Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "Your books make me laugh," she said grimly.

  Tom's marriage took place the following afternoon in a church in Soho patronised by Catholic stage performers. Sarah Bernhardt had stumped to mass there during a phase of superstition, and Coquelin had dramatically taken the host on his tongue. The last Sunday mass was at noon, since Catholic actors, sword swallowers and trick cyclists needed a long lie after the rigours of Saturday night. Many British stage people were of Catholic family: families that had not yielded to the Reformation had, when not burned, hanged or beheaded, been deprived of the opportunities of commercial and social advancement which were the birthright of British Protestants. Unable to become lawyers, surgeons and professors of Greek, many old Catholics had taken to the only profession for which documentary qualifications were not needful and established family stage traditions, especially in the recusant North. Catholics were now emancipated, though the hierarchy was unrepresented in the House of Lords, but the tradition held. Perhaps there was even something in transfused Catholic blood. That would explain Tom and, for I after all sporadically wrote for the stage, myself. Most stage homosexuals were, I thought, of the Reformed Church.

  I was not best man. That office had been given to a low comedian colleague of Tom's, Ernie Callaghan, who, one could see, was badly tempted to go into a ring--not-here-not-there-surely. I putthedamnedthing in this pocket routine at the altar. I recognized many moderately famous faces in the congregation, and somebody had brought a brace of well-comported performing dogs. The priest appeared to be cast for the role: a man who, I was later told, had got no further than third murderer and discovered a late clerical vocation. The demands and responses of the ceremony rang clear, the timing was good. Estella wore a short-skirted wedding dress with shirt-type sleeves and flared lace oversleeves, a low U neckline, a chiffon veil with embroidery on the edge, soft kid shoes with straps over the instep. Late in the ceremony Augustus John and Peter Warlock (or Philip Heseltine) came in drunk but were ejected by two strong men later, jocularly, identified for me as Cough and Spit the Flemish Twins. Warlock was heard crying that he wanted to play an old chantey called "Rumbelow" on the organ. There was no time for more than a little champagne in a hired upper room of the Wheatsheaf. Tom, and certain others, were performing that evening: there would be a real party on the stage of the Palladium after the second house. Tom was last turn of the first half.

  Estella, our sister-in-law, sat with Hortense and me in one of the stage left boxes. "They were gorgeous," she told us, meaning the Framboise silver coffee set, my gift, and Hortense's, some genuine Svres oversize dinner plates. You could send things from Paris in those days without danger of breakage or pilfering. "I love that sort of thing," Estella said. She seemed to have forgotten me; Hortense, of course, she had never met. She had transferred her old arty enthusiasms to the Catholic Church, for her conversion to which there had been lengthy preparation from, of all people, that Fr. Frobisher of Farm Street who had damned me. She wished to be known as Stella Mans, she was devoted to the Little Flower, she observed the First Fridays, she prayed to Saint Anthony of Padua for the recovery of lost things, she loved fasting, it was so good for the figure, and would fast, regardless of the Church ordinances, at the drop of a hat. When the Palladium orchestra blasted with excessive noise and speed into The Entry of the Gladiators, she took rosary beads from her purse and, with a faint superior smile, began to tell a decade. I had heard about Joe Framley, the beery conductor. The orchestra had begun to rehearse that piece at a good lively tempo but he had cracked down with his baton and yelled, "This is not a fucking funeral march." Hence the ripping and tearing now.

