The Complete Enderby (26 page)

Enderby watched and waited carefully in the hotel bar. There were late coffee-drinkers at the little tables, voluble speakers of fast foreign tongues, ten or a dozen all told, and Enderby would have given them all for Rawcliffe. He wished yesterday morning could be shunted back for just five minutes, he and Dante and Rawcliffe alone in the bar, one damned good crack on the proleptically bloody nose.
L’Animal Binato
, indeed. The Muse would be very annoyed now, fuming, a harpy, with all that work wasted. Enderby watched Vesta lovely over her glass of Pernod, waited till his third glass of Frascati, then writhed in simulated stomach-ache. ‘Ugggggh,’ said Enderby, ‘blast it. Arrrrgh.’ Vesta said:

‘You’ve been drinking too much, that’s your trouble. Come on, we’re going to bed.’ Enderby, artist to the end, made a harrowing borborygm, just like old times. Grerrrrkhrapshhhhh. She rose in concern. Enderby said:

‘No. You wait here. There’s a lavatory on the ground floor. Really, it’s nothing.’ He smiled, the liar, through his agony, motioning her to sit down again. He gargoyle-bulged his cheeks, nodded vigorously to show that this showed what it seemed to show, then left the bar smartly, urrping and arrrkhing to the surprise of the coffee-drinkers, into the lobby. To the insincerely gold-grinning dapper receptionist, framed in tubes of light at his desk, Enderby said urgently, ‘I have to return to London. Just for a couple of days. Business. My wife will stay on here. I don’t want you to think,’ added Enderby guiltily, ‘that I’m running away or anything like that. If you wish, I’ll pay my bill up to date. But I’m leaving my luggage. All except one small overnight case. I take it that that will
be
all right, will it?’ He almost prepared to give the receptionist a thousand-lire note of hush-money but, in time, thought better of it. The receptionist, with a graceful head-inclination as of one bending to hear the tick of a watch in an invisible man’s waistcoat pocket, said that everything would be quite all right, but Signor Enderby must understand that there could be no rebate in respect of the time that Signor Enderby would be away. Signor Enderby gladly understood. ‘I want,’ he said, ‘to ring up the air terminal, the one on this street. Could you give me the number?’ The receptionist would be only too pleased to ring up for him; he could take the call in one of those boxes over there.

From the box Enderby could just see Vesta eating a ham sandwich. It must be ham, because she was stroking each sliver with what must be, from the shape of the jar, mustard. Enderby tried, which was not difficult, to look very ill in case she should glance up and see him. If she came over he would have to pretend that he had blindly dashed in here because it had the outward appearance of a lavatory; if she saw him urgently mouthing into the telephone he would have to pretend he was calling a doctor. A voice now spoke in English to Enderby, and Enderby said furtively, ‘Enderby here.’ The name, understandably, meant nothing to the suave clerkly voice. Enderby said, ‘I want to travel to London by the next possible plane. Very urgent. I already have a first-class ticket, but my booking, you see, is for the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth or something – I can’t quite remember the exact date. This is very very urgent. Business. And my mother’s dying.’ There was no cluck of condolence: hard bastards these Romans. The voice said, above the rustle of ledger-pages, that it thought there might be empty seats on the BOAC plane from Cape Town, due at Rome at five-thirty in the morning. The voice would ring back to confirm or deny. ‘A matter of life and death,’ said Enderby. The voice, however, seemed to know that Enderby was about to run away from his wife.

Vesta had finished her sandwiches and was picking her front teeth with an old London tube ticket she had taken from her bag. The bag was open, very untidy, but in it Enderby saw a bunch of keys. Those keys he would require: in the Gloucester Road flat were certain things he needed. Seeing the teeth-picking, Enderby
nodded
: another thing marshalling him the way that he was going. ‘How do you feel now?’ she asked.

‘A good deal better,’ smiled Enderby. ‘I got a lot of it up.’ With what was still in the bank, with what he thought he could legitimately filch from her (mink, chiefly), he considered it was possible for him to return for a year or two to something like his old life: the lone poet in some sordid attic or other with thin stews and bread, trying to make it up to his Muse. He did not repine at the loss of his capital. Not any longer. It was, after all, his stepmother’s money, and here, now pulling a ham-fibre from her molars, though with grace and without ostentation, sat his stepmother, all too able to use that money. The interest, of course, was another matter. The Church had always condemned the lending out of money at interest, so no good Catholic had a right to claim the increment it had earned when the return of the loan was made. Enderby, though determined to be just, was also determined to be strictly Protestant here. As he smiled to himself he was suddenly jolted by the calling of his name over a loudspeaker.

