Free The Complete Enderby by Anthony Burgess Page B

Bainbridge, sighing and sitting up straighter. She brushed minimal crumbs off her lap and said, ‘Two guineas a poem. It’s not much, but we can’t manage more. We’re featuring the memoirs of a pop-singer, you see – not very long memoirs, of course, because he’s only nineteen – but those are costing us a pretty penny, believe me. And the memoirs have to be written for him as well. Still, the effect on the circulation should be, to say the least, stimulating. If that princely fee is all right by you I’ll send you a contract. And some back numbers of
Fem
, to show you what it’s like. Please remember that the vocabulary of our readers isn’t very extensive, so don’t go using words like ‘oriflamme’ or ‘inelectable’.’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Enderby. ‘I’m really most grateful that you should have thought of me like this. You’re really being most kind.’ He had been poking into the ashtray with a matchstick, breaking up cigarette-ends; this had necessitated a sort of crouching on the chair’s edge, his bald crown presented to Mrs Bainbridge. Now he looked up sincerely, his eyes rather wet behind their glasses. She smiled.
    ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you don’t believe me about my liking your poetry, do you? Well, I even know one or two of them by heart.’
    ‘Say one,’ begged Enderby. She took breath and recited, quite clearly but with few nuances of tone:
     
‘A dream, yes, but for everyone the same.
The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch;
The Absolute was anybody’s pitch
For, when a note was struck, we knew its name’.
     
    ‘Good,’ said Enderby. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever actually heard –’
     
‘– That dark aborted any urge to tame
Waters that day might prove to be a ditch
But then were endless growling ocean, rich
In fish and heroes, till the dredgers came.’
     
    ‘Excellent,’ said Enderby. ‘And now the sestet.’ It excited him to hear his own verses. She went on confidently:
     
‘
Wachet auf!
A fretful dunghill cock
Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires;
A martin’s nest clogged the cathedral clock,
But it was morning (birds could not be liars).
A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock;
Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.
     
    There,’ she said, taking breath. ‘But I’ve no real idea what it means.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Enderby, ‘the meaning doesn’t matter all that much. I’m surprised at your liking that. It’s not what I’d thought of as a woman’s poem.’ Suddenly the poem seemed to find its place in the real world – overseas businessmen reading financial papers, the scent of
Miss Dior
or whatever it was, the noise of London waiting to pounce outside the hotel. Spoken by her, it seemed suddenly to have a use.
    ‘And what exactly do you mean by a woman’s poem?’ asked Mrs Bainbridge.
    ‘For you,’ said Enderby with disarming candour, ‘something softer and yet more elegant, something with less harshness and thought and history in it. That, you see, is about the Middle Ages and the coming of the Reformation. In the sestet you get Martin Luther and the beginning of dissolution, everybody beginning to be alone, a common tradition providing no tuning-fork of reference and no way of telling the time, because the common tradition has been dredged away. Nothing sure and nothing mysterious.’
    ‘I see,’ said Vesta Bainbridge. ‘I take it you’re a Catholic, then.’
    ‘Oh, no, no,’ protested Enderby. ‘I’m not, really I’m not.’
    ‘All right,’ said Vesta Bainbridge, smiling. ‘I heard you the first time.’ Protestant Enderby grinned and shut up. The Roman waiter came along, chewing gently but mournfully, with a bill. ‘For me,’ she said, and notes rustled in her bag like pork crackling. She paid the bill and, womanly, tipped the waiter merely adequately. Enderby said:
    ‘I’d ask you to dine with me this evening, but I’ve just realized that I didn’t bring very much money. I expected, you see,