Anthony Burgess - The Clockwork Testament (Or - Enderby 's End)

Hell, Enderby was thinking as he sat in one of the IRT coaches going uptownwards. Because we were too intellectual and clever and humanistic to believe in a hell didn't mean that a hell couldn't exist. If there were a God, he could easily be a God who relieved himself of the almost intolerable love he felt for the major part of his creation (on such planets, say, as Turulura 15a and Baa'rdnok and Juriat) by torturing forever the inhabitants of 111/9 Tellus 1706defg. A touch of pepper sauce, his palate entitled to it. Or perhaps an experiment to see how much handing out of torture he himself could tolerate. He had, after all, a kind of duty to his own infinitely variable supersensorium. Hamlet was right, naturally. Troubles the will and makes us rather. This little uptown ride, especially when the train stopped long and inexplicably between stations, was a fair miniature simulacrum of the ultimate misery-potential black and brown devils ready to rob, slice, and rape; the names of the devils blowpainted on bulkheads and seats, though never on advertisements (sacred scriptures of the infernal law) JESUS 69, SATAN 127, REDBALL is back.

Coming out of the subway, walking through the disfigured streets full of decayed and disaffected and dogmerds, he felt a sudden and inappropriate accession of well-being. It was as though that lunchtime spasm had cleared away black humours inaccessible to the Chinese black draught. Everything came back about minor Elizabethan drama, though in the form of a great cinema poster with a brooding Shakespeare in the middle. But the supporting cast was set neatly about-George Peele, carrying a copy of The Old Wives' Tale and singing in a fumetto about chopcherry chopcherry ripe within; poor cirrhotic Robert Greene conjuring Friars Bacon and Bungay; Tom Brightness-falls-from-the-air Nashe; others, including Dekker eating a pancake. That was all right, then. But wait-who were those other others? Anthony Munday, yes yes, a bad playbotcher but he certainly existed. Plowman? A play called A Priest in a Whorehouse ? Deverish? England's Might or The Triumphs of Gloriana ?

Treading through rack of crumpled protest handouts, desiccated leaves, beer cans, admitted with reluctance by a black armed policeman, he made his familiar way to the officially desecrated chapel which now held partitioned classrooms. Heart thumping, though fairly healthily, he entered his own (he was no more than five minutes late) to find his twenty or so waiting. There were Chinese, skullcapped Hebrews, a girl from the Coast who piquantly combined black and Japanese, a beer-fat Irishman with red thatch, an exquisite Latin nymph, a cunning know-all of the Kickapoo nation. He stood looking vaguely at them all. They lounged and ate snacks and drank from cans and smoked pot and looked back at him. He didn't know whether to sit or not at the table on which someone had chalked ASSFUCK. A little indisposed today, ladies and gentlemen. But no, he would doggedly stand. He stood. That bright Elizabethan poster swiftly evanesced. He gaped. All was blank except for imagination, which was a scurrying colony of termites. He said:

"Today, ladies and gentlemen, continuing our necessarily superficial survey of the minor Elizabethan dramatists-"

The door opened and a boy and a girl, wan and breathless from swift fumbling in the corridor, entered, buttoning. They sat, looking up at him, panting.

"We come to-" But who the hell did we come to? They waited, he waited. He went to the blackboard and wiped off some elementary English grammar. The chalk in his grip trembled, broke in two. He wrote to his astonishment the name GERVASE WHITELADY. He added, in greater surprise and fear, the dates 1559-1591. He turned shaking to see that many of the students were taking the data down on bits of paper. He was committed now: this bloody man, not yet brought into existence, had to have existed. "Gervase Whitelady," he said, matter-of-factly, almost with a smear of the boredom proper to mention of a name nauseatingly well known among scholars. "Not a great name-a name, indeed, that some of you have probably never even heard of-" But the Kickapoo know-all had heard of it all right: he nodded with superior vigour. "-But we cannot afford to neglect his achievement, such as it was. Whitelady was the second son of Giles Whitelady, a scrivener. The family had settled in Pease Pottage, not far from the seaside town we now call Brighton, and were supporters of the Moabite persuasion of crypto-reformed Christianity as far back as the time of Wyclif." He looked at them all, incurious lot of young bastards. "Any questions?" There were no questions. "Very well, then." The Kickapoo shot up a hand. "Yes?"

"Is Whitelady the one who collaborated with-what was the name of the guy now-Fenprick? You know, they did this comedy together-what the hell was the name of it-"

A very cunning young redskin sod, ought to be kept on his reservation. Enderby was Not going to have this. "Are you quite sure you mean Fenprick, er er-"

"Running Deer is the name, professor. It might have been Fencock. A lot of these British names sound crazy."

Enderby looked long on him. "The dates of Richard Fenpick," he said, "-note that it is pick not prick, by the way, er er-" Running Deer, indeed. He must sometime look through the admission cards they were supposed to hand in. "His dates are 1574-1619. He could hardly have collaborated with er-" He checked the name from the board. "Er Whitelady unless he had been a sort of infant prodigy, and I can assure you he was er not." He now felt a hunger to say more about this Fenpick, whose career and even physical lineaments were being presented most lucidly to a wing of his brain which, he was sure, had been newly erected between the heart attack and now. "What," he said with large energy and confidence, "we most certainly do know about er Fenpick is his instrumentality in bringing the Essex rebellion to a happy conclusion." To his shock the hand of the girl who had just come in with that oversexed lout there, still panting, shot up. She cried:

"Happy for whom?"

"For er everybody concerned," Enderby er affirmed. "It had happened before in history, English naturally, as Whatsis-name's own er conveniently or inconveniently dramatised."

"Inconvenient for whom?"

"For er those concerned."

"What she means is," said the red-thatched beer-swollen Irish student, "that the movie was on last night. The Late Late Date-with-the-Great Show. What Bette Davis called it was Richard Two."

"Elizabeth and Essex," the buttoned girl said. "It failed and she had his head cut off but she cries because it's a Cruel Necessity."

"What Professor Enderby was trying to say," the Kickapoo said, "was that the record is all a lie. There was really a King Robert the First on the British throne, disguised as the Queen." Enderby looked bitterly at him, saying:

"Are you trying to take the-Are you having a go?"

"Pardon me?"

"The vital statistics," a young Talmudist said, pencil poised at the ready. "This Whitelady."

"Who? Ah, yes."

"The works."

"The works," Enderby said, with refocillated energy. "Ah, yes. One long poem on a classical theme, the love of er Hostus for Primula. The title, I mean the hero and heroine, are eponymous." He clearly saw a first edition of the damned poem with title page a horrid mixture of typefaces, fat ill-drawn nymphs on it, a round chop which said Bibliotheca Somethingorother. "Specimen lines," he continued boldly:

"Then as the moon engilds the Thalian fields

The nymph her er knotted maidenhead thus yields,

In joy the howlets owl it to the night,

In joy fair Cynthia augments her light,

The bubbling conies in their warrens er move

And simulate the transports of their love."