by Ann Swinfen
Four days will quickly steep themselves in night:
Four nights will quickly dream away the time:
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.
They're very good, thought Frances, as Egeus entered to complain about his daughter Hermia's disobedience in falling in love with the wrong man and refusing to marry the husband of her father's choice. The complex courting dance of the play began, with Demetrius and Lysander vying for Hermia's love, Hermia in love with Lysander, and Helena, Hermia's friend and the spurned love of Demetrius, full of bitterness – betraying friendship and trust because of the violence of her own rejected passion.
Nothing changes, thought Frances with a wry smile, as Helena decided to reveal the escape of Hermia and Lysander to Demetrius, hoping for no more reward than his thanks for being able to pursue his new love. You would think we would learn what cruel sport love makes of us, but each generation has to discover it all over again for itself.
Not bad, thought Nigel, relaxing a little in his chair two rows behind Natasha. He had planned to avoid the amateur theatricals, but had found himself talking to Peter Kaufmann over drinks, and could not easily escape as the pianist directed his wheelchair down the ramp to where chairs had been arranged in rows. Kaufmann had been very pleasant, not difficult at all, and had agreed to perform a short extract for the opening programme of Nigel's series, 'Provided,' he had said firmly, 'an acceptable fee is paid into the St Martins trust funds.' Nigel had immediately agreed a generous fee, and was now prepared to sit out the play, which looked as though it might be quite bearable. As long as the producer allows old Will to speak for himself, he thought, you can't go far wrong, and they have some talent, these people, for a group of amateurs from the provinces.
Giles stopped a few yards behind Frances, on the fringes of the audience, and tried to get a grip on himself. He used his familiar stage technique to steady his angry breathing, and forced himself to relax, but inside he was still seething with humiliation.
'I don't really fancy fat old men,' Alice had announced coolly after she had calmly declared her relationship with Tony, just when he had thought he was going to make it with her. 'Oh, I know some girls are turned on by sugar daddies – and fair enough if you need a bit of financial security. But frankly, Mr Kilworth' – she made his name sound like an insult – 'I am right out of your price bracket. And I like my men lean and lovely, not flabby, with seedy skin and an alcohol flush in the nose and eyeballs.'
He, Giles Kilworth, smooth and experienced escort of innumerable beautiful women, had been left quite speechless. She had removed his hands, frozen in a grotesque mockery of seduction, and risen to her feet with a smooth, cat-like motion. After a few moments he had followed her out of the shrubbery, stumbling over his own feet like a stage clown.
That will ask some tears in the true performing of it, said Bottom on stage. If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes: I will move storms: I will condole in some measure. To the rest – yet my chief humour is for a tyrant. I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split.
Katya wrapped her arms round her legs and rested her chin on her knees. She could feel the warmth of Natasha's leg against her side. Some time ago she had thrown off her heavy boots and socks, and the cool grass curled up deliciously between her bare toes. The town craftsmen were leaving the terrace by the french windows, calling out to each other their arrangements to meet the next night in the wood for a rehearsal of their play. A play inside another play, thought Katya. No, with its own prologue, it's almost a play inside a play inside a play inside reality. As if everything is a series of images in mirrors that reflect each other, getting further away and harder to reach. But sometimes I feel as though I am inside the image, and reality is far away, back down the tunnel of mirrors. Perhaps if I were clever enough, I could learn to manipulate the images and the mirrors, so that I could live inside the image where I feel at home, and force reality to become the shadow in the mirror. Perhaps that's what people do when they grow up – if reality becomes unbearable, you just turn it upside down. She stole a glance towards her mother. Frances looked very still and remote, as though she were listening to something underneath the words of the play.
A soft shivering passage sounded on a flute from somewhere behind the audience. A figure in a tight bodysuit of moss green, under a floating transparent tunic, approached the terrace, coming up from the garden towards the steps and playing that strange wild thread of music. From the other side of the terrace a small figure in grey gossamer like spiders' webs skimmed up the steps, meeting Puck halfway. Chrissie's voice was as pure and clear as a choirboy's:
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough briar,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander every where,
Swifter than the moonës sphere:
And I serve the Fairy Queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
The cowslips tall her pensioners be,
In their gold coats spots you see:
Those be rubies, fairy favours:
In those freckles live their savours.
I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits: I'll be gone –
Our queen and all her elves come here anon.
