The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (55 page)

‘A pity,’ Heminges said. ‘He has the talent, if he could master the temper. He could learn from your brother there. My wife says she never knew a soberer man.’

‘Aye, he applies himself, does Master Edmund,’ Burbage said, ‘even though he hasn’t – well—’

‘Hasn’t a quarter of the talent,’ Will said.

‘Yes. Well, you did ask,’ Burbage said. ‘Oh, no, you didn’t, did you?’

‘The theatre needs its Edmund Shakespeares,’ Heminges said. ‘Earth, iron, jewels. It has to contain all.’

Damn Matthew. Was this how he repaid all the work they had put into his training? What was he about? Idling away his time? Dancing attendance on a mistress, perhaps. Self-hatred compounded Will’s urgency. He roamed Matthew’s haunts, from the south bank of the river to Shoreditch. He darted into the back rooms and upper rooms of theatre taverns, flung back curtains, received oaths and stares from numerous young men who were not Matthew. All the time, bits of his past and present jutted and tripped him. Tarlton fetching him in from the street and saving him from starvation. Nashe comfortably ensconced in the Mermaid, walled in with books. Greene lurking in his pride and poverty with the grave on his breath. Jonson accosting him at Field’s shop. So much that was familiar; but in the course of the long, frustrating day he felt difference too, the way time, beyond a certain age, was a backward wave that left you in the shallows. The young he saw were cooler somehow, more knowing: they possessed life and the world as he possessed money, reach, doubt.

‘Very well. Have him here Monday morning, perfect in his part,’ Henslowe had said, when Will went to see him, ‘and we’ll go on. Otherwise, he’s done.’

Now the afternoon was late, still hot, a little thundery, sunlight suddenly spilling from the clouds on to the street with as physical an effect as the unrolling of great bolts of shining fabric. Will’s legs ached, and his head throbbed, and he thought: Leave him to it. What is he to you? Not as if you’re his father.

He went on.

*   *   *

‘How did it happen?’

He had found Matthew at last, hiding out at a friend’s lodging in a Westminster courtyard. He threw open the shutters. Matthew cringed on the bed.

‘I told you, a fall.’

‘A fall? You’re young for your dotage. Show.’

Scowling, Matthew sat up and turned his face to the light. The black eye twitched. ‘I laid a beefsteak to it to draw it out. But it still looks hideous, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. But it will fade. It’s a small thing, to set beside your life as a player. You’re not indispensable, they can easily dismiss you. And then the word will go round; Matt Hollingbery is not to be relied on. Swift consequences. Also your landlady is troubled at missing you.’

‘She’s a good creature.’ A reminiscent smile. Oho, Will thought, possibly. Or it might be just in Matthew’s mind. ‘I didn’t want to go back there – be seen thus.’

‘After your fall, naturally. So, what was the fight about?’

‘God knows,’ Matthew said, holding his head. ‘There was drink in it, and drink is a great maker, a builder of towers from scraps … You’ve surely been drunk when young. Even you.’

Even me. Dear heaven. Will felt himself scatter like a dropped pack of cards. There, somewhere, was the true one.

‘I’m not here to read you a lecture. Only to say opportunity is no deep well: it runs soon dry. So if you must carouse, then – then be like Master Jonson. He drinks himself to blankness, sleeps in a great sweat, and then rises early to study. Mix your debauches, if you can’t mix your wine. You are too good to lose. For the theatre to lose, I mean.’ He was rewarded with a half-smile. How different our rewards, our gratifications. Truly we are divided creatures. ‘Come. Action. To your landlady, and make your bows and apologise for her distresses, and then your part.’

‘I don’t have it. I’ve hardly looked at it.’

‘Where’s the copy? Your lodging? Excellent, there we shall learn it, and make you perfect in it. I’ll send a message to the Rose that you’ll be there tomorrow for rehearsal.’

Matthew shook his head. ‘And this face?’

‘More beefsteak. Then, if it comes to it, paint with white lead. What’s your part? Lucius the honest knight, very well. Is he esteemed for his beauty throughout the piece? Are there long speeches about the fairness of his eyes? Why, then, it won’t be marked. Above all, remember what you do. You make the audience see what you want them to see. How else does Burbage make you see a tall, martial man, mighty-limbed?’

Matthew’s smile faded. ‘But I can’t get the part by tomorrow.’

‘Not alone, no. Come.’ He gave Matthew his hand and hauled him up.

