The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Page 6

  That smile. It didn’t last as long as it should. It seemed to Will that to coax and tend that smile, to bring it into the world, would be something worth.

  The clown waddled off, the play began. ‘The Right Tragical History of Darius King of Persia, as it has been acted before Her Majesty the Queen…’ The King hurried to the edge of the stage to tell them urgently of the fate that hung over him. It was William Knell yet not so: all king now, no player.

  The rafters of the Guildhall became the arches of Babylon. A shift, a change. You couldn’t be aware of it any more than you could pinpoint the moment when you fell asleep. Joan threw herself into it, Will saw with pleasure, gasping at every cruelty, hands flying to her cheeks in pity: as if everything were really happening in a room that she happened to be in. As it should be.

  But for the first time Will’s attention was split. He kept watching Anne’s face, almost as if it were part of the play. Judging the tragedy by the lights and shades it drew on that face. It seemed to him that other faces were like blank leaves compared to hers, where a whole busy page of text invited the eye to read.

  Meanwhile two vast young women at her side, sharing a cider-jug that they passed to each other like an infant to be nursed, grew larger with drink and self-love and began crowding her out. They wanted to be reproved, so they could enjoy a quarrel or shouting-match. But Anne simply coiled her stepbrother closer and took up less room. He saw not shyness, not absence of will, but a pure refusal of contention: so pure it stretched out for ever, an infinite quiet denial of the stupid and ugly. He moved.

  ‘Mistress, come this side of me, there’s more room.’

  He made the space, and preserved it with taut back and stiff elbows. Her lips moved, perhaps thanks. He preferred none. As the play neared its catastrophe, he observed her – as Joan was – shifting her weight from one foot to the other: the boy was sitting on the ground at her feet. A play was a long time standing unless you were, like him, insane about it.

  ‘Will! What are you doing?’

  ‘Offering comfort,’ he said to Joan, on his knees. He had sometimes seen men do this for their womenfolk at the play, as two hours turned into three. Young men often propped each other up back to back. ‘Lean on me. Do it, please.’ He did not quite turn his head. ‘Mistress Hathaway – if you will.’

  Joan, giggling, leaned her weight on his shoulder at once. In Anne’s short hesitation he found time for a surmise that he had mortally, everlastingly, offended her; and to wonder what that meant to him. When she laid her hand on his shoulder everything else, thought, emotion, gave way to sensation. The breathing weight and warmth of her astonished him. It was as if he had never touched a human being before. Eighteen years old: eighteen years’ worth of living, and now it seemed a long, fusty drowse before a proper waking.

  He never wanted a play to end. But this was different. Of course he could not kneel for ever; but it was enough to imagine doing it, to see himself lit by the new blaze of possibility.

  * * *

  Outside the Guildhall Joan, stretching, yawning, chattering all at once, was still in command. ‘Lord, how bright it is – I feel like a mole. That clown was monstrous, was he not? He tried to fix my eye when he did that shocking jig, but I would have none of him. Still, I had to laugh. Pooh, don’t look, mistress, the beasts, they might wait until they get home.’ Along an alleyway beside the Guildhall a file of groaning men were emptying their bladders against the wall. ‘A pity the play brings out the low sort, for it’s a pleasant, pretty diversion after all. Does no one fetch you, Anne? Then you must have Will attend you home. No, I insist, I have only Henley Street to go to and Gilbert with me, but I can’t think of you and your chick plying the Shottery road alone, not when I’ve seen such Brummagem faces about.’

  It should have been me proposing that, Will thought. He was glad to be doing it but faintly sick, queasy with doubt. Why? Perhaps because, although they took the Shottery field path at a slow enough pace, in his mind he felt himself running again full pelt, running beyond his reach.

  ‘Looks like a poorish harvest,’ he said, then wondered if these were her brother’s fields.

  ‘Does it?’ Her look was surprised, then awkward. ‘I’m never good at judging these things.’

  He had an empty-handed feeling, as if he were trying to make a purchase with no money. Then he remembered the unborn calf, and thought that perhaps she could never forgive him for seeing her in extremity, and wondered if they could walk all the way to Hewlands Farm in silence. They might have, if it had not been for the boy, John. Freed from physical constriction, he was a wild thing, climbing, leaping, tumbling, rolling in mud.

  ‘John, come down from there – you’ll hurt yourself.’

  ‘I never hurt myself.’ He landed at their feet clutching a broken branch, thwacked himself across the head with it. ‘See?’ He squinted up at Will. ‘Did you like that play?’

  ‘Aye, did you?’

  ‘It went on too long.’ The boy flung the stick and hared off, flapping his arms and shrieking.

  ‘I can remember being like that,’ Will said, then stilled his tongue disgustedly. The remark exposed his youth; besides, it was sheer cant. He could not recall ever feeling that degree of abandon even as a child. Yielding to the moment – no, it meant losing sight of the moment before and the moment after. He needed to see all round.

  ‘Did you really like the play?’ she asked.

  ‘I like all plays. I like them better than life.’ A crude statement, but it was a relief to find himself saying something true. ‘Did you not care for it?’

  ‘I wonder they can remember all those speeches. It is very clever.’

  ‘But no more?’

  Even so gentle a pressure seemed to make her withdraw, her lips biting back the words. Hers was no token blush: you were reminded that it was made of blood. He thought: Shyness? But how could you be shy, fortified by that beauty and grace? How not cry defiance from the battlements?

  ‘I felt it was not real,’ she said at last. ‘But perhaps I take after my brother. He says the play is idle feigning and breeds vain dreams.’

  Will had not supposed Master Hathaway a Puritan; though, of course, there were many shades beside the hard crow-black piety of the Fields. ‘But he didn’t mind your going?’

  She shook her head. ‘I may do as I like,’ she said. Somehow it sounded like the wretchedest of confessions.

  John came back to them, leaping and stamping. ‘There, Anne. I treaded on your shadow, that means you’re dead.’

  ‘Trod, not treaded.’

  ‘Treaded and deaded. Treaded and deaded…’

  ‘All that rhyming has got into his wits,’ she murmured, without approval. The boy sang it over and over, wildly stamping.

  ‘You’re dead, you’re dead, and that’s good…’ He rasped his tongue, dancing backwards. Suddenly there was fury in her face and she was after him.

  ‘For shame – shame on you, to say that…’

  Will wanted to call her back, to say it was only childish silliness. But there was, after all, something grim about it. And when she caught up with the squealing boy she did not collar him or hit him. Her blue, crackling-blue, eyes were all she needed to hold him still. Hitching her skirts she jumped neatly on his shadow.

  ‘Now you’re dead,’ she said. ‘Is that good?’

  The boy pouted, big face half stricken, half mutinous. Will saw the resemblance to the farmer. He seemed to see other things, in vanishing glimpses.

  ‘Come now, let’s kiss,’ she said, on a plain tender note. The boy clung to her passionately for a moment, then pulled away, pointing at Will.

  ‘Make him dead now.’

  She straightened, glancing at Will’s shadow on the grass, then at his face.

  ‘No need,’ he said. ‘You’ve already killed me.’

  ‘No, she hasn’t.’ The boy groaned impatiently. ‘Here, I’ll do it.’ That gave a little space, in which what Will had said could reverberate. He wond
ered at himself for having said it: not with regret – though that might come – but with a giant amaze, for suddenly it seemed possible that he could say anything.

  Anne shook her head slightly; a slight smile likewise. He felt she would always temper the sharpness of the negative. ‘No, I think you are living yet.’

  She turned to walk on. To her mind he had said, perhaps, one of those things that were not real.

  He followed. It was not far to Hewlands Farm now, but it didn’t matter: now, with his heart clanging rough music to break an age of silence, it didn’t matter how far he had to go.

  3

  The Triumph of Beauty (1582)

  A gift of gloves.

  Is this, Anne wonders, the moment?

  When he presents them to her they are outside, naturally. Outside is their indoors, the wood their closed chamber. (Not the house, she told him, when they first began to meet.) Summer holds fast. Woodbine and dog-rose grow in tangles, in aromatic and sticky tunnels. Butterflies stumble along winding lanes of hot air. Too warm for gloves, but these are a gift, made by him.

