‘I have already. A fat disgusting man with his mouth full of chicken bones.’
Mad. Good, he knew where he stood, lay rather. He too would have difficulty in getting up. The lawyer said:
‘You just come over now then?’
‘Well, yes. From Tangiers, where I live. I have ah severed connections with my country. Not its language, of course, nor its literature.’
‘Mr Elderly,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said, ‘is a distinguished writer. He is doing this thing for us here. The life of Shakespeare set to music.’
‘I guess so,’ the lawyer said. He accepted more whisky. He and the black flunky grunted at each other. The distant pianist struck up a version of ‘Greensleeves’. He knew what was wanted.
‘Henry VIII himself wrote that,’ Enderby blurted. ‘A musician as well as a ah distinguished tyrant. Some of the words are obscene.’
‘That figures,’ Mrs Allegramente said. The academic said:
‘Mrs Schoenbaum has done a lot for William Shakespeare.’ He gave out the full name as though Mrs Schoenbaum had, for good reasons perhaps of an ethical nature, ignored the rest of the family. But Mrs Schoenbaum at once discountenanced that supposition by saying:
‘Well, like I always said, Irwin, that’s only natural. I am,’ she told Enderby, ‘related to the Shakespeares. By marriage, of course.’ Enderby nodded. These American women were very straightforward people, quick to disclose their madness. The men were a little slower. These here would, after a few more whiskies, give out their madness with a circumspection proper to the professions they practised. ‘Not, that is, through Mr Schoenbaum, of course, whose family was from Germany, but through the Quineys.’
‘Thomas Quiney,’ prompt Enderby said. ‘He married Judith Shakespeare on 10 February 1616. Shakespeare had only a couple of months of life left after that. The shock did his health no good. A low tavernkeeper already convicted of fornication. The tavern he kept was called the Cage, an appropriate name considering the poor girl’s virtually incarcerated condition. A barmaid. Now the place is a place that sells hamburgers.’
‘Is that so,’ said rather than asked the lawyer. Mrs Schoenbaum seemed unabashed by the details. She said:
‘The Quineys emigrated to America and married into the Greenwoods, which is my family.’
‘Under the Grünbaum tree,’ unwisely quoted Enderby, ‘who loves to lie with me.’
‘Well, Greenwood was not always the name, as you so er quickly devised. But I got back to the baum bit with my late husband.’
‘A lovely man,’ obituarized the lawyer.
‘He called me Queenie,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said, ‘when he found out that’s how Quiney was sometimes pronounced. He spent much time and money, Mr Elderly, on my geneography. He was deeply interested. But my real name is Laura.’
‘And my real name,’ Enderby said, ‘is Enderby. Not Elderly.’
‘We’re all getting on a little,’ said the academic called Irwin, ‘except for our lovely hostess. And, of course, for Mrs Allegramente.’ The young man at the piano called across the room over his rolling chords the word shit. Mrs Schoenbaum said:
‘There’s no call for that language, Philip. My son,’ she confided to Enderby. ‘He is very unsociable.’
‘He has a considerable social gift,’ Enderby said. ‘He er manages that superb instrument with great panache and er vivacity.’
‘Do you have children, sir?’ the lawyer asked in an accusatory manner. His thick eyebrows, Enderby now noticed, had been given, perhaps by art, a devilish upsweep at the outer edges. He had several chins.
‘I think not,’ Enderby said. ‘Paternity, however, is said to be a legal fiction.’
‘Surely, surely,’ Mrs Schoenbaum seemed to soothe. ‘And are they properly looking after you at the place where you are staying?’
‘It is the Holiday Inn,’ Enderby said. ‘I cannot get tea. It’s as bad as France with this dipping of bags into tepid water. I asked for one of their big coffee jugs to be filled with boiling water and for seven sachets to be steeped in it. They considered this to be British eccentricity.’
Mrs Allegramente, responding to the signal British, said: ‘You better quit Northern Ireland right now if you know what’s good for you. I can read the signs.’
‘She has great gifts,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said, ‘as we shall see demonstrated after.’
‘What they did,’ Enderby continued, ‘was to put three sachets in a jug which already contained what they call coffee. The manager was not helpful. So I bought my own apparatus.’
‘You did, eh?’ said the academic with uncalled-for animation. ‘You went out and bought the wherewithal and now make tea of the required strength in your own room?’
