The Complete Enderby
Page 42
They all – Tetuani clearing the old men’s whisky-glasses, Antonio at the kitchen door, Manuel from the arena with its furled umbrellas, Enderby turned in his chair – watched her prancing seawards over the deserted sand, in scanty crimson, her hair loose. Enderby turned back in rage to his table. He took paper and wrote fiercely: ‘You bitch, you know you ruined my life. You also stole my verse to give to that blasphemous false commercial Lazarus of yours. Well, you won’t get away with it. One of the stolen poems had already been published in one of my volumes. I’m going to sue, you’re all going to suffer.’ And then he could see Vesta standing there, cool, smart in spotless dacron, unperturbed, saying that she wouldn’t suffer, only that mouthing creature of hers, and he was going to be abandoned anyway, past his peak, the time for the chaotopoeic groups coming, or the duo called Lyserge and Diethyl, or Big D and the Cube and the Hawk and the Blue Acid. Or worse. Enderby took another sheet of paper and wrote:
Smell and fearful and incorrigible knackers
With the crouched pole under
And strings of his inner testes strewn
Over curried pancreas and where the
Hollowed afternoon vomits
Semen of ennui and
And and and. Send it round, signed, to the bloody Doggy Wog, showing that I can beat them at their own game if I want to, but the game isn’t worth the, in Walkerian locution, turn-the-handle. And, amigo with the onion, I know what’s in the carta you wanted to bring round to my lodgings where my razor and antisolar spectacle clip-on and few dirty handkerchiefs have been long snapped up by those who had not that night yet been betrayed to the police by fat Napo. Khogh. It was some word of their language, no deformed proper name from another. And the letter surely says that he saw who did it, hombre, and told Scotland Yard as much. A curious and perhaps suspicious lack of treachery from treacherous Spain. Enderby felt ungratefully gloomy. All was set for writing and yet he could not write. Draft after unfinished draft. Gloomily he read through his sonnet octave again.
Augustus on a guinea sat in state. This is the eighteenth century, the Augustan age, and that guinea is a reduction of the sun. The sun no proper study. Exactly, the real sun being God and that urban life essentially a product of reason, which the sun melts. And no more sun-kings, only Hanoverians. But each shaft of filtered light a column. Meaning that you can’t really do without the sun, which gives life, so filter it through smoked glass, using its energy to erect neo-classic structures in architecture or literature (well, The Rambler, say or The Spectator, and there’s a nuance in ‘shaft’ suggesting wit). Classic craft abhorred the arc or arch. Yes, and those ships sailed a known world, unfloodable by a rational God, and the arc-en-ciel covenant is rejected. Something like that. To circulate (blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight. Clear enough. You need the roundness of the guinea only so that it can roll along the straight streets or something of commercial enterprise. The round bores of the pipes are not seen on the surface, the pipes in essence being means of linking points by the shortest or most syllogistical way. And, to return to that pipe business, remember that pipes were smoked in coffee-houses and that news and ideas circulated there. And that craft business ties up with Lloyd’s coffee-house. As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed, Thyrsis was Jack. A bit fill-in for rhyme’s sake, but, rejecting the sun, you reject life and can only accept it in stylized mythological or eclogue forms. But Jack leads us to Jean-Jacques. Crousseau on a raft sought Johnjack’s rational island – the pivot coming with the volta. Defoe started it off: overcome Nature with reason. But the hearer will just hear Crusoe. Jack is dignified to John, glorification of common, or natural, man. Then make Nature reason and you start to topple into reason’s antithesis, you become romantic. Why? A very awkward job, the continuation.
‘Lovely.’ She had come running in, wet. She wrung a hank of hair, wetting the floor. Fat drops broke on her gold limbs. Her high-arched foot left Man Friday spoors. Seeing her round jigging nates, Enderby could have died with regret and rage. ‘Like a fool I brought everything except a towel. Could you possibly –’ She smiled, her chin dripping as from a crunching of grapes.
