The Complete Enderby (33 page)

Crowed Monday in. A collar kissed the throat,

Clothes braced the body, a benignant ache

Lit up a tooth. The papers had a note:

‘His death may mean an empire is at stake.’

Sunday and this were equally remote.

And it was signed with that former, forbidden, name. Hogg said, stuttering:

‘I can explain everything. I started that before, you see, before you got hold of me. Cured me, I mean. Of antisocial activities, that is. But I couldn’t finish it. And then one night when I was working in the bar it just came. It had sort of tidied itself up behind my back. It was perfect, if you’ll pardon the expression. So I sent it off and they published it. A kind of last fling, as you might
term
it. Or posthumous, perhaps you could even say. And then no more poetry, not never no more.’ That last phrase was perhaps too ingratiating, too consciously the old-time barman. Dr Wapenshaw did not fall for it. Instead, he rose in wrath and cried:

‘That’s right, that’s right, indulge yourself at my expense.’ He strode across to a little table near the empty grate, picked up a human skull from it, and then waved it threateningly at Hogg. ‘What you won’t or can’t realize,
you traitor
, is that that treacherous effusion of yours has been seen, yes, seen. Shorthouse saw it, Dr Shorthouse to you. You wouldn’t know who Dr Shorthouse is, in your wilful treachery, but Dr Shorthouse is the author of
The Poetic Syndrome
and
Art and the Spirochaete
and other standard clinical works. Shorthouse saw it and Shorthouse showed it to me.’ He crept towards Hogg, his eyes blowlamping in shame and anger, holding the skull in both hands like a pudding. ‘And,’ he cried, ‘I felt a fool, because I’d already discussed your case with Shorthouse.’

‘Dr Shorthouse,’ kindly emended Hogg.

‘Now do you see?
Do you see
? I boast about you as a cure, and here you are again with your bloody poetry.’ Thumbs in skull’s eye-sockets, he tore outwards in his anger, though the skull stayed firm.

‘If it’s the page-proofs of that thing of yours you’re worried about,’ said Hogg, still kindly, ‘I’d be only too pleased to help you to correct them. What I mean is, to say that I wasn’t cured after all and that my case was a failure. If that would be of any use,’ he added humbly. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘I know all about altering things when they’re in proof. I was a writer by profession, you see, as you know (I mean, that’s what you tried to cure me of, isn’t it?), and to you, who are really a doctor, it’s only a sort of hobby when all’s said and done.’ He tried to smile at Dr Wapenshaw and then at the skull, but only the latter responded. ‘Or if you like,’ suggested Hogg, ‘I’ll tell everybody that I’m really cured and that that sonnet was only a kind of left-over from the old days. Or that that bloke K isn’t really me but somebody else. In any case, that Shorthouse man won’t say anything to anybody, will he? I mean, you doctors stick together, you have to, don’t you? In one of those papers of yours I could do it,’ expanded Hogg. ‘
The Lancet
and
The Scalpel
and all those things.’

Dr Wapenshaw tore at the skull with his tense strong-nailed hairy fingers, but the skull, as though, it shot into Hogg’s mind, remembering Housman’s line about the man of bone remaining, grinned in armoured complacency. Dr Wapenshaw seemed about to weep then, as though this skull were Yorick’s. After that, he made as to hurl the skull at Hogg, but Hogg got down to the floor to pick up the copy of
The Kvadrat’s Kloochy
. Dr Wapenshaw put the skull back on its table, took a great breath and cried:

‘Get out! Get out of my bloody consulting-room!’

‘I,’ said Hogg, still on his knees, mildly, ‘only came here because you told me to.’

‘Go on, get out! I expended skill and time and patience and, yes, bloody love on your case, and this is the thanks I get! You want to ruin my bloody career, that’s what it is!’

Hogg, who had forgotten that he was still kneeling, said with continued mildness: ‘You could always put what they call an erratum slip in the book, you know. I had one once. The printers had printed “immortal” instead of “immoral”. It’ll be a great pleasure to help you, really and truly. In any case, if the worst comes to the worst, they can always take that whole section out of the book and you can put something else in. Although,’ he added seriously, ‘you’ll have to make sure it’s exactly the same length. You could sit down tonight and make something up.’

