Enderby's Dark Lady

by Anthony Burgess

  "Been reading some of it," Enderby said tiredly.

  "Only viable literary form we have," said the Canadian. "What did you say your name was?"

  "Why are you driving a taxi?" Enderby said instead of replying.

  "It's my brother-in-law's cab. He went bowling. Did I imagine it or were there two guys at that place dressed up like Shakespeare?"

  "You didn't imagine it."

  "And what did you say your name was?"

  "Enderby," Enderby said. "The poet," with small hope of being known as such, not that it mattered.

  "Right. I thought that was the name. And then when I saw these two guys it kind of rang a bell. Read that thing of yours if you're the guy that wrote it. It was in the Koksoak, hell of a name. About Shakespeare. What you ought to write is sort of SF Shakespeare, know what I mean? About some Martian landing in Elizabethan England and meeting Shakespeare and putting The Power on him. See what I mean?"

  "It's the name of a Canadian lake, I think. Not pronounced Cock Soak. Yes yes, I see what you mean. Here we are, I think."

  "Yeah." Meaning the Holiday Inn in Terrebasse. "It's an idea anyhow. Although there's this theory that it's us are the Martians. We landed on this planet in prehistoric times and killed off the earthmen. We knew that Mars was dying, see, and saw the fertility of the earth through powerful instruments. Then the earth's lack of oxygen stunted our brains and we had to start all over again. Four dollars fifty."

  Enderby had a nightmare and woke from it, impertinently engorged, at something after four. He dreamed that he was forced to act the role of Shakespeare in Actor on His Ass because both leading man and understudy had walked out and there was nobody else who knew the lines. No question of cancelling the performance, too much investment involved, backers insisted that show go on. Enderby as Shakespeare went on stage and opened mouth but no words came out. The audience jeered and somebody threw a missile like a miniature moon. It hit his head and cracked open and covered him with olive oil. The audience roared. Enderby awoke sweating. Thank God it was only a dream, nightmare rather.

  11

  "I mean, damn it, look at me," Enderby cried supererogatorily, for that was precisely what they were doing. The cast, with two notable exceptions and a nailbiting Jed Tilbury in charge, his colour today like that of a very old elephant, sat around in the greenroom, looking at Enderby. The coffee machine needed repair, and it growled within like a stomach and infrequently, into a plastic yellow bucket, gushed slop. "Why can't somebody else do it, for Christ's sake?"

  "Tomorrow night, okay," Jed Tilbury said. "Floyd learning the lines and Shep learning the other lines." He meant a long youth in a lumberjack outfit with a yellow coxcomb and another, older, in jeans and a Monte Carlo Grand Prix tee-shirt. "But there's tonight, man, and it's the opening and you got this British voice and you wrote the goddamned thing. And you'll have a wig and a beard – and, Jesus, you got Ape here to push you through it, and Oldfellow's songs are taped, and, Jesus, you got to do it, man." Enderby looked at the sweating youth, not so blackly cocky as he had been, a lot on the poor bastard's plate. "And it's Ape's show, we know that, she push you through."

  "Yes," Enderby said, with some bitterness. "Ape." April Elgar sat there in a mauve track or jump suit looking rested, as though after some great black night of black amation, her own kind, right. Baby, ah just died. "Goats and monkeys. Actor on his ass. Shakespeare reduced to the animalistic was bad enough. Now Shakespeare's reduced to me. Besides, I don't belong to the appropriate union."

  "Ah, fuck that," somebody said.

  "You're a poet," April Elgar said without warmth. "You got that in common."

  "I fear," Enderby said, "I fear – You lot are actors, and that means you're superstitious. That fag Oldfellow would have made Shakespeare just vulgar. I'd make him absurd. I can't do it."

  "Oh Jesus God." Jed Tilbury's black emotional lability began to show. "I got this job to do, can't you see that, man? I got to put this show on now Gus Toplady has slung. I got a career to think of, man." He began to cry. As Enderby had half-expected, April Elgar did a there there patting act and even kissed his limp hand. Call of the blood, fellow melanoid in distress. Just died. One of the girls from the secretarial concourse came pertly in to announce:

  "Pete Oldfellow's still blacked out with concussion. Dick Corcoran has this broken arm they've set and cuts and bruises. And he's charged with drunk driving and damaging public property. A mailbox it was. That was the Illinois police on the line."

