Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  The lovely focative sucking over, just this side of emission, she’d let my engine out of her spiced trap – (Mrs Nightwork was a great one for eating garlic and cloves.) Then she’d press my prick to her cheek, which was usually cool as cream. She had a trick of fluttering her eyelashes upon the delicate skin just below the head, where the foreskin puckers, which I found delicious. When at last Jane could see and feel by the uncontrollable spasms that I was past the point of return, irretrievably advanced by all these gorgeous attentions, then she would grab me in her hands and push as much of me as would go into the complicated country of her ear.

  I was smaller in the yard in those days, and she inevitably got it in far enough to satisfy her. Such charged chambers! Such cracks! Such virgin circles! Secret parts! It was like bursting into a sea where no ship had ever thrust. It was like entering an Oriental palace. There were whirls and galleries to that ear, whorls and twirls, windings and turnings, tight spirals, scallops such as I cannot describe. It was like fucking a little labyrinth.

  My thrust and paddle there brought both of us to discharge. I’d have my whole fist stuck between her pumping legs. My thumb up her cunt. She’d shake her head marvellously, as though the hot seed I shot into her ear was like good news from another world.

  This was a curious voluptuousness, and I mention it since it is a facet of human nature to wish to know the most bizarre before encountering the orthodox. I cannot say that I preferred Jane’s ear to her cunt. But it made a change. And for her part, she professed herself weary of men forever grinding away between her thighs, and could not get enough of the Fastolf horn in her ear. She said that it beat listening in shells for the sound of the sea any day. The sound of John Fastolf’s coming must always have been mightier than any ocean – and to hear him coming right in your ear is a treat which has been reserved for some few extremely blessed and well-chosen ladies.

  Ears, though, are the merest prologue to love’s comedy. The rose, the ring, the rudder, the ruff – O, in a word, the cunt. Ah, hey now, there’s the rub! There’s your true comfort, entertainment, pranks and provocation. It makes my tail wag just to think of it. Benedicite!

  And the names that have gone with it. The ladies I have fucked. O Imogen, whose bedchamber I had to enter in a trunk, and who fought like a cat until she found she liked what I wanted to do to her, and ended up fitting a bracelet on my cock to try and keep him in a condition of uprightness all night! O Juliet, whose green young boyfriend Romeo was as ignorant of what to do as you were, until I pushed him off your virgin belly and showed him how to do it! O Perdita, who liked to lie and have the lambkins nibble at your naked crack, until I came and made it wider! O strange Titania, who demanded the use of a donkey’s thing as well as my own! O Beatrice, who liked to whip and be whipped, with the tongue and other instruments of pleasure!

  Life is a shuttle. Follow me. I’ll tell you strange things. Follow. Strange things in hand, dear reader. Follow.

  In my middle life, now, when I was a man you could call a man, this same sword of flesh of mine was a terror to the enemy. In Vaudemont once, bargaining with some dishonest reeve, his daughter chanced to wander through the chamber. A little creature, features like a fairy queen’s, a nymph, with silky black hair neatly braided, a light slippered step. Something about her – something about the innocence and longing mingled in those eyes – something about the incipient swell of her breasts under a piece of Breton lace – something or other, or all of it, so stirred and stung and struck me in the groin that – still arguing with the little lying Frenchman – I loosened my apparel in my chair and let my prick out for a peek at her.

  The girl was startled. A dainty doe. But she was a true daughter of her country. She did not run away from the English milord’s great red throbbing eye cocked out to inspect her charms.

  She came closer, as a matter of fact, fidgeting with withered roses in a bowl, pretending to look elsewhere while watching all the while my erect and attent admirer of her beauty.

  Her father, however, obsequious but shocked, noting the size and usefulness of my tool – for I swear it grew half an inch with every tripping tiptoe step the daughter took towards me, this being an occasion when what with pressure of battles and the other affairs of Mars I had not offered a drop to Venus for two weeks – the miserable father began to jabber away in French at a rascal rate, and grabbed his daughter, and thrust her from the room. Adieu, French velvet!

  I had to spin off my stuff, and conjure my cock down quickly. Drop by drop. The marrow liquored my boots. When the Frenchman came back my codpiece was as crestfallen as a dried pear.

  I learnt later from Basset – who had been an amused witness of the scene – that the upshot of the reeve’s complaint and fear was that the gross enormity and gianthood of the Englishman’s John Thomas would do some murderous injury to his child. These superstitions are of course nonsense – as any decent whore will tell you. (If you don’t have a whore, ask your wife.) For though a man’s member may be as long and as thick and as hard as a truncheon, it always contrives to slide happily into any hole well-oiled, and then to grow again when it has entered and made itself at home. This gift of swelling, shrinking, and then swelling again is one of the grand mysteries by which Dame Nature looks after her own. It is a trick that I have perfected – either by concentration, or by passion, or by Cerne Abbas figs. Or by a mixture or addition of all three. It has stood me in erectile stead on many occasions, when delicacy was required.

  With virgins, though, a different technique is needed. It is no kindness to be slow or gentle with the cracking of a virgin glass. Put a hard pillow under the girl’s buttocks. Get her hot with your tongue and fingers. Suck her nipples. Tickle her button. Then push your lance in an inch – and charge! (It may be as well to give her something to bite on. A diamond necklace works wonders, distracting the mind from the initial inevitable pain. Then, when she begins to enjoy things, the membrane broken, you can always retrieve the diamonds for someone else.)

  With matrons – something else again. Most of them think they know everything. You must presume that their husbands have tried to satisfy them in every way their own imaginations could cook up, after all. So let it be your ambition to bring your older mistress to some cliff-edge of passion which she had not known was there to fall over. Take her upon your knee, and treat her like a naughty little girl. It is quite wonderful, what the simple command –

  ‘Bend over!’

  will do to stimulate the well-worn wife. Slap her bum with the flat of your hand. Hands never really hurt anyone, and she will soon be begging you, ‘Harder! Harder!’ until her posteriors tingle. A useful trick then is to push up your fingers and make them converse with her bum. I did this once with my Mrs Ford of Windsor. She got so excited she tried to trap my hand there for ever. So I slipped two fingers into her back passage, and pulling them in and out soon had her in ecstasies. Naturally, she told her friend Mrs Page. And naturally then she required some of the same treatment. Ever resourceful, I dreamt up a new refinement. After a similar spanking, I inserted my tongue.

  French matrons, in my experience, are not so likely to find these games so novel. But then, half expecting them, they are also more given to washing that particular seat of love, and even to sprinkling some scent up it.

  My prick is a good prick. The times when it has served me a fault I can count on the fingers of one hand. I have noted, by the way, that the more exercise I give it, the more energy it appears to possess in itself. I mean, in these latter years. (For in my young age it was not a question of energy but of trying to find a way to quieten the animal down from his state of perpetual rage! In a London street, or in the environs of the court, he had overweening ambitions then to get up every woman I could see.)

  Hence I abjure those false moralists who say that in old age a man should not indulge in the appetites of the flesh. Dame Milicent, my late wife, caught me one day in the cellar with a servant girl. We were doing it with me leaning back against a
wine-cask, and Ursula, that’s the servant girl, held an inch off the ground on the end of my prong. Next day, Milicent was surprised when Ursula came to her and said that she felt so ashamed she would have to leave. ‘My lady,’ she said, ‘after what you saw in the cellar …’ ‘Don’t be absurd,’ snapped my darling wife. ‘Do you think I mind? It all helps. It all helps. What with you in the cellar, and me in the bedroom, perhaps we can keep the old devil at home between the two of us!’

  Compare what Mrs Quickly said of me at an earlier date:

  ‘In good faith, he cares not what mischief he does, if his weapon be out! He will foin like any devil! He will spare neither man, woman, nor child!’

  (Not strictly speaking true. I can think of men and children I have spared.)

  The world’s my oyster. With this sword I still open it.

  Up, rogue! Stand upon your honour! Lust and luxury. Sinful fire. I am in haste. With a Goliath like this between my legs, who am I to bewail that the pricking capacity of my prong has been blunted or otherwise reduced by the passage of years? The boy is still growing! He has a hunger now for Miranda which if I do not feed it will cause him to batter down the door and spend his honeyseed on the three serving wenches who are about to bring me my mid-day flagons. It is my pleasure, incidentally, to have these girls attend me with their lower portions bare save for a thin silk about the posteriors. In this garb, I can correct them quickly if they err in their manners. It is a refinement I acquired from my classical education. You may recall my tutor Ravenstone and his tales of Trimalchio’s banquet. He told me also of a Roman Empress who kept her slave girls undressed in this way so that there was no impediment to an instant whipping.

  I have done many things with my Jack-a-Dandy. I have lit fires, and put them out. I have made cuckoos, and charmed the birds from the trees. I have tickled little trout and groped for them in a peculiar river. I have found out countries with it. I have picked locks. I have taken treasure. I have pissed tallow and mandrake. I have ploughed. I have plucked. I have possessed. I have procured. I have put down, put in, put to, and put to sea. (Above deck, and under hatches.) I have cracked bonds of chastity. I have fed in dales and mountains. I have lived in ladies’ hearts, died in their laps, and been buried in their eyes. I have discharged upon my hostess of the Boar’s Head tavern. I have dribbled darts of love. I have ferred, and firked, and ferreted, and functioned. I have been cruel with maids, and cut off their heads. I have ridden hobby-horses. I have lusted. I have loved.

  He is a fearless friend and formidable foe. Ladies have been known to faint at the sight of him, but to come round with one eye open and very bright. Thomas, eighth baron Clifford of Clifford, standing beside me once to piss against a wall in Calais, spying my creature out of the corner of his eye, remarked: ‘So that’s how we won at Agincourt!’

  Reader, my friend, my brother, I lay no claim to the possession of a secret weapon. On the contrary, I have opened my heart and my codpiece to you. My pubic matter is now public knowledge.

  Of the particular amorous adventures of my fellow I shall have more to record in the course of these memorials. The purpose of this disquisition of a prick is not to recount adventures, but to offer a simple inventory of my closest friend and most significant part.

  I tell him that it’s rude to point. But he won’t listen. He is a deaf brute, and a hard man. There it is.

  It occurs to me that if I didn’t have secretaries and couldn’t write with my own hand, here is the ideal instrument with which to tell my story. Take it that this penal gentleman is writing. He is certainly the one who is talking. From the first of my Hundred Days he has been talking his head off.

  The pen is mightier than the sword. The penis is mightier than the pen.

  No doubt this is the first record of a man’s life ever to tell some of the true aspects of it which I am telling.

  Vile worm.

  But this is the short and the long of it.

  The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.

  Up, gentlemen. You shall see sport anon. Follow me, gentlemen. (And ladies too – I promise you some penetrating prose!)

  May I never spit white again if this isn’t the first record of a man’s life to be written by his prick.

  Chapter Forty-One

  How Sir John Fastolf fell in love with a lady of London

  Whitsunday

  Love. Love is a villain. You love sack, and so do I; would you desire better sympathy? Is there better sympathy? Fr Brackley tells me so. In love the heavens themselves do guide the state. Angels must be made of love. The seraphim and cherubim, and thrones, in the first circle; the dominions and virtues and powers, in the second circle; the principalities and archangels, and then the ordinary common or guardian angels, in the third circle. Abdiel, Gabriel, Michael, Raguel, Raphael, Simiel, Uriel. The seven holy angels. Love, all made of love. Of course, there are knotty points about angels. But then there are tangles in love down here. Utrum Angelus moveatur de loco ad locum transeundo per medium? God knows. Or maybe St Thomas Aquinas, who was a doctor of angels.

  Love. I do not underestimate it, madam. Nothing else is, in the last analysis. That great member of mine which occupied the last chapter – nothing, nothing at all, merest nothing, without love. Just a muscle, sir.

  Henry VI may owe me ten thousand pounds. His father owed me a million. I do not exaggerate. Hal owed me his love. His love was worth a million.

  As for my foining aforementioned. I am not such a gross of hypocrites as to claim that it was all for love. But that part of it which was, was surely justified? Love is too young to know what conscience is. Eros is a great little god, and Venus my lovely gossip.

  In the early days of my first time in London – not long after I came to the city – it was my foul good fortune to fall in love. The depth of this love into which I fell was deep, though not as bad as Leander’s. I mean, I did not drown in it. But it was deep enough, and bad enough, and good enough, and true enough, and while the ferocious, sweet fever lasted I believed it to be at once the best and the worst thing in the world, now spinning me up to the stars, now dragging me down to the gutters. And once I was out of it I resolved never again to venture into such regions.

  But we have no choice in the matter. Love and death are strange sisters, and they choose us. Barbarous sisters, sisters from a foreign country, a land that has never yet nor ever will be discovered perhaps. O enigmatic sisters, spare me. It crosses my mind that all my desire is desire for death. Death is that lost continuity which I – I, I, I, myself sometimes, shuffling, hedging, lurching, discontinuous – long for. I am a man. Define me by my mortality. By the incompleteness implicit in my passions. It would be an irrelevance to imagine existence without these passions. Celibates dwell as much upon them as do whores and strumpets. Celibates probably think more lust than wantons do. At the same time, don’t I modify my mortality by this need for the infinite, by my nostalgia for death? How can I feel nostalgia for what I have never known? I don’t know; but I do. And then I find it most convenient and easy to celebrate death in voluptuousness, in acts and actures, in the amorous rite. I exorcise myself in my beloved. And in that deed of darkness I have often found that I am gaining more than I am losing – that lechery is only a foretaste of ecstasy. O unreasoning fury – and here I am trying to reason with you! At the root of love I discover a lust for disorder, violence, and indignity. Is my thirst for the grave? Woman is death, or the way to die, then. She is certainly the only cure for life.

  I revisit my confusions of that state, I see.

  Truth to tell, I can mention the matter now with scarcely a twinge of pain in the right kneecap – but it still remains my task to set this down among less honourable pursuits. (Honour! But I’ll come to honour.)

  I have recorded, when all is said and done, my first adventures of the flesh with my stepsister Ophelia, and my later encounters with those flashy creatures poor Mr Shallow insisted upon knowing (to the best of his limited ability) as
bona-robas. It is only fair, then, to confess that on just one occasion in my youth I fell so low as to love where I would lust.

  The curious thing I have to tell you is that I never knew the lady’s name. I saw her three times. Three apparitions. In St Botolph’s, Shoreditch, just beyond the Bishop’s Gate in London Wall.

  The first time I saw her I had entered the church by mistake, taking a wrong turn when pursued by the watch, and stopping a moment in that painted peace when I realised the place was empty save for myself and one other. St Botolph’s was a lovely church. A picture-book of the Faith. Windows, paintings, gilded statues. All telling the one story.

  The other person in the church was a lady all in blue, who knelt before a statue of the Virgin, and did not look up as the door slammed shut behind me, or show by the slightest movement of her head that she heard my footsteps as I walked slowly through the candled gloom.

  My idea had been to leave St Botolph’s by a side-door, thus making doubly sure that the watch did not get scent of me again. But something in this lady kneeling made me stop. I slipped behind a pillar and waited patiently for her to finish her prayers, hoping that when she had done so she might pass by me on her way to the great door.

  Deo gratias, she did.

  I think I never saw a face so beautiful. There was a light about it. A radiance. A glory. Her cheek-bones were high and her brow as white as snow. Her eyes were blue and bright. Her face a perfect oval. She looked straight ahead as she walked and gave no gesture which would betray that she had the slightest suspicion I might be behind the pillar. She had this straight, shy look which I find difficult to describe.

  I cleared my throat. I wanted to speak to her. To exchange a greeting. To make some comment on the beauty and the peace of that hallowed ground. Something. Anything. But my tongue would not move.