Cover
About the Author
Also by Anthony Burgess
Title Page
Inside Mr Enderby
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Enderby Outside
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Appendix: Some Uncollected Early Poems by F. X. Enderby
The Clockwork Testament
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Enderby’s Dark Lady
Dedication
A Prefatory Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Copyright
Anthony Burgess achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the leading novelists of his day, and one of the most versatile. He was born in Manchester in 1917 and studied English at the university there. He served in the army between 1940 to 1956, and as a colonial education officer in Malaya and Borneo from 1954 to 1960, which proved the inspiration for The Malayan Trilogy. In 1959 Burgess was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour and he decided to try to live by writing. He wrote over fifty books, scripts, translations, a Broadway musical, three symphonies and hundreds of book reviews. His novel Earthly Powers was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980. Burgess was a Visiting Fellow of Princeton University and a Distinguished Professor of City College, New York. He was created a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French President and Commandeur de Mérite Culturel by Prince Rainier of Monaco. His last novel, published in the spring of 1993, was A Dead Man in Deptford, based around the murder of Christopher Marlowe.
Anthony Burgess died in November 1993. In the tributes that followed The New York Times celebrated his ‘versatility and erudition’, Gore Vidal said ‘the Enderby series are even finer comedies than those by the so much admired Evelyn Waugh’, David Lodge admired ‘his tireless energy and fertility of invention’ and John Updike praised his ‘energy and the wide-ranging interests of a dozen writers … He seemed not only a prodigious intellect, but an affectionate spirit whose mind, like Ariel’s, circled the globe in a few seconds.’
ALSO BY ANTHONY BURGESS
Novels
Abba Abba
A Dead Man in Deptford
Byrne
Earthly Powers
The Malayan Trilogy: Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, Beds in the East
Autobiography
Little Wilson and Big God
You’ve Had Your Time
Non Fiction
Shakespeare
To D’Arcy Conyers
– Allons, dernier des poètes,
Toujours enfermé tu te rendras malade!
Vois, il fait beau temps, tout le monde est dehors,
Va donc acheter deux sous d’ellébore,
Ça te fera une petite promenade.
Jules Laforgue, Dimanches
PFFFRRRUMMMP.
And a very happy New Year to you too, Mr Enderby!
The wish is, however, wasted on both sides, for this, to your night visitors, is a very old year. We, whispering, fingering, rustling, creaking about your bedroom, are that posterity to which you hopefully addressed yourself. Congratulations, Mr Enderby: you have already hit your ball smack over the pavilion clock. If you awaken now with one of the duodenal or pyloric twinges which are, to us, as gruesome a literature-lesson spicer as Johnson’s scrofula, Swift’s scatophobia, or Keats’s gallop of death-warrant blood, do not fancy it is ghosts you hear sibilant and crepitant about the bed. To be a ghost one has first to die or, at least, be born.
Perrrrrp.
A posterior riposte from Mr Enderby. Do not touch, Priscilla. Mr Enderby is not a thing to be prodded; he is a great poet sleeping. Your grubby finger out of his mouth, please, Alberta. His mouth is open for no amateur dental inspection but to the end that he may breathe. That nose is, at forty-five, past its best as an organ, the black twitching caverns – each with its miniature armpit – stuffed and obtuse. The world of smell is visited by his early poems, remember (see here to here of the Harvard University Press selection which is your set book). There we have washed hair, pickles, gorse, bath-salts, skin, pencil-shavings, tinned peaches, post offices, Mrs Lazenby at the corner-shop in his native slum, cloves, diabetes. But it has no existence in his maturer work; the twin ports are closed for ever. That gentle noise, Harold, is snoring. That is so, Christine; his teeth, both upper and lower, are removable: they have been removed to that plastic night-jar there. Child, child, you have spilt denture-fluid on to Mr Enderby’s landlady’s carpet. No, Robin, the carpet is neither beautiful nor rare, but it is Mrs Meldrum’s property. Yes, Mr Enderby himself is our property, the world’s property, but his carpet is his landlady’s. Mrs Meldrum’s.
Now. His hair goes a daily journey from head to brush, squad by tiny squad on a one-way ticket. Here on the dressing-table are the imitation-silver-backed brushes bequeathed by his father, the tobacconist. The bristles are indeed dirty, Mavis, but great poets have other things to do than attend to the calls of hygiene. See how the bristles have trapped their day’s quota of Mr Enderby’s few remaining hairs. Holy relics, children. Do not rush. One each for everybody. There. Keep it safe, each of you, in your little diary of posterity’s present year. Shed hairs, Henry, become the property of the picker. They are of no use to Mr Enderby, but they are already fetching, at classical auction-rooms, a pound or so each if nicely mounted. It is not proper, Audrey, that you should try to pick your hair alive. Such a rough tug at the scalp is enough to wake Mr Enderby.
Querpkprrmp.
You see? He’s disturbed. Let him settle as one lets churned water settle. Right. A better view of Mr Enderby, you will agree, children, as he flops on his back cruciform and sends the bedclothes sliding and plopping to the floor. His belly bulges in two gentle hills, one on either side of the cutting pyjama-cord. There is a wealth of hair, see. It is one of the abominable ironies of middle age that hair should march down from the noble summit, the eagle’s lodge, to leave that bare as an eagle, in order that the camps and barracks and garrisons of the warm vulgar body be crammed with a growth that is neither useful nor pretty. The flabby chest too, see. Rich in hair, aflame with whorls and tendrils of it. And for good measure, chin and jowls bristling. Horrent, Milton might say.
