Gertrude and Claudius

by John Updike

  “Kind advice comes constantly to a king, and he learns to see it all in terms of the bearer’s own benefit.”

  “And reaches the point where suspicion has whittled his heart to the size of the knob of his sceptre,” Geruthe responded hotly, “and his own child understandably refuses to come home.”

  “It is not me he avoids,” Horvendile snapped. Then, fearful lest his queen take a hurt from the clear implication that it was she, he said in amends, “It is the—the general climate,” giving up on describing a local situation so elusively slack and malodorous.

  “What ever happened to Bathsheba?” Fengon asked Geruthe. They were seated in a little-used room of Elsinore, where Fengon’s man Sandro, a slender honey-skinned native of Calabria, had persuaded, in very imperfect Danish, an unwilling servant to lay and light a fire. The wood was fresh-chopped ash; the fire smoked; still, the two aristocrats hardly noticed their stinging eyes and cold feet, so intent were they on the intimations each was giving the other, beneath the surface of speech.

  In mild panic Geruthe asked, “Bathsheba?”

  “The little brown brancher I sent you many years ago, before heading south again. You have forgotten, so accustomed is a queen to gifts from near-strangers.”

  “Near now, but no stranger ever. I remember. We were not a good match, Bathsheba and I. Her eyes, unseeled, took in too much, and she was forever bating—that is the word?—at bright objects in my chamber as they caught the sun. And she would hurl herself at sounds in the wall, mice or swallows nesting in the chimney, too faint for my ears. I could not reason with her.”

  “Nor could one with any falcon,” Fengon said, in the casual, murmurous voice he used, she had noticed, only with her. Among men and servants he spoke up clearly, even officiously. He had put on weight, his voice volume. “Reason is not their path. In this they are like our deeper selves, over whom the brain would in vain set itself as master.”

  “A queen in a castle, I discovered, is in poor position to acquire a daily supply of fresh-killed meat. At night her soft but incessant cry—lamenting her loss of freedom, as I imagined it—kept me quite awake. Horvendile’s chief falconer took my starving pet into the royal mews, but there existed in those perches an already established order to which the other birds of prey, broken to human use, were not willing to admit our half-wild Bathsheba. The falconer was fearful she would be slaughtered, her throat slashed or her back snapped, in the necessary interval when the birds are unhooded and permitted to use their wings in the mews’ high vaults. Thinking that Thord—yes? that was his name?—might take her back, I rode to Lokisheim with a pair of guards, and found only the boy, the pale-faced limping boy—?”

  “Ljot,” Fengon supplied, his sable eyes swarming with glints, feeding on her every motion and inflection and lineament, so that Geruthe, as she talked, felt her tongue and gestures slowing, as a musician drags his tempo when overly conscious of being listened to. Her skin prickled beneath her heavy diapered surcoat, laced in front, over a blue cotehardie brocaded with silver thread. Could any woman, let alone one of forty-seven summers and no longer lean, withstand the pressure of attention so avid? She was used to being admired but not consumed by eyes like this.

  “Little Ljot, yes,” Geruthe agreed, hurrying on, through those unsatisfactory events of more than a decade ago, when Fengon’s slightly sinister gift had enlisted her in a secret of sorts, though Horvendile had been made aware of his brother’s curious present and laughed dismissingly: “As soon give a man a spinning wheel,” he had said, “for all the use to be gotten from it!”

  She went on, seeking to match the cautious tone of the man she was with, “He said that Thord had fallen sick, of age and the cruel demands of the birds, and your flock had been yielded up, on your instructions in parting, to a dealer from Nødebo in such precious and precarious fowl.”

  “I did not expect to return soon,” Fengon told her. “I had taken a vow.”

  “What sort of vow?”

  “A vow of renunciation.”

  “What were you renouncing, may I ask?”

  “Who better to ask? I was renouncing the sight of you, the sound of you, the faint but maddening scent of you.”

  She blushed. He had a way of insinuating the unspeakable, yet at her prompting, so she could not fault him. “Surely there was no need,” she did protest. “A man is entitled to lend his sister-in-law attendance, if it is done respectfully.”

  “My thoughts did not exclude respect, but were more than that. They frightened me in their vehemence, their possession of all my waking minutes and then, hideously warped, of my dreams. In my dreams, you were wanton, and I wore a crown. My qualms were perhaps dynastic: I feared that in my love of you and envy of him I might injure my brother.”

  Geruthe stood, partly in alarm, partly to stir herself, in this cold and smoky room, into warmth. “We must not speak of love.”

  “No, we must not. Tell me the fate of poor forlorn Bathsheba, too wild for her lady and too tame for nature.”

  “We took her, Ljot and I, to your field, where I had seen you demonstrate falconry, and set her free.”

  “Free? But what did freedom mean to her? Death in the talons of a bigger, wilder raptor utterly unspoiled by man’s hand.” He had stood, too, so as not to loll in the Queen’s presence.

