The Complete Enderby (10 page)

At any man’s or country’s enemies.’

He said. ‘Slaughter will wreak a red relief.’

She said not no, not yes.

And so he went to marry mud and toil,

Swallow in general hell his private hell.

His salts have long drained into alien soil,

And she says nothing still.

Enderby looked up bitterly from the tenth selected anthology, his tenth reading of the poem. And in none of these books was there anything by Enderby.

Enderby pulled out a spilling palmful of coin from Arry’s right trouser-pocket. Snorting, he counted it: twelve and ninepence. In his wallet there was, he knew, one pound note. He muttered to himself as he moved doorwards, head down to count again. He bumped into a young salesman who said, ‘Whoops, sir. See nothing you fancy, sir?’

‘Books,’ said Enderby, with proleptic drunken thickness. ‘Waste of time and bloody money.’ He left, saying a soldier’s goodbye to Goodby’s, not one of Goodby’s good boys. There was a pub almost directly opposite, shedding cosy Christmas-card lights through its old-time bottle-glass windows. Enderby entered the public bar and ordered whisky.

Enderby entered the public bar and ordered whisky. This was some hours later, a different pub. Not the second or third pub, but
somewhere
well on in the series, the xth pub or something. On the whole, benevolent and swaying Enderby decided, he had had not too bad an evening. He had met two very fat Nigerians with wide cunning smiles and many blackheads. These had cordially invited him to their country and to write an epic to celebrate its independence. He had met a Guinness-drinker with a wooden leg which, for the delectation of Enderby, he had offered to unscrew. He had met a chief petty officer of the Royal Navy who, in the friendliest spirit in the world, had been prepared to fight Enderby and, when Enderby had demurred, had given him two packets of ship’s Woodbines and said that Enderby was his pal. He had met a Siamese osteopath with a collection of fighting fish. He had met a punch-drunk bruiser who said he saw visions and offered to see one then for a pint. He had met a little aggressive chinny chewing man, not unlike Rawcliffe, who swore that Shakespeare’s plays had been written by Sir William Knollys, Controller of the Queen’s Household. He had met a cobbler who knew the Old Testament in Hebrew, an amateur exegetist who distrusted all Biblical scholarship after 1890. He had met, seen, or heard many others too: a thin woman who had talked incessantly to a loll-tongued Alsatian; a man with the shakes who swallowed his own phlegm (
Fem, Fem
, remember that,
Fem
); a pair of hand-holding lesbians; a man who wore flower transfers on a surgical boot; callow soldiers drinking raw gin … Now it was nearing closing-time and Enderby was, he thought, fairly near to Charing Cross. That meant two stops on the Underground to Victoria. There must be a nice convenient after-closing-time train to the coast.

Enderby, paying fumblingly for his whisky, saw that he had very little money left. He estimated that he had managed to consume this evening a good dozen whiskies and a draught beer or so. His return ticket was snug in Arry’s left-hand inside jacket-pocket. He had cigarettes. One more drink and he would be right for home. He looked round the public bar smiling. Good honest British working-men, salt of the earth, bloodying and buggering their meagre dole of speech, horny-handed but delicate with darts. And, on a high-backed settle at right angles to the bar counter, two British working-women sat, made placid with the fumes of stout. One said:

‘Starting next week, it is, in
Fem
. With free gift picture in full
colour
. Smashing, he is.’ Enderby listened jealously. The other woman said:

‘Never take it, myself. Silly sort of name it is. Makes you wonder how they think of them sometimes, really it does.’

‘If,’ said Enderby, ‘you are referring to the magazine to which I myself am to be a contributor, I would say that that name is meant to be Frenchified and naughty.’ He smiled down at them with a whiskified smirk, right elbow on the counter, left fingers on right forearm. The two women looked up doubtfully. They were probably about the same age as Vesta Bainbridge, but they had an aura of back kitchens about them, tea served to shirt-sleeved men doing their pools, the telly flicking and shouting in the corner.

‘Pardon?’ said one, loudly.

‘Naughty,’ said Enderby, with great clarity. ‘Frenchified.’

‘What’s French frieds to do with it?’ said the other. ‘My friend and me was just talking, do you mind?’

‘Poetry is what I shall write for it,’ said Enderby, ‘every week.’ He nodded several times, just like Rawcliffe.