Yes, Janice, I am constrained to agree that Mr Enderby does not make a pretty sight when sleeping, even in total darkness. Yes, we all remark the scant hair, the toothless jaws, the ample folds of flesh rising and falling. But what has prettiness to do with greatness, eh? There is something for you all to ponder on. You would not like to have been married to him, Alberta? Might not the reverse also have applied, even more so, you stupid giggling silly thing? Who are you to think that you would ever be meet to mate with a great poet?
The extremities. The feet that trod Parnassus. Callosities on the intricate map of the sole, see. Torn toenails, though that of the great toe too rocky to be tearable. They could both do with a long sudsy soaking, agreed. The outstretched right hand, like a beggar’s, really a king’s. Gaze with reverence on those fingers that rest now from writing. Tomorrow they will write again, continuing the poem that he considers to be his masterpiece. Ah, what these fingers have produced! Each of you kiss the hand, more gently, though, than a fly crawling. I realize that the act of kissing needs an effort of will to overcome a certain natural revulsion. Here, however, is a little lesson for you in scholastic philosophy. The grubby knuckles, the nails with black borders, the deep stains of tobacco-tar (the cigarette was held interdigitally, forgotten, while the poet’s mind soared above the smell of burning), the coarse skin – these are the accidents, the outer aspects of the hand, their concession to the ordinary world of eating and dying. But the essence of the hand – what is that? A divine machine that has made our lives more blessed. Kiss it, come on, kiss it. Althea, stop making that vomiting noise. Your face, Charles, is ugly enough without contorting it to a rictus of nausea. That’s right, kiss it.
It has hardly disturbed him at all. He scratches it gently in his sleep, the tickle of a questing alighting moth. Listen. In his sleep he is going to say something. Your kiss has prodded a sleeping inspiration. Listen.
My bedmate deep
In the heavy labour of unrequited sleep.
No more? No more. There, children, what a thrill! You have heard his voice, a mumbly sleepy voice, true, but still his voice. And now let us pass on to Mr Enderby’s bedside table.
Books, children, Mr Enderby’s bed-reading. Blondes Like Bullets, whatever that means; Who Was Who in the Ancient World, useful, no doubt; Raffity’s Deal, with a brutish cover; How I Succeeded, by a tycoon who died of arteriosclerosis; Little Stories of the Marian Martyrs, sensational. And here, dears, is one of Mr Enderby’s own: Fish and Heroes, his early poems. What a genius he had then! Yes, Denis, you may handle it but, please, with care. Oh, you stupid boy, you have sent a shower of things to the floor. What are these, that were hidden between the well-thumbed pages? Photographs? Don’t touch, leave them, they are not for you! Merciful heavens, the weaknesses of the great. What shame we have unintentionally uncovered. Do not giggle, Brenda and Maureen, and hand that photograph back to me this instant. You will wake Mr Enderby with those obscene girlish noises. What, Charles, are they doing? The man and woman in the picture? They are minding their own business, that’s what they’re doing.
Bopperlop.
Rest, rest, perturbed spirit. That picture, please, Robin. I can see it in your blazer pocket. Thank you. Fellation, if you must know, is the technical term. And now, no more of that. Shall we tiptoe into Mr Enderby’s bathroom? Here we are. This is where Mr Enderby writes most of his verse. Remarkable, isn’t it? Here, he knows, he can be truly private. The bath is full of manuscripts and dictionaries and ink-milked ballpoint pens. In front of the W.C. is a low desk, just the right height. There is an electric heater to glow on to his bared legs. Why does he choose this meagre chamber? Poetry, he has already said in an interview, is appropriate to it; the poet is time’s cleanser and cathartizer. But, one may be sure, there is much more to it than that. Some childhood agony not yet to be uncovered by us. But Educational Time Trips are already talking of pushing further back into the past. Who knows? Before you leave school you may yet visit Shakespeare struggling, in the parish of St Olave, with verse quantities and a quill. Nigel, leave those rusty razor-blades alone, stupid boy. Softly, softly, now. To the room where he eats and, when not writing, lives is but a step. No, Stephanie, Mr Enderby lives alone through choice. Love, love, love. That’s all that some of you girls can think about. Mr Enderby’s love-life up to this point is obscure and shrouded. His attitude to women? You have his poems, though they, admittedly, mention the sex but little.
Porripipoop.
The horns of Elfland. We have left him to his poet’s peace. There is one thing, though. The poems of this year – which, of course, he has not yet written – show a shy stirring of a more than photographic interest in woman. But we have no biographical evidence of an affair, a change of ménage. We have little biographical evidence of anything. He was essentially a man who lived inside himself. And this sandy seaside address is the only one we have. Can you hear the sea, children? It is the same sea that we know, cruel, green, corrupt.
And what of Mr Enderby do we find in this room? It is Mrs Meldrum, his landlady, who speaks out clear in all this ranged bric-à-brac. Yes, survey it with wonder: a geometrical series of baby ebony elephants, the sweetest of china shepherds flute-blowing to unseen lambs, a plaster toy toast-rack with ancient Blackpool gilding, a tea-caddy replica of tarnished Brighton Pavilion, an enmarbled papier-mâché candlestick, a china bitch and her china litter, a filigree sheet-iron button-box. Do you like the picture above the electric-fire mantelpiece? It shows men in rusty red preparing for the hunting morning, all men identical because, we presume, the pseudo-artist could afford only one model. And, on the opposite wall, British admirals of the eighteenth century unrolling maps of terra incognita, wine being poured for them in tankards that catch the fire’s glow. Here, jolly monks fish on Thursday; there, they lap up their Friday feast. A pot head of a twentyish flapper, hatted and lipsticked, on that strip of wall past the kitchen door. Emily, leave your nostrils alone. To blow spittle-bubbles on your nether lip is, need I say, Charles, childish. The kitchen is hardly worth examining. Very well, if you insist.
