by Mavis Cheek
Courtly Love, the perfect ideal, the golden age of chivalry with its civilizing effect upon manners, became for Janice Gentle the golden age of history. Vous ou Mort was, she felt, the correct, and only, undertaking for love.
She refuted Castiglione for his latter-day belief that in The Courtier he had encapsulated it all. 'Castiglione was a hundred and fifty years too late,' she wrote in an essay, 'and his own weaknesses barred him from understanding the purity of what had gone before him. He, like the Elizabethans, took Courtly Love and bastardized it, killing the parent Provencal and burying it under a mawkish effluvium of sentiment, conceit, artifice and plagiarism. As the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was inspired by Giotto and went on to make bad, naive paintings despite the greatness of their inspiration, so did Castiglione become inspired by l’amour courtois and go on to write an intolerable pastiche. In the next pages I intend to illustrate this with evidence drawn from early source material — from the courts of Blois, Flanders, Brittany, Burgundy, England, and from the writings that abounded among the troubadours and the trouveres of France, the minnesingers of Germany and the dolce stil novo of Italy . . .'
It was this essay which won her the scholarship to Cambridge. With little encouragement from her mother and even less from herself, Janice declined to go. One thing to sit in a very small sixth-form class of girls and discuss Petrarch; quite another to be away from home, in a strange city, with new faces belonging to both sexes, and not fear giving public voice to her views on the Judgements of Marie de Champagne. Janice Gentle abandoned the idea. In any case, she told herself, her mother was getting old and frail and ailing, and Janice was required to stay with her. Mother and daughter colluded and Janice stayed, very firmly, at home: Janice to continue her studies by post and to attend the occasional lecture on her favourite subject, Mrs Gentle to sew and settle herself into the role of fragile parent. Janice stepped up her intake of food and rounded out considerably, finding, as in the past, that it was cheering to munch away the hours. They had a small income from Mrs Gentle's deceased maiden sister, and the house was theirs. With caution and low expenditure they existed very well, caution and low expenditure being the major legacy left to them in their experience of Mr Gentle, disappeared.
For Janice's twenty-first birthday Mrs Gentle made a special effort and produced a birthday cake. The first since, well, she could hardly remember. Could Janice? Janice could, just as she knew her mother could, but she forbore to say so. Instead she opened the parcel her mother handed to her, out of which tumbled a coat of myriad colours, product of many hours' boudoir struggle by Mrs Gentle: a ravishing item made up of long-squirrelled-away remnants and the cut-up remains of what had once, in the good days, been Mrs Gentle's not unstylish wardrobe.
Janice was astonished at its colourful variation and brightness. It made her think of Chaucer's Madame Eglentyne in her pretty cloak and her coral and green gauds. Generally clothes were not something which interested her, she being somewhat well-covered for mini-skirts. This, however, was a delight; it flared around her plumpness without feeling restrictive, and she slipped it on the very next night when she went out to her Literary Society. It uplifted her spirits. There was something jewel-like about it, something that made her feel she glowed like a detail from an illuminated manuscript, something altogether fitting to her ways. It continued to uplift her as she left the Adult Education Building to catch her bus home. It was a rainy February night, bleak and cold, dismal and forlorn, but Janice did not feel any of these things. As she mused over Thomas Campion (1567-1620) and his absurd notions of Astrophel and Stella and Sir Philip Sidney's even more conceited tribute to the starstruck pair (making a pun with his own name, of course - very Elizabethan to riddle-me-ree rather than delight in the distancing of self and controlling the form), she looked pink-cheeked and happy. There was something altogether delightful about being snuggled into this soft, bright stylishness. She looked quite radiant, like a beautiful feminine ball in her contentment. Such is the power of clothes.
Dermot Poll coming out of the Bell and Bugle public house stepped swaying into the drizzle and shivered. A young Irishman with a pale (despite the Guinness consumed), appealing face and damp black curls, he embraced the night in sentimental mood. His wife, somewhere behind those low lit windows of the hospital opposite, had just been brought to bed with his first son, and
Dermot Poll was prepared to be in Love with the World. Everyone in the Bell and Bugle had loved him and he had assuredly loved them. Now it was the turn of the rest of humanity to experience his emotional beneficence. It being rather a bad night, however, the rest of humanity seemed to have stayed indoors. Only one human figure graced the darkness. Janice. And when he saw her, head bowed against the rain, body glowing radiantly against the shadows of the street - Madonna, Life-Bearing Womanhood - he felt a rising desire to worship.
Janice, still mulling over Thomas Campion and whether his apologia for classical metre was a useful piece of information or not, was concentrating. As she tried to recall some lines of his Astropbel, and not muddle them with Sir Philip Sidney's, she was wholly absorbed and did not notice the approach of the rapt young Dermot. Concentrating was an attractive facial arrangement for Janice in those days. Her large, pale eyes, unseeing, had a misty quality, and the line of her mouth was puckered in a rather delightful way. In a low voice she attempted to recall the verse exactly.
'Hark, all you ladies that do sleep;
The fairy queen Proserpina
Bids you awake and pity them that weep.'
Janice paused, unsure of the next line. Dermot paused, entranced. What better for a son of Erin, with a belly full of beer and his potency so recently made flesh, than to hear beautiful words in the night?
Janice recollected what she had forgotten, and continued.
'You may do in the dark
What the day doth forbid;
Fear not dogs that bark,
Night will have all hid.'
Dermot remained entranced. 'Night will have all hid .. .'
But not from Dermot Poll. He saw and he was conquered. Oh how he needed to worship. To worship was a requirement that was becoming acute. Woman. Birth-giver, God's unsullied creation. He fell to his knees before Janice and lifted up his shining, pretty face so that the light from a shop front near by illuminated him.
'Oh Queen of the Night,' he said, 'you are colour and you are magic. I have come to worship you and you have captured my heart.'
The emotion spilled out of him. A Father. A Man. And here was Woman. Woman who looked undeniably pregnant, full with seed, the highest state of feminine being.
'My heart,' he said, 'is yours, Fair Lady.' And he offered himself in the purest sense.
Janice took this very well. She did not run away nor scream, for threat was not in the air in those days. A stranger bending his knee to her on a wet pavement was, however, unusual, so she looked down at him and gave a hesitant half-smile, revealing a pair of pretty dimples.
'Ah, Mother of God, the Night Queen has dimples,' said Dermot to the empty street.
'Perhaps you should get up,' said Janice, 'for your knees must be quite wet.'
But Dermot, as much feeling the gravitational pull of the Guinness as the overwhelming thrill of the moment, stayed where he was. Janice continued to be unafraid, so she smiled at him again. Smiles from girls to sober men are pleasing. Smiles from girls to inebriate men are bewitching. Dermot Poll was duly bewitched and said so.
Janice blinked, astonished. Modern men were philanderers and brutes, were they not? Yet this one knelt before her like some knight of old.
Courtly Love, she thought, and she whispered aloud, 'Love unto Death.'
'Is that more of your poetry, O Lady of Colours?'
'What?' said Janice, who had already gone back in time to see it emblazoned upon a courtier's shield.
'More ... of your poetry?'
Janice, obedient, heard this as a request.
'Well,' she said, 'it is not the sort o
f poetry I really care for you to see, but of its kind it has a certain ring.'
Dermot nodded encouragingly. What did it matter what the vision said, so long as she stayed here in the dark and the cold with him? It was infinitely more joyful than being alone.
So Janice continued with Campion, realizing that this sort of thing was some people's preference.
'"This night by moonshine leading merry rounds/Holds a-"'
'Moonshine!' Dermot Poll felt indignant. 'This is not moonshine . ..' And indeed, he felt quite convinced it was not. He took her hand, in its woolly glove, and kissed it chastely. On the whole he was enjoying himself and was now firmly entrenched in the undemanding role of lyrical enslavement.
Janice blinked again. Something stirred within her. A little urge to reach out and touch his face with her other woolly glove, an urge she resisted. Very possibly he might bite after all. Courtly Love, she found herself saying, first made its appearance in twelfth-century poetry, term probably originated in Islamic culture, original European tenets set down by Guillaume de Lorris before 1240, but. . .
