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"I like a laugh same as the next one, but watch it, that's all." And the customer left, going aaarkbrokhhh on his stomach of whisky. Hogg and Spanish John faced each other.
"Puerco," said John, for so he translated Hogg's mother's name. "You speak other time of poetry, not good. Get on with bloody job is right way."
"Nark," growled Hogg. "Tell Holden if you want to. A fat lot I care." Holden was the Head Steward, a big man hidden behind secretaries and banks of flowers, an American who sometimes pretended he was Canadian. He would talk of cricket. It was something to do with American trade policy.
"I say bugrall this time," promised John generously. "This time not big. Last time very big."
Well, it hadn't really been Hogg's fault. A group of young fattish television producers had been there for di
"Who?" said Hogg. He had begun to tremble. There was a phantom girl hovering near the pig-pink (chopped-ham-and-pork-pink, to be accurate) ceiling, a scroll in her hand, queenly shoulders nacreous above a Regency ballgown. Hogg knew her all too well. Had she not deserted him a long time ago? Now she smiled encouragingly, unrolling her scroll coquettishly though, an allumeuse. "Did you say Enderby?" asked Hogg, shaking beneath his barman's white bum-freezer and frowning. The girl swooped down to just behind him, flat-handed him on the nape, and then shoved the wide-open scroll in front of his eyes. He found himself reciting confidentially, as in threat:
"Bells broke in the long Sunday, a dressing-gown day.
The childless couple basked in the central heat.
The papers came on time, the enormous meat
Sang in the oven. On thick carpets lay
Thin panther kittens locked in clawless play -"
"Ah, Jesus -"
"A so
Hogg glowered at this one, a small gesturing man, and prepared to say "For cough." But instead he went stoutly on:
"Bodies were firm, their tongues clean and their feet
Uncalloused. All their wine was new and sweet.
Recorders, unaccompanied, crooned away -"
At this moment another television man came in, one they had apparently all been waiting for. He was much like the others, very pasty. They clawed at him passionately, shouting.
"The Minetta Tavern -"
"Goody's on Sixth Avenue -"
There was a solitary man at the counter, one who had ordered by pointing; he wore dark glasses; his mouth had opened at Hogg and let cigarette smoke wander out at him. The tabled customers, aware of the intrusion of verse-rhythm into the formlessness of chat, had all been looking at Hogg. Spanish John stood shaking his head, nastily pleased.
"No more verse-fest," said the chief peanut-eater to Hogg. "More martinis."
"Wait," said Hogg, "for the bloody sestet."
"Oh, let's go in," the newcomer said, "I'm starving." And so they all shouted off to the Wessex Saddleback, clawing and going ja. Hogg turned gloomily to the man in dark glasses and said:
"They could have waited for the bloody sestet. No ma
"Nye ponimaiu." That was why he had started pointing again. Hogg, sighing, had measured out a large globule of an Iron Curtain glycerine-smelling aperitif. Must watch himself. He was happy now, wasn't he? Useful citizen.
It was after that occasion that he had been summoned to see Mr Holden, a man desperately balding as though to get into Time magazine. Mr Holden had said:
"You were on a sticky wicket there, ja. A straight bat and keep your eye on the pitcher. This is a respectable hotel and you are a sort of gliding presence in white, that's your image, ja. You've done well to get here after so short an i
Past, was it? The past, that is. He did something there was no law against doing shortly after. If anybody found out they would have him on television, sandwiched between a dustman who collected Meissen and a bank-clerk who had taught his dog to smoke a pipe. A curiosity at best. At worst a traitor. To what, though? To what a traitor would he be regarded as? And now, a month after, he was frowning while he compared his takings with the roll in the till that recorded each several amount rung. He would have to take the money in a little box to the huge clacking hotel treasury full of comptometers that-so Larry in the Harlequin Bar upstairs had asserted-if programmed proper could be made to see right through to your very soul. And then he had an appointment. In (his breast swelled minimally) Harley Street. To your very soul, eh? He felt uneasy. But, damn it, he had done no real wrong, surely? When John Milton clocked in to do his daily stint of translation of Cromwell into Latin, had they not perhaps used to say: "All right that was, that thing you pi
"My brother," John was saying, "now he work in Tangier. At Big Fat White Doggy Wog, bloody daft name for bar. Billy Gomez, everybody know him. Good on knife if trouble, ah yes, man." He made a bloodthirsty queeeeeking noise and drove a ghost-stiletto at Hogg's hidden puddings. "He say poetry, but now not. Good poetry. Spanish poetry. Gonzalo de Berceo, Juan Ruiz, Ferrant Sánchez Calavera, Jorge Manrique, Góngora-good poetry. England too fackin cold for good poetry. English man no fuego. Like bloody fish, hombre."
"I'll give you no fuego," said Hogg, incensed. "We gave you mucho bloody fuego in 1588, bastards, and we'll do it again. Garlicky sods. I'll give you no good poetry." A ruff went round his neck. He stroked a spade-beard, enditing. The sky was red with fireships. Then he saw himself in the gross reredos mirror, his cross reflection framed in foreign bottles, a decently shaven barman in glasses, going, like Mr. Holden, rapidly bald.
"We go eat now," said John. In the hotel's intestines steamed an employees' cafeteria, full of the noise of shovelled chips and heady with Daddies Sauce. A social organiser walked regularly between the tables, trying to get up table-te