  When, after Estella's fifteenth or so decade, Tommy Toomey came on, neat and slight in tails, there was affectionate applause from the audience. They knew he had been married that afternoon, for there was a picture and a brief story in the Evening Standard, the bride looking lovely and pious. Instead of rushing straight into the blisses of matrimony he had come here to couple with his public. Fidelity. Duty. Tommy was well and smiling. He had put on a little weight, the old cough, fruit of an innate bronchial weakness exacerbated by being a gas corporal at Boyce Barracks, was hardly to be noticed. That light voice, expertly forward placed, filled the fine vulgar auditorium with the melody of mock patrician speech. There had been a good deal in the news about a trade agreement between Great Britain and Denmark, so Tom retold the story of Hamlet in terms of dairy exports. Hamlet, he said, was really christened Ham Omelette. Claudius, his wicked uncle, was a very bad Danish egg. He owed his name to the fact that he was regularly clawed by his wife. "Clawed," said his subjects. "Better 'e than us." So he was called Clawed e us. His queen had formerly been known as Gert. It was rude to go on calling her Gert, she said at the coronation breakfast (eggs and bacon), so she was called Gertrude. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were two pawnbrokers who had gone broke but had now become pawns in the paws of the king and queen. Polonius was a Polish import. The Danes had enough sausages of their own, so Ham Omelette carved him up behind the arras. Arras, I said arras. Ophelia was proud of her egg-smooth skin and was always inviting people to touch it: "Oh, feel 'ere," she would say. Ham Omelette duly felt and said something about a nice piece of crackling and then found himself trapped in a long engagement. It was so long that Ophelia went mad and sang the most filthy songs. Ham Omelette felt depressed and contemplated suicide. The second law of the Danish State (where Ham Omelette had discovered something rotten: a load of eggs intended for shipment to England) was divided into 2A and 2B. 2A said you mustn't kill other people; 2B said you mustn't kill yourself. "2B or not 2B," brooded Ham Omelette. And so on. Infantile really, prep school stuff, but Tom's manner acknowledged it as such. The consistently weak jokes couldn't be ridiculed because Tom's ridicule got in first. At the end he sang, and I got a little round as brother and lyricist, my old song about love and Paris:

  Find a cosy table

  Inside a restaurant,

  Somewhere formidable

  Where you'll be tres contents.

  Let your lady fair know

  That she is all you see,

  Prime her with a Pernod

  Or three.

  Watch her crack a lobster

  And strip it to the buff,

  Rough as when a mobster

  Gets tough.

  Keep the wine cascading

  And you'll ensure

  Une p'tite specialite called l'amour...

  Prolonging the ultimate l'amour, he made a courtly signal which brought dimming up a cosy pink spot on his bride. She, queenly as the Star of the Sea, rose to the clapping, rosary firmly gripped. Then the curtains closed to Tom's tabs music ("It's Tommy This and Tommy That"--old Bud Kipling and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford), the house lights came up, and the audience went off for a bad-tempered struggle at the bar.

  The party we had after the show was, for a time, the best kind of party it was possible to imagine. The bare stage was Frenchchalked, the orchestra came onstage and played the latest Charlestons and fox-trots. There was also the Black Bottom:

  They say that when that river bottom's covered with ooze

  They start to squirm

  Couples dance and that's the rhythm they use

  Just like a worm

  The dancing was lively because there were so many professional dancers, such as the girls of the Palladium chorus, probably far more seductive in their short skirts and fancy garters than in their former spangled nearnakedness. Low comedians recited from Othello and Measure for Measure, a Dantesquely ravaged old laddie actor performed a cakewalk. There was bottled beer as well as whisky and champagne, and there were hearty vulgar pork pies with a thick dark crust. Ernie Callaghan recited "Little Orphan Annie," making little orphan Estella cry. But she recovered to sing the Bach. Gounod "Ave Maria" very badly, though the company applauded with the admirable insincerity of stage folk. Tom gave us, movingly, the final stanzas of Spenser's Epithalamion. Dick Bradshaw got me into a corner by the bank of d
immers and said the time was ripe for a big patriotic musical. The country needed confidence in its own Schicksal, what with the General Strike still strong in memory and trade suffering from the dumping of the Japanese. There was a lot of unemployment in the profession and it was going to get worse: you could cram a stage with crowds at thirty bob a head and glad of the money. The story of the quarter century in song, laughter and a bloody good cry. Tell Noel Coward, I said; ask him. In time for the cutting of the cake (the Palladium in sugar with an embracing sugar couple on its crown), my old lover Val appeared.

  Val was now Soho's favorite drunken poet and growing fat. He brought with him an overhandsome young man in royal robes who was introduced as the exiled king of Bohemia. This man had a stage sword in a stage scabbard and, for five bob or a triple whisky, he would willingly dub anyone knight or dame. Val was already a multiple Sir Valentine. Val recognized Hortense at once. "All that time ago, dear," he said, "during that destructive war when we were all fighting for our honor, I thought to myself ah there is real beauty that will burgeon and blossom and I was not wrong. To think," he said, squinting without favor at me, "that you and this foul weed should have sprung from the same compost." He munched cake.

  "You should have brought your archbishop pal as well," I said. "Exiled kings are ten a penny." I nibbled icing.

  "I know," Val spattered saliva at me, "your cynicism, dear. The sentimental sneerer steeped in pusillanimity. My archbishop pal as you vulgarly term him is dead. He was kicked to the ground and booted while he lay in a puddle. By, I might add, drunken Irishmen on a Saturday night. A rib was broken. He caught pneumonia lying there. He did not recover." He swallowed cake.

  "So that's one autocephalous church out of the way," I said. "Plenty more, I suppose. Plenty of theatrical costumiers on Charing Cross Road."

  "He's filthy, isn't he?" Val said, evilly slit eyes on me, to Hortense. "All that sentimental scum for a public surface, while underneath is the most adamantine heartlessness."

  "You're talking about my brother," Hortense said.

  "Yes," Val went, with comic splayed nostrils and a manic glitter, "that's who I'm talking about, dear. The death of love and Toomey is its tomb."

  "Don't give me that," I said, "about the death of love."

  "Corned beef and slobber," Val said with unerring memory. "Tripe and onions. Ah, here's Jenny." A woman of four and a half feet in a liver-colored costume and a cloche right over her eyes like a guardsman's peak, somewhat humpbacked, about my age but with lines like overflow channels for gravy scored from mouth to chin, stood there looking up at me, sipping what I assumed was neat whisky. "This," Val said, "is the great Toomey. This is his exquisite sister."

  "Ah yes, exquisite," she said eagerly. "Jenny Tarleton," she said, imprisoning Hortense's hand for too long. "Literary agent," she clarified. "Val here's mine." She ate no cake.

  "You mean," I said, "you sell Val's verse to the highest bidder? Things are looking up."

  "Verse," she said, letting the hand go with reluctance, "is coming back to the theatre. We're done with the well-made play."

  "So now," I said, "you're going to have badly made ones? Tarleton," I said, "is a great theatrical name. Dick Tarleton, cirrhotic leader of the Queen's Men. There's a picture of him somewhere with his little drum, prancing. Any relation?"

  "Never heard of him. You were not to the fore in the Well of Loneliness case."

  "A bad book."

  "What's badness to do with it?"

  "Just what I said," Hortense struck in. "It's a question of the right to say what you want to say, well or badly."

  "I disagree," I said, and to Val, "Plays in verse, eh? Back to the glory of Stephen Phillips and prolix theeandthouery. What dost thou have in thy mind? Empedocles? Cyrus the Great? Tintinnabulus the Tyrant?" I palatalized the t's campily.

  "Yes yes, how exquisitely you put it," Jenny Tarleton was saying to Hortense. "The right, as you say, to say, to do. Yes, exquisite."

  "Or," I said, inspired, "how about a nice falsification of English history? An archbishop martyred for his homocephalous church, four butch knights sticking it in."

  "You're so awful," Val said indulgently, "that one can't take you as one should. Just a tease, so out of date with everything. Not heard of Brecht, for instance? Stuck there in Paris, where it's all coming to an end. Berlin is the town of the future, you old fart. Brecht. Wystan Auden and I were entranced."

  "Who's he?"

  "There you are, what do I tell you? Nose always in the air among the pinkcandy cumulus of your appalling fiction, never to the ground, sniffing."

  "I thought it was ear not nose you had to have. Sorry," I said to two dancers who bumped into my back.

  "To be at least honest," Hortense was saying.

  "I could not conceivably agree more with you than I do. Without honesty where are we? We must stand up for things, true, exquisitely so." I caught Estella's voice saying ginnily to someone: "I wish I'd discovered virginity, you know, while I was still a virgin. But we're chaste, you know, we're going to have lots of it. I love chastity."

  "She'll be a good wife," Val said. "No plying awye. Not at any rate till she gets all that ordure out of her system."

  "What do you know about good wives," I said, "apart from Louisa M. Alcott? What do you know about bloody chastity?" Tears came to my eyes then left.

  "You could have stood up for that nice sincere little woman," Val began to scold. "You could still do it. There's Bascombe over there of the Evening Standard. Give him something now while he can still see straight. He's very accurate. Poor dear Radclyfle." He evidently did not know her, no one who knew her called her by that name. "Well, we're going to fight, we're going to lobby. And we can do without the help of the great bloody Toomey."

