The Complete Enderby (88 page)

‘As you came from the holy land of Walsingham,

Met you not my true love by the way as you came?’

‘Ah,’ says Poley, ‘he knows the name Walsingham. It was, after all, his master’s. His ears pricked like a dog’s.’

‘Sir Francis Walsingham,’ says Skeres. ‘Dead these two years, but once head of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He recruited you, Kit.’

‘Sing him more,’ says Poley, so Frizer sings:

‘I sing of a spy, of a spy sing I,

That under the cloak of tobacco smoke

And drink and boys and blasphemous noise

Had sharp enough eyes for other spies.

‘Meaning that he was, or is, a counter-spy, matching the Counter-Reformation.’

‘Will,’ says Marlowe, frightened, ‘go and call in those men. The Privy Council men we told to wait in the garden.’ Will tries to get up, quick enough on the uptake, but finds Skeres’ drawn sword at his chest. Skeres says:

‘Nay, stay, we beg you, Mr Shakejelly. Play stuff, Kit,’ he says to Marlowe, ‘apt for the stage but not for real life.’

‘I admit,’ says Marlowe, ‘real life has more surprises. I had no idea my three friends were creatures of King Philip of Spain.’

‘You still have no idea, Kit,’ says Frizer. ‘You have no idea who we are working for, or, if thou wishest,
para quien nosotros estamos trabajando
. Why, we may also be working for Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and that organization may deem it desirable to be rid of unreliability.’

‘Look,’ says Poley, his eyes stern on Will, ‘this one here. Must he not too –?’

‘He is not quite a gentleman,’ says Skeres. ‘He carries no sword. He may freely report what he is about to see. The judgement of God on an atheistical roarer.’ They all have their swords drawn. Will remains rigid in his seat. Frizer says:

‘Draw your dagger, Kit. Let us have some little argument about the honour of a wench or who shall pay the reckoning.’ He lunges at Marlowe. Marlowe draws his dagger. Frizer laughs, keeping at a sword’s length’s distance. He says:

‘Ah, Mr Shakeshoes, are you not now in the great world? Did you not dream of all the glory of this London life when you wiped your snotty country nose on your sleeve?’

‘Tell them, Will,’ says Marlowe. ‘Tell them what you have seen.’

‘He may tell them,’ says Poley. ‘He shall corroborate all.’ So all three now have their swords out, but they clatter them to the floor. ‘Strike, Kit,’ says Poley, ‘strike, you passionate shepherd.’ Marlowe holds his dagger indecisively. ‘Now,’ says Poley. All three seize Marlowe’s dagger hand and drive the dagger into his frontal lobes. Marlowe screams. Will is petrified.

‘I still think,’ says Skeres, ‘we should dispatch this one too. A quarrel of drunken poets.’

‘No, no,’ says Frizer. ‘It is a little man. Leave him.’ And Will runs away.

Enderby looked up at the blur of Toplady, pleased. He could not tell from his look whether Toplady was pleased or not, but he took it that he was not, since he never was.

‘Well,’ Toplady began, and got no further. For his door flew open and in swam or sailed or flew April Elgar, saying:

‘Hi.’

‘Sweetie, marshmallow pie, angelcake’ and so on went Toplady, half-rising and making a cold sketch of embracing her in hungry arms. Enderby not merely got up to give her his chair but retreated to the wall. ‘This,’ Toplady said with dramatic lack of enthusiasm, ‘is er,’ meaning Enderby.

‘Hi.’

Enderby stood openmouthed underneath a poster for
Mother Courage
. He had never seen anything or body like this woman before. In Tangiers, true, he had presided, as owner of a perch of sunning ground windtrapped, over comely enough bodies and acceptable enough, if usually chronically dissatisfied, faces above them or, if they were lying down, at one end or other of them. These had been all white, meaning unwholesomely rich in greens and blues and carmines, and very pallid to begin with, earning slow increments of honey and ultimate toffee as the sun slowly chewed them. The women of darker hue he had been unable to judge of, since they showed only ankles under robes and kohled eyes over yashmaks. He had never really had standards for the assessing of black American beauty. This April Elgar was a revelation to his awed eyes, and would be even more so when he got his glasses on. She glowed in deep content with her Blue Mountain glow and exact sculpted line of feature. Quadroon? Octoroon? Blasphemous terms, obsolete musical instruments squeaking in accompaniment to a celestial choir. Denoting cold-blooded blood apportionments apt only for damnable race laws. Doubloon was more like it: hot gold, also cool. The divine sinuous body was skirted in cinnamon, ensilked shins and ankles and feet shod frivolously on frail plinths that were really artful engineering made Enderby groan with their frightful perfection. She had had pasted upon her a matching jumper of fairy chain metal. Her delicate breasts appeared unsupported. The hair, obligatorily raven, flowed a satin river, to whose blackness all blacks were chalk, scrawling their own reproach.
She
sat, well pleased with herself, by God, and no wonder, by Christ. She said, in a voice of cassia honey or an Elgarian string section:

‘Has that fucking fag schlepped his ass here yet?’

‘Don’t be like that, Ape,’ whined Toplady. ‘You like Pete, you know you’ll be great together.’

‘What did you call her then?’ cried Enderby in outrage. ‘Did you call her what I think you called her?’ She turned and looked Enderby up and down, as to appraise his fag properties, if any, and said:

‘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 roles. ‘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 non Will 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.’