It’s so easy to do the right thing, he thought, that we hesitate to do it: we suspect a trick. Children see no tricks. Be as a child.

‘I feel so melancholy sometimes,’ Matthew said, as they walked. ‘Why is that, think you, when feeling happy is so much better?’

‘We inherit tears. And then they dry, and we foot it across the world. And all the while the music plays, grave or gay. Have you dined? You’ll need food in the belly, then something to keep you fresh as we work. Valerian has good properties, they say. Burbage swears by an infusion of ginger for late study.’

So, all night at Matthew’s lodging, lighting candle after candle, repeating, coaching, bullying. There were a few tears.

‘I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. I don’t give a hang for playing.’

‘Plain enough, but I do. “And yet, methinks my lover has forgot…” Go on.’

‘Can I not sleep a few minutes?’

‘No. If you sleep you won’t stir till morning.’

‘“And yet, methinks my lover has forgot

Our fixed bond, and all my comfort’s lost…”’

‘Good. Nearly there.’

‘No, you’re good, too good to me,’ Matthew said impulsively, touching his hand. ‘I’m not worth it. You know, I called you an old woman to my friends the other day.’

‘No, you didn’t, you called me something much worse. Now, cue, “Farewell, and blessings attend thee”.’

‘I wish I could be like you.’

‘That is not the line. Nor is it true. Or a part of me only.’ He suddenly found himself imagining what Anne would think if she could see him now. It always took him by stealth, this thought: the only way, perhaps, like visioning your own death.

He left Matthew’s lodging when first light was brushing the sky. Matt would manage a couple of hours’ sleep before going to the Rose. His landlady, for the price of a little purse, had engaged to wake him in time and march him up there if need be. All that could be done. Will’s weariness took the form of incredible clumsy stiffness, like a wooden leg taking over the body. At Silver Street he filled a pail at the pump and doused his head deliciously and shook it till the water-drops were like a rain-shower. And in each of them he saw a face.

And then he remembered where she should have been, last night.

*   *   *

The supper still stood on the table. It looked untouched – except that at some point she had dug into the wheel of cheese with a knife and made eyeholes and a grin, like a skull. A sated fly drowsed on a capon breast.

Having let him in, Isabelle drooped to the hearth and knelt down there, away from him. The bare soles of her feet were pink and delicately ridged.

‘There’s wine, if you want it,’ she said, in a metallic voice. ‘It’s not poisoned.’

He took up the cup. ‘Well, in a way it is.’

‘Why do you come now? What does it serve, to come now?’

‘To explain what happened. But after all, Isabelle—’

‘After all it was to be our last supper, yes, and I meant it so and it would have been so. But instead you choose to end it with insult.’ Her eyes flared, soft violet, lost in rage. ‘You made me feel worthless as I sat here, Master William, you made me feel that I did not deserve to exist and that you wanted me to know it.’

‘I meant none of that. For God’s sake, what do you think I am? I was helping a friend.’

She laughed briefly, rocking back. ‘All night? Oh, you sad fool. Helping a friend, quotha, and all night too.’

‘Matthew.’ He told it briefly.

She stared, and her teeth began to part and gleam as if she were about to bite these bare bones of narration, suck their marrow. ‘And this,’ she said at last, rising, ‘this lessens the insult, is that what you suppose? Instead of magnifying it a hundredfold? Do you know nothing, Will, of me or of yourself? Matthew. Matthew.’ She spat the name smiling. ‘Don’t you know that you’ll tire of him too, once you’ve finally fucked the whelp’s arse?’

He turned and groped for the door-handle, but it seemed to have disappeared in a black mist, along with everything solid, everything with dimensions. ‘An end, then. You’ve said enough.’

‘No. Just the truth. Once you’ve had what you want, you don’t want it more: common enough for a man led by his tarse, but with you, Will, it goes further, it’s like a sickness. You might love the dead enduringly, or a dream, or an angel, but we poor mortals standing on the earth don’t have a chance at you. I wonder, should I tell your boy-girl about it – how you’ve been doing to me what you secretly want to do to him? It would be amusing. Revealing. But, no, I’ve no interest in your mumbled crumbs. Get gone.’

‘Oh, I will. Your play’s all finished, is it not? That I know. True, I don’t know myself. I only know I have had more good fortune in my life than I have known what to do with.’ He found the handle, got the door open: it felt giant, heavy, as if made of bronze. ‘As for you, I don’t know how you can bring back your brother, Isabelle. But not this way. Not with me, and I pray God with no other. That’s the quick and essence of evil, it takes away.’ His last sight of her was grey and crisp and unequivocal with morning. ‘Only takes away.’

*   *   *

All the world was going with Anne to London, it seemed. Travellers were everywhere on the roads south, in groups and strings, on horseback and on mules and donkeys, laden with packs and panniers, cloaked, grimed, with here and there a new travelling-coach shuddering and straining and getting itself stuck, tilted, beetle-like, in the chalky ruts.

It was because of the coronation of the new King, of course, and what could be sought and solicited, grabbed and got: favour, office, influence. And so her excuse for leaving Stratford, conveyed also to brother-in-law Richard and to her wise-nodding lizard-lidded mother-in-law at Henley Street, made perfect sense. As for her determination to travel only with Andrew, the long-nosed, imperturbable manservant, she could press that home because of who she was: Mistress Shakespeare, wife of a substantial man who played before the Court. She could carry these decisions high.

And yet she knew herself a lie, fraud and exception as she rode with the others south under humid skies. She was doing this for the smallest, most limited, most personal reasons, which would make no sense to anyone else and were hardly lucid even to herself. The aim of her fellow travellers was large with significance, moated and acred and mortgaged, spreading to the horizon of a family future. Hers was a daisy in a meadow. She wanted to keep the daisy intact and the daisy was her feeling for her husband, and what it meant to her and to him and to them: how it must have that golden centre, those white rays. She was thinking not of knighthoods but of a gift of gloves, a green tunnel, a cradle of intimate days, a laughing look across butter-coloured stone, summer indoors, a staggering babe hand-guided from bemused mother to bemused father, lips turned and offered in sleep, the stretched fear of other sickness and wanting to take it on yourself: of the late-learned, never-learned truth of love.

Luckily, no one took notice of her. She didn’t fancy scrutiny. So, mistress, whither are you going and why? To assess my life. To see if it’s worth the living.

And all the time as she rode the dusty, jolting way, with the flies maddening the horse’s ears as if horse and fly had been at creation proclaimed enemies, all the time, she had a strange feeling or conviction that Will knew she was coming. At the end of that cresting road, where the sky purpled, he was: and somehow he was sending out something of himself.

The people, on her way, at the inns. He must have made them. The world as Will’s invention – well, that seemed enticingly likely, yes. How else this burly, sausage-armed, bragging captain complaining of the ale? ‘Mine host, if you would catch a bird like me, you must lime your twig with stronger stuff, else I shall fly to your brother innkeeper along the road, I a man of large and generous spirit that must be floated on a tide of dark and potent ale, look you, not confined within a thimbleful of the mincing dribble wrung from an ailing baby’s clouts…’ Good-natured, though: he saluted her across the inn-parlour, laughing at himself, laughing at the sheer brazen impossibility of his existence. Will must have made him, and made what made him; likewise the pair with whom she had to share a supper-table, brother and sister to judge by their chiming beautiful faces, she cool, luminous, he twitching, callow. Some contention between them. If you loved me a little better – Do you conceive I could love you more? If so, you know nothing. – Better, better is of a different quality than more. To love me better would be to try to comprehend my feeling, not to pity it. – I never said I pity you, Edward. Not for something of your own making. It’s her I pity in the case, not you. – And this is your love, is it? – Aye, so: there is love, and there is indulgence, and they may touch sometimes but they’re not the same.

It explained a lot, these people, these creations. But once she was attuned to it, she found it oppressive: all these stories going around her, these endless planets turning on the centre of endless selves. A vast drama of infinite acts and numberless parts, and there was no exiting from it.

And she, what was she but a queen? Head of the family, Bartholomew said. Queen of griefs and foolish private pains that flitted on her face just as when she was a girl. Queen of jealousy, she lay drowning in wonderment in the bug-rid inn bed, imagining Will in someone’s arms, and the someone almost took shape when she dreamed, and woke with a start putting out her hand, purposefully. Doing what? She seemed to feel or see, with the melded senses of sleep, a dagger. Was she putting it away, or taking it to her? Was this – she lurched up – blood? She flung back the bed-curtains, consulted her hand in the undercooked light of foredawn. No: sweat. Hot. Was this the change of life that Judith Sadler groaned about and yet longed for? Change of life. That was always, surely: every morning. Besides, she had had her bleeding last week. Never troubled her overmuch. A thing of life.