Alms for Oblivion (16 page)

I wondered whether this delightful couple had yet read Richard’s play of
The World’s Diseas’d
, that tale of incest and Italian double-dealing. Of course the brother
lordling didn’t read because he had more important things to do. But his sister might spell her way through the text, finger underlining each word, tongue protruding from the fat purse of her
mouth. She might actually read
The World’s Diseas’d
if she thought it offered the chance of a bit of dirt.

I really should advise Milford to change the name of his female heroine, just in case Robert and Vinny saw themselves in the lurid mirror of his characters. He wouldn’t listen but it would
salve my conscience. It wasn’t too late to change a detail, even though the text was at the printer’s. (The book trade is used to dealing with the last-minute whims of authors.) I
looked in Richard’s direction and he caught my eye. His gaze seemed to convey a mixture of defensiveness and hostility – or maybe I was imputing these feelings to him. I was certain now
that the naming and the crude characterization of the incestuous brother and sister in
The World’s Diseas’d
were quite deliberate. From what Richard had said about taking money
with one hand and paying back with the other, as well as the references to hidden ‘messages’, he secretly resented the necessity for patronage. Therefore he conveyed his real feelings
about the absurd brother and sister in this oblique fashion, never imagining he’d be detected because his patrons were so stupid, so thick-skinned. If this was his opinion he was likely to be
wrong. The insensitive may be blind to the world around them but they’re often very sensitive and watchful over everything connected to themselves.

Anyway, in the matter of this play, I thought I’d leave well alone. What business was it of mine?

While Richard was having to listen to the drunken mean-derings of his rustic patron, I took the opportunity to accost Lucy Milford. She was standing near her husband but also separate from him,
if you see what I mean. She half glanced at me – through those long lashes!

“Did you enjoy the play, Mrs Milford?”

Even in the hazy dimness of the hall I could see the blush that crept into her cheeks. She inclined her head slightly and said, “I did.”

Her voice was gentle.

“You do not find the taste of the lawyers too coarse and cynical?”

Still looking down she said, “No.”

“I rather thought – it seemed to me – ”

I had been intending to turn a compliment here, contrasting the roughness of the play or the witty crudity of its humour, with her delicacy and refinement. It’s safe enough to pay
compliments to a married woman, they enjoy them. But Lucy’s near silence, her downcast gaze, made me stumble.

“ – it might be too much for you,” I ended feebly.

“Oh no.”

“Oh well,” I said.

I wondered how Richard Milford had courted her. Had his stream of words – for he was a voluble, self-explaining fellow (not unlike me) – met the dam of her silence? How had he
prevailed?

Seeing I would get no further here, I made to turn away. Then I felt a firm hand on my arm and was surprised to see that it was Lucy’s.

“Master Revill . . .?”

“Yes?”

“There was a man murdered.”

I bent my head towards her. I couldn’t be sure that I’d heard what I’d heard, her voice was so soft.

“A man – ? You mean, Peter Agate.”

Her grip tightened on my arm.

“No, not your friend.”

“Who then?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Ah madam,” I said, moving to detach myself. I felt sweat breaking out on my face. The heat of the room, the drink I’d already taken.

“Look how he dies! Look how his eye turns pale!” she said. Her voice did not vary from its low pitch but she shuddered.

My skin crawled. The hair prickled on my nape. She seemed to be looking over my shoulder. I was afraid to turn round in case I saw what she was seeing.

“Look how his wounds do bleed at many vents!”

And then I recognized the lines. They are the words of the mad prophetess Cassandra in Troy, as she foresees the death of her brother
Hector on the battlefield outside the city. Well, I suppose there are different kinds of prophetesses, the raving ones and the quiet ones. Obviously Lucy Milford had been more deeply affected, not
to say afflicted, by
Troilus and Cressida
than she’d let on at first. If she was a Cassandra then she was a whispering one rather than of the breast-beating variety.

“It was only a play, Mrs Milford, only a play,” I said, my tone almost matching hers for softness. I glanced sideways to where her husband was in close conversation with Robert and
Vinny Venner, their red countenances framing his paler face. He was oblivious to his wife’s strange mood. “Those are words from the play you have just seen.”

“Stop him,” she said.

“Stop who? Stop Hector? But he will go out to battle and be killed. He has already gone. The warrior’s fate. It is written.”

“No, not him,” she said for the second time. She moved closer. “
You know
.”

“I don’t know.”

“But you have it too.”

Before I could ask what she meant or what it was that I was supposed to have too – if she knew it herself – we were interrupted by Jack Wilson.

“A fine performance, Nick.”

“What? Oh, thank you, Jack. And you as Hector.”

I gestured at my friend, as if to say to Lucy Milford, look here is the player who impersonated Hector, alive and well.

But whatever strange mood had seized her seemed to have passed. She inclined her head and said, with only a faint blush, “You make a fine warrior, Jack.”

“Though I am not a martial man by nature,” he said.

I felt a twinge of – yes, admit it – a twinge of jealousy that she should be complimenting my friend on his acting as well as the fact that she called him by his first name. Yet it
was not surprising. Jack was liked by all for his easy openness.

At this point I was swept off by a gaggle of law students, among whom I identified Michael Pye and Edmund Jute. It was that stage in the evening when I had to stop a moment and identify people.
To be honest, I wasn’t altogether unwilling to be drawn away from Lucy Milford’s company, especially now that Jack had turned up. There was an unsettling quality about Mistress Milford.
Perhaps that was part of her attraction.

My tankard was refilled by someone or other. I hadn’t been aware of finishing it. Normally I drink sparingly, in sips like a green girl. Not tonight though.

“Well, was our Helen made of hot enough stuff for you gentlemen?” I said to the young lawyers. “Worth fighting a war over, was she? Or going to law for?”

“We hear that the law has rather come to you, Master Revill,” said Michael Pye.

Was there anyone in London who didn’t know my circumstances? Was I walking round with a dark cloud of suspicion over my head? Next I’d find myself the subject of a broadsheet
ballad!

“Let Master Revill alone,” said Edmund Jute. “He has just wrung our hearts as Troilus. What he does in his spare time is no concern of ours. In law a man is innocent until
proven . . . otherwise.”

This was a two-edged compliment, like being told by Tom Gally that his employer Henslowe did not regard me as a murderer. But it was more acceptable because Jute had coupled it with praise of my
playing. But then, what did the opinion of these law-chicks matter? They had such good judgement that they thought it a good use of their time to ogle Vinnie Venner’s tits.

“My question was about matchless Helen, gentlemen,” I said, trying not to slur my speech. “Whether she was worth it.”

“I grant she had a ready tongue,” said Edmund Jute, “though the face that surrounded it was not one that would ever launch a thousand ships, in my opinion.”

“Or only a little ship, just a bark,” said another student.

“Maybe a cock-boat,” said a third.

“Who is the boy that played Cressida?” asked a fourth student, a solid fellow. I detected a level of interest here, it was more than a casual query. “What is his name, Troilus?
You must know him, know him well. Tell me his name now.”

My head was muzzy from the heat and drink and that odd combination of excitement and tiredness which comes after a play. I had to struggle for a moment to think of a name for Peter Pearce.

“One of our apprentices. Let me see, what is his name, my head is thick . . . his name is . . . Matthew Goodpiece.”

“Named for his mother? He has a feminine cast.”

“Boys make better women than women,” I said.

“It depends on the end you have in view,” said Jute, whose carroty hair had taken on a flaming quality in the artificial light of the hall.

“On the stage, I mean.”

“Women for duty, boys for pleasure,” said the stocky student, licking his lips in a manner that reminded me of Samuel Benwell.

“Your Goodpiece had a fetching eye, though I preferred the one who was Helen,” said Michael Pye.

“Then you have the worse taste,” I said. “Cressida is young and fresh, not used goods.”

“You may be right,” said Pye, cocking up his large nose. “As for Helen, she was a king’s wife and the mistress to a prince – but she was still a whore.”

“What do you know about whores, Michael?” said the Benwell-like student.

Yes
, I thought,
what do you know about whores?
Answer now. Are you familiar with one by the name of Nell?

“I know the breed, which is more than you will ever know, Master Miller.”

