Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess

by Burgess, Anthony

  The world collapsed into mockery: heaps of old sacking, twigs scratching bare thighs; shame not at an act of sin but at bidding so much (that word ‘love’, for instance) for so little, questing crawlers in the grass, the whining country voice of Alice Studley unsatisfied. He saw the mockery of a whole life expressed in the disorder of clothing — tapes to be tied, the affects of promised ecstasy to be stowed in shame, an eternal hell of buttoning. And all else, too, of the Stratford glover’s life marched gloomily through the void that now presented itself. The surfeit of ale, the vomit, the riot of frighting the ancientry after dark with Dick Quiney and Jack Bell and the fool from Kineton, the loud empty laughing of wasteful sport, the guilt of life brief and naught done.

  ‘Love,’ she whined, still lacing. ‘Love, tha said love.’

  ‘It is, in a manner, love. But I promised nothing.’

  ‘Tha said of getten wed. Tha did promise.’

  ‘A man will promise much in his heat.’ And then: ‘Though I am not yet a man but a boy still.’

  ‘What tha has there is enow like a man’s.’ In the growing dusk she made herself prim and tidy; like seed, a great pity pumped and pumped from him; he must beware, lest he call that also love. Brutally he said:

  ‘That you will know, doubtless. It is not just your dad’s you have seen, peering through a chink in the door.’

  ‘Chill tell my dad all, that tha did force me unto doing of it.’

  A great weariness mantled him, another, swifter, dusk. ‘As Ben Lovell did and Gervase Black from Blockley and Pip Gaydon and the rest. Forced, is it?’ She wept. Pity advanced him to her, to take the soft slack body in his arms, to taste in pity the rugosity of pimples on her left cheek, the black loose hair sucked deep, as he kissed, into his mouth. He saw, in one consuming moment, how pity might undo him quite. He took her hand gently and set her on her way. She grew soft again at parting, saying no more of complaints, glowed in a dulcet good-night of pigeon-kisses, waved, turning, walked into the moon.

  And then the father and mother came, in hot August, but there was nothing to prove. They were doing their rounds of all the houses where young men, swelling in flesh-fed lustihead, skulked (too much meat in that diet, too little of the allaying cabbage-leaf), collecting here a tester, there a groat, to shut their loud mouths withal. It would not be hard to find a husband for Alice, eyes in bushes watching the unwary youth yielding to her open bosom, untrussing, caught in the act. It was ever thus. They went away, whining like their daughter, a coin clutched tight in the mother’s sweaty hand, and then John and Mary Shakespeare turned on their eldest son. Shame, disgrace, sin, uncontrolled libidinous wretch, down on thy knees to pray to be made clean (John Shakespeare veered to the new pure faith of tradesmen and merchants). WS spake back pertly; it was the mother, lady Arden, that struck. He left the house burning.

  He would go, he would be on his way that night, he would seek out his gold goddess. A night promising fair, scented, the moon in her third quarter, nightingales in the wood, WS, in worn cloak against the morning’s chill, empty scrip and purse, taking the road. Whither? South-west, into the wind’s mouth, to Bristol. Evesham, Tewkesbury, Gloucester. A march of a day or so, rewarded at last by salt on the lips and masts in the harbour. And then?

  No, no, it could not be, not yet. He needed time. He bethought him of the oracle that dwelt in an old woman’s body, Madge Bowyer, who was called Old Madge and sometimes witch, in her hovel at the town’s end. She had spells against warts and would guess at the future, but they were often good guesses. Her cats were fat and blinked in the sun; her house smelt of no devil’s compacts, but of pungent herbs, foul linen, and a woman’s old age. He walked, calming himself, through the odorous dark, came to her cottage set away among docks and nettles on a side-lane, saw dim light and knocked. She came with a lantern, her pegless gums mounching away, knew him and bade him enter.

  He coughed at the smoke. A cauldron of stew bubbled on the fire; from the low rafters hung hunks of nameless flesh, their shadows swinging on the walls from the draught of his entering; a cat suckled her brinded kittens and purred. The kitchen was in great disarray — a tumble of unwashed clouts, pots unscoured, a dish of sour curds on the rough table, a loaf grown all mossy and too hard for her to mumble. A wise goat peered in at an open window, chewing roundly, wagging her beard. A yellow-and-white cat mewed at WS to be picked up and fondled, and pity at its trust swooned through him. So it was with those calves he would have no hand in killing. He saw, in one of his fiery instants, all beasts that ever were, torn, hunted, baited, betrayed, bleeding; their cries seared his brain. Madge said, ‘What would you know then, boy?’

  ‘I will bring you a penny tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I would have one pennyworth of the future, whether I am to take a long journey or no.’ He sat at the table on a three-legged stool, moving a greasy washing-clout from it first; the cheesy smell of curds rose at him like a small grey spirit. She mounched away at nothing, bringing cards. He knew these cards, though not the manner of telling them. Cartomancy. He thrilled at the word. These were not for an innocent game of trump or ruff; they were antique pictures, as old as Egypt (so she had told him), of towers crumbling to brick in a lightning-flash; of pope and empress; the moon all blood; Adam and Eve; the rising of the dead, sleepy and naked, at doomsday’s trumpet.

  ‘A journey,’ she said. ‘We will see of a journey.’ A cat leaped on to the table, as it would itself see, and was pushed off with a distracted hand. She fumbled the worn reechy cards. The thin light, the shadows, gave a sort of small majesty to this old lined crone, her wretched filthy hair, the sack dress stained with years of unhandy eating (annals of grease dropped from a trembling horn-spoon), the torn nails with their margins of dirt. She told on to the table, at random it seemed, an outer paling of seven cards, an inner lozenge of four. Her trembling claws upturned them, her lips gibbering strange language: ‘Hominy pominy didimus dis dis genitivo tibi dabo auriculorum.’ WS saw the calm fierce pictures look up at him; there were dogs baying the bloody moon and a crayfish sprawled in the waters below, the stars with the naked girl, the juggler, the man hanging from a tree by his heel, Death the skeleton mower, the woman with a leashed lion, a chariot. She rocked, crooning; she delivered:

  ‘You will go on no journey yet. Here you must stay to find a woman that will drive you to it. And there is also the Seven Deadly Sins.’

  ‘What woman? Will she commit those sins?’

  ‘It is a fair woman. The sins will be brought here and you will go out with the sins.’

  ‘I understand nothing of this.’

  ‘You are here to be told, not to understand. And you will take your pen and write like a clerk. You will be pushed and hurried and told to write with speed.’

  His heart sank. ‘Is there naught else?’

  ‘I will give you a fair rhyme, but that will be another penny.’

  ‘Twopence tomorrow then.’

  She cackled, coughed, choked, sprayed his face with toad’s wet, and the cats looked up, unfearful. ‘This is the rhyme. Mark me.’ Then she gave it as though reading it from the dark wall behind WS:

  ‘Catch as catch can.

  A black woman or a golden man.’

  And would not say more. A poor twopennyworth?

  III

  THE GODDESS CALLED FROM THE SEA, and he could not answer; she called inaccessibly from dreamed golden bodies. He must close his eyes to the beckoning arms from the spice-bed, except those eyes of sleep, seeing most when they wink; for the visions of travel, he descried that they meant most when most cocooned in words. But would not words chime the goddess away for ever? He did not know yet.

  Hoby, ere he died — as he did of a fever that clasped him to its hot body while he slept drunkenly in the rain — would talk sometimes soberly of ships and the sailor’s life. He told of vessels high charged, high at stern and bow for majesty and terror of the enemy, for now was general talk of an enemy. Sail-trimmers at their work on the waist between poop and fo
recastle, where too were stowed pinnace and skiff. The gravel-ballast and cable tiers; the outboard-thrusting beakhead that cracked the seas as the ship plunged. The hold below the orlop where the rotten beer and crawling cheese were stored. Foresail and foretop sail on the foremast; square course and topsail on the mainmast; the mizen mast with its lateen or mizen yard; the bonaventure mizen; drabler and bonnet. Calivers and arquebuses, the gunner with his linstock, the aft and forward slueing of the carriage, the quoin.

