‘Very well, Marion. I will hear his message,’ went April Elgar. ‘Stay close and listen for my bell. Now, sir.’
‘Your beauty,’ Shakeserby said earnestly, ‘deserves better than the homage of a mere player. You need a poet. A poet is what I am.’
‘You are very forward, sir.’
‘Come, none of this. I glory in your beauty. I have here a sonnet.’
‘You have writ a sonnet? For me?’
‘I have writ them for only one man – my near friend whom I love with all my heart, the Earl of Southampton.’
‘So,’ said April Elgar as herself, which was no different from as Lucy, speaking to Toplady, ‘he’s faggy.’
‘Not at all,’ said non Will Enderby stoutly. ‘He was omnifutuant. It was the way things were then.’
‘Yeah, faggy.’
‘Read,’ commanded Toplady. Willerby read:
‘But for one woman I have this:’
‘So he takes out his shlong?’
‘A sonnet. A sonnet. He takes out a sonnet. Shakespeare didn’t write this sonnet. I did.’ Enderby enWilled himself again. ‘Hear, madam.
‘All other beauty’s light I lightly rate.
My love is as my love is, for the dark.
In night enthroned, I ask no better state
Than thus to range, nor seek a guiding spark –’
‘It is forward, to write of love so. You are very impertinent. I’ll say he is.’
‘I wrote this long ago to another lady, one I saw only in dreams. Now I see reality in your true and rich midnight darkness. I have always been seeking one such as you – goddess, genius, poetic pharos.’
‘Poetic what?’
‘Pharos, pharos. Greek for a lighthouse.’
‘Okay, why can’t he say lighthouse. Then it says that I play.’
‘Where did you learn so delicate a touch? Surely not in your own country,’ said Shakesby.
‘I left my own country as a small child. I was torn away as a slave. I was brought up by a family in Bristol. It was a holy work to them to bring light to what they called the heathen. But then they freed me and made me into the lady you see, and when the father died he left me money.’
‘Sing,’ said Enderwill. ‘A song in exchange for my sonnet.’
‘Ah Jesus. You mean this?’ And she minced out the words like a Moody and Sankey hymn:
‘What doth it mean, to love?
It is to plumb the seas and scale the skies.
It is to wear the day away with sighs
Or mount the moon above.
Thus doth it mean, to love,
So wouldst thou seek the truth of this to prove,
And love?’
The entire troupe smirked at that. April Elgar gaped incredulous. ‘It is,’ Enderby stoutly said, ‘in the Elizabethan manner. The sort of thing you’d sing to the virginals.’
‘Sweetie,’ she said, and then, in a kind of slave whine, ‘ah doan want none of dem lil old virginals, whatever de shit dey are. Dey doan fit mah personality no way no how.’
‘I’ve warned you before,’ Enderby cried, ‘about that sort of language. There’s too much of this shit,’ he told the whole troupe, ‘going on. She there,’ jerking his shoulder towards her, ‘blasphemes against her exquisite beauty by bemerding her speech in that manner. For Christ’s sake cut out the shit and let’s be serious.’ And he blazed his way back into the role, crying like a threat: ‘You sing prettily, madam? Can you dance as well?’
‘Some dances I can dance,’ April Elgar said, first grinning and then not. ‘The pavane – the galliard –’
‘Canst,’ Shenderspeare said, with a cunning change to the familiar mode, ‘dance the Beginning of the World?’
‘I know not such a dance.’
‘I,’ Spearesby said, ‘will show thee.’ And he beamed in embarrassment as pure Enderby.
‘Well,’ she said, in her proper person, ‘we’re waiting.’
‘Oh, that. Well – he takes her in his arms and covers her with kisses. He imposes his will upon her, pun intended, he strips her of her taffeta elegance and carries her over to a gorgeous daybed. He untrusses himself and dances the dance called the Beginning of the World. A nice conceit,’ he explained. ‘The Elizabethans saw the sexual act in cosmic terms. It began with an image of creation and ended with death. To die meant to experience the ah orgasm.’
For the first time the assembled company responded to words of Enderby with something approaching attention and even respect. It evidently surprised some of the younger ones to learn that people who had been dead a thousand or a hundred years, same thing, knew about copulation and even had expressive figurative speech to decorate it in or with. ‘Beginnin o the World,’ the black lad said, drawing out World into something unglobular. ‘I like that, man.’ Before or after that night’s Brecht nonsense some of them would be trying it out for the sake of the nomenclature. Baby, ah just died. Then a man in overalls entered to say that the Holiday Inn was on fire.
6
WHAT HAD HAPPENED, so Enderby was to learn later, was that a disaffected busboy or bellhop, mandatorily stoned, had filled a familysize Coca-Cola bottle with gasoline siphoned from the hotel manager’s car, glugged this inflammable out in the empty third-floor bedroom two doors away from Enderby’s own and then enflamed it. He had then got the hell out with a cashbox containing something under a hundred dollars, there not being much cash around these days of credit cards. When Enderby got by taxi to the hotel he found a fire engine there, summoned from Indianapolis, with the firemen pumping not water but a grey chemical substance over all available surfaces. Not much of a fire, but the third floor had been evacuated. Enderby found his suitcase, fortunately closed, covered with grey dust and his decent clerical grey suit suited in a deeper grey. His tea mug and kettle were no longer around, but the rest of his stuff rested, along with other defiled luggage, by a pillar in the defiled foyer. He should by rights demand compensation for defilement but contented himself with getting the hell out, not paying his bill, and asking the taxi driver who had brought him hither and was staying to share in the excitement to take him and his defilements to the Sheraton Hotel in Indianapolis.
The driver insisted first on showing him the town he was to dwell in for a space, or it may have been a matter of his not knowing where the Sheraton Hotel was and hoping to find it by dint of cruising the entire city around. Central Park, Monument Place, radiating Massachusetts, Indiana, Virginia and Kentucky Avenues. State Capitol, Court House, Board of Trade building, Central College of Physicians and Surgeons, Blind and Deaf and Dumb Asylums. At length he said, with no hint of triumph, ‘Well, here it is.’ And there it was. Enderby expected sympathy from the reception clerk for his refugee condition and the state of his baggage but got none. But he was permitted to submit his suit for dry cleaning.
Lying on his bed, smoking a Robert Burns, he noted that he had been carrying all this while, and in spite of more immediate emotions and preoccupations, an inflated shlong, as she called it, and all because of her. Then he wondered about the fire and dismissed a superstitious supposition. Then he remembered that she was staying in this same hotel: he had heard a girl in the big open secretarial area of the theater’s offices confirming her reservation on the telephone. Then he lusted for strong tea and raged in frustration. He would have to go out and resupply himself. He went down, overcoated though without his tout cap, and found a kettle and mug in a kind of hardware store off Kentucky Avenue and, in a supermarket entitled rather soberly EATGOOD, bought brown sugar lumps, canned milk and a box of two hundred tea sachets of unstated provenance, also a brand of toothglue he had not previously met called Champ. And then there was a new variety of stomach tablet named Whoosh. Rather exciting, really, all this consumerism. Fairly pleased, he took his purchases back to the hotel. In the lobby he saw Ms April Elgar. She was being silently admired, and no bloody wonder, by God. She was also flipping through mail that had arrived for her, frowning crossly at it. Enderby we
nt straight up to her and said:
‘Not much of a fire, really. But, as you see, I have been evacuated. I have the pleasure or honour of, both I suppose. As you observe.’
She did not at first seem to know who he was, a matter of his not wearing the tout cap, but his fag British accent presumably rang the bell of recognition that rang. ‘Hi,’ she said.
‘A few essential purchases,’ excusing the brown bags under his arm.
‘I guess so,’ distractedly. And then: ‘You and me have to rap.’
