The Complete Enderby (53 page)

‘Better, Enderby, much better. Taken that letter to the post, has he? Loiters on the way sometimes, wayward. Good fundamentally, though. A bottom of good sense. Dr Johnson or somebody said that, Enderby.’

‘It was about a woman.’

‘Woman, was it? Well, of course, that’s more your line, isn’t it? God God God God, the bloody pain. The thing to do is to try to see the bloody pain as working in something out there. The body is not me. No transubstan. But Christ Christ, there’s a hot line to the brain. Snip the nerve-endings, is there a me still there when all have been snipped? Psychoneural paral paral parallelism ism. Very popular that, before the war. The new immortality.’

‘There’s this morphine here,’ Enderby said.

‘More your line. Two lines there, though, hot and cold. Sun and moon. Moon’s no power over you, Enderby. Me, I sinned against the Muse, all woman, and she took her revenge. And now to be sacrificed to her. But she’ll be partly cheated, Enderby. New moon coming up about now. But eastward there are tideless waters. Drop this exterior thing in the tideless waters, Enderby. More brandy.’

‘Do you think you –’

‘Yes, I do. Got to tell you. Give instructions.’ Enderby poured
more
cognac into the feeding-cup. Obscene, somehow, that festive gold and heady vapour in bland invalid china. Rawcliffe sucked more in avidly. ‘There’s a man called Walker, Enderby. Useful sort of man, British colonial. His precise terry territory uncertain. He’s in Casablanca now. Get in touch with him, his phone number’s behind the bar. He knows how to get a small aircraft, borrows it from Abdul Krim or somebody, bloody rogue whoever he is. Bloody rogue. What was I saying? Tight, a bit, that’s the trouble. Empty stomach, that’s the trouble.’

‘I know this Walker. Easy Walker he calls himself.’ And then: ‘Can you eat anything? An egg or something?’

‘It’s not your job to keep me alive, is it, Enderby? What’s the bloody use of nutriment to me? Listen. The money’s in this mattress. For Christ’s sake don’t let anybody burn it. It’s not that I don’t trust the banks. It’s the buggers in the banks I don’t trust, Enderby. Tattle tattle tattle about how much he’s got, then coming along for a loan, then beat you up in a back-alley if they can’t have it. I know them all too well. You know them all too well. You know Easy Walker. Always said you’d fall on your feet, Enderby. Get that bloody Antonio in here.’

‘What for?’

‘Tell him to bring his guitar. Want to hear. To hear. In all the anthol. He sings it.’

Enderby went out to the bar and said: ‘
Antonio, Señor Rawcliffe quiere que tu, usted canta, cante
, subjunctive there somewhere, whatever it is.
Su cancion, él dice
.’ Antonio and Manuel both looked up from a Scrabble board now nearly full of words, their eyes ready to brim. Enderby went back to Rawcliffe. ‘That letter to Scotland Yard,’ he said. ‘It won’t do any good. There must be a lot who send in letters like that.’ And where was he to go, where? He had reconciled himself, hadn’t he? But that was when it had seemed possible to be able to murder Rawcliffe. Rawcliffe’s eyes were closed. He had started snorting again. His body writhed feebly. And then he started violently awake.

‘You’ve no bloody idea,’ he said with slow seriousness, ‘of the bloody agony. You wouldn’t think it possible. Don’t leave it too long, Enderby.’

‘Morphine?’

‘Brandy. Insult to the brain. Poor Dylan. Kill me with bloody kindness.’ Enderby sighed, then recharged the feeding-cup. Antonio came in, trying his strings, crying. ‘Sing, blast you,’ said Rawcliffe, spluttering out cognac. The smell of it was fast overcoming his own. Antonio sat on the Rif saddle and twanged his thumb from E to e, sniffing his tears back. It was a well-worn guitar; Enderby could see the abrasions of fingers that, in Andalusian style, had drummed its body. Antonio gave out a thrummed major chord that, with the smell of cognac, seemed to affirm life (sun, zapateados, death in the afternoon). He wailed:

‘Per ap sa yamna tuonti diri seyed
,

Per ap sayid beter go
,

Ji seyed. Mocionles jer ayis, jer jeyed
,

Seyin not yes, not no.’

‘In all the anthologies,’ Rawcliffe cried, then coughed and coughed. Antonio did not go on. ‘Put that, death, in your bloody pipe,’ said Rawcliffe more weakly when the racking had subsided. ‘
Exegi monumentum
. And what of yours, Enderby?’ He was so faint that Enderby had to drop his ear towards him. ‘Better to be the one-poem man. But she left me then. Opened up heaven of creativity and then closed it. All right, Antonio. Later, later.
Muchas gracias
.’ Antonio blew his nose on his cook’s apron. ‘Read me something of yours, Enderby. They’re there, your slender volumes, somewhere. I bought your books at least. Least I could do. I am not all badness.’

‘Well, really, this is hardly – What I mean is –’

‘Something appropriate. Something to one about to die or one dead.’

Enderby felt grimly in his left jacket pocket. He had transferred that stolen horror thither. ‘I can,’ he said, ‘without going to your shelves.’ But there was here at last, and his heart began to climb as with muscular pseudopodia, the chance of checking. Auntie Vesta. He strode over Rawcliffe’s hidden feet towards the wall of books. A lot of cheap nasty stuff there:
Bumboy, Mr Wigg’s Fancy, Lashmaster
. He thought, from the shape and size, he saw a copy of his own
Fish and Heroes
, but it turned out to be a small collection of glossy
photographs
: men and boys complicatedly on the job, with idiot eyes. But here it was, that other volume, the one the critics had trounced:
The Circular Pavane
. He flicked and flicked through the pages. There weren’t many. And then. ‘Right,’ he said. Rawcliffe’s eyes were closed again but he could tell Enderby was smiling. He said:

‘Glee, eh? The creator’s glee? You’ve found something that recalls the actual ecstasy of its making. Don’t exass exacerbate my agony. Read it.’

‘Listen.’ Enderby tried to be gruff, but his reading made the poem sound sneering, as though the emotions of the mature were being mocked by some clever green child:

‘They thought they’d see it as parenthesis –

Only the naked statement to remember,

Cleaving no logic in their sentences,

Putting no feelers out to the waking dreamer –

So they might reassume untaken seats,

Finish their coffee and their arguments,

From the familiar hooks redeem their hats

And leave, with the complacency of friends.

But strand is locked with strand, like the weave of bread,

And this is part of them and part of time –’

‘Oh God God,’ Rawcliffe suddenly cried. ‘Ugly hell gape not come not Lucifer.’ He began to babble. ‘And if the eternal finds its figures in the temporal then they can find their inferno here.’ He screamed and then collapsed, his head lolling, his tongue out, blood coming from his left nostril. Antonio’s guitar clanged gently superposed fourths and my-dog-has-fleas as he put it down. He made the sign of the cross and prayed weeping. ‘A shot, Enderby, for Christ’s sake.’ Enderby started: a test; see if he could really kill? ‘A lot of shots.’ He saw then and went over to the coffee-table and the syringe and the morphine ampoules in their box. He hoped he could cope. Those Doggy Wog people would be able to cope all right.

Rawcliffe did not stay under for long. There was a powerful life-urge there, despite everything. ‘Brandy,’ he said. ‘I’ll beat them all yet, Enderby.’ Enderby filled the cup: the bottle was near its end. Rawcliffe sucked it all in like water. ‘What news?’ he asked. ‘What irrelevancies are proceeding in the big world?’

‘There’s nothing as far as I can see,’ Enderby said. ‘But we’ve only got the Spanish paper, and I can’t read Spanish very well.’