What a strong stench of stale bread! See that fish glow in the dark. Pans on the high shelf. Do not touch, Denis, do not. Oh you damnable young idiot. The whole blasted flaming lot clanking and clashing and ringing down. You bloody young fool. You will all laugh on the other sides of your faces when I get you back to civilization. Oh God, a frying-pan has knocked the kettle over. The gas-stove is full of water. What a filthy, damnable, metal noise! Who has spilt the pepper? Stop sneezing, blast the lot of you. Aaaaaarch! Howrashyouare! Out of here, quickly.
You can’t be trusted, any of you. This is the last time I arrange such an expedition. Look down on all those Victorian roofs, fish-scaled under the New-Year moon. You will never see them again. Nor any of this town, in whose flats and lodgings the retired and dying wheeze away till dawn. It is all very much like a great hair-comb, isn’t it? – the winking jewelled handle, the avenues of teeth combing the hinterland of downs, the hair-ball of smoke which is the railway station. Above us, the January sky: Scutum, Ophiuchus, Sagittarius, the planets of age and war and love westering. And that man down below, whom that clatter of cheap metal has aroused from dyspeptic and flatulent sleep, he gives it all meaning.
Enderby awoke, aware of both noise and heartburn. Clamped to his bedhead was a lamp in a plastic shade. He switched this on, realized he was shivering and saw why. He picked up the tangle of bedclothes from the floor, covered himself roughly, and lay back again to savour the pain. It had an inexplicable note of raw turnip about it. The noise? The kitchen-gods fighting. Rats. He needed bicarbonate of soda. He must, he reminded himself for at least the seven-thousandth time, remember to keep it ready-mixed and handy by his bed. The stab of sharpened raw turnip shattered his breastbone. He had to get up.
He saw himself in the wardrobe mirror as he slapped stiffly out of the room into the tiny hallway of his flat, a rheumatic robot in pyjamas. He entered the dining-room, switching on, sniffing like a dog as for a craftily hidden presence. Ghosts had been whimpering around, he was sure, ghosts of the dead year. Or perhaps, he smiled wryly at the conceit, posterity had been shyly looking in. He was astonished at the mess in the kitchen. Such things happened, though: a delicate balance upset by a micrometric subsidence of the old house, an earth tremor, self-willed monads in the utensils themselves. He took a cloudy glass from the draining-board, snowed in some sodium bicarbonate, stirred with two fingers, then drank. He waited thirty seconds, squinting at the glazed pane of the back door. A tiny hand hidden beneath his epiglottis gave a come-up signal. And then.
Delightful. Oh, doctor, the relief! I feel I must write to say thank you for the benefits I have obtained from your product. Aaaaaaarp. Almost immediately after the second spasm of release came a fierce and shameless hunger. He moved the three steps necessary from sink to food-cupboard and found himself freezingly sploshing in spilt water by the stove. He dried his feet in the dropped tea-towel, rearranged the fallen pans on their shelf, wincing with old man’s bent pain as he picked them up. He then remembered that he needed his teeth, so he padded back to the bedroom for them, switching the living-room fire on on the way. He clacked a false gleam at the mirror when he returned to the living-room, then did a brief lumbering dance of rage at his reflection. In the food-cupboard were pellets of rocky cheddar, greasily wrapped. A lone midget cauliflower swam like a doll’s brain in dense pickle. There was half a tin of sardines, soft plump knives in golden oil. He ate with fingers that he then wiped dry on his pyjamas.
Almost at once his bowels reacted. He ran like a man in a comic film, sat down with a sigh and clicked on the bathroom heater. He scratched his bare legs and read, thoughtfully, the confused draft he was working on. Pfffrumpfff. It was an attempt at allegory, a narrative poem in which two myths were fused – the Cretan and the Christian. A winged bull swooped from heaven in a howling wind. Wheeeeee. The law-giver’s queen was ravished. Big with child, called whore by her husband, she went incognita to a tiny village of the kingdom, there, in a cheap hotel, to give birth to the Minotaur. But the old gummy trot who tended her would keep no secret; she blazoned it about the village (and this spread beyond to the towns, to the capital) that a god-man-beast had come down to rule the world. Prrfrrr. In hope, the anarchic party of the state was now ready to rise against the law-maker: tradition had spoken of the coming of a divine leader. Civil war broke out, propaganda flashed in jagged lightnings from both sides. The beast was evil, said King Minos: capture it, kill it. The beast was God, cried the rebels. But nobody, except the queen-mother and the toothless midwife, had ever seen the beast. Brrrrbfrrr. The baby Minotaur was growing fast, bellowing lustily, hidden away safely with its dam in a lonely cottage. But, by treachery, the forces of Minos were given knowledge of its whereabouts. Manifestly, thought Minos, when it was brought to his palace, though technically a monster it was no horror: its gentle eyes were twin worlds of love. With the talisman and mascot of the rebels in his power, Minos was able to call for surrender. He had a labyrinth built, vast and marbly splendid, with the Minotaur hidden in its heart. It was a horror, unspeakable, reputedly fed on human flesh; it was the state’s bogey, the state’s guilt. But Minos was economical: the peripheral corridors of the labyrinth became a home of Cretan culture – university, museum, library, art gallery; a treasury of human achievement; beauty and knowledge built round a core of sin, the human condition. Prrrrf. (Enderby’s toilet-roll span.) But one day, from the west, there flew in the Pelagian liberator, the man who had never known sin, the guilt-killer. Minos by now was long dead, along with his shameless queen and, long long before, the midwife. Nobody living had seen the monster and survived, so it was said. Greeted with cheers, flowers and wine, the liberator went to his heroic work. Blond, bronzed, muscular, sinless, he entered the labyrinth and, a day later, emerged leading the monster on a string. Gentle as a pet, with hurt and forgiving eyes, it looked on humanity. Humanity seized it and reviled it and buffeted it. Finally it was nailed to a cross, where it died slowly. At the moment of giving up the ghost there was a sound of rending and crashing. The labyrinth collapsed; books were buried, statues ground to chalk-dust: civilization was at an end. Brrrrp.
