The Complete Enderby (19 page)

‘Do you really believe that?’ asked Enderby. ‘I thought perhaps
I
appealed to a sort of protective instinct in her. And I’m very fond of her. Very, very fond. In love,’ said Enderby. Rawcliffe nodded and nodded, paying the driver. He seemed to have recovered completely from his Strega-bout. The two poets stood in the warm street, cooled by river air. Enderby let the taxi go and said, ‘Damn. I’ve let that taxi go. I ought to get back to my wife.’ He reminded himself that he disliked Rawcliffe because he was in all the anthologies. ‘It strikes me,’ said Enderby, ‘that you were swinging the bloody lead. I needn’t have come with you at all.’

‘Strega,’ said Rawcliffe, nodding, ‘passes through my system very quickly. I think, now we’re here, we’ll have some more. Or perhaps a litre or so of Frascati.’

‘I must get back. She may be all right now. She may be wondering where I am.’

‘There’s no hurry. The bride’s supposed to wait, you know. Supposed to lie in cool sheets smelling of lavender while the bridegroom gets drunk and impotent. The Toby night, you know. That’s what it used to be called. After Tobias in the Apocrypha. Come on, Enderby, I’m lonely. A brother poet is lonely. And I have things to tell you.’

‘About Vesta?’

‘Oh, no. Much more interesting. About you and your poetic destiny.’

They entered the little shop. It was dark and warm. On the walls were vulgar mosaics, pseudo-Etruscan, of prancing men and women in profile. There were glass jars of wine and cloudy tumblers. An old man from the age of Victor Emmanuel sucked an ample moustache; two sincere-eyed rogues, round-faced and, despite the heat, in overcoats, whispered roguery to each other. A champing old woman, each step an effort, brought a litre of urine to two English poets. ‘
Salute
,’ said Rawcliffe. He shuddered at the first draught, found the second blander. ‘Tell me, Enderby,’ he said, ‘How old would you say I am?’

‘Old? Oh, about fifty.’

‘Fifty-two. And when do you think I stopped writing?’

‘I didn’t know you
had
stopped.’

‘Oh, yes, a long time, a long, long time. I haven’t written a line of verse, Enderby, since I was twenty-seven. There, that surprises
you
, doesn’t it? But writing verse is so difficult, Enderby, so so difficult. The only people who can write verse after the age of thirty are the people who do the competitions, you know, in the week-end papers. You can add to that, of course, the monkey-gland boys, of whom Yeats was one, but that’s not playing the game, by God. The greatest senile poet of the age, by God, by grace of this bloody man Voronoff. But the rest of us? There are no dramatic poets left, Enderby, and, ha ha, certainly no epic poets. We’re all lyric poets, then, and how long does the lyric urge last? No bloody time at all, my boy, ten years at the most. It’s no accident, you know, that they all died young, mainly, for some reason, in Mediterranean lands. Dylan, of course, died in America, but the Atlantic’s a sort of Mediterranean, when you come to think of it. What I mean is, American civilization’s a sort of sea-board civilization, when you come to think of it, and not a river civilization at all.’ Rawcliffe shook his head in a fuddled gesture, the Frascati having wakened the sleeping Strega. ‘What I mean is, Enderby, that you’re bloody lucky to be writing poetry at all at the age of – what is your age?’

‘Forty-five.’

‘At the age of forty-five, Enderby. What I mean is, what are you looking forward to now? Eh?’ He let more Frascati stagger into his glass. Outside, the Roman daylight flashed and rippled. ‘Don’t kid yourself, my dear boy, about long bloody narrative poems, or plays, or any of that nonsense. You’re a lyric poet, and the time is coming for the lyric gift to die. Who knows? Perhaps it’s died already.’ He looked narrowly at Enderby over the glass flask of Frascati swimming and dancing in his grip. ‘Don’t expect any more epiphanies, any more mad dawn inspirations, Enderby. That poem of mine, the one in the anthologies, the one I’ll live by if I’m going to live at all, I wrote that bugger, you know, Enderby, at the age of twenty-one. Youth. It’s the only thing worth having.’ He nodded sadly. As in a film, an easy symbol of youth orchestrated his words, passing by outside, a very head-high girl of Rome with black hair and smoky sideburns, thrust breasts, liquid waist like Harry Ploughman’s, animal haunches. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Rawcliffe, ‘youth.’ He drank Frascati and sighed. ‘Haven’t you felt, Enderby, that your gift is dying? It’s a gift appropriate to youth, you know,
owing
nothing to experience or learning. An athletic gift, really, a
sportif
gift.’ Rawcliffe dropped his jaw at Enderby, disclosing crooked teeth of various colours. ‘What are you going to do, Enderby, what are you going to do? To the world, of course, all this is nothing. If the world should enter and hear us mourning the death of Enderby’s lyric gift, the world, Enderby, would deem us not merely mad. They would consider us, Enderby, to be, Enderby’ – he leaned forward, hissing – ‘really talking about something else in the guise of the harmless. They would think us, perhaps, to be
Communists
.’

