The Clockwork Testament (Or: Enderby `s End)

THREE

"Do you believe in God?" she asked, a steak sandwich in one paw and the cassette thing in the other.

"Is that tea strong enough for you?" Enderby asked. "It doesn't look potable to me. One bag indeed. Gnat piss," he added. And then: "Oh, God. Well, believing is neither here nor there, you know. I believe in God and so what? I don't believe in God and so what again? It doesn't affect his own position, does it?"

"Why do you say his?" she hizzed.

"Her, then. It. Doesn't matter really. A matter of tradition and convention and so on. Needs a new pronoun. Let's invent one, unique, just for-himherit. Ah, that's it, then. Nominative heshir. Accusative himrit. Genitive hiserits."

"But you're still putting the masculine first. The heshit bit's all right, though. Appropriate."

"I don't mind what goes first," Enderby said. "Would you like something by Sara Lee? Please yourself then. All right. Shehit Herimit. Herisits. It doesn't affect herisits position whether I believe or not."

"But what happens when you die?"

"You're finished with," Enderby said promptly. "Done for. And even if you weren't-well, you die then, gasp your last, then you're sort of wandering, free of your body. You wander around and then you come into contact with a sort of big thing. What is this big thing? God, if you like. What's it, or shehit, like? I would say," Enderby said thoughtfully, "like a big symphony, the page of the score of infinite length, the number of instruments infinite but all bound into one big unity. This big symphony plays itself for ever and ever. And who listens to it? It listens to itself. Enjoys itself for ever and ever and ever. It doesn't give a bugger whether you hear it or not."

"Like masturbation."

"I thought it would come to that. I thought you'd have to bring sex into it sooner or later. Anyway, a kind of infinite Ninth Symphony. God as Eternal Beauty. God as Truth? Nonsense. God as Goodness. That means shehit has to be in some sort of ethical relationship with beings that are notGod. But God is removed, cut off, self-subsistent, not giving a damn."

"But that's horrible. I couldn't live with a God like that."

"You don't have to. Anyway, what have you or anybody else got to do with it? God doesn't have to be what people want shehit to be. I'm fed up with God," Enderby said, "so let's get on to something else." And at once he got up painfully and noisily to find the whisky bottle, this being about the time for. "I haven't got any glasses," he said. "Not clean ones, anyway. You'll have to have it from the bottle."

"I don't want any." She didn't want her tea either. Quite right: gnat piss. Enderby got down again. "If there's no life after death," she said, "why does it matter about doing good in this world? I mean, if there's no reward or punishment in the next."

"That's terrible," Enderby sneered. "Doing things because of what you're bloody well going to get out of it." He took some whisky and did a conventional shudder. It raged briefly through the inner streets and then was transmuted into benevolent warmth in the citadel. Enderby smiled on the girl kindly and offered the bottle. She took it, raised it like a trumpet to the heavens, sucked in a millilitre or so. "And, while we're at it," he said, "let's decide what we mean by good."

"You decide. It's you who are being interviewed."

"Well, there are some stupid bastards who can't understand how the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp could go home after torturing Jews all day and then weep tears of joy at a Schubert symphony on the radio. They say: here's a man dedicated to evil capable of enjoying the good. But what the imbecilic sods don't realise is that there are two kinds of good-one is neutral, outside ethics, purely aesthetic. You get it in music or in a sunset if you like that sort of thing or in a grilled steak or in an apple. If God's good, if God exists that is, God's probably good in that way. As I said." He sipped from the bottle she had handed back. "Before."

"Or sex. Sex is as good whether-I mean, you don't have to be in what they used to call a state of grace to enjoy it."

"That's good," Enderby said warmly. "That's right. Though you're still going on about sex. You mean lesbian sex, of course, in your case. Not that I have anything against it, naturally, except that I'm not permitted to experience it. The world's getting narrower all the time. All little sects doing what they call their own thing."

"Why do you keep showing your balls all the time?" she said boldly. "Don't you have underpants or anything?"

Enderby flushed very deeply all over. "I had no intention," he said. "I can assure you. What I mean is, I'll put something on. I was not trying to provoke-I apologise," he said, going off back to the bedroom. He came out again wearing nondescript trousers, something from an old suit, and a not overclean striped shirt. Also slippers. He said, "There." The hypocritical little bitch had been at the bottle in his brief absence. He could tell that from her slight slur. She said:

"Evil."

"Who? Oh, evil." And he sat down again. "Evil is the destructive urge. Not to be confused with mere wrong. Wrong is what the government doesn't like. Sometimes a thing can be wrong and evil at the same time-murder, for instance. But then it can be right to murder. Like you people going round killing the Vietnamese and so on. Evil called right."

"It wasn't right. Nobody said it was right."

"The government did. Get this straight. Right and wrong are fluid and interchangeable. What's right one day can be wrong the next. And vice versa. It's right to like the Chinese now. Before you started playing Ping-pong with them it was wrong. A lot of evil nonsense. What you kids need is some good food (there you are, see: good in non-ethical sense) and an idea of what good and evil are about."

"Well, go on, tell us."

"Nobody," said Enderby, having taken a swig, "has any clear idea about good. Oh, giving money to the poor perhaps. Helping old ladies across the street. That sort of thing. Evil's different. Everybody knows evil. Brought up to it, you see. Original sin."

"I don't believe in original sin." She was taking the bottle quite manfully now. "We're free."

Enderby looked on her bitterly, also sweating. It was really too hot to wear anything indoors. Damned unchangeable central heating, controlled by some cold sadist somewhere in the basement. Bitterly because she'd hit on the damned problem that he had to present in the poem. She ought to go away now and let him get on with it. Still, his duty. One of his students. He was being paid. Those brown bastards in whose hands he had left La Belle Mer would be shovelling it all from till to pocket. Bad year we had, señor. Had to near shut up bloody shop. He said carefully:

"Well, yes. Freeish. Wir sind ein wenig frei. Wagner wrote that. Gave it to Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger." And then: "No, to hell with it. Wholly free. Totally free to choose between good and evil. The other things don't matter-I mean free to drink a quart of whisky without vomiting and so on. Free to touch one's forehead with one's foot. And so forth."

"I can do that," she said. The latter. Doing it. That was the whisky, God help the ill-nourished child.

"But," Enderby said, ignoring the acrobatics. She didn't seem to be bothering to use her cassette thing any more. Never mind. "But we're disposed to do evil rather than good. History is the record of that. Given the choice, we're inclined to do the bad thing. That's all it means. We have to make a strong effort to do the good thing."

"Examples of evil," she said.

"Oh," said Enderby. "Killing for the sake of doing it. Torturing for pleasure-it always is that, though, isn't it? Defacing a work of art. Farting during a performance of a late Beethoven quartet. That must be evil because it's not wrong. I mean, there's no law against it."

"We believe," she said, sitting up seriously, checking the cassette machine and holding it out, "that a time will come when evil will be no more. She'll come again, and that will be the end of evil."

"Who's she?"

"Jesus, of course."

Enderby breathed deeply several times. "Look," he said. "If you get rid of evil you get rid of choice. You've got to have things to choose between, and that means good and evil. If you don't choose, you're not human any more. You're something else. Or you're dead."

"You're sweating just terribly," she said. "There's no need to wear all that. Don't you have swimming trunks?"

"I don't swim," Enderby said.

"It is hot," she said. And she began to remove her Coke-and-hamburger-stained sweater. Enderby gulped and gulped. He said:

"This is, you must admit, somewhat irregular. I mean, the professor and student relationship and all that sort of thing."

"You exhibited yourself. That's somewhat irregular too." By now she had taken off the sweater. She was, he supposed, decently dressed by beach standards, but there was a curious erotic difference between the two kinds of top worn. This was austere enough-no frills or representations of black hands feeling for the nipples. Still, it was undress. Beach dress was not that. He said:

"An interesting question when you come to think of it. If somebody's lying naked on the beach it's not erotic. Naked on the bed is different. Even more different on the floor."

"The first one's functional," she said. "Like for a surgical operation. Nakedness is only erotic when it's obviously not for anything else."

"You're quite a clever girl," Enderby said. "What kind of marks have I been giving you?"

"Two C's. But I couldn't do the sestina. Very old-fashioned. And the other one was free verse. But you said it was really hexameters."

"People often go into hexameters when they try to write free verse," Enderby said. "Walt Whitman, for instance."

"I have to get A's. I just have to." And then: "It is hot."

"Would you like some ice in that? I can get you some ice."

"Have you a cold Coke?"

"There you go again, with your bloody Cokes and 7-Ups and so on. It's uncivilised," Enderby raged. "I'll get you some ice." He went into the kitchen and looked at it gloomily. It was a bit dirty, really, the sink piled high. He didn't know how to use the washing-up machine. He crunched out ice cubes by pulling a lever. Ice cubes went tumbling into dirty water and old fat. He cleaned them on a dishrag. Then he put them into the GEORGIA tea mug and took them in. He gulped. He said: "That's going too far, you know." Topless waitresses, topless students. And then: "I forgot to wash a glass for you. Scatch on the racks," he added, desperately facetious. He went back to the kitchen and at once the kitchen telephone rang.

"Enderby?" It was an English voice, male.

"Professor Enderby, yes."

"Well, you're really in the shit now, aren't you, old boy?"

"Look, did you put her up to this? Who are you, anyway?"

"Ah, something going on there too, eh? This is Jim Bister from Washington. I saw you in Tangier, remember? Surrounded by all those bitsy booful brown boys."

"Are you tight?"

"Not more than usual, old boy. Look, seriously. I was asked by my editor to get you to say something about this nun business."

"What nun business? What editor? Who are you, anyway?" He was perhaps going too far in asking that last question again, but he objected to this assumption that British expatriates in America ought to be matey with each other, saying in the shit and so forth at the drop of a hat.

"I've said who I am. I thought you'd remember. I suppose you were half-pissed that time in Tangier. My newspaper is the Evening Banner, London if you've forgotten, what with your brandy and pederasty, and my editor wants to know what you-"

"What did you say then about pederasty? I thought I caught something about pederasty. Because if I did, by Jesus I'll be down there in Washington and I'll-"

"I didn't. Couldn't pronounce it even if I knew it. It's about this nun business in Ashton-under-Lyne, if you know where that is."

"You've got that wrong. It's here."

"No, that's a different one, old man. This one in Ashton-under-Lyne-that's in the North of England, Lancashire, in case you don't know-is manslaughter. Nunslaughter. Maybe murder. Haven't you heard?"

"What the hell's it to do with me anyway? Look, I distinctly heard you say pederasty-"

"Oh, balls to pederasty. Be serious for once. These kids who did it said they'd seen your film, the Deutschland thing. So now everybody's having a go at that. And one of the kids-"

"It's not mine, do you hear, and in any case no work of art has ever yet been responsible for-"

"Ah, call it a work of art, do you? That's interesting. And you'd call the book they made it from a work of art too, would you? Because one of the kids said he'd read the book as well as seen the film and it might have been the book that put the idea into his head. Any comments?"

"It's not a book, it's a poem. And I don't believe that it would be possible for a poem to-In any case, I think he's lying."

"They've been reading it out in court. I've got some bits here. May have got a bit garbled over the telex, of course. Anyway, there's this: 'From life's dawn it is drawn down, Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked the same.' Apparently that started him dreaming at night. And there's something about 'the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his lovescape crucified.' Very showy type of writing, I must say. They're talking about the danger to susceptible young minds and banning it from the Ashton-under-Lyne bookshops."

"I shouldn't imagine there's one bloody copy there. This is bloody ridiculous, of course. They're talking of banning the collected poems of a great English poet? A Jesuit priest, as well? God bloody almighty, they must all be out of their fucking minds."

"There's this nun dead, anyhow. What are you going to do about it?"

"Me? I'm not going to do anything. Ask the buggers who made the film. They'll say what I say-that once you start admitting that a work of art can cause people to start committing crimes, then you're lost. Nothing's safe. Not even Shakespeare. Not even the Bible. Though the Bible's a lot of bloodthirsty balderdash that ought to be kept out of people's hands."

"Can I quote you, old man?"

"You can do what the hell you like. Pederasty, indeed. I've got a naked girl in here now. Does that sound like pederasty, you stupid insulting bastard?" And he rang off, snorting. He went back, snorting, to his whisky and pouffe. The girl was not there. "Where are you?" he cried. "You and your bloody Jesus-was-a-woman nonsense. Do you know what they've done now? Do you know what they're trying to do to one of the greatest mystical poets that English poetry has ever known? Where are you?"

She was in his bedroom, he found to no surprise, lying on the circular bed, though still with her worker's pants on. "Shall I take these off?" she said. Enderby, whisky bottle in hand, sat down heavily on a rattan chair not too far from the bed and looked at her, jaw dropped. He said:

"Why?"

"To lay me. That's what you want, isn't it? You don't get much of a chance, do you, you being old and ugly and a bit fat. Well, anyway, you can if you want."

"Is this," asked Enderby carefully, "how you work for this bloody blasphemous Jesus of yours?"

"I've got to have an A."

Enderby started noisily to cry. The girl, startled, got off the bed. She went out. Enderby continued crying, interrupting,the spasm only to swig at the bottle. He heard her, presumably now sweatered again and clutching her cassette nonsense that was partially stuffed with his woolly voice, leaving the apartment swiftly on sneakered feet. Then she, as it were, threw in her face for him to look at now that her body had gone-a lost face with drowned hair of no particular colour, green eyes set wide apart like an animal's, a cheese-paring nose, a wide American mouth that was a false promise of generosity, the face of a girl who wanted an A. Enderby went on weeping and, while it went on, was presented intellectually with several bloody good reasons for weeping: his own decay, the daily nightmare of many parcels (too many cigarette lighters that wouldn't work, too many old bills, unanswered letters, empty gin bottles, single socks, physical organs, hairs in the nose and ears), everyone's desperate longing for a final refrigerated simplicity. He saw very clearly the creature that was weeping-a kind of Blake sylph, a desperately innocent observer buried under the burden of extension, in which dyspepsia and sore gums were hardly distinguishable from past sins and follies, the great bloody muckheap of multiplicity (make that the name of the conurbation in which I live) from which he wanted to escape but couldn't. I've got to have an A. The sheer horrible innocence of it. Who the hell didn't feel he'd got to have an A?

It was still only eleven-thirty. He went to the bathroom and, mixing shaving cream with tears not yet dried, he shaved. He shaved bloodily and, in the manner of ageing men, left patches of stubble here and there. Then he shambled over to the desk and conjured St. Augustine.

He strode in out of Africa, wearing a

Tattered royal robe of orchard moonlight

Smelling of stolen apples but otherwise

Ready to scorch, a punishing sun, saying:

Where is this man of the northern sea, let me

Chide him, let me do more if

His heresy merits it, what is his heresy?

And a hand-rubbing priest, olive-skinned,

Garlic-breathed, looked up at the

Great African solar face to whine:

If it please you, the heresy is evidently a

Heresy but there is as yet no name for it.

And Augustine said: All things must have a name,

Otherwise, Proteus-like, they slither and slide

From the grasp. A thing does not

Exist until it has a name. Name it

After this sea-man, call it after

Pelagius. And lo the heresy existed.

What could be written sometime, Enderby suddenly thought, was a saga of a man's teeth-the Odontiad. The idea came to him because of this image of the African bishop and saint and chider, whose thirty-two wholesome and gleaming teeth he clearly saw, flashing like two ivory blades (an upper teeth and a lower teeth) as he gnashed out condemnatory silver Latin. The Odontiad-a poetic record of dental decay in thirty-two books. The idea excited him so much that he felt an untimely and certainly unearned gust of hunger. He sharply down-sir-downed his growling stomach and went on with his work.

Pelagius appeared, north-pale, cool as one of

Britain's summers, to say, in British Latin:

Christ redeemed us from the general sin, from

The Adamic inheritance, the sour apple

Stuck in the throat (and underneath his solar

Hide Augustine blushed). And thus, my lord,

Man was set free, no longer bounden

In sin's bond. He is free to choose

To sin or not to sin, he is in no wise

Predisposed, it is all a matter of

Human choice. And by his own effort, yea,

His own effort only, not some matter of God's

Grace arbitrarily and capriciously

Bestowed, he may reach heaven, he may indeed

Make his heaven. He is free to do so.

Do you deny his freedom? Do you deny

That God's incredible benison was to

Make man free, if he wished, to offend him?

That no greater love is conceivable

Than to leave the creature free to hate

The creator and come to love the hard way

But always (mark this mark this) by his own

Will by his own free will?

Cool Britain thus spoke, a land where indeed a

Man groans not for the grace of rain, where

He can sow and reap, a green land, where

The God of unpredictable Africa is

A strange God

It was no use. He ached with hunger. He went rumbling to the kitchen and looked at his untidy store cupboards. Soon he sat down to a new-rinsed dish of yesterday's stew reheated (chuck steak, onions, carrots, spuds, well-spiced with Lea and Perrin's and a generous drop or so of chili sauce) while there sang on the stove in deep though tepid fat a whole bag of ready-cut crinkled potato pieces and, in another pan, slices of spongy canned meat called Mensch or Munch or something. The kettle was on for tea.

To his surprise, Enderby felt, while sitting calm, relaxed, and in mildly pleasant anticipation of good things to come, a sudden spasm that was not quite dyspepsia. An obscene pain struck in the breastbone, then climbed with some difficulty into the left clavicle and, from there, cascaded like a handful of heavy money down the left upper arm. He was appalled, outraged, what had he done to deserve-He caught an image of Henry James's face for some reason, similarly appalled though in a manner somehow patrician. Then nausea, sweating, and very cruel pain took over entirely. What the hell did one do now? The dish of half-eaten stew did not tell him, except not to finish it. What was that about the something-or-other distinguished thing? Ah yes, death. He was going to die. That was what it was.

He staggered moaning and cursing about the unfairness to the living room (dying room?). Death. It was very important to know what he was dying of. Was this what was called a heart attack? He sat on a comfortless chair and saw pain dripping onto the floor from his forehead. His shirt was soaked. It was so bloody hot. Breathing was very difficult. He tried to stop breathing, but his body, ill as it was, was not going to have that. Forced to take in a sharp lungful, he found the pain receding. Not death then. Not yet. A warning only. There was a statutory number of heart attacks before the ultimate, was there not? What he was being warned against he did not know. Smoking? Masturbation? Poetry?

He smelt smoke. Ah, was that also a symptom, a dysfunctioning of the olfactory system or something? But no, it was the damned food he had left sizzling. He tottered back into the kitchen and turned everything off. Didn't feel much like eating now.

Enderby left the apartment and the apartment building itself with great caution, as though death, having promised sometime to present himself in one form, might (with a dirtiness more appropriate to life) now present himself in another. Enderby was well wrapped against what he took to be the February cold. He had looked from his twelfth-floor window to see fur caps as if this were Moscow, though also sun and wind-scoured sidewalks. Liverish weather, then. He was dressed in his old beret, woollen gloves, and a kind of sculpted Edwardian overcoat bequeathed by his old enemy Rawcliffe. Rawcliffe was long dead. He had died bloodily, fecally, messily, and now, to quote his own poem, practically his only own poem, his salts drained into alien soil. He had got death over with, then. He was, in a sense, lucky.

Perhaps posthumous life was better than the real thing. Oh God yes, I remember Enderby, what a man. Eater, drinker, wencher, and such exotic adventures. You could go on living without all the trouble of still being alive. Your character got blurred and mingled with those of other dead men, wittier, handsomer, themselves more vital now that they were dead. And there was one's work, good or bad but still a death-cheater. Perennius acre, and it was no vain boast even for the lousiest sonneteer that the Muse had ever farted onto. It wasn't death that was the trouble, of course, it was dying.

Enderby also carried, or was part carried by, a very special stick or cane. It was a swordstick, also formerly Rawcliffe's property. Enderby had gathered that it was illegal to go around with it in America, a concealed weapon, but that was the worst bloody hypocrisy he had ever met in this hypocritical country where everybody had a gun. He had not had cause to use the sword part of the stick, but it was a comfort to have in the foul streets that, like pustular bandages, wrapped the running sore of his university around. For corruption of the best was always the worst, lilies that fester, etc. What had been a centre of incorrupt learning was now a whorehouse of progressive intellectual abdication. The kids had to have what they wanted, this being a so-called democracy: courses in soul cookery, whatever that was, and petromusicology, that being teen-age garbage now treated as an art, and the history of black slavery, and innumerable branches of a subject called sociology. The past was spat upon and the future was ready to be spat upon too, since this would quickly enough turn itself into the past.

The elevator depressed Enderby to a vestibule with telescreens on the wall, each channel showing something different but always people unbent on violence or breaking in, it being too early in the day and probably too cold. A Puerto Rican named Sancho sat, in the uniform designed by Ms. Schwarz of the block police committee, nursing a submachine gun. He greeted Enderby in Puerto Rican and Enderby responded in Tangerine. The point was: where was the capital of Spanish these days? Certainly not Madrid. And of English? Certainly not London. Enderby, British poet. That was exact but somehow ludicrous. Wordsworth, British poet. That was ludicrous in a different way. When Wordsworth wrote of a British shepherd, as he did somewhere, he meant a remote shadowy Celt. Enderby went out into the cold and walked carefully, leaning on his swordstick, towards Broadway. This afternoon he had two classes and he wondered if he was up to either of them. The first was a formal lecture really in which, heretically, he taught, told, gave out information. It was minor Elizabethan dramatists, a subject none of the regular English Department was willing-or, so far as he could tell, qualified-to teach. This afternoon he was dealing with-

At the corner of 91st Street and Broadway he paused, appalled. He had forgotten. But it was as if he had never known. There was a blank in that part of his brain which was concerned with minor, or for that matter, major Elizabethan drama. Was this a consequence of that brief heart attack? He had no notes, scorned to use them. Nobody cared, anyway. It was something to get an A with. He walked into Broadway and towards the 96th Street subway entrance, conjuring minor Elizabethans desperately-men who all looked alike and died young, black-bearded ruffians with ruffs and earrings. He would have to get a book on-But there was no time. Wait-it was coming back. Dekker, Greene, Peele, Nashe. The Christian names had gone, but never mind. The plays they had written? The Shoemaker's Holiday, Old Fortunatus, The Honest Whore. Which one of those syphilitic scoundrels had written those, and what the hell were they about? Enderby could feel his heart preparing to stop beating, and this could not, obviously, be allowed. The other class he had was all right-Creative Writing-and he had some of the ghastly poems they had written in his inside jacket pocket. But this first one-Relax, relax. It was a question of not trying too hard, not getting uptight, keeping your cool, as they said-very vague terms.

Reaching the subway entrance, moving as ever cautiously among muttering or insolent or palpably drugged people whom it was best to think of as being there mainly to demonstrate the range of the pigmentation spectrum, he observed, with gloom, shock, pride, shame, horror, amusement, and kindred emotions, that The Wreck of the Deutschland was now showing at the Symphony movie house. The 96th Street subway entrance he had arrived at was actually at the corner of 93rd Street. To see the advertising material of the film better, he walked, with his stick's aid, towards the matrical or perhaps seniorsororal entrance, and was able to take in a known gaudy poster showing a near-naked nun facing, with carmined lips opened in orgasm, the rash-smart sloggering brine. Meanwhile, in one inset tableau, thugs wearing swastikas prepared to violate five of the coifed sisterhood, Gertrude, lily, conspicuous by her tallness among them, and, in another, Father Tom Hopkins, S.J., desperately prayed, apparently having just got out of the bath to do so. Enderby felt his heart prepare, in the manner rather of a stomach, to react to all this, so he escaped into the dirty hell of the subway. A tall Negro with a poncho and a cowboy hat was just coming up, and he said no good to Enderby.

Hell, Enderby was thinking as he sat in one of the IRT coaches going uptownwards. Because we were too intellectual and clever and humanistic to believe in a hell didn't mean that a hell couldn't exist. If there were a God, he could easily be a God who relieved himself of the almost intolerable love he felt for the major part of his creation (on such planets, say, as Turulura 15a and Baa'rdnok and Juriat) by torturing forever the inhabitants of 111/9 Tellus 1706defg. A touch of pepper sauce, his palate entitled to it. Or perhaps an experiment to see how much handing out of torture he himself could tolerate. He had, after all, a kind of duty to his own infinitely variable supersensorium. Hamlet was right, naturally. Troubles the will and makes us rather. This little uptown ride, especially when the train stopped long and inexplicably between stations, was a fair miniature simulacrum of the ultimate misery-potential black and brown devils ready to rob, slice, and rape; the names of the devils blowpainted on bulkheads and seats, though never on advertisements (sacred scriptures of the infernal law) JESUS 69, SATAN 127, REDBALL is back.

Coming out of the subway, walking through the disfigured streets full of decayed and disaffected and dogmerds, he felt a sudden and inappropriate accession of well-being. It was as though that lunchtime spasm had cleared away black humours inaccessible to the Chinese black draught. Everything came back about minor Elizabethan drama, though in the form of a great cinema poster with a brooding Shakespeare in the middle. But the supporting cast was set neatly about-George Peele, carrying a copy of The Old Wives' Tale and singing in a fumetto about chopcherry chopcherry ripe within; poor cirrhotic Robert Greene conjuring Friars Bacon and Bungay; Tom Brightness-falls-from-the-air Nashe; others, including Dekker eating a pancake. That was all right, then. But wait-who were those other others? Anthony Munday, yes yes, a bad playbotcher but he certainly existed. Plowman? A play called A Priest in a Whorehouse? Deverish? England's Might or The Triumphs of Gloriana?

Treading through rack of crumpled protest handouts, desiccated leaves, beer cans, admitted with reluctance by a black armed policeman, he made his familiar way to the officially desecrated chapel which now held partitioned classrooms. Heart thumping, though fairly healthily, he entered his own (he was no more than five minutes late) to find his twenty or so waiting. There were Chinese, skullcapped Hebrews, a girl from the Coast who piquantly combined black and Japanese, a beer-fat Irishman with red thatch, an exquisite Latin nymph, a cunning know-all of the Kickapoo nation. He stood looking vaguely at them all. They lounged and ate snacks and drank from cans and smoked pot and looked back at him. He didn't know whether to sit or not at the table on which someone had chalked ASSFUCK. A little indisposed today, ladies and gentlemen. But no, he would doggedly stand. He stood. That bright Elizabethan poster swiftly evanesced. He gaped. All was blank except for imagination, which was a scurrying colony of termites. He said:

"Today, ladies and gentlemen, continuing our necessarily superficial survey of the minor Elizabethan dramatists-"

The door opened and a boy and a girl, wan and breathless from swift fumbling in the corridor, entered, buttoning. They sat, looking up at him, panting.

"We come to-" But who the hell did we come to? They waited, he waited. He went to the blackboard and wiped off some elementary English grammar. The chalk in his grip trembled, broke in two. He wrote to his astonishment the name GERVASE WHITELADY. He added, in greater surprise and fear, the dates 1559-1591. He turned shaking to see that many of the students were taking the data down on bits of paper. He was committed now: this bloody man, not yet brought into existence, had to have existed. "Gervase Whitelady," he said, matter-of-factly, almost with a smear of the boredom proper to mention of a name nauseatingly well known among scholars. "Not a great name-a name, indeed, that some of you have probably never even heard of-" But the Kickapoo know-all had heard of it all right: he nodded with superior vigour. "-But we cannot afford to neglect his achievement, such as it was. Whitelady was the second son of Giles Whitelady, a scrivener. The family had settled in Pease Pottage, not far from the seaside town we now call Brighton, and were supporters of the Moabite persuasion of crypto-reformed Christianity as far back as the time of Wyclif." He looked at them all, incurious lot of young bastards. "Any questions?" There were no questions. "Very well, then." The Kickapoo shot up a hand. "Yes?"

"Is Whitelady the one who collaborated with-what was the name of the guy now-Fenprick? You know, they did this comedy together-what the hell was the name of it-"

A very cunning young redskin sod, ought to be kept on his reservation. Enderby was Not going to have this. "Are you quite sure you mean Fenprick, er er-"

"Running Deer is the name, professor. It might have been Fencock. A lot of these British names sound crazy."

Enderby looked long on him. "The dates of Richard Fenpick," he said, "-note that it is pick not prick, by the way, er er-" Running Deer, indeed. He must sometime look through the admission cards they were supposed to hand in. "His dates are 1574-1619. He could hardly have collaborated with er-" He checked the name from the board. "Er Whitelady unless he had been a sort of infant prodigy, and I can assure you he was er not." He now felt a hunger to say more about this Fenpick, whose career and even physical lineaments were being presented most lucidly to a wing of his brain which, he was sure, had been newly erected between the heart attack and now. "What," he said with large energy and confidence, "we most certainly do know about er Fenpick is his instrumentality in bringing the Essex rebellion to a happy conclusion." To his shock the hand of the girl who had just come in with that oversexed lout there, still panting, shot up. She cried:

"Happy for whom?"

"For er everybody concerned," Enderby er affirmed. "It had happened before in history, English naturally, as Whatsis-name's own er conveniently or inconveniently dramatised."

"Inconvenient for whom?"

"For er those concerned."

"What she means is," said the red-thatched beer-swollen Irish student, "that the movie was on last night. The Late Late Date-with-the-Great Show. What Bette Davis called it was Richard Two."

"Elizabeth and Essex," the buttoned girl said. "It failed and she had his head cut off but she cries because it's a Cruel Necessity."

"What Professor Enderby was trying to say," the Kickapoo said, "was that the record is all a lie. There was really a King Robert the First on the British throne, disguised as the Queen." Enderby looked bitterly at him, saying:

"Are you trying to take the-Are you having a go?"

"Pardon me?"

"The vital statistics," a young Talmudist said, pencil poised at the ready. "This Whitelady."

"Who? Ah, yes."

"The works."

"The works," Enderby said, with refocillated energy. "Ah, yes. One long poem on a classical theme, the love of er Hostus for Primula. The title, I mean the hero and heroine, are eponymous." He clearly saw a first edition of the damned poem with title page a horrid mixture of typefaces, fat ill-drawn nymphs on it, a round chop which said Bibliotheca Somethingorother. "Specimen lines," he continued boldly:

"Then as the moon engilds the Thalian fields

The nymph her er knotted maidenhead thus yields,

In joy the howlets owl it to the night,

In joy fair Cynthia augments her light,

The bubbling conies in their warrens er move

And simulate the transports of their love."

"But that's beautiful," said the beautiful Latin nymph, unfat, un-ill-drawn, unknotted.

"Crap," the Talmudist offered. "The transports of whose love?"

"Theirs, of course," Enderby said. "Primavera and the er her lover."

"There were six plays," the Kickapoo said, "if I remember correctly."

"Seven," Enderby said, "if you count the one long attributed to er Sidebottom-"

"Crazy British names."

"But now pretty firmly established as mainly the work of er the man we're dealing with, with an act and a half by an unknown hand."

"How can they tell?"

"Computer work," Enderby said vaguely. "Cybernetic wonders in Texas or some such place." He saw now fairly clearly that he would have to be for the chop. Or no, no, I quit. This was intolerable.

"What plays?" the Chinese next to the Talmudist said, a small round cheerful boy, perhaps an assistant cook in his spare time or main time if this were his spare time.

"Yes," with fine briskness. "Take these down. What do you lack, fair mistress? A comedy, done by the Earl of Leicester's Men, 1588. The Tragedy of Canicula, Earl of Sussex's Men, the same year. A year later came The History of Lambert Simnel, performed at court for the Shrovetide Revels. And then there was, let me see-"

"Where can we get hold of them?" the melanonipponese said crossly. "I mean, there's not much point in just having the titles."

"Impossible," prompt Enderby said. "Long out of print. It's only important for your purpose that you know that Longbottom that is to say Whitelady actually existed-"

"But how do we know he did?" There were two very obdurate strains in this mixed Coast girl.

"Records," Enderby said. "Look it all up in the appropriate books. Use your library, that's what it's for. One cannot exaggerate the importance of er his contribution to the medium, as an influence that is, the influence of his rhythm is quite apparent in the earlier plays of er-"

"Mangold Smotherwild," the Kickapoo said, no longer sneeringly outside the creative process but almost sweatily in the middle of it. Enderby saw that he could always say that he had been trying out a new subject called Creative Literary History. They might even write articles about it: The Use of the Fictive Alternative World in the Teaching of Literature. Somebody called out: "Specimen."

"No trouble at all," Enderby said. "In the first scene of Give you good den good my masters you have a soliloquy by a minor character named Retchpork. It goes, as I remember, something like this:

"So the world ticks, aye, like to a tocking dock

On th' wall of naked else infinitude,

And I am hither come to lend an ear

To manners, modes and bawdries of this town

In hope to school myself in knavery.

Aye, 'tis a knavish world wherein the whore

And bawd and pickpurse, he of the quatertrey,

The coneycatcher, prigger, jack o' trumps

Do profit mightily while the studious lamp

Affords but little glimmer to the starved

And studious partisan of learning's lore.

Therefore, I say, am I come hither, aye,

To be enrolled in knavish roguery.

But soft, who's this? Aye, marry, by my troth,

A subject apt for working on. Good den,

My master, prithee what o'clock hast thou,

You I would say, and have not hast, forgive

Such rustical familiarity

From one unlearn'd in all the lore polite

Of streets, piazzas and the panoply

Of populous cities-

Something like that, anyway," Enderby said. "I could go on if you wished. But it's all a bit dull."

"If it's all a bit dull," the Irish one said, "why do we have to have it?"

"I thought you said he was influential," somebody else complained.

"Well, he was. Dully influential," the Kickapoo said.

"Dead at thirty-two," Enderby said, having checked with the blackboard data. "Dead in a duel or perhaps of the French pox or of a surfeit of pickled herrings and onions in vinegar with crushed peppercorns and sour ale or, of course, of the plague. It was a pretty bad year for the plague, I think, 1591." He saw Whitelady peering beseechingly at him, a white face from the shades, begging for a good epitaph. "He was nothing," Enderby said brutally, the face flinching as though from blows, "so you can forget about him. One of the unknown poets who never properly mastered their craft, spurned by the Muse." The whole luggage of Elizabethan drama was now, unfantasticated by fictional additions, neatly stacked before him. He knew what was in it and what wasn't. This Whitelady wasn't there. And yet, as the mowing face and haunted eyes, watching his, showed, in a sense he was. "The important thing," Enderby pronounced, "is to get yourself born. You're entitled to that. But you're not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen. How much do you think you're entitled to, you?" he asked the Kickapoo.

"As much as I can get."

"And that's a good answer," Enderby said, meaning it, meaning it more than they, in their present stage of growth, could possibly mean it. He suddenly felt a tearful love and compassion for these poor orphans, manipulated by brutal statesmen and the makers of tooth-eroding sweet poisonous drinks and (his face blotted temporarily out that of anguished Whitelady) the bearded southern colonel who made it a virtue to lick chicken fat off your fingers. Schmaltz and Chutzpah. The names swam in, as from the Book of Deuteronomy. Who were they? Lawyers? He said: "Life is sensation, which includes thought, and the sensation of having sensation, which ought to take care of all your stupid worries about identity. Christ, Whitelady has identity. But what he doesn't have and what he never had is the sensation of having sensations. Better and cleverer people than we are can be invented." He saw how wrong he was about perennius acre. "But what can't be invented is," he said, directly addressing the couple who had come in late, "what you two were doing outside in the corridor."

The boy grew very red but the girl smirked.

"The touch of the skin of a young girl's breast. A lush-capped plush-kept sloe-"

"You got that the wrong way around," the Kickapoo said.

"Yes, yes," Enderby said, tired. And then, in utter depression, he saw who Whitelady was. He winked at him with his right eye and Whitelady simultaneously winked back with his left.