  “It was not my hand that tamed her,” Geruthe said. “We undid the jesses, and at first she flew low, dipping as if she were trailing a creance that would pull her back at will, and then, feeling no tug, she beat herself toward Heaven, and by lifts and lilts explored the breadth of its corridors, yet kept banking obliquely back to be above us, circling quizzically, as if unwilling to give up a connection she had known. She descended it seemed to take my wrist again, but I threw my gauntlet of padded chamois into the tall grass, where she eyed it in flight, as if thinking to retrieve it; but no, then she swooped away mewing, toward the Forest of Gurre in the direction of Elsinore.”

  “You remember it as if painted on your memory. And did she ever reappear at Elsinore, on your windowsill perhaps?”

  “No, but she haunted my thoughts there, as I realized that she had been dear to me, though her value had been eclipsed by the trouble she caused.”

  “Needing to be fed, you mean.”

  “And to have her messes swept and scoured and her feathers checked for mites and lice, and the general worry of her.” Her torso twitched in indignation as if to ring a girdle of bells. “You had burdened me, it seemed, with a representative of yourself, that I dare not neglect, so to keep you alive, whether in the hazards of your travels or in my cherishing memory was unclear.”

  “The living,” allowed Fengon, “make cruel demands.” To his manservant he said softly, “Parti,” and only when the dark young man, who moved with a disquieting docile fluidity that awakened distrust in heavy-footed Danes, had slipped from the chamber did Fengon embrace Geruthe where she stood expectant, indignant and awed by the pit opening up beneath her but afire with the wish to have his lips—curved and cushioned almost like a woman’s, and shaping themselves for the pressure of hers in that dense black beard salted with gray—united with hers, so their breaths would each pollute the other’s, and the moisture they carried behind their teeth would thrust with their tongues into the other’s warm maw. He was solid as a tree, as a rigid young bear, in his diagonally quilted doublet, younger and smaller and firmer than Horvendile. And tasting not of rotting teeth and recent food softened with ale but of living wood, like a mandrake root when as a little girl she chewed and sucked it, excited by the almost-taste, the hint of sweetness coming from underground.

  She broke off the embrace. She was panting, an immediate desire slaked but others crowding after it, a chain of shameless petitioners, making her dizzy. “This is sin,” she told her partner in it.

  He took a dance step backward, his lips twisted by a triumphant amusement. “Not by the laws of love,” he rapidly, softly urged. “There are sins against the Church, and sins against natur
e, which is God’s older and purer handiwork. Our sin has been these many years one of denying our natures.”

  “You think I have loved you?” she asked, not deaf to his presumption, though her body felt swollen and abandoned and longing for his arms as an animal hunted and wounded seeks the safety of the forest.

  “I cannot believe—” he began carefully, sensing that she might seize the slightest affront as an excuse to flee his presence forever. “It is a possibly heretical article of my own faith,” he began again, “that a creator would not engender so fierce a love in me without allowing in its object the gleam of a response. Can prayer be so futile? You have always received my presence kindly, for all my sins of absence.”

  Her heart, her hands were fluttering; she felt her life threatened with a large meaning, larger than any since she had been a little princess begging the crumbs of Rodericke’s love amid the tumble and alarums of his bawdy court. When you are small, the meanings are large; if in later life you lose childhood’s background of assured forgiveness and everlasting rescue, a swerving sense of largeness now and then nevertheless returns. “I can carry on this conversation,” she breathed to Fengon, “but not at Elsinore. Look at us, whispering in this cold and smoky nook while your man waits outside, thinking the worst! In these royal precincts nothing goes unobserved, and my own conscience grimaces at the least action that is not queenly. It was better, my dear brother-in-law, when I could cherish the image of you in a place that stretched me to imagine, and remembered fondly how you dared to tease a queen, in a voice pitched like no other she heard, than have you here and face your bold claims.”

  He slumped to his knees on the stones at her feet, showing her not his face but his bowed head with its grizzled, thick hair and splash of white where a ground had been survived. “I make no claims, Geruthe. I am a beggar sheerly. The truth is simple: I live only in your company. The rest is performance.”

  “This is not performance?” Geruthe said dryly, brushing his tingling hair with a hand gone cold in the fatality of her commitment. “We must find a better stage—one not borrowed from our king.”

  “Yes,” he said, rising and taking as practical a tone as her own. “My brother is my king, too, and that would gall even if I were not in the base position of desiring his wife.”

  “Me—so far past my prime? Dear Fengon, did you not meet in those Mediterranean lands younger women to help you forget your plump and aging sister-in-law? One hears that blood runs hot and the nights are thick with the aromas of lemons and flowers, away from our sullen skies.” She was trying to move them off that treacherous, leaden ground where they had made, it was plain though unstated, an illicit compact.

  He joined her in banter. “They are, and there were such women—women throng every land—but I am a son of the barren heath, and looked in vain for the northern lights in those skies where the stars hung close as fruit. Our lights move elusively, tantalizingly. In comparison, the hot sun and fat moon that encourage the southern races in their lucidity of spirit seemed—what can I say?—vulgar, blatant, coarse—”

  “Unsubtle,” she provided, laughing at herself and at her harmony with this adorable villain. If the priests keep telling a woman that her lower parts are bad, then she must take a bad man as lover.

  • • •

  Geruthe called Corambis to her on a day when no summons from the King could disturb them. Horvendile was inspecting his troops at the Spodsbjerg garrison, showing himself in full armor, keeping up their morale for the clash, which he said was inevitable, with young Fortinbras and his Norwegian renegades. Geruthe could breathe for a few days. The near presence of her corpulent, war-minded spouse lately had begun to squeeze her lungs; just the thought of him brought a furtive lump to her throat.

  The Lord Chamberlain had seemed old to the newly deflowered bride of seventeen when this official, then lithe and just forty, had skied across twelve leagues of fresh snow to confirm the evidence of bloodied sheets; but to the matron of forty-seven he seemed not much older than herself, though his next birthday would be his seventieth, and his unkempt goatee had become quite white. “Dear friend,” she began, “you alone in this court have seen through my queenly comportment to the restlessness in my heart.”

  His moist lower lip slid about thoughtfully before he pronounced, “Many have perhaps glimpsed it, but only I have been privileged to discuss with you a certain mild disquiet.”

  “Mild grows wild with the years. A modest chafing ends in convulsions.”

  “Unease, Your Majesty, is the human lot, even for the most exalted. The pampered foot most feels the pinch.”

  “Don’t scold me. I believe you love me,” Geruthe said, her hand of its own nervous will dipping toward his knee where he sat in his accustomed three-legged chair, with its pinnacled upright slat that no one could safely lean back on. “And from those we love no shame should shield us.” Her hands, having not quite touched him, flitted to indicate the thick stone walls around them. “Elsinore has been a dungeon to me ever since I watched my father die within it. He had pledged me to continue as its mistress. It is not natural to live where we have lived since birth: our spreading roots must snake through heaps of old debris. I had hoped the years would ease my sense of obstruction, as the ears become deaf to a daily repeated sound, be it the cry of rooks or the rattle of fellies on cobblestones; but it has not proven so. My old age approaches. My beauty—which reflected more a simple health than any special grace—is faded, and I have never lived for myself.”

  “For yourself?” Corambis prompted, rolling his wet lips as if to get the savor of the elusive concept.

  “I was my father’s daughter, and became the wife of a distracted husband and the mother of a distant son. When, tell, do I serve the person I carry within, the spirit that I cannot stop from hearing, that sought expression with my first bloody cry, burst as I was into the air from my mother’s torn loins? When, Corambis? What I need—it really need not shock you—”

  The elder statesman tutted fussily, readjusting the extravagant scalloped sleeves of his houppelande. “But, beloved Geruthe, how do any of us define ourselves but in relation to others? There is no unattached free-floating self. By a parallel litany I am the parent of a distant son, Laertes being set upon self-improvement in Paris, and of a very present daughter, present to my concern as a replica of her mother, imperilled by the same otherworldly beauty. I am, to continue this relational way of speaking, Magrit’s widower and the obedient servant of my king and, by effortless and proper extension, of his consort, my most excellent queen.”

  There was a little sting in this laborious protocol, implying the priority of a king over a queen, as if Corambis cagily felt an awkward importunity coming.

  She came out with it, then. “I need a place of my own,” she told him. “A place to be, however you construe the term, ‘by myself,’ when my duties permit, away from these crowded halls of Elsinore, yet not so far away that a half-hour’s ride will fail to bring me safely back. You once advised me to read and embroider less, and to exert my body in sport more. The place I picture would be embedded in nature, free of the constant witness that attends royalty, where in solitude and salutary idleness I could reclaim the poise and piety that befits a monarch’s loving consort.”

  Corambis listened, head tilted, his lower lip slack, in an attitude of, she felt, rising resistance, as her specific request drew nearer. “Dear old friend,” she made herself go on, with a drop into throaty, rapid intimacy that was in part truly impulsive—impulsive affection conjured up by deliberate recall of images from the days when he was still lithe and she lissome—“you know how conscientiously I have trimmed my feelings to suit the demands of Denmark. Is this nation, in all its scattered islands, too small to afford me a single hiding-space? If I cannot have it, then I may be galled to hate this entire polity that hems me in.”

  Corambis had come fully alert, sensing the danger in her mood. “I cannot imagine Geruthe hating anyone, even those who restrict her
liberty. Cheer and generosity have ever been your habit. As a baby rosy in the crib, you would laugh and offer your toys to an onlooker. Of late, my daughter has received from you many benefices of kind attention. She regards you as almost a mother.”

  “I do love Ophelia, and not merely, as I have been unkindly told, because I fancy my young self in her. I was never so rare as she, nor so shy. I see in her the healing simple whereby my Hamblet can be cured of his coldness, and with him this whole chilly kingdom. But I must save myself,” she hurried on, “at least for intervals of privacy more precious than I have been able, I fear, to convey to you.”

  “You have conveyed enough.”

  “How strange, that a queen must beg what a peasant wench need only go to the haymow to secure! How foreign this passionate whim of mine must appear to a man, who has only to wrap his cloak about himself, turn his back, and will that the world be banished! You have, Corambis, purchased and improved a mansion on the shore of Gurre Sø, secluded in the Gurre Forest and provided with all the daylight comforts a visitor would need.”