Inside Mr Enderby

1

Errrrrrrrp.

Enderby was in a very small lavatory, being sick. He was also married, just. Enderby the married man. A vomiting bridegroom.

When his forehead was cooler he sat, sighing, on the little seat. All below him was June weather, June being the month for weddings. Alone in this buzzing and humming tiny lavatory he had his first leisure to feel both gratified and frightened. The bride, though only in a severe suit suitable for a registry office, had looked lovely. Sir George had said so. Sir George was friendly again. All was forgiven.

Almost the first thing she had insisted on was an apology to Sir George. Enderby had written: "So sorry I should seem to rate your sirship as a stupid dolt, but thought you would appreciate that feeble gesture of revolt. For you yourself have tried, God wot, the awful agonizing art, and though, as poet, you are not worth the least poetaster's fart, yet you're equipped to understand what clockwork makes the poet tick and how he hates the laden hand below the empty rhetoric…" That, she had said, was not really suitable, so he had tried something briefer in genuine prose, and Sir George had only been too delighted to accept the formal creaking apology.

Oh, she had begun to reorganize his life, that one. From the start, taking breakfast together in the large dining-room of her large flat, February Gloucester Road sulking outside, it was clear that things could only go one way. For what other relationship could be viable in the world's eyes than this one they were beginning now? Enderby had been forced to reject that of landlady and tenant, for he had paid no rent. The step-relationship was, with women, practically the only other one he had experienced. She was, he knew, and for this he valued her, antipodeal to a stepmother, being clean and beautiful. His father's remarriage had introduced brief squibs of step-aunts-in-law and the fable of a paragon stepsister, too good for this world and hence soon dead of a botulism, whom Enderby had always visualized as a puppet doll-dangling parody of his stepmother. Vesta was not, he had felt, a stepsister. A female Friend? He had rung that on his palate several times, upper case and all, and savoured a melancholy twilit aquarelle of Shelley and Godwin, with chorusmen's calves as if limned by Blake, holding reading-parties in a moored boat with high-waisted rather silly ladies, lovers of Gothic romances, while midges played fiddles in the sad air. Epipsychidion. Epithalamion. Ah God, that word had really started things off, for it had started off a poem.

The cry in the clouds, the throng of migratory birds,

The alien planet's heaven where seven moons

Are jasper, agate, carbuncle, onyx, amethyst and blood-ruby and bloodstone.

Or else binary suns

Wrestle like lions to a flame that we can stand,

Bound, twisted and conjoined

To an invertebrate love where selves are melted

To the primal juice of a creator's joy,

Before matter was made,

Two spheres in a single orbit…

They had drunk Orange Pekoe with breakfast and she, in a rust-coloured suit with a heavy clip of hammered pewter on the left lapel, had just gone off to work. Enderby, in the kitchenette whose pastel beauty made him feel particularly dirty and gross, had put on the kettle for stepmother's tea, and the word "epithalamion", like the announcement of a train's approach, had set the floorboards trembling with thunder. Panting at the dining-table, he had set down words, seeing his emergent poem as a song for the celebration of the consummation of the passion of the mature-Gertrude and Claudius in Hamlet, red-bearded lips on a widow's white neck. The leafy tea had cooled beside him. Mrs Opisso the daily woman had come in, dusky, hippy, bosomy, garlicky, moustached, leering brilliantly, a wartime Gibraltarian evacuee in whose blood seethed Genoese, Portuguese Jewish, Saracen, Irish, and Andalusian corpuscles, to say, interrupting sweeping, "What are you in this house, eh? You not going out, not doing work, true? What are you to her, eh? You tell." It had not been easy to tell; it was not enough to say that it was none of her business.

… Swollen with cream or honey,

The convalescent evening launches its rockets,

Soaring above the rich man's gala day,

In the thousand parks of the kingdom

Which radiate from this bed…

Vesta would not necessarily think that this epithalamion was intended for her and her guest-Male Friend-protégé, for she had already said sardonically, "if you intend to write any love poetry this morning make sure you don't send it to Sir George by mistake. This carelessness of yours will land you into big trouble one of these days, you mark my words." Enderby had hung his head. She had been irritable that morning, tired, rubbing her brow tiredly, as in a TV commercial for some quack analgesic, under her green eyes delicate blue arcs of tiredness. She had stood by the door, in neat rust, a chiffon scarf in two tones of green, a minute brown beret aslant, brown suede gloves to match her shoes, slender, elegant and (so Enderby had divined) menstruating quietly. Enderby had said:

"Menstruation hits some women more than others, you know. Try gin and hot water. That's said to work wonders."

She had blushed faintly and said, "Where did you learn that?"

"In Fem."

Sighing, she had said, "It's all very confusing. I must work out, when I have time, the precise nature of our relationship."

Anoint the ship with wine! On ample wafers,

Which always wear this ring, that the earth be humbled

Only away from cities, let it dance and ride…

And again, another time, the precise nature still not worked out, "The question is, what's to be done with you?"

"Done with me?"

"Yes, that's the question."

"Nothing is to be done with me." He had looked across at her in fear, over the shattered fragments of toast which he had been feeding, as to a pet bird, to his mouth. "I am, after all, a poet." A lorry had backfired the world's answer.

"I want to know," Vesta had said, chill morning hands round her breakfast-cup, "exactly how much money you've got."

"Why do you want to know that?" cunning Enderby had asked.

"Oh, please. I've got a busy day ahead of me. Let's not have any nonsense. Please." Enderby had begun to tell out the contents of his left trouser-pocket. "Not that sort of money," she had cut in, sharply. Enderby had said, with care:

"Ten thousand pounds in local government loans at five and a half per cent. For dividends. Two thousand pounds in ICI, BMC, Butlin's. For capital appreciation."

"Ah. And what income does all that yield?"

"About six hundred. Not a lot, really, is it?"

"It's nothing. And I suppose your poetry brings in less than nothing."

"Two guineas a week. From Fem, God bless it." For he had at last signed the contract and already seen in print, over the name of Faith Fortitude, hogwash beginning, "A baby's cheeks, a baby's limbs are prayers to God and holy hymns; a little baby's toothless smile does the holy saints beguile…"

"An income like yours isn't worth having, really it isn't. So we've got to work out what's to be done with you."

"Done with me?" prompt Enderby had flashed.

"Look," she had said, "I know you're a poet. But there's no need to regale us with poetic drama in the style of early Mr Eliot, is there? Not at breakfast there isn't."

"Stichomythia," had been learned Enderby's comment. "But it's you who keep starting it off."

Well, that was something not yet started off: useful employment, a deuxième métier for a poet. From Valentine to Pentecost he had been allowed, though not in the lavatory, to work at The Pet Beast peaceably. But after the honeymoon things would have to be different.

And you whose fear of maps

Set buzzing the long processes of power,

Resign your limbs at length to elements

Friendly or neutral at least,

Mirrors of the enemy…

His own bit of money had not, even before they'd started on capital purchases, been going very far ("Call in at the Lion, will you, and buy a couple of bottles of gin. Pay Mrs Opisso; I'm clean out of cash."). And the greedy maws of Fortnum and Mason and the Army and Navy Stores. And a new wardrobe for himself, London not really favouring the casual valetudinarian garb of the seaside. Enderby's capital was going now. She, a thriftless Scot, did not believe in money, only in things. Hence the seven-thousand-pound house in Sussex in her name, this being his marriage settlement, also furniture, also a bright new Velox for Vesta to drive, Enderby when most sober managing a car like the drunkest drunk. And a mink coat, a wedding present.

Who had proposed marriage, and when? Who loved whom, if at all, and why? Enderby, in thinker's pose on the lavatory seat, frowned back to an evening when he had sat finishing his epithalamion in her twin dining-room, facing a piece of furniture he admired-a sideboard, massive and warped, proclaiming its date (1685) among carved lozenges and other tropes, fancies of the woodworker signifying his love of the great negroid ship-oak he had shaped and smoothed. Above that sideboard hung a painting of Vesta done by Gideon Dalgleish, she pearly-shouldered and haughty in a ballgown, seeming about to fly off, centrifugally, back into waiting but invisible paint-tubes. Above open bookshelves was a photograph of the late Pete Bainbridge. He grinned handsomely in a helmet, seated at the wheel of the Anselm 3.493 litre (six-cylinder; 250 b.h.p. Girling disc brakes; Weber 58 DCO carburettors, etc.) in which he had met his messy death. Enderby had started his last stanza:

And even the dead may bring blue lips to this banquet

And twitter like mice or birds down their corridors

Hung with undecipherable blazons…

He had felt a sudden and unwonted surge of personal, as opposed to poet's, strength: he, unworthy and ugly as he was, was at least alive, while this bright and talented handsome one had been blown to pieces. He had grinned, borrowing the shape of the grin from the dead man, in a sort of triumph. Vesta, reading some new brilliant novel by an undergraduate, had looked up from her Parker-Knoll and caught the grin. She had said:

"Why are you grinning? Have you written something funny?"

"Me? Funny? Oh, no." Enderby had covered his manuscript with clumsy paws, as one protects one's dinner-plate from an importunate second scooping of mashed potato. "Nothing funny at all."

She had got up, so graceful, to see what he was writing, asking: "What are you writing?"

"This? Oh, I don't think you'd like it. It's-Well, it's a sort of -"

She had picked up the sheet of scrawled lines and read aloud:

… For two at least can deny

That the past has any odour. They can witness

Passion and patience rooted in one paradigm; in this music recognize

That all the world's guilt can sit like air

On the bodies of these living."

"You see," Enderby had said, over-eagerly, "it's an epithalamion. For the marriage of two mature people." Inexplicably she had lowered her head with its sweet-smelling penny-coloured hair and kissed him. Kissed him. Him, Enderby.

"Your breath," she had said, "is no longer unhealthy. Sometimes it's hard for the body and mind to come to terms. You're looking better, much better." What could he say but, "Thanks to you"?

Airsick, seated in this aerial lavatory, he had to admit that a new Enderby had emerged out of the spring and early summer-a younger Enderby with less fat and wind, new teeth imperfect enough to look real, several smart suits, hair cunningly dressed by Trumper's of Mayfair and breathing delicately of Eucris, less gauche in company, his appetite healthier with no dyspeptic lust for spices and bread-and-jam, more carefully shaven, his skin clearer, his eyeballs glassy with contact lenses. If only Mrs Meldrum could see him now!

Who had mentioned love? Had anybody mentioned love? They had lived under one roof chaste, vestal, phoenix, and turtle, with Pete Bainbridge grinning from some Elysium of racing-drivers at the strange ménage of Friends. But one had only to chuck and see spin that worn coin on the polished floor for it to chink louder and louder music and revolve into a world. Had it been pocket or handbag? Enderby could not remember, but he was sure that one evening one of them had spoken the word in some connexion or other, perhaps denouncing its inflation in popular songs or in the hoarse speech of immediate need, perhaps discussing its personified identification with, in seventeenth-century religious poetry, the Lord. Then, by a swift process too subtle and irrational for analysis, one or other of them had whistled down the dove-hawk from safe heights of speculation to perch, blinking, on a pair of joined hands.

"I've been so lonely," she had said. "I've been so cold at night."

Enderby, potential bedwarmer, still potential on this brief flight to the honeymoon, for they had been chaste till now. Till tonight. Tonight in the Albergo Tritone on the Via Nazionale. Something, gulped Enderby, to look forward to.

"Look," said a voice, meaning "Listen". Enderby started from the tiny seat, listening. "Your ticket does not entitle you to undisputed monopolization of the John." That, Enderby considered, was well put. The voice was American and authoritative and Enderby hastened to give place, fairly sure now that he felt better. Outside the folding doors he breathed deeply, taking in a large touristy man who nodded at him, edging past. He had a steak complexion and two cameras-still and movie respectively-on his stomach at the ready. Enderby wondered if he would photograph the John. Through a porthole summer cloud shone up. Enderby walked down the aisle to his bride who sat, cool and lovely, gazing at summer cloud beneath. She looked up and smiled, asking if he felt better. She gave her hand to him as he sat. It seemed to be a new life beginning.

2

As if he were in a well-appointed bath, Enderby was struck by various liquid sensations as they descended to Rome (going down. Eternal City: pasta, old junk, monumental remnants, figleaved stone stalwarts, veal, Vatican, staircases to basement and bones of martyrs. The whole roofed in ringing silver and refreshed by fountains. And the very best of luck). He felt cold sweat as his stomach, tardy in descending, encouraged its master to view Rome in a sort of stepmother-context (Pope in picture on bedroom wall, blessing seven hills; translucent image of St Peter's embedded in cross of blancmange-coloured rosary; missal bookmark of Holy Family as middle-class spaghetti-guzzlers, printed in Rome). Then he was warmed by thrilling gushes, the chicken-skinned hand that held the hand of the bride growing smooth again, as there swam up from the News of the World a picture of a heavy-breasted starlet sploshing, for a lark, in the Trevi fountain. There were also weary handsome princes in sordid divorce cases and Cinecitta was greater than the Vatican. It was all right really, it would be all right, sensual, thrilling. He looked with pride on his bride and, like a distant rumour of war, felt a prick of desire, legitimate desire; she was, in a flash, identified with this new city, to be, all so legitimately, sacked and pillaged. He said to her, a few words coming back from his L. of C. days, "Io ti amo." She smiled and squeezed his hand. Enderby, Latin lover.

The warmth, the excitement, the sense of rejuvenation, survived the landing (the stewardess smirked at the exit as though she herself, after the aerial gestation, had given birth to the airport; the American who had ousted Enderby from the John began clicking away desperately). In the ragged procession to the buildings, Ciampino stretching in hot honeymoon weather, Enderby felt the barren flat airfield express, like a blank page, his new freedom, this being a freedom from his old freedom. A Cassius-lean and Casca-sullen Roman customs-man zipped open roughly the overnight bag of Vesta and held up for the whole shed to see a new nightdress. He winked sullenly at Enderby, and this to Enderby was a good omen, even though the man was starved-jawed and hence untrustworthy. The fat bus-driver sang some plangent oily aria with amore in it, jolting up the Appian Way, thus inspiring confidence. And then, whoosh, came the cold water again as the sun clouded over above a mossy aqueduct growing in ruins out of the dry grass, over an old plinth lying like a large merd under a comic-strip-coloured petrol poster. The American from the John fed his cameras like lapdogs. Mean while Enderby grew oppressed with a sense of travelling through a butcher's shop of mean history, between the ribs of carcasses, already being force-fed with chunks of the carrion empire. Rostra were quietly set up just beyond his line of vision and on them settled a sort of Seneca chorus of smirking noseless ancient Romans, fat on Sicilian corndoles and gladiator's blood. They would be present at the honeymoon; it was their city.

The sun suddenly exploded, a fire in a syrup factory, as they arrived at the airline terminal on the Via Nazionale. A dwarf porter of great strength carried their cases the few doors down to the hotel and Enderby gave him a tip of over-light suspect coins. They were bowed at and greeted with insincere golden smiles in the hotel lobby. "Signor Enderby," said Signor Enderby, "and Signora Bainbridge." "No, no, no," said Signora Enderby. Enderby smiled. "Not used to it yet, you see. Our honeymoon," he explained to the receptionist. He, a dapper Roman elf, said:

"Honeymoon, eh? I maker sure everythinger quiet forer honeymoon. A longer time since I have a honeymoon," he said regretfully. Vesta said:

"Look, I don't feel all that well. Do you think we could be taken to our -?" There were immediate calls and dartings and hoistings of bags.

"Darling," said Enderby, concerned. "What is it, darling?"

"Tired, that's all. I want to lie down."

