Vesta had finished her sandwiches and was picking her front teeth with an old London tube ticket she had taken from her bag. The bag was open, very untidy, but in it Enderby saw a bunch of keys. Those keys he would require: in the Gloucester Road flat were certain things he needed. Seeing the teeth-picking, Enderby nodded: another thing marshalling him the way that he was going. "How do you feel now?" she asked.
"A good deal better," smiled Enderby. "I got a lot of it up." With what was still in the bank, with what he thought he could legitimately filch from her (mink, chiefly), he considered it was possible for him to return for a year or two to something like his old life: the lone poet in some sordid attic or other with thin stews and bread, trying to make it up to his Muse. He did not repine at the loss of his capital. Not any longer. It was, after all, his stepmother's money, and here, now pulling a ham-fibre from her molars, though with grace and without ostentation, sat his step mother, all too able to use that money. The interest, of course, was another matter. The Church had always condemned the lending out of money at interest, so no good Catholic had a right to claim the increment it had earned when the return of the loan was made. Enderby, though determined to be just, was also determined to be strictly Protestant here. As he smiled to himself he was suddenly jolted by the calling of his name over a loudspeaker.
"Who on earth," said Vesta, "can be ringing you up at this hour of the evening? You stay there, I'll take it. You're still looking a bit pale." And she rose.
"No, no, no," protested Enderby, pushing her roughly back into her cane armchair. "It's something you're not supposed to know about. A surprise," he tried to smile. She grimaced and, taking a hair-clip from her bag, began to clean her left ear. Enderby was delighted to see that.
The clerkly voice was pleased to be able to confirm a booking on the plane from Cape Town. Enderby was to report at the terminal at four; the clerk then on duty would alter his ticket for him. "Deo gratias," breathed Enderby, meaning grazie. But only that liturgical gratitude, he reflected, could express his relief at the prospect of getting out of, with all its detonations and connotations, Rome.
"It's arranged," he smirked at Vesta. "Don't ask me what, but it's all arranged." As they rose to go to their room he saw on the table a hair-clip; its bend of bifurcation was stuffed with ear-wax. He took Vesta's arm with something like love.
4
Staying awake till three-thirty was not really difficult. Really difficult was getting the packing done on a night when Vesta, normally a good solid Scots sleeper, had decided to be restless and somniloquent. Enderby watched her warily as she lay prone, having kicked the clothes off the bed, her nates silvered by the Roman moonlight to the likeness of a meringue. Delectable, yes, but from now on for somebody else's delectation. Enderby stole about the silvered room in his socks, suddenly stiffening as in a statue dance each time she burbled in her sleep, rushing to the dark corner by the window to stand as if for his height to be taken when she pettishly whisked from the prone to the supine. Supine, she uttered strange words to the ceiling and then chuckled, but Enderby would not permit himself to be scared. Taking his passport and air ticket from the top drawer of the chest of drawers he also, after a few seconds of ethical thought, decided to take hers. Thus, if she woke to a realization of Enderby's desertion, she would not be able to follow at once. But he placed several thousand or million lire on the mantelpiece, and he knew that she had traveller's cheques of her own. Although she and Rome went so beautifully together, he could not, in all decency, condemn her to too long an enforced stay; he hoped he still had enough humanity not to wish that on his worst enemy.