‘Just a minute.’ He puffed to his bedroom and brought out a bath-towel, not yet, if ever to be, used by him, and also the gaudy robe, not greatly stained, that Rawcliffe had died in. He put it round her shoulders. Clear gold skin without a blemish and a flue of ridiculous delicacy. She rubbed her hair dry with vigour, smiling her thanks. Manuel hovered smiling. She smiled back. Enderby tried to smile.
‘Could I,’ she smiled, ‘have a drink? Something a bit astringent. Let me see –’ The bottles smiled. No, they bloody well didn’t: Enderby was not going to have that. ‘A whisky sour.’
‘Weeskee –?’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Enderby. ‘Fetch some white of egg. Clara de huevo.’ Manuel ran into the kitchen. She rubbed herself all over in, with dead Rawcliffe’s brilliant robe. ‘A difficult art,’ blabbed Enderby, ‘making a whisky sour.’ That sounded like boasting. ‘Americans are very fond of them.’ An egg cracked loudly off. She rubbed and rubbed. Enderby got behind the bar and looked for the plastic lemon that contained lemon-juice. Manuel, having brought a tea-cup with egg-white in it and some minute embedded triangles of shell, watched her rub instead of his master mix. ‘There,’ said Enderby, quite soon.
She took it and sipped. ‘Hm. Is nobody else drinking?’
‘About time,’ Enderby said, ‘I had my preprandial, if that’s the right word.’ He seemed to himself to simper, pouring out straight Scotch.
‘Do I pay now or do you give me a bill afterwards? And can I get lunch here, talking about preprandials?’
‘Oh,’ said Enderby, ‘have this one on me. It’s a kind of custom here, the first drink of a new customer on the house.’ And ‘Oh, yes. You can have steak and salad or something like that. Or spaghetti with something or other. Anything you like, really. Within reason, that is.’ Reason. That brought him back to that bloody poem. To his shock, he saw her bending over his table, looking openly at his papers.
‘Hm,’ she said, having sipped again. ‘You’ve certainly got it in for this person, bitch rather.’
‘That,’ went flustered Enderby, coming round from the counter, ‘is of no consequence. I’m not sending it. It was just an idea, that’s all. Really,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t, you know. Private.’ But it was your privates you were only too ready to expose, wasn’t that so, when you – He felt a kind of tepid pleasure promising warmth, not outrage at all. She sat down in his fireside-type chair. She started reading his octave frowning a little. A curiously tutorial aura seemed to be forming. Enderby went to sit down on one of the stackable chairs near his table.
‘Bring it closer,’ she said. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘Well,’ babbled Enderby, ‘it’s a sonnet, very strict. It’s an attempt, really, to tie up the Age of Reason with the French Revolution. Or on another level, the rational and the romantic can be regarded as aspects of each other, if you see what I mean.’ Sitting, he moved towards her without getting up, as though this were an invalid chair. ‘What I have to do is to show that romantic curves are made out of classical straightness. Do you see what I mean?’ And then, gloomily, to himself: Probably not. She was young. She had perhaps mourned Yod Crewsy’s death, gone to some open-air evangelical meeting on his resurrection.
She closed her eyes tight. ‘Keep a triplet pattern in your sestet,’ she said. ‘A breath between your cdc and your dcd. How will classical pillars become Gothic arches? The sun will melt them, I suppose. And then you ought to have the guillotine. A very rational machine – sorry about the rhyme, but it’s rhymes you’re after, isn’t it?’
‘What,’ Enderby asked gravely, ‘would you like for lunch? There’s Antonio, you see, waiting there ready to cook it.’ Antonio stood at the kitchen door, trying to smile while chewing something. She nodded, not smiling but puckered charmingly, thoughtful. Guillotine, machine, seen, scene.
‘Well,’ Enderby mumbled, ‘I don’t normally till – We close for the siesta, you see, and then I usually have –’
‘I hate eating on my own. Besides, we’ve got to work this thing out. Is it something with meat in it?’
