The Complete Enderby (39 page)

‘A poem? How thrilling. What do you mean by the wherewithal? You want me to pay you for it? I will if you like. This is the first time anybody’s ever said they’d write a poem for me.’ Enderby looked sternly at her. She seemed to be teasing. It was possible she did not believe that he was a poet. Her eyes were, he noted with gloom, what might be termed merry.

‘Paper is what I want,’ he said. ‘And an envelope, if you can spare it. Two envelopes,’ he amended.

‘Dear, dear, you do want a lot.’ She took out her writing materials gaily. Enderby said:

‘I’ll write you a poem tonight. When we get there.’

‘I’ll hold you to that.’

Enderby took out his ballpoint and wrote to John the Spaniard: ‘You know I didn’t do it. Pass this note on to you-know-who. I shall be in you-know-where. Your brother. That fat dog place you mentioned. Keep in touch. Yours –’ He didn’t know how to sign himself. At last he wrote PUERCO. Then he took another piece of paper and addressed it from In The Air. He wrote: ‘To Whomsoever It May Concern. It was not me who shot that pop-singer, as he is called. It was –’ He was damned if he could remember the name. To Miss Boland he said once more: ‘I’ve got to get out. I’ve forgotten something.’ She let him out, mock-sighing and smiling. He kept paper and ballpoint in his hands. He went back to Miss Kelly, still in a trance of vacancy. Mr Mercer was lip-smacking, ready to surface. A monitor in his sleep had perhaps warned him that soon they would be starting to drop towards Seville. Enderby said:

‘That one that used to be with Mrs Einstein’s lot –’

‘Mrs Wittgenstein.’

‘That’s right. The one that got out and became unsuccessful and goes round the clubs now.’

‘Jed Foot, you mean.’

‘That’s it.’ He wrote the name in standing. He might forget it again if he waited till he got back to his seat. Might spill it on the way. He nodded thanks and went back now, and Miss Boland, letting him in, said:

‘You
are
a busy little bee.’

Enderby wrote: ‘He handed me the gun and I took it without thinking. I panicked and ran. Pick him up and get him to confess. I am innocent.’ Then he signed that abandoned pseudonym. He addressed one envelope to The Authorities and the other to Mr John Gomez, Piggy’s Bar, Tyburn Towers Hotel, W.
I
. He licked and folded and arranged. Then he sighed. Finished. He could do no more. He thought he had better shut his eyes and get ready for Seville. That would stop Miss Boland teasing him further. Miss Boland, he noticed, was looking something up in her little Spanish dictionary. She was grinning. He didn’t like that. It was too small a dictionary to have anything to grin at in it. He killed her grin with his eyelids.

Enderby slept, though without dreaming, as though the recent materials made available for dreams were far too shocking to be processed into fantasy. He was shaken awake by Miss Boland, who smiled on him and said, for some reason, ‘Dirty.’ He said:

‘Eh?’

‘We’re there,’ she said. ‘Sunny Spain, though it’s the middle of the night and it’s been raining. The rain in Spain,’ she giggled.

‘What do you mean, dirty? Did I do something I shouldn’t? In my sleep, that is?’ He wondered what incontinent act might have overtaken him.

‘That’s what it says. Come on, we’re to get out.’ People were passing down the aisle, some yawning as after a boring sermon. Miss Boland smiled as if she were some relative of the vicar. ‘Also,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘it says nasty and foul.’ Enderby saw wet-gleaming tarmac under dim lamps. There was something he had to worry about. He said:

‘What does?’

‘Oh, come on.’ She was getting her raincoat and overnight satchel from the rack. Enderby had nothing to get. Feeling naked, he said:

‘I’ll carry that if you like.’ And then his fear smote him and his hand shook.

‘That’s sweet of you. Take it then.’ He could hardly get his hand through the straps of the bag, but she didn’t notice: she had arrived in non-sunny, not even moony, Spain. Mr Mercer seemed as nervous as Enderby himself; it was as though he had to introduce Seville like his wife and, perhaps being on the menopause, she might do something embarrassing. This was it, Enderby thought, this was it. He was cold and sober and ready and he would bluff it out to the end. He looked coldly and soberly on Miss Boland and decided that she must, in a manner, help him. He would laugh down the steps with her, linked, as if she were his wife. They were looking for a single desperate fugitive, not a laughing married man. But, as they smiled and Enderby nodded at Miss Kelly, standing at the aircraft exit, he saw that the stairway was very narrow and that he must go down unlinked. Miss Kelly beamed at everybody as if they had all just arrived at her party, which was being held in the
cellar
. Enderby heard Mr Guthkelch ahead, singing ‘The Spaniard who blighted my life’, doing his job.

