The Pale Companion (19 page)

“Yes, I know the place and do not like it,” I said. “What happened?”

“Ah, Nick,” said Laurence, “we shall have to wait for the conclusion of the story. Look.”

He gestured at the bank of seats erected in front of the playing area. They were all full now except for a central section which was to be occupied by the bride and groom-to-be and their families. I’d been so absorbed in Laurence’s tale that I’d almost forgotten the audience – but not quite. No actor quite forgets his audience.

“We are both on in a moment,” said Laurence Savage, sliding away. I was momentarily annoyed, almost suspecting him of deliberately pausing at this point in his narrative to make me more eager to hear the rest of it. I still couldn’t see any connection between Lord Elcombe and two little Savages – for it was certain that the older boy was Laurence himself, wasn’t it? – playing by a filthy London stream. But now these speculations were put to one side as Master Thomas Pope came round in his Puckish guise to give us, each and every one, some last word of encouragement. I noticed that he was especially solicitous to the company of noble children who were to open the action with a fairy procession and a dance before the appearance of the adult humans. By this time, with a little fanfare, the Elcombes and Morlands had taken up their places and so we had our cue to begin.

Before I entered, and while Theseus and Hippolyta were talking of the snail-paced approach of their wedding, I cast my eyes swiftly across the audience, trying to place Kate Fielding. Yes, there she was, next to her father. Both of them were sitting above and to one side of the Elcombe clan. I felt a little shiver run through me which, I swear, was less to do with apprehension over the coming performance than it was connected to Kate’s presence. She had never seen me act before, although as soon as this notion occurred to me came the counter-idea: why should she care whether she’d seen me before or not? And then I was able to give no more time to my heart for I had to step out onto the golden green and play the part of the anguished lover, Lysander.

Ay me! For aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth
. . .

And so we began. The lovers’ crossed fortunes, their wanderings in the forest whose mazy windings show the tangled paths we humans tread in pursuit of our desires, the intervention of Oberon and Titania who have the powers of gods and the appetites of mortals, the quite different contribution of the rude mechanicals to the love debate – all of this surely served as a fitting dessert course to the banquet they (and we) had just enjoyed. Master Shakespeare’s words are sweet enough but there is in them the tartness of observation and experience.

As the action of the
Dream
unfolded, the heavens above us gathered up the day’s gold and stowed it away in night’s dark trunk. But because it was midsummer the process seemed infinitely slow and gentle. Even as we drew towards an end, with all the confusions and cross-purposes resolved in wedding and celebration, there was still a sheen of light in the west while on the opposite side the moon – pale companion to our revels and almost at the full – gazed coolly down.

After Thomas Pope as Puck had spoken his final words –
Give me your hands if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends
– the noble troupe of children once more danced and sang, their burning tapers making stately circles in the twilight. The applause which Puck had solicited was duly given, the more generously perhaps because so many of the audience’s little darlings were on show, and the whole company bobbed and bowed on the moonlit sward. This is what it means to play before the quality. No whores and pickpockets, no swearing veterans or unlettered apprentices; instead there is taste, balance and restraint. I couldn’t have put up with it for too long but, once in a while, it’s a pleasant experience.

“How was I?” said Cuthbert Ascre to me as we gathered “backstage” behind the canvas screens. The area was fitfully illuminated by a couple of flares; the moonlight did better service. Here we changed back into our day clothes and Jack Horner took charge of our costumes. Because we were touring we were less lavishly garbed than we would have been at the Globe and, as usual in these circumstances, most of us were wearing a mixture of our own garments and Company property. The waning light of evening, by comparison with the bright glare of afternoon in the London playhouse, also allows one to make do with less in the way of face-painting &c.

“How was I?” Cuthbert Ascre repeated, impatient for opinion like all beginners. “Was I good?”

“Very good,” I said. “We’ll make a player of you yet.”

I was not straining to pay a compliment or not by much. Cuthbert really had shown a natural fluency as Demetrius, my rival in love. In that mood of easy jubilation which comes at the end of a successful performance, Cuthbert was as open to my praise as I was ready to give it. I could see his face glimmer with pleasure in the flickering light.

“Oh, this has given me a taste for it, to be sure. I could throw up my fortunes now, such as they are, and go on the road – with your company.”

“We would be delighted to have you,” I said, wondering what Laurence Savage – or any of us – would make of an aristocratic companion but willing enough to indulge Cuthbert for a moment.

“But that’s a fantasy,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. His face suddenly took on a harder cast. “My father would never permit it.”

“I didn’t know you were serious.”

“Nor did I,” he said. “But why should I be constrained to play a part I do not wish?”

I presumed he meant the part of a younger brother, usually a pretty thankless role in the real world. Trying to lighten his newly clouded mood, I said, “If you were a member of our company you’d find yourself playing plenty of unwelcome parts. Look at me, for example. I’ve only been with the Chamberlain’s a short time, yet I’ve been poisoned twice, torn asunder once and stabbed three times at least. The rest of the time I’ve stood around as an ambassador, or a soldier, or a member of council. That’s when I haven’t been skulking in the bushes as a murderer. There’s no great romance in this. Villains and placemen are my meat and drink.”

“And lovers.”

“I am only lately graduated to them.”

“But Nicholas, that is exactly what I would choose. To be one clay the murderer and the next his victim. To be the victor in battle, then the vanquished. Or the shop-keeper who sells poison on a Monday and the lovelorn youth who swallows it on the Thursday.”

I saw that my attempts to play down, as it were, the appeal of the playhouse were serving only to inflame him further and leave him with a sense of what he could never have, at least as long as his father stood in the way.

By now most of our company had wandered away from the area to mingle with the lords and ladies of the audience or, in a few cases perhaps, the men and maidservants. I was eager to be off myself, perhaps to catch up by accident with Kate Fielding and to have her opinion of what she’d just seen. I saw there was no placating Cuthbert Ascre who seemed to growing gloomier by the instant. So, assuring him that he’d made a fine Demetrius – no, really, an excellent performance – I sped off into the gathering darkness.

Almost immediately I ran into Kate. Literally. I didn’t recognize her at first, nor she me.

“Take care, sir,” she said.

“Oh Kate, Mistress Fielding . . .”

“Master Revill, is it?”

“The very same.”

“Well, you are obviously off somewhere in a rush. Don’t let me detain you.”

We looked at each other in the moonlight. Not too far away torches flickered, while soft voices and laughter blended in the mild air.

“No . . . I’m not. Nothing that can’t wait. Did you enjoy the play?”

“Yes. I saw it first some years ago in the city, but it’s better suited to this sylvan setting.”

“Where we may all imagine ourselves to be lovers in the woods of Athens?”

“Some of us perhaps.”

“Of course, I forget. You don’t believe in love poetry. You think that poets are just writing to the empty air.”

“And you think, if I remember correctly, that even if they are that doesn’t mean that they don’t intend their words to be taken seriously.”

It was gratifying, of course, to have my own opinion recalled and quoted back at me, even if we were speaking in a rather combative spirit.

“Well, perhaps you’re right,” I said. “Who was it said that the truest poetry is the most feigning?”

“Your own Master Shakespeare, I believe.”

“I think I have found you out . . . Kate.”

“How so, Master Revill?”

“You see, you know the lines, you know the ideas and opinions of our poets. That tells me one thing. Under this guise of pretended indifference or even contempt for love poetry, you are really in thrall to it. Admit that you are a devotee in your closet of the latest volume of sonnets, that you pine and sigh with the lovesick – in spirit of course.”

“Really, Master Revill, you must change out of your costume. If you are still speaking as the impassioned Lysander.”

“Perhaps I am speaking in my own part,” I said, wondering how much longer I could continue without breaking cover. Did I dare to confess openly what I felt towards her? My heart pounded and there was a roaring in my ears. On the edge of my vision the light from the torches seemed to swim in the soft, mothy air. So, I noted (and a part of me was still sufficiently detached to note that I was noting it), this is what it means to be in love. These are the symptoms of the sickness.