One suitcase was enough for Enderby's clothes and shaving gear. The lotions and creams and sprays she had made him buy-these he decided to leave behind: no one would ever want to smell him any more. Now there was the question of that key to the flat; he had left a couple of boxes there, stuffed with drafts and notes. The typescript of The Pet Beast was locked in the drawer of her own escritoire, and there it could stay. Its interest, he admitted glumly, was one of content more than form, and the content had been niched and distorted. Let that be a lesson to him. Enderby now squinted in the moonlight for Vesta's bag, a flat silver envelope into which, that evening, she had poured the entire load of rubbish from a black bag from a grey bag from a white bag from a blue bag, a woman who, with residual Scots thrift, could not bear to throw anything away. Enderby saw this silver bag, further silvered by the light, lying on her bedside table. He stalked over for it, like some clumsy ballerina on her points, and, as he made to pick it up, Vesta swiftly pronated, diagonal across the bed, and a bare slim arm flopped over the table to hold the bag down like a silver bar. Enderby hesitated now, standing with breathing suspended, wondering whether he dare risk. But then she, with the same swiftness, lurched her body to the supine, though with her left arm still across the table, and began to speak out of some profound dream. She said:
"Pete. Do it again, Pete. Och, Pete, that was bloody marvellous." It was a coarse accent, suggesting the Gorbals rather than Eskbank, and, to match it, the sleeping Vesta began to use coarse terms suggesting an extremity of abandon. Enderby listened horrified, at last calming his nerves by reflecting that anything, even necrophily, was allowed to the dreamer. He did not now try to extract the bag from under her silver arm; he could perhaps get into the flat without a key. Effect an entrance, as they say. He now wished to effect an exit, and quickly.
As he fumbled at the door-handle, hidden under the mink coat that hung from the door-hook, he had the impression that she was about to lift herself out of sleep, some warning bell having shrilled at the end of one of the long corridors of the cerebral cortex. He calmed her with words and a noise:
"Brarrrkh. Just going to the lavatory." His last words to her as he softly folded the mink over his arm. She grunted, smacked her lips, then, seeming satisfied, started to lower herself into deeper levels of sleep. Enderby opened the door and went out. Standing an instant to quieten his loud heart, he felt cautiously elated that soon, on the aircraft, he would be able to feel fully and uninhibitedly elated.
A poem began to twitch as he weighed his suitcase and paid his embarkation fee and bought his bus ticket:
Stepmother of the West…
Enderby waited with excitement for the images to come into focus-Emperor and Pope the same pantomime dame, no more red meat since spate of it in snaring arena, old bitch she-wolf with hanging dugs, the big backyard of broken columns for the refuse-collector; Enderby waited with impatience for the rhymes to line up. City, titty. Beyond that was nothing.
Stepmother of the West, of venal cities
Most venal something something she-wolf bitch
Romulus Remus something something titties
Something something something something rich which ditch pitch
On the bus to Ciampino Enderby, frowning, called on his Muse to do something about this ragged donnée. On the aircraft, placed next to a Negro clergyman, Enderby muttered and grimaced so that the stewardess came up to ask if everything was all right. A suspicious character, muttering and frowning, a mink coat on the luggage rack overhead, Enderby looked down on Rome. He had forgotten all about Vesta already. He had expected that he would be able to recite, under his breath, at least a stanza of this poem in valediction. Thwarted and somewhat apprehensive, remembering the prophecy of the traitor Rawdiffe, he could only devise a farewell that went beyond words but which the Negro clergyman apparently took to be an adverse comment on his colour. Fffffrrrrrerrrrrpshhhhhh.
Part Three
Chapter One
1
"You've got absolutely nothing to worry about there," said Dr Preston Hawkes. "The plates are negative: no TB, no carcinoma, nothing." He held up a couple of cloudy portraits of the inner Enderby. "That's the lot, then." He had a loud Northern voice, some of the vowels home-made approximations to Received Standard. "You can go away with a contented mind." He was young and highly dentate, tanned, and tousled as though to
advertise, for a side-line, the healthful properties of the resort where he practised. "If bicarb helps that dyspepsia, you just stick to bicarb. But fundamentally your stomach and guts are perfectly sound."
"You would say, would you," said Enderby, "that I'm quite unlikely to die in the near future?"
"Oh, my dear fellow," said Dr Preston Hawkes, "none of us can ever know that. Apart from the normal hazards of living-getting run over or electrocuted or slipping in the bathroom-there must always be some unknown factor that doesn't yield to examination. We know a lot," he confided, "but we don't know everything. But, as far as I can see, you're physically sound and likely to live for many years." He glowed at Enderby like a frying slice of potato. "Of course," he said, "your tone isn't as good as it might be. Take exercise: tennis, golf, walks. You could do with paring yourself down a bit. Keep off fried things; don't eat too much starch. You're a sedentary worker, aren't you? A clerk or something?"