  "Orange juice," Enderby said. "I should have warned him. I didn't think, blast it."

  "What in the hell did they think they were doing?" Jed Tilbury cried. "Wearing those goddamn costumes too?"

  "They might have been in drag," somebody said. "Fart in gales or whatever they're called."

  "And the car," the girl said, "is a writeoff. Lucky to be alive, the police say."

  "No sense," Jed Tilbury said with sad weight, "of professional responsibility."

  "And," said the girl, "we have to tell the press and the radio and the TV. About cancellation."

  "Yeah," bowed Jed Tilbury said, "we gonna cancel."

  "Lifelong love and devotion," April Elgar said obscurely, though not, in a second or so, to Enderby. "Let's see some of that. We don't cancel. Stick your ass on the line. You going to do it."

  "Oh God oh God," Enderby moaned. "What have I to lose? The ultimate tomfoolery."

  "You just pretend," she said, "that you're acting a Baptist minister. The words are different, that's all." Most frowned, not understanding.

  Jed Tilbury showed both relief and the concern of immediate problems. "We got to do a run through," he said. "Start now."

  "No rehearsals," Enderby said. "I know my own lines."

  "Yeah, but there been some changes -"

  "About which I was not consulted. And I was barred from your bloody rehearsals. The joke, the man who wrote the bloody thing, that's all. Not one of you spoke up."

  "That's not true," April Elgar said. "It doesn't matter, but that's not true."

  "All right, thanks. So I get up on that stage as William Shakespeare, and you'd better all pray hard that the man himself doesn't punch through the bloody shoddy thing from the shades. Perhaps you'd better arrange a quick seance with Mrs Allegramente, if that's her real name, stupid bitch always going on about the sufferings of Northern Ireland, knows sod all about it. Get the enigmatic voice of the Bard on the hot line. Bugger everything and everybody." He got stiffly up, the minor poet daring to be Shakespeare, Marsyas who was flayed for his temerity, and then hurried stiffly out to the nearest toilet. There he was urgently drained like a sump. Awaiting him outside was April Elgar. She said:

  "You'll be all right. Just be yourself. If they laugh, okay they laugh. I don't think they going to laugh. You care for Shakespeare, that's got to come out."

  "That's the bloody trouble." And then: "What did you do last night?"

  "No business of yours, sonny."

  "Tell me."

  "No, I don't tell you. You want to be jealous, okay you be jealous. Then you don't have to act jealous tonight. It's pretty hard to act jealous." And then: "You got no claim on me."

  "Love," Enderby said heavily. "Love, love. No, no claim, you're right. Love. I'm going off now to get drunk."

  "You better not."

  "You've no claim on me. I do what I want. What time do I have to report for duty?"

  "You and me," she said, "are going to eat lunch, right. A couple martinis, okay. Then we go through the script. Then you have a little sleep. Then we come back here together. We give 'em all hell, you and me. Cabbages, sheep's heads, you got to despise them. Okay?"

  Enderby sat in what had been, and might be again (emerging from blackout was the news), Pete Oldfellow's dressing room. He felt absolutely stone cold and indifferent as Pete Oldfellow's dresser, a retired minor actor new to the job, breathed Southern Comfort onto him. He sat and saw himself in a mirror framed with hot bulbs. Wig, beard secured with str
ong spirit gum. The Burbage portrait stared grimly back, though without earrings. Codpiece, hose, shirt, jerkin, ruff. Outside in the corridor there was scurrying and he could almost smell the sweat of nerves, as in a stable. A calm voice over a loudspeaker said: "Fifteen minutes." The dresser said: "Your teeth okay? That bottom set looks kind of wobbly to me." Enderby realized that he had left his tubes of toothglue back in his hotel bathroom. He gnashed at the mirror. They'd hold. The door opened and April Elgar came in in scarlet silk, café au lait bosom achingly on show. Her ink hair flashed with stage gems. She held out an envelope.

  "Give 'em hell," she said. "My momma sent this. Enclosed, just for you. She sends her warm affection, happy in the Lord. We got a full house, baby. Don't open it now." Enderby propped the letter against a Max Factor makeup outfit. "There he goes." They heard the faint voice of Jed Tilbury addressing the audience, apologizing for absence unavoidable of Pete Oldfellow and begging indulgence, part of William Shakespeare being taken at short notice by play's author the distinguished British. The audience's angry response did not come through. Soon, however, the farting of trombones and thuds of drums did. Overture and beginners. "Luck," she said and was off.