  It was all words. And, anyway, to become a swabbing younker in wet and filthy dark would bring him no whit nearer to the goddess. With words there was a realm; more, if he practised the art of words, that vision of old Madge would not necessarily mean what it seemed to mean — the labour of clerking in some worm-eaten chambers of the law; it could mean noble lords saying hurry hurry hurry, the birthday ode must be ready soon for Her Majesty. There were books in the house of Bretchgirdle, the parson. He would lend them to polite youths. WS read Ovid, in the English of Golding, or he would pick out the Latin — with more relish than under Jenkins at the school — word by slow word, as an unskilful lute-player plucks out painfully his air. Ovid was divine. Could he not be Ovid, though in an English way?

  Fair is as fair as fair itself allows,

  And hiding in the dark is not less fair.

  The married blackness of my mistress’ brows

  Is thus fair’s home …

  It was after dinner. He was quietly shuddering within, for that night he was to go forth to help bring in the May out by Shottery. His quill squeaked out the lines among the uncleared trenchers, in the smell of the saffron and garlic that had given a savour to their dull veal (he had refused to help kill the calf), the green spitting elmwood of the fire, the sweating of a too-warm room (but his father felt the cold), tempered by the chill of a woman’s contempt. He was enditing a sonnet to another black-haired girl, all her hairs black, all, the sonnet’s shape that first made by the Earl of Surrey, English having too few rhymes for the more strict Italian form. But, he was learning, you could not write verses of the one and particular but only of the All or Universal (so why then did Plato cry out on the falseness of poets?), and the All was figured or incarnated in a new One, and what name could you give to that One but divinity?

  … for fair abideth there.

  My love being black, her beauty may not shine

  And light so foiled to heat alone may turn.

  Meantime his mother, greying frizzed, with scanty brows of strong ginger colour still, railed at his father in fine Arden lady’s fashion, and Joan — sole daughter now with poor Anne dead these three years — neglectful of her table-clearing duty and the crumbs for the pigeons (ah, the Wilmcote cotes), stood by her haughty skirts, grinning. His father, merrily red-cheeked in his misery, sat hunched by the smoky coughing fire, gnawing a little-finger nail.

  Heat is my heart, my hearth, all earth is mine;

  Heaven do I scorn when in such hell I burn.

  On the floor crawled little Edmund, his two-year birthday that month. Gilbert and Richard were without, and Richard was playing, shouting. Joan was all Arden, grinning there, siding with her virago mother.

  ‘And now your talk is of selling my silver, so we shall be like the truly low, God help us, and end with digging hollows in the table as in some filthy rogues’ ordinary, an we are kindly let to keep the table, and the broth slopped therein and we must needs fumble at it with greasy fingers. Oh the shame, the shame that we should ever come to this, I would all my children were safely buried like poor poor Anne, so they might not live to see what shifts we are coming to …’

  Little Edmund gurgled toward WS’s crossed feet. He uncrossed to give a privy kick but then thought better of it.

  All other beauty’s light I lightly rate.

  My love is as my love is, for the dark.

  In night, on night, enthroned on night …

  ‘And a promised a new gownd for Whitsun.’ That was whining Joan, sharp-faced and mean-eyed. ‘And now a says naught of a new gownd.’

  Enthroned on night I keep my something state.

  ‘New gowns?’ said his mother, with woman’s ready pluralising. ‘Look to thine old gowns, girl, lest he sell those slyly to some rogue pedlar or belike change for a boy’s whirligig to play withal.’

  ‘My throne is night. Night is my throne.’ So WS murmured involuntary.

  ‘And there sits he,’ said his mother, ‘with idle versing and naught else in his head. What money will that ever bring in?’

  ‘Many a man,’ said his timid father, ‘has known preferment through timely verses.’

  In night enthroned, I ask no better state,

  Twin-orbed and sceptred …

  Too gross by far, that would not do.

  ‘Will is crazy and lazy,’ went Joan. WS made a speedy contortion of his face at her: squinny, cheeks finger-bunched, horse-nostrils. Then it came:

  … I ask no better state

  Than thus to range, nor seek a guiding spark.