"Perhaps in the older sense," said Enderby. "I am," he explained sadly, "a poet."
"You mean," said Dr Preston Hawkes incredulously, "that's your job?"
"It was," said Enderby. "That's really why I came to see you. You see, I'm not writing any more poems."
"Oh." Dr Preston Hawkes became agitated; he tapped contrary-motion five-finger exercises on his desk, his smile fixed and nervous. He spoke now slackly, bubbling. "Well, I hardly think-I mean, that's nothing to do with me, is it? I mean, I should have thought-That is to say, if you don't propose writing any more poetry, well, good luck to you. The very best of luck and all that sort of thing. But that's entirely your own affair, isn't it? That's what I'd say, anyway." He now began to perform, though ineptly, the ritual of a man whose time is valuable: a syndrome of nervous grubbing among papers, looking at his watch, peering exophthalmically above Enderby's head as though the next patient was due to squeeze in between door and lintel.
"No," said Enderby, "you've got that wrong. What I mean is that I can't write poetry any more. I try and try, but nothing happens, nothing will come. Can you understand what I mean?"
"Oh, yes," said the doctor, smiling warily. "I quite see that. Well, I shouldn't worry too much about it if I were you. I mean, there are other things in life, aren't there? The sun is shining, the children are playing." That was literally true; Dr Preston Hawkes lifted a hand as if he himself were conjuring the warm evening shaft through the window, the noise of an infant squabble on the road to the beach. "I mean, writing poetry isn't the whole of life, is it? You're bound to find something else to do. Life is still all before you. The best is yet to be."
"What," asked Enderby, "is the purpose of life?"
The doctor brightened at this question. He was young enough to have answers to it, answers clearly remembered from pipe-puffing student discussions. "The purpose of life," he said promptly, "is the living of it. Life itself is the end of life. Life is here and now and what you can get out of it. Life is living by the square inch and the round minute. The end is the process. Life is what you make it. I know what I'm talking about, believe you me. I am, after all, a doctor." He smiled towards something framed on the wall, his duly certified twin baccalaureate.
Enderby shook his head in vigorous gloom. "I don't think Keats would have given you that answer. Or Shelley. Or Byron. Or Chatterton. Man," said Enderby, "is a tree. He bears fruit. When he stops bearing fruit life cuts him down. That's why I wanted to know whether I was going to die."
"Look," said the doctor sharply, "this is all a lot of morbid nonsense. It's everybody's duty to live. That's what the National Health Service is for. To help people to live. You're a healthy man with years of life ahead of you, and you ought to be very glad and very grateful. Otherwise, let's face it, you're blaspheming against life and God and, yes, democracy and the National Health Service. That's hardly fair, is it?"
"But what do I live for?" asked Enderby.
"I've told you what you live for," said the doctor, more sharply. "You weren't paying attention, were you? You live for the sake of living. And, yes, you live for others, of course. You live for your wife and children." He granted himself a two-second smirk of fondness at the photograph on his desk: Mrs Preston Hawkes playing with Master Preston Hawkes, Master Preston Hawkes playing with teddy-bear.
"I had a wife," said Enderby, "for a very short time. I left her nearly a year ago. In Rome it was. We just didn't get on. I'm quite sure I have no children. I think I can say that I'm absolutely sure about that."
"Well, all right then," said the doctor. "But there are lots of other people who need you, surely. Friends and so on. I take it," he said cautiously, "that there are still people left who like to read poetry."
