‘Even bad art,’ Enderby solemnly said, half-empty mug in paws, ‘is made out of elemental cries for help.’ But she had gone.
Mrs Johnson sang crackily a song about the itty bitty baby born in Baithlaihaim as she served breakfast. Here was he, Enderby the all too white man, Bradcaster pink mitigated by Tangerine bronze, at home, dusky Morocco a mere station in its direction, in a black household. He could see himself for ever here, drinking ever stronger tea and reading the Book of Deuteronomy with Mrs Johnson, cracking the kids’ woolly heads when they were fretful, waiting for the daughter-Female Friend-goddess-impossible she to be deglamorized on a flying visit. After breakfast of two fried eggs and ham and a sort of white porridge (get dem greeerts down, dey’ll do you gud), he shaved, dressed in Christmas clerical (all metaphors in time become reality) grey, then trembled. God knew what he could do about this bloody sermon. Leave it to chance, muse, Holy Ghost? Cynicism. Compoundedly dangerous American visit. Surely the God of the black Baptists could not be less vindictive than dead Will?
They were driven by May Johnson down the main boulevard of Chapel Hill, Enderby at back flanked by kids. Both ladies were demurely hatted and gloved. They arrived at a whiteboard building of simple pseudocolonial charm between a Howard Johnson restaurant that looked much more like a church, spire and all, and a garage where hammering artisans defied Christmas. The chapel had its own carpark, and this was already full of Plymouths and Oldsmobiles. There were a lot of women waiting to go in, all blackly radiant in the mild sun, and black respectable men in decent suits. Big treble event this, evidently: Christmas, big singing star back in hometown, foreign Reverend: Mrs Johnson had clearly been busy on the telephone. A genuine or right Reverend, named on the outside board as Dr R. F. Grigson, greeted Enderby with warm black hands and secular gusto. A big man took Enderby on one side and handed him his card: Condor Life. You travellin a lot, Reverend, your dearest and nearest in need of first class protection, we have lil talk after service. Then they went into a plain place of worship with a dais, a lectern, and an electronic organ. The worshippers, gleamingly teethed and boldly coloured, were stained glass enough.
It was not at all like the Catholic masses of Enderby’s youth, dyspeptic Maynooth leprechauns peevish about last week’s collections, or the anaemic evensongs of his brief curative Anglicanism, with fine if archaic Jacobean prose apologetically delivered by cricketing rectors and very well-made hymns bleated by conservativeclubcakebaking etiolated housewives with herb gardens. They went in a lot for extravagant joy here, also a healthy concern with sin. They cried yeah, that right and we hearin you. May Johnson, as he ought to have expected, sang what was called a gospel song to a jazzy accompaniment from a young buck whose grin mimicked his two electronic manuals, while the congregation clapped in rhythm:
And when I get to heaven where I belong
It gonna be Christmas all eternity long.
They smiled on him with encouragement and expectation when he was called upon. He stifflegged it to the lectern and surveyed them all sickly, fine bright open godly black sods as they were, no, not sods, decent people really. May Johnson expected the best from him, he could see that. Not let her down. He had given, when in the army, lectures on the British Way and Purpose, now very remote entities and never easily definable even then. He had delivered a disastrous speech when receiving the Goodby gold medal for poetry, which, along with the meagre cheque that went with it, he had at once given back. He had always found it difficult to be insincere and that perhaps was why he had not got on in the world. He was worried now about the danger of sincerity breaking in. He was not worried about either articulacy or audibility. They would hear him all right. He said:
‘My name is Enderby.’ They all smiled at the quaintness of his accent. ‘Enderby the poet,’ he unwisely continued. They did not now all smile. ‘So they call me sometimes in my own country, because I have endeavoured to praise the good of life and deplore its evil, and do other things as well, in the medium of verse. There is nothing wrong with being a poet, so long as one’s poetry is not obscene or Godless or ill composed. King David, as you all know from your psalms, was a poet, and King Solomon, he er –’ – he was not sure whether son or father, like a character in Ulysses – ‘was also a poet, as you know from the Song of Songs that is his. A poet can be a witness for the divine posterior, that is to say truth, and he can thus be a martyr, which means witness in Greek.’ The Reverend Grigson went amen at that. ‘Now tomorrow is the feastday of St Stephen, who was battered to death with stones because he was a Christian, and you know who ordered the battering – Saul, who later had a sort of epileptic fit on the road to Damascus and was changed into St Paul.’ To some in the congregation, including Mrs Johnson, this seemed to be news. Enderby had already lost his connection. Poets. Martyrs. ‘William Shakespeare, a great martyr or witness for the truth, put himself into Psalm 46 – look it up after your Christmas dinner or even before – forty-sixth word from the beginning, forty-sixth word from the end, if you omit the flourish Selah.’ Some of the older and ignorant, who presumably believed that the King James version was the direct word of God, no nonsense about having to go through the Hebrew first, showed wideeyed shock. ‘Do not be afraid of poets,’ Enderby cried bitterly, ‘since they are often God’s instruments, though they can also be the devil’s as well, though not usually at the same time if it can be avoided.’ Then: ‘Martyrs, I said, and I say again martyrs. Your people have been martyrs, witnesses to the devilry and Godlessness of racial oppression. You think of the white man as the enemy, but I ask you to remember that white men have suffered, if you can accept the Jews as white, women too. My own people suffered in England in the times of the Godless Tudors, a sort of gingerhaired people from the principality of Wales, not of the race of the fish, mammal really, that swallowed Jonah, if you can believe that, a whale’s throat being somewhat narrow.’ They all looked at him in wonder, no cries of dat right and I hearin ya. ‘My family stuck to God’s truth as taught by the Church of Rome, and, by Christ, we suffered for it. Later, of course,’ he added speedily, ‘we became Baptist, another true faith battered by the forces of oppression. Oppression,’ he then cried, ‘intolerance, hatred – ah, by God, do we know them? By God we do, and will go on knowing them. Today, as some of you will know, we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ in a filthy stable. He was on the side of intolerance, saying I come to bring not peace but a sword, and on the side of hatred, as of the Pharisees and of even your own father and mother if they got in the way of the truth and the light. Christians have been oppressors throughout the history of the faith, as you know, for it was at least nominal Christians who oppressed your people during the dark days of slavery. Christians oppressing Jews as well as blacks as well as Muslims, for the most part teetotal pederastic people, and of course the other way round, although neither Jews nor blacks have had much opportunity to be oppressive, except in Israel and Africa. Still, everything comes to those that wait. Some call slavery and oppression modes of cultural transmission, meaning that if you had not been enslaved and oppressed you would still be worshipping stocks and stones and sucking jujus in the heart of darkness, well, not quite, most of you coming from West Africa, an explanation of your natural artistry, don’t bother to try to learn Swahili, that is an East Coast lingua franca. Therefore I ask you to move forward,’ he said, ‘forward to an age in which none of these things will happen, except in the Godless media, of which the damnable stage is one, and try to get on with the job, whatever it happens to be, insurance or singing or bongo drumming, and let us try to make a little money for our children and our children’s children and, if the hideous future which has not yet come about but, by heaven, will come about will permit it, even our children’s children’s children, yea, unto seventy times seven. Not that I personally, so far as I know, I was briefly stationed in Catania in World War Two, have children of any colour whatsoever. Today is the feast of the holiest of all the children and, by God, let us not forget it. In nomin
e Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,’ making the sign of the cross, ‘Amen.’ Then he got down.
9
THEY WERE SITTING together on the flight back up north, so she had been retransformed into April Elgar, and very lovely and mythical with it. Her hair, newly straightened, was all ink and health. She was else fresh Blue Mountain coffee mixed with the morning’s milk, scarlet too, dress and liprouge and fingernails and, as Enderby knew though scarlet leather hid them, toenails as well.
‘That’s what she said,’ she said, ‘when you weren’t there, in the john or some place.’
‘In the er yes,’ Enderby corroborated. ‘Never ask me to be insincere again. God won’t attack, anyway. He could see through the confusion. A great one for sorting out chaos. In London on a hoarding I saw DEVLIN THE BIG NAME IN DEMOLITION. I misread that Devlin, naturally. It’s the other up in Indiana we have to watch. Shakespeare, that is.’
‘It’s not Indiaaaaahna, it’s Indianna, like in bananna.’
