Ale and Anacreon,
Beer and Boethius,
Sack and Sophocles, these
Please my heart
More than the farting littleness,
Borborygmic brittleness,
Jokes and japes
Of the apes and jackanapes
One sees
Courting the great
At court, on estate –
Fleas!
He foreheard the bemerding response to that and crumpled the yellow legal paper up. Yet he needed Ben Jonson to sneak in a few extra blank verse lines to make the revival of Richard II relevant to the Essex rebellion which immediately followed and thus have poor Will bemerded. Keep out of the great world, sirrah, stick to your word games. I, your Queen, tell you so. Lucky for you your head rolleth not like his, that runagate traitorous earl, on Tower Hill. Get you gone from my royal sight. Will was turning out to be a very bemerdable character. Then he wrote lines to April Elgar:
Edwardian brass, O enigmatic kingdom,
Apostolic musicmaker, nobilmente
Clashes the green roots, outyells returning swifts
Derides the cuckoocall. I cannot go on I
Cannot go on
Cannot
Enderby
He folded them into a Sheraton envelope, scrawled her name on, went downstairs overcoated, told the reception clerk to put it into her box. Surely surely. Then he went out to get drunk. He settled at length into a low bar behind the Board of Trade building. An old man whined to the bartender, who consoled him surely surely. Enderby ordered Scotch uniced and beer to pursue it. Workmen came in in hard hats. They heard Enderby’s accent on his third ordering of the same again and derided his Britishry with what what and all that sort of rot jolly good eh old chap. They seemed to have watched a fair quantity of old films on television. Enderby grinned at them, unoffended. Then one man said that the Queen of England was a whore. Enderby grinned at him, unoffended. Then, Orpheus with his lute, he came out with:
‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war –’ Then he took a drink. The workmen looked solemn, as in church: Lincoln’s speech was a powerful cantrip. They bought Enderby the same again. He was told that it was only kidding about the Queen of England being a whore. He said: ‘Her circumstances hardly allow it. Of course, your President Kennedy was a whoremaster or lecher, but that sort of thing is expected in a male leader. A double standard, you know.’ Somebody put a dime or quarter into the jukebox hidden in the corner in deep shadow. It illuminated itself and thumped and twanged. Unformed male voices pitched high excreted nonsense with bad rhymes. Kennedy, he was told, slept with Marilyn Monroe. Now they were conveniently dead, both assassinated by the FBI, and were screwing away in heaven. No such place as heaven. It’s got to be heaven if you’re screwing Marilyn Monroe, you better believe it. Then the disc changed and Enderby heard a known voice:
‘Give the world a kiss
Although it rates a kick
Get in double quick
And give the world a kiss’
‘Ah God,’ he said. There, said somebody, is another one that screws. All dinges screw, they got no morality. She’s here right now in Indianapolis, screwing. Screw a dog, screw a beer bottle, bottom end. ‘Oh God,’ moaned Enderby.
‘There may be roars
But there are roses
A fiddle and a flute
There may be wars
But underneath your nose is
Juicy fruit still unpolluted’
Juicy fruit, I’ll say. Give the world a fuck, I’ll say. Enderby had to get out. You tell the Queen of England from me, fella, she ain’t no whore. Enderby was surprised to find it dark without, street lamps on, hail spinning lazily down. He had been there longer than he thought. He wove his way back to the Sheraton. He carried his key in his pocket, always forgot the number. He made several stabs at the wrong door, somebody yelled, muffled, ‘Who’s there?’, then found his own, 360. That number meant something, he couldn’t for the moment think what. He fell inside, doffed and threw at the television set his overcoat, then fell on the bed.
He was awakened by knocking. He got up with considerable difficulty and groaned his way to the bathroom door. It was not at that that the knocking was proceeding. He opened another door and blinked painfully. She, paper in hand, dispossession notice. She wore scarlet tailored slacks and matching jumper, heavy beaten bronze earrings, scarfed montage of European cathedrals about her throat. Enderby’s heart thumped from drink. He bowed her shakily in. She sat down on the one chair with arms and looked at him. He said:
‘I heard you singing. In some low place. Not you personally, of course. I must take something. Heartburn. If you’ll excuse me.’ He went to the bathroom for Whoosh and water. He came back with a foul headache. He sat on the edge of the bed. ‘That in your hand,’ he said. ‘I see what it is now. Doesn’t make much sense. Nominal fantasy. Had to go out. Drank a little. My apologies.’
‘What gives with you?’ she said. ‘I’ve never met any dude quite like you.’
‘Double agony,’ Enderby said. ‘I adore Shakespeare. I adore you. Somebody has to be betrayed. You’ll swallow him. You’re swallowing me. Old as I am. Ugly. Unworthy. You try that on for size,’ he said with bitter jocosity.
‘You mean you want to get laid?’
‘That’s right,’ cried Enderby, head cracking, ‘bring it down to animality. Things aren’t as easy as that. Shakespeare didn’t want just to get laid, as you put it. She was stitched into his senses, made his soul drunk. He cured himself, but only through his art. He had to lose his only son first. Oh yes, sex came into it, with all its connotations, universal, cosmic, yin and yang, ultimate sex. You don’t get over it by screwing, as those men said.’
‘Which men said?’
‘The men in the pub, bar. They said the Queen of England was a whore. You can’t complain if they said the same about you. Bloody animality. Then we come to the most dangerous word in the language, and you know what it is. A declaration of faith with little hope and not much bloody charity. Why aren’t you with that bloody man you were with last night?’
‘What? Who? Oh, him. That was Ben Jonson, my brother, and don’t call him bloody. He plays piano with Mitch Frobisher’s combo. Ah, the greeneyed dingus. And so you get paralytic.’ Not a just word, he considered, looking down at his tremor. He said:
‘Jonson with an aitch, I suppose. Without would be going too far. Although there’s an aitch in Westminster Abbey. And where does the Elgar come in?’
‘He was a British composer. I always liked that what I used to call when I was a kid Pompous Circus Dance of his.’
‘He wrote a bloody sight more than that,’ Enderby said. ‘Edwardian hubris and neurosis, an incredible combination. And I suppose the April is really June.’
‘Not far out. May Johnson, brought up Baptist. If they want to fantasize over the April Elgar image, okay, let them. That’s what it’s there for, I guess.’
‘Funny,’ Enderby said, ‘girls are called after spring, only men after summer. Augustus, I was thinking of. But of course that’s the cart before the horse again. Forgive me.’
‘Like that thing in Kant, I guess. Noumenon and phenomenon. May Johnson is the dingus an sich.’
Enderby gaped. But, of course, everybody in this country got educated at the State U, a kind of superior high school. Then they forgot their bit of education in order to make money. Very sound, really. And then they could paralyse their interlocutors with Kant when they didn’t expect it. ‘I’m parched,’ he said. ‘I have to make very strong tea. Will you join me? But I only have this one mug. I’ll buy another tomorrow in case you. You can use this one first and I can swill it after.’
&nb
sp; ‘Real English genlmn. But it’s dinnertime. Wipe that white stuff off of your mouth and drink three glasses of water. Then I take you up on us having dinner together, okay?’
‘I couldn’t eat a thing.’
‘Then watch you lil friend eat.’
The three glasses of water prescribed renewed the heartburn ferociously, but a couple of powerful martinis at table put him right: the headache merely hovered over like the awareness of a decorated ceiling. He felt he could tackle red meat. He looked with tolerant disapproval at April Elgar’s cottage cheese and salad with thousand islands dressing. His tumescence did its best to find its aetiology in the Aprilian and Elgarian and leave May Johnson alone. How bloody beautiful she was, each functional eating gesture a shorter lyric. Men at other tables kept sneaking glances of envy at him. No one could say: that ugly old bastard is her father. And sick desire at her. Their wives ignored him and knifed her with bitter hate. Enderby monologuized, awaiting his red meat. ‘Salads dry up my saliva. Green things have something unnatural about them. The most dangerous word in the language, as I said. Onanism is a logical safeguard, you know, a device of protection of the deeper emotion. Nobody wants to lust after people: images are what are required. Though love is a bloody nuisance. Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. Funny he should say that disparagingly. He felt differently when he got to Cleopatra.’
