The Complete Enderby (37 page)

‘You should have read it proper. I leave them sort of things to you. Well, it’s your stuff that’ll have to stay behind, not mine.’

‘How was I to know you couldn’t take as much on a charter flight as on one of them ordinary uns?’ He laid a polythene-wrapped suit, like a corpse, on the dirty floor. Hogg saw a yawning official at a desk. Above him stretched a title in neon Egyptian italic: PANMED AIRWAYS. Panmed. That would mean all over the Med or Mediterranean. He went up and said politely:

‘A single to Morocco, please.’ Morocco was, surely, round the Mediterranean or somewhere like that. Hogg saw the raincoated paper-reader looking at him. Lack of luggage, no coat over arm, a man obviously on the run.

‘Eh?’ The official stopped yawning. He was young and ginger with eyes, like a dog’s, set very wide apart. ‘Single? Oh, one person you mean.’

‘That’s right. Just me. Rather urgent, actually.’ He shouldn’t have said that. The young man said:

‘You mean this air cruise? Is that what you mean? A last-minute decision, is that it? Couldn’t stand it any longer? Had to get away?’ It was as though he were rehearsing a report on the matter; he was also putting words into Hogg’s mouth. Hogg said:

‘That’s right.’ And then: ‘I don’t
have
to get away, of course. I just thought it would be a good idea, that’s all.’

‘Charlie!’ called the young official. To Hogg he said: ‘It looks as though you’re going to be in luck. Somebody died at the last minute.’

Hogg showed shock at the notion of someone dying suddenly. The man called Charlie came over. He was thin and harassed, wore a worn suit, had PANMED in metal on his left lapel. ‘They won’t ever learn,’ said Charlie. ‘There’s one couple there brought what looks like a cabin-trunk. They just don’t seem able to
read
, some of them.’

‘The point is,’ said the young ginger man, ‘that you’ve had this cancellation, and there’s this gentleman here anxious to fill it.
Longing
to get to the warmth, he is. Can’t wait till the BEA flight this evening. That’s about it, isn’t it?’ he said to Hogg. Hogg nodded very eagerly. Too eagerly, he then reflected.

Charlie surveyed Hogg all over. He didn’t seem to care much for the barman’s trousers. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know really. It’s a question of him being able to pay in cash.’

‘I can pay in nothing else,’ said Hogg with some pride. He pulled out a fistful in earnest. ‘I just want to be taken to Morocco, that’s all. I have,’ he said, improvising rapidly, ‘to get to my mother out there. She’s ill, you see. Something she ate. I received a telegram just after lunch. Very urgent.’
Very
urgent: the type-setters would be setting up the type now; the C.I.D. would be watching the airports.

Charlie had a fair-sized wart on his left cheek. He fiddled with it as though it activated a telegraphic device. He waited. Hogg put his money back in his trouser-pocket. A message seemed to come through. Charlie said: ‘Well, it all depends where in Morocco, doesn’t it? And how fast you want to get there. We’ll be in Seville late tonight, see, and not in Marrakesh till tomorrow dinner-time. This is an air-cruise, this is. If it’s Tangier you want to get to, we shan’t be there for another fortnight. We go round the Canaries a bit, you see.’

‘Marrakesh would do very nicely,’ said Hogg. ‘What I mean is, that’s where my mother is.’

‘You won’t get anybody else, Charlie,’ said the young ginger official. ‘That seat’s going begging, all paid for by the bloke who snuffed it. He’s got cash.’ He spoke too openly; he seemed to know that Hogg was making a shady exit. ‘The bus,’ he looked at the big clock, ‘leaves in ten minutes.’

‘Shall we say fifty?’ Charlie licked his lips; the young official picked up the gesture. ‘In cash, like I said.’

‘Done,’ said Hogg. He lick-counted the money out. A good slice of his savings. Savings. The word struck, like a thin tuning-fork (he was glad Yod Crewsy was dead, if he
was
dead), a pertinent connotation. He put the money on the counter.

‘Passport in order, sir?’ said the ginger official. Hogg showed him. ‘Luggage, sir?’