“Oh, the Miller grinds on, careless of who comes to bring him their corn, boy or girl,” said the one called by that name. He lurched in my direction. “Let me take your flour,
Troilus.”

I smiled, slipped out of reach and slopped my drink on the floor.

“Just make sure you don’t get caught between his upper and nether stones, Master Revill,” said someone else, Jute, I think.

So the evening wore on with this unrelenting kind of raillery, and with drinking and more drinking still. Was the chat of these educated young lawyers – their pleasure in suggestion and
bawdy – so different from what the lewd apprentices enjoyed? Not really.

At some later point a band of us, students and the younger players, shifted to the nearby Devil Tavern, there to go on drinking and singing and swapping bawdy talk, with occasional intervals to
go outside for a spew or a piss (or both at once). I couldn’t help remembering the last time I’d been here with Peter Agate. His murder seemed distant but not distant enough. If I drank
a little more I could make it more distant still. I craved oblivion. In our play of
Troilus
the Greek Ulysses tells of how time stuffs the deeds of the past – good deeds and bad deeds,
heroic ones and mean ones – into the wallet which he carries on his back. Everything is destined for oblivion. Alms for oblivion. Just give it all to time. Well, I hadn’t got the time
at the moment so, in the interim, drink would do the job well enough.

The stocky boy-loving student who went by the name of Miller snugged up to me on the bench, and insisted on buying me another drink or three. He wasn’t interested in me or only interested
insofar as I might be a conduit to younger, fresher flesh. He pressed me for details about young Matthew Goodpiece. Given fluency by the ale, I invented a few facts, just as I had already invented
another name for Peter Pearce. I felt protective of my Cressida, and didn’t want this fellow going in pursuit of her or him Besides, our boy-players – with one or two exceptions –
lead clean lives, often lodging with our seniors, the best of them being brought on to inherit the dramatic mantle which their elders will one day pass over. Often, they are quite well born and
their parents have entrusted them to the care of the Company.

At an even later point during that evening the interior of the Devil Tavern started to spin and swirl. The faces of my companions danced in front of my own. I began seeing things. I was sure
that in one corner of the place I spotted Tom Gally in conversation with the old player Chesser, the one who had seen the extra devil on stage during
Faustus
. Well, he’s in the right
place, I thought. There are plenty more devils, young and old, in the Devil . . .

I could no longer distinguish between what was real and what wasn’t. I knew this because Lucy Milford’s face and body floated before me and the words coming out of her mouth asked me
if I would like her to tear her clothing and bare her breast, like a true Cassandra. I knew this wasn’t happening, since I had earlier left her and her husband with the Venners in the
banqueting-hall. I also knew it wasn’t happening because she would never have uttered those words. So I said yes. But she must have been teasing me for she shook her head and said that she
couldn’t do it and when I asked her why, she repeated, as if it was reason enough, “There was a man murdered.” I nodded, since this did seem a good reason.

And then I decided that the floor would be a more comfortable place on which to spend the next few hours, or years, and accordingly I slid off my bench and took up my position among the dust and
dregs. From lying down it was a short step to sleeping or stupor.

I dreamed that I’d died and gone to the underworld. It was a mazy place of alleys and arches. Although this underworld was nearly deserted, I did recognize one of the passers-by. It was
the headless figure who had knocked me to the ground in Middle Temple. He too was out and about and striding through the streets, regardless of anyone who stood in his way and exuding that strange,
feral smell. Then I was being ferried across the river Styx by Charon, the boatman who is at everybody’s service, like it or not. I recognized him. That thin shape taking on definition
through the yellow-grey gloom. I heard the grinding of the oar against the side of the boat . . . I knew that steady, undeviating approach.

Then there were hands helping me into his boat and even a body sitting in the stern next to me, and I was filled with gratitude that I had at least one friend prepared to accompany me on this
last ride. We reached the far side and my friend – from his voice it sounded like Jack Wilson – had Jack died as well then? – helped me up some stairs and through some more mazy
streets. I tried to tell Jack about the headless figure as he helped me up yet more stairs to my room in the underworld, but I don’t think that my friend was listening. Instead he clapped me
reassuringly on the shoulder and told me to sleep sound. There is kindness in the afterlife after all, I thought. Then I sank into a true oblivion.