"Darling," said Enderby. They entered a lift that was all rococo filigree-work, an airy frail cage that carried them up to a floor paved with veiny marble. Enderby saw, with interest, an open Roman lavatory, but he waved the interest away. Those days were over. They were shown into their room by a young man in a wine-coloured coat, his nose squashed flat as in desperate contradiction of the myth of Roman profiles. Enderby gave him several worthless slips of metal and asked for vino. (Enderby in Rome, ordering vino.) The young man shook hands with himself fiercely, then tensely raised the upper hand, teeth clenched as though lifting a killing weight, showing the space between to Enderby-a bottle of air with a hand-bottom and hand-top. Trascati," he nodded direly, and went out, nodding. Enderby turned to his wife. She sat on the window-side of the double bed, looking out at the Via Nazionale. The little room was full of its noise-tram-clanks, horse-clops, Fiats and Lambrettas. "Tired, tired, tired," said Vesta, blue arcs back under her eyes, her face weary in the sharp Roman light. "I don't feel at all the thing."

"It's not -?" asked Enderby.

"No, of course it's not. This is our wedding-day, isn't it? I'll be all right when I've had a rest." She kicked off her shoes and then, as Enderby gulped, swiftly unhitched her stockings. He turned to the dull sights of the street: metropolitan dourness, no flashing Southern teeth, no song. Across the road a shop, as though for Enderby's own benefit, had a special display of holy pictures going cheap, ill-painted hagiographs festooned with rosary-beads. When he turned back towards the bed Vesta was already in it, her thin arms and shoulders uncovered. Not a voluptuous woman; her body pared to a decent female minimum. That was as it should be. Enderby had once caught his stepmother stripped off in the bathroom, panting with the exertion of one of her rare over-all washes, flesh-shaking, fat tits swinging like bells. He shuddered at the memory, his burring lips becoming, for the moment, those of his stepmother flinching at the cold sponge. There was a knock. Enderby had read Dante with an English crib; there was, he knew, a line which contained the word for "come in". He delved for it, and it came up just as the door opened. "All hope abandon," he called in fine Tuscan, "you who -" A long-faced waiter peered in, doubtful, then entered with his tray, leaving without waiting (a non-waiting waiter) for a tip. Enderby, a mad Englishman, sighed and poured wine. He shouldn't have said that. It was a bad omen. It was like Byron waking on his wedding-night and thinking that the bedroom fire was hell. He said:

"Darling. Would you care for a glass of this, darling?" He gulped some thirstily. A very nice little wine. "Help you to sleep if you're going to sleep." She nodded tiredly. Enderby poured another glass, the urine-gold flashing in the clear light, belching as it left the bottle. He gave the glass to her and she sat up to sip it. Fair down on her upper lip, Enderby noticed in love and pity, his arm round her shoulders to support her sitting up. She drank half a glassful and at once, to Enderby's shock and horror, reacted violently. Pushing him and the glass away, she fought to leave the bed, her cheeks bulging. She ran on bare feet to the washbowl, gripped its sides, groaned and started to vomit. Enderby, much concerned, followed and stood by her, slender, defenceless in her minimal unalluring summer underwear. "That's your lunch coming up," said Enderby, watching."A bit fatty, wasn't it?" With a roar more came up. Enderby poured water from the water-bottle.

"Oh God," she groaned. "Oh Jesus." She turned on both taps and began to retch again.

"Drink this," said Enderby. "Water." She gulped from the proffered glass and vomited again, but this time mostly water, groaning between spasms blasphemously. "There," said Enderby, "you'll be better now. That was a nasty sort of pudding they served up. All jammy."

"Oh Jesus Christ," retched Vesta (All jammy). Enderby watched kindly, a past master on visceral dysfunctions, as she got it all up. Then weak, wet, limp, spent, she staggered back to the bed. "A good start," she gasped. "Oh God."

"That's the worst of meals on aircraft," said Enderby, sage after his first flight. "They warm things up, you see. Have some more wine. That'll settle your stomach." Fascinated by the near-rhymes, he began softly to repeat. "That'll settle, that'll settle," pacing the room softly, one hand in pocket, the other holding wine.

"Oh, shut up," moaned Vesta. "Leave me alone."

"Yes, darling," said Enderby, accommodating. "Certainly, darling. You have a little sleep, darling." He heard himself wheedling like a foreign whore, so he straightened up and said more gruffly, "I'll go and see about traveller's cheques." Saying that, he was standing up against the door, as if challenging it or measuring himself against it. When a knock came he was able to open it at once. The long-faced boy looked startled. His arms were full of roses, red and white. "Fiori," he said, "per la signora."

"Who from?" frowned Enderby, feeling for an accompanying card. "Good God," he said, finding it. "Rawcliffe. And Rawcliffe's in the bar. Darling," he called, turning. But she was asleep.

3

"Ah," said Rawcliffe. "You got the message, got the flowers? Good. Where," he asked, "is Mrs Enderby?" He was dressed as when Enderby had last seen him, in an old-fashioned heavy suit with a gold watch-chain, Kipling-moustached, beetle-goggled, drunk.

"Mrs Enderby," said Enderby, "is dead."

"I beg your pardon," said Rawcliffe. "Already? Roman fever? How very Jamesian!"

"Oh, I see what you mean," said Enderby. "Sorry. She only became Mrs Enderby today, you see. It takes some getting used to. I thought you meant my stepmother."

"I see, I see. And your stepmother's dead, is she? How very interesting!" Enderby shyly examined the bar, the shelves massed with liquors of all countries, the silver tea-urn, the espresso apparatus. Behind the bar a short fat man kept bowing. "Have some of this Strega," said Rawcliffe. "Dante," he said, and the fat un-Dantesque man came to attention. Rawcliffe then spoke most intricate Italian, full, as far as Enderby could judge, of subjunctives, but with a most English accent. "Strega," said Dante. "Are you," said Enderby nastily, "in all the Italian anthologies, too?" He was given, with flourishes, a glass of Strega..

"Ha, ha," said Rawcliffe, without much mirth. "As a matter of fact, there's a very good Italian translation of that little poem of mine, you know. It goes well into Italian. Now, tell me, tell me, Enderby, what are you writing at the moment?"

"Nothing," said Enderby. "I finished my long poem, The Pet Beast. I told you about that."

"You most certainly did," said Rawcliffe, bowing. Dante bowed too. "A very good idea, that was. I look forward to reading it."

"What I'd like to know," said Enderby, "is what you're doing here. You don't look as though you're on holiday, not in those clothes you don't."

Rawcliffe did something Enderby had read about but never before seen: he placed a finger against his nose. "You're right," he said. "Most certainly not on holiday. At work. Always at work. Some more Strega?"

"With me," said Enderby. Dante bowed and bowed, filling their glasses. "And one for you, too," said Enderby, expansive, on his honeymoon. Dante bowed and said to Rawcliffe, "Americano?"

"Inglese," said Rawcliffe.

"Americani," said Dante, leaning forward, confidential, "fack you. Mezzo mezzo."

"Un poeta," said Rawcliffe, "that's what he is. Poeta. Feminine in form, masculine in gender."

"I beg your pardon," said Enderby. "Did you by any chance mean anything by that?"

"As a matter of fact," said Rawcliffe, "it's my belief that all we poets are really a sort of a blooming hermaphrodite. Like Tiresias, you know. And you're on your honeymoon, eh? Have some more Strega."

"What exactly do you mean by that?" said Enderby, wary.

"Mean? You are a one for meaning, aren't you? The meaning of meaning. I. A. Richards and the Cambridge school. A lot of twaddle, if you ask my opinion. All right, if you won't have more Strega with me I'll have more Strega with you."

"Strega," said Enderby.

"Your Italian's coming along very nicely," said Rawcliffe. "A couple of nice vowels there. A couple of nice Stregas," he said, as these appeared. "God bless, all." He drank. He sang, "Who would an ender be, let him come hither."

"How did you know we were here?" asked Enderby.

"Air terminal," said Rawcliffe. "Today's arrivals from London. Always interesting. Here, they said honeymoon. Remarkable, Enderby, in a man of your age."

"What do you mean by that?" asked Enderby.

"You gentlemen ave Strega on the ouse," said Dante, pouring.

"Tante grazie," said Rawcliffe. "There you go, Enderby, worrying about meaning all the time." He sang, standing to attention. "Would you a spender be, would you a mender be, God save the Queen. No meaning there, is there? Would you a fender be. That's better still. Too much meaning in your poetry, Enderby. Always has been." His words rode over a few drinker's belches. "Pardon, as they say." He drank.

"Strega," said Enderby. "E uno per Lei, Dante."

"You can't say that," said Rawcliffe, hiccoughing. "What bloody awful Italian you speak, Enderby! Bad as your poetry. Pardon. Fair criticism. But I will say that the monster idea of yours was a bloody good one. Too good to make a poem out of it. Ah, Rome," he said, lyrically, "fair, fair Rome. Remarkable place, Enderby, no place like it. Listen, Enderby. I'm going to a party tonight. At the house of the Principessa Somebody-or-other. Would you like to come? You and your missus? Or does it behove you to retire early this fair nuptial night?" He shook his head. "La Rochefoucauld, or some other bloody scoundrel, said you mustn't do it on the first night. What did he know about it, eh? Homosexuals, the lot of them. All writers are homosexuals. They have to be. Stands to reason. To hell with writing." He poured his last few drops of Strega on to the floor. "That," he said, "is for the Lares and Penates to come and lap up. A potation, that is to say a libation. They come to lap it up like bloody big dogs. More Strega."

"Don't you think?" said Enderby cautiously. "I mean, if you're going to a party -"

"Not for hours yet," said Rawcliffe. "Hours and hours and hours. Plenty of time for you to get it over and done with several times over before it starts. If you can, that is. Shellfish are bloody good, you know. Magnificent augmenters of male potency. Scampi. Dante," he cried, "send for some scampi for this here signore. He is a newly married man, God bless him." Rawcliffe swayed on his stool. Dante said:

"Today you are married? Very good. You ave Strega on the ouse." He poured. "Salute," he toasted. "Molti bambini," he winked.

"Lovely grub," said Rawcliffe, drinking. Enderby drank and said:

"What you've been saying is very indelicate. You ought by rights to be bashed."

"Oh dear dear dear me, no," said Rawcliffe, shaking his head, his eyes shut. "Not on a day like this. Much too warm. Pace, pace, this is a city of peace." He began to fall asleep.

"Troppo," confided Dante. "Too mash. You get im ome."

"No," said Enderby. "Damn it all, I'm on my honeymoon. I don't like him, anyway, Nasty bit of work."

"Jealous," mumbled Rawcliffe, eyes still shut, head drooping to the counter. "I'm in all the anthologies. He's not. Popular poet, me. Known and loved and respected by all." He then neatly, as in a professional tumbling act, collapsed with the stool on to the deep carpet of the bar, falling, it seemed, quite slowly, in a rotary figure. The noise, though muffled, was loud enough to summon men in skimpy suits from the hotel lobby. These spoke very fast Italian and looked with hate upon Enderby. Enderby said:

"Nothing to do with me. He was drunk when I met him." Surlily he added, "Damn it all, I'm on my honeymoon." Two men bent over Rawcliffe and Enderby was afforded an intimate, non-tourist's, glimpse of the city, for one man had dandruff and the other boil-scars on his nape. Rawcliffe opened one eye and said, very clearly:

"Don't trust him. He's a spy pretending to be on his honeymoon. Made me drunk to shteal official shecretsh. Overthrow of Italian government plot dishcovered, alleged. Bombs shecreted in Foro Traiano and Tempio di Vesta."

"You leave my wife out of this," threatened Enderby.

"Ah, wife," said one of the men. "Capita." All was clear. Enderby had knocked Rawcliffe down in wronged husband's legitimate anger. A matter of honour. Rawcliffe now snored. The two men returned to their lobby to see about a taxi for him. Dante said to Enderby, tentatively: "Strega?"

"Si," said Enderby. He signed the chit and counted the number of other chits he had signed, all for Strega. Amazing. He would have to go easy, he hadn't all the money in the world. But, of course, he reflected, after this honeymoon he would start earning money. The capital was there to be spent; Vesta had said so.

Rawcliffe ceased snoring, smacked his lips, and said: "Thou hast wrongedst me, O Enderby." His eyes did not open. "I wished no harm. Merely desired to crown your nuptials in appropriate manner." He then gave a loud snore. A taxi-driver with a square of moustache dead under his nose entered, shook his head tolerantly, and started to lift Rawcliffe by the shoulders. Members of the hotel staff appeared, including menials in off-white jackets, and Dante struck a pose behind the bar. All were waiting for Enderby to lift Rawcliffe's feet.

Enderby said: "I know he's Inglese and I'm Inglese, but it bloody well stops there. I can't stand him, see? Io," he said, piecing the sentence together painfully, "non voglio aiutare." Everybody inclined, with smiles, to show that they appreciated this attempt on the part of an Englishman to use their beautiful language, but they ignored the meaning, perhaps having been well schooled by this snoring Rawcliffe. "I won't help," repeated Enderby, picking up Rawcliffe's feet. (There was a hole in the left sole.) "This is no way to be spending a bloody honeymoon," said Enderby, helping, very awkwardly, to carry Rawcliffe out. "Especially in Rome." As he passed, now panting, the ranked officials of the hotel, these bowed fully or gently inclined, all with smiles.

The Via Nazionale was afire with sun and brilliant with people. The taxi throbbed, waiting, by the kerb. Enderby and the driver sweated as they pushed their way, Rawcliffe still snoring. A sort of begging friar rattled his box at Enderby. "For cough," said Enderby. An American, not the John one, poised his camera to shoot. "For cough," snarled expiring Enderby. The driver, raising his knee to support the snoring body, freed his hand to open the passenger-door. Rawcliffe, like six months' laundry, was bundled in. "There," said Enderby. "All yours."

"Dove?" asked the driver.

"Oh, God, yes, where to?" Enderby manhandled, still panting, the loud, still Rawcliffe, trying to shout, "Where do you live, you bastard? Come on, tell us where."

Rawcliffe came awake with startling briskness, as though he had merely pretended to pass out so that he might be carried. His blue eyes, quite clear, flashed patches of Roman sky at Enderby. "Tiber, Father Tiber," he said, "on whom the Romans prey. The Via Mancini by the Ponte Matteotti."

The driver eagerly drank that in. "O world, O life, O time," intoned Rawcliffe. "Here lies one whose name was not writ in water. In all the anthologies." He returned to a heavy sleep with louder snores than before. Enderby hesitated, then, since the whole waiting world seemed to expect it of him, roughly made room next to Rawcliffe. They drove off. The driver honked down the Via Nazionale and turned abruptly into the Via IV Novembre. Then, as they sped north up the Via del Corso, Rawcliffe came quite alive again, sat up sedately, and said:

"Have you such a thing as a cigarette on you, my dear Enderby? An English cigarette, preferably."

"Are you all right now?" asked Enderby. "Can I get out here and let you go home on your own?"

"Over there on the left," pointed Rawcliffe, "you'll find the Pantheon if you look carefully. And there"-his hand swished right, striking Enderby-"down the street of humility, at the end, is the Fontana di Trevi. There you will throw your coin and be photographed by touts in berets. Do give me a cigarette, there's a good fellow." Enderby offered a single crushed Senior Service. Rawcliffe took it steadily without thanks, lighting up as firm as a rock. "We come now, Enderby, to the Piazza Colonna. There it is, the column itself, and at the top Marcus Aurelius, see."

"I could get off here," suggested Enderby, "and go back to the hotel. My wife isn't too good, you know."

"Isn't she?" said Rawcliffe. "Not too good at what? A great admirer of poets, though. I'll say that for her. She always liked my little poem in the anthologies. It's quite likely, you know, Enderby, that you're going to be a great man. She likes to back winners. She backed one very good one, but that was in the field of sport. Poets don't get killed as racing-drivers do, you know. Look, the Piazza del Popolo. And now we're coming up to the Via Flaminia and there, you can just see, is Father Tiber himself, into whom the Romans spit."

