"No expense of breath in falling downstairs."
"Mario, put that bread-knife away."
"You are a naughty boy, but not undelectable."
"In all the antholololologies."
"This will make Enderby feel very sick."
Indeed, Enderby felt very sick when he had worked out his sums and found that his credit balance in the bank stood at, taking the most liberal computation, little more than four hundred and ninety pounds. It was pointless asking himself where the money had gone to, for he knew all too welclass="underline" it had flowed back to its source: his stepmother had given and his stepmother had, in a youthful, well-spoken, dove-soft, spring-smelling, highly improbable disguise, taken away again. From his sleep Rawcliffe called:
"Aha! Man not the boats, but woman-and-child them. I'll shoot all else. Back, you brute, back. The rash, smart, sloggering Hopkinsian brine. Enderby was a very inferior poet. Very wise of him to pack up."
Enderby spoke sternly to this dark voice. "I am not packing up," he said. This silenced Rawdiffe's sleep-persona temporarily. To himself Enderby said, "If I can keep the relationship on the most superficial of levels, for superficially I am quite fond of her, then it should be possible to contrive some sort of satisfactory co-existence. But I will not be ordered about. And she has, after all, a good job and I could, at a pinch, refuse to get a job of my own or have a job found for me. The Sussex house has many rooms. My stomach is better." Rawdiffe's sleeping voice spoke again from outer space:
"You will do as I say, Vincent. I will not have you calling Reggy an old queen. He is not old." And then, "God should feel highly flattered that we have invented Him." And finally, before falling into serious speechless sleep, in the voice of Yeats speaking with the voice of Swift speaking with the voice of Job: "Let the day perish wherein I was born." Enderby shuddered, the wine seeming sharper than usual.
2
They arrived late for the film première. The cinema was in an obscure street somewhere off the Viale Aventino, and the taxi-driver had difficulty in finding it. He at first denied, in the manner of taxi-drivers, the existence of what he himself did not know existed, until Enderby waved a ticket of invitation in his moustached face. The façade of the cinema rather let down the rest of Rome, thought Enderby, as he helped Vesta out of the cab.
Sculpturally and architecturally, the rest of Rome was rubbishy, yet rubbishy on a baroque and hypnotic scale, like the delusions of grandeur of some gibbering G.P.I. patient. But here was authentic fleapit, from the look of it, epitome of every bughouse that Enderby had, as a child, queued outside on Saturday afternoons, sticky paw clutching twopence, filthy-jerseyed other children clinging to him aromatically lest they lose him in the scrimmage of entrance, Enderby being the only one of their lot who could read. The old silent film had, Enderby reflected, been, in one facet, an extension of literature. He said now to Vesta, "This is one of those places where you go in with a blouse and come out with a jumper." He tweaked her elbow jocularly, but she looked queenlily blank. "Blouse?" she said. "I'm not wearing a blouse." She was, in fact, wearing black silk from her Roman-lady couturière, sleeveless, the back décolleté, the skirt slim, tails of mink dripping from her shoulders against the night's cool. Enderby was in white tuxedo, black silk in breast pocket to match tie. But it looked as though he needn't have taken so much trouble: there were no adoring crowds, no gleaming stars' mouths of coral and ivory in maniacal abandon to the flashbulbs, no jostle of Cadillacs and Bentleys. There were a few decent Fiats, unattended, evidently owner-driven; a painted banner across the deplorable rococo façade said, in the midst of cheap coloured bulbs, L'ANIMAL BINATO. The man who took their cards of invitation chewed something morosely and his lantern-jaw was ill-shaven. It let down Vesta as much as it let down Rome. Little, of course, thought Enderby, could let down Enderby.
They were flashlamped to their seats. Enderby felt torn cheap plush beneath him and smelt a strong citrus tang through the dark. Orange, too, bloodless orange, was the light which warmed the worn stage curtains. These now, as if they had been waiting only for Enderby and his wife, parted to the noise of loud cinema music, banal, conventionally sinister. Enderby peered through the dark: there did not, by the feel and sound of things, seem to be a very large audience. The screen said L'ANIMAL BINATO and followed this with jerkily dissolved frames of the names of the conspirators: Alberto Formica; Giorgio Farfalla; Maria Vacca; A. F. Corvo; P. Ranocchio; Giacomo Capra; Beatrice Pappagallo; R. Coniglio; Giovanni Chiocciola; Gina Gatto. Rawcliffe's name appeared near the end, Italianized to, as far as Enderby could tell, something like Raucliffo. "Serve him right," thought Enderby, and told Vesta so. She said shhhhh. The film began.
Night, very much night, with tortured cypresses lit by lightning. Thunder (Vesta dug her nails into Enderby's hand). Tempestuous wind. Camera tracks to steps of terrace, handsome woman standing thereon, much of Italian bosom exposed to lightning. She raises arms, cornily, to stormy heavens in crash of thunder. Camera swings up towards sky. Another stock shot of lightning cracking cloud like a teacup. Thunder (Vesta's nails). New camera angle shows a something speeding down the firmament, a white flashing something. Cut to wooden effigy of cow, lightning-lit. Handsome bosomed woman seen walking through tempest, statelily, towards wooden cow. Lightning shows her doing something obscure, pulling some lever or other, then creaking music accompanies shot of wooden cow opening, two hollow half-cows, woman climbing into upright half, cow closing up, woman imprisoned in cow. Cut to white bull, snorting against the thunder, tearing down the sky, bull-lust from heaven.