April Elgar picked on that along with a forkful of salad. She said: ‘Right. Cleopatra. Think of Cleopatra and you won’t go far wrong. Stick an asp on my left tit if you like at the end, but it’s me they got to remember. A blaze of gold, you see that?’
‘Don’t use that word,’ Enderby groaned.
‘Which one?’
‘That one.’
‘Tit? Sorry, old boy, old boy. Bosom. Breast. Knocker.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘We’ll beat the bastards, you and me. May sheow, eold felleow.’
7
ENDERBY SAT IN one of the many toilets of the Peter Brook Theater reading a paperback volume of what were known as Science Fiction Stories. He sat long partly because of a costiveness that seven Gringe tablets had so far done nothing to ease. Perhaps, after all, salads were healthful. Too much protein and starch. For breakfast he had eaten pancakes and maple syrup and sausages on the side. He had brought his own steaming mug of tea down with him, an eccentricity now accepted by the Sheraton. Must do something about diet. Must not reject little paper cup of coleslaw issued with lunchtime sandwich. Spinach munched from can like marine character in old cartoons with ridiculously overdeveloped forearms. He sat long sequestered also partly because there was such a hell of a row proceeding at rehearsal. Clash of characters, egos really. That fag Pete Oldfellow and the divine April Elgar were creating, with claws distended and genuine hurled spittle, more compelling drama than any dramaturge could contrive. God was still, after all, so Enderby ungrudgingly conceded, the best of the dramatic poets, though shapeless and uneconomical. A bit like Charles Dickens. God was good on the physical and emotional sides and a great one for hate. He generously spilled his own hate into his dearest creation. That’s why you had to have Jesus Christ, who unrealistically overstressed the love part. But God hated him too and sponged him out one Friday afternoon. The play now enacted on the dimlit stage was God’s play, though God had to leave it to people to provide an ending.
Enderby read about people travelling to imaginary galaxies. God, if he would only grow arms and learn how to write, could do this sort of thing much better. The monsters on the planetoid Anatrakia were very anthropomorphically conceived. There seemed to be a lot of this sort of thing around, alternative universes ten a penny, and the young actor who had lent him this volume for a quiet lavatorial read boasted of possessing over four hundred science fiction paperbacks. Ought to have volumes of Shakespeare, really, Sophocles, Racine, Ben Jonson, others, but didn’t. Didn’t take his paid art seriously. Dick Corcoran from Manticore, near Toronto, Ontario, playing Essex and understudying the fag Oldfellow, who was making a very peevish job of Shakespeare.
Enderby read a story about the inhabitants of Garagogoki, the capital city of Berkibark on the planet Urkurk, who gave birth to little machines of no apparent purpose but produced babies in flesh factories. If the parents, or purlerguts as they were called (a term roughly meaning beneficiaries), did not discover the purpose of their machine within four orgs, a measurement of time relating to the periodic explosion of a renewable sun called Maha, the machine, which grew steadily to a monstrous size, Molochlike devoured them. The hero and heroine of the story, named Arg and Gogogoch respectively, tried to smash their machine at birth, but this resulted only in fissiparous replication of the monster. Enderby was deeply absorbed in this implausible narrative when a voice above his head said:
‘Mr Enderby is urgently wanted on the telephone.’
No escape. There were loudspeakers everywhere. He discounted the allegation of urgency and wiped himself, alas, drily. There was nothing urgent for him, at least not on the telephone. He had managed to get through to Tangiers yesterday and, except for the explosion of the frying machine in the kitchen and a fire quickly doused, everything seemed to be all right there. Muy bien. Adios. Enderby took his time getting to the telephone in the main office and there heard a woman’s voice say to his earhole:
‘Mr Elderly? Laura Schoenbaum.’
