Enderby's Dark Lady

by Anthony Burgess

  He was adding up even larger sums on his bed later that day, having eaten hamburger steak with fried eggs, drunk lager that tasted of onions and water, taken Pepts and Windkill, then sadly onanized. He should rightly have done so to the stimulus of April Elgar's present, but it was not aromatic of her as a shoe or stocking would have been. The present was really an unwilled invitation to accept a very dull future in which one second was the same as another, as symbolized by the minimal metamorphosis from number to number, in which the achievement of a minute and later an hour was, so muted was the change, nothing for the instrument to crow over. The sums he added were, though large, small enough for him to check by simple arithmetic. The instrument told, it seemed, no lies and might be trusted with huge multiplications and even square roots. Then there was a knocking at his door. It was April Elgar in plastic rainhood and raincoat. It was hard to tell whether her face had been irrigated by rain or was being irrigated by tears. She said:

  "I've moved in here. I can't stand the bastards."

  "You mean," Enderby asked, "in here?"

  "Not in here, stoopid. In the hotel. Just down the corridor." And then she sat on the nearer bed, that on which Enderby, in shirt, trousers and socks, had been lying calculating, and wept. Enderby sat next to her. He said:

  "Take those things off. The outer ones, I mean. Then tell me why. Crying, that is. Not that there's any reason why you should. Explain, I mean. We all ought to be crying all the bloody time." She needed, Enderby could see, comfort, so he put his arms about her. So, in his arms and in plastic rainwear, she sobbed. He patted the plastic rainwear, going "There, there." And then: "Insulted you, did they, those white bastards? And then there's coming away from home and leaving your mother and your kids, a known loving ambience, and meeting sneering swine making uncalled-for references to your private life I took them to be, believe me, I don't believe any of it, I know you, it's the snarl the jealous world delivers to talent and beauty, there, there." He nearly added, unthinking, his stepmother's cantrip: Cry more and you'll pee less. She stopped crying very suddenly, wiped her eyes and face vigorously on Enderby's shirt, then said, as all women were supposed to say, according to Enderby's reading, in such circumstances:

  "I must look terrible."

  "Not at all. Young, defenceless, and, of course, very beautiful. Now take that stupid rain thing off. Have you eaten anything?"

  "Yeah, I ate dinner, and those bastards were in the dining room kind of jeering, and then I went back up and was taking a shower, and I said the hell with it, I'm going to where my friend is, so I got my bags taken down and I put on my raincoat and. If I take it off," she suddenly began to giggle, "you'll see the real me, kid. Divine fundament and all."

  "You mean," Enderby gulped, "straight out of the bath, shower I mean, ridiculous unclean American custom, and and." His body stiffened except for one member, which couched morbidly flaccid. "I see." He added, obscurely: "The casting of the die." He superadded: "You mean you would?"

  "You talked about loving me till you die, kid."

  "It's not the same," Enderby said, much perturbed. "Perhaps I've been too dualistic, too Platonic. I mean, there are too many difficulties involved. Aesthetic, for instance. Beauty and the beast. Not that I'm ungrateful. But love, love, that's something different from taking that thing off. Please understand."

  "I see." Standing, she put her hands in the raincoat pockets. "I got in one of my bags in the room down along there what they called publicity pictures. Tits and ass and teeth and legs in gunmetal stockings and frothy lingerie. The kind of thing pimply kids fire their wad at. You know what I mean?"

  "Yes," Enderby said unhappily. "Pulling their wires, or monkeys. Bashing the bishop. Alas, yes."

  "That the me you want, brother?"

  "If," Enderby said hangdog and noticing a hole in his sock where an uncut craggy nail protruded, "I were worthy. Young, black perhaps or browner than I am. All I can do is love humbly and cherish dreams."

  "Yah, wet ones."

  "It's been a long time. I am what I am. But I mean what I say about love."

  "Yeah, and you don't have to prove it. I'm not God, Baptist or Catholic. But, brother, I forbid the worship of images. Think about it. I got to go and unpack. We got an early call tomorrow. First band rehearsal."

  "I'll see you," Enderby said with relief, "at breakfast."

