The Complete Enderby (74 page)

‘That’s a terrible weapon you have there.’

‘Look,’ Enderby panted, ‘that was my stop. I’ve gone past my bloody stop.’

‘You can ride back from the next one.’

‘But I’ve no money.’ And then: ‘Are you all right now? Is she all right now?’ They were all all right now except for the shock.

‘You can get on without a token,’ the nun said. ‘A lot of them do it.’ And then: ‘You shouldn’t be carrying a thing like that around with you. It’s against the law.’

‘Entitled self-protection. Bugger the law.’

‘Are you an Englishman?’ Nodnod. ‘I thought so from your way of swearing. Are you a Protestant?’ Shakeshake. ‘I said to myself you had a Catholic face.’

‘Aren’t you,’ Enderby said, ‘frightened? Travelling like this. A lot of thugs and rapists and.’

‘I trust in Almighty God.’

‘He wasn’t all that bloody quick in. Coming to your. Help.’

‘Are you all right now? You look very pale.’

‘Heart,’ Enderby said. ‘Heart.’

‘I’ll say a decade of the rosary for you.’

‘You have your supper first. A nice veal sandwich. A cup of.’

‘What a strange thing to say. I can’t stand veal.’

Enderby got shakily off at the next stop but would not take a free ride back to 96th Street. Timorousness? No, he did not think it was that. It was rather something to do with vital integrity, not lowering oneself, wearing a suit evocative of an age of decency when gentlemen thrashed niggers but paid their bills. So he walked as far as the Symphony movie house and thought it might be a good plan to sit there, resting in the dark, judging once more, if he had the strength, certain ethical aspects of
The Wreck of the Deutschland
, and then go home calmly and starving to bed. But, of course, approaching the pay-box, he realized once more he had no money. He said, to the bored chewing black bespectacled girl behind the grille:

‘Look, I just want to go in for a minute. I was involved in the making of this er movie, you see. Something I have to check. Business not pleasure.’ She did not seem to care. She waved him towards the cavern of the antechamber, see man in charge, man. But there was no one around who cared much. It was past the hour for anyone to care much. Enderby entered tempestuous darkness: the breakers were rolling on the beam of the Deutschland
with
ruinous shock. And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheel idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured. There did not seem to be, now he could see better, many audients taking it all in. An old man slept uneasily. Some blacks chortled inexplicably at the sight of one stirring from the rigging to save the wild womankind below, with a rope’s end round the man, handy and brave. Some fine swooping camerawork showed him being pitched to his death at a blow, for all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew. Cut to night roaring, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble, the woman’s wailing, the crying of child without check. Then a lioness arose breasting the babble. Gertrude, lily, Franciscan robe already rent, spoke of courage, God. Then came the flashback – Deutschland, double a desperate name. Beautifully contrived colour-contrasts: black uniforms, white nunflesh, red yelling gob, blood, a patch of yellow convent-garden daffodils crushed under the blackbooted foot. Hitler appeared briefly, roaring something (beast of the waste wood) to black approbation in the audience.

Away in the loveable west, on a pastoral forehead of Wales, Father Tom Hopkins S.J. seemed mystically or ESPishly aware of something terrible going on out there somewhere. Putting down his breviary, he dreamed back to boy-and-girl love. A student in Germany, Gertrude not yet coifed, passion amid
Vogelgesang
in Schwarzwald. Rather touching, really, but far too naked. Song of Hitlerjugend marching in the distance. Bad times coming for us all. Ja ja, Tom. It all seemed pretty harmless, Enderby thought. It aroused desire to see off the Nazis, no more, but that had already been done, Enderby vaguely assisting. And so he left. He walked down chill blowing Broadway as far as 91st Street, then crossed towards Columbus Avenue.

At this point it happened again. Pain was pumped rapidly into his chest and he stopped breathing. The surplus of pain overflowed into his left shoulder and went rattling down the arm to the elbow. At the same time both legs went suddenly dead and the tough metalled stick was not enough to sustain him. He went over gently on to the sidewalk and lay, writhing, trying to deal with the pain and the inability to breathe like a pair of messages that both had to be answered at once. Pain passed and breath
shot
in with the hiss of an airtight can being opened. But still he lay, now feeling the cold. A few people passed by, naturally ignoring him, some junky, a man knifed, dangerous to be involved. And they were right, of course, in a world that thought the worst of involvement. Why did you help him, mister? Got scared, did you? Let’s see what you got in your pockets. What’s this? A stomach tablet? That’s a laaaugh. Soon he was able to get up. Blood and a kind of healthy pain were flowing into his legs. He felt all right, even gently elated. After all, he knew now where he stood. There was no need to plan anything long, that
Odontiad
, for instance. A loosening artistic obligation. There was only the obligation of setting things in order. He might live a long time yet, but time would be doled out to him in very small denominations, like pocket-money. On the other hand, there was no need to work at living a long time. He had not done too badly. He was fifty-six, already had done four years better than Shakespeare. As for poor Gervase Whitelady. Kindly he suddenly decided to allow Whitelady to live till 1637, which meant he could benefit from the critical acumen of Ben Jonson.

He got to the apartment block without difficulty. Mr Audley, the black guard, sat in his chair in the warmth of the foyer, while the many telescreens showed dull programmes: people muffled up hurrying round the corner, the basement empty, the main porch newly free of entering Enderby. They nodded at each other, Enderby was allowed in, he took the elevator to his floor, he entered his apartment. Thanked, so to speak, be Almighty God. He drew his bloody sword and executed a courtly flourish with it at the mess in the kitchen. Then he cleaned off the blood with a dishrag. His stomach, crassly ignoring the day’s circulatory warnings, growled at him, knowing it was in the kitchen, messy or not.

There was an episode, Enderby remembered, in Galsworthy’s terrible Forsyte or Forsyth epic, in which some old scoundrel of the dynasty faced ruin and determined to kill himself like a gentleman by eating a damn good dinner. In full fig, by George. By George, they had got him an oyster. By George, he had forgotten to put his teeth in, and here was a brace of mutton chops grilled to a turn. A rather repulsive story, but it did not debar
Galsworthy
from getting the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize. Enderby had never got or gotten anything, not even the Heinemann Award for Poetry, but he did not give a bugger. He did not now propose to eat himself to death, in a subforsytian manner befitting his station, but rather just not to give a bugger. To take a fairly substantial supper with, since time might be short, a few unwonted luxuries added. Such as that French chocolate ice cream that was ironhard in the deep freeze. And that small tin of pâté mixed in the great culminatory stew he envisaged after, for tidiness’s sake, finishing off his Sara Lee collection and eating the potato pieces and spongemeat that waited for a second chance, nestling ready in their fat. And to get through the mixed pickles and Major Grey’s chutney. He had always hated waste.

ENDERBY’S SUPPER WAS
interrupted by two telephone calls. During the stew course (two cans of corned beef, frozen onion-rings, canned carrots, a large Chunky turkey soup, pâté, a dollop of whisky, Lea and Perrin’s, pickled cauliflowers, the remains of the spongemeat, and the crinkle-cut potato-bits) Ms Tietjens sobbed to him briefly without preamble: I’m sick, I tell ya, I’m all knotted up inside, I’m sick, sick, there’s something gone wrong with me, I tell ya; and Lloyd Utterage confirmed the impending fulfilment of his threat, so that Enderby was constrained to tell him to come along and welcome, black bastard, and have an already bloody sword stuck into his black guts. Enderby placidly ended his meal with the French ice cream (brought to near melting in a saucepan over a brisk flame) with raspberry jam spread liberally over, spooning the treat in on rich tea biscuits he ate as he spooned. Then he had some strong tea (six Lipton’s bags in the pint
ALABAMA
mug) and lighted up a White Owl. He felt pretty good, as they said in American fiction, though distended. All he needed now, as again
they
would say in American fiction, and he laughed at the conceit, was a woman.

A woman came while he was making himself more tea. He was surprised to hear the doorbell ring with no anterior warning on the intercommunication system from the black guard below. Every visitor was supposed to be screened, frisked, reported to the intended visited before actually appearing. The woman at the door was young and very attractive in a reactionary way, being dressed in a bourgeois grey costume with a sort of nutria or coypu or something coat swinging open over it. She wore over decently arranged chastaigne hair a little pillbox hat of the same fur. She was carrying a handful of slim volumes. She said:

‘Mr Enderby?’