‘I most certainly did and do. A kind of kettle and a big mug. Condensed milk. A box of sachets from a store called CHEEP CHEEP with the recorded song of a canary playing all the time.’
‘Is that so? Is that really so?’ The academic’s pisshued eyes glowed with interest. ‘It’s in the private sector that the major events of human life occur. Ah,’ he said, ‘here is Lucille.’
‘My daughter,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said. A girl with jeans and a tee-shirt came in saying hi to everyone. The tee-shirt had Shakespeare as bigfisted flying Superman on it with the legend WILL POWER. ‘She is a dropout.’
Enderby assumed that the term, combining knockout and cough-drop, was a slangy tribute to beauty not at once apparent. ‘She certainly is,’ he said. She advertised the lipoid virtues of what he had heard called junkfood, presumably food for junkies, whom, living in Tangiers, he knew all about. A girl greasy as though basted. He was glad when she said she had to split. She had things to do with her friends, to whom too she would say hi. She took her big worn blue arse away. She collided with the black servant who came in to say they could all eat if they wanted. Mrs Schoenbaum told him that Philip would not be eating with them, an aspect of his unsociability. The black man could give Philip a sandwich and a coke. The black man seemed to demur and said things unintelligible but certainly rebellious in tone. Everybody helped each other to get out of the couch barge. Enderby slithered on wool and high polish. The black man cackled.
The dining room was like a great tomb with votive flowers and candles. Enderby could not see into its corners but he observed over his head an untenanted minstrels’ gallery. There were highlighted what he took to be Cézannes, bad paintings of apples and bottles. ‘Paella,’ Mrs Schoenbaum announced, pronouncing the double clear L as a single dark one. ‘In honour of our guest who lives where it is part of the kwee zeen.’
‘Never see it in Tangiers,’ Enderby said. ‘Couscous country.’
‘Is that so,’ the lawyer said. The dish that the black man grousingly put on the table was all shells and bits of rubber and soggy rice. There was chlorinated water but no wine. You were supposed to bring your highball in with you. Enderby had finished his. He had been placed next to Mrs Allegramente. She now started again on the theme of suffering Ulster. Enderby was fed up. He said:
‘Get this straight. I was brought up an English Catholic. I’ve no time for those bloody Orangemen there. They say an Orangeman’s dinner consists of roast spuds, boiled spuds, chips and croquettes.’
‘Is that so.’
‘Pudgy bastards who discharge their carbohydrated energy in gross tribalism. No time for the sods. So hand the place over to the IRA for all I care. But it’s no business of the Yanks.’
Mrs Schoenbaum was a polite hostess. She ignored her British guest’s snarl and said: ‘I hear great things of our project. I understand that things are going really well.’
‘Conflicts,’ Enderby said, and spat a bit of shell onto his fork end. ‘They will all be resolved. This was your idea, or so I’m credibly informed.’
‘It was the idea,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said, ‘of the Bard himself. Ask Mrs Allegramente.’ Enderby choked. ‘He spoke from the Happy House and said he was delighted that America had achieved two hundred years of free nationhood. He wished to b
e associated in song and dance with our celebrations.’ Enderby looked darkly, in the dark, at Mrs Allegramente, who looked, though chewing something unchewable, darkly back. ‘After dinner we shall tune in to him again. It’s a great privilege,’ said Mrs Schoenbaum.
‘He will not speak to the sceptical,’ Mrs Allegramente said.
‘What,’ Enderby asked, ‘is this Happy House you spoke of?’
‘The mansion of the blessed,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said. ‘He is with his fellow writers. He sent greetings from John Steinbeck, who would not speak for himself.’
‘I met Steinbeck,’ Enderby said, ‘when he was given, unjustly I thought and still think, the Nobel, oh I don’t know though when you consider some of these dago scribblers who get it, think it was an unjust bestowal. There was a party for him given by Heinemann in London. I asked him what he was going to do with the prize money and he said: Fuck off.’ Before he could apologize, the academic said:
‘Don’t apologize. Oratio recta. Such a response I find deeply interesting. The private sector of a man’s life.’
‘This was in public,’ Enderby said. ‘I apologize for what he said,’ he said to Mrs Schoenbaum. Mrs Schoenbaum, who evidently heard worse from her children, inclined queenlily. ‘I trust,’ he said with swimming brain, ‘the er bard keeps his language clean.’
‘He will not speak to sceptics,’ Mrs Allegramente said.
‘What kind of sceptics do you have in mind? People who believe his works were written by the gonorrheal Earl of Rutland?’
‘People who do not believe in the open line to the beyond,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there’s any use proceeding tonight,’ she told her hostess, who moaned in distress:
‘Oh, Mrs Allegramente.’
‘You must flout the sceptic,’ the academic said. ‘You do not preach to the converted.’
‘I don’t like,’ Enderby said, seeing in gloom a big cake like an Edwardian lady’s hat swim from darkness to light and hearing coffee cups arattle, ‘the assumption that I don’t believe. I am, after all, a poet. There are more things, et cetera. Horatio,’ he added to the lawyer. ‘My stepmother,’ he prepared to say.
‘Perhaps you would prefer tea,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said. Enderby heard a black whine from the darkness.
‘No, no, no. I shall have tea when I get back to my room. Along with the Late Late Show.’
‘The Late,’ the academic, ‘Late,’ tasting every word, ‘Show,’ said. It was clear he had never heard of it. ‘That is an amusing locution.’
‘It’s on television every night,’ Enderby informed him. ‘An ancient ah movie interspersed with commercials for cutprice ah discs.’ He accepted a plate of white and bloody goo. The lawyer now began to disclose his madness. He said:
‘Don’t knock free enterprise. Free enterprise made this country what it is.’
‘I’m not ah er knocking anything –’
‘We don’t need smartass, pardon me Laura, Europeans coming over here to knock American institootions. This next year we have our bicentennial.’
‘As I am certainly well aware. My heartiest felicitations.’
‘We don’t need smartass sarcasm, pardon me Laura and Mrs Allegramente, from smartass knockers of American traditions. We celebrate two centuries of American knowhow. Also liberty of conscience and expression.’
‘I most heartfeltly congratulate you.’
‘Don’t give us that. There’s a tone of voice that grates on me, pardon me Laura. We’re your one bastion against the communist takeover. So don’t knock.’
‘I certainly will not,’ Enderby promised.
‘There you are again,’ the lawyer cried. ‘It’s the tone of voice.’
‘I can’t help my bloody tone of voice,’ Enderby countered with truculence. ‘I can’t help being a bloody Englishman.’
‘Who,’ said Mrs Allegramente, ‘is oppressing the Irish.’
‘Ah, hell,’ Enderby said. He would have said more, but at that moment the son Philip lurched in, probably stoned. He clearly reserved articulacy to his pianoplaying, for what he said, though long and partially structured, made no sense. But his mother understood him, for she said:
‘I’ve no intention of marrying him, do you hear me, Philip? I’ve no intention of dishonouring your dear father’s memory.’ Enderby nodded at this apparent Hamlet situation. He did not however understand why this Philip, his gaunt stoned face encandled and dramatically shadowed, should look menacingly at him, Enderby. ‘He takes you for someone else, Mr Elderly,’ the mother explained. ‘Tell him that you are not who he thinks you are.’
‘I am not,’ Enderby said loudly, ‘who he thinks I am.’ And then, in Duchess of Malfi tones, ‘I am Enderby, not Elderly. I am Enderby the poet.’
This quietened the son down somewhat. He grabbed himself a hunk of the carved goo from the table centre and left noisily ingesting it. ‘Good boy, good boy,’ the academic said in relief.
‘I think I’d better go now,’ Enderby said, getting up.
‘Oh no, oh no,’ Mrs Schoenbaum cried in new distress. ‘Mrs Allegramente has to convince you.’
‘I’m already convinced,’ Enderby said. ‘There is a Happy House far far away.’
‘Not far away,’ Mrs Schoenbaum cried. ‘Let’s start, Mrs Allegramente.’
‘Nothing will come through. Too much British scepticism around.’
‘Let’s have him telling us to get out of Northern Ireland,’ Enderby suggested nastily.
‘You see?’ Mrs Allegramente said to Mrs Schoenbaum.
