Enderby, sighing, went to the bathroom to start work. He gazed doubtfully at the bathtub, which was full of notes, drafts, fair copies not yet filed for their eventual volume, books, ink-bottles, cigarette-packets, the remains of odd snacks taken while writing. There were also a few mice that lived beneath the detritus, encouraged in their busy scavenging by Enderby. Occasionally one would surface and perch on the bath's edge to watch the poet watching the ceiling, pen in hand. With him they were neither cowering nor timorous (he had forgotten the meaning of "sleekit"). Enderby recognized that the coming occasion called for a bath. Lustration before the sacramental meal. He had once read in some women's magazine a grim apothegm he had never forgotten: "Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace." On the other hand, Frederick the Great had never bathed in his life; his corpse had been a rich mahogany colour. Enderby's view of bathing was neither obsessive nor insouciant. ("Sans Souci", Frederick's palace, was it not?) He was an empiricist in such matters. Though he recognized that a bath would, in a week or two, seem necessary, he recoiled from the prospect of preparing the bathtub and evicting the mice. He would compromise. He would wash very nearly all over in the basin. More, he would shave with exceptional care and trim his hair with nail-scissors.
Gloomily, Enderby reflected that most modern poets were not merely sufficiently clean but positively natty. T. S. Eliot, with his Lloyd's Bank nonsense, had started all that, a real treason of clerks. Before him, Enderby liked to believe, cleanliness and neatness had been only for writers of journalistic ballades and triolets. Still, he would show them when he went for his gold medal; he would beat them at their own game. Enderby sighed again as, with bare legs, he took his poetic seat. His first job was to compose a letter of gratitude and acceptance. Prose was not his métier.
After several pompous drafts which he crumpled into the waste-basket on which he sat, Enderby dashed off a letter in In Memoriam quatrains, disguised as prose. "The gratitude for this award, though sent in all humility, should not, however, come from me, but from my Muse, and from the Lord…" He paused as a bizarre analogue swam up from memory. In a London restaurant during the days of fierce post-war food shortage he had ordered rabbit pie. The pie, when it had arrived, had contained nothing but breast of chicken. A mystery never to be solved. He shrugged it away and went on disguising the chicken-breast of verse as rabbit-prose. A mouse, forepaws retracted like those of a kangaroo, came up to watch.
2
Enderby found Arry in white in his underground kitchen, brown ale frothing beside him, slicing pork into blade-thin shives. An imbecilic-looking scullion in khaki threw fistfuls of cabbage on to plates. When he missed he picked up the scattered helping carefully from the floor and tried again. Massive sides of beef were jocularly being unloaded from Smithfield-the fat a golden fleece, the flesh the hue of diluted Empire burgundy. Enderby said:
"I've got to go up to London to be given a gold medal and fifty guineas. But I haven't got a suit."
"Yer'll be able to buy a good un," said Arry, "with that amount of mooney." He didn't look too happy; he frowned down at his precise task like a surgeon saving the life of a bitter foe. "There," he said, forking up a translucent slice to the light, "that's about as thin as yer can bloody get."
"But," said Enderby, "I don't see the point of buying a suit just for this occasion. I probably shan't want to wear a suit again. Or not for a long time. That's why I'd like to borrow one of yours."
Arry said nothing. He quizzed the forked slice and nodded at it, as though he had met its challenge and won. Then he returned to his carving. He said, "Yer quite right when yer suppose av got more than wan. Am always doin' things for people, aren't a? Boot what dooz any bogger do for me?" He looked up at Enderby an instant, his tongue flicking out between its gateposts as if to lick up a tear.
"Well," said Enderby, embarrassed, "you know you can rely on me. For anything I can do, that is. But I've only one talent, and that's not much good to you. Nor, it seems," the mood of self-pity catching, "to anyone else. Except a hundred or so people here and in America. And one mad female admirer in Cape Town. She writes once a year, you know, offering marriage."
"Female admirers," said carving Arry, pluralizing easily. "Female admirers, eh? That's wan thing a 'aven't got. It's me oo admires er, that's the bloody trooble. It's got real bad, that as." He became violently dialectal. "Av getten eed-warch wi' it," he said. Then, as an underling sniffed towards him with a cold, "Vol-au-vent de dindon's in that bloody coopboard," he said.
"Who?" said Enderby. "When?"
"Er oopstairs," said Any. "Thelma as serves int cocktail bar. A knew it definite ender the moonth. Bloody loovely oo is boot bloody cruel," he said, carving steadily. "Oo's bloody smashin'," he said.
"I don't know," said Enderby.
"Don't know what?"
"Who's bloody smashing."
"Oo is," said Arry, gesturing to the ceiling with his knife. "Oo oop thur. That Thelma."
Enderby then, remembered that two Anglo-Saxon feminine pronouns co-existed in Lancashire. He said "Well, why don't you go in and win? Just put a few teeth in your mouth first, though. The popular prejudice goes in favour of teeth."
"What's pegs to do with it?" said Arry. "A don't eat. Pegs is for eatin'. Am in loove, that's bloody trooble, and what's pegs to do with that?"
"Women like to see them," said Enderby. "It's more of an aesthetic than a functional thing. Love, eh? Well, well. Love. It's a long time since I've heard of anybody being in love."
"Every boogger's in loove nowadays," said Arry, ending his carving. He drank some brown ale. "There's songs about it ont wireless. A used to laff at 'em. And now it's me oo's copped it. Loove. Bloody nuisance it is an' all, what with bein' busy at this timer year. Firms givin' loonches an' dinners till near the end of February. Couldn't 'ave coom at a worse time."
"About this suit," said Enderby. He faced a vast carboy of pickled onions and his bowels melted within him. He wanted to be gone.
"Yer can do summat for me," said Any, "if am to do summat for you." He tasted this last pronoun and then decided that his revelation, his coming request, called for tutoyer intimacy. "Summat for thee," he amended. "Al lend thee that suit if tha'll write to 'er for me, that bein' thy line, writin' poetry an' all that mook. A keep sendin 'er oop special things as av cooked special, boot that's not romantic, like. A nice dish of tripe doon in milk, which were always my favourite when a were eatin'. Sent it down, oontooched, oo did. A reel boogger. What would go down best would be a nice loove-letter or a bitter poetry. That's where you'd coom in," said Arry, and his snake-tongue darted. " 'Av a grey un, a blue un, a brown un, a fawn un an a 'errin-bone tweed. Tha's welcome to any wan on 'em. Thee write summat an' sign it Arry and send it to me an' all send it oop to 'er."