‘Rap?’ Oh Christ, more spiritualist nonsense. ‘I should be delighted to er.’
‘Okay, the bar.’ She swayed her way ahead to it. Enderby removed his overcoat but found it necessary to hold it folded on his lap. The linen trousers were thin. An insincerely cheerful matron dressed like a whore took their orders: whisky sours for both.
‘More sweet than sour,’ Enderby remarked. ‘Something of a misnomer.’
‘You always talk like that?’ she said. ‘All these words.’
‘Well,’ Enderby said, ‘the British have no real slang on the American pattern, I mean not one diffused throughout the entire social system, if you see what I mean. Also, I am a poet, Enderby the poet. Also, I live alone and speak little English these days. It’s becoming, from the spoken angle, something of a foreign language for me.’
‘What do you mean, live alone?’
‘In Tangiers, with these three boys.’
‘Jesus, so you’re another of these screaming fags.’
‘No, no, far from it, although you will, of course, naturally assume that all the British are fags. That’s because your American fags tend to speak with a British accent. A bit illogical, really. Cart before the horse, sort of. I am unimpeachably heterosexual.’ And, by atavistic instinct, he confirmed the testimony by slapping his crotch smartly. ‘Too many fags around,’ he added. ‘Especially in the theatre.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘Too many fags a –’
‘And dykes too. Listen. This is my show, right?’
‘Well,’ Enderby said with care, ‘it’s supposed to be Shakespeare’s really. And let’s get this straight about this er fag element in his life. He had an affair with the Earl of Southampton, no doubt about that, but it didn’t express his true nature, which was passionately heterosexual. He had to climb through the pretence of ah faggishness. Not uncommon at that time. Their sexuality was so intense that it expressed itself in many forms. But in the sense that the Dark Lady is not only a woman but also a kind of destructive and creative goddess at one and the same time, and even perhaps a disease, well, yes, it is, to some extent your show.’
‘So the opening number is me, a production number. I’ll put the shake in Shakespeare, I’ll put the spear in too. Establish,’ she said, much in Enderby’s manner, ‘priorities.’
‘Where did you get that from?’ Enderby asked with some admiration. ‘That’s rather witty.’
‘Just thought of it. Sharp as a pistol, brought up in Bristol. The white man’s knavery sold me in slavery. Hey,’ she hailed the serving matron. ‘Two more of those.’
‘Thou art,’ Enderby said, ‘as wise as thou art beautiful.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘Quotation from. Titania says that to Bottom. But,’ Enderby said with some urgency, ‘the beauty is real enough, God knows. I say this with total objectivity. Your beauty is overwhelming, of a kind rarely seen. But this, of course, you must know.’
‘Yah,’ she said, ‘I know it. My beauty is my bread,’ she added with mock solemnity. ‘Talent, too, baby, I got talent.’
‘That,’ Enderby said, ‘I still have to see.’
‘You better believe it. Right. That fag Silverass is on his way and you gotta have words to give him. Songs, baby. So I want you to steer your pinko ass into that elevator and get up to your room and start writing.’
‘Gladly,’ Enderby said. ‘After dinner. I thought,’ he thought for the first time, ‘we might have dinner together.’
‘That’s nice, that’s real nice. Like in old movies. Not tonight, baby, some other time.’
‘You,’ Enderby said, ‘have already arranged to dine with some other ah guy. I see.’
‘No, you don’t see.’ She sipped at her fresh whisky sour and Enderby at his. The tumescence was terrible. ‘You see nothing. Ah has mah prahvit lahf.’
‘At least,’ Enderby said, ‘you’ve stopped saying shit all the time. That’s a word I’ve heard Americans use even at table. They don’t take in the referent of the word. It’s become just a neutral expletive.’