Dr Wapenshaw now stomped over to kneeling Hogg and began to lift him by his collar. ‘Out!’ he cried again. ‘Get out of here, you immoral bastard!’ He thumped to the door, opened it and held it open. The patient by the gasfire was weeping quietly. ‘As for you, you scrimshanker,’ Dr Wapenshaw cried at him, ‘I’ll deal with you in a minute. I know you, leadswinger as you are.’ Hogg, in sorrowful dignity that would, he foreknew, become a brew of rage when he could get to somewhere nice and quiet, walked to the door and said:

‘You take too much on yourselves, if you don’t mind me saying so.’ He waved
The Kvadrat’s Kloochy
in a kind of admonition. ‘I’d say it was the job of people like you to set the rest of us a good example. It’s you who want a good going over, not this poor chap here.’

‘Out!’

‘Just going,’ said Hogg, just going. He went, shaking his head slowly. ‘And,’ he said, turning back to Dr Wapenshaw, though from a safe distance, ‘I’ll write what poetry I want to, thanks very much, and not you nor anybody else will stop me.’ He thought of adding ‘So there,’ but, before he could decide, Dr Wapenshaw slammed his consulting-room door; the patient by the gasfire went ‘Oh!’ as though clouted by his mother. Not a very good man after all, thought Hogg, leaving. He ought to have suspected that heartiness right at the beginning. There had always, he felt, been something a bit insincere about it.

Some short time later, Hogg sat trembling in a public lavatory. He could actually see the flesh of his inner thighs jellying with rage. Up above him diesel trains kept setting off to the west, for this was Paddington Station, whither he had walked by way of Madame Tussaud’s, the Planetarium, Edgware Road, and so on. He had put a penny in the slot and was having more than his pennyworth of anger out. The whole poetry-loathing world had the face of Dr Wapenshaw but, he felt, having soundly and legitimately bemerded that face in imagination and micturated on it also, the world was content merely to loathe, while Dr Wapenshaw had had to go further, deliberately liquidating the poet. Or trying to. He, Hogg, was maligning the world. The world was very bad, but not as bad as Dr Wapenshaw. But then again, was not the bloody Muse bad too, withholding her gifts as she had done and then coming forward with a most ill-timed bestowal? The point was, what was the position? What precisely and the hell did she want him to do? He caught a most agonizing and fragrant whiff of himself as he had once been, seated like this in the workroom of his seaside flat, scratching bared legs that were mottled by the electric fire, working away steadily at his verse, the Muse and he set in a calm and utterly professional relationship. Would she, coaxed (which meant, among other things, not calling her bad or bloody as he had done just then), be willing to return on a sort of chronic basis? An acute spasm
like
that one which there had just been the row about really did nobody anything but harm.

But, of course, in those days, before that bloody woman had married him and made him squander his capital, it had been possible for him to be a professional (i.e. non-earning, or earning very little) poet. Now he had to have a wage. Even if the gift returned properly it would have to be expended in the form of what was called a nice hobby. Of course, he had been able to save a little. He had a little bedroom in the hotel, his food, a few tips. His trousers being down, he was able to find out at once how much he had saved. He kept his money in cash in a sponge-bag whose string was wound about a fly-button. He trusted neither banks nor his colleagues at the hotel. Keys there were a mockery, because of pass-keys. Once he had entered his little bedroom to find Spanish John in it, with a shirt of Hogg’s in one hand and one of Hogg’s razor-blades in the other, and Hogg had been quite sure he had locked his door. John had smiled falsely and said that he had found the door unlocked and had entered to borrow a razor-blade, he being out of them, and at the same time had been filled with a desire to admire Hogg’s shirts, which he considered to be very good ones. Hogg did not believe that. Anyway, he kept his money in a bag in his trousers. It was a kind of testicle-protector, for there were some dirty fighters among the Maltese and Cypriot commis waiters. He now took his roll of five-pound notes out of the bag and counted them earnestly. A crude drawing of a man, a sort of naked god of fertility, looked down without envy.

