The Complete Enderby (24 page)

‘Och,’ she said, drooping as though suddenly very weary. ‘What does it matter? Who’s going to care whether you write great poetry or not? The feeblest teenage pop-singer is a million times more regarded than you are. You sell only a handful of copies of every book you write. There’s going to be a nuclear war and the libraries will be destroyed. What’s the use? What good can it all possibly be
if
one doesn’t believe in God?’ She sat on the bed, quite dispirited, and began to cry softly. Enderby came softly over to her and said:

‘I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry. But I think I’m too old to learn really, too old to change. Perhaps we’d better admit it’s all a mistake and go back to things as they were before. No real harm’s been done, not yet, has it? I mean, we’re not even properly married, are we?’

She looked up sternly and said, ‘You’re like a child. A child who doesn’t like his first morning at school so says he doesn’t think he’ll go back in the afternoon.’ She wiped her eyes and became hard, self-possessed again. ‘Nobody makes a fool of me,’ she said. ‘Nobody throws me over.’

‘You could have the marriage annulled,’ said Enderby. ‘On the grounds of non-consummation. Because it won’t ever be consummated, you know.’

‘You think,’ said Vesta, ‘that you’ll go back to living on a tiny but adequate income, writing your poetry in the lavatory. But you won’t. What little bit of capital you’ve got left I shall have. I’ll make sure of that. And the things you’ve bought are on my name. Nobody makes a fool out of me.’

‘I can get a job,’ said Enderby, growing angry. ‘I’m not reliant on anybody. I can be independent.’ Then he felt tears of self-pity coming. ‘The poet,’ he said, whimpering, ‘is best left to live on his own.’ Through his tears he had confused images of Dantesque eagles flitting round lightning-shot peaks. He left the edge of the bed and went to stand in a corner. ‘The poet,’ he said, blubbing like that seven-year-old Elizabethan bridegroom who had cried to go home with his father.

‘MY MAIN PURPOSE,’
said swaying Rawcliffe, ‘was to present you with –’ He swayed and fumbled in various pockets, drawing out
filthy
old papers decaying at their folds, two half-used tubes of stomach tablets which were dust-fluffy, a referee’s whistle, a dry rattle of ball-points, finally a quite clean envelope. ‘– these. Tickets for a première. I think, my dear old Enderby, you should be reasonably amused. I have no further interest in the film in question, having been so closely involved in it. And, let me tell you, Enderby, it is a cheap film, a film made on a shoestring, a film made very quickly, with bits borrowed – quite without permission, you know – from other films. Strega,’ he said suddenly to Dante behind the bar. The bar was, as at their first meeting in it, empty except for them. Enderby felt worn and old, his mouth seeming to taste of cascara-coated motoring chocolate. It was mid-morning, the day after the day of their return from the papal township by the lake, and Vesta had gone to see a woman called Princess Irene Galitzine, a Roman lady famed for her boutique models or couture designs or something. Vesta was spending money fast. ‘And,’ said Rawcliffe, ‘there are, of course, for this the world expects of Italy, several
sfacciate donne Fiorentine
, except that they’re not Florentine but Roman,
mostrando con le poppe il petto
. There, Enderby, you see: brazen-faced bitches showing breasts with paps. Dante was a great prophet; he foresaw the Italian film industry. Dante.’

Dante behind the bar bowed. ‘Same a name,’ he said confidentially to Enderby.

‘Bloody big coincidence, eh?’ swayed Rawcliffe. ‘You’ll find everything in Dante, Enderby, if you look long enough. Even the film you’re going to see derives its title from the
Purgatorio
. I found that title, Enderby, I, an English poet, for none of these unholy Romans has even so much as glanced at Dante since leaving school, if any of them ever went to school.’ Enderby took from the envelope the cards of invitation and saw that the film was named
L’Animal Binato
. It meant nothing to him. He turned to the bottle of Frascati on the counter and poured himself a tumbler. ‘Drinking hard, I see, Enderby,’ said Rawcliffe. ‘If I may make so lewd a guess, it is because you are using muscles you never used before. Venus catches cold without Bacchus and Ceres, although you can leave out that goddess of breakfast foods for all I care. Strega,’ he called again, nodding vigorously.

