The Complete Enderby (22 page)

‘Mississippi, California, Oklahoma.’ It was like something from a sort of holy Walt Whitman.

‘Rah, rah, rah! The Pope, the Pope, the Pope!’

‘Oh Christ,’ sobbed Enderby, ‘please let me get out, please. I’m not well, I’m ill, I’ve got to get to a lavatory.’

‘The Church Militant is here,’ said Vesta nastily, ‘and all you want is a lavatory.’

‘I do, I do.’ Enderby, his eyes full of tears, was now grappling with a redolent Spaniard who would not let him pass. The French child still cried, pointing up at Enderby. Suddenly there was a sort
of
exordium to prayer and everybody began to kneel in the dust of the courtyard. Enderby became a kind of raging schoolmaster in a sea of stunted children. She too knelt; Vesta knelt; she got down on her knees with the rest of them. ‘Get up!’ bawled Enderby, and, like a sergeant, ‘Get off your bloody knees!’

‘Kneel down,’ she ordered, her eyes like powerful green poisons. ‘Kneel down. Everybody’s looking at you.’

‘Oh my God,’ wept Enderby, praying against the current, and he began to try to get out again, lifting his legs as though striding through treacle. He trod on knees, skirts, even shoulders, and was cursed roundly even by some who prayed with frightening sincerity, their eyes dewy with prayer. Stumbling, himself cursing, goose-stepping clumsily, laying episcopal palms on heads, he cut through the vast cake of kneelers and reached, almost vomiting, blind with sweat, the gate and the hill-road. As he staggered down the hill, past the smiling vendors, he muttered to himself, ‘I was a bloody fool to come.’ From the top of the hill came the sound of a great Amen.

‘
Cefil Uensdi
,’ said the man. ‘
Totnam Otispar. Cardiff Siti
.’ He had a surprised lion-face, though hairless, with a few wavy filaments crawling over his otherwise bare scalp. Staring all the time at Enderby as though convinced Enderby wished to mesmerize him and too polite (a) to object that he did not wish to be mesmerized and (b) to announce that the mesmerism was ineffectual, he ever and anon brought, with a bold arm gesture, a cigarette-end to his lips, drawing on this with a desperate groan as if it were a sole source of oxygen and he dying.

‘
Tutti buoni
,’ nodded Enderby over his wine. ‘All football very good.’

The man gripped Enderby’s left forearm and gave a mirthless grin of deep deep blood-brotherhood’s understanding. They were sitting at rough trestle-tables in the open air. Here Frascati had reached its last gasp of cheapness – golden gallons for a few bits of tinkly metal. ‘
Ues Bromic
,’ the man went on in his litany. ‘
Mancesita
lunaiti
. Uolveramiton Uanarar
.’ This, though more heartening than the geographical manifests up the hill, was beginning to weary Enderby. He wondered vaguely if perhaps that was what Etruscan had sounded like. Up on the main road, beyond the dark and nameless trees that were a wall to this sky-roofed tavern, the pilgrims could be heard coming back to their buses, walking slowly and with dignity now after the comic freewheeling down the hill. If Vesta had any sense at all she would know where to find him. Not that, in his present mood, he cared much whether she found him or not. Next to the lion-faced man with the football litany lolled a patriot who did not believe that Mussolini was really dead: like King Arthur he would rise with unsheathed sword to avenge his country’s new wrongs. This man said that the English had always been the friends of Mussolini; Italian and Briton together had fought to expel the foul Tedesco. He bunched one side of his face often at Enderby, raising his thumb like an emperor at the games, winking in complicity. There were other drinkers on the periphery, some with bad unsouthern teeth, one carrying on his shoulder an ill-kempt parrot that squawked part of a Bellini aria. There was also a very buxom girl, a country beauty called Bice, who brought round the wine. Enderby did not, would not, lack company. He only wished his Italian were better. But ‘Blackburn Rovers’ he fed to the litanist and ‘Newcastle United’; to the patriot ‘Addis Ababa’ and ‘La Fanciulla del Golden West’. Meanwhile thunder flapped with extreme gentleness on the other side of the lake. ‘Garibaldi,’ he said. ‘Long live Italian Africa!’

When Vesta at last arrived the pleasant dirty drinking-yard at once was disinfected into a background for a
Vogue
fashion pose. She looked tired, but her calm and elegance fluttered all present, making even the roughest drinkers consider removing their caps. Some, remembering that they were Italian, said dutifully, ‘
Molto bella
’ and made poulterer’s pinching gestures to the air. Without preamble she said to Enderby, ‘I knew I’d find you in some such place as this. I’m fed up. I’m sick to death. You seem to be doing your utmost to make a farce out of our honeymoon and a fool out of me.’

‘Sit down,’ invited Enderby. ‘Do sit down. Have some of this nice Frascati.’ He bowed her towards a dry and fairly clean part of
the
bench on which he had been sitting. The litanist, grasping that she was
Inglese
, assuming a passion for football in her accordingly, said, ingratiatingly, ‘Arse an all,’ meaning a football team. Vesta would not sit. She said:

‘No. You’re to come with me and look for this coach. What I have to say to you must wait till we get back to Rome. I don’t want to risk breaking down in public.’

‘Peace,’ mocked Enderby. ‘Peace and order. You played a very mean trick on me, and I shan’t forget it in a hurry. A really dirty trick.’

‘Come on. Some of the coaches are going already. Leave that wine and come on.’ Enderby saw that there still remained a half-litre of this precious golden urine. He filled his glass and said, ‘
Salute
.’ His swallow excited cries of ‘
Bravo
’, as enthusiastic as those heard up the sacred hill, though not then for Enderby. ‘Right,’ said Enderby, waving farewell. ‘We’re late,’ said Vesta. ‘Late for that coach. We wouldn’t have been late if I hadn’t had to come looking for you.’

‘It was a mean trick,’ repeated Enderby. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that we were being taken to the Vatican?’

‘Oh, don’t be so stupid. That’s not the Vatican; that’s his summer residence. Now where on earth is this coach?’

There was a bewildering number of coaches, all looking alike. The pilgrims had nestled snugly and smugly in them; some of them were impatiently roaring off. Coaches had settled everywhere – by the roadside, down small hilly streets – like big bugs in bed-crevices. Vesta and Enderby began to examine coaches swiftly but intently, as though they proposed to buy them, passengers and all. None looked familiar, and Vesta made noises of distress. Listening through his thick curtain of wine, Enderby thought he heard the veneers and inlays of Received English stripped roughly off, so that something like raw Lallans became audible, as spicy as home-pickled onions with its gutturals and glottal stops. She was really worried. Enderby said:

‘Damn it all, if they do leave us behind there’s no great harm done. There must be a bus service or trains or taxis or something. It’s not as though we’re lost in the jungle or anything.’

‘You insulted him,’ complained Vesta. ‘It was blasphemous, too. These people take their religion very seriously, you know.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Enderby. Stealthily the sky had, above their searching heads, been clouding over. There was a greenish look in the atmosphere as though the atmosphere proposed, sooner or later, to be sick. From beyond the lake came renewed gentle drummings, as of finger-tips on timpani. ‘It’s going to rain,’ wailed Vesta. ‘Och, we’ll be caught in it. We’ll be drenched.’ But Enderby, in impermeable of wine, said not to worry, they would catch that blasted bus.

But they did not catch it. As soon as they approached a coach, the coach skittishly started up, its gears grinding a derisive expletive all for Enderby. Faces looked down, grinning pilgrims, and some hands waved. It was as though Vesta and Enderby were host and hostess after some huge party, seeing off loads of quite unappreciative guests. ‘He’s done it deliberately,’ cried Vesta. ‘He’s getting his own back. Oh, you
are
a nuisance.’ They hurried towards another coach and, like a kitten in chase-me play, it at once began to move off. There were very few left now, but Enderby was fairly sure that, from one of these few, a Roman face, the ignoble face of a Roman guide, leered and Roman fingers made a complicated gesture of mean triumph.

The timpanists across the lake picked up their felt sticks and rolled for a few bars, while the coaches, as though they could thus escape from bad weather, sang off to the city. The lake underwent complex metallurgical changes and the sky, cloaking hot and fearsome lights, began to sweat, then cry. ‘Oh Jesus,’ called Vesta, ‘here it comes.’ And indeed there it came while they were still half a mile from shelter other than that of trees: the sky cracked open like a waterbutt, and the air became vertical glass down which pail after pail was poured. They dashed blindly towards the lake-side inn, Vesta tottering on her smart spikes, Enderby gripping her elbow as though her arm were a pair of blackboard dividers, already too wet really to be all that urgent about seeking shelter. The deluge made Enderby’s scalp prickle with dandruff, and his fawn summer suit was soaked. But she, poor girl, was already a wreck: hat comically flopping, hair in rat-tails, mascara running, her face that of a crying old crone as though she wept over the disintegration of her
chic
. ‘In here,’ gasped Enderby, steering her straight into a room smelling of size and new paint, empty chairs and tables in it, a sleek boy-waiter admiring the free show of the rain. ‘I think,’ panted
Enderby
, ‘that we’ll have to take a room, if they have one. The first thing to do is to get dry. Perhaps they’ll –’ The waiter called a name, then turned his young empty face back on these two wet ones. Enderby said, ‘
Una camera. Si é possible
.’ The boy called again, an unbroken boy’s yelp under the drumming water. A woman came, creamily fat in a flowered frock, clucked commiseration, took in in a swift look Vesta’s ringed finger, said there was a
camera
with one
letto
. Beside her smiling hugeness Vesta looked a snivelling waif. ‘
Grazie
,’ said Enderby. Lightning cracked momentarily the late-sky, the timpanists counted half a bar and came in with a fine peal, rolling cosmic Berlioz chords. Vesta made the sign of the cross. She was shivering.

‘What,’ asked Enderby, ‘did you do that for?’

‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘it scares me. I can’t stand thunder.’ Enderby felt his stomach turn over when she said that.

Up in the bedroom they confronted each other naked. Somehow, for some reason, Enderby had not expected that, when they had stripped off their drenched clothes and dumped them outside the door, they would confront each other naked. Naked confrontation was supposed to come about otherwise: deliberately, in desire or duty. Enderby had been trying to digest too many other things to foresee this prelapsarian picture (and there up the hill, so neatly fitting into the pattern, was a great postlapsarian witness), for the room was very much like his own as a boy – pictures of St John the Baptist, the Sacred Heart, the B.V.M., a melodramatic Golgotha; a smell of unclean bedclothes, dust, boots, and stale holy water; a stringy unbeaten carpet; a narrow bed. This reproduction of the main stage-set for so many adolescent monodramas, here in Italy under rain, did not depress him: that bedroom had always been an enclave of revolt in stepmother country. Very clearly, lines of an unpublished poem came back to him:

… There were times, misunderstood by the family,

When you, at fifteen, on your summer evening bed

Believed there were ancient towns you might anciently visit.

There might be a neglected platform on some station

And a ticket bought when the clock was off its guard.

Oh, who can dismember the past? The boy on the friendly bed

Lay on the unpossessed mother, the bosom of history,

And is gathered to her at last. And tears I suppose

Still hunger for that reeking unwashed pillow,

That bed ingrained with all the dirt of the past,

The mess and lice and stupidity of the Golden Age,

But a mother and loving, ultimately Eden …

He nodded several times, standing there naked in rainy Italy, thinking that it was a mother he had always wanted, not a stepmother, and he had made that mother himself in his bedroom, made her out of the past, history, myth, the craft of verse. When she was made she became slimmer, younger, more like a mistress; she became the Muse.

Lightning again shivered the firmament and then, after a careful count, the laughing drummers knocked hell out of their resonant membranes. Vesta gave a little scream, put her arms round Enderby’s trunk, and then seemed to try to push herself inside him as though he were a deviscerated rabbit of great size and she a mound of palpitating stuffing. ‘There, there,’ said Enderby, kindly but disturbed: she had no right to bring these stepmother terrors into his adolescent bedroom. Then he sweated, seeing more than a mere fear of thunder. Still, he clasped her to him and soothed her shoulderblades, thinking how such naked contacts had an essential unalluring core of
heartiness
: the slap of palm on buttock; the jelly sound of two moist segments of flesh drawing apart. She shivered: the air had cooled considerably.