Nothing Like the Sun Read online

  BOOKS BY ANTHONY BURGESS IN

  W. W. NORTON PAPERBACK

  Re Joyce

  Tremor of Intent

  Honey for the Bears

  The Wanting Seed

  A Clockwork Orange

  The Doctor Is Sick

  The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy

  To

  PAMELA

  and

  CHARLES SNOW

  My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,

  Coral is far more red than her lips' red,

  If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun,

  If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head ...

  MR BURGESS'S

  farewell lecture to his

  special students (Misses Alabaster,

  Ang Poh Gaik, Bacchus, Brochocki, Ishak,

  Kinipple, Shackles, Spottiswoode and Messrs

  Ahmad bin Harun, Anguish, Balwant Singh, Lillington,

  Lympe, Raja Mokhtar, Prindable, Rosario, Spittal, Whitelegge etc) who complained that Shakespeare had nothing to give to the East. (Thanks for the farewell gift of three bottles of samsu. I will take a swig now. Delicious.) The text being the acrostical significance of the following lines: '... My love is as a fever --

  Feeding on that which doth preserve the

  ill,

  The uncertain sickly appetite to please.

  My reason, the physician to my love,

  Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

  Hath left me ...'

  Contents

  157?-1587

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  1592-1599

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  Epilogue

  157?-1587

  I

  IT WAS ALL A MATTER OF A GODDESS -- dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable. When did her image first dawn?

  A Good Friday, sure. '77? '78? '79? WS, stripling, in worn tight doublet, patched cloak, but gloves very new. Beardless, the down on his cheek gold in the sun, the hair auburn, the eyes a spaniel's eyes. He kicked in youth's peevishness at the turves of the Avon's left bank, marking with storing-up spaniel's eye the spurgeoning of the back-eddy under the Clopton Bridge. (Clopton, the New Place hero, who had run away to get rich. Would he, WS, die as great a Stratford's son?) He smarted to be treated as a child still, he and the family idiot Gilbert charged to take young Anne and younger Richard on a glove-delivering walk in the healthful air. Air blue and sweet over the greenery where the hares darted, away from Henley Street's dunghills, the butchers sharpening their knives and sorting their pricks and making ready for Easter-Eve market. Young beasts dying maaaaaaa for fine appetites. Jack of Lent ready to be turned out of doors and belaboured. Sweet hopeful air, sad, with a mild southwesterly whisper of afternoon rain. Spring and, battering and belabouring his ears, the moans of another sort of dying, another sort of beast -- all white, all clawing fingers, froglegs swimming on the bed, sepulchrally white. He had seen, that Maundy Thursday afternoon, dupping their chamber door in all maaaaaaa innocence. He should not have seen nor heard. All that busy whiteness. They could not have known he saw.

  'Do not that, Dickon,' he said yet again to Richard, who this time poked his snotty finger at his sister's eye. And then, 'Go not too near the water, neither. Water hath a trick of drowning and, at best, is a wetter.' And then the jingle ruled him, already a word-boy. 'Water wetter water wetter water wetter.' Sly Anne, with the trolling eye that her father, before his nail-gnawing troubles, had used to net wenches withal, said:

  'Poor Will is mad Will. Will he nill he. Chuck Will's widow.'

  'Wetter water.'

  Gilbert, the family idiot, gaped up at the spring sky, on whose washed blue clouds were gently and seriously propelled, a snouty lad with lips of slack red meat. 'Is heaven up there?' he asked heaven. 'Is God and His saints up there?'

  'Debtor daughter. Ducats suckets. What was that,' asked WS, 'about Will's widow?'

  'A goatsucker,' answered Anne. Richard, whose left leg was shorter than his right by an inch and a half, limped a pace, thought, then whipped out his little thing to piss on the grass, a brief-lived golden arc in the spring sun. He gathered spittle on his lips and was thinning it to a bubble, a popping membrana. 'And that tree yonder is a goat willow,' said Anne. Richard wore a little velvet cap and his cloak, now back from his shoulders, had a frayed tassel.

  Goat. Willow. Widow. Tarquin, superb sun-black southern king, all awry, twisted snakewise, had goatlike gone to it. So tragos, a tragedy. Razor and whetstone. But that was the other Tarquin. WS saw great-bellied slack whiteness in the spring of a southern country, a Lucy lawn peacock ghost-aglimmer, Arden, patrician, screaming. No willow she. But a willow was right for death. He watched the strange back-eddy under the arch. Back to the strait that sent him on so fast. As great a Stratford's son as Clopton ever was? He seemed to himself to be dreaming of dreaming of straining after some dark image just beyond the tail of his spaniel eye.

  'Tha didst go all a shudder then,' said Gilbert. 'Shudder shudder shudder.'

  WS made a wry pinched face, flushing. A nipping English spring, he shrugged to say. He pulled his worn cloak closer about him, as King Stephen in the song. A worthy peer. Indeed. But now Richard had finished and was tucking it away. He made little bellowing noises, his hands still there, and ran, with limper's agility, after pale-lashed no-eyebrowed Anne. Pallor, the endless winter's pale, sunless England, white ghosts coupling in watery light. Anne feigned to be frightened and ran, gleefully screaming, towards the bushes. She looked back at her little pursuer, crying, 'Boar, boar, bristly boar!' Then she raced full tilt smack into the bulky figure that emerged from behind the thick and warty oakbole. They all knew him. A palliard, some said on Henley Street, a wild rogue. Jack Hoby his name was. Filthy shirt, old hat with broken crown. A true canvas-climber or a freshwater mariner? He was far enough inland, sure. WS believed he had known the sea. He was, as ever, cup-shotten.

  'So,' says Hoby to Anne, whom he held by the shoulders an instant in unwashed hairy paws. 'I have thee, nops, sucket, little ringocandy. Queen of Fortunato and Eractelenty, so shalt be. I will take thee to where geese dance trenchmore and apes play at tickatack.' Anne broke away, unaffrighted. Richard laughed. Hoby's face was too much the painted devil's to summon a child's fear in daylight -- an eye shut forever, cheek-scores that dust loved, black teeth showing their waists, a party beard full of crumbs. He grinned, a pirate. He stank of Banbury cheese. He belched forth the soul of an alehouse. 'Master glover,' he grinned at WS. 'A holy day is on us, all free from tranks and fourshits.'

  'Fourchettes.' WS made a cold correction. And then he felt shame at seeming too ready to correct, as out of a craftsman's pride. It was not his craft, though his father had taken him away from school to practise it, pleading poverty. A trade at his son's finger-tips. Ad unguem. A dunghill. He reddened; he reddened to know he reddened. Oh, the ancient glories of the Ardens, long before the Conqueror came. The Arden lands, the Arden hauteur. The pigeon-house at Wilmcote, with its coocoocooing of more than six hundred pair. ('And and and,' cried his mother, all Arden, 'they passed through Stratford, mine own cousins, and they would not call, not for a glass of wine, no, nor to give a word of family news. Oh, the shame, the shame. I have married beneath me. I was taken unawares by a rogue's eye. I was ruined.') Tears came to the eyes of WS. It was, he feigned, the spring wind freshening. They had best get home to their dinner, greasy
Joan and the great lady their mother and their anxious smiling father.

  'Put to sea while time is,' jeered Hoby. 'See the wide world. The isle of Ruc in the Can's land. Madagastat in Scorea, where the kings be Mahometans and black as devils. And their queens be queans, for they will take any man to lie withal.'

  Was it at that moment? England grew all heat, Avon glowed like Nilus and bobbed with watersnakes. WS saw it: a golden face in the East, a queen on a gold coin, galleons sailing towards her. He gulped, swallowed the vision. He counter-jeered: 'You will say that you filled galleons with gold and ambergris and musk and unicorn's horns and then sailed by the adamant stones and lost all and that now the black ox treadeth upon your foot.'

  'A dog shall have his day,' said Hoby, no whit abashed at hearing his words so well remembered. 'I have gained, I have spent, no niggard ever. I have seen Leviathan on the waters and fishes that did climb trees like boys for apples. I have eat of camel's flesh and been to lands where men do eat men and have eyes set in their breasts.' Richard was picking at the cold-sore round his nether lip, gaping up at Hoby; Anne smacked his hand away. 'Wilt thou ever see the world in such manner, with waves like great toothed hounds howling all about and slime on their backs, and the sun that would melt a man's eyes like butter did he not wink?'

  'Tha couldst not see naught then.' So Gilbert said with idiot's acuteness.

  'Too much of thou-and-thee.' It was that prim boy, WS, the gentleman. 'We will have a proper distance.'

  'So,' says Hoby, sweeping off, all astagger, his bad hat and disclosing rotten unraked hair, pied of grey and dirty brown, knotted and conjoined locks which shut in the merry leaping life that would be wild and roving else, 'we must bow to their worships the gentry. His Worthiness Sir Skite going hum hum hum through the clean and holy holes of his long nose. Mercy, your grace and favour. Grant me the honour of licking your dirty shoe.' And he bowed so deep that, drunken as he was, he near toppled, and Anne and Richard laughed.

  And then the great gentleman took pity on this poor mendacious wretch whose breath smelt so rotten, bethought him of the lone small wren of a coin in his purse, given to him by Mistress Mistress (her name was gone) to whom he had delivered a pair of fine calfskin gloves that Wednesday past, blushing again to see himself treated thus, with a there's-for-thy-pains-boy, and he took it out and said, 'Here.' His brothers and sister stared; Hoby stared too but took the proffer wordlessly, wondering. Yet he could not forbear to cry after those he called the Chaxpers or Jackspaws as they moved homeward:

  'Get to sea, lad! There is no world here, God help us. Aping gentry, it is no life. Out out out, before it be all too late!' And he seemed to stagger back to the bushes where belike drunken sleep, his constant mistress, awaited him. WS let Anne straight-run and Richard limp-run ahead, renewing their chasing sport. Gilbert walked in a pattern of zeds, still full of the sky's blue milk. His slack mouth was raised agape, as thirsty for God. WS brooded. His spaniel's eye saw and did not see the cowslip, burnet, green clover nor did his ear take in the lark's soaring cantilena.

  Was that, then, where it had to lie, the restoring of fortune and honour, the redemption of a name Snitterfield had pride in ere ever Wilmcote drank glory of Arden blood? (Such work of restoration he had vowed.) Was it, he wondered then, to be the way of the adventurer, mythical raker of carbuncles and diamonds from beneath the spicetrees, but first and last the hold's stink and the foul water after the weeviled biscuit, men rent and filthy and reechy like their shirts of the hogo of earwax, the hap of wrack and piracy or, at best, spewing among rude and rough rascals made roaring lustful with salt beef and, a mere week at sea, cursing and raging in their fights over the ravaging of the soft white body of a boy, a boy refined and gentled with snippets of Ovid and maxims out of Seneca. A dark excitement came that guilt at once pounced on in a rearing wave to wash away. Yet the names fired: America, Muscovy, Selenetide, Zanzibar, Terra Florida, Canaria, Palme Ferro ...

  His father was his betrayer. Yes yes, that gentle-voiced man, so patient under the Xantippe railings and Arden scorn, had sunk and sunk to one of little account. John Shakespeare, once Bailiff (of all magisterial glories the most high) paid no more his levies for the poor's relief, was alderman still but of low rate for the musters, dared not appear at the Corporation's meetings. He had sold the greater part of his most meagre properties. He had sold his eldest son into kidskin slavery. Tears pricked at the thought of a life spent so, in oh a fair trade, a cleanly trade, but till the end of his days, the end, the end of his days. The cutting of the trank, the slitting of the slim fourchettes, the bitty gussets, the thumb, the slit binding, the patient glover's stitch. A pair of mirror-twin poems. Then the deliveries by a well-spoken boy who, at the doors of the greater houses, must meekly wait on the pleasure of servants, sniffed at by little dogs. And then ...

  That vision! He knocked, he waited. Then the servant said that the steward said that the great lady asked that he might be sent in to her, alone at table in a fair room full of tapestries (Susanna and the lustful elders; the Ark and the dove and a son of Noah looking for landfall; Judith raising her sword to Holofernes). He saw so clearly, he smelt the great fire of spitting pearwood. Dinner was done, the trenchers and silver castle of salt cleared, the steward with his tasselled staff had bowed out backward. Little dogs (his spaniel's eyes encountered many) leaped and fawned about her, their sharp neat teeth clogging in the soft candy they chumbled from her gloved hand. She was veiled, a widow, nothing of her to be seen save the richness of her brocade. She rustled, the fire cracked, the scent of burning pear ravished, overpowered; she set down by her the silver cup of sweet wine (he knew it was sweet, he could taste its sweetness; the cup was embossed of writhing cherubim, the feet of the cup were silver lions' feet) and took from it the rosemary sprig for stirring in the spices. WS could not breathe. She beckoned him with a waving of this sprig, then rose, looking to him to follow. The doors opened as by sorcery. He padded after her through rooms and galleries of rich wood and carving, pictures of heroes on the silken walls. And then came a bedchamber, a bed all gold and damask, smelling of all the Indies, and there were screens all about blazoned with the wanton loves of the gods. He could hear the little dogs, that had followed, scratching and whining to be admitted. He was to turn away, he was to wink a space. Her voice was soft, low, made all his senses shudder. He heard above the beating of his blood the rustling of linen, a gentle panting at the restraining fingers of tapes and laces that yielded all too slowly. WS kept his eyes tight closed. Soon she said:

  'Turn, O my beloved. Oh, turn now.'

  He turned, ready to swoon, unwinking, at the vision. She was naked, gold, glowing, burnished, burning, the sun, all desire of him.

  'I am altogether thine. Do thou take what is thine.'

  Oh, his young heart. Oh, the giddiness, the mad beating. He fell before her, fell at her golden feet. She raised him with strong arms of gold. They fell into swansdown, behind curtains of silver silk. And there was the promise that when the moment came, and soon, too soon, it must come, he would be possessed of all time's secrets and his very mouth grow golden and utter speech for which the very gods waited and would be silent to hear.

  And then the gold had all departed. It was Stratford, Good Friday noon with the wind fresher than before. That boy was at his father's house, the doorway wide, the others already within, shouting their hunger. He must needs pause to still the great fluttering of doves in his breast. He looked up and down the tumbled toppling street, black and white timber awry, cobbles, cats fighting squawwwwwwwk for the fish-heads the Quiney girl next door had thrown out. From his father's house marched on muffled feet the smell of stockfish baked with cloves and cinnamon. Bread, ale, applejohns. The Geneva Bible on his father's lap. Remember that this day did Christ die for thee.

  No! The blistering sun and the watersnakes, the Queen of Sheba all bare on a silken bed. He desired the whole wide world to hug in his arms. Trembling with desire, he stripped off his gloves before en
tering. He cupped his right hand and the southwest wind blew wetly in. What made a frail fistful on Henley Street was elsewhere bellying the sails of ships homeward bound from the Americas, outward bound for isles of gold and spice. The world, the wide world crying and calling like a cat to be let in, scratching like spaniels.

  'Will!'

  'Poor Will! Mad Will!'

  He was bound fast there, the fingers that would caress the world's mystery, probe the world's secrets, muffled home in a mean craft. The voices called him in to dinner.

  II

  HE THOUGHT HE MIGHT GET AWAY THEN, that time of Alice Studley's father and mother coming, terrible in righteousness, to tell John Shakespeare that it was his son, aye, Will, that had filled their daughter with kicking feet and must now, aye, marry her, go to, he is forward for his years, he but a lad scarce breeched, but now must he play the man and do right.

  He had thought that was one way toward the goddess; he had thought he saw golden feet on the dying sun, that former apparition of Good Friday returned on Easter Sunday evening. The spring a warm