Inside Mr Enderby

Walpole sniffed the warm dry air, the lingering sour stew-smell, the raised dust, and then noticed Enderby's packed bags. "Leaving, eh?" he said. "Well, I only just got you in time, didn't I?"

"I've got to catch a train," said Enderby, "any minute now. Would you -?"

"Oh, I'll be quick," said Walpole, "very quick. What I want to say is that I won't have you writing poetry to my wife."

Enderby saw rush and then fade a quite unreasonable possibility. Then he smiled and said, "I don't write poetry to anybody's wife."

Walpole drew from his raincoat pocket a carefully folded and smoothed sheaf of sheets. "This poetry," he said. "Look at it carefully and then tell me whether or not you wrote it."

Enderby looked at it quickly. His handwriting. The Thelma poems. "I wrote these, yes," he said, "but not on my own behalf. I wrote them at the request of another man. I suppose you could call him a client, really. You see, poetry is my profession."

"If it's a profession," said Walpole in all seriousness, "does it have what you might call rules of professional etty kwett? More important than that, in a way of speaking, does it have a union?"

Enderby suddenly saw that he had been made a party to a proposed bed-breach. He said that he saw, ignoring Walpole's questions, saying, "I see, I see. I'm really very sorry about all this. I knew nothing about it. I'm even more i

"Mrs Walpole," said Walpole tautologically, "is my wife. Thelma may or may not be her name, all according to whether she is on duty or not. At the moment she is not on duty. And this question of Harry"-he stressed the aitch pedantically-"is a question that brings you in as a hypocrite and a liar, if you don't mind me saying so." Walpole held up his hand as if taking the oath. "I make use of those terms," he said, "out of reference to the conventionalities you yourself, as a boor Joyce, probably uphold. To me, in one ma

"I," said Enderby warmly, "object very strongly to being called a hypocrite and a liar, especially in my own house."

"Clear your mind of cant," said Walpole, whose reading was evidently wide. He straddled comfortably, raincoat-tails spread, in front of the electric fire. "You are just leaving this place which is not a house and not, I presume, your property, and, moreover, what difference should it make to the effect of certain words on the individual brain whether those words are spoke in a church or in a lavatory, if you'll pardon the term, or, as it might be, here?" He made the knees-bend gesture of freeing a trouser-seat stuck in a rump-cleft.

The mention of church and lavatory went straight to Enderby's heart, also the invocation of logic. "All right, then," he said. "In what way am I a hypocrite and a liar?"

"A fair question," admitted Walpole. "You are a hypocrite and a liar"-he pointed a j'accuse finger with forensic sudde

"Yes," said Enderby, "no."

"Well, then," continued Walpole, "I have it on the word of Harry, who is a worker, that he had no adulterating intention in mind. To him it came as a shock, and I was there and I saw the shock as it came, that another man should be sending poetry to a married woman and signing it with another man's name, the name of a man who, still living in a capitalist society, is not in the same position to hit back as what you are." Again the accusatory finger darted out like a chameleon's tongue.

"Why," said stu

"Single or double makes no difference," said Walpole sagely. "And there have been occasions when men, especially poets, have only seen a woman once (and I will thank you not to use that term in co

"This is absurd," said Enderby. "This is bloody nonsense. I wrote those poems at Arry's request. I wrote them in exchange for the loan of a suit and a few gifts of chicken and turkey carcasses. Does that not sound reasonable?"

"No," said Walpole reasonably. "It does not. You wrote these poems. You wrote of breasts and buttocks and even navels in co

"But damn it," said angry Enderby, "she's got them, hasn't she? She's the same as any other woman in that respect, isn't she?"

"I do not know," said Walpole, stilling Enderby's rage with a choir-conductor's hand. "I am no womanizer. I have had to work. I have had no time for the fripperies and dalliances of poetry. I have had to work. I have had no time for the flippancies and insincerities of women. I have had to work, night after night, after the labours of the day, reading and studying Marx and Lenin and the other writers who would lead me to a position to help my fellow-workers. Can you say as much? Where has your poetry led you? To this." He swept a hand round Enderby's dusty living-room. "Where have my studies led me?" He did not answer his own question; Enderby waited, but the question was definitely established as rhetorical.

"Look," said Enderby, "I've got to catch a train. I'm sorry that this has happened, but you can see it was all a misunderstanding. And you must take my assurance that I've had nothing to do socially with Mrs Walpole and very little more professionally. By 'professionally'," added Enderby carefully, spying a possible misinterpretation, "I mean, of course, in co

"That," said Walpole, shaking his head, "is not salaried, it is not a profession. Well," he said, "the question of a punishment arises. I think, to some extent, that should be a matter to let rest between you and your Maker."

"Yes, yes," said Enderby, too eagerly, with too much relief, "I agree."

"You agree, do you?" said Walpole. "A more intelligent and more well-read man and who follows political theories would there be tempted to ask a certain simple question. What would that certain simple question be, Comrade Enderby?"

The chill honorific, with its suggestion of brain-washing and salt-mines, made Enderby's bowels react strongly: they seemed to liquefy; at the same time a solid blast prepared itself for utterance. Nevertheless he said bravely, "People who accept dialectical materialism don't usually accept the proposition of a divine first cause."

"And very well put, too," said Walpole, "though a bit old-fashioned in its circumloquaciousness. God is what you mean, Comrade Enderby, God, God, God." He raised his eyes to the ceiling, his mouth opening and shutting on the divine name as though he were eating it. "God, God, God," said Walpole. As in response to a summons there was a knock on the flat-door. "Ignore it," said Walpole sharply.