‘You keep your poetry to yourself, do you mind?’ and she took a sharp draught of Guinness. A man came from the dart-playing part of the room, a single dart in his hand, saying:

‘You all right, Edie?’ He wore a decently cut suit of poor serge, but no collar or tie. His gold-headed collar-stud caught the light and dazzled Enderby. He had a gaunt quick face and was as small and supple as a miner. He inspected Enderby as if invited to give an estimate on him. ‘You saying something to her that you shouldn’t?’ he said. ‘Mate?’ he added, provocatively.

‘He was saying,’ said Edie, ‘about naughty poetry. French, too.’

‘Was you saying naughty poetry to my wife here?’ said the man. Like Milton’s Death, he shook a dreadful dart.

‘I was just saying,’ said smirking Enderby, ‘that I was going to write for it. What they read, I mean. That is to say, Edie here, your wife, as I take it to be, doesn’t read, but the other one does, you see.’

‘We’ll have less of that about doesn’t read, do you mind?’ said Edie. ‘And less of using my name familiar, do you mind?’

‘Look here,’ said Edie’s husband. ‘You want to keep that for the saloon bar, where they pay a penny extra for the privilege, do you mind? We don’t want your sort in here.’

‘Doing no harm,’ said Enderby huffily. He then poured over the huff a trickle of sweet sauce of ingratiation. ‘I mean, I was just talking.’ He leered. ‘Just passing the time of day, if you see what I mean.’

‘Well,’ said the dart-man, ‘don’t you try to pass the time with my missis, do you mind?’

‘Do you mind?’ said Edie, in near-unison.

‘I wouldn’t want to pass the time with her,’ said Enderby, proudly, ‘I’ve other things to do, thank you very much.’

‘I’ll have to do you,’ said the man, sincerely. ‘Too much bloody hoot altogether, mate, to my way of thinking, that’s what you’ve got. You’d better get out of here before I get really nasty. Been smelling the barmaid’s apron, that’s your trouble.’

Prrrfffp.

‘Look,’ said Enderby, ‘that wasn’t intended, I really had no intention, that was not meant in any way to be a comment, I assure you that is the sort of thing that could happen to any man, or woman too, for that matter, even Edie here, your wife, that is to say, yourself included.’ Prrrfffp.

‘Do you mind?’ said Edie.

‘This here’s my fist,’ said the man, pocketing his dart. The other customers quietened and looked interested. ‘You’ll get it straight in the moosh, straight up you will, if you don’t get out of my bleeding sight this instant, do you mind?’

‘I was just going anyway,’ said dignified swaying Enderby. ‘If you will allow me the privilege of finishing my drink here.’

‘You’ve had enough, you have, mate,’ said the man, more kindly. From the saloon bar came the call of ‘Last orders.’ ‘If you want to drown your secret sorrows don’t do it where me and my wife is, see, because I take the sort of thing that you’ve been saying very hard, see.’ Enderby put down his glass, gave the dart-man a glassy but straight look, then eructed strongly and without malice. He bowed and, pushing his way courteously through the long-swallowers anxious to get one last one in, made an exit that was not without dignity. Outside in the street the heady air of a Guinness-sharp refrigerated night hit him and he staggered. The dart-man had followed him out and stood there, gauging and weighing. ‘Look, mate,’ he said, ‘this is not for me really, because
I’ve
been like that myself often enough, God knows, but my wife insists, do you mind, and this is like for a keepsake.’ He bowed, and while bowing swerved his torso suddenly to the left as though listening to something from that side, then he brought left fist and torso right and up and let Enderby have one, not too hard, straight in the stomach. ‘There,’ he said, somewhat kindly, as if the blow had been intended purely therapeutically. ‘That’ll do, won’t it?’

Enderby gasped. The procession of the evening’s whiskies and beers passed painfully through a new taste-organ that had been erected specially for this occasion. They grimaced in pain, making painful obeisance as they passed. Gas and fire shot up as from a geyser, smiting rudely the crystalline air. Premonitions of the desire to vomit huddled and fluttered. Enderby went to the wall. ‘Now then,’ said the man, ‘where is it you want to go, eh? Kennington you are now, see, if you didn’t know.’

‘Victoria,’ said Enderby’s stomach-gas, shaped into a word by tongue and lips. He had, at the moment, no air.