‘Wait,’ said Hogg. ‘I’ve got it over there.’ He pierced the waiting
crowd
. That unpacking man had finished unpacking. In the big suitcase lay only a pair of Bermuda shorts, some shaving gear, and two or three paperbacks of a low sort. The unpacked garments were on his arm. ‘They said I could leave them in their office here,’ he puffed. ‘Collect them on the way back. Still, it’s a bloody nuisance. I’ve practically only got what I stand up in.’ Hogg said:

‘Saw you were in a bit of trouble over weight.’ He smiled at the couple as if they were going to do him a favour, which they were. ‘That suitcase could go with mine, if you like. I’m taking practically nothing, you see.’

The couple looked at him with proper suspicion. They were decent fattish short people in late middle age, unused to kindness without a catch in it. The man groused: ‘It means I’ll have to shove it all in again.’

‘That’s right,’ said Hogg. ‘Shove it all in again.’ The man, shaking his head, once more got down heavily on his knees.

‘It’s very kind, Mr er,’ said the wife, grudgingly.

They never took their eyes off Hogg as he swung the reconstituted bag to the weighing. Charlie and the ginger official had seen nothing: they were busy doing a split on Hogg’s money. The raincoated paper-reader, Hogg noticed, had gone. Perhaps to buy a later edition. Hogg was glad to be herded to the bus.

This Charlie seemed to be what they called a dragoman. He counted his charges on, and then, when they were on, counted them again. He frowned, as if the numbers did not tally. Hogg was seated next to a rather dowdy woman in early middle age, younger than himself, that was. She smiled at him as to a companion in adventure. She wore churchgoing clothes of sensible district-nurse-type hat and costume in a kind of underdone pie-crust colour. Her stockings, of which the knees just about showed, were of some kind of lisle material, opaque gunmetal. Hogg smiled back tentatively, and then warily surveyed the other members of the party. They were mostly unremarkable people subduedly thrilled at going off to exotic places. The men were already casting themselves for
parts
, as if the trip were really going to be full of enforced privations and they had, somehow, to make their own entertainment. One beef-necked publican-type was pointing out the sights on the way to the airport and inventing bogus historical associations, like ‘Queen Lizzy had a milk stout there’. There was cautious fencing for the role of low comedian, and one man who, his teeth out, could contort his face in a rubbery manner seemed likely to win. There was a loud and serious man, a frequenter presumably of public libraries, who was giving a preliminary account of the more hurtful fauna of North Africa. Another man could reel off exchange rates. Hogg’s seat-companion smiled again at him, as if with pleasure that everything was going to be so nice and cosy. Hogg closed his eyes in feigned (but was it feigned?) weariness.

When they got to the airport the news was still unbroken. Perhaps the management, on the instructions of the police, had sealed everything off, and it was no good the Prime Minister saying he had to get back to the House. Twenty minutes before take-off. Hogg spent most of that time in one of the lavatories, sitting gloomily on the seat. Could he do anything about disguising himself? With teeth out he would be expected to compete for the part of cruise comedian perhaps. Spectacles off? He tried that; he could just about see. Rearrange hair-style? Too little hair really, but he combed what he had down in a Roman emperor arrangement. Walk with a limp? Easy enough, if he could remember to keep on doing it. He heard ladylike intonations from a loudspeaker, so he pulled the chain and went to join his party. The man with the overweight luggage had suddenly woken up to the fact of Hogg’s kindness; he did not seem to notice any change in Hogg’s appearance. With bleary unfocused eyes, top denture out (a compromise that a sudden feeling of nausea had forced upon him on leaving the lavatory), and scant imperial coiffure, Hogg nodded and nodded that that was really quite all right, only too glad to oblige.

They all walked to the aircraft. Wind blew grit across the tarmac. Farewell, English autumn. It did not seem to Hogg to be a very elegant aircraft. There was a button missing from the stewardess’s uniform jacket, and she herself, though insipidly and blondly pretty, had a look of vacancy that did not inspire confidence. Things
done
on the cheap, that was about it. Hogg sat down next to a starboard window, taking his last look of England. Somebody sat next to him, a woman. She said, in a semi-cultured Lancashire accent:

‘We seem destined, don’t we?’ It was the one who had sat next to him on the bus. Hogg grunted. The unavoidable happening. In the elastic-topped pocket on the back of the seat in front of him, Hogg sadly found reading-matter, very cheerful and highly coloured stuff. No need to worry if we go down into the sea. We have a fine record for air safety. Keep calm, the stewardess will tell you what to do. But who, wondered Hogg, would tell her? There were brochures about the ports of call on the air cruise.