Vous ou Mort. ..
Vous ou Mort...
It just kept getting in the way.
Dermot Poll looked about him for inspiration. He wanted to go further, he wanted to see signs, give symbols, but he had nothing. And then, like a miracle, he saw. He rose from his knees, clasped the hand he had so recently kissed, and led its owner, as if she floated, towards the lighted shop window near by.
'See,' he said, gesturing towards an enormous satin heart that rested in the window. 'A sign .. .'
She looked cautiously from Dermot to window and back again. She looked unconvinced. It was therefore Dermot Poll's absolute requirement to convince her.
'You are my heart's delight,' he began to sing, placing his free hand McCormack-like on that area of his anatomy.
Janice's eyes widened even further, though whether at the sentiments expressed or at the manner of their expression he could not tell. So he stopped singing and spoke to try it both ways.
'You are my heart's delight,' he said, 'because you are colour. You are radiance. You glow like an exotic flower and I wish to worship you.'
Janice's heart bumped again.
'A picture made of jewels,' he continued, quite caught up in the joy of it all.
Book of Days, thought Janice excitedly, Les Tres Riches Heures
'In your lovely coat, your magical, magnificent, momentous coat, you are blessed with the beauty of a rainbow. Ah, I could sing to you all night. ..'
Janice stared, no longer able to hear above the rushing in her ears the pumping in her body.
Dermot Poll, exhausted both by metaphor and by passion, loved the world and all creatures in it. 'I love you,' he said, making a grand, all-encompassing gesture. 'And I worship your womanhood . . .'
Christine de Pisan, in her fourteenth-century study somewhere in the ether, said, 'Do not listen.'
Thomas Campion and the Court of Gloriana said, 'Hark.'
It was scarcely a contest. Gloriana was yards in front.
This, then, was what she had been avoiding for so long. This, then, was true and real and beautiful. She stroked her coat. How wrong her mother had been. How unlike Mr Gentle this beautiful, poetical young man was . . .
Dermot watched entranced as her hand slid over the swelling of her belly.
She looked at him, saw the enchantment in his eyes, and saw that this, her gallant, spoke a truth so strong that it trembled. Indeed, she noticed, from time to time his voice became quite indistinct with the burr of emotion. How could she not believe? How could she not let him worship her and love her if he wished?
Poor Janice. Fatal trust. Vous ou Mort. She offered herself up.
'Tell me who you are,' she said. Her eyes never left his beautiful, shining face as she spoke. This was love, she was convinced of it. It was beautiful and real.
'My name is Dermot Poll,' he said. 'I come from Skibbereen.' His eyes grew moist. 'And one day, when I have travelled the world, I shall go back there. But meanwhile, O lovely creature, this' - he looked at the lettering in the shop window, he smiled at her, a warm smile, a blind smile, a smile that belonged to the absent Deirdre - 'is St Valentine's Eve.'
'Yes,' she breathed, skirting the voice in her head, which was her own, her former, now deceased, academic persona, which said, 'Valentine, martyr, date unknown, legend lends no credence to connection with lovers . . .' Instead she smiled and exhaled a sigh with the involuntary huskiness that befitted such romance.
'Tomorrow, then, is St Valentine's Day . . .' he breathed.
Janice disregarded the faint, last whisperings of her bluestocking ways, which pointed out to her that this was tautological since he had already said, had he not, that this was St Valentine's Eve?
Dermot Poll remembered that he could sing. Through the mists of this impassioned sensibility he recalled that it was by singing he earned his living. The Irish Balladeer, beloved at over-sixties clubs everywhere, the popular high spot at many a silver wedding, doyen of a dozen Irish clubs up and down the Kilburn High Road and beyond . . .
He burst forth, his lungs leaping readily to the task. 'I'll walk beside you through the passing years . . .' he warbled into the damp dark night and Janice Gentle's ear.
Janice Gentle continued to believe. If anything, her believing deepened. Dermot Poll was now singing for all the women in the world. Janice listened, entranced. When he had ceased, she whispered, 'Do you really think you love me?'
Deirdre had said that on the night of their first physical union, nine months since and four months before they were wed. It was an emotional remembrance. He said the same now as he had said then.
