Joss roared with laughter at Barry’s frozen, scarlet face, and prodded the boy’s groin suggestively. Barry stalked straight out of the coach house to find Alice, his cold fists clenched with insulted dignity. Alice was busy counting chicks to make sure that she hadn’t been robbed. The mother hen pecked at her bare, brown arms as she collected little balls of twitching fluff and packed them into a straw-bedded box. Her fingers closed delicately around the fragile specks of gold, twittering with anxiety. She met Barry’s glance, which was now a pale white glare, fixed with rage and fright.
‘Ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen . . . all right. They’re all there. Now tell me what’s happened.’
Barry narrated the incident, hesitated, then reported the fact that the groom had also given him a bold tweak between the legs to make his points clear. To his horror, Alice burst out laughing.
‘Oh dear, James! You can’t join the army and be serious about things like that. Why, it’ll happen every day. Anyway, Joss is a rogue. My mum warned me. He gets you alone among the buckets then lifts up your skirt, right up, to keep it out of the molasses, he says, and puts his hands in between to see if you’ve got anything sticky, there where you shouldn’t have. I’m surprised that he didn’t insist on undoing all your buttons to see if you’ve really got a road or just a mass of feathers . . .’
Two huge tears rolled down James Barry’s cheeks.
‘Oh, don’t cry, James!’ She bundled the chickens into the hutch, an armful of pecking and fluttering. ‘Come on down to the stream.’
The September sun warmed the dark, ploughed earth. Alice washed her feet in the river, then dried them on her apron. The air’s chill tongue licked her skin. She looked up at the changing willows shivering in the stream, and into the cool, vast quiet of England, the cattle standing by the green shallows, their white flanks streaked with gold, and above the great vault, guttering white high in the blue. James Barry lay beside her, following her gaze into nothingness. She sighed, feeling the burden of his curious innocence: this child, knowing and unknowing the things that Alice had always been able to whistle up towards her, or brush from her skin with her fingertips.
This boy’s first love had been the slender woman in muslin and ribbons, who had carried him firmly on her hip. His second love, the huge courageous revolutionary general with his prominent nose, widening girth, heart as boundless as the seas and all the distances he travelled. His third love was Alice Jones. He rolled onto his side to gaze at her black curls, tucked behind the golden ring. Slowly, he reached out and turned the ring gently in her ear. She put her fingers over his and smiled at the chill of his touch. Come into the garden, my sister, my love. Behold, thou art fair, my love – also our bed is green. The beams of our house are of chestnut and the rafters of willows and fir. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.
* * *
Scenes from Shakespeare! Now there was mist coating the cedars in the park and the purple-blue clouds of Michaelmas daisies had been imprisoned with festoons of string. The gardeners were planting experimental tulips on the other side of the haha in the early day, and the swifts were already massed on the roof tops. James Barry was due to travel north within the week. And his departure was to be marked by Scenes from Shakespeare. There were still sufficient numbers of languid adults loitering in the household to make up a party of courtiers and mechanicals. We are all going to perform the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the audience seated in front of the first winter fire in the Great Hall, surrounded by trays of soft cake, roast chestnuts, and sweet wine. The boy will play Robin Goodfellow. Won’t that be charming? He’s quite perfect for the part.
But he wasn’t. Caparisoned in a rich costume of lace and velvet with pale silver stockings cut off at the ankle, Barry was to scamper through the Hall at the head of a troupe of fairies, non-speaking roles supplied from the stock of kitchen help, who, once scrubbed and dressed up could pass for wee folk of the magical kind, blessing this house, invoking the powers of darkness, only to banish them forever.
Now the hungry lion roars
And the wolf behowls the moon . . .
Now it is the time of night
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide . . .
Barry had already learned the part by heart. But alas! As soon as all eyes were fixed upon his tiny pallid face and open mouth and once the assembled household, radiant with expectation, leaned forwards to hear him, he was metamorphosed into a wooden mannikin, whose clockwork innards were on the brink of extinction. He struck an unlikely pose, one arm rigid at the hip, and chanted the words inaudibly, punctuating the poetry with a sequence of querulous gulps. Alice covered her face with her hands. The company shrank in their chairs, or looked into their glasses.
‘Oh dear,’ gasped Elizabeth, as he ceased his undifferentiated mutter, ‘and you’ve even taken the trouble to learn the wretched thing. What a dreadful shame. That won’t do at all.’
Now no one could imagine James Barry engaged in a lighthearted frolic through the corridors with a gaggle of laughing fairies at his heel. The idea had to be regretfully abandoned. No, Puck the mischief-maker was simply not Barry’s role.
‘Never mind, darling. We’ll think of something.’
Barry could not endure being patronised and stalked out in a huff. Alice dashed after him, her wooden clogs ringing on the stone floors.
‘We could end it all with “Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time,” and just forget about Puck.’
‘But then the boy has no role at all.’
