The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (54 page)

‘I never look in the mirror,’ Ben had said. ‘I know myself without.’

But now, in the middle of the straining muddy street, he stood against the jostling and let his thoughts free to terrify him, just for a moment. Shapes in the window, indeterminate. How if indeterminacy is Will’s essence? But it can’t be – because if he is nothing, how can he be what he so magnificently is?

The sun was sinking behind the roofs with a palpable withdrawal of warmth, like the shutting of a stove. Ben shook himself and plunged on. If it made no sense, he could not let it in. He refreshed himself with a memory of avenued oaks, park walls, limits and borders.

*   *   *

Under summer heat, under hot self-hate like packed straw in an overhead loft, about to catch and smoulder, Will enacted it.

All that was wrong in the earth was in it, and in him. But still he rose and took his morning draught at the sign of the Ram across the way, and wrote, and then sat awhile with Mistress Mountjoy to commiserate her troubles in getting her daughter happily married, and met Burbage and Heminges to talk business, share prices and the cost of candles, and what the Admiral’s Men were planning for the Fortune and the new proclamation against plays from the city, and took supper at the Ram or at the Mermaid with backbiting Dekker and Jonson, and often Middleton now with his burnished attention. And then he went to Isabelle and flung himself on the stones of passion.

And neither of these things drove the other out or brought it down. He had never expected evil to be so accommodating.

No doubting that it was evil, and that it came from him. You could call up images of spider and web and fly, and they came all too readily; but they meant nothing.

‘Oh, it’s a wicked world, Will,’ she said to him once, pinning him down, laughing.

No, it isn’t, he thought. It’s the people in it.

Once she cut herself in the forearm with a knife, moderate deep, after he had put her away from him saying, no more, an end.

Once she lay under him absolutely unmoving, staring past his shoulder.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I was just thinking what’s in your brain.’

The next night she screamed and blasphemed and said she wanted to bathe in him.

Will thought of killing her or himself, both perhaps. But it didn’t seem to solve the problem, or even approach it.

And meanwhile the city filled for the forthcoming coronation, swarming hot about the coming of a king. London lawyers and country gentlemen sniffed the air in city gardens and bowling-greens, outstaring each other: plague slashed red on doors, plague-bodies were trestled away in the humid afterglow when clothes felt like a rind. Food prices shot up. Loyal addresses and banners barely stirred in the no-air. Citizens grew used to the sound of Scots accents, and looked thoughtfully at the spare room, wondering how many mattresses it would take. (A Scots play, Middleton urged Will, that’s what a man should think of in these times.) And in Hay Passage Will returned to the sudden persecutions of Isabelle’s passion, in the room where no bird moved now: only the ticking ghost of its madness in the cage.

*   *   *

At New Place the wasps’ nest in the eaves had become an insistent presence. It bulged out the plaster in the corner of the north bedchamber, the guest room where sometimes on market-day Bartholomew slept off his unhappy booze-fill.

Warm to the touch, this neighbouring nest: Susannah shrieked the first time she laid her hand against it, though Judith went back in fascination to that concentrated, intimate humming: full of subtle movement like a pregnant woman’s belly.

‘I’ll send Hamnet to look at it,’ Judith Sadler said. ‘He’ll know what to do. He contrived to rid my mother’s outhouse of a nest, God knows how. Doesn’t feel the stings, I vow. No sense, no feeling.’ This was relatively warm for her. She made a home with hatred: every day wrapped in the familiar. Reassuring. After all, with love, how do you know where you are?

Hamnet came after the day’s business was over at the bakery: the time of shutters, cook-fires being lit, water scattered to lay the dust before the householder’s door, and the sun held like a bleeding ball by the roofs and chimneys of the town. He came broad and a little bowed, with his skin like a fair youth’s against cropped silvery hair. He looked, as he was, a good, conscientious, slightly beaten man. The Sadlers had lost money to the great fires; and then there was the spirit, or heart … His upper lip dipped in the centre. All fourteen babies, living and dead, had that mouth. You could imagine him, Anne thought, suddenly striking out on a road, choosing to be alone with his neglected self, going off to ports and star-chased seas.

‘Aye, you must needs do something. Sizeable. It might fall through in the end, with the weight of it.’ He laid big tender hands against the waspy roof-belly. ‘Then the swarm’s in your house, maddened. Boiling water or tar will do it, late at night when they’re still. I’ll come help tomorrow night, if you will: have your Andrew keep a big fire all day.’

‘Thank you. Do you think such small creatures feel when they die?’

‘Perhaps they do.’ He smiled sadly. ‘But you’d go mad to keep thinking of it.’

‘Oh, I shall think of some other foolish thing soon enough.’ She laughed. ‘Have you supped? Then stay, we have good roast ham. And Susannah has made quince tartlets.’

‘Not to be refused. My thanks.’

‘Shall I have Andrew go tell Judith you’re staying?’

He shrugged. ‘If you like. I’ll not be looked for.’

At supper, and after, they talked easily and without intermission. With so much common ground between them, you could always light on something that brought a smile, a nod: a quickening. And so they stayed, talking, after the girls had taken their candles and gone upstairs.

‘You’ll be marrying them soon,’ Hamnet said. ‘The Quineys will take an interest, I’ll wager.’

‘Your own children marrying: Lord, what a thought.’

‘Not a good one?’

She trimmed a smoking candle, proffered the ale-jug. ‘Drink about. A good thought? Yes, if they are happy. But no. Because it means you must know yourself old.’

Hamnet laughed low. ‘Old? Look in your glass, Anne.’

Afterwards she wondered whether she would have done it without that remark. Was it the hinge on which decision turned? Yet something had already prompted her to ask him to supper: that waking something, perhaps, or its malign shadow. She stood to trim the candle again, and her skirts brushed his leg, and she left it so instead of twitching away. The candle-flame glared at her like a merciless sun. What was Hamnet seeing? An old friend grown odd and whimsical? A discontented wife daring an intrigue?

‘It’s not a looking matter, Hamnet.’ She drained her cup. ‘It’s feeling.’

She had called him Hamnet, simply, unthinkingly; but it was an acknowledgement that Hamnet Sadler was the only living one, the name had reverted to his sole use. Lost was the other Hamnet, and the loss had brought her to this precipice. My good went then, she thought, leaving an old nest of heart for scavengers to move into. Scavengers and suspicions, hates and revenges. Hamnet, of all names to murmur in adultery: but no, very well, for everything now had a dark, freakish aptness.

‘How does Judith?’

He grimaced. ‘You know well.’

‘She’s happy, in truth. Not content. But happy.’

‘Is she?’

‘If not, she should be.’ She spoke firmly, but into the dark. Her motives were blind formless things like new-born kittens. No good examining them for features. She sat down closer to him. She wondered what his bare legs were like, his weight, how harsh his beard. She had only the one experience of a man, and that was all broken on rocks. That man was elsewhere, love-embedded and separate: in her mind at least, probably in reality. Anne hid a sob and made her face cool. ‘Let’s not talk of her. Or any others, let them go. We should be ourselves alone, shouldn’t we, and do only as our selves prompt?’

He gazed at her, looking quite young, and almost helpless with indirection: where would this go? ‘Life,’ he said heavily, ‘life so seldom allows.’

‘Life, the old jade, must learn to do better.’ Was this real? Or was the room a painting, Hamnet a scarecrow set moving, her slow approaching body a dream of her self?

They began, so tentatively, with holding hands. Glances in the suffocating candlelight.

‘I’m so alone.’

‘Aye, so. I know what it is to be alone, Anne.’

‘And folk would not believe it of either of us.’

‘Aye, so.’ Hamnet not quite listening. ‘Thou art a beauty, dost know?’

Hands mapping, laboriously invading new places. Anne was not without pleasure, but she wished she could jump forward to when they would lie cooling apart in bed. To when she would be a woman who had achieved it, and claimed the far shore of revenge for her own.

Hamnet, gentle, sincere – but still not without opportunism, she realised. Kissing her, he mumbled about respect for Will and not changing things, but it was words. Everyone, she thought, as his hand kneaded her breast, was essentially furtive: walking in the daylit street, they stalked behind themselves.

‘Art sure, heart? To go on?’ As he spoke he lifted her skirts. ‘It will be sweet. Promise thee.’

Yes, sure. No, not sure. His tongue and teeth claimed her world; they were too strong, there was too much of them. Breeches open, he put her hand to his standing cock: she touched and it seemed a strange hard fat clammy thing, not something that should be out in the air.

He drew his face back. Briefly scanned her. ‘Are you afraid of Will?’

‘No. Not afraid—’

‘He doesn’t beat you?’

She shrugged, and it was a shrugging him off, and he must have seen that.

‘You know, Anne, he won’t get to hear of it.’

Ah, true: and that was just it. Why else go through with it? To satisfy something in her? But it wasn’t in her, she touched only vacancy, an echo. No thrilling note of vindication rang out.

She put down her skirts.

‘You are too good a man, Hamnet, for this.’

He gave her a long regard, and let out a long sigh. Hitching up his breeches, he seemed to review acres of reflection, expectation, debate. ‘I see it. Well, if I’m too good, I wish I might be otherwise. I wish I might be a bad man.’ His glance flashed cold a moment, and she knew his was the power: whatever happened. ‘I still might.’

‘You won’t, though.’

‘No.’ He shook his head, wry, caught out in his unavoidable humanity.

‘You’re free to hate me, Hamnet.’

His look was kind and grey. ‘No. It doesn’t go that deep, my dear.’

And that finished it. He put on his doublet, drained the last of the beer, took his leave, with no haste: why haste, after all? Meanwhile she stared at the small orbit of her burning world, the candle, her lap, a moth, a dribble of spilled beer on the board, her shame.

When he was gone, and she was alone, and she had finished silently weeping and digging her fingernails into her scalp until blood seeped, she sat in subsiding shudders and thought about things. She thought of Will. Chiefly with hatred, for his betrayal. Also, for making her helpless – or, rather, for his success where she failed. Look at him: he could play every part in life, and she could not even play the cheap adulteress for one night.

*   *   *

Susannah stood in the bedchamber doorway. Unlike Judith, who would have gasped or shouted, she thought for a moment before speaking, even though she must have been startled.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Packing.’ Anne’s eyes felt gritty from the sleepless night, and the light of morning was in them like bright sand. ‘For London.’

‘Are we all to go?’

She shook her head. The white shift folded itself in her hands, submissive ghost. ‘Your father writes me. It’s an exceptional season. The new King, the coronation, favours to be granted. So all public men are fetching their wives to London, for we mustn’t miss it.’

‘But you hate London.’ Susannah said it, then let it hang while she thought about it. She was subtle, and at ease in the presence of the unsaid. ‘Wives, and not daughters.’ She smiled.

‘The house needs a mistress. You’re a woman now. Andrew will ride with me. If you have need of anything, go to Uncle Richard.’

‘How if I have need of you?’ Susannah said; but she looked as if she did not expect an answer, or need one.

*   *   *

They were all deedily about it, writing for the King – Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, the others – all deep in loyal addresses and odes and pageants. And Will tried, seriously, because he believed that a poet must write upon any occasion, and build with what clay came to his hands.

But he couldn’t. He was all shrunk to the pinhead of the personal, and he hated it, perching there. It was one of the many things, indeed, that he hated about his inclination to Isabelle: the way it turned him into an artist of the mirror, colouring everything with the hue of inescapable self. He longed to write outside. But the new King didn’t do it.

And then came hope. She was abstracted one evening, and even the dance of cruelty seemed to bore her.

‘Come to sup with me tomorrow, Will, and we’ll make an end.’ She frowned at his look, which must have been high disbelief. ‘No, I am in earnest, and I’ll tell you why. My funds are low, and when I went marketing I couldn’t get credit today, which frightened me. I can’t live frugal – so I think I must marry again: and I can’t do that while you and I are swyving. So, best end it. Hey?’

Looking at her, he could see no layers: just the top, the impatience. It seemed real. ‘Very well. I will believe you are in earnest.’

‘I’ve never been anything else,’ she said, dead-voiced, taking up her sewing.

He wasn’t sure, but he thought it possible she might drop him as easily as she had picked him up. She wouldn’t want him, he thought, to draw any meaning from their association: that would be her worst failure.

‘Be damned to the King, God save him,’ Burbage said, when he asked what Will was working on. ‘Come, he’ll not lack addresses. A play, man. Something to catch his Scots fancy. If we can but become the King’s Men, why, then, we’re fitted. By the by, seen Henslowe of late? He’s after your young Hollingbery’s blood. He advanced him money, seemingly, on condition the sprig would be ready to play at the Rose on Monday. First leading part. But he hasn’t been to rehearsals, and his landlord says he didn’t come home last night. Drink, doxies, I don’t know. But he’ll fail, Will, in short order.’