by Ros Barber
‘And the playwright of The Massacre.’ ‘Say more!’
I talk her to her climax seven times.
‘What would they do to you?’ ‘They’d make me dead
as I’m supposed to be.’ She chews my arm;
she grinds her pelvis into me; she groans.
And is she done? She sighs. ‘But people know.
Your friends know.’ ‘Some of them.’ ‘How can you hope
to keep yourself a secret?’ ‘No one talks.’
I flop beside her, grateful her desire
has come to some conclusion. Not so mine.
‘They know the danger to myself, and them.
In any case, the Queen has sealed it tight.
She has me writing plays, just as she likes,
but through her censors. She would not be pleased
to have me exposed and killed. That I still live
is purely through her will.’
‘She has a will?’
She giggles. ‘She has grown too manly then,
in her man’s position. I prefer this will.’
She seeks it out and grips it.
Why the mind,
so glorious in all it apprehends
should be encased in flesh, I do not know.
And why its workings shudder, stall and drop
to the call of base desire’s a mystery
no priest has ever purposed. Thus enslaved,
I lose all higher sense, all urgent goal
except the spilling of myself, in her.
‘Call me his name,’ I urge, ‘call me his name.
Tell me you want Kit Marlowe.’ And she does:
the name huffed out of her with every thrust
resurrects me by degrees. My hungry corpse
fiercely asserts its need for life and love,
like the soldier soon to risk his all in war.
And afterwards, the silence almost throbs
with the bruise of my forbidden name. What chance
that the walls, or sleep, contained it? ‘I must go,’
I whisper, though I sense she isn’t there,
but in a dream of goose-down infamy,
fresh bedded by the rogue she thinks is me.
I pull on clothes, now greyed out by the dawn
and make for my room. But as I cross the floor
I swear that something scuttles from the door.
MY TRUE LOVE SENT TO ME
Yet I was not uncovered, and the quiet
that hung over breakfast tables, white as cloth
prepared for a christening, was shaken off
in under an hour by more distracting things:
the Countess of Bedford’s evident delight
at the Christmas plans, which she swore quite the best
of the fifteen years since she was born. ‘See here,’
she squealed to her father, waving in his face
the letter that occasioned her to dance.
‘The Earl of Southampton’s hiring Pembroke’s Men
to come from London with a play. A play!
How wonderful! Let’s hope a joyous one,
full of romance and clowning.’
Lutes and drums
were in her head, but I thought, One of mine.
He’s bringing one of mine.
He’s bringing one of mine.‘And Rutland too,
with quite an entourage.’ She mouthed the French
with gusto that the dogs around her feet
took as a cue to whine as though they sensed
a hare on the lawns outside.
‘Twelve days of fun!’
She twirled with the thought of ‘Lords and ladies here!
So many lovely gentlefolk!’
My mind
was stuck on the play, what play, and would the cast
be old familiars, fooled by no disguise?
Until a certain name fell from her tongue.
Undid me, straight.
‘ … and Thomas Walsingham!’
STOPPED
Could time run slower? Only if God’s hand
were pressed against the sun to keep it still.
If shadows made to inch across the floor
were painted in their places. Come. Please come.
Before the weight of waiting buries me.
The boy’s sums take for ever. Afternoons
grow whiskers, even though the days are short.
And nights would stop completely, but for Ide
pestering me to look into her eyes.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she says. ‘Where have you gone?’
I say I’m nowhere but between her thighs.
But I’m lost in you, beyond my boots in you,
and the blessed future day when you arrive.
DOGS
A faithful dog, I raise my head to see
each visitor arrive. It’s never you.
The hurt of half imagining your arms
on a coach’s door, or seeing at the end
of the drive, on horseback, someone of your frame
melting to unfamiliar on approach
has steeled me thus: I’ll have no faith in you.
I’ll not believe you’re coming till you do.
I immerse myself in scripting thwarted love
while the hubbub grows around me. Christmas Eve,
and a hundred guests expected down below
as I scratch doomed love towards oblivion.
A knock, as soft as a servant’s, come to feed
some logs to the fire.
‘Come,’ I say. ‘Come in,’
intent on my sentence, finishing the line
before I sense no housemaid at the grate
but a solid, watchful presence.
‘Hello, Kit.’
And there you are, like a month of blessed rain
on a field of sun-blanched wheat: too much, too late,
and yet embraced at once. I clasp your flesh
like a storm would tear me from your mast, the chair
I’ve abandoned faking a gunshot as it falls.
I hold you like a once abandoned babe
clings to its mother, though your arms, round me,
seem hesitant, as though you’re scared to touch
something so live, so hot, so not the same.
You smell of Kent. You smell of Scadbury.
‘I dare not let you go,’ I tell your ear,
and feel your breath draw in. ‘And yet you must’ –
you unclasp my arms as gently as you might
undo the bonds of a prisoner soon to hang –
‘or how can I look a dear friend in the face?’
Your own is plagued by nervousness. ‘The door—’
‘I’ll lock the door,’ I say. ‘Don’t move an inch.’
And you obey, as if the world will fall
should you exhale. There is a chill in you
like you brought the outside inside.
‘You are cold.
You’ve only just arrived?’ I feed the fire
with all the logs there are. ‘That ought to help.
Sit down,’ I say, and offer you the chair,
put right on its feet, while I perch on the bed.
‘Tom, I’m so glad you came. I thought perhaps—’
Though words are what I worship, mine are lame
straight from the mouth, uncrafted. ‘You had said
you wouldn’t come.’
‘That was the safest course.’
Your eyes are troubled. You barely look at me
as though afraid I really am long dead,
a spectral illusion. My own eyes are slaves
to the face I worked so hard to conjure up
that effort erased each feature over time:
they relish and restore to me the slant
of cheek, of neck, of nose, the different hues
within your hair. I wait for your voice, which comes
like a rumble over mountains: ‘Kit, I fear
I put us both in danger being here.’
I reach to take your hand. Cold as a bed
no one has slept in, but the pulse in it
connects me to your heart. ‘But, Tom, you came.
You cast off fear and came. What made you come?’
Twelve weeks without a letter was the start.
And as you told the tale of how you’d sat,
your heart as heavy as a mason’s stone,
at Chislehurst Common, at the crossroads there,
unable to point your horse towards your home,
or spur her to chase a chosen compass point,
my heart rose up to kiss the thought of you
statued by doubt, and every ounce of me
sang that your strange paralysis was love.
The smallest tug of your arm, and you are mine.
You are the puppy suddenly, and I
the master commanding that you kiss my face.
The strangest transformation’s wrought by fear:
you are quite melted, subject to my will.
Though all these thirty months you’ve held like rock
to a separateness, you now consent like snow
consents to its thawing underneath the sun;
consent to let me in, consent we’re one.
So let the fire crackle that perfect hour
when we, again, go deeper now than friends,
swim in our Hellespont, and hope to drown.
FRIEND
You dress yourself; each button carefully
replaced in its hole as though it never left.
The evening lights you coldly, now the fire
has dimmed to embers. It is only six,
just gone, and the house below us thrums halloo
as the hunting set return.
‘Thomas, you said—’
It’s hard to be naked when you’re fully dressed;
I pull my shirt on also. ‘When I left,
you said you couldn’t follow me because
some might suspect your role in it.’
Your boots
are going on now, laces tugged as tight
as a good spy’s cover story. ‘That’s still true.’
I picture the cobbler measuring your calf;
of how you’d talk more easily with him
than you do with me.
I say, ‘But time has passed …’
Your eyes stay with the laces, concentrate:
this notch, that hole, criss-cross. ‘Nothing has changed,’
you say. Then glancing up, ‘We cannot be
together, Kit. You want a dozen whys?
Because you’re dead. Because you’re known in Kent.
Because I have a house and estate to run.
Because what we are sometimes drawn to do
is a capital crime. Because I want a wife—’
You read my eyes and save the other seven.
I’m washed up into tears so easily
that I might be your wife, but for one thing.
‘Sorry.’ You watch the floor as though your words
are spilt on the rug between us. ‘Kit, I swore
I wouldn’t—’
You leave me to fill the line.
I don’t oblige. I concentrate on dressing
to distract me from the tightness in my chest.
As long as I’m turned away from you, you stare:
I feel it hot as a brand upon my skin,
an undisguised desire to drink me in
that slides to the fixtures when I look your way.
I shiver.
‘Come sit by me. It’s warmer here.’
I move as I’m bid. Again, you apologise,
and this time touch my arm. So you’re forgiven.
‘Nobody doubts I’m dead?’
I watch your eyes
rest anywhere but on me, like the bee
that lights from flower to flower. ‘Not nobody.
But mostly, yes, your death is very famous.
More famous than your life was.’ There, a smile
like the sort I knew of old. A tug at me.
I sneeze; the thought of my death is full of cold.
‘But you might safely visit me abroad,
if I’m forced abroad again?’
Your sigh’s released
like old tobacco smoke: ‘It won’t be safe.’
You pick up the poker, stir the dying fire.
‘Kit, I can’t live pretence. For years my job
was setting up secret schemes, devising lies
for others to populate – and I can bite
as hard on my tongue as any man, but not
if I’m in your company. Who are you now?
Will Hall? Louis Le Doux? What if I slip,
one night, in the grip of wine, and call you Kit
in a public place? It only takes one ear,
one English-speaking, sly, take-profit ear
to root through my history and dig you up –
and snap, you’re jigging on a hangman’s rope
and your heart cut out still beating. No, I’ll not
be a part of it. It’s bad enough I’m here
to spend Christmas with you. I should not have come.’
Again, constriction. You, the conjuror
whose words alone can starve me of my breath.
Just one word more, and I might turn to stone.
You prod and poke, and tiny tongues of fire
burst into silent speech, and then subdue.
Somewhere, I find inside of me, your name.
‘Tom—’
‘I believed—’
We stall.
‘You first,’ I say.
But a knock at the door is first. It is a maid
with a supper tray, and wine: ‘Monsieur Petit
said I should bring it for your gentleman.
He said the two of you would dine alone.’
As if he had intruded in the flesh,
all thin-stretched smile and stale obsequious French,
a flicker of annoyance finds me words.
‘Monsieur Petit has overreached himself –
but as it comes, this suits us very well.
The fire is dying also – will you tend it?’
She bobs, and in her smile, the signature
of a private joke unnerves me. She brings wood
stacked up like consequences. When she leaves
we break the bread in silence.
‘What I lost—’
I take a gulp of wine to steel my blood.
Afraid of what is written on my face,
you blurt, ‘Say nothing more. I understand.’
No appetite at all, I watch you chew
until obliged to say it anyway.
‘What keeps me hidden is my love of you.’
You swallow. ‘Then love me constantly,’ you say,
‘if you cannot love yourself.’
‘What’s there to love?’
And I begin the list of all my faults.
And you turn off the faucet with a kiss,
your only weapon.
‘Kit, you must stay hidden.’
There is a quiver in you, in your eyes.
I suddenly understood your presence there
was underwritten not by love, but fear.
You feared that I was breaking. Hence, you came.
And after that, I watched you differently.
As a lover who gifts his mistress beauty’s dress,
but then insists she never take it off.
‘I’m not the only thing that keeps you sane.
You’ve said it yourself before, you live to write.’
A sudden laugh downstairs. All out of time
with our private bartering, yet to my ears
the laugh of the universal gods. ‘I do.
What else do I have but writing? Where my friends
/>
and drinking used to be, or riding down
to the river for a boat, or afternoons
engaged in the playful fare of theatres,
there’s pen and paper and those endless hours
in which to fill it.’
‘You speak bitterly.’
As if to sweeten me, you fill my cup.
Drink loosens resistance. Still I play along
to numb the pain of understanding you.
‘If there were no hope, Tom, I might be restored
to my former life and reputation—’ Here,
my mind lets go and free-falls at the thought,
unable to fill that gaping ‘if’.
‘Oh, Kit,’
you say, and though my name means more than gold,
and to hear you speak it still delights my heart,
that Oh, that empty Oh’s another hole
that can’t arrest my falling.
‘Do you think
I can’t be rescued? I can’t be restored?’
Your eyes, which testify the truth of this,
look anywhere but mine. ‘We worked so hard
to have this lie believed. It isn’t time
to undermine it. They would have you killed.’
‘Who, they?’
‘Archbishop Whitgift and the rest.
Come on, Kit, nothing’s changed. You can’t go back
to the life we’ve buried. There is nothing left.’