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?"
"In Fem."
Sighing, she had said, "It's all very confusing. I must work out, when I have time, the precise nature of our relationship."
Anoint the ship with wine! On ample wafers,
Which always wear this ring, that the earth be humbled
Only away from cities, let it dance and ride…
And again, another time, the precise nature still not worked out, "The question is, what's to be done with you?"
"Done with me?"
"Yes, that's the question."
"Nothing is to be done with me." He had looked across at her in fear, over the shattered fragments of toast which he had been feeding, as to a pet bird, to his mouth. "I am, after all, a poet." A lorry had backfired the world's answer.
"I want to know," Vesta had said, chill morning hands round her breakfast-cup, "exactly how much money you've got."
"Why do you want to know that?" cunning Enderby had asked.
"Oh, please. I've got a busy day ahead of me. Let's not have any nonsense. Please." Enderby had begun to tell out the contents of his left trouser-pocket. "Not that sort of money," she had cut in, sharply. Enderby had said, with care:
"Ten thousand pounds in local government loans at five and a half per cent. For dividends. Two thousand pounds in ICI, BMC, Butlin's. For capital appreciation."
"Ah. And what income does all that yield?"
"About six hundred. Not a lot, really, is it?"
"It's nothing. And I suppose your poetry brings in less than nothing."
"Two guineas a week. From Fem, God bless it." For he had at last signed the contract and already seen in print, over the name of Faith Fortitude, hogwash beginning, "A baby's cheeks, a baby's limbs are prayers to God and holy hymns; a little baby's toothless smile does the holy saints beguile…"
"An income like yours isn't worth having, really it isn't. So we've got to work out what's to be done with you."
"Done with me?" prompt Enderby had flashed.
"Look," she had said, "I know you're a poet. But there's no need to regale us with poetic drama in the style of early Mr Eliot, is there? Not at breakfast there isn't."
"Stichomythia," had been learned Enderby's comment. "But it's you who keep starting it off."
Well, that was something not yet started off: useful employment, a deuxième métier for a poet. From Valentine to Pentecost he had been allowed, though not in the lavatory, to work at The Pet Beast peaceably. But after the honeymoon things would have to be different.
And you whose fear of maps
Set buzzing the long processes of power,
Resign your limbs at length to elements
Friendly or neutral at least,
Mirrors of the enemy…
His own bit of money had not, even before they'd started on capital purchases, been going very far ("Call in at the Lion, will you, and buy a couple of bottles of gin. Pay Mrs Opisso; I'm clean out of cash."). And the greedy maws of Fortnum and Mason and the Army and Navy Stores. And a new wardrobe for himself, London not really favouring the casual valetudinarian garb of the seaside. Enderby's capital was going now. She, a thriftless Scot, did not believe in money, only in things. Hence the seven-thousand-pound house in Sussex in her name, this being his marriage settlement, also furniture, also a bright new Velox for Vesta to drive, Enderby when most sober managing a car like the drunkest drunk. And a mink coat, a wedding present.
Who had proposed marriage, and when? Who loved whom, if at all, and why? Enderby, in thinker's pose on the lavatory seat, frowned back to an evening when he had sat finishing his epithalamion in her twin dining-room, facing a piece of furniture he admired-a sideboard, massive and warped, proclaiming its date (1685) among carved lozenges and other tropes, fancies of the woodworker signifying his love of the great negroid ship-oak he had shaped and smoothed. Above that sideboard hung a painting of Vesta done by Gideon Dalgleish, she pearly-shouldered and haughty in a ballgown, seeming about to fly off, centrifugally, back into waiting but invisible paint-tubes. Above open bookshelves was a photograph of the late Pete Bainbridge. He grinned handsomely in a helmet, seated at the wheel of the Anselm 3.493 litre (six-cylinder; 250 b.h.p. Girling disc brakes; Weber 58 DCO carburettors, etc.) in which he had met his messy death. Enderby had started his last stanza:
And even the dead may bring blue lips to this banquet
And twitter like mice or birds down their corridors
Hung with undecipherable blazons…
He had felt a sudden and unwonted surge of personal, as opposed to poet's, strength: he, unworthy and ugly as he was, was at least alive, while this bright and talented handsome one had been blown to pieces. He had grinned, borrowing the shape of the grin from the dead man, in a sort of triumph. Vesta, reading some new brilliant novel by an undergraduate, had looked up from her Parker-Knoll and caught the grin. She had said:
"Why are you grinning? Have you written something funny?"
"Me? Funny? Oh, no." Enderby had covered his manuscript with clumsy paws, as one protects one's dinner-plate from an importunate second scooping of mashed potato. "Nothing funny at all."
She had got up, so graceful, to see what he was writing, asking: "What are you writing?"
"This? Oh, I don't think you'd like it. It's-Well, it's a sort of -"
She had picked up the sheet of scrawled lines and read aloud:
… For two at least can deny
That the past has any odour. They can witness
Passion and patience rooted in one paradigm; in this music recognize
That all the world's guilt can sit like air
On the bodies of these living."
"You see," Enderby had said, over-eagerly, "it's an epithalamion. For the marriage of two mature people." Inexplicably she had lowered her head with its sweet-smelling penny-coloured hair and kissed him. Kissed him. Him, Enderby.
"Your breath," she had said, "is no longer unhealthy. Sometimes it's hard for the body and mind to come to terms. You're looking better, much better." What could he say but, "Thanks to you"?
Airsick, seated in this aerial lavatory, he had to admit that a new Enderby had emerged out of the spring and early summer-a younger Enderby with less fat and wind, new teeth imperfect enough to look real, several smart suits, hair cunningly dressed by Trumper's of Mayfair and breathing delicately of Eucris, less gauche in company, his appetite healthier with no dyspeptic lust for spices and bread-and-jam, more carefully shaven, his skin clearer, his eyeballs glassy with contact lenses. If only Mrs Meldrum could see him now!
Who had mentioned love? Had anybody mentioned love? They had lived under one roof chaste, vestal, phoenix, and turtle, with Pete Bainbridge grinning from some Elysium of racing-drivers at the strange ménage of Friends. But one had only to chuck and see spin that worn coin on the polished floor for it to chink louder and louder music and revolve into a world. Had it been pocket or handbag? Enderby could not remember, but he was sure that one evening one of them had spoken the word in some connexion or other, perhaps denouncing its inflation in popular songs or in the hoarse speech of immediate need, perhaps discussing its personified identification with, in seventeenth-century religious poetry, the Lord. Then, by a swift process too subtle and irrational for analysis, one or other of them had whistled down the dove-hawk from safe heights of speculation to perch, blinking, on a pair of joined hands.