Free The Complete Enderby by Anthony Burgess Page A

frowning.
    ‘For a man,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, ‘who’s cut himself from the world, you’re not doing too badly. I should have thought,’ she said, pouring more tea, ‘that it was very unwise for a poet to do that. After all, you need images, themes, and so on, don’t you? You’ve got to get those from the outside world.’
    ‘There are quite enough images,’ said Enderby, speaking with firm authority, ‘in half a pound of New Zealand cheddar. Or in the washing-up water. Or,’ he added, with even greater authority, ‘in a new toilet-roll.’
    ‘You poor man,’ said Vesta Bainbridge. ‘Is that how you live?’
    ‘Everybody,’ said Enderby, with perhaps diminishing dogmatism, ‘uses toilet-paper.’ A man in spectacles, very tall and with an open mouth, looked across from his chair as if to dispute this assertion, thought better of it, then returned to his evening paper.
Poet Refuses Medal
, said a tiny headline which Enderby caught sight of. Some other bloody fool shooting his mouth off, some other toy trumpet singing to battle.
    ‘Anyway,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, ‘I think it would be an excellent thing for you to have a wider audience. Would you try it for, say, six months, a poem every week? Preferably set in the form of prose, so as not to offend anyone.’
    ‘I thought people didn’t actually find verse
offensive
,’ said Enderby. ‘I thought they just despised it.’
    ‘Be that as it may,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, ‘what do you say to the proposal?’ She shattered a sort of macaroon with a fork and, before eating, said, ‘The poems would have to be, shall I say, and I hope this is the right word, ephemeral. You know, dealing with everyday things that the average woman would be interested in.’
    ‘The dross of the workaday world,’ said Enderby, ‘transmuted to sheerest gold. I suppose I could do that. I know all about household chores and dishcloths and so on. Also lavatory brushes.’
    ‘Dear me,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, ‘you
have
got a cloacal obsession, haven’t you? No, not that sort of thing, and not too much of this sheerest gold, either. Womankind cannot bear very much reality. Love and dreams are wanted, also babies without cloacal obsessions. The mystery of the stars would come in quite nicely, especially if seen from the garden of a council-house. And marriage, perhaps.’
    ‘Tell me,’ said Enderby. ‘Are you Miss Cambridge or Mrs?’
    ‘Bainbridge, not Cambridge.
Fem
, not
Phlegm
. Mrs. Why do you want to know?’
    ‘I have to call you something,’ said Enderby, ‘don’t I?’ She seemed at last to have finished her meal, so Enderby offered his crumpled cigarette-packet.
    ‘I’ll smoke my own,’ she said, ‘if you don’t mind.’ She took from her handbag a packet of ship’s Woodbines and, before Enderby could find an unused match in his matchbox (he saved used matches, a long unfathomable habit), she had flicked her pearl-faced lighter on and then off. Her wide nostrils walrussed out two pretty blue jets.
    ‘I take it,’ said Enderby, ‘that your husband’s in the navy.’
    ‘My husband,’ she said, ‘is dead. It shows how cut off you are, really, doesn’t it? Everybody else seems to have heard of Pete Bainbridge.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Enderby. ‘Very sorry.’
    ‘What for? Because he’s dead, or because you’ve never heard of him? Never mind,’ said Widow Bainbridge. ‘He died in a smash four years ago, in the Monte Carlo Rally. I thought everybody knew that. It was a great loss, the papers said, to the motor-racing world. He left behind a beautiful young widow, a bride of only two years,’ she said, her tone half-mocking.
    ‘He did,’ said Enderby gravely. ‘He most certainly did. Beautiful, I mean. How much?’
    ‘How much what? How much did he leave, or how much did I love him?’ She seemed suddenly tired, perhaps from over-eating.
    ‘How much do I get for doing these poems?’
    ‘Mr Dick sets us all right,’ said Vesta