  "You wanna a drop of this?" the dresser asked, bringing from a cupboard a fluted bottle of Southern Comfort. He was an undistinguished man on whom rested impertinently the distinguished though raddled mask of the late John Barrymore. Enderby could reply only with a headshake. He had no saliva and the mechanism of speech had totally to be remastered. He looked down with difficulty at sturdy legs in gooseturd hose. From these the power of locomotion had entirely departed. The feet just about worked still, however, and on these he slid towards the door. The door opened and Jed Tilbury, dressed presumably for Aaron the Moor, nodded at him. Enderby nodded back and said:

  "Aaargh."

  Enderby was pushed by men in stagehand undress into total blackness. From his right an orchestra boomed and screeched to its final chord or what passed for one. Farther right there was meagre and dutiful applause. Enderby saw below the young bald Pip Wesel dimly lighted wagging a stick with a glowworm stuck to its end at dimly lighted music stands. There was a faint response to the stick and Enderby heard sung faintly from ubiquitous loudspeakers words he had himself composed:

  "Bringing the maypole home

  Bringing the maypole home

  Bringing the maypole home

  Bringing the maypole home"

  He now saw a woman in a kind of nightgown rocking a kind of cradle. That would be Anne Shakespeare, NéE Hathaway. He saw her more clearly as dimmers undimmed. He presumed he had to have a colloquy with her. To his surprise he found he could walk. He walked towards her. She was downstage in a pool of pink light. He spoke words:

  "Aye, they're bringing the maypole home. You remember?" He saw there was a kind of casement standing on little wheels, unsupported by a wall. He went to this object to pretend to look out of it. "A night spent in the woods, cider and cold meat and hot lechery. You overbore me as Venus overbore Adonis. I was cozened, caught, caged in a loveless marriage. I have a mind to go." These words, so far as he could remember, were not in the script. It seemed to him that he was probably improvising them. "Aye, a mind to leave you." He blinked at the cradle-rocking Anne, who was not being played by the mistress of Toplady. There were coughs and rustles from the audience. Enderby spoke out more boldly. "I have my destiny to fulfil, my star to follow." He peered through nonexistent glass and saw nothing. "More than my star – my constellation – she is bright this night. Cassiopeia is roaring lionlike in the heavens – an inverted W signifying my name. Will and Will in overplus. My name in the sky."

  From nowhere and everywhere the voice of the fag Oldfellow began to bleat:

  "My name in the sky

  Burning for ever

  Fame fixed by fate

  Never to die

  At least I feast on that dream

  The gleam of gold, my fortunes mounting high"

  At the third line Enderby realized that he was supposed to mouth those words, so he did. But it offended him that his voice should have become the voice of that now blacked out or just emerging from blackout fag. He strode quite sturdily downstage to the very edge of the apron and addressed the audience:

  "A mask, a copy, a travesty. The poet turned into a motley to the view. You have heard of the A-Effekt? Alienation. I am not Shakespeare, he is not Shakespeare. We mock, we defy, we admit absurdities. You and you and you must all be punished." He had heard those lines before somewhere. Yes, Eliot, Murder in the. "Beware." He strode back upstage. The song ended, to no applause. Male voices off began to sing.

  The Queen's Men

  The Queen's Men

  Not bread-and-beer-and-beans men

  But fine men

  Wine men

  Music-while-we-dine men"

  "By God," Enderby cried, "the players are leaving. I will leave with them. They return to London, I spoke to Dick Tarleton in the inn but today. By God, if they will have me I will be one of them." Anne ceased her cradlerocking and began to sing:

  "Will o' the wisp, do not desire

  To follow fame, that foolish fire"

  Enderby again confided in the audience: "A lot of nonsense. This ginger-haired bednag, having nagged me to screaming, having scraped my loins dry, now tries the craft of quasi-melodic seduction. Listen to that voice. Would you be seduced by it?" And then, with great confidence, he strode off. There was applause which drowned the last lines of the song. He had, by God, got them.

