Enderby Outside

"What you mean, hombre? You call me pig."

"Big, I said big," said Hogg, distracted. "Look, the bar doesn't open for another hour. I've got to go to my room."

"Big pig, you say? I hear. Not bloody daft, man."

Hogg made a dash for the staff lift which, he saw, was just about to land. It opened, and a very natty though puffy young man came out, bearing what looked like the disgorgements of one of the hotel computers. He seemed to look direly at Hogg, as though it was his character that had been programmed. Hogg got in frowning, his brain full of words that were trying to marshal themselves into an ordered, though cryptic, statement. John the Spaniard tried to follow, but the puffy young man was in the way. Hogg pressed the right button and saw the door slice fist-shaking John laterally until there was nothing left of him save the after-image of the glow of his fillings. The lift-car seemed to remain where it was, and only the flash of the floor-numbers spoke of rising to 34A, a floor not accessible to the hotel guests. A high-powered car rushing on to it, whether you will or not. Hogg nearly fainted.

He got out blindly when the door automatically opened, fumbled for his key, almost tumbled into his cheerless cell. Paper. He had a lined writing-pad, in keeping with his new image. He sat panting heavily on his cot and began to scribble. She breathed hard into his left ear; her voice had become, for some reason, a lisping child's one. He wrote:

Useless to hope to hold off

The unavoidable happening

With that frail barricade

Of week, day or hour

Which melts as it is made,

For time himself will bring

You in his high-powered car,

Rushing on to it,

Whether you will or not.

And then sudden silence. What was it all about? What did it mean? Too much meaning in your poetry, Enderby. Somebody had said that once. You worry, my dear Enderby, far too much about meaning. Rawcliffe, one of the special trinity of enemies. And there was Wapenshaw, trying to crush his skull. He saw the strong hairy fingers, but the skull only gri

So, shaking hands with the grim

Satisfactory argument,

The consolation of bone

Resigned to the event,

Making a friend of him,

He, in an access of love,

Renders his bare acres

Golden and wide enough.

The prophetic tingling, as of something thrilling to welcome and then to lose and not to mind losing. He could have wept. The Muse stood by his wash-basin. What, then? What was the covenant to be? He might have to wait for a dream for the full disclosure. There was a hammering on the door. She hid, sliding through its door, into his tiny clothes-cupboard.

"Puerco, puerco!" called John the Spaniard. "You get tonic water for bloody bar, man!"

"For cough!" cried Hogg. "Go away, you garlicky bastard!" And then, radiating from the clothes-cupboard, it a

And this last margin of leaving

Is sheltered from the rude

Indiscreet tugging of winds.

"You bastard! You pull pudding in there! I bloody know!" Hogg wrote, like a dying message:

For parting, a point in time,

Ca

And ca

The final

John's thudding drowned the final whatever it was. The Muse, hidden in the cupboard, shook her sad child's head. Hogg-Enderby, enraged, got up and unlocked his door. Then he pulled it open. John almost fell in.

"Right," Hogg-Enderby clenched. "You've had this coming a long time, bloody hombre. You and bloody Franco and wanting bloody Gibraltar. Right." Well, Wapenshaw and the rest wished him to be involved in the world, didn't they-low, vulgar, an ordinary citizen ungiven to civilised restraints? John gri

"Momenta de verdad." Hogg thought he saw peasant's muscles underneath the cheap bar-waiter's clothes; his heart failed; he was too old; he shouldn't have started this. He put the chair gently down on the floor again. He said:

"All right. Here's my bloody throat." And he proffered it. John did not expect this. He said:

"You give kick on flaming leg, hombre. Not good."

"Listen," said Hogg, "listen." He, who had done Latin at school, who had spoken soldier's Italian in Catania but also read Dante with a crib, for some reason was now impelled to draw on this Romance equipment and create, nearly from scratch, not merely a language for Spain but a literature as well. "La consolación del osso," he suggested. John cocked an ear and said:

"Hueso."

"That's right," Hogg agreed. "La consolación del hueso resignado al evento." He didn't know whether that was right or not, but he felt it ought to have a place somewhere along the line of colonial deformation of Latin. In any case, John went pale. It was Orpheus with his lute, by God, who (so Hogg as schoolboy Enderby had believed, taking the first line of the song as a semantic entity) made trees. "And," said Hogg, very recklessly now, To say adiós, no è que un punto temporál."

"Sí sí."

"Y un punto can't have a bloody ombra."

"No puede tener sombra, sí, claro."

"And so there can't be any sombras around the something finál." (There was a rhyme there, wasn't there? He was actually rhyming in Spanish.)

"Ah," and as though they were both merely trying to remember a Spanish poem that actually existed, "el beso." Beso, baiser, bacio. Kiss.

And ca

The final kiss

Tears came into Hogg's eyes. He felt unutterably wretched. He said to John, tearfully, "You can have the job any time you like. I don't want it. I want to be a poet again, that's all."

John nodded. Garlicky sod as he was, he understood. "Poetry no money," he said. "Go on National Assistance, man." Like most immigrants, he knew everything about the resources of the British Welfare State. And then he said: "No, no good. Wait is best. Wait." He knew all about destiny too, being a foreigner. "Wait for," he said, "el acaso inevitable."

Hogg looked at him in wonder. The unavoidable happening.