by WALL, ALAN
I watched him leave with the old acquaintance. She didn’t look so old to me. Considerably younger than me, in fact. Stefan’s final words before departing were these: ‘I sincerely hope you didn’t have too many of those bloody gins, my friend. I reckon there must be at least four measures to a glass.’
7
The next day, unshaven, my mind half-ruined from the Watchman’s gin, I went up as arranged to Swiss Cottage so that I could pick up the remainder of my things. Dominique had just taken a bath and was in her robe, her hair wrapped in a towel. We kissed, a little remotely, as people might when commiserating with one another over a shared bereavement. The way we’ll probably be kissing later today at the funeral.
‘Daniel came the other night,’ she said offhandedly as I filled up one of my bags. I stopped what I was doing and turned to look at her.
‘Daniel?’
‘He was trying to find you. I told him you’d moved out. It was late when he came, so he stayed for a drink.’
‘Couldn’t he have phoned me at the newsroom?’
‘I gave him the number, but he said no. Said it was your physical presence he craved. He’s a great one for physical presence, your friend Daniel. Said to tell you Sally and the boys are well. They’d all like to see you some time. It’s only a train ride to Thames Ditton, he said. He’s working on something new in London at the moment, did you know that?’
I stared at her in silence.
‘How’s your head, Sean?’
‘Not too bad. I’m not sure half a pint of gin helps much.’
‘Things are still going in then, through the night?’ I decided not to answer that.
‘How’s our friend Dr Emmanuel been?’
‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t see him any more.’
‘Then…’ I hesitated.
‘No, Sean, it’s over. Had been for a good long while and you know that as well as I do. But like so many people, we didn’t want to face the fact. We hadn’t even made love for six months. I must have been desperate to start doing it with Emmanuel. The Tavi’s Don Juan. If you ask me, you’ve been living alone since the beginning anyway. You still have your vocation, after all. I’d just been getting in the way of it, like a priest’s doxy.’
I finally dropped the last book into my bag and walked over to the door. Dominique came and kissed me a little less remotely on the cheek and then spoke again.
‘Maybe you should try getting angry. The only times I’ve ever seen you really angry were with Sigmund Freud and once over that mystical statue in Rome. Who was it again?’
‘St Teresa.’
‘The only thing the two of them have in common is that they’re both dead.’
‘Maybe I can only get angry with the dead.’
‘Or maybe it’s the dead you’re angry with – it’s not the same thing, you know. One of the most important functions of the parent is to be there to get angry with. You can’t even remember your mother, or you say you can’t, and your father finally wandered off and disappeared after one of this century’s most unsuccessful criminal careers.’
‘I didn’t know either of them well enough to spend too much time grieving.’
‘No, and that’s why you’re going to spend the rest of your life doing it through other means. You should be careful, you know, Sean. There is a lot of anger in there, actually. I know, because I located it from time to time. And if you leave it long enough, when it finally does come out you’ll probably kill somebody. There and then. How’s the School of Night these days?’
‘Still in the dark.’
‘Suit you then.’ I noticed as I looked down at the flesh on her neck a small red welt. It looked more like a tooth mark than anything else.
On the way back on the Underground I remembered the one time I had taken Dominique to stay with my grandparents. She had been entirely natural with them, for which I had been grateful. On the day we left we had driven to the glen outside town, a glacial valley strewn with mighty boulders. It had been early spring and there had been an overnight frost. She’d found a tiny wild flower, the name of which neither of us knew, its heart a vivid yellow. It was bright from its icing and I could still see the wonder on her face as she gazed at it, brilliant in its unexpected diamond.
I lay in bed and thought of what Dominique had said. Anger. Deep inside me. Not towards her, though. Towards someone else then, but who? Sally? No, I certainly felt something about her, but it wasn’t that. And it was surely not my old friend. I didn’t feel capable of any truly negative feelings towards Dan any more. Dear dead Dan.
8
You start to notice certain figures, luminous in their small cubes of light, suspended over the city. I liked to think of them as my fellow students: nocturnal lepidoptera, night-imps and night-hags, the incubi and succubi who prey upon the body of the past. They too shunned daylight’s kingdom as too bright and noisy for important recollections. Then home again to Stefan.
As a translator of the Sonnets, he was intrigued by my work on the School of Night. We were both in no doubt that they were riddled with clues, but neither of us was sure where the clues might be pointing. He peered over my shoulder at the sheets spread out all over the table, then, reclining on his ancient sofa with a cognac in his hand, he demanded that I explain the cat’s cradle I was trying to disentangle. And so I started.
‘I think Ralegh’s in here somewhere,’ I said.
‘Ralegh?’
‘Elizabeth’s pet name for Ralegh was Water. Take the L out of Walter and you have Water, and it’s surely appropriate enough, given his trade, though perhaps not quite as amusing as the good lady imagined. So, pushing it a little further, Ralegh calls himself Ocean. And when he’s in the Tower in 1592 he’s writing “Ocean’s Love to Cynthia”, Cynthia, as you know, being his name for Elizabeth. Well, London back then was a leaky sort of place and I doubt many literary secrets were kept for very long. What I mean is, I should think quite a few people knew that Ralegh was petitioning, in the name of Ocean, to his queen from his imprisonment. Petitioning to be reinstated inside the court of her sulky little heart. It strikes me as only to be expected that sheets would have been copied and passed around. Maybe not round the taverns, but then whoever wrote the works assigned to Shakespeare was moving in circles higher than the tapsters by then. So Ocean had run dry. The king of the seas was locked in a tower.
‘Of course, a fair number of scholars have assumed that some at least of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written in the early 1590s. So take another look at Sonnet 64.’ I picked up my sheet from the table and read:
When I have scene by times fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworne buried age,
When sometime loftie towers I see downe rased,
And brasse eternall slave to mortall rage.
When I have seen the hungry Ocean gaine
Advantage on the Kingdome of the shoare,
And the firme soile win of the watry maine,
Increasing store with losse, and losse with store.
When I have seene such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded, to decay,
Ruine hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weepe to have, that which it feares to loose.
‘Ralegh, that man of towering pride, put in the tower and so down-razed. The advantage that he, as Ocean, had gained in the kingdom now reversed and all his treasure squandered, “Increasing store with losse, and losse with store”. I think the writer of this was probably astounded by Ralegh’s fall from grace. It was like watching God die. Look at the known facts. Even his judges later were to say, “You have lived like a Star, at which the World hath Gazed.” Everyone knew how gloriously he shone, what a height he’d scaled. To end up in the Tower. The Tower represented two of the last four things: death and judgement. And it was the entry point for the other two: heaven and hell
. People went in there and came out alive, to be sure; Elizabeth herself had done so as a princess. But while you were there you represented to the world the absence of liberty, the curtailment of movement, the presence nearby of the axe. It was a very public place: later, during his last imprisonment, they had to stop Ralegh walking up and down one of the galleries because of the cheers the sight of him elicited from sailors on the river. You were put in the Tower as an emblem to the age; but now and then the emblem came to represent something the authorities had not intended.
‘This, our writer must have thought, was a definitive circumscription.’
‘Our writer, Sean? You’re referring to your national poet. What are you saying?’ Stefan lit up one of his Gauloises and blew the smoke up towards the ceiling.
‘I still think he’s our national poet, as a matter of fact, but I don’t think he’s necessarily who he’s been assumed to be.’
‘Forgive my ignorance, but has anyone else ever linked up that sonnet to Ralegh’s imprisonment?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Shakespeare was Southampton’s man, not Ralegh’s.’
‘When you say Shakespeare you mean the man from Stratford.’
‘Ah. You don’t, obviously.’
‘I’m sure of one thing. Whoever wrote that sonnet held Ralegh very close to his heart. I’m not at the stage where I can answer any questions, Stefan, I’m still asking them.
‘Ralegh, remember, had come pretty much from nowhere – the court aristos thought the way he spoke ridiculous. They hated and despised him for the way he’d gone straight to the top. If even he could be imprisoned, then thought itself was now a prison. And the building mentioned most often in the Shakespeare works is the Tower. See how the word ruminate in the sonnet actually contains the word ruin inside it. “Time will come and take my love away.” That doesn’t sound like decay so much as arrest by the Guard, such being the law of mutability in the interchanges of the State. Ralegh’s wife was imprisoned with him at the time. I think the Tower entered deep into this writer’s mind then. With the fall of Ralegh nothing was secure in this sublunary realm. And then, one year later almost to the day, Christopher Marlowe was done to death by Ingram Frizer in Deptford.
‘Marlowe and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Marlowe. There’s so much collaboration between these two that it’s hard to disentangle Shakespeare’s early work from Marlowe’s hand. Their imaginations fed upon one another. In some ways Marlowe seems to have shown whoever Shakespeare was how it could be done and that’s why he quotes the other poet’s line as a token of remembrance in As You Like It, “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”’
‘And Marlowe was close to Ralegh, a favourite of his, in fact,’ Stefan said, ‘and he was also, unless I’m mistaken, a leading member of the School of Night.’
‘He was, and I’ve been coming to think he might well have written the sonnet I just quoted.’
‘Do you think he wrote the rest of the works attributed to Shakespeare too?’
I took another drink of cognac before answering.
‘I suppose that’s where my thoughts would lead me, if it weren’t for the one indisputable fact: Marlowe dies on 30 May 1593 and by then we can only be certain that whoever wrote Shakespeare has written Henry VI, Richard III, maybe The Comedy of Errors, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and some sonnets. All the rest is still to come.’
‘Yes, that does seem to present something of a problem.’
We both fell silent for a moment, then Stefan went and took his Shakespeare down from the shelf.
‘There is supposed to be an actual reference to Marlowe’s death, isn’t there, in As You Like It?’
‘Yes, I said. It’s at the beginning of Act Three, Scene Three.’
‘I’m impressed,’ he said, finding it there as he turned the pages, then he read it out:
When a man’s verses cannot be understood … it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.
‘Isn’t that the quarrel over the bill?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘The official cause of Marlowe’s death was said to be an argument over the reckoning in a little room in Deptford; there’s a whimsicality about those words that could be offensive, don’t you think? But it always sounds to me more like a man whistling in the dark to cheer himself up. It has about it an air of bravado. I don’t believe the tone here really tells us much, to be honest. I wonder if the writer could even admit to himself what he really thought about it, not until much later anyway, in Macbeth, when the three murderers are sent after Banquo and Fleance. And there were three in the room with Marlowe that day when he died, remember – all of them, it’s become apparent since, employed on and off by the State to get up to no good, the third a piece of low-life dross. There’s that strange speech made by Macbeth to the murderers, a speech that seems to stop the play dead for a moment and sounds to me like the playwright inadvertently talking to himself.’ I turned over my notes until I had found the passage. ‘The first murderer says “We are men, my Liege”. And Macbeth replies,
Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are dept
All by the name of dogs …
Something ominously personal about that, don’t you think? There’s an actual revulsion there. Incidentally, allowing for the vagaries of Elizabethan spelling and letter substitution, there’s an anagram in amongst those nouns. They’ll let you spell Ingram Frizer, Poley and Skeres – the three men in the room when Marlowe was killed. It’s always been a slight oddity in the play that only two murderers go to see Macbeth, but by the time they kill Banquo there are three. But then the third doesn’t much signify – he’s just another piece of low-life dross.
‘A few lines later comes a crux the editors still argue over to this day. It’s still unresolved. Macbeth says, giving instructions for the murder:
I will advise you where to plant yourselves,
Acquaint you with the perfect spy o’th’time …
What could it mean? Well, I think it means Banquo. He was the perfect spy of the time, because he knew Macbeth’s secrets, he had been with him when the weird sisters made their prophecies. In other words, he knew too much. Just as Marlowe did. So the State set its curs on both of them, three men in both cases who made a profession of selling themselves body and soul, and were only too happy to sell the lives of others too.
‘It’s an odd thing, but Shakespeare’s works don’t speak too badly of spies; it’s a word that has an almost redemptive ring to it when it’s used. Remember what Lear says to Cordelia: “And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies.” Not so, though, with the word intelligencer, which is nasty. Richard III is referred to as hell’s black intelligencer. The real crookback schemer, of course, was Robert Cecil, who takes over from Francis Walsingham when he dies in 1590. What he takes over is the business of intelligence and projection. He decides in other words who is to be made to talk and who will be kept silent; who will be positioned at what precise position of peril in the spider’s web. There are racks and prisons at his disposal and if necessary blades too, like the one that went through Kit Marlowe’s head, just above the right eye, and found his brain. The man who wrote Shakespeare was still brooding on it over ten years later.
‘Everybody seems to be speaking in code here. That doesn’t necessarily make analysis any easier, does it?’
Stefan put his drink down on the table.
‘Well, speaking as someone who has lived under a communist regime, let me tell you this much: the only intelligent response to a world that is entirely encrypted and encoded is suspicion. At its worst this leads to paranoia; at its best to a profound scepticism in regard to human motivation and witness.’ By now I was hunting through my papers again.
‘Here it is. This is a phrase from a letter by the pursuivant and torturer Richard Topcliffe, a ph
rase I sometimes think is the most terrifying in all Elizabethan literature. He speaks of how, in regard to some poor sod attached to the old religion, he had endeavoured to “decipher the gent to the full”. I think it might explain why there’s something close to hysteria in Hamlet’s wish not to be inquisitorially known.’ I turned the sheets on the table before me again until I found his passage: ‘“You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass…” It was better not to be known, wasn’t it? To be known could be very dangerous, so people encoded themselves, became mysterious ciphers to their own contemporaries, so as to ensure their survival.’
‘But that’s what those works are all about, Sean, I realised that much during my translation work. You’ve summed up the theme that runs through each of them, even the comedies. But you don’t think the man from Stratford wrote them?’
‘His life doesn’t seem to correspond in any way to this man of secret studies, this dark obsessive with his terrifying revelations.’
‘But do you seriously think you could ever prove that it wasn’t him?’
‘Not at the moment, no. Maybe never. I’d have to turn up another source, wouldn’t I, to provide something in the way of triangulation. It’s far from impossible, though. I don’t doubt myself that there’s enough in Shakespeare’s work to read the age by, but what intrigues me about his life is that the facts lead nowhere. There’s something disconcertingly banal about them. They don’t tell you anything that helps you to interpret the plays. It’s almost as though they’re a provocation.’
Stefan had risen and now took another book down from the shelf. He turned the pages as he spoke.
‘I suppose there is another way of looking at it though, isn’t there?’
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘That his life, or rather the inconsequentiality of what’s known of his life, could be a standing rebuke to all those who worship the world of fact. To live entirely in facts is to be dwarf-brained and dwarf-spirited. Keats got it absolutely right, as so often. Here, I’ve found it: “That quality that forms a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…” In other words, if the mind is to expand into the space provided for it, what he called elsewhere the vale of soul-making, we must have faith. Now Shakespeare, whoever he was, knew that to place your faith in the wrong thing can lead to madness, but he knew just as surely that to refuse to place your faith in anything at all leads always to evil, to the howling pit. The zero of no belief at all is the black hole through which all that is good disappears. All Shakespeare’s villains end up as nihilists, even the ones that didn’t start out that way.’ Stefan took another sip from his glass and looked distractedly towards the window. ‘But I do know what you mean. There seems to be something unanswerably adrift between life and work that does make you wonder if another, hidden hand could have been involved. Could that solid and tiresome-looking burgher in the portraits really have undergone all the torment and passion that the words contain? This man who, when he’s hoovered up sufficient profits from his businesses in London, heads back to Stratford to count his tithes. Dante’s words do at least correspond to his life and his exile – not that you could have predicted them, but there’s nothing in the life that actually contradicts them. But nothing in Shakespeare’s life corresponds to what he created, as far as I can see. Nothing. So where does the School of Night come in?’
