NINE

Enderby's supper was interrupted by two telephone calls. During the stew course (two cans of corned beef, frozen onion rings, canned carrots, a large Chunky turkey soup, pâté, a dollop of whisky, Lea and Perrin's, pickled cauliflowers, the remains of the spongemeat and the crinkle-cut potato bits) Ms. Tietjens sobbed to him briefly without preamble: I'm sick, I tell ya, I'm all knotted up inside, I'm sick, sick, there's something wrong with me, I tell ya; and Lloyd Utterage confirmed the impending fulfilment of his threat, so that Enderby was constrained to tell him to come along and welcome, black bastard, and have an already bloody sword stuck into his black guts. Enderby placidly ended his meal with the French ice cream (brought to near melting in a saucepan over a brisk flame) with raspberry jam spread liberally over, spooning the treat in on rich tea biscuits he ate as he spooned. Then he had some strong tea (six Lipton's bags in the pint alabama mug) and lighted up a White Owl. He felt pretty good, as they said in American fiction, though distended. All he needed now, as again they would say in American fiction, and he laughed at the conceit, was a woman.

A woman came while he was making himself more tea. He was surprised to hear the doorbell ring with no anterior warning on the intercommunication system from the black guard below. Every visitor was supposed to be screened, frisked, reported to the intended visited before actually appearing. The woman at the door was young and very attractive in a reactionary way, being dressed in a bourgeois grey costume with a sort of nutria or coypu or something coat swinging open over it. She wore over decently arranged chastaigne hair a little pillbox hat of the same fur. She was carrying a handful of slim volumes. She said:

"Mr. Enderby?"

"Or Professor, according to the nature of. How did you get here? You're not supposed just to come up, you know, without a premonition."

"A what?"

"A forewarning from the gunman."

"Oh. Well, I said it was a late visit from one of your students and that you were expecting me. It is all right, isn't it?"

"Are you one of my students?" Enderby asked. "I don't seem to-"

"I am in a sense. I've studied your work. I'm Dr. Greaving."

"Doctor?"

"From Goldengrove College."

"Oh very well then, perhaps you'd better. That is to say." And he motioned courtlily that she should enter. She entered, sniffing. "Just been cooking," Enderby said. "My supper, that is to say. Can I perhaps offer?"

In the sitting room there was a small table. Dr. Greaving put down her books on it and at once sat on the straight-backed uncomfortable chair nearby.

"Whisky or something like that?"

"Water." Now in, she had become vaguely hostile. She looked up thinly at him.

"Oh, very well. Water." And Enderby went to get it. He let the faucet run but the stream did not noticeably cool. He brought some back warmish and put the glass down with care next to the slim volumes. He saw they were of his own work. British editions, American not existing. "Oh," he said. "How did you manage to get hold of those?"

"Paid for them. Ordered them through a Canadian bookseller. When I was in Montreal." Enderby now noticed that she had taken out of her handbag a small automatic pistol, a lady killer.

"Oh," he said. "Now perhaps you'll understand why they're so keen down below on checking visitors and so on. Why have you brought that? It seems, to say the least, unnecessary." He marvelled at himself saying this. (Cinna the poet: tear him for his bad verses?)

"You deserve," she said, "to be punished. Incidentally, my name is not Dr. Greaving. But what I said about being a student of your work is true."

"Are you Canadian?" Enderby asked.

"You seem to be a big man for irrelevancies. One thing you're a big man in." She drank some water, keeping her eyes on him. The eyes were of a kind of triple-sec colour. "You'd better bring a chair."

"There's one in the kitchen," Enderby said with relief. "I'll just go and-"

"Oh no. No dashing into the kitchen to the telephone. If you tried that anyway I'd come and shoot you in the back. Get that chair over there." It was not really a chair. It was a sort of very frail Indian-style coffee table. Enderby said:

"It's really a sort of very frail. It belongs to my landlady. I might." He was really, to his surprise, quite enjoying this. It seemed quite certain to him now that he was not going to die of cancer of the lung.

"Bring it. Sit on it." He did. He sat on its edge, pity to damage so frail a, horrible though he had always thought it. He said:

"Now what I can do for you, Miss er?"

"I'm not," she said, "going to tolerate any more of this persecution. And it's Mrs., as you perfectly well know. Not that I'm living with him any more, but that's another irrelevance. I'm not going to have you," she said, "getting into my brain."

Enderby gaped. "How?" he said. "What?"

"I know them by heart," she said, "a great number of them. Well, I don't want it any more. I want to be free. I want to get on with my own things, can't you see that, you bastard?" She pointed the little gun very steadily at Enderby.

"I don't understand," Enderby said. "You've read my things, you say. That's what they're for, to be read. But there's no er compulsion to read them, you know."

"There's a lot of things there's no compulsion for. Like going to the movies to see a movie that turns out to be corruptive. But then you're corrupted, just the same. You never know in advance." As this seemed to her ears apparently, as certainly to his, to be a piece of neutral or even friendly expository talk, she added sharply, with a gun gesture, "You bastard."

"Well, what do you want me to do?" Enderby asked. "Unwrite the damned things?" And then, this just striking him, "You're mad, you know, you must be. Sane readers of my poems don't-"

"That's what they all say. That's what he said, till I stopped him."

"How did you stop him?" Enderby asked, fascinated.

"Another irrelevance. Don't you bastards ever think of your responsibility?"

"To our art," Enderby said. "Oh my God," he added in quite impersonal distress, "do you mean there's to be no more art? Aye, by St. Anne," he added, seeing that mad was a very difficult term to define, "and ginger shall be hot in the-"

"There you go again. Decent people suffer and you sit on your fat ass talking about art."

"That's just low abuse," he frowned. "Besides, I don't think you could call this really sitting." She had, he could see, beneath the peel of the mad hate, a sweet face, a Catholic face, ruined, God help the girl, ruined. "No, no," he said in haste. "Relevance is what is called for. I see that." And then: "Look. If you shoot me, it won't make any difference, will it? It won't destroy the words I wrote." And then: "What intrigues me, if that doesn't sound too irrelevant a term, is how you got to know them in the first place. My poems, I mean. I mean, not many people do. And here you are, young as I see, also beautiful if I may say that without sounding frivolous or irrelevant, knowing them. If you do know them, that is, of course, I mean," he ended cunningly.

"Oh, I know them all right," she cried scornfully. "I see lines set up at eye level in the subway. There's one in fifteen-foot-high Gothic letters just by the Port Authority. They get sort of stitched into that Times Square news-ticker thing."

"Interesting," Enderby said.

"There you go," she gun-pointed. "Interesting. So tied up in yourself and your so-called work you're just interested. Interested in how it happened, and all that crap about youth and beauty and the other irrelevancies."

"They're not irrelevant," Enderby said sharply. "I won't have that. Beauty and youth are the only things worth having. Dust hath closed Helen's eye. And they go. And here you are, saying they don't matter. Silly bitch," he attempted, not sure whether that would pull the trigger.