Christopher Uptake

by Susan Price

  When I first saw George, I thought him a sick old man of at least fifty. I was partly right. He was sick, but, in fact, was only thirty-six years old. The deep creases that marked his face and dragged it down into an expression of pain and misery were like a mask; if you looked through them, you saw his youth beneath. But he was still over ten years older than I, and had been trying to live by writing for a long time.

  I learned a great deal from him. He told me how stupid I had been to let Dick Hobson cheat me out of a crown; I should have made a great noise and fuss about it, and then he would have paid me. If you let people cheat you so easily, George said, they will queue up to do it. He approved of my refusing to name a price for my play, but said that I should have demanded sixty crowns, or even more. Don't be embarrassed, he said; argue and fight and scream and claw for every penny you can get, and then you might get enough to starve on.

  I could see that he spoke from experience, and I remembered what he said, and have always tried to put his teachings into practice; but on some days you just don't feel strong enough to carry them through.

  George spent a lot of his time in the Bear, cadging meals and drinks from the actors and theatre-goers, to save money. I went with him often, to get away from the stinking yard we lodged in, but I didn't cadge. I was ashamed to do such a thing, since I hadn't a chance of returning the favour. George was past caring about appearances.

  After I had lodged with him a month, I felt that I had been appointed to look out for him. I pestered him to buy some new shoes and a coat, both of which he needed badly, but he had been poor for so long that he was afraid to spend any money, and said that he would buy new clothes when he had sold the play he was working on, and not before. So I offered to help him finish it. It was to my advantage too; I also needed money more quickly than I could earn it by myself and I knew that George always planned out the action of a play before he began writing, instead of inventing it as he went along, as I did.*

  There were problems when we actually attempted it: I used words and phrases which George would never have used, and we argued about them, and I always had to give way, because not only was I younger and less experienced, but it was George's play. Again, I found it difficult to stop myself taking the characters and events in directions which George did not wish them taken, and I had to rewrite some scenes before he was satisfied - and, naturally, the scenes he gave me to write were all the dull ones that he couldn’t be bothered with, and the work was often very tedious. But the play was finished the sooner, and Dick Hobson bought it, although he wasn't impressed with it; still, he needed many plays, and it would do.

  George bought himself some new shoes, and said the coat could wait. The rest of the money we divided between us, although we shared the cost of the rent and food, and proved the truth of the maxim that two can live as cheaply as one.

  I returned to writing my own play, and was getting along well with it when George brought in the manuscript of a play which Dick Hobson wanted rewritten. It was out of date, and had some pages missing, and we were to renew and complete it.

  I didn't want anything to do with it, but George said we were lucky to be offered the work, and when he told me how much he had made Dick agree to pay for it, I said that I would help him, providing he did the donkey-work of reading it to discover the story, and then plotting our version, while I continued to work on my own play. He agreed, and I had over a fortnight to myself before he was ready to divide the scenes for our hack-work between us. I insisted, this time, on having some of the more important and interesting scenes, and he said that we would have to try harder to write like one another - which meant that I was to try harder to write as he did.

  During the day we both worked at the table - we had acquired another chair - but in the evening George would go out, and I would put away the old play and begin work on my own. The difference between working on the two plays was like the difference between dawdling along, dragging your feet, and running as fast as you can. I never put much effort into the scenes that George had plotted. All I did was to find words which fitted his purpose.

  When I wrote my own play, I had to find words which meant what I wished to say, and I had to try to feel everything that my characters felt, and everything that the watching audience would feel, and I had to be sceptical about everything too - 'Would anyone truly say that, do that?' - all of which made it a far more tiring business. And yet after a day spent in muddily spinning out someone else's play, it was a relief and a relaxation to begin on mine.

  When I had finished it, and sold it to Dick Hobson, I turned to helping George with the play he was writing.

  Even before we had finished that one, he brought home another for us to rewrite, for another manager; and when we had finished that, he found us another. When an idea for a play of my own came to me again, I was unable to start writing it, or even to do much thinking about it, because I was committed to writing, according to George's plan, a Comedy and a Revenge, neither of which I wanted to do, while he worked on a pamphlet for which he had sought out a commission. Many, many times during the writing of those things, I stopped, and sighed, and looked across the table at him as he grunted and stuck out his tongue, and thought out the words to tell him that I was going to do no more work unless it was on my own play - but I never told him, because of the money the plays and the pamphlet would earn us.

  We always needed money. As well as food, there was rent, and firewood or coals, and paper and ink and candles. And I discovered that it is part of my nature to spend more, the poorer I am.

  The knowledge that I cannot afford a thing, and that I would be sensible to pass it by and save my money, irritates me until I am scarcely responsible for my actions - and so I bought a History of England, a silver earring, several plays, and a necklace which I had intended to send to one of my sisters - but, as I never bought a present for my other sister, I later took to wearing it myself, as some justification for buying it. I was afraid that if I refused to do the work George found for us, and took lodgings elsewhere, I should starve.

  Working together, the two of us earned steadily and, although we were poor and shabby, we never actually went hungry, as George often had, he told me, before I had come along.

  I thought that now he was better fed, his health might improve, but it did not. He developed the strange quirk of forgetting which things belonged to him; he would wake in the morning, find his shoes beside his bed, look at them, and then say that they weren't his, and begin to look everywhere for his shoes. I would try to convince him that the shoes by his bed were the shoes he had taken off the night before, but he would not believe me.

  "I've never seen them before,'' he’d say, and refuse to touch them, as if they were contaminated, and he would want me to go and buy him some new ones.

  We went through this with almost everything he possessed: his pen, his shirt, his knife, his pillow… He started to insist that there was someone else living in our room with us, who was somehow avoiding us, and that he couldn't possibly use that jug, that cup, that spoon, because it belonged to this other person. He began to make me nervous; even to frighten me. I thought seriously of finding other lodgings, but it seemed shameful to leave him in such a state.

  Another thing about George which I found hard to tolerate was his hatred of foreigners. Jews, of course, were mean and rich. "Everyone knows they are," he told me. Why, he knew many people - some of whom he’d known as long as an hour - who agreed with him about this.

  The French, his friends also agreed, were hermaphrodites, every one of them, and wouldn't know what to do with a woman. The Italians were all cowards and poisoners, the Danes all drunkards.

  Worst of all were the Flemings, because they were coming into England and settling down, buying shops, setting up their own businesses and schools. They were taking over! They bred like rabbits, and there would soon be more of them than there were Englishmen. Besides, the government was on their side, corrupt as it was, and allowed them to rule
us. Soon we wouldn't be allowed to speak English; we'd have to speak bloody Flemish! - he knew a lot of people who would agree with him about that.

  Hating the Flemings as he did, he hated Catholics even more, and yet by 'Flemings' he meant only those Protestant refugees who were coming into England to escape from Catholic persecution on the Continent. I think he hated Catholics because the French, Spanish and Italians were Catholic; I am also sure that he believed the Fleming refugees to be secretly Catholic, because they weren't English.*

  He boasted that his family had been Protestant long before the country had, and he thanked God that England was Catholic no longer. You only had to look to Spain to see what Catholic rule meant. Rule by torture and fear. Any dissenter might expect to be burned alive.

  "Why in Hell's name are you always ranting about Flemings, then?" I asked. He stopped and looked completely bewildered. I said, "Aren't the Flemings coming here to escape from that?"

  George remembered the Flemings. "Oh yes," he said, "but why do they have to come here? Why don't they go to Germany or Denmark?"

  "Perhaps the Germans don't want them," I said. "Or perhaps they want to come here."

  "Oh - be sure they do!'' he said. "The Government feather-beds 'em. They shouldn't be allowed in. They bring disease. They're taking work away from us, and God knows there was enough hunger and poverty before they came."

  "They bring in new work," I said. "Silk-weaving and - What do you want them to do? Go to Spain? Ask the Inquisition to find them somewhere to live? What would you do in their place? Stay, or try to reach England?" He didn't answer me for a while, and, since I was writing, I soon forgot about him, and went on scribbling.

  Then he said, quietly, and evidently after some thought, "God would look after them."

  For a second I didn't understand; then I remembered what we had been talking about, and was instantly so angry that he should advise people in danger of burning to look for protection to something that doesn't exist, that I gasped, breathless for a moment, before saying, "You - brainless pratt!'' George, across the table, gasped too, and then snatched up my ink-pot and threw it at me.

  I took a deep breath, and sat still a while before putting up a hand to mop away the ink which was running down my brow and nose, and over my mouth. George was lying back in his chair, laughing in little squeaks. I stood, and said, "I'm leaving."

  With the ink still wet on my face, I dragged from the bed the thin blanket I had brought with me from the College, spread it on the floor, and piled my things on it.

  George continued to laugh; then sat and watched me, giggling occasionally at the sight of my inky face. I borrowed his ink to make a copy of the plan we were working to; washed my face as clean as I could, tied the corners of my blanket together, told him that I would bring him my scenes for the play when I had finished them, and left.

  I found Dick Hobson in the room behind his stage, where the props were kept and the actors changed. I explained what had happened, and he seated himself on one of the royal thrones, took a little book from inside his jacket, opened it to a page headed 'Chr. Uptake' and studied it. He had written down there every payment made to me, and every sum of money lent to me since I had started working for him. After doing some calculation in his head, he gave me four sovereigns.

  I found new lodgings, where I eventually finished the scenes I had to write. I took them round to George, and found him in bed. He looked at what I’d written, and nodded, but I don't know whether he understood what I was saying.

