The Complete Enderby (86 page)

Enderby was let in by a muttering black man in a white jacket. Mrs Schoenbaum was there in the hallway to greet him. ‘Mr Elderly? We are so honoured,’ honored, really. Enderby shyly took in riches. Daubs on the walls which must be what were known as rich men’s impressionists, cost millions. He knew that Mr Schoenbaum was dead from making money. Mrs Schoenbaum was clearly enjoying her widowhood. She wore a kind of harem dress of silk trousers and brocaded sort of cutdown caftan. Her silver hair was frozen into a photographed stormtossed effect, clicked into sempiternal tempestuousness on a Wuthering Heights of the American imagination. Her eyelids were gold-dusted and her lips white-lacquered. Her nose looked as though its natural butt had been surgically cut off. She took Enderby by the hand and led him into a salon with more daubs discreetly lighted. Enderby tottered and then recovered on bearskins laid on pine overpolished. ‘Whoops,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said, holding on to his hand. ‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘you know nobody here.’ That was true. An evidently hired youth playing cocktail tripe on the Bechstein in a far corner sent over to Enderby a vulgar conspiratorial look. Enderby was introduced to two overweight men who got up from a couch as long as a barge with some difficulty. A middle-aged woman laden with beads did not, quite rightly, get up, but she fixed Enderby with eyes of hate. One overweight man was from the University of Indianapolis. The other seemed to be a lawyer or something shady of that kind. Enderby did not catch the names. ‘Mrs Allegramente,’ or something, said Mrs Schoenbaum, ‘has promised to demonstrate her powers for us after dinner.’ This Mrs Allegramente said, as Enderby boarded the couch and accepted a whisky with ice from the muttering black:

‘When are you British going to quit Northern Ireland?’

‘Which British do you mean?’ Enderby asked with care.

‘You colonizing British who are holding that poor country in a vice of disgusting tyranny.’

‘Nothing to do with me. Ask Henry VIII and the Tudor founders of the Protestant plantation,’ he jocularly added.

‘I have already. A fat disgusting man with his mouth full of chicken bones.’

Mad. Good, he knew where he stood, lay rather. He too would have difficulty in getting up. The lawyer said:

‘You just come over now then?’

‘Well, yes. From Tangiers, where I live. I have ah severed connections with my country. Not its language, of course, nor its literature.’

‘Mr Elderly,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said, ‘is a distinguished writer. He is doing this thing for us here. The life of Shakespeare set to music.’

‘I guess so,’ the lawyer said. He accepted more whisky. He and the black flunky grunted at each other. The distant pianist struck up a version of ‘Greensleeves’. He knew what was wanted.

‘Henry VIII himself wrote that,’ Enderby blurted. ‘A musician as well as a ah distinguished tyrant. Some of the words are obscene.’

‘That figures,’ Mrs Allegramente said. The academic said:

‘Mrs Schoenbaum has done a lot for William Shakespeare.’ He gave out the full name as though Mrs Schoenbaum had, for good reasons perhaps of an ethical nature, ignored the rest of the family. But Mrs Schoenbaum at once discountenanced that supposition by saying:

‘Well, like I always said, Irwin, that’s only natural. I am,’ she told Enderby, ‘related to the Shakespeares. By marriage, of course.’ Enderby nodded. These American women were very straightforward people, quick to disclose their madness. The men were a little slower. These here would, after a few more whiskies, give out their madness with a circumspection proper to the professions they practised. ‘Not, that is, through Mr Schoenbaum, of course, whose family was from Germany, but through the Quineys.’

‘Thomas Quiney,’ prompt Enderby said. ‘He married Judith Shakespeare on 10 February 1616. Shakespeare had only a couple of months of life left after that. The shock did his health no good. A low tavernkeeper already convicted of fornication. The tavern he kept was called the Cage, an appropriate name considering the poor girl’s virtually incarcerated condition. A barmaid. Now the place is a place that sells hamburgers.’

‘Is that so,’ said rather than asked the lawyer. Mrs Schoenbaum seemed unabashed by the details. She said:

‘The Quineys emigrated to America and married into the Greenwoods, which is my family.’

‘Under the Grünbaum tree,’ unwisely quoted Enderby, ‘who loves to lie with me.’

‘Well, Greenwood was not always the name, as you so er quickly devised. But I got back to the baum bit with my late husband.’

‘A lovely man,’ obituarized the lawyer.

‘He called me Queenie,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said, ‘when he found out that’s how Quiney was sometimes pronounced. He spent much time and money, Mr Elderly, on my geneography. He was deeply interested. But my real name is Laura.’

‘And my real name,’ Enderby said, ‘is Enderby. Not Elderly.’

‘We’re all getting on a little,’ said the academic called Irwin, ‘except for our lovely hostess. And, of course, for Mrs Allegramente.’ The young man at the piano called across the room over his rolling chords the word shit. Mrs Schoenbaum said:

‘There’s no call for that language, Philip. My son,’ she confided to Enderby. ‘He is very unsociable.’

‘He has a considerable social gift,’ Enderby said. ‘He er manages that superb instrument with great panache and er vivacity.’

‘Do you have children, sir?’ the lawyer asked in an accusatory manner. His thick eyebrows, Enderby now noticed, had been given, perhaps by art, a devilish upsweep at the outer edges. He had several chins.

‘I think not,’ Enderby said. ‘Paternity, however, is said to be a legal fiction.’

‘Surely, surely,’ Mrs Schoenbaum seemed to soothe. ‘And are they properly looking after you at the place where you are staying?’

‘It is the Holiday Inn,’ Enderby said. ‘I cannot get tea. It’s as bad as France with this dipping of bags into tepid water. I asked for one of their big coffee jugs to be filled with boiling water and for seven sachets to be steeped in it. They considered this to be British eccentricity.’

Mrs Allegramente, responding to the signal British, said: ‘You better quit Northern Ireland right now if you know what’s good for you. I can read the signs.’

‘She has great gifts,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said, ‘as we shall see demonstrated after.’

‘What they did,’ Enderby continued, ‘was to put
three
sachets in a jug which already contained what they call coffee. The manager was not helpful. So I bought my own apparatus.’

‘You did, eh?’ said the academic with uncalled-for animation. ‘You went out and bought the wherewithal and now make tea of the required strength in your own room?’

‘I most certainly did and do. A kind of kettle and a big mug. Condensed milk. A box of sachets from a store called
CHEEP CHEEP
with the recorded song of a canary playing all the time.’

‘Is that so? Is that really so?’ The academic’s pisshued eyes glowed with interest. ‘It’s in the private sector that the major events of human life occur. Ah,’ he said, ‘here is Lucille.’

‘My daughter,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said. A girl with jeans and a tee-shirt came in saying hi to everyone. The tee-shirt had Shakespeare as bigfisted flying Superman on it with the legend
WILL POWER
. ‘She is a dropout.’

Enderby assumed that the term, combining knockout and cough-drop, was a slangy tribute to beauty not at once apparent. ‘She certainly is,’ he said. She advertised the lipoid virtues of what he had heard called junkfood, presumably food for junkies, whom, living in Tangiers, he knew all about. A girl greasy as though basted. He was glad when she said she had to split. She had things to do with her friends, to whom too she would say hi. She took her big worn blue arse away. She collided with the black servant who came in to say they could all eat if they wanted. Mrs Schoenbaum told him that Philip would not be eating with them, an aspect of his unsociability. The black man could give Philip a sandwich and a coke. The black man seemed to demur and said things unintelligible but certainly rebellious in tone. Everybody helped each other to get out of the couch barge. Enderby slithered on wool and high polish. The black man cackled.

The dining room was like a great tomb with votive flowers and candles. Enderby could not see into its corners but he observed over his head an untenanted minstrels’ gallery. There were highlighted what he took to be Cézannes, bad paintings of apples and bottles. ‘Paella,’ Mrs Schoenbaum announced, pronouncing the double clear L as a single dark one. ‘In honour of our guest who lives where it is part of the kwee zeen.’

‘Never see it in Tangiers,’ Enderby said. ‘Couscous country.’

