Страница 25 из 39
"Momma," she said, "don't hold with poets and showbiz people and all that crap. She's a gooood woman. Reads the Bible all day. You got to come to momma's house that I bought for her out of my sinful showbiz success as an Englishman spreading the word of the Lord, kind of a smalltown Billy Graham, dig, I worked all this out in mah lil what ah calls mah mahnd, you got to be called Reverend. You'll be okay, momma cooks real good."
Enderby had read in some magazine of soulfood, strange name, as though the soul resided in the lowliest of animal organs, intestines, hog's bellylinings, spleens. Perhaps it did, black wisdom. Also mustard greens.
"And," she said, "she makes tea good and strong in a quart brown pot, ladling it in by the shovel. She drinks it all day when the kids are at school, reading her Bible. You better bone up on your Bible, Reverend, don't want to be caught out."
Enderby warmed at once to the quart brown pot. "That goes with the name Johnson," he said. "Dr Samuel Johnson, great tea drinker. Boswell said he must have had exceptionally strong nerves."
"How did you know that," she asked, surprised, in a straight, or American straight, voice, "about Boswell? My great grand-pappy was called Boswell Johnson."
"Some learned and facetious slaveowner," Enderby said, catching with no pleasure an image of elephant hided men called Cudge whining under Simon Legree whips in the cottonfields, what time old massa in the parlour read with mild interest a great record of the conversation of the English Enlightenment. And then: "Alas, I have no money. I can't afford the fare."
"I pay, baby. Ah is a rich lil gal."
"Well, then, yes, thank you, it's a great honour and you're very very generous." Then he began to weep, he did not know why. The voice of Toplady sounded over loudspeakers, its very tones giving him a partial reason why, calling the company together. "Sorry," Enderby sniffed, "ridiculous, I know. Emotional lability. Creative tension, something. Again thank you."
^^She laid on him hands intended for comfort but provocative of a ferocious glandular gear change and said: "Something's going on in there, I know. Life's not easy, kid. We'll talk again, okay." And she darted off, showing a cu
Then there was Hamlet, Will as ghost misnaming prince as Hamnet, sick for many reasons (death of son and end of Shakespeare line; his lordly friend Southampton in prison; the loss of a rare mistress, brightness falls from the air or hair) and sent off to Stratford to be made whole. And in marital embraces with ginger A
Let's have one other gaudy night,
Let's have one other bawdy night
And fright the white owls away.
Come, captains, drink beneath the stars
Until the wine peeps through your scars,
Drink till the dawning of the day!
For some reason that needed a black voice, altogether male and fully ballsed, but it had to be the fag Oldfellow transformed in vision to a Will with a chest like twin kettledrums. And for her?
God knew, she was Cleopatrician enough as they boarded the plane for Chicago, she in plain moulded emerald dress with seagreen cloak that had flared in the wind as they left the taxi, he in cap and old overcoat, blinking without glasses. At Chicago they got on an aircraft bound for Raleigh, named for the father of smoking. Smoking, she said:
"Now, honey, you can talk."
"What about?"
"You know what about, kid."
Enderby sighed like furnace. "You mustn't," he said, "consider me to be a sexless recluse advancing into grey middle age. I live alone after a brief failed marriage. Unconsummated, indeed. She was a woman of great chic and skill and ambition, and she wanted to be married to a poet. Then she became well known as a manager of pop groups and similar abominations."
She looked at him wideeyed, new angle on him. "Who?"
"A certain Vesta Bainbridge who became a certain Vesta Wittgenstein."
"Oh Jesus, her I knew. She wanted to manage me one time. She was a bitch, one hundred per cent and no discount."
"Well, there you are then. The muse was very angry about it and went away. I couldn't write. I attempted suicide. Then I was rehabilitated, as they put it. Then she came back."
"Who came back? La Wittgenstein?"
"No, the muse." Enderby looked very gravely at the smoking goddess beside him, a meanly framed vista of American bad weather beyond her. "Personification, if you like. Writing poetry isn't like adding up figures. There's a force outside that gets inside and starts dictating. Easier to call it the muse. Her, I mean. She can be very jealous. She's gone for good now, I think. So much and no more is granted to a poet. I've published my Collected Poems, to no applause. What I do in that bloody theatre or theater is nothing. Pure craft. Not so pure either. I hope I'm not boring you."
"No, honey. You just keep straight on."
"My feelings towards ah your divine self, then. With a woman a man has to effect a dichotomy. You know the word?"
"Oh, come on."
"Sorry, you keep assuming this Topsy act, the slangy front to the world, the virtues of deprivation and so on. What I mean is. Well, it was you who mentioned the noumenon and the phenomenon aspect of things. I take your image to bed with me and devour it growling. Need, you know, the filling up of the wells. Disgusting but ineluctable. A private indeed privy matter. But behind that is you, and yet not behind that, because your body is no mask. And if I say love -" The aircraft responded to that dangerous word by meeting clear air turbulence. "- I mean, what the hell can you do with love except cleanse yourself of it by debasing the image to a lust object? I mean, what do I say, I, an ugly ageing man whose skin was never washed in the sun's glory, ru
"Yeah yeah yeah. Quite a speech."
"And what," Enderby asked, "do you do about love? If I may ask."