‘Look,’ said Enderby, ‘I’m not taking you home again. You were
a
damned nuisance last time, Rawcliffe, and you made a real fool out of me. If you’re going to pass out here, you can stay passed out, is that clear? I’ve got worries of my own without having to look after –’

‘He talks in rhyme,’ said Rawcliffe in exaggerated wonder. ‘He is still very much the poet, is he not? But for how much longer now, eh?’ he said sinisterly, slitting his eyes. ‘The Muse, O Enderby. Has the Muse yet been in to tell you that she has booked her one-way flight to Parnassus or wherever Muses live? She has done her long stint with Enderby and the time has come for Enderby to abjure this rough magic and pack it in, the Muse, unlike Ariel, being no airy slave of indeterminate sex but a woman, very much a woman.’ Rawcliffe now made himself look shrunken and very old. ‘Perhaps, Enderby, I was destined never to be much of a success with that particular woman because of – you know, because of – that is to say, a certain, shall I say, indeterminate attitude towards sex.’ He sighed in a litre or so of Roman bar air. He drank down a centilitre or less of Strega. ‘And now, you see, Enderby, I’m on the move again. This afternoon, to be precise. So, you see, you won’t have to carry me home or anywhere. The BEA men will come and collect me, excellent fellows. They will get me on that plane. Where am I going, Enderby?’ He leered roguishly, wagging a finger. ‘Ah, I’m not telling you. I am, suffice it to say, on my way further south. I have picked up my little packet here.’ He tapped, winking, the right breast of his coat. ‘And now little Marco and Mario and that bloody Piedmontese, to quote Milton, can go and stuff themselves. I have finished, Enderby, with the lot. Finish, Enderby,’ he said loudly and with emphatic fists on the counter, ‘with the lot. You, I mean. Get wise to yourself, as they say. Wake up. A poet must be alone.’

Enderby pouted, pouring himself the last of his bottle. He felt that it was not up to Rawcliffe to tell him that he must be alone. He took from his inside jacket-pocket a piece of paper on which he had been doing sums. ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘how much mink costs? Mink,’ he repeated. ‘I have it here,’ he said carefully. ‘One Black Diamond mink coat: one thousand four hundred and ninety-five pounds. One hip-length jacket: five hundred and ninety-five pounds. One pastel mink bolero: three hundred
and
ninety-five pounds. We leave out of account,’ said Enderby, ‘as being too inexpensive for serious consideration, a pastel stole at two hundred pounds. That’s a frippery, a mere nugacity.’ He smiled sillily. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘can a poet do with no money, eh? How does a poet live?’

‘Well,’ said Rawcliffe, both hands round his new Strega as if it were something to be strangled, ‘there are jobs, you know. All sorts of jobs. Only the very luckiest of poets can be professional poets. You could teach or write for the papers or do film scripts or advertising slogans or lecture for the British Council or get unskilled work in a factory. Lots of things to be done.’

‘But,’ objected Enderby, ‘suppose one is no good at anything except writing poetry? Suppose one makes a bloody fool of oneself at anything else?’

‘Oh,’ said Rawcliffe reasonably, ‘I don’t think that anybody could make such a bloody fool of himself that it would really matter. Now, if I were you, I should leave everything in the hands of Auntie Vesta. She’ll fix you up with something nice and easy.’

‘But,’ protested Enderby, ‘only a minute ago you were telling me that I’ve got to be alone.’

‘I see,’ said Rawcliffe, seeing into his Strega. ‘Well, in that case it’s all a bit of a mess, isn’t it, Enderby? But don’t worry me with your worries, Enderby, because I’ve got worries of my own, you see. You sort out things for yourself.’ He seemed suddenly sober and rather cold despite the June warmth. He downed his Strega and shivered exaggeratedly, as if he had taken a wholesome but bitter medicine. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘I should have started this heavy drinking business earlier. I might possibly be dead by now instead of having putatively fathered or foster-fathered or helped with the illegitimate fathering of
L’Animal Binato
, alive and healthy and almost impervious to the more deadly effects of alcohol. I should, by rights, Enderby, have considered seeing myself off when I found that the lyric gift had departed from me. I could at least have contrived to be careless crossing the road, couldn’t I? And, instead of that propaganda job during the war, I could perhaps have volunteered for something more genuinely lethal.’

