Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  By the light in his face I refer, of course, to HIS NOSE.

  There never was a nose that came near the nose of my man Bardolph. Not for brilliancy, refulgor, or resplendence. Not for irradiation or sheer unmatched capacity for frightening the horses in the streets.

  It was not a nose, it was a phosphorus.

  Bardolph, that nose made you a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire.

  It must have saved me £1000 (One Thousand Pounds) in torches, that nose of Bardolph’s, walking with him in the night between tavern and tavern. (On the other hand, think of the cost of all the sack I bought to fuel that nose! It would amount to more than a thousand pounds’ worth of torches.) Well, I maintained that salamander of Bardolph’s nose for thirty-two years. Thirty-two years I fed it with the necessary wildfire. God reward me for it!

  Once, near Deptford, in the depths of despair, at the ends of extremity – I mean, we had no ready cash for sack or beer – it was on the Retreat from Gadshill – once, just once, I saw this same Bardolph drink water.

  Madam, forgive me. I have to put in all the grisly details. This truth-telling is sometimes a promiscuous and obscene pursuit. I serve a stern mistress. Clio. She’s none of your nice Nellies, I’m afraid.

  WATER.

  In Deptford.

  From a horse trough.

  Singular phenomena attended upon this prodigy, this violation of Nature, this riot of right dancing among the elements. As Bardolph brought his face to a level with the noxious liquid, a hissing sound was heard, and a quick cloud of steam came scorching from its surface. Also the same water, on the withdrawal of that ravishing proboscis, was discovered to be hot, as if a blacksmith’s iron had been thrust into it.

  Bardolph. The very name is like a little light pilfering of church alms-boxes.

  He had a Tyburn face. His complexion was a kind of constellations. He very rarely opened his mouth, I’ll say that for him, except to pour something into it. His upper lip had a permanent smile – the result of a dagger slash from the priest at St Clement Danes, where he had once sought sanctuary. He walked like a lank cat treading on eggs.

  All the same, on one occasion, following a good influx of liquor, I obtained from this Bardolph his story.

  It is my content and contention to believe that every man alive has a story, has matter enough in him for a book – and a very good place for it to stay, in most cases. When the story which sack eventually elicits from the darkest regions of the human heart is as sad and unusual as the tale which Bardolph told me, it seems worth the writing down, however, and since to my knowledge no man has ever heard Bardolph’s strange story except myself, I will tell it to you now.

  Today seems the right day to do it, too. There is a slight hiatus here in History – we pause on the eve (in these annals) of the Prince procuring for me a small command of infantry, and the March to Coventry, and the Battle of Shrewsbury. Besides which, William Worcester has retired to his couch quite knackered from his extra-curricular duties of last night, when you may recall that he had to follow Miranda and your author to bed – so determined I was not to lose the thread of my discourse, despite (as you might say) my intercourse.

  So we have Bussard back with us. Pigbum. Which is appropriate to

  BARDOLPH’S TALE

  ‘My mother,’ Bardolph said, ‘was Tannakin Skinker.’

  We were sprawling at our ease in the Boar’s Head tavern. Just the two of us. From the state of my legs I would say that the time must have been about eleven o’clock at night.

  ‘The Tannakin Skinker,’ Bardolph said, as if this addition of the definite article would explain everything. It didn’t. I must have looked at him with questions in my eyes, there in the light of the great logs crackling on the hearth, and his glowing nose.

  ‘You mean to tell me,’ Bardolph said, with a sniff like a fanfare of trumpets, ‘that you never heard of Tannakin Skinker?’

  I shook my head. ‘Forgive me,’ I said, stirring my sack with my finger, round and round, and thinking all the while how my dear darling Doll liked stirring like this, round and round in her little clack-dish. ‘Forgive me, old friend, for not having heard of your mother. I’ve lived the quiet life of a country gentleman. In town, it is true, I’ve found harlots cheaper than hotels. But then,’ I added hastily, ‘no doubt that’s why I’ve not met your mother.’

  ‘Nobody met my mother,’ growled Bardolph. ‘That’s the point.’

  ‘Perhaps your father?’ I said, sipping sack. ‘Met her, I mean.’

  ‘Not at the time,’ Bardolph grunted. ‘He didn’t.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘The age of miracles will never pass,’ I said. ‘I believe it. Only yesterday I heard that Timur the Lame has snuffed it, and they’re going to put him in a mausoleum in the golden city of Samarcand just to make sure. But Bardolph, old bugger-in-arms that you are, if you’re expecting me to credit that your entrance into this world was the result of some kind of immaculate conception, accompanied without prejudice to your mother’s virginity, then—’

  I left the sentence unfinished, and crossed myself.

  Bardolph blew snot into the fire, pinching his nose in his fingers. The snot flared like sea coals.

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ he said. ‘Tannakin Skinker, she was. I thought the whole world knew of Tannakin Skinker. I walk about all the time, night and day, man and boy, thinking to myself that people go pointing after me in the street, whispering, “That must be Skinker’s spawn!”’

  He looked so sorry for himself that I handed him my handkerchief. He inspected it. Then he handed it back.

  Despite this uncalled-for insult, I remarked gently:

  ‘The world forgets.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Whatever the sins of Tannakin Skinker, the world has forgotten them.’

  ‘I don’t think she had many sins,’ said Bardolph. ‘Sins are hard to come by in that condition.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘What condition?’

  ‘It was more on account of her mother’s sins,’ said Bardolph.

  A sudden shower of rain beat at the shutters. Outside, I heard the watch at their long march away down Eastcheap. Beside us, between us, candleflames nodded like monks in their thin hoods of wax. I thought of Duncan, dead. I felt suddenly like a father confessor.

  ‘Unburden your conscience,’ I said.

  ‘Not likely,’ said Bardolph. He snorted. ‘Nothing so filthy,’ he said. He took a long draught of sack, then smacked his lips and stretched out his boots to the roaring fire. ‘I just want to tell you my story.’

  ‘Which involves your mother.’

  ‘Who was Tannakin Skinker.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘That is established. We know the worst. Fire ahead.’

  Bardolph stared deep into the fire, as though past and present and his life to come all met there. Then something seemed to click – I heard it! – either in his head or his throat or (most likely) his NOSE, and he started to talk. He talked and he talked, while I listened.

  ‘My story begins with my mother’s own mother,’ he said. ‘She came from a place called Wirkham, a town on the River Rhine. Oh yes, I have foreign blood in me, some, and maybe worse … But she was a person of consequence, my mother’s mother. A lady of some kind of rank and fashion. At least among Hollanders. She would be, I should estimate, a burgheress.’ He picked thoughtfully at his nose, withdrawing his finger as if it was singed. ‘Well,’ went on Bardolph, ‘she was married, you see, she was pregnant, and one day she opened the door on an old beggar-woman, you know the type of person, and the beggar-woman asked her for sixpence, for the sake of the child which she held in her arms. She was a particularly filthy beggar-woman, and it was a particularly filthy child. What’s more, it squalled and it squealed, and my grandmother was in no especially charitable mood – having just discovered my grandfather in the broom-cupboard and up the serving maid – and she told the old beggar-woman to bugger off and take her nasty pig away with her. To whic
h, because she was – I mean, a witch! – the beggar-woman turns round and snaps, ‘When your own child comes out of your womb it’ll be more like a pig than mine, you just wait and see!’ And she trots off, muttering to herself the Devil’s Paternoster. Well, Fastolf, I tell you, my grandmother didn’t think too much of this, not being one of your superstitious Dutch, but when she was brought to bed, and her baby was born, oh oh oh Fastolf, oh Jack, conceive of her horror when she was safely delivered of a daughter, correct in all parts, all limbs and lineaments of the body well-featured and proportioned, save only her face – save only her NOSE … The babe had the snout of a pig! A hog’s nozzle! A swine’s proboscis! An organ of smell in the shape of the neb of a sow! O horror, horror, horror!’

  I could think of no words adequate to the occasion. So I belched. Not out of contumely, you understand. It was a sympathetic belch, a belch of brotherhood. Bardolph accepted it as such. He went on quickly:

  ‘They bribed the midwife, my grandmother and my grandfather, and swore her thus to secrecy. They called the pig-child Tannakin, and never let her out of the house. They were persons of some substance, remember, and these things can be arranged, especially on the continent. They took care that whenever anyone had to be present in the room where Tannakin was, then the girl’s face was so veiled and covered that nobody ever saw her nose. They fed her secretly. They taught her. It is all lies, incidentally, that my mother would eat swine-grub only from a silver trough, and that all she ever learnt to say was some hoggish Dutch Ough! Ough! or French Owee! Owee! She could talk and eat, this Tannakin, just like an ordinary everyday person. The only difference between her and the rest of the human race was her NOSE.’

  Bardolph scratched at his own inheritance reflectively.

  I said nothing. I kicked a log on the fire. I poured us some more sack to drink.

  ‘My grandparents consulted the most learned doctors in Europe,’ Bardolph continued. ‘Wolfram von Eschenbach, Matthew Paris, Michael Scot, Fibonacci, Snorri Sturluson, Yaqut ibn Abdallah ur-Rumi, Thomas of Cantimpre, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Albert Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, William of Saliceto, Jean de Meung, Rutebeuf, Bonaventura, Ristoro, Rufinus, Lanfranchi, even—’

  ‘Roger Bacon,’ I said.

  My friend nodded glumly. ‘Even Roger Bacon,’ he said. He took a slow pull at his sack.

  ‘Medical knowledge was in its infancy in those days,’ I observed. ‘But didn’t one of these learned doctors come up with a single idea that might help?’

  Bardolph gargled with his sack and spat some in the fire. ‘Always too much lime in Boar’s Head sack,’ he complained. But he accepted the fresh jug I poured him. ‘Oh yes,’ he went on. ‘An idea was found. A solution. A cure. An antidote.’

  ‘Hurrah!’ I shouted, drinking to it. ‘Which doctor?’

  ‘Bacon.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘But naturally.’

  We drank to the author of De Speculis, De Mirabili Potesate Artis et Naturae, De Computo Naturali, Opus Maius, Opus Minus, Opus Tertius, Compendium Studii Philosophiae, De Retardandis Senectutis Accidentibus, Speculum Alchimiae, De Secretis Operibus Naturae, Libellus de Retardandis Senectutis Accidentibus. And so on. A glorious bibliography of sack.

  Then I said, the last toast drunk:

  ‘And what was the cure that Roger Bacon prescribed?’

  ‘Me,’ said Bardolph.

  ‘You?’ I said.

  ‘Me,’ said Bardolph. ‘I have a kind of self,’ he added.

  ‘I drink to it!’ I said. ‘To you and your yard and your little finger! But how could you be a cure for your mother’s affliction when you were not even as much as a twinkle in your father’s whatsit?’

  ‘Attend,’ said Bardolph.

  He spilt sack from the flagon on the table, and began to draw with his finger across it.

  ‘That learned Dr Bacon had a theory,’ he explained, ‘relating to natural agents and their activities. In other words, to matter and to force. In other words, to virtus, species, imago agentis – God’s teeth, I can’t remember all the fancy names he gave them. But, roughly speaking, the main idea in his philosophy was that change, in any of your natural phenomenon, is produced by the impression of a VIRTUS or SPECIES on matter.’

  ‘Roughly speaking,’ I said.

  ‘Roughly speaking,’ said Bardolph, still drawing in the sack.

  ‘Not rough enough for my five wits,’ I said. ‘I can’t follow a bloody word you’re saying, my boy.’

  ‘Physical action,’ said Bardolph grimly, gritting his teeth, as though reciting a lesson that had been drummed into him time and again to justify or explain his own existence, or perhaps the shape of his own existence, ‘physical action is impression. Transmission.’

  ‘Transmission of what?’ I said.

  ‘Of force,’ said Bardolph.

  ‘In what?’ I said.

  ‘In lines,’ said Bardolph. ‘Look.’

  He had finished tracing with his finger in the sack.

  This is what he had drawn:

  I stroked my beard. ‘Bardolph,’ I said, ‘you are no Praxiteles. But I take it from these crude and imperfect representations that you wish to refer me to those parts of the human body, the one male, the other female, which are of use to us in copulation? I take it that you are trying to draw for me the things which prudish times disguise with fig-leaves?’

  ‘That there’s a cunt,’ said Bardolph. ‘And that’s a prick.’

  ‘I have your drift. Proceed.’

  ‘Dr Bacon’s diagnosis,’ went on Bardolph, ‘was that my mother’s gross deformity could be cured only by the wrack and ruin of her maidenhead. Your prick was to be the VIRTUS, with its SPECIES, which would effect the change, not only upon her cunt, but upon her NOSE.’

  ‘If you will forgive a pun,’ I murmured, ‘this sounds like a nostrum to me.’

  ‘It worked,’ said Bardolph simply. He scrubbed out his drawing with his sleeve, took another draught of sack, then said: ‘Not wishing to cause scandal in the Rhineland, and to come where they would not be known at all, my grandparents brought my mother to England, here, to London. A little discreet advertising was done. Of course, they couldn’t expect anyone to marry my mother with her nose like that, and of course they couldn’t even guarantee to a prospective husband that her nose would improve with lechery. But a way was worked out. Remember, my grandfather was a wealthy burgher. For twenty-five pounds and a pony he discovered a tinker who was only too willing to project his VIRTUS through a hole in a tapestry, and so squirt his SPECIES—’

  ‘Into your mother’s matter,’ I concluded.

  ‘You have it,’ said Bardolph.

  ‘And she had you,’ said I.

  ‘And her nose came down to normal overnight,’ said Bardolph.

  I clapped my hands. ‘A happy ending,’ I said. ‘A moral tale.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Bardolph. ‘The tinker, whose name was Skinker – he jumped in the Thames.’

  ‘With lead in his boots?’

  ‘No. Iron cartwheel. Round his neck.’

  ‘But why?’

  Bardolph shrugged, and picked at his carbuncles. ‘Matter and force,’ he said, ‘matter and force. They’re funny things. There’s a delicate sort of balance we don’t understand.’

  ‘But with your mother’s nose transformed to normal,’ I mused, ‘I should have thought Skinker could even have brought himself to marry her, seeing the wealth in the family and all that.’

  ‘He did marry her,’ said Bardolph. ‘They lived down at Windsor. They were merry as cock and hen for about a year. Then, one midsummer night, poor Skinker wakes up and needs a piss. He goes to the window – they lived in this fine house, right by the river’s edge – and gets out his tool, and what does he find?’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said.

  I held up my little finger.

  ‘Right first time,’ said Bardolph. ‘Shrunk to the size of a pig’s tail. And with a little curly twist in it b
esides.’

  I shook my head. Outside, the chimes were sounding midnight.

  ‘It’s a wicked and wonderful world,’ I said.

  Bardolph grunted.

  Then he looked up and grinned at me, rubbing his nose in the firelight.

  ‘Things could be worse,’ he said. ‘At least I don’t favour my father!’

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  About the holy number 7

  Feast of the 7 Brothers

  Desdemona, a word in your ear.

  Upon upon a time there was a Roman lady, a rich widow, called Felicity. The name means happiness. No one knows much about her, except God. She was a Christian. She had seven sons. During the reign of Antoninus Pius they were all arrested. That puts it round about the year of God’s Death 140, since it was at that time that Lollius Urbicus, legate of this Emperor, built the Antonine Wall from Dunglass Castle, on the Clyde, to Castle Blackness, on the Firth of Forth, taking his cue from Hadrian’s earlier job. O Picts. O devolution.

  The lady Felicity and her seven sons declined to offer sacrifices to the pagan gods. (Which gods would have included Antoninus Pius himself, and his slightly less pious wife called Faustina.) The whole family was brought before four different judges, and sentenced to death in seven differing ways. The sons were killed first. Their names were Felix, Philip, Martial, Vitalis, Alexander, Silvanus, and Januarius. St Felicity was the last to be put to death. All that is mortal of them is buried on the Salarian Way.

  Today is the day we remember those seven martyrs and their mother. Pope St Symmachus added Alexander as representative of them to the canon of the Mass in the sixth century.

  Seven, my sweet Desdemona. A holy number.

  7 Deadly Sins.

  7 Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross.

  7 Joys of the Virgin.

  7 Days in Creation.