"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.
"Re
pubblica," 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.
Chapter Two
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.