by WALL, ALAN
My view had by now become defined, dogmatic: the man from Stratford had not written the works attributed to Shakespeare. That doltish-looking maltster and usurer from Warwickshire, without a book in his will, whose daughter remained illiterate all her life, and of whom no mention was made at the time of his death as having written a single word, could simply not have composed this body of work more brimful with life and learning than any other that’s ever been created. As early as 1728 Captain Goulding had spoken derisively of the army of chuckle-headed historians who would have been required to supply William Shakespeare with all his necessary data. He had once done some acting, certainly, and picked up a fair amount of the equity in one or two theatres. He had even assisted Marlowe in a few early pieces. But I could see more and more clearly that Shakespeare wasn’t who he was supposed to be. It had confused many, at the time even the man’s own contemporaries. Ben Jonson obviously thought he was the author of the works ascribed to him, but then, if the secret had been well enough kept, why shouldn’t he have done? Jonson wasn’t in the room with him when the plays were being written. After all, the queen had thought Anthony Blunt merely a scholarly and patriotic old curator until someone had whispered in her ear about his decades as a Soviet spy. She’d seen him more often than Jonson ever saw Shakespeare. People can be other than we think. This would also explain why the Warwickshire man didn’t carouse much, but tended, by report, to stay alone at his lodgings most nights. Best keep yourself largely to yourself and thus keep out of danger from any detailed questioning.
No, it had been Marlowe all along. The dead man had written the words, using the living one as his mask. Thomas Walsingham had facilitated the deception and Thomas Thorpe of St Paul’s Churchyard had been sworn to secrecy for his part in the production. And there were, of course, two other people who knew all about it: Walter Ralegh and Thomas Hariot. Now I found more clues whenever I opened up the Collected Works. I could seldom read more than six or seven lines without cryptograms starting to emerge. Here, for example, was one of the sonnets:
… nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence
As victors of my silence.
Whole books had been written trying to establish the identity of the rival poet mentioned here. But for the classically minded, as Marlowe undoubtedly was, there was another way of writing the word William: Guilliam. And that’s the way it is written on the memorial in the church at Stratford-upon-Avon. Guilliam. The gull. Also the victor of Kit’s silence, since he was the one who reaped the worldly rewards due to the other.
As I turned the pages of my notebooks, I realised that I had been edging towards this recognition for a long time, even when I’d had no idea where I was going. There was this entry from years before:
Hamlet’s the first modern figure in drama or fiction for a very simple reason: the further he delves into the past the more of a catastrophe he becomes, the more he questions his own identity. His ancestors in the genre would simply have taken their cue for revenge and got on with it, but the burden of the past settles on to Hamlet’s soul like a shrieking monkey. He takes revenge instead on himself; he finds it impossible to see how he could put things right. And he doesn’t, does he? He makes things worse. He retreats into a labyrinth of self-examination. He damages everyone around him before he finally gets to Claudius, and a few minutes later almost anyone of any interest is dead. Then the stage is inherited by Fortinbras – about the nearest we get to a fascistic automaton before the invention of fascism itself.
But Hamlet’s the first figure of modernity for another reason too: the possibility of suicide is the very condition of his thought. Self-extinction is the only clear exit from his dilemma. His own power, in other words, cannot resolve the fractured world he finds himself inhabiting; or it can do it only by turning against himself. Seconds after the poisoned sword has been poked into his flesh, it is in his hand being wielded against others – it’s almost as though it was always in his hand, as though the others were vicarious exponents of his own search for an exit. He is liberated into action only by his mother’s death, a death she has brought on by her own sexual infatuation. It is as though he has committed suicide by using someone else’s hand.
The more he finds out what’s really happened in the past, the more trouble Hamlet’s in and the less sense he can make of it. Isn’t the same true of the School of Night? Four hundred years on and we still don’t know how or why Marlowe died in Deptford that day. Or even if he did. Some might say that it’s hardly surprising we don’t know: it was four hundred years ago. But this could be reversed. We’ve had four centuries to think about it and ponder it and weigh up the evidence. If we haven’t come to a firm conclusion by now, what hope is there of establishing what went on a mere forty years ago? You can understand the judicial employment of torture, in a way. It’s an aspect of the State’s exasperation: will you, for God’s sake or the devil’s, just tell us what actually happened? If not, we’ll have to question you to the full. The scraping of the conscience, it was called back then.
I bought the papers for a few weeks, something I had stopped doing since leaving the BBC. Maybe I’d felt a little let down by the news after performing such sterling service on its behalf for so many years. But now I scanned the headlines with my old expertise. The story about the collapse of Arborfield emerged first in the financial sections, but made it finally on to the news pages. There was much talk of junk bonds, of a change of mood in the US regulatory bodies, a new intolerance in regard to asset-stripping and high-yield refinancing. It was hard to divide the politics from the economics, but then I suppose it always is. Arborfield had certainly not helped its own case by the nature of its expansion into South America at precisely the time that the dubious logging industry down there was coming under scrutiny for its potentially catastrophic environmental effects. They had been cavalier in this regard, though, as far as I could see, no more so than most of their competitors. One or two of the papers carried a picture of Gerry, with a caption saying that after a few days in prison he had been released on bail. And there was an occasional mention of Gerry’s partner, the English tycoon Daniel Pagett, who had also been guaranteed to make a fortune had their scheme actually come off. He, it was thought, had left the country, but no one knew where he had gone. His own companies elsewhere were all in liquidation.
During this news trawl I also noticed something else. Henry Willoughby, late of my Oxford college, had been charged with spying. It seemed that Henry had become so disillusioned with the British secret service, which he had served mostly in Northern Ireland, that he had toddled along to the Russian embassy in London one night and popped a list of his fellow agents through the door. He had been drunk: like so many famous English spies before him, he was an alcoholic. The Russians had been convinced that an attempt to contact them characterised by such blatant ineptitude had to be a set-up. They had complained to the British authorities and Henry had been caught the following week. Then it had also transpired that the figure I had known at Oxford had not been entirely what he’d seemed. The Anglo-Catholic with the upper-class accent had a few years before been a working-class boy in a council house. He had, said the authorities, always had some difficulty in blending his different personae.
One evening I walked down to the King’s Road. There were notices in the windows and on the door of the Pavilion, but it was still open; figures were walking in and out; I could even make out one or two yellow suits inside the foyer, but I didn’t dare go in. Instead I went along to Markham Square and knocked on Charlie’s door.
‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Mr Tallow.’
‘Hello, Charles,’ I said. ‘Keep your voice down, will you?’
‘Ah, staying out of harm’s way, are we? I did note your somewhat speedy departure from the scene. Come in and have a drink.’ And as I walked through his elegant hallway, hung with watercolours, and into his kitchen, he turned to me and smiled.
‘Keepin
g a low profile, Sean?’
‘Exactly, Charlie. You have put it with characteristic succinctness.’ He poured me a glass of chilled white wine and then he explained, with the expertise gained from his profession, how the receiver had evidently decided that the best way to attempt to liquidate the portion of debt accrued by Davenant’s was to keep the business going, which they were endeavouring to do.
‘They did drive off in Mr Pagett’s nice sports car. Mind you, it needed a wash by then. Daniel was always so fastidious about it too. I did get the feeling they’d love to have a chat with you though.’
‘I’m not here, Charlie, all right? I’m not anywhere.’
‘I spend half my life pouring drinks for chimeras, so let me refill yours. Do you remember the Dong?’ he said meditatively, looking out of the French windows into his neat little garden.
‘The Dong?’
‘He was a poet, so I’m told anyway. Used to sit over in the corner of the Pavilion on a Friday evening. Nose glowed with forty years’ straight whisky. If there’d ever been a power cut, he could have charged you lot utility rates. Had a young chap there with him last week, a nephew or something, who informed me he was about to go to Scotland for three months. To stay in a remote castle, on some new course of therapy specifically designed to discover the inner self.
‘I told him I’d discovered my inner self years ago, without too much effort being required. Found it repellent, quite frankly, a ceaseless whine of appetite and mawkish blather, yearning for the womb all over again, so I reverted immediately to the outer self, where I’ve been more than happy to remain ever since. Why do you think people are so hard on repression these days? It is, after all, the only thing that makes life amongst us even halfway tolerable.’
‘I never thought of you as particularly repressed, Charlie, I must say.’
A photograph had caught my eye and I went across to peer at it. Charles was standing in his morning suit outside a church, and beside him in her bridal gear was a figure I was sure I recognised from years before. I looked more closely.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said, ‘it’s Becky Southgate.’
‘And what are you doing there?’
‘Marrying her.’
‘You married Becky Southgate?’
‘Oh, don’t sound quite so disapproving, Sean.’
‘You told me she was a hysteric and a liar.’
‘You didn’t see her at her best that evening. I mean, she could get a bit worked up from time to time, but to be fair she was never a liar.’
‘So Comrade Protheroe and the Disciplinary Committee were right after all?’
‘I think even Becky came to see that she’d overreacted to what is, when all’s said and done, a pretty traditional way for a man to express his physical admiration for a woman. In some cultures it’s the required first step in a courtship ritual. It’s thought very rude if you don’t put your hand there.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought that Becky would have been very keen on marriage.’
‘She wasn’t, but her father was. And Becky did love her old daddy.’
‘So what happened?’
‘She found after a while that she didn’t believe in marriage after all. Well, not to me anyway. We got divorced.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Tell me something: does it strike you as a realistic condition of life, Sean, to ask a man to stick to one pair of breasts? I mean, you say “I will” on some misty Saturday morning and then that’s it for ever. Just the one pair.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘How many pairs do you have access to these days?’
‘None.’ He pondered this for a moment, then looked at me intently, his bony features quizzical and quirky. ‘Are you suggesting we should try to average it out? Decide if three pairs a year at one stage of your life really justifies having no pairs at all at another? Is that what you’re getting at? A sort of statistical approach to the mammary question?’
‘I don’t know, Charlie, but I suppose it might be one way of looking at things, don’t you think? How long have you had this flat, out of interest?’
‘My old man passed this on, pausing only to pass on himself first. I should be grateful. In fact, I am grateful, believe it or not. What have you inherited, Sean?’
‘A snooker cue.’
‘Do you play snooker?’
‘No.’
We walked out into his trim and tiny garden. The liquefying throb of a blackbird’s song seemed to moisten the evening air.
‘Do you know what that noise is, Sean?’
‘Joy?’
‘Territoriality, I’d say. Thank God the little buggers aren’t armed.’
2
How quickly months turn into years. Come to think of it, I really didn’t miss being employed by my old friend Dan all that much. I suppose I so easily fit in with the conditions wherever I find myself, not wishing to commit any of the capital sins against time or to push against rivers, but I did wonder now and then what had happened to him. For some reason I simply couldn’t bring myself to call Sally. One day I walked along the towpath between Hampton Court and Kingston and stood opposite Thames Ditton. I knew, even before the new people stepped out on to the lawn, that the Pagetts didn’t live there any more. Down in that cellar I tried hard to think things over, but nothing made much sense, so I simply kept on with my work on the Shakespeare mystery, following my tutor’s priceless advice to spend the rest of my life studying the School of Night. At times I felt I was beginning to disappear inside my own cryptographia, which is perhaps understandable. Shakespeare’s text, after all, is not a stable thing. The folio edition of Henry V says, unequivocally, in regard to Falstaff’s death: ‘For his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields’, whereas today any edition will read: ‘for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and ’a babbled of green fields.’ Such being the present principles of emendation, which shift with vertiginous force from century to century. We’ve always changed the Shakespeare text at will to suit our latest preconceptions.
After the chemical wedding comes the dissolution of forms, darkness and eclipses. She’s an elusive one, Lady Alchymia. I remembered once reading how Richard Pryor, while attempting to freebase crack cocaine in his basement, had suffered first-degree burns when his equipment exploded. Disreputable alchemists were still locked in their cellars searching for the veins of gold.
One night, as I was closing up after treating myself to an hour on one of the beds, I called Dominique on an impulse. I wasn’t even sure if she’d still be at the same address.
‘Where the hell did you go, Sean?’
‘Not far.’
‘You took your time letting us know.’
‘I’m sure you all survived.’
‘One of us won’t survive much longer, though.’
‘Don’t understand.’
‘Dan’s sick, Sean. Very sick. Come over for dinner tomorrow and I’ll tell you about it.’
The next evening we sat eating pasta and drinking red wine, as though the years that had passed between us had altered nothing. Except for little hints, italic lines about Dominique’s eyes, flecks of grey scattered through the ringlets. She looked as though the transference had finally started working and now she really was receiving the sorrows of fractured hearts from the other side.
‘You look better than I’ve ever seen you,’ she said. ‘You should have introduced yourself to daylight earlier.’ I didn’t tell her that all my sunshine came from underground.
And then as we ate she spoke of Dan.
‘He’s had radiotherapy and chemo, but it can’t be long. He’s a sorry sight, Sean, to be honest. I can’t remember the names now but there are three sorts of tumour that affect the brain and he’s got the big one. He’d like to see you, I know that. But you’d better make it sooner rather than later.’ And she gave me the address and telephone number.
‘Ramsgate?’ I said, baffled.
‘Don’t ask me. He’s ba
nkrupt, of course. The big house they had on the Thames was taken and Ramsgate’s where they ended up. Maybe he’d put some money in his wife’s name.’
‘Sally,’ I said quietly.
‘That’s right, Sean. Your old girlfriend, Sally.’
‘You got quite close to Dan, didn’t you?’
‘He’d told me he was getting divorced. I don’t make a habit of screwing up other people’s marriages.’
‘I thought you hated him.’
‘No, I never hated him. It’s hard not to be fascinated by a man like that, isn’t it? You always were.’
‘Was he a good lover, out of interest?’
‘No better than you. Different, but no better.’ I found it hard to believe her.
‘You never told me I was a good lover.’
‘You never asked. You never told me whether I rated much either.’
‘You were the only one I’d ever had, so I didn’t have anything to compare you with.’
* * *
The next day I called and Sally answered. Her voice was subdued.
‘Nice to hear from you, Sean. We thought you’d vanished off the face of the earth. Dan’s not too good today or he’d come to the phone himself. Could you travel down at the weekend? It’s only a couple of hours on the train.’
I stared out of the window all the way from Victoria, and when I arrived I walked about for half an hour, along the coastal road, before I managed finally to direct my feet to the house. Ramsgate. Despite the new marina, the place felt as though out-of-season winds had blown away the heart of it some decades before. Like so many English seaside towns, it had lost the will to continue. The stucco that remained on its old houses was peeling from the walls and the facias of the new shops and fast-food dives were just as tawdry, newer maybe, but equally dismal. It felt like a place that no one actually came to any more; these days everyone merely passed through. It was a transit camp beside the grey, unlovely swill of the Channel. The few amusement arcades bleated disconsolately as unsmiling children rammed coins into their slots. What on earth was Daniel Pagett doing here?