‘This is my first time,’ said the woman next to Hogg. ‘Is it yours?’ Her teeth seemed to be all her own. She had taken off her hat. Her hair was prettily mousy.

‘First time to do what?’ said Hogg dourly.

‘Oh, you know, go on one of these things. It’s funny really, I suppose, but I know all about the moon yet I’ve never seen the Mountains of the Moon.’

‘A stronger telescope,’ said Hogg. He was leafing through a booklet, full of robes, skies of impossible blue, camels, palms, the wizened faces of professional Moorish beggars, which told him of the joys of Tangier.

‘No, no, I mean the Mountains of the Moon in Africa.’ She giggled.

Hogg heard the door of the aircraft slam. It did not slam properly. Charlie the dragoman, who now wore a little woolly highly coloured cap, helped the stewardess to give it a good hard slam, and then it seemed to stay shut. Engines and things began to fire and backfire or something. They were going to take off. Hogg felt safe for an instant, but then realized that there was no escape. They had things like Interpol and so on, or some such things. Spanish police, with teeth all bits of gold like John, waiting for him at Seville. But perhaps not, he thought with a little rising hope. Perhaps Spain would consider the murder of a pop-singer a very nugatory crime, which of course it was. Not really a crime at all if you took the larger view. Well then, landed in Spain, let him stay in Spain,
el señor inglés
. But how live there? With his
little
bit of money he could not, even in that notoriously cheap (because poverty-stricken) country, find a retreat or lavatory that would accommodate him long enough to coax, like a costive bowel, the art of verse back. The Muse had still made no real sign. There was a poem still to be completed. And, besides, there was terrible repression in Spain, a big dictator up there in the Escorial or wherever it was, directing phalanges of cruel bruisers (no, not bruisers; thin sadists, rather) with steel whips. No freedom of expression, poets suspect, foreign poets arrested and eventually handed over to Interpol. No, better to go to a country full of men on the run and smugglers and (so he had heard) artistic homosexuals, where English, language of international shadiness, was spoken and understood, and where at least he might hide (even out of doors; the nights were warm, weren’t they?) and work out the future. One step at a time.

‘You haven’t fastened your safety-belt,’ said the woman. Hogg grumbled, fumbling for the metal-tipped tongues of dirty webbing. The airfield, his last view of England, was speeding as a grey blur back into the past. Speed increased; they were getting off the ground. You in that high-powered car. Perhaps an old-fashioned image, really. Hogg leafed through the Tangier brochure absently, noticing little box advertisements for restaurants and bars. He frowned at one of these, wondering. It said:

AL-ROKLIF

English Spoken Berber Dances

Wide Range of Exotic Delights

A Good British Cup of Tea

‘IN ALL THE ANTHOLOGIES!’

He wondered, he wondered, he wondered. Artistic, which included literary, homosexuals. The name, rationalized into mock-Arabic. The slogan. Well. He began to breathe hard. If they caught him, and he would surely know if they were going to catch him, he would not be punished gratuitously. There was something very just but highly punishable he would do before Interpol dragged him off in handcuffs. When you came to think of it, Tangier sounded like just the sort of place a man of Rawcliffe’s type would end up
in
. Moorish catamites. Drinking himself to death. Drinking was too slow a process.

Hogg came to to find the woman gently unclicking his safety-belt for him. ‘You were miles away,’ she smiled. ‘And we’re miles up. Look.’ Hogg, mumbling sour thanks, surveyed without much interest a lot of clouds lying below them. He had seen such things before, travelling to Rome on his honeymoon. He gave the clouds the tribute of a look of weary sophistication. It was the Romantic poets really who should have flown; Percy Shelley would have loved to see all this lot from this angle. How did that thing go now? He chewed a line or two to himself.

‘Did you say something?’ asked the woman.

‘Poetry,’ said Hogg. ‘A bit of poetry. About clouds.’ And, as if to make up for his neglect of her, kind and friendly as she was, he recited, in his woolly voice: