The Vavasour Macbeth

by Bart Casey

  He was astonished as she continued. “I guess these things happen. Well, it’s happened to us. So, what d’ya think of that?”

  Stephen looked down and drew back in his chair, moving away from her. She saw he was no longer surprised, but actually seemed to be turning angry as he narrowed his eyes and gazed back at her. He became cold with the silence.

  “Well? Aren’t you going to say something?” she asked.

  Stephen picked up his glass and tossed down the rest of his first gin and tonic. He knew it was impossible for him to be the father: doctors had explained all that to him years ago. But he’d never told Miranda. What was she up to?

  “That’s impossible!” he hissed out at her.

  “Not really, mate. Unless you were asleep in school health class. That was the one I was most awake for in me whole education,” she countered.

  “No, Miranda. I’m sorry, but it’s bullshit.”

  “Bullshit? Well, you fucking bastard! I should bloody well know about what’s happening to me. And it’s not bullshit! I expected you to be more caring.” Her cheeks turned as red as if a fire had lit up inside her.

  “Miranda, you’re either lying to me, or it’s someone else’s. That’s all I know.”

  Without any pause at all, Miranda picked up her glass and tossed the contents in Stephen’s face, hitting the people sitting behind him as well. Then she stood up and threw the glass on the floor, shattering it.

  “You bastard,” she shouted and she turned on her heel and stormed out the door.

  Now all heads were turned on Stephen. Slowly he stood up and took off his jacket, hanging it on the back of his chair. He smoothed off some of the drink from his white shirt, wiping his hand across and downward. The shirt was soaked through so that his nipples were suddenly visible, dark and pressing against the damp cotton. He reached up and unslipped his tie. The man at the table behind him was also on his feet taking off his own jacket, which was splattered across the back. Looking around, Stephen saw he was the center of attention. “Sorry, everyone. Very sorry about that.”

  Mollie came over with several small towels and patted Stephen’s front before handing one to him and another to the man aside him. She seemed to like mothering him. “Never mind, Stephen. She’s always been trouble,” said Mollie.

  “Sorry for all the mess.” His feet crunched on the broken glass as he moved away from the table.

  “Just you move over there away from the glass and dry out for a while,” Mollie said. “I’ll take these jackets and your tie back into the kitchen by the cooker and they’ll dry out faster. And here’s your paper—that’s still dry anyway.”

  “Thanks. I suppose I’ll have another G and T—this one in the glass and not over my head.” Stephen turned to the couple behind him. “And can I please stand you a round.” Well, at least they didn’t seem too upset—and they were also moving away from the broken glass.

  Stephen walked over to an empty table and sat down. Minutes before, he’d felt a bit tipsy, but his drink-in-the-face from Miranda had brought back momentary clarity. Now, actually, he felt a bit sad—sad and wet—because he liked Miranda a lot, and it had all happened so fast. Too fast to really think through what to say, what to do. So he’d just let fly the first thing that came into his head. Great.

  Well, she was clearly lying to him. Strange, he thought, I’d never thought of her as wanting to settle down with me before. Or maybe she wasn’t lying. Maybe she had gotten pregnant and just assumed that he was the father. But there must have been another man. Now, we weren’t married or anything. We both date other people, and neither one of us is a martyr to celibacy. And then, she couldn’t have known about my not being able to have children: everything seems to work normally. I use condoms anyway for commonsense safety—but she would have taken that as birth control. That’s understandable. I never told her—didn’t seem important. I mean we were just bonking, not starting a family. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong with

  women...again.

  Stephen was just halfway through his new gin and tonic—and feeling a bit drier—when in through the doors came Miranda’s brother, Tony, who worked down at the village garage. He was red-faced with clenched fists. When he set eyes on Stephen, he’d found what he’d been looking for. Before Stephen could say anything—in fact, just as he was opening his mouth—Tony straightened to his full height and hit him full force in the face, catching him just to the right of his nose and square on his eye. The force of the blow knocked Stephen right off the chair and onto the floor.

  “That’s for fucking my sister, you bastard. Just crying her eyes out to me mum right now—got the whole house a shambles.”

  Tony moved in closer as if to hit Stephen again, or give a good kick, but checked himself at the last moment. “You ain’t worth it, you wanker!”

  Next moment, Tony had the barman in front of him.

  “All right, you, out of here,” Jim ordered. Come on, out the door. I’ll call a copper for you if you don’t move out now. You’re banned here, mate. Do your drinking and your fighting somewhere else from now on. Out you go.”

  As the barkeeper ushered Tony out, Stephen was rolling about on the floor, his hands and arms over his face, wincing with the pain. Inside Stephen’s head, the numbness was fast turning into a sharp ache. It had been quite a number of years since Stephen had been on the receiving end of any punch like that.

  Mollie was having a hard night’s work with Stephen—more like the trauma nurse at the hospital than a barmaid. She reentered the lounge with a towel full of ice, which she set down on the table as she helped Stephen up to a sitting position. Then Jim uprighted the chair and came over to Stephen on the other side of Mollie.

  “Here. Let me have a look at that,” she said, gently pushing Stephen’s hands down and away from his already swelling eye. “Oh, that’s a nasty one, but you’ll survive. Come on up into the chair…that’s it. Just like me brother after a rugby game. Towels and ice every which way.” The barman grasped Stephen under his shoulder and helped hoist him up.

  Stephen set his elbow on the tabletop, took hold of the towel, and lowered his eye into the ice. Slowly the pain started to be replaced by the numbness of the cold.

  “Well, what next?” he winced.

  “I think you’ve had the lot tonight, mate,” Jim said. “Anyone else comes in that door after you and you’d better go and move in with Salman Rushdie.”

  Stephen would have smiled if he could—but he couldn’t. “Right, just bring me a nightcap G and T, and I’m going to go into hiding at home. Just need to sit here for a few minutes.”

  “I should think you should have them look at that at hospital tonight,” said Mollie. “Just keep the ice on it for an hour or two.”

  “Is it badly cut and bleeding? You know, I can’t tell myself right now.”

  “Well, no. But it is swollen up pretty bad and turned a shade of deep red—must be bruising.”

  “Well, I’m going to give it a few minutes then. And then I’ll decide. I know I’d be sitting there hours before they got to me in the emergency room, and I don’t think I could take that tonight.”

  After about a half hour, Stephen felt well enough to stand up and go to the toilet. There, over the top of perhaps the dirtiest sink in Britain, he could make the first damage assessment with his good eye. “Bloody hell, I look a sight.” It was going to get worse, too. It would be black as coal when school opened next week. Oh, what the hell, he thought. Can’t do anything about that now.

  After a minute he was back in the bar paying his tab and leaving five-pound tips for Mollie and Jim.

  “Bless you and take care getting home. Here’s a fresh towel with more ice,” said Mollie.

  “Thanks. Good night. And sorry about all the trouble.”

  Almost eleven o’clock, and now besides the pain in his eye, an overarching headache set in. Got to load up on acetaminophen before I hit the bed, he thought, or I won’t last until morning.

  He found t
he keys to his Mini in his dried jacket pocket and fumbled about with them in the lock for a while because he couldn’t see much at all in the dark space of the lawn where the cars were parked between the pub and the village cricket pitch. There were people still sitting out at tables surrounding the pub, and he knew their eyes were on him. He finally opened the door and lowered himself in. He set the ice towel down on the passenger seat to his left and fit the key into the ignition. The car started up with a shake and he felt every vibration in his eye. This is going to be bad, he thought.

  He shifted into reverse to back out of his space and started to lift the clutch, rolling back slowly. But suddenly there was a commotion behind him...voices...yelling...and then finally someone banging on the boot and back window. What the hell! Stephen turned his one good eye up to the rearview mirror and saw people immediately behind him, pressed up to the car. They must have been walking past, and he hadn’t seen them. Now what?

