"I don't quite get that," said Enderby. "Would you say that again?"
"I don't quite get you," said Vesta Bainbridge. "You send me what I suppose you'd call a verse-letter, straining at the leash with quite unequivocal suggestions, then you take fright and decide to run away. Or is it as simple as that? Obviously you thought I wouldn't get the letter till Monday morning, so it seems as though you planned to attack and retire at the same time. Actually, I always go into the office on Saturday mornings to see if there's any mail, and there I found the letter-rack practically sizzling with your little effort. I got a train right away. I was puzzled, intrigued. Also worried."
"Worried?"
"Yes. About you." She sniffed round the living-room with a wrinkle of distaste. "I can see one would have cause to be worried. This place is absolutely filthy. Does nobody come in to clean it?"
"I do it myself," said Enderby, suddenly and shamefully seeing the squalor of his life more clearly against the foil of her frightful wholesomeness. "More or less." He hung his schoolboy head.
"Exactly. And what, Harry, if I may call you that-indeed, I must call you that now, mustn't I?-were you proposing to do? Where were you proposing to go?"
"Harry's not my name," said Not-Harry Enderby. "It's just the name at the end of the poem."
"I know, of course, it can't really be your name, because your initials don't have an aitch in them. Still, you signed yourself Harry and Harry seems to suit you." She surveyed him with a cocked parrot head, as though Harry were a hat. "I repeat, Harry, what are you going to do?"
"I don't know," said pseudoharry wretched Enderby. "That was all to be thought out, you see. Where to go and whatnot. What to do and so on and so forth."
"Well," said Vesta Bainbridge, "a few days ago I gave you a tea and you offered me a dinner which I couldn't accept. I think it would be a good idea if you took me out to lunch somewhere now. And after that -"
"There's one place I shan't take you," said Enderby, betrayed and angry. "That's quite certain. It would poison me. It would choke me. Every mouthful."
"Very well," soothed Vesta Bainbridge. "You shall take me wherever you choose. And after that I'm taking you home."
"Home?" said Enderby with sudden fear.
"Yes, home. Home, home home. You know, the place where the heart is. The place that there's no place like. You need looking after. I'm taking you home, Harry."
Part Two
Chapter One
1
Errrrrrrrp.
Enderby was in a very small lavatory, being sick. He was also married, just. Enderby the married man. A vomiting bridegroom.
When his forehead was cooler he sat, sighing, on the little seat. All below him was June weather, June being the month for weddings. Alone in this buzzing and humming tiny lavatory he had his first leisure to feel both gratified and frightened. The bride, though only in a severe suit suitable for a registry office, had looked lovely. Sir George had said so. Sir George was friendly again. All was forgiven.
Almost the first thing she had insisted on was an apology to Sir George. Enderby had written: "So sorry I should seem to rate your sirship as a stupid dolt, but thought you would appreciate that feeble gesture of revolt. For you yourself have tried, God wot, the awful agonizing art, and though, as poet, you are not worth the least poetaster's fart, yet you're equipped to understand what clockwork makes the poet tick and how he hates the laden hand below the empty rhetoric…" That, she had said, was not really suitable, so he had tried something briefer in genuine prose, and Sir George had only been too delighted to accept the formal creaking apology.
Oh, she had begun to reorganize his life, that one. From the start, taking breakfast together in the large dining-room of her large flat, February Gloucester Road sulking outside, it was clear that things could only go one way. For what other relationship could be viable in the world's eyes than this one they were beginning now? Enderby had been forced to reject that of landlady and tenant, for he had paid no rent. The step-relationship was, with women, practically the only other one he had experienced. She was, he knew, and for this he valued her, antipodeal to a stepmother, being clean and beautiful. His father's remarriage had introduced brief squibs of step-aunts-in-law and the fable of a paragon stepsister, too good for this world and hence soon dead of a botulism, whom Enderby had always visualized as a puppet doll-dangling parody of his stepmother. Vesta was not, he had felt, a stepsister. A female Friend? He had rung that on his palate several times, upper case and all, and savoured a melancholy twilit aquarelle of Shelley and Godwin, with chorusmen's calves as if limned by Blake, holding reading-parties in a moored boat with high-waisted rather silly ladies, lovers of Gothic romances, while midges played fiddles in the sad air. Epipsychidion. Epithalamion. Ah God, that word had really started things off, for it had started off a poem.
The cry in the clouds, the throng of migratory birds,
The alien planet's heaven where seven moons
Are jasper, agate, carbuncle, onyx, amethyst and blood-ruby and bloodstone.
Or else binary suns
Wrestle like lions to a flame that we can stand,
Bound, twisted and conjoined
To an invertebrate love where selves are melted
To the primal juice of a creator's joy,
Before matter was made,
Two spheres in a single orbit…
They had drunk Orange Pekoe with breakfast and she, in a rust-coloured suit with a heavy clip of hammered pewter on the left lapel, had just gone off to work. Enderby, in the kitchenette whose pastel beauty made him feel particularly dirty and gross, had put on the kettle for stepmother's tea, and the word "epithalamion", like the announcement of a train's approach, had set the floorboards trembling with thunder. Panting at the dining-table, he had set down words, seeing his emergent poem as a song for the celebration of the consummation of the passion of the mature-Gertrude and Claudius in Hamlet, red-bearded lips on a widow's white neck. The leafy tea had cooled beside him. Mrs Opisso the daily woman had come in, dusky, hippy, bosomy, garlicky, moustached, leering brilliantly, a wartime Gibraltarian evacuee in whose blood seethed Genoese, Portuguese Jewish, Saracen, Irish, and Andalusian corpuscles, to say, interrupting sweeping, "What are you in this house, eh? You not going out, not doing work, true? What are you to her, eh? You tell." It had not been easy to tell; it was not enough to say that it was none of her business.
… Swollen with cream or honey,
The convalescent evening launches its rockets,
Soaring above the rich man's gala day,
In the thousand parks of the kingdom
Which radiate from this bed…
Vesta would not necessarily think that this epithalamion was intended for her and her guest-Male Friend-protégé, for she had already said sardonically, "if you intend to write any love poetry this morning make sure you don't send it to Sir George by mistake. This carelessness of yours will land you into big trouble one of these days, you mark my words." Enderby had hung his head. She had been irritable that morning, tired, rubbing her brow tiredly, as in a TV commercial for some quack analgesic, under her green eyes delicate blue arcs of tiredness. She had stood by the door, in neat rust, a chiffon scarf in two tones of green, a minute brown beret aslant, brown suede gloves to match her shoes, slender, elegant and (so Enderby had divined) menstruating quietly. Enderby had said:
"Menstruation hits some women more than others, you know. Try gin and hot water. That's said to work wonders."
She had blushed faintly and said, "Where did you learn that?"