The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (22 page)

Anne opens her hand. The coins do not glitter, London coins dull with use, but they have their brilliance.

‘Well. A man in a proper way of trade would do well to earn such in a fortnight.’ He looks away from them. ‘Are you happy with it? A husband in London, far away, naught of him but this?’

‘A husband still.’ Her voice surprises her with its sharpness. ‘A son still.’

Edmund appears, solemnly balancing the ale-jug. His father watches him as if expecting him to drop it. This is his look with his children now: a steady expectation of disappointment. Anne takes the jug from him and pours. But drink never alters John Shakespeare, not in the way of making him softer or harder. It only makes him more stubbornly himself. In the end it is Gilbert, coming in sweat-soaked and sunburned from drilling, who reads the letter out.

It is short. Recommends himself to the favour of his father and mother, presents his truest fondest love to his dear wife Anne, earnestly prays that this finds all at home well. Reports that he finds himself, after some small travails, in good case, and regularly employed in the London theatres as a player by my lord Sussex’s Men, on such terms as enable him to send by his good friend Greenaway the enclosed sum, with the firm hope of more anon. Reports that there is but little sign of summer plague in London this year, praise be to God. Reports that he will soon be undertaking a summer tour of the southern and midland parts of the kingdom with his company, and hopes to be among them for a short time when they come by Wycombe and Oxford. To Anne his wife again much love, and for the babes kisses …

Her father-in-law drains his tankard. ‘So, you see. He will try just to include us on his way about the country with his players. A few days, perhaps, think you? And after, gone again. That’s all there is, daughter, and all there will be.’

Anne makes a subtle face at Edmund to wipe his nose. ‘Well, we’ll see. He’s new in the profession, so he has to work hard. In time—’

‘You delude yourself, Anne.’

‘Do I? I try only to hold fast to my belief, and not change it. After all, you told me he’d come slinking home like a beaten dog. Now he’s a coxcomb who won’t come at all. He can’t be both, Father John.’

He stares. Anne feels the enormity of it too, and tries not to flush. This is new: she has never quarrelled with him before, never found the grounds. She sees it in his eyes also – if we fall out, where will the power shift to next, and who will be the winner or loser?

‘As long as you are happy with this – this life that he forces on you,’ he says at last, ‘who am I to speak? You do well to reproach me, daughter.’

He goes out. There is still ale in the jug. Gilbert, after a moment, scoops it up and drinks from it. Over the foaming rim his eyes salute Anne’s with a crackle of rebellion. Another shift.

But Anne fears it as she fears all change. She is summoned to the yard by a roar from Hamnet, who has been shoved over on to the cobbles by Judith. She wipes his tear-mashed face, soothing, wondering whence the easy sentiment about twins: sometimes these two resemble overgrown birds in a small nest, each trying to push the other out. Then she goes in search of her father-in-law.

She finds him at the front of the house. He has borrowed the neighbour’s ladder and propped it up so that it reaches the roof on the west gable and he is climbing. A few spectators have gathered, as they will for anything, a dog-fight, a drunk spewing.

Anne grips the wobbling ladder. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Attending,’ comes his voice. ‘Attending to matters.’

The holes in the roof. Reaching the top, he begins poking at them ineffectually. Nonsense: the tiler’s job. He lunges and sways and Anne tastes metal. Strong, yes, but he has put on weight lately, grown splay-legged and stiff, like the spinster’s overfed cat.

‘Come down, Father John.’ Try to keep the voice level, no pulse of panic in it. Like when Susannah cut open her knee: don’t let her tell from your face how bad it is. ‘That’s no work for you, and it can’t be patched. The rain doesn’t come in. Leave it.’ The ladder wobbles again. She feels his stubbornness, stabbing down with the sun: recognises it. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’

‘Aye, what then?’

Then, of course, it will be Will’s fault. She understands the reasoning. Susannah has it when she throws one of her rare tantrums; she herself had it when her father was dying, and she preferred him to suffer rather than leave her. ‘If you won’t come down,’ she says, ‘I’ll come up.’ Anne hates heights, but grimly starts the climb. A fine pair of monkeys on a stick … The overburdened ladder creaks. He looks down, white-faced. ‘Climb as high as you like,’ she says, ‘but he still can’t see you.’ Nor will he pity you, come home, and change. She does not say that part, but her father-in-law feels it, perhaps, as an emanation, for he makes a growling sigh and begins to descend.

On the ground they face each other.

‘You may not direct me, Anne,’ he says breathing hard. ‘I am not yours to direct.’

‘Love doesn’t seek to direct.’

‘Then love is oft the loser.’ He shakes his head. She sees him at a point of perplexity, about to ask,
Whose side are you on?

Which is a good question. My side, Father John: my side alone. It occurs to her that you have only one life. All the time as you walk on, the ground falls away behind your heels.

That evening her father-in-law loses his temper with Edmund over something and nothing, and raises his arm to beat him. Her mother-in-law intervenes. No more trouble, she mourns. Her sad, bitter look is inclusive: she wishes they could all be better. Follow her example. Anne mixes his favourite drinks and stirs his fire, and secretly promises Edmund a tale later. Gilbert’s expression is habitually cool and dry, but she sees more in it now when his eye falls on his father: sees the contempt. Would it have been better if Will had reached that point? The point of looking at his father and thinking, you sad old fool. And then the break, without mess. But she shivers, imagining a Will so single-minded, so terrifyingly capable.

She tells Edmund a tale separately, after her own children are asleep, the way he likes it. Only three years older than Susannah, he keeps adult hours, has an adolescent’s eager pallor.

‘Edmund,’ she says, ‘bring your hornbook.’

‘Oh,’ he groans, ‘study now?’

‘Not you, me. Will you teach me a little, Edmund? I barely have my letters. I want to read swift and clear. Let’s learn together, hey? But a secret betwixt us.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Nothing he likes better: he already belongs to her and Will, bought and sold. Then a little grin of calculation. ‘And after study, we can dance?’

They danced at Christmas, at Hewlands Farm, on one of her rare visits. (Bartholomew on Will’s defection to London: dear God, a hundred carefully withheld remarks, a thousand wry faces.) Since then, whenever there is music in Stratford, a wedding, a street-fiddler, Edmund hankers for it. Sometimes Anne foots it with him, just humming the tune, to please him. But here is a fair bargain. ‘Yes. After, we shall dance.’

They do, trying not to make the floorboards creak, while vowel sounds skip round her head. She ignores the voice that says,
You’ll never learn.
Edmund looks so much like Will she could almost weep – but Anne is setting a course away from those rocks, where the wrecks of tears lie wasting.

*   *   *

Will reaches Stratford a day before his company by walking all night. Anne, coming down early to light the fire, finds him in the kitchen drinking in great blind gulps. For a moment she thinks she has actually imagined him into being. Even the curious whiteness of the image seems to confirm it, as if her longing sorcery could not quite manage the colours.

Then she sees: he is covered with road-dust.

‘Your boots,’ she says.

He looks down at the floor, then pats his doublet so the dust puffs out. ‘My everything,’ he says. And then: ‘My everything.’

*   *   *

Here, coiled in the crook of his arm, all is well and it is hard to see how all can be otherwise. And it is only a night, but nights can stretch themselves out and in them you can do and say and think and feel much, much that won’t fit in the squeeze of day.

‘He’s not always like this,’ she says. They have talked of many things: the beautiful progresses and infinitely varied impossibilities of the children; his life in London, his lodging and living, the struggle up the slope; crowds and coaches, processional court ladies with white barn-owl faces above great icy ruffs, Bridewell prisoners clearing dung from the streets with a cart they pull themselves like horses; the sweaty agitation of the theatre tiring-houses where the mutter has changed from a hostile
Who’s this?
to an indifferent
It’s Will Shakespeare.
(And she is glad of this knowledge, but gladder, a hundred times, of her own secret conclusion: on his lips she has tasted him only, the hands that devour her body have been long empty, thank God. And, of course, that’s not real knowledge, that’s mere mind-magic too, but what else does she have?) Still their talk comes back to this: John Shakespeare, the peg to which they are chained.

‘Not always, meaning very often?’

‘No. This is – exceptional.’

His laugh gently shakes the bed. Yes, here they can even laugh, recalling how he was today: the giant silences, the sickly flicker of a smile when Joan or Gilbert shouted aloud at some anecdote of Will’s, the way he would say
nothing
in response but would turn, like a slow sunning lizard, to Anne. Well, Anne? Well, daughter? Throwing it all on her. For who was he…?

‘I’ve come back,’ Will says. ‘And I shall come back whenever I am able, Lent, summer, whenever I have space and money to ride home, and if I can rise higher as a player then I will be freer to do so … Isn’t this enough for him?’

‘Let me see. No.’

He sighs, though she can tell in the darkness that the sigh is shaped by a smile. She can still create those, here.

‘We need a home of our own,’ he says. And she doesn’t ask, even in her mind, how that is going to happen. He sets it up as a star to steer by and that is good. For now, everything is for now.

*   *   *

In the morning they walk in the fields, and Will tries to find the little cairn of stones where he bled. But somehow, as he remarks, even the disposition of the trees looks different; and he has to give it up. She could tell him, but doesn’t, that she came looking for it very soon after he left, with a very clear memory of the spot, and that it was absolutely gone as if it had never been.

*   *   *

His troupe arrives in Stratford, and Will joins them to take part in the performance at the Guildhall. Anne doesn’t go. The price of peace, exacted by her father-in-law, whose brooding has become unreal, outrageous, as if a headache should not go but get worse for ever. Will has already promised him not to advertise his presence in Stratford; and he is wigged and hooded in both his parts in the play, so perhaps he will go altogether unnoticed by his fellow citizens.

But besides that, Anne doesn’t want to go. Last night he was telling Gilbert of counterfeiters in London, of their subtle skill, such that you can hardly tell if the money you hold in your hand is something or nothing worth. Counterfeit: even the word sounds like a hollow whisper. No, she won’t watch Will acting, for fear that she will see him gesture, smile, vow as she knows him; for fear that on that stage she will see not a posturing stranger, but the Will she thought was hers alone.

7

A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1589–91)

London: Will returns to it not so much torn apart as in flittering tatters, as if a sharp gust of wind could scatter him for ever.

Over there, the husband, loving but absent and therefore failing: over there, the father who thought his children looked huge and alien; over here, the man of the theatre lusting for new lines and loud, quick-witted citizen-crowds, and over here, too, someone grim and purposeful, thinking: Put money in your purse, aim, make right, win – win over your father else nothing won will ever count.

Is his father right after all? That a man can’t split himself in two? Well, here he is in Shoreditch trying painfully to scrape himself together from a hundred ragged shreds. The curious thing is, Will doesn’t feel any less himself because of it.

Also here, newly arrived, is Gilbert. Will had done as his brother had asked on first going to London, looked around for some opening in trade. Richard Field knew a haberdasher in nearby St Bride’s whose apprentice would soon be out of his time. ‘If I say the word, you know, I can secure his interest,’ Richard said, laying a finger to his nose. Will wondered then if he could ever do that – be
weighty,
in life and not on the stage – and he wonders it again now, as he accompanies or delivers his brother to St Bride’s. He ought to say some weighty wise things, as the elder, as the one already established in London. But who is he to give advice?

Fortunately Gilbert doesn’t seek it. As soon as Will mentioned the haberdasher, back in Stratford, Gilbert said, ‘Yes.’ As soon as Will meets him at the Bell, hard by St Paul’s, Gilbert looks fresh, ready, in need of nothing. ‘Whenever, if ever you need me,’ Will says, giving the address of his new lodging – still Shoreditch, a little more salubrious. Gilbert is twisting his neck and noting signboards, landmarks: at home, or soon will be.

But here’s something unexpected: their father cautiously approves of Gilbert’s move. It was the only moment the sullenness lifted: when Will said, ‘Haberdasher in St Bride’s, in a good way of trade,’ a spark had come into his father’s eyes. ‘Indeed, indeed, how long a master? How many prentices? So, so…’ A spark of poetry, in fact.

Perhaps, Will thinks, as he unpacks his trunk, perhaps that is my way to him. Become an alderman of the stage, a merchant of mummery: licensed to deal in plays.

Certainly he needs money, for it was not much of a tour, and London is testy. Comedy doesn’t play well just now. They want blood and grandeur. They want, above all, Marlowe.
He
wants Marlowe: that is, from the moment he heard
Tamburlaine
he has wanted to hear it again, read and memorise, live it in his dreams. Act in it also – but the Admiral’s Men have made Marlowe their own, and somehow he has made no headway with them.