"You're drunk," she said. "You're mad." There was a knock at the door and Enderby, gesticulating, went to answer it, now wearing his nakedness as unconsciously as if it were a suit. "Drunk, eh?" he said. "Mad, eh? You've made me drunk, that's what it is." He opened the door, and the lady of the house presented a pressed pile of dried clothes. "Tante grazie," said Enderby, and then, turning back on his wife, he presented his bottom to the signora; she slammed the door and went off speaking loud Italian. "Things," said Enderby, "already," dumping the clothes on the bed, "have not worked out at all as I expected. It's been a bloody big mistake, that's what it's been."
She reached over for her clothes, angrily fussily trembling, saying, "A mistake, you say? That's gratitude, I must say, gratitude." She paused, one hand on her clothes, breathing deeply as if a stethoscope had begun to wander down her back, eyes downcast, seeking self-control. Then she said, calmly, "I'm keeping my temper, you notice. Somebody has to be rational." Enderby began, in a sort of hopping dance, to put on his underpants. "Listen to me," she said, "listen. You're like a child, you know so little about life. When I first met you, it looked horrible that a man of so much talent should be living the way you did. No, let me speak, let me keep my temper." Enderby, from inside his shirt was mumbling something. "You had nothing to do with women," she continued, "and no faith in anything, and no sense of responsibility to society. Oh, I know you had substitutes for all those things," she said bitterly. "Dirty photographs instead of flesh and blood." Enderby repeated the hopping dance, this time with his trousers, scowling and blushing. "Society," she said, with loud eloquence, "shrunk to the smallest room in the house. Is that any life for a man?" she asked strongly. "Is that any life for a poet? Is that the way you expect to make great poetry?"
"Poetry," said Enderby. "Don't you start telling me about poetry. I know all about poetry, thank you very much," he said with a bull-snort. "But let me tell you this. There's no obligation to accept society or women or religion or anything else, not for anyone there isn't. And as for poetry, that's a job for anarchs. Poetry's made by rebels and exiles and outsiders, it's made by people on their own, not by sheep baaing bravo to the Pope. Poets don't need religion and they don't need bloody little cocktail-party gossip either; it's they who make language and make myths. Poets don't need anybody except themselves."
Vesta picked up her brassiere and wearily dropped herself into it as though it were some necessary instrument of penance. "You seemed," she said, "to like going to parties. You seemed to think it was a good thing to wear a decent suit and talk with people. You said it was civilized. You gave me, one evening you may have forgotten, a long dull lecture on the Poet and Society. You even went to the trouble of thanking me for having rescued you from your old life. Some day," she sighed, "you'll make it absolutely clear to people what exactly you do want."
"Oh," said Enderby, "it was all right, I suppose. It made a nice change. It was nice to be clean and smart, you see, and hear educated accents. It was, you see, so different from my stepmother." Now fully dressed, he sat with greater confidence on the cane-bottomed chair in the corner. "But," he said, "if society means going back to the Church, I don't want anything to do with society. As far as I'm concerned, the Church is all tied up with that bitch, superstitious and nasty and unclean."
"Oh, you're so stupid," said Vesta, having put on her dress swiftly and neatly. "You're so uneducated. Some of the best modern brains are in the Church-poets, novelists, philosophers. Just because a silly illiterate woman made a nonsense out of it for you doesn't mean that it is a nonsense. You're a fool, but you surely aren't such a fool as all that. Anyway," she said, clicking her handbag open and rummaging for a comb, "nobody's asking you to go back into the Church. The Church, presumably, can get on very well without you. But if I'm going back, you might at least have the courtesy and decency to go through the form of going back with me."
"You mean," said Enderby, "that we'll have to get properly married? By a priest in a church? Look," he said, folding his arms and crossing his legs, "why didn't you think about all this before? Why do you have to wait till our honeymoon before you decided to baa back to the fold? Don't answer, because I know the answer. It's because you want to go down to posterity as the woman who reorganized Enderby's life, faith and works. It's what Rawcliffe said, and I hadn't thought of it before, because I really believed that you had some affection for me, but, looking at it more soberly, I can see now that was impossible, me being ugly and middle-aged and, as you're kind enough to say, stupid. All right, then; now we know how we stand."
She was combing her hair, gritting her teeth at the tangles, and the penny-colour shone out, crackling, renewed after its rat-tailed dullness. "Fool, fool," she said. "My idea was that we could make a go of marriage. We still can. Of course, if you think that Rawcliffe's more trustworthy than I am (and remember that Rawcliffe's jealous as hell of you) then that's your own affair and you can get on with it. The fact is that, for all your stupidity, I'm very fond of you and, at the same time, I feel that I can make you happy by making you more normal, more sane."
"There you are, you see," said Enderby in triumph.
"Oh, nonsense. What I mean is this: an artist needs a place in the world, he needs to be committed to something, and he needs to be in touch with the current of life. Surely the trouble with all your work is that it reads as though it's cut off from the current?"
"Very interesting," said Enderby, his arms still folded. "Very, very fascinating."
"Och," she said, drooping as though suddenly very weary. "What does it matter? Who's going to care whether you write great poetry or not? The feeblest teenage pop-singer is a million times more regarded than you are. You sell only a handful of copies of every book you write. There's going to be a nuclear war and the libraries will be destroyed. What's the use? What good can it all possibly be if one doesn't believe in God?" She sat on the bed, quite dispirited, and began to cry softly. Enderby came softly over to her and said:
"I'm sorry, I'm terribly sorry. But I think I'm too old to learn really, too old to change. Perhaps we'd better admit it's all a mistake and go back to things as they were before. No real harm's been done, not yet, has it? I mean, we're not even properly married, are we?"
She looked up sternly and said, "You're like a child. A child who doesn't like his first morning at school so says he doesn't think he'll go back in the afternoon." She wiped her eyes and became hard, self-possessed again. "Nobody makes a fool of me," she said. "Nobody throws me over."
"You could have the marriage annulled," said Enderby. "On the grounds of non-consummation. Because it won't ever be consummated, you know."
"You think," said Vesta, "that you'll go back to living on a tiny but adequate income, writing your poetry in the lavatory. But you won't. What little bit of capital you've got left I shall have. I'll make sure of that. And the things you've bought are on my name. Nobody makes a fool out of me."