‘We must really, you know, get this business of the name properly sorted out. I am Enderby. Enderby the poet.’
‘Oh, so glad you’re there. Mrs Allegramente didn’t want me to but I’m doing it just the same. Nobody else could say what it meant, but I’m sure you can.’
‘Another tabletapping session, eh? A lot of nonsense. Somebody pretending to be William Shakespeare, eh? There’s a lot of malice going on back there, ought to have something better to do with their time, eternity that is. What was –’
‘Well, yes, it was the Bard himself from the Happy House and he just made the same sound three times. Through Mrs Allegramente’s mouth of course, which was wide open, she was in a trance.’
‘What was this sound?’
‘Well, it sounds kind of silly – kha, kha, kha, just like that. And then a pause, and then the same again. And then another pause, and then the –’
‘Kha, kha, kha?’ asked Enderby. Girls looked up from their typing. ‘Or was it more ha, ha, ha, though with a very strong aspiration?’
‘You could say that, I guess, yes.’
‘Hha, hha, hha, then,’ Enderby said. ‘Fairly clear, I should think. There’s a sonnet beginning with the line. “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame”, and it warns about the dangers of lust. The sin of animality. Then comes the line that begins “Had, having and in quest to have”, and there’s no doubt that he’s mocking the noise of lustful panting. Dog and bitch on heat. Men too. Women also perhaps.’ Typing had not been resumed. ‘So he’s reminding somebody not to get caught up in the toils of unconsidering sensuality. Hha, hha, hha, eh? Of course, it may not be Shakespeare at all. Just somebody who’s read him.’
‘There was nobody there it would apply to, Mr Elderly.’
‘You can never be sure,’ Enderby said darkly. ‘Hha, hha, hha.’
‘Well, thank you, I hope everything’s going all right there.’
‘Everything’s going just fine,’ Enderby said, as he heard the screams of April Elgar and Pete Oldfellow approaching the secretarial area and Toplady’s office. ‘Hha, hha, hha,’ he said in valediction. And he put down the handset.
God, how bloody beautiful she was in a rage. Her raging elongated sunset of a rehearsal suit, a onepiece jersey jumpthing, turned her into a flame with teeth. Enderby’s heart melted. Behind her, glum and nailbiting, was Toplady. They were going to have it all out in a kind of privacy. Oldfellow whined, but he had neither her vocabulary, suprasegmental tropes of remote jungle origin, nor her numinosity. He was a man of about Enderby’s size with a nose that would not get in the way in kissing sequences, mean blue eyes and a po
uting mouthful of porcelain crowns. With him was his wife, Ms Grace Hope, a thin woman in a ginger trouser suit and an extravagant fair wig. To her Enderby abruptly addressed himself, saying:
‘A question of money. There are two hotels requesting nay demanding payment. My own resources are not ah unlimited. I invoke the terms of my contract.’
‘Later,’ Ms Grace Hope said. ‘At the moment the show itself is in jeopardy.’
‘Not through any fault of mine,’ Enderby said. ‘I’ve done everything required. Totally accommodating.’
‘A smidgen too accommodating,’ Oldfellow said. ‘My part’s been slashed to fucking ribbons.’ And his head with its mean blue eyes tocked to April Elgar and ticked back to Enderby. Enderby said:
‘I’ll thank you not to use that word in ah her presence. Nor, for that matter, in the presence of ah her.’ Meaning Ms Grace Hope, his wife. ‘Questions of propriety.’
‘Don’t give me that kind of shit,’ Oldfellow said. ‘I know what’s been going on around here.’
‘In,’ Toplady said with weary bitterness, his nailgnawed right thumb showing in where.
‘What precisely,’ asked Enderby of Oldfellow, ‘are you suggesting?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Toplady said, entering his office first.
‘Myself also?’ Enderby asked.
‘Yeah, yourself also.’
‘Why,’ Enderby asked Toplady, when they were seated, ‘are you called Angus?’
‘I don’t see what the shit that’s got to do with anything.’
The Complete Enderby Page 66
