“It will die down," said the goitrous old man, "and new sensations will come up. That new shiftless generation must be fed with fresh novelties." He took some Wilson's snuff, then hawked, carked and shivered with the dour pleasure of it.
"Not a religious man," said the snapping ex-major. "But when I see a central tenet of my father's faith-he held it, poor devil, through all his suffering-when I see that, I say, turned to a trick or gimmick or whatever the fashionable word is, then I wonder. I wonder what new blasphemy they can devise." He shuddered his whisky down in one.
“No morals," said the twittering man. "No loyalty. They will turn on their friends as if they were enemies. It was at a private party that this youth with the gun boasted in his cups. Isn't that so, Rawcliffe?"
"I don't really know," said Enderby. "I don't read the papers."
“Very wise too," said the senior elder. "Stay away from that world. Get on with your job, whatever it is."
"Sam Foot," said the goitrous old man. "A ridiculous name. Probably made up."
"Samuel Foot," said Enderby, "was an eighteenth-century actor and playwright. He was also an agent for small beer. And they all jell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots."
There was a silence. “They did, eh?" said the senior. “Well suppose I'd better be thinking about getting home for lunch. Takes me longer and longer. Walking, that is."
"He wrote that," said Enderby. "It was a test-piece. This other man said that he could recite anything after hearing it once only."
"On my way too," said the ex-major. "Bit of a blow on the prom."
The door opened and a girl came in, very tanned. She wore, as for high summer, a simple green frock well above her knees, deep-cut at her young bosom, her golden arms totally bare. She carried a beach-bag. She smiled shyly and went up to Manuel at the bar. "I understand," she said, "that I can hire a changing-cubicle or whatever it's called." Her voice was low in pitch, the accent classless. Susannah among the elders, Enderby thought. The ex-major said quietly:
"Susannah among the elders." Enderby could see them feeling old, impotent, lust too tired within to rage at so many opportunities lost, the time gone, perhaps death to be their next season. And himself? He got up and said to the girclass="underline"
"Well, you can actually, but -" She looked at him from green eyes sprinkled, like a sireh quid, with gold. They were set wide apart but not too much: enough for beauty, perhaps honesty; not enough for the panic mindless world of the animals. Hair? Enderby at once, to his surprise, thought of the flower called montbretia. "What I mean is that, surely, it's getting a bit cold now. This time of the year I mean."
"I don't feel the cold. A cold sea doesn't frighten me." As in an allegory or Punch title-page, the aged trundled off-winter or war, industrial depression or an all-around bad year-from the presence of youth as peace, spring, a change of government. They creaked and groaned, snorted, limped, winced at arterio-sclerotic calf-ache, went. One or two waved tiredly at Enderby from beyond the closed glass door, a safe distance. "Could I have one then? For a couple of days. Do I pay in advance?"
"No, no, no need-Certainly. Un llave, Manuel."
"Numero ocho," Manuel smiled.
They all-Tetuani clearing the old men's whisky-glasses, Antonio at the kitchen-door, Manuel from the arena with its furled umbrellas, Enderby turned in his chair-watched her prancing seawards over the deserted sand, in scanty crimson, her hair loose. Enderby turned back in rage to his table. He took paper and wrote fiercely: "You bitch, you know you ruined my life. You also stole my verse to give to that blasphemous false commercial Lazarus of yours. Well, you won't get away with it. One of the stolen poems had already been published in one of my volumes. I'm going to sue, you’re all going to suffer." And then he could see Vesta standing there, cool, smart in spotless dacron, unperturbed, saying that she wouldn't suffer, only that mouthing creature of hers, and he was going to be abandoned anyway, past his peak, the time for the chaotopoeic groups coming, or the duo called Lyserge and Diethyl, or Big D and the Cube and the Hawk and the Blue Acid. Or worse. Enderby took another sheet of paper and wrote:
Smell and fearful and incorrigible knackers
With the crouched pole under
And strings of his inner testes strewn
Over curried pancreas and where the
Hollowed afternoon vomits
Semen of ennui and
And and and. Send it round, signed, to the bloody Doggy Wog, showing that I can beat them at their own game if I want to, but the game isn't worth the, in Walkerian locution, turn-the-handle. And, amigo with the onion, I know what's in the carta you wanted to bring round to my lodgings where my razor and antisolar spectacle clip-on and few dirty handkerchiefs have been long snapped up by those who had not, that night, yet been betrayed to the police by fat Napo. Khogh. It was some word of their language, no deformed proper name from another. And the letter surely says that he saw who did it, hombre, and told Scotland Yard as much. A curious and perhaps suspicious lack of treachery from treacherous Spain. Enderby felt ungratefully gloomy. All was set for writing and yet he could not write. Draft after unfinished draft. Gloomily he read through his sonnet octave again.
Augustus on a guinea sat in state. This is the eighteenth century, the Augustan age, and that guinea is a reduction of the sun. The sun no proper study. Exactly, the real sun being God and that urban life essentially a product of reason, which the sun melts. And no more sun-kings, only Hanoverians. But each shaft of filtered light a column. Meaning that you can't really do without the sun, which gives life, so filter it through smoked glass, using its energy to erect neo-classic structures in architecture or literature (well, The Rambler, say, or The Spectator, and there's a nuance in "shaft" suggesting wit). Classic craft abhorred the arc or arch. Yes, and those ships sailed a known world, unflood-able by a rational God, and the arc-en-ciel covenant is rejected. Something like that. To circulate (blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight. Clear enough. You need the roundness of the guinea only so that it can roll along the straight streets or something of commercial enterprise. The round bores of the pipes are not seen on the surface, the pipes in essence being means of linking points by the shortest or most syllogistical way. And, to return to that guinea, impress on it the straight line of royal descent. And, to return to that pipe business, remember that pipes were smoked in coffee-houses and that news and ideas circulated there. And that craft business ties up with Lloyd's coffee-house. As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed, Thyrsis was Jack. A bit fill-in for rhyme's sake, but, rejecting the sun, you reject life and can only accept it in stylised mythological or eclogue forms. But Jack leads us to Jean-Jacques. Crousseau on a raft sought Johnjack's rational island-The pivot coming with the volta. Defoe started it off: overcome Nature with reason. But the hearer will just hear Crusoe. Jack is dignified to John, glorification of common, or natural, man. Then make Nature reason and you start to topple into reason's antithesis, you become romantic. Why? A very awkward job, the continuation.
"Lovely." She had come running in, wet. She wrung a hank of hair, wetting the floor. Fat drops broke on her gold limbs. Her high-arched foot left Man Friday spoors. Seeing her round jigging nates, Enderby could have died with regret and rage. "Like a fool I brought everything except a towel. Could you possibly -" She smiled, her chin dripping as from a crunching of grapes.