  Then he said, suddenly, that he had finished his half of the play and had put it away somewhere. I found it, shuffled the scenes together in the right order, and sat looking at George as he lay flat on his back. I had been counting on him to sell the play, because he could always get a better price than I, but it was obvious that he could not go out.

  I took the play to Dick Hobson and left it for him to read. Then I bought a hot meat pie from a man in the street and carried it back to George. He was pleased and, when I had found him a spoon which he recognised, he sat up and ate some of it.

  I watched him, and found myself thinking that here was what a very sick man looked like, this was how a sick man behaved, and that I should remember this and this detail about him, in case I ever wanted to write about a sick man.

  Becoming aware of these thoughts, I was ashamed and felt I should do something to make amends, so I asked if he would like me to move in with him again. He was surprised. When had I ever lived with him? He genuinely could not remember. I am not certain he even knew who I was.

  Dick Hobson did not want the play we had written. It was terrible, he said, predictable and dull from beginning to finish. He could only consider buying it if we agreed to rewrite it according to his plan - but that I couldn't do.

  Very well, Dick said, and gave me the play back. I explained that George was very ill, and asked for some money for him, and Dick looked George up in his little book, and gave me a couple of sovereigns.

  I delivered the money to George, having added a little to it, but could not make him understand that I had not sold our play and the money was only a loan against the next thing he should write. He was angry because I had not got a better price. I went back to my own lodgings in a low mood.

  In the days which followed I was miserable. For almost the first time since I had left the University, I had nothing to do, no scenes to write for George and no ideas for a play of my own. There was a ring of weariness round my eyes; aches and fidgets in my shoulders and arms; an ache of frustration in my chest. I noticed that I was becoming nervous and, when alone in my lodgings, would be suddenly compelled to look over my shoulder to make sure that no one was behind me. I remembered the invisible person who shared George's lodging and used his things, and told myself that if I wasn't careful, I should be as mad as he - but that didn't help. I was nervous because I felt guilty, and I felt guilty because I was not writing, and when I was not writing - well, what use was I?

  I spent much time walking round the town, and what a stinking, ugly place it was. I had been so pleased to escape from the college walls, and now here I was, surrounded by walls, unable to walk in any direction without being turned aside by one. I remembered Hawksmere, and my father, who never worked the hours I did. Why had I ever thought that writing would make a good way of life? If I had had money, I would have gone back to Hawksmere, but I did not want to go home penniless.

  While wandering one afternoon in an unfamiliar part of the town, I went into a tavern to buy a drink. I sat in a corner, close to an old man. After a short time, I noticed that he was looking at me, and when I stared back, he moved himself a little nearer along the bench, and gave a slight nod toward my chest.

  I looked down and saw the necklace I had bought for my sister, but had been wearing myself. It was unusual - partly bead and partly chain, and with two medallions besides the usual crucifix hanging from it. The old man came closer and said breathily in my ear, "I see you're one of St. Peter's flock.''

  I looked into his face from a distance of a few inches, and saw yellow stains drawn across the white of his eye-balls, and felt, and smelled, his breath. He leaned to my ear again and spoke, his breath making my own hair tickle me. "I should put it inside your jacket. It's courageous to wear it openly, but not sensible.''

  I tucked the necklace into my jacket, as he wanted me to do, but couldn't understand him. "Are you one of St. Peter's flock?'' I asked.

  "All my life; all my life," he said. "I've brought my children up in the faith, and seen my grandchildren brought up in it too." He glanced at me. "It's heartening to see that others have done the same."

  He didn't go on, but cleared his throat with a deep, prolonged grumbling, then slumped in his seat, staring vaguely and blearily ahead of him. He was a mound of an old man, seeming made of brick and mortar rather than flesh, for his two colours were red and grey, and the texture of his skin was rough and gritty, as if it would be possible to blunt a knife on him. He smelled of beer an
d old cloth. Suddenly he turned to me again, and said "Are you able to worship?"

  "Ah - '' I said, caught out. I had never worshipped anything. "No,'' I said, deciding on half-truth.

  "You've never been baptized or confirmed?" he said pityingly.

  "Yes, I have." I had been, as a child.

  "Into the Church?" he said, and, puzzled, I nodded. He scowled, and said, "Not St. Peter's church!'' I was silent, waiting for him to speak again. "It could be done, you know."

  "Could it?" I said.

  "Oh, yes, yes. It could be arranged.''

  "Where, sir?'' I asked, since my last question had not led him on to tell me any more.

  At this he suddenly became cautious. Perhaps my tone of voice warned him that I had very little idea what he was talking about. He tried to rise quickly, but, being so old, tottered, fell, and had to lean on my shoulder to save himself. I hoisted him to his feet, and he tried to push me away, muttering, "Never mind, never mind!'' I walked with him to the door of the tavern, where he jerked his jacket down over his belly, gave me a half-fierce, half- nervous look, and walked away across the street.