Dusk fell while he was still reading, with much more reading still to do. He stole to the light-switch, feeling guilty, excusing himself for this long soaking: after all, he was going to write for them, he had to know their tastes. His belly growled its neglect. Enderby had nothing in the flat except bread, jam, pickles; he must go out and buy something. He rather fancied a dish concocted by Gillian Frobisher, Head of Fem's Cookery Department: Spaghetti Fromaggio Surprise.
Enderby went out with his shopping-net and returned with a pound of spaghetti, a quarter of cheese, and a large garlic for fourpence. (The recipe gave the alternative of two large onions, but Enderby had an obscure repugnance to entering a greengrocer's just to ask for two onions; garlic was a different matter, being exotic.) Panting with excitement, he took the relevant issue of Fem into the kitchen and followed the instructions slavishly. "Enough for four", he read. He was but one man alone, himself, he, hungry Enderby. He must divide everything, then, by four. He took the pound of spaghetti and broke the brittle sticks into small pieces. He took his frying pan (pity that the recipe asked for a large deep one; still, never mind) and poured one tablespoonful of olive oil. (He had about a cupful of this in his cupboard, saved from sardine tins.)
He threw in about a quarter of the spaghetti, lit the gas, and cooked it slowly, turning and stirring. He then added two cupfuls of water, remembering that he was to divide by four, so threw some of the water out again. He turned, breathing heavily, to Fem, while the pan gently simmered. Grated cheese. He grated some with Mrs Meldrum's nutmeg-grater and threw it into the mixture. Now this question of onion or garlic. "Two large onions chopped", said Gillian Frobisher, or "garlic to taste". Enderby looked at his garlic, stronger, he knew, than onions; perhaps this one would be equivalent to two of those. Should he skin it? No. The goodness was in the skin: potatoes, for instance. He sliced the garlic warpwise, then woofwise, then threw the bits into the simmering pan. And now. A greased dish. He found a cloudy Pyrex on the shelf, and he liberally coated its inside with margarine. He now had to transfer the stuff from the pan into the Pyrex. He had some difficulty in turning it out: it had stuck to the pan for some reason, and he had to gouge vigorously to detach what was willing to be detached. He flopped the mixture into the dish. "Top with sour cream", said Gillian. There was no sour cream, but plenty of sour milk, greenish on top. He crowned the dish with generous curds, then lit the oven. It had to cook to a slow heat therein, about twenty minutes. Groaning, he placed the dish on the oven shelf, kicked the black door shut, wiped one hand on the other. There.
Damn. He had not, he realized, consistently divided by four. Never mind. And perhaps the spaghetti was meant to turn black. He had heard of smart restaurants where things were deliberately burned before one's eyes, as one sat cool and well-dressed at table. He went back to the electric fire to continue his reading of yet another issue of Fem. After gazing transfixed at a soup advertisement showing a cup of cold blood, and an egg advertisement in which a pallid yolk hung over the edge of the fish-slice that lifted it aslant from the pan, ready to flop in pale yellow, Enderby settled to a story called "You're Not My Darling". This was about an air-hostess who fell in love with the captain of her aircraft, a theme new to Enderby. He gawped on long past Gillian Frobisher's twenty minutes of cooking-time, came to with a hiccoughing start, then drew his Spaghetti Fromaggio Surprise out of the oven. Its name was not inept. He sat down to it, and savoured mingled hues of burnt farinacity and shouting brutal garlic, loud and hot as an acetylene blast; the tone of these hues was a tired tepidity. He had not quite expected this; still presumably Gillian Frobisher knew what she was doing. He ate dutifully, with many draughts of cold water. He must learn the tastes of his prospective readers.
3
Enderby awoke in the middle of the night, jerked with sergeant's roughness out of an odd dream about pokers. The pain was ghastly though it did not feel dangerous. Enderby's head was clear enough as he crawled out; he even remembered the name of the bloody woman. Gillian Frobisher. There was a photograph of her in one of the Cookery Supplements: a crisp handsome Jewish girl with an impossibly clean frying-pan. If he ever got hold of her, Enderby vowed, he would dirty that frying-pan and no mistake. He had been taken advantage of.
Bicarb shattered the pain and sent its fragments flying on the wind. Enderby sat down in his living-room and switched on the electric fire. It was, said his watch, three-ten. A ghastly hour. There was noise upstairs, a woman's voice shouting as through a muslin strainer, "Get out, do you hear? Get out, you pig." Then the rumble of a man's voice and the tread of heavy shoes. Jack was, apparently, back. Soon the woman's abuse grew fainter and was curiously articulated, as though from the side of the mouth, in brief bursts. Later the springs began to bounce. Enderby picked up the contract from the sofa, wondering whether he ought to sign or not. To produce a block of rhymed cliches weekly, sententious vapourings about the stars so far away, the feel of chubby baby arms round mummy's neck, being kind to those in trouble-was not this prostitution? The poems he was writing to Thelma from Arry were not that, whatever they were. Where they were not straight-forwardly sensual they were gently ironicaclass="underline" he needn't be ashamed of them. But this proposal of Mrs Bainbridge-was it not the fiend luring him away from proper art with the chink of guineas that, anyway, would be all for Mrs Meldrum? Enderby walked into the bathroom to survey all the tumbled years' work in the bath. He had moved, over the last decade and a half, from town to town and flat to flat, but he had thought that here he could settle it. It was not good to change one's workshop in the middle of a major creation. The mood altered under the subtle influence of a new place, the continuity was broken. And then the thought of packing all this bathful into suitcases-mice, breadcrusts and all. One lost things, one was tempted to throw things away. But Enderby, standing in bare feet, thinking hard, wondered whether perhaps he ought to make the sacrifice, move on up or down the coast, away from Mrs Meldrum and-a much more dangerous person, the widow to be enjoyed in the meadow-Mrs Bainbridge, coolly elegant, self-confessed admirer of his poems.
He saw that to some extent he was rationalizing his fear of a relationship with a woman, the possibility that what was now finishing upstairs might soon start downstairs. And yet a worry that had often nagged him-especially after scurrying away from the verge of other relationships-was that this very desire to remain uncommitted might impair his work. Love of woman had always, traditionally, played a large part in the lives of the poets. Look at Goethe, for instance, who had to have a new love affair before he could begin a new lyric. Enderby, in so far as German culture had played any part in his development, had chosen to be influenced by a much dourer personality-Schopenhauer. Spengler, too, with his promise of the undergoing of evening lands, had had something to say to him. He had needed to invoke both philosophers before writing a poem about sex and other people. He remembered the typical evening of wartime, blackout in the garrison town, horny hands groping for giggling bodies in the dark.
Nymphs and satyrs, come away.
Faunus, laughing from the hill,
Rips the blanket of the day
From the paunch of dirty Will.
Each projector downs its snout,
Truffling the blackened scene,
Till the Wille's lights gush out