What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  “Here we go, sir,” he announced. “Saint Evremond Brut. Oh, it’s a Taittinger brand. ‘A blend of several crus from vineyards in the Champagne region around Reims and Epernay. It is made up of thirty percent Chardonnay and sixty percent Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier as well as a selection of reserve wines as prescribed by the seventeenth-century French exile Charles de Saint Denis, Lord of Saint Evremond.’ ”

  Thomas nodded, none the wiser, thanked him, and was considering buying something to show his gratitude when something chimed in his memory.

  “Can I see that again?” he said.

  He leaned in and stared at the entry till he found the name. A moment later he was in the street, scanning the sidewalk for a pay phone and fumbling in his pocket for his wallet.

  It took him five minutes to find a public phone, and another six to get through to Westminster Abbey.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m trying to reach a particular verger. I don’t know his name but he was on duty two days ago. Small man, longish jet-black hair and wire-rimmed glasses . . .”

  “That’s Mr. Hazlehurst,” said a woman with a cut-glass accent. “You wish to speak to him?”

  “If that is possible.”

  “I’m sure it’s possible,” she said, as if he had asked if Mr. Hazlehurst swam the backstroke, “though it may take a few moments to locate him. Can I tell him what it is you wish to discuss?”

  Thomas told her that they had chatted in Poets’ Corner and he wanted to check on one of the monuments, or rather on the person commemorated by the monument . . .

  “Hold the line, please,” she said, crisp as a January breeze.

  The phone went silent for seven minutes. Thomas watched the display, anxious that his card was about expire.

  “Hello? This is Ron Hazlehurst.”

  The voice sounded uncertain.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” said Thomas, talking fast. “We met at the abbey two days ago in Poets’ Corner. We talked about The Da Vinci Code.”

  “Did we?”

  “And . . . I don’t know, Britishness and tourists and . . .”

  “You were the lost gentleman who wasn’t sure what he was looking for,” said the verger, pleased with the memory.

  “That’s right.”

  “And did you find it?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Thomas. “Perhaps.”

  “But you need some help.”

  “Just a little. Would you mind?”

  “So long as it doesn’t involve the Knights Templar, I’m at your disposal,” said the verger.

  Thomas could almost hear his mischievous grin.

  CHAPTER 39

  Thomas took the bus into Stratford and walked down to the river past the Gower Memorial, where a bronze Shakespeare stood surrounded by statues of his creations: Falstaff, Lady Macbeth, Prince Hal, and Hamlet. There was a scattering of tourists taking pictures, and behind them, wearing the same suit he had been wearing last time, the old man who rattled off lengthy quotes from the Bard. Thomas caught his eye and nodded, but the man was in midstream—Puck, it sounded like—and did not respond. Thomas didn’t mind. There was something about the game that depressed him a little even as it pleased him to identify the speeches. Maybe it was the man himself. There was something about him, or rather something absent from him.

  Thomas shrugged the feeling off and returned to the riverbank and the quiet spot under the willow where he had dozed before. He got comfortable and then reread Love’s Labour’s Lost. He had not looked at it since graduate school and then somewhat cursorily, and his memory of even the story was sketchy. He read the whole play in an unbroken two-hour sitting.

  The main plot was simple enough; the King of Navarre forms a kind of academy with his friends Longueville, Dumaine, and Berowne, their purpose to study and reflect for three years, mortifying their flesh by avoiding banquets, drinking, the company of women, and anything that might distract them from their philosophical labors. The pact lasts until the ambassadorial visit of the Princess of France and her ladies, Rosaline, Maria, and Katherine. The men fall for the women, abandon their academy, and pursue them with various romantic inventions, pageantry, and verbal pyrotechnics. All seems to be going well, moving toward something like the multiple weddings that occur at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, until something remarkable happens. At the very end of the play, a messenger arrives announcing the death of the French king, the princess’s father, whereupon the ladies prepare to leave. The men try to get words of love from their respective women—presumably, promises of marriage—but the mood has shifted drastically. All the witticisms and conventions of romance that the men have used to date are now dismissed as courtly games by the women, who will promise to be theirs only if the men can endure a year of isolation and hardship. But then the play ends.

  There was more to it, of course, much of it involving the Spanish braggart Don Armado and the pedant Holofernes, but the play was light on plot, and the delight for the original audience must have been primarily in the sentence-level banter, the verbal posturing, and those puns to which Samuel Johnson thought Shakespeare morbidly addicted. It was an early play, according to the introduction in his edition, though scholars seemed to disagree as to how early it came in Shakespeare’s career: no later than 1595 or so, but possibly as early as the late 1580s, which would make it among the playwright’s very first attempts. Even if pushed back to 1595 it would still be earlier than any of Shakespeare’s comedies except for The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and, at a push, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Whether or not it could be considered evidence for dating the text, Thomas thought the play’s language and characterization was different from any of these, particularly Errors, which was all plot, and Dream, which seemed an altogether richer and more imaginative piece. Love’s Labour’s Lost, with its expressly courtly setting and themes, felt like a clever variation on a familiar theme—courtly love—though that cleverness went beyond the repartee and extended images and finally raised serious questions about the validity of the whole enterprise.

  The ending was, after all, truly amazing in its unexpected darkening and lack of closure. Thomas couldn’t think of another romantic comedy from any period in which the central couple or couples so pointedly failed to get together. The princess’s remark that they had received the gentlemen’s wooing merely “like a merriment,” something that had passed the time but was of no real value and had nothing to do with actual love, was extraordinary. It was as if, on the death of her father, she and her ladies moved into another genre entirely and the men just didn’t know how to adjust. It wasn’t as if the goalposts had been moved so much as that the light had shifted and it became clear that there never had been any goalposts at all. The king and his friends were utterly thwarted in that which, in romantic comedy, is usually given so easily at the end: the promise of a relationship the audience would never see.

  “Now, at the latest minute of the hour,” says the King of Navarre, still not hearing how his suit has been weighed, and with the French court packing to leave all around him, “grant us your loves.”

  The princess answers,

  A time, methinks, too short

  To make a world-without-end bargain in.

  And that was it. The end.

  Except, of course, that it might not be. Thomas found it impossible to read the ending without imagining what might happen in Love’s Labour’s Won, the romantic conclusion it must surely bring that the earlier play resisted. Never, since the idea had first been mentioned to him, had he been more sure that there had indeed once been such a sequel, and believing that, he thought, was more than half the way to believing that it still existed.

  But even as he felt the excitement of the thought, he wondered if the play was not better with the darker inconclusion of Love’s Labour’s Lost, less romantically conventional though it was.

  Less conventional, more like life, he thought, thinking briefly of his most recent
squabble with Kumi. Which is less a squabble and more a stage in a longer tactical engagement the end of which might yet be closer to Love’s Labour’s Lost than any more hopeful sequel . . .

  Thomas looked up and saw, on the other side of the river, a couple in earnest conversation. He probably wouldn’t have given them another thought, but the woman, who looked at least sixty, suddenly shouted “No!” with surprising ferocity. She had long, unkempt black hair slashed with gray and her eyes, though dark, were wide and staring. As he watched her, she started to rant, gesticulating and pointing at the man, who had his back to Thomas and the river, though it was impossible to hear what she was saying. The excess of her fury was alarming. Some of it was measured and even rhythmical so that Thomas would have thought they were doing a scene from a play if the woman had not seemed so out of control. She waved her hands and pointed at the man—a long stab with her bony finger—and Thomas thought she was calling him names, long hyphenated insults.

  “Bunch-backed toad . . . !” he thought she yelled.

  Or perhaps he imagined that, because the line seemed right, old Margaret screaming her venom at Richard III.

