Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

"What precisely," asked Enderby of Oldfellow, "are you suggesting?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Toplady said, entering his office first.

"Myself also?" Enderby asked.

"Yeah, yourself also."

"Why," Enderby asked Toplady, when they were seated, "are you called Angus?"

"I don't see what the shit that's got to do with anything."

"What I mean is, the Scottish blood, if any, is not made manifest in any – Well, a certain directness of utterance, though usually coarse and improper, an apparent passion for whisky: that bottle on your desk is now empty but was full yesterday -"

"I get this for lagniappe," Toplady told everybody.

"They were going to call him Agnes," April Elgar said, "but when they got a closer look -"

"Stop it, stop it, stop it," Oldfellow screamed.

"Right," Ms Grace Hope said, a very hardfaced woman. "We keep our tempers, right? And we talk about the script. A musical's changed while it's in flight, we know that, but there've been too many changes behind Pete's back with no consultation. He's the star, right? He plays William Shakespeare, right? He gets the script and he says okay, lousily written but that can be put right later, and then when he gets here -"

"Who," Enderby said, "says that it's lousily written?"

"You may know Shakespeare," Oldfellow said, "but you don't know the theatre. There's a difference."

"You don't know the theatre, either," Enderby said. "You're what is known as a film star."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Ms Grace Hope said, a sudden winter sun shaft firing a faint lanugo Enderby had not before noticed, so that her face seemed to bristle, "let's stick to the point. This is supposed to be a musical about Shakespeare."

"Which it is," Toplady said. "It's also about the Dark Lady."

"It's about the Dark Lady," April Elgar said very sweetly. "It's also about Shakespeare."

"You see?" Ms Grace Hope told a poster.

"Well," Enderby mumbled, "the concept was bound to change. The talents of Miss ah Elgar here have to be employed. The emphasis is on the power of certain ah dark forces on the life of the poet. I admit there was no such emphasis before. The emphasis now seems to me to be a just one."

"Thanks, kid," April Elgar said.

"Practicalities," Ms Grace Hope said. "We want certain things restored that got cut out behind our backs."

"This plurality," Enderby said. "Do you speak as ah Mr Oldfellow's wife or as his agent or as ah what?"

"I," she told Enderby, "am taking this show to Broadway. There's money being put into this show on certain strict understandings."

"I assumed," Enderby said, "that Mrs ah Schoenbaum -"

"That applies here. It doesn't apply when the show takes off from this theatre."

"What she means," April Elgar said, "is that she's producing a musical to show that the great overpaid Pete Oldfellow is more than just a pretty face."

"Listen who's talking about overpaid," Oldfellow hotly said. "I do this fucking thing for peanuts and she -"

"I will not," Enderby cried, "have this continual debasement of language."

"Ah Jesus," Toplady went.

"All that's needed," Ms Grace Hope said, "is cooperation, right?"

"Okay, tell that fag of a husband of yours to cooperate, okay?"

"I will not be called a fag by this black bitch."

"Ah, I knew we"d get that sooner or later. Okay, maybe this black bitch better schlepp her black ass off home."

"He didn't mean that," Enderby said. "And you didn't mean that about his being a fag."

"Didn't I just, brother."

"She calls everybody a fag," Enderby explained. "She calls me a fag too, but I don't object."

"Baby," April Elgar said, "you may be an uptight ofay milk-toast limey bastard, but you ain't no fag."

"Thank you," Enderby said gravely. Pete Oldfellow said in heat:

"She's got him by the balls, she's made him pussydrunk, she eats him for dinner." Toplady cried:

"We've got less than one month before opening. This can't go on."

"Well, try a smaller size, baby," April Elgar said.

"I'll say one thing," Enderby suddenly said with weight. "This thing is not entirely in our hands. There are too many messages coming through. Not very coherent perhaps, but we're being warned, I think, not to play ducks and drakes with the dead. I'm no more superstitious than the next person, but there have been various signs." They all looked at him. Ms Grace Hope said:

"What do you mean – signs?"

"Mrs Schoenbaum has these seances, superstitious nonsense, of course, but there seems to be somebody out there, watching. A fire at the Holiday Inn. My fryer back in Tangiers exploded."

"You're crazy," Oldfellow said without conviction.

" 'Good friend,' " Enderby said, " 'for Jesus' sake forbear -' "

"Jesus," went Toplady anticlimactically.

"A thought, that's all. We're trying to celebrate, in a popular and rather ah American form, altogether appropriate considering the double nature of the celebration, the human side of a great poet. That human side must not be traduced. The dead seem to have their own way of responding to the law of libel. If anybody's going to be made to suffer, it's going to be me. A fellow poet. Letting the side down. You," he said sternly to Oldfellow, "had better watch out. You're acting Shakespeare like a kind of cowboy. And with what I take to be a Milwaukee accent. Shakespeare's not going to like that."

"You're crazy, that's for sure," Oldfellow said, now with conviction. "And I come from Cedar Rapids, Iowa."

"Listen," Toplady hissed at Enderby, "I'm director, okay? And I'll decide who does what and how. You just give what you're asked for, okay? That's laid down in your contract."

"It's also laid down in my contract that I get some money."

"Give him some money, for Christ's sake," Toplady said to Ms Grace Hope. Ms Grace Hope at once gave him some money out of a big canvas bag covered with widowed letters of the alphabet in various typefaces. Enderby thanked her courteously. "Okay," Toplady said, "next call's at two. Entire company. Act One."

"That fag," April Elgar, "that plays piano. I want him out on his fat ass."

"Mike Silversmith always has him," Toplady patiently explained. "Mike Silversmith needs him."

"I don't need him, brother. And I don't have him."

"Silversmith," Enderby pronounced, "is musically analphabetic. His sense of prosody is rudimentary. This fag, Coppola I gather his name is, is at the moment necessary. He can notate music."

"Who," Toplady said viciously, "is running this show?"

Enderby bowed to everybody and then took his urgent engorgement and the image of April Elgar off to another toilet. Then, having finished the implausible story about the planet Urkurk, he went off to have a beef sandwich with coleslaw, which latter he ate.

That afternoon, from a lonely seat in the dark auditorium, he watched Act One unroll. The Induction was back in. Then Elizabethan London was primarily April Elgar and a dumpy woman choreographer. Oldfellow gawped at London, gumchewing kid as dumb Hamnet holding his dad's paw, and gave it slow hayseed (Cedar Rapids, he had said) greeting. He had prerecorded his songs, cheating but permitted in a star who had never sung before, and to the thumping of a live piano by the bald but hairy Coppola opened and shut a soundless gob. April Elgar did not warble Enderby's little Elizabethan pastiche about love; instead she belted out gamier words, though still by him, Enderby:

"Love, you say love, you say love?

All you're talking about

Is fleshly philandering,

Goosing and gandering.

Peacock and peahen stalking about,

Squawking about

Love,

He-goat, she-goat, mare and stallion,

Blowsy trull, poxy rapscallion.

You'd better know that my golden galleon

Is not for your climbing aboard