It was to WS he spoke. ‘What,’ said WS, ‘is all this of a long ride? Let us have all once again. And which man dost thou speak of?’
‘Him of the gloves. Th’art going with him, so he doth say. Th’art to be as a father to’s childer, aye, and teach them, and thereto is signed an adventure.’
‘Indenture?’ WS frowned, he could remember nothing of this. His father approached, wiping his hands on a napkin, Anne came with Susanna in her arms, greasy Joan listened, his mother was nowhere about. ‘Where, then, is my half?’
‘’Tis here.’ And Gilbert pulled from his bosom the zigzag-edged paper that made one of a pair of indentures. WS took and read, incredulous. He had bound himself to Master Quedgeley for a year as tutor to his boys. His own signature was there, though cider-sprawling. He could not remember. He just could not remember. ‘He is to go teach Senna and Pluto,’ Gilbert told everybody. ‘Aye, to all his childer.’
‘Oh, a secret man,’ said Anne. ‘He plans to run off in the night and say naught.’ Then she started.
‘’Tis in the morning,’ said literal Gilbert. ‘Early the morrow, aye. He did give me this penny to buy suckets withal.’ He showed it to all with gravity.
Was he, then, wondered WS, to have his life’s course writ for him behind his back, each several stage announced by bravos or idiots? ‘There is payment,’ he told his wife. ‘I am not being sold in slavery. See. I will send you money home.’
But the great scolding went on. ‘Amen amen amen,’ said WS to himself.
VIII
‘LUNA fuit: specto si quid nisi litora cernam——’
He had not thought his escape would take such form, though truly what form? He had (agreed) agreed in his cider stupor to be tutor to five young Quedgeleys, teaching them chiefly Latin and receiving in return bed and board and payment of ten shillings each quarter. It was no dizzy sum to take home at the end; he was not there in Gloucestershire to make his fortune.
‘— Quod videant oculi nil nisi litus habent——’
For the house, it was new-built, of Henry the Eighth’s reign, and as near Sharpness as Berkeley, so that he could see the Severn and dream again of ships; for the household, its lady was Mistress Quedgeley (the master’s second wife), a sharp woman who could be more content with eisel than sack-and-sugar, the master himself no longer the jolly unbuttoned fellow that had cidered it to insensibility in Ettington but a grave man, much the magistrate, in black. The servants thought at first they would have WS as a butt among them, laughing at his Stratford twang, jeering at hing hang hog, but he was tart from the beginning with the swaggering butler and cold at the hip-swinging maids. He requested, and was granted, a chamber to his own self, near to the boys’ rooms.
‘Nunc huc nunc illuc, et utroque sine ordine curro——’
For the boys, his pupils or disciples, there was Matthew, the eldest at fifteen, then Arthur, thirteen-and-a-half, then John, twelve years — all by the first Mistress Quedgeley; the second had achieved twins — Miles and Ralph, ten or just under. There had been two daughters, with their mother’s vinegar face to judge from miniatures ill-done by some Gloucester painter, and these had died very early — at seven and eight. So there were left these sturdy grinning youths, five brains to be charged with Latin and but four faces beneath them.
‘Alta puellares tardat arena pedes——’
Divine Ovid rendered dull and sleepy in the sleepy afternoon of late summer. A bluebottle buzzed in through the open casement, their eyes followed its flight. They would not learn. It was as if the twins deemed it sufficient in life to be, as it were, a genetical prodigy; the elder boys yawned and stretched and kicked, groaned at Ovid and Lyly’s Grammar, sometimes shouted and fought, threw inky pellets and drew dirty pictures covertly. For WS they had little reverence. Did he address Ralph, then he would be told it was Miles, and also the other way about, and the elder boys would abet this. At times their father would test them for what they had learned, but what they had learned was never enough.
‘Why then,’ growl-squeaked Arthur, whose voice was on the break, ‘is it tuli and latum when it is in the present fero? It is all nonsense and I will have none of it.’
‘You will, by God, have what you are given,’ said WS, whipped to ire.
‘You swear, sir,’ said Matthew in holy shock. ‘You take the divine name in vain.’
‘I will take your breeches down,’ cried WS, ‘and not in vain. I will take a stick to your buttocks.’
The twins giggled at this mention of taking breeches down. Why?
One autumn morning Master Quedgeley said to WS:
‘Well, my lord Berkeley’s players are home. They have played, though of course in English, the Mostellaria at the castle.’
‘The comedy of the haunted house.’
‘It is that. And I think my boys will best learn out of themselves Englishing some Plautus that they may act it. Each one to English his own part. They will learn best out of pleasure — not the pleasure of noise and fighting (you need not deny that your classes are full of this), but the lawful and useful pleasure of working to a delightful end.’
‘But there is no poetry in Plautus.’
‘No, but there is wit and ready cut-and-thrust. Stichomythia. It is good for those who will study law, as Matthew and Arthur must. You will take the Menaechmi. Therein are parts for twins. You will buy copies at Master Cunliffe’s shop in Bristol. It is many years since I acted myself in it, at school, in Latin. I mind well the pleasure of it.’ He said this in something like gloom.
So WS rode to Bristol on a gold October day. Berkeley and its castle. Woodford, Alveston. Almondsbury, Patchway, Filton. He was mounted on Master Quedgeley’s chestnut gelding. Leaves gold and brown lying like fried fish; birds twittering like rats in branch-companies, ready to leave the sinking ship of summer. He rode shivering, gold in his purse (a fine purse made by his father), an old cloak about him. The gold was for books and his simple dinner at some ordinary. He had no money of his own.
Bristol. He greeted Bristol in something like fear. Bristol, bristling with masts at his mouth open in wonder; he could smell salt, see sailors whose tarry trade was not in doubt (alas poor inland Hoby, now in earth). The streets rang with work and drunkenness and the bells of the slavetraders’ chapels; barrels were trundled merrily over the cobbles; he grew affrighted and shy at the sight of so many sea-folk, some strange in colour and dress, at the earrings of gold the sun answered, sun glowing from skin tanned and burned by sea and far places of nothing but the sun. And his mission was, God help him, to buy books of a Roman long-dead, to pay, eat a frugal dinner, then turn his back on life again.
‘We have here,’ said Cunliffe the bookseller, ‘Menaechmi and Mostellaria and eke Miles Gloriosus. Oh, you can have five of any one and your own teacher’s copy for three-quarters the price. Of others there are none.’ He was an old man, chinny and chewing, and his shop was dark and smelt of the grave, which was to say of books; but on his money-table there was a skull (ah, those gnawing greedy kites) and he said, holding it in his right hand, that it was the skull of a black man, a slave, that had been beaten to death. Outside was the noise of sailors (yarely, my hearties) staggering from a tavern, and also the tang of brine carried up this other Avon, the brailed, or furled, masts. ‘Nor,’ said Cunliffe, ‘wiww you find ’em in aww Bristow ewsewhere.’ That was his way of speech (it was Mostew-waria and Miwes Gworiosus he truly said). Then a coach, drawn by a cobble-clattering pair of greys, went goldenly down Broad Street. ‘Not aww the bwack be swaves,’ said Cunliffe. ‘She in there, hid by those curtains is bwack, or brown perhaps you would say. They do report that she was brought back from the Indies, aye, a smaww girl, a chieftain’s daughter, and that she was made one of that famiwy out of pity. But now she is a fine haughty Christian dame with her thick mouth, though not many have set eyes on her.’ WS followed that coach with hungry look to its point of clattering round the corner. ‘In Fishponds,’ said Cunliffe, nodding and chewing WS out o
f his shop.
WS, books stringed together in his oxter beneath his cloak, wandered, still in wonder, among the back streets that were like serpents or twisted veins. And it was then a voice summoned him. From an open doorway it called:
‘What cheer, bully! Dost dou seek a bert?’
He turned, his heart near fainted. Dressed in a fair loose gown of virtuous, though dirty, white, her shoulders and bosom glowing to the empty street, she leaned, her arms folded, at ease against the doorpost, smiling. If Englishmen were white, he thought, then must she be called black; but black she could not in truth be called, rather gold, but then not gold, nor royal purple neither, for when we say colours we see a flatness, as of cloth, but here was flesh that moved and swam on the light’s tide, ever changing in hue but always of a richness that could only be termed royal; her colour was royalty. For her hair, it coiled in true blackness; her lips were thick; her nose was not tightened against the cold air, like an English nose, an Anne nose, nor pinched as at the meagreness of the sun, but flat and wide; her brow was wide too, though shallow. And so she stood, smiling at him and beckoning with her long golden finger.