Enough, though. When Tetuani came back from posting that air-letter, he brought with him a copy of
España
, which Enderby took with him to a bar-table. Rawcliffe unconscious, though roaring terribly from deep in his cortex, Enderby sat with a large whisky, breathing the prophylactic of fresh air from an open window. ‘
Quiere comer
?’ Antonio asked. Enderby shook his head: he couldn’t eat anything just yet, not just yet,
gracias
all the same. He drank his drink and looked at the paper. It was better that he read what he was undoubtedly going to read not in English: he needed the cushioning of a foreign tongue, with all its associations of literature and tourism, despite his foreknowledge. Words had power of their own:
dead
would always be a horrible word. On the front page the Caudillo still howled for the Rock, and some Arab leader called vainly for the extermination of Israel. When, on the second page, he came to the headline YOD CREWSY MUERTO, his response was that of a printer who had set the type himself. The score was, say, 10–2, and you had to wait ten minutes, say, for the anti-climax of the final whistle. What it said under the headline was brief. It said, as far as Enderby could tell, that he had passed into a terminal coma after a moment of flickering his eyes open and that soon there were no further indications of cardiac activity. There would be a sort of lying in state somewhere and then a requiem mass at the Catholic Cathedral in London (they meant Westminster). Fr O’Malley would deliver the panegyric. Nothing about girls weeping, as over Osiris or Adonis or somebody. Nothing about Scotland Yard expecting immediate arrest.

‘Nothing at all,’ Enderby said.

What would Scotland Yard do about Rawcliffe’s letter? Enderby had two-fingered it himself to Rawcliffe’s dictation. It would do
no
good, Enderby had said, but Rawcliffe had insisted. Repentance, seeing the light, symbolic blow against anti-art. A guest (check guest-list) who had come with full cold-blooded intention of killing and then being arrested – dying of those encroaching claws, what had he to lose? – he had succumbed in reflex to panic and handed gun to an anonymous waiter. He was not sorry, oh no, far from it: so perish all art’s enemies, including (but with him it was the fullest blackest knowledge: he knew what he did) himself. Rawcliffe’s scrawl, two witnesses: Antonio Alarcón and Manuel Pardo Palma. Well, Enderby thought, it might resolve things one way or the other. It would welcome the police to one terminus or another. And your name, sir,
señor
? Enderby. Your passport, please,
por favor
. Well, a slight problem there, officer. Whispered consultation, sergeant calling inspector over, comparing photograph with. All right, Hogg then. I recognized the true murderer and pursued him. Doing the job of the police for them, really, in best fictional tradition. I say no more. All right, arrest me then. Obviously I say no more. No warning necessary.

He was indifferent, really. All he wanted was a small room and a table to write verse on and freedom from the necessity to earn a living. But there remained self-doubt. Was the Muse so generous now only because she was dispensing rubbish? The future, perhaps, lay with those Doggy Wog people. He didn’t really know; he wanted to be told, shown. But was he being reserved for something? Why did not everybody know that Hogg was Enderby? Why had that moon-bitch been silent? If John the Spaniard had blown the gaff, why was Tangier not milling with Interpol, demanding to see all foreign passports, combing? What force had struck down Wapenshaw, if it was Wapenshaw they’d been talking about, and rendered him dumb?

Enderby wondered now, sitting on the Rif saddle, keeping away from the putridity, whether he should ask Rawcliffe (meaning the still not foundered intelligence in the penthouse above the demolition squads), as a dying man who had nothing to gain by mendacity, what he thought of his, Enderby’s, work and (what he really meant) whether he should go on with it. But heaving and groaning Rawcliffe gave him an answer without being asked, without speaking. Go on with anything so long as you’re alive; nothing
matters
except staying alive. Enderby could see that now, but had not always thought so. Rawcliffe said:

‘Get on to Walker. It’s going to be
it
soon, Enderby. Never mind what he asks. Money money money. All money these days. Fortunately it’s stuffed in here, mine I mean, by my feet. No danger, Enderby, of ultimate incontinence fouling it. Clean money, most. The dirty part did not really harm my country. Hashish a harmless enough drug. More brandy.’

‘I’ll have to get a new bottle.’

‘Get it then, blast you. What are those bloody boys doing?’

‘The siesta.’

‘Something in the Bible about that. What, could ye not watch with me one hour? This night, before the cock crow.’ Rawcliffe took breath, rattling, and went feebly cocorico. Then he coughed and coughed. Blood bubbled from both nostrils and some trickled from his right mouth-corner. ‘Good Christ,’ he panted, ‘I won’t have this. Bewrayed, beshitten. Die in one’s own bloody dung.’ He tried to shift his body away from the new foulness but rolled back on to it. ‘I’m getting up,’ he said. ‘I’m going to die on my feet. Help me, blast you, Enderby.’