‘Who on earth,’ said Vesta, ‘can be ringing you up at this hour of the evening? You stay there, I’ll take it. You’re still looking a bit pale.’ And she rose.

‘No, no, no,’ protested Enderby, pushing her roughly back into her cane armchair. ‘It’s something you’re not supposed to know about. A surprise,’ he tried to smile. She grimaced and, taking a hair-clip from her bag, began to clean her left ear. Enderby was delighted to see that.

The clerkly voice was pleased to be able to confirm a booking on the plane from Cape Town. Enderby was to report at the terminal at four; the clerk then on duty would alter his ticket for him. ‘
Deo gratias
,’ breathed Enderby, meaning
grazie
. But only that liturgical gratitude, he reflected, could express his relief at the prospect of getting out of, with all its detonations and connotations, Rome.

‘It’s arranged,’ he smirked at Vesta. ‘Don’t ask me what, but it’s all arranged.’ As they rose to go to their room he saw on the table a hair-clip; its bend of bifurcation was stuffed with ear-wax. He took Vesta’s arm with something like love.

Staying awake till three-thirty was not really difficult. Really difficult was getting the packing done on a night when Vesta, normally a good solid Scots sleeper, had decided to be restless and somniloquent. Enderby watched her warily as she lay prone, having kicked the clothes off the bed, her nates silvered by the Roman moonlight to the likeness of a meringue. Delectable, yes, but from now on for somebody else’s delectation. Enderby stole about the silvered room in his socks, suddenly stiffening as in a statue dance each time she burbled in her sleep, rushing to the dark corner by the window to stand as if for his height to be taken when she pettishly whisked from the prone to the supine. Supine, she uttered strange words to the ceiling and then chuckled, but Enderby would not permit himself to be scared. Taking his passport and air ticket from the top drawer of the chest of drawers he also, after a few seconds of ethical thought, decided to take hers. Thus, if she woke to a realization of Enderby’s desertion, she would not be able to follow at once. But he placed several thousand or million lire on the mantelpiece, and he knew that she had traveller’s cheques of her own. Although she and Rome went so beautifully together, he could not, in all decency, condemn her to too long an enforced stay; he hoped he still had enough humanity not to wish that on his worst enemy.

One suitcase was enough for Enderby’s clothes and shaving gear. The lotions and creams and sprays she had made him buy – these he decided to leave behind: no one would ever want to smell him any more. Now there was the question of that key to the flat; he had left a couple of boxes there, stuffed with drafts and notes. The typescript of
The Pet Beast
was locked in the drawer of her own escritoire, and there it could stay. Its interest, he admitted glumly, was one of content more than form, and the content had been filched and distorted. Let that be a lesson to him. Enderby now squinted in the moonlight for Vesta’s bag, a flat silver envelope into which, that evening, she had poured the entire load of rubbish from a black bag from a grey bag from a white bag from a blue bag, a woman who, with residual Scots thrift, could not bear to throw anything away. Enderby saw this silver bag, further silvered
by
the light, lying on her bedside table. He stalked over for it, like some clumsy ballerina on her points, and, as he made to pick it up, Vesta swiftly pronated, diagonal across the bed, and a bare slim arm flopped over the table to hold the bag down like a silver bar. Enderby hesitated now, standing with breathing suspended, wondering whether he dare risk. But then she, with the same swiftness, lurched her body to the supine, though with her left arm still across the table, and began to speak out of some profound dream. She said:

‘Pete. Do it again, Pete. Och, Pete, that was bloody marvellous.’ It was a coarse accent, suggesting the Gorbals rather than Eskbank, and, to match it, the sleeping Vesta began to use coarse terms suggesting an extremity of abandon. Enderby listened horrified, at last calming his nerves by reflecting that anything, even necrophily, was allowed to the dreamer. He did not now try to extract the bag from under her silver arm; he could perhaps get into the flat without a key. Effect an entrance, as they say. He now wished to effect an exit, and quickly.