The poem was to be called, tentatively, The Pet Beast. Enderby realized that a great deal of work had to be done on it, symbols clarified, technical knots unravelled. There was the disinterested craftsman, Daedalus, to be brought into it, the antisocial genius with the final answer of flight. There was Pasiphae’s pantomime cow. He tried out, in his deep woollily inept voice, a line or two on a hushed audience of hanging dirty towels:
He, the cold king, judged cases in his dreams.
Awake, lithe at his task,
The other whistled, sawing pliant beams.
Law is what seems;
The Craftsman’s place to act and not to ask.
The words, resounding in that tiny cell, acted at once like a conjuration. Just outside the flimsy door of Mr Enderby’s ground-floor flat was the entrance-hall of the house itself. He heard the massive front door creak open and the hall seemed to fill with New Year revellers. He recognized the silly unresonant voice of the salesman who lived in the flat above, the stout-fed laugh of the woman who lived with him. There were other voices, not assignable to known persons but generic, voices of Daily Mirror-readers, ITV-viewers, HP-buyers, Babycham-drinkers. There were loud and cheerful greetings:
‘Happy New Year, Enderby!’
‘Prrrrrrrrp!’
The stout-fed woman’s voice said, ‘I don’t feel well. I’m going to be sick.’ She at once, by the sound of it, was. Someone called:
‘Give us a poem, Enderby, “Eskimo Nell” or “The Good Ship Venus”.’
‘Sing us a song, Enderby.’
‘Jack,’ said the sick woman weakly, ‘I’m going straight up. I’ve had it.’
‘You go up, love,’ said the salesman’s voice. ‘I’ll be after you in a minute. Got to serenade old Enderby first.’ There was the noise of a staggering fall against the door of Enderby’s flat, a choirmaster’s ‘One two three’, and then the vigorous ragged strains of ‘Ach Du Lieber Augustin’, but with rude English words:
Balls to Mister Enderby, Enderby, Enderby;
Balls to Mister Enderby, ballocks to you.
For he keeps us waiting while he’s masturbating, so –
Enderby stuffed moistened pellets of toilet-paper in his ears. Locked safely enough in his flat, he now locked himself safelier in his bathroom. Scratching a warmed bare leg, he tried to concentrate on his poem. The revellers soon desisted and dispersed. He thought he heard the salesman call out, ‘That’s the enderby, Enderby.’
Cosily muffled against the sharp marine morning, Enderby walked down Fitzherbert Avenue towards the sea. It was ten-thirty by the Town Hall clock and the pubs were just opening. He passed Gradeleigh (‘for Gradely Folk’), Kia-Ora (retired Kiwis), Ty-Gwyn (couple from Tredegar), Channel View, White Posts, Dulce Domus, The Laurels, Ithaca (former classics master and convicted pederast). Converted to flats, humbled as guest-houses, all were owned by foreigners from north and west of the downs, bemused by an image of the glamour of the south coast: France winked at night across the water; here the air had a fancied mildness. Not today, thought Enderby, smacking his woolly bear-paw palms together. He wore a scarf coloured like a Neapolitan ice; his overcoat was a tightly-belted Melton; he was shielded from heaven by a Basque beret. The house wherein he had a flat was, he thanked that same heaven, nameless. Number 81, Fitzherbert Avenue. Would there ever, some day, be a plaque to mark that he had lived there? He was quite sure not. He was one of a dying race, unregarded by the world. Hurray.
Enderby turned on to the Esplanade, joined a queue of old women in a cake-shop, and came out with a seven-penny loaf. He crossed over to the sea-rail and leaned on it, tearing the loaf. The gulls wheeled screaming for the thrown bread, beady-eyed greedy creatures, while the sea whooped in, the green-grey winter Channel, then grumbled back, as at the lion-tamer’s whip, grudgingly rattling many tambourines. Enderby tossed the last crumbs to the bitter air and its grey planing birds, then turned from the sea. He looked back on it before he entered the Neptune, seeing in it, as so often from a distance, the clever naughty green child which had learned to draw a straight line free-hand.
The saloon-bar of the Neptune was already half-filled with old people, mainly widows. ‘Morning,’ said a dying major-general, ‘and a happy New Year to you.’ Two male ancients compared arthritis over baby stouts. A bearded lady drank off her port and slowly, toothlessly, chewed the mouthful. ‘And to you too,’ said Enderby. ‘If I can live to see the spring,’ said the general, ‘that’s all. That’s as much as I can hope for.’ Enderby sat down with his whisky. He was at home with the aged, accepted as one of them, despite his ridiculous youth. Still, his recorded age was a mere actuarial cipher; his gullet burning as the whisky descended, his aches and pains, his lack of interest in action – these made him as old as the crocks among whom he sat.
‘How,’ asked a gentle tremulous man made of parchment, ‘how,’ his hand shaking his drink like a dicebox, ‘how is the stomach?’