‘And,’ said Enderby, frightened by this vision of coming impotence, impotence perhaps already arrived, ‘what do
you
do?’

‘I?’ Rawcliffe was already drunk again. He shoulder-jerked spastically and munched the air like spaghetti. ‘I, Enderby, am the great diluter. Nothing can be taken neat any more. The question is this: do we live, or do we partly live? Or,’ he said, ‘do we,’ and he was suddenly blinking in the killing lights, before the cranking cameras, jerking upright to stand against the wall, as against, with spread thin arms, a rockcliff, a rawface, ‘die?’ He then collapsed on the table, like a Hollywood absinthe-drinker, but none of the Romans took any notice.

‘And,’ said Vesta, ‘what exactly do you think you’ve been doing? Where exactly do you think you’ve been?’ Enderby felt a sort of stepson’s guilt, the only kind he really knew, looking at her, head hung. She was brilliant in a wide-skirted daffodil-yellow dress, penny-coloured hair smooth and shining, skin summer-honeyed, healthy again, her eyes green, wide, nasty, a most formidable and desirable woman. Enderby said, mumbling: ‘It was Rawcliffe, you see.’

She folded her bare arms. ‘You know Rawcliffe,’ chumbled Enderby and, a humble and hopeful attempt at palliation of his crime or crimes, ‘he’s in all the anthologies.’

‘In all the bars, most likely, if I know anything about Rawcliffe. And you’ve been with him. I’m giving you fair warning, Harry. You keep out of the way of people like Rawcliffe. What’s he doing
in
Rome, anyway? It all sounds very suspicious to me. What did he say? What was he telling you?’

‘He said that being a lyric poet was really like being a racing motorist and that you’ve only lowered yourself to marry me because you’ll be in all the biographies and will share in my eternal fame and glory, and he said that my poetic gift was dying and then what was I going to do? Then he passed out and I had to help carry him upstairs and that made me very thirsty. Then I couldn’t find a taxi for a long time and I couldn’t remember the name of the hotel. So that’s why I’m late. But,’ said Enderby, ‘you didn’t say anything about what time to be back, did you? You didn’t say anything at all.’

‘You said you were going to cash traveller’s cheques,’ said Vesta. ‘It was your duty to stay here, with me. A fine start to a honeymoon this is, isn’t it, you going off with people like Rawcliffe to get drunk and listen to lies about your wife.’

‘What lies?’

‘The man’s a born liar. He was always trying to make passes at me.’

‘When? How do you know him?’

‘Oh, he’s been a journalist of sorts,’ said Vesta. ‘Always messing round on the fringes of things. He’s probably here in films, I should think, just messing round. Look,’ she said very sternly, ‘in future you’re not to go anywhere without me, do you understand? You just don’t know the world, you’re just too innocent to live. My job is to look after you, take charge of things for you.’

‘And
my
job?’ said Enderby.

She smiled faintly. Enderby noticed that the bottle of Frascati, three-quarters full when he had left the bedroom, was now empty. She had certainly recovered. Outside was gentle Roman early evening. ‘What do we do now?’ asked Enderby.

‘We go and eat.’

‘It’s a bit early for that, isn’t it? Don’t you think we ought to drink a little before eating?’

‘You’ve drunk enough.’

‘Well,’ said Enderby, looking again at the empty Frascati bottle, ‘you haven’t done too badly yourself. On an empty stomach, too.’