  A silent signal. She extends her right hand. With infinite care he draws the glove on to it, though his own hands are slightly trembling. Perhaps that is the moment: observing that tremble, and how it elevates her, so that the fallen trunk she sits on sheds its moss and fungus, and turns throne.

  The limp kid fingers fill and stiffen. He inches the cuff up her wrist, past a million thrilling pinpoints.

  And surely this should be the moment – if she is certain of her throne, certain of him at her feet. She doesn’t shrink from anything in him: looking on the dark waving crown of hair, broad brow, long-lashed salt-grey eyes, she is invited and beguiled. His youth, of which he is so conscious, seems to her a zenith, not a falling short; hard to imagine him burning any brighter than this.

  ‘It’s beautiful making,’ she says, flexing her hand, as a wand of sunlight conjures the intricate tracery of beads.

  He shrugs. ‘An attempt. I wanted to put myself into every stitch.’ He laughs nervously. ‘And then I wanted to take myself out. To make the making better … No matter. Next to your skin it can only be a snarl and a cobble.’

  Anne accepts the gift of gloves. But beyond that lies another acceptance, and there she still shrinks. Because now she knows something terrifying about herself: that her yes is not a word but a shout; that you can set the world before her and she, for the right thing, for the right love, will tip it all over like a drunkard with an inn-table, devoted to that dreaming fire in the head.

  But before the gift there was Lammas-feast: perhaps it began then. Bartholomew invited Will to it, after he had escorted her home from the play. ‘My thanks, Master Shakespeare. We hold Lammas-feast tomorrow, come join us.’ It was thrown out in absently genial mood. Later, across the tumult of the supper-table, she intercepted a speculative look from him. ‘So, Anne,’ he said. But soon he was diverted by Bella: pregnant, and not eating hugely enough for his liking. Though she hardly shows, he is always touching and caressing her belly lately: as if he wants to hatch it. He is convinced it will be a son. For Bartholomew the past is of no interest at all, and the present an impatience: he lives in the future, of which he is amazingly unafraid.

  And lately he has also been making some changes, like the disposing of the last of their father’s clothes as gifts to the farm servants. Good and right. She is bored by her own grief, its slow circularity, the windmill creak of it.

  Lammas-feast, then. Bartholomew is one of the few farmers to keep it up: some call it popish. ‘If they work hard, let them have a little play,’ is how Bartholomew sees it. Trestles in the barn, a hogshead of ale, flitches of bacon; the farmhands at ease with him as he trades jokes and matches them pint for pint. When Will comes in she realises she has been waiting for this: not simply his arrival but how he will look against this background.

  Bartholomew beckons him to the seat by his side, sets before him a heaped trencher. Her brother’s white teeth crunch away at onions and crackling as if noise is half the pleasure of eating.

  Will – he eats too, converses, he doesn’t look out of place. But again Anne notices this about him: while many people sprawl in the world as if it is their own fireside, to see him is to think of a traveller at an inn, making a temporary separate comfort with wrapped cloak, the corner of a settle, his thoughts.

  Evening squeezes its juicy light through the high slit windows, an incredible gold: the pewter dish in front of her glitters like a precious artefact. Resentfully she seeks and avoids Will’s eye. Why, she thinks, do you come to destroy my peace?

  Bartholomew is on his feet and seizing Nathaniel, the shepherd’s lad, by the shoulder. Hauling him up.

  ‘Now hark ye, good people, I heard a tale about friend Nathaniel here, as you have likewise perhaps. A tale of a man and a maid, or shall we say a maid unmade?’ Bartholomew’s arm grips Nathaniel’s neck, not letting go. ‘How old are you, my buck? Eighteen? We’ll say a man, then. Certain you’ve played a man’s part with little Alice Barr, and now she’s not so little neither. Where is she? Come, Alice, now’s not the time to be shy…’

  Everyone is laughing as Bartholomew marches the lad over to staring blushing Alice.

  ‘Come, clasp hands. There’s a picture. Tell me, now, if I’m mistook, for it’s no small matter. Eh, Alice? Not small, was it?’ Bartholomew’s grin is broad and hard. ‘What I surmise is, you were both thinking so much of your marrying day that your thoughts ran clean away with you. Well, as long as you fix the day now, my friends, I’ve naught to say against it. I’ll even give you a bridal present. To the church in the morning, Nathaniel, to pray the banns, hey? Yes or no?’

  It is admirable how he sets these things straight. Loud claps and cheers as he pushes the pair into a kiss. No bastards on the parish. On the way back to his seat he slips his arms around Bella and again caresses her belly. Teeming wombs and proper households. Anne rises to her feet, feeling sere and light, as if a breeze would bowl the husk of her across the threshing-floor.

  She has to get away from this, but conscience will allow only an escape to duty. Her stepmother’s chamber. Before her apoplexy, Stepmother would have been on highest form at Lammas-feast: the overflowing hostess, dancing, joking, ladling, rapping knuckles. A little better today, she completes a turn of the room on Anne’s arm; her speech is clearer. One day soon, she mews, as Anne settles her, she wants to come downstairs.

  ‘You will.’ Anne has no doubt of that. She’s strong, determined: she’ll take her place as chatelaine again. ‘I want…’ She tucks the pillow behind her stepmother’s neck. ‘I want a world where nothing is cheap.’

  At the foot of the staircase Anne finds him waiting for her.

  ‘I wondered – I thought you unwell, perhaps.’

  ‘No. I wanted to be, just for a little, without company.’

  That comes out harsher than she intends it – but, no, she is angry. Angry at herself, for the vertical spider-ascent of her heart when she saw his face. Angry at him, for the fear he prompts in her – the fear that he does not mean it. If he does not mean it, then—

  ‘I’m not company,’ he says. ‘I can be, if you like. Otherwise I can be nothing.’

  ‘No one can be nothing,’ she says, thinking: Oh, yes, yes, they can.

  ‘Just the creak of the board under your foot, then. The fly on that windowpane. That feeling in the air, when there’s feasting, of something unsatisfactory that makes you want to smash through it all. You feel it, I know.’

  His smile, his eyes are bright and fierce: a glitter from the bottom of a deep well of unhappiness. But, then, perhaps Bartholomew has been plying him with too much drink.

  ‘Really, you know nothing of me,’ she says, ready to pass him.

  ‘Certain, for I know nothing of myself, and I have lived with myself these eighteen years. But what’s knowing? You know what clouds look like. Lie on your back and gaze at a cloud until you feel yourself turning into it. Still you wou
ldn’t know its twin next day.’ From the barn comes the squeaking of a rebec. ‘They’re dancing.’

  ‘Then go dance.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to say how afraid of you I am. It might make you pity me, which would be something.’

  Oh, drunk, nonsensical. ‘You make a game of me.’

  He only touches her arm to detain her, but when she shakes off his hand he seems still to be holding her. ‘Never,’ he says. ‘Never, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ve heard about men and their never, sir. Never will I forsake and never will I this and that—’

  ‘I am not men. Nor Stratford man nor Englishman nor young man, I hate that, damnation on all flocks and herds,’ he says, breathing hard. ‘Am I allowed to fall in love with you, yes or no?’

  ‘No,’ she says, all fear now: because now it is as if a fay sits in the corner of your chamber, and says, yes, all the tales were true, we’re real, and so let us bargain.

  ‘Not even hopelessly?’

  He has drawn a smile from her before she knows it; but with everything he says she has a sense of trying feverishly to catch him up.

  She says: ‘You’re very young.’

  ‘I shave, I’m breeched. And you, are you a grandam disguised? If my youth is the only fence I must climb, then tell me. There’s hope in that.’ The music rises. ‘That’s a branle. Dance it with me. Then I’ll ask nothing more.’

  ‘Until the next time.’ She realises that this is a kind of yes. Was this the moment? ‘You can’t – you can’t truly be afraid of me.’