‘Is that so,’ the lawyer said. The dish that the black man grousingly put on the table was all shells and bits of rubber and soggy rice. There was chlorinated water but no wine. You were supposed to bring your highball in with you. Enderby had finished his. He had been placed next to Mrs Allegramente. She now started again on the theme of suffering Ulster. Enderby was fed up. He said:

‘Get this straight. I was brought up an English Catholic. I’ve no time for those bloody Orangemen there. They say an Orangeman’s dinner consists of roast spuds, boiled spuds, chips and croquettes.’

‘Is that so.’

‘Pudgy bastards who discharge their carbohydrated energy in gross tribalism. No time for the sods. So hand the place over to the IRA for all I care. But it’s no business of the Yanks.’

Mrs Schoenbaum was a polite hostess. She ignored her British guest’s snarl and said: ‘I hear great things of our project. I understand that things are going really well.’

‘Conflicts,’ Enderby said, and spat a bit of shell onto his fork end. ‘They will all be resolved. This was your idea, or so I’m credibly informed.’

‘It was the idea,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said, ‘of the Bard himself. Ask Mrs Allegramente.’ Enderby choked. ‘He spoke from the Happy House and said he was delighted that America had achieved two hundred years of free nationhood. He wished to be associated in song and dance with our celebrations.’ Enderby looked darkly, in the dark, at Mrs Allegramente, who looked, though chewing something unchewable, darkly back. ‘After dinner we shall tune in to him again. It’s a great privilege,’ said Mrs Schoenbaum.

‘He will not speak to the sceptical,’ Mrs Allegramente said.

‘What,’ Enderby asked, ‘is this Happy House you spoke of?’

‘The mansion of the blessed,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said. ‘He is with his fellow writers. He sent greetings from John Steinbeck, who would not speak for himself.’

‘I met Steinbeck,’ Enderby said, ‘when he was given, unjustly I thought and still think, the Nobel, oh I don’t know though when you consider some of these dago scribblers who get it, think it was an unjust bestowal. There was a party for him given by Heinemann in London. I asked him what he was going to do with
the
prize money and he said:
Fuck off
.’ Before he could apologize, the academic said:

‘Don’t apologize.
Oratio recta
. Such a response I find deeply interesting. The private sector of a man’s life.’

‘This was in public,’ Enderby said. ‘I apologize for what he said,’ he said to Mrs Schoenbaum. Mrs Schoenbaum, who evidently heard worse from her children, inclined queenlily. ‘I trust,’ he said with swimming brain, ‘the er bard keeps his language clean.’

‘He will not speak to sceptics,’ Mrs Allegramente said.

‘What kind of sceptics do you have in mind? People who believe his works were written by the gonorrheal Earl of Rutland?’

‘People who do not believe in the open line to the beyond,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there’s any use proceeding tonight,’ she told her hostess, who moaned in distress:

‘Oh, Mrs Allegramente.’

‘You must flout the sceptic,’ the academic said. ‘You do not preach to the converted.’

‘I don’t like,’ Enderby said, seeing in gloom a big cake like an Edwardian lady’s hat swim from darkness to light and hearing coffee cups arattle, ‘the assumption that I don’t believe. I am, after all, a poet. There are more things, et cetera. Horatio,’ he added to the lawyer. ‘My stepmother,’ he prepared to say.

‘Perhaps you would prefer tea,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said. Enderby heard a black whine from the darkness.

‘No, no, no. I shall have tea when I get back to my room. Along with the Late Late Show.’

‘The Late,’ the academic, ‘Late,’ tasting every word, ‘Show,’ said. It was clear he had never heard of it. ‘That is an amusing locution.’

‘It’s on television every night,’ Enderby informed him. ‘An ancient ah movie interspersed with commercials for cutprice ah discs.’ He accepted a plate of white and bloody goo. The lawyer now began to disclose his madness. He said:

‘Don’t knock free enterprise. Free enterprise made this country what it is.’

‘I’m not ah er knocking anything –’

‘We don’t need smartass, pardon me Laura, Europeans coming over here to knock American institootions. This next year we have our bicentennial.’

‘As I am certainly well aware. My heartiest felicitations.’

‘We don’t need smartass sarcasm, pardon me Laura and Mrs Allegramente, from smartass knockers of American traditions. We celebrate two centuries of American knowhow. Also liberty of conscience and expression.’

‘I most heartfeltly congratulate you.’