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thinking of Defoe’s
Journal of the Plague Year
. And there he was – as he emptied his cold plateful back into the saucepan – with his stepmother again. At the age of fifteen he had bought off a twopenny stall in the market a duo-decimo book of recipes, gossip, and homilies, printed in 1605. His stepmother, able to read figures, had screamed at the sight of it when he had proudly brought it home. 1605 was ‘the olden days’, meaning Henry VIII, the executioner’s axe, and the Great Plague. She thrust the book into the kitchen fire with the tongs, yelling that it must be seething with lethal germs. A limited, though live, sense of history.
    And history was the reason why she would never go to London. She saw it as dominated by the Bloody Tower, Fleet Street full of demon barbers, as well as dangerous escalators everywhere. As Enderby now turned on the hot-water tap he saw that the Ascot heater did not, as it should, flare up like a bed of pain. The meter needed a shilling and he was too lazy to go and look for one. He washed his soup-plate and mug in cold water, reflecting that his stepmother had been a great one for that (knives and forks wrapped in grease as if they were guns). She had been very lazy, very stupid, very superstitious. He decided, wiping the dishes, that he would, after all, go to London. After all, it wasn’t very far – only an hour by electric train – and there would be no need to spend the night in a hotel. It was an honour really, he supposed. He would have to borrow a suit from somebody. Arry, he was sure, had one. They were much of a size.
    Enderby, sighing, went to the bathroom to start work. He gazed doubtfully at the bathtub, which was full of notes, drafts, fair copies not yet filed for their eventual volume, books, ink-bottles, cigarette-packets, the remains of odd snacks taken while writing. There were also a few mice that lived beneath the detritus, encouraged in their busy scavenging by Enderby. Occasionally one would surface and perch on the bath’s edge to watch the poet watching the ceiling, pen in hand. With him they were neither cowering nor timorous (he had forgotten the meaning of ‘sleekit’). Enderby recognized that the coming occasion called for a bath. Lustration before the sacramental meal. He had once read in some women’s magazine a grim apothegm he had never forgotten: ‘Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.’ On the other hand, Frederick the Great had never bathed in his life; his corpse had been a rich mahogany colour. Enderby’s view of bathing was neither obsessive nor insouciant. (‘Sans Souci’, Frederick’s palace, was it not?) He was an empiricist in such matters. Though he recognized that a bath would, in a week or two, seem necessary, he recoiled from the prospect of preparing the bathtub and evicting the mice. He would compromise. He would wash very nearly all over in the basin. More, he would shave with exceptional care and trim his hair with nail-scissors.
    Gloomily, Enderby reflected that most modern poets were not merely sufficiently clean but positively natty. T. S. Eliot, with his Lloyd’s Bank nonsense, had started all that, a real treason of clerks. Before him, Enderby liked to believe, cleanliness and neatness had been only for writers of journalistic ballades and triolets. Still, he would show them when he went for his gold medal; he would beat them at their own game. Enderby sighed again as, with bare legs, he took his poetic seat. His first job was to compose a letter of gratitude and acceptance. Prose was not his
métier
.
    After several pompous drafts which he crumpled into the waste-basket on which he sat, Enderby dashed off a letter in
In Memoriam
quatrains, disguised as prose. ‘The gratitude for this award, though sent in all humility, should not, however, come from me, but from my Muse, and from the Lord …’ He paused as a bizarre analogue swam up