I was about to open my mouth to make some declaration, which might have changed everything (or more probably left everything just the same), when I sensed rather than saw another figure approaching through the dark.

“Cuthbert,” said Kate.

“Kate,” said Cuthbert.

“Did you like my Demetrius? Good, was I?”

“I have never seen a finer lover, coz.”

“I was a little worried at the start but I soon got into it. My friend Nicholas here assures me that it was an excellent performance.”

“Oh yes,” I mumbled. “Very good.”

“Tell me, Nicholas, when we were searching for each other in the mist . . . when you were chasing me, you know, with your sword . . . don’t you think that if instead of coming in from that side, the effect would have been better if . . .”

“Well, you must excuse me now,” I said, slipping away from them. I was half-relieved to be quit of Kate’s company for I feared her mocking reception of the stuttering declaration of love which I’d been about to make. And, though glad enough to see that Lord Cuthbert had recovered his good humour, I didn’t want to be exposed to his ideas on how the
Dream
performance might have been made sharper or funnier. Let him bend Kate’s ear for that.

But the ear-bending wasn’t finished for me either.

For I’d no sooner reached the company of my fellows, who by now had finished receiving the personal plaudits of the audience and were making up for the drink-deprived hours we’d endured while performing, than Laurence Savage reminded me that I hadn’t heard the end of his tale of the two boys.

“Very well, Laurence,” I said, a little impatient even though I’d been eager enough to hear its conclusion earlier on. “But can we get one thing clear. No more mystification if you please. You’re talking about yourself and your brother and your mother, aren’t you?”

“How did you guess, Nicholas?”

“Get on with the story.”

Taking a swig at some of Lord Elcombe’s ale, Laurence launched into the second half.

“As I was saying before I was interrupted by the play, these two boys of a poor widow-woman were together one day on the margins of Fleet Ditch. All of a sudden the little one, the one who had only lately learnt to walk, loses interest in what his brother is doing and sets out on his sturdy legs to examine something which has caught his eye on the other side of the street, something glinting in the sun, I dare say. Meanwhile the big brother is distracted for an instant, perhaps caught up in some day-dream. He is not looking after his charge.”

Laurence, still in his garb as Bottom, paused to slurp again at his tankard. It was evident that the scene he was describing was unfurling again before his eyes. I would have told him to hurry it up but something in his grave, determined expression suggested that it would be safer to hear him out in silence.

“All at once, round the corner of this stinking thoroughfare come a pair of horsemen riding as if the devil were at their heels. The older boy hears them before he sees them and makes a plunge to save the little one from being knocked to the ground and trampled upon. But he is too late. The child is struck by the hoofs of the leading horse and again by the hoofs of the second. The rush and frenzy of their passage throws the little boy against the wall of the tumbledown tenement. The older boy feels the heat and draught of these frantic travellers and their mounts and does not at first realize what has happened to his brother. In front of him is the empty roadway with the ditch beyond. He turns round and sees crumpled against the black wall a pile of clothing. Though the street is always filthy he hadn’t noticed that particular mound of rags earlier and he wonders how it came to be there. Then he understands.”

Laurence paused again to swig his drink. I saw his eyes moisten. He was sweating heavily. His cowlick of hair was glued to his forhead.

“I ran across and picked up the bundle in my arms. Thomas was dead, of course, several times over. If the first blow from the horse had not finished him then the second would have done, or the third or the fourth – and after that to be thrown violently against a brick wall. His brains were near dashed out. My mother, she emerged from the house, drawn by something or other. Perhaps I was crying out or screaming, I don’t know. And we took the little form back inside and laid him down on the chest which served as our table. He was not yet a year and a half.”

Laurence Savage gulped before resuming. “I had lost other brothers and sisters before – that is not much, provided they go early. But this one I had just got used to. Thomas his name was.”