‘Some quite remarkable twinges,’ said Enderby. ‘Almost visible, you know. And flatulence.’
‘Flatulence,’ said the major-general, ‘ah, yes, flatulence.’ He spoke of it as though it were a rare old vintage. ‘Many years since I’ve had that. Now, of course, I eat nothing. A little bread soaked in warm milk, morning and evening. I swear it’s this rum that’s keeping me alive. I told you, did I, about that contretemps over the rum ration at Bruderstroom?’
‘Several times,’ said Enderby. ‘A very good story.’
‘Isn’t it?’ said the general, painfully animated. ‘Isn’t it a good story? And true. Incredible, but true.’
A plebeian crone in dirty black spoke from a bar-stool. ‘I,’ she said, ‘have had part of my stomach removed.’ There was a silence. The aged males ruminated this gratuitous revelation, wondering whether, coming from a female and a comparative stranger, it was really in the best of taste. Enderby said kindly: ‘That must have been quite an experience.’ The old woman looked crafty, gripped the counter’s edge with papery hands that grew chalky at the knuckles, canted her stool towards Enderby and said, very loudly, ‘Pardon?’
‘An experience,’ said Enderby, ‘never to be forgotten.’
‘Six hours on the table,’ said the woman. ‘Nobody here can’t beat that.’
‘Crump,’ called the major-general in an etiolated martinet’s voice. ‘Crump. Crump.’ He was not reminiscing about the first World War; he wanted the barman to replenish his rum-glass. Crump came from behind the bar, seventyish, in a waiter’s white jacket, with a false smile both imbecilic and ingratiating, his grey head cocked permanently to one side like that of a listening parrot. ‘Yes, General,’ he said. ‘Similar, sir? Very good, sir.’
‘I’m always telling him,’ said an ancient with the humpty-dumpty head of Sibelius, ‘about that use of the word. It’s common among barmen and landlords. They say you can’t have the same again. But it is, in fact, precisely the same again that one wants. One doesn’t want anything similar. You deal in words, Enderby. You’re a writer. What’s your view of the matter?’
‘It is the same,’ agreed Enderby. ‘It’s from the same bottle. Something similar is something different.’
‘Professor Taylor used to argue that out very persuasively,’ said an old man mottled like salami, a dewdrop on the hook of his nose.
‘What’s happened to Taylor?’ asked the major-general. ‘We haven’t seen him for quite some time.’
‘He died,’ said the mottled man. ‘Last week. While drawing a cork. Cardiac failure.’
‘He’d just turned eighty,’ said a man just turned eighty. ‘Not all that old.’
‘Taylor gone,’ said the general. ‘I didn’t know.’ He accepted rum from obsequious Crump. Crump accepted silver with an obsequious inclination of a broken and mended torso. ‘I thought I’d go before him,’ said the general, ‘but I’m still here.’
‘You’re not all that old yourself,’ said the tremulous parchment man.
‘I’m eighty-five,’ said the general in puffy indignation. ‘I call that very old.’
Higher bids came from the corners. One woman confessed coyly to ninety. As if somehow to prove this, she performed a few waltz-twirls, humming from The Merry Widow. She sat down again to genteel shocked applause, her lips blue, her heart almost audibly thumping. ‘And,’ asked the Sibelius-man, ‘how old might you be, Enderby?’
‘Forty-five.’
There were snorts of both contempt and amusement. One man in a corner piped, ‘If that’s meant to be funny, I don’t think it’s in very good taste.’
The major-general turned sternly and deliberately towards Enderby, both hands resting on the ivory bulldog-head of his malacca. ‘And what is it you do for a living?’ he asked.
‘You know that,’ said Enderby. ‘I’m a poet.’
‘Yes, yes, but what do you do for a living? Only Sir Walter made a living out of poetry. And perhaps that Anglo-Indian man who lived at Burwash.’
‘A few investments,’ said Enderby.
‘What investments precisely?’
‘I.C.I. and B.M.C. and Butlin’s. And local government loans.’
The major-general grunted, as though none of Enderby’s replies was above suspicion. ‘What was your rank in the last war?’ he asked, a last throw.
Before Enderby could give a lying answer, a widow in antique tweeds, a long thin woman with black-rimmed spectacles, fell from a low stool by a wicker table. Old men reached trembling for their sticks, that they might lever themselves up and help. But Enderby was there first. ‘Sho kind,’ said the woman genteelly. ‘Sho shorry to cauzhe all thish trouble.’ She had evidently been tanking up at home before opening-time. Enderby lifted her from the floor, as light and as stiff as a bundle of celery. ‘Thezhe thingzh,’ she said, ‘happen in the besht of familiezh.’
His hands still hooked in her armpits, Enderby was shocked to see the image of his stepmother in the big Gilbey’s Port mirror on the wall opposite. Shaken, he nearly dropped his burden to the floor again. The image nodded to him, as out of some animated painting in a TV commercial, raised its glass in New Year salutation, then seemed to hobble out of the picture, into the wings, thus disappearing.
‘Get on with it, Enderby,’ said the peevish major-general. ‘Put her back on her seat.’
‘Sho very kind,’ said the woman, trying hard to focus on her gin-glass. Enderby looked in the room for a source of that mirror-image, but saw only a bent back hobbling to the Gents. That might be it, a trick of the light or the New Year. It was his stepmother, strangely enough, who had told him as a child that, on New Year’s Day, a man walked the streets with as many noses on his face as there were days in the year. He had gone looking for this man, thinking of him fearfully as of the family of the Antichrist that walked the world before the day of judgement. Long after he had seen through the trick, New Year’s Day still possessed for him an irritating macabre flavour, as a day of possible prodigies. His stepmother was, he was pretty sure, dead and buried. She’d done her work, as far as he was concerned. There was no point in her staying alive or coming back from the grave.
