King of Shadows

  In panic I shut my eyes again, looking back for the other side of sleep. My hand crept up underneath the pillow, and groped to and fro, looking for Will Shakespeare’s poem, but could find nothing. I sat up abruptly, and picked up the pillow. There was nothing underneath but the bare white sheet.

  “Good morning, Nat,” said the young woman cheerfully. She pulled down the near side of the bed with a metallic clang, and pressed a button, making the head part of the bed move to a sitting-up angle, with a soft whirring noise. She was smiling at me, with interest but a little warily, I thought. She had a dimple in her right cheek.

  “I’m Nurse Jenkins,” she said. “Nurse Stevens is off duty, she said she was sorry not to see you again before you go. She sent you her love.”

  Nurse Stevens? Who was Nurse Stevens? Where was I? “Thank you,” I said.

  She was busy plumping up my pillows, straightening my bedclothes. “Well, you’ve had quite a time, haven’t you? All this way from America, and we give you this nasty obscure disease. But you’re going home this morning. Ten o’clock.”

  She settled me back against the pillows, as if I were a large doll. I tried to smile at her, and I said “Thank you” again. I was lost. I thought seriously that I might have gone mad.

  “Breakfast first,” said Nurse Jenkins briskly, and she tugged a bed tray around to jut over my lap. “Then you can have a shower—your clothes are outside the bathroom.” She pointed to a door in the corner of the room, and a small suitcase beside it. “Take your time now—don’t rush about. Ring me if you need anything.”

  She indicated a little buzzer on the bed next to my hand, patted the hand, and turned to go. I said, “Nurse, how long have I been in here?”

  “I’m not sure, love, I just got back from holiday. About a week, I think.”

  She disappeared, and I looked at the breakfast tray. There was a carton of orange juice, with a small plastic glass inverted over it, a carton of strawberry yogurt, a carton of milk, a carton of cornflakes, a paper dish, three little paper packets of sugar. Behind all these was a paper plate holding two bread rolls, two foil-wrapped pats of butter and two tiny foil packs of marmalade, all held together on the plate by a roof of plastic wrap. Wrapped in a small paper napkin were a plastic knife and a plastic spoon. I was looking at the result of four hundred years of progress.

  Still, I was hungry, so I ate everything that wasn’t plastic, paper or foil.

  As I was finishing, Nurse Jenkins dived in and out of the room, leaving a small white bottle on my bed tray. “I brought you some shampoo,” she said, looking critically at my head. “I’m really surprised nobody’s washed your hair.”

  Soaping myself in the shower, I was pretty surprised too—at how good it felt to be thoroughly clean again. I washed my hair twice, and toweled it dry and combed it, with a comb I found in a toilet kit in the bathroom. In the mirror I looked like some familiar person whom I’d almost forgotten. I put on clean undershorts, jeans, T-shirt, socks and sneakers, all from the suitcase. I was numb; if I started to think, I would panic.

  I can’t have left him; I can’t really have left him . . .

  Nurse Jenkins came back, flashed her dimple, exclaimed over my cleanliness, and began packing into the little suitcase several things I didn’t know were mine: the toilet kit, a hairbrush, two paperback books and a silly-looking yellow rubber duck.

  “Anything else?” she said, looking around.

  I said, “I had a sheet of crackly paper, with a poem written on it. Under my pillow.”

  Nurse Jenkins pulled the bedclothes apart, looked underneath the bed, shook her head—and then paused as she saw the expression on my face. “It was important, wasn’t it?” she said.

  I said tightly, “Very, very important.”

  “I’ll copy your address from your chart,” she said, and patted my shoulder. She was a plump, comforting person, like a young Mistress Fawcett. “If it turns up I’ll make sure it gets to you.”

  As an afterthought she peered into the wastepaper basket, but found nothing. A tall, lean man in grey shirt and pants came into the room without knocking, pushing a wheelchair. “Nathan Field?” he said.

  “That’s right, Ali,” said Nurse Jenkins.

  “Hop in, chum,” the man said to me.

  “But I’m well,” I said. “I don’t need a wheelchair.”

  “Hospital rules, matey,” said the man, flashing beautiful white teeth at me. I wasn’t used to beautiful white teeth. “You’re not better till you’re outside the hospital doors.”

  So I sat in the wheelchair, fully dressed, feeling idiotic, until we reached a waiting room on the ground floor. And there was Mrs. Fisher, and with her was my Aunt Jen, smiling. She took one look at me and started to cry.

  They were astounded, they kept saying on the way back to the Fishers’ apartment, at how well I looked. Clearly they had expected me to be thin and frail and possibly even weak in the head. This was the first time Mrs. Fisher had seen me since she had—she said—put me in the hospital.

  “You were so ill,” she said. “Do you remember that night?”

  “I remember throwing up,” I said. “And I had a fever. I went to bed and you gave me a hot-water bottle.”

  “That’s all you remember?”

  I remember waking up next morning in Elizabethan England, still Nat Field but a different Nat Field, a boy actor borrowed by William Shakespeare to play before the Queen. . .

  “That’s all,” I said.

  “I’ve never seen such a high fever—I was afraid you’d go into convulsions. So we called the ambulance. You weren’t really conscious by then.”

  Was it all a dream, then, a long elaborate fever dream? Did I never leave this time and place at all?

  Mrs. Fisher said, “So we went to Guy’s Hospital with you, and next morning they said you had bubonic plague.”

  I stared at her. I could see Harry’s earnest dark eyes looking into mine, in the little bedroom; I could hear him saying in relief, “Dear Lord, I was afraid you had the plague.” Could that have been a dream?

  We arrived at the apartment block, and Mrs. Fisher insisted on carrying my little suitcase. Aunt Jen was clutching my hand, as if I might vanish suddenly away. It was clear they’d had a scary week, but I couldn’t get to the point of feeling sympathetic, not yet; I was too deep in my own bafflement about what had really been happening to me.

  And in trying to cope with the terrible aching realization that I should never see Will Shakespeare again.

  Rachel Levin and Gil Warmun came by, late that afternoon. They both hugged me, and then sat with their eyes fixed on me, in that careful, cautious way people do when you’ve been ill and they don’t want to exhaust you. They brought me a Welcome Back card signed by every member of the company, and a big basket of fruit from Arby, with a note saying I mustn’t come back to rehearsal until I really felt strong enough.

  “I feel fine,” I said. I was trying hard to connect with them, to find my way out of the fog I was in. I couldn’t bear the thought that I might have been living a dream.

  “He’s actually longing to have you back,” Rachel said. “He really hopes you can still do Puck. Eric Sawyer is a nice kid but he just isn’t up to it, not in that space.”

  Gil said, “Oberon could use you too. That was one hell of a time to get sick.”

  The word Oberon was like a window opening.

  I said, “Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t really think you intended to catch the plague. That’s taking period realism a bit too far.”

  “What did it feel like?” said Rachel curiously.

  “I can’t remember,” I said. “It’s all a kind of blur. But I’m all right, I’ll be at the theater tomorrow.” Suddenly I wanted passionately to get back to the Globe. It wasn’t my Globe, but it was the next best thing.

  Gil stood up. His beard was thickening up; he looked older. “Come at nine, and I’ll show you the blocking. There’s a run-
through at ten.” He grinned at me. “Young Eric will fall over with relief. He’s been having a hard time with Arby.”

  “We’ll pick you up,” Rachel said. “Quarter of nine. Oh, Nat, I’m so glad you’re better!” She flung her arms around me and gave me a big extra hug; she was always good at showing affection, Rachel. I wasn’t in her world yet, but I tried to hug her back.

  Suddenly she let me go, poking an inquisitive finger down the back of my neck, under the edge of my T-shirt. “What’s that?”

  “What?” I said. I felt her finger rub my skin a little.

  “It’s paint,” she said.

  She was holding out her hand, and I saw the fingertip. It was green.

  She looked at my neck again, intrigued. “Green paint. And such a neat shape. Look, Gil. Just like a pretty little leaf.”

  “Must be the hospital,” I said. “Some antiseptic stuff.” Suddenly sunlight was filling the world, suddenly I was trying not to grin, not to shout. It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t a dream . . .

  * * *

  I was the only person who knew my life was complicated. To everyone else it seemed very simple: I’d been ill in the hospital, and now I was better and had been released. Since they assumed I’d been lying in bed for a week, often feverish, often asleep, they asked me no questions. All I had to do was listen while they chattered away about what had happened while I was gone, and eat and drink whatever was put in front of me. My aunt and Mrs. Fisher seemed to have become such good friends in the three days Aunt Jen had been in Britain that they worked automatically as a kind of double act, checking my health and strength and appetite, offering me little snacks that I didn’t want, patting my shoulder affectionately as they passed.

  Claire, the Fishers’ daughter, had gone away with friends for two weeks, so Aunt Jen was sleeping in her bedroom. The other Nat Field, or whoever it was in that hospital bed, must have been really ill, because the first phone call to South Carolina had warned her bluntly that there was a chance he—I—might die. By the time she got here the danger was past, but she had clearly been badly scared just the same.

  She held me very tightly, when she said good night to me. We’ve been through a lot together, Aunt Jen and me. She’s a high school English teacher, and she was the one who encouraged me to start acting, the year after my dad died. She understood about the comfort you can get from a small separate world, whether it’s a theater or a basketball team or the inside of a book.

  “Welcome back, Nat,” she said. “I couldn’t do without you.”

  “I’m real glad you’re here,” I said.

  And that was true too, in spite of my hopelessness.

  There was far more space backstage at the new Globe than there had been at the old one, and it was much cleaner and less drafty. We had four big dressing rooms, with names—Air, Earth, Fire, Water—and real bathrooms with running water and toilets. Behind the stage, instead of hauling furniture up with ropes and pulleys, all you had to do was put them in a big elevator and press a button.

  Yet even with all this, I found myself missing the dirt and the smells of the noisy primitive Elizabethan theater, which had so easily become home. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that it was what was happening in the theater that mattered, the play and the players, the little separate world. I believed that, but still there was something missing.

  I was missing him, of course.

  This was Sunday. Monday afternoon would be a preview; on Tuesday A Midsummer Night’s Dream would open, and run for two weeks, alternating every two or three performances with Julius Caesar. Arby had taken me out of Julius Caesar because I was supposed to have been so ill; I’d only had bit parts in it anyway. But I was a serious part of his vision of the Dream, and that production was far more important to him than my possible state of health. From Arby’s point of view, bubonic plague wasn’t an extraordinary, life-threatening disease, it was an annoying nuisance that had temporarily screwed up his casting. Back on his stage now, I was an ordinary member of the company and he was the same touchy perfectionist he’d always been. I realized very soon that this wasn’t exactly a happy company, because everyone was so jumpy and nervous—but it was a very good one.

  Ferdie gave me a big hug when I first saw him. He looked just the same: droopy jeans, long flapping T-shirt, three chains around his neck.

  “Welcome back to the human race, my man!”

  “How you been, Ferdie?”

  “Stressed. Arby stress. He got us running like little hamsters on a wheel.”

  “He’ll be better now you’re back,” little Eric Sawyer said. He punched me on the arm, his smile as bright as his red hair. “He was worried. We all were.”

  “I’m just fine,” I said, and tried to believe myself. “I’m just fine.”

  Before rehearsal, Gil walked me through our Oberon-Puck scenes on the stage. It was eerie, because so many of the moves were the same as those I’d played with Will Shakespeare—especially, of course, the acrobatic exits and entrances I’d taken into the past with me, which had been invented by Arby four hundred years after they were played. I couldn’t get my head around the time difference; it was as if I were living in both centuries at once. On stage in particular, I kept waiting for Roper and Harry to come on, or John Heminges, Henry Condell, Dick Burbage . . .

  And instead of Will Shakespeare I had Gil. I suppose he was actually a better actor than Shakespeare, both technically and intuitively, but it wasn’t the same. I was like a planet that has lost its sun. Our scenes together didn’t have the personal connection they’d had when he and I had played together before, and Gil could sense it, and was puzzled. He knew we’d lost something. He probably hoped it would come back in performance.

  I hoped so too, but not enough to try to do anything about it. I was still pining. I wasn’t really there. When I went off to put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes, this time I wasn’t a spirit in love with his master, but an obedient little servant. I felt as if I were inside a huge thundercloud, waiting for the storm to explode.

  When I first bumped heads with someone, it wasn’t with Gil, but with the designer, Diane, who had just flown in from New York for a few days. She hovered while Maggie the wardrobe mistress put Gil and me into our costumes; then she nodded her head in approval.

  “It all looks great. The lightness really sets them off against the others.”

  Oberon, Titania, the fairies and I were all dressed in Elizabethan costume, in assorted shades of white and cream. I looked at Gil’s formal creamy brocade cloak, and my puffy white pants and white legs, and I hated them. I said, “It’s all wrong!”

  Diane looked down at me as if she’d heard a mouse bark. She was a tall, lean lady with bright red nails and long dark hair, and she wore long floaty black clothes and lots of jangly jewelry. She said dangerously, “What did you say?”

  “They wouldn’t have looked like that!” I said.

  Diane sighed. “It was common for Elizabethan plays to be done in Elizabethan costume,” she said.

  “But not this one!” I said.

  Diane smiled at me, with some effort. “Well, Nat, since neither of us was there when they did it, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to put up with what you’ve got.”

  “You look lovely,” said Maggie, pacifying me. “Like a snowflake.”

  I said, “I look like a vanilla ice-cream cone.”

  “Well, try not to melt onstage,” Diane said nastily. She turned to Gil, who was trying to pretend he was somewhere else, and she began adjusting his cloak.

  I stared at myself sulkily in the mirror, and tried not to think about Master Burbage’s wonderful green leaves.

  I found the run-through a very painful business. Here I was, straight out of Will Shakespeare’s own fresh new Midsummer Night’s Dream, trying to adjust to Arby’s production, which was designed to shake up four hundred years of familiarity, not to mention the accumulated boredom of generations of kids forced to read
it only on the page. I had to bite my tongue as we went along, to stop myself shouting out warnings of how a line would work or not work. Once or twice I said things anyway, and this was not popular. The company were all supposed to know this theater better than I did, not the other way around.

  Arby must have been taken aback by the erratic behavior of quiet Nat Field, his athletic but shy Puck from Greenville, South Carolina. He wasn’t to know that someone who starts off quiet and shy can be turned into a kind of simmering volcano, if he’s flung in and out of the past, and given more emotions to cope with in a week than some people have in a lifetime.

  Our real explosion came over that exit line when Oberon sends Puck off to get the magic herb; when, for Will Shakespeare, I had cartwheeled my way upstage and all the way off. When the line came this time—

  “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth

  In forty minutes—”

  —instinctively I threw myself into the first cartwheel, and at once Arby’s voice boomed out from the gallery where he was sitting.

  “NO, Puck! Exit through the house, remember!”

  I stopped, and looked toward the gallery; I couldn’t see him properly.

  “It’s better this way!” I called out.

  He ignored me. “Jump down, without hitting a groundling—run out through the yard door, and around back.”

  I stood obstinately still on the stage. “Shakespeare hated exits through the theater!” I shouted at him.

  Arby rasped, “Just do what I ask, Nat.”

  “He did, he thought they were corny!”

  “And who gave you that little gem?”

  “I just know it!” I longed passionately to be able to yell, He told me so, you idiot!

  Arby was angry now; he had all the weight of two productions on his mind, and I guess he wasn’t going to be crossed by one little actor. His voice began softly, and it rose and rose. “Whatever William Shakespeare may be said to have preferred, Nat, I want you to run forward, jump down and run out, as we rehearsed—you may have been sick, but you can still take direction, and I am alive and kicking and directing this show for this century and Shakespeare is dead!”