The Complete Enderby Read Free

state’s bogey, the state’s guilt. But Minos was economical: the peripheral corridors of the labyrinth became a home of Cretan culture – university, museum, library, art gallery; a treasury of human achievement; beauty and knowledge built round a core of sin, the human condition. Prrrrf. (Enderby’s toilet-roll span.) But one day, from the west, there flew in the Pelagian liberator, the man who had never known sin, the guilt-killer. Minos by now was long dead, along with his shameless queen and, long long before, the midwife. Nobody living had seen the monster and survived, so it was said. Greeted with cheers, flowers and wine, the liberator went to his heroic work. Blond, bronzed, muscular, sinless, he entered the labyrinth and, a day later, emerged leading the monster on a string. Gentle as a pet, with hurt and forgiving eyes, it looked on humanity. Humanity seized it and reviled it and buffeted it. Finally it was nailed to a cross, where it died slowly. At the moment of giving up the ghost there was a sound of rending and crashing. The labyrinth collapsed; books were buried, statues ground to chalk-dust: civilization was at an end. Brrrrp.
    The poem was to be called, tentatively,
The Pet Beast
. Enderby realized that a great deal of work had to be done on it, symbols clarified, technical knots unravelled. There was the disinterested craftsman, Daedalus, to be brought into it, the antisocial genius with the final answer of flight. There was Pasiphae’s pantomime cow. He tried out, in his deep woollily inept voice, a line or two on a hushed audience of hanging dirty towels:
     
He, the cold king, judged cases in his dreams.
Awake, lithe at his task,
The other whistled, sawing pliant beams.
Law is what seems;
The Craftsman’s place to act and not to ask.
     
    The words, resounding in that tiny cell, acted at once like a conjuration. Just outside the flimsy door of Mr Enderby’s ground-floor flat was the entrance-hall of the house itself. He heard the massive front door creak open and the hall seemed to fill with New Year revellers. He recognized the silly unresonant voice of the salesman who lived in the flat above, the stout-fed laugh of the woman who lived with him. There were other voices, not assignable to known persons but generic, voices of
Daily Mirror
-readers, ITV-viewers, HP-buyers, Babycham-drinkers. There were loud and cheerful greetings:
    ‘Happy New Year, Enderby!’
    ‘Prrrrrrrrp!’
    The stout-fed woman’s voice said, ‘I don’t feel well. I’m going to be sick.’ She at once, by the sound of it, was. Someone called:
    ‘Give us a poem, Enderby, “Eskimo Nell” or “The Good Ship Venus”.’
    ‘Sing us a song, Enderby.’
    ‘Jack,’ said the sick woman weakly, ‘I’m going straight up. I’ve had it.’
    ‘You go up, love,’ said the salesman’s voice. ‘I’ll be after you in a minute. Got to serenade old Enderby first.’ There was the noise of a staggering fall against the door of Enderby’s flat, a choirmaster’s ‘One two three’, and then the vigorous ragged strains of ‘
Ach Du Lieber Augustin
’, but with rude English words:
     
Balls to Mister Enderby, Enderby, Enderby;
Balls to Mister Enderby, ballocks to you.
For he keeps us waiting while he’s masturbating, so –
     
    Enderby stuffed moistened pellets of toilet-paper in his ears. Locked safely enough in his flat, he now locked himself safelier in his bathroom. Scratching a warmed bare leg, he tried to concentrate on his poem. The revellers soon desisted and dispersed. He thought he heard the salesman call out, ‘That’s the enderby, Enderby.’
3
     
    Cosily muffled against the sharp marine morning, Enderby walked down Fitzherbert Avenue towards the sea. It was ten-thirty by the Town Hall clock and the pubs were just opening. He passed Gradeleigh (‘for Gradely Folk’), Kia-Ora (retired Kiwis), Ty-Gwyn (couple from Tredegar), Channel View, White Posts, Dulce Domus, The Laurels, Ithaca (former classics master