Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow -

That makes three.

The first tomorrow is for me.

The second tomorrow – we.

The third tomorrow – thee.

I start with my poetic fame,

I then restore the family name,

And last of all I see

Thee -

Sir Hamnet, Lord Hamnet

The day after the day after tomorrow.

I pledge that these things shall be.

Terrible, but the music was terrible. Henslowe follows his growling bear. Will follows Henslowe. Good idea: Hamnet, left outside the brothel, finds his way in, seeing lust and bosoms. The beginning of his corruption. Two first scenes there in, as they said, the bag. The company could start rehearsing.

Enderby looked at his watch. Time to ask somebody at the front desk to seek him a taxi. He had to go to dinner at Mrs Schoenbaum's. Toplady, thank God, would not be there: there was a play on and he had to give his troupe confidence by glaring at them from the wings. The play was some libellous nonsense about the Salvation Army by a dead German named Brecht. Silversmith had taken a flying, literally, visit to New York to superintend what he called the pressing of an album, old-fashioned phrase recalling the crushing to death of flowers in young ladies' commonplace books.

He got a taxi with small difficulty. 1102 Sycamore Street. What's that number again, mister? The driver, a white man with Silversmith wire-wool hair, seemed to be, as they said here, stoned. He growled all the time like Henslowe's bear. 1102. Ain't never heard of that number. I can assure you it does exist. What's that you say, mister, and so on. There were no sycamores. Sumachs, rather, and a kind of hornbeam or carpinus betulus. The driver seemed dissatisfied with his tip. He looked at his ensilvered palm as though Enderby had spat into it.

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 Grunbaum 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."