The Complete Enderby (100 page)

Not a mouse stirring, had he thought? But those creatures with long tails were surely rats, a trio of them nibbling at some dump of rubbish not far from the way into the Theatre. He went warily nearer, and the rats at once scampered off, each filament of whisker clear in the light. They were rats as he knew rats – though he had seen them only in cages in the laboratories of his university – with mean bright eyes and thick meaty tails. But then he saw what they had been eating.

Dragged out from the mound of trash was a human forearm. In some ways Paley was not unprepared for this. He had soaked in images of traitor heads stuck up on Temple Bar, bodies washed by three tides and left to rot on Thames shore, limbs hacked off at Tyburn and carelessly left for the scavenging. Kites, of course, kites. But now the kites would all be roosting. Clinically, his stomach calm from its medicine, he examined the raw gnawed thing. There was not much flesh off it yet: the feast had been interrupted at its very beginning. On the wrist, though, was a torn and pulpy patch which made Paley frown – something anatomically familiar but, surely, not referrable to a normal human arm. It occurred to him for just a second that this was rather like an eye-socket, the eye wrenched out but the soft bed left, still not completely ravaged. And then he smiled that away, though it was difficult to smile.

He turned his back on the poor human remnant and made straight for the entrance door. To his surprise it was not locked. It creaked as he opened it, a sort of harsh voice of welcome to this world of 1595 and its strange familiarity. There it was – tamped earth for the groundlings to tamp down yet further; the side boxes; the jutting apron; the study uncurtained; the tarrass; the tower with its flagstaff. He breathed deeply, reverently. This was the Theatre. And then –

‘Arrr, catched y’at it!’ Paley’s heart seemed about to leap from his mouth like a badly fitting denture. He turned to meet his first
Elizabethan
. Thank God, he looked normal enough, though filthy. He was in clumsy boots, gooseturd-coloured hose, and a rancid jerkin. He tottered somewhat as though drunk, and, as he came closer to peer into Paley’s face, Paley caught a frightful blast of ale breath. The man’s eyes were glazed and he sniffed deeply and long at Paley as though trying to place him by scent. Intoxicated, unfocused, thought Paley with contempt, and as for having the nerve to sniff … Paley spoke up, watching his words with care:

‘I am a gentleman from Norwich, but newly arrived. Stand some way off, fellow. Know you not your betters when you see them?’

‘I know not thee, nor why tha should be here at dead night.’ But he stood away. Paley glowed with small triumph, the triumph of one who has, say, spoken home-learnt Russian for the first time in Moscow and has found himself perfectly understood. He said:

‘Thee?
Thee
? I will not be thee-and-thou’d so, fellow. I would speak with Master Burbage, though mayhap I am somewhat early for’t.’

‘The young un or th’old?’

‘Either. I have writ plays and fain would show them about.’

The watchman sniffed at Paley again. ‘Genlmn you may be, but you smell not like a Christian. Nor do you keep Christian hours.’

‘As I say, I am but newly arrived.’

‘I see not your horse. Nor your traveller’s cloak.’

‘They are – I ha’left ’em at mine inn.’

The watchman muttered. ‘And yet he saith he is but newly arrived. Go to.’ Then he chuckled and, at the same time, delicately advanced his right hand towards Paley as though about to bless him. ‘I know what ’tis,’ he said, chuckling. ‘’Tis some naughtiness, th’hast trysted ringading with some wench, nay, some wife rather, nor has she belled out the morn.’ Paley could make little of this. ‘Come,’ the man said, ‘chill make for ’ee an th’hast the needful.’ Paley looked blank. ‘An tha wants beddn,’ the man said more loudly. Paley caught that, he caught also the meaning of the open palm and wiggling fingers. Gold. He felt in his scrip and produced an angel. The man’s jaw dropped as he took it. ‘Sir,’ he said, hat-touching.

‘Truth to tell,’ Paley said, ‘I am shut out of mine inn, late
returning
from a visit and not able to make mine host hear with e’en the loudest knocking.’

‘Arrr,’ and the watchman put his finger by his nose, then scratched his cheek with the angel, finally, before stowing it in a little purse at his girdle, passing it a few times in front of his chest. ‘With me, sir, come.’