‘Well,’ Enderby said, ‘I have a sort of stew going most of the time. Beef and potatoes and turnips and things. I don’t know whether you’d like it, really.’
‘With pickled onions,’ she said. ‘And Worcestershire sauce, plenty of it. I like gross things sometimes.’ Enderby blushed. ‘I like to come down to earth sometimes.’
‘Here with your family?’ She didn’t answer. Monied, probably. ‘Where are you staying? The Rif? The El Greco?’
‘Oh, vaguely. It’s right up the hill. Now, then. Try it.’
‘Eh?’ And, while Tetuani set places in the conservatory, he tried it.
Sought Johnjack’s rational island, loath to wait
Till the sun, slighted, took revenge so that
The pillars nodded, melted, and were seen
As Gothic shadows where a goddess sat –
‘Volta not strong enough. The rhyme-words are far too weak. That that is shocking.’
Then, over the thick stew, grossly over-sauced, with pickled onions crunched whole on the side and a bottle of thick red eely alumy local wine, they, he rather, literally sweated over the rest of the sestet.
For, after all, that rational machine
Imposed on all men by the technocrat
Was patented by Dr Guillotine.
‘This is terrible,’ she said. ‘Such bloody clumsiness.’ She breathed on him (though a young lady should not eat, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions. ‘I’d like a bit of cheese now,’ she crunched. ‘Have you any Black Diamond cheddar? Not too fresh, if that’s possible. I like it a bit hard.’
‘Would you also like,’ asked Enderby humbly, ‘some very strong tea? We do a very good line in that.’
‘It must be really strong, though. I’m glad there’s something you do a very good line in. These lines are a bloody disgrace. And you call yourself a poet.’
‘I didn’t – I never –’ But she smiled when she said it.
3
Enderby dreamt about her that night. It was a nightmare really. She was playing the piano in her scanty green dress for a gang of near-closing-time pot-swinging male singers. But it was not a pub so much as a long dark gymnasium. On top of the piano lay a yawning black dog, and Enderby, knowing it was evil, tried to warn her against it, but she and the singers only laughed. At last, though, he dragged her out protesting into the winter night (but she did not seem to feel the cold) of a grimy Northern industrial town. They had to get away quickly, by bus or tram or cab, or the dog would be out after her. He rushed her, still protesting, to a main road, and he stopped, with no difficulty, a southbound truck. She began to think the adventure funny and she made jokes to the driver. But she did not see that the driver was the dog. Enderby had to open the truck cabin door while the vehicle was in motion and get her on to the road again to thumb a lift. Again it was the dog. And again. The new drivers were always the old dog and, moreover, though they barked they were southbound, they would almost at once turn left and left again, taking her passengers back north. Finally Enderby lost her and found himself in a town very much like Tangiers, though in a summer too scorching for North Africa. He had a room but it was at the top of a high stair. Entering, he met with no surprise this girl and her mother, an older Miss Boland. His heart pounded, he was pale, they kindly gave him a glass of water. But then, though there was no wind, the shutters of the window began to vibrate, and he heard a distant rather silly voice that somehow resembled his own. ‘I’m coming,’ it said. The girl screamed now, saying that it was the dog. But he swam up through leagues of ocean, gasping for air. Then he awoke.
He had foul dyspepsia, and, switching on the bedside lamp, he took ten Bisodol tablets. But the word love, he noticed, was in his mouth in the form of a remotish pickled-onion aftertaste, and he resented that. The moon was dim. Some Moorish drunks quarrelled in the distance and, more distant, real dogs started a chain of barking. He was not having it, it was all over. He drank from a bottle of Vittel, went brarrgh (and she had done that too, just once and with no excuse-me), then padded in his pyjama top to the bathroom. The striplight above the mirror suddenly granted him a grousing image of The Poet. He sat down on the lavatory seat and, a big heterosexual pornographic volume on his knees as a writing-board, he tried to get the dream into a poem, see what it was all about. It was a slow job.
