"Oh," Enderby smiled kindly, "it's not that sort of poem, you know. You're thinking of an aubade-a good-morning song. The Elizabethans were very fond of these. Hark hark the lark, and so on. When all the birds have matins said, and so forth. A sonnet is a poem in fourteen lines. For any occasion, I suppose."
"I know what a sonnet is," her voice said, muffled but sharp. "There's a sonnet in that book by Yod Crewsy."
Enderby stood paralysed, his own sonnet held forward like a knuckleduster. "Eh?" Thought fell in at a great distance and, in British tommies' clodhoppers, advanced steadily at a light infantry pace.
"You know. You were asking about pop-singers on the plane. Vesta Wittgenstein you were asking about too, remember. Yod Crewsy did this book of poems that won the prize. There's one in it he calls a sonnet. I couldn't make head nor tail of it really, but one of the BOAC ground-hostesses, educated you see, she said it was very clever."
"Can you," faltered Enderby, "can you remember anything about it?" Like Macbeth, he began to see that it might be necessary to kill everybody.
"Oh, it's so early. And," she said, a girl slow on the uptake, sitting up again, things dawning on her, "you shouldn't be in here really at this hour. Not at any hour you shouldn't. Nobody asked you to come in here. I'll call Captain O'Shaughnessy." Her voice was growing louder.
"One line, one word," begged Enderby. "Just tell me what it was about."
"You're not supposed to be in here. It's taking advantage of being a passenger. I'm not supposed to be rude to passengers. Oh, why don't you go?"
"About the devil and hell and so on? Was that it?
"I've had enough. I'm going to call Captain O'Shaughnessy."
"Oh, don't bother," groaned Enderby. "I'm just going. But it's liberty after liberty."
"You're telling me it's taking a liberty."
"First one thing and then another. If he's dead I'm glad he's dead. But there'll be other heads rolling, I can tell you that. Did it have something about an eagle in it? You know, dropping from a great height?"
Miss Kelly seemed to be taking a very deep breath, as though in preparation for shouting. Enderby went, nodding balefully, closing the door. In the circumstances, he did not much feel like calling on Miss Boland. Women were highly unpredictable creatures. No, that was stupid. You could predict them all right. He had thought he would never have to see blasted treacherous Vesta again, but he obviously had to confront her before he did her in. The future was filling itself up horribly. Things both monstrously necessary and sickeningly irrelevant. He wanted to get on with his poetry again.
Part II
Chapter 1
One
Calm, calm. Enderby reflected that it was morning and he was up and there was nothing to prevent his engaging Seville in the doing of what had to be done. First, a question of pesetas. Unshaven, dirty-shirted, otherwise respectable, he asked the day-porter of the hotel, yawning to his duty, where sterling might be changed. He asked in Italian, which, thanks to the Roman Empire, the porter clearly understood. Enderby had some idea that it was forbidden by the British government, treacherously in league with foreign bankers (even Franco's fiscal thugs), to present naked pounds in any Continental place of official monetary transaction. They found you had more pound-notes on you than you ought, by law, to have, and then, by various uncompassionate channels, they reported you to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, an insincerely smiling man Enderby had once seen with a woman in Piggy's Sty. In Italy that time, on his brief and dummy honeymoon, it had been traveller's cheques, which were all right. The porter, in mime and basic Romance, told Enderby that there was a barber round the corner who gave a very good rate of exchange. Enderby felt a little ice cube of pleasure, soon to be pounced on and demolished by the hot water he was in. He needed a shave, anyway. A barber of Seville, eh? "Figaro?" he asked, momentarily forgetting his actual, and other people's proleptic, trouble. Not Figaro, said the unliterary and literal porter. He was called Pepe.
This barber breathed hard on Enderby as he shaved him, a sour young man smelling of very fresh garlic. He seemed not unwilling to change fifty pounds of Enderby's money, and Enderby wondered if the suspiciously clean pesetas he got were genuine. The world was terrible really, full of cheating and shadiness, as much in low as in high places. He tested his pesetas in a dirty eating-den full of loud dialogue (the participants as far away from each other as possible: one man tooth-picking at the door, another hidden in the kitchen, for instance). Enderby asked for ovos which turned out to be huevos, and for prosciutto, not cognate with jamón. He was learning essential words: he would not starve. He changed a big note with no trouble, receiving back a fistful of small dirty rags. Then, on the counter, he saw a copy of a newspaper called Diario Pueblo.
How often had he, on the day of publication of a volume of his verse (or the day before, if publication day had been Monday), gone to the quality papers as to a condemned cell, his stomach sick and his legs pure angelica. Usually there was no review, poetry being left to accumulate in literary editors' offices until there was enough of it for one expert to do a single clean sweep in a grudging brief article, everybody-Enderby, poetesses, poetasters, Sir George Goodby-all fluffed up together. But once, surprisingly, there had been a prompt solus of condemnation, all for Enderby, in a very reputable paper. Since then, the smell of newsprint had always made him feel slightly giddy. The fear he felt now was strong enough, since it was to do with his appearance in a context of action, but it was mitigated somewhat by the fact of the newspaper's foreignness. It seemed a very badly put together newspaper, with a lot of news items boxed in thick black, as though they were all obituaries. "Scusa" he said to the curled dark youth who took his money. And then he looked for news of himself.
He did not have far to look. It was on the front page. There was, thank God, no photograph, but there were frightful succinct words, as though from some sensational foreign novel. Chocante. Horroroso. Come, that was going too far. Delante del Primer Ministro Británico. They had to bring that in, make it political. Banquete para celebrar something or other. And then Yod Crewsy, cuadrillero de los Fixers. Was he dead, then? What was "dead"-morto? No, Enderby concluded from both his Spanish pseudonym and his eggs, now repeating violently, it must be muerto. References to a revólver, very clear that, and to a tiro and-what the hell was this?-an escopetazo. And then it said: El victima, en grave estado, fué conducido al some hospital or other, English name of it all messed up. Not muerto yet, then. Enderby was horrified at feeling cheated. All this upset for just en grave estado. Still, that might be pretty bad. Then it said something about Scotland Yard buscando something something un camarero. He knew what that was: Spanish John had once or twice been hailed by that title facetiously by men and women who had been to the Costa del Sol. John had always responded readily, gleaming in complaisant dentition, all of gold. And now it was he, Enderby, who was the camarero. He was wanted, the paper said, to ayudar the policía in their investigación. Well, he'd already helped, hadn't he? He'd sent them the name of the true attempted matador, or whatever it was. And now the newspaper gave Enderby's own abandoned other name, or a version of it. Hagg. That was hardly fair to that barely imaginable sweet woman.