"That," said Enderby, "is written. They've got that. There won't be any more. And," he said, "I'm not the sort of man who has friends. The poet has to be alone." This platitude, delivered rhetorically in spite of himself, brought a glassy look to his eyes; he got up stiffly from his chair. The doctor, who had seen television plays, thought he descried in Enderby the lineaments of impending suicide. He was not a bad doctor. He said:
"You don't propose to do anything silly, do you? I mean, it wouldn't do anybody any good, would it, that sort of thing? I mean, especially after you've been to see me and so on. Life," he said, less certainly than before, "has to be lived. We all have a duty. I'll get the police on to you, you know. Don't start doing anything you shouldn't be doing. Look, I'll arrange an appointment with a psychiatrist, if you like." He made the gesture of reaching at once for the telephone, of being prepared to tap, at once, all the riches of the National Health Service for the benefit of Enderby.
"You needn't worry," said Enderby soothingly. "I shan't do anything I'd consider silly. I promise you that."
"Get around a bit," said the doctor desperately. "Meet people. Watch the telly. Have the odd drink in a pub, all right in moderation. Go to the pictures. Go and see this horror film round the corner. That'll take you out of yourself."
"I saw it in Rome," said Enderby. "The world première."
Here in England L'Animal Binato or The Two-Natured Animal had become Son of the Beast from Outer Space.
"As a matter of fact," said Enderby, "I wrote it. That is to say, it was stolen from me."
"Look," said Dr Preston Hawkes, now standing up. "It would be no trouble at all for me to fix up an appointment for you. I think you'd feel a lot happier if you talked with Dr Greenslade. He's a very good man, you know, very good, very sympathetic. I could ring up the hospital now. No trouble at all. He could probably see you first thing in the morning."
"Now," said Enderby, "don't worry. Take life as it comes. Live it by the square yard or whatever it was you said."
"I'm not at all happy about what you might do," said Dr Preston Hawkes. "It wouldn't be fair for you to go back home and do yourself in straight after coming to see me. I'd feel happier if you'd see Dr Greenslade. I could ring up now. I could get a bed for you straight away. I'm not sure that it's right for you to be going off on your own. Not in your present state of mind, that is." He stood confused and young, mumbling, "I mean, after all, we've all got a duty to each other -"
"I'm perfectly sane," soothed Enderby, "if that's what you're worrying about. And I promise you again not to do anything silly. You can have that in writing if you like. I'll send you a letter. I'll write it as soon as I get back to my digs." Dr Preston Hawkes bit his lip from end to end and back again, as though testing it for durability. He looked darkly and uncertainly at Enderby, not liking the sound of "letter" in this context. "Everything," said Enderby, with a great smile of reassurance, "is going to be all right." They had exchanged roles. It was with a doctor's jauntiness that Enderby said, "Nothing to worry about at all." Then he left swiftly.
He passed through a waiting-room full of people who, from the look of them, could not write poetry either. Some were in sporting kit, as if prepared to be tried out at the nets by Dr Preston Hawkes, wearing their ailments as lightly as a blazer-badge; others, dressed more fo
rmally, saw disease as a kind of church. Enderby had to squint his way out. He had lost his contact-lenses somewhere; the glasses he had formerly worn were, he supposed, still in the Gloucester Road flat. Unless, of course, she had thrown out all that was his. Walking through the rich marine light he regurgitated the word "police". If this doctor proposed to put the police on to him it would be necessary to act quickly. In imagination he heard what the world called sanity as something in heavy clumsy hoofing boots. He remembered the boots that chased him when, just back from Rome, he had tried to break into the flat by the window and been suddenly transfixed in the beam of a copper's lantern. He could have stayed to explain, of course, but the police might well, with their professional tendency to suspicion, have held him till the eventual arrival of Vesta. That mink coat, left behind in the scamper, would have taken some explaining away. So he had swung his suitcase into the constable's groin and, between a starting-line and finishing-tape of whistles, dodged about till-to his surprise, for he had thought such things only possible in films-he had managed to escape by skidding down a sidestreet and into an alley, waiting there till the whistles peeped, like lost tropical birds, forlornly in the distance.