  And now the clinching couplet, whose work was full seven times more than all twelve precedent lines. But his father said:

  ‘If it be work that is wanted, then we had best get back to work.’ And he rose sighing from his fireside chair. ‘Come thy ways, Will.’

  And childish I am put to school of night.

  Right light fight wight tight. WS pondered, eyes trolling like tennis-balls at the low rafters.

  ‘Am I nowhere to be obeyed?’ His father was at last in one of his rare rages. ‘Nor here in the house nor in my workshop neither?’ WS, O foolish boy, sat on, chewing the gristly quill, tickling his gum with the soaked feathers. Joan giggled. Will said:

  ‘This one moment. The poem is near done.’ His mother said:

  ‘Oh, he is going the way of preferment. He will be making a leg before Her Majesty, poem in hand, what time we are all begging for crusts for want of men in the house to work.’

  And childlike I am put to school of night

  For to seek light, for to seek light light

  light …

  His father, with weak mottled nief, did a bold thing then, one that made the mouth of WS to gape, the chewed quill-feathers to dribble to the board, unregarded. He seized the paper with its fair script, unblotted, and made as if to tear it. WS was quick to his feet, he would have none of this. And it was then as if the goddess reappeared, rushing down the chimney in a wind, making the fire flare gold, and smote WS hard on the back, thrusting him into fight (For to seek light, and for that light to fight) against father, mother, sister, all one, enemies. And now he wrestled with his father for possession of thirteen lines (a sonnet thus incomplete being most unlucky), and then the paper tore and Joan went whoop with laughing. WS, in poet’s frenzy, would have struck his father dead, but Joan was a child and easier game. So he flapped four stiff fingers crack hard on her cheek, crying words like FOR THEE, BITCH, and she howled like a hound, hellishly. Then came the last line:

  For to seek light beyond the reach of light.

  WS glowed in anger and poet’s triumph, but no shame or fear. There was loud protesting in the room, directed at him. Little Edmund set up a bruit. WS stood proud above all, and would — like a Roman conqueror in laurels — have placed his foot on Edmund’s crawling body had he not crawled under the table. WS stood head-high, like some warlock that had conjured a storm of wild waters. A passer-by, hearing loud angry words, peered in through the casement. He had no nose, love’s disease. WS cried to him:

  ‘And, childish, I am put to school of night

  For to seek light beyond the reach of light.’

  He went on his way, a warning. And this magical incantation put a good black blob of a period to the raving. His mother crossed herself. She stared, holding blind hands out for crying Joan. Softly she said:

  ‘Come then, chuck, to it mammy. There there there there there. Thou, Jack, touch him not, he is a devil, no son of mine. He is but a beast, there is bad and wicked blood, it is the low
ness of devil’s stock coming out. There there, wipe and blow, chicken, thy brother is no brother.’

  His father bit his bottom lip, looking now on his son, now on the rent and deformed sonnet: beauty’s light for the dark enthroned guiding spark heat heart hearth earth. (He hath a good wit, God help us, and I have deprived him of his schooling. I am to blame, wherein have I failed?) Then Gilbert came in, the family idiot, saying:

  ‘God. I ha’ seen God with’s hat on, a-walken down Henley Street.’

  His father seemed now as he would fain weep, wresting the lachrymal torch from snivelling Joan. Joan’s face shone greasily.

  ‘Aye, marry. And I did fall and did sleep a space and then did rise. Aye.’

  His mother turned wearily to him to say, ‘And where is Dickon? What is Dickon doing?’

  ‘Dick is all dirt and feared to come home. All dung is, aye. Was pushed in dung by these fellows.’

  ‘Which fellows?’ Very loud now, but a tightening in her weasand. WS looked steady at his father and his father looked not so steady back, then one nodded to the other.

  ‘Tom of the Hill that is called Tom Hill and him from Upper Quinton that saith never aught. Aye.’

  His father head-pointed toward the door while his mother took breath. Dunghills, dung, she would say. Words she had never heard, let alone encountered the reality thereof, ere she had married into (ha!) the Jakes peers. I am done, I can no more. I am full-fed with work and misery. I am at my wit’s end here with you all. Go thou, Jack, and fetch the boy hither and clean him. Go thou and do somewhat to redeem thine idleness.