‘What,’ asked Enderby morbidly, ‘did it feel like? I mean, when the lyric gift departed?’ Rawcliffe looked up so morosely, fixing
Enderby
with an eye so baleful, that Enderby began to smile nervously. Rawcliffe said:

‘Blast your mean little soul, it’s no laughing matter, even in retrospect.’ Then he came nearer to Enderby and gave him a close-up of bad teeth and worse breath. ‘It was like everything going all dead,’ said Rawcliffe. ‘It was like going dumb. I could see quite clearly what had to be said, but I couldn’t say it. I could perceive that an imaginative relationship existed between disparate objects but I couldn’t tell what the relationship was. I used to sit for hours with paper in front of me, hours and hours, Enderby, and then I would at last get something down. But what I got down somehow – don’t laugh at me – had a smell of decay about it. What I got down was
evil
, and I used to shudder when I crumpled it up and threw it in the fire. And then, at night, in bed, I used to wake up to hear mocking laughter. And then,’ tottered Rawcliffe, ‘one night there was the sound of an awful
click
, and then everything in the bedroom seemed cold, somehow, cold and obscene. I knew, Enderby, it was all over. Thenceforward I should be outside the Garden, useless to anyone, a mess and, moreover, Enderby, in some indefinable way
evil
. Like an unfrocked priest, Enderby. The unfrocked priest does not become a mere neuter harmless human being; he becomes
evil
. He has to be used by something, for supernature abhors a supervacuum, so he becomes
evil
, Enderby.’ He swigged more Strega and staggered, as it were, against the ropes, saying, ‘And all that is left for the poet, Enderby, when the inspiration is departed, Enderby, is the travesty, the plagiarism, the popularization, the debasement, the curse. He has drunk the milk of paradise, but it has long passed through his system, Enderby, and, unfortunately for him, he remembers the taste.’ Rawcliffe shut weary eyes, saying, ‘
Ara vos prec
,’ and then, ‘be mindful in due time of my pain. I translate, Enderby, because you would not understand the original Provençal. That is the poet Arnaut Daniel in Purgatory. He was a lucky bugger, or is, Enderby, a lucky bugger to be in Purgatory. Not like some of us.’ At this point, Rawcliffe went quite gently to sleep standing up, his head reposing on arms he had folded on the counter. Dante said: ‘Better e slip.’ There was a plum-plush settee against the wall; to this Dante and Enderby carried, led, pushed, dragged Rawcliffe. ‘Too mash facking Strega,’ diagnosed Dante.
Sighing
, Enderby sat next to Rawcliffe, a fresh bottle of Frascati and a tumbler on the table in front of him, and he continued to do sums on bits of paper. At intervals Rawcliffe gave gnomic utterance, often obscure, from his sleep; reports from the first crazed space-traveller:

‘No expense of breath in falling downstairs.’

‘Mario, put that bread-knife away.’

‘You are a naughty boy, but not undelectable.’

‘In all the antholololologies.’

‘This will make Enderby feel very sick.’

Indeed, Enderby felt very sick when he had worked out his sums and found that his credit balance in the bank stood at, taking the most liberal computation, little more than four hundred and ninety pounds. It was pointless asking himself where the money had gone to, for he knew all too well: it had flowed back to its source: his stepmother had given and his stepmother had, in a youthful well-spoken, dove-soft, spring-smelling, highly improbable disguise, taken away again. From his sleep Rawcliffe called:

‘Aha! Man not the boats, but woman-and-child them. I’ll shoot all else. Back, you brute, back. The rash, smart, sloggering Hopkinsian brine. Enderby was a very inferior poet. Very wise of him to pack up.’

Enderby spoke sternly to this dark voice. ‘I am not packing up,’ he said. This silenced Rawcliffe’s sleep-persona temporarily. To himself Enderby said, ‘If I can keep the relationship on the most superficial of levels, for superficially I am quite fond of her, then it should be possible to contrive some sort of satisfactory co-existence. But I will not be ordered about. And she has, after all, a good job and I could, at a pinch, refuse to get a job of my own or have a job found for me. The Sussex house has many rooms. My stomach is better.’ Rawcliffe’s sleeping voice spoke again from outer space:

‘You will do as I say, Vincent. I will not have you calling Reggy an old queen. He is not old.’ And then, ‘God should feel highly flattered that we have invented Him.’ And finally, before falling into serious speechless sleep, in the voice of Yeats speaking with the voice of Swift speaking with the voice of Job: ‘
Let the day perish wherein I was born
.’ Enderby shuddered, the wine seeming sharper than usual.