‘Oh, I sent down for some pizza and then a couple of club
sandwiches
,’ said Vesta. ‘I was starving. I still am.’ She took from the wardrobe a stole, daffodil-yellow, to cover her bare shoulders against evening cold or Italian lust. She had unpacked, Enderby noticed; she couldn’t have been ill for very long. They left the bedroom and went down by the stairs, mistrusting the frail filigree charm of the lift. In the corridors, in the hotel lobby, men frankly admired Vesta. Bottom-pinchers, suddenly realized Enderby, all Italians were blasted bottom-pinchers; that raised a problem. And surely duels of honour were still fought in this backward country? Out on the Via Nazionale, Enderby walked a pace behind Vesta, smiling sourly up at the SPQR shields on the lamp standards. He didn’t want any trouble. He hadn’t before quite realized what a responsibility a wife was. ‘I was told,’ said Vesta, ‘that there’s a little place on the Via Torino. Harry, why are you walking behind? Don’t be silly; people are looking at you.’

Enderby skipped to her side, but, invisible to her, his open hand was spread six inches behind her walking rump, as though warming itself at a fire. ‘Who told you?’

‘Gillian Frobisher.’

‘That,’ said Enderby, ‘is the woman who nearly killed me with her Spaghetti Surprise.’

‘It was your own fault. We turn right here.’

The restaurant was full of smeary mirrors and smelt strongly of cellar-damp and very old breadcrumbs. Enderby read the menu in gloom. The waiter was blue-jawed, lantern-jawed, untrustworthy, trying to peer, slyly, into Vesta’s
décolletage
. Enderby wondered why such glamour surrounded the Italian cuisine. After all, it consisted only of a few allomorphs of paste, the odd sauce or so; the only Italian meat was veal. Nevertheless Enderby read ‘bifstek’ and, with faint hope, ordered it. Vesta, starving, had worked through minestrone, a ravioli dish, some spaghetti mess or other, and was dipping artichoke leaves into oily vinegar, Enderby had begun to glow on a half-litre of Frascati when the alleged steak arrived. It was thin, white, on a cold plate. Enderby said to the waiter:

‘
Questo é vitello
.’ He, who had, before his life with Vesta, subsisted on ghastly stews and dips in the jampot, now became steak-faced with thwarted gastronome’s anger.

‘
Si, é vitello, signore
.’

‘I ordered beefsteak,’ cried furious Enderby, uncouth Englishman abroad, ‘not bloody veal. Not that it is bloody veal,’ he added, with poetic concern for verbal accuracy. ‘Fetch the manager.’

‘Now, Harry,’ rebuked Vesta. ‘We’ve had enough naughtiness for one day, haven’t we? See, people are looking at you.’ The Roman eaters all round were shovelling away, swollen-eyed, sincerely voluble with each other. They ignored Enderby; they had seen his type before. The manager came, fat, small, shiftily black-eyed, breathing hard with suppressed indignation at Enderby.

‘I ordered,’ said Enderby, ‘a steak. This is veal.’

‘Is a same thing,’ said the manager. ‘Veal is a cow. Beef is a cow. Ergo, beef is a veal.’

‘Are you,’ said Enderby, enraged by this syllogism, ‘trying to teach me what is a beefsteak and what is not? Are you trying to teach me my own bloody language?’

‘Language, Harry, language,’ said Vesta ineptly.

‘Yes, my own bloody language,’ cried Enderby. ‘He thinks he knows better than I do. Are you going to stick up for him?’

‘Is a true,’ said the manager. ‘You not a eat, you pay just a same. What a you a order you a pay.’

Enderby stood up, saying, ‘Oh, no. Oh, most certainly bloody well no.’ He looked down at Vesta, before whom frothed a zabaglione. ‘I’m not,’ he said, ‘paying for what I didn’t order, and what I didn’t order was that pallid apology down there. I’m going to eat somewhere else.’

‘Harry,’ she ordered, ‘sit down. Eat what you’re given.’ She pinged her zabaglione glass pettishly with her spoon. ‘Don’t make such a fuss over nothing.’

‘I don’t like throwing money away,’ said Enderby, ‘and I don’t like being insulted by foreigners.’

‘You,’ said Vesta, ‘are the foreigner. Now
sit down
.’

Enderby grumpily sat down. The manager sneered in foreigner’s triumph, ready to depart, having resolved the stupid fuss, meat being veal anyway, no argument about it. Enderby saw the sneer and stood up again, angrier. ‘I won’t bloody well sit down,’ he said, ‘and he knows what he can do with his bloodless stuff here. If you’re staying, I’m not.’

Vesta’s eyes changed from expression to expression rapidly, like
the
number-indicator of a bus being changed by the conductor. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘dear. Leave me some money to pay for my own meal. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes in that open-air café place.’

‘Where?’

‘On the Piazza di what’s-its-name,’ she said, pointing.

‘Repubblica,’ said the waiter, helpful.