‘Or Professor, according to the nature of. How did you get here? You’re not supposed just to come up, you know, without a premonition.’

‘A what?’

‘A forewarning from the gunman.’

‘Oh. Well, I said it was a late visit from one of your students and that you were expecting me. It
is
all right, isn’t it?’

‘Are you one of my students?’ Enderby asked. ‘I don’t seem to –’

‘I am in a sense. I’ve studied your work. I’m Dr Greaving.’

‘Doctor?’

‘From Goldengrove College.’

‘Oh very well then, perhaps you’d better. That is to say.’ And he motioned courtlily that she should enter. She entered, sniffing. ‘Just been cooking,’ Enderby said. ‘My supper, that is to say. Can I perhaps offer?’

In the sitting-room there was a small table. Dr Greaving put down her books on it and at once sat on the straightbacked uncomfortable chair nearby.

‘Whisky or something like that?’

‘Water.’ Now in, she had become vaguely hostile. She looked up thinly at him.

‘Oh, very well. Water.’ And Enderby went to get it. He let the faucet run but the stream did not noticeably cool. He brought back some warmish water and put the glass down with care next to the slim volumes. He saw they were of his own work. British
editions
, American not existing. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘How did you manage to get hold of those?’

‘Paid for them. Ordered them through a Canadian bookseller. When I was in Montreal.’ Enderby now noticed that she had taken out of her handbag a small automatic pistol, a lady killer.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Now perhaps you’ll understand why they’re so keen down below on checking visitors and so on. Why have you brought that? It seems, to say the least, unnecessary.’ He marvelled at himself saying this. (Cinna the poet: tear him for his bad verses?)

‘You deserve,’ she said, ‘to be punished. Incidentally, my name is
not
Doctor Greaving. But what I said about being a student of your work is true.’

‘Are you Canadian?’ Enderby asked.

‘You seem to be a big man for irrelevancies. One thing you’re a big man in.’ She drank some water, keeping her eyes on him. The eyes were of a kind of triple sec colour. ‘You’d better bring a chair.’

‘There’s one in the kitchen,’ Enderby said with relief. ‘I’ll just go and –’

‘Oh no. No dashing into the kitchen to telephone. If you tried that anyway I’d come and shoot you in the back. Get that chair over there.’ It was not really a chair. It was a sort of very frail Indian-style coffee-table. Enderby said:

‘It’s really a sort of very frail. It belongs to my landlady. I might …’ He was really, to his surprise, quite enjoying this. It seemed quite certain to him now that he was not going to die of cancer of the lung.

‘Bring it. Sit on it.’ He did. He sat on its edge, pity to damage so frail a thing, horrible though he had always thought it. He said:

‘Now what I can do for you, Miss er?’

‘I’m not,’ she said, ‘going to tolerate any more of this persecution. And it’s Mrs, as you perfectly well know. Not that I’m living with him any more, but that’s another irrelevance. I’m not going to have you,’ she said, ‘getting into my brain.’

Enderby gaped. ‘How?’ he said. ‘What?’

‘I know them by heart,’ she said, ‘a great number of them. Well, I don’t want it any more. I want to be free. I want to get on with my own things, can’t you see that, you bastard?’ She pointed the little gun very steadily at Enderby.

‘I don’t understand,’ Enderby said. ‘You’ve read my things, you say. That’s what they’re for, to be read. But there’s no er compulsion to read them, you know.’

‘There’s a lot of things there’s no compulsion for. Like going to the movies to see a movie that turns out to be corruptive. But then you’re corrupted, just the same. You never know in advance.’ As this seemed to her ears apparently, as certainly to his, to be a piece of neutral or even friendly expository talk, she added sharply, with a gun gesture, ‘You bastard.’

‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ Enderby asked. ‘Unwrite the damned things?’ And then, this just striking him, ‘You’re mad, you know, you must be. Sane readers of my poems don’t –’