With scant money (the ordinary’s destined mutton-slice, enough just for that), he knew not what to do. Surely it must be gold for gold, an angel, say, for this proffer of new heaven, yet had he never before paid (save dearly, or cheaply, with his freedom) for the act of love, and something within him shrivelled at the thought of haggling now over the price of entering this house of gold by its little hid gold door. But, first, the tumbledown brick house, a vista of darkness down a corridor, noises of lust and release. He stood undecided and she smiled still, then said: ‘If’n d’art comin’, come now den.’ He mowed and grinned and muttered, opening out the fingers of his right hand to show an empty palm, and then she laughed in a fracture of strange crystal.
As he tottered towards her his calves were emptied of muscle and filled with water. Smiling, she beckoned him to follow her in. He entered darkness that smelled of musk and dust, the tang of sweating oxters, and, somehow, the ancient stale reek of egg after egg cracked in waste, the musty hold-smell of seamen’s garments, seamen’s semen spattered, a ghost procession of dead sailors lusting till the crack of doom. Noises came from the chambers on either side of the corridor — laughter, creakings in rhythm, a deep male voice ejaculating as in prophecy: ‘Let nameless fall and all done.’ And there was one chamber-door standing open, and WS saw what went on within. There was a low pallet with filthy blankets, bloody clouts on the floor, but it was against the wall that the act of lust proceeded, a ride now reaching, in sweat and curses, the destination that was a broken city, a voyage to a shipwreck. The woman was black, shining, naked, agape, thrust against the wall as though at bay, and there rammed and rammed at her a bulky seaman, in unbuttoned shirt and points loosened for his work, whorls and bushes of red hair showing, his beard red, his head bald save for odd plastered tendrils and filaments of red. The companion of WS smiled to see all this, while he himself felt a sickness, an excitement, a disgust he had hardly known before, not even on those bizarre nights of Anne’s madness; he even flushed in shame and fear, strangely fain to run blubbering to that known white body, the thin lips and sharp nose, burrowing into her, his coney, for comfort. But he followed his companion to another chamber, this time empty save for those ghosts of past doers, all grinning at him from walls, tiny rat-sprites peering from the folds of the crumpled dirty bed-sheets, a dead hairy arm gesturing from under the bed. He stood; it was still not too late to retreat. She pulled her gown swiftly down further from her shoulders, disclosing nipples black as ink-blobs; she came for him smiling, her arms held out. He dropped his stringed copies of Plautus to the floor and, his cloak still on but thrown back, he embraced her golden body trembling. She said naught, he kissed what words she would utter fiercely back into her mouth and, in that soft strange contact, felt as if he were starting some strange Hoby-voyage to lands of men with dog-heads or plate-feet, carbuncles and diamonds to be raked from under the golden-egg palms. Rocks, the oven-sun, fish that talked, the toothed waves. Then she drew herself away brusquely and held out her palm for money.
‘I have but——’ He showed. At once she grew angry. She beat at him with her black fists, what time he tried to force her back to that time-dissolving hug. She called a strange name. An older woman shuffled in, black, gross, smelling of grease, chewing something that had made her fat lips all purple, her unbusked bubs swinging — under a loose stained red gown — almost to her waist. They talked loud in their own language; they beat at him, four-fisting, shouting. He backed stumbling, his forearm to his eyes, for they would scratch him too, and, as he was thrust down the corridor, his couple of copper coins tinkling and rolling on the floor, an untrussed white man looked out from a room, saw, then opened a mouth of rotten teeth to roar his laughter.
