The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (9 page)

‘Yet you’re writing our history.’

‘In Latin. Our tongue is loose and profuse, perhaps because so many tongues have gone into the making of it. And still do. English is capacious, a great full warm cloak – but lacking shape and order. No one can agree even on a simple spelling.’

‘I prefer order,’ Ben said. It was true. But he knew its riotous opposite – looked, sometimes, flinching and fascinated, into its mirror-face. There came the time when his stepfather’s longing for a child of his own bore fruit. His mother quickened: what had seemed impossible, after so long, was here at last. His stepfather went around whistling. At night Ben heard his hammer in the attic room: making a cradle. Robert even invited Ben to look at it.

‘Well? What do you think?’

Ben wasn’t touched, exactly, but it was possible to imagine being so. The cradle was a little lopsided: his stepfather was oddly unhandy about everything except bricklaying, which was perplexing – Ben liked people to be consistent, even in their failings. His stepfather flushed at Ben’s silence.

‘What, jealous already? The poor babe’s not born yet.’

He spat and went away. The next evening when Ben came home from school he found his stepfather sitting grey with his great hands loose between his knees, and the parish midwife there, though with nothing to do.

‘She’s abed, resting up. Miscarried.’ From upstairs he heard his mother weeping, a restrained, limited sound like a cat’s mew. ‘Naught to be done. She’ll mend, and that’s a blessing, but I doubt you’ll see a live child from her womb, not this late. As for that poor little thing, good master, I’ve heard the priest say when it’s so early there’s no sin in just putting it on the fire.’

And later Ben was a spectator of his stepfather’s rage. The man took an axe to the cradle, made a fire in the yard with the pieces, then, snorting, got hold of the tiles with which he had been meaning to mend the outhouse roof and tossed and flung them. The smashing noise brought his neighbour out complaining, and a part of Ben said eagerly:
Now
we shall see something. But the fury and violence seemed to Ben half-hearted, in the circumstances: his stepfather broke the neighbour’s head and kicked his dog bloody, but then tailed off into oaths, and finished with tears. So great a grief needed killing, Ben thought, and, hearing his stepfather’s footsteps outside his room that night, wondered if the true blows would fall on him. But the man staggered on to bed, and snored.

All he said to Ben the next day was: ‘Neither of you wanted it. So between you it didn’t stand a chance.’

His mother never spoke of it. Sometimes afterwards Ben would see her gaze at her husband when his back was turned, as you might gaze at someone in a crowd, trying to remember where you had seen them before.

‘Begin with prose,’ Master Camden told him, pen hovering over Ben’s Latin verses. ‘These lines are running away with you, and taking the thought with them. First see the thought clear, next set it out straight in prose. Only then turn it into verses. Otherwise you are writing into the dark.’

Ben obeyed, because in Master Camden he saw a mind superior to his own. But writing into the dark – he knew about that, reading likewise, eking out the taper with a wedge of moonlight. In fact, it was a fair image of how he lived. For now, there was the certain daylight of the school; beyond, all was dubiety. He had heard of the grand grammatical combats when the Queen’s Scholars competed for the university scholarships, parsing and construing with the speed of fencers; tried not to imagine himself among them, and failed. He was too young and vigorous for despair. Still, he took to walking home a different way, because outside the pastry-cook’s there was a blind bird in a cage, and somehow he could no longer bear to look at it.

*   *   *

It is a kind of double courtship – allowing her, perhaps, to think of it as no courtship at all.

There is Will as the acceptable presence in the house, on the loose rope of acquaintance, genially tugged by Bartholomew: ‘How, Master Shakespeare, what cheer? Come see the nag I’ve bought.’ (But since Lammas-feast, since they danced the branle, there is a new crisp look of assessment in her brother’s eye even as he shoulder-claps.) Bella, all vast breasts and placid ankles, urges Will to sit here, take another bite of this, come eat up. As if men are like geese, only good when fattened. This Will is, for Anne, miserably reduced. Just Master Shakespeare the glover’s son, who goes often to Hewlands Farm, they say: aye, I wonder. It is like that – like nothing, in other words.

Outside is different.

Outside the gift of gloves is possible. Outside he is not diminished but multiplied. Along the bare field path he conjures a company; he peoples the wood. Daphne runs from Apollo towards the Evesham road.

