Anthony Burgess - Enderby Outside

Painfully Enderby got up and went to the bathroom. He could hear, through the wall, in the adjoining bathroom, the man with overweight luggage being rebuked bitterly by his wife. Libidinous wretch. Condom-carrier. Thought he'd have a nasty sly go at the señoritas or bintim did he? Words to that effect, anyway. Best years of her life slaving away for him. Enderby, sighing, micturated briefly, pulled the chain and left his room buttoning, sighing. Leaving his room, he met Miss Boland coming to his room. Quite a coincidence, really.

"I've come," she said, "for my poem." She looked rather like a woman who was coming to collect a poem, not a bit the lecturer in selenography. Her dressing-gown was far from sensible: it was diaphanous black, billowing in the hot wind from the window at the corridor's end, and under it was a peach-coloured nightdress. Her pretty mousy hair had been brushed; it crackled in the hot wind; a peach-coloured fillet was binding it. She had put on cochineal lipstick, matching the hot wind. Enderby gulped. Gulping, he bowed her in. He said:

"I haven't had time yet. To write a poem, that is. I've been unpacking, as you can see."

"You've unpacked everything? Goodness. A bit pointless, isn't it? We're only here for the night. What's left of it, that is. Ah," she said, billowing in the hot wind over to the window, "you have the luna too. My luna and yours."

"We must," Enderby said reasonably, "be on the same side of the corridor. The same view, you see." And then: "Have a drink."

"Well," she said, "I don't usually. Especially at this hour of the morning. But I am on holiday after all, aren't I?"

"You most certainly are," Enderby said gravely. "I'll get a glass from the bathroom." He went to get it. The row was still going on next door. Uncontrollable lust in middle age. Comic if it was not disgusting. Or something like that. He brought back the glass and found Miss Boland sitting on his bed. "Mare Imbrium," she was saying. "Seleucus. Aristarchus." He poured her a very healthy slug. He would make her drunk and have a hangover, and that would distract her tomorrow morning from puerco business. Soon he would go to her room and steal her dictionary. Everything was going to be all right.

"You've been thorough," she said, taking the glass from him. "You've even packed your suitcase away."

"Oh, yes," he said. "It's a sort of mania with me. Tidiness, that is." Then he saw himself in the dressing-table mirror-unshaven since early this morning in London (he had written Londra on the envelope; was that right?) and with shirt very crumpled and trousers proclaiming cheapness and jacket thin at the elbows. He gave himself a grim smile full of teeth. They looked clean enough, anyway. He transferred the smile to Miss Boland. "You poor man," she said. "You're lonely, aren't you? I could see that when you got on the bus in London. Still, you've no need to be lonely now. Not for this holiday, anyhow." She took a sip of the Fundador without grimacing. "Hm. Fiery but nice."

"Mucho fuego," said Enderby. English man no fuego : he remembered that.

Miss Boland leaned back. She wore feathery slippers with heels. Leaning back, she kicked them off. Her feet were long and clean and the toes were unpainted. She closed her eyes, frowned, then said: "Let me see if I can remember. A cada puerco something-or-other su San Martín. That means: Every dog has his day. But it should be "every hog" really, shouldn't it? The dictionary says hog, not pig."

Enderby sat down heavily on the other side of the bed. Then he looked with heavy apprehension at Miss Boland. She seemed to have lost about two stone and fifteen years since embarking at London. He tried to see himself imposing upon her a complex of subtle but vigorous amation which should have an effect of drowsy enslavement, rendering her, for instance, totally indifferent to tomorrow's news. Then he thought he had perhaps better get out of here and find his own way to North Africa: there must surely be something hopping over there at this hour. But no. Despite everything, he was safer in Mr Mercer's party-a supernumerary, fiddled in with a wink, no name on the manifest, waved through by officials who were waved back at by Mr Guthkelch. Moreover, Mr Mercer had returned everybody's passport, and Enderby's was snug once more in its inside pocket. He was not going to let it go again, unless, in final desperate abandonment of identity, to the fire of some Moorish kebab-vendor. He saw this man quite clearly, crying his kebabs against the sun, brown and lined and toothless, opposing his call to the muezzin's. That was the poetic imagination, that was.

"And," Miss Boland was now saying, having helped herself to more Fundador, "Mother and Dad used to take me and Charles, that was my brother, to see Uncle Herbert when he lived in Wellington-Wellington, Salop, I mean; why do they call it Salop? Oh, the Latin name I suppose-and we went up Bredon Hill several times -"

"The coloured counties," Enderby said, doing an estimate of her for seduction purposes and realising at the same time how purely academic such a notion was, "and hear the larks on high. Young men hanging themselves and ending up in Shrewsbury jail. For love, as they call it."

"How cynical you are. But I suppose I've every right to be cynical too, really. Toby his name was-a silly name for a man, isn't it?-and he said I had to choose between him and my career-I mean, more the name for a dog, isn't it, really?-and of course there was no question of me abandoning my vocation for the sake of anything he said he had to give. And he said something about a brainy wife being a bad wife and he wasn't going to have the moon lying in bed between us."

"A bit of a poet," said Enderby, feeling himself grow drowsy. The hot wind puppeteered the window-curtains and plastered Miss Boland's nightdress against her shin.

"A bit of a liar," Miss Boland said. "He lied about his father. His father wasn't a solicitor, only a solicitor's clerk. He lied about his rank in the Royal Corps of Signals. He lied about his car. It wasn't his, it was one he borrowed from a friend. Not that he had many friends. Men," she said, "tend to be liars. Look at you, for instance."

"Me?" said Enderby.

"Saying you're a poet. Talking about your old Shropshire name."

"Listen," said Enderby. And he began to recite.

"Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury, rounded by river,

The envious Severn like a sleeping dog

That wakes at whiles to snarl and slaver

Or growls in its dream its snores of fog."

"That's yours, is it?"

"Lover-haunted in the casual summer:

A monstrous aphrodisiac,

The sun excites in the noonday shimmer,

When Jack is sweating, Joan on her back."

"I was always taught that you can't make poetry with long words."

"Sick and sinless in the anaemic winter:

The nymphs have danced off the summer rout,

The boats jog on the fraying painter,

The School is hacking its statesmen out."

"Oh, I see what you mean. Shrewsbury School. That's where Darwin went to, isn't it?"

"The pubs dispense their weak solution,

The unfructified waitresses bring their bills,

While Darwin broods upon evolution,

Under the pall of a night that chills -"

"Sorry, I shouldn't have interrupted."

"- But smooths out the acne of adolescence

As the god appears in the fourteenth glass

And the urgent promptings of tumescence

Lead to the tumbled patch of grass."

"A lot of sex in it, isn't there? Sorry, I won't interrupt again."

"This is the last bloody stanza," Enderby said sternly. "Coming up now.

Time and the town go round like the river,

But Darwin thinks in a line that is straight.

A sort of selection goes on for ever,