David Erskine lit the candles. Dusk was closing early upon them now, and all the trees were filled with a dark twittering. They could hear the ducks crying through the twilight, far away among the browning reeds. The dogs lifted their heads for a moment, then subsided again with a sigh. Their fur smelt feral in the first hot wash of flame from the green logs.
Elizabeth stared at Alice, who was shyly hanging in the doorway, unsure of her place without James. She had failed to persuade him out of his temper and he was sulking on the cellar steps, his arse getting steadily colder from the moist brick stairs. Scenes from Shakespeare! Use another play. One where my dearest James can just sit there, as he always does, gazing at Alice. That’s it! Why, how now Orlando! where have you been all this while? You a lover! An’ you serve me such another trick, never come in my sight more. And he has damn all to say and that pert little maid will turn all the men’s heads. Just the courting scene. Utterly suitable! We need someone to play Celia. Grace Sperling. She’ll do. A bit mouse-like, but we can draw her out of herself. Alice will pout and flounce quite charmingly. She’s grown tall this summer and holds herself well. James can coach her in the part. But he only comes up to her shoulder. Won’t he look ridiculous as Orlando? Oh, what does it matter? It’s a breeches part. He can lie among some greenery and no one will notice how small he is. The gardeners can construct the Forest of Arden in half an hour. Then we can have it all in the background for the Dream as the play comes indoors. Yes, yes, that’s it! And so it was decided to abandon the fairies, who were not normally allowed in the house anyway and whose honesty was doubtful. The butler, who had foreseen that the awful task of supervising the delinquent magicals would have fallen upon him, was mightily relieved. And here comes Alice! The wiser, the waywarder. I can hear her saying it. Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that and ’twill out at the key-hole; stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney. There it is. As you like it.
‘Alice. Come here, my girl. Come here at once.’
Scenes from Shakespeare proliferated like a camel with an uncommon row of humps. Alice, whose talent for showing off in public proved little short of miraculous, was given the final word. She was to speak the Epilogue from As You Like It at the end of this hybrid performance, thus transforming two plays into one.
None of the dogs in the household was sufficiently reliable to be presented on stage. Alice and Barry cut one out of stiff black paper, dug out of the old painter’s studio, then reinforced it on one side with batons, and set it up on little wheels. It took them two days to construct this thing and it looked grotesque. They were so delighted with the monster that they led it everywhere around the house. Its straw whiskers began to fall off, leaving a suggestive trail behind them, like bread crumbs in the fairy tale.
Everyone was involved in the performance. Thus the division between spectators and players ceased to exist. Theseus and Hippolyta, the Master and the Mistress, naturally, sat in the front row with the jeering courtiers all around them. During one of the rehearsals Moon really did lose his temper, yanked the paper dog’s lead a little too violently and pulled its head off. Desperate repair work was carried out on the spot, amidst an orgy of recriminations. Alice was accused of being insolent to one of the house guests, who, not realising that the beast was a domestic construction, created with love, had vilified the prop designers. Not my fault, Alice defended herself, if the Retort Courteous was received as the Countercheck Quarrelsome. David Erskine was enchanted, for she quarrelled by the book, and he found in her favour.
Barry and Alice learned their scene by heart within a day, but found themselves mortally inhibited by Grace Sperling’s censorious Celia. ‘Pretend she’s not there. She doesn’t count for anything. I’m the one you should be looking at,’ snapped Alice. And the insignificant Celia, slightly tearful at Rosalind’s brisk dismissiveness, sank into anonymity upon her rustic seat, clutching her bonnet.
The performance took place by candlelight in the Great Hall. Most of the audience were in full costume with whitened faces or bizarre masks, like the commedia del arte, escaped for the evening. And many were already roaring drunk, ready to shout and cheer, whatever the event. Barry wore a suit of lincoln green with a hat that collapsed over his nose, weighed down with bright red feathers. He hurled it into the air when he saw Alice, dressed as a brown leather huntsman, her legs revealed to scandalous advantage, nonchalantly carving hearts on a forest log.
‘Good day, and happiness, dear Rosalind.’
The household howled and clapped their approval at this suggestive scene. For the hero was perfect, if a little small, and his lady was provocatively moody, tantalising in her more coming-on disposition. Barry lay at her feet, delivering tentative interjections as Alice stalked back and forth among the autumnal branches delivering her cynical lessons in love, every gesture making a persuasive case for eroticism and perversity. The household was bewitched. O Alice, thou art translated. A glamorous boy looked her public in the eye, tweaked the nose of her plain little coz, whose startled look was quite unfeigned, as this cheeky pantomime had not been agreed in rehearsal, and declared in a voice lavish with innuendo, that her affection had ‘an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal’. Her audience stamped and roared. Barry, languishing on moss, was merely a foil, an occasion for this boy-girl’s barefaced offering of sex to every member of the audience, well warmed by David Erskine’s mulled wine.
And wilt thou have me?
Ay, and twenty such.
What sayest thou?
Are you not good?
I hope so.
Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing? (This to the assembled company, with an insolent wink) Come, sister, (Celia was dragged off the log) you shall be the priest and marry us.
The audience cheered. Barry’s ears burned beneath his curls as he knelt down beside her. The play was too much to the point. Alice did not believe in the love that swam Hellesponts, dared Grecian clubs, and dragged beautiful gods down from their horses to seduce them. But Barry did.
The kitchen staff never saw the performance, because from every feast someone is always excluded. And so they demanded an encore after supper. The scene was less suggestive, for Alice wore her skirts again, but Grace Sperling, that one restraining factor, had been abandoned in the drawing room. The two principals had drunk so much spiced wine that they performed with wild, drunken panache to a chorus of cheers, yells and lewd enthusiasm.
Alice climbed onto a stool and addressed the assembled kitchen, along with all the pots, tankards and crockery.
‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleas’d me, complexions that lik’d me, and breaths that I defied not . . .’ Here, she put out her tongue at Joss, who was leering from the inglenook, ‘and, I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsey, bid me farewell.’
She lifted her skirts provocatively, and bowed only to Barry.
‘Show us your cunt!’ shouted Joss, leaping up. Cook rapped his shins with a poker. Alice jumped off the stool and ran for the door, dragging Barry after her. In the kitchens nobody bothered. It was accepted practice in the household, or at least it always used to be when the old Master’s sons lived at home, that the young gentlemen carried on with the scullery maids.
Part Three
The Painter’s Death
I catch sight of myself in a long, ruffled sheet of sea water and I am fearfully humiliated. There stands a small, peculiar figure, dressed in a scarlet jacket and grey trousers, with a full-length overcoat trailing across his narrow shoulders. The coat is too long and the figure looks grotesque, a puppet dressed in a carnival costume, a caricature of the Evil Baron, who will crack a whip five times his length to summon up his unfortunate peasants. I look more closely at the shifting slab of water. No, I am not mistaken. The dwarf is crying, and his tears are slipping away into the freezing wind, blown far off into the salt wastes and grey waves. These are the last days of March in an evil spring. I wait for the wind to restore my composure. When my tears are dry, I turn round to look at Jobson, who is hundreds of yards away. He is smoking on the wharf, his buttocks stowed neatly into a nest of ropes. I cannot see his features clearly. But I know that he is watching me. He has learned to leave well alone, so he does not approach, but in the ebbing light he can still observe me, wandering along the Solent shore.
I no longer know the difference between grief and frustration. And so I walk the damp sand at twilight, biting my lips, skirting the water’s edge. The tiny moulds of my worn boots hover and vanish. I walk slowly back, hunched, eyes down, elbows tucked close to my side, marking the retreating tide. Here lies a faint line of white, broken shells in the grey sand, here a sunken piece of smooth, pale wood, with a dark knot like an eye, blackened, gouged out. Battered and abandoned, wooden fishing pots, the ribs cracked and splintered, a mass of shredded canvas sunk into the sand, a bleached skull protruding, the teeth uncannily human. I try to pluck the skull from the sand and the bones fall to shards and dust in my hands. Everything I touch dissolves. Here is the long shelf of grey rocks, darkening now, the light folded across the pools.
I turn to step carefully over the slippery rocks. I stop, bend down and stare into one of the long fissures which decorate this strange, jagged formation. I recoil at once. I thought that I had seen the flickering of transparent crawfish sliding between the mass of uncoiling, green weed. But when I stare down I see a yellow face, mouth open, the sweat streaming down either side of his nose. The face gapes back. I know that I am seeing two things at once, but neither will disperse in the pool’s reflection. As I watch, the mus
cles tighten into a terrible grimace, then slacken, as the eyeballs turn over and the man dies. I will not flinch. I peer down into the salt crevice. And all I see is the murky slap and smack of the sinking edge. A thin trace of green slime that had trickled from the man’s mouth unfurls into the rock pool as the tide sucks back. It is only seaweed, floating in the tides. I shake my head fiercely to displace this image of the face drowned in death, not water. I retreat, slipping on the mass of grey pebbles left wet by the lapping surf. I look back towards the wharf.
The dark sweeps rapidly up the beach. Jobson must still be there. But I can no longer see him. All I can see are the black tarred slats of Portsmouth barracks, a square hulk against the fading sky, beyond that the church tower and immovable weather-vane, rigid with rust, no matter how insistent the wind. Here is the white shed open to the sea, housing the lifeboat, the upturned ovals of the fishermen’s skiffs, the painted pale roofs of the outhouses, where the daily catch is sold, all sinking now into darkness. As I watch the cottages along the front, a woman appears, wearing a white apron. I can see the outline of her apron. I hear a voice, calling, calling. I set out, back up the beach, my small boots slithering and sinking in the wet grey sand. I have regained my composure, my habitual calm. They shall not see that I have been crying. My tears would tell the world that I am not invulnerable, unfeeling, vain.
James Miranda Barry Page 12