The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (25 page)

‘But you’ll write more for the stage?’ says Will, glancing at Henslowe, thinking: Why here, else?

‘Aye, what do you fear, Tom, that you won’t
please
again?’ Marlowe says, his gaze sliding mockingly to Will. ‘He’s being coy. Like a girl who’s yielded up her maidenhead but still wants to play the sly virgin. What’s become of your designing Dane, your Saxo-grammatical Hamlet? Must be ready by now. A very pretty tragedy, Will. He read me the first act and I stayed awake, oh, minutes at a time.’ He grips Kyd’s bony shoulder, bringing his face close. More wolf than Kit, Will thinks. ‘Lord. Won’t hit back, Tom? Won’t tell me to go fuck myself?’

‘I should be glad of a word with you on quite other matters than these,’ Kyd says through tight lips, with a wishing-away look at Will. ‘The matter of my lord Sussex?’

‘Oh, that. I’ve told you, I’ll try what I can do. There’s no hurrying great ones, my friend. If it’s money you need, sell your play.’

‘The question is not so simple…’

Pawn he may be, but Will knows when to make himself scarce. He finds a window-seat untenanted and sits with the casement a little open, trying to quieten the drink inside him. Outside and separate, a cool, dull afternoon. He wonders whether he should be afraid of it. He thinks of Marlowe and Kyd, little wasp jealousies and fooleries. If I could write as they write, he thinks, I would rise and soar, fearing nothing. You would live in a state of recompense.

‘A good spot,’ Marlowe says, sitting down by him, and drawing out pipe and tobacco. ‘“Not here,” they’ll cry, “don’t drink smoke here,” as if I’m frigging myself or something worse. I have a second pipe if you want – no? Tut, and you’re scarce drunk neither. You need some vices, man.’

‘What for?’

Marlowe laughs, then applies himself to the demanding business of getting the pipe going. Once it is, he smokes greedily: most men go puff-puff, pinched. ‘You write, don’t you, or try to? Nashe told me. Well, then. Get some vices for experience.’

‘Why does writing have to be from experience? Are you Tamburlaine?’

Marlowe’s smile fades to a clench of teeth around the pipe-stem. ‘No. But I couldn’t have written him without being me.’

Will feels small, slightly angry, intensely alive. He wants to marshal great arguments against this arrogance, but fears his army are all empty suits of armour and jerkins stuffed with straw. ‘A man may write outside himself, surely.’ Tentative, temperate it comes out, though he believes it with passion.

Marlowe looks him over critically, dubiously. ‘I don’t know about
a man.
I don’t believe in
a man,
if it’s your common man you mean, or what’s the fellow in that fearful canting old play? Everyman. The common run, the many many. Ugh. What I only believe in is the exceptional man. Life is too brief to count the difference betwixt grains of wheat. I don’t include you. There’s something in you, though I can’t tell what.’ Marlowe lays a hand on Will’s thigh. ‘So, who is Will, what is he for? You came from the country, I know that. Is that where you’re fixed? Is that where you belong? Do you intend going back after you’ve saved fifty pound from playing Second Knight in sundry indifferent plays, and fit out a new barn, and live content for the rest of your days?’

Will twitches his leg away. He is irritated and alarmed by his faint cock-stand, yet in a detached way fascinated too. Because up close he sees Marlowe is not as handsome as he looks, as it were – somehow coarser, fleshier,
Not to my taste,
begins the thought, before he catches it up with bemusement. What taste? Being with Marlowe force-feeds you such questions, until you feel sickened.

‘I have my ambitions like everyone else,’ Will says.

‘If you have ambitions, then you are not like everyone else. Grain, chaff. They think to be born a human creature on this earth is a mere drawing of a mortal lot. And if there is anything more to it than that, then priest or holy writ will settle it for ’em, and they can thus go forth with eyes on the ground and never look up till the grave shuts on them, never look up to ask, to question, to demand. And so we are half what we might be. So what is it? The barn? Marriage to a rich alderman’s daughter?’

‘I’m married.’ Said prompt and loud as if to proclaim it, as a man might say, ‘I’m king.’ Though why so loud if the throne is secure?

‘Truly? Well, I dare say it happens. But you’re free now. Ah, yes, now I see it.’

‘You don’t. You don’t understand it at all.’

Marlowe blows a smoke-ring and admires it. ‘Don’t like me, do you?’

‘Does it always have to be that way? Can’t we go a-ramble about the broad country of the mind, without going back to that plain little road with
you
at the end of it?’

