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She wailed from the bed. Enderby dashed into the bathroom, inspired, and came out swathed in toilet-paper. "This will do fine," he smiled. "Shan't be long. Darling," he added. Then he sat at the dressing-table, horridly undressed, and began to write.
Pulling up blinds and lifting every ban.
The galaxies revolving to their plan,
They made the coin, the conch, the cortex yield
Their keys
"You're hateful, you're disgusting. I've never in my whole life been so insulted. No wonder she -"
"Look," said Enderby, without turning round, "this is important. The gift's definitely come back, thank God. I knew it would. Just give me a couple of minutes. Then I'll be in there again." In the bed, he meant, raising his eyes to the dressing-table mirror as to make them tell her, if she was in that mirror, precisely that. He saw her all right. He ought, he knew, to be shocked by what he saw, but there was no time for that now. Hell has no fury. Better not let other poems get in the way. Besides, that quotation was wrong, everybody always got it wrong.
And in a garden, once a field,
They hoisted up a statue of a man.
"Finished the octave," he sang out. "Shan't be long now."
"You filthy thing. You sexless rotter."
"Really. Such language." Mirror, terror, error. Pity there was no true rhyme for mirror, except that bloody Sir Launcelot thing Te
"You won't get away with this. You wait." And, dressing-gown decently about her, she was out through that door, to Enderby's mild surprise, and was gone, slamming it.
"Look here," Enderby said feebly. And then the mirror, holding out its English name, told him to get on with the sestet.
Four
The sestet. It was all right, he thought. He told the Spanish dawn he thought it was all right. Then he had a swig of Fundador. Not all that much left. She'd put her name into it, that one, Miss whoever-it-was, moon-woman. He told the sestet to his reflection like an elocutionist:
"Of man, rather. To most it seemed a mirror:
They strained their necks with gazing in the air,
Proud of those stony eyes unglazed by terror.
Though marble is not glass, why should they care?
There would be time for coughing up the error.
Someone was bound to find his portrait there."
And the meaning? It seemed pretty clear, really. This was what happened in a humanist society. The Garden of Eden (and that was in the other so
Enderby was moderately pleased with the poem, but he was more pleased with the prospect of a bigger structure, a sequence. Some years before he had published the volume called Revolutionary So
He felt excited. He toasted himself in the last of the Fundador. That bloody woman. But there was time for shame now and for the desire to make amends. He thought he had better go now to her room and apologise. He saw that it was not perhaps really all that polite to get out of bed and so on with a woman in order to write down a poem. Especially on toilet-paper brought in like triumphal streamers. Women had their own peculiar notion of priorities, and this had to be respected. But he had no doubt that she would see his point if properly explained. Suppose, he might say, she had suddenly spotted a new lunar crater while so engaged, would she not herself have leapt up as he had done? And then he could read his so
He went out on to the corridor, his so
"I came to tell you I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. It just came over me, as I said."
She started awake at once, more surprised, it seemed, than angry. She had changed her nightdress to demure cotton, also the colour of her hair. It was the aircraft's stewardess. Miss Kelly was the name. Enderby frowned on her. She had no right-But perhaps he had entered the wrong room. She said:
"Did you want something? I'm not really supposed to be available to passengers, you know, except on the flight."
"No, no," frowned Enderby. "Sorry. I was after that other woman. The moon one. Miss Boolan."
"Miss Boland. Oh, I see. It's your wrist, is it? You've got that thing round your wrist. You've cut your wrist, is that it? All the first-aid stuffs on the aircraft. The hotel people might be able to help you."
"Oh, no, no, no," Enderby laughed now. "This is a poem, not an improvised bandage. I had to get up and write this poem, you understand, and I fear I a