small fire. A little boy, his head shaven as for ringworm, was threading rubbery gobs of what Enderby took to be goatmeat on to skewers. Enderby nodded in awed satisfaction. His imagination had not failed him, then. It was time to get rid of that passport.
The Complete Enderby Page 33
