"I beg your pardon?"
"Juvenilia. One of your," she belched gently, "juvenilia."
"Juvenilia? But I never published any of my juvenilia." Several bar-customers were interested in the repeated word: a gland injection, a sexual posture, a synthetic holiday resort. She began to recite with mocking intensity:
They fear and hate
the Donne and Dante in him, this
cold
gift to turn heat to a flame, a kiss
to the gate of a mons-
ter's labyrinth. They hold
and anchor a thin thread -"
"Not so loud," went Enderby with quiet force, blushing. The mortician was looking sardonic over a large dish of blood-coloured ice cream.
"- the tennis party, the parish dance:
stale pus out of dead
pores."
Someone at the bar, unseen in the dimness, applauded. "I didn't write that," said Enderby. "You're getting me mixed up with somebody else."
"Am I? Am I? I suppose that's possible. There's so much minor poetry about."
"What do you mean-minor?"
She downed a long draught of Bellinger, as though the recitation had made her thirsty, belched with no excuse-me, and said:
"There was that other nasty little thing about meeting a girl at a dance, wasn't there? Juvenilia, again." Or a disease perhaps, one of those gruesomely pleasant-sounding ones like salmonella. She took more champagne and, with world-weary tone and over-sharp articulation, recited:
"Semitic violins by the wailing wall
Gnash their threnody
For the buried jungle, the tangle of lianas -"
"I think," Enderby said sternly, "that I have some right to know-"
"Or say that was before, in the first flush,
And say that now
A handful of coins, image and milled edge worn,
Is spilled abroad to determine
Our trade of emotions."
"I mean, apart from how you know all that, and I don't believe it's mine anyway-"
"On this background are imposed
Urges, whose precise nature it is difficult to define:
Shells shaped by forgotten surges."
"I'm not having any more of this," and Enderby grasped her thin wrist firmly. She shook herself free with little effort and said:
"Too rich for you, is it?" She sniffed at his half-eaten sheep's tongue en papillotes. "A lot of things are too rich for you, aren't they? Never mind, mumsy will ook after him den. Let me finish." Enderby, very wretched, let her.
"One understands so little, having no words
To body forth thoughts, no axe
To reach flagged soil, no drills
To pierce to living wells. It would tax
My energies overmuch now to garner you
Out of worn coins, worn shells."
She took another bumper of fuming wine, belched like an elfin trumpet of triumph, then waved smiling across to the mortician. He said:
"That's telling him."
"You're being bloody unfair," said Enderby loudly and, to the mortician, more loudly, "You keep your nose out of this, sod." The mortician looked at Enderby with very small interest and went on eating ice cream.
"Big untrue postures," she delivered. "Pretence. You can't make major poetry out of pretence."
"I tell you," said Enderby, "it was my stepmother's fault, but that's all over now. Pretence, you say," he added cunningly, "but very memorable pretence. Not," he super-added, "that I wrote that. I'm sure I didn't." He was pretty sure, anyway.
"I can remember anything," she said smugly. "It's a gift." Then she went phew. "God, it's warm in here." And she pulled her stole off roughly, showing her glowing young shoulders.
"It's not really warm, you know," said Enderby. And, hopefully: "Perhaps it's all that champagne. Perhaps you're not feeling too well."
"I feel fine," she said. "It's the sun within me. I'm a beaker full of the warm south. Nice tension of opposites there: cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth." She had drunk most of the first bottle and was now doing very well with the second. "I won't pretend that you wrote that, because you didn't. Poor boy. But his name was not writ in water." Enderby felt chilled when he heard that. "Posterity," she then said. The poet addresses posterity. And what is posterity? Schooknarms with snotty kids trailing round the monuments. The poet's tea-mug with an ingrained ring of tannin-stain. The poet's love-letters. The poet's falling hair, trapped in brush-bristles rarely washed. The poet's little failings-well-hidden, but not for ever. And the kids are bored, and the texts are covered with thumb-marks and dirty little marginalia. They've read the poems, oh yes. They're posterity. Do you never think of posterity?"
Enderby looked warily at her. "Well, like everybody else -"
"Minor poets hope that posterity will turn them into major ones. A great man, my dear, who suffered the critics' sneers and the public's neglect. Halitotic breathing over your corpse. Reverent treading through the poet's cottage, fingering the pots and pans."
Enderby started. "That's brought back a dream. I think it was a dream. The pots and pans fell, and I woke."
"Oh, come on, let's finish this champagne and go. I can't eat any more of this muck. Creamed leveret's bones, ugh. Let's go and swim."
"At this hour? And it's very cold, the sea I mean. And besides -"
"You don't swim. I know. You're preparing your body for honoured corpsedom. You don't do anything with it. All right, you can watch me swim." She filled both their flutes and downed hers, re-filled and downed again.
"What I meant to say was-It's a bit difficult, I know, but -" He called for the bill. "Cuenta, par favor." Quite the little Tangerine, he was thinking. Settling here for corpsedom. No, not that. He had his work, hadn't he? And there was this other matter, and he'd better blurt it out now before the bill came. "I know," he said stiffly but urgently, "there's a great disparity of age. But if you could see your way-I mean, we get on all right together. I would leave it to you to decide on the precise nature of the relationship. I ask nothing." The bill came: another flame-haired Goth of a Spanish waiter, flashing a gold tunthus. It was a lot of dirhams. Enderby counted out note after note after note, all from Rawcliffe's mattress.
"You only ask me," she said. The champagne was done, and she upturned the bottle to hold it like a thyrsus. "Come on, I'm burning."
The mortician growled something about that being okay then. She smiled and nodded. "What do you do over there?" asked Enderby jealously. "You go over there. The dog place, I mean. I know you do."
"I go to a lot of places. I'm a beezy leetle girl. The world's bigger than you could ever imagine."
The doorman whistled a petit taxi or taxi chico. It was a windy night in a hilly street, no more. But a dirty old Moor shuffled to them to offer a small parcel of marijuana for five dirhams. "Shit," she said. "Dilutions for the tourists. All teased out of fag-ends collected from the gutters." She gave the old man a brief mouthful of what sounded like fluent Arabic. He seemed shocked. Enderby was past being surprised. In the taxi he said:
"What do you say then? The precise nature of the relationship -"
"You leave to me. Right. I heard you the first time." They rolled seawards. The driver, a moustached thin Moor with a skullcap, kept turning round to have a look at her. She banged him on the shoulder, saying: "Keep your fucking eyes on the road." And to Enderby: "All I want at the moment is my swim. I don't want avowals and the precise nature of the relationship." She was silent then, and Enderby thought it prudent also to be silent. They came to near the gate, only the single track to cross, which opened on to the beach steps and the-But El Acantilado Verde had been painted out and the new name as yet only lightly stencilled. Manuel had a brother who did that sort of thing.