"Has that fucking fag schlepped his ass here yet?"
"Don't be like that, Ape," whined Toplady. "You like Pete, you know you'll be great together."
"What did you call her then?" cried Enderby in outrage. "Did you call her what I think you called her?" She turned and looked Enderby up and down, as to appraise his fag properties, if any, and said:
"Ape he said, short for April, that's my name, honey."
"Well, I won't have it," Enderby cried. "It's a bloody disgrace. To have so exquisite a name apocopized into the libellously simian. And you too with your bloody Goats and Monkeys," he told Toplady loudly.
"Wow," she said, "you better write that down big so I can frame it and stick it on my wall. Good for the lip muscles. What's this," she then said, "about goats and monkeys?" She took a gold étui from her Bayeux tapestry bag. Enderby shook for his lighter and shook out a flame as she gave a white tube to her lips. She held his hand steady with long cool brown fingers. Toplady said:
"Our title. Right out of Othello. I knew you'd like it."
"I get it. I'm the monkey and that screaming fag is the goat. Or is it the other way round? It's a lousy title. And in future you can quit calling me Ape."
"Not dignified enough for its ah protagonist," Enderby said. "I think now that Will might be better. Will the name and the drive, sexual and social, you know, and even the final testament with the second best bed. With an exclamation point possibly. Will! Or two, if you like – Will!!"
"Dark Lady," she said. She'd done some homework, then.
"With respect," Enderby said, "there's a play by Bernard Shaw called The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Of course, she's not really dark in your exquisite and overwhelming manner. Darkhaired only. Well, eyes too. My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. How about," inspired, "A Dark Lady's Will?"
"When do I start work?" she asked Toplady.
"Reading after lunch. I booked a table at the Escoffier. Silversmith will be back with some great songs day after tomorrow."
"That fag," she said. Enderby liked all this very much. But, of course, he, being British, had to be the final repository of faghood. "Lousy British fag," she would tell Toplady over luncheon, to which, Enderby did not have to be told, Enderby was not invited. She now ignored Enderby till she had finished her fag, which she had handled elegantly but on which she had drunk deep, discussing with hard impersonality the while various contractual rights which Toplady said could be clarified when the wife, Ms Grace Hope, of the screaming fag Oldfellow arrived with the screaming fag along with the other fag, screaming or not, Silversmith. Enderby was quick to wrest the exhausted lipsticked butt from her and grind it out in the concave plinth of some trophy, elongated humanoid, which stood on Toplady's desk. She stood and smoothed herself down laterally and said now to Enderby:
"What was that shit about exquisite apocalypse of the something something?"
"Not shit," Enderby reproved. "I don't wish to hear that word in your connection. It harms your beauty and elegance."
"My my," she said, with an oeillade meant to be comic. "Okay, Gus, we go and all that sort of nonsense."
"A fair warning," stern Enderby said. She glided out and Toplady looked acidly on Enderby as he followed. Enderby lighted himself a Robert Burns cigar and coughed in a sort of delirium round the office. Her perfume, a complication of something expensively distilled in the town of Grasse and her own salt animal emanation, rode over the foul reek of non-tobacco ingredients. Enderby went out, past the girl and women typists, and took the stairs down to the greenroom, where he gave himself lunch from the vending machine – yoghurt with boysenberries and coffee that went on wasting itself on the sugar-encrusted grill beneath. A dirty business. Later he went to the sort of classroom where, floor today unencumbered by the fag Silversmith, the troupe would assemble for the reading of Act One entire. He would have to read Will again. Soon he must surrender his lines to this screaming fag Oldfellow. It struck him with horror now that he must – The incongruity. God, they would laugh their heads off.
She was late, stardom's privilege. Toplady, being with her, also had to be late. Enderby filled in some of the waiting time by telling the lounging troupe about the kind of English they had, properly, to employ in their rôles. "Remember," he said, "the Mayflower."
"We ain't old enough, man," said a black boy Enderby had not seen before. What the hell part was he to play? Henslowe? Sir Walter Raleigh?
"I mean, remember that the Mayflower brought over to America a kind of English very close to what Shakespeare and his ah contemporaries spoke. Do not attempt Sir John Gielgud accents, even if you know how. Speak the tongue of Boston, Massachusetts. It will be good enough." He nodded kindly at them, who looked fuzzily, he being spectacleless, but unkindly back. Then April Elgar entered, followed by Toplady, and she looked at the men as if they were all fags, and at the others, which they were, frowsty frumpish sluts. She said, seated:
"Me."
"I beg your pardon?" Enderby said.
"Me, me. Take it from where I come in, okay?"
"I," Enderby apologetically said, "have to read Will. Shakespeare, that is."
"Okay. You wrote it. What page?" There was a fluttering of already soiled typescripts.
"Your name is Lucy," Enderby said. "There is a room with a pair of virginals in it."
"A pair of who?"
"A musical instrument," Enderby explained. "Like a harpsichord. The Dark Lady plays it well. It says so in the Sonnets."
"Well, this Dark Lady don't play nothing. Except a little stud poker." Then she said very woodenly: "Who are you, sir? Who sent you? You take a liberty, sir."
"You summoned Richard the Third to your house," Will Enderby said. "You set your sights too low, madam. You should have asked for Richard the Third's creator."
A pudgy ginger girl as duenna said, very woodenly: "I knew he was not the man. Shall I have him thrown out, madam?"
Enderspeare said: "The person of William Shakespeare is not handled by kitchen ruffians. I come as a gentleman to pay my respects to a lady. Get you gone, woman, and learn your place."
"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 nonWill 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 s
lave. 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 thirdfloor 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 theatre'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 went 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 a
n 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."
Enderby's Dark Lady Page 8