  In the wings he collapsed and was offered Southern Comfort and smelling salts, which they called smelling sauce. The thin girl who played Anne was on to him, ready to tear off his well-glued beard. "You bastard," she cried. "You fucked up my song." She was dragged away by ready shirtsleeved muscles. The wings were suddenly cluttered by mock-Elizabethans. Flats were wheeled in and off. Full stage lights screamed. The orchestra blared. And then there she was, divine farthingaled ass awag, down centre:

  "The white man's knavery

  Sold me in slavery

  To an unsavoury"

  Enderby was on his feet again looking down at a small boy dressed like a miniature Elizabethan adult. This boy proffered a sticky hand which Enderby vaguely shook. "No," the boy said in a profound if juvenile Midwestern accent, "you gotta hold on to it."

  Of course, Hamnet his son. A property hand handed to Enderby a vague brown bundle. "That's your grip," he said.

  Enderby and the lad toddled on and looked about them. London peopled mainly with prostitutes, some of them sitting sprawled, all bosom and legs anachronistically exposed, outside a door unupheld by a building. Enderby took the boy downstage and addressed the audience: "The title, incidentally, must not be misunderstood. Ass means a donkey. This child is meant to be Shakespeare's son Hamnet. His accent, you will notice, is unauthentic. Speak, child."

  The boy said: "Is this London, dad?"

  "Yes, my boy, this is a London apparently peopled by tibs, trulls and holy mutton. And do not call me dad. Dad is a term used only for an illegitimate father. In other words, only a bastard may use it. You, whatever you are, are not a bastard. Your mother and I were married in Trinity Church, Stratford. Ah, I wonder if that is Philip Henslowe." Some members of the audience seemed to consider all this funny. Enderby went up to an actor who was frowning over a daybook and addressed him. "You are Master Henslowe? In charge of the Rose Playhouse on the Bankside? I have a play for you."

  "Ah, Jesus, will they never give up?"

  It went rather well, Enderby thought, except that the small lad insisted on holding on to his hand while he was trying to gesture. He was forced to say: "Go in there, Hamnet my boy, and play with the pretty ladies." And he banged the boy's bottom thither. One way of getting him off. Unfortunately he collided with Ned Alleyn coming out, buttoning.

  There was a kind of ballet with people carrying posters on sticks: TITUS ANDRONICUS; HENRY VI PART ONE; HENRY VI PART TWO – Finally there came RICHARD III.
All Enderby had to do was to stand and watch and leave the work to others. But he had not to forget to note ostentatiously the passing of a message from April Elgar through her duenna to Dick Burbage. He was dragged off by a mass of exiters only to be pushed on later to find himself alone with the Dark Lady. He gulped. There was a frilled and tasselled day bed upstage. Downstage she sat combing her hair in an Elizabethan negligee. This was to be a love scene.

  "Who are you, sir?"

  "Madam, I noted at the play you did tender a message to Master Dick Burbage. You bade him come meet you here but be announced for discretion as Richard the Third. But, madam, I am the creator, with a little help from the historians, of that reprehensible humpback. I am William Shakespeare, madam." Enderby glanced timidly up at the flies, whose lord might launch flyshit, at the enskied bard's request, to punish the Marsyas temerity of that identification. Then he said: "Will you not like better a visit from a king maker than from a mere king?"

  "What do you want of me, sir?"

  "To see closer your beauty," Enderby proclaimed, "and to," declaimed, "admire it." He heard a donnish querulousness in his tones and subdued it with a not too proper gruffness. "It is a special and translunary loveliness not much seen, alack, in our pale and shivering clime that enthroned Sol disdains to visit. A sore lack, alack. But how do we define beauty? As that special property in woman, and in man too for such as are so given, that ah generates love. Seeing your beauty, I love it. And must I not love the possessor of that beauty? Ah, madam, I long to take you in mine arms. Love, aye, love, love. Love."

  That was her cue for song, but Pip Wesel the MD was slow to pick it up. Only when Enderby growled the word once more, frowning at the orchestra and, while his hand was in, the audience too, did the jazzy chords of exordium thump. She sang. Enderby blinked at her, still and watching. That lower denture, damn it, felt loose. He wondered whether he should go downstage and talk to the audience in good A-Effekt manner, explain that in point of biographical fact what they were now observing, except for the song, probably truly happened, but, in fact or true truth, she played on the virginals, so called because, and there was a sonnet about it, though Shakespeare got the meaning of the term jacks wrong. But then the song ended, and he beamed as she got her due meed of applause. No doubt about it, she swung both voice and d.v.a. to remarkable effect. He forgot his line, beaming. She fed it to him.