The Complete Enderby (32 page)

Hogg, in working trousers and decent dogtooth-patterned sports-jacket, was soon seated in Dr Wapenshaw’s waiting-room. He had received, some three days before, a curt summons from Dr Wapenshaw, chief agent of his rehabilitation from failed suicide to useful citizen. He could think of only one possible reason for the curtness, but it was a reason so unlikely that he was fain to reject it. Still, when you thought about these cybernetic triumphs and what they were capable of, and how a psychiatrist as cunning as Dr Wapenshaw would be quite likely to have banks of electronic brains working for him (and all at National Health expense), then it was just about possible that the summons might be about this particular hole-in-the-corner thing that Hogg had done, an act of recidivism, to use the fashionable jargon. Otherwise, he, Hogg, and Dr Wapenshaw had achieved a condition
of
mutual love and trust that, however official and Government-sponsored, had been looked on as a wonder in that green place of convalescence. Had not Dr Wapenshaw shown him, Hogg, off as an exemplary cure, inviting colleagues of all nations to prod and finger and smile and nod and ask cunning questions about Hogg’s relationship with his Muse and his stepmother and his lavatory and his pseudo-wife, cooling all that turbulent past to the wan and abstract dignity of a purely clinically interesting case to be handled by fingers smelling of antiseptics? Yes, that was so. Perhaps that curtness was, after all, the official wrapping that enclosed warmth and love and protected them from the eyes of strangers. Still and nevertheless.

The waiting-room had a gasfire, and the only other waiting patient was crouching over it, as though it were a wicket and he its keeper. The chill of autumn was reflected in the covers of copies of
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
that lay on the polished table that turned the vase of real, not plastic, chrysanthemums into a kind of antipodeal ghost. These covers showed thin young women in mink against the falling of leaves. Something like winter cold struck Hogg as he noticed a deck of copies of
Fem
. Those days, not so long ago, when he had actually written ghastly verses for
Fem
, set as harmless prose (‘I lift my baby to the air. He gurgles because God is there’) and pseudonymously signed Faith Fortitude; those incredible days when he had actually been married to its features editress, Vesta Bainbridge; those days should, officially, be striking him with little more than mild and condescending curiosity. That had been another man, one from a story read yawning. But the past was fastening its suckers on him once more, had been doing ever since that night of the goddess and the television
ja
-sayers and unpremeditated chrysostomatic utterance. Hogg nodded, sighing heavily. Dr Wapenshaw knew; he knew everything. That was what this interview was going to be about.

‘For a load of blasphemous balderdash,’ said the man by the gasfire, ‘you ought to read this lot.’ He turned to Hogg, waving a thin little book. He had, then, been holding it to the gasfire, as if, as with bread in some sturdy feed in some school story of pre-electric days, deliberately toasting it. He was a man with wild grey hair who spoke with a cultivated accent which made his demotic
vocabulary
seem affected, which, if he was, as he evidently was, one of Dr Wapenshaw’s patients, being rehabilitated in the same modes as Hogg himself had been, if he really had been, it probably was. ‘And they say it’s
us
that are crackers,’ he said. ‘You and me,’ he clarified, ‘are supposed to be the barmy ones.’ Hogg prepared to dissociate himself from that predication, but he let it pass. The man launched wild fluttering wings of paper at Hogg and Hogg deftly caught them. The man did not say ‘Fielded’; that was rather for Mr Holden or for Dr Wapenshaw himself, at least the Dr Wapenshaw of the chimney green days with his ‘Good show’ and ‘That’s the ticket.’ Hogg leafed through the little book, frowning. He caught the title and further frowned:
The Kvadrat’s Kloochy
. He said, with care:

‘What does it mean, then?’

‘Oh,’ said the man, irritably, ‘what does
anything
mean? It’s all a
merde universelle
, as that French Irishman says. You read it, that’s all.’ Hogg read, at random:

The miracle of this uncomplicated monody with its minimal chordal accompaniment is not diminished by our hindsight knowledge that it had been there waiting, throughout recorded history, yet unnoticed by the bearded creaking practitioners of the complex. They built up their multivocal counterpoint, their massive orchestras, their fugal and sonata forms, seeking a perfection that, if they could have cleansed the rheum from their old-man’s eyes, they would have known had to lie in the simple and direct rather than the periphrastic and complicated. And yet it is in the error of the traditional equating of age with wisdom that one may find the cause of their blindness or, to be kind, presbyopia. The answer to all problems, aesthetic as much as social, religious, and economic, resides, in a word, in Youth.

‘I don’t see what all this is about,’ said Hogg. He frowned still, turning over the page to find a photograph of four common louts who leered up at him, one bearing a guitar from which electrical flex sprouted, the others poising sticks over gaudy sidedrums.

‘Ah,’ growled the man, ‘don’t bother
me
with it. You stick to your world and I’ll stick to mine.’ And then he cried, very loud:
‘Mother
you’ve forsaken your son.’ Hogg nodded without fear. Had he not spent an entire summer among men given to sudden despairing ejaculations or, worse, quiet confident assertions about the nature of ultimate reality, often delivered, Hogg and other patients shaken awake for the intimation, in the middle of the night? He read on:

Jack Cade and the Revolters established the fruitful device of a heavy ictus on the fourth beat in their disc
Like He Done That Time
, pressed in April 1964. In May of the same year this was further developed by Nap and the Bonies, who, in their
Knee Trembler
, transferred it to the quaver between the third beat and the fourth. Needless to say, this was achieved instinctually, these youthful performers being unburdened by traditional technical knowledge. In June both groups were superseded by the Tumers who, intuitively aware of a new shift in the
Zeitgeist
, perhaps wisely reverted to a greater simplicity of rhythmical texture and …

‘Ah, Hogg!’ cried a voice both fierce and plummy. Hogg looked up to see a different Dr Wapenshaw from the one he remembered – an urban Dr Wapenshaw in a natty suit of charcoal grey with discreet stripes, more formidable than the one who, in that country retreat, had dressed for his consultations as if for outdoor games. The chubby face was stern. Meekly Hogg went into the consulting-room. ‘Sit you down,’ said Dr Wapenshaw. Hogg sat on the seat nearest the door, a sort of creepy-stool. ‘Here,’ said Dr Wapenshaw, throwing a fierce fistful of air at a seat drawn up to the desk, a desk massive enough to contain any number of small secret electronic monitors. He himself went round the desk to its window-side and stood behind his swivel-chair, grey Harley Street framed behind him, while he watched Hogg, who still had
The Kvadrat’s Kloochy
in his hand, shamble over. ‘Very well, then,’ said Dr Wapenshaw, in the manner of a sour grace. Consultant and patient sat simultaneously.

‘Soon be winter now,’ said Hogg in a conversational manner. ‘The nights are drawing in very fast. Could do with a fire, really, in a manner of speaking.’ Suddenly noticing that Dr Wapenshaw’s consulting-room had a grate conspicuously empty, he added, ‘Not
that
I meant that in any spirit of criticism, as you might say. All I meant was that it gets a bit chilly at nights.’ Dr Wapenshaw held him with a disgusted look; Hogg grew flustered. ‘What I mean is, some feel the cold more than others, so to speak. But’ – and he struck hard at Dr Wapenshaw’s flint, desperately seeking some of that old warmth – ‘nobody can deny that it’s late autumn now, and after autumn, if you’ll pardon the observation –’

‘Shut up!’ cried Dr Wapenshaw. (‘No, no, don’t,’ whimpered the patient in the waiting-room.) ‘I’ll do all the talking.’ But all he did was to hurl a thick book bound in green paper across at Hogg. Hogg was already growing tired of having books hurled at him; still, he caught it deftly, just like the other one, which was now on his knee. ‘Look at that,’ ordered Dr Wapenshaw. ‘
see here
. Read it, man.’

