The Complete Enderby by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online

clean handkerchiefs. He would beat these city-slickers at their own game. The suit from Arry was sober grey, the most Eliotian one in his whole wardrobe.
    He was pleasantly surprised by the decent gravity of the figure that bowed from the wardrobe mirror. Urban, respectable, scholarly – a poet-banker, a poet-publisher, teeth a flashing two double octaves in the electric firelight, spectacles drinking of the bedlamp’s glow. Satisfied, he went to get his breakfast – a special breakfast today, for God knew what ghastly sauced muck he might be coldly given in the great hotel. He had bought a Cornish pasty but had, coming out of the shop, slipped on an ice-patch. This had hurt him and flattened the pasty, but its edibility was hardly impaired. It was to be eaten with Branston pickle and, as an extra-special treat, washed down with Blue Mountain coffee. He felt an unwonted exultation as he prepared this viaticum, as if – after years of struggle – he had at last arrived. What should he buy with the prize-money? He couldn’t think what. Books? He had done reading. Clothes? Ha ha. There was nothing he really needed except more talent. Nothing in the world.
    The coffee was disappointingly cool and weak. Perhaps he had not made it properly. Could he take lessons in that? Were there teachers of such things? Arry. Of course, he would ask Arry. At nine-fifteen (train at nine-fifty, ten minutes walk to station) he sat with a cigarette, hypnotized by the gash-gold-vermilion of the electric fire, waiting. He suddenly caught another memory like a flea. Far childhood. Christmas Day, 1924. Snow came down in the afternoon, transfiguring the slum street where the shop was. He had been given a magic lantern and, after dinner, he was to project slides of wild animals on to the sitting-room wall. Powered by a candle, the lantern had been fitted with a candle – a new one, its flame much too high for the lens. His Uncle Jimmy the plumber had said, ‘We’ll have to wait till it burns down. Give us a tune, Fred.’ And Fred, Enderby’s father, had sat at the piano and played. The rest of that dim gathering – only the stepmother bright in memory, belching away – had waited for the candle to burn down to lens level, the coloured animals suddenly to appear on the wall.
    Why, wondered Enderby now, why had nobody thought to cut the candle? Why had they all, every single one of them, agreed to wait on the candle’s convenience? It was another mystery, but he wondered if it was really a mystery of a different order from this other waiting – waiting on Shakespeare’s time’s candle to burn down to time to dress warmly, time to leave for the station. Enderby suddenly passionately wished he could cut the whole long candle to its end – have written his poetry and have done. Then he grinned as his stomach, having slyly engineered this melancholy, plaintively subscribed to it.
    Pfffrrrp. And then Brrrrrrr. But that, he realized, after surprise at his stomach’s achievement of such metallic ectophony, that, he heard with annoyance, was the doorbell. So early, whoever it was, and coming so inconveniently. Enderby went to his flat-door and saw, waddling down the hallway of the house itself, his landlady, Mrs Meldrum. Well. He paid her by post. The less he saw of her the better. ‘If I can trouble you for a moment, Mr E,’ she said. She was a woman of sixty, with pinched East Midland vowels. Her face was modelled on that of a tired but cheerful crescent moon in a bedtime-malted-milk-drink advertisement that even Enderby had seen often: Punch-nose meeting cusp-chin, but no jolly Punch plumpness. She had a full set of Tenniel-teeth of the colour of small chips of dirty ice, and these she showed to Enderby now as to a mirror. Enderby said:
    ‘I’ve got to go up to town.’ He thrilled gently, saying that, a busy man of affairs.
    ‘I shan’t keep you not more than one minute,’ said Mrs Meldrum, ‘Mr E.’ She waddled in past Enderby as if