"What do you know about my wife?" asked Enderby. "Who told you I'd married Vesta Bainbridge?"

"It was in the popular papers," said Rawcliffie. "Didn't you see? Perhaps she kept them from you. Pete Bainbridge's widow to remarry, they said. The popular papers didn't seem to know very much about you. But when you're dead there'll be biographies, you know. There haven't been any biographies of Pete Bainbridge, so there's a lot to be said for not being known to the readers of the Daily Mirror. Ah, here is the Via Mancini." He banged the glass partition and made grotesque boxing gestures at the driver. The driver nodded, swerved madly, and came to rest before a small drinking-shop. "This is where I have my humble lodging," said Rawcliffe. "Above here."

"Do you really believe that?" asked Enderby. "I thought perhaps I appealed to a sort of protective instinct in her. And I'm very fond of her. Very, very fond. In love," said Enderby. Rawcliffe nodded and nodded, paying the driver. He seemed to have recovered completely from his Strega-bout. The two poets stood in the warm street, cooled by river air. Enderby let the taxi go and said, "Damn. I've let that taxi go. I ought to get back to my wife." He reminded himself that he disliked Rawcliffe because he was in all the anthologies. "It strikes me," said Enderby, "that you were swinging the bloody lead. I needn't have come with you at all."

"Strega," said Rawcliffe, nodding, "passes through my system very quickly. I think, now we're here, we'll have some more. Or perhaps a litre or so of Frascati."

"I must get back. She may be all right now. She may be wondering where I am."

"There's no hurry. The bride's supposed to wait, you know. Supposed to lie in cool sheets smelling of lavender while the bridegroom gets drunk and impotent. The Toby night, you know. That's what it used to be called. After Tobias in the Apocrypha. Come on, Enderby, I'm lonely. A brother poet is lonely. And I have things to tell you."

"About Vesta?"

"Oh, no. Much more interesting. About you and your poetic destiny."

They entered the little shop. It was dark and warm. On the walls were vulgar mosaics, pseudo-Etruscan, of prancing men and women in profile. There were glass jars of wine and cloudy tumblers. An old man from the age of Victor Emmanuel sucked an ample moustache; two sincere-eyed rogues, round-faced and, despite the heat, in overcoats, whispered roguery to each other. A champing old woman, each step an effort, brought a litre of urine to two English poets. "Salute," said Rawcliffe. He shuddered at the first draught, found the second blander. "Tell me, Enderby," he said, "how old would you say I am?"

"Old? Oh, about fifty."

"Fifty-two. And when do you think I stopped writing?"

"I didn't know you had stopped."

"Oh, yes, a long time, a long, long time. I haven't written a line of verse, Enderby, since I was twenty-seven. There, that surprises you, doesn't it? But writing verse is so difficult, Enderby, so so difficult. The only people who can write verse after the age of thirty are the people who do the competitions, you know, in the week-end papers. You can add to that, of course, the monkey-gland boys, of whom Yeats was one, but that's not playing the game, by God. The greatest senile poet of the age, by God, by grace of this bloody man Voronoff. But the rest of us? There are no dramatic poets left, Enderby, and, ha ha, certainly no epic poets. We're all lyric poets, then, and how long does the lyric urge last? No bloody time at all, my boy, ten years at the most. It's no accident, you know, that they all died young, mainly, for some reason, in Mediterranean lands. Dylan, of course, died in America, but the Atlantic's a sort of Mediterranean, when you come to think of it. What I mean is, American civilization's a sort of seaboard civilizaton, when you come to think of it, and not a river civilization at all." Rawcliffe shook his head in a fuddled gesture, the Frascati having wakened the sleeping Strega. "What I mean is, Enderby, that you're bloody lucky to be writing poetry at all at the age of-what is your age?"

"Forty-five."

"At the age of forty-five, Enderby. What I mean is, what are you looking forward to now? Eh?" He let more Frascati stagger into his glass. Outside, the Roman daylight flashed and rippled. "Don't kid yourself, my dear boy, about long bloody narrative poems, or plays, or any of that nonsense. You're a lyric poet, and the time is coming for the lyric gift to die. Who knows? Perhaps it's died already." He looked narrowly at Enderby over the glass flask of Frascati swimming and dancing in his grip. "Don't expect any more epiphanies, any more mad dawn inspirations, Enderby. That poem of mine, the one in the anthologies, the one I'll live by if I'm going to live at all, I wrote that bugger, you know, Enderby, at the age of twenty-one. Youth. It's the only thing worth having." He nodded sadly. As in a film, an easy symbol of youth orchestrated his words, passing by outside, a very head-high girl of Rome with black hair and smoky sideburns, thrust breasts, liquid waist like Harry Ploughman's, animal haunches. "Yes, yes," said Rawcliffe, "youth." He drank Frascati and sighed. "Haven't you felt, Enderby, that your gift is dying? It's a gift appropriate to youth, you know, owing nothing to experience or learning. An athletic gift, really, a sportif gift." Rawcliffe dropped his jaw at Enderby, disclosing crooked teeth of various colours. "What are you going to do, Enderby, what are you going to do? To the world, of course, all this is nothing. If the world should enter and hear us mourning the death of Enderby's lyric gift, the world, Enderby, would deem us not merely mad. They would consider us, Enderby, to be, Enderby"-he leaned forward, hissing -"really talking about something else in the guise of the harmless. They would think us, perhaps, to be Communists."

"And," said Enderby, frightened by this vision of coming impotence, impotence perhaps already arrived, "what do you do?"

"I?" Rawcliffe was already drunk again. He shoulder-jerked spastically and munched the air like spaghetti. "I, Enderby, am the great diluter. Nothing can be taken neat any more. The question is this: do we live, or do we partly live? Or," he said, "do we," and he was suddenly blinking in the killing lights, before the cranking cameras, jerking upright to stand against the wall, as against, with spread thin arms, a rockcliff, a rawface, "die?" He then collapsed on the table, like a Hollywood absinthe-drinker, but none of the Romans took any notice.

4

"And," said Vesta, "what exactly do you think you've been doing? Where exactly do you think you've been?" Enderby felt a sort of stepson's guilt, the only kind he really knew, looking at her, head hung. She was brilliant in a wide-skirted daffodil-yellow dress, penny-coloured hair smooth and shining, skin summer-honeyed, healthy again, her eyes green, wide, nasty, a most formidable and desirable woman. Enderby said, mumbling: "It was Rawcliffe, you see." She folded her bare arms. "You know Rawcliffe," chumbled Enderby and, a humble and hopeful attempt at palliation of his crime or crimes, "he's in all the anthologies."

"In all the bars, most likely, if I know anything about Rawcliffe. And you've been with him. I'm giving you fair warning, Harry. You keep out of the way of people like Rawcliffe. What's he doing in Rome, anyway? It all sounds very suspicious to me. What did he say? What was he telling you?"

"He said that being a lyric poet was really like being a racing motorist and that you've only lowered yourself to marry me because you'll be in all the biographies and will share in my eternal fame and glory, and he said that my poetic gift was dying and then what was I going to do? Then he passed out and I had to help carry him upstairs and that made me very thirsty. Then I couldn't find a taxi for a long time and I couldn't remember the name of the hotel. So that's why I'm late. But," said Enderby, "you didn't say anything about what time to be back, did you? You didn't say anything at all."

"You said you were going to cash traveller's cheques," said Vesta. "It was your duty to stay here, with me. A fine start to a honeymoon this is, isn't it, you going off with people like Rawcliffe to get drunk and listen to lies about your wife."

"What lies?"

"The man's a born liar. He was always trying to make passes at me."

"When? How do you know him?"

"Oh, he's been a journalist of sorts," said Vesta. "Always messing round on the fringes of things. He's probably here in films, I should think, just messing round. Look," she said very sternly, "in future you're not to go anywhere without me, do you understand? You just don't know the world, you're just too innocent to live. My job is to look after you, take charge of things for you."

"And my job?" said Enderby.

She smiled faintly. Enderby noticed that the bottle of Frascati, three-quarters full when he had left the bedroom, was now empty. She had certainly recovered. Outside was gentle Roman early evening. "What do we do now?" asked Enderby.

"We go and eat."

"It's a bit early for that, isn't it? Don't you think we ought to drink a little before eating?"

"You've drunk enough."

"Well," said Enderby, looking again at the empty Frascati bottle, "you haven't done too badly yourself. On an empty stomach, too."

"Oh, I sent down for some pizza and then a couple of club sandwiches," said Vesta. "I was starving. I still am." She took from the wardrobe a stole, daffodil-yellow, to cover her bare shoulders against evening cold or Italian lust. She had unpacked, Enderby noticed; she couldn't have been ill for very long. They left the bedroom and went down by the stairs, mistrusting the frail filigree charm of the lift. In the corridors, in the hotel lobby, men frankly admired Vesta. Bottom-pinchers, suddenly realized Enderby, all Italians were blasted bottom-pinchers; that raised a problem. And surely duels of honour were still fought in this backward country? Out on the Via Nazionale, Enderby walked a pace behind Vesta, smiling sourly up at the SPQR shields on the lamp standards. He didn't want any trouble. He hadn't before quite realized what a responsibility a wife was. "I was told," said Vesta, "that there's a little place on the Via Torino. Harry, why are you walking behind? Don't be silly; people are looking at you."

Enderby skipped to her side, but, invisible to her, his open hand was spread six inches behind her walking rump, as though warming itself at a fire. "Who told you?"

"Gillian Frobisher."

"That," said Enderby, "is the woman who nearly killed me with her Spaghetti Surprise."

"It was your own fault. We turn right here."

The restaurant was full of smeary mirrors and smelt strongly of cellar-damp and very old breadcrumbs. Enderby read the menu in gloom. The waiter was blue-jawed, lantern-jawed, untrustworthy, trying to peer, slyly, into Vesta's décolletage. Enderby wondered why such glamour surrounded the Italian cuisine. After all, it consisted only of a few allomorphs of paste, the odd sauce or so; the only Italian meat was veal. Nevertheless Enderby read "bifstek" and, with faint hope, ordered it. Vesta, starving, had worked through minestrone, a ravioli dish, some spaghetti mess or other, and was dipping artichoke leaves into oily vinegar, Enderby had begun to glow on a half-litre of Frascati when the alleged steak arrived. It was thin, white, on a cold plate. Enderby said to the waiter:

"Questo é vitello." He, who had, before his life with Vesta, subsisted on ghastly stews and dips in the jampot, now became steak-faced with thwarted gastronome's anger.

"Si, é vitelo, signore."

"I ordered beefsteak," cried furious Enderby, uncouth Englishman abroad, "not bloody veal. Not that it is bloody veal," he added, with poetic concern for verbal accuracy. "Fetch the manager."

"Now, Harry," rebuked Vesta. "We've had enough naughtiness for one day, haven't we? See, people are looking at you." The Roman eaters all round were shovelling away, swollen-eyed, sincerely voluble with each other. They ignored Enderby; they had seen his type before. The manager came, fat, small, shiftily black-eyed, breathing hard with suppressed indignation at Enderby.

"I ordered," said Enderby, "a steak. This is veal."

"Is a same thing," said the manager. "Veal is a cow. Beef is a cow. Ergo, beef is a veal."

"Are you," said Enderby, enraged by this syllogism, "trying to teach me what is a beefsteak and what is not? Are you trying to teach me my own bloody language?"

"Language, Harry, language," said Vesta ineptly.

"Yes, my own bloody language," cried Enderby. "He thinks he knows better than I do. Are you going to stick up for him?"

"Is a true," said the manager. "You not a eat, you pay just a same. What a you a order you a pay."

Enderby stood up, saying, "Oh, no. Oh, most certainly bloody well no." He looked down at Vesta, before whom frothed a zabaglione. "I'm not," he said, "paying for what I didn't order, and what I didn't order was that pallid apology down there. I'm going to eat somewhere else."

"Harry," she ordered, "sit down. Eat what you're given." She pinged her zabaglione glass pettishly with her spoon. "Don't make such a fuss over nothing."

"I don't like throwing money away," said Enderby, "and I don't like being insulted by foreigners."

"You," said Vesta, "are the foreigner. Now sit down."

Enderby grumpily sat down. The manager sneered in foreigner's triumph, ready to depart, having resolved the stupid fuss, meat being veal anyway, no argument about it. Enderby saw the sneer and stood up again, angrier. "I won't bloody well sit down," he said, "and he knows what he can do with this bloodless stuff here. If you're staying, I'm not."

Vesta's eyes changed from expression to expression rapidly, like the number-indicator of a bus being changed by the conductor. "All right," she said, "dear. Leave me some money to pay for my own meal. I'll see you in fifteen minutes in that open-air café place."

"Where?"

"On the Piazza di what's-its-name," she said, pointing.

"Repubblica," said the waiter, helpful.

"You keep your bloody nose out of this," said Enderby. "All right, then. I'll see you there." He left with her a large note for several thousand or million lire. From it the face of some allegorical lady looked up at Enderby in mute appeal.

Fifteen minutes later Enderby, gazing glumly at the colour-lit fountain, watching the Vespas and the Fiats and the sober crowds, sat near the end of a bottle of Frascati. It had come to him warm, and he had said to the terrace waiter. "Non freddo." The waiter had agreed that the bottle was non freddo and had gone off smiling. Now the bottle was less freddo than ever. It was a warm evening. Enderby felt a sudden strong longing for his old life, the stewed tea, the poetry in the lavatory, onanistic sex. Then, wanting to blubber, he realized that he was being very childish. It was right that a man should marry and be honeymooning among the fountains of Rome; it was right to want to be mature. But Rawdiffe had said something about poetry being a youthful gift, hence immature, cognate with the gifts of speed and alertness that made a man into a racing-driver. Was it possible that the gift was already leaving him, having stayed perhaps longer than was right? If so, what was he, what would he turn into?

Vesta arrived, a Vogue vision of beauty against the floodlit fountain. Fluttered and suddenly proud, Enderby stood up. She sat down, saying, "I was really ashamed of you in there. You behaved absolutely disgracefully. Naturally, I paid for the meal you ordered. I hate these petty wrangles over money."

"My money," said Enderby. "You shouldn't have done it."

"All right, your money. But, please remember, my dignity. I don't allow you or any man to make a fool out of me." She softened. "Oh, Harry, how could you, how could you behave like that? On the first day of our honeymoon, too. Oh, Harry, you upset me dreadfully."

"Have some wine," said Enderby. The waiter inclined with a Roman sneer, bold eyes of admiration for the signora. "That last lot," said Enderby, "was bloody caldo. This time I want it freddo, see? Bloody freddo." The waiter went, sneering and leering. "How I hate this bloody town!" said Enderby, suddenly shivering. Vesta began to snivel quietly. "What's the trouble?" asked Enderby.

"Oh, I thought things would be different. I thought you'd be different." Suddenly she stiffened, staring straight ahead of her, as though waiting for some psychic visitation. Enderby looked at her, his mouth open. Her mouth opened, too, and, as from the mouth of a spiritualistic medium, there was emitted what sounded like the greeting of a Red Indian "control":

Haaaaooooo.

Enderby listened in silent wonder, his mouth open wider. It was a belch.

"Oh," she said, "sorry. I couldn't help that at all, really I couldn't."

"Let it come," said Enderby kindly. "You can always say excuse-me."

Barrrrrp.

"I do beg your pardon," said Vesta. "You know, I don't think I feel frightfully well. I don't think this change of food is agreeing with me." Rorrrrp. Auuuuu.

"Would you like to go back to the hotel?" asked Enderby eagerly.

"I think I'll have to." Borrrrphhh. "We're having the most unfortunate day, aren't we?"

"The Toby night," said Enderby with relief. "Like Tobias in the Apocrypha." He took her arm.

1

"Piazza San Pietro," said the guide. "St Peter's Square." He was a young Roman with a crewcut, insolent, bold eyes for the ladies. "Place Saint Pierre. St Peter's Platz." Vulgar, decided Enderby. Pretentious. The guide saw Enderby's sourness, saw that he was not impressed. "Plaza San Pedro," he said, as though playing a trump card.

It was a real scorcher, and Vesta was dressed for a real scorcher in beige linen, something austere and expensive by Berhanyer. She had amazing powers of recuperation. Last night her stomach upset had jabbered and frothed away like an idiot child even when, eventually, she had got to sleep. Enderby had lain in clean pyjamas listening tolerantly, her slim back and haunches visible through the diaphanous nightdress, neat but unseductive, heaving occasionally with new accessions of wind, the bedclothes having been kicked away by Enderby because of the warmth of the night. The bedside lamp out, she had become a mere parcel of noises which had filled Enderby with weak nostalgia for his single days, so that he had gone to sleep to dream of stewpans and the craft of verse, the sea. At three-thirty by his luminous wristwatch (a wedding-present), he had awakened with his heart punch-balling desperately because of Strega and Frascati to hear her still fizzing and pooping healthily away. But, waking at nine o'clock to the peevish traffic of the Via Nazionale, he had seen her at the window, eating.

An essential task had not yet been accomplished. Enderby, blinking and squinting, noting that he had slept with his teeth in, wondering where he had put his contact lenses, was emboldened by morning chordee to say, "Oughtn't you to come back to bed for a while? What I mean is, you ought really." Impromptu verses, wittily gross, came into his head to give the lie to Rawcliffe's raised finger of doom; the Muse was still very much with him:

The marriage contract was designed,

Despite what all the notaries think.

To be by only one pen signed,

And that is mine, and full of ink.

Enderby hesitated about saying these verses aloud. Anyway, Vesta said:

"I've been up for hours. I had a ham omelette in the restaurant and now I'm eating the breakfast I ordered for you. But it's only croissants and jam and things. Look, we're going on a little excursion. I thought it might be fun. We're going to see Rome. The coach calls here at nine-thirty, so you'd better hurry." Waving the excursion tickets in a shaft of Roman sun, then cracking a kind of hard bread: "You don't seem very enthusiastic. Don't you want to see Rome?"

"No." Ask a straight question and you get a straight answer.

"You call yourself a poet. Poets are supposed to be full of curiosity. I don't understand you at all."

Anyway, here they were, stepping out of the coach in full noon, to inspect the Obelisk of Nero's Circus. The guide, who had decided that Enderby was a Spaniard, said ingratiatingly, "Obelisco del Circo de Nerón." "Si," said Enderby, unenticed, "Look," he said to Vesta, "I'm parched. I must have a drink." It was all the solids they'd been forced to eat-the Pincian Gate and the Borghese Gallery and the Pincio Terrace and the Mausoleum of Caesar Augustus and the Pantheon and the Senate House and the Palace of Justice and the Castle of St Angelo and the Via della Conciazione. Enderby remembered what the great poet Clough had said about Rome. Rubbishy, he had called it. Enderby was always ready to defer to the judgement of a great poet. "Rubbishy," he quoted.

"You know," said Vesta, "I do believe you're really quite a philistine."

"A thirsty one."

"All right. It's nearly the end of the tour, anyway." Enderby, who had developed in less than a day a sightless instinct for drinking shops, led Vesta down the Road of Conciliation. Soon they were sitting very cool and drinking Frascati. Vesta sighed and said:

"Peace."

Enderby choked on his wine. "I beg your pardon?"

"That's what we all want, isn't it? Peace. Peace and order. Certitude. Certainty. The mind quiet and at peace in the presence of order." Her skin was so clear, so youthful, under the widebrimmed hat (also from the Madrid workshop of the crafty young Berhanyer), and her body so elegantly decked; exquisite the stallion-flared nostrils and honest and yet clever the green eyes. "Peace," she said again, then sighed once more. "Och."

"What was that word?" asked Enderby.

"Peace."

"No, no, the one after."

"I didn't say anything after. You're hearing things, Harry boy."

"What did you call me then?"

"Really, what is the matter with you? Rome's peculiar magic seems to be having a curious influence… And you're drinking far far more than you drink in England."

"You cured my stomach," said Enderby ungrudgingly. "I find I can down any quantity of this stuff without any ill effects. That diet you put me on certainly worked wonders." He nodded cheerily at her and poured more wine from the flask.

Vesta looked slightly disgusted; she flared her nostrils further, saying, "I talk about peace and you talk about stomachs."

"One stomach," said Enderby. "Poets talk about stomachs and Fem editors talk about peace. That seems a fair division."

"We can look forward to so much peace," said Vesta, "the two of us. That beautiful house in Sussex, overlooking the downs. It breathes peace, doesn't it?"

"You're too young to want peace," said Enderby. "Peace is for the old."

"Och, we all want it," said Vesta fiercely. "And I feel it here, you know, in Rome. A big big peace."

"A big piece of peace," said Enderby. "Pax Romana. Where they made a desolation they called it a peace. What absolute nonsense! It was a nasty, vulgar sort of civilization, only dignified by being hidden under a lot of declensions. Peace? They didn't know what peace was. The release of the vomitorium after fieldfares in syrup and quail's brains in aspic and a go at a little slave-boy between courses. They knew that. They knew the catharsis after seeing women torn apart by mangy starved lions in an arena. But they didn't know peace. If they'd been quiet and reposeful for thirty seconds they'd have heard too many voices telling them that the Empire was all a bloody swindle. Don't talk to me about the bloody pax Romana." Enderby snorted, not quite knowing why he was so moved.

Vesta smiled in tolerance. "That's not real Rome. That's Hollywood Rome."

"Real Rome was Hollywood Rome, only more so," said Enderby. "And what's really left of it now? Mouldering studio-lots. Big vulgar broken columns. The imperial publicity of P. Virgil Maro, yes-man to Augustus and all his triumphal arches, now dropped. Boots boots boots boots marching up and down again. Rome." Enderby made, appropriately but vulgarly, the old Roman sign. "A big maggoty cheese, with too many irregular verbs."

Vesta was still smiling, somewhat like Our Lady in the vision Enderby had had that slippery day, travelling to London with a poem to give birth to. "You just don't listen, do you? You just don't give me a chance to say what I want to say."

"Bloody Roman peace," snorted Enderby.

"I didn't mean that Empire. I meant the other one being nourished in the catacombs."

"Oh God, no," murmured Enderby. Vesta drank some wine and then, quite gently, belched. She did not say excuse me; she did not seem to notice. Enderby stared. She said, "Doesn't it seem to you to be a bit like coming home? ¥ou know-the return of the prodigal? You opted out of the Empire and have regretted it ever since. It's no good denying it; it's there in your poems all the time."

Enderby breathed deeply. "In a way," he said, "we all regret the death of universal order. A big smile of teeth. But that smile is a smile of dead teeth. No, not even just dead. False. It never began to be alive. Not for me, anyway."

"Liar."

"What do you know about it?" said Enderby, truculent.

"Oh, more than you think." She sipped her Frascati as though it were very hot tea. "You've never been much interested in me, have you? Not really. You've never troubled to find out anything about me."

"We haven't known each other very long," said Enderby, somewhat guiltily.

"Long enough to get married. No, be honest. To Enderby, Enderby's always been the important thing. Enderby the end of Enderby."

"That's not really true," said Enderby doubtfully. "I've regarded my work as important, I suppose. But not myself. I've not cared very much for my own comfort or honour or glory."

"Exactly. You've been too interested in yourself to be interested in those things. Enderby in a void. Enderby spinning round and round in an eternal lavatory."

"That's not fair. That's not true at all."

"You see? You're getting really interested. You're prepared for a good long talk about Enderby. Supposing we talk about me instead."

"Gladly," said Enderby, settling himself in resignation. Vesta pushed her wine-glass away and, with slim hands folded on the table, said:

"How do you think I was brought up?"

"Oh," said Enderby, "we know all about that, don't we? Good Scottish home. Calvinist. Another imperial dream to be opted out of."

"Oh, no," said Vesta, "not at all. Not Calvinist. Catholic. Just like you." She smiled sweetly.

"What?" squawked Enderby, aghast.

"Yes," said Vesta, "Catholic. There are Catholics in Scotland, you know. Lots and lots of them. It was intended that I should be a nun. There, that's a surprise for you, isn't it?"

"Not really," said Enderby. "Granted that original premiss, which I'm still trying to digest, not at all a surprise. You wear your clothes like a nun."

"What a very odd thing to say!" said Vesta. "What, I wonder, do you mean by that?"

"Why didn't you tell me before?" asked Enderby, agitated. "I mean, we've lived under the same roof for, oh, for months, and you've never breathed a word about it."

"Why should I have done? It never seemed relevant to anything we ever talked about. And you never showed any curiosity about me. As I've already said, you have, for a poet, surprisingly little curiosity."

Enderby looked at her, definitely curiously: by rights, this revelation should have modified her appearance, but she still seemed a slim Protestant beauty, cognate with his adolescent vision, an angel of release.

She said, "Anyway, it makes no difference. I left the Church when I was, oh, when I married Pete. He, as everybody but you knows, had already been married and divorced. I was drifting anyway; I didn't believe any more. Pete believed in motor engines, I'll say that for him, and he used to pray before racing, though I don't know what to; perhaps to some archetypal internal combustion engine. Pete was a nice boy." She drained her glass.

"Have some more wine," said Enderby.

"Yes, I will, just a little. Rome has a peculiar atmosphere, hasn't it? Don't you feel that? It makes me, somehow, feel that I'm empty, empty of belief and so on."

"Be careful," said Enderby, very clearly, leaning across. "Be very careful indeed of feeling like that. Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare. But don't you start thinking that it's a great pure mother calling you home. You can't go home, anyway. You're living in sin. We were only married in a registry office, remember."

"And are we living in sin?" asked Vesta coolly. "I haven't noticed particularly."

"Well," said Enderby, confused, "that's what the world would think if the world happened to know and to be Catholic. We're not, of course, really, as you say, living in sin at all."

"You've contracted out of everything in your time, haven't you? Out of the Church, out of society, out of the family -"

"Damn it all, I am, after all, a poet -"

"Everything goes into the lavatory, everything. Even the act of love."

Enderby flushed flea-coloured. "What do you mean by that? What do you know about that? I'm just the same as anybody else, except that I'm not accustomed, except that it's been a long time, except that I'm ugly and shy and -"

"Everything's going to be put right. You just wait. You'll see." She gave him, forgiving, a kind cool hand. Anything he might then have wanted to say was snatched from his very lungs by a massive silver plunging of claws, swallowed, as all sounds of angelic noontime were swallowed, by a sudden boisterous revelry of bells, huge throats of white metal baying, snarling, hurling, fuming at the sky, the heavens of Rome a nickel and aluminium flame of bells.

2

After sauced pasta and a straw-harnessed globe of Chianti, Vesta's proposal seemed reasonable enough. Because she spoke of the process rather than the end: cool breezes stirred by the fan of the moving coach; the stop for tasting the wines of the Frascati vineyards; the wide sheet of lake and the albergo on its shore. And then the rolling back to Rome in early evening. It was more than a proposal, anyway. When Enderby said yes she promptly pulled the tickets out of her handbag. "But," said Enderby, "are we to spend all our time in Rome riding in coaches?"

"There's a lot to see, isn't there? And you'd better see it all just so you can confirm that it's rubbishy."

"It is rubbishy, too." And Enderby, in after-lunch somnolence, thought particularly of that ghastly Arco di Costantino which was like a petrified and sempiternal page of the Daily Mirror, all cartoons and lapidary headlines. But a lake would be, especially in this cruel mounting heat, different altogether. Rome was really best taken in liquid form-wine, fountains and Aqua Sacra. Enderby approved of Aqua Sacra. Charged with a wide selection of windy chemicals, it brought the wind up lovely and contrived a civilized evacuation of the bowels. In these terms he recommended it seriously to Vesta.

Enderby was surprised that this lake was to be visited by so many. Boarding the coach at the hotel, he had immediately prepared for sleep; almost at once they, and the jabbering polyglot others, had been told to get out. They were at some nameless piazza, sweltering and bone-dry, mocked by a fountain. There, their metal blistering in the sun, stood a fleet of coaches. Men with numbered placards stuck on sticks yelled for their squads, and obedient people, frowning and wrinkling in the huge light, marched on to markers. "We're Number Six," said Vesta. They marched.

Heat was intense in the coach; it had cooked to a turn in a slow oven. Even Vesta glowed. Enderby became a kind of fountain, his bursting sweat almost audible. And a worried man came on to the coach, calling, "Where is Dr Buchwald?" in many languages, so that a kind of fidgety sense of responsibility for this missing one pervaded the coach and engendered scratchiness. In front of Enderby a Portuguese snored, his head on the shoulder of a Frenchman, a stranger; Americans camera-recorded everything, like the scene of a crime; there were two chortling Negroes; a large ham-pink German family spoke of Rome in serious and regretful cadences, churning the sights and sounds into long compound sausage-words. Enderby closed his eyes.

Vaguely, through the haze of his doze, he was aware of comforting wind fanned in by the movement of the coach. "A very popular lake," he said sleepily to Vesta; "must be. All these people." The convoy was rolling south. Through the coach loudspeaker came the voice of the guide, in Italian, French, German and American, and the intermittent drone was finneganswaked by lightly sleeping Enderby into a parachronic lullaby chronicle, containing Constantine the grandgross and battlebottles fought by lakes which were full of lager. He awoke, laughing, to see villas and vineyards and burning country, then slept again, carrying into deeper sleep a coin-image of Vesta looking on him protectively with the protectiveness of a farmer's wife carrying a pig to market.

He was awakened, smacking dry lips, to a small town of great charm and cleanliness, napkin-carrying waiters waiting on a wide terrace full of tables. Stiff stretching coachloads got out to drink. Here, Enderby understood, they were very near to Frascati, and that wine that was so shy of travel had travelled the least possible distance. White dust, heat, the shimmering flask on the table. Enderby felt suddenly well and happy. He smiled at Vesta and took her hand, saying:

"Queer that we're both renegade Catholics, isn't it? You were right when you said that it's a bit like coming home. What I mean is, we understand a country like this better than the Protestants. We belong to its traditions." He indicated, with a kind smile, a couple of hungry-eyed children at the foot of the terrace steps, the elder of the two solemnly nose-picking. "Even if you don't believe any longer," said Enderby, "you're bound to find England a bit strange, a bit inimical. I mean, take all the churches they stole from us. I mean, they can keep them for all I care, but they ought to be reminded occasionally that they're really still ours." He looked round the full drinking terrace happily, soothed by the jabber of alien phonemes.

Vesta smiled somewhat sourly and said: "I wish you wouldn't talk in your sleep. Not in public, anyway."

"Why, what was I saying?"

"You were saying, "Down with the Pope", or words to that effect. It's a good thing that not many people on this trip can understand English."

"That's funny," said Enderby. "I wasn't even thinking of the Pope. That's very curious. Amazing what the subconscious mind can get up to, isn't it?"

"Perhaps you'd better stay awake on this leg of the journey," ordered Vesta. "It's the last leg."

"I mean, it isn't as though anybody mentioned the Pope, or anything, is it?" puzzled Enderby. "Look, people are climbing aboard."

