Enderby Outside

"Me?" said Enderby.

"Saying you're a poet. Talking about your old Shropshire name."

"Listen," said Enderby. And he began to recite.

"Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury, rounded by river,

The envious Severn like a sleeping dog

That wakes at whiles to snarl and slaver

Or growls in its dream its snores of fog."

"That's yours, is it?"

"Lover-haunted in the casual summer:

A monstrous aphrodisiac,

The sun excites in the noonday shimmer,

When Jack is sweating, Joan on her back."

"I was always taught that you can't make poetry with long words."

"Sick and sinless in the anaemic winter:

The nymphs have danced off the summer rout,

The boats jog on the fraying painter,

The School is hacking its statesmen out."

"Oh, I see what you mean. Shrewsbury School. That's where Darwin went to, isn't it?"

"The pubs dispense their weak solution,

The unfructified waitresses bring their bills,

While Darwin broods upon evolution,

Under the pall of a night that chills -"

"Sorry, I shouldn't have interrupted."

"- But smooths out the acne of adolescence

As the god appears in the fourteenth glass

And the urgent promptings of tumescence

Lead to the tumbled patch of grass."

"A lot of sex in it, isn't there? Sorry, I won't interrupt again."

"This is the last bloody stanza," Enderby said sternly. "Coming up now.

Time and the town go round like the river,

But Darwin thinks in a line that is straight.

A sort of selection goes on for ever,

But no new species originate."

They were silent. Enderby felt a spurt of poet's pride, and then exhaustion. It had been a terrible day. Miss Boland was impressed. She said: Well, you are a poet, after all. If that is yours, that is."

"Of course it's mine. Give me some more from that bottle." And she glugged some out for him gladly, handmaiden to a poet. "That's from my early volume, Fish and Heroes. Which you haven't read. Which nobody's read. But, by God," said Enderby, "I'll show them all. I'm not finished yet, not by a long chalk."

"That's right. Don't you think you'd be more comfortable with your shoes off? Don't bother-leave it to me." Enderby closed his eyes. "And your jacket too?" Enderby soon lay on one half of the bed in shirt and trousers; she had had his socks off too and also his tie, which was in the hotel colours of red, white, and blue. The hot wind was still there, but he felt cooler. She lay next to him. They had a cigarette apiece.

"Associations," Enderby found himself saying. "Mind you, everybody's done it, from that Spanish priest right up to Albert Camus, with Kierkegaard somewhere in the middle."

"Who's Kierke-whatever-it-is?"

"This philosopher who made out it was really like God and the soul. Don Juan using women and God using man. Anyway, this is his town. And I was going to write a poetic drama about a Don Juan who bribed women to pretend that he'd done it to them because really he couldn't do it, not with anybody. And then poetic drama went out of fashion." His toenails, he decided, could really do with cutting. The big toenails, however, would have to be attacked with a chisel or something. Very hard. He had not changed all that much, after all. A bath, after all, was a tank for poetic drafts. He felt a new poem twitching inside him like a sneeze. A poem about a statue. He looked rather warmly on Miss Boland. The final kiss and final-If only he could get that one finished first.

"And who was this barber of Seville?"

"Oh, a Frenchman invented that one, and there's a French newspaper named after him. A sort of general factotum, getting things for people and so on." Enderby nodded off.

"Wake up." She was quite rough with him; that would be the Fundador. "You could have a play in which this barber was really Don Juan, and he did horrible things with his razor. In revenge, you know."

"What do you mean? What revenge?"

"I said nothing about revenge. You dropped off again. Wake up! I don't see why the moon couldn't be a proper scientific subject for a poem instead of what it is for most poets-you know, a sort of lamp, or a what-do-you-call-it aphrodisiac like the sun in your poem. Then you could have as many nice long words as you wanted. Apogee and perigee and the sidereal day and ectocraters and the ejecta hypothesis."

"What did you say about ejectors?"

She hadn't heard him. Or perhaps he'd said nothing. "And the months," she was now saying. "Synodic and nodical and sidereal and anomalistic. And isostasy. And grabens and horsts. And the lunar maria, not seas at all but huge plains of lava covered in dust. Your body is a horst and mine a graben, because horst is the opposite of graben. Come on, let's get out of here and wander the streets of Seville as we are, in our night clothes I mean. But your night clothes are the altogether, aren't they? Still, it's a lovely night though the moon's setting now. Feel that warm wind on your flesh?" That was not true about the moon setting. When they were walking down the calle outside the hotel, Enderby totally bare, his little bags aswing, the moon was full and huge and very near. It was so near that an odour came off it-like the odour of cachous from old evening bags, of yellowing dance-programmes, of fox-fur long laid in mothballs. Miss Boland said: "Mare Tranquillitatis. Fracastorius. Hipparchus. Mare Nectaris." She had brought the moon right down to the Seville housetops so that she could go burrowing into its maria. She disappeared temporarily into one of those, and then her head, its mousy hair become golden Berenice's and flying about, popped through the northern polar membrane. She seemed to be agitating this hollow moon from the inside, impelling it towards Enderby. He ran from her and it down the calle, back into the hotel. The old hall-porter yawned out of his hidalgo lantern jaws at Enderby's twinkling nakedness. Enderby panted up the stairs, once getting his toe caught in a carpet-hole, then cursing as a tack lodged in his calloused left heel. He found his room blindly and fell flat on the bed, desperate for air. There was not much coming from the open window. What was coming in by that window was the moon, much shrunken but evidently of considerable mass, for the window-frame creaked, four unwilling tangents to the straining globe, bits of lunar substance flaking off like plaster at the four points of engagement. Miss Boland's head now protruded at a pole which had become a navel, her hair still flying in fire. Enderby was stuck to that bed. With one lunge she and the moon were on him.

"No," he grunted, waking up. "No, you can't do that, it isn't right." But she and her heavy lunar body held him down. That left heel was fluked by one of her toenails; the staircarpet-hole turned out to be a minute gap between the fabric of her dressing-gown and its lacy border. There was no real nakedness, then: only exposure, things riding up and pulled down. "Show me then, show me what's right. You do it." He rolled her off, so that she lay expectant on her back now, and with desperate agility he trampolined his buttocks away from the punished mattress. This was springier than he had thought, for he found himself on his feet looking sternly down at her. "If," he said, "you want that sort of a holiday there'll be plenty to provide it. Gigolos and whatnot. Little dark-ski