He fled, that laughter following on the wind that was of a sudden strongly arisen in the street, scarred with humiliation, blindly seeking Broad Street among cloaks blown by the wind, hats chased to urchins’ laughter, under swinging inn-signs all creaking, looking, whipped to his knees by shame, for that Rose where a lad was holding his master’s restive chestnut for a halfpenny. He would not stay for food in the loud smoky ordinary — indeed, he could not, for he had no money; nay, he had not even the halfpenny to pay this sniffing ragged boy. ‘Take this,’ he said, and he handed him his empty purse, the piece of fine leatherwork done by his own father. The boy opened his mouth, taking it, turning it over and over. WS mounted and turned his shamed back on Bristol, leaving Severn’s mouth and returning to its source without, he soon saw in renewed shame and some fear, the books that had been the sole end of his coming hither.
IX
AND YET THAT VISION of the golden trull, the black nipples, the flash of breast-muscle, even the fierce small fists upraised, haunted his sleep and oft, in the dawn, lashed his seed to cold and queasy pumping out. In the daytime he lashed out another sort of seed, out of necessity, for if Plautus’s Menaechmi did not exist (and it did not, not in this household: he searched Quedgeley’s small library diligently when Quedgeley was out), why, then, it must be invented. Epidamnus? Epidamnum? He could not be sure of that town where the twins, separated in infancy, came together in a comedy of errors in later life, unknown to each other. As for the names of those twins, he knew that one was Menaechmus. But what was the other? Isosceles? Sophocles? Sosicles? It was many a year since he had seen a copy of that play. WS must be Plautus, not Ovid. That was a part of life’s irony.
‘A surprise,’ said WS to his master. ‘We shall be ready by Christmas. Ask nothing of their progress. Such foreknowledge must dull the pleasure to come.’
‘Well then, if you will have it so.’
‘It will be like My Lord Quedgeley’s Men.’
‘Aye. Aye.’ He enjoyed the savour of that. ‘Aye.’
And so WS wrote:
There had she not been long but she became
A joyful mother of two goodly sons;
And, which was strange, the one so like the other
As could not be distinguished but by names …
Vile, vile — he saw that. It hid its rhymes ill. Could English, with its lack of tunes, bear this blankness? But, he remembered, these were meant to be lines translated from the Latin by Matthew, who, being the eldest boy, should play the father of the twins, Ægeon; they must not glow with the burnishing of any expert hand. Blot no line: let it come, pumping out.
‘And the twins,’ he told his class, ‘are called both Antipholus, though the one is of Syracuse and the other of Ephesus.’ That would do, that name, those places would do. ‘And the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus is called Adriana.’
‘There is to be a woman, then?’ growl-squeaked Arthur. ‘Is our mother to play that part?’
So, then, for all their father’s grunting against Banbury talk, they had not yet seen a play. ‘Boys,’ said WS, ‘take the parts of women and ever have done, for it is not seemly
to have women as actors.’
‘But,’ said deep-voiced Matthew, ‘it is not seemly neither that there be love between boys and men, even in play.’
Something tingled within WS. He was pushed, impelled. He said: ‘Oh, the ancients accounted that no sin, for the noble Athenians had their catamites, so they were called, that name being but a form of Ganymede, the name of Jove’s cupbearer. For women they saw only as the bearers of their children, while for true pleasure of mind and body it was their own sex they sought. A sweet and lovely boy was all the desire of these bearded men. And so it is to this day with the Moors.’ Father forgive him, he had strayed all from the path, but their eyes were bright as they listened. Then Arthur growled:
‘Is not that against religion and the teachings of Our Lord Jesus Christ?’ WS felt that Arthur and his brother Gilbert might belike make fast friends. He replied in his foolishness:
‘There are some who say not so, and that He Himself did practise this sort of love with His beloved disciple John and that Judas was jealous and that no woman save one, His mother, is called to the Kingdom.’ Then, in sudden fear of their blabbing this to their father as his own sentence, he added, ‘It is false and wrong, yes yes, but there be some that have said that. And now turn we to our grammar-book.’
What was this? Why had he said that? Was it nerves struck to jangling by frustration? Had his inner being revolted against women — white and nagging, black and punching? He threw himself into his re-making of Plautus:
She is so hot because the meat is cold,
The meat is cold because you come not home,
You come not home because you have no stomach,
You have no stomach, having broke your fast;
But we, that know what ’tis to fast and pray,
Are penitent for your default today.
Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess Page 6