He got out quite briskly at Times Square and walked down West 44th Street. In the lobby of the Algonquin there were, he saw, British periodicals on sale. He bought The Times and leafed through it standing. In a remote corner of it, he saw, a Merhber of Parliament was pleading for a special royal commission to clean up the Old Testament. Dangers even in great classics, provocation to idle and affluent youth etc. In the Blue Bar there were some conspiratorial and lecherous customers at tables, but seated on a bar stool was a rather loud man whose voice Enderby seemed to recognise. Good God, it was Father Hopkins himself. No, the man who played him in the film. What was his name now?
"So I said to him up yours, that's what I said."
"That's it, Mr. O'Donnell."
Coemgen (pronounced Kevin) O'Donnell, that was the man. Enderby had met him briefly at a little party after the London preview, when he had been affably drunk. No coincidence that he was here now: the Algonquin took in actors as much as writers. Sitting at a stool two empty stools away from O'Donnell, Enderby asked politely for a pink gin. O'Donnell, hunched to the counter, heard the voice, swivelled gracelessly, and said:
"You British?"
"Well, yes," Enderby said. "British-born but, like yourself I presume, living in exile. Look, we've already met."
"Never seen you before in my life." The voice was wholly American. "Lots of guys like you, seen me in the movies, assume acquaintanceshhh. Ip. You British?"
"Well, yes. British-born but, like yourself I presume, living in."
"You said all that crap already, buster. All I asked was a straight queschhh. Un. Okay, you're British. Needn't keep on about it. No need to eggs hhhibit the flag tattooed on your ass. And all that sort of. What? What?"
"The film," Enderby said. "The movie. The Wreck of the Deutschland."
"I was in it. That was my movie." He thrust his empty tumbler rudely towards the bartender. He was most unpriestlike in his dress, glistening cranberry suit, violet silk, shoes that Enderby took to be Gucci. The face was a rugged corner-boy's, apt for some slum baseball-with-the-kids Maynooth-type priest, but hardly for the delicate intellectual unconscious pederast ah-my-dear Hopkins.
"The point is," Enderby said, "that I too was in it in a sense. It was my idea. My name was among the credits. Enderby," he added, to no applause. "Enderby," to not even recognition. Coemgen O'Donnell said:
"Yeah. I guess it had to be somebody's idea. Everything is kind of built on the idea of some unknown guy. You seen the figures in this week's Variety? Sex and violence, always the answer. But the guy that wrote the book was not like the guy I played in the movie. No, sir. The original Father Hopkins was a fag."
"A priest a fag?" the bartender said. "You don't say."
"There are priests fags," O'Donnell said. "Known several. Have it off with the altar boys. But in the movie he's normal. Has it off with a nun." He nodded gravely at Enderby and said: "You British?"
"Listen," Enderby said, "Gerard Manley Hopkins was not a homosexual. At least not consciously. Certainly not actively. Sublimation into the love of Christ perhaps. A theory, no more. A possibility. Of no religious or literary interest, of course. A love of male beauty. The Bugler's First Communion and The Loss of the Eurydice and Hairy Ploughman. Admiration for it. 'Every inch a tar, of the best we boast our sailors are.' 'Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue.' What's wrong with that, for Christ's sake?"
"Broth of goldfish my ass," O'Donnell said. "Has that guy from the front office come yet?" he asked the bartender.
"He'll come in here, Mr. O'Donnell. He'll know where you are. If I was you, sir, I'd make that one the last. Until after the show, that is."
"Show?" Enderby said. "Are you by any chance on the-" He consulted the tear-off from his pocket. "Live Lancing Show?"
"Hey, that's good. Sperr would like that. Not that it's live, old boy, old boy. Nothing's live, not any more." And then: "You British?"
"I've said already that I-"
"You a fag? Okay okay. That's not what I was going to ask. What I was going to ask was-What was I going to ask?" he asked the bartender.
"Search me, Mr. O'Donnell."
"I know. Something about a bugle boy. What was that about a bugugle boy?"
"The Bugler's First Communion?"
"That's it, I guess. Now this proves that he was a fag. You British? Yeah yeah, asked that already. That means you know the town of Oxford, where the college is, right? It was my father."
"What?"
"Got that balled up, I guess. Big army barracks there. Cow cow cow something."
"Cowley?"
"Right, you'd know that, being British. Another scatch on the-"
"Sorry, Mr. O'Donnell. You yourself give me strict instructions when you started."
"Okay okay, gotta be with old Can Dix. Sending a limousine."
"Who? What?"
"Sending a car around. This talk show."
"I," Enderby said, "am on the other one, the Spurling one. What," he said with apprehension, "are you going to tell them?"
"Listen, old boy old boy, not finished, had I, right? Right. It was my mother's father. British, with an Irish mother. Sent him off to be good Catholic. Right? One hell of a row, father was Protestant."
"Yes," Enderby said. " 'Born, he tells me, of Irish / Mother to an English sire (he / Shares their best gifts surely, fall how things will).' "
"Not finished, had I, right?"
"Sorry."
"No need to be sorry. Never regret anything, my what the hell do you call it slogan, right? Went over to Ireland with my mother's father's mother, he was my mother's father, you see that?"
"Right."
"Married Irish, the British all got smothered up. Well, that was his story."
"What was his story?"
"Had him down there in what do you call it presbyt presbyt, his red pants off of him and gave him, you know, the stick. Met him again in Dublin when he was some sort of professor, reminded him of it. Made him very sick. Very sick already."
"Oh God," Enderby said.
O now well work that sealing sacred ointment!
O for now charms, arms, what bans off bad
And locks love ever in a lad!
Let me though see no more of him, and not disappointment
Those sweet hopes quell whose least me quickenings lift…
"I can't believe it," Enderby said. "I won't." He had intimations of a renewal of quasi-lethal pains ready to shoot from chest to clavicle to arm. No, he wouldn't have it. He frightened the promise away with a quick draught of gin. "So," he said. "You're going to tell them all about it?"
"Not that," O'Donnell said. "Crack a few gags about nuns. I was with this dame in a taxi and she was a nun. She'd have nun of this and nun of that."
"What a filthy unspeakable world," Enderby said. "What defilement, what horror."
"You can say that again. Ah, Josh. It is Josh? Sure it's Josh. How are things, Josh? How's the kids and the missus? The old trouble-and-strife, our British friend here would say." His Cockney was tolerable. "A cap of Sara Lee and dahn wiv yer rahnd the ahzes."
"Getting married next month," this Josh said unrelatedly. He looked Armenian to Enderby, hairy and with an ovine profile.
"Is that right, is that really right, well I sure am happy for you, Josh. Our friend here," O'Donnell said, "has been talking about our movie, Kraut Soup." He stood up and appeared not merely sober but actually as though he had just downed a gill of vinegar. He was, after all, an actor. Could you then believe anything he said or did? But how did he know about the barracks at Cowley? "What defilement, what horror," he said, in exactly Enderby's accent and intonation.