'I thank you, no. What was the cause of his insanity?' 'That is not established. There are many ways to madness, sir. One may take it from a parent, from a fever, from a blow to the head. Some are mad from love or grief. From liquor. From religious enthusiasm. From sunstroke. From too much reading, or tainted meat, or dog bites.' 'He has been educated?'
1 believe he has. You have your letters, Dyer? You may read and write?'
'Yes, sir.'
Rose examines him. He does not stand too close. He says: 'Is he free of disease?'
The Physician says: 'Quite free. And should he serve your turn we shall scrape him. Make him somewhat respectable.'
'Then I believe he may serve. Though I should like to hear more of his voice. It is the voice that counts.'
The Physician says: 'Speak up. Dyer. Come now. None of your tricks.'
James says: 'I do not know what to say, sir. I do not know what this gentleman would have me say. I have no conversation, sir.'
Rose says: 'He is originally from a western county. Somerset or Gloucestershire. Undoubtedly he is educated and has at some time kept good company. If not precisely a gentleman he was one of those who might wait upon a gentleman. A steward, a scrivener. A genteel barber.'
The Physician says: 'Why, that is a marvellous facility, sir, to tell a man so nearly from his voice. Were you ever on your uppers, sir, you might live by it.'
Rose steps closer to James. He says: 'I hope that shall not be necessary.' He takes hold of James's left hand, holding the fingertips with his own. He turns the hand over, says: 'Though the hands are damaged they are good hands. Have you worked as a painter, Mr Dyer, or as a musician perhaps?'
James shakes his head. He is alarmed by the man's questions, his perspicacity. As yet he has remained unrecognised, though he knows he has seen the Physician before, in London, in another life. At least two visitors to the hospital were men he knew. Neither smoked him. Now he is close to being uncovered by a stranger. He stares at the floor, says: 'I can neither paint nor play. I do not remember how I lived. I remember nothing before I came to this place.'
Rose leaves go of his hand. 'Sometimes it is necessary to forget.' He turns to the Physician. 'I believe Mr Dyer should be of the company. With your permission.'
'By all means, have him. What part shall he have? One of the conspirators? A ghost? What of that comical fellow in yellow stockings?'
Says Rose: 'Malvolio would be excellent. But our play is A Midsummer Night's Dream. I have a part in mind for him, but I must see them together before I decide. I should like to have them tomorrow in some large convenient room. One can never overestimate how long these matters will take.'
The Physician says: 'We have more rooms here than we know how to fill. I shall have one made ready for you.'
He calls into the gallery for Wagner. Wagner comes, stands in the doorway. The Physician says: 'Clean this fellow up. Fetch him fresh linen. Tell Callow to charge him accordingly.'
Wagner nods, stands out of the way for the gentlemen to leave. Rose turns at the door; the light catches the diamond at his ear. He grins at James, his face pure monkey.
'A bientot, Mr Dyer.'
O'Connor, swinging keys, leads them down the stairs. Adam is there. James walks beside him. He says: 'Are we put out?'
'Out?'
'Sent away from here?'
'We are to be players, James. This Rose is to make a play with us. We are to grow sane by playing sane men. By imitation.'
On the ground floor at the front of the hospital a room has been prepared. Furniture is piled together at one side and a small fire has been lit, though the heat does not touch the cold of the place. The women are already there with their keepers. Dot Flyer is among them. Her bruise has faded. Her face looks very young, very pale. There is no swagger about her today. There are marks on her wrists from where she has been chained. The keepers lounge against the walls, pick at their nails, look about as if uncertain how they shall wield their authority here.
Mr Rose comes into the room. He is a short man. He is beautifully dressed; a satin waistcoat, coloured like his name, a gold-and-silver coat. He climbs on to a chair, holds out his arms, brings the room to silence.
'I am Augustus Rose. Some of you know of me already, and have attended at my concerts here at the hospital. Some - I see Mr Lyle there - good day to you, sir - have taken part in my little theatrical parties. Well, dear friends, today I am inviting you to join with me in a most ambitious venture.'
He holds up a sheaf of coloured papers. 'These are tickets to a play. A tale of enchantment, to be performed by your good selves in
front of certain privileged and discerning members of the public' He flourishes the tickets. One floats free, flies to James's feet. He picks it up.
AUGUSTUS ROSE Esq, CELEBRATED IMPRESARIO,
presents a THEATRICAL PRODUCTION of
Mr Wlm Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's
Dream' PERFORMED ENTIRELY BY THE LUNATICS
OF THE BETHLEHEM HOSPITAL in the gardens
thereof the 5 & 6 i^ 7 days of June 1769
2 Guineas Each
Rose leans down for the ticket; James passes it to him. Rose says: It is Mr Dyer, is it not? Shortly, sir, I intend to make you a duke. How do you say to that?'
He hops from his chair and begins dividing the company: Athenians on one side. Spirits on the other. When he has them in two crooked lines, he steps back on to his chair.
'Now, to the naming of the parts. Mr Nathaniel Collins and Mr John Collins, I have you for the lovers Demetrius and Lysander. Mrs Donovan, you madame for the fair and warlike Hippolyta. Mrs Forbellow as Hermia, who loves Lysander. Miss Poole as Helena, who loves Demetrius. Miss Flyer as Titania, the fairy queen. Mr Adam Meridith as Robin Goodfellow, Mr Asquini as Oberon, Mr Dyer as Theseus, Duke of Athens. Mr Lyle for Peter Quince, Mr George Dee as the weaver Bottom, Mr Hobbes, Egeus, father of . . .'
'I shall play no weaver's ARSE.'
George Dee, a butcher from Houndsditch, fat-eyed, face flushed with blood, elbows his way to Rose's chair. The keepers stir. Rose, in gentle voice, says: 'Mr Dee, you are mistaken. Bottom is a sweet part, a true comic part. He is an honest weaver, loved by his friends. Why he even . . .'
'An ARSE! I will not! Did you not promise me I should play some duke or great lord? Did you not promise me?'
Rose holds up his hand to O'Connor. 'Dear Mr Dee. I am sure I never made any such promise. However, if Bottom is not to your liking, I may offer you Flute, which is a gentle part, though smaller, or Snug . . .'
The butcher shakes his head. It is as if a wasp has flown into his ear. 'No Flute, no Snug, no ARSE! You said I should be Theseus, indeed you did!'
Rose says: 'Faith, sir, I am sure I did not. And Theseus has many lines. To con them would be a mountain of work.'
Dee says: 'I cannot bear to be thwarted! I cannot bear it!'
Rose smiles. 'Why, this is most authentic! Quite like Drury Lane. Mr Lyle, will you save us, sir? Will you change places with Mr Dee? You have, I believe, the necessary genius to play the weaver.'
Lyle shakes his head. Dee bites his own hand; teeth in the old scars. 'I shall be Theseus or I shall set fire to my head! Why do you torment me? Why am I persecuted? It is because I have been a great murderer of animals. Ay, I know it.' His eyes crease, tears squeeze down his cheeks. 'You are right to persecute me.'
Mr Hobbes embraces him.
James says: 'Let him be Theseus. I do not know one part from another.'
Rose says: 'You are kind, sir. But I do not know if the weaver is right for you.'
Says James: 'It is one to me.'
Mr Rose consults his watch. 'We can settle this another time. I am certain when Mr Dee has seen the parts . . .'
George Dee unclasps from Mr Hobbes, wipes a wing of snot from his nose, stares delightedly at James. 'YOU shall be the arse! I shall be Theseus! I am Duke of Athens!'
He starts to hop, to dance. It is infectious. The lines dissolve.
&n
bsp; Dot tugs at James's arm. He staggers after her. Those who cannot dance stand and shake like prophets. Miss Forbellow, skipping near to the fire, ignites her skirts. She is extinguished. A footstool sails through the air, shatters one of the windows. Over the stamping, the whoops, the barking. Rose calls. 'Until tomorrow, my friends! We shall all be perfectly famous!'
The keepers move in, swing their ropes, swing their canes. The lunatics flee before them.
On dry days they rehearse in the gardens, filing out, blinking like the denizens of an underground city, in their hands the tatty chap-book copies of the play. Rose mimes the parts, sings all the songs, shows the fairies how to dance, his legs like the legs of an elegant frog.
There are incidents. Helena head-butts Demetrius. Lysander unexpectedly shits himself Dot, for chewing a keeper's nose, is confined for a week to the Coffin. Through it all Rose operates his craft. He is unshakeable. From the chaos of the early meetings a play emerges, not unlike the one intended. James, reluctant to begin with, miserable, mumbling his lines, at length takes refiage in the character of the weaver and, concealed in the weaver, he starts to move and speak with a freedom that amazes him. His mind grows lighter, his pains ease. On his hands the wounds of Gummer's needle. Canning's pincers, begin to dry. He hears himself laugh; it stardes him. He has no recollection of the last time he laughed.
Dot shines; she has the knack. Her presence, though always fierce, even when she is tender or playing tender, no longer intimidates James. He makes eyes at her, walks close beside her
so that sometimes the skin of their hands touch. There is still no love-talk between them. He cannot explain his heart to her; a lack of language more than a want of resolve. But when they make their scenes together, waking in imaginary woods under the imaginary moon, Rose and the lunatics hushed in a circle around them, then they are intimate and speak their lines as though they have invented them.
'Come sit thee down upon this flow ry bed While I thy amiable cheeks do coy. And stick musk roses in thy sleek smooth head, And kiss thy fair long ears, my gentle joy.^
[They sit; she embraces him]
The week after Easter the properties arrive. Pillars, schematic trees; a moon with the face of a man sleeping off his dinner. There is a basket full of clothes, wooden swords and crowns. Cloaks, doublets stiff with powder and the sweat of other players. Gowns in brilliant colours, harsh on the skin, none with its full complement of buttons or ties. And an asse's head. Rose presents it to James. James sits it on his shoulders. It is heavy and stinks of decaying hide. He looks out through the not-quite-even eyes. His breath sounds in his ears hke the tide in a shell. The company is bunched about him. Rose cries: 'Oh, Bottom, thou art changed!'
James turns. Through the thing's left eye he sees Dot, naked, pouring over her head the gaudiest of the costumes; golds and scarlet. The dress is too big for her. She gathers it in her fists, turns, curtseys and comes towards him. He closes his eyes. Tears gum in the stubble of his chin. His hands shake. He staggers; he is afraid that he will fall. Someone takes the ass's head, lifts it off; someone else supports him. He blinks away the tears. The air wraps his face like a scarf. Dot is smiling at him. She is beautiful.
An evening in May. In the garden. The quaUty of Athens, the lords and ladies of the fairy world, make their exits and entrances under the creeping shadow of the hospital. Miss Poole, a tall, pocked, lunatic seamstress from the Isle of Dogs, is speaking as Helena. Adam - Puck now - dressed in a petticoat, hovers about her to work his magic. James squats outside the D of their arena. His cue is: 'The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.' He is wearing the head. He is quite accustomed to it now. He does not see Dot until she is sat beside him.
Adam says: 'On the ground, sleep sound; I'll apply, to your eye . . .'
Dot takes James's hand. Presses her lips against the scars, then guides it into the top of her dress, holds it against the swell of her breast, the nipple stiffening under his palm. He can feel the pulse of her heart.
Puck is singing. 'Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill . . .'
What gifts are these? It is raining joys.
A voice summons them. They struggle to their feet, walk tipsily across the grass. James hears the whirling of a beetle, then Dot saying: 'Come, sit thee down upon this flowWy bed . . .'
Each time they meet they are bolder. They grope behind the wooden trees, in the shadow of the wooden moon or pressed against the stone face of the building. Around them the play lurches towards it final shape. Mr Hobbes suffers an anal prolapse and is replaced at short notice by John Johnson, a deranged schoolmaster. God speaks to the Collins twins, dictates to them new lines concerning the inheritance of a glue factory in Brentford. Theseus is slightly madder than he was. Mr Rose, stripped of his coats, his wig, understanding everything, admitting everything, herds them towards their first night.
