Anthony Burgess - Inside Mr Enderby

"You're not all that old yourself," said the tremulous parchment man.

"I'm eighty-five," said the general in puffy indignation. "I call that very old."

Higher bids came from the corners. One woman confessed coyly to ninety. As if somehow to prove this, she performed a few waltz-twirls, humming from The Merry Widow. She sat down again to genteel shocked applause, her lips blue, her heart almost audibly thumping. "And," asked the Sibelius-man, "how old might you be, Enderby?"

"Forty-five."

There were snorts of both contempt and amusement.

One man in a corner piped, "If that's meant to be funny, I don't think it's in very good taste."

The major-general turned sternly and deliberately towards Enderby, both hands resting on the ivory bulldog-head of his malacca. "And what is it you do for a living?" he asked.

"You know that," said Enderby. "I'm a poet."

"Yes, yes, but what do you do for a living? Only Sir Walter made a living out of poetry. And perhaps that Anglo-Indian man who lived at Burwash."

"A few investments," said Enderby.

"What investments precisely?"

"I.C.I, and B.M.C. and Butlin's. And local government loans."

The major-general grunted, as though none of Enderby's replies was above suspicion. "What was your rank in the last war?" he asked, a last throw.

Before Enderby could give a lying answer, a widow in antique tweeds, a long thin woman with black-rimmed spectacles, fell from a low stool by a wicker table. Old men reached trembling for their sticks, that they might lever themselves up and help. But Enderby was there first. "Sho kind," said the woman genteelly. "Sho shorry to cauzhe all thish trouble." She had evidently been tanking up at home before opening-time. Enderby lifted her from the floor, as light and as stiff as a bundle of celery. "Thezhe thingzh," she said, "happen in the besht of familiezh."

His hands still hooked in her armpits, Enderby was shocked to see the image of his stepmother in the big Gilbey's Port mirror on the wall opposite. Shaken, he nearly dropped his burden to the floor again. The image nodded to him, as out of some animated painting in a TV commercial, raised its glass in New Year salutation, then seemed to hobble out of the picture, into the wings, thus disappearing.

"Get on with it, Enderby," said the peevish major-general. "Put her back on her seat."

"Sho very kind," said the woman, trying hard to focus on her gin-glass. Enderby looked in the room for a source of that mirror-image, but saw only a bent back hobbling to the Gents. That might be it, a trick of the light or the New Year. It was his stepmother, strangely enough, who had told him as a child that, on New Year's Day, a man walked the streets with as many noses on his face as there were days in the year. He had gone looking for this man, thinking of him fearfully as of the family of the Antichrist that walked the world before the day of judgement. Long after he had seen through the trick, New Year's Day still possessed for him an irritating macabre flavour, as a day of possible prodigies. His stepmother was, he was pretty sure, dead and buried. She'd done her work, as far as he was concerned. There was no point in her staying alive or coming back from the grave.

"Now," said the major-general, as Enderby sat down again with a new whisky, "what did you say your rank was?"

"Lieutenant-general," said Enderby. In speech a comma is as good as a hyphen.

"I don't believe you."

"Look it up." Enderby was almost sure he saw his step mother leave the jug-and-bottle department, a quarter-bottle of Booth's in her bag. The Neptune was the sort of pub in which any of the three parts-saloon, public, outdoor-is visible from any other. Enderby spilt whisky on his tie. An old man who had not previously spoken pointed at Enderby with shaky care and said, "You've spilt whisky on your tie." Enderby felt that fear would possibly make worse happen. The outer world was not safe. He must go back home and closet himself, work at his poem. He finished the driblet in his glass, buttoned himself up and donned his Basque beret. The major-general said, "I don't believe you, sir."

"You must please yourself, General," said Ex-lieutenant Enderby. And, with a general salute, he left.

"He's a liar," said the major-general. "I always knew he wasn't to be trusted. I don't believe he's a poet, either. A very shifty look about him this morning."