‘Banahna,’ Enderby corrected. ‘That thing with jam and sliced bananas and custard your ah momma made was very good, took me back to my infancy. The turkey was good too, very crisp on the outside. But strong tea is her real, appropriate when you come to think of it, forte. She said I ought to stay on and help look after the kids and have some real good home cooking. She seemed to think I was not very well. A consequence of.’
‘They’re charitable people,’ she said, ‘and don’t you forget it. My momma told everybody you been working too hard and got the word of the Lord all balled up. That’s charity.’
‘Caritas,’ Enderby said. ‘Well, she’s welcome to come to Tangiers. Kids as well. Do them good, they can learn Moghrabi Arabic and be black Muslims or something. No, they can’t, being Baptist, I see that. You too,’ he then said. ‘You’ll knock them ah cold.’ He then saw her very clearly lying naked in the sun and felt his flesh respond terribly. But she wouldn’t lie in the sun, brown enough already. He spread Time magazine over his crotch. She said:
‘That’s in Africa some place, right?’
‘North. The kingdom of Morocco. Not what they call Black Africa. This unitary concept you get over here from some of those woolhaired louts is a load of ah nonsense. Africa’s very big, you know. So big that nobody can swallow it. They huddle into tribes in self-protection from it, you know. Anyway, we’re all exiles. You and I, anyway. As for colour, that’s only like furniture. A green chair or an orange one, it’s for putting your fundament on. If white’s no good it’s because it has the wrong connotations. Leprosy, slugs, and all the rest of it. It’s not real white anyway. If you think I like being white you’re wrong. I see myself white writhing over your divine brownness. An abomination. I beg your pardon. Shouldn’t have ah externalized that vision. Better off as we are,’ he added vaguely.
‘How do you mean – as we are?’
‘I love you,’ Enderby said boldly. ‘I shall love you till the day I die. There,’ he added unnecessarily, ‘I’ve said it. Demand nothing. Totally disinterested. Perhaps,’ he superadded, ‘I can start writing poems again. Love poems. From a distance. Me white in Africa, you black here. Not really black, of course. A damnable politicoracial abstraction. There,’ he finished.
She sighed out cigarette smoke. ‘Brother,’ she then said, ‘you sure are one large pain in the ass.’
‘Unfair. Disinterested. Ask nothing. If you wish, I apologize for that ah declaration. We’re coming into Chicago now, my kind of town, sorry, that’s back in Tangiers. Then back on the job, forget what I said. Partners in crime only. It is a bloody crime too. The things we’re doing to Shakespeare. Then I pack your divine image among my dirty shirts and go. Love poems.’
‘Pain,’ she varied, as they prepared to get out, ‘in the divine fundament.’
‘What God showed to Moses,’ Enderby said, following her down the aisle. ‘I’ve often wondered why. God with a bottom. Some very profound significance.’
When they had marched a mile or so, to the accompaniment of ubiquitous Vivaldi, nice change from pop, pop of its day when you came to think of it, to the area whence the aircraft for Indianapolis took off, Enderby at once sat down and chewed a couple of Pepts. Silversmith was there, with two other men. ‘Hi,’ he offered. He effected laconic introductions. ‘Len Bodiman, orchestrator. Pip Wesel, MD.’ Bodiman carried a heavy canvas bag which presumably contained what would be called the score. His glasses, in heavy black mourning frames, were too big for him, and he kept them on by variously grimacing. He was a big soft man in a kind of Churchillian sirensuit. Enderby said:
‘What kind of orchestra? Shawms, recorders, viols da gamba, sackbuts? Authentic, I mean?’ It was this Pip Wesel who replied. Enderby assumed that Silversmith’s rude terming of him as Mentally Deficient was either a joke or a tribute to his creative madness in whatever field he wandered, scenic artistry perhaps, but the young man, who was chihuahua-hairless, was full of uncoordinated gestures and he now bleated several times. He said:
‘We’ve been hearing about you. Mike here said that’s what you’d say. You want madrigals too? Hey nonny nonny and all that shit?’
