The Complete Enderby

by Anthony Burgess

  It was hard to get that door, which had swung open to its limit, back in place. But Easy Walker lurched violently to port and the door hurtled in and, on a lurch that brought them both lying on their sides as at a Roman supper, it slammed to. Then he righted the craft and, widely circling in the air, its nose sniffed round towards home. Home: what else could you call it? Green Africa ahead, then the geometry of the little airport, then a sudden urgent love for the runway. A three-point landing of the kind called insolently skilled, a taxiing towards Easy Walker’s waiting Volkswagen.

  ‘Talking about passports,’ Enderby said as they sped through the brown country outside town, ‘I’d like that back if you’ve still got it. I let it go too soon.’

  ‘Not poss, brad. Swallowed up, that, in the great dirty passy-hungry what-does-your-dad-do. Have this, though, your need being greater than. Dead jarveys help the living from their heart of darkness. Still. A pig of a pity.’

  ‘What I mean is,’ said Enderby. ‘I’m entitled to an official identity of some sort.’ But was he? And, if so, why? He might yet be taken somewhere, but he had no intention of making a move of his own. And, anyway, did bearing a name matter? Rawcliffe would be glad to be called anything or nothing if he could be alive again.

  ‘There was the time I got this passy just as the jarvey as todded it seemed like as to take off. But he came to, yes he did, when it was already swapping fumblers. Well, you’re all right, I’d say, with this Rawcliffe jarvey. He won’t come up, no, not never no more. Different from this jarvey back in Great Dirty Mum.’

  When they arrived back at El Acantilado Verde, Rawcliffe’s other verbal monument, Easy Walker was eager to see what shady treasures there might be to buy cheap and sell dear. The three boys sat, in clean white, at a table by the bar-counter, playing some game which involved the linking of little fingers. They had difficulty in composing their faces to a funeral look. ‘All finished,’ Enderby said. ‘Finito.’ But there must be a better Spanish word than that. Consommado? It sounded soupish. ‘Consummatum,’ he said, pushing down to the roots.

  ‘March on markers,’ said Easy Walker. He was very deft. The amount of pornography he uncovered was shocking. It was mostly in the cartridge-box book-shelves, though previously – because of the austerity of the binding – unsuspected by Enderby. ‘Here,’ said Easy Walker, ‘is some right donk flag for such as takes a swizzle to it,’ showing Enderby Victorian steel-engravings of bloody wounds, lovingly detailed, and knobbed whips and knotted thongs. ‘And there’s them shoving up the old kazerzy with it, very painful for my shekels and sherbet. And here,’ Easy Walker said, shock on his unshockable, ‘is what I would not have if it was my own Aunt Ada as did it, brad. Cause there’s limitations to all bozzles, has to be, stands.’ In his hands trembled a leather-bound folio of what, to squinting Enderby, seemed at first to be illustrations to the Bible. But they were very perverted illustrations, and there was one that made Enderby feel sick. ‘I mean,’ Easy Walker said, slamming the book shut, ‘that was bad enough in itself without making it worse and dirty sexual.’ It was the first time Enderby had heard him use plain language. ‘Making a mock of it like that jarvey I said. When a jarvey snuffs it’s not up to him to come back, up-your-piping and that. All right for him in here,’ he bowed his head, ‘because he was what he was and no up-my-tickle. But this jarvey like I said. And there was like that saucepan-lid, Lazarus his all-the-same. And crucifixions too in this one, very dirty. Very clear that came off.’

  ‘What?’ said Enderby. ‘Who?’ Time himself will bring you in his high-powered car. And supposing the car doesn’t go on to pick someone else up but, instead, goes back to the garage. Things as they were before, or as near as you could get them. He would not be surprised, he would not be surprised at anything. ‘You mean,’ said Enderby, ‘Yod Crewsy. You mean he’s not dead after all.’

  Easy Walker nodded and nodded. ‘Laid out, brad, in some arsee plum-and-apple in the Smoke. Then all them teens brooping round, going sniff sniff. Turn-the-handles lighted all about him in his best whistle. And his three brads keeping double-scotch, two at his toots and one behind his uncle. Then he flicks open and says “Where am I?” Got it this morning on the talkbox, in the near-and-far, coming here.’