The keepers grow lax. They sprawl, smoke, play dice; sleep off their binges. Dot and James, loitering during the last week ever
nearer to the door of the hospital, now sHp unregarded into the building and lose themselves amid its passageways. They peer in at rooms until they find one suitable to their purpose. A broad room, empty but for a hundred, two hundred, five hundred strait jackets piled up together; a single high barred-window for light; the noise of the world muffled like a dream. They He on the jackets; the jackets sigh and give off their breath of sweat, dog blanket, midden. All the spices vented by the soul in mortal combat. This, thinks James, is how purgatory will smell.
Dot raises her skirts. James kneels, lightly touches her. She shivers then leans forward, tugs his breeches to his knees, finds his cock, plays her tongue around its head. It is a pleasure as vast, as shocking, as any pain that has come to him since St Petersburg. He reels away from her, gets awkwardly to his feet. He is afraid. Dot goes to him, holds him from behind, her head resting at the nape of his neck. He turns inside the ring of her arms, kisses her, hard on her mouth. They shuffle towards the bed of jackets, tumble backward, knocking teeth together, faces. His entrance is savage. Like the force used to stab a man or to kill an animal. He dreamt it would be gentle. Dot gasps, punches his ribs. The buckle from one of the jackets cuts into his knee as he moves. The pain is a black rope; he cUngs to it. He is laughing now, like a true madman. He sees that she is laughing too, and frowning and crying, fighting him and licking his face. He pulls out of her and spends over her belly. She wipes it with her hand, then wipes her hand on one of the jackets. James lies on his back beside her. There is a fly in the room, having followed them perhaps from the garden. A fly the only witness. Dot says: 'We must go back now.'
He calls her 'My love. My dearest'. She does not seem to be Hstening. He would like to tell her about Mary, and how he used to be one thing, one kind of man, a half-man. And how he is changed, like a man who has walked through an
enchanted mirror, a man who has woken dishevelled from the grave. He thinks: Indeed, I am like Lazarus. Did Lazarus have a wife?
We must go now,' she says.
Through the little window, blunt distorted sunlight falls between them. It strikes her hair, his patched shoes.
'Dot?'
She puts a finger to her lips.
'Dot, my life.'
'Peace, Jem.'
She is by the door. She holds out her hand to him. He takes it soberly in his. They go back to the garden. They are not running now. They have been away some fifteen minutes. Oberon is sending Robin Goodfellow to search for the magical flower. They have not been missed.
Augustus Rose, four o'clock on a Saturday evening, walks with the Physician in front of the Bethlehem hospital, showing him the tiers of seating the carpenters have been erecting for the last three days. There is still the noise of saws, a sudden crescendo of hammering, the tuneless whistle of a workman, but the work is largely done. Seating for two hundred, the first of whom may be expected in less than three hours' time.
The hospital wears its grandest face. Its windows show the sk
y over Moorfields, the streaks of feathery cloud. The gardens have been clipped. The smell of the honeysuckle comes near to hiding the stink of the Necessary. Only the bars on the windows of the
upper floors and the cries like those of seagulls suggest that this is not the tranquil suburban seat of a grandee.
The Physician has changed his clothes and wears now a suit of resplendent plum in which to receive his guests. Rose dawdles with him on the lawn, indicates the court, the woods, the nooks and bowers where the action will take place. They have not talked of the money. They shall talk of it later. There is a mutual, workable distrust between them. Neither shall cheat the other by much.
The Physician says: 'There is nothing in the play to excite them too greatly? I would not want them doing any violence to the audience. That would not do at all.'
Rose says: 'It is a calm play. A very mellow play. It quite drugs them.'
'The woman called Dorothy Flyer. You have had no trouble with her?'
'Dot Flyer, sir, is our brightest light.'
The Physician says: 'I have given orders she is to be handled most firmly should she give us cause. They must fear us, Mr Rose.'
'I am sure that they do.'
The Physician jingles the silver in his pocket, mutters: 'For their own good.'
They stand watching the workmen. The last of them is stowing his tools in a canvas sack, wiping the warmth from his face with a cloth. A dog cocks its leg against one of the benches. The carpenter kicks at it, misses. At length Rose says: 'Should you care to meet your players?'
'My players, sir?'
'They think of you as their patron. You have no idea, sir, how large you are in their minds.'
The Physician nods, allows himself a smile. He says: 'By all means, then. Let us see them.'
Ingenious Pain Page 25
