Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

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, cold felleow."

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 ear hole:

"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 in heat. Men too. Women also perhaps." Typing had not been resumed. "Solie'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 pouting 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 locked 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.