1
"Piazza San Pietro," said the guide. "St Peter's Square." He was a young Roman with a crewcut, insolent, bold eyes for the ladies. "Place Saint Pierre. St Peter's Platz." Vulgar, decided Enderby. Pretentious. The guide saw Enderby's sourness, saw that he was not impressed. "Plaza San Pedro," he said, as though playing a trump card.
It was a real scorcher, and Vesta was dressed for a real scorcher in beige linen, something austere and expensive by Berhanyer. She had amazing powers of recuperation. Last night her stomach upset had jabbered and frothed away like an idiot child even when, eventually, she had got to sleep. Enderby had lain in clean pyjamas listening tolerantly, her slim back and haunches visible through the diaphanous nightdress, neat but unseductive, heaving occasionally with new accessions of wind, the bedclothes having been kicked away by Enderby because of the warmth of the night. The bedside lamp out, she had become a mere parcel of noises which had filled Enderby with weak nostalgia for his single days, so that he had gone to sleep to dream of stewpans and the craft of verse, the sea. At three-thirty by his luminous wristwatch (a wedding-present), he had awakened with his heart punch-balling desperately because of Strega and Frascati to hear her still fizzing and pooping healthily away. But, waking at nine o'clock to the peevish traffic of the Via Nazionale, he had seen her at the window, eating.
An essential task had not yet been accomplished. Enderby, blinking and squinting, noting that he had slept with his teeth in, wondering where he had put his contact lenses, was emboldened by morning chordee to say, "Oughtn't you to come back to bed for a while? What I mean is, you ought really." Impromptu verses, wittily gross, came into his head to give the lie to Rawcliffe's raised finger of doom; the Muse was still very much with him:
The marriage contract was designed,
Despite what all the notaries think.
To be by only one pen signed,
And that is mine, and full of ink.
Enderby hesitated about saying these verses aloud. Anyway, Vesta said:
"I've been up for hours. I had a ham omelette in the restaurant and now I'm eating the breakfast I ordered for you. But it's only croissants and jam and things. Look, we're going on a little excursion. I thought it might be fun. We're going to see Rome. The coach calls here at nine-thirty, so you'd better hurry." Waving the excursion tickets in a shaft of Roman sun, then cracking a kind of hard bread: "You don't seem very enthusiastic. Don't you want to see Rome?"
"No." Ask a straight question and you get a straight answer.
"You call yourself a poet. Poets are supposed to be full of curiosity. I don't understand you at all."
Anyway, here they were, stepping out of the coach in full noon, to inspect the Obelisk of Nero's Circus. The guide, who had decided that Enderby was a Spaniard, said ingratiatingly, "Obelisco del Circo de Nerón." "Si," said Enderby, unenticed, "Look," he said to Vesta, "I'm parched. I must have a drink." It was all the solids they'd been forced to eat-the Pincian Gate and the Borghese Gallery and the Pincio Terrace and the Mausoleum of Caesar Augustus and the Pantheon and the Senate House and the Palace of Justice and the Castle of St Angelo and the Via della Conciazione. Enderby remembered what the great poet Clough had said about Rome. Rubbishy, he had called it. Enderby was always ready to defer to the judgement of a great poet. "Rubbishy," he quoted.
"You know," said Vesta, "I do believe you're really quite a philistine."
"A thirsty one."
"All right. It's nearly the end of the tour, anyway." Enderby, who had developed in less than a day a sightless instinct for drinking shops, led Vesta down the Road of Conciliation. Soon they were sitting very cool and drinking Frascati. Vesta sighed and said:
"Peace."
Enderby choked on his wine. "I beg your pardon?"
"That's what we all want, isn't it? Peace. Peace and order. Certitude. Certainty. The mind quiet and at peace in the presence of order." Her skin was so clear, so youthful, under the widebrimmed hat (also from the Madrid workshop of the crafty young Berhanyer), and her body so elegantly decked; exquisite the stallion-flared nostrils and honest and yet clever the green eyes. "Peace," she said again, then sighed once more. "Och."
"What was that word?" asked Enderby.
"Peace."
"No, no, the one after."
"I didn't say anything after. You're hearing things, Harry boy."
"What did you call me then?"
"Really, what is the matter with you? Rome's peculiar magic seems to be having a curious influence… And you're drinking far far more than you drink in England."
"You cured my stomach," said Enderby ungrudgingly. "I find I can down any quantity of this stuff without any ill effects. That diet you put me on certainly worked wonders." He nodded cheerily at her and poured more wine from the flask.
Vesta looked slightly disgusted; she flared her nostrils further, saying, "I talk about peace and you talk about stomachs."
"One stomach," said Enderby. "Poets talk about stomachs and Fem editors talk about peace. That seems a fair division."
"We can look forward to so much peace," said Vesta, "the two of us. That beautiful house in Sussex, overlooking the downs. It breathes peace, doesn't it?"
"You're too young to want peace," said Enderby. "Peace is for the old."
"Och, we all want it," said Vesta fiercely. "And I feel it here, you know, in Rome. A big big peace."
"A big piece of peace," said Enderby. "Pax Romana. Where they made a desolation they called it a peace. What absolute nonsense! It was a nasty, vulgar sort of civilization, only dignified by being hidden under a lot of declensions. Peace? They didn't know what peace was. The release of the vomitorium after fieldfares in syrup and quail's brains in aspic and a go at a little slave-boy between courses. They knew that. They knew the catharsis after seeing women torn apart by mangy starved lions in an arena. But they didn't know peace. If they'd been quiet and reposeful for thirty seconds they'd have heard too many voices telling them that the Empire was all a bloody swindle. Don't talk to me about the bloody pax Romana." Enderby snorted, not quite knowing why he was so moved.
Vesta smiled in tolerance. "That's not real Rome. That's Hollywood Rome."
"Real Rome was Hollywood Rome, only more so," said Enderby. "And what's really left of it now? Mouldering studio-lots. Big vulgar broken columns. The imperial publicity of P. Virgil Maro, yes-man to Augustus and all his triumphal arches, now dropped. Boots boots boots boots marching up and down again. Rome." Enderby made, appropriately but vulgarly, the old Roman sign. "A big maggoty cheese, with too many irregular verbs."
Vesta was still smiling, somewhat like Our Lady in the vision Enderby had had that slippery day, travelling to London with a poem to give birth to. "You just don't listen, do you? You just don't give me a chance to say what I want to say."
"Bloody Roman peace," snorted Enderby.
"I didn't mean that Empire. I meant the other one being nourished in the catacombs."
"Oh God, no," murmured Enderby. Vesta drank some wine and then, quite gently, belched. She did not say excuse me; she did not seem to notice. Enderby stared. She said, "Doesn't it seem to you to be a bit like coming home? ¥ou know-the return of the prodigal? You opted out of the Empire and have regretted it ever since. It's no good denying it; it's there in your poems all the time."
Enderby breathed deeply. "In a way," he said, "we all regret the death of universal order. A big smile of teeth. But that smile is a smile of dead teeth. No, not even just dead. False. It never began to be alive. Not for me, anyway."
"Liar."
"What do you know about it?" said Enderby, truculent.
"Oh, more than you think." She sipped her Frascati as though it were very hot tea. "You've never been much interested in me, have you? Not really. You've never troubled to find out anything about me."