They followed the chatter, smiling faintly at their fellow-passengers as they moved down the aisle of the coach. There had been some changing-round of seats, but that didn't matter: at the very furthest, you could not be more than one seat away from the window. A paunched small cocky Frenchman, however, linen-suited and with panama as though resident in a colony, hurled and fluted sharp words at a German who, he alleged, had taken his seat. The German barked and sobbed indignant denial. A tipsy lean Portuguese, thus encouraged by a fellow-Latin, started on an innocent red cheese of a Dutchman: a claim had, at the outset, been staked to that seat nearest the driver and renewed at this stop for refreshment-see, your fat Dutch arse is sitting on it, my map of Rome and environs. Europe now warred with itself, so that a keen-eyed Texan called, "Aw, pipe down." The guide came aboard and spoke French, saying that as a little infant at school he had been taught to keep to the first seat allotted to him. Enderby nodded; in French that sounded reasonable and civilized. The guide translated into American, saying, "Like you were in school, stick to your own seat and don't try and grab somebody else's. Okay?"

Enderby felt himself growing instantly red and mad. He cried: "Who the hell do you think you are-the Pope?" It was an Englishman's never-never-never protest against foreign overbearingness. Vesta said, "Why don't you keep your big mouth -" The words of Enderby were translated swiftly into many tongues, and faces turned to look at Enderby, some wondering, others doubtful, yet others fearful. But one elderly man, a grey and dapper raisonneur-type, stood to say, in English. "We are rebuked. He reminds us of the purpose of our journey. Catholic Europe must not be divided." He sat down, and people began to look more warmly on Enderby, one wizened brownish woman offering him a piece of Belgian chocolate. "What did he mean by that?" asked Enderby of Vesta. "The purpose of our journey, he said. We're going to see this lake, aren't we? What's a lake got to do with Catholic Europe?"

"You'll see," soothed Vesta, and then, "I think, after all, it might be better if you did have a little sleep."

But Enderby could not now doze. The countryside slid past, brilliant distant townships on high sunlit plateaux, olive, vine, and cypress, villas, browned fields, endless blue sky. And at length came the lake, a wide white sheet of waters in laky air, the heat of the day mitigated by it, and the little inn close by. The guide, who had sulked and been silent since Enderby's blast of brash Britishry in rebuke, now stood up to say, "We stay here two hours. The coach will be parked in the parking-place for coaches." He indicated, with a sketchy squizzle of his Roman fingers, roughly where that might be. He frowned at the Enderbys as they came down the coach-aisle, a blue-jawed lean Roman's frown despite Enderby's "No hard feelings? Eh?" He was even stonier when Enderby said, "Ma é vero che Lei ha parlato un poco pontificalmente."

"Come on," said Vesta.

The wide silver water breathed coolness. But, to Enderby's fresh surprise, nobody seemed anxious to savour it. Crowds were leaving coaches and toiling up a hill towards what seemed to be a walled township. Coach after coach came up, disgorging unfestive people, grave, some pious with rosaries. There were carved Africans, a gaggle of Chinese, a piscatorium of Finns, a rotary chew of Americans, Frenchmen haussing their épaules, rare blond Vikings and their goddesses, all going up the hill. "We," said Vesta, "are also going up there."

"What," asked Enderby carefully, "lies up yonder hill?"

"Come on." Vesta took his arm. "A little poetic curiosity, please. Come and find out."

Enderby now half-knew what lay at the top of the hill-street they now began to ascend, dodging new squealing arriving coaches, but he suffered himself to be led, passing smiling sellers of fruit and holy pictures. Enderby paused for a moment aghast, seeing a playing-card-sized portrait repeated more than fifty-two times: it seemed at first to be his stepmother in the guise of a holy man blessing his portrait-painter. And then it was not she.

Panting, he was led up to massy gates and a courtyard already thronged and electric. Behind himself and Vesta crowds still moved purposefully up. A trap, a trap: he would not be able to get out. But now there was a holy roar, tremendous, hill-shaking, and an amplified voice began to speak very fast Italian. The voice had no owner: the open ecstatic mouths drank the air, their black eyes searching for the voice above the high stucco buff walls, the window-shutters thrown open for the heat, trees and sky. Joy suffused their stubbled faces at the loud indistinct words. The cry started-"Viva, viva, viva!"-and was caught up. "So," said Enderby to Vesta, "it's him, is it?" She nodded. And now the French became excited, ear-cocking, lips parted in joy, as the voice seemed to announce fantastic departures by air: Toulon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Avignon. "Bravo!" The vales redoubled to the hills, and they to heaven. "Bravo, bravo!" Enderby was terrified, bewildered. "What exactly is going on?" he cried. Now the voice began to speak American, welcoming contingents of pilgrims from Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Delaware. And Enderby felt chill hands clasp his hot body all over as he saw the rhythmical signals of a cheer-leader, a young man in a new jersey with a large blue-woven P.

"Rhode Island," said the voice. "Kentucky, Texas."

"Rah, rah, rah!" came the cheers. "The Pope, the Pope, the Pope!"

"Oh God, no," moaned Enderby. "For Christ's sake let me get out of here." He tried to push, with feeble excuse-mes, but the crowd behind was dense, the eyes up to the hills, and he trod on a little French girl's foot and made her cry.

"Harry," said Vesta sharply, "you just stay where you are."

"Mississippi, California, Oklahoma." It was like something from a sort of holy Walt Whitman.

"Rah, rah, rah! The Pope, the Pope, the Pope!"

"Oh Christ," sobbed Enderby, "please let me get out, please. I'm not well, I'm ill, I've got to get to a lavatory."

"The Church Militant is here," said Vesta nastily, "and all you want is a lavatory."

"I do, I do." Enderby, his eyes full of tears, was now grappling with a redolent Spaniard who would not let him pass. The French child still cried, pointing up at Enderby. Suddenly there was a sort of exordium to prayer and everybody began to kneel in the dust of the courtyard. Enderby became a kind of raging schoolmaster in a sea of stunted children. She too knelt; Vesta knelt; she got down on her knees with the rest of them. "Get up!" bawled Enderby, and, like a sergeant, "Get off your bloody knees!"

"Kneel down," she ordered, her eyes like powerful green poisons. "Kneel down. Everybody's looking at you."

"Oh my God," wept Enderby, praying against the current, and he began to try to get out again, lifting his legs as though striding through treacle. He trod on knees, skirts, even shoulders, and was cursed roundly even by some who prayed with frightening sincerity, their eyes dewy with prayer. Stumbling, himself cursing, goose-stepping clumsily, laying episcopal palms on heads, he cut through the vast cake of kneelers and reached, almost vomiting, blind with sweat, the gate and the hill-road. As he staggered down the hill, past the smiling vendors, he muttered to himself, "I was a bloody fool to come." From the top of the hill came the sound of a great Amen.

3

"Cefil Uensdi," said the man. "Totnam Otispar. Cardiff Siti." He had a surprised lion-face, though hairless, with a few wavy filaments crawling over his otherwise bare scalp. Staring all the time at Enderby as though convinced Enderby wished to mesmerize him and too polite (a) to object that he did not wish to be mesmerized and (b) to announce that the mesmerism was ineffectual, he ever and anon brought, with a bold arm gesture, a cigarette-end to his lips, drawing on this with a desperate groan as if it were a sole source of oxygen and he dying.

"Tutti buoni," nodded Enderby over his wine. "All football very good."

The man gripped Enderby's left forearm and gave a mirthless grin of deep deep blood-brotherhood's understanding. They were sitting at rough trestle-tables in the open air. Here Frascati had reached its last gasp of cheapness-golden gallons for a few bits of tinkly metal. "Ues Bromic," the man went on in his litany. "Mancesita, lunaiti. Uolveramiton Uanarar." This, though more heartening than the geographical manifests up the hill, was beginning to weary Enderby. He wondered vaguely if perhaps that was what Etruscan had sounded like. Up on the main road, beyond the dark and nameless trees that were a wall to this sky-roofed tavern, the pilgrims could be heard coming back to their buses, walking slowly and with dignity now after the comic freewheeling down the hill. If Vesta had any sense at all she would know where to find him. Not that, in his present mood, he cared much whether she found him or not. Next to the lion-faced man with the football litany lolled a patriot who did not believe that Mussolini was really dead: like King Arthur he would rise with unsheathed sword to avenge his country's new wrongs. This man said that the English had always been the friends of Mussolini; Italian and Briton together had fought to expel the foul Tedesco. He bunched one side of his face often at Enderby, raising his thumb like an emperor at the games, winking in complicity. There were other drinkers on the periphery, some with bad un-southern teeth, one carrying on his shoulder an ill-kempt parrot that squawked part of a Bellini aria. There was also a very buxom girl, a country beauty called Bice, who brought round the wine. Enderby did not, would not, lack company. He only wished his Italian were better. But "Blackburn Rovers" he fed to the litanist and "Newcastle United"; to the patriot "Addis Ababa" and "La Fanciulla del Golden West". Meanwhile thunder flapped with extreme gentleness on the other side of the lake. "Garibaldi," he said. "Long live Italian Africa!"

When Vesta at last arrived the pleasant dirty drinking-yard at once was disinfected into a background for a Vogue fashion pose. She looked tired, but her calm and elegance fluttered all present, making even the roughest drinkers consider removing their caps. Some, remembering that they were Italian, said dutifully, "Molto bella" and made poulterer's pinching gestures to the air. Without preamble she said to Enderby, "I knew I'd find you in some such place as this. I'm fed up. I'm sick to death. You seem to be doing your utmost to make a farce out of our honeymoon and a fool out of me."

"Sit down," invited Enderby. "Do sit down. Have some of this nice Frascati." He bowed her towards a dry and fairly clean part of the bench on which he had been sitting. The litanist, grasping that she was Inglese, assuming a passion for football in her accordingly, said, ingratiatingly, "Arse an all," meaning a football team. Vesta would not sit. She said:

"No. You're to come with me and look for this coach. What I have to say to you must wait till we get back to Rome. I don't want to risk breaking down in public."

"Peace," mocked Enderby. "Peace and order. You played a very mean trick on me, and I shan't forget it in a hurry. A really dirty trick."

"Come on. Some of the coaches are going already. Leave that wine and come on." Enderby saw that there still remained a half-litre of this precious golden urine. He filled his glass and said, "Salute." His swallow excited cries of "Bravo", as enthusiastic as those heard up the sacred hill, though not then for Enderby. "Right," said Enderby, waving farewell.

"We're late," said Vesta. "Late for that coach. We wouldn't have been late if I hadn't had to come looking for you."

"It was a mean trick," repeated Enderby. "Why didn't you tell me that we were being taken to the Vatican?"

"Oh, don't be so stupid. That's not the Vatican; that's his summer residence. Now where on earth is this coach?"

There was a bewildering number of coaches, all looking alike. The pilgrims had nestled snugly and smugly in them; some of them were impatiently roaring off. Coaches had settled everywhere-by the roadside, down small hilly streets-like big bugs in bed-crevices. Vesta and Enderby began to examine coaches swiftly but intently, as though they proposed to buy them, passengers and all. None looked familiar, and Vesta made noises of distress. Listening through his thick curtain of wine, Enderby thought he heard the veneers and inlays of Received English stripped roughly off, so that something like raw Lallans became audible, as spicy as home-pickled onions with its gutturals and glottal stops. She was really worried. Enderby said:

"Damn it all, if they do leave us behind there's no great harm done. There must be a bus service or trains or taxis or something. It's not as though we're lost in the jungle or anything."

"You insulted him," complained Vesta. "It was blasphemous, too. These people take their religion very seriously, you know."

"Nonsense," said Enderby. Stealthily the sky had, above their searching heads, been clouding over. There was a greenish look in the atmosphere as though the atmosphere proposed, sooner tir later, to be sick. From beyond the lake care renewed gentle drummings, as of finger-tips on timpani. "It's going to rain," wailed Vesta. "Och, we'll be caught in it. We'll be drenched." But Enderby, in impermeable of wine, said not to worry, they would catch that blasted bus.

But they did not catch it. As soon as they approached a coach, the coach skittishly started up, its gears grinding a derisive expletive all for Enderby. Faces looked down, grinning pilgrims, and some hands waved. It was as though Vesta and Enderby were host and hostess after some huge party, seeing off loads of quite unappreciative guests. "He's done it deliberately," cried Vesta. "He's getting his own back. Oh, you are a nuisance." They hurried towards another coach and, like a kitten in chase-me play, it at once began to move off. There were very few left now, but Enderby was fairly sure that, from one of these few, a Roman face, the ignoble face of a Roman guide, leered and Roman fingers made a complicated gesture of mean triumph.

The timpanists across the lake picked up their felt sticks and rolled for a few bars, while the coaches, as though they could thus escape from bad weather, sang off to the city. The lake underwent complex metallurgical changes and the sky, cloaking hot and fearsome lights, began to sweat, then cry. "Oh Jesus," called Vesta, "here it comes." And indeed there it came while they were still half a mile from shelter other than that of trees: the sky cracked open like a waterbutt, and the air became vertical glass down which pail after pail was poured. They dashed blindly towards the lakeside inn, Vesta tottering on her smart spikes, Enderby gripping her elbow as though her arm were a pair of blackboard dividers, already too wet really to be all that urgent about seeking shelter. The deluge made Enderby's scalp prickle with dandruff, and his fawn summer suit was soaked. But she, poor girl, was already a wreck: hat comically flopping, hair in rat-tails, mascara running, her face that of a crying old crone as though she wept over the disintegration of her chic. "In here," gasped Enderby, steering her straight into a room smelling of size and new paint, empty chairs and tables in it, a sleek boy-waiter admiring the free show of the rain. "I think," panted Enderby, "that we'll have to take a room, if they have one. The first thing to do is to get dry. Perhaps they'll -" The waiter called a name, then turned his young empty face back on these two wet ones. Enderby said, "Una camera. Si é possible." The boy called again, an unbroken boy's yelp under the drumming water. A woman came, creamily fat in a flowered frock, clucked commiseration, took in in a swift look Vesta's ringed finger, said there was a camera with one letto. Beside her smiling hugeness Vesta looked a snivelling waif. "Grazie," said Enderby. Lightning cracked momentarily the late-sky, the timpanists counted half a bar and came in with a fine peal, rolling cosmic Berlioz chords. Vesta made the sign of the cross. She was shivering.

"What," asked Enderby, "did you do that for?"

"Oh God," she said, "it scares me. I can't stand thunder."

4

Enderby felt his stomach turn over when she said that.

Up in the bedroom they confronted each other naked. Somehow, for some reason, Enderby had not expected that, when they had stripped off their drenched clothes and dumped them outside the door, they would confront each other naked. Naked confrontation was supposed to come about otherwise: deliberately, in desire or duty. Enderby had been trying to digest too many other things to foresee this prelapsarian picture (and there up the hill, so neatly fitting into the pattern, was a great postlapsarian witness), for the room was very much like his own as a boy-pictures of St John the Baptist, the Sacred Heart, the B.V.M., a melodramatic Golgotha; a smell of unclean bedclothes, dust, boots, and stale holy water; a stringy unbeaten carpet; a narrow bed. This reproduction of the main stage-set for so many adolescent monodramas, here in Italy under rain, did not depress him: that bedroom had always been an enclave of revolt in stepmother country. Very clearly, lines of an unpublished poem came back to him:

…There were times, misunderstood by the family,

When you, at fifteen, on your summer evening bed

Believed there were ancient towns you might anciently visit.

There might be a neglected platform on some station

And a ticket bought when the clock was off its guard.

Oh, who can dismember the past? The boy on the friendly bed

Lay on the unpossessed mother, the bosom of history,

And is gathered to her at last. And tears I suppose

Still hunger for that reeking unwashed pillow,

That bed ingrained with all the dirt of the past,

The mess and lice and stupidity of the Golden Age,

But a mother and loving, ultimately Eden…

He nodded several times, standing there naked in rainy Italy, thinking that it was a mother he had always wanted, not a stepmother, and he had made that mother himself in his bedroom, made her out of the past, history, myth, the craft of verse. When she was made she became slimmer, younger, more like a mistress; she became the Muse.