  Enderby nodded and nodded. Bitch. Blasphemous bitch. Very clever. Easily done, bribed doctors or not even that. Genuine error. Clinical death and real death. And now sermons about miracles and popsters flocking to give thanks. Our Thammuz, Adonis, Christ for that matter. ‘And,’ Enderby said, ‘I suppose there was one sly pseudo-mourner, come to see, his only chance, his handiwork, lurking in the shadows of the chapel, and, when this body rose from the dead, he screamed. Screamed that the times have been that, when the brains were out, the man would die, and there an end, but now they rise again, this is more strange than such a murder is.’

  Easy Walker shook his head, baffled. ‘Don’t get that at all, brad. Forked me on the cobbles and no rare-with-Worcester. Have to mince the papers when they come out, not out yet, not with that, pennywise.’

  Enderby shook his head, not baffled. ‘No more papers. Bugger the outside world,’ he said violently. ‘If not that way, some other. I’ll hear about it, only a question of waiting. No resurrection for Rawcliffe, not of any kind. They’ll crumple his letter up at Scotland Yard, another crank.’

  ‘I’ll ghoul these off now,’ Easy Walker said, ‘dirt-bibles.’ He showed new shock on the realization that his slang had, for once, slung at the gold and pierced it. Enderby then had an intuition that he was going to throw off what must be a home-stitched patchwork of patois and, strayed sheep or remittance-man, speak a true language that was far more middle-class than his, Enderby’s. ‘It’s all dirt and cheating,’ he said, and only on the last word (cheadn) did the innominate colonial really sound out. He seemed for an instant as feeble as in a plonk hangover. Enderby nodded. He said kindly:

  ‘Come back tomorrow or the next day for the rest of the stuff. Except for what I want, that is. Any heterosexual pornography I’ll keep. I’ve finished with women.’

  ‘Finish with them.’ It was clear and bitter. And then: ‘What’s all them there sling-your-hooks there, brad?’ He headed at a set of cartridge-boxes set aside, special.

  ‘Those,’ said Enderby, ‘are all the anthologies.’

  When Easy Walker had left, Enderby ripped open Rawcliffe’s mattress with a tarnished curved dagger. There were bundles of dirty notes, high and low in denomination: about, he reckoned, fifteen thousand dirhams. He would buy a new mattress tomorrow; tonight he would make a dog’s bed of rugs and cushions. Then he went thoughtfully to examine Rawcliffe’s bath and lavatory, rather well-appointed; for the customers there was only a stark, though regularly sluiced, W C off the dining-conservatory. Then he went to the bar. All three boys looked at him in expectation, a composition, as for early Picasso, of coffee-mug handlers: Antonio sipped wide-eyed; Tetuani warmed both dark brown hands on the mug’s belly; Manuel, finished drinking, swung his gently, handle on little finger. ‘No,’ Enderby said firmly. ‘I sleep alone. Yo duermo solo.’ They nodded with degrees of vigour: they had merely wanted to know. Manuel said:

  ‘Open up bloody shop?’

  ‘Mañana.’

  ‘Quiere café?’ asked Antonio.

  Enderby did not resist his yearnings towards a resumption of chronic self-imposed dyspepsia. He had convinced himself that he could be healthy enough if he wanted to be. ‘Make,’ he said slowly, ‘very strong tea. Muy fuerte. Not tea-bags but spoonfuls of the real stuff. Comprendido? Tinned milk. Leche condensada.’ And later he would eat – What? Something stepmotherly gross – a corned beef stew with bacon added to make floating flowers of grease, a grumbling huddle of boiled spuds, pickled onions. He nodded with relaxed kindness, then went for his first for a hell of a long time leisurely session in the lavatory.

  2

  ‘What I say is,’ said the oldest of the men, his skin of broken veins and capillaries like an enlargement of a microscop
ic picture of motor oil, ‘there couldn’t have been any conspiracy. They choose crack shots. A political assassination is, in our country at least, a rather serious undertaking.’

  ‘It’s altogether possible,’ said a dried ancient, goitrous thyroid colloidally distended, eyes popping, voice hoarse, ‘that it was the act of a private entrepreneur. More enthusiasm than skill. They should never have got rid of National Service.’

  ‘Well, that’s just what I said, isn’t it?’

  ‘Implied, if you will. Hardly said.’

  ‘He too,’ said a brisk barking small ex-major, the youngest, about seventy-five, ‘might have been resurrected. Wouldn’t put anything past them. An everlasting premier.’

  ‘Or he was just a liar.’ This was a dithering man with twittering toothless mouth. ‘Jealousy of the bug for the flea. Shot at him. Failed to kill. Now he tries to make himself a political hero. What do you think, Rawcliffe?’

  ‘I really have no opinion on the matter,’ said Enderby. He sat in the fireside-type chair, the table in front of him, paper and ballpoint on the table, not a line added to the lines already there:

  As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed,

  Thyrsis was Jack, but Crousseau on a raft

  Sought Johnjack’s rational island –

  The sun was weakish, what Tangier called winter inching up. The bottles behind the bar caught that meagre light as if to store anew what was already long stored. Manuel measured out whisky for the old men, retired here for the warmth and fancied cheapness. Manuel was cheerful and honest, to be trusted with the till. Honesty was a Tangerine luxury, to be enjoyed. There were bright pin-up calendars, promising, after the mild though windy winter, torrid abandon renewed, golden flesh, the heart-breaking wagging cruppers of the bikinied young over the golden beaches. And there were plaques advertising Byrrh, Rivoli, Royal Anjou, Carlier, a British beer called Golden Fleece. The Coca-Cola ice-box had been freshly polished by Tetuani. Marie Brizard’s name was on the water-jugs, Picon’s on the ashtrays. Antonio sang, preparing tapas in the kitchen. ‘Both politicians and pop-singers,’ Enderby said, ‘are boils on the bottom of the communal body.’ The oldest elder went aaaaargh. He liked that. Writer fellow this Rawcliffe. The apt phrase.

  Enderby was not pushing on with the sonnet, nor with the letter he still had to write. The question was, he was thinking, how he was to address her. When he wrote. If he wrote. Dear Vesta: never. Dear Mrs – He’d forgotten her new name. (The address was easy: the publisher of this filthy volume.) An abusive salutation, that would be letting himself down. He had written to his own publisher, for he thought he might need him, them, again. Tiny royalties had accrued: they had been keeping them for him (£5.7.9.); they were glad, they said, to know where he was at last. As for this business of plagiarism, that was his affair, since he owned copyright. They themselves were not willing to take action, since they were in the bidding for the resurrected Yod Crewsy’s next book – a brief prose volume, they understood, humorous, inspirational, even religious. And they enclosed a personal letter, still in its envelope, only recently arrived at the office. Enderby had frowned over the handwriting, female. You and your female hadmirers. With a thudding heart he had opened it up.

  Dear Piggy or Hoggy or Dirty (for I don’t know what else to call you, do I?),

  I was sorry about things and still am. And now this is the only way I can get in touch with you. Because I got it out of that silly girl on the plane that it was all really a mistake and you had gone to the wrong room without meaning to do what that silly captain of the plane thought (you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?). They choose too many of these air-hostesses for their looks, though hers weren’t much to write home about really, and not their intelligence, and that silly captain was a bit too quick to draw conclusions, and I certainly shan’t fly with them again, that courier with the stupid woolly cap on was also very rude, I thought. The number of wrongs that seem to have been done you! I was stupid too, wasn’t I, thinking you could have anything to do with that shooting, it must have been my inflamed holiday imagination. I’ve been thinking about you a lot and am sure you must have been thinking very bad thoughts about me. But could you blame me really? I mean, you were a bit mysterious, no luggage and all. What I had to do to try and make amends was to get some of your poems from the library – very difficult, the library had to send off for them – and I found some of them rather obscure and others very sad. Very modern, of course. I can’t make up my mind yet about whether I really like them – that sounds ungrateful, doesn’t it, but I do like to think of myself as an Honest Person, but one of our junior English lecturers – did I tell you about him? Harold Pritchard, he’s trying to get a little book of criticism published – was quite gone on them. He said there were curious resemblances to the poems of Yod Crewsy (the more I think of this whole scandalous business the more convinced I am it was a big publicity stunt, and in the presence of the Prime Minister as well, and that makes me think less of him). Then Harold found the same poem in both books, and that gave him an unholy thrill, he loves anything like a literary scandal. There was no doubt, he said, who stole from whom. So he’s written a letter to the Times Literary Supplement and thinks the sparks will fly.

