"When are you British going to quit Northern Ireland?"
"Which British do you mean?" Enderby asked with care.
"You colonizing British who are holding that poor country in a vice of disgusting tyranny."
"Nothing to do with me. Ask Henry VIII and the Tudor founders of the Protestant plantation," he jocularly added.
"I have already. A fat disgusting man with his mouth full of chicken bones."
Mad. Good, he knew where he stood, lay rather. He too would have difficulty in getting up. The lawyer said:
"You just come over now then?"
"Well, yes. From Tangiers, where I live. I have ah severed connections with my country. Not its language, of course, nor its literature."
"Mr Elderly," Mrs Schoenbaum said, "is a distinguished writer. He is doing this thing for us here. The life of Shakespeare set to music."
"I guess so," the lawyer said. He accepted more whisky. He and the black flunky grunted at each other. The distant pianist struck up a version of "Greensleeves". He knew what was wanted.
"Henry VIII himself wrote that," Enderby blurted. "A musician as well as a ah distinguished tyrant. Some of the words are obscene."
"That figures," Mrs Allegramente said. The academic said:
"Mrs Schoenbaum has done a lot for William Shakespeare." He gave out the full name as though Mrs Schoenbaum had, for good reasons perhaps of an ethical nature, ignored the rest of the family. But Mrs Schoenbaum at once discountenanced that supposition by saying:
"Well, like I always said, Irwin, that's only natural. I am," she told Enderby, "related to the Shakespeares. By marriage, of course." Enderby nodded. These American women were very straightforward people, quick to disclose their madness. The men were a little slower. These here would, after a few more whiskies, give out their madness with a circumspection proper to the professions they practised. "Not, that is, through Mr Schoenbaum, of course, whose family was from Germany, but through the Quineys."
"Thomas Quiney," prompt Enderby said. "He married Judith Shakespeare on 10 February 1616. Shakespeare had only a couple of months of life left after that. The shock did his health no good. A low tavernkeeper already convicted of fornication. The tavern he kept was called the Cage, an appropriate name considering the poor girl's virtually incarcerated condition. A barmaid. Now the place is a place that sells hamburgers."
"Is that so," said rather than asked the lawyer. Mrs Schoenbaum seemed unabashed by the details. She said:
"The Quineys emigrated to America and married into the Greenwoods, which is my family."
"Under the Grunbaum tree," unwisely quoted Enderby, "who loves to lie with me."
"Well, Greenwood was not always the name, as you so er quickly devised. But I got back to the baum bit with my late husband."
"A lovely man," obituarized the lawyer.
"He called me Queenie," Mrs Schoenbaum said, "when he found out that's how Quiney was sometimes pronounced. He spent much time and money, Mr Elderly, on my geneography. He was deeply interested. But my real name is Laura."
"And my real name," Enderby said, "is Enderby. Not Elderly."
"We're all getting on a little," said the academic called Irwin, "except for our lovely hostess. And, of course, for Mrs Allegramente." The young man at the piano called across the room over his rolling chords the word shit. Mrs Schoenbaum said:
"There's no call for that language, Philip. My son," she confided to Enderby. "He is very unsociable."
"He has a considerable social gift," Enderby said. "He er manages that superb instrument with great panache and er vivacity."
"Do you have children, sir?" the lawyer asked in an accusatory manner. His thick eyebrows, Enderby now noticed, had been given, perhaps by art, a devilish upsweep at the outer edges. He had several chins.
"I think not," Enderby said. "Paternity, however, is said to be a legal fiction."
"Surely, surely," Mrs Schoenbaum seemed to soothe. "And are they properly looking after you at the place where you are staying?"
"It is the Holiday Inn," Enderby said. "I cannot get tea. It's as bad as France with this dipping of bags into tepid water. I asked for one of their big coffee jugs to be filled with boiling water and for seven sachets to be steeped in it. They considered this to be British eccentricity."
Mrs Allegramente, responding to the signal British, said: "You better quit Northern Ireland right now if you know what's good for you. I can read the signs."
"She has great gifts," Mrs Schoenbaum said, "as we shall see demonstrated after."
"What they did," Enderby continued, "was to put three sachets in a jug which already contained what they call coffee. The manager was not helpful. So I bought my own apparatus."
"You did, eh?" said the academic with uncalled-for animation. "You went out and bought the wherewithal and now make tea of the required strength in your own room?"
"I most certainly did and do. A kind of kettle and a big mug. Condensed milk. A box of sachets from a store called CHEEP CHEEP with the recorded song of a canary playing all the time."
"Is that so? Is that really so?" The academic's pisshued eyes glowed with interest. "It's in the private sector that the major events of human life occur. Ah," he said, "here is Lucille."
"My daughter," Mrs Schoenbaum said. A girl with jeans and a tee-shirt came in saying hi to everyone. The tee-shirt had Shakespeare as bigfisted flying Superman on it with the legend WILL POWER. "She is a dropout."
Enderby assumed that the term, combining knockout and coughdrop, was a slangy tribute to beauty not at once apparent. "She certainly is," he said. She advertised the lipoid virtues of what he had heard called junkfood, presumably food for junkies, whom, living in Tangiers, he knew all about. A girl greasy as though basted. He was glad when she said she had to split. She had things to do with her friends, to whom too she would say hi. She took her big worn blue arse away. She collided with the black servant who came in to say they could all eat if they wanted. Mrs Schoenbaum told him that Philip would not be eating with them, an aspect of his unsociability. The black man could give Philip a sandwich and a Coke. The black man seemed to demur and said things unintelligible but certainly rebellious in tone. Everybody helped each other to get out of the couch barge. Enderby slithered on wool and high polish. The black man cackled.
The dining room was like a great tomb with votive flowers and candles. Enderby could not see into its corners but he observed over his head an untenanted minstrels' gallery. There were highlighted what he took to be Cézannes, bad paintings of apples and bottles. "Paella," Mrs Schoenbaum announced, pronouncing the double clear L as a single dark one. "In honour of our guest who lives where it is part of the kwee zeen."
"Never see it in Tangiers," Enderby said. "Couscous country."
"Is that so," the lawyer said. The dish that the black man grousingly put on the table was all shells and bits of rubber and soggy rice. There was chlorinated water but no wine. You were supposed to bring your highball in with you. Enderby had finished his. He had been placed next to Mrs Allegramente. She now started again on the theme of suffering Ulster. Enderby was fed up. He said: