Nothing Like the Sun

by Anthony Burgess

  Fine spring weather, the many days of riding -- Slough, Maidenhead, Henley, Wallingford, Oxford, Chipping Norton, Shipston-on-Stour: many days for choice, to savour the leisured travel of a gentleman with gold in his purse. And then, gulping, Henley Street unchanged, his father and mother riper, Anne carrying thirty-eight stately years on her fine wide shoulders, Gilbert approaching thirty -- still godly, prone to fall foaming, unmarried -- and Richard a man of twenty. There were no children in the house now, only young men and women: Hamnet and Judith were nine, Susanna eleven, their uncle Edmund a sturdy voice-breaking youth of fourteen. Time churned steadily, silently, behind one's back. There was shyness in the presence of this Londoner with the tired eyes, hair receding, who called himself son, brother, husband and father. It was to Richard his own children ran, nuncle Richard.

  'And so th'hast made thy fortune.'

  'Not yet. This gold is nothing. The fortune is to come.'

  'And when wilt come back for ever?'

  'Soon. Very soon. And I shall never go away again.'

  There was shyness between Anne and himself, back in that old bedchamber from which he had watched out on the beating and driving of a witch, in which he had shrunk from her desire. They had lain together in the bed from Shottery, but in no marital embrace. Something had died that dry summer night with Tarleton's men singing in the tavern, poor Madge whipped, sobbing for breath. Well, the wife had done the function she had pressed him to. Sitting up in bed in the morning, he told stories to his son, embracing the boy's thin body with hopeless love.

  'And what is there in London?'

  'Oh, the Queen is there and the Tower of London and the great river. There are very many streets, full of shops in which a man may buy everything in the world, and there are many ships sailing in from America and Cathay and Cipango and Muscovy where the Russes live.'

  'Shall I go to London?'

  'One day. Meantime there are duties here. Thou must look after thy mother.'

  'Tell me a story and let me be in the story.'

  WS smiled. 'Well, once there was a king and he had a son and the son's name was Hamnet.' He thought of Kyd's crude play; strange, this matter of the name. And of dead Lord Strange with his north-country voice: 'I'll play Amloth with thee, lad!' Meaning that he would go into a rage (it was with a servant, not a player) like the hero they half-remembered in Yorkshire from the old days of Danish rule, only his rage had been a feigned madness to discover who had killed -- 'And the king's father died but his ghost came back to tell the prince that he had not truly died but had been murdered. And the man that had murdered him was his own brother, the uncle of Hamnet.'

  'Which uncle -- Uncle Dickon or Uncle Gilbert or Uncle Edmund?'

  'This is a story only. The uncle wished to marry the queen and become ruler of all the land.'

  'Oh, it would be Uncle Dickon then.'

  'Why Uncle Dickon?'

  'Oh, he says he is King Richard now that William the Conqueror is away in London. And Uncle Gilbert says that he should be king, for he is eldest, but Uncle Dickon says there never has been a King Gilbert, but Gilbert can be the, the----'

  'Archbishop of Canterbury?'

  'Aye, that. It is all joking. Uncle Dickon laughs because it is all joking.'

  RIDING back, presents and money bestowed and duty done, WS saw the terrible mystery of fatherhood clearly in the spring weather but, more than that, the horror of its responsibility. An actor, a playwright, he turned himself into his son an instant, a sleeping being called out of the darkness to suffer, perhaps be damned, because of a shaft of enacted lust. Out of the urgent coupling, the stave, the chord of summer morning, the melting of the night island of winter heat, he came, crowned with more than was asked for. Only from them, the makers, was hidden the enormous pulse of the engines, whose switch they touched by an alien curse concealed in the fever of rose or apple or mirror. One would ask only a candle, whose doomed flicker was grateful enough; but that other gift embarrassed, fire that could not be handled or tamed to humble sufficient processes. With that passage from intolerable heat to water there was remembered the ocean in runnels, the ocean in the corn, in the fruit-skin's pressure, and death might be thought the desirable crown of the foul river. But instead it was fire that was found, ironically bestowed, waiting, rehearsing, with a smothered laugh, lurking in the comfort of light. The fuse of water sooner or later led to the ghastly miracle implosion which would not blast its frailest tabernacle. When the warning bell announced to the crouched hearers the wafer suffused by fire, there could be no escape, nor could the burden be purged in news (poets dead, thieves hanged, traitors torn to pieces) that cast no shiver over dawn sleep. Oneself was the storm's centre, the heart of the giant flower. The smallest room he could rent, though with only a single friendly door fronting the light and music of traffic or carnival, would at length -- when the picture was burned, the mirror with its dream panorama shattered -- still in a speck of dust open the desert and the howl of the time wind.

  Calmly, he thought, before sleep in the inn at Oxford, that all over Europe and the Antipodes and Cathay and Cipango and the fabulous Americas, the gods were detonating. Yet there was only the one personal burden of being the source of the whole, the centre of the projection of shadows into the real that, bigger and undying, yet moved as oneself moved, in the mock court of an endless sterile reign to truckle and mow.

  He woke in the spring morning to clutch the receding dream: in all the wood there was one leaf or acorn which, touched or gathered, would release the spring that fired the great trees on the outermost ring, and the circled fire closed in to him, trampling down, dissolving to heat and light all but the finally known -- that when flesh, heart, lungs were quite wrung to irreducible ash, the exact centre would be proved in a gush of water.

  But the morning wreckage floated on the raw flood and the day probed and had to be answered, a nightmare of many parcels. Multiplicity was sickness. In either fire or ocean only rest lay, when the point of light could grow and renew the known globe of air. Blood and renewing cells and the body's river flowing over the stone of mole or naevus called to the dance and the climb or the descent, but the son, himself, was rooted in that dead tree, left arm stretched to a world it might be death to finger, right arm signposting to a new land. There the fiddler stamped on a floor where the wineskins were never emptied, where saffron ladies moved in a calm pavane, and tomorrow was certain as the grave and happy laws, and a string would strike always the note expected, the word flung in the pool pulse out its steady circles. His son, then, inherited the curse that stilled the present to a mouldering picture hung in every room, he hanging in that picture, caught in paralysis, the nerveless arms held on a crossbar flush with the river's flow ...

  'You are not well this morning, sir,' said the landlord of the inn.

  'Bad dreams only. Bad dreams.'

  'WELL, I must to court then,' said Harry, putting down the proofs of Lucrece.

  The mock court of an endless sterile reign. 'Yes, we hear there is much going on at court. Alarms and excursions.' Incursions too. Harry, WS knew this, was worming into that delectable flower-bed of the Queen's pert Glories. It had to come. Life, after all, was not a limiting but an expanding. The love of men and the love of women could co-exist, nay had to.

  'It is all this business of Lopez. Lopez is this physician that is also a spy, the Jew from Portugal.'

  'Yes, I know all about who Lopez is. Even tame poets hear court news.'

  'The Queen would not have it that Robin was right about his treachery. Well, she must believe it now.' There was excitement in his girl's-face, the excitement of one who was privileged to be near the centre of great things. WS felt very old, very weary, looking at him. 'He is condemned, and these two others, Tinoco and Ferrara, are condemned too. And yet, out of spite to Robin, she will not have the sentence carried out.'

  'Before you go,' said WS slowly, 'I would beg one small word.'

  'Well, quickly then.'

 
'I think I am no longer welcome here.'

  'Oh?' Harry opened his mouth at him. 'Have I said aught of your not being welcome?'

  'No. But I hear things from your secretary. I think he is disappointed in me.'

  Harry laughed. 'Florio is disappointed in everybody and everything. Florio is Florio. And also my secretary, no more.' He pouted, quick in his moods. 'But I will not have this. I will have Florio in now.'

  'No. No, wait. I think her ladyship your mother has been speaking to Florio. Has she also been speaking to you?'

  Harry rubbed his chin. 'She has said some things, very gently. She talks of time wasted on sonnets that seem to have persuaded me the way opposed to what she wanted. Well, she is a mother, only that.'

  'A mother that no longer approves of her son's friend, not since he ceased to write sonnets on the duty of marriage. And I think that Master Florio, in his subtle way, knows of what we do together.'

  'Florio is immersed in the dictionary he is making. I think you worry too much.'

  WS took a deep breath. 'Everything points to my leaving. I have thought of this much. I do not mean my withdrawing from our friendship, for I will ever be what you wish me to be, since what you wish I wish also. But I have chosen a craft and, with the opening of the theatres again, I must follow it. Some, seeing me as a poet, forget I am a player. Well, a player cannot lodge here.' He extended his hands briefly to indicate the rich hangings, the crystal, the gold inlays.

  Harry looked bored and tired. 'We will talk of this at another time. You are making a great ado about very little.'

  'And I fear that you yourself may, one of these days, report to me the sneering of your friends at a player being close to you. And Sir Jack and Lord Robin will, of necessity, mean more to you than poor Will. I have to prove myself yet. To have a ready pen is something, but it is less than to have land. I must work to the having of possessions.'

  'You have my love,' Harry laughed.

  'I must pay for it. It is a dear thing to pay for.'

  BUT summer came and The Rape of Lucrece raped the senses of its exquisite readers, overcame them in heady dispensations of rose-leaves and honeysuckle, though many saw in it a sterner moral core, a stiffer and maturer view of virtue (not the seeming virtue of the innocent but the achieved virtue of the experienced) than in the earlier poem. WS knew that the players who were once Lord Strange's but now the Lord Chamberlain's had united with the Lord Admiral's Men to act at Newington Butts, but he heard that things went poorly. His play of Roman atrocities and his play of shrew-taming had both been presented to yawns and near-empty houses. Cosily, he remained the poet; he stayed in his friend's house; the sheaf of sonnets in the camphorwood box grew thicker. Those were poems by which he would never make any public name as a sonneteer: they were for one reader's eyes only. Sidney had told the world of his wrecked love for Lady Penelope Devereux, bonny sweet Robin's sister, now poor Penny Rich; Daniel had published his Delia and Drayton's Idea was going from hand to hand; but, though there were rumours of Mr WS's 'sugared sonnets among his private friends', those rumours must never sharpen into exterior knowledge. There were some things that must remain secret.

  But, one hot day in June, Harry said: 'We are to go forth together. I will take you to see the best play in the world.'

  'A play?'

  'You may call it that.' He was excited. 'No more questions.' WS had not asked any. 'It far outdoes any of your Senecan stuff. It has no title as yet. You and I will give it a title after.'

  'Whose men are doing it?'

  'Oh, you could say the Queen's.' He giggled. 'I have ordered the coach. Come.'

  'I have but the final couplet of this sonnet----'

  'Oh, that can wait. We must not miss the beginning.'

  WS felt foolish, as he often did, trundling in the rich coach westward from Holborn, four greys prancing before. Curtains were drawn to keep out the peering mob as well as the sunlight that would burn off Harry's pallor. He pulled an inch of curtain aside. There were crowds scurrying west, roaring, chewing bread and bits of garlic sausage, some armed with bottles against the summer drouth, the plebs, the commons, the mob. 'It seems to me,' he said slowly, 'that we are going to Tyburn.'

  'Ah well, it was not possible to keep it from you for long. Tyburn today puts on a very special spectacle. Robin is puffed up as a pigeon, and rightly. He is shown to be right and the Queen admits she was wrong. Her little ape of a physician that everyone knew had received a great jewel from Spain. And those two that were sent to win him over. Well, there will be no more treason from any of them.'

  'You should have told me,' said WS bitterly. 'I do not like to see these things.'

  Harry laughed. 'Little innocent Will. He who makes Tarquin leap on Lucrece and everything the filthy world could dream of happen in Titus. Well, you cannot separate so your dreaming from your waking. If you would indulge the one you must suffer the other.'

  'I will not look.'

  'You will. You will drain it to the dregs.'

  They moved with some difficulty over the cobbles of the narrow street with its toppling shops and houses; they could hear the confusion of the horses' feet, the crowd jeering, feel the coach jostled. The coachman lashed out at those who came near enough to scare the horses or finger the gleaming brass and polished harness; the footmen shouted abuse. There were cries of pain and growls, but the underdog remained under. At Tyburn they drew the curtains back to let light in and the vision of a grim holiday crowd that sweated and squinted under the light. Here was a whole clutter of noble coaches, on some of which the gaily and richly dressed had climbed to the roof or ousted the footmen from their seat; the soberer citizenry sat, more soberly, inside their sober coaches. All waited.