Hogg fingered the book rather tenderly. It was, he saw, a proof copy. He had, in the remote past when he was another man altogether, handled proof copies of his own work, very slim proof copies, poems. He flicked through the massive prose-work with a certain envy, then admired the title. ‘
Rehabilitations
,’ he read out. ‘There used to be a lot like that in the old days. F. R. Leavis and such people. The New School of Criticism, they called it. But it’s all changed now. They have different ideas now and more flowery titles.
The Romantic Orgasm
was one I saw in a shop. And
The Candle in the Thigh
was another. They get a lot of the titles from poor Dylan, you know, who died. It’s nice to see a good old-fashioned title like this again. That,’ he said diffidently, though with a wisp of ancient authority, when he had lighted at last
see here
, ‘isn’t the right symbol for a deletion and close up, if you’ll pardon the correction. It should be like a little balloon on the tip of a stick –’

‘Read it, man, read it!’ And Dr Wapenshaw thumped his desk thrice. Hogg read where he was ordered, wonderingly. Dr Wapenshaw tattooed the desk-top softly, as though his fingers at least were appeased – three beats in the left hand against two beats in the right, as though playing in some children’s nonsense by Benjamin Britten, with tuned tea-cups and tin-whistles but also Peter Pears as an old man. ‘Well?’ he said at length.

‘You know,’ said Hogg, ‘this case seems pretty close to what my
own
was. This chap here, K you call him, was a poet, and that made him into a protracted adolescent. He spent a lot of his time writing verse in the lavatory – a kind of womb you say it is here, but that’s a lot of nonsense, of course – and this woman made him marry her and it was a mess and he ran away and then tried to go back to the old life, writing poetry in the lavatory and so on, and it didn’t work so he attempted suicide and then you cured him by reorientating his personality, as it’s called here, and then he became a useful citizen and forgot all about poetry and – Well,’ Hogg said, ‘that, if I may say so, is an astonishing coincidence, you might call it.’ He tried to beam, but Dr Wapenshaw’s black look was not irradiable. Dr Wapenshaw leaned across the desk and said, with terrible quietness and control:

‘You bloody fool. That
is
you.’

Hogg frowned slightly. ‘But,’ he said, ‘it can’t be. It says here that this K had delusions about other people stealing his work and making horror-films out of his poetry. That’s not quite the same, is it? I mean, this bloody man Rawcliffe did pinch the plot of my
Pet Beast
and make a bloody awful Italian picture out of it. I even remember the name.
L’ Animal Binato
it was called in Italy – that’s from Dante, you see: The Double-Natured Animal or something like it – and in England it was called
Son of the Beast from Outer Space
.’ He read more intently, frowning further. ‘What’s all this,’ he said, ‘about a sexual fixation on this bloke K’s stepmother? That can’t be me, this bloke can’t. I hated her, you know how much for I told you. And,’ he said blushing, ‘about masturbating in the lavatory. And about this woman being very refined and trying to make a real married man out of him.’ He looked up, his sternness a remote (fourth or fifth or something) carbon copy of Dr Wapenshaw’s own. ‘That woman,’ he said clearly, ‘was
not
refined. She was a bitch. She wanted my bit of money, which she got, and she wanted a bit of my honour and glory. When I was dead, that is,’ he said, less assertively. ‘In my biography, if such should come to be written.’ The great expensive consulting-room tasted that, shrugged, grimaced, swallowed it.

‘Can you see it?’ said Dr Wapenshaw, his upper lip lifted. ‘Can you honestly say that you see it, man? The most elegant woman
in
Europe, controller of the best pop-groups in the business?’ Hogg stared at this wink of evidence of knowledge of a very vulgar world (he knew it all; he read the
Daily Mirror
doggedly every morning before opening his bar) in an eminent consultant. He said:

‘I’ve not seen her name in the papers –’

‘She’s married again. A
real
marriage. A man with
real
money and
real
talent, also younger than you and, moreover, handsome.’

‘– But that confirms what I always thought, what you said then I mean. I mean
not
refined. A bitch.’
The Kvadrat’s Kloochy
fell off his knees, as in conscious failure to convert. Dr Wapenshaw said harshly:

‘Right. Now look at this.’ And Hogg had hurled at him his third fluttering paper bird of the afternoon. He caught it without much skill; he was already weary; it was a journal he at once recognized; it was called
Confrontation
, a cisatlantic quarterly transatlantically financed and of, he understood, little general appeal. He nodded, unsurprised. Dr Wapenshaw knew everything, then. Hogg understood all. He knew now what it was all about. This was it. He turned the page where the sestet of that sonnet, which the
ja
-sayers had not wished to hear, spoke to no frequenters of expensive bars, though the octave certainly had:

Coiled on the rooftree, bored, inspired, their snake