‘You took your time,’ she said.
‘I came,’ was all I said, ‘nearly every night I came, though you didn’t know it.’
‘I knew it.’
The night-moths knew it too – and every owl between Stratford and Shottery.
‘And I’ve thought about nothing else,’ I said, ‘nothing but you.’
‘What did you expect me to do? Throw open my windows, hang down from the balcony? Shout to all the world, “Where are you, Will? Come up and take me!”The normal thing would be to call.’
‘Is love normal?’ I said. ‘Is love easy? I thought it was a madness. That’s what it feels like.’
‘So you love me.’
I’d said it. There was no going back.
‘I loved my father, Will.’
Her voice was very low.
‘But I’ve laid more than my father to rest today. My eldest brother will run the house now, and with a wife of his own. From today Hewlands has its mistress and my stepmother sits in state. My own mother is in that grave with my father. I’m twenty-six years old and single. They all have their lives back there, and their futures. I’m alone. Alone in the world.’
I took a deep breath. As men do when they get ready for the big speech. The one they make for the first time. But I couldn’t find my tongue. So I reached out instead and lifted her veil, slowly as if she were a bride. A bride in black. There was a single teardrop glittering on her eyelash. I fingered it off gently and tasted her pain. Sweet. O, you should not rest between the elements of air and earth but you should pity me. I cupped her face in my hands, fed on her eyes, her forehead, her lips; drank deep from the imagined goblet of her mouth. Still we hadn’t kissed. She looked straight back at me, whispering, barely even breathing the words.
‘I know…’
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine. With sweet musk-roses. And with eglantine.
‘Take me. Show me.’
A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know. Feed where thou wilt, graze on my lips, stray lower where the pleasant fountains lie, round rising hillocks, sweet bottom grass – and bush obscure and rough. These blue-veined violets whereon we lean never can blab, nor know not what we mean. Then be my deer, since I am such a park. No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.
I followed her to that thyme-blown bank and we stood and looked at one another – and she sighed and kissed me hard, as hard as if she plucked up kisses by the roots that grew upon my lips. They were end-of-the-world kisses, and they took the reason prisoner. I’d gone into the forest of Arden, into the wild wood, into her wild mouth. And I’d never be seen again.
16
Like a unicorn. Like a unicorn under a spell, I followed Anne Hathaway into these woods. The virgin had me by the horn and Venus was cupping the balls. As fresh as yesterday, that bank where the wild thyme blew, and the memory still be green. There she laid me down, took my head between her hands and swooped on me – like a falcon falling on some wild thing that fluttered on my mouth. Her frantic hands were busy tearing at both our clothes. Bodice and doublet, belt and girdle, boots and bonnet, shirt and gown, stomacher, stockings, shoes – a black cataract of garments cascading to the grass. Adam and Eve emerging at last out of death’s linen chrysalis to embrace nakedness and guilt. While high over Snitterfield God came strolling in his coat of clouds, drawing close, peering and prying, eyebeams slanting like swords of sunlight through the chequered net of leaves.
Out bobbed those glorious boobs – like two kittens suddenly born and bewildered and eager for play. Pussy at the well was a mere memory now, no more, Marian’s nipples lost among icicles and the sound of Dick roaring like the Snitterfield bull. Here at last was the awesome orb. And its terrible twin. And two wild strawberries perched with shocking availability on those excitingly white and shivering swinging things. I touched the right one with my left hand and felt it slide and glide through my fingers like some strange virgin substance newly created, foreign, fluid, firm. I marvelled at how quickly her nipples swelled and hardened, responsive to the touch of digits, teeth, and tongue. Ovid had not warned me about this. What else had he kept back? I took a big breath, sat up, and stared straight down at what lay in the grass before me.
A head thrown back with shuttered eyes and open mouth like a saint in ecstasy. A river of hair waving among dim violets and twisted eglantine. The dramatic curves of waist and hips (oh, those buttercup-crushing buttocks!) and the dark cave of the navel attracting and arresting my eye with maddening brevity as it sped on downwards to take in the long strong thighs and calves, lightly covered with down that glowed like golden fire. Up again then from those funny little toes and hardened heels all the way up the lovely ladder of her life’s history, the cuts and scars of childhood, the sobs and bruises whose records would stay with her till death, ingrained in her flesh, all the long anatomical return to that most stirring of all sights.
O, glorious pubes! The ultimate triangle, whose angles delve to hell but point to paradise. Let me sing the black banner, the blackbird’s wing, the chink, the cleft, the keyhole in the door. The fig, the fanny, the cranny, the quim – I’d come close to it now, this sudden blush, this ancient avenue, the end of all odysseys and epic aim of life, pulling at my prick now, pulling like a lodestone.
Anne Hathaway’s cow-milking fingers, cradling my balls in her almond palm, now took pity on the poor anguished erection, and in the infinite agony of her desire, guided it to the quick of the wound. At the same time I searched wildly with the fingers of my left hand, groping blind as Cyclops, found the pulpy furred wetness, parted the old lips of time and slipped my middle finger into the sancta sanctorum. It welcomed me with soft sucking sounds, syllables older than language, solace lovelier than words. She pulled my hand away, positioned the prick, slid her buttocks deep into the grass, raised her thighs back high, crossed her legs behind my back, dug her heels into my spine and hauled at me savagely and hard. I fell into her.
It was exhilarating, to be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space. But Anne Hathaway was a cruel queen. Her calves crushed my ribs, her crossed heels digging in hard, drawing me in deeper. She responded with those cries that men long to hear, the sweet deep moaning sounds that echo the sigh of oceans, the ebb and flow of fields, the sough of stars. So we drank from one another, clung together on the ship we’d made of ourselves, breasting the irrelevance of time.
All around us nature joined in: the sky-spearing oaks, the dragonflies poised like purple pricks, raping the air, flies fucking on the wing, insects gendering on stones, on the currents of the tumbling streams, the birds lechering endlessly among the leaves – even the sperm-spurting thistles sending the milky froth sliding like spittle back down their long hairy stems. Only the cattle were quiet, out in the fields, though the bull ruminated rape.
Streamers of heat lashed my back and shoulders and far beneath me now the body of Anne Hathaway began to rage and founder in the rising foam as I clung like a mariner to her heaving haunches, the deep keel of her backbone dipping and lifting through July, through the green surge of growth, till at last the moment came when some colossal wave flung her up high, and I held on for my life, and she screamed loud and long. Then O! then O! then O! my true love said and I felt death go through her. Our vessel ran shuddering onto the rocks, a wave of wetness ran through us, the air was rent with screams and I became aware that the bank on which we lay drenched and grounded was journey’s end, love’s end, the very sea-mark of our utmost sail.
I woke to find myself lying stranded, beached on my back, my head to one side, looking straight into it, the breach in nature. The legs were wide apart, just as I’d left them when I’d slipped out and rolled over in the shallows. The cunt gaped like a wounded fruit and the seeds of being were pouring from the core and into the shaggy crack between the pollinated buttocks, as if wild flowers would now spring from her cleft, the keyhole
to Canaan, oozing milk and honey.
But what was this sorrow stealing over me now? This strange sadness taking hold? Was this really the promised land, this inflamed wound leaking frog-spawn and snail-slime, turning ugly in my eyes?
‘O, Will, what hast thou done? Will, Will…’
It was Anne’s voice, not God’s. And her hand in my hand. And her deflowered body bestriding mine. And her cock-caressing, ball-brushing fingers twisting wild flowers round my poor ruined prick, to make it wild once more, to make it flower again, Titania twisting woodbine through my pubes.
‘Anne hath a way with her hands, I see.’
And yes, I had risen and she was straddling me again, her hair lost in the blaze of the sky, her face one with the sun. And after a brief brutal thrusting she made me come again and was heavy and fulfilled on me, her locks soaking wet and her loins still at last under my spread hands.
The sun ticked round the sky.
‘Well, you’ve had your will of me.’
Her voice was sleepy and smiling in my shoulder.
‘And you’ve had your Will.’
‘Yes, I’ve had my Will in me. And will he not come again?’
‘No, no, he is dead.’
For the rest of the day anyway.
‘But where there’s a will –’
‘Anne hath a way.’
Anne Hathaway.
When she stood up to gather her clothes I noticed a head of honeysuckle sticking to her left flank. Held there by pressure and perspiration. I picked it off, kissed the cheek it had imprinted, sniffed the bloom and stowed it away in my jerkin. An emblem of our fuck among the flowers, balmy symbol of the fidelity we were about to swear. I have it still, long withered. Its fragrance gone. Like the love we knew that day. Like that day itself. That can never come again.
17
Thus began the long summer of ’82. We pressed every flower of the season under the wet weight of our one flesh and they winked at our wooing, whispering their names to us as we lay long hours with our faces close to theirs – tickle-my-fancy, pink-of-my-John, purple-love’s-wound, love-dew-in-milk. She sat on the prick of noon and we made the night-snail gallop, grow wings, and fly. We claimed kinship with crickets, were on nodding terms with nettles. We wore out the summer constellations, saw the Great Square of Pegasus soaring out of the fields, like a colossus, bestraddling September.
‘Do you love me, Will?’
And yes, she was the wonder of the world. Yes, I loved her.
Yet even so.
‘Will.’
‘Yes, Anne?’
‘Tell me again.’
‘Tell you what?’
‘What it is to love.’
‘Why again?’
‘You tell it so well.’
‘It is to be all made of sighs and tears. It is to be all made of faith and service. It is to be all made of fantasy, all made of passion, and all made of wishes. And so am I for you.’
‘And I for you.’
‘Forever and a day.’
‘Will you come and see me tomorrow, Will?’
‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’
But when September ended, the bloody banner did not unfurl between Anne’s much opened legs. There was still no show by October. I began to wish it away, this little blind guest in her belly, blocking the door. Sunday after Sunday swept by, like a rush of wings, ever faster, ever darkening. Sunday the eleventh, Sunday the eighteenth, Sunday the twenty-fifth of November.
Finally Anne said, ‘There can be no banns called from Advent to Epiphany. You have to do something before the second day of December.’
So on that Monday morning I told my father just before breakfast. He looked at me across the unlaid table.
‘Well, well, so you’re going to make a grandfather of me. About time, I reckon. Half a century is a long wait. And she’s a good lass. Good family.’
I nodded. What did I care about her family? He gave one of his little laughs. There was no beer for him to chuckle into. Or Dick Hathaway to give the wink.
‘We didn’t think it was gloves you were making with her at Shottery.’
And that was all he said.
After he’d gone up to tell my mother she came out and stood on the stairs, looking down at me, unspeaking. I never knew what was in that look. No reproach. A certain sadness, but not directed at me. At life, perhaps. But my father was all practical prattle. That’s what he was good at.
‘St Andrew’s Day is, let’s see, the last day of the month. This is the twenty-sixth. Tomorrow we’ll go to Worcester. We’ll have you wed by the end of the month. Failing that, on the first day of the last month. Jesu, I wish old Dick were here!’
So on the twenty-seventh day of November a small party made for Worcester, to the diocesan court, to obtain from Bishop John Whitgift a special licence to marry. ‘Special, yes, but not entirely unheard of,’ my father said. Henry Heicroft, vicar of Stratford, had been married after only one declaration of the banns instead of the usual three, finding himself and his lady friend in sudden need of such a licence. The lady in question was well known in Stratford. She was called Emme Careless. Whether she was or wasn’t, she became Mistress Heicroft. And became him well. Anne Hathaway was to become Mistress Shakespeare.
The party that went to Worcester consisted of myself and my father and two Shottery farmers, Fulk Sandell and John Richardson, friends of the late Richard Hathaway. They provided a bond for forty pounds, indemnifying the bishop against any proceedings that might conceivably arise from our hurried marriage. We never saw the recipient of those forty pounds, the bishop himself. The bond was accepted by the Chancellor, the Registrar, and by the clerk of the consistory court, who also asked for a written allegation containing the reasons that pressed us into this sudden notion of matrimony. And for a signed statement from my parents, swearing that there was no impediment to the marriage by way of consanguinity or any pre-contractual arrangement.
It was all a far cry from Ovid and a little embarrassing. I needn’t have worried. The clerk of court was a tired old cipher who paid little attention to his scribble. But his scratching did the business. A licence was issued to allow the banns, which were called once, on the last day of November. I heard with a mixture of bewilderment, detachment, and disbelief that two parties, a certain William Shakespeare of Stratford and an Anne Hathaway of Shottery were to be married. Who were these people?
On the first day of December we took the old west road from Shottery and made for Temple Grafton church where John Frith was vicar. On the way there we met a shepherd from Red Hill.
‘Wouldn’t get wed there if I was you folks.’
‘Why not?’
‘Considered unsound in his religion, is old Frith. He’s on the list, you know.’
‘What list is that, then?’
‘Government list. Runs an old-style church, you know.’
‘Nice quiet church, though,’ my father suggested. ‘Nicely out of the way. Nice quiet ceremony. Nothing much wrong with that. Nothing much wrong with Frith either, if you ask me.’
‘Careful, John,’ grumbled old Henry. ‘Walsingham could be shitting in a thicket for all you know. Wouldn’t be blabbing your opinions on the open road.’
The shepherd persisted.
‘Blind old bungler, friend Frith – take it from me, knows more about birds than bible. Some kind of hawk doctor.’
This impressed Henry the other way.
‘Well now, God knows his birds, don’t he? Scripture says there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’
The shepherd shook his slow old head.
‘Don’t know anything about that. But I do know there’s a good strong Protestant priest in Stratford, Heycroft’s your man, and I know as I wouldn’t get wed by John Frith. How could you even be sure you was married by the end of it?’
There was something in what the old fellow said. Frith mumbled and stumbled his way through the ceremony with a sort of cidery benevolence. He
then assured us we were married – and might he toast us on the path of life with a glass of primrose wine? Under his simple roof.
‘Uncommon good wine to be got out of the primroses here at Temple Grafton – and that wine is a miracle of Cana, let me tell you, for the curing of sick hawks. It’s wasted on men.’
And he took my father off under my mother’s cloudy frown, Uncle Henry too, cups in hand, to examine the kinds of birds he was wise in curing.
The women hovered like bees about the queenly Anne of the pouting belly. Left alone for a moment I wandered outside to stand at Frith’s gable-end and look down the long view southwest to the Cotswolds. Wondering what lay ahead of me on the path, with or without its primroses, culled by virgins, quaffed by drunkards, sipped by fallen hawks.
And then we went home, into a tiny Henley Street bedroom that black December night and huddled together between freezing white sheets. There were no carousals to the conquest of Anne’s assaulted maidenhead. Nobody undressed me and brought me legless to bed to bray the triumph of Priapus. No one sewed up our sheets to delay the moment of midnight nuptials. We lay sexlessly, craving the blank of sleep.
It was broken by brass voices.
If thou dost break her virgin knot before all sanctimonious ceremonies may with full and holy rites be ministered, no sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall to make this contract grow, but barren hate, sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew the union of your bed with weeds so loathly that you shall hate it both. Therefore take heed, as Hymen’s lamps shall light you.
Will Page 16