"What do you mean – signs?"
"Mrs Schoenbaum has these seances, superstitious nonsense, of course, but there seems to be somebody out there, watching. A fire at the Holiday Inn. My fryer back in Tangiers exploded."
"You're crazy," Oldfellow said without conviction.
" 'Good friend,' " Enderby said, " 'for Jesus' sake forbear -' "
"Jesus," went Toplady anticlimactically.
"A thought, that's all. We're trying to celebrate, in a popular and rather ah American form, altogether appropriate considering the double nature of the celebration, the human side of a great poet. That human side must not be traduced. The dead seem to have their own way of responding to the law of libel. If anybody's going to be made to suffer, it's going to be me. A fellow poet. Letting the side down. You," he said sternly to Oldfellow, "had better watch out. You're acting Shakespeare like a kind of cowboy. And with what I take to be a Milwaukee accent. Shakespeare's not going to like that."
"You're crazy, that's for sure," Oldfellow said, now with conviction. "And I come from Cedar Rapids, Iowa."
"Listen," Toplady hissed at Enderby, "I'm director, okay? And I'll decide who does what and how. You just give what you're asked for, okay? That's laid down in your contract."
"It's also laid down in my contract that I get some money."
"Give him some money, for Christ's sake," Toplady said to Ms Grace Hope. Ms Grace Hope at once gave him some money out of a big canvas bag covered with widowed letters of the alphabet in various typefaces. Enderby thanked her courteously. "Okay," Toplady said, "next call's at two. Entire company. Act One."
"That fag," April Elgar, "that plays piano. I want him out on his fat ass."
"Mike Silversmith always has him," Toplady patiently explained. "Mike Silversmith needs him."
"I don't need him, brother. And I don't have him."
"Silversmith," Enderby pronounced, "is musically analphabetic. His sense of prosody is rudimentary. This fag, Coppola I gather his name is, is at the moment necessary. He can notate music."
"Who," Toplady said viciously, "is running this show?"
Enderby bowed to everybody and then took his urgent engorgement and the image of April Elgar off to another toilet. Then, having finished the implausible story about the planet Urkurk, he went off to have a beef sandwich with coleslaw, which latter he ate.
That afternoon, from a lonely seat in the dark auditorium, he watched Act One unroll. The Induction was back in. Then Elizabethan London was primarily April Elgar and a dumpy woman choreographer. Oldfellow gawped at London, gumchewing kid as dumb Hamnet holding his dad's paw, and gave it slow hayseed (Cedar Rapids, he had said) greeting. He had prerecorded his songs, cheating but permitted in a star who had never sung before, and to the thumping of a live piano by the bald but hairy Coppola opened and shut a soundless gob. April Elgar did not warble Enderby's little Elizabethan pastiche about love; instead she belted out gamier words, though still by him, Enderby:
"Love, you say love, you say love?
All you're talking about
Is fleshly philandering,
Goosing and gandering.
Peacock and peahen stalking about,
Squawking about
Love,
He-goat, she-goat, mare and stallion,
Blowsy trull, poxy rapscallion.
You'd better know that my golden galleon
Is not for your climbing aboard
Of"
And so on. And it was not right. She was shaking her divine black ass to it. She was black America, which was better than Cedar Rapids, but she was not Elizabethan London. Nor, God help him, were his own rhythms. And another thing: what right had he, Enderby, to assume that Shakespeare had fallen for a genuine negress (inadmissible term nowadays, he had been told)? A dark lady was not necessarily a black lady. A chill fell on Enderby. He had been corrupted in advance, he had wanted a black lady, and nobody had questioned his assumption. Another thing: the dialogue was being steadily corrupted to modern American colloquial. Pete Oldfellow now said, in his Shakespeare persona: "Okay, then, let's forget it." Enderby yelled:
"No!"
Toplady, who sat in the centre aisle at a table with a light trained on his script and notes, looked round from over black-framed reading glasses at the source of the agonized cry, then he counteryelled:
"Out!"
"Are you talking to me?" a quieter Enderby said, while the cast looked down.
"Yeah, talking to you. And what I said was."
"I know what you said. Am I to sit here and hear that bloody traduction and make no bloody protest? I said no and I mean bloody no. And if you haven't the sense of historical propriety to say bloody no too then you're a."
"You want to be thrown out? You're barred from rehearsals, get that? When I want you I'll let you know, right? Now get your ass out of here."
"Bugger you," Enderby said doubtfully and getting up. "The whole thing's a bloody travesty. I'm getting out. I'm also going home. Bugger the contract." And he climbed panting up the deeply raked aisle. When he got outside into the dusking concourse or whatever they called it he breathed deeply and angrily. Also impotently. He had no return ticket nor money for one. He had, in the toilet, counted Ms Grace Hope's meagre handout. He had neither publisher nor literary agent in New York. He had no source of money to get him to what he called home. He lighted himself a White Owl, better than Robert Burns though not much, he had been recommended to try Muriel but he had once known a girl called Muriel, and he looked through the great window at the dusking carpark. Snow spun on blacktops and, tautomorphically, white tops. Gonna be a white Christmas, they said. He turned to snort smoke at the double door whence he had exited and puff disdain at what lay within. Then the doors opened to show April Elgar running on long legs out. Ah God, that damnable beauty, crystalline and coral concern, body like flame, arms like lesser flames towards him. Then she had him embraced, and he, White Owl awkward in gripe, had to embrace back, then throwing White Owl to hoot out disregarded smoke on oatmeal carpeting. Recover it later.
"Honey, honey," she said, "we'll beat the bastards, you'll see." Then she raised her lips (only a little way necessary) and kissed, with surely histrionic though instinctually histrionic sincerity, him, Enderby. Who dithered. Who trembled kneewise. Who groaned. Who said with little breath:
"You shouldn't. You know. Changes world. Forces me to. Avowals. Most dangerous word in the."
"I'm with you, baby. Screaming fags. Just thought I'd let you, you know, like know. Ow." That was Enderby's embrace unwillingly pressing the air out of her. But a sturdy tumescence more appropriate to her image than to her pressed reality thrust them, in the first phase of its arc, apart like some instrument, a truncheon say, of moral order. One of her sharp metal heels transfixed Enderby's White Owl and it ceased, though not for that reason, to smoke. Enderby, seeing it, said:
"Ought to. Give it up. No breath, you see. Don't make me. Avowals."
"That bastard Topass insulted you, kid, and I've come to take you back in there. You got your rights. He's gonna pologize."
"I don't," Enderby said, volume of SF at groin, "want his bloody apologies. I wouldn't go in there again if I was dragged. I'd be on the next plane if I had the money. I'll lock myself into that bloody cell with the electric typewriter, obscene thing purring at you all the time, and I'll do what has to be done. Then I'll get paid and I'll bugger off. Forgive my bad language."