He waddled speedily out, Paley following him with pulse fast abeat. ‘Where go we then?’ he asked. He received no answer. The moon was almost down and there were the first intimations of early summer dawn. Paley shivered in the wind; he wished he had brought a cloak with him instead of the mere intention of buying one here. If it was really a bed he was to be taken to, he was glad. An hour or so’s sleep in the warmth of blankets and never mind whether or not there would be fleas. On the streets nobody was astir, though Paley thought he heard a distant cats’ concert – a painful courtship, just as on true Earth. Paley followed the watchman down a narrow lane off Bishopsgate, dark and stinking. The effects of the medicine had worn off; he felt his gorge rise as before. But the stink, his nose noticed, was subtly different from what it had been: it was, he thought in a kind of small madness, somehow swirling, redistributing its elements as though capable of autonomous action. He did not like this. Looking up at the paling stars he felt sure they too had done a sly job of refiguration, forming fresh patterns like a sand tray on top of a thumped piano.

‘Here ’tis,’ the watchman said, arriving at a door and knocking without further ado. ‘Croshabels,’ he winked. But the eyelid winked on nothing but glazed emptiness. He knocked again, and Paley said:

‘’Tis no matter. It is late, or early, to drag folk from their beds.’ A young cock crowed near, brokenly, a prentice cock.

‘Never one nor t’other. ’Tis in the way of a body’s trade, aye.’ Before he could knock again, the door opened. A cross and sleepy-looking woman appeared. She wore a filthy nightgown and, from its bosom, what seemed like an arum lily peered out. She thrust it back in irritably. She was an old Elizabethan woman, greyhaired, about thirty. She cried:

‘Ah?’

‘One for one. A genlman, he saith.’ He took his angel from its
nest
and held it up. She raised a candle the better to see. The arum lily peeped out again. All smiles now, she curtseyed Paley in. Paley said:

‘’Tis but a matter of a bed, madam.’ The other two laughed at that ‘madam’. ‘A long and wearisome journey from Norwich,’ he added. She gave a deeper curtsey, more mocking than before, and said, in a sort of croak:

‘A bed it shall be and no pallet nor the floor neither. For the gentleman from Norwich where the cows eat porridge.’ The watchman grinned. He was blind, Paley was sure he was blind. On his right thumb something winked richly. The door closed on him, and Paley and the madam were together in the rancid hallway.

‘Follow, follow,’ she said, and she creaked first up the stairs. The shadows her candle cast were not deep; from the east grey was filling the world. On the wall of the stairwell were framed pictures. One was a crude woodcut showing a martyr hanging from a tree, a fire burning under him. Out of the smiling mouth words ballooned:
AND YETTE I SAY THAT MOGRADON GIUETH LYFE
. Another picture showed a king with a crown, orb and sceptre and a third eye set in his forehead. ‘What king is that?’ asked Paley. She turned to look at him in some amazement. ‘Ye know naught in Norwich,’ she said. ‘God rest ye and keep ye all.’ Paley asked no further questions and kept his wonder to himself at another picture they passed: ‘Q. Horat. Flaccus’ it said, but the portrait was of a turbaned Arab.

The madam knocked loudly on a door at the top of the stairs. ‘Bess, Bess,’ she cried. ‘Here’s gold, lass. A cleanly and a pretty man withal.’ She turned to smile with black teeth at Paley. ‘Anon will she come. She must deck herself like unto a bride.’ From the bosom of her nightgown the lily again poked out and Paley thought he saw a blinking eye enfolded in its head. He began to feel the tremors of a very special sort of fear, not a terror of the unknown so much as of the known. He had rendered his flying boat invulnerable; this world could not touch it. Supposing it was possible that this world was in some manner rendered invulnerable by a different process. A voice in his head seemed to say, with great clarity: ‘Not with impunity may one disturb the.’ And then the door opened and the girl called Bess appeared, smiling professionally. The madam said, smiling also:

‘There then, as pretty a mutton slice as was e’er sauced o’er.’ And she held out her hand for money. Confused, Paley dipped into his scrip and pulled out a dull-gleaming handful. He told one coin into her hand and she still waited. He told another, then another. ‘We ha’ wine,’ she said. ‘Wouldst?’ Paley thanked her: no wine. The grey hair on her head grew erect. She mockcurtseyed off.

