“Yes," she said, her green eyes, their gold very much metal, hard on him. “You lack courage. You’ve been softened by somebody or something. You’re frightened of the young and the experimental and the way-out and the black dog. When Shelley said what he said about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he wasn't really using fancy language. It's only by the exact use of words that people can begin to understand themselves. Poetry isn't a silly little hobby to be practised in the smallest room of the house."
He blushed. “What can I do?”
She sighed. "Get all these old things out of your system first. Then push on."
Beating out number. As arithmetic,
As short division not divided aims,
Resentment flared. But then, carved out in flames,
He read: That flower is not for you to pick.
“It's time," she said, "you started work on a long poem."
"I tried that once. That bastard stole it and vulgarised it. But," and he looked downhill, seaward, "he's paid. Wrapped in a Union Jack, being gently gnawed." “You can get something here. This is a junction. Deucalion's flood and Noah's. Africa and Europe. Christianity and Islam. Past and future. The black and the white. Two rocks looking across at each other. The Straits may have a submarine tunnel. But it was Mallarmé who said that poetry is made with words, not ideas."
"How do you know all this? You're so young."
She spat out breath very nastily. "There you go again. More interested in the false divisions than the true ones. Come on, let's have that sestet."
The sestet ended in a drinking-shop not far from the Souk or Socco, over glasses of warmish pastis. Drab long robes, hoods, ponchos, ass-beaters, loud gargling Moghrabi, nose-picking children who used the other hand to beg. Sympathetic, Enderby gave them little coins.
Therefore he picked it. All things thawed to action,
Sound, colour. A shrill electric bell
Summoned the guard. He gathered up his faction,
Poised on the brink, thought and created hell.
Light shimmered in miraculous refraction
As, like a bloody thunderbolt, he fell.
"That bloody," Enderby said. "It's meant really to express grudging admiration. But that only works if the reader knows I've taken the line from Tennyson's poem about the eagle."
"To hell with the reader. Good. That needs a lot of going over, of course, but you can do that at leisure. When I'm gone, I mean. Now we'd better take a look at that Horatian Ode thing. Can we have dinner at your place?"
"I'd like to take you out to dinner," Enderby said. And, "When you're gone, you said. When are you going?"
"I'm flying off tomorrow evening. About six."
Enderby gulped. "It's been a short stay. You can get a very good dinner at a place called the Parade. I could get a taxi and pick you up about -"
"Still curious, aren't you? Bit of a change for you, isn't it, this curiosity about people? You've never cared much for people, have you? From what you've told me, anyway. Your father let you down by marrying your stepmother, and your mother let you down by dying too young. And these others you've mentioned, men and women."
"My father was all right," Enderby said. "I never had anything against him." He frowned, though ungrudgingly.
"Many years ago," she said, "you published a little volume at your own expense. Inevitably it was very badly printed. You had a poem in it called 'Independence Day'."
"I'm damned if I remember."
"A rather bad poem. It started:
Anciently the man who showed
Hate to his father with the sword
Was bundled up in a coarse sack
With a frantic ape to tear his back
And the squawking talk of a parrot to mock
Time's terror of air-and-light's lack
Black
And the creeping torpor of a snake."
"I can't possibly have written that," went Enderby, worried now. "I could never possibly have written anything as bad as that."
"No?" she said. "Listen.
Then he was swirled into the sea.
But that was all balls and talk.
Nowadays we have changed all that,
Into a cleaner light to walk
And wipe that mire off on the mat.
So when I knew his end was near
My mind was freer
And snapped its thumb and finger then
At the irrelevance of birth,
And I had a better right to the earth
And knew myself more of a man,
Shedding the last squamour of the old skin."
"That's somebody else," said Enderby urgently. "Honestly, it's not me."
"And you love your mother because you never knew her. For all you know she might have been like your stepmother."
"It's different now," pleaded Enderby. "I forgive my stepmother, I forgive her everything."
"That's very generous of you. And who do you love?"
"I was just coming to that," said Enderby with approaching banners of wretchedness. "What I wanted to say was -"
"All right, all right. Don't pick me up in a taxi. You can't anyway, because you don't know where I am. I'll pick you up about eight. Now go home and work on your bloody Horatian Ode. No, leave me here. I go in a different direction." She seemed needlessly irritable, and Enderby, having once, though briefly, lived with a woman, wondered if it was possibly-She was old enough, wasn't she, to have -
"Gin and hot water," he suggested kindly, "are said to work wonders." But she didn't seem to hear. She seemed to have switched off Enderby like a television image, looking blankly at him as if he had become a blank screen. A very strange girl altogether. But he thought that, having got the better of the moon, he could perhaps this time live with his fear.
Four
She was smartly dressed for the evening in bronze stockings and a brief, but not too brief, gold dress, a gold stole round her tanned shoulders, her hair up at the back. On her left wrist she had a gold chain from which miniscule figurines depended. It was a restaurant of subdued lights, and Enderby could not see what the figurines were or meant. She was perfumed, and the perfume suggested something baked-a delicate but aphrodisiacal soufflé seasoned with rare liqueurs. Enderby was wearing one of Rawcliffe's Edwardian suits-it did not fit too badly-and even Rawcliffe's gold watch and chain. One thing Enderby did not like about this place was that the mortician collage man from the Doggy Wog was in it and was obviously a respected and regular customer. He sat at a table opposite and was eating with his fingers a brace of roast game-birds. He had greeted this girl with a growl of familiarity but now, picking the meat from a backbone, he kept his eyes sternly on her. He did not apparently remember Enderby. She had returned his greeting with an American air-hostess's "Hi."
Tonight she was not going to have greasy stew and pickled onions and stepmother's tea. She read the menu intently, as though it contained a Nabokovian cryptogram, and ordered a young hare of the kind called a capuchin, marinated in marc, stuffed with its own and some pig's liver as well as breadcrumbs, truffle, and a little preserved turkey-meat, and served with a sauce full of red wine and double cream. Before it she had a small helping of jellied boar. Enderby, confused, said he would have sheep's tongue en papillotes, whatever they were, that was. And, after dry martinis which she sent back as neither dry nor cold enough, they had champagne-Bollinger '53. She said it was not very exciting, but it seemed to be the best they had, so they put, at her demand, another bottle on ice while they were drinking this one. Enderby uneasily saw signs of a deliberate intention to get tight. Soon, clanking down her fork, she said:
"A fancied superiority to women. Despise their brains so pretend to despise their bodies as well. Just because you can't have their bodies."