  "Yeah, early morning nourishment. Wadfiring must take a lot out of you." Then she left.

  10

  "The signification in British, that is to say traditional, English is altogether -"

  "There will have to be an emergency meeting of the -"

  "Too late now. We open tomorrow."

  And so there had been a howling and scratching limping progression towards the moment of the first dress rehearsal, Enderby sometimes peering in at the screaming and shouting from one of the top doors of the auditorium, but Toplady always seeming to know he was doing this and turning to yell "Out!" So Enderby had stood a short while outside, Lazarus at the feast of punching and hairtearing, listening to music which, whatever it was, was not Elizabethan. Instrumentalists who did not seem to care much for music except as a union-protected livelihood had been scraped in from all over flat Indiana, and these had demanded coffeebreaks at the very instant when, after several hours of paid unscraping and unblowing, they were bidden play. There had been disdainful dim men around copying band parts, but only after bitter sessions of negotiation with the head of the local part-copying union, who himself copied no parts.

  "Arse is one thing, ass quite another."

  "That first word is a British perversion of that second one."

  "Ah, bloody nonsense."

  Enderby had been both surprised and fearful that he had no longer, save for one small thing, been called in to make emendations or compose new verses. Everybody had appeared resigned to the way things were, not knowing how to make them better, or worse, and sensibly doubting that Enderby knew either. So the second act had the Essex rebellion, the Dark Lady shoved into a dark jail, the Bard collapsing with various kinds of distress as the Ghost in Hamlet, which and whom (Hamlet) he kept, in bereaved father's guilt, calling Hamnet and Hamnet, his going home to Stratford to be nagged to death by Anne, but not before conjuring the Dark Lady as Cleopatra and seeing, about his deathbed, visions of her wagging her divine farthingaled ass to that early mocking ditty about love.

  " New England puritanism would not admit the real word. Bugger it, man, look at Chaucer – ers. Ass is a euphemism."

  "The title will have to be changed. There will have to be an emergency -"

  So that was it and there it was. Pay me and let me get the hell out. But Ms Grace Hope, who had previously disgrudged odd thin sheaves of greenbacks, had buggered off back to the Coast, first having quarrelled violently, in public too, with her husband the fag Oldfellow, who had been carrying on overblatantly with his understudy Dick Corcoran, the Earl of Essex. Enderby had brought his overdue hotel bill to the concourse of wildly but silently clacking typewriters to have something done about it and been sent, by circuitous stairways, to a little Viennese Kantian sequestered in a cellar, a refugee from Hitler's Anschluss, who would discourse charmingly on the metaphysics of money but would pay not one red cent out. Enderby had been, was, fed up.

  "Believe you me, you will make yourselves bloody laughing-stocks. The title comes from -"

  "Not even William Shakespeare is immune from censure. We have here a quorum, I think -"

  "Some of them drunk."

  "That is uncalled for -"

  He had assuaged his misery and boredom by raging around the small office, uncleaned, unvisited, that had long before been allotted to him, switching on the typewriter and mostly ignoring its invitatory hum, thus vindictively wasting the Peter Brook Theater's electricity, but also occasionally adding a pecked line to a formless poem he was allowing to accumulate, its theme Caesar (he, Enderby, unlaureled) and Cleopatra (she who these days uttered mostly a distracted Hi at him. Her
dresser had arrived from New York, an Iras or Charmian of gross mammyish aspect who slept in the room next to Enderby's and laughed in her sleep).

  Nor will this quadrate marble crush

  Juice from the olive stone,

  No slave philosopher enmesh

  In marriage stone and moon.

  By narrow moongate let me in,

  Eased by the olive's gush.

  He had had his chance, he could not deny it, but he had not wanted the chance, had he? Shakespeare would have understood, she not, never, either Dark Lady. Musing thus, he received a cold note ordering him to perform what seemed to be a final scriptorial office, namely to compose a kind of national anthem for Elizabethan England. He rattled off:

  The babe's first breath

  Is: Elizabeth.

  The soldier's death

  Is for Elizabeth.

  Hail Gloriana, keep England our home

  Safe from her enemies: Scotland and Ireland and France and Spain

  and Muscovy and the Holy Roman Empire and, it goes totally

  without saying, Rome.

  Delivering it in an envelope (let them bloody well process that into something singable, the bastards) to the secretarial concourse, he had seen for the first time the presswet posters. ACTOR ON HIS ASS. Clever in a way. It could not be, though it was now being, considered obscene, since it was a citation from Hamlet, but its implication was totally vulgar. On a notice board he had read that the final dress rehearsal would be in the nature of a free performance for the schoolkids of Indianapolis and environs, three in the afternoon of 6 January, Twelfth Night if anyone was interested, and that in the evening there would be an obligatory party at the mansion of Mrs Schoenbaum. That party was in progress now. Enderby was having it out about the title with one of the board of governors of the theater trust, a hardware magnate named, it seemed, Humrig, retired and now, apparently, a full time churchwarden. He drank teetotal punch, which few others there did. Enderby said:

  "Anyway, it's not my responsibility – either the title or your own wretched squeamishness. Ass is asinus, a donkey."

  "You wrote the ah play."

  "I wrote something. Whether that something is still there I can't say. I did not go to the dress rehearsal, though I heard lots of ill-behaved schoolchildren. They seemed to enjoy it. On their level."

  Enderby turned his back on Mr Humrig and went to the improvised bar, which the mad son Philip and the grey black retainer were running together. "Gin," Enderby ordered. The mad son Philip whispered:

  "I got this stuff spiked."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Smell it." A jug of murky orange liquid was raised to Enderby's nose and he got a whiff of surgical spirit.

  "That," Enderby said, "could be dangerous."

  "Shit to them. That guy there plays piano like shit."

  He meant the haired répétiteur Coppola, who was crashing out what sounded like an atonal cancan, to which Toplady's ginger mistress and another girl pranced with raised skirts. "Gin," Enderby insisted. He observed April Elgar in a blazing scarlet directoire, from the look of it, nightdress talking earnestly to the black lad of the company, Sir Walter Raleigh for all Enderby knew, who counted points off on his fingers. Toplady sat glumly with talking elders on or in the deep couch. Enderby heard something about renewal of contract, probably nonrenewal. Toplady was perhaps for the chop for some reason, probably unconnected primarily with the ass business. Mrs Allegramente came up to Enderby and said:

  "Leave the Irish alone."

  "Only too glad," Enderby said, "to leave the murderous bastards alone. It's not my concern anyway. If you're so concerned get over to Belfast and have your kneecaps converted to Quaker Oats."

  Mrs Schoenbaum did not seem happy about her party. She stood at an end of the room with the lawyer Elvin or Alvin or something, clad in black silk pyjamas with a gold caftan over, her hair, as previously, glued to a snapshot wuthering. She seemed ready for a cardiac arrest when two genuine Elizabethans entered, late and tanked up elsewhere – William Shakespeare and the Earl of Essex, both bearded, wigged, ruffed, jerkined, slashtrunked, hosed. Enderby too had a profound tremor until William Shakespeare spoke in the accent of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He cried:

  "Greetings to ye all, let the nutbrown ale floweth, or, marry and egad, the iciclebythewalled martini." He noticed Enderby and added: "And all that sort of heynonnino shit." Enderby growled:

  "Learn your Elizabethan grammar before you start mocking it. The accusative of ye is you. And a profound heynonnino to you, fleerer and bad actor."

  "Do not," said Humrig the churchwarden, "use language of that sort in the presence of Mrs Schoenbaum."

  "Shit," said the mad son Philip. "Shit shit shit."

  "Philip," his mother said, "please."

  "I wanna play the piano," Philip said, "and that guy there hogs it."

  "Welcome," haired Coppola said, banging three Scriabinesque cacophonies and getting up with a low bow and an arm stretched in proffer. Philip drooled his way over and began to play something manic and unrecognizable. He cried:

  "Dance! Dance!" Some obeyed. Enderby asked the grey black for more gin. Oldfellow Shakespeare was on to him now, saying:

  "And what the fuck do you know about acting?"

  "Enough to know that you're as much like Shakespeare as my arse or ass. And," he added, "your breath smells horrible." It did too. Perhaps that was the origin of sodomy: avoiding partner's halitosis. Enderby got away and over to a corner where Mrs Schoenbaum's daughter was leasing her bedroom for half an hour for five dollars. Toplady and the conferrers got up with difficulty from the deep boat of a couch. Toplady cried:

  "Stop that row for a minute."

  "Okay." Oldfellow had followed Enderby. "You try it, buster, that's all, you just try it."

  "I speak English anyway," Enderby said, "and I know the lines."

  The hands of Philip had been forcibly removed from the piano keys. Toplady cried: "A few words, friends. You've worked hard. We've all worked hard. Some not so hard as others, but let that pass. Tomorrow we open. Or rather tomorrow you open. My contract as Artistic Director of the Peter Brook Theater was due to end in March. By mutual agreement it ends as of now. Certain elements do not like the way I have been doing things. There's a feeling that I should have concentrated on ordure like Abie's Irish Rose or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I have not made the Peter Brook Theater a centre of entertainment. It is wrong apparently to take the drama seriously. Until my successor has been chosen things will be in the incapable hands of my sleeping assistant director Jed Tilbury. Bless some of you and fuck others. I go." He went. Some watched him go, others turned to look at this Jed Tilbury, who was the black lad enumerating points, though now no longer, to April Elgar. He cried:

  "Hey, man -"

  "De party over, I guess," said the grey black retainer. "An a gud ting too," in the manner of Mr Woodhouse.

  "More gin," Enderby said. "And then call me a taxi."

  "You call you own taxi, man. I don't call no taxis for no one no how."

  Toplady's mistress was meanwhile looking for her left shoe and calling: "Gus, Gus, wait for me, Gus." The shoe found, she stopped on her way out to fix hatefilled eyes on Enderby. "It's you," she said. "You brought bad luck, you bastard."

  "Not me, kid or baby or whatever it is," Enderby said heavily. "Somebody bigger than me. Leave well alone is what I say. And don't call me bastard."

  "Bastard," she said and was off, crying "Gus." Enderby said to the grey black:

  "You're a servant. Call me a taxi. But first more gin."

  "You not call me servant, man. I ain't no servant."

  Mrs Allegramente was now there, saying: "Is he giving trouble, Edwin? Is he being racist?"

  "You keep out of this," Enderby said. And then: "Ah, please yourself. Protestant Ulster for ever. God bless King Henry the Eighth." Before going to the hallway to call himself a taxi, he went over to April Elgar and the black now revealed as Jed Tilbury. To him he said:
"Congratulations are probably in order." To her: "I'm going back to the hotel. Will you come?"

  "Why?" she said with a new pertness.

  "Because the party seems to be over and it was a terrible party anyhow and we stay at the same hotel and I'm calling a -"

  "Jed'll take me home," she said.

  From the tail of his right eye Enderby saw Dick Corcoran as Earl of Essex swill thirstily from an orange juice jug. Very sensible, do him good, all those vitamins. "Right," Enderby said. And then: "A queer sort of time we've had when you come to think about it. Meddling with Shakespeare. All right on the night, though. As they say." He saw now, coming in too late, Bodiman, Pip Wesel and Silversmith, all drunk and leering. The grey black retainer or hired man or whatever he was supposed to be called let out a great wail of distress. "If," Enderby said, "those three start insulting you, let me know."

  "Certainly," she said. "I'll call your room and you can come back and hit them or something." She spoke, for some reason, rather like the actress Bette Davis. Enderby knew now that it was far too late to start trying to learn about women. He sighed and said:

  "That girl who left just then, the one who plays Queen Elizabeth I gather, says it's all my fault, whatever she means by all. Ah well, I suppose I must go and say good night to our hostess."

  "Don't be like that," Jed Tilbury said. "Nothing to be depressed about, man. Ain't the end of the world." He showed many teeth, all his own, and added: "Just what it's not." It was only when a taxi arrived that Enderby realized what he might mean. Ah just died, baby. Well, let them get on with it. The taxi driver was prepared for a long literary conversation with Enderby. He was a young Canadian, down here visiting for the Christmas vacation, then back to Yorke University outside Toronto to resume work on his thesis, to be entitled "Future in the Past". About science fiction.