‘Easy,’ said the kind man. ‘First to the right second to the left keep straight on brings you to Kennington Station, see. Get a train to Charing Cross, that’s the second stop, Waterloo’s the first, change at Charing Cross, see, Circle Line. Westminster St James’s Park and then you’re there, see. And the very best of luck and no hard feelings.’ He patted Enderby’s left shoulder and re-entered the public bar.

Enderby still gasped. This sort of thing had not happened since his student-days when he had once been beaten up by a pub pianist and his friend for being bloody sarky about the sort of pseudo-music the pub pianist had been playing. Enderby filled his coughing lungs in draught after draught, then wondered whether he really wanted to vomit. He thought, for the moment, not. The punch in the stomach still glowed and smouldered, and the name
LONDON
fluttered in fearful flames, a warning, as in the trailer of some film about call-girls or the end of the world. He saw himself safe in his own lavatory, at work on his poems. Never again. Never never again. Women’s Institutes. Gold medals. London pubs. Traps set for poor Enderby, gins waiting for him to trip.

He reached Kennington Station without much difficulty and
booked
to Victoria. In the train, sitting opposite a cross-eyed man who spoke Scots to a complacent terrier on his knee, Enderby felt a shipboard motion and knew that soon he must dash to the rails. Further along on the side where he was sitting, he had the illusion that a couple of gum-chewing teenagers were discussing a play by Calderón. He strained to listen and nearly fell on his right ear. At Waterloo he was sure that the Scotsman with strabismus said ‘
morne plaine
’ to his dog. A drum beat and a bugle brayed in Enderby’s stomach; here, perhaps, he must admit defeat, stagger off, be sick in a fire-bucket. Too late. The train and time marched on from Waterloo, under the river, and, thank God, there was Charing Cross. The charing-cross-eyed man got out here too, with terrier. ‘A drop taken,’ he said confidentially to Enderby and then marched off to the Bakerloo Line, dog trotting with twinkletoes behind, fat rump, joyous tail. Enderby now felt decidedly unwell and bewildered. He had a confused notion that the southbound platform of this Northern Line would take him whither he wanted. He staggered over and sat on a bench. Across the rail a poster showed an outdoor man draining a milk stout, his fine muscular throat corded with stout-drinker’s strength. Next to that was a colourwash sketch, vivid with steam and laughter, of a confident young man wrestling with a delightful girl for a portion of pie made with meat-extract. Next to that a ginger child, macrocephalic, went ‘Ooooo!’ with pleasure, his cheek gumboiled with a slab of extra-creamy toffee. Enderby retched, but memory saved him with four lines of a drinker’s poem he had written in his drunken youth:

And I have walked no way I looked

And multitudinously puked

Into the gutter, legs outstretched,

Holding my head low as I …

That threw his present queasiness back into the past and also depersonalized it. The solace of art. And now the distant Minotaur roar of the tube-train alerted the others waiting on that platform. One man folded his evening paper and stuck it into the side-pocket of his greatcoat.
Poet Speaks Out for Fair Play
, read Enderby. Field-day for poets, this. The tube-train slammed itself into the clearing,
bringing
a fine gale of Arctic air which did Enderby good. He stood and felt giddy but steeled himself to travel to Victoria, seeing that, in his muzzy state, as a very large and desirable lavatory of blasts and sulphuretted hydrogen. He straddled before a not-yet-opened double-door of the train, trying to hold the unquiet platform steady, while the passengers waiting to alight stood as though for a curtain call. Then a panic of doubt clouted Enderby as the doors slid open and the alighters flooded off. ‘Is this,’ he called, ‘all right for Victoria?’ Many of the emergent did not speak English and made apologetic gestures, but a cool woman’s voice said:

‘This, Mr Enderby, is most certainly not all right for Victoria.’ Enderby blinked at this apparition, Mrs What’s-her-name of
Fem
, racing ace’s widow, in semi-formal pale apple-green taffetas, sheathed at the front, and three-quarter-length Persian lamb jacket, marcasite clip as single fine dress-embellisher, tiny hoop ear-rings of marcasite, marcasite-coloured glacé kid high-heels, penny-coloured hair cleanly glowing. Enderby’s mouth opened sheepishly. ‘If you got this train,’ she said, ‘you would be travelling to Waterloo and Kennington, Tooting Bec, ultimately Morden. From the look of you, you would probably be awakened at Morden. You wouldn’t like Morden very much.’