  "What is this? What are you talking about?"

  "Hortense here," Jenny Tarleton said, "if I may call her Hortense, which I'm sure I may, exquisite little name, I knew there was French blood there as soon as I saw you, something to do with the cut of the wrists and, yes, the ankles, Hortense will love to be there, won't you, little angel?"

  "Where?" Hortense asked, not now too happy about the right to lesbic selfexpression.

  "Westminster," Jenny Tarleton hissed, as if it were a snakepit, "where people are supposed to look after our liberties but never do. The time is exquisitely ripe. Tomorrow at two with our banners."

  "What is to be engrossed on these banners?" I asked.

  "They have already been engrossed, as you put it," Val said, "with your little property conveyer's mind. There will be at least three hundred of us. London will see the terms gayboy and gaygirl. They will become part of everybody's vocabulary."

  "Christ," I said, "those are prison words."

  "Yes," Val said, "precisely. And the other words belong to the teminology of such as Krafft-Ebing. We must make our choice."

  "Mass martyrdom," I said. "The new English martyrs."

  "They can't martyr us all," Jenny Tarleton said. "Nor can our petition be rejected. Five hundred signatures."

  "What exactly," asked Hortense, "are you petitioning for?"

  "Well," Jenny Tarleton said, frustrated in seeking for Hortense's hands, which were both now behind Hortense's back, raising her voice above "The Post Horn Gallop" and the hunting whoops and tallyhos, "we demand all the freedomsassociation, action, expression. We are not criminals."

  "How," Val said, "did Christianity get started? We've already had our crucifixions and we have our saints."

  "It's not the same thing," I said.

  "Isn't it? Aren't we proclaiming," cried Val, "a new view of God? God made us what we are and he had his reasons. I don't see the difference."

  I smiled, though with no smear of triumph, at Hortense. "You," I said, "were saying something similar this very afternoon."

  "I'm sure she was," Jenny Tarleton cooed. "She has an attuned mind. I could feel its exquisite vibrations as soon as I saw her. You'll be there, angel, won't you? There'll be plenty and p
lenty to look after you."

  "We're flying back tomorrow, aren't we, Ken?"

  "The day after," I said. "I've some people to see tomorrow. Will you excuse me now?" I said generally. "I must have a word with my brother."

  There was now tangoing for the nearly sober and dervish-style whirling for the drunk. Tom had his arm about his bride; both were leaning against the stageright knobbed and voluted column of the proscenium arch. Tom was nodding, and Estella looked vacant, at something an old woman in black, somebody's dresser perhaps, was telling them. "All she craved was a bit of affection and love but he had to be poured into bed every night he come home. There's a warning for everybody in that." Seeing me coming she repeated "For everybody" and went off for more drink.

  "Much happiness again, dear brother," I said in a stage tone. "Dear Estella," I added.

  "I don't think we've been introduced."

  "Oh, come off it, Stell. If she can put up with the life," Tom said. "Well, she has already. Manchester next week, the old Palace. Not much of a honeymoon, is it, Stell?"

  "You're looking fit," I said. "That cough seems to have gone."

  "Stell found me a remarkable cough medicine, Dr. Gregg's. She gave me the whole bottle when I was near dead with bronchitis. I passed out for three days, marvellous dreams. When I woke up I was as clear as a bell. Astonishing little girl, aren't you? Who's that woman there trying to embrace Hortense? Ah, that's stopped her." Hortense had hit out. Jenny Tarleton seemed very surprised. Ernie Callaghan grabbed Hortense and was tangoing with her in long flat-footed strides. The band was playing "Jealousy."

  "Hortense," I said, "has taken to sculpture."

  "Why do you say that?" Estella said. "I don't see the connection."

  "Muscle," I said. "She's good with a hammer and chisel."

  "I think I know you," Estella said. "You're a friend of Peter Warlock's."

  "Much happiness," I said again. "Not much more I can say really, is there? I'm glad you've taken the plunge."

  "What a horrid thing to say," Estella said. "Does she do religious sculptures and things?"

  "She's going to do a Madonna and Child, she says."