Lightning again shivered the firmament and then, after a careful count, the laughing drummers knocked hell out of their resonant membranes. Vesta gave a little scream, put her arms round Enderby's trunk, and then seemed to try to push herself inside him as though he were a deviscerated rabbit of great size and she a mound of palpitating stuffing."There, there,"said Enderby, kindly but disturbed: she had no right to bring these stepmother terrors into his adolescent bedroom. Then he sweated, seeing more than a mere fear of thunder. Still, he clasped her to him and soothed her shoulder-blades, thinking how such naked contacts had an essential unalluring core of heartiness: the slap of palm on buttock; the jelly sound of two moist segments of flesh drawing apart. She shivered: the air had cooled considerably.

"You'd better," said Enderby, "get into bed."

"Yes," she shuddered, "yes. Into bed." And she pulled him towards bed, her grip on him unrelaxed, so that they shambled to it as though clumsily dancing. As soon as they were in it, a skein of lightning lay an instant against the sky, like a stunned man against a cliff, and then the drums whammed out from hi-fi loudspeakers all over the heavens. She again seemed to try to enter him in fear, a rather soft rock of ages, and he smelt her terror, as familiar a smell as that faintly oily one of the coverlet.

"There," he said again, clasping her, stroking and soothing. It was a very narrow bed. This, he kept reminding himself, was his bride, an intelligent and desirable young woman and it was time, under the thunder and rain, to be thinking of performing, that is to say consummating, that is to say. He stealthily felt his way down to find out what was his body's view of this constatation, but all was quiet there, as though he were calmly reading Jane Austen.

The rain eased and the thunder was trundled, grumbling, off. Enderby felt her body relax and seem, somehow, to grow moister and more expectant. She gripped him still, though there was no more thunder to fear. Enderby's engines, rusty and sluggish, tried to wake up and respond to various quite unoriginal ganglionic stimuli, but there were certain difficulties which were secret and shameful. Enderby had been spoiled by too many pictures; it was a long time since he had held a real woman in his arms like this; he had possessed in imagination houri after houri of a beauty, passivity, voluptuousness no real woman could ever touch. Perhaps, he now felt, if this body he held could become-just for twenty or thirty seconds-one of those harem dreams of his, pampered, pouting, perfumed, steatopygous, he could, he was sure, achieve what it was a plain duty, apart from all questions of gratification, to achieve. But the body of his bride was spare, barely cushioned. With a desperate effort he conjured a gross tit-swinging image, saw whose image it was, then, making the retching noises of a child trying to disgust, he swung out of the bed with unwonted agility and stood shivering on the worn mat. "What's the matter?" she called. "What is it? Don't you feel well?" Forgetting that he was naked, Enderby dashed out of the room without replying. Two doors down the corridor was the sign Gabinetto, and Enderby, re-living the past, entered it and locked its door. To his horror he found that the lavatory was not a sane comfortable English WC but a Continental crouch-hole with a right-hand hand-rail and a toilet-roll-fitting on the same side. Once, many years ago, he had fallen into one of these holes. He almost cried for the security of his old seaside lavatory but, unlocking the door to leave, the tears froze as he heard two female Italian voices on the corridor. One of these, saying loud passing greetings to the other, was now right up against the gabinetto door and trying the handle. Enderby swiftly re-locked himself in. The voice spoke urgently, saying, for all Enderby knew, that its owner was in a bad way, desperate, and couldn't wait too long. Enderby seated himself on the edge of the low crouch-hole dais, saying, "Go away. Go away," and, as an afterthought, "Io sono nudo, completamente nudo", wondering if that was correct Italian. Correct or not, the voice was silenced and apparently carried back down the corridor. Enderby the completely naked sat on, in thinking pose, feeling at his lowest ebb.

5

Like an Arab thief, though not so slippery, Enderby darted back to the bedroom. Vesta was sitting up in the bed, smoking a ship's (or export) Woodbine through a holder and, because of that, looking more naked than she was, though this, reflected Enderby, was not really possible. "Now then," she said. "We're going to have this whole thing out."

"No," mumbled Enderby. "Not like this." He sat shamefacedly down on the cane chair in the corner, wriggling and wincing as odd prickly cane thorns assaulted his bottom. "Not," said Enderby, "with no clothes on. It's not right." He joined his hands as for prayer and, with this frail cage of fingers, hid his genitals from the smoking woman in the bed. "I mean," said Enderby, "one can't really talk about anything naked."

"Who are you to say that?" she said fiercely. "What do you know about the world? My first husband and I once belonged to a nudist camp -" (Enderby whimpered at the sudden formality of "first husband")"-and there used to be really prominent men and women there, and they didn't have any pudeur about talking. And they, I might add," she added acidly, "could talk about rather more than lavatories and stomachs and how rotten the Roman Empire must have been." Enderby gazed glumly out of the window, seeing that the rain had stopped and the June warmth, encouraged, was creeping back into the Italian evening. Then he was granted a brief image of a fat sack-bellied middle-aged female nudist don, breasts hanging like tripe, discoursing on aesthetic values. This cheered him up a little, so he turned boldly on Vesta, to say:

"All right then. Let's have it out, the whole damned thing. What exactly do you think you're playing at?"

"I don't understand you," she said. "I'm playing at nothing. I'm working hard, with absolutely no co-operation from you, to try and build a marriage."

"And your idea of building a marriage is to try to drag me back into the Church, is that it?" said Enderby, half-uncovering his genitals so as to gesticulate with one hand. "And in a nasty sly way too. Not saying anything about being a Catholic yourself, and even being quite ready to have a registry office wedding, even though you know that that sort of wedding means nothing at all."

"Oh," she said, "you admit that, do you? You admit that it means nothing at all? In other words, you admit that a Catholic wedding is the only valid one?"

"I don't admit anything," cried Enderby. "All I'm saying is that I'm confused, completely confused about what's supposed to be going on. What I mean is, we've only been married a couple of days, and everything seems to have changed. You weren't like this before, were you? You weren't like this when we were living in your flat in London, were you? Everything was all right then. You were on my side, and you were getting on with your job and I was getting on with mine, and it was all nice and pleasant and not a care in the world. But now look at things. Since we got married, and that's only a couple of days ago, mind you, only a couple of days -" (two fingers held up, five on his genitals)"-you've been doing your damnedest to turn into my stepmother."

Vesta's mouth opened and smoke wandered out. "To what, did you say? To turn into what?"

"My stepmother, bitch as she was. You're not fat yet, but I suppose you soon will be. You keep belching away all the time and saying "Och" and going on at me-natter and nag, nag and natter-and you're scared of the bloody thunder and you're trying to get me to go back into the Church. Why? That's what I want to know. Why? What's your motive? What are you getting at? What are you trying to do?"

"This," she said heavily, "is fantastic. This is the most incredible-this is the most incredible fantastic -" She started to get out of bed. Enderby, seeing this, saw that there would be too much visible nakedness about the room, so he lunged across from the cane chair, genitals swinging, and pushed her back into bed and pulled the clothes over her. He said:

"We'll have less frivolity, if you don't mind, and less nonsense. Before we got married-listen to me, I'm talking-before we got married you were what I'd dreamed of, ever since I was a boy. You were everything she wasn't; you were a release; you were a way out. You were something that would kill her for good and all. And now look at you." He pointed sternly. She, as though he were a stranger who had just broken in, pulled the grey sheet over her bosom and looked fearful. "You're trying to drag me back into that old world, aren't you? Back to the bloody Church and female smells all over the place -"

"You're drunk," she said. "You're mad." There was a knock at the door and Enderby, gesticulating, went to answer it, now wearing his nakedness as unconsciously as if it were a suit. "Drunk, eh?" he said. "Mad, eh? You've made me drunk, that's what it is." He opened the door, and the lady of the house presented a pressed pile of dried clothes. "Tante grazie," said Enderby, and then, turning back on his wife, he presented his bottom to the signora; she slammed the door and went off speaking loud Italian. "Things," said Enderby, "already," dumping the clothes on the bed, "have not worked out at all as I expected. It's been a bloody big mistake, that's what it's been."

She reached over for her clothes, angrily fussily trembling, saying, "A mistake, you say? That's gratitude, I must say, gratitude." She paused, one hand on her clothes, breathing deeply as if a stethoscope had begun to wander down her back, eyes downcast, seeking self-control. Then she said, calmly, "I'm keeping my temper, you notice. Somebody has to be rational." Enderby began, in a sort of hopping dance, to put on his underpants. "Listen to me," she said, "listen. You're like a child, you know so little about life. When I first met you, it looked horrible that a man of so much talent should be living the way you did. No, let me speak, let me keep my temper." Enderby, from inside his shirt was mumbling something. "You had nothing to do with women," she continued, "and no faith in anything, and no sense of responsibility to society. Oh, I know you had substitutes for all those things," she said bitterly. "Dirty photographs instead of flesh and blood." Enderby repeated the hopping dance, this time with his trousers, scowling and blushing. "Society," she said, with loud eloquence, "shrunk to the smallest room in the house. Is that any life for a man?" she asked strongly. "Is that any life for a poet? Is that the way you expect to make great poetry?"

"Poetry," said Enderby. "Don't you start telling me about poetry. I know all about poetry, thank you very much," he said with a bull-snort. "But let me tell you this. There's no obligation to accept society or women or religion or anything else, not for anyone there isn't. And as for poetry, that's a job for anarchs. Poetry's made by rebels and exiles and outsiders, it's made by people on their own, not by sheep baaing bravo to the Pope. Poets don't need religion and they don't need bloody little cocktail-party gossip either; it's they who make language and make myths. Poets don't need anybody except themselves."

Vesta picked up her brassiere and wearily dropped herself into it as though it were some necessary instrument of penance. "You seemed," she said, "to like going to parties. You seemed to think it was a good thing to wear a decent suit and talk with people. You said it was civilized. You gave me, one evening you may have forgotten, a long dull lecture on the Poet and Society. You even went to the trouble of thanking me for having rescued you from your old life. Some day," she sighed, "you'll make it absolutely clear to people what exactly you do want."

"Oh," said Enderby, "it was all right, I suppose. It made a nice change. It was nice to be clean and smart, you see, and hear educated accents. It was, you see, so different from my stepmother." Now fully dressed, he sat with greater confidence on the cane-bottomed chair in the corner. "But," he said, "if society means going back to the Church, I don't want anything to do with society. As far as I'm concerned, the Church is all tied up with that bitch, superstitious and nasty and unclean."

"Oh, you're so stupid," said Vesta, having put on her dress swiftly and neatly. "You're so uneducated. Some of the best modern brains are in the Church-poets, novelists, philosophers. Just because a silly illiterate woman made a nonsense out of it for you doesn't mean that it is a nonsense. You're a fool, but you surely aren't such a fool as all that. Anyway," she said, clicking her handbag open and rummaging for a comb, "nobody's asking you to go back into the Church. The Church, presumably, can get on very well without you. But if I'm going back, you might at least have the courtesy and decency to go through the form of going back with me."

"You mean," said Enderby, "that we'll have to get properly married? By a priest in a church? Look," he said, folding his arms and crossing his legs, "why didn't you think about all this before? Why do you have to wait till our honeymoon before you decided to baa back to the fold? Don't answer, because I know the answer. It's because you want to go down to posterity as the woman who reorganized Enderby's life, faith and works. It's what Rawcliffe said, and I hadn't thought of it before, because I really believed that you had some affection for me, but, looking at it more soberly, I can see now that was impossible, me being ugly and middle-aged and, as you're kind enough to say, stupid. All right, then; now we know how we stand."

She was combing her hair, gritting her teeth at the tangles, and the penny-colour shone out, crackling, renewed after its rat-tailed dullness. "Fool, fool," she said. "My idea was that we could make a go of marriage. We still can. Of course, if you think that Rawcliffe's more trustworthy than I am (and remember that Rawcliffe's jealous as hell of you) then that's your own affair and you can get on with it. The fact is that, for all your stupidity, I'm very fond of you and, at the same time, I feel that I can make you happy by making you more normal, more sane."

"There you are, you see," said Enderby in triumph.

"Oh, nonsense. What I mean is this: an artist needs a place in the world, he needs to be committed to something, and he needs to be in touch with the current of life. Surely the trouble with all your work is that it reads as though it's cut off from the current?"

"Very interesting," said Enderby, his arms still folded. "Very, very fascinating."

"Och," she said, drooping as though suddenly very weary. "What does it matter? Who's going to care whether you write great poetry or not? The feeblest teenage pop-singer is a million times more regarded than you are. You sell only a handful of copies of every book you write. There's going to be a nuclear war and the libraries will be destroyed. What's the use? What good can it all possibly be if one doesn't believe in God?" She sat on the bed, quite dispirited, and began to cry softly. Enderby came softly over to her and said:

"I'm sorry, I'm terribly sorry. But I think I'm too old to learn really, too old to change. Perhaps we'd better admit it's all a mistake and go back to things as they were before. No real harm's been done, not yet, has it? I mean, we're not even properly married, are we?"

She looked up sternly and said, "You're like a child. A child who doesn't like his first morning at school so says he doesn't think he'll go back in the afternoon." She wiped her eyes and became hard, self-possessed again. "Nobody makes a fool of me," she said. "Nobody throws me over."

"You could have the marriage annulled," said Enderby. "On the grounds of non-consummation. Because it won't ever be consummated, you know."

"You think," said Vesta, "that you'll go back to living on a tiny but adequate income, writing your poetry in the lavatory. But you won't. What little bit of capital you've got left I shall have. I'll make sure of that. And the things you've bought are on my name. Nobody makes a fool out of me."

"I can get a job," said Enderby, growing angry. "I'm not reliant on anybody. I can be independent." Then he felt tears of self-pity coming. "The poet," he said, whimpering, "is best left to live on his own." Through his tears he had confused images of Dantesque eagles flitting round lightning-shot peaks. He left the edge of the bed and went to stand in a corner. "The poet," he said, blubbing like that seven-year-old Elizabethan bridegroom who had cried to go home with his father.

1

"My main purpose," said swaying Rawcliffe, "was to present you with -" He swayed and fumbled in various pockets, drawing out filthy old papers decaying at their folds, two half-used tubes of stomach tablets which were dust-fluffy, a referee's whistle, a dry rattle of ball-points, finally a quite dean envelope. "- these. Tickets for a première. I think, my dear old Enderby, you should be reasonably amused. I have no further interest in the film in question, having been so closely involved in it. And, let me tell you, Enderby, it is a cheap film, a film made on a shoestring, a film made very quickly, with bits borrowed-quite without permission, you know-from other films. Strega," he said suddenly to Dante behind the bar. The bar was, as at their first meeting in it, empty except for them. Enderby felt worn and old, his mouth seeming to taste of cascara-coated motoring chocolate. It was mid-morning, the day after the day of their return from the papal township by the lake, and Vesta had gone to see a woman called Princess Irene Galitzine, a Roman lady famed for her boutique models or couture designs or something. Vesta was spending money fast. "And," said Rawcliffe, "there are, of course, for this the world expects of Italy, several sfacciate donne Florentine, except that they're not Florentine but Roman, mostrando con le poppe il petto. There, Enderby, you see: brazenfaced bitches showing breasts with paps. Dante was a great prophet; he foresaw the Italian film industry. Dante."

Dante behind the bar bowed. "Same a name," he said confidentially to Enderby.

"Bloody big coincidence, eh?" swayed Rawcliffe. "You'll find everything in Dante, Enderby, if you look long enough. Even the film you're going to see derives its title from the Purgatorio. I found that title, Enderby, I, an English poet, for none of these unholy Romans has even so much as glanced at Dante since leaving school, if any of them ever went to school." Enderby took from the envelope the cards of invitation and saw that the film was named L'Animal Binato. It meant nothing to him. He turned to the bottle of Frascati on the counter and poured himself a tumbler. "Drinking hard, I see, Enderby," said Rawcliffe. "If I may make so lewd a guess, it is because you are using muscles you never used before. Venus catches cold without Bacchus and Ceres, although you can leave out that goddess of breakfast foods for all I care. Strega," he called again, nodding vigorously.