'Love you?' he said with passion. 'Love you? I will love you for ever. I will never leave you. And if ever we are torn apart, I shall come looking for you, or you for me. Though I go to Australia, America, China even, I will find you again or you will find me. Now kiss me, darling . . .' Janice had become Deirdre. Dermot was beginning to be very muddled.
Janice, cautious, desiring, restrained and obedient, leaned towards him and planted a kiss upon his pale, damp cheek. It felt strangely alluring, exotic, tight, cool and with the slightest rasping from the stubble lightly sprouting there. It was essence of manliness after Mrs Gentle's slack and sweet-smelling pinkness.
'I think perhaps I love you, too,' she said, astonished. 'You will come to see me tomorrow? You really will?'
'But of course. And then I travel the world.' He burst into song again. 'Each and every by-way . . . and did it my way . . .' Dermot was looking up at the sky as he spoke. He was lost in the dark clouds, a traveller.
'I shall wait for you tomorrow after dark,' said Janice eagerly. He reached out his hand and, still looking up at the veiled sky, ran his fingers over her contours, lightly and not concernedly touching her round shoulders, her plump breast, her generous belly. 'I love this shape,' he whispered to the firmament. 'This shape, round and full, is the essence of Woman.'
Janice blinked slightly as the hand slid gently over her bosom, but finding it was all right and nothing else was expected of her (thus finally disproving Mrs Gentle's maxims on men), she relaxed. She saw them travelling the world together, a troubadour and his Lady. Arterberry Road and its unpleasant associations put down at last.
Dermot Poll swayed a little. She, too, felt like swaying, swooning perhaps, in the joy of it all. Chance encounter: Dante on the bridge seeing Beatrice, Abelard coming to lodge in Heloise's house, Dermot finding Janice on a bleak February night in south London.
'I will wait for you,' she said with conviction. 'If necessary, I will wait for you for ever.'
'Ah,' he replied, and clutched at her arm for support. 'I will come to you tomorrow when the mists of morning have yielded up the moon.'
'Thirty-two Arterberry Road,' she said. 'Opposite the pillar-box.' He repeated it dreamily. 'Valentine red heart. . .'
To be absolutely sure, she wrote it down for him on the back of a
sheet of paper torn carelessly from her notebook, which thus destroyed two hours' work on whether or not the grasping Lady Fee of Langland's Piers was really a representation of Edward Ill's mistress, Alice Perrers. Now she abandoned what had once been so totally absorbing for this new wonder in her life.
She who had never been kissed and who had never sought it began to hope that he would kiss her, began to hope it very much indeed. And before her bus came along, too. But he did not, and in a way she was content with this, for whatever all that side of things was, it had no place here (as indeed it had no place for the ladies of l’amour courtois) and might or might not come later if Destiny allowed.
His last words to her were 'Farewell, O brightener of the starless sky', and her last sight of him was from the top of a 77A double-decker. A young man leaning up against a lighted shop window that held red sticky paper hearts in abundance. She waved and watched him, starry-eyed, until the bus turned a corner. What she did not see was how he very slowly and rather elegantly slid down the length of the window and crumpled peacefully into a sleeping position just as the tail-lights of the vehicle disappeared. Nor did she know that the piece of paper which flapped through the gutter and kept up with the ponderous pace of the bus for a time, held cogent arguments both for and against its being Alice Perrers, on one side of it, and her own, now illegible address, on the other.
How could she know any of that?
Any more than she could be aware that the memory of this great moment in her life remained the merest dim flicker to the young man asleep on the pavement - for what is the registering of memory to the experience of a policeman's toe-cap prodding him in the rear? Besides, he was a romantic, not a fool. And when a man has fathered his first son, he would do well, as Dermot Poll intended, to recognize his priorities. All the same, such fleeting images and words that did remain before he tucked them away were pleasing. He felt, by the memory of her response, by the trace of an image of her smile and the light in her eyes as he had kissed her hand and touched her fulsome body, that he had made that girl’s day. He felt proud of himself. To have done that and to have fathered a son as well. Ah! Is this not happiness?