Marlowe grins: he looks delighted. ‘But I do understand, Will. Ah, nothing I like better than being the subject of a hasty conclusion. What’s your father? Man in an honest trade, I guess. You think I sneer: I recognise. Hie you to Canterbury, Will, home of mummery and priestcraft, and ask for Master Marlowe the shoemaker. A goodly godly person, well reputed, except when he takes a drop too much and challenges his prentice to a fist-fight in the yard. Stripped. With his hairy belly wagging like a pregnant sow’s tits.’ Marlowe’s pipe will not draw: he resolves the problem by smashing it deftly against the wall. ‘But holy blessed canting Cunterbury has at least a good school. And from there, my fortuitous scholarship took me to Cambridge, away from being the old man’s prentice. Like a cat Kit landed, up tails and away. You hate men who talk about themselves in the third person as much as I do, I’m sure. Why do it? Why do I do most things? It’s like trying a shoe on. See how it feels. I remember my father on his knees fitting a boot to the son of a lordling. God knows when the whelp had last shifted his stockings. The honour, quotha, the honour. The honour of grovelling in stink.’ He suddenly looks lost, like a schoolboy questioned out of his knowledge. ‘What’s the place you come from? Stratford? Is it like that?’

Will nods. ‘Take away the cathedral.’

‘Oh, I have in my mind, many a time,’ Marlowe grates softly, drawing his legs up into the window-seat: his toes rest lightly on Will’s leg. Will doesn’t twitch away this time, partly because he doesn’t want to give Marlowe anything to read into it. ‘I watch it blaze, before the kindly flames spread to the rest of the town. One by one the houses go. Naturally you spare one or two places, yes? But in reality you have to leave it. Once you get free, you can make yourself anew.’

Will shifts under his look. ‘If you want to.’

‘No, there isn’t a choice.’ Marlowe speaks now with pleasant precision: either an angel or a devil would speak so, you feel. ‘Shall I tell you what the one true duty of man is? To make himself. The job as done by the almighty is a botch. Got children back there too? Christ. Well, all the better in a way. You’re absolved. You’ve made souls for God’s kingdom, you’ve been fruitful and multiplied, that must satisfy your Bible-Puritan and your old Papist. A lot of those in Stratford I’ll wager. They cling to it. These are our old ways and precious to our hearts. Never mind that a set of priests imposed it on your forefathers, swallow it or be burned else. Get some vices, Will, live.’

‘Now you sound like a play-villain.’

‘That’s what I am. I have a friend, or had, he’s lately buried – died of the French pox atop of a surfeit of liquor. He had been in Italy, Flanders, everywhere. Kept a tally of the beds he tumbled into – he had his principles, you see, made it a rule never to swyve against a wall. Seven hundred and one was the figure. Seven hundred and one fornications. That superfluous one gives it verisimilitude, no? I had no reason to doubt him. When his nose began to fall off and the blindness set in he even began to regret. When they put him in the casket his corpse was so twisted they had to bundle it up with straps to get the lid down. And do you know what? I envy him still.’

‘But you don’t,’ Will finds himself saying. ‘Something in you says you should feel that, because it makes a flourish of life, but you don’t believe it really. You’d rather live like a comfortable snail for ever, and never see the shooting stars across the sky, and so everyone would, in the truth of their hearts.’

‘Dost call me a liar, Master William?’

‘No: I call you an inventor.’ Odd: he can imagine fighting Marlowe, as he could never imagine fighting anyone. Excepting his father, of course.

‘Why, then, that’s different.’ Marlowe smiles seraphically. ‘We’re all that, Will, the best of us. You speak of imagination, and there we have it in us to be princes in the head. Now employ the faculty, please you. Imagine you could go back, just the once, to see yourself at – what? Fifteen, sixteen? Not to hover and gaze phantom-wise upon your younger self, no – you can talk to him. Take him, you, down to the alehouse for a pot of beer and a good deep talk together. Just the two of you. Would you do it? And what would you say to that young Will?’ Marlowe’s eyes glitter. Will wrests himself away from them, looks through the lattice at the street and in discomfort tries to put himself out there: it usually works. A brawny woman in a French hood, great slung breasts like panniers, is yelling at a man with an unmuzzled dog, threatening law or her meaty fist. Some boys are laughing and shying mud. A beggar sits in a doorway, head against the jamb, face blinking and dead. The afternoon is unchanged and unpromising.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what I’d say to young Kit, shall I?’ Marlowe says. ‘Or what I’d do to him.’ He rolls his eyes, laughs with a sound like stones in a pail. ‘Well, I was a comely youth, and after all, who better to pleasure you, for you’d know exactly what worked? There, oh, just there.’