"I read about him in the public library," said the salami-mottled man. "There was a photograph, too. It was an article, and it seemed to think quite a lot of him."

"What is he? Where does he come from?" asked another.

"He keeps himself very much to himself," said the mottled man and, just in time, he snuffed up a perilous dewdrop.

"He's a liar, anyway," said the major-general. "I shall look up the Army List this afternoon."

He never did. A motorist, irritable and jumpy with a seasonal hangover, knocked him down as he was crossing Nollekens Avenue. Long before spring, the major-general was promoted to glory.

Out in the gull-clawed air, New-Year blue, the tide crawling creamily in, Enderby felt better. In this sharp light there was no room for ghosts. But the imagined visitation had acted as an injunction to honour the past before looking, as at every year's beginning, to the future.

Enderby first thought of his mother, dead at his birth, of whom there had seemed to be no record. He liked to imagine a young woman of gentle blondeness, sweetly refined and slenderly pliant. He liked to think of her swathed in gold, in a beeswax-breathing drawing-room, singing "Passing By" to her own accompaniment. The dying heat of a July day sang in sadness through the wide-open french windows from a garden that glowed with Crimson Glory, Mme L. Dieudonne, Ena Harkness and Golden Spectre. He saw his father, become bookish, wearing bookman's slippers, O-ing out smoke from an oval-bored Passing Cloud, nodding his head in quiet pleasure as he listened. But his father had never been quite like that. A wholesale tobacconist, ruling lines in the ledger with an ebony sceptre of a ledger-ruler, sitting in the office behind the shop in waistcoat and black bowler, always glad of opening-time. Why? To escape from that bitch of a second wife. Why in God's name had he married her? "Money, son. Her first one left her a packet. Her stepson will, we hope, reap the benefit." And, to some extent, it had turned out that way. Hence the few hundred a year from I.C.I., British Motors, and the rest. But had it been worth it?

Oh, she had been graceless and coarse, that one. A hundredweight of ringed and brooched blubber, smelling to high heaven of female smells, rank as long-hung hare or blown beef, her bedroom strewn with soiled bloomers, crumby combinations, malodorous bust-bodices. She had swollen finger-joints, puffy palms, wrists girdled with fat, slug-white upper arms that, when naked, showed indecent as thighs. She was corned, bunioned, calloused, varicose-veined. Healthy as a sow, she moaned of pains in all her joints, a perpetual migraine, a bad back, toothache. "The pains in me legs," she would say, "is killin' me." Her wind was loud, even in public places. "The doctor says to let it come up. You can always say excuse me." Her habits were loathsome. She picked her teeth with old tram-tickets, cleaned out her ears with hairclips in whose U-bend ear-wax was trapped to darken and harden, scratched her private parts through her clothes with a matchbox-rasping noise audible two rooms away, made gross sandwiches of all her meals or cut her meat with scissors, spat chewed bacon-rind or pork-crackling back on her plate, excavated beef-fibres from her cavernous molars and held them up for all the world to see, hooked out larger chunks with a soiled sausage-finger, belched like a ship in the fog, was sick on stout on Saturday nights, tromboned vigorously in the lavatory, ranted without aitches or grammar, scoffed at all books except Old Moore's Almanac, whose apocalyptic pictures she could follow. Literally illiterate all her life, she would sign cheques by copying her name from a prototype on a greasy piece of paper, drawing it carefully as a Chinese draws an ideogram. She provided fried meals mostly, ensuring first that the fat was tepid. But she brewed good tea, potent with tannin, and taught young Enderby the technique, that he might bring her a cup in the morning: three for each person and two for the pot, condensed milk rather than fresh, be lavish with the sugar. Enderby, sixth-form boy, would stand over her while she drank it in bed-tousled, wrinkled, puffed, ill-smelling, a wreck-though she did not really drink it: the tea seemed to soak into her as into parched earth. One day he would put rat-poison in her cup. But he never did, even though he bought the rat-poison. Hate? You've just no idea.