Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

"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 slave. 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."