Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  This is a moral story. All my stories are moral stories. Aesop was very deformed and a slave, but his fables are true. I am myself the grossest moralist that ever lived, and here’s the proof of it.

  This jealous tailor, this O’Tallow, having taken it into his epileptic head to pay me back for what in his eyes was my defection in the matter of his vastly exaggerated bill, had evidently consulted with the master of the drains at Kildare Castle, or some other equally elevated and well-informed student of the building’s architecture and engines. By hook or by crook, by bidding farewell to his tranquil mind and swimming the moat or following some conduit, O’Tallow had succeeded in introducing himself to a platform some twenty feet down the shaft, just where the droppings from the lavatory achieved the absolution of the moat. There he was crouched, in the dark, below, though all unbeknown to innocent me, at ease, bowels generous and open, above …

  He had, the knave, a spear of fir—

  Worcester! Write!

  The recollection offends me yet. It gives me fundamental pain to think of it. Ravished! Defiled! Deflowered! It was a sore affront. A base attack. Such insult! Such surprise!

  One minute, an English soldier is sitting shitting, minding his own business, his concentration all upon the relaxed enjoyment of the ripple of his wind, the movement of his bowels – the next he is three feet in the air, shrieking, yelling, with a horrible spike of fir jabbing and stabbing most horribly at his largest orifice.

  Ransacked, Worcester! That’s the only bloody word for it. I was ransacked in the Netherlands!

  It was a trenchant experience, my son, and an undermining one too. It epitomised Ireland and the Irish for me. Never forget. Your Irishman is a fellow who can swim a turd-filled moat with a spike between his teeth, worm his way along a conduit, and then most subtly and perpendicularly prong you up the arse with a spear of fir while you, his master, sit in state upon the jakes above.

  O drains. O bum.

  I daresay, if my reflexes had not been good, and my constitution resilient in all essentials, that experience would have spoilt me for life. As it was, it taught me this lesson: Never relax too far. Never think the enemy has lost interest. The Devil is most likely to strike when you have your trousers down.

  That is the reason why, when I go into a new room, I stand always with my back to the wall. And if they move the wall, I move with it. And before standing there at all, I inspect the wall for holes.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  About honour & onions

  26th June

  With her usual flair for the dramatic, my mother chose Ash Wednesday for her day to die on. Just as the priest was applying the ashes in the sign of the cross to her forehead, murmuring ‘Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem revertis’ (‘Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return’), Mother remembered, fell sideways, and started that return.

  Madam, my mother, forgive your son.

  I remember you once displayed your collected evening shoes in a glass case.

  Two years before my mother’s death, while I was still in Ireland, she had given Caister to me. As well as the next-door manor of Repps. I have in front of me her deed granting these. It includes also the freehold of Caister Hall – which is now transformed into this Castle. And the advowson of the chapel of St John with the Caister manor. All these houses and property to hold to John Fastolf and his heirs for ever, it says, and dated the first day of October, in the sixth year of the reign of Harry IV, and the 1405th of our Redemption. Her seal is attached. Lady Mortimer, her seal. She was the daughter, as I may have told you, of Nicholas Park, Esquire, and the widow of Sir Richard Mortimer (among others), of Attleburgh, in Norfolk.

  My mother’s gifts did not make me a man of substance. In point of finance, my resource was not materially increased until the time of my marriage. However, for the present, in that first decade of this fifteenth century, here I am with two fair manors and the advowson of a chapel to my name – albeit in enforced military residence in the country called Juverna by Juvenal no doubt because he found it juvenile, and still running all riot of risks from long spears, cathedral burning, and Irishmen.

  The prospect of my property was a comfort to me in exile. I am an Englishman and I love our country. My idea of riches is a handful of English earth. It was for that which men fought and died in the wars in France. I fought for other reasons besides, as you shall shortly hear, and the same no doubt is true of any other professional soldier since the time of Hannibal and Achilles. I fought when I had to, and there was no getting out of it. All the same, I fought then not only to save my own skin, but to save that inch of England’s skin which is my Caister even – for that bleak and barren coast beyond the windows out there, the low, shifting sandbanks, the few trees with their backs turned towards the east. This is a flat county. There is nothing in it to attract or distract attention from the soft line where land and sea meet sky – save this my Castle, my great tower.

  I am in Ireland. I am at Kildare. Prince Thomas is with me, hot arrived from England, and critical of my conduct of another siege. Yet it had gone well enough. Seven Irish bodies swung on gibbets outside.

  Inside, we talked of honour. (The Duke of Clarence disapproved of fighting with potatoes and poteen.)

  ‘Honour,’ he said, fixing me with a stern look that was meant to emulate Hal. ‘Honour is the emblem of chivalry. Honour is what chivalry does. Honour is gallantry in battle. To do chivalry is to act the knight.’

  The Irish bayed across the moat. Those seven were acting as martyrs, not deterrents. You could hear the cathedral crackling.

  ‘Honour pricks me on too,’ I said. ‘But how if honour pricks me off when I come on? How then?’

  Thomas did not like the way I had associated his grand theme of honour with talk of pricks and comings. His worried expression gave him a canine look. He sat and stared at the matted rushes on the floor. He was his own worst enemy. I heard the soft thud of the hanged men against the castellated wall. When an Irishman flatters you he always calls you Your honour …

  ‘Can honour set to a leg?’ I said. ‘No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? What is that honour? Air.’

  ‘You owe God a death,’ Thomas reminded me.

  ‘Which I pray is not due yet!’

  ‘Yes, but honour—’

  ‘Who has it, this honour of yours?’ I demanded. ‘He that died on Wednesday. And does he feel it? No. Does he hear it? No.’ I jerked my thumb. ‘Those seven outside. That’s honour.’

  Prince Thomas kicked a log further into the fire with his pointed boot. ‘Honour is an insensible quality,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s why it suits the dead.’

  He shrugged. ‘You will never make a knight,’ he muttered.

  ‘Knighthood,’ I said, ‘is more than mere scutcheons. Honour is your scutcheon. Just a cheap piece of heraldry to grace a funeral.’

  ‘You owe God a death,’ Thomas said again, with a flash of the usual obstinacy.

  ‘So do we all,’ I said. ‘And I’ll pay my debt when it falls due.’

  There was a silence as the wind stirred in the tapestries. The gibbets creaked. ‘And so ends my catechism,’ I said quietly. Adding, after another lengthy pause, ‘My lord.’

  This answer of mine concerning the particularities of Honour did not please Prince Thomas and I knew it. It marked the beginning of a certain intellectual disagreement – a divorce of minds – between myself and him, which persisted until the end of his life. He preferred to talk of Amadis de Gaule, while I ate onions.

  Onions, now. That was the year of the onions in Kildare. I never knew a fruit more succulent than the onions were that autumn. Amused with wine, as the night wore on, while my royal master talked endlessly, repeating and reciting very boring tales of chivalry and knights errant designed to controvert my view of honour – tales which I shall certainly not bore you with, dear reader,
for you can find them to hand in any tavern where old dilettantes gather who never saw cold steel in their prissy lives, although I’ll bet you’ll rarely see a true soldier look up from his game of cards to enter in – while Thomas, Duke of Clarence, spoke of HONOUR, it diverted me in my cups to substitute for his word HONOUR the richer and lovelier word ONION.

  ‘Your ONION, now, is the emblem of chivalry – ONIONS are what chivalry achieves … The ancient Romans knew all there is to know about ONIONS … Jealous in ONIONS, sudden and quick in quarrel … ONION, high ONION, and renown … Have you not set my ONION at the stake? … Save him from danger, do him love and ONIONS … My ONION is my life; both grow in one; take ONIONS from me, and my life is done … There is my ONION’s pawn … The fewer men, the greater share of ONIONS … All men’s ONIONS lie like one lump before him … The gods assist you! And keep your ONIONS safe! … Set ONIONS in one eye and death in the other, and I will look on both indifferently, for let the gods so speed me as I love the name of ONIONS more than I fear death … Knighthoods and ONIONS! … If you were born to ONIONS, show it now …’

  And so on. This substitution of the word ONION for the word HONOUR seemed to be giving me some clue as to the relationship between Thomas and Hal. And the fact that my sack-befuddled (or be-sharpened) wits kept making the substitution was telling me something about what Hal required of me. Because all the four princes were to some extent mirrors of each other, and what you learnt of one you applied to the others. And particularly to Hal, who was the mirror of them all, and the frame also.

  As a matter of fact, I had it of an old yeoman of Repps that your onion came into Britain before the Romans (and thereby, perhaps, before your HONOUR) – indeed, it came from the deeps and caverns of the world, and entered our soil from the bottom up, so to speak, and not in the pocket or pouch of any mere invader. You will find onions embossed and carved on the monuments of Egypt. Some of the lords of Egypt used to worship the onion. Its very name, so my man Worcester tells me this minute, from the French oignon, which is derived from the Latin unio, implies such liberal unity and oneness as I approve in and from the depths of my onion-growing heart. There is not a world of difference between a pearl and an onion.

  Pickles, though, like honour, are another story.

  HONOUR and ONIONS, and my mother dead.

  What’s for supper?

  Tomorrow I promise you matter of greater swiftness and import. To wit, how Francis Pickbone and Black George Barnes, with my sweet stepsister, brought me back from Ireland to London, where I again fell in with that reprobate Prince Hal.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  How Sir John Fastolf came back to London

  27th June

  Up early in kill-me-by-inches Kildare, to memories of Caister – that bleak, that barren, bitter coast I like so well, mackerel and herring taken from the sea in season, in winter the skiffs drawn up in a smoke of rain and spray on the long grey shore. The cry of curlews. Your footprints filling up with water the moment you make them.

  I walked by the flame in the cathedral of St Bridget. It gave no warmth to my hands. The three miles of country between Caister and Yarmouth were in my mind’s eye wherever I turned my gaze on Irish stone or Irish grass or Irish sky. That stretch of England presents as level and unbroken an aspect as the opposing coast of Holland, or as the melancholy ocean in between. It is a long green expanse, covered on the side nearest the sea with little blowing bushes of furze, bright and sweet in summer with gold flowers. To the west, inland, the same stretch offers only a pancake of marshes, in winter always overflowed, but dotted and diversified at other times of the year with the brown-and-white and black-and-white of grazing cattle. In my skull I saw this, at a remove in Ireland. In my skull also, having just inherited Caister from my mother, I was beginning to dream of the Castle I would one day build here. My Castle would be the answer to that place Elsinore I once saw in Zealand. My tower would be the Pharos of the marshes.

  It is a curious phenomenon which I have observed of myself – when I am in a place I do not dwell much upon its physical character (having so much of my own to contend with?); but when I am out of the same scene I see it well and vividly, and reflect a lot upon its contours. This is not just a matter of homesickness. I daresay that now, writing in Caister, I could if I so wished recall each wretched blade of grass on which I wiped my arse in Ireland. But I do not so wish.

  Upon the morning I am telling you about – returned from St Bridget’s flickering, forked flame to my quarters in the garrison, I found horses in the courtyard. Nothing remarkable in that. But one of the horses was a giant. And, even so, this Bucephalos or Brigliadoro of a horse had a kind of dip or dent in his back where his rider had been seated in the ride across country. Discounting the possibility that Orlando or Alexander the Great had come to visit me, I realised in a flash that there was only one man I knew who would make a mark in a huge horse like that –

  Black George Barnes!

  I went up the stairs like a bouncing salmon – for in these years in Ireland, what with poteen and potatoes, my own dimensions had improved to the point where I was now about two yards round the waist. This was the first thing Ophelia noticed – yes, she was there too, my sweet stepsister, warming her pretty little bottom before the fire and turning a rose in her hands. George Barnes and Frank Pickbone were with her in the upper room.

  ‘Jack! You’ve got fat!’

  She caught my hands and kissed me, standing on tip-toes. ‘Something has come between us,’ she said, rubbing my belly. ‘What do you feed it on?’

  ‘Roses,’ I said.

  I took her on my lap and she touched the red rose to my cheek. ‘Hullo, mountain,’ she said. ‘My own dear darling whale.’

  Pickbone cleared his throat and shifted quickly away from the fire where it was burning his jambarts. ‘Good to see you, Fastolf,’ he grunted.

  ‘Good to see more of you,’ added Black George, with a chuckle. ‘How’s life in Ultima Thule?’

  We exchanged the usual gruff jokes and greetings, the courtesies of Englishmen, the marvellous irrelevancies. My visitors had not been impressed by their journey across Ireland. One thing stuck in Pickbone’s head. They’d been riding through a village, he said, when they saw a clothes-line hanging across the main street with a pair of cat’s tails dangling from it, bleeding, but no sign of any cats. ‘We asked what had happened there,’ he said, ‘and they told us that two cats had been fighting and had eaten every bit of each other except the tails!’

  ‘Poor pussy,’ Ophelia whispered in my ear, playing cat’s cradle with my codpiece. ‘It does seem a terribly fierce country, Jack.’

  I laughed. ‘The villagers saw you coming,’ I told Pickbone. ‘It’s just a local sport. They tie the cats together by their tails and throw them up over the line and then lay bets on which one will scratch the other’s eyes out first. If they’re interrupted all bets are void, and someone cuts the cats down with his sword.’

  Ophelia shivered, plucking one petal from the rose.

  ‘And thereby hangs a tail,’ I said. And kissed her.

  George Barnes was at his pacing, up and down, hands behind his back, black buggerly beard thrust forward like a trident. ‘Well, Fastolf,’ he said, ‘as you can guess, we’ve not come all this way to talk about cruelty to animals.’

  I wasn’t paying much attention to him. ‘I’d hate to lose my tail,’ I whispered in Ophelia’s ear. ‘But I wouldn’t mind losing my tongue. In your tail!’

  She giggled, and wriggled on my lap, and I was glad to see that she could still blush. Her cheeks approached the colour of the rose as I shifted some of my bulk beneath her.

  ‘We have come,’ barked Barnes, ‘to fetch you back home!’

  I almost dropped Ophelia when that sank in.

  ‘To Caister?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Barnes. ‘To London. To your friends.’

  I frowned. ‘Nothing I’d like better,’ I said. ‘But my friends aren’t England, and Eng
land is having to do without me, since England wants me here in Bogland with the Duke of Clarence. You know that. You know Jack Fastolf can’t come back to Cheapside just because his good friends miss his company.’

  Pickbone was pouring jugs of sack for all of us. He gave me mine into my hands with a significant small smile, then said: ‘One of your friends is England, Jack. Or one day will be. You know what I mean. You were fetched out here to Ireland by Prince Thomas because of some jealousy between him and his brother that no one needs to understand, and which they probably don’t yet admit to in themselves.’

  I twined arms with Ophelia, and we drank from each others’ jugs. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I’m beginning to get the hang of it.’

  ‘As well that you do,’ sniffed Pickbone, ‘since if you don’t, we’re instructed to fetch you back to England – to the Tower! And people have a way of getting the hang of things damned fast in there.’

  ‘The Tower,’ I said smoothly, leading him on, ‘might be interesting. I could keep company with the Royal Mint.’

  Barnes slapped his side with his broad black hat. ‘Henry III kept an elephant there,’ he said. ‘You’re growing mighty like an elephant yourself, and I can tell you that a certain person will have Henry IV keep Fastolf for his elephant in the Tower if you don’t come back with us.’

  I put down my jug. I put down Ophelia’s jug.

  ‘A certain person?’ I pressed. ‘Let me guess. Is it our friend Mr Shallow who has abrogated to himself such authority? Has he now graduated? Is he to be Lord Chief Justice of England?’