The Complete Enderby (72 page)

Enderby, sweating hard under the lights and the awareness of his unpopularity, looked at this hard woman who exhibited great sternly supported breasts to the very periphery of the areola and was dressed in a kind of succulent rutilant taffeta. The name, he was thinking: as artificial as the huge aureate wig. He said:

‘I grant its cleverness. The name, I mean. I should imagine your real name is something like let me see Irma Polansky. No, wait, Edelmann, something like that.’ She looked very hard back at him.

‘Do you read much poetry, professor?’ Sperr Lansing asked.

‘Well, I guess I hardly have the time these days.’ This Professor Balaglas flashed glasses in the lights. He had the soft face of a boy devoted to his mother and wore a hideous spotted bowtie. ‘What with working on the problems that this kind of movie under present discussion gives rise to.’ There was laughter. The audience was full of mouths, always as it were at the ready, lips parted in potential ecstasy. ‘I have a collection of rock records like everybody else, of course. It’s the job of poets to get close to the people. We shall be able to use poets in the new dispensation,’ he promised. ‘Rhymes are of considerable value in hypnopaedia or sleep-teaching. A great deal of the so-called poetry they write these days …’

‘Who writes?’ Enderby asked.

‘I don’t mean you, professor. I never read anything you wrote. You may be very clear and straightforward for all I know.’ Laughter. ‘I mean, you’ve been using very clear and straightforward language to me tonight.’ Very great laughter.

‘The point I was trying to make,’ Enderby said. ‘About her name, that is.’ He shoulderjerked towards the star, ‘There you see the poetic process exemplified in a small way. Ermine, suggesting opulence, wealth, softness, luxury. Elderley, the piquancy of contrast with her evident near-youth, no longer
very
young, of course, but it happens to everybody, and the denotation of the name. The small
frisson
of gerontophilia.’

Sperr Lansing did not seem to be greatly enjoying his job. He was a man adept at appearing to be on top of everything, ready
with
quip and
oeillade
, but the eyes now had become as glassy as those of a hung hare. ‘Get on top of whom?’ he tried, and then saw he was being betrayed into unbecoming lowness. There was, rightly, no audience laugh.

Miss Elderley cunningly got in with ‘I used to know a poem about the wreck of something.’ There were relieved sniggers.

‘The Hesperus perhaps,’ Professor Isinglass (?) brightly said.

‘Naw, this went “The boy stood on the burning deck …”’

A thing exquisitely coarse shot up from Enderby’s schooldays. It was neat, too. Dirty verse depended upon an almost Augustan neatness. ‘“The boy stood in the witness-box,”’ he recited, ‘“Picking his nose like fury –”’ There were loud cries of hey hey and Lansing picked up a packet of Shagbag or something from among the various commercial artefacts stowed behind the ashtray-and-water-bottle table. ‘I think,’ he cried, ‘it’s time we heard another important message. Girls,’ he counter-recited, ‘is your fried chicken greasy?’

‘– “Little blocks, And aimed it at the jury.”’

‘Because if you want it to be crisp and dry as the bone within, here’s how to do it.’ There were at once waving fat studio major-domos running around, and the monitor screens began to show hideous greasy fried chicken, oleic, aureate.

‘All right all right,’ Sperr Lansing was saying, ‘it’s going to be Jake Summers next. Look,’ he said to Enderby, ‘keep it clean, willya.’

‘I was only trying to keep it vulgar,’ Enderby said. ‘It’s evidently a vulgar sort of show.’

‘It wasn’t till you got on to it, buster,’ Miss Elderley began.

‘Well, damn it,’ Enderby said, ‘the amount of tit you’re showing, if you don’t mind my saying so, is hardly conducive to the maintenance of a high standard of intellectual discourse.’

‘You leave my bosoms out of this –’

‘There’s only
one
bosom. A bosom is a dual entity.’

‘I object to him using that word about me. I’ve met these bastards before –’

‘I object to being called a bastard –’

‘Either sex maniacs or fags –’

Sperr Lansing composed his face to beatific calm and told the camera and the audience: ‘Welcome back, folks. Now here’s the man who pays for a moon shot with every Broadway success he writes.
Somebody
once said that there were only two men of the theatre, Jake Speare and Jake Summers. Well, here’s one of them.’

Underneath the applause and the shambling on of a small near-bald clerkly man in spectacles and sweatshirt, Enderby said to Miss Elderley:

‘I suppose you wouldn’t call that vulgar. Eh? Jakes Peare, indeed. And I’ll tell you another thing – I won’t be called a bloody fag.’

‘I didn’t say that. I said the British are either fags or sex maniacs. Keep it quiet, willya.’

For Sperr Lansing was now praising this Summers man lavishly to his face. ‘– Five hundred and forty-five performances is what I have written down here. To what do you attribute –’

Summers was wearily modest. ‘Write well, I guess. Keep it clean, I guess. When they do it, they do it offstage.’ Applause and laughter. ‘No, yah. Let them hear about sex and violence, I guess, not see it.’ (
A and L
.) ‘Talking about poetry,’ he said, ‘I used to write it. Then I meet this guy on his yacht and he says give it up, there’s nothing in it.’ Applause.

Enderby saw the tortured ecstatic face of Father Hopkins on top of the bugler and went mad. ‘Filth,’ he said, ‘filth and vulgarity.’

‘Aw, can it willya,’ Miss Elderley said. Professor Glass said:

‘It is not my place, not here and now that is, to proffer any diagnosis of er Professor Endlessly’s perpetual er manic state of excitation. Facts must be faced, though. The world has changed. England is no longer the centre of a world empire. The English language has found its finest er flowering in what he called a colonial territory.’

‘Attaboy,’ Miss Elderley said. ‘Wow.’

‘Be fair, I guess,’ Summers said. ‘Those boys with guitars.’

‘He feels his manhood threatened,’ Professor Elderglass went on. ‘Note how his dress proclaims an, er, long dead national virility. He thinks man is being abolished. His kind of man.’

‘Bankside,’ Summers said. Everybody roared.