"We haven't known each other very long," said Enderby, somewhat guiltily.
"Long enough to get married. No, be honest. To Enderby, Enderby's always been the important thing. Enderby the end of Enderby."
"That's not really true," said Enderby doubtfully. "I've regarded my work as important, I suppose. But not myself. I've not cared very much for my own comfort or honour or glory."
"Exactly. You've been too interested in yourself to be interested in those things. Enderby in a void. Enderby spinning round and round in an eternal lavatory."
"That's not fair. That's not true at all."
"You see? You're getting really interested. You're prepared for a good long talk about Enderby. Supposing we talk about me instead."
"Gladly," said Enderby, settling himself in resignation. Vesta pushed her wine-glass away and, with slim hands folded on the table, said:
"How do you think I was brought up?"
"Oh," said Enderby, "we know all about that, don't we? Good Scottish home. Calvinist. Another imperial dream to be opted out of."
"Oh, no," said Vesta, "not at all. Not Calvinist. Catholic. Just like you." She smiled sweetly.
"What?" squawked Enderby, aghast.
"Yes," said Vesta, "Catholic. There are Catholics in Scotland, you know. Lots and lots of them. It was intended that I should be a nun. There, that's a surprise for you, isn't it?"
"Not really," said Enderby. "Granted that original premiss, which I'm still trying to digest, not at all a surprise. You wear your clothes like a nun."
"What a very odd thing to say!" said Vesta. "What, I wonder, do you mean by that?"
"Why didn't you tell me before?" asked Enderby, agitated. "I mean, we've lived under the same roof for, oh, for months, and you've never breathed a word about it."
"Why should I have done? It never seemed relevant to anything we ever talked about. And you never showed any curiosity about me. As I've already said, you have, for a poet, surprisingly little curiosity."
Enderby looked at her, definitely curiously: by rights, this revelation should have modified her appearance, but she still seemed a slim Protestant beauty, cognate with his adolescent vision, an angel of release.
She said, "Anyway, it makes no difference. I left the Church when I was, oh, when I married Pete. He, as everybody but you knows, had already been married and divorced. I was drifting anyway; I didn't believe any more. Pete believed in motor engines, I'll say that for him, and he used to pray before racing, though I don't know what to; perhaps to some archetypal internal combustion engine. Pete was a nice boy." She drained her glass.
"Have some more wine," said Enderby.
"Yes, I will, just a little. Rome has a peculiar atmosphere, hasn't it? Don't you feel that? It makes me, somehow, feel that I'm empty, empty of belief and so on."
"Be careful," said Enderby, very clearly, leaning across. "Be very careful indeed of feeling like that. Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare. But don't you start thinking that it's a great pure mother calling you home. You can't go home, anyway. You're living in sin. We were only married in a registry office, remember."
"And are we living in sin?" asked Vesta coolly. "I haven't noticed particularly."
"Well," said Enderby, confused, "that's what the world would think if the world happened to know and to be Catholic. We're not, of course, really, as you say, living in sin at all."
"You've contracted out of everything in your time, haven't you? Out of the Church, out of society, out of the family -"
"Damn it all, I am, after all, a poet -"
"Everything goes into the lavatory, everything. Even the act of love."
Enderby flushed flea-coloured. "What do you mean by that? What do you know about that? I'm just the same as anybody else, except that I'm not accustomed, except that it's been a long time, except that I'm ugly and shy and -"
"Everything's going to be put right. You just wait. You'll see." She gave him, forgiving, a kind cool hand. Anything he might then have wanted to say was snatched from his very lungs by a massive silver plunging of claws, swallowed, as all sounds of angelic noontime were swallowed, by a sudden boisterous revelry of bells, huge throats of white metal baying, snarling, hurling, fuming at the sky, the heavens of Rome a nickel and aluminium flame of bells.
2
After sauced pasta and a straw-harnessed globe of Chianti, Vesta's proposal seemed reasonable enough. Because she spoke of the process rather than the end: cool breezes stirred by the fan of the moving coach; the stop for tasting the wines of the Frascati vineyards; the wide sheet of lake and the albergo on its shore. And then the rolling back to Rome in early evening. It was more than a proposal, anyway. When Enderby said yes she promptly pulled the tickets out of her handbag. "But," said Enderby, "are we to spend all our time in Rome riding in coaches?"
"There's a lot to see, isn't there? And you'd better see it all just so you can confirm that it's rubbishy."
"It is rubbishy, too." And Enderby, in after-lunch somnolence, thought particularly of that ghastly Arco di Costantino which was like a petrified and sempiternal page of the Daily Mirror, all cartoons and lapidary headlines. But a lake would be, especially in this cruel mounting heat, different altogether. Rome was really best taken in liquid form-wine, fountains and Aqua Sacra. Enderby approved of Aqua Sacra. Charged with a wide selection of windy chemicals, it brought the wind up lovely and contrived a civilized evacuation of the bowels. In these terms he recommended it seriously to Vesta.
Enderby was surprised that this lake was to be visited by so many. Boarding the coach at the hotel, he had immediately prepared for sleep; almost at once they, and the jabbering polyglot others, had been told to get out. They were at some nameless piazza, sweltering and bone-dry, mocked by a fountain. There, their metal blistering in the sun, stood a fleet of coaches. Men with numbered placards stuck on sticks yelled for their squads, and obedient people, frowning and wrinkling in the huge light, marched on to markers. "We're Number Six," said Vesta. They marched.
Heat was intense in the coach; it had cooked to a turn in a slow oven. Even Vesta glowed. Enderby became a kind of fountain, his bursting sweat almost audible. And a worried man came on to the coach, calling, "Where is Dr Buchwald?" in many languages, so that a kind of fidgety sense of responsibility for this missing one pervaded the coach and engendered scratchiness. In front of Enderby a Portuguese snored, his head on the shoulder of a Frenchman, a stranger; Americans camera-recorded everything, like the scene of a crime; there were two chortling Negroes; a large ham-pink German family spoke of Rome in serious and regretful cadences, churning the sights and sounds into long compound sausage-words. Enderby closed his eyes.
Vaguely, through the haze of his doze, he was aware of comforting wind fanned in by the movement of the coach. "A very popular lake," he said sleepily to Vesta; "must be. All these people." The convoy was rolling south. Through the coach loudspeaker came the voice of the guide, in Italian, French, German and American, and the intermittent drone was finneganswaked by lightly sleeping Enderby into a parachronic lullaby chronicle, containing Constantine the grandgross and battlebottles fought by lakes which were full of lager. He awoke, laughing, to see villas and vineyards and burning country, then slept again, carrying into deeper sleep a coin-image of Vesta looking on him protectively with the protectiveness of a farmer's wife carrying a pig to market.
He was awakened, smacking dry lips, to a small town of great charm and cleanliness, napkin-carrying waiters waiting on a wide terrace full of tables. Stiff stretching coachloads got out to drink. Here, Enderby understood, they were very near to Frascati, and that wine that was so shy of travel had travelled the least possible distance. White dust, heat, the shimmering flask on the table. Enderby felt suddenly well and happy. He smiled at Vesta and took her hand, saying: