"You know," said Enderby with wonder, "this is really an astonishing coincidence."
"Shhhhh," said Vesta. Enderby, his eyes now accustomed to the dark, looked round to find the cinema half-empty, but next to him was a huge man, jowled and bag-eyed in lightning from the screen, a cigar slowly burning towards his fingers, already asleep and snoring slightly.
Day. Ruritanian palace, moustached handsome king in late middle age conferring with deferential bearded (false-bearded) counsellors. Fanfare. Palaver is ended. One counsellor stays behind, ingratiating Iago-type, to talk to the king. The king's eyes cornily cloud with suspicion. Odd Italian words that Enderby can understand snap out from the sound-track: queen, cow, Dedalo. Dedalo ordered to be brought in. Cut to Dedalo's workshop. Dedalo and Icaro, Dedalo's crisp-haired son, are building aeroplanes. Dedalo very old skinny man. Summoned by servant, he pulls down shirt-sleeves, dons jacket period 1860, follows down labyrinthine corridors, a kind old man with clever eyes and deep face-furrows. He enters royal presence. Long unintelligible Italian colloquy with much eloquent arm-waving. Dedalo struck on aged face by angry king. Iago-type goes off, bowing, oily, leaving royal face in royal hands. Dedalo hauled off for torture.
Enderby now began to feel an emotion other than wonder; his stomach heaved and pricked with apprehension: this was more than coincidence. "Don't you think," he said to Vesta, "this is just a little too much like my poem? Don't you think -"
"Shhhhh," she said. The snoring man next to Enderby said, in his sleep, "Tace." Enderby, reminded of the sleep-talking Raudiffo, said, "Tace your arse." And to Vesta, "This is just like The Pet Beast." He then remembered that she hadn't yet read it, had not, in fact, yet shown any desire to read it. He grimly watched the screen, the further unwinding of Raucliffo's infamy.
Day. Pregnant queen in exile, sitting in mean cottage with old crone. Colloquy. Labour-pains. Then dissolve to shot of doctor galloping in from afar. He enters cottage. From bedroom door come bellowing noises. He enters bedroom. Close-up of doctor's face. Horror, incredulity, nausea, syncope. Close-up, with foul discord of what doctor sees: head of bull-calf on child's body.
"That's mine," said Enderby. "It's mine, I tell you. If I find that blasted Rawcliffe -"
"It's nobody's," said Vesta. "It's just a myth. Even I know that."
"Tace," snored Enderby's pone.
Calf-child, in montage series, grows to bull-man, hideous, muscular, fire-breathing, gigantic. Having stolen piece of raw meat from kitchen, bull-man makes discovery of carnivorous nature. Kills old crone and eats her. Tries to kill mother, too, but mother escapes, falls over cliff screaming but uneaten. Good clean fun. Bull-man totters, tall as ten houses, to capital city, leaving bone-trail behind. Cut to palace gardens where Princess Ariadne, with sizeable bosom-show, is playing ball with giggling bosom-showing alleged maidens. Close-up of beast drooling through thicket. Screams, scatter, Ariadne carried off on beast's back. Beast, drooling, carries her, screaming, to cellars of metropolitan museum. Shots of priceless pictures, rare books, stately sculptures, sounds of great music as bull-man bellows his-its way to hide-out deep beneath eternal monuments of culture. Ariadne shows more bosom, screams more loudly. Bull-man does not, however, wish to eat her, not yet anyway.
Enderby clenched his fists tight, their knuckles gleaming in the light that flashed, intermittently, from the screen.
Dénouement. Alpine-Italian hero, Mussolini-headed, crashes into deep cellars, wanders through dark, hears bull-bellow and princess-scream, finds monster and victim, shoots, finds bullets of no avail as bull-man is, on sire's side, thing from outer space. Ariadne escapes, screaming, showing allowable limit of Roman bosom, as howling chest-beating beast advances on hero. Hero, like Count Belisarius, has pepper-bag. He hurls its contents, temporarily blinding beast. To sneezes-bellows-howls, hero escapes. Lo, a prodigy: Dedalo and Icaro in flying-machine some decades ahead of its time drop bomb on metropolitan museum. Howls of dying bull-man, crash of statuary, flap and rustle of books caught alight, Mona Lisa with burnt-out smile, harp-strings pinging as they crack. Death of culture, death of the past, a rational future, embracing lovers. Dedalo and Icaro have engine-trouble. They crash in sea, against glorious sunrise. Heavenly voices. End.
"If," trembled Enderby, "I could lay my hands on that bloody Rawcliffe -"
"Stop it, do you hear?" said Vesta very sharply indeed. "I can't take you anywhere, can I? Nothing satisfies you, nothing. I thought it was quite a nice little horror film, and all you can do is to say that it's been stolen from you. Are you getting delusions of grandeur or something?"
"I tell you," said Enderby, with angry patience, "that that bastard Rawcliffe -" The house-lights, all sick sweet orange, came gently up, disclosing applauding people crying bravo, brava, and bravi, as for the Pope's whole family. The fat man next to Enderby, now radiantly awake, lighted his long-gone-out cigar and then openly laughed at Enderby's clenched fists. Enderby prepared twelve obscene English words as a ground-row (variations and embellishments to follow), but, like a blow on the occiput, it suddenly came to him that he had had enough of words, obscene or otherwise. He smiled with fierce saccharinity on Vesta and said, so that she searched his whole face for sarcasm, "Shall we be going now, dear?"
3
Late at night, thought Enderby, meant in England after the shutting of the pubs. Here there were no pubs to shut, so it was not yet late. He and Vesta picked up a horse-cab or carrozza or whatever it was called on the Via Marmorata, and this clopped along by the side of the Tiber while Enderby fed sedative words to his wife, saying, "I'm honestly going to make an effort, really I am. My maturity's been much delayed, as you realize. I'm really terribly grateful for everything you've done for me. I promise to try to grow up, and I know you'll help me there as you've helped me in everything else. That film tonight has convinced me that I've got to make a real effort to live in public." Vesta, beautiful in the June Roman aromatic night, her hair stirred but gently by the bland wind of their passage, gave him a wary look but said nothing. "What I mean is," said Enderby, "that it's no use living in the lavatory on a tiny income. You were quite right to insist on spending all my capital. I've got to earn a place in the world; I've got to come to terms with the public and give the public, within reason, what it wants. I mean, how many people would want to read The Pet Beast? A couple of hundred at the outside, whereas this film will be seen by millions. I see, I see it all." He reminded himself of the main protagonist of a drink-cure advertisement in Old Moore's Almanac: the medicine cunningly mixed with the drunkard's tea; the immediate result-the drunkard's raising a hand to heaven, wife hanging, sobbing with relief, round his neck. Too much ham altogether. Vesta, still with the wary look, said:
"I hope you mean what you say. I don't mean about the film; I mean about trying to be a bit more normal. There's a lot in life that you've missed, isn't there?" She gave him her hand as a cool token. "Oh, I know it must sound a little pretentious, but I feel that I've got a duty to you; not the ordinary duty of a wife to a husband, but a bigger one. I've been entrusted with the care of a great poet." The horse should, rightly, have neighed; massed trumpets should have brayed from the Isola Tiberina.