The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (49 page)

‘And forgive me if I have been insolent.’

‘You have, but you consider you have cause.’ The earl put a hand on his shoulder. His breath was on Will’s face. ‘So you see why it would never have done. Too much arrogance on both sides.’ His eyes dropped and he altered the touch, steering Will to a new-varnished picture. ‘Come see my birthday portrait. What do you think? I’m content enough, but my mother cried out against it and was for stinting the painter’s money.’

It was a beautiful picture of a beautiful man, but somehow it failed of beauty. ‘Highly finished.’

‘A deadening thing at best, to have a portrait made. Have you been painted?’

Will shrugged. ‘I’ve seen no reason.’

‘More false modesty?’

‘That depends if you believe there is any such thing as true modesty.’

The earl chuckled. ‘You’re as jaded as a courtier. Or are you hiding again?’

After a moment Will said: ‘I can warrant you this, my lord: if you put my picture on this wall, and invited all the court and city and country to bear you company here, not one among them would stop to look at it.’ He hesitated. ‘Thank God.’

*   *   *

‘You can’t hide it any more, Matt. You’ve been talking false, and it’s the most fearful squeaking. Your voice is broke, isn’t it?’

Matthew gazed bleak, mutinous, at Will, not seeing him. ‘So that’s it. But look you, I can still take the parts, surely. Henry Bright still plays women, and his voice is long broke.’

‘His voice is naturally light in pitch. And still I think he strains it. Yours is low, and it will growl and hoot and be absurd if you try to throw it. Why fear? You are a player, a surpassing player. You’ll take male roles now, that’s all. You know you have me to speak for you. You’ll never lack.’

‘I suppose.’ Matthew chewed his lip. Redness surged, blood on snow. ‘The woman parts make you feel exceptional. You have to reach so far. I don’t want to go on stage and – well, rest, let it go. I don’t want to be myself.’

Will patted his shoulder. ‘That, if you can do it, is the one thing to avoid.’

Suddenly Matthew’s brow was clear. Emotions flexible as his joints. The secret, perhaps, if you could maintain it, of skimming the pond of life: whatever you felt, it would not be for long. ‘Well. The voice broke surely means I am a man now, and can indulge a man’s liberties – drink, smoke, wench, hey?’

‘And ruin your health and bewray your credit,’ Will said, the mock-severity nearly real.

‘And matters will change betwixt us, surely,’ Matthew said, lightly teasing. ‘No more of the strict father.’

Will, achieving a smile, shook his head. ‘A man never loses his father.’

*   *   *

Jonson moves his queen. ‘Check. My words were hasty.’ His eyes slide about, Will’s face, the black and white pattern set out, the tapster. He is a good friend and generous heart, but the whole business of the emotions fatigues him. Also he wants to win the game: this, every game. ‘I think I only dared say them because of the love I bear you. Only to those we love do we dare the worst. Not so?’

Will gazes: black, white, imprinting his eyes. He says: ‘I don’t understand love.’

*   *   *

Climbing the grunting stairs, passing the warped window, he saw his legs entangled by rods of shadow and light. The entanglement, he told himself, is plain enough, and it is temptation of the simplest kind; therefore stop and come no more.

No, it’s not, it’s something else. It’s a play I’m in, one unwritten: the best kind. And, besides, when he tried to reject the dark, think of the good and belong to the good, dead Hamnet stirred and cried in his grave and Anne, with all the stone force of dead love, rose and smashed him. So, why stop? What do I preserve, if I withdraw? The best and future part of me is gone down into the dark. Plays, they don’t last: they’re like human lives, stretching out their finished time. And I have fears about the eternity of the soul: how is it durable, when I can no more fix my own than nail thistledown?

‘Today we will speak nothing but French.’

‘But my French is weak.’

She did not accept
but.
She killed it with a glance, a twitch of her shoulders. Which, bared, were like smooth brown apples. He acquiesced, because he always did, because her strange brown quiet movements and her hair and look made him, and struggled through a bleeding evening of thorny language. She laughed silently at him, but then most of the time she did; that was nothing to remark. Some words she used were, he guessed, obscene, and some he was sure she invented.

Suddenly in English, pouring him wine, she said: ‘Do you love me?’

A short, neat reflection, like the tensing of muscles to jump muck in the street. ‘No. If anything, I hate you.’

‘That will suffice.’ She nodded, eyes closed, drinking. She looked desperate and thirsty and shrunken, as if perilously rescued. ‘Why do you come here, Will? Is it hope? Hope that you will get at last into my bed?’

‘Your bed,’ he said truthfully, ‘is just another bed, after all.’

She seemed quite to like that. But then the wolf grew in her face. ‘Are you making a dream of me, when I’m not by? Don’t do that, Will. Don’t dare turn me into one of your dreams.’

He faced the wolf: you couldn’t, after all, outrun it. ‘Why, what else are you but a dream of your own, Isabelle? And Monsieur Berger, did you dream him too? Last week you told me he died ten years ago. Yesterday it turned into five years. Now, you do not forget a thing like that.’

She burst out laughing, as if the conversation had taken a joyful, high-spirited turn. ‘But you don’t understand at all. That is precisely the sort of thing I would forget. Monsieur Berger? Why, even when his prick was in me I used to forget about him. It was the only way. Ever felt a man press you down, indifferent, as the fishmonger does with the eel to chop off its head?’

He set down his wine. ‘I didn’t mean to doubt you. Isabelle—’

She slapped his cheek, not very hard: enough. ‘Your pardon, Will, but that was meant to give you pain, therefore to stop you feeling sorry for me, which is intolerable to me. Now this.’ She took his hand and slipped it inside her bodice, and he felt her nipple strong and dry against his palm. His face ached, his mouth was full of stone. ‘Now,’ she gave him back his hand, ‘we part.’

‘For ever?’ Feeling hope and terror hellishly combined, a basilisk emotion.

‘What? Never for ever. Sweet fool, don’t you see this is how I ensure it?’

The walk away from the house in Hay Passage, into St Martin-le-grand, was blindingly familiar, every cobble and doorpost, in sun and shade (but it was always in shade). Every step of it was irradiated with his anguish, like the glow of decay he had seen on broken dead fish at Tower Wharf. And everything he saw, every footfall resounded with a thump in his brain of resolution: no more, no more. Go back no more.

It was, after all, such a simple thing not to do.

*   *   *

Will sacrifices a pawn.

‘Is it generally known, Ben?’

‘What?’ Jonson pulls his mind from the chess problem. ‘About you and the woman? No. Rumoured more than known. In truth I made a lucky hit. Come, every man in the theatre has his
amours
talked of. And even if there are none, it takes very little wit-work to invent some, just to pass the time, you know—’

‘If you walk backwards any faster you’ll fall over.’

‘Look now. I’ve heard you have a woman tucked away somewhere. What do you fear? It will be reported to your wife, a hundred miles off? And even in that unlikely event, what does she suppose? That you live an anchorite in London? Why, if my wife didn’t suspect me of straying, she would think there was something wrong with me.’

Does he fear it getting to Anne? Perhaps. More truthfully, it’s Anne thinking of him as faithless. Their love may have decamped, but there is still something precious on the grey field.

‘What did I say? Last night, when you spoke of my – of this mistress?’

‘When we quarrelled? Well: you said that you don’t have to buy love. You said the difference between us is you don’t even have to try.’ Lips set, Jonson moves his queen or, rather, propels her in his meaty fist. ‘Check. A pretty exchange of insults.’

‘Yes … Let us forget it.’

‘You won’t, though. You never forget anything, do you?’ Beaming now, Jonson gives a rough chuckle. ‘You should learn the art, Will. As I’ve said before.’

*   *   *

Playing parts and shifting identities, they both moved easily there. It was where their shadows touched. Will remembered Anne’s stepbrother, stamping in grim fun. Treading on your shadow. Play was no play, he knew that: Isabelle too. Common ground. And lust: which he could hardly recognise for what it was, because he did not think her beautiful or attractive. The lust was more like pain, or burning or freezing, or some unknown form of extremity, miserably first-discovered by him.

Will stares at the black, the white of the chessboard. Demanding a move. Insisting on choice. How he hates choice, and its burden.

Playing at the Globe one afternoon – was this real? Black Burbage was kneeling sorrowfully, looking into the poisoned well of innocence, and Will was watching from his noble Venetian role. So often he played nobles and dukes and kings, eminences pained and withdrawn and powerless: chess-kings. And then he saw her. Not in the galleries, her usual place, but at the rear of the pit where the whores congregated, where they could prop themselves against the bulks and watch the play while they received exploring hands, sometimes tongues. And that was what Isabelle was doing. An old man was pawing her, and Will saw his tongue like a little snake flicking at her smiling lips. Isabelle is looking at and for Will. Who, after his heart goes up on a pulley, carries on acting. So, he supposes, does she.

By the time of the jig she is no longer down with the bared breasts. She is in the gallery opposite him, seated, demure.

‘You thought you saw that. But did you?’ She met him afterwards at the back of the tiring-house. He wanted to pick her up and throw her. He wanted to see her tongue. ‘I don’t know why I laugh. You don’t provoke laughter in me, Will. Your face is too sombre and beautiful, also your hands, and the space betwixt your shoulder-blades, as I picture it. Touch it before I sleep. I’m ill, I’m bad. It’s one of those days. I must go home now.’

*   *   *

Usually it was him going to her: attending on her, waiting on her. Treading a strange half-sideways path to her, like the knight erring across the chessboard. But sometimes he found her waiting for him outside the house in Silver Street, perhaps cold or wet: like a lover. And she would tell him how she had been thinking of him all day, and weep. Once she put her hands up to him, there in the street, and he wanted to swipe them away, but held them and kissed her ticking wrists. He moaned: ‘An end, an end.’

‘A thousand pities about us,’ she said. ‘You know, it isn’t only that you have a wife.’ And she glinted at him from behind a dark knowledge, an eclipse of him. And the knowledge pressed smothering over him when alone he put out the light, and then put out the light.

And then a young man came to see him at Silver Street. Mistress Mountjoy, instead of sending the servant, came up to his rooms herself and said in her anxious pretty head-tilting way: ‘I’d not disturb you, Master Shakespeare. I don’t know the lad. But he won’t be told. He says over and over that you’ll want to see him.’

Matt, he thought, heart jerking – he didn’t know why, pleased surprise, perhaps, for Matt never came here. It was always Will seeking him out: natural, of course. (And sometimes Matt could not conceal a little teeth-grin of impatience at seeing Will again but that was natural too,
in loco parentis.
) So, let the lad come up.

And when the dark youth, smallish, black-clad, swept into his rooms he experienced a moment of peculiar fear. He didn’t know him – or did he? For some reason he remembered the last time he had seen Marlowe on the street, hyena-mouthed, full of himself; and afterwards Marlowe dead in a crammed room, in the crammed room of Will’s imagination, where he had seen the dagger go in a thousand times.

The youth presented a narrow back to him, warming small hands at the fire.

‘What do you want?’

‘Oh, sir, good Master Shakespeare—’ husky, almost sobbing ‘– I am come to beg you, won’t you make me one of your boy-girls? It is all I’ve lived for … I have talents, sir, I have uncommon talents, and that’s what’s wanted, is it not?’

The youth turned. Will looked into Isabelle’s eyes. It was as if he had touched spring leaves and found them painted green and pinned to the tree.

It was she who looked away first, her laugh of triumph choking off.

‘I thought it a pretty jest. Also I thought that this way – how else, then? – I might surprise you into love.’

‘God knows what you mean by love,’ he said, going breathless to fling open the window. Stifled, suddenly. She had never come up to his rooms before.

‘I doubt God does, which is one of the reasons I have parted with him. Do you? Do you know all of love?’ She sat down on the hearth, crossing and embracing her legs. ‘Is it one rule for all? I wonder. Now when you see the grass, you call its colour green, and so do all, they learned it as babes, see, my chick, see the green grass. But perhaps what you see and call green, I see as blue or pink. Or black, black. Who can tell? Another mortal’s mind is the one place we cannot go. The solitary sanctuary. I rattle on and can’t you see I’m afraid? I don’t do well in strange places. And this is strange to me.’ She looked round with a shiver. ‘Foreign, even.’

He gave her a cup of wine, uncut. She had a stronger head than any of his boozing acquaintance. Marlowe again. He realised something about Marlowe: he had had a weak head for liquor in truth. How young we were.

‘I make a good boy, don’t I? Perhaps good isn’t the word. I throw it to you, see what you can do with it. Oh, man made of words.’

She made it sound like ‘man of straw’. She didn’t really make a good boy, yet there was something refreshing in the awkwardness the breeches and doublet gave her. She made her own gowns, beautifully, and he was always irritated by their elegant delicacy, their difference. Wanted to tear them, perhaps. But also she looked something other than a woman, even as she snatched off the close cap and let her wiry hair fall. Some half-glimpse, perhaps, of that true self he was always trying to grasp.