‘Be good,’ pleaded Mrs Schoenbaum. ‘Promise to be good, Mr Elderly.’ And she got up. Enderby muttered something about Mrs Allegramente’s better being good, but this was not heard in the chairleg skirring. He followed his hostess and the others out. Their hostess led them to a small chamber off the hallway. The son was to be heard back at his piano, playing a single monodic line, one hand evidently busy with his goo. The black servant in the white coat nodded balefully at everybody, not specifically Enderby. He too seemed stoned. The small chamber was brilliantly lighted. There was a round table in the middle, four chairs of a dining order, a kind of throne for, presumed Enderby, Mrs Allegramente. ‘No chicanery,’ the academic said to Enderby. ‘All above board. I have participated in previous sessions.’
‘Is that so?’ Enderby said. ‘What is your ah specialization?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘You do what?’
‘I run a course in theosophy. Saul Bellow is visiting us at the moment. He is deeply interested.’
‘My kind of town.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Be seated, all,’ Mrs Schoenbaum invited. ‘You will have the small lamp, Mrs Allegramente?’ There was such a lamp on the table, a bulb of low wattage with a parchment shade. Enderby asked the theosophist in a low tone:
‘Is that human skin?’
‘Pardon me?’ But Mrs Allegramente was already on her throne, breathing from the diaphragm. Look at the bloody man filling himself up with air. That had been said of AE, George Russell, prototheosophist, in sceptical Dublin. High on a throne like this, ready to speak of the maharishivantatattarara or some such bloody thing. Mrs Schoenbaum, very eager, turned out the bright main light. Shadows, shadows and shadows. She put Enderby as far away as possible from Mrs Allegramente or whatever her bloody name was. She said:
‘We all join hands.’
So Enderby had the dry bones of the academic on his left and the soft supermarket turkey breast of the paw of his hostess to the right.
‘We may have to wait quite a while,’ Mrs Schoenbaum whispered to Enderby after quite a while of waiting. Enderby nodded that he understood, quite a while, feeling, with a sensation of faint horripilation, that it was colder than it ought to be. Mrs Allegramente encouragingly groaned. Enderby realized he had neglected to micturate for several hours. His bladder, encouraged by the cold and not giving a damn whether or not it was astral, happily, like a dog, pawed its owner for walkies. Mrs Allegramente
went: ‘Oooooooh.’ There was a sound in the room like the tearing of paper. Enderby did not like this. His bladder importuned. Mrs Allegramente said:
‘Is there anybody there?’
There was a more irritable papertearing noise and then, after a minute or so, a hell of a knock on the wall behind Mrs Allegramente.
‘One knock yes, two knocks no?’
There was another hell of a knock, though as it were structured like a monosyllable.
‘Is that William Shakespeare?’
‘I’m getting out of here,’ Enderby said, hearing the wall banged in a sort of proud affirmation.
‘Shhhh,’ went panting Mrs Schoenbaum. Mrs Allegramente asked:
‘Have you a message for anyone?’
There was no reply. ‘Bloody nonsense,’ Enderby muttered. And then he heard knocking on the underside of the table itself. There were four swift knocks, then a pause. There were six swift knocks and a longer pause. There were four swift knocks, then a pause. There were six swift knocks and a longer pause. There were four swift knocks, then a pause. There were six swift knocks and then silence. The damned table all the time tried to leap, but the spirit fist was not strong enough to raise it. ‘Oh Jesus,’ Enderby muttered. Mrs Allegramente could be heard breathing with decent, or non-spirit-raising, shallowness. ‘No more?’ Mrs Schoenbaum dared to ask. They all broke hands. Mrs Schoenbaum went to flood the room with decent brightness.
‘It had the feel of a somewhat enigmatic message,’ the academic said as they all rose. Enderby said:
‘Pardon me. I’m afraid I have to –’ The lawyer grimly pointed.
Enderby found a small and overdainty lavatory off the hallway. He pounded his load out furiously. Enigmatic message his arse. His arse, thus invoked, spoke. 46 46 46. If that wasn’t bible-amending Shakespeare, who the hell was it? Enderby did not like any of this one little bit. He wiped his penis on a handy face towel. Poor sod, proud of his contribution to the King James psalms. And now these New English Bible bastards had cheated him of his major triumph. Enderby pulled a lever which flushed the bowl, and, while it flushed still, left. Mrs Allegramente was waiting for him outside the door. She said:
The Complete Enderby Page 63
