The Complete Enderby (84 page)

‘Bringing the maypole home,

Bringing the maypole home,

Bringing the maypole home,

Bringing the maypole home.’

‘A deathless lyric,’ Toplady said.

‘There’s more to it than that,’ Enderby said, red. ‘It goes on:

‘Custom has blessed this strange festivity,

Licensing every gross proclivity,

Here’s the year’s nativity,

Here is life, let’s live it.

To sin it is no sin

When spring is coming in.’

He looked round for a positive response, but there was none, except of vague incredulity. He pushed on sturdily:

‘In his dying delirium he sees the mayers prancing about the deathchamber, his younger self and Anne Hathaway among them. He says: “Thus it began. She overbore me in a wood. Needed a husband, even though one ten years younger. Susannah there born but six months after the marriage.” Himself dying and his surrounding family fade into blackness, and the younger Shakespeare, whom we will call Will for brevity, is sitting in a chair nursing his son Hamnet.’

‘What happens to the singing and dancing?’ asked somebody.

‘That is ah sung and danced off. But this is another May and Will hears the song in the distance. He hugs his little son and sings to him as follows:

‘Little son,

When I look at thee

I am filled with won-

Der such wonder should be.

Part of me yet no part of me,

Wholly good yet the wood of my tree.

If I could

I would live to see

Fulfilled in me

The man that I can never be,

Born to property,

Richly clad retainers about thee.

Hawk on hand,

You survey your land,

Your acres shining in the summer’s gold

And I behold

The glory of a name

Restored to fame

It had of old.

Little son,

If these things should be

And I die before they are granted to thee,

Think of me as he who carved them

From the wood

For the wood of my tree.’

There was a silence. Toplady said to Silversmith, who lay on the floor: ‘Mike?’ Silversmith pronounced:

‘I say what I said already.’ Toplady said with cold eyes to Enderby:

‘Go on. But cut out the lyrics.’

‘But the whole of this ah induction is done practically entirely in song.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well,’ Enderby said, ‘Will goes to the window and looks up at the clear night sky. He sees, but we do not see, Cassiopeia’s Chair, a constellation in the shape of an inverted W, the initial of his name. He sings to it.’

‘Ah Jesus,’ said Silversmith from the floor.

‘He sings to it as follows:

‘My name in the sky

Burning for ever,

Fame fixed by fate

Never to die.

At least

I feast on that dream,

The gleam of gold, my fortunes mounting high.

To render my deed

More than pure fancy,

On lonely roads I must proceed,

My one companion a dream,

A seemly vision only I espy!

My name in the sky.

‘But then his wife Anne appears and sings a contrary song which combines in counterpoint with Will’s:

‘Will o’ the wisp,

A foolish fire,

Leads fools to fall

In mud and mire.

Better by far

The fire at home,

Smoke in the rafter,

Lamb’s wool and laughter –’

‘What,’ Toplady’s mistress asked, ‘does lamb’s wool have to do with it?’

‘Lamb’s wool,’ Enderby authoritatively defined, ‘was an Elizabethan drink for cold weather, consisting of heated ale mixed with the pounded pulp of roasted crab apples, which fragments
floated
in the ale like the wool of lambs in a high wind. Seasoned with nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Highly fortifying.’

‘You’d have to have a programme note,’ said a bearded youth, ‘or some guy standing there to stop the song and explain it.’

‘Push on,’ Toplady said in the tone of one who leads a toiling party through a high wind.

‘Anne finishes the song:

‘Will o’ the wisp,

Do not desire

To follow fame,

That foolish fire.

Better by far

The fire at home,

Fresh dawn on waking

And fresh bread baking.

A will o’ the wisp

Should not aspire

To be a star.’

‘Mike?’

‘Like I said already.’

‘But,’ pleaded Enderby, ‘they both hear approaching song. It is the company of players known as the Queen’s Men. They have been playing in Stratford and are now leaving it, with their property carts and clopping horses. The troupe sings:

‘The Queen’s Men,

The Queen’s Men,

Not beer-and-bread-and-beans men

But fine men,

Wine men,

Music-while-we-dine men.

The Queen’s Men,

The Queen’s Men,

Of-more-than-ample-means men,

Are off now,

Doff, bow,

We will come again,

The Queeeeeeen’s Men.’

Enderby prolonged the long vowel in a gesture of song: ‘Hearing it, Will says: “By God, I will go with them. I will become a player and eke write plays –”’

‘Why does he go eek?’ a fat frizzy girl in crimson asked.

‘Eke means also,’ learned Enderby said. ‘Cognate with German
auch
. But he can say also if that is what is, ah, desired.’

‘That is, ah, desired,’ the girl said.

‘He says to his little son: “I will be back with fine gifts for Hamnet. And eke Susannah and Judith. And eke their mother.” Or, if that is still desired, also. Anne sings her Will o’ the Wisp song and Will his Cassiopeia song again, and both are in counterpoint to the song of the Queen’s Men. The scene ends. The curtain goes up almost at once on Elizabethan London in the full flush of victory over the Spaniards. A song is sung which begins with a kind of ah fart –’

‘Your first job,’ Toplady said, ‘was to find out about the stage. This stage has no curtains. Go and look at it sometime. No curtains.’

‘Except for someone,’ Silversmith said obscurely from the floor.

‘A sort of er fart,’ Enderby went on, ‘like this:

‘Prrrrrrrp

We ha’ done for the Don,

Clawed off his breeches

And rent every stitch he’s

Had on –’

‘Right,’ Toplady said to the company, ‘you can see a lot of work has to be done yet, and our friend here says that this is only what he calls an induction –’

‘Shakespeare too,’ Enderby cut in. ‘You all know your
Taming of the
.’

‘Watch noticeboard for next reading call. Okay,’ dismissively. To Enderby he said: ‘You and me and Mike have to talk. In ten minutes in my office.’

‘You,’ Enderby said, ‘do not appear to like the project.’

‘I like any project that has a fart in hell’s chance of working. This project we’ve got to do. There’s money gone into it from Mrs Schoenbaum. She wants it and to Mrs Schoenbaum you don’t say no. But we don’t do the project the way you see the project or think you see it.’ He breathed on Enderby and exuded a memory of breakfast blueberry pancakes. ‘Ten minutes in my office.’ Both he and Enderby had to leave by the same door, but it was if they were to exit by opposed wings. Silversmith remained on the floor. Enderby said harshly to him:

‘Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blest be the man who spares these stones

But curst be he who moves my bones.’

‘That too,’ Silversmith said, ‘is a shitty lyric.’ Enderby was constrained, though silently, to agree with him. He then lost himself in the bowels of the theater among shut cabin doors, fat heating pipes, growling engines. A big place, he concluded, having passed twice the same boilersuited men playing cards. At length he found himself in the wings of a stage and he timidly ventured onto the stage itself which, true, had no curtains and jutted far into an auditorium far too large for the town of Terrebasse but not for playgoers from the state capital, which was near. Less shyly, he moved downstage in the dusk mitigated by a working light and tried certain lines:

‘By God, I will follow them to London and make my fortune there, acting plays and eke writing them.’ Terrible. A man who now appeared in the wings with a hamburger seemed to think so too, for he clapped faintly.

Enderby went down to the auditorium and through it, uphill, to doors which led to a wide corridor. Then there were stairs and he came to the administrative area, where girls and grown women were typing. He was somewhat late. Toplady glowered from his open office. Silversmith was already lying on the floor. Toplady’s office was full of framed posters of his triumphs in high colour and fancy lettering. Toplady drank coffee from a paper cup and so, with some loss of the substance, did Silversmith. No coffee was
offered
to Enderby but a chair was. Toplady sat behind his desk. He said:

‘What’s the story?’

‘The story, yes. Shakespeare, or Will as we may call him for brevity’s sake, said that already, sorry, leaves wife and children in Stratford and goes to London. He sees how the Londoners like violent sports like bearbaiting and beheadings at Tyburn, so he writes the most violent play ever written. I see you presumably know it, Mr Ladysmith, since a poster there says you once directed it. Not a good play. In fact,’ he said daringly, ‘a lousy one.’

‘Go on.’

‘This leads him to the
Henry VI
plays and the friendship of the Earl of Southampton and at least acquaintanceship with the Earl of Essex, who wants to be king of England. Then there is
Richard III
, which leads him to the Dark Lady. She sees the play and falls for Burbage who plays the lead, and wants him to come to her bed with the announcement at the door that Richard III is here. But Will gets there first and is at his work when the announcement comes and says tell him William the Conqueror comes before Richard III.’

The anecdote made Enderby smile but the two others remained gloomily watching. He continued:

‘The Earl of Southampton takes the Dark Lady away from him and he falls into depression and whoring and drinking. You could have a song about that,’ he suggested.