Alms for Oblivion (6 page)

After the play practice some of us repaired to a local tavern, a rather more salubrious one than Southwark’s Goat & Monkey (but we were in north London and in lawyer-land after all).
The place was called the Devil, spawning plenty of jokes about ‘going to the . . . ’ and ‘talking of the . . . ’. The story went that the tavern owed its name to the church
of St Dunstan which stood nearby, and that an old inn-sign had once depicted that saint pulling the devil by the nose (what the devil had done to deserve this, I don’t know). Now the painted
sign was duller and vaguely legalish, showing a scroll and a seal and a quill. Even so I considered that the devil’s name was a fitting one for a tract of London where so many lawyers and
would-be lawyers congregated.

Peter got on famously with those of my fellows he chatted with in the Devil. We were in that high-spirited mood that comes after a successful practice or performance and we welcomed a newcomer
to our ranks. I was split between pleasure that my friend was being so graciously received by the Company and anxiety in case he thought it was always like this. And of course there was a little
touch of resentment too. No patron likes to see his client go too far too fast.

We didn’t get free of the Devil until late evening. Peter was reluctant to leave and we reeled out with the other unwived, unloved, un-bed-warmed members of the Chamberlain’s, mostly
the younger ones. The fog had cleared and permitted a few stars to gaze drowsily down on the two of us as we reached the river, caught a ferry and, on the far side, retraced our steps to Dead
Man’s Place. No Charons or chalk-faced old ranters in sight.

It was generally assumed that Peter would share my lodgings for the next few days until he could find his own. Assumed by him, that is, and acquiesced in by me. I didn’t think Samuel
Benwell would make any difficulty. More likely he would be drooling to imagine two members of his favourite profession sharing a bed. So it proved. My landlord was still in the little lobby,
leaning into a corner – I wondered if he’d been hanging around there all day waiting for some surprise visitor. He was holding a candle of stinking tallow whose waste oozed into a
grease-pan. For a moment I thought of a mother, or perhaps a wife, waiting for two naughty boys to come back home after a night on the town.

I shut Peter up just after he’d started burbling and slurring on about his fren’ship with Willum Shakeshpeare and his discovery that the Chamberlain’s were wunnerful men.
Revill, relatively sober, swiftly negotiated with Benwell the provision of a spare mattress rather than a new room. The landlord simultaneously looked disappointed and raised his eyebrows in
surprise – insofar as one could read all this expressiveness by a single smoky candle – but he must have known that my bed was small and mean, not really comfortable enough to share
with anyone, even with a woman. He must have known, I say, because I think he was in the habit of spying on me.

We settled on one and a half pennies a night extra. I already knew that Peter was in funds, having seen his largesse in the Devil. The bargain struck, Benwell graciously handed over his odorous
candle, now more grease than illumination, so that we might see ourselves to bed. Then we went single file up to my room, I almost pushing Peter up the stairs with one hand and holding on to the
light with the other. I retrieved a leaking straw mattress from some unregarded corner, tugged it into my little room, laid it out beside my own bed (there was no space for it to go anywhere else),
and felt simultaneously virtuous and resentful, as if I’d done everything and more that could be expected of me in relation to my old friend.

Peter had bashed his forehead somewhere in his progress to my room, probably at the entrance. The lintel was low but I was used to it. I should have warned him but the blow seemed to do him a
favour and clear his head a little, even as the blood leaked slowly from his noddle. He was disposed to go on talking. He was still the worse for drink although the slurring disappeared.

I didn’t much want to talk. For one thing, I had to work the next day, not on
Troilus and Cressida
, which would henceforth be rehearsed in Middle Temple, but on an actual play for
the following afternoon and a practice for a different one in the morning, both of them at the Globe. So when Peter, half sitting up on his straw mattress and wiping abstractedly at his bloody
forehead, said, “You know what Master Shakespeare said to me?” I merely grunted. This didn’t deter Peter, who continued, “He smiled at me and said I had the makings of a
player. He smilingly said.”

Anyone not absolutely dead could be said to have the makings of a player. I didn’t tell Peter that from WS these words were faint praise. If they’d been said to me I would’ve
packed up straightaway and headed home to Somerset. Then I felt guilty for thinking such thoughts. Instead of grunting again, I asked Peter a question which had been nagging at the edge of my mind
during the day.

“How did you know where to find me this morning?”

Now it was Peter’s turn to grunt or make some similar non-committal noise. He lay down on his penny-and-a-half-a-night bed. I’d been about to snuff out the candle. The wick was
guttering like a very small man drowning in a great greasy sea. It was my curiosity that flared up instead.

“I mean, you didn’t go to the playhouse first, did you? It wasn’t one of my fellows who told you where I lived?”

“Not exactly,” said Peter.

“Who then?”

I looked down at him lying there, his forehead painted with blood which he’d wiped at ineffectually and which showed up dark in the little light.

“I’m bleeding.”

“A flesh wound only,” I said. “Who told you about my lodgings?”

Peter tried to avoid my eye. What didn’t he want to tell me?

“I reached London yesterday,” he said finally. “Not knowing where you lived of course, I thought I’d apply at the playhouse. And I had to ask where
that
was first.
On the way to the Globe playhouse I passed a place called Holland’s Leaguer . . . ”

Oh, I saw where he was headed now.

“I suppose you’re going to say, my friend, that you wandered in there all innocent.”

The remark came out sharper than I intended and Peter seemed to bristle.

“I had heard of the place, naturally. Even in the depths of the country I had heard of it.”

“And you thought you’d just have a taste.”

“It seemed an – appropriate thing to do on arriving in a new town,” he said. “And I’d had a drink or two.”

“Of course. I’ve done the same.”

“Had a drink?”

“Visited a brothel early on.”

Had I? I couldn’t remember. Did I enter a brothel on my first night in London town? The second or third night possibly – it could take that long to summon up the nerve – and
then it would’ve been somewhere modest, where one could blush unseen, and not the famous, semi-fortified place known as Holland’s Leaguer. Anyway, my comment had the effect of putting
Peter at his ease, even making him combative.

“Yes, you
have
done the same, Nick, so you can get off that high horse.”

No use to contradict him so I said nothing. I was very much afraid that I could see where he was headed now.

“I met a friend of yours in Holland’s Leaguer.”

“A customer, you mean?”

“A
resident
of the place.”

“Any whore is friend to half the men of London, to hear them talk. The whores, that is.”

“No, this was a very particular friend of yours. After we had finished the business which we had contracted for, we exchanged a few words. Since she could see I wasn’t a townee she
asked me where I came from. And when I told her it was a Somerset village she grew attentive and when I told her the name of the village she grew more attentive still. She even asked me if I knew
one Nicholas Revill, the parson’s son.”

I rather wished that Peter had bashed his head hard enough on the lintel to knock himself right out. Or perhaps I should hit him over the head myself to stop him going on.

“‘Know him!’ I exclaimed,” said Peter. “‘We have known each other since we were boys. I have come to London expressly to see him.’”

“Whores are sentimental,” I said. “I suppose she wanted to know what I was like as a youngster in that Somerset village.”

“She didn’t seem very interested in that. She was more interested in what I was doing here in town. So I told her of my ambitions to become a player.”

“She likes players . . .” I said weakly. (I could in truth think of nothing else to say.)

“You may well say so, Nick. She gave me a free turn after that. I paid only once.”

“ . . . and she has a heart of gold.”

He ignored my irony, pursuing a different train of thought.

“I think it may have been my freshness, my ambition. That seemed to touch her.”

“She is easily touched,” I said, this time without irony. “If you are talking of Nell.”

“Nell, yes. I didn’t know if it was her real name.”

“It is.”

“Not only was she able to tell me where you live but she had a message for you – if I managed to find you.”

“Well, you have found me, Peter, and pretty soon I must sleep in order to rise fresh for work tomorrow. So tell me Nell’s message and then I’ll snuff out this filthy
candle.”

“Didn’t make much sense to me,” said Peter drowsily.

The excitement of the day – the playing – the drinking – the blow to the head – were at last getting the better of him.

“Nevertheless, tell me what Nell said.”

“She said to tell you, ‘A recovery would be fine.’ That’s all.”

“A recovery would be fine?”

“Her words. Sounds legal to me.”

“It probably is,” I said, leaning across to extinguish the dirty light.

If this comment about fines and recoveries was Nell’s way of re-establishing friendly relations, I didn’t think much of it. Or, more accurately, I wasn’t sure
what to think of it.

Nell – for all our years together I never had discovered what her surname was (I’m not sure that she knew either) – Nell was a flesh-pedlar at Holland’s Leaguer, as
you’ll have gathered. The Leaguer was the chief stew in Southwark, got up like a fortress with a moat and battlements, but all in a pissy play-acting style that wouldn’t have kept out a
band of children equipped with pikes of straw. (Oddly enough the Leaguer had a connection with the current patron of the Chamberlain’s Company, the ailing Lord Hunsdon, since it was his
father who’d owned the place when it was just a straightforward manor house.) The residents of this house of ill-fame were higher-priced than the members of the profession in other places
like the Cardinal’s Hat or the Windmill, and they accordingly adopted a more lady-like air as though they were doing you a favour in accepting your coin.

Not my coin, though. I got in free. And I could hardly object that Nell gave me what others paid for, nor that she was willing to give me in addition something you might have come close to
calling love. I loved her too, in my fashion. Or perhaps it was that I was merely pleased to have her at hand, winning and grateful.

But as we grew more familiar with London our paths began to diverge, Nell’s and mine, after a couple of years. The itch of respectability started to make me restless. I grew familiar
enough with great men and their houses, two or three of them anyway. I considered that I was moving up in the world. I wasn’t the only one to feel this. When we’d first met, Dick Burbage
said that players were crawling towards respectability, even if slowly. Many of our seniors in the Chamberlain’s were married men with children, in some cases happily so. They were
shareholders, men of substance. Wasn’t that what I was aiming at too?

In other words, I was growing up (or merely growing older).

Nell too must have been feeling this itch for respectability. It’s even harder, though, for a doxy to get a leg up in the world than it is for a player. They start from further down the
ladder, you see. True, there were stories that circulated around Nell’s work-place about girls who’d been favoured by rich old men, so favoured that they’d been fished out of the
stew and set up in comfortable establishments, with jewellery and servants and fine linen. Nell and her particular confederate in night-work, a girl called Jenny, often talked about these rich old
men as if they actually existed. The best part was that, in the triumphant climax to the stories, the old men were persuaded to marry their dolls on their death-beds. These dolls – still
comparatively young and fresh but wealthy and widowed – had worked themselves into an enviable position. Mind you, I’d never met any of these newly respectable widows, and neither had
Nell or Jenny. They always turned out to be acquaintances of aunts of neighbours in the next street.

Now my Nell knew how the world worked, she knew what was what. And, since these rich young widows were nowhere to be found, she also realized that the rich old men were as real as the unicorn.
Less real perhaps, because who is to say that the unicorn is not roaming somewhere on the far side of the world, even at this moment?

Therefore Nell was well aware that the way ahead was a rocky one. Unless she transformed herself into a madam or bawd, what lay in the future for the whore but fading charms and the pox? She
must attach herself respectably, must find a protector. Maybe not a wealthy dotard who would peg out straightaway after the marriage but a younger gentleman with a bit of influence, with a prospect
or two in the world. A player doesn’t have influence or prospects, not really.

So my Nell too was growing up (or merely growing older).

Our friendship had been cooling for many months, although we still met from time to time for conversation of every sort. Our last encounter had been in her place of work, Holland’s
Leaguer, since she pleaded a busy-ness which prevented her from visiting me in Dead Man’s Place. Really I think she didn’t like Master Benwell’s prying eye. It was a mark of her
increasing fastidiousness.

Another sign of this was her desire to impress me with her ability to read. “Jenny can’t read as I can read,” she said proudly. This was a turnabout from the old days when
she’d claimed, probably rightly, that being able to read and write wouldn’t add a scrap to her earnings. Now it was a different Nell. I didn’t respond – as I might have done
once – “What business has a whore with words?” It would have been an illiberal remark, an ungentle one. Besides I was afraid she might hit me. She had a neat little fist.