‘He shall die! He shall die! He shall die tiddly iddly eye tie tie eye tie tie tie!’

In very bad taste, Enderby thought. Stepping out into moist velvet warmth, he saw at the stair-bottom only Mr Mercer with an armful of passports chatting quite amiably, though in the loud and slow English needful when speaking to a foreigner, to a foreigner. It was a uniformed Spaniard in dark glasses. He had both hands in his trousers pockets and seemed to Enderby to be playing the solitaire game known as pocket billiards. He looked up at Miss Kelly, blowing up sparks from his cigarette at her like impotent signals of desire. He was not, Enderby was sure, from Interpol.

Miss Boland descended before him. As soon as he had reached damp tarmac, Enderby skipped up to her and took her arm. She seemed surprised but not displeased; she pressed Enderby’s arm into her warm side. There seemed, and Enderby’s knees liquefied in relief as he saw what there seemed, to be no raincoated men waiting anywhere for him on the passage over the tarmac to the airport building. There seemed to be only very lowly workmen, thin and in blue, leaning against walls, smoking vigorously, and eyeing the tourists with the hungry look of the very poor. The airport itself, despite its being very late at night, was busy. There was an aircraft with Arabic letters on it preparing to take off and there was one called IBERIA taxiing in. There were men in overalls pulling carts around and chugging about in little tractors. Enderby approved of all this bustle, especially the passenger-bustle that was evident in the building they now approached. He saw himself being chased and hiding behind people. But no, he was safe for the time being. Miss Boland said:

‘There’s no
luna
. That’s what it’s called, isn’t it?
Luna
. Better than “moon”. Lunar. Lunation. Endo-lunar. I thought the
luna
would be here to meet me. Never mind.’

‘You’ve had plenty on the way,’ said Enderby in a slightly chiding tone. ‘You’ll get plenty while you’re here. On holiday, I mean. But I thought perhaps you’d want to get away from it.’ A fellow-tourist walking near them gave Enderby a suspicious look. ‘The
luna
, I mean,’ Enderby said.

‘You can’t get away from it,’ said Miss Boland. ‘Not if you’ve given your whole life to it, as I have.’ And she squeezed Enderby’s arm with hers. She was very warm. ‘Where did you learn Spanish?’ she asked.

‘I never did. I don’t know any Spanish. Italian, yes, a bit. But not Spanish. They’re similar, though.’

‘You’re very mysterious,’ said Miss Boland mysteriously. ‘You intrigue me rather. There seems to be a lot you’re holding back. Why, you haven’t even brought a raincoat. But I suppose that’s your business, not mine. And no overnight bag of your own. You give me the impression of a man who had to get away in a hurry.’

‘Oh, I had to,’ palpitated Enderby. ‘What I mean is, I’m a man of impulse. I think of a thing and then I do it.’ She squeezed his arm again and said:

‘You can call me Miranda if you like.’

‘A very poetical name,’ said Enderby in duty. He couldn’t quite remember who wrote that poem. A big Catholic winy man in a cloak. ‘The fleas that tease in the high Pyrenees,’ he quoted. And then: ‘Never more, Miranda, never more. Only the something whore.’

‘Pardon?’

‘And something something something at the door.’ They had now entered the airport building. It was small, dark, and smelt faintly of men’s urinals, specifically foreign ones, a garlic-scented effluent. There was a big photograph of General Franco, dressed as a civilian, a bald man with jowls and parvenu lifted eyebrows. There were also yellowing notices probably forbidding things. Mr Mercer was already there, having perhaps been given a lift on one of those tractors. All the cruise members clustered round him, as for protection. Enderby saw that his arm was still in Miss Boland’s. He disengaged it by saying he had to post a letter.

‘Mysterious again,’ she said. ‘You’re no sooner here than you have to post a mysterious letter. Signed with a mysterious name.’

‘What?’ squawked Enderby.

‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t help seeing it. You left it on the seat. Do forgive me. It was with those brochures and things, and I picked them up to look at them and there was your letter. But it’s no
good
my pretending that I don’t know your first name now, is it? Or nickname it must be.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘It
must
be. I’ve never seen the name Puerco before.’ She pronounced it
Pure co
. ‘And then, since it looked foreign, I looked it up in my Spanish dictionary, and, lo and behold, there it was. Meaning “dirty”.’

‘Actually,’ Enderby improvised in delirium, ‘it’s an old border name. Welsh border, I mean. My family came from near Shrewsbury. That’s a coincidence, that is, the Spanish business, I mean. Look, I’ve
got
to post this letter. I’ll be back.’ As soon as he had clumsily pushed his way through the crowd that was round woolly-capped Mr Mercer, he realized he had behaved foolishly in being willing to leave her if only for five minutes. She wouldn’t believe that story about Puerco being an old border name; she’d look it up again in her Spanish dictionary and she’d find more than dirty and filthy and so on. She was bound to. He hesitated at a door that led on to a dismal wet garden, beyond it a kind of restaurant all made of big dirty windows. He would have to get that dictionary away from her, tear out the dangerous page or lose the whole book. Or should he now, with his five-pound notes and anthology of exotic
pourboires
, get out there into the great rainy windy peninsula, lose himself in cork-woods, become dried up like a raisin tramping the hot white country roads? He thought not. A lean poor man was standing by the door, opposing cigarette-sparks to the dull damp night. It was possible, thought Enderby, that Spanish John’s hispaniolizing of his mother’s maiden name represented a historical phase of the word, long superseded. But if, of course, it was the same as Italian and – Enderby said to this man:

‘
Amigo
.’ The man responded with a benison of sparks. Enderby said: ‘In
español. L’animal
. What’s the
español
for it?’ He snorted and snuffed the air all around at chest-level as though rooting for truffles. Then he saw that a man in smart uniform, just behind, was watching with some interest. The lean poor man said: ‘
Entiendo. Un puerco
.’

That was it then, Enderby thought grimly. He stood wavering, letter in hand. The thin poor man seemed to be awaiting further charades from Enderby. The uniformed man frowned, very puzzled. The thin poor one whinnied and said, ‘
Un caballo
.’ Enderby said
‘
Sí
’
then tripped over the uniformed man’s left boot as he went in again, letter unposted.

‘My goodness, you were quick,’ said Miss Boland.

‘It’s the language,’ Enderby said. ‘I don’t know the language, as I said. Perhaps if I could borrow your little dictionary –’

‘Right,’ Mr Mercer was now saying. ‘Everybody please stand round there where the baggage is.’ They’d got it out pretty quickly, Enderby thought distractedly: no spirit of
mañana
here. ‘As you know, they have customs here same as everywhere else –’

‘Old Spanish customs,’ cried Mr Guthkelch.

‘– But only a few of you will have to open your bags –’

‘As long as nobody has to drop ’em,’ cried Mr Guthkelch, perhaps going too far.

‘– It’s a sample, you see, what you might call a sample checkup.’

‘I don’t suppose,’ said Miss Boland to Enderby, ‘that you’ve got anything so bourgeois as luggage, have you? I suppose you’ll be sleeping in your shirt or in the altogether.’ Her eyes glistened when she said that, as though excited by it. Enderby was disgusted; he said:

‘You’ll soon see whether I’ve got it or not. I’m no different from anybody else.’ The man who had looked at him suspiciously on the way across the tarmac now did the same thing again. ‘In the sense, that is,’ expanded Enderby, ‘of personal possessions and the like.’

‘This is a bit like an identification parade, isn’t it?’ giggled Miss Boland. ‘Very thrilling.’ They were all there near the pile of luggage, and an official with a peaked cap did a caged-tiger walk up and down in front of this squad of pleasure-seekers, hands folded behind his back. Enderby saw who it was: that man out there who had frowned at his pig-snorting. The man now halted and faced them. He had jowls not unlike those of his Caudillo and even allelomorphs of those eyebrows; perhaps a lowly relative for whom the régime had had to find a job. He sternly pointed at people. He pointed at Enderby. Enderby at once looked round for the man with the overweight luggage. He found him and said: