Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

He lay in the bedroom that had been intended, it seemed, for Ben the son, who had however Christmas engagements but telephoned from somewhere to his mother, who said you just do dat son and we be thinkin of you and lovin you just de same. After the meatloaf and collard greens and a Sara Lee creature, strong tea but no alcohol, Mrs Johnson opened up her Bible, put on spectacles and looked over the top of them at Enderby. Enderby felt fear: he was going to be tested. But all she said was what your favourite psalm Reverend, and he was able to answer Psalm 46 and even quote some of it at her, so that she nodded and checked and said dat right Reverend. And then she said: what you goana preach about tomorrow Reverend and that made him spill his tea on his tie. She had him there in the corner of the combined living and dining room at the cleared table, while May Johnson had her arms about the two kids on the biscuit-coloured settee, watching Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in Holiday Inn. "The meaning of the Nativity," Enderby said, and she nodded and quoted about de census to be taken ob all de world in de time ob Caesar Augustus.

Well, he lay there. Mrs Johnson lay in the room next to his, her daughter in the room beyond, and the two kids on a two-tiered bunk in the room beyond that. This was neither the time nor the place to entertain lewd thoughts about April Elgar, so he lay there partly illumined by a sodium street lamp working out tomorrow's sermon. Of course, this had been inevitable and he, or that blasted divine girl there, ought to have foreseen it. Distinguished visiting inevitably Baptist preacher all the way from England. It was not to give a sermon to Baptist blacks that he had come all the way from Morocco. He ought really to try to convert them to his own brand of apostate Catholicism, but perhaps Christmas was hardly a discreet season for that. Soon, a Holiday Inn face towel stuffed inside the crotch of his faded striped pyjamas in case of accidents, he slept. He slept remarkably well, and was wakened in southern winter sunlight by a small black boy bashing him on the shoulder and offering him a mug, no inscription on it, of very strong hot tea. The other black boy was with him, and then May Johnson herself came in in dressing gown and worn mules to wish him a merry Christmas and even to hand him a small gaudily wrapped gift. She also kissed him on the lips, her lips being warm from sleep and also greaseless, while the two kids looked solemnly on. Fortunately he had slept with his teeth in. He said, unwrapping:

"Oh my God, you shouldn't, I didn't get anything for. Oh my God, oh just what I wanted." It was not really, being a miniature calculator to be worn on the wrist with a dusky screen that showed time playing the game of numerical transformation, squarish figures becoming other figures with the minimum of dim-lit metamorphosis. The day, and all the days to follow till the end of the world, were presented to Enderby as a linear process, not the fall-rise cycle of the poet. As for calculating, what had he to calculate? He looked at her, sitting on the bed edge, with humble gratitude, saying: "It was a problem of. Well, you see, I had to pay the hotel bill."

"You gave me a poem," she said.

He could not now very well upbraid her for getting him into this Reverend situation. He offered his tea mug to her but she shook her head. Enderby slurped. The voice of Mrs Johnson below called them to breakfast. The kids, jostling each other for precedence, ran. She remained seated, lovely though not, the deglamorized daughter, mythical. "Strange," Enderby said. "Here we both are, in a clinal situation so to speak, a bed context I mean, the Greek word means to lean or repose I suppose, hence bed, hence clinic by the way, and this has nothing to do with my feverish imaginings. Domestic, I mean. I weep at the impossibility of it all."

"Momma has breakfast ready. Eggs. Ham. Hominy grits."

"I'll write you a proper poem," Enderby said. "You'll see. I weep at the."

"Yeah, yeah, impossibility of it all. Say, there's a good title for a song, Cole Porterish. The impossibility of it all, the sheer futility of it all. You must work on that."

"Even bad art," Enderby solemnly said, half-empty mug in paws, "is made out of elemental cries for help." But she had gone.

Mrs Johnson sang crackily a song about the itty bitty baby born in Baithlaihaim as she served breakfast. Here was he, Enderby the all too white man, Bradcaster pink mitigated by Tangerine bronze, at home, dusky Morocco a mere station in its direction, in a black household. He could see himself for ever here, drinking ever stronger tea and reading the Book of Deuteronomy with Mrs Johnson, cracking the kids' woolly heads when they were fretful, waiting for the daughter-Female Friend-goddess-impossible she to be deglamorized on a flying visit. After breakfast of two fried eggs and ham and a sort of white porridge (get dem greeerts down, dey'll do you gud), he shaved, dressed in Christmas clerical (all metaphors in time become reality) grey, then trembled. God knew what he could do about this bloody sermon. Leave it to chance, muse, Holy Ghost? Cynicism. Compoundedly dangerous American visit. Surely the God of the black Baptists could not be less vindictive than dead Will?

They were driven by May Johnson down the main boulevard of Chapel Hill, Enderby at back flanked by kids. Both ladies were demurely hatted and gloved. They arrived at a whiteboard building of simple pseudocolonial charm between a Howard Johnson restaurant that looked much more like a church, spire and all, and a garage where hammering artisans defied Christmas. The chapel had its own carpark, and this was already full of Plymouths and Oldsmobiles. There were a lot of women waiting to go in, all blackly radiant in the mild sun, and black respectable men in decent suits. Big treble event this, evidently: Christmas, big singing star back in hometown, foreign Reverend: Mrs Johnson had clearly been busy on the telephone. A genuine or right Reverend, named on the outside board as Dr R. F. Grigson, greeted Enderby with warm black hands and secular gusto. A big man took Enderby on one side and handed him his card: Condor Life. You travellin a lot, Reverend, your dearest and nearest in need of first class protection, we have lil talk after service. Then they went into a plain place of worship with a dais, a lectern, and an electronic organ. The worshippers, gleamingly teethed and boldly coloured, were stained glass enough.

It was not at all like the Catholic masses of Enderby's youth, dyspeptic Maynooth leprechauns peevish about last week's collections, or the anaemic evensongs of his brief curative Anglicanism, with fine if archaic Jacobean prose apologetically delivered by cricketing rectors and very well-made hymns bleated by conservativeclubcakebaking etiolated housewives with herb gardens. They went in a lot for extravagant joy here, also a healthy concern with sin. They cried yeah, that right and we hearin you. May Johnson, as he ought to have expected, sang what was called a gospel song to a jazzy accompaniment from a young buck whose grin mimicked his two electronic manuals, while the congregation clapped in rhythm:

And when I get to heaven where I belong

It gonna be Christmas all eternity long.

They smiled on him with encouragement and expectation when he was called upon. He stifflegged it to the lectern and surveyed them all sickly, fine bright open godly black sods as they were, no, not sods, decent people really. May Johnson expected the best from him, he could see that. Not let her down. He had given, when in the army, lectures on the British Way and Purpose, now very remote entities and never easily definable even then. He had delivered a disastrous speech when receiving the Goodby gold medal for poetry, which, along with the meagre cheque that went with it, he had at once given back. He had always found it difficult to be insincere and that perhaps was why he had not got on in the world. He was worried now about the danger of sincerity breaking in. He was not worried about either articulacy or audibility. They would hear him all right. He said: