"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 nonWill 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."
"I wrote this long ago to another lady, one I saw only in dreams. Now I see reality in your true and rich midnight darkness. I have always been seeking one such as you – goddess, genius, poetic pharos."
"Poetic what?"
"Pharos, pharos. Greek for a lighthouse."
"Okay, why can't he say lighthouse. Then it says that I play."
"Where did you learn so delicate a touch? Surely not in your own country," said Shakesby.
"I left my own country as a small child. I was torn away as a slave. I was brought up by a family in Bristol. It was a holy work to them to bring light to what they called the heathen. But then they freed me and made me into the lady you see, and when the father died he left me money."
"Sing," said Enderwill. "A song in exchange for my sonnet."
"Ah Jesus. You mean this?" And she minced out the words like a Moody and Sankey hymn:
"What doth it mean, to love?.
It is to plumb the seas and scale the skies.
It is to wear the day away with sighs
Or mount the moon above.
Thus doth it mean, to love,
So wouldst thou seek the truth of this to prove,
And love?"
The entire troupe smirked at that. April Elgar gaped incredulous. "It is," Enderby stoutly said, "in the Elizabethan manner. The sort of thing you'd sing to the virginals."
"Sweetie," she said, and then, in a kind of slave whine, "ah doan want none of dem lil old virginals, whatever de shit dey are. Dey doan fit mah personality no way no how."
"I've warned you before," Enderby cried, "about that sort of language. There's too much of this shit," he told the whole troupe, "going on. She there," jerking his shoulder towards her, "blasphemes against her exquisite beauty by bemerding her speech in that manner. For Christ's sake cut out the shit and let's be serious." And he blazed his way back into the role, crying like a threat: "You sing prettily, madam. Can you dance as well?"
"Some dances I can dance," April Elgar said, first grinning and then not. "The pavane – the galliard -"
"Canst," Shenderspeare said, with a cunning change to the familiar mode, "dance the Beginning of the World?"
"I know not such a dance."
"I," Spearesby said, "will show thee." And he beamed in embarrassment as pure Enderby.
"Well," she said, in her proper person, "we're waiting."
"Oh, that. Well – he takes her in his arms and covers her with kisses. He imposes his will upon her, pun intended, he strips her of her taffeta elegance and carries her over to a gorgeous daybed. He untrusses himself and dances the dance called the Beginning of the World. A nice conceit," he explained. "The Elizabethans saw the sexual act in cosmic terms. It began with an image of creation and ended with death. To die meant to experience the ah orgasm."
For the first time the assembled company responded to words of Enderby with something approaching attention and even respect. It evidently surprised some of the younger ones to learn that people who had been dead a thousand or a hundred years, same thing, knew about copulation and even had expressive figurative speech to decorate it in or with. "Beginnin o the World," the black lad said, drawing out World into something unglobular. "I like that, man." Before or after that night's Brecht nonsense some of them would be trying it out for the sake of the nomenclature. Baby, ah just died. Then a man in overalls entered to say that the Holiday Inn was on fire.
6
What had happened, so Enderby was to learn later, was that a disaffected busboy or bellhop, mandatorily stoned, had filled a familysize Coca-Cola bottle with gasoline siphoned from the hotel manager's car, glugged this inflammable out in the empty thirdfloor bedroom two doors away from Enderby's own and then enflamed it. He had then got the hell out with a cashbox containing something under a hundred dollars, there not being much cash around these days of credit cards. When Enderby got by taxi to the hotel he found a fire engine there, summoned from Indianapolis, with the firemen pumping not water but a grey chemical substance over all available surfaces. Not much of a fire, but the third floor had been evacuated. Enderby found his suitcase, fortunately closed, covered with grey dust and his decent clerical grey suit suited in a deeper grey. His tea mug and kettle were no longer around, but the rest of his stuff rested, along with other defiled luggage, by a pillar in the defiled foyer. He should by rights demand compensation for defilement but contented himself with getting the hell out, not paying his bill, and asking the taxi driver who had brought him hither and was staying to share in the excitement to take him and his defilements to the Sheraton Hotel in Indianapolis.
The driver insisted first on showing him the town he was to dwell in for a space, or it may have been a matter of his not knowing where the Sheraton Hotel was and hoping to find it by dint of cruising the entire city around. Central Park, Monument Place, radiating Massachusetts, Indiana, Virginia and Kentucky Avenues. State Capitol, Court House, Board of Trade building, Central College of Physicians and Surgeons, Blind and Deaf and Dumb Asylums. At length he said, with no hint of triumph, "Well, here it is." And there it was. Enderby expected sympathy from the reception clerk for his refugee condition and the state of his baggage but got none. But he was permitted to submit his suit for dry cleaning.
Lying on his bed, smoking a Robert Burns, he noted that he had been carrying all this while, and in spite of more immediate emotions and preoccupations, an inflated shlong, as she called it, and all because of her. Then he wondered about the fire and dismissed a superstitious supposition. Then he remembered that she was staying in this same hoteclass="underline" he had heard a girl in the big open secretarial area of the theatre's offices confirming her reservation on the telephone. Then he lusted for strong tea and raged in frustration. He would have to go out and resupply himself. He went down, overcoated though without his tout cap, and found a kettle and mug in a kind of hardware store off Kentucky Avenue and, in a supermarket entitled rather soberly EATGOOD, bought brown sugar lumps, canned milk and a box of two hundred tea sachets of unstated provenance, also a brand of toothglue he had not previously met called Champ. And then there was a new variety of stomach tablet named Whoosh. Rather exciting, really, all this consumerism. Fairly pleased, he took his purchases back to the hotel. In the lobby he saw Ms April Elgar. She was being silently admired, and no bloody wonder, by God. She was also flipping through mail that had arrived for her, frowning crossly at it. Enderby went straight up to her and said: