Will

by Christopher Rush

  Had Anne been primed? Was she Ophelia? Or did they simply set the plot in motion, leaving it to time, fate, and genitals to do the rest? It’s a question I never asked Anne, as often as it troubled me. But I had no such cares, I have to confess, in the giddy spring and heady summer of ’82. And why should I have worried at the time, in youth when I did love, did love? I knew nothing but bitter-sweet itches then. When I left Hewlands with my father that fateful day, I understood only one thing. A woman called Anne Hathaway had me like the hangman, by heart and balls, a double clutch. I couldn’t break free. I didn’t want to. I was eager for the game. I was on fire. And verses bubbled in the blood.

  O spirit of love! How quick and fresh art thou, that notwithstanding thy capacity receiveth as the sea, nought enters there of what validity and pitch soe’er but falls into abatement and low price even in a minute.

  I was staring into that infinite ocean. I was standing on the edge. History a wrinkle on a green sea. Nothing else mattered. She was the wonder of the world. And all I could think about now was Anne Hathaway. Was she standing or lying? waking or sleeping? laughing or sad? at home or abroad? O mistress mine where are you roaming? Was she dreaming of me? Dying for me? How could she brook one moment’s delay? Life at best’s a doubtful bubble. What’s to come is still unsure.

  And youth?

  ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’

  Francis surprising me again. Maybe lawyers never go completely to sleep. There’s always a tendril untouched by Morpheus.

  And I’ll not endure it, I said. And I couldn’t, it was true. Couldn’t work, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Took to rising from bed each night as soon as I could hear the walls of Henley Street begin to whisper with the sounds of snores, the combined undulations of roomfuls of breasts sighing like the sea. And it gave me a weird pleasure to be stealing from the house at this hour – tread softly that the blind mole may not hear a footfall! – to roam the deserted listening streets, gliding like a ghost, a murderer, a wolf, towards some terrible design: the taking of a Troy, the raping of an innocent, the killing of a king. Now o’er the one half world nature seems dead and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep. Even the very stones seemed to hear my steps and shout to all the world that Will Shakespeare was awake and stalking Anne Hathaway all the way to Shottery. Ring the alarm bell, summon the night watch! And I crouched with shadows and heard the thudding of a heart on fire for Hathaway.

  Down Henley Street I stole, past the shops and houses whose moonlit roofs and battened shutters let out not the ghost of a sigh from all those bosoms hushed and swelling like some dark and distant tide; past the shambles whose spilt black pools mirrored the moon, its red stenches drenching the air. O, horrible! But I sped down Rother Street till I came to the turning into the Shottery footpath. There I relaxed and lingered, stopped to face the setting stars pouring slowly down the sky, the Virgin and the Lion lying down to sleep, and Hydra westering, settling to rest along the dim misty skyline. Behind me surfaced the summer constellations, rising to make love to the spring as they always did, faithful old flames wooing the wet fields night after night as May slipped into June, the Milky Way dripped over the forest of Arden, over the blind humps of the Snitterfield hill, like a golden bough laden with glittering fruit, and I tasted stars on my tongue.

  So I passed like a shadow along the mile of fields to Shottery, the footpath sometimes black as a bat, sometimes white with moon and lonely in the night, apart from me, its only friend. Only the cattle coughed and the foxes barked and the owls screeched out their supperless laments as I bore down on Shottery. Hawthorn and honeysuckle were singing in my head, pollen powdering my nose, my feet washed with grasses and my hair brushed and heavy with dew, with the secret drops of the night. I was the complete lover, eager for action, perfumed by passion and pasture, groomed by the horses of the night. Daylight and champain! I was higher than madness or the dreams of wine – my feet never felt the ground.

  Down I came to the farmhouse, the palace in the wild where she slept her unmindful sleep, calm queen of the night, and I stood there and drank the air, sharing it with her, the divine Hathaway. I held my breath. I was starstruck, moonstruck, Annestruck. When I exhaled again after an infinity of held breath, it was to expel the entire soul. Magically, my spirit drifted across the silent gardens, passed through the walls and latticed windows of the rooms, like a night mist, a fragrance, seeking that slumbering form. And there it was – a secret glowing pinkness, shrouded by the shocking whiteness of sheets, chaste and cold as a corpse.

  O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It is her breathing that perfumes the chamber thus. The taper’s flame bends to her in salutation and in flickering silence laves her lids, washes those windows, white and azure-veined, those shutters laced with blue of heaven’s own tinct…

  And there, on her left breast – heaven and earth, must I remember? – a mole, cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops streaked in the bottom of a cowslip. On that very spot where some time past a single drop of cream had splashed, masking that beautiful blemish. It stood out now, blinding my mind – more private than the secretest part of her.

  Time had stopped here. Somewhere beyond Hewlands meaningless events were taking place. Stars were burning to waste, acts of love and treachery committed, sharks slamming madly through the dark, sleepless kings holding council, sleepless worms probing corpses in the clod – corpses oblivious of the calm constellations that went slow and stately by, over the graveyards of the earth, while the cold oceans washed the globe, slurped and bulged to the moonpull, and the tides sighed in their shackles. All slaves. All of them. Even those kings were the slaves of history, the stars the slaves of God’s thoughts, thought of life itself, and life – time’s fool. Only here did freedom exist, here in Anne Hathaway’s room, this box within a sphere, this abstruse cube. She was the primum mobile. Without her the morning would never come.

  So I sighed away the last of April and all of May and June. Violets died like greensick girls, the elves evacuated the cowslips, the harebells’ blue music was heard no more. But the Milky Way, always in blossom, dusted the huge skies, the stars dripped on the elder trees and the trees on the fields, showering them with the strong white scents of life. Unable to stand upright, to remain sane in this dizzy wilderness, I dived instead into the darkness of woods, where late bluebells and buttercups bunched in the shadows like stranded angels dropped from a lost heaven, where, hugging the tree trunks, the toadstools lurked and tittered, listening for tell-tale whispers, waiting for the fragrance of woman, the swish of a skirt in the dew.

  Madness. Midsummer madness.

  By midsummer I was indeed so mad with lust I’d become a blue thread of life buzzing low over the baked landscape, a dragonfly of desire, deadly hovering, never at heart’s ease. Till night fell like a drunkard, reeling with stars, and I cooled down a little and sang to the greenwood that Greensleeves was all my joy and Anne Hathaway my heart’s delight. But the raving and the prickthirst simply couldn’t be slaked by a few lines from an old lyric. It was the hour of pure longing, too violet and violent to deny. My balls were barbarians, the prick a giant thistle, its purple head bristling with lethal seeds. When I went out walking I carried a book to hide it. The vicar had given me a Caesar to keep my Latin alive after my exit from school, and the Gallic Wars were fought against my groin. Darkness came – and I threw off the camouflage, giving in to concupiscence. I rampaged round the Shottery field, a bull gone berserk, fell like Jupiter on an imaginary Anne Hathaway, crushing her loins with lavender, scattering the night-tripping fairies, bruising the thyme, releasing wild aromas so that heaven sniffed the dawn and bees came blundering from their hives, booming through the blackness. That quietened me for a moment and I lay back in the dark and watched a glow-worm, heard it speak to the stars.

  It was unbearable. I pulled out my prick and made it flower. My hot white sperm shot up with all the vigour of juicy youth, stinging the stars, making another Milky Way, beautif
ul but brief. My soul sprang up with it, invincible, and the stars threw down their swords in surrender. The sperm grew cold and I rose groggily to test the ice-brook’s temper, wash my shrinking dick. Then I ran, whooping, towards Hewlands. I had offended the angels but I didn’t care. Not one whit. I was brushed by bats as I plunged through the long grasses, leaping like a gazelle. And flights of night-moths conducted me there with such glittering excitement in their tiny wings but with such infinite gentleness too. They were nature’s escorts, alternative angels. And I was a god. I roared, diving for cover as I woke the Hewlands household from its sleep. They’d no business dozing anyway, the snoring drones, when their hive accommodated such a queen! Up, up, my lords! The sun doth gild our armour! Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, and from your graves rise up and walk like sprites!

  Jesus, what a time it was!

  15

  It had to end. And end it did.

  One early July dawn.

  There was a soft rain falling that morning. It had been falling all night and I was lying half awake, listening to the rain falling on the rye and wondering what it felt like to be an ear of corn, a single grain, sodden by the downpour, out in the drowned fields all night long. Open unto the sky. It had become a habit with me recently, to enter into any other entity I might imagine or encounter: the wet wheat, the blind worm, the snail hearing the apocalyptic thunder of the rain booming on his back, echoing in his shell. But my mind’s travels were interrupted by a faint but frantic knocking on our downstairs shutters and a girl’s voice fluttering in the grey dawn, asking for John Shakespeare. My father shouted to me to see what was up. Rubbing gummed-up eyes I stuck my head out between flung shutters and saw the white upturned face of Alison Hathaway, Miss Marble-Mammaries herself. But I didn’t think about any of that right then. There was something else in the air. The small white face looking up at me in the half light of that early hour of the morning was like the face of somebody lying dead in the bottom of a tomb.

  ‘It’s my father. He’s –’

  Yes. Of course he is. That was what was in the air, the scent of death. His time had come, then. And the time for the wearing of black.

  And it was in black that we made our way to Shottery two days later – dry-footed as it turned out, the rain having stopped and the sun suddenly pumping out a fierce heat for the funeral of my father’s old friend. The grasses we trailed through were bloodied with poppies, broken by the blue-white horses of cornflowers and daisies, flecking the fields. Richard Hathaway was now poppies and stars. He was the insect voices in ears of wheat. He was the dead leather on our shoes that tramped the footpath to his home. And he was still the focus of that home, the centre of a circle of staring faces, blanked by death. He was a stiffness in its shroud. A thing of nothing. They would return him to the dust before returning to their lives. They would bury and remember. And then forget. We looked at the dead white face for the last time. At the shut eyelids that locked in everything he’d ever been, all the secrets he’d ever known, and those he now knew. If any. For the dead know not anything, a voice whispered to me out of scripture. We lined up to kiss the coldness that was Richard Hathaway, the marble cheek that was his no longer but the stony earth’s. Then we got ready to shoulder him out of his home and into that waiting hole in the ground.

  But where was she? The room where the corpse was laid out was thick with cloaks and gowns, the air filled with their uneasy anonymous rustling. There was no sign in this black sea of the woman I’d worshipped all through these last mind-boggling months of madness and moonlight. She was crushed with grief, too heavy with her loss perhaps to make an appearance. Some women didn’t attend funerals. And now the time had come to bear the body. The sons came forward.

  ‘Wait.’

  All heads turned to the door.

  ‘Wait for me – I’m coming.’

  One final bitter moment, then. The last goodbye.

  The girl I’d last seen in springtime green. Clothed now in black from crown to toe, her face hidden. A sudden rustling from the little bunch of mourners as it parted, murmuring, to let her through the ranks of death. She crossed to where the body lay, bent over the bier, kissed the corpse through the veils.

  The last kiss.

  It was a long walk to Temple Grafton churchyard where the first Mistress Hathaway lay waiting, but the four sons who bore their father insisted they would have neither horse nor hearse. He had been a good father. A man should be carried by his own people. On the last long walk to his long home. It’s short enough – next to eternity, if you care to look at it like that.

  So the black crocodile procession wound its way across the green fields, irksomely beset by bees, bullied by the blinding sun that beat down on swathed faces and bodies drenched in jet. The sweat trickled down backs and buttocks, ran down our brows and stung our eyes as we dragged our feet respectfully through the long hot grasses where the crickets chirped and jigged, fiddling stridently, riotously, without a shred of decorum. It was a twisting trail. But at last we reached a gaping wound in the grass where butterflies danced and quivered like the sun on water. It was the last frenetic reminder of the quickness Richard Hathaway left behind him as he went into the blackness from which he would never return, in spite of Lazarus on the painted cloth, in spite of the preacher’s platitudes and assurances, the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. All hollow, all lies, and we knew it for sure, beneath all the consoling stories, the fairy tales.

  The priest reached out to the upturned mound beside the grave, cupped a few flakes of earth in his fist, and assured us all that Richard Hathaway would live again. Then he flung his fistful into the grave. The sunbaked soil flew like breadcrumbs from the white unringed fingers and pattered over the shrouded corpse. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In sure and certain hope. Etcetera and amen. The gravedigger started shovelling in the clods. Afterwards he’d fit the squares of turf back over the grave, and time and nature would see to the stitching. Then the stitches would dissolve and the sweet green sea would blow over the spot where Richard Hathaway now lay again with his first wife. Death was the end of all marriages.

  The mourners broke up and started to move away, people of the world again, walking briskly back to Shottery. The orderly black file had broken up into animated little bunches of folk, busy clearing their throats and complaining loudly about the sun. They were glad to be leaving death, that embarrassing old bastard, well behind them in Temple Grafton and to be thinking instead about a nice slice of cold shoulder and an even colder beer.

  And Anne Hathaway? I lingered on the fringes, watching her as she stepped back lightly through the fields with the rest of the party. If she’d seen me at all she seemed oblivious of the fact. Not once had she as much as even glanced in my direction. And the banter in the buttery? Well, that’s all it amounted to, banter and fantasy. My youthful ignorance. A fashion and a toy in blood. I’d made a madness out of the summer season. I felt sick with shame and disgust and there was a tightness in my chest as we approached Shottery, and the dislocated file of folk, unruly now, made for Hewlands to cheer on old Dickie boy into eternity with beef and beer. I decided to leave them to it and to go back to Stratford.

  It was just as I made to turn east that I saw her stop. The last of the funeral party flowed past her into Hewlands and she stood there and let them. And stood, and stood. Then abruptly she turned north and started walking. On the road to nowhere, between Wilmcote and Snitterfield, with only the forest of Arden in front of her. With never a backward glance.

  There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood – leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. I didn’t know exactly what I was about as I stood there watching Anne Hathaway disappear into distance but I knew that I had to follow her. For we must take the current when it serves. Or lose our venture.

  She went ahead of me with brisk compulsion, as though she walked with a purpose. Trip no further, p
retty sweeting. There was a song in my head. Journeys end in lovers meeting. My heart beginning to thud and hurt, I stepped after her as she strode over the fields, a strange figure, still clad in black mourning, the fluttering veils clouding her head. In the distance the black froth of the forest was a frown on the skyline. Behind us Stratford shivered like a memory. I remembered the day seven years ago I’d come down from Kenilworth with mermaids and dolphins in my brain. Where had he gone to, that eleven-year-old boy? Only this field existed now, in which these great oaks and chestnuts spread themselves out in time. What is love? ’Tis not hereafter. The song spread out in my head. Present mirth hath present laughter. The trees’ shadows had shortened for noon and the sensible cattle had got up from vanished canopies and gone to the streams for comfort. There they stood cooling their hooves and gaping at me as I hurried by. Where my tongue had once been, a scorched lizard lay in my mouth. Bees bumbled into me and strongholds of nettles loomed threateningly – ancient with expectation, alert with some wordless understanding. What was it they knew?

  Did Anne know I was trailing her? I felt not so much that I was following her as being hauled in her wake. The swooping swallows tried to cut me off, criss-crossing the route. Still the bees were booming overhead, dropping pollen on their drunken homeward flights, bombarding my path. A spider on a gooseberry bush watched me from its throne of threads. The larks on invisible strings laughed at me, singing their blue songs.

  And she carried on walking under the insistent brazen sunglare, past the blue crenellations of thistles, through swarms of purple dragonflies, tangles of campion and columbines, blue vetch, rank fumitory and old man’s beard, wagging with disapproval. And on I went after her. Till she stopped dead at the edge of the wood. Stopped and stood unmoving, as if waiting. I stopped too, instinctively, looked at the black statue still a hundred yards ahead of me. Then I started off again, more slowly this time, coming through the final field that lay between us. The earth was pulsing through the balls of my feet, my eyeballs throbbing in the sun, the birds gone mad, the insects shrieking in my ears. I came up close, swishing the grasses and stopped within an arm’s length of her. For a few more maddening moments she stayed as she was – then sawed round almost savagely to face me, but still veiled, an effigy in ebony, set weirdly in the green field. She bore no resemblance to my memory of the girl in the buttery who had seemed clothed with the young year. Greensleeves.