Inside Mr Enderby

Enderby pouted, pouring himself the last of his bottle. He felt that it was not up to Rawcliffe to tell him that he must be alone. He took from his inside jacket-pocket a piece of paper on which he had been doing sums. "Did you know," he said, "how much mink costs? Mink," he repeated. "I have it here," he said carefully. "One Black Diamond mink coat: one thousand four hundred and ninety-five pounds. One hip-length jacket: five hundred and ninety-five pounds. One pastel mink bolero: three hundred and ninety-five pounds. We leave out of account," said Enderby, "as being too inexpensive for serious consideration, a pastel stole at two hundred pounds. That's a frippery, a mere nugacity." He smiled sillily. "What," he asked, "can a poet do with no money, eh? How does a poet live?"

"Well," said Rawcliffe, both hands round his new Strega as if it were something to be strangled, "there are jobs, you know. All sorts of jobs. Only the very luckiest of poets can be professional poets. You could teach or write for the papers or do film scripts or advertising slogans or lecture for the British Council or get unskilled work in a factory. Lots of things to be done."

"But," objected Enderby, "suppose one is no good at anything except writing poetry? Suppose one makes a bloody fool of oneself at anything else?"

"Oh," said Rawcliffe reasonably, "I don't think that anybody could make such a bloody fool of himself that it would really matter. Now, if I were you, I should leave everything in the hands of Auntie Vesta. She'll fix you up with something nice and easy."

"But," protested Enderby, "only a minute ago you were telling me that I've got to be alone."

"I see," said Rawcliffe, seeing into his Strega. "Well, in that case it's all a bit of a mess, isn't it, Enderby? But don't worry me with your worries, Enderby, because I've got worries of my own, you see. You sort out things for yourself." He seemed suddenly sober and rather cold despite the June warmth. He downed his Strega and shivered exaggeratedly, as if he had taken a wholesome but bitter medicine. "Perhaps," he said, "I should have started this heavy drinking business earlier. I might possibly be dead by now instead of having putatively fathered or foster-fathered or helped with the illegitimate fathering of L'Animal Binato, alive and healthy and almost impervious to the more deadly effects of alcohol. I should, by rights, Enderby, have considered seeing myself off when I found that the lyric gift had departed from me. I could at least have contrived to be careless crossing the road, couldn't I? And, instead of that propaganda job during the war, I could perhaps have volunteered for something more genuinely lethal."

"What," asked Enderby morbidly, "did it feel like? I mean, when the lyric gift departed?" Rawcliffe looked up so morosely, fixing Enderby with an eye so baleful, that Enderby began to smile nervously. Rawcliffe said:

"Blast your mean little soul, it's no laughing matter, even in retrospect." Then he came nearer to Enderby and gave him a close-up of bad teeth and worse breath. "It was like everything going all dead," said Rawcliffe. "It was like going dumb. I could see quite clearly what had to be said, but I couldn't say it. I could perceive that an imaginative relationship existed between disparate objects but I couldn't tell what the relationship was. I used to sit for hours with paper in front of me, hours and hours, Enderby, and then I would at last get something down. But what I got down somehow-don't laugh at me-had a smell of decay about it. What I got down was evil, and I used to shudder when I crumpled it up and threw it in the fire. And then, at night, in bed, I used to wake up to hear mocking laughter. And then," tottered Rawcliffe, "one night there was the sound of an awful click, and then everything in the bedroom seemed cold, somehow, cold and obscene. I knew, Enderby, it was all over. Thenceforward I should be outside the Garden, useless to anyone, a mess and, moreover, Enderby, in some indefinable way evil. Like an unfrocked priest, Enderby. The unfrocked priest does not become a mere neuter harmless human being; he becomes evil. He has to be used by something, for supernature abhors a supervacuum, so he becomes evil, Enderby." He swigged more Strega and staggered, as it were, against the ropes, saying, "And all that is left for the poet, Enderby, when the inspiration is departed, Enderby, is the travesty, the plagiarism, the popularization, the debasement, the curse. He has drunk the milk of paradise, but it has long passed through his system, Enderby, and, unfortunately for him, he remembers the taste." Rawcliffe shut weary eyes, saying, "Ara vos prec," and then "be mindful in due time of my pain. I translate, Enderby, because you would not understand the original Provençal. That is the poet Arnaut Daniel in Purgatory. He was a lucky bugger, or is, Enderby, a lucky bugger to be in Purgatory. Not like some of us." At this point, Rawcliffe went quite gently to sleep standing up, his head reposing on arms he had folded on the counter. Dante said: "Better e slip." There was a plum-plush settee against the wall; to this Dante and Enderby carried, led, pushed, dragged Rawcliffe. "Too mash fackin Strega," diagnosed Dante. Sighing, Enderby sat next to Rawcliffe, a fresh bottle of Frascati and a tumbler on the table in front of him, and he continued to do sums on bits of paper. At intervals Rawcliffe gave gnomic utterance, often obscure, from his sleep; reports from the first crazed space-traveller:

"No expense of breath in falling downstairs."

"Mario, put that bread-knife away."

"You are a naughty boy, but not undelectable."

"In all the antholololologies."

"This will make Enderby feel very sick."

Indeed, Enderby felt very sick when he had worked out his sums and found that his credit balance in the bank stood at, taking the most liberal computation, little more than four hundred and ninety pounds. It was pointless asking himself where the money had gone to, for he knew all too well: it had flowed back to its source: his stepmother had given and his stepmother had, in a youthful, well-spoken, dove-soft, spring-smelling, highly improbable disguise, taken away again. From his sleep Rawcliffe called:

"Aha! Man not the boats, but woman-and-child them. I'll shoot all else. Back, you brute, back. The rash, smart, sloggering Hopkinsian brine. Enderby was a very inferior poet. Very wise of him to pack up."

Enderby spoke sternly to this dark voice. "I am not packing up," he said. This silenced Rawdiffe's sleep-persona temporarily. To himself Enderby said, "If I can keep the relationship on the most superficial of levels, for superficially I am quite fond of her, then it should be possible to contrive some sort of satisfactory co-existence. But I will not be ordered about. And she has, after all, a good job and I could, at a pinch, refuse to get a job of my own or have a job found for me. The Sussex house has many rooms. My stomach is better." Rawdiffe's sleeping voice spoke again from outer space:

"You will do as I say, Vincent. I will not have you calling Reggy an old queen. He is not old." And then, "God should feel highly flattered that we have invented Him." And finally, before falling into serious speechless sleep, in the voice of Yeats speaking with the voice of Swift speaking with the voice of Job: "Let the day perish wherein I was born." Enderby shuddered, the wine seeming sharper than usual.