Mary was walking away. ‘I shall see you there later.’
‘You shall.’
As we carried on towards the cottage I asked Rose about Mr Willow.
‘Oh, don’t worry. He is a little strict, that’s all.’
And that was all she said. The next thing I knew she was talking about Mary. Rose said that she had come to the area a few years ago and was a very private person. She wouldn’t be drawn into talking about her past so there wasn’t much to tell.
‘She is a kind woman. But she is a mystery. Much as you are. But I will solve you. Tell me something I do not know. A small thing. A crumb.’
I could buy all the gold on the Strand and I would still rather be living in a small cottage on Well Lane if it meant living with you, I didn’t say.
‘I saw a boatman fall in the Thames just yesterday, right below Nonesuch House, with all the crowds there watching, and all I thought was how I wished you were there to see it too.’
‘My sense of amusement isn’t as cruel as yours.’
‘He lived, I believe.’
She gave a suspicious and cynical kind of look. I gave her something else.
‘I like the way you look after Grace. The way you know yourself. The way you have made a life, a good one, with a good home, when you have lost so much. You find beauty where there is none. You are the light that glimmers in a puddle.’
‘A puddle?’ she laughed. ‘I am sorry. Go on . . . I am starved of compliments. Feed me more.’
‘I like the way you think. I like the way you don’t just go through life unaware of its nature.’
‘I am not a pale theatre lady. I am a fruit picker. I am plain.’
‘You are the least plain thing I know.’
Her hand was on me. ‘My clothes are just rags with dreams.’
‘You may be better without them, then.’
‘Dreams?’
‘No.’
I was standing close to her now. And I held her gaze. There was no running away. I had no idea I had been looking for her, but now I had found her, I had no idea what would happen. I felt like I was spinning fast and out of control, like the seed of a sycamore, travelling on a changing wind.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘Save our pleasure. You will be late.’
We kissed and I closed my eyes and inhaled lavender and her, and I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they – the terror, the love – were one and the same thing.
London, now
I remember how it feels, that dizzy spinning fusion of love and terror. I remember, as the bell rings. I remember the orchard scent of her hair, and still miss her so much it can burn.
Steady thyself.
I open my eyes, and see Anton sloping out of the room.
‘Anton,’ I say, ‘a minute.’
He looks scared. He has looked like that for the whole lesson. He is in the process of putting an earphone in his ear.
‘Do you like music?’
He seems confused by the question. He’d been expecting another one. Everything about him was playing it cool except his eyes. ‘Yeah. Yes, sir.’
‘Do you play?’
He nods. ‘Yeah, piano, a bit. My mum taught me when I was younger.’
‘You have to be careful with that. It can screw you up. Messes with your brain chemistry. The emotion.’
He looks at me quizzically.
I move on. ‘Does your mum know about your friends?’
He shrugs sheepishly.
‘Because you could do better.’
He knows he can’t sulk, but he almost does. Pouts a little. ‘Si isn’t my friend. He’s just the older brother of someone I know.’
‘Someone? A school someone? Someone from here?’
He shakes his head. ‘Used to be.’
‘Used to be?’
‘He got expelled.’
I nod. It made sense.
There is a pause. His face clenches, building up to something. ‘Did you mean what you said last night? About killing someone.’
‘Oh yes. Yes, I did. In a desert. Arizona. Quite a long time ago. I don’t advise it.’
He laughs, doesn’t quite know if it is a joke. (It isn’t.) ‘Did you ever get caught?’
‘No, not in the way you mean. No, I didn’t. But as you get older, Anton, you realise that you never get away with things. The human mind has its own. . . prisons. You don’t have a choice over everything in life.’
‘Yeah. I’ve worked that one out, sir.’
‘You can’t choose where you are born, you can’t decide who won’t leave you, you can’t choose much. A life has unchangeable tides the same as history does. But there is still room inside it for choice. For decisions.’
‘I suppose.’
‘It’s true. You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versailles in nineteen nineteen sowed the ground for Hitler to take power in nineteen thirty-three, so every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don’t get away with anything.’
‘Seems that way.’
‘People talk about a moral compass and I think that is it. We always know the right and wrong for ourselves, the north and south. You have to trust it, Anton. People can tell you all kinds of wrong directions, lead you around any corner. You can’t trust any of that. You can’t even trust me. What do they say in car adverts? About the navigation system? Comes as standard. Everything you need to know about right and wrong is already there. It comes as standard. It’s like music. You just have to listen.’
He nods. I have no idea if any of this has gone in, or if he is just bored or frightened and wants to get out of the room as quickly as he can.
‘Okay, sir. Good speech.’
‘Okay.’
Strange saying this to a mayfly. As if I care. Hendrich has always told me there is nothing more dangerous than caring for an ordinary mortal human, because it ‘compromises our priorities’. But maybe Hendrich’s priorities are no longer my priorities, and maybe they need to be compromised. Maybe I just need to feel vaguely human again. It has been a while. It has been four hundred years.
I decide to lighten the tone. ‘Do you like school, Anton?’
He shrugs. ‘Sometimes. Sometimes it seems . . . irrelevant.’
‘Irrelevant?’
‘Yeah. Trigonometry and Shakespeare and shit.’
‘Oh yes. Shakespeare. Henry the Fourth.’
‘Part One.’
‘Yes, you said. So you don’t like it?’
He shrugs. ‘We went to see it. School trip. Was pretty boring.’
‘You don’t like theatre?’
‘Nah. It’s for old posh people, innit?’
‘It didn’t used to be like that. It used to be for everyone. It used to be the maddest place in London. You’d get everyone there. You’d get the posh old people, sure, up on the balconies, dressed to be seen, but then you’d get everyone else. You could get in for a penny, which even then wasn’t so much. A loaf of bread, that’s all. There used to be fights too, sometimes knife fights. People used to throw stuff at the actors if they didn’t like what they saw. Oyster shells. Apples. All kinds of stuff. And Shakespeare used to be on the stage too. William Shakespeare. That dead man from the posters. There. On stage. It’s not that long ago, not really. History is right here, Anton. It’s breathing down our necks.’
He smiles a little. This is the point of being a teacher. A glimmer of hope where you thought it didn’t exist. ‘You almost sound like you were there.’
‘I was,’ I say.
‘What, sir?’
I smile this time. It is tantalising, to be this close to revealing your own truth, like holding a bird you are about to set free.
‘I knew Shakespeare.’
And then he laughs like he knows I am joking.
‘All right, yeah, Mr Hazard.’
‘See you tomorrow.’ Tomor
row. I have always hated that word. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t grate too much. ‘Tomorrow. Yeah.’
London, 1599
I sat in the gallery high above the stage next to an old, snooty, cadaverous man named Christopher, who played the virginal. I say ‘old’. He was probably no more than fifty, but he was the oldest of any man working for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. We were visible to much of the audience, should they have cared to look up in our direction, but we were in shadow, and I felt safely anonymous. Christopher rarely said a word to me, either before or after the performance.
I remember one conversation with him.
‘You are not from London, are you?’ he asked me with disdain.
It was a peculiar disdain, really. Then, as now, much of London was from elsewhere. That was the whole point of London. And, given that there were far more deaths about than births, it was the only way London kept going, and growing.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I am from France. My mother sought refuge here. From the king’s forces.’
‘The Catholics?’
‘Yes.’
‘And where is your mother now?’
‘She passed.’
Not a flicker of sympathy. Or curiosity. Just a long studious look. ‘You play like a Frenchman. You have foreign fingers.’
I stared at my hands. ‘Do I?’
‘Yes. You stroke the strings rather than pluck them. It makes a strange noise.’
‘Well, it is a strange noise that Mr Shakespeare likes.’
‘You play well for your age, I suppose. It is a novelty. But you shan’t stay young for ever. No one does. Except that boy out east.’
And there it was.
The moment I realised, even in a place as large as London, I still had to be on my guard.
‘They killed his mother. She was a witch.’
My heart started beating uncontrollably. It took every ounce of effort to fake a semblance of calm.
‘Well, if she drowned, that proved her innocence.’
He looked with suspicion. ‘I never said drowned.’
‘I assumed it was the ducking stool, if it was for witchcraft.’
His eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘You seem most excited about this. Look, your French fingers tremble. To be honest, I don’t have the details. It was Hal who told me.’
Hal, the mild-mannered flautist, sitting on the bench in front of ours, didn’t really want to be dragged into the conversation. They had known each other for quite a while, and worked on other productions together.
‘The son didn’t age.’ Hal, pale and mousy and small-mouthed, relayed. ‘She had cast a charm and killed a man to give her boy eternal life.’
I had no idea what to say.
Christopher was still scrutinising me. And then we heard footsteps on the galley.
‘Is this an open conversation?’
It was Shakespeare himself. Standing there, opening an oyster shell, then sucking the mollusc out, careful not to make any mess on the quilted taffeta of his costume. As he savoured the taste his eyes stayed on Christopher.
‘Yes,’ said Christopher, ‘of course.’
‘Well, I trust you are making young Tom feel at home.’
‘Oh yes, young Tom is just fine.’
Shakespeare let the oyster shell drop to the floor. He gave a quick smile. ‘Good.’
He pointed at me. ‘We need to move you forward, to the next bench. To hear the lute.’
I could see Christopher simmering. It was quite a delicious moment. I stood up and walked to my new position, as Hal budged along. I sat down. The inside of an oyster shell shone up at me from the dusty wood, like a watching eye.
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said to my employer.
Shakespeare shook his head, impassive. ‘I assure you it isn’t charity. Now, all of you, play your finest. Sir Walter is in attendance.’
The thing about the front bench was that it meant I had a good view. And the audience was always a show in itself. On a sunny afternoon thousands of people crammed into the place. Far more than you’d fit in the average theatre nowadays, even the Globe. There were often brawls and raucousness among the penny groundlings in the pit and the tuppenny benchers further back. If you had the three pennies needed for a bench and a cushion it seemed, somehow, that you thought yourself above such things, though I noticed that the bad behaviour returned again when you cast your eye up to the upper classes in the balconies.
In other words, you would get all types. Thieves. Troublemakers. Prostitutes. Pale-faced ladies with artificially blackened teeth to simulate the mark of luxury that was sugar-induced decay (a fact I always remember in our modern age of bottle tans and teeth whitening procedures).
There were many songs to enliven the crowd. I particularly enjoyed ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, sung by a jolly blond actor I have forgotten the name of, who played the faithful Lord Amiens, one of the loyal men willing to go into exile in the French forest with the heroine Rosalind’s father, Duke Senior.
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall he see no enemy
But winter and rough weather.
In my mind, the French Forest of Ardennes became la Forêt de Pons that I had known as a child, where Maman and I would sometimes go. We would sit by a large sycamore tree, and she would sing to me there, as I watched falling sycamore seeds. A world far away from the stench and squalor of Bankside, or the smell of beer and shellfish and urine coming from the pit below. Yet the play stirred many other things in me. There were people being exiled, changing their identities, falling in love.
It was a comedy, but I found it quite troubling.
I think it was the character of Jaques that was the problem. He does absolutely nothing. I saw the play eighty-four times and I still can’t remember what he did. He just walked around, amid all the bright young optimists, being cynical and miserable. He was played by Shakespeare himself, and every time he spoke, the words got into my bones, as if warning me of my own future:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts . . .
Shakespeare was a strange actor. He was very quiet – I don’t mean in volume, I mean in mannerisms and presence. Such the opposite of a Burbage or a Kemp. There was something very un-Shakespearean about Shakespeare, especially when he was sober. A quietness, on stage and off it, as though he was absorbing the world rather than projecting it.
One Thursday I came home and found Grace crying and Rose hugging her. It turned out that Mr Willow had given their space to a woman who gave him sexual favours. He had tried it on with Rose too. And had strong words for both her and Grace.
‘It will be all right. We can still work there. Just not in the spot we had.’
I felt such rage. A burning anger devoured me. The next day, before heading to Southwark, I went to the market and I found Mr Willow, and, in my juvenile stupidity, ended up hitting him and shoving him into the spice stall. He fell in an orange cloud of exotic New World aromas.
Grace and Rose were now banned from the market completely. And it was only the knowledge that we knew about his desire for sexual favours that prevented him from taking further action against us.
Rose cursed my hot-headedness, even as she fired back her own in my direction.
It was our first argument. I remember the fury more than the words. I remember her worry about what she would tell Mr Sharpe.
‘We can’t just pick fruit, Tom. We have to sell it. Where will we sell it?’
‘I will mend this. I broke this. I will mend it, Rose. I promise.’
So I spoke to Shakespeare about the chance of Rose and Grace working as fruit sellers in the theatre. I saw him, after a performance, walking through the crowds on the green, in front of the
Queen’s Tavern. He was heading into the alehouse, on his own, ignoring a man who recognised him as he disappeared in through the door.
I followed him. I had been in the Queen’s before. My young face was no problem there. I found Shakespeare, jar in hand, in a quiet corner.
I was wondering how – and if – I should approach him when his hand raised and beckoned me over.
‘Young Tom! Take a pew.’
I went over and sat on the bench opposite him, with a small oak table between us. Two men further along the table were studiously engaged in a game of draughts.
‘Hello, Mr Shakespeare.’
A barmaid nearby was clearing up abandoned jars, and Shakespeare called over.
‘An ale for my friend here.’
She nodded, then Shakespeare reconsidered. ‘But you are from France, aren’t you? You probably like beer.’
‘No, sir. I prefer ale.’
‘Your wisdom calms me, Tom. They serve the greatest and sweetest ale in all of London in here.’
He sipped on his, closing his eyes. ‘Ale doesn’t live well,’ he said. ‘A week from today this will taste as sour as a knight’s breeches. Beer lasts for ever. All the hops, they say, causes its immortality. Ale is a more worthy lesson on life. You wait too long, and you will be saying farewell before you say good day. My father was once an ale taster. I have an education in it.’
The ale came. It was indeed sweet. Shakespeare filled and lit a pipe. Like most theatre types with access to money he was a fan of tobacco. (‘The indian herb works wonders for my ailments.’) He told me it also helped with his writing.
‘Are you writing a new play?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Am I keeping you from your writing?’
He nodded. ‘I am, and, no, you are not.’
‘Ah,’ I said. (There was no one like Will Shakespeare to make you feel tongue-tied.) ‘Good. And good.’
‘It shall be called Julius Caesar.’
‘So it is about the life of Julius Caesar?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
He sucked long on his pipe. ‘I hate writing,’ he said, through the spiralling smoke. ‘That is the truth of it.’
‘But you are very good at it.’
‘So? My talent is not worth a pot of ale. It signifies nothing. Nought. To be good at writing is to be good at pulling out your own hair. What use is a talent that pains you? It is a gift that smells to heaven and it smells of fox shit. You should rather be a whore in the Cardinal’s Hat than be a writer. My quill is my curse.’