He was adding up even larger sums on his bed later that day, having eaten hamburger steak with fried eggs, drunk lager that tasted of onions and water, taken Pepts and Windkill, then sadly onanized. He should rightly have done so to the stimulus of April Elgar's present, but it was not aromatic of her as a shoe or stocking would have been. The present was really an unwilled invitation to accept a very dull future in which one second was the same as another, as symbolized by the minimal metamorphosis from number to number, in which the achievement of a minute and later an hour was, so muted was the change, nothing for the instrument to crow over. The sums he added were, though large, small enough for him to check by simple arithmetic. The instrument told, it seemed, no lies and might be trusted with huge multiplications and even square roots. Then there was a knocking at his door. It was April Elgar in plastic rainhood and raincoat. It was hard to tell whether her face had been irrigated by rain or was being irrigated by tears. She said:
"I've moved in here. I can't stand the bastards."
"You mean," Enderby asked, "in here?"
"Not in here, stoopid. In the hotel. Just down the corridor." And then she sat on the nearer bed, that on which Enderby, in shirt, trousers and socks, had been lying calculating, and wept. Enderby sat next to her. He said:
"Take those things off. The outer ones, I mean. Then tell me why. Crying, that is. Not that there's any reason why you should. Explain, I mean. We all ought to be crying all the bloody time." She needed, Enderby could see, comfort, so he put his arms about her. So, in his arms and in plastic rainwear, she sobbed. He patted the plastic rainwear, going "There, there." And then: "Insulted you, did they, those white bastards? And then there's coming away from home and leaving your mother and your kids, a known loving ambience, and meeting sneering swine making uncalled-for references to your private life I took them to be, believe me, I don't believe any of it, I know you, it's the snarl the jealous world delivers to talent and beauty, there, there." He nearly added, unthinking, his stepmother's cantrip: Cry more and you'll pee less. She stopped crying very suddenly, wiped her eyes and face vigorously on Enderby's shirt, then said, as all women were supposed to say, according to Enderby's reading, in such circumstances:
"I must look terrible."
"Not at all. Young, defenceless, and, of course, very beautiful. Now take that stupid rain thing off. Have you eaten anything?"
"Yeah, I ate dinner, and those bastards were in the dining room kind of jeering, and then I went back up and was taking a shower, and I said the hell with it, I'm going to where my friend is, so I got my bags taken down and I put on my raincoat and. If I take it off," she suddenly began to giggle, "you'll see the real me, kid. Divine fundament and all."
"You mean," Enderby gulped, "straight out of the bath, shower I mean, ridiculous unclean American custom, and and." His body stiffened except for one member, which couched morbidly flaccid. "I see." He added, obscurely: "The casting of the die." He superadded: "You mean you would?"
"You talked about loving me till you die, kid."
"It's not the same," Enderby said, much perturbed. "Perhaps I've been too dualistic, too Platonic. I mean, there are too many difficulties involved. Aesthetic, for instance. Beauty and the beast. Not that I'm ungrateful. But love, love, that's something different from taking that thing off. Please understand."
"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.
10
"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.