Comedy B – has a young man broken up in a wrestling match, after which a banished duke’s daughter flees for her life into a forest inhabited by lions.
Comedy C – has a woman framed and near to death, after which, as a prelude to a wedding feast, we are offered the promise of brave tortures.
Comedy D – has a sexually blackmailed nun whose brother is thrown into prison.
Comedy E – takes place in a space of contracted time between sunrise and sundown, when an old man, searching for his lost son is condemned to execution.
Comedy F – the most putrid with the smell of sinful humanity, offers us a leitmotif of Jew-baiting, while we wait to have the flesh ripped out from around the heart of a bankrupt merchant.
Christina paused here. She omitted a line and, on the next, she wrote:
Funny peculiar, or funny ha ha?
She omitted another line, after which she went on:
And another thing. The Comedies are much more okay these days than the Tragedies, because they are much more okay about women. They appreciate that women make up half the human race. There are more women among the dramatis personae and the women are allowed to speak. Not just to speak, but to contradict, initiate and utter smutty wisecracks in the presence of the male sex. Some of them are even blatantly otherwise, such as the beautiful Olivia.
At school, you get told that Olivia falls in love with Viola by mistake. But the more you look at the play the more you know it’s not a mistake. Viola may be dressed up like George Sand at the time, but all her body language is screaming XX chromosomes. And wouldn’t you be a lesbian if you were the beautiful Olivia? If your brother and your father had gone and died on you and left you to the mercies of your only surviving male relation? Sir Toby Belch. All fart and beer belly and hands on your maid’s tits and drinking your wine cellar dry, while he’s trying to fix you up with his sidekick. Mr Worzel Gummidge of the dish-mop hair and wrinkled tights. And your only suitor is the indolent Count Poove, forever horizontal on the chaise longue, sniffing the odour of violets and experiencing heightened states of consciousness. Can it really be violets that the exquisite Count is sniffing? He’s probably got platinum linings in both of his exquisite nostrils.
The Comedies [she wrote] are terrifically unfussed about cross-dressing and homo-stuff. In this the page boy is extremely useful. He is like a junior in an English boys’ public school. The universal Cherubino. He is someone for people to practise on:
Olivia falls in love with Viola, who is pretending to be a page boy.
Phebe falls in love with Rosalind, who is pretending to be a page boy.
Orlando makes love to Ganymede, who is pretending to be a page boy.
Count Orsino proposes marriage to his page boy, who is Viola pretending to be a page boy.
Then she wrote:
There is a serious shortage of page boys these days. People don’t have them any more, except at royal weddings when they wear kilts, which is another form of cross-dressing.
In conclusion, Christina became lightheaded:
You would have to go to Amsterdam to marry your page boy today, but Count Orsino does it in Albania. Shakespeare calls Albania ‘Illyria’. And he calls Bohemia ‘a desert country near the sea’. For us it is in the Czech Republic, but this has to do with continental drift. Continental drift is beyond the scope of this essay.
She put down her pen and read the essay through. She picked up her stapler and she stapled the pages together. She wrote her name with a flourish across the top of page one. Out loud, she said, ‘Hey, Dulce. Do you know something? I’m really pleased with this essay.’ Then she got up to deposit the essay in Dr Campbell’s pigeonhole. On the way she stopped at the library to check on the Old Testament. Genesis was the first book, but Zachariah was not the last. The last book was Malachi. Judith had got it wrong.
The Green Man sur l’Herbe
Within the week it was clear to Christina that someone had begun to use her bicycle. Afterwards he always left her chocolate bars and pencils in the cycle basket. Twice recently, when she had needed the bike in a hurry – to get to her lunchtime job in the Fish Bar – the thing had not been there. The first time she had found it locked up round the corner. There had been a box of Staedtler pencils along with a small Cadbury’s Flake. The next time she had found it leaning up against a telephone box in the market place. The wheel rim had been buckled slightly, but two milk chocolate Bounty bars were gleaming at her from the basket in their enticing pale blue wrappers. It was obvious to her that the phantom bike sharer was adept at cracking open padlocks.
She had written him a letter after the Bounty bars. In it, her annoyance had been somewhat modified by her admiration for his dexterity – and by the softening effect of his gifts.