  He opened his door and looked back.

  “Stop the car, man! You’ve knocked him down with the bumper. Don’t move now.”

  Before he could get out, Stephen saw that he had apparently knocked down someone, and that others were lifting them up.

  “Are you all right, Tony?”

  “Aye, just a scare. Why don’t you watch where you’re going, arsehole?”

  For Christ’s sake, it was Tony Baker—the punch thrower himself. Well, he looks alive, thought Stephen, so I’m going to bugger off.

  With room in front instead of behind, Stephen closed the door, shifted into first, and headed off forward out of his parking space. Last thing he saw was Tony framed in the sideview mirror shaking his fist in Stephen’s dust with his friends making weak-hearted attempts to run after him. Well, I may not have hit him back, but at least I did something, thought Stephen. That’s one point for me.

  A few days after the fight at the pub, Stephen was forcing himself to spend a quiet evening at home prepping for school. He was more than annoyed at having to put the Vavasour papers aside to meet teaching obligations, but it was his own fault. As headmaster, he had made it a custom each year to be a one-day guest lecturer on the opening day of school.

  In fifth-form English, they were going to read and discuss the short stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners for a fortnight. Stephen would launch all that with a biographical talk on Joyce himself, which always went down well. It humanized the great man to tell the kids he liked to drink too much, sit down at the piano, and belt out a bevy of emotional Irish ballads. Made the old bard very approachable.

  Then Stephen would kick off the new term’s fourth-form Latin class. They were about to wade through weeks of translating the Aeneid by Virgil. He sighed, thinking how English schoolmasters for the last five hundred years had stood up and intoned “Arma virumque cano”—”Of arms and the man I sing”—to start poor Aeneas and his close friend the faithful Achates off on their heroic wanderings after the Trojan War. Actually, there was a very good reason to keep the Aeneid, he thought, since there was nothing like a tale of swordplay and the conflict between good and evil to get the Lord of the Rings generation engaged.

  He liked showing the way for his teachers in a class or two as headmaster, encouraging the staff to make a strong start for the new term. Kept him in the game. But he wished he had bowed out of it this year, although it was too late now.

  Over the few days just before the start of school, he had already noticed how the staff and boys helping prepare the school behaved unusually well whenever he was around them. That probably could be put down to his fearsome black eye from his pub fight, now radiant with its puffy red, yellow, and purple concentric circles. Two or three more weeks and it would be normal, he thought, but for now he might as well enjoy the mask. He tidied his papers into folders for the separate classes and slipped them into his briefcase, which was next to the chair. Now he could indulge himself again in his new passion, the Vavasour papers.

  He stood up and walked over to the bookcase to his right. From the top shelf, he chose a flat leather portfolio and moved it to the desk. It was an oversize folder a Victorian artist might have kept his sketches in—just two leather covers hinged together, lined with hand-marbled Florentine endpapers inside—about the size of a large atlas when closed.

  Stephen then made a detour into the kitchen to pour another glass of the red wine he’d been sipping since dinner, a very good St. Emilion, even though its label revealed it as the Waitrose store brand. He thought how librarians would bristle if they ever saw such a noxious red fluid near any old manuscript on their own premises. But for now he was alone with these scribblings resurrected from the tomb, and he could work as he wanted. He would, however, be bloody careful not to spill anything.

  Back at his desk, Stephen opened the folder and lifted out the top leaf from a short stack of loose sheets. Since he had mixed up all the papers from the Vavasour tomb when he dried them out, inventories, leases, poems, and recipes were all jumbled together.

  A salutation and signature proclaimed this particular page a letter. Writing was clustered in the center of the sheet and old creases showed how the edges had originally been folded and then sealed with wax for confidentiality. All that remained of the wax was a red smudge. Holding it up to the light, he could see a familiar watermark in the shape of a cooking pot—one of the most common ones found on Elizabethan-era paper.