Twenty-five drawings of a clavigerous lion guarding a rather imbecile teenage Britannia. That was not bad. That was one hundred and twenty-five pounds. And, in his trouser pocket, there was about thirty shillings in silver, made up of mostly very mean gratuities. The value of certain other gratuities, dispensed in foreign notes, he had not yet troubled to ascertain. These – dirhams, lire, new-francs, deutschmarks, and so on – he kept folded in his passport, which was in the inside pocket of his sports jacket, now hanging from the door-hook. It was necessary, he had learned, for every employee of the hotel to keep close guard on his passport, because of the thievery and shady trade in passports that went on among the dark scullions, outcasts of the islands, creatures of obcure ethnic
origin
, cunning, vicious, and unscrupulous. Despite Britain’s new despised status in the world, a British passport was still prized. So there it was, then. Enough to buy time to write, say, some really careful sestinas or rambling Pound-type cantos, if the Muse would be willing to cooperate. He blew very faint wind. That was not, he told her, in case she were around, acting silly, meant in any spirit of acrimony or impatience: it was legitimate efflation, paid for in advance.

He was calmer now. He looked with sympathy at the graffiti on the walls and door. Some of these must, he thought, be considered a kind of art, since they were evidently attempts to purge powerful emotion into stylized forms. There were also wild messages, pleas for assignations at known places, though the dates were long gone; there were boasts too extravagant to be capable of fulfilment, also succinct desiderations of sexual partners too complaisant to be of this world. Sex. Well, he, Hogg, had tried, following the rehabilitatory pattern imposed by Dr, now bloody, Wapenshaw, to go in for sex like everybody else, but it had not been very successful. In any case, you really had to be young nowadays to go in properly for sex: that had been made fairly clear to him by such of the young – Italian chambermaids and so on – as he had met, as also by some of the popular art he had, again in fulfilment of the Wapenshaw bloody pattern, tried glumly to appreciate. So there it was, then. He must stop himself saying that to himself all the time.

On the walls there were also little verses, most of them set – like those works of Faith Fortitude – as prose. They were all traditional verses, mostly on cloacal subjects, but it was somehow warming to find that verse was still in regard for its gnomic mnemonic properties. Among the common people, that was. He could not imagine bloody Wapenshaw writing or drawing anything in a lavatory. There was, Hogg noticed, a nice little patch of naked wall by his right arm. He did not need his Muse for what he now took out his ballpoint pen to write. He wrote:

Think, when you ease your inner gripe

Or stand with penis in your paw,

A face is lodged within the pipe

And it belongs to Wapenshaw.

That, perhaps, would be learned by heart and reproduced elsewhere underground, imperfect memory blurring the sharp elegance but perhaps not wholly losing that name, in some allomorph or other. Enderby, folk poet. Enderby, not Hogg. And Wapenshaw given proper immortality.

Hoggerby now felt hungry. He girded himself, pulled the chain, donned his jacket, and went out. He nodded kindly at the wash-and-brush-up man, who was reading the
Evening Standard
by his glazed partition, then mounted to the light. He walked out of the station and found a sufficiently dirty-looking little eating-hell in a side-street, nearly filled with slurping men. He knew the sort of meal he wanted: a rebellious meal. From the tooth-sucking man with glasses behind the counter he ordered a mug of very strong tea, eggs and fat bacon, marged doorsteps. He was going to give himself indigestion. That would show bloody Wapenshaw.

‘A GREAT HONOUR
,
ja
,’ said Mr Holden from behind massed flowers of the season. In the adjoining office typewriters clacked. Standing before Mr Holden were Hogg and John the Spaniard, respectively flashing gold-and-caries and looking dour about the great honour. ‘Smallish and very select, and the Saddleback is just about the right-sized pitch,
ja
. So it’ll be cocktails in the Sty, and this is where you, brother Hogg, show your batting strength. We’ll be having some waiters from the Sweet Thames Run Softly bar, sort of extra cover. You’d better start boning up on your cocktails, fella, read up
your
sort of bartender’s Wisden. Horse’s necks, sidecars, manhattans, snowballs, the lot. You reckon you can carry your bat?’