Enderby felt his neck getting thicker. ‘Don’t,’ he threatened, ‘use that word in the presence of this lady here.’ April Elgar was standing somewhat apart, and Enderby saw himself, with bitter regret, as physically not very disjunct from these three ugly leerers. White and unbalanced, paunchy and full of tics. He pulled in his own belly since he could not push in theirs. He had a vision of April Elgar writhing on a bed with a black man of comparable beauty. He nodded with desperate regret and satisfaction. April Elgar said:
‘Save your breath, kid. He’s crammed with that er commodity.’ She had learned something from him, Enderby, then. Wesel said:
‘Okay okay, colleagues, right? Working together, right? Peace and love and all that shit, right?’
‘There you go again,’ Enderby said. ‘And what precisely is your ah role in this enterprise?’
‘MD,’ Wesel said.
‘That’s frank, or perhaps facetious, but what is it precisely that you do?’
‘He wags the stick,’ Bodiman said. ‘He’s the stickwagger.’ And then, to April Elgar, ‘You got rhythm yet, Ape?’
‘Don’t,’ Enderby began, ‘call –’
‘One of the big black fallacies,’ Bodiman continued. ‘Rhythm as the inborn inheritance of the jungle.’
‘I got more rhythm in my ass,’ April Elgar said unwisely, ‘than you got in your whole fat sluggy ofay corpse, brother. I can see we going to get along just fine.’
‘Shakespeare at work,’ Enderby pronounced. ‘Sowing dissension. It’s the curse he prophesied. Moving his bones.’ But nobody listened. They had been told through a loudspeaker to get on the aircraft, but Bodiman found the opportunity to say:
‘In your ass, right,’ and she:
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘He’s not referring,’ Wesel said, ‘to your singing, if that’s what it’s called.’ And then he skipped ahead, bleating. If Enderby had had the money, he would have limped back through the crowds and Vivaldi to the international segment of O’Hare, there to purchase a homeward ticket and get, as they said here, the hell out. But he was chained. On the aircraft, next to an April Elgar who brooded and drank whisky sours in excess, by some dispensation, of the number allowed by the paternalistic airline, he gloomily regarded his new digital watch, faintly fascinated by the onward march of the square figures which turned one into the other with insolent ease, a kind of numerical paranomasia. Then he switched the instrument to a calculator and added up large sums.
He was adding up even larger sums on his bed later that day, having eaten hamburger steak with fried eggs, drunk lager that tasted of onions and water, taken Pepts and Windkill, then sadly onanized. He should rightly have done so to the stimulus of April Elgar’s present, but it was not aromatic of her as a shoe or stocking would have been. The present was really an unwilled invitation to accept a very dull f
uture in which one second was the same as another, as symbolized by the minimal metamorphosis from number to number, in which the achievement of a minute and later an hour was, so muted was the change, nothing for the instrument to crow over. The sums he added were, though large, small enough for him to check by simple arithmetic. The instrument told, it seemed, no lies and might be trusted with huge multiplications and even square roots. Then there was a knocking at his door. It was April Elgar in plastic rainhood and raincoat. It was hard to tell whether her face had been irrigated by rain or was being irrigated by tears. She said:
‘I’ve moved in here. I can’t stand the bastards.’
‘You mean,’ Enderby asked, ‘in here?’
‘Not in here, stoopid. In the hotel. Just down the corridor.’ And then she sat on the nearer bed, that on which Enderby, in shirt, trousers and socks, had been lying calculating, and wept. Enderby sat next to her. He said:
‘Take those things off. The outer ones, I mean. Then tell me why. Crying, that is. Not that there’s any reason why you should. Explain, I mean. We all ought to be crying all the bloody time.’ She needed, Enderby could see, comfort, so he put his arms about her. So, in his arms and in plastic rainwear, she sobbed. He patted the plastic rainwear, going ‘There, there.’ And then: ‘Insulted you, did they, those white bastards? And then there’s coming away from home and leaving your mother and your kids, a known loving ambience, and meeting sneering swine making uncalled-for references to your private life I took them to be, believe me, I don’t believe any of it, I know you, it’s the snarl the jealous world delivers to talent and beauty, there, there.’ He nearly added, unthinking, his stepmother’s cantrip: Cry more and you’ll pee less. She stopped crying very suddenly, wiped her eyes and face vigorously on Enderby’s shirt, then said, as all women were supposed to say, according to Enderby’s reading, in such circumstances:
The Complete Enderby Page 69