"Look," said Enderby, "I'm not taking you home again. You were a damned nuisance last time, Rawcliffe, and you made a real fool out of me. If you're going to pass out here, you can stay passed out, is that clear? I've got worries of my own without having to look after -"

"He talks in rhyme," said Rawcliffe in exaggerated wonder. "He is still very much the poet, is he not? But for how much longer now, eh?" he said sinisterly, slitting his eyes. "The Muse, O Enderby. Has the Muse yet been in to tell you that she has booked her one-way flight to Parnassus or wherever Muses live? She has done her long stint with Enderby and the time has come for Enderby to abjure this rough magic and pack it in, the Muse, unlike Ariel, being no airy slave of indeterminate sex but a woman, very much a woman." Rawcliffe now made himself look shrunken and very old. "Perhaps, Enderby, I was destined never to be much of a success with that particular woman because of-you know, because of-that is to say, a certain, shall I say, indeterminate attitude towards sex." He sighed in a litre or so of Roman bar air. He drank down a centilitre or less of Strega. "And now, you see, Enderby, I'm on the move again. This afternoon, to be precise. So, you see, you won't have to carry me home or anywhere. The BEA men will come and collect me, excellent fellows. They will get me on that plane. Where am I going, Enderby?" He leered roguishly, wagging a finger. "Ah, I'm not telling you. I am, suffice it to say, on my way further south. I have picked up my little packet here." He tapped, winking, the right breast of his coat. "And now little Marco and Mario and that bloody Piedmontese, to quote Milton, can go and stuff themselves. I have finished, Enderby, with the lot. Finish, Enderby," he said loudly and with emphatic fists on the counter, "with the lot. You, I mean. Get wise to yourself, as they say. Wake up. A poet must be alone."

Enderby pouted, pouring himself the last of his bottle. He felt that it was not up to Rawcliffe to tell him that he must be alone. He took from his inside jacket-pocket a piece of paper on which he had been doing sums. "Did you know," he said, "how much mink costs? Mink," he repeated. "I have it here," he said carefully. "One Black Diamond mink coat: one thousand four hundred and ninety-five pounds. One hip-length jacket: five hundred and ninety-five pounds. One pastel mink bolero: three hundred and ninety-five pounds. We leave out of account," said Enderby, "as being too inexpensive for serious consideration, a pastel stole at two hundred pounds. That's a frippery, a mere nugacity." He smiled sillily. "What," he asked, "can a poet do with no money, eh? How does a poet live?"

"Well," said Rawcliffe, both hands round his new Strega as if it were something to be strangled, "there are jobs, you know. All sorts of jobs. Only the very luckiest of poets can be professional poets. You could teach or write for the papers or do film scripts or advertising slogans or lecture for the British Council or get unskilled work in a factory. Lots of things to be done."

"But," objected Enderby, "suppose one is no good at anything except writing poetry? Suppose one makes a bloody fool of oneself at anything else?"

"Oh," said Rawcliffe reasonably, "I don't think that anybody could make such a bloody fool of himself that it would really matter. Now, if I were you, I should leave everything in the hands of Auntie Vesta. She'll fix you up with something nice and easy."

"But," protested Enderby, "only a minute ago you were telling me that I've got to be alone."

"I see," said Rawcliffe, seeing into his Strega. "Well, in that case it's all a bit of a mess, isn't it, Enderby? But don't worry me with your worries, Enderby, because I've got worries of my own, you see. You sort out things for yourself." He seemed suddenly sober and rather cold despite the June warmth. He downed his Strega and shivered exaggeratedly, as if he had taken a wholesome but bitter medicine. "Perhaps," he said, "I should have started this heavy drinking business earlier. I might possibly be dead by now instead of having putatively fathered or foster-fathered or helped with the illegitimate fathering of L'Animal Binato, alive and healthy and almost impervious to the more deadly effects of alcohol. I should, by rights, Enderby, have considered seeing myself off when I found that the lyric gift had departed from me. I could at least have contrived to be careless crossing the road, couldn't I? And, instead of that propaganda job during the war, I could perhaps have volunteered for something more genuinely lethal."

"What," asked Enderby morbidly, "did it feel like? I mean, when the lyric gift departed?" Rawcliffe looked up so morosely, fixing Enderby with an eye so baleful, that Enderby began to smile nervously. Rawcliffe said:

"Blast your mean little soul, it's no laughing matter, even in retrospect." Then he came nearer to Enderby and gave him a close-up of bad teeth and worse breath. "It was like everything going all dead," said Rawcliffe. "It was like going dumb. I could see quite clearly what had to be said, but I couldn't say it. I could perceive that an imaginative relationship existed between disparate objects but I couldn't tell what the relationship was. I used to sit for hours with paper in front of me, hours and hours, Enderby, and then I would at last get something down. But what I got down somehow-don't laugh at me-had a smell of decay about it. What I got down was evil, and I used to shudder when I crumpled it up and threw it in the fire. And then, at night, in bed, I used to wake up to hear mocking laughter. And then," tottered Rawcliffe, "one night there was the sound of an awful click, and then everything in the bedroom seemed cold, somehow, cold and obscene. I knew, Enderby, it was all over. Thenceforward I should be outside the Garden, useless to anyone, a mess and, moreover, Enderby, in some indefinable way evil. Like an unfrocked priest, Enderby. The unfrocked priest does not become a mere neuter harmless human being; he becomes evil. He has to be used by something, for supernature abhors a supervacuum, so he becomes evil, Enderby." He swigged more Strega and staggered, as it were, against the ropes, saying, "And all that is left for the poet, Enderby, when the inspiration is departed, Enderby, is the travesty, the plagiarism, the popularization, the debasement, the curse. He has drunk the milk of paradise, but it has long passed through his system, Enderby, and, unfortunately for him, he remembers the taste." Rawcliffe shut weary eyes, saying, "Ara vos prec," and then "be mindful in due time of my pain. I translate, Enderby, because you would not understand the original Provençal. That is the poet Arnaut Daniel in Purgatory. He was a lucky bugger, or is, Enderby, a lucky bugger to be in Purgatory. Not like some of us." At this point, Rawcliffe went quite gently to sleep standing up, his head reposing on arms he had folded on the counter. Dante said: "Better e slip." There was a plum-plush settee against the wall; to this Dante and Enderby carried, led, pushed, dragged Rawcliffe. "Too mash fackin Strega," diagnosed Dante. Sighing, Enderby sat next to Rawcliffe, a fresh bottle of Frascati and a tumbler on the table in front of him, and he continued to do sums on bits of paper. At intervals Rawcliffe gave gnomic utterance, often obscure, from his sleep; reports from the first crazed space-traveller:

"No expense of breath in falling downstairs."

"Mario, put that bread-knife away."

"You are a naughty boy, but not undelectable."

"In all the antholololologies."

"This will make Enderby feel very sick."

Indeed, Enderby felt very sick when he had worked out his sums and found that his credit balance in the bank stood at, taking the most liberal computation, little more than four hundred and ninety pounds. It was pointless asking himself where the money had gone to, for he knew all too well: it had flowed back to its source: his stepmother had given and his stepmother had, in a youthful, well-spoken, dove-soft, spring-smelling, highly improbable disguise, taken away again. From his sleep Rawcliffe called:

"Aha! Man not the boats, but woman-and-child them. I'll shoot all else. Back, you brute, back. The rash, smart, sloggering Hopkinsian brine. Enderby was a very inferior poet. Very wise of him to pack up."

Enderby spoke sternly to this dark voice. "I am not packing up," he said. This silenced Rawdiffe's sleep-persona temporarily. To himself Enderby said, "If I can keep the relationship on the most superficial of levels, for superficially I am quite fond of her, then it should be possible to contrive some sort of satisfactory co-existence. But I will not be ordered about. And she has, after all, a good job and I could, at a pinch, refuse to get a job of my own or have a job found for me. The Sussex house has many rooms. My stomach is better." Rawdiffe's sleeping voice spoke again from outer space:

"You will do as I say, Vincent. I will not have you calling Reggy an old queen. He is not old." And then, "God should feel highly flattered that we have invented Him." And finally, before falling into serious speechless sleep, in the voice of Yeats speaking with the voice of Swift speaking with the voice of Job: "Let the day perish wherein I was born." Enderby shuddered, the wine seeming sharper than usual.

2

They arrived late for the film première. The cinema was in an obscure street somewhere off the Viale Aventino, and the taxi-driver had difficulty in finding it. He at first denied, in the manner of taxi-drivers, the existence of what he himself did not know existed, until Enderby waved a ticket of invitation in his moustached face. The façade of the cinema rather let down the rest of Rome, thought Enderby, as he helped Vesta out of the cab.

Sculpturally and architecturally, the rest of Rome was rubbishy, yet rubbishy on a baroque and hypnotic scale, like the delusions of grandeur of some gibbering G.P.I. patient. But here was authentic fleapit, from the look of it, epitome of every bughouse that Enderby had, as a child, queued outside on Saturday afternoons, sticky paw clutching twopence, filthy-jerseyed other children clinging to him aromatically lest they lose him in the scrimmage of entrance, Enderby being the only one of their lot who could read. The old silent film had, Enderby reflected, been, in one facet, an extension of literature. He said now to Vesta, "This is one of those places where you go in with a blouse and come out with a jumper." He tweaked her elbow jocularly, but she looked queenlily blank. "Blouse?" she said. "I'm not wearing a blouse." She was, in fact, wearing black silk from her Roman-lady couturière, sleeveless, the back décolleté, the skirt slim, tails of mink dripping from her shoulders against the night's cool. Enderby was in white tuxedo, black silk in breast pocket to match tie. But it looked as though he needn't have taken so much trouble: there were no adoring crowds, no gleaming stars' mouths of coral and ivory in maniacal abandon to the flashbulbs, no jostle of Cadillacs and Bentleys. There were a few decent Fiats, unattended, evidently owner-driven; a painted banner across the deplorable rococo façade said, in the midst of cheap coloured bulbs, L'ANIMAL BINATO. The man who took their cards of invitation chewed something morosely and his lantern-jaw was ill-shaven. It let down Vesta as much as it let down Rome. Little, of course, thought Enderby, could let down Enderby.

They were flashlamped to their seats. Enderby felt torn cheap plush beneath him and smelt a strong citrus tang through the dark. Orange, too, bloodless orange, was the light which warmed the worn stage curtains. These now, as if they had been waiting only for Enderby and his wife, parted to the noise of loud cinema music, banal, conventionally sinister. Enderby peered through the dark: there did not, by the feel and sound of things, seem to be a very large audience. The screen said L'ANIMAL BINATO and followed this with jerkily dissolved frames of the names of the conspirators: Alberto Formica; Giorgio Farfalla; Maria Vacca; A. F. Corvo; P. Ranocchio; Giacomo Capra; Beatrice Pappagallo; R. Coniglio; Giovanni Chiocciola; Gina Gatto. Rawcliffe's name appeared near the end, Italianized to, as far as Enderby could tell, something like Raucliffo. "Serve him right," thought Enderby, and told Vesta so. She said shhhhh. The film began.

Night, very much night, with tortured cypresses lit by lightning. Thunder (Vesta dug her nails into Enderby's hand). Tempestuous wind. Camera tracks to steps of terrace, handsome woman standing thereon, much of Italian bosom exposed to lightning. She raises arms, cornily, to stormy heavens in crash of thunder. Camera swings up towards sky. Another stock shot of lightning cracking cloud like a teacup. Thunder (Vesta's nails). New camera angle shows a something speeding down the firmament, a white flashing something. Cut to wooden effigy of cow, lightning-lit. Handsome bosomed woman seen walking through tempest, statelily, towards wooden cow. Lightning shows her doing something obscure, pulling some lever or other, then creaking music accompanies shot of wooden cow opening, two hollow half-cows, woman climbing into upright half, cow closing up, woman imprisoned in cow. Cut to white bull, snorting against the thunder, tearing down the sky, bull-lust from heaven.

"You know," said Enderby with wonder, "this is really an astonishing coincidence."

"Shhhhh," said Vesta. Enderby, his eyes now accustomed to the dark, looked round to find the cinema half-empty, but next to him was a huge man, jowled and bag-eyed in lightning from the screen, a cigar slowly burning towards his fingers, already asleep and snoring slightly.

Day. Ruritanian palace, moustached handsome king in late middle age conferring with deferential bearded (false-bearded) counsellors. Fanfare. Palaver is ended. One counsellor stays behind, ingratiating Iago-type, to talk to the king. The king's eyes cornily cloud with suspicion. Odd Italian words that Enderby can understand snap out from the sound-track: queen, cow, Dedalo. Dedalo ordered to be brought in. Cut to Dedalo's workshop. Dedalo and Icaro, Dedalo's crisp-haired son, are building aeroplanes. Dedalo very old skinny man. Summoned by servant, he pulls down shirt-sleeves, dons jacket period 1860, follows down labyrinthine corridors, a kind old man with clever eyes and deep face-furrows. He enters royal presence. Long unintelligible Italian colloquy with much eloquent arm-waving. Dedalo struck on aged face by angry king. Iago-type goes off, bowing, oily, leaving royal face in royal hands. Dedalo hauled off for torture.

Enderby now began to feel an emotion other than wonder; his stomach heaved and pricked with apprehension: this was more than coincidence. "Don't you think," he said to Vesta, "this is just a little too much like my poem? Don't you think -"

"Shhhhh," she said. The snoring man next to Enderby said, in his sleep, "Tace." Enderby, reminded of the sleep-talking Raudiffo, said, "Tace your arse." And to Vesta, "This is just like The Pet Beast." He then remembered that she hadn't yet read it, had not, in fact, yet shown any desire to read it. He grimly watched the screen, the further unwinding of Raucliffo's infamy.

Day. Pregnant queen in exile, sitting in mean cottage with old crone. Colloquy. Labour-pains. Then dissolve to shot of doctor galloping in from afar. He enters cottage. From bedroom door come bellowing noises. He enters bedroom. Close-up of doctor's face. Horror, incredulity, nausea, syncope. Close-up, with foul discord of what doctor sees: head of bull-calf on child's body.

"That's mine," said Enderby. "It's mine, I tell you. If I find that blasted Rawcliffe -"

"It's nobody's," said Vesta. "It's just a myth. Even I know that."

"Tace," snored Enderby's pone.

Calf-child, in montage series, grows to bull-man, hideous, muscular, fire-breathing, gigantic. Having stolen piece of raw meat from kitchen, bull-man makes discovery of carnivorous nature. Kills old crone and eats her. Tries to kill mother, too, but mother escapes, falls over cliff screaming but uneaten. Good clean fun. Bull-man totters, tall as ten houses, to capital city, leaving bone-trail behind. Cut to palace gardens where Princess Ariadne, with sizeable bosom-show, is playing ball with giggling bosom-showing alleged maidens. Close-up of beast drooling through thicket. Screams, scatter, Ariadne carried off on beast's back. Beast, drooling, carries her, screaming, to cellars of metropolitan museum. Shots of priceless pictures, rare books, stately sculptures, sounds of great music as bull-man bellows his-its way to hide-out deep beneath eternal monuments of culture. Ariadne shows more bosom, screams more loudly. Bull-man does not, however, wish to eat her, not yet anyway.

Enderby clenched his fists tight, their knuckles gleaming in the light that flashed, intermittently, from the screen.

Dénouement. Alpine-Italian hero, Mussolini-headed, crashes into deep cellars, wanders through dark, hears bull-bellow and princess-scream, finds monster and victim, shoots, finds bullets of no avail as bull-man is, on sire's side, thing from outer space. Ariadne escapes, screaming, showing allowable limit of Roman bosom, as howling chest-beating beast advances on hero. Hero, like Count Belisarius, has pepper-bag. He hurls its contents, temporarily blinding beast. To sneezes-bellows-howls, hero escapes. Lo, a prodigy: Dedalo and Icaro in flying-machine some decades ahead of its time drop bomb on metropolitan museum. Howls of dying bull-man, crash of statuary, flap and rustle of books caught alight, Mona Lisa with burnt-out smile, harp-strings pinging as they crack. Death of culture, death of the past, a rational future, embracing lovers. Dedalo and Icaro have engine-trouble. They crash in sea, against glorious sunrise. Heavenly voices. End.

"If," trembled Enderby, "I could lay my hands on that bloody Rawcliffe -"

"Stop it, do you hear?" said Vesta very sharply indeed. "I can't take you anywhere, can I? Nothing satisfies you, nothing. I thought it was quite a nice little horror film, and all you can do is to say that it's been stolen from you. Are you getting delusions of grandeur or something?"

"I tell you," said Enderby, with angry patience, "that that bastard Rawcliffe -" The house-lights, all sick sweet orange, came gently up, disclosing applauding people crying bravo, brava, and bravi, as for the Pope's whole family. The fat man next to Enderby, now radiantly awake, lighted his long-gone-out cigar and then openly laughed at Enderby's clenched fists. Enderby prepared twelve obscene English words as a ground-row (variations and embellishments to follow), but, like a blow on the occiput, it suddenly came to him that he had had enough of words, obscene or otherwise. He smiled with fierce saccharinity on Vesta and said, so that she searched his whole face for sarcasm, "Shall we be going now, dear?"

3

Late at night, thought Enderby, meant in England after the shutting of the pubs. Here there were no pubs to shut, so it was not yet late. He and Vesta picked up a horse-cab or carrozza or whatever it was called on the Via Marmorata, and this clopped along by the side of the Tiber while Enderby fed sedative words to his wife, saying, "I'm honestly going to make an effort, really I am. My maturity's been much delayed, as you realize. I'm really terribly grateful for everything you've done for me. I promise to try to grow up, and I know you'll help me there as you've helped me in everything else. That film tonight has convinced me that I've got to make a real effort to live in public." Vesta, beautiful in the June Roman aromatic night, her hair stirred but gently by the bland wind of their passage, gave him a wary look but said nothing. "What I mean is," said Enderby, "that it's no use living in the lavatory on a tiny income. You were quite right to insist on spending all my capital. I've got to earn a place in the world; I've got to come to terms with the public and give the public, within reason, what it wants. I mean, how many people would want to read The Pet Beast? A couple of hundred at the outside, whereas this film will be seen by millions. I see, I see it all." He reminded himself of the main protagonist of a drink-cure advertisement in Old Moore's Almanac: the medicine cunningly mixed with the drunkard's tea; the immediate result-the drunkard's raising a hand to heaven, wife hanging, sobbing with relief, round his neck. Too much ham altogether. Vesta, still with the wary look, said:

"I hope you mean what you say. I don't mean about the film; I mean about trying to be a bit more normal. There's a lot in life that you've missed, isn't there?" She gave him her hand as a cool token. "Oh, I know it must sound a little pretentious, but I feel that I've got a duty to you; not the ordinary duty of a wife to a husband, but a bigger one. I've been entrusted with the care of a great poet." The horse should, rightly, have neighed; massed trumpets should have brayed from the Isola Tiberina.

"And you were quite right," said Enderby, "to bring me to Rome. I see that too. The Eternal City." He was almost enjoying this. "Symbol of public life, symbol of spiritual regeneration. But," he said, slyly, "when are we going back? I'm so anxious," he said, "to go back, so we can really start our life together. I long," he said, "to be with you in our own home, just the two of us. Let's," he said, bouncing suddenly with schoolboy eagerness, "go back tomorrow. It should be possible to get a couple of seats on some plane or other, shouldn't it? Oh, do let's go back."

She withdrew her hand from his, and Enderby had a pang of fear, not unlike heartburn, that perhaps she was seeing through this performance. But she said:

"Well, no, we can't go back. Not just yet. Not for a week or so, anyway. You see, I have something arranged. It was meant to be a surprise, really, but now I'd better tell you. I thought it would be a good idea for us to be married, here in Rome, married properly. I don't mean a nuptial mass or anything, of course, but just the plain ceremony."

"Oh," gleamed Enderby, swallowing bolus after bolus of anger and nausea, "what a very good idea!"

"And there's a very good priest, Father Agnello I believe his name is, and he'll be coming to see you tomorrow. I met him yesterday at Princess Vittoria Corombona's." She trilled the name with relish, dearly loving a title.

False Enderby breathed hard with the effort of pushing True Enderby back into the cupboard. "What," he asked, "was a priest doing in a dress-shop?"

"Oh, silly," smiled Vesta. "Princess Vittoria Corombona doesn't run a dress-shop. She does film-gossip for Fem. Father Agnello is very intellectual. He's spent a lot of time in the United States and he speaks English perfectly. Strangely enough, he's read one of your poems-the blasphemous one about the Virgin Mary-and he's very anxious to have a couple of good long talks with you. Then, of course, he'll hear your confession."

"Well," smiled Enderby, "it's good to know that everything's being taken care of. It's such a relief. I am really, you know, most grateful." He squeezed her hand as they turned into the Via Nazionale: lights, lights; the Snack Bar Americano; the Bank of the Holy Spirit; shop after shop after shop; the air terminal, alight and busy; the hotel. The fat horse clomped to a ragged halt and snorted, not specifically at Enderby. The driver swore that his taximeter was wrong, a mechanical fault hard to repair, it showed too little. Enderby would not argue. He gave five hundred lire more than the clocked amount, saying "Sod you too" to the driver. Rome; how he loved Rome!

Enderby watched and waited carefully in the hotel bar. There were late coffee-drinkers at the little tables, voluble speakers of fast foreign tongues, ten or a dozen all told, and Enderby would have given them all for Rawcliffe. He wished yesterday morning could be shunted back for just five minutes, he and Dante and Rawcliffe alone in the bar, one damned good crack on the proleptically bloody nose. L'Animal Binato, indeed. The Muse would be very annoyed now, fuming, a harpy, with all that work wasted. Enderby watched Vesta lovely over her glass of Pernod, waited till his third glass of Frascati, then writhed in simulated stomach-ache. "Ugggggh," said Enderby, "blast it. Arrrrgh." Vesta said:

"You've been drinking too much, that's your trouble. Come on, we're going to bed." Enderby, artist to the end, made a harrowing borborygm, just like old times. Grerrrrkhrapshhhhh. She rose in concern. Enderby said:

"No. You wait here. There's a lavatory on the ground floor. Really, it's nothing." He smiled, the liar, through his agony, motioning her to sit down again. He gargoyle-bulged his cheeks, nodded vigorously to show that this showed what it seemed to show, then left the bar smartly, urrping and arrrkhing to the surprise of the coffee-drinkers, into the lobby. To the insincerely gold-grinning dapper receptionist, framed in tubes of light at his desk, Enderby said urgently, "I have to return to London. Just for a couple of days. Business. My wife will stay on here. I don't want you to think," added Enderby guiltily, "that I'm running away or anything like that. If you wish, I'll pay my bill up to date. But I'm leaving my luggage. All except one small overnight case. I take it that that will be all right, will it?" He almost prepared to give the receptionist a thousand-lire note of hush-money but, in time, thought better of it. The receptionist, with a graceful head-inclination as of one bending to hear the tick of a watch in an invisible man's waistcoat pocket, said that everything would be quite all right, but Signer Enderby must understand that there could be no rebate in respect of the time that Signor Enderby would be away. Signor Enderby gladly understood. "I want," he said, "to ring up the air terminal, the one on this street. Could you give me the number?" The receptionist would be only too pleased to ring up for him; he could take the call in one of those boxes over there.

From the box Enderby could just see Vesta eating a ham sandwich. It must be ham, because she was stroking each sliver with what must be, from the shape of the jar, mustard. Enderby tried, which was not difficult, to look very ill in case she should glance up and see him. If she came over he would have to pretend that he had blindly dashed in here because it had the outward appearance of a lavatory; if she saw him urgently mouthing into the telephone he would have to pretend he was calling a doctor. A voice now spoke in English to Enderby, and Enderby said furtively, "Enderby here." The name, understandably, meant nothing to the suave clerkly voice. Enderby said, "I want to travel to London by the next possible plane. Very urgent. I already have a first-class ticket, but my booking, you see, is for the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth or something-I can't quite remember the exact date. This is very very urgent. Business. And my mother's dying." There was no cluck of condolence: hard bastards these Romans. The voice said, above the rustle of ledger-pages, that it thought there might be empty seats on the BO AC plane from Cape Town, due at Rome at five-thirty in the morning. The voice would ring back to confirm or deny. "A matter of life and death," said Enderby. The voice, however, seemed to know that Enderby was about to run away from his wife.

Vesta had finished her sandwiches and was picking her front teeth with an old London tube ticket she had taken from her bag. The bag was open, very untidy, but in it Enderby saw a bunch of keys. Those keys he would require: in the Gloucester Road flat were certain things he needed. Seeing the teeth-picking, Enderby nodded: another thing marshalling him the way that he was going. "How do you feel now?" she asked.

"A good deal better," smiled Enderby. "I got a lot of it up." With what was still in the bank, with what he thought he could legitimately filch from her (mink, chiefly), he considered it was possible for him to return for a year or two to something like his old life: the lone poet in some sordid attic or other with thin stews and bread, trying to make it up to his Muse. He did not repine at the loss of his capital. Not any longer. It was, after all, his stepmother's money, and here, now pulling a ham-fibre from her molars, though with grace and without ostentation, sat his step mother, all too able to use that money. The interest, of course, was another matter. The Church had always condemned the lending out of money at interest, so no good Catholic had a right to claim the increment it had earned when the return of the loan was made. Enderby, though determined to be just, was also determined to be strictly Protestant here. As he smiled to himself he was suddenly jolted by the calling of his name over a loudspeaker.

"Who on earth," said Vesta, "can be ringing you up at this hour of the evening? You stay there, I'll take it. You're still looking a bit pale." And she rose.

"No, no, no," protested Enderby, pushing her roughly back into her cane armchair. "It's something you're not supposed to know about. A surprise," he tried to smile. She grimaced and, taking a hair-clip from her bag, began to clean her left ear. Enderby was delighted to see that.

The clerkly voice was pleased to be able to confirm a booking on the plane from Cape Town. Enderby was to report at the terminal at four; the clerk then on duty would alter his ticket for him. "Deo gratias," breathed Enderby, meaning grazie. But only that liturgical gratitude, he reflected, could express his relief at the prospect of getting out of, with all its detonations and connotations, Rome.

"It's arranged," he smirked at Vesta. "Don't ask me what, but it's all arranged." As they rose to go to their room he saw on the table a hair-clip; its bend of bifurcation was stuffed with ear-wax. He took Vesta's arm with something like love.

4

Staying awake till three-thirty was not really difficult. Really difficult was getting the packing done on a night when Vesta, normally a good solid Scots sleeper, had decided to be restless and somniloquent. Enderby watched her warily as she lay prone, having kicked the clothes off the bed, her nates silvered by the Roman moonlight to the likeness of a meringue. Delectable, yes, but from now on for somebody else's delectation. Enderby stole about the silvered room in his socks, suddenly stiffening as in a statue dance each time she burbled in her sleep, rushing to the dark corner by the window to stand as if for his height to be taken when she pettishly whisked from the prone to the supine. Supine, she uttered strange words to the ceiling and then chuckled, but Enderby would not permit himself to be scared. Taking his passport and air ticket from the top drawer of the chest of drawers he also, after a few seconds of ethical thought, decided to take hers. Thus, if she woke to a realization of Enderby's desertion, she would not be able to follow at once. But he placed several thousand or million lire on the mantelpiece, and he knew that she had traveller's cheques of her own. Although she and Rome went so beautifully together, he could not, in all decency, condemn her to too long an enforced stay; he hoped he still had enough humanity not to wish that on his worst enemy.

One suitcase was enough for Enderby's clothes and shaving gear. The lotions and creams and sprays she had made him buy-these he decided to leave behind: no one would ever want to smell him any more. Now there was the question of that key to the flat; he had left a couple of boxes there, stuffed with drafts and notes. The typescript of The Pet Beast was locked in the drawer of her own escritoire, and there it could stay. Its interest, he admitted glumly, was one of content more than form, and the content had been niched and distorted. Let that be a lesson to him. Enderby now squinted in the moonlight for Vesta's bag, a flat silver envelope into which, that evening, she had poured the entire load of rubbish from a black bag from a grey bag from a white bag from a blue bag, a woman who, with residual Scots thrift, could not bear to throw anything away. Enderby saw this silver bag, further silvered by the light, lying on her bedside table. He stalked over for it, like some clumsy ballerina on her points, and, as he made to pick it up, Vesta swiftly pronated, diagonal across the bed, and a bare slim arm flopped over the table to hold the bag down like a silver bar. Enderby hesitated now, standing with breathing suspended, wondering whether he dare risk. But then she, with the same swiftness, lurched her body to the supine, though with her left arm still across the table, and began to speak out of some profound dream. She said:

"Pete. Do it again, Pete. Och, Pete, that was bloody marvellous." It was a coarse accent, suggesting the Gorbals rather than Eskbank, and, to match it, the sleeping Vesta began to use coarse terms suggesting an extremity of abandon. Enderby listened horrified, at last calming his nerves by reflecting that anything, even necrophily, was allowed to the dreamer. He did not now try to extract the bag from under her silver arm; he could perhaps get into the flat without a key. Effect an entrance, as they say. He now wished to effect an exit, and quickly.

As he fumbled at the door-handle, hidden under the mink coat that hung from the door-hook, he had the impression that she was about to lift herself out of sleep, some warning bell having shrilled at the end of one of the long corridors of the cerebral cortex. He calmed her with words and a noise:

"Brarrrkh. Just going to the lavatory." His last words to her as he softly folded the mink over his arm. She grunted, smacked her lips, then, seeming satisfied, started to lower herself into deeper levels of sleep. Enderby opened the door and went out. Standing an instant to quieten his loud heart, he felt cautiously elated that soon, on the aircraft, he would be able to feel fully and uninhibitedly elated.

A poem began to twitch as he weighed his suitcase and paid his embarkation fee and bought his bus ticket:

Stepmother of the West…

Enderby waited with excitement for the images to come into focus-Emperor and Pope the same pantomime dame, no more red meat since spate of it in snaring arena, old bitch she-wolf with hanging dugs, the big backyard of broken columns for the refuse-collector; Enderby waited with impatience for the rhymes to line up. City, titty. Beyond that was nothing.

Stepmother of the West, of venal cities

Most venal something something she-wolf bitch

Romulus Remus something something titties

Something something something something rich which ditch pitch

On the bus to Ciampino Enderby, frowning, called on his Muse to do something about this ragged donnée. On the aircraft, placed next to a Negro clergyman, Enderby muttered and grimaced so that the stewardess came up to ask if everything was all right. A suspicious character, muttering and frowning, a mink coat on the luggage rack overhead, Enderby looked down on Rome. He had forgotten all about Vesta already. He had expected that he would be able to recite, under his breath, at least a stanza of this poem in valediction. Thwarted and somewhat apprehensive, remembering the prophecy of the traitor Rawdiffe, he could only devise a farewell that went beyond words but which the Negro clergyman apparently took to be an adverse comment on his colour. Fffffrrrrrerrrrrpshhhhhh.