  Where are you, dear Piggy? I wish I could make proper amends. Looking back I see that, despite everything, that Seville night was really romantic – love and your sudden inspiration and my dear moon and even your mistake when, bless you, you were looking for me. Write to me and accept my love if you will and forgive me.

  Your

  Miranda.

  Sitting here on this quiet weekday, the train from royal Rabat just going by on the single-tracked line that separated the Spanish Avenue from the beach cafes, the inkpaint congealing in his ballpoint, the harmless winter approaching, he thought that, despite the luck that had been granted (said, and died), the autumn should, for the sake of justice, flame out with a last act of vengeance. But he could not write the letter and, the letter unwritten, the poem would never flood into the estuary of its sestet. What did he really want from her? His money back? No, this place made enough, even in winter. Her humiliation, her smartness wrecked once more but by more devastating waters than the rain of Castel whatever-it-was, the snivelling, the running eye-shadow, the smooth face collapsed into that of a weary crone? No, not that either. Rawcliffe had taught him pity, that maketh the forests to fail.

  ‘It will die down,’ said the goitrous old man,’ ‘and new sensations will come up. That new shiftless generation must be fed with fresh novelties.’ He took some Wilson’s snuff, then hawked, carked, and shivered with the dour pleasure of it.

  ‘Not a religious man,’ said the snapping ex-major. ‘But when I see a central tenet of my father’s faith – he held it, poor devil, through all his suffering – when I see that, I say, turned to a trick or gimmick or whatever the fashionable word is, then I wonder. I wonder what new blasphemy they can devise.’ He shuddered his whisky down in one.

  ‘No morals,’ said the twittering man. ‘No loyalty. They will turn on their friends as if they were enemies. It was at a private party that this youth with the gun boasted in his cups. Isn’t that so, Rawcliffe?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ said Enderby. ‘I don’t read the papers.’

  ‘Very wise too,’ said the senior elder. ‘Stay away from that world. Get on with your job, whatever it is.’

  ‘Sam Foote,’ said the goitrous old man. ‘A ridiculous name. Probably made up.’

  ‘Samuel Foote,’ said Enderby, ‘was an eighteenth-century actor and playwright. He was also an agent for small beer. And they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.’

  There was a silence. ‘They did, eh?’ said the senior. ‘Well, suppose I’d better be thinking about getting home for lunch. Takes me longer and longer. Walking, that is.’

  ‘He wrote that,’ said Enderby. ‘It was a test-piece. This other man said tha
t he could recite anything hearing it once only.’

  ‘On my way too,’ said the ex-major. ‘Bit of a blow on the prom.’

  The door opened and a girl came in, very tanned. She wore, as for high summer, a simple green frock well above her knees, deepcut at her young bosom, her golden arms totally bare. She carried a beach-bag. She smiled shyly and went up to Manuel at the bar. ‘I understand,’ she said, ‘that I can hire a changing-cubicle or whatever it’s called.’ Her voice was low in pitch, the accent classless. Susannah among the elders, Enderby thought. The ex-major said quietly:

  ‘Susannah among the elders.’ Enderby could see them feeling old, impotent, lust too tired within to rage at so many opportunities lost, the time gone, perhaps death to be their next season. And himself? He got up and said to the girl:

  ‘Well, you can actually, but –’ She looked at him from green eyes sprinkled, like a sireh quid, with gold. They were set apart but not too much: enough for beauty, perhaps honesty; not enough for the panic mindless world of the animals. Hair? Enderby at once, to his surprise, thought of the flower called montbretia. ‘What I mean is that, surely, it’s getting a bit cold now. This time of the year I mean.’

  ‘I don’t feel the cold. A cold sea doesn’t frighten me.’ As in an allegory or Punch title-page, the aged trundled off – winter or war or industrial depression or an all-round bad year – from the presence of youth as peace, spring, a change of government. They creaked and groaned, snorted, limped, winced at arteriosclerotic calf-ache, went. One or two waved tiredly at Enderby from beyond the closed glass door, a safe distance. ‘Could I have one then? For a couple of days. Do I pay in advance?’

  ‘No, no, no need – Certainly. Un llave, Manuel.’

  ‘Numero ocho,’ Manuel smiled.