‘Fix my wheel,’ she wrote. ‘Or there’ll be hell to pay.’ She signed it, ‘love Christina.’ Then she wrote, ‘P.S. I’d prefer plain chocolate Bounty bars, if it’s all the same to you.’
Now, as she hurried to check on the bicycle, just prior to her supervision, she found that it had been locked to a railing opposite Barclays Bank. The wheel was gleaming with a brand-new rim and spokes and there was a letter for her in the basket.
It had been wrapped around a small Toblerone box and fixed with an elastic band. Christina removed the elastic band with a flutter of expectation.
The phantom bike sharer had terrible handwriting. Quite the worst she had ever seen.
‘You suggest that I “love Christina”,’ he had written. ‘And I only wish I could. I must tell you, now, with my hand on my heart, that I am committed to another.’
Christina laughed as she made her way to Hugo Campbell’s rooms. She munched the Toblerone as she went, enjoying the intrigue of the business. The bike sharer was fun, she thought. He was more fun, certainly, than the mass of undergraduates whom she had encountered thus far. And was he trying to make her jealous?
Then she arrived at the watery green rooms at the end of the flagstone corridor.
Hugo, too, had left her a message, but his was less appealing. It was inscribed on a yellow Post-It – one of the more objectionable Post-Its, she considered. It had the silhouette of a small black telephone at the top and was marked out, officiously, with little lines and spaces for recipient and sender, date and time. The message had evidently been dictated over the telephone to Fiona Campbell, whose neat, backward-sloping hand was there – as always, Christina reflected – to interpose itself between one party and another in any matter of college business. The Post-It ran as follows:
To: Christina
From: Hugo
Message: Go away.
Under this, perhaps by accident of layout, the rest ran as if by afterthought.
Write essay
Shakespearean Tragedy
See me Thursday next.
It quoted date and time of issue. Christina was frustrated. She had hoped to retrieve her Comedy essay and had envisaged a great many approving red ticks along the left- and right-hand margins. Even, perhaps, in a whimsical moment, one of Mrs Alfieri’s glow-in-the-dark stickers awarded for meritorious effort.
Instead, she returned to her room. She applied her mind, grudgingly, to the business of Shakespeare’s Tragedies. First, she reflected upon the fact that almost all the tragic heroes reminded her of her father. All of them severe cases of cancer of the ego. Look at me. See how I fill the stage. Even as I lay down my life. I, Myself and Me.
She began to make some undirected jottings on the backs of her college notices:
Othello [she wrote]. Wife dead. Strangled in her bed. And what is the General doing? He is sitting by the corpse as it stiffens and writing his own testimonials. Putting the best gloss that he can on the strangulation incident for the Council of Elders back in Venice. ‘I have done the state some service . . .’
The woman is lying there dead on her wedding sheets and Othello is asking to have his record as Chief Honcho in the Marines taken into account.
Macbeth – dit
to. Butchers half the county, including best friend, plus Macduff, plus wife and babes. So how does he spend his last moments? Swaggering, of course. Dying the Real Man. No quiche eater he. No, not he. King Bloodbath himself. Put ’em up, and POWBASHBAM!! First man down’s a sissy. ‘Lay on, Macduff; And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!” ’
Here Christina paused. She chewed upon one of the bike sharer’s Staedtler pencils. Then she wrote:
I don’t like to quibble, but ‘damned be him’ doesn’t sound like grammar. Wobbly pronouns from the Thane of Glamis and Cawdor. Still, the circumstances are terrifically extenuating. Burnham Wood is on the march to Dunsinane – cheap trick that it may be – and Capt. Macduff is swanking his gory caul and afterbirth in a piece of pervy one-upman-ship.
Christina paused again. ‘Untimely ripped’ was horrible. Quite disgusting, in fact, like the whole business of childbirth. She hoped that Mrs Macduff the Elder had managed to die in the process, in order to be spared the discomfort of her bizarre, post-parturition equipment. Or was ‘untimely ripped’ merely a piece of muscular hyperbole? Did Macduff mean no more than that he had been born premature? (‘Like me,’ Christina wrote. ‘Two whole months premature.’)
And – something I have never noticed before – [she wrote] Macbeth calls the witches ‘juggling fiends’. To ‘juggle’ is to deceive. Classic case of transference. Mr Axe Man himself can murder his way to the throne in the dead of night, but it’s jugglers who deceive? This does not apply to my juggler. Nor does it apply to Dulcie. She juggles. They both juggle, but neither of them deceives. Others deceive, not they.
She wrote a memo in the margin:
Saw such lovely juggling balls yesterday. Little shop in King’s Parade. Everything overpriced. Crochet work from Guatemala. All crunchy in the hand. Fatly stuffed with barley. Dulcie’s Christmas present – if only I can save the pennies for them.
Christina put down the Staedtler and sighed. After a while she picked it up again and wrote:
Say which of the following Tragic Persons you would like to have sitting beside you at the next college guest night:
1. Macbeth – Occupation: General. Hallucinating all over the vegetarian leekbake. Shake not thy gory locks at me. Embarrassing to a degree.
2. Antony and Cleopatra – Occupation(s): General (and General’s General?). One on each side of you. Both drunk and slobbering. Playing footsie across your ankle bones.
3. Julius Caesar – Occupation: General (retired). Come on my right ear for this ear is deaf. Oh boy. So left ear he can’t hear you and right ear he isn’t listening. He’s giving you the wall-to-wall boy’s talk until the cheese board comes round. Politics and Promotion. Musket, Fife and Drum. Rumpatum. Campaigns accomplished. Conferences attended.
4. Coriolanus – Occupation: General. Don’t even think about it. Next thing you know he’s followed you home and he’s got his foot in the door. Then your body is found floating down the Cam in segments.
5. Othello – Occupation: General. Polishing his assonance in your ear and pulling you with his tales of Darkest Africa. The headless Anthropophagae and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. Ninety-eight per cent crap artist. The litmus test is language. Look at Hamlet’s language and what do you see? It’s all built on the ordinary small details of life – shoes and cakes and sparrows and moles. But Othello’s language is forever banging on about the hills whose heads touch heaven and the steep down gulfs of liquid fire. He’s so busy getting drunk on his own cosmic verbiage that he can’t tell the nutshell from the infinite space. (Sort of like the difference between my father and Roland Dent?)
Then she wrote:
6. Hamlet – Occupation: Philosophy Student . . . aaah!
At this point, Christina luxuriated pleasantly in the idea of skipping the guest night and of taking the slow train back with Hamlet to his university in Wittenberg. She imagined herself blissfully footloose with Hamlet and his friend Horatio. Two men and a girl – like Kate in Jules et Jim. They would hang out, fancy-free, in the coffee houses and in the fleapits to wisecrack and talk philosophy.
Then the cold reality of the play began to intrude. Hamlet was in love with Ophelia. Like the phantom bike sharer, he was committed to another.
Christina got up. With a heavy sigh, she took her lined A4 pad off the shelf and she grabbed a few ballpoint pens. Then she sat down and, for want of inspiration, she gave her mind once more, to the idea of the Objective Correlative.
‘So,’ said Hugo, making the effort of speech. ‘Since you suffer so direly from partiality for the Dane, you might as well tell me about Hamlet.’
It was early afternoon on Thursday – Thursday two weeks later. On the Thursday following the first Post-It, Hugo had not been available. A second Post-It had suggested that she return at the later hour of five. At five, when she returned, Hugo was still not there. Nor was there any Post-It, this time, to help her live on in hope.
When Hugo had still not materialized on the morning of the Thursday following that, Christina directed her steps towards the lodge, where the porter – while he declined to make available the home address or telephone number of Dr Hugo Campbell – was perfectly willing to assist her through a perusal of the phone book.
She complained to him of a great many Campbells to impede her selection there.
‘Myself,’ said the porter, wittily, ‘I blame the Highland Clearances.’
Christina ignored him. ‘I can try under Judith Levin,’ she said. She thumbed through the pages of L subscribers, mumbling as she went. ‘Lever, Leveritt, Levi, Levick, Levicki, Levin, Group Captain A. C. OBE. Say,’ she said, out loud, ‘what next?’ Then she mumbled on. ‘Levin, Dr D. I., Levin, Dr E. A., Levin, Dr J. I., Levin, Dr J. J. –’ She looked up. ‘Sod it,’ she said. ‘They’re all doctors.’
‘Now, let’s not forget the Group Captain,’ said the porter. ‘OBE and all.’ He paused to hang some keys on a board arranged with rows of cup-hooks before returning to her at the counter. ‘Mind, there’ll not be too many among that lot who could fix a person’s broken leg,’ he said. ‘Doctors of Philosophy, if you get my drift.’
‘Yes,’ Christina said.
‘Cambridge, see,’ he said. ‘Now, if you’d broken your leg, for example – well, then, I’d be able to advise you. If you get my drift.’
‘I’ve broken my leg,’ Christina said. ‘That’s exactly why I came.’
‘Ah, well now,’ said the porter. ‘Then I’d go for Dr Levin, J. J. She’ll do you a very nice plaster cast. If you get my drift.’
‘Thank you,’ Christina said, ‘Geronimo. I hope you get the DSO and bar.’
Christina made her descent upon the house after she’d completed her noontide hour in the Fish Bar. Even once she had taken that liberty, it appeared that Hugo Campbell was not at home. Nobody answered the doorbell. It was only as she turned to leave that she saw him through the window. He was reclining at the far end of the garden in a setting which provided a suitably arboreal context for his muted green clothing. There were no flowers in Hugo’s green garden, only grass and trees. Hugo was enclosed within a delicate iron structure that looked like a giant birdcage with most of the bars removed. He was slumped in one of two matching dark green garden chairs with his feet on a garden table. He was staring into a pastry-board which was once again propped on his knees. This time he had no pen in his hand and his arms were hanging at his sides.
Hugo looked up at Christina only once her body had got between him and the sun. As he did so his expression was such that her unease made her belligerent.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘But I’d like to ask you if it could be that I smell.’
Hugo raised his nose a half-inch and sniffed the air carefully, delicately, like a cat sifting for evidence of salmon pâté stowed somewhere on a high shelf.
‘Slightly,’ he said. ‘Very slightly. You smell of Sarson’s Malt Vinegar. I would hazard that you have recently been in the vicinity of a chip shop.’
&nb
sp; Christina elected to ignore this remark, since its accuracy wounded her. She rallied to console herself that the moral ground was hers.
‘So,’ Hugo said, sighing deeply, ‘you might as well tell me about Hamlet.’
It was difficult, in the event, to talk about Hamlet, with his great burden of paralysis and inertia. To do so in front of the slumped figure of Hugo would have made everything that she wanted to say sound like a personal remark. As a result she said nothing. A pair of pretty speckled brown birds fussed and rustled in the greenery behind Hugo’s head as the silence grew large around them.
Then, suddenly, something strange happened. Horatio came to her rescue. Horatio, the prince’s friend. She fixed her mind, not upon Prince Hamlet, who was proving quite useless to her, but upon the attendant lord. As she did so, Horatio grew tall. He ceased to stand in Hamlet’s shadow. He was standing head and shoulders above all the others in the cast. He was standing lofty perpendicular, in the mire of treachery and betrayal. Horatio had put on the gown of glory; the Merlin cloak; the blanket of authority. Horatio had become the great warrior-poet; the elegiac musician. And there he stood, alone. Like a cathedral. And all around him lay the dead.
And she thought, with no little excitement, of Horatio’s ‘flights of angels’ as the play’s only real uplift.
‘I’m not in love with the prince. I’m in love with Horatio,’ she said, but she said it only to herself. Out loud, she said, ‘I’ve decided that the play is Horatio’s tragedy. I think Horatio is the hero. I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Mm,’ Hugo said.
‘That is what I think,’ she said.
‘Mm,’ Hugo said.
‘Well, isn’t Tragedy supposed to give us some hope?’ she said. ‘Really, the only hope here is entirely to do with Horatio. His loyalty. His sacrifice in agreeing to stay alive in such a rat-hole, just to pass on Hamlet’s story. Meanwhile Hamlet can go swanning off to heaven with Horatio’s flights of angels.’
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