Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

"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.

"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: