The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (41 page)

‘Oh, it’s mere fantastication, a game of words, not real.’

‘That’s not what I asked you.’

‘I know, and I’m not going to answer. Women talk bawdy among themselves, that I know.’

‘How do you know it, if it’s only among themselves?’

‘From listening at doors.’

They were so nearly playful with each other: so far from at ease, or happy.

‘Is it not a pity that men and women must be so separate? How, if women were to act on stage, might that not change things?’ she said: or the perry did. ‘I know, it would shame their modesty to make a public exhibition. But at least they would be real. Not these invented women – a man writes them, a boy presents them. Not a touch of woman has gone into their making.’

‘Unless the man who made them is part woman.’

Startled, she said: ‘You mean the boys who play? But surely there’s nothing of that about them—’

‘No, no, I didn’t mean that … You don’t care for Matthew, I know.’

She felt herself impugned as mother and woman. ‘He is a good young fellow, I wish him well. But I didn’t expect him – that’s all.’ There was a sharp whistle from the yard below. Anne opened the window and waved. ‘That’s Betty. She’s a cow-keeper. I buy milk of her. Fresh from the kine. And we have a rare talk. She’s a real woman, not someone pretending.’ She added that angrily, because he looked somehow surprised and disappointed – at what? Her making friends with a cow-keeper? Who else, then? she thought, as she went downstairs. Belly-smoothing Jacqueline Field, whose talk was all of narrow candlelit city doings? That other Frenchwoman who always seemed to be there, with a subdued stare and a cryptic greeting for Will? (And Will hardly spared her a glance. No, that wasn’t what she had to fear.)

Betty: she was about Anne’s age, comfortingly slow-moving as her cow, her voice softly burred: ready to stand about the yard and agree that the sun was hot today, mortal hot, but then the season, aye, without ever wanting to whip the conversation to some dazzling finish. Each day she came in to London from St Giles, which Anne thought at first must be another of those city parishes packed like boxes within boxes.

‘Nay, it’s country there. Not like this.’ Betty jerked her thumb back – at London. Oh, thrilling dismissal. ‘We live by the old spital wall, with an old oak for shade and a herb garden and a well of sweet water. Drink water here and you’re bent in a bloody flux.’ Spotting Will on his way out, she went on: ‘That your man? They’re pretty things in their way, aren’t they? As long as you keep them in their place. My Dickon’s a fair sort. Poulterer. A haynish item, but no harm in him. Married when I was fifteen. It was his eyes that did it. Handsome eyes, I thought. Now I know they all have handsome eyes when they’re young. What’s your man?’

‘A player.’

Betty grunted, hefting her pail. ‘Well, they’re all that.’

*   *   *

His new play was coming on. Anne was going to see it. For the first time since they had arrived, she was going to step into a theatre.

Edmund had taken the children to see Will act in pieces written by other hands. Why had she waited? Loyalty, perhaps: reserving herself for a play of his own making.

Or, perhaps, until she could put it off no longer.

She had heard snatches of it. The boy Matthew was in it, and she had overheard him rehearsing; Edmund had read – overcoming grim reluctance – Will’s own copy, and went around murmuring lines.
Sweep the dust behind the door.

Anne looked too. Will left it on the chest in their bedchamber. A breeze fingered the pages, ahead of her reaching hand. Soft spring-laden scents should have come with that breeze: not here, though. She looked, read a little, but it was too difficult for her,
ill met by moonlight proud Titania,
to manage it for long. Will said they weren’t for reading anyway. How came her eyes so bright? Not with salt tears. She left it, and went to help Susannah with the dressing of her hair. It had thickened amazingly of late: felt heavy as rope in the hand. She wondered if Susannah had started her menses yet. An attempt last winter to raise the subject had elicited one of Susannah’s loftiest responses: ‘Dear Mother, please, let’s talk of pleasant things.’ Susannah was happy behind her fences. She thought of the bird in the kitchen at Henley Street, and how she had once left the cage door open by mistake. A forlorn piping had alerted her. The bird could not be happy until the door was shut.

Betty would be here soon. Anne went downstairs to wait for her. She was growing quite addicted to milk from the cow.
I am sent with broom before, To sweep the dust behind the door.
And there was some, she saw. On impulse she wrote in it with her finger. She wrote:
somewhere it is spring.
She preferred that to pen and ink. You could just wipe it away.

*   *   *

And now here she was. Flag blaring and trumpet rippling on high, trample of feet, press of voices. Hawkers with neck-slung trays, beer from the back-borne keg. Prostitutes bare-necked and balancing their bosom-wares, looking at you as only they could: as if you’d intruded on them, but they’d let it be, this once. Mud underfoot as Anne and her family squeezed their way through the gate, money-taker knowing, bowing them in. Edmund thick-tongued, almost glazed with excitement: Hamnet nearly as bad.

‘Father made this. Didn’t he? Didn’t he make all of it?’

‘Well. Not this building.’

‘I don’t mean that. I don’t mean the building,’ Hamnet said, in his slightly laborious way, his grandfather’s way. None of the quicksilver that went into Will and Edmund. She hugged him with the sudden fierce love of a child’s flaws. ‘I mean,’ he said, gently pulling away, ‘what we’re going to see.’

Well, he was right. It was years since she had been to the play, and never in London, in these strange crammed circles made for the sole purpose; and she half expected more show, more appurtenances of illusion. Instead she faced a bare stage lit by clear sky, a few properties, the heavy bob and whisk of rich costumes: and the words.

And it was nothing horrible, as she believed the
Romeo
play was that everyone talked of. Edmund had read out some, and there was love and death and it was all like a dream of a black rose pressing velvety and smothering your breath and she feared it. No, this was beautiful and often gay, like dancing in words. It was in the wood and of the wood. It was about the madness of love and what madness leads men and women to. It made her remember a pair of gloves being slipped on to her hands; Bartholomew watching her across the threshing-floor as she danced; a wild bird eating from her hand; many things. Many things that belonged to her alone. Yet this play was no whisper but a participation. Everything belonged to everyone here. Will had them, somehow. As if he had the secret of all their lives and put his ear to their sleeping breathing lips. As the play went on the crowd warmed, cracked like logs on a well-laid fire. He was seducing them. She sensed the surrender, and certain stars shot madly from their spheres to hear the sea-maid’s music, and it gave her as much unease as pride. Somewhere there is spring. But here is midsummer, and such a season created as makes the real unnecessary.

Then the laughter. The man with the ass’s head made the children roar – but Anne could not join in properly, and it was to Edmund that they turned their laughing faces, his arms that went companionably round them. A man with the head of an ass, and a bewitched queen loved him. But this was too real. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. She looked with her mind and shuddered, for it did not seem right somehow that the inmost madness of life should be turned inside out to smiles in the sun.
Sweep the dust behind the door.

The lovers were lost in the wood. They would never get out of the wood, perhaps: find their bones at last under a heap of stones, perhaps. Everyone was subject to enchantment, even the plain and countrified. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. She knew, though. There came the countrified characters doing a play. A bad play: but she wondered if there were any bad plays. And it was only at this point that she realised if Will was a player in the piece she had not noticed him.

There was a happy resolution.
So shall all the couple there ever true in loving be. Sweep the dust behind the door.
The crowd sighed, trilled, bellowed, and applauded. Anne clapped, but soon needed her hands: to grip the splintery edge of her seat in fear.

Because this was where Will had gone. This was where he had taken his self. And this, she saw now, was where she could not follow him. Oh, she could offer him truth, perhaps, beauty, love – but nothing, nothing compared with what he could make.

*   *   *

It was crowded and stinking in the tiring-house: no place for them to linger, especially with men half undressed.

‘Burbage is going to make a speech,’ Will said, with a grimace, kissing her. Unreal: as if a figure had reached out of a painting. ‘Then there’ll be a supper at the Black Bull. I’ll not stay long.’

‘You never do,’ cried Bottom the weaver – but, no, this was Will Kempe the comedian, big, golden-haired, like Bartholomew.
My brother thou art translated.
She felt sick. ‘You should learn to exult, man. Cultivate a reckless side.’

‘Then what would become of my other sides?’ Will said. ‘Matthew was fine, was he not?’ His eyes went proudly to the boy, who was taking off his wings as if shedding his school satchel. And Hamnet saw that, Anne could tell. But his own pride did not diminish, not a whit. His face still shone with what his father had wrought.

Edmund was a little doleful, the heavy afterwards of intoxication. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said, and went to find the manservant, their guardian through dubious Shoreditch to decent Bishopsgate. Anne hurried them on, not because of that, but because she had had a sudden thought: she might miss Betty. It seemed desperately important.

‘The cow-keeper? Been and gone, mistress,’ the maid said. Adding brightly: ‘I bought a pint for you.’

No, no, this wouldn’t do, she had to have a talk with Betty each day, a deep, warm, earthy draught of her; it mattered. Anne took up her cloak. Edmund looked his question: where? ‘Out.’ If she had missed Betty coming to her, then she would go to Betty. These things seem small and undistinguishable, like far-off mountains turned into clouds. She walked north-west, along by London Wall, judging by the setting sun, asking when she went astray: not shy, because this had killed shy, this feeling of importance to her alone. Who knew or cared for Betty, the cow-keeper of St Giles? She did. Barns appeared, timber-ponds, vegetable rows, though still London did not seem quite to fall away.
I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows.
But where? New fine houses rose up, some still building in choice brick: habitations of the wealthy sort. But she was looking for something plainer, simpler: a cottage by the old spital wall, with an old oak and a sweet well. She found a church: St Giles, very well. Found remnants of old monastic wall among a scrubby rambling sort of village, but where…?

At last, an old woman had heard of Betty the cow-keeper and Dickon the poulterer. She nodded Anne to a tumbledown hovel she had already passed twice. The oak was a dead stump. Still: to airy nothing give a habitation and a name. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and Betty loved this spot of earth.

Above the open door hung a couple of skinny fowls: another, hardly more alive, scratched on the threshold. Anne’s calf muscles burned from the walk. Getting soft from London: next she would be carried about in one of those new coaches. She would say this to Betty, and they would chuckle.

‘Betty, art there?’ She hadn’t used
thou
with her before, but they were friends after all. She went forward in semi-darkness. Damp straw squelched underfoot.

‘Don’t come dunning here, mistress! You’ll get naught, hear me, get naught!’

A man loomed at her, breathing drink. A strap dangled from his hand and spit from his lips.

‘Master Dickon?’ she quavered. She had expected someone like Peter Quince the carpenter, solid and jovial. This man was like a rat nosing from an alley.

‘Who’d know?’ Behind him a small child grizzled on the floor, another stood nose-picking and staring. A sickly goose squatted in a sort of wicker pen directly adjoining the bare room.

‘I’m a friend to Betty. She keeps a cow, has a milk-walk in Bishopsgate—’

‘Oh, a friend, hey?’ His crusted eyes ran over her clothes, adding up. ‘Not a dun, then, hey? Your pardon, but a man must wonder, when a stranger comes asking of her.’ He hit out at the crying child, with a blind fly-swatting motion, while his face rearranged itself into troubled friendliness. ‘That’s my Betty, yes, but she’s still from home, mistress. Late. Always she’s late, the bitch.’ He belched sourly and grinned. ‘Jesting. She’s a good creature in the main. But what’s goodness when there’s a pest on your fowl, and sick children needing delicate food? Nothing, that’s what.’ She noticed the prompt way he stepped forward when she stepped back. A drunk, and a hitter. She brought to mind how Betty always kept her arms covered, even in warm weather.
What hempen homespuns…?
‘Now you say you’re a friend, but I don’t say friend until I see money. Money’s what’s needed, you see.’ Wheedling, sidling to block the door. ‘And I see money about you, mistress.’

Not for long. She wrenched her purse from her waist and scattered the coins on the filthy floor and ran.

And ran.

In mud-spattered Bishopsgate Street, in grey dusk, she ran straight into Will, who was out looking for her. She screamed and fought him for the few seconds it took her to understand this.

‘Where have you been? Edmund’s out seeking you, I’ve been everywhere – in God’s name, what…?’

She told him. Leaning on him, half staggering back to the house, she told it all: why not?

Indoors he dispensed quick explanations to the children, urging her upstairs. In their bedchamber, door shut, he gently took off her drenched cloak, then knelt and eased off her mud-stiff shoes.