Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  ‘Ooh, Uncle, now you’ve gone and come! The hot cream’s all over my ankles, look!’

  Amusing. A few hours of that kind of pastime and a man loses enthusiasm for his own biography. Especially when that biography has reached a stage and a place – pre-Hal, Ireland – that no longer interests him. Enough of it then, I thought. And to hell with the probability of leprechauns and the holding actions of Prince Thomas, when there is the warmer, nearer probability of your niece in your bed and her holding actions to contend with in your eighty-first year.

  But then there is the matter of my feeling there was time to kill … That came later. Later, that is, than the seven days I spent in bed with Miranda. I sent the servants packing and I fucked her for a week. There is no need for modesty here. These memoirs are from a point beyond modesty. There is a style that is no style. A style beyond styles. Clean, stripped-down, plain. The style of truth. That’s the only style I’m after. Madam, you say I am obsessed with sex? I admit it. I am impenitent about the obsession, though not about the acts. Did you not realise that all the great autobiographies are obsessed with sex? Did you never read a fellow called Augustine?

  We angled then together, my niece and I. And after that, Miranda having gone off to her parents at Norwich well-satisfied (though I say it myself) and with cheeks like roses, glowing all over under her bodice too, I knew, in that way a well-fucked woman does and nothing else does (with the possible exception of a fine horse that has just galloped seven furlongs well within himself on a sunny morning just before the dew has risen) – Miranda being gone, I returned to my labours, and for the first time they were labours. I hawked. I stopped. I was constipated with the matter of my life. Kicking Hanson and Nanton together did not help, nor chasing my idle stepson Scrope, nor lighting candles from John Bussard’s purple farting. Nothing helped. I had not a word to say to any of them on the subject of my life and valiant deeds. Nor had I a word to write when I dismissed the lot of them, and Friar Brackley, and tried to write myself.

  SO – the reason now becomes apparent!

  Worcester. William Botoner Worcester.

  Worcester is back.

  Worcester writes these words about himself at my dictation – his hand not hesitating, his eye no longer flickering from the page as the eyes of the others do when it is themselves or the present moment I make them write of.

  Worcester is a professional.

  Worcester is a writer.

  He is my man, and in his absence I could go on no further with these annals. There – I concede and confess it. This book, which when it is finished with will encompass in its entirety all my deeds and days, and the English wars in France, and the affairs of state and my own affairs (so far as those two conditions are not one, which is a variable far) – this book, the Acta domini Johannis Fastolfe, is his book. The writing of it is his. I am the author, but Wm Worcester is my hand. Without that hand, I have been at a loss this month of wasted writing days, no work of words done, and I freely now admit it.

  Today’s chapter was to be on the not unimportant subject of my nose. I have a note for it, squeezed out of the time when I could not compose a thing. DAY XLV: About Sir JF’s nose & other noses. I will come to it. It’s Midsummer Eve too, and they’re lighting the bonfire on the hill and no doubt Stephen Scrope will be up there leaping through the flames to change what he thinks is his bad luck. But, first, a word for Worcester.

  A WORD FOR WORCESTER. (There, let’s have it in capitals.)

  He was born in the year of Agincourt, this man of mine, this son to me. Ha! I will say it, Worcester. I have no son save one, the bastard, now in the monastery in damned Ireland, which is to say in Purgatory or worse – for how a man could be more damnably damned than to be

  1) a bastard

  2) a monk

  3) in Ireland

  is beyond me. Apart from that whore’s abortion, then, I have no offspring, no scatterings in the shape of men, so my man Worcester will stand me for one. He has a son’s loyalty and a son’s courage. Who else would set off to see the bloody traces of St Whoever-it-was just because I told him to? I am especially moved that he returned to me without once washing his right hand, so that I could see and smell for myself the saintly sanctified piss-awful blood which attaches to it. A joke, Worcester. In God’s earnest then, in the bowels of our Lord, I am grateful for this dog’s loyalty, who tramped out that long itinerary into Wales, and came back home again to Caister, and entered the hall with the one laconic greeting:

  ‘They seem to have cleaned it up!’

  Good for you, Worcester. Very English. I approve a man like that. That was the return of a man after my own heart. Such a return Ulysses made, when he came back to his wife Penelope after his wanderings and all Troy, and greeted her with the muttered, ‘What’s for supper?’

  There is a poetry in such forms of speech on such occasions. A poet of the kind who makes them is born not made. Worcester, then, is my son, my poet, my annalist, and I am glad to have him back. Having him back, I find the story of my days again tripping, again flowing along as sweetly as the Queen of Navarre’s barges when she came up to the Pool that morning, sailing between the legs of your author while he stood and farted that noble and majestic and long-winded fart which I can remember now as if I could still smell it. Ah, the farts of youth. They have a careless rapture beyond the farts of age. They are many-coloured farts, and there is no recapturing them in a colander.

  My nose – the subject of my nose –

  Worcester was born in Bristol, where the milk comes from. His mother’s name was Elizabeth Botoner. His father’s name … His mother could never remember it. A joke, Worcester, a joke. In truth, the fellow is bred well enough, of the best blood in England, like myself, which is to say of yeoman stock, uncorrupted by your Norman pimps and bullies, a freeholder, a wine-drinker, a beaf-eater, a true Englishman. There are not many of us left. One day no doubt there will be none, and England will sink under the weight of French and Irish and other dealers in horses.

  Reader, we English have to stick together.

  This same itchy, irascible scribe Worcester, librarian, Mr Bookworm Esquire, proceeded to Oxford at my expense. (Write down you are grateful, Worcester.) At Oxford, there, he studied astronomy with Friar John Hobby. Soon after that he entered my household as my secretary, my general factotum and scrubber of scrotum. I am his patron. He is my man. He writes a neat hand and he has a good eye. I say eye singular, since he lost the other in a small accident. I hit him with an inkpot that had sack in it. My little Cyclops. But his one eye is as big as the full moon. And here he sits doing truly Cyclopean work for me, making my book like the Gallery of Tiryns, the Gate of Lyons, the Treasury of Athens, and the Tombs of Phoroneus and Danaos. Cyclopean masonry: huge blocks fitted together without mortar, but as nice as you please. A living cyclopaedia too. I am your Vulcan, eh, Worcester? And you forge iron for me in these Days.

  His complexion is swarthy. His cheeks are dun. As to his character, it is that of an English scholar. He is as pleased to buy a new book as I am to buy a new manor or a fat parcel of land.

  This Subject of my nose –

  To hell with my nose, if not the rest of me! We will kill the fatted calf, since Wm Worcester is back from Wales with the good news that St Someone’s head has stopped bleeding at last, and with other items culled from a stupid itinerary. In truth, he enjoys these journeys, and since we came down here to Caister when the building of my life’s Castle was finally completed in the year of the Incarnation 1454, he has been off seven times on similar fool’s errands. So we will eat and we will drink, as my son is home and restored to me.

  As to noses: I knew a man once, called Bardolph, that was hanged in the end for looting French churches. He had a nose like that St John’s Eve bonfire you can see out there on the hill. You could have found your way safe by it on a dark night. I warmed my poor turnip fingers on it once in winter. That was a sun among noses, a terrible comet, a blazing torch with snot dropping
out of it and the snot sizzling where it fell. More of him anon.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  About Sir John Fastolf’s soul

  Midsummer Day

  I come to the problem of my soul. Do I have one? you say. Madam, of course I have one. I may even have two. I am large enough to have the use or rent of two souls. Every created person has a soul, as sure as eggs have meat, and men have shadows. The soul is the shadow cast by the flesh – or, more likely, the other way round. The flesh is the shadow cast by the soul. Yes. I approve that definition. Ergo, the mortal flesh being the shadow cast by the immortal part, the body being the mere extension or reflection of the soul, it follows that I have a possibly worthy, probably glorious, and certainly substantial soul, since I have something in the way of a mountain for a body.

  I should say that my soul was about the size of Spain, though in a better spiritual condition.

  Aristotle recognised several different kinds of soul, some of which were used by the Greek warriors for padding their helmets. My corpuscular soul is too much for that. Not even Achilles could have crammed it into his helmet, thank you very much. It might have served Agamemnon as a shield or buckler, my companionable soul, my consubstantial bronze immortal part.

  Even Moslems admit the existence of the soul. When he’s strangling you to death, your devout Moslem always slackens the rope just a bit before you croak it – to let your soul escape.

  Some say the soul is the wit’s principle – that by which we feel and know and will, and by which the body is animated. In that case my soul is a vast and complicated engine of war. It has in its charge and command, this captain soul of mine, great territories of flesh and terrible cohorts of blood. It controls a continent. It rules over and administrates an empire of sense. It is the emperor of my senses, and some of those fellows are arch rebels I can tell you. Hence, I daresay, my sins.

  But one of the thieves was saved. Remember that. St Luke tells the story. The first thief mocked and blasphemed, but the other thief said only:

  ‘Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.’

  And Jesus said unto him, ‘Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.’

  Friar Brackley, pressed for a definition, informs me that in his opinion the soul is a substance or being which exists per se, which is to say for and in itself – and he adds also that it is simple or unextended, which is to say not composed of separate principles of any kind, and he concludes furthermore that it is spiritual in the essence of its existence, so that to some degree its operations are independent of matter.

  I can’t understand any of that.

  But I can understand the Thief.

  He is in paradise.

  There were all these gnostics and people who taught that salvation was difficult, or only for the fit and few, the initiates. The gnostics got it wrong. That Thief was no initiate. Neither was the blessed St Mary Magdalen.

  (I have seen the Magdalen’s skull. It is at La Sainte Baume, in Provence. They keep it in a jewelled casket with a wig of gold hair about it.)

  Mary Magdalen is in paradise too.

  The soul cannot be killed.

  My soul is my immortal organ. The others will perish. Though one day they shall be re-animated, on the Last Day, when time glories to a stop. I will be Christian dust until that Day. Until I hear the final chimes at midnight.

  In the meantime …

  In the meantime, bruising my brains even on this definition of Fr Brackley’s, concerning the soul’s operations being in a degree independent of matter – while I can nod my head and say I think I like it well enough as a sort of diagram of how these things will fall out after my death, I don’t think I’m half as well pleased with it as a sufficient picture of how it is just now (three o’clock) between my soul and me.

  My soul is as close to my flesh as a smile is to my face, or as laughter to my lungs and throat. In other words, as you cannot have laughter without lungs, so I doubt the necessity of souls without bodies at least while we are alive.

  (But I leave these matters finally to the doctors of the Church, as I do all things concerning the ultimate meaning and purpose of life.)

  Jesus, Lord, remember me …

  I read somewhere that there are in fact three kinds of soul.

  First, your vegetative soul – which is the root of vital activity in plants. The fire in the rose.

  Second, your sensitive soul – which is the root of vital activity in animals. The fire in the lion.

  Third, your intellectual soul – which is the root of vital activity in man. The fire in Jack Fastolf.

  And yet—

  And yet it seems to me that the soul of Jack Fastolf is a triple or triune creature, and that he has his vegetable and sensitive ways as well as his allowable intellectual ones. Does this make me a cabbage or an onion? Or a dog or a fish? I think not.

  I am a man made of stars and mud, like the rest of us.

  Like you, reader? Do I read you?

  I met a philosopher once in Damascus who spoke much of the transmigation of souls. He went in fear all the time down the street in case he should tread on a beetle who might have been his grandmother in a previous incarnation. I have never hesitated in the path of beetles. My grandmother is with God, and not a beetle. If my soul is an intellectual soul then it contains the sensitive and vegetative elements also. These vegetables and sensitives are just unfinished versions of a man. They are incapable of existing apart from matter after death. There will be no onions in heaven.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  About a base attack upon Sir John Fastolf

  25th June

  Once, though, in Ireland, on a lavatory—

  Start again. A little vellum here, Worcester, if you please.

  I, I, I, Sir John Fastolf, quarterly or and az. on a bend gul. three croslets trefflé arg. –

  I, Knight in the train of King Henry V on his first expedition across the channel, which expedition was known among the common soldiery as the Fucking Expedition, on account of the great amount of Guess What that was forbidden on it –

  I, distinguished for my courage and resourcefulness in the plashy field at Agincourt, and in the affrays and affairs at Rouen and Caen and Falaise and Seez, capturer of innumerable castles and fortresses in that duchy –

  I, Lieutenant of Harfleur and Grand Butler of Normandy –

  I, victor over John II, Duke of Alençon, which little frog I caught with my own bare hands at the Battle of Verneuil, sending him back here in a box (with holes in it) to keep at Caister until his ransom money was paid (which money was then unlawfully retained by the Crown and Lord Willoughby, so that the sum of £2666. 13s. 5d is owing to me to this very day) –

  I, Baron of Gingingle in France and Knight of the Garter in England –

  I, Ambassador Extraordinary to the Council at Basle

  once –

  was violated, raped, privily invaded –

  in the lavatory above the moat of the castle at Kildare!

  Botoner, stop laughing. Worcester, you Botoner buttoner, stop laughing, or I’ll have your other eye on toast for breakfast. Poached eye on holy ghost. One day I swear you’ll meet your Ulysses. Listen, and we’ll get this over. I promise it will make an end of Ireland, that ignominious interval, although to be sure I’ll have to return there for the affair of my matrimony …

  It was in Kildare Castle. The boggers were busy at their burning and building. (Old Irish proverb number seven: Rome wasn’t burnt in a day. Thank God and St Columba, I’ve forgotten the other six.) The rain fell from the sky which was as grey and as desolate as an old widow’s arse.

  There was in the castle this lavatory, this garderobe, this jakes, this suitable hole for pissing and shitting, which careful providence in the form of an architect with more practical wit than appreciation of draughts upon the tender fundament of the bum-gut, had caused to be built in the tower. You ascended a stone spiral stairway, and there was the garderob
e, with the lavatory, in the tower, a cavity, some four feet wide from side to side, in a hole in the wall.

  It was, as I say, above the moat.

  Now, God help us, there was in the county of Kildare a tailor, a poxed-out weasel by the name of O’Tallow – O’ being an Irish patronymic, and this specimen being indefatigably descended from generations of candlegrease. O’Tallow danced adipose attendance upon me from moon to moon in earnest of some trifling payment of a couple of crowns for a cloak lined with ermine which I had ordered him to run up for me as a little comfort against the Irish cold. The man was a pain in the neck. I used his bills for a nether purpose.

  I tell you – it was my pleasure of a Spring evening to sit upon this lavatory and to meditate. Opposite there was a long, narrow perpendicular slit cut in the castle wall, affording as fair a prospect of green fields as any you are likely to see in a day’s march in Hibernia, if ever the rain lifts a soggy inch or two and the good Lord preserves you for five minutes from a shillelagh on the back of the head or a colleen with her clog in your crutch.

  There I would sit. Thus I would shit. King of the castle, lord of the lavatory, gentleman of the garderobe, as like as not still sporting my beastly ermine robe, wrapped well about me, for even in Spring the draught that blew up that funnel from the moat was no one’s bloody business and bleak critical inspiration to the bowels I can tell you.

  I report this tragedy, Worcester, as a warning against too great a trust. When a man is private, when a man is seated thus about some of his most intimate, necessary, and useless business, doing no harm to anyone, cogitating and reflecting upon nothing in particular, turning over in his rectum the price of a leg of mutton or a joke to tell his master Prince Thomas at supper – well, then he might suppose that he is safe. But not a bit of it, as you shall hear. Life is short and mortality is at us always, avid to strike and penetrate and pit us against eternity. In the midst of life, even on a lavatory, we are in death.