‘It’s curious. When you strive for these effects, I don’t mind it, because I know something worthwhile will come along presently, after the bombast has blown itself out.’

Gently Marlowe says: ‘Answer the fucking question, Will.’

‘I don’t have to.’ Will shakes his head. ‘If we were going to be friends, I might.’

Marlowe swings his legs down. ‘I’m not going in a pet, Will. I need more drink, and it’s not that I find you any more tedious than anyone else. You’re right, in fact. What shall I write about next, think you? Great tragedy of high-aiming soul – or write about Will, perhaps? The tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.’

Is that me? Will thinks, as he leaves the inn; well, revealing question. At the touch of the fresh air he is drunk all over again, staggers, and for the first time since his arrival in London, gets lost. Alleyways and stableyards entrap him. Vicious little winds get up in their corners, sending brittle dry leaves upward. All the leaves in London, he observes, whatever the season, are like autumn leaves.

Her arms, a warm brown egg-colour. He knows where she is in the house at any time without looking or listening out. Imagination. He hears it again in Marlowe’s odd harsh, husky voice. The most beautiful word. Suddenly the Thames flashes from the foot of a set of slimy steps, and he knows where he is. Cold colours coming and going in the sky. Evening waiting to be filled. He ought to go and see Gilbert. He thinks of it, firmly and brightly: he likes the thought of seeing his brother; when they meet the meeting is pleasant, yet always he is reluctant to go. In his mind Marlowe asks him why – or, rather, he smiles, and doesn’t have to ask.

*   *   *

Coming home from the wars, Ben thought, ought to feel more – well, it ought to feel more like coming home from the wars.

Not triumph, necessarily. A little acclamation, perhaps, to be met with a weary shrug, an easing of the lame leg. Or joy in his heart at beholding this stretch of his native land, tempered with a wry glance at the littleness of a world at peace.

Instead, this half-slinking nothingness. I might as well, he thought, have committed a crime and gone to prison for it and been released. The turnkey draws back the rusty, screeching bolts, a wedge of light falls on stone, and out you step blinking, half ecstatic, half fearful.

At least you’d be feeling something.

He was put ashore at Deal, after a rough crossing. Mariners glared and spat as he and his fellows straggled down the gangplank. Seamen from the ship-owner down hated carrying soldiers, who were quarrelsome, lousy, and riddled with disease. You could only secure a fairly comfortable passage through bribery, and Ben had no money. What the captain left him after creaming off his pay went on powder and shot, green pork, stinking blankets, more bribes.

At the castle a clerk with a pudding face wrote down his name, misspelling it.

‘Jonson without the
h,
’ Ben told him.

‘Musket, flask, belt,’ said the clerk, shrugging. ‘Any shot?’

‘No, I fired it all at the Spanish, the enemies of our queen, while you were making lists in comfort,’ retorted Ben. ‘Is that a charcoal foot-warmer I see down there?’

‘In your own parish by Tuesday first light, else you’ll be clapped in irons,’ said the clerk, tapping the pass. ‘And your
h
won’t make any difference there.’

Ben laughed: not bad; and he didn’t mean the military bombast, anyway. Who could blame the clerk for making the most of a good billet, after all? Not he. When his company had found that abandoned farmhouse, hadn’t they made it a palace against the howling Dutch winter, fires banked high and cheeses dug out of the pit where the owners had thought they’d be safe? Ducks on the spit. And when the fires sank and there was no more wood, they’d used some Lutheran Bibles.

Which made a mockery of what they were fighting for, certain. But that was one of the first things you learned as a soldier – that you weren’t fighting for anything. There had been triumphal arches and garlands when the first troops came to the aid of the Dutchman, in Sidney’s day, but now the allies cordially loathed each other, and everyone loathed the war. And, besides, you needed a fire when there were wolves about. At night you could see their yellow eyes just beyond the camp. Wolves, in thriving, well-ordered Holland. But they made you feel as if you were the intruder. When you were gone they would take the land back.

Down in the fishy, slimy lanes of Deal, he looked among the chandlers and slop-shops for somewhere that would buy jewellery, specifically the ring he had taken from a ditch-laid corpse on the march to Flushing. He hadn’t liked doing it, but he had known he would need money, and the corpse didn’t seem to mind. The dead, he had found this past twenty months, were the most amenable of people. The living could learn a lot from them. In the end, after a lot of insults about drunken soldiery – which annoyed him, as he wasn’t drunk, though he intended to be – he found a rope-maker who gave him a couple of shillings for it. The rope-maker was drunk. Dead or drunk, that was what brought out the best in people, Ben thought.