‘Okay, no shit.’ And then a great handsome man of her own colour, though much darker, bore down on their table. She rose in shrill ecstasy and they fondly embraced. Baby honey-bunch and then an unintelligible duet in what Enderby took to be Black English. He drained his whisky sour unnoticed and unintroduced and stole off with his coat and packages. His shlong settled to neutrality. Black bitch and so on. Christ, jealousy, a dark wine long untasted. He hadn’t come all this way to be jealous. He would leave it to her, bitch, to sign for the whisky sours.
But up in his room, strengthened by mahogany tea, he got out his yellow legal pad and started to scribble to her will. Lyrics, seeing her in a richly crimson silk farthingale belting them out, brown bosom fully exposed in the Tudor manner to proclaim, like the Queen herself, putative virginity. This vision was physically very painful. He had to cart the engorged shlong three times into the bathroom and, on a face towel monogrammed with a fanciful S, fiercely discharge his heat. He saw himself fierce in the lighted mirror doing it and nodded fiercely at the fierce reflection. Then, less fierce, indeed encalmed, he went down to dinner and ordered a beefsteak and a half bottle of some ruby Californian muck, both restorative, indeed freshly inflaming. The waiter, a frail Viennese PhD immigrant, seemed to ask him what dressing he would take with his salad. No dressing because no salad. Green stuff was not good for you. April Elgar and her co-coloured fancy man were not there. Swiving like rattlesnakes some place. He, Enderby, willed himself not to care, finishing his french frieds with his fingers, ordering apple pie with ice cream on it. Then he belched his way back up to make tea.
The white man’s knavery
Sold me in slavery
To an unsavoury
Household.
I slept in an attic all
Foully rheumatical,
Bedbugged and cobwebbed
And mouseholed.
I slaved like the slave I was,
Ripe for the grave I was,
But I was brave, I was
Ready
For my master’s remorse and my
Freedom of course and my
Carriage and horse and my
Monetary source
Safe and steady.
Now see me here in London,
Ready for revenge –
All England will be undone
From Carlisle to Stonehenge
On the dayyyyyyyy
I get my wayyyyyy.
But here, by God, was corruption. You cease to celebrate the greatest poet in the world’s history and ennoble nothing but lust of one kind or another. Goats and monkeys. Toplady was, after all, no fool.
I’ll screw some sex into Essex,
I’ll scourge Walter Raleigh’s raw hide.
I’ll make Francis Drake
Chase a duck on a lake
And eat Francis Bacon fried.
I’ll inject the shakes into Shakespeare
And stick in the spear as well,
Wrench out Queen Bess’s
Carroty tresses
And make her bald as a bell.
Right under your gaze
I’m going to raise
Elizabethan hell.
Enderby groaned, but not now with lust, that foul fundamental whose harmonics were admiration, awe and even the most dangerous word in the language. He had been drawn into the celebration of America, not Shakespeare. What voice from the dead h
ad condoned the travesty to come? Robert Greene, perhaps, putting on the tame tiger’s hide in his cunning. One in the eye for Shakescene. Enderby got blearily off his bed (lyricizing was bloody hard work) and dug his contract out of the dusty suitcase. He should have read the small print before signing. Sold into slavery, by God. Suable if he reneged. Best to embrace one’s enforced corruption. He started to write one more song before sleep.
To be or not to be
Smitten by you
Bitten by you
Teased as a ball of wool is teased by a kitten by you:
That is the question
Which harms my digestion
Marry, à propos. He swallowed six Whoosh tablets with chlorinated water and got ready for troubled slumber.
The next day Enderby left them all to it. Let the bastards get on with it. He tried to work in the hotel lounge, but perpetual sedative music got in the way of his rhythms. He went to see the bell bald manager about it, but the manager did not easily comprehend his complaint. Anaesthetization of the ear or something. Offwhite noise. He returned to his room to find the bed yet unmade, but he was used to unmade beds. He stuck the DO NOT DISTURB notice up outside and made himself more tea. Fed up, fucked up and far from home. He dragged Ben Jonson grumbling from his long sleep and made him sing:
The Complete Enderby Page 65