‘Now,’ said the major-general, as Enderby sat down again with a new whisky, ‘what did you say your rank was?’
‘Lieutenant-general,’ said Enderby. In speech a comma is as good as a hyphen.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Look it up.’ Enderby was almost sure he saw his stepmother leave the jug-and-bottle department, a quarter-bottle of Booth’s in her bag. The Neptune was the sort of pub in which any of the three parts – saloon, public, out-door – is visible from any other. Enderby spilt whisky on his tie. An old man who had not previously spoken pointed at Enderby with shaky care and said, ‘You’ve spilt whisky on your tie.’ Enderby felt that fear would possibly make worse happen. The outer world was not safe. He must go back home and closet himself, work at his poem. He finished the driblet in his glass, buttoned himself up and donned his Basque beret. The major-general said, ‘I don’t believe you, sir.’
‘You must please yourself, General,’ said Ex-lieutenant Enderby. And, with a general salute, he left.
‘He’s a liar,’ said the major-general. ‘I always knew he wasn’t to be trusted. I don’t believe he’s a poet, either. A very shifty look about him this morning.’
‘I read about him in the public library,’ said the salami-mottled man. ‘There was a photograph, too. It was an article, and it seemed to think quite a lot of him.’
‘What is he? Where does he come from?’ asked another.
‘He keeps himself very much to himself,’ said the mottled man and, just in time, he snuffed up a perilous dewdrop.
‘He’s a liar, anyway,’ said the major-general. ‘I shall look up the Army List this afternoon.’
He never did. A motorist, irritable and jumpy with a seasonal hangover, knocked him down as he was crossing Nollekens Avenue. Long before spring, the major-general was promoted to glory.
Out in the gull-clawed air, New-Year blue, the tide crawling creamily in, Enderby felt better. In this sharp light there was no room for ghosts. But the imagined visitation had acted as an injunction to honour the past before looking, as at every year’s beginning, to the future.
Enderby first thought of his mother, dead at his birth, of whom there had seemed to be no record. He liked to imagine a young woman of gentle blondeness, sweetly refined and slenderly pliant. He liked to think of her swathed in gold, in a beeswax-breathing drawing-room, singing ‘Passing By’ to her own accompaniment. The dying heat of a July day sang in sadness through the wide-open french windows from a garden that glowed with Crimson Glory, Mme L. Dieudonne, Ena Harkness and Golden Spectre. He saw his father, become bookish, wearing bookman’s slippers, O-ing out smoke from an oval-bored Passing Cloud, nodding his head in quiet pleasure as he listened. But his father had never been quite like that. A wholesale tobacconist, ruling lines in the ledger with an ebony sceptre of a ledger-ruler, sitting in the office behind the shop in waistcoat and black bowler, always glad of opening-time. Why? To escape from that bitch of a second wife. Why in God’s name had he married her? ‘Money, son. Her first one left her a packet. Her stepson will, we hope, reap the benefit.’ And, to some extent, it had turned out that way. Hence the few hundred a year from I.C.I., British Motors, and the rest. But had it been worth it?
Oh, she had been graceless and coarse, that one. A hundredweight of ringed and brooched blubber, smelling to high heaven of female smells, rank as long-hung hare or blown beef, her bedroom strewn with soiled bloomers, crumby combinations, malodorous bust-bodices. She had swollen finger-joints, puffy palms, wrists girdled with fat, slug-white upper arms that, when naked, showed indecent as thighs. She was corned, bunioned, calloused, varicose-veined. Healthy as a sow, she moaned of pains in all her joints, a perpetual migraine, a bad back, toothache. ‘The pains in me legs,’ she would say, ‘is killin’ me.’ Her wind was loud, even in public places. ‘The doctor says to let it come up. You can always say excuse me.’ Her habits were loathsome. She picked her teeth with old tram-tickets, cleaned out her ears with hairclips in whose U-bend ear-wax was trapped to darken and harden, scratched her private parts through her clothes with a matchbox-rasping noise audible two rooms away, made gross sandwiches of all her meals or cut her meat with scissors, spat chewed bacon-rind or pork-crackling back on her plate, excavated beef-fibres from her cavernous molars and held them up for all the world to see, hooked out larger chunks with a soiled sausage-finger, belched like a ship in the fog, was sick on stout on Saturday nights, tromboned vigorously in the lavatory, ranted without aitches or grammar, scoffed at all books except Old Moore’s Almanac, whose apocalyptic pictures she could follow. Literally illiterate all her life, she would sign cheques by copying her name from a prototype on a greasy piece of paper, drawing it carefully as a Chinese draws an ideogram. She provided fried meals mostly, ensuring first that the fat was tepid. But she brewed good tea, potent with tannin, and taught young Enderby the technique, that he might bring her a cup in the morning: three for each person and two for the pot, condensed milk rather than fresh, be lavish with the sugar. Enderby, sixth-form boy, would stand over her while she drank it in bed – tousled, wrinkled, puffed, ill-smelling, a wreck – though she did not really drink it: the tea seemed to soak into her as into parched earth. One day he would put rat-poison in her cup. But he never did, even though he bought the rat-poison. Hate? You’ve just no idea.