  'That is Robin over there,' said Harry, dismounting. 'It is his day of triumph.' Well, so it was. It was Essex who, some four years back, had employed Lopez as his agent, for Lopez knew better than any in England what went on in both the states of Iberia. But Lopez had given his news first to the Queen, then to Essex, and Essex, monger of old information at court, had been laughed at. Then came his malice towards Lopez, his accusations, and more derision from the Queen; more, the Queen's rebuke: so Dr Lopez was buying strong poison with Spanish gold, was he, bent on assassination? The poison was in silly and naughty Robin's own mind, not in the medicine-chest of the Queen's own little ape of a Jew. And so four years of hard and malevolent work, culminating, on a bright June day, in this. 'Triumph,' repeated Harry. 'I will go over to him.' Essex and his toadies were drinking wine and laughing, their raiment gay in the sun. 'Do you stay here and shut your eyes to it all.' And he grinned.

  There was the tree. Crouched on the platform the hangman's assistant was securing a plank with busy hammer. The hangman himself, masked, with brawny arms folded, strutted like Alleyn, an Alleyn that needed no glory of words. The eternal kites wheeled above in the pure and blue and crystalline air, as yet unpolluted by men. From afar came a roar. The hurdles were approaching, dragged over dry ground, raising a coughing dust. One of the draggers, with a toothless idiot's face, greeted friends from a black and panting mouth. There were jeers, men spat on the still figures roped to the hurdles, a young woman in front of WS began to jump, partly to see better, partly in a kind of transport of expectancy. Children were lifted on to parents' shoulders. Some further hangman's assistants brought, severally, a great metal bowl and four steaming kettles. There were cheers as the near-boiling water was jetted, splashing, into the bowl. One kettle-carrier made as he would pour a scalding stream over the spectators nearest the tree; they retreated in a scurry, screaming their laughter to his grin. The hurdles had reached the end of their journey. And now----

  That is Noko. What is his name? Noko, no, Tinoco. A foreign and heathen name. He is to be first. And now this Tinoco, a dark and shivering man in a white shirt, had his shirt stripped from him as he was roughly untied from the hurdle. The hangman presented his knife, new-sharpened, new-polished, to the sun; the mob went aaaaaaaah. Called the hang
man, it was yet not his office to fix the long thin neck into the halter; the first assistant must do that. Tinoco, stumbling, falling with fear, and all to the crowd's laughter, was made to mount the ladder, rung by slow trembling rung. Behind him, behind the gallows itself, the hanger waited on a narrow crude podium, a platform mounted on a platform. He was a young man, muscular; his mouth opened in some ribald pleasantry to his victim as he secured the hempen noose about his neck. And then WS could see the lips of the victim moving, as in prayer; the trembling hands sought to join in prayer, but could not. Of a sudden the noose was tightened; over the momentary inbreathed silence of the crowd the choking desperation of the hanged could clearly be heard. The second assistant pulled the ladder away sharply. The legs dangled a second but the staring eyes still blinked. Here was art, far more exact than WS's own: the hangman approached with his knife, fire in the sunlight, before the neck could crack, ripped downwards from heart to groin in one slash, swiftly changed knife from right to left, then plunged a mottled fist inside the swinging body. The first assistant took the bloody knife from his master and wiped it with care on a clean cloth, the while his eyes were on the artistry of the drawing. The right hand withdrew, dripping, holding up for all to see a heart in its fatty wrappings; then the left arm plunged to reappear all coiled and clotted with entrails. The crowd cheered; the girl in front of WS leaped and clapped; a child on his father's shoulder thumb-sucked, indifferent, understanding nothing of all this, the adult world. Blood poured and spurted richly, the sumptuousness of heraldic bearings, glinting as the sun struck. And then (for the rope must be used again) the noose was loosened, the ruined body upheld while blood poured still, the tautness of the rope made slack again. The hangman threw the heart and guts into the steaming bowl, freeing his arms from the incrustations with quick fingers, drying them then, unwashed, on a towel. The crowd moaned its pleasure, its continued excitement, for were there not two more victims to come? The hangman was handed a hatchet, squat and dull compared with that quick artist's instrument but sharp as it cracked through bone for the quartering -- the head, the limbs. A gaping torso was upheld a moment, then all these pieces of man were thrown into a basket.