  The man seemed to take it without response, or with muttered words that didn’t carry across the Avon. His hands flitted a little, as if in calming gestures, but they were small, dwarfed by the woman’s rage.

  Then, quite suddenly, it was over. The woman marched away and the man, hunched-shouldered and wilted, turned quickly toward the water before walking slowly back toward the scaffolding surrounding the Memorial Theatre.

  Thomas blinked. It was his former professor, Randall Dagenhart.

  CHAPTER 40

  Thomas called Kumi twice before she answered. He had been putting it off because he had begun to enjoy himself, playing sleuth and academic in this quirky and history-laden place, and a part of him didn’t want her irritation with him to spoil that. He wanted to tell her all about what he was doing, share it with her, but he thought there would be some awkwardness first so he had delayed. Normally, when he sensed a problem he dealt with it as directly as possible, but with Kumi he knew she sometimes needed time. If he forced the issue, the reconciliation would take longer in coming.

  Because she’s almost as stubborn as you.

  She sounded weary and distant, though the line itself was clear. He said he was sorry for not calling before and she said it was fine, that she was sorry she had been so upset. He should have been glad, but she sounded so tired, so lacking in emotion that even the apology didn’t sit quite right. He asked about work and her classes and she answered briefly, that same blankness in her voice, so he told her what had happened since they last spoke, including the episode in the castle ruins. That, he hoped, would kindle a little sympathy.

  “But you’re okay?” she asked.

  “Right as rain, as they say here. Do we say that too? I’m losing track.”

  “I think so,” she said.

  She sounded distracted still and her concern for his welfare, the root of her anger when last they spoke, was perfunctory at best.

  “You okay?” said Thomas.

  “Sure. Just tired.”

  “Should I leave you to it?”

  “To what?”

  “I don’t know,” said Thomas. “Work. Rest. Whatever.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is there something on your mind?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I’m just . . . I don’t know. Can we talk about it later?”

  “You aren’t in danger, are you?” he asked.

  It sounded like a line from a bad movie, and as soon as he said it he wished he hadn’t, though in the circumstances it wasn’t an unreasonable question. She had been in danger because of him before. But he wasn’t ready for her response, which was a whispering, breathless laugh like a series of sighs, which gradually turned into something else. He realized with a start that she was crying.

  “I have cancer, Tom,” she said. “Breast cancer. They found a lump a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t think it was anything. A cyst maybe. I would have mentioned it last time but I was mad at you for not calling, and I really didn’t think it was anything. But they biopsied it . . .”

  “Wait,” said Thomas. “What? Cancer? How can you have cancer? I don’t understand.”

  And he didn’t. There was nothing she could say that would change that, so he just listened.

  Cancer?

  She told him not to come, that it would do neither of them any good, that she trusted her doctors and felt she was in good hands. She would know more soon about what they planned to do and when. Thomas stood there, his teeth clamped together to lock the sound in, nodding like an idiot. Then she repeated it all again, and wept, and he listened, nodding, until his phone card ran out and the line went dead.

  CHAPTER 41

  Thomas drifted around Stratford as if wrapped in a fog. He had been like this since the phone call, since he’d heard that word, and he had spent the evening shut up in his room, pacing, or sitting in silence for hours at a time. He slept in the armchair, fading in and out, dreaming dreams he forgot immediately but that left the impression of panic and apprehension like footprints under his window. The only one he remembered was the last, Daniella Blackstone, her strange, mismatched eyes vacant and her head bloody, tapping against his Evanston kitchen window and mouthing Kumi’s name. When he woke this morning it was waiting for him, like some taloned beast nestled in the corner.

  Cancer.

  So he walked, and when he had done that for a couple of hours he called Deborah Miller on her cell phone, staring blankly through the call box window while she picked up.

  “No, tragically you didn’t wake me,” she said. “I had to come in to Valladolid to help with the lab. If you’d called later—you know, at a decent time when I could be expected to be out of bed—I’d be on site where you only get a signal if you climb above the jungle via a specially built four hundred foot tower. Made of wood.”

  Thomas, who had forgotten she would be in Mexico, interrupted, speaking gently but insistently. He told her simply. She was quiet for a while, and he thought she might be crying. When she spoke, it was to ask the question he had known she would get to eventually.

  “Are you going to go to Japan?”

  “She said not to,” Thomas said. “I don’t know. She seems to want to just . . . you know . . . carry on, as if everything is the same. But maybe I should just go. Be with her.”

  “For her, or for you?”

  “Both, I guess. Does it matter?”

  “Maybe not,” said Deborah. Thomas had never heard her so quiet. “Maybe she needs normalcy.”

  “And I’m not part of that,” said Thomas.

  “Thomas,” she said, and now she was back to her usual assured self, “this isn’t the time to feel sorry for yourself. Not while you are dealing with her, at least. You have to do and say the things she needs from you. If you think that what she really needs is for you to go to her, then hang up and go. If you want to go so that you can feel better, feel like you’re doing something, forget it. A neighbor of my mother’s had terminal cancer twice.”

  “Is that a joke?” said Thomas.

  “Kind of,” said Deborah, “but it’s true. And she kept going because she didn’t have time to stop. She refused to. I’m not giving you some new-age mind-over-matter crap, Thomas, but from what I’ve heard, attitude is important when you have cancer.”

  He nodded, wincing slightly at the word.

  “You’ve not been part of her life for the last few years,” she said. “Not the day-to-day, work, meals, sleep kind of life anyway. If you go out there now, it’s not normal. It all becomes a big deal.”

  “A big deal . . . ?”

  “I know it is a big deal, but she can’t think of it like that. She needs to work right through it. Stay on task. Isn’t that the Kumi you know?”

  Thomas hesitated.

  “You don’t think I should go,” he said.

  “I think she’s pro
bably being honest when she says she doesn’t want you to. Not now. Not yet. Don’t take it personally. It’s not about you.”

  Thomas took the bus into Stratford and joined the sprawl of Shakespeareans taking tea and smoking on the steps of the institute. Anything to focus his mind. He nodded to Taylor Bradley but made no move to speak to him, and as soon as the group began to return inside for the eleven o’clock session, he lowered his head and pushed through before anyone could close the door on him.

  He sat at the back of the seminar room, which was full. He didn’t care who was speaking, or about what. It was just something to do so that he could think. Or not think.

  It was, it turned out, the Julia McBride show. There she was, sitting at a table, flanked by her graduate students, Angela on her right, Chad on her left. The moderator—a hawkish-looking Scottish woman with a defiantly thick accent, introduced them, and the graduate students tried not to look proud and terrified as their meager accomplishments were cited, while Julia, serene, sipped bottled water from a glass. The panel was titled “More Early Modern Bodies.”

  Thomas didn’t really listen. From time to time a phrase caught his ear, a quotation usually, but though he understood the words, he didn’t grasp what the papers meant. Chad’s—which used the twin Dromios in Comedy of Errors to say something about how Renaissance (or, as he preferred to say, Early Modern) identity was shaped by clothing—was the least professional of the three, though it seemed workmanlike enough. But whereas his sounded like it was reinventing the wheel a bit and substituting fervor for deep knowledge, Angela’s was clearly the coming-out party. She talked about clothing buttons: their manufacture in the period, the various styles, how they signified rank and allegiance, and the way they “served as gateways between the public and the private.” A part of Thomas wanted to laugh, but the more she talked, the more compelling her case became, and when she segued into a discussion of key “button moments” in the plays, ending with Lear’s dying “pray you, sir, undo this button. Thank you,” he was convinced. It reminded him of what he had loved about scholarly research, when some unnoticed little detail became a fulcrum on which the entire work seemed to pivot, shifting it so that it seemed new and revelatory. For a moment, Angela’s paper concentrated his mind on history and literature and the significance of the body, rather than its disease.