When Enderby was seventeen, his father went off to Nottingham to be shown over a tobacco factory, was away for the night. July heat (she showed up badly in that) broke in monsoon weather, with terrifying lightning. But it was only the thunder that scared her. Enderby awoke at five in the morning to find her in his bed, in dirty winceyette, clutching him in fear. He got up, was sick in the lavatory, then locked himself in, reading till dawn the scraps of newspaper on the floor.
Her death was reported to him when he was in the Army, L. of C. troops in Catania. She had died after drinking a morning cup of tea, brought by his father. Heart failure. The night of hearing the news, Enderby went with a woman of Catania (one tin of corned beef and a packet of biscuits) and, to her almost concealed laughter, could do nothing. Also, on arriving back at his billet, he was sick.
Well, there it was. His stepmother had killed women for him, emerging in a ladylike belch or a matchstick picking of teeth from behind the most cool and delectable façade. He had got on quite nicely on his own, locked in the bathroom, cooking his own meals (ensuring first that the fat was tepid), living on his dividends and the pound or two a year his poems earned. But, as middle-age advanced, his stepmother seemed to be entering slyly into him more and more. His back ached, his feet hurt, he had a tidy paunch, all his teeth out, he belched. He had tried to be careful about laundry and cleaning the saucepans, but poetry got in the way, raising him above worry about squalor. Yet dyspepsia would cut disconcertingly in, more and more, blasting like a tuba through the solo string traceries of his little creations.
The act of creation. Sex. That was the trouble with art. Urgent sexual desire aroused with the excitement of a new image or rhythm. But adolescence had prolonged its techniques of easy detumescence, normal activities of the bathroom. Walking towards the Freemason’s Arms he felt wind rising from his stomach. Damn. Brerrrrp. Blast. He was, however, on the whole, taking all things into consideration, by and large, not to put too fine a point on it, reasonably well self-sufficient. Brrrrrp. Blast and damn.
Arry, head cook at the Conway, was standing by the bar of the Freemason’s with a pint tankard of brown ale and bitter mixed. He said to Enderby, ‘’Ere yar.’ He handed over a long bloody parcel, blood congealed on a newspaper headline about some woman’s blood. ‘A said ad get it an a got it.’ Enderby said, ‘Thanks, and a happy New Year. What will you have?’ He eased away some of the newspaper at one end, ‘Missing Persons’, covered with blood, and the head of a mature hare stared at him with glass eyes. ‘Yer can joog it today,’ said Arry. He was in a brown sports-coat that reeked of old fat, a tout’s cap on his head. His upper jaw had only two canines. These were gateposts between which his tongue, car-like, occasionally eased itself out and in. He came from Oldham. ‘Red coorant jelly,’ said Arry. ‘What a generally do is serve red coorant jelly on a art-shaped croutong. Coot out a art-shaped bitter bread with a art-cooter. Fry it in ’ot fat, quick. Boot, livin’ on yer own, a don’t suppose yer’ll wanter go to that trooble.’ He drank down his brown ale and bitter and, on Enderby, had another pint. ‘Good job yer coom in when yer did,’ he said. ‘’Ave to go now. Special loonch for South Coast Association of Car Salesmen.’ He swigged the pint in one lift of the tankard, had another, yet another, all in two minutes flat. Like most cooks he could eat little. He had ferocious gastric pains which endeared him to Enderby. ‘Seein’ yer,’ he said, leaving. Enderby nursed his hare.
This bar was the haunt of all local lesbians over fifty. Most of them fulfilled the paradigms of marriage, a few were divorced, widowed or estranged. On a stool in the corner was a woman called Gladys, a peroxided Jewess of sixty with tortoise-shell spectacle-rims and leopard-skin jeans. She was kissing, more often and more passionately than seemed necessary, another woman in New-Year greeting. This woman wore a bristling old fur coat and was delicately cross-eyed. A fierce-looking thin woman in a dress as hairy and simple as a monk’s habit, a nutria coat swinging open over it, crashed into the bar and greeted her too, long and gluily. ‘Prudence, my duck,’ she said. Prudence seemed to be a popular girl. The peculiar charm of strabismus. And then the fragments of a new poem came swimming with a familiar confidence into Enderby’s head. He saw the shape, he heard the words, he felt the rhythm. Three stanzas, each beginning with birds. Prudence, prudence, the pigeons call. And, of course, that’s what they did call, that’s what they’d always called. Act, act, the ducks give voice. And that was true, too. What were the other birds? They weren’t seagulls. The dyed-blonde Jewess, Gladys, suddenly, raucously, laughed. It was a bird like that. Caution, caution. Rooks, that was it. But why were they calling, giving voice, proclaiming?
He had a ball-point pen, but no paper. Only the wrapping of the hare. There was a long empty stop-press column, two forlorn football results at the head. He wrote the lines he had heard. Also other fragments that he could hear dimly. The meaning? Meaning was no concern of the poet. The widow in the shadow. The widow in the meadow. A voice, very clear and thin, spoke as though pressed to his ear: Drain the sacrament of choice. Gladys began to sing, pop garbage composed by some teenager, much heard on radio discprogrammes. She sang loudly. Excited, Enderby cried, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake shut up!’ Gladys was indignant. ‘Who the bloody hell do you think you’re telling to shut up?’ she called across, with menace. ‘I’m trying to write a poem,’ said Enderby. ‘This,’ said someone, ‘is supposed to be a respectable pub.’ Enderby downed his whisky and left.
Walking home quickly he tried to call back the rhythm, but it had gone. The fragments ceased to be live limbs of some mystical body that promised to reveal itself wholly. Dead as the hare, meaningless onomatopoeia; a silly jingle: widow, shadow, meadow. The big rhythms of the nearing tide, the winter sea-wind, the melancholy gulls. A gust shattered and dispersed the emerging form of the poem. Oh, well. Of the million poems that beckoned, like coquettish girls, from the bushes, how very few could be caught!