Puck and the fairy spoke of the quarrel between the king and queen of fairyland, then drew aside as the two processions approached and confronted each other. Oberon was played by a new teacher at the village school. He had arrived that Easter, and had not previously appeared in any production by the Priorbridge Thespians. He had just the right touch of mischievous arrogance for the part, Frances thought. Kate Fellowes, daughter of a farmer living halfway between Clunwardine Priors and Stanway Bridges, was Titania. She had been acting with the Thespians for fourteen years, since the age of six, and now, with one more year to go at RADA, would have graced any professional production. She was wearing her great cloud of copper-coloured hair loose on her shoulders, and it whirled about her, rippling above the gauzy layers of her costume, as she spun round and confronted her husband.
What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence –
I have forsworn his bed and company . . .
I know
When thou hast stol'n away from fairy land,
And in the shape of Corin sat all day,
Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love,
To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,
Come from the farthest steep of India?
But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,
Your buskined mistress and your warrior love,
To Theseus must be wedded; and you come
To give their bed joy and prosperity.
* * *
In the Cambridge theatre, the Marlowe players are giving a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Frances sits between Giles and his Cambridge friend, John Rafael. They have driven over from Oxford to attend the May Ball at John's college, preceded by the trip to the theatre and dinner.
A room has been booked in a hotel for Frances and John's girlfriend, an arrogant deb called Cecilia, who looked at Frances's ball gown with undisguised disdain as they changed and put on their make-up. Frances is relieved that they will probably not make any further use of the room until they change again tomorrow morning. The ball lasts all night and they are to punt up to Granchester for breakfast. She does not feel she wants to share girlish confidences with Cecilia in the dark.
She turns over the pages of her programme, tense with excitement. She has never been asked to a Commem at Oxford or a May Ball at Cambridge before. In fact, apart from the modest affairs sometimes held in the village hall, she has never been to a dance at all, something she was rash enough to admit to Cecilia in the first few moments of their acquaintance, bef
ore she realised the wisdom of holding her tongue. Her head swims at the thought of dancing all night with Giles in this magical place – somehow more magical than Oxford, loved but familiar as it is. Cambridge is strange to her, and seems to float in a gilded cloud of its own river mist.
Carelessly scanning the names in the cast list, her eye is arrested by the sight of one she recognises. She remembers the girl from the Oxford interviews eighteen months ago. They talked long into the night, immediately establishing the intimacy of old friends. It was both comforting and exhilarating for Frances, whose natural shyness with people means she does not easily make friends. She was sorry to discover later that they had chosen different universities. Now here the other girl is, playing Titania.
These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By pavéd fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or in the beachéd margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs: which falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The musical voice conjures up the vision of a land sick and ill at ease, nature fractured. Frances jumps, startled from her absorption in the play as Giles slides his hand into her lap and leans over to nibble her ear.
* * *
Two different interpretations of the part, thought Frances now. This Titania of the 1990s is all mystic air and fire. The Cambridge one, dark haired and square jawed, was passionate woman, defying an overbearing husband, as human as the human characters in the play – back in the early days of the feminist movement. She smiled ruefully to herself. That Titania had gone on to become a distinguished novelist. Odd how things turn out. When we sat in that Oxford room, drinking coffee and mapping out our ambitions and dreams to each other, we can't have been so very different.
She felt her arm gripped from behind.
'I need to talk to you,' said Giles.
She looked round at him in irritation. 'I want to watch the play,' she whispered.
He sighed. 'In the interval, then.'
* * *
Paul had telephoned the hospital in Hereford just before the play started.
'Your wife is fine,' a soothing female voice said. 'She is still having some contraction-like pains, but doctor thinks they are likely to pass. We'll be settling her for the night soon.'
'She needs to stay in overnight, then?'
'Much the best thing. Give us a ring about nine tomorrow, and we'll see how things are.'
'You will let me know if – well, if anything starts to happen?'
'Yes, of course, Mr Fenway. Goodbye.' The voice was cheerfully dismissive.
Paul tried to concentrate on the play.
Titania was speaking of her human friend, mother of the child Oberon wanted to take from her.
The fairy land buys not the child of me.
His mother was a vot'ress of my order;
And in the spicéd Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossiped by my side;
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking th'embarkéd traders on the flood;
When we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following – her womb then rich with my young squire –
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
It was true, thought Paul. Lisa's profile, which he found so distressing, did resemble a sailing ship blown before the wind. As a scientist he had little time in his life for poetry, but Shakespeare did manage to put his finger on things with amazing accuracy. To compare a pregnant woman with a merchant ship laden with the treasures of the Indies made it more acceptable somehow.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die.
Paul clenched his fists and turned away. It is quite different nowadays. Women hardly ever die in childbirth.
* * *
Hugh Appleton leaned back in his hired car and closed his eyes. The driver, fortunately, was a silent fellow. The fatigue of the last few weeks of travelling was catching up with him now that he was back firmly on English soil, being borne effortlessly on towards St Martins, to the only place he could think of as home. His easy familiarity with many people and places would keep him away for years at a time, and then suddenly – quite without warning and curiously disconcerting – the feeling would overwhelm him that he could not be at peace until those familiar scenes surrounded him again. The plane from Moscow had been hopelessly late at Heathrow. He had phoned ahead from Russia and arranged to be collected and driven to Reading railway station, where he could catch a train for Hereford, but now he had missed the last possible connection. The driver, after checking with his office, had said he was willing to drive Hugh all the way from Heathrow to St Martins. It was an extravagance, but he must not let Natasha down altogether. He would be late enough as it was.
Something rustled in his pocket as he turned to make his head more comfortable. He patted his pocket and smiled. Then he slept.
* * *
Oberon was instructing Puck about the magic flower he was to fetch from the other side of the world, which had the power to make people fall in love.
It fell upon a little western flower;
Before, milk-white; now purple with love's wound –
And maidens call it Love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower, the herb I showed thee once.
The juice of it, on sleeping eyelids laid,
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb, and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.
Puck leapt from the terrace in one swift movement, then paused for a moment, crouched on the grass like a runner at the start of a race. He called back over his shoulder to Oberon:
I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.
Time, thought Frances – how clever Shakespeare is with time. He draws our attention to his artifice in Henry V, when he has the Chorus persuade us to suspend our disbelief and imagine that events taking place over many years and many miles are truly represented within the wooden O of the theatre. But in fact he is doing it all the time, in all his plays. Puck reappears almost at once, not within forty minutes. How long would it take for a whale to swim a league? Would it take forty minutes? It would surely take longer than it takes Puck to re-enter carrying the herb. Wouldn't it? Yet he plays these games with time, and we accept them.
It is one of those themes he keeps coming back to, like the qualities and duties of a king, the corruption of power, and the confusion between shadow and substance, imagination and reality. There's that speech about the seven ages of man, put into the mocking mouth of Jaques in As You Like It, but I'm sure he means us to see that there is an underlying truth in it. In Jaques's scheme of things I would be too old to start again, to make a new life. But things are different now. Well, not different, but the boundaries extend further. People live longer. Look at Natasha. And although Oberon treats Titania badly in this play, on the whole Shakespeare was surprisingly strong in defence of women. What can Giles possibly want to talk about? He hasn't uttered a word to me since he arrived; now he wants to disrupt my enjoyment of the play.
Puck laid the magic potion on the eyes of the wrong lover, forcing the enchanted Lysander to abandon his true love Hermia and pursue the outraged Helena. The knockabout of the craftsmen's rehearsal ended in t
heir flight when they saw the ass's head on the luckless Bottom's shoulders, and Titania, awakening from her sleep on the grassy bank, was besotted with the monster. Oberon chided Puck for his mistake and sprinkled the potion into Demetrius's eyes. And so the play reached its central knot – the ordered world reduced to total disorder. Hermia, once loved by two men, now abandoned and reviled by both. The scorned Helena, now pursued by two lovers, weeping at their cruel mockery. Titania, the ethereal queen of enchantment, forced to lie in the arms of a monster, a foolish braggart of a man with an ass's head, instead of reigning as queen and maintaining order and balance in the parallel world she ruled with her consort.
The players left the stage, and Mr Peters, playing the herald with his trumpet, declared an interval of twenty minutes.
Frances found her elbow gripped again firmly by Giles. He began to steer her away from the audience without any further word of explanation, and she could not resist a slight dig at him: 'Are we going into the shrubbery?'
His hand jerked and he veered suddenly to the left.
'We'll go into the walled garden,' he said, abruptly but with a conciliatory note in his voice.
They found a place where they could sit on the worn old bricks surrounding the raised beds in one corner. The heat of the sun, which had been building up in the encircling Georgian walls all day, made this angle of the garden warm and sheltered.
'I wanted to tell you about the offer I've had for a new series – from Nigel Laker. You saw I'd brought him down?'
Frances gritted her teeth. 'You haven't introduced him to me, but I did receive your instructions that he was to have a room for the night. I made up a bed for him in one of the ground-floor rooms of the east wing.'