As he fumbled at the door-handle, hidden under the mink coat that hung from the door-hook, he had the impression that she was about to lift herself out of sleep, some warning bell having shrilled at the end of one of the long corridors of the cerebral cortex. He calmed her with words and a noise:

‘Brarrrkh. Just going to the lavatory.’ His last words to her as he softly folded the mink over his arm. She grunted, smacked her lips, then, seeming satisfied, started to lower herself into deeper levels of sleep. Enderby opened the door and went out. Standing an instant to quieten his loud heart, he felt cautiously elated that soon, on the aircraft, he would be able to feel fully and uninhibitedly elated.

A poem began to twitch as he weighed his suitcase and paid his embarkation fee and bought his bus ticket:

Stepmother of the West …

Enderby waited with excitement for the images to come into focus – Emperor and Pope the same pantomime dame, no more red meat since spate of it in snaring arena, old bitch she-wolf with
hanging
dugs, the big backyard of broken columns for the refuse-collector; Enderby waited with impatience for the rhymes to line up. City, titty. Beyond that was nothing.

Stepmother of the West, of venal cities

Most venal something something she-wolf bitch

Romulus Remus something something titties

Something something something something rich which ditch pitch

On the bus to Ciampino Enderby, frowning, called on his Muse to do something about this ragged
donnée
. On the aircraft, placed next to a Negro clergyman, Enderby muttered and grimaced so that the stewardess came up to ask if everything was all right. A suspicious character, muttering and frowning, a mink coat on the luggage rack overhead, Enderby looked down on Rome. He had forgotten all about Vesta already. He had expected that he would be able to recite, under his breath, at least a stanza of this poem in valediction. Thwarted and somewhat apprehensive, remembering the prophecy of the traitor Rawcliffe, he could only devise a farewell that went beyond words but which the Negro clergyman apparently took to be an adverse comment on his colour.

Fffffrrrrrerrrrrpshhhhhh.

‘YOU’VE GOT ABSOLUTELY
nothing to worry about there,’ said Dr Preston Hawkes. ‘The plates are negative: no TB, no carcinoma, nothing.’ He held up a couple of cloudy portraits of the inner Enderby. ‘That’s the lot, then.’ He had a loud Northern voice, some of the vowels home-made approximations to Received Standard. ‘You can go away with a contented mind.’ He was young and highly dentate, tanned, and tousled as though to advertise, for a side-line, the healthful properties of the resort where he practised. ‘If bicarb helps that dyspepsia, you just stick to bicarb. But fundamentally your stomach and guts are perfectly sound.’

‘You would say, would you,’ said Enderby, ‘that I’m quite unlikely to die in the near future?’

‘Oh, my dear fellow,’ said Dr Preston Hawkes, ‘none of us can ever know that. Apart from the normal hazards of living – getting run over or electrocuted or slipping in the bathroom – there must always be some unknown factor that doesn’t yield to examination. We know a lot,’ he confided, ‘but we don’t know everything. But, as far as I can see, you’re physically sound and likely to live for many years.’ He glowed at Enderby like a frying slice of potato. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘your tone isn’t as good as it might be. Take exercise: tennis, golf, walks. You could do with paring yourself down a bit. Keep off fried things; don’t eat too much starch. You’re a sedentary worker, aren’t you? A clerk or something?’

‘Perhaps in the older sense,’ said Enderby. ‘I am,’ he explained sadly, ‘a poet.’

‘You mean,’ said Dr Preston Hawkes incredulously, ‘that’s your job?’

‘It was,’ said Enderby. ‘That’s really why I came to see you. You see, I’m not writing any more poems.’

‘Oh.’ Dr Preston Hawkes became agitated; he tapped contrary-motion five-finger exercises on his desk, his smile fixed and nervous. He spoke now slackly, bubbling. ‘Well, I hardly think – I mean, that’s nothing to do with me, is it? I mean, I should have thought – That is to say, if you don’t propose writing any more poetry, well, good luck to you. The very best of luck and all that sort of thing. But that’s entirely your own affair, isn’t it? That’s what I’d say, anyway.’ He now began to perform, though ineptly, the ritual of a man whose time is valuable: a syndrome of nervous grubbing among papers, looking at his watch, peering exophthalmically above Enderby’s head as though the next patient was due to squeeze in between door and lintel.