Enderby stripped the hare of its bloody paper as he approached 81 Fitzherbert Avenue. There was a public litter basket attached to a lamp-post almost in front of the front-steps. He threw the crumpled mess of news, blood, inchoate poetry in, and got out his key. A tidy town, this. Must not let our standards relax even though there are no holiday visitors. He entered the kitchen and began to skin the hare. It would give him, he thought, stewed with carrots, potatoes and onions, seasoned with pepper and celery salt, the remains of the Christmas red wine poured in before serving, enough meals for nearly a week. He slapped the viscera on to a saucer, cut up the carcass, and then turned on the kitchen tap. Hangman’s hands, he thought, looking at them. Soaked in blood up to the elbows. He tried out a murderer’s leer, holding the sacrificial knife, imagining a mirror above the kitchen sink.
The water flowing from the faucet cast a faint shadow, a still shadow, on the splashboard. The line came, a refrain: The running tap casts a static shadow. That was it, he recognized, his excitement mounting again. The widow, the meadow. A whole stanza blurted itself out:
‘Act! Act!’ The ducks give voice.
‘Enjoy the widow in the meadow.
Drain the sacrament of choice.
The running tap casts a static shadow.’
To hell with the meaning. Where the hell were those other birds? What were they? The cuckoo? The sea-gull? What was the name of that cross-eyed lesbian bitch in the Freemason’s? Knife in hand, steeped in blood to the elbows, he dashed out of his flat, out of the house, to the rubbish-basket clamped to the lamp-post. Others had been there while he had been gutting and skinning and quartering. A Black Magic box, a Senior Service packet, banana-peel. He threw it all out madly into the gutter. He found the defiled paper which had wrapped the beast. Frantically he searched page after crumpled page. THIS MAN MAY KILL, POLICE WARN. NOW THIS BOY IS LOVED. Most people stop Acid Stomach with Rennies. Compulsive reading. He read: ‘The pain-causing acid is neutralized and you get that wonderful sensation that tells you the pain is beginning to go. The antacid ingredients reach your stomach gradually and gently – drip by drip …’
‘What’s this? What’s going on?’ asked an official voice.
‘Eh?’ It was the law, inevitably. ‘I’m looking for these blasted birds,’ said Enderby, rummaging again. ‘Ah, thank God. Here they are. Prudence, pigeons. Rooks, caution. It’s as good as written. Here.’ He thrust the extended sheets into the policeman’s arms.
‘Not so fast,’ said the policeman. He was a young man, apple-ruddy from the rural hinterland, very tall. ‘What’s this knife for, where did all that blood come from?’
‘I’ve been murdering my stepmother,’ said Enderby, absorbed in composition. Prudence, prudence, the pigeons call. He ran into the house. The woman from upstairs was just coming down. She saw a knife and blood and screamed. Enderby entered his flat, ran into the bathroom, kicked on the heater, sat on the low seat. Automatically he stood up again to lower his trousers. Then, all bloody, he began to write. Somebody knocked – imperious, imperative – at his front door. He locked the bathroom door and got on with his writing. The knocks soon ceased. After half an hour he had the whole poem on paper.
‘Prudence! Prudence!’ the pigeons call.
‘Scorpions lurk in the gilded meadow.
An eye is embossed on the island wall.
The running tap casts a static shadow.’
‘Caution! Caution!’ the rooks proclaim.
‘The dear departed, the weeping widow
Will meet in you in the core of flame.
The running tap casts a static shadow.’
The injunction of the last stanza seemed clear enough, privy enough. Was it really possible, he wondered, for him to follow it, making this year different from all others?
‘Act! Act!’ The ducks give voice.
‘Enjoy the widow in the meadow.
Drain the sacrament of choice …’
In the kitchen, he could now hear, the water was still flooding away. He had forgotten to turn it off. Casting a static shadow all the time. He got up from his seat, automatically pulling the chain. Who was this blasted widow that the poem referred to?
WHILE ENDERBY WAS breakfasting off reheated hare stew with pickled walnuts and stepmother’s tea, the postman came with a fateful letter. The envelope was thick, rich, creamy; richly black the typed address, as though a new ribbon had been put in just for that holy name. The note-paper was embossed with the arms of a famous firm of chain booksellers. The letter congratulated Enderby on his last year’s volume – Revolutionary Sonnets – and was overjoyed to announce that he had been awarded the firm’s annual Poetry Prize of a gold medal and fifty guineas. Enderby was cordially invited to a special luncheon to be held in the banqueting-room of an intimidating London hotel, there to receive his prizes amid the plaudits of the literary world. Enderby let his hare stew go cold. The third Tuesday in January. Please reply. He was dazed. And, again, congratulations. London. The very name evoked the same responses as lung cancer, overdrawn, stepmother.
He wouldn’t go, he couldn’t go, he hadn’t a suit. At the moment he was wearing glasses, a day’s beard, pyjamas, polo-neck sweater, sports-jacket and very old corduroys. In his wardrobe were a pair of flannel trousers and a watered-silk waistcoat. These, he had thought when settling down after demobilization, were enough for a poet, the watered-silk waistcoat being, perhaps, even, an unseemly luxury of stockbroker-like extravagance. He had had it, by mistake, knocked down to him for five shillings at an auction.
Oliver Twist, The Waste LandNineteen Eighty-FourJournal of the Plague Yearthat