At the end of the dark hall he found his love
Who, flushed and gay,
Pounded with walking hand and flying fingers
The grinning stained teeth for a wassail of singers
That drooped around, while on the lid above
The dog unnoticed, waiting, lolling lay.
She had been unwilling to give her name, saying it was not relevant. She had gone off about three o’clock, back in green, swinging her towelless beach-bag, giving no clue where she was going. Manuel, out later to pick up the cigarette order, said he had seen her coming out of the Doggy Wog. Enderby was jealous about that: was she helping those filthy drug-takers with their filthy drugged verses? Who was she, what did she want? Was she an anonymous agent of the British Arts Council, sent out to help with culture in, in Blake’s phrase, minute particulars?
He noticed, cried, dragged her away from laughter.
Lifts on the frantic road
From loaded lorries helpful to seek safe south
Slyly sidestreeted north. Each driver’s mouth,
Answering her silly jokes, he gasped at after
The cabin-door slammed shut: the dogteeth showed.
She had better stop being a dream of boyhood, for it was all too late. He had reached haven, hadn’t he? He would not be in the bar tomorrow morning (this morning really); he would be out taking a walk.
At last, weary, out of the hot noon’s humming,
Mounting his own stair
It was no surprise to find a mother and daughter,
The daughter she. Hospitable, she gave him water.
Windless, the shutters shook.
This was all messed up. The story wouldn’t run to another stanza, and this stanza was going to be too long. And the rhythm was atrocious.
A quiet voice said: ‘I’m coming.’
‘Oh God God it’s the dog,’ screamed the daughter,
But he, up the miles of leaden water,
Frantically beat for air.
A good discussion about that with somebody, over whisky or stepmother’s tea: that was what was needful. The realization suddenly shocked him. Had not the poet to be alone? He converted that into bowel language and noised it grimly in the still night, clenching the appropriate muscles, but the noise was hollow.
And so she was there again in the lemony Tangerine sunlight of nearwinter, this time bringing her towel. The old men, perhaps frightened of the gunpowder running out of the heels of their boots, had stayed away, but there were other customers. Two youngish film-men, in Morocco to choose locations that might serve for Arizona, kept going ja at each other and greedily scoffing Antonio’s tapas – fat black olives; hot fried liver on bread; Spanish salad of onion, tomato, vinegar, chopped peppers. An Englishman in fluent but very English Spanish, expressed to Manuel his love of baseball, a game he had followed passionately when he lived three miles outside Havana. A quiet man, perhaps a Russian, sat at the corner of the counter, steadily and to no effect downing Spanish gin.
‘Not worth writing,’ she said, ‘a poem like that.’ She had changed back into a crimson dress even briefer than the green one. The baseball aficionado, greying vapidly handsome, kept giving her frank glances, but she did not seem to notice. ‘You yourself may be moved by it,’ she said, ‘because of the emot
ional impact of the dream itself. But it’s dreary old sex images, isn’t it, no more. The dog, I mean. North for tumescence. And you’re trying to protect me from yourself, or yourself from me – both silly.’ Enderby looked at her bitterly, desirable and businesslike as she was. He said:
‘That love in the first line. I’m sorry about that. I don’t mean it, of course. It was just in the dream.’
‘All right, we’re scrapping it anyway.’ And she crumpled the work of three hours of darkness and threw it on the floor. Tetuani gladly picked it up and bore it off to nest with other garbage. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we’ll go for a walk. There’s another sonnet we have to work out, isn’t there?’
‘Another?’
‘One you mentioned yesterday. About the Revolt of the Angels or something.’
‘I’m not sure that I –’ He frowned. She punched him vigorously on the arm, saying:
‘Oh, don’t dither so. We haven’t much time.’ She led him out of the bar, stronger than she looked, and the customers, all of whom were new, assumed that Enderby was an old customer who had had enough.
‘Look,’ Enderby said, when they stood on the esplanade, ‘I don’t understand anything about this at all. Who are you? What right have you? Not,’ he added, ‘that I don’t appreciate – But really, when you come to consider it –’