Paley followed Bess into the bedchamber, on his guard now. The ceiling bent like a pulse; ‘Piggesnie,’ Bess croaked, pulling her single garment down from her bosom. The breasts swung and the nipples ogled him. They were, as he had expected, eyes. He nodded in something like satisfaction. There was, of course, no question of going to bed now. ‘Honeycake,’ gurgled Bess, and the breast-eyes rolled, the long black lashes swept up and down coquettishly. Paley clutched his scrip tightlier to him. If this distortion – likely, as far as he could judge – were to grow progressively worse – if this scrambling of sense data were a regular barrier against intrusion, why was there not more information about it on Earth? Other time-travellers had ventured forth and come back unharmed and laden with sensible records. Wait, though: had they? How did one know? There was Swenson’s mention of Wheeler, jailed in the Middle Ages by chunks of tripodic ectoplasm. ‘White-haired and gibbering when we got him aboard.’ Swenson’s own words. How about Swenson’s own vision of the future – a plaque showing his own birth and death dates? Perhaps the future did not object to intrusion from the past, since it was made of the same substance. But (Paley shook his head as though he were drunk, beating back sense into it) it was not a question of past and future, it was a matter of other worlds existing
now
. The now-past was completed, the now-future was completed. Perhaps that plaque in Rostron Place, Brighton, showing Swenson’s death some thirty years off, perhaps that was an illusion, a device to engender satisfaction rather than fear but still to discourage interference with the pattern. ‘My time is short,’ Paley said suddenly, using urgent twenty-third-century phonemes, not Elizabethan ones. ‘I will give you gold if you will take me to the house of Master Shakespeare.’

‘Maister –?’

‘Shairkspeyr.’

Bess, her ears growing larger, stared at Paley with a growing montage of film battle scenes playing away on the wall behind her. ‘Th’art not that kind. Women tha likes. That see I in tha face.’

‘This is urgent. This is business. Quick. He lives, I think, in Bishopsgate.’ He could find out something before the epistemological enemies took over. And then what? Try to live. Keep sane with signals in some quiet spot till a year was past. Signal Swenson, receive his reassurances in reply; perhaps – who knew? – hear from far time-space that he was to be taken home before the scheduled date, instructions from Earth, arrangements changed –

‘Thou knowest,’ Paley said, ‘what man I mean. Master Shakespeare the player at the Theatre.’

‘Aye aye.’ The voice was thickening fast. Paley said to himself: It is up to me to take in what I wish to take in; this girl has no eyes on her breasts, that mouth new-formed under her chin is not really there. Thus checked, the hallucinations wobbled and were pushed back temporarily. But their strength was great. Bess pulled on a simple smock over her nakedness, took a worn cloak from a closet. ‘Gorled maintwise,’ she said. Paley pushed like mad; the words unscrambled. ‘Give me money now,’ she said. He gave her a portague.

They tiptoed downstairs. Paley tried to look steadily at the pictures in the stairwell, but there was no time to force them into telling of the truth. The stairs caught him off his guard and changed to a primitive escalator. He whipped them back to trembling stair-hood. Bess, he was sure, would melt into some monster capable of turning his heart to stone if he let her. Quick. He held the point-of-day in the sky by a great effort. There were a few people in the street. He durst not look on them. ‘It is far?’ he asked. Cocks crowed, many and near, mature cocks.

‘Not far.’ But nothing could be far from anything in this crammed and toppling London. Paley strained to keep his sanity. Sweat dripped from his forehead and a drop caught on the scrip which he hugged to himself like a stomachache. He examined the drop as he walked, stumbling often on the cobbles. A drop of salty water from his pores. Was it of this alien world or of his own? If he cut off his hair and left it lying, if he dunged in that foul jakes there from which a three-headed woman now appeared, would this B303
London
reject it, as a human body will reject a grafted kidney? Was it perhaps not a matter of natural law but of some God of the system, a God against Whom, the devil on one’s side, one could prevail? Was it God’s club rules he was pushing against, not some deeper inbuilt necessity? Anyway, he pushed, and Elizabethan London, in its silver dawn, steadied, rocked, steadied, held. But the strain was terrific.

‘Here, sir.’ She had brought him to a mean door which warned Paley that it was going to turn into water and flow down the cobbles did he not hold its form fast. ‘Money,’ she said. But Paley had given enough. He scowled and shook his head. She held out a fist which turned into a winking bearded man’s face, threatening with chattering mouth. He raised his own hand, flat, to slap her. She ran off, whimpering, and he turned the raised hand to a fist that knocked. His knock was slow to be answered. He wondered how much longer he could maintain this desperate holding of the world in position. If he slept, what would happen? Would it all dissolve and leave him howling in cold space when he awoke?