  The writing itself was in the swirling flourishes of the secretary hand. As he had explained to Vicar Hamilton, in those days it was the most common handwriting for business, literary composition, and correspondence. However, it wasn’t clear whether a secretary or someone else wrote this page because the style was sloppy. That could mean the person with the pen wrote infrequently, or was too arrogant to care about clarity. Or perhaps someone wrote it very fast while taking dictation. Hopefully the content of the message would shed light on all that.

  The date of “the twelfth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth” placed the letter’s date of composition around 1570. As usual, the spelling was idiosyncratic and inconsistent, rather than conforming to any set way of spelling; it was more as if the writer simply had tried to capture how the words sounded. Frequent abbreviations made some of the words hard to identify, but the general sense of the letter was clear. The writer was telling Sir Henry Lee that he was the likeliest candidate to be appointed ranger in charge of the royal estate of Woodstock, one of Elizabeth’s favorite hunting properties, just northwest of London. That would indeed be a choice gift from the sovereign.

  It had taken Stephen about seven minutes to get that far. Which was the pattern for all of the letters among the sheets (and there seemed to be several dozen in front of him). Understanding each would mean a laborious word-by-word transcription, working out each phrase. The next document on top of the stack in his folder, by contrast, appeared to be a poem: that would be something a little different as soon as he got to it. At least a poem should be easier, he thought, because there should be no abbreviations or attempts at code.

  Stephen was using a simple inventory classification system, assigning each of the sheets a numbered identity, which he marked in soft pencil at the top right, and labeling his own sheet-by-sheet translations to match. A medium-length letter might take a half hour to transcribe, though things should move faster once Stephen became familiar with the handwriting of any individuals who were represented multiple times. However, this letter about becoming ranger at Woodstock was new. It was from someone he did not yet recognize among the find.

  As a college student at Oxford, Stephen had liked this sort of work, which was called paleography. Few people could do it. England might have literally millions of unread ancient documents, but only a dwindling number of people could actually read them. Most university budgets were under pressure and recently many paid positions in paleography had been cut. The same pinch was on in the public sector, although strong pockets of skills remained at the museums and government record offices that maintained archives b
ack to the centuries before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Fortunately, the faculty and librarians at Oxford remained strong, for the moment, and he was glad to have been given close supervision and training.

  Stephen’s undergraduate course at Oxford led him to a dual degree in English and classics. His focus was poetry. He especially liked the period of English writing from 1550 to 1650, when the ancient classics had perhaps their most obvious influence on what was being written and created in English. Translations from the Greek and Latin authors were popular—with some, such as Chapman’s Homer, notably appearing as English verse quite different in style from the originals. That was because later Tudor and Stuart writers loved playing around with language; constructing new meters, verse styles, and rhyming schemes; and enriching them with rhetorical devices, puns, and double entendres to amuse their readers, as when Hamlet tells Ophelia “get thee to a nunnery,” which could be directing her to either a convent or a brothel. They decorated their sentences the way an interior decorator styled a fine sitting room. Stephen also had a soft spot for the nineteenth-century young Romantic poets—Byron, Shelley, and Keats—because they were also worshippers of the classics, creating their own latter-day epics, cantos, and odes.

  In those college days, it hadn’t seemed to Stephen that his concentration in classics was an obscure, tiny backwater for twentieth-century study. The university was divided up into about forty supportive residential colleges, each with its own quadrangles, libraries, dining halls, and grounds for scholars. Magdalen College was his home. It housed about four hundred undergraduates and two hundred graduate students, and even with scores of possible concentrations, about a dozen of his fellow Magdalen undergrads were also neck deep into classics. And his classics tutor was based there as well. Besides, the rest of his studies were concentrated in the English department, one of the largest in the school. So in that small world at Oxford, he was a mainstream scholar.