‘It’s a heathen tale, surely … But which part of her turned tree first?’

‘However you like. I always see leaves fluttering at the ends of her hair.’

‘Pretty. But, oh, fie, heathen. These gods, falling in love with people.’

‘The more gods they.’

Or when the mimic mood is on him, he brings all Stratford before her. The Goodwins, tailors, father and son. You suppose Master Goodwin the oldest man in the world until Old Master Goodwin totters after him. Will gives their high, hissing voices and blinds himself with their rheumy chuckle-tears. ‘Small beer only for the younker – he’s boisterous.’ The invisible tankard weaves an incredible trembling journey to his lips, only to be dashed by the entrance of Master Hobb, now Puritan, once a drunkard. ‘Do you know how it feels to have a spear thrust in your side, friend?’ Poor Master Goodwin ashamed that he does not. ‘And then the laying-on of whips, and scorpions—’

‘What have scorpions to do with anything?’ cries Dame Summers.

‘I can hardly give you a notion of her carriage,’ Will says, ‘except that she smiles with her breasts.’

‘Fie, Will, for shame.’

‘Aye, but she does. A woman of courtesy, though.’

‘Leave go your preaching, Master Hobb. It’s lucky I’m a lady, else I’d say you’re a shitten hypocrite. And not to speak ill of the dead, but your wife was a double-dyed strumpet. Lord, I only mention common knowledge!’

And now who is this treading gravely on to the scene, with Will leaning back a little at the hips to suggest a belly, his slowly twiddling fingers evoking heavy rings? ‘Enough of this frippery. We must speak of matters of true import. After the late fire in Sheep Street, which consumed, item, one signboard, item, one sack, it is our decision that henceforth every alderman shall supply at his own charge two leather buckets, and every burgess one leather bucket, against the possibilities of future conflagrations. Alderman Quiney asks whether he may not supply one and a half buckets, given the dearness of the times, but the council is not empowered to consider the question of half buckets—’

‘Who is
that
?’ Anne cries, laughing as she pulls him, breathless, to the ground.

‘Nobody.’ For a moment he looks as frightened and furtive as if he has found a dripping dagger in his hand.

She wonders, touches his face. ‘Are you afraid you’ll lose yourself altogether when you do that?’

‘That’s the last thing I fear.’

‘I do want this, you know.’

He brightens. ‘I know.’

‘Oh, conceited man. Give me that kiss, then.’

‘Which?’

‘The one from yesterday – that went so. So…’

And outside this is possible too. This, the urgent collapse, sun a straw-stabbing halo round their heads, which push and fight for the angle of kiss that will surpass the last.

She does want it, this overthrow of sense and senses, though it is a jewel without a setting and she cannot imagine it stitched on to any part of her plain-stuff life. At last the freeing of lips and hands leads them to a new licence, where the forbidden is hardly distinguishable from the unknown.

‘I’ll stop. We should stop.’

‘No.’

This is surely the moment, because of what it is not. Oh, she knows what the voice from the well of dullness would call it:
a roll in the hay.
But that comprehends nothing of this green bower they have made and the terrible intensity they bring to it. It comprehends nothing of the vast inquisition in Anne, expanding mind, heart, flesh; how she sees every part of her life funnelling towards this moment – the dutiful child, the young woman who wished for the child’s certainties, the woman hiding in the night. As she holds him to her, gasping not so much in pain as at her own body’s opened strangeness, she realises how long she has been waiting for something she can give herself to.

*   *   *

‘And this maiden was so gentle,’ Will went on, ‘that wild birds would take food from her hand.’

Edmund, who would not sleep without a tale from Will, lay slowly blinking at the taper. There was a special, final blink, before sleep, that seemed almost audible, like the click of a latch. Not yet.

‘More.’

‘She put the breadcrumbs in her hand, and whistled to them…’ Not the way it really was, but that belonged only to him. They had taken a loaf and cheese out to the fields. Anne threw bread to some sparrows and starlings, drawing them nearer. At last she had put breadcrumbs on her palm and laid it flat on the grass. The sparrows would have none of it. One starling strutted in a circle, eyeing her from every angle.

‘They won’t,’ Will said. ‘Not wild birds. Or only in a starveling winter.’

But in a laughing way she was determined. ‘I look too big, I think,’ she said, and dropped down, hand extended. The starling fluttered, retreated, circled.

‘You’re still human.’

‘It’s because I’m looking. Dumb creatures can never meet our eyes.’ She had rolled slowly over on to her back, till she was staring at the sky, arm outstretched, bread still on her palm.

‘Now it fancies you mad,’ he said. But he realised that Anne could never look ridiculous: nature would not allow it. He was often confronted by these sudden revelations lately, as if he were starting from sleep even while he was awake. The starling had waddled forward: then scurried, snatched the bread, was gone all in a second.

‘I never felt it,’ Anne said, sitting up, laughing at herself, but pleased. ‘So light and quick – I never felt a thing…’ Will had trapped her laugh with his open lips.

‘More,’ murmured Edmund.

‘This maiden was so tender-hearted,’ Will went on, ‘that she could not bear to see an egg broke in the pan.’ Or rather, he thought, her tender-heartedness was how she apprehended the world: she carried it delicately before her, like the tapping stick of a blind man. ‘She lived in a high castle far beyond the clouds.’ He wrested the tale towards fantasy as fierce surges of memory shook him. All that schoolboy talk of rutting and rooting – how wrong it had been, with its robust purposefulness, when the act was really so indeterminate, a ticklish tightrope of almost-pain and held-in sneeze, an insane wanting of what you already had, as if you were sated and hungry all at once. Afterwards, that first time, he had been divided between wanting to sob helplessly in her arms and wanting to become immediately a greatly good, strong, sober, wise person, whom she could trust for ever more.

He found himself saying: ‘We should not do this again.’

‘No,’ she said. She covered herself neatly, modestly: not with haste. He knew they would.

Once, in the house. He knew her feeling about the place, but that day Bartholomew had taken everyone to the churching of a cousin at Temple Grafton, and Anne had stayed home to see to her stepmother, and somehow it fell out. He wondered afterwards if it had been a test – whether of him, or of herself, was another question. He liked the amplitude of the house, the stored hen-belly warmth under the thatch, the feeling that another room would always open out beyond the next footworn step. But Anne moved about it stiff-necked, always just beyond arm’s-length, as if leaving space for a third person between them.

So Will asked about him: what he was like.

‘Oh, Bartholomew thinks I’m a great fool about him. You will hear nothing but nonsense from me on that matter, believe me.’ Her eyes roamed painfully behind a tight smile.

‘I don’t much care what Bartholomew thinks.’

‘But you should.’ She began trimming the apple boughs that hung from the kitchen beams, and she, too, was sharp and dry and splintery. ‘He is a good deal better than me. He’s healthful. I’m sick. No, I am, Will: you should see this about me, you should see clear and true.’

‘There isn’t any seeing true,’ he said. ‘There’s only seeing.’

She crushed the withered twigs in her hand. ‘No. You’re sick too, if you think so.’

‘Good, I want to be. Look there, you’ve made dust. Turn this way, look at it in the beam of light. See how it dances.’

She eluded his grasp. ‘Dust, dead dust.’

‘Living. Why all this of health and sickness? Do you miss your father too much, is that it?’

‘Aye, there’s my brother’s true note, well struck, Will, only have a care. You personate so well that some might say you never speak for yourself at all, never sincere, never from the heart.’ She twisted away from him, looked him up and down as if to assess the wound of that. ‘Is this to say I loved him too much? What has love to do with
too much
?’

‘I don’t know. You see, I still don’t know what he was like. Was he always dead? I only wonder, because I can’t see the purpose of a man’s living on this earth and striving and laughing – aye, did he laugh, Anne, plump from the belly or high through the nose? – and loving and being loved, only to be thought of as someone who died. Naught else to him. A pinch of dust. A sigh. And this by the one who loved him best of all—’

‘I didn’t love him best. Bartholomew loved him best – straight and honest, according to his bond, not changing his feeling when Father took the stick to him. If Father had taken it to me, do you know what I would have done? I would have withheld my love from him. I would have made him suffer, made him pay. That was my love, Will. All conditions. As long as he let me be wrong, and never tried to make me right…’

‘Don’t weep. Come, hush, don’t.’

‘And now you indulge me as he did.’