"Well, yes, it was the Bard himself from the Happy House and he just made the same sound three times. Through Mrs Allegramente's mouth of course, which was wide open, she was in a trance."
"What was this sound?"
"Well, it sounds kind of silly – kha, kha, kha, just like that. And then a pause, and then the same again. And then another pause, and then the -"
"Kha, kha, kha?" asked Enderby. Girls looked up from their typing. "Or was it more ha, ha, ha, though with a very strong aspiration?"
"You could say that, I guess, yes."
"Hha, hha, hha, then," Enderby said. "Fairly clear, I should think. There's a sonnet beginning with the line 'The expense of spirit in a waste of shame', and it warns about the dangers of lust. The sin of animality. Then comes the line that begins 'Had, having and in quest to have', and there's no doubt that he's mocking the noise of lustful panting. Dog and bitch in heat. Men too. Women also perhaps." Typing had not been resumed. "Solie's reminding somebody not to get caught up in the toils of unconsidering sensuality. Hha, hha, hha, eh? Of course, it may not be Shakespeare at all. Just somebody who's read him."
"There was nobody there it would apply to, Mr Elderly."
"You can never be sure," Enderby said darkly. "Hha, hha, hha."
"Well, thank you, I hope everything's going all right there."
"Everything's going just fine," Enderby said, as he heard the screams of April Elgar and Pete Oldfellow approaching the secretarial area and Toplady's office. "Hha, hha, hha," he said in valediction. And he put down the handset.
God, how bloody beautiful she was in a rage. Her raging elongated sunset of a rehearsal suit, a onepiece jersey jumpthing, turned her into a flame with teeth. Enderby's heart melted. Behind her, glum and nailbiting, was Toplady. They were going to have it all out in a kind of privacy. Oldfellow whined, but he had neither her vocabulary, suprasegmental tropes of remote jungle origin, nor her numinosity. He was a man of about Enderby's size with a nose that would not get in the way in kissing sequences, mean blue eyes and a pouting mouthful of porcelain crowns. With him was his wife, Ms Grace Hope, a thin woman in a ginger trouser suit and an extravagant fair wig. To her Enderby abruptly addressed himself, saying:
"A question of money. There are two hotels requesting nay demanding payment. My own resources are not ah unlimited. I invoke the terms of my contract."
"Later," Ms Grace Hope said. "At the moment the show itself is in jeopardy."
"Not through any fault of mine," Enderby said. "I've done everything required. Totally accommodating."
"A smidgen too accommodating," Oldfellow said. "My part's been slashed to fucking ribbons." And his head with its mean blue eyes locked to April Elgar and ticked back to Enderby. Enderby said:
"I'll thank you not to use that word in ah her presence. Nor, for that matter, in the presence of ah her." Meaning Ms Grace Hope, his wife. "Questions of propriety."
"Don't give me that kind of shit," Oldfellow said. "I know what's been going on around here."
"In," Toplady said with weary bitterness, his nailgnawed right thumb showing in where.
"What precisely," asked Enderby of Oldfellow, "are you suggesting?"
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Toplady said, entering his office first.
"Myself also?" Enderby asked.
"Yeah, yourself also."
"Why," Enderby asked Toplady, when they were seated, "are you called Angus?"
"I don't see what the shit that's got to do with anything."
"What I mean is, the Scottish blood, if any, is not made manifest in any – Well, a certain directness of utterance, though usually coarse and improper, an apparent passion for whisky: that bottle on your desk is now empty but was full yesterday -"
"I get this for lagniappe," Toplady told everybody.
"They were going to call him Agnes," April Elgar said, "but when they got a closer look -"
"Stop it, stop it, stop it," Oldfellow screamed.
"Right," Ms Grace Hope said, a very hardfaced woman. "We keep our tempers, right? And we talk about the script. A musical's changed while it's in flight, we know that, but there've been too many changes behind Pete's back with no consultation. He's the star, right? He plays William Shakespeare, right? He gets the script and he says okay, lousily written but that can be put right later, and then when he gets here -"
"Who," Enderby said, "says that it's lousily written?"
"You may know Shakespeare," Oldfellow said, "but you don't know the theatre. There's a difference."
"You don't know the theatre, either," Enderby said. "You're what is known as a film star."
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Ms Grace Hope said, a sudden winter sun shaft firing a faint lanugo Enderby had not before noticed, so that her face seemed to bristle, "let's stick to the point. This is supposed to be a musical about Shakespeare."
"Which it is," Toplady said. "It's also about the Dark Lady."
"It's about the Dark Lady," April Elgar said very sweetly. "It's also about Shakespeare."
"You see?" Ms Grace Hope told a poster.
"Well," Enderby mumbled, "the concept was bound to change. The talents of Miss ah Elgar here have to be employed. The emphasis is on the power of certain ah dark forces on the life of the poet. I admit there was no such emphasis before. The emphasis now seems to me to be a just one."
"Thanks, kid," April Elgar said.
"Practicalities," Ms Grace Hope said. "We want certain things restored that got cut out behind our backs."
"This plurality," Enderby said. "Do you speak as ah Mr Oldfellow's wife or as his agent or as ah what?"
"I," she told Enderby, "am taking this show to Broadway. There's money being put into this show on certain strict understandings."
"I assumed," Enderby said, "that Mrs ah Schoenbaum -"
"That applies here. It doesn't apply when the show takes off from this theatre."
"What she means," April Elgar said, "is that she's producing a musical to show that the great overpaid Pete Oldfellow is more than just a pretty face."
"Listen who's talking about overpaid," Oldfellow hotly said. "I do this fucking thing for peanuts and she -"
"I will not," Enderby cried, "have this continual debasement of language."
"Ah Jesus," Toplady went.
"All that's needed," Ms Grace Hope said, "is cooperation, right?"
"Okay, tell that fag of a husband of yours to cooperate, okay?"
"I will not be called a fag by this black bitch."
"Ah, I knew we"d get that sooner or later. Okay, maybe this black bitch better schlepp her black ass off home."
"He didn't mean that," Enderby said. "And you didn't mean that about his being a fag."
"Didn't I just, brother."
"She calls everybody a fag," Enderby explained. "She calls me a fag too, but I don't object."
"Baby," April Elgar said, "you may be an uptight ofay milk-toast limey bastard, but you ain't no fag."
"Thank you," Enderby said gravely. Pete Oldfellow said in heat:
"She's got him by the balls, she's made him pussydrunk, she eats him for dinner." Toplady cried:
"We've got less than one month before opening. This can't go on."
"Well, try a smaller size, baby," April Elgar said.
"I'll say one thing," Enderby suddenly said with weight. "This thing is not entirely in our hands. There are too many messages coming through. Not very coherent perhaps, but we're being warned, I think, not to play ducks and drakes with the dead. I'm no more superstitious than the next person, but there have been various signs." They all looked at him. Ms Grace Hope said: