The Complete Enderby Read Online Free PDF

coming down. She saw a knife and blood and screamed. Enderby entered his flat, ran into the bathroom, kicked on the heater, sat on the low seat. Automatically he stood up again to lower his trousers. Then, all bloody, he began to write. Somebody knocked – imperious, imperative – at his front door. He locked the bathroom door and got on with his writing. The knocks soon ceased. After half an hour he had the whole poem on paper.
     
‘Prudence! Prudence!’ the pigeons call.
‘Scorpions lurk in the gilded meadow.
An eye is embossed on the island wall.
The running tap casts a static shadow.’
‘Caution! Caution!’ the rooks proclaim.
‘The dear departed, the weeping widow
Will meet in you in the core of flame.
The running tap casts a static shadow.’
     
    The injunction of the last stanza seemed clear enough, privy enough. Was it really possible, he wondered, for him to follow it, making this year different from all others?
     
‘Act! Act!’ The ducks give voice.
‘Enjoy the widow in the meadow.
Drain the sacrament of choice …’
     
    In the kitchen, he could now hear, the water was still flooding away. He had forgotten to turn it off. Casting a static shadow all the time. He got up from his seat, automatically pulling the chain. Who was this blasted widow that the poem referred to?

2
     
1
     
    WHILE ENDERBY WAS breakfasting off reheated hare stew with pickled walnuts and stepmother’s tea, the postman came with a fateful letter. The envelope was thick, rich, creamy; richly black the typed address, as though a new ribbon had been put in just for that holy name. The note-paper was embossed with the arms of a famous firm of chain booksellers. The letter congratulated Enderby on his last year’s volume –
Revolutionary Sonnets
– and was overjoyed to announce that he had been awarded the firm’s annual Poetry Prize of a gold medal and fifty guineas. Enderby was cordially invited to a special luncheon to be held in the banqueting-room of an intimidating London hotel, there to receive his prizes amid the plaudits of the literary world. Enderby let his hare stew go cold. The third Tuesday in January. Please reply. He was dazed. And, again, congratulations. London. The very name evoked the same responses as
lung cancer, overdrawn, stepmother
.
    He wouldn’t go, he couldn’t go, he hadn’t a suit. At the moment he was wearing glasses, a day’s beard, pyjamas, polo-neck sweater, sports-jacket and very old corduroys. In his wardrobe were a pair of flannel trousers and a watered-silk waistcoat. These, he had thought when settling down after demobilization, were enough for a poet, the watered-silk waistcoat being, perhaps, even, an unseemly luxury of stockbroker-like extravagance. He had had it, by mistake, knocked down to him for five shillings at an auction.
    London. He was flooded with horrid images, some derived from direct experience, others from books. At the end of the war, searching for William Hazlitt’s tomb in its Soho graveyard, he had been abused by a constable and had up in Bow Street on a charge of loitering with intent. He had once slipped on the greasy pavement outside Foyle’s and the man who had helped him up – stocky, elderly, with stiff grey hair – had begged five bob to ’elp aht a bit cos they was on strike that week, guv. That was just after he had bought the watered-silk waistcoat: ten bob down the drain. In the urinal of a very foggy pub he had, unbelievably, been invited to a fellation party by a handsome stranger in smart city wear. This man had become nasty at Enderby’s polite refusal and threatened to scream that Enderby was assaulting him. Very unpleasant. Along with other memories that made him wince (including one excruciating one of a ten-shilling note in the Café Royal) came gobbets from
Oliver Twist, The Waste Land
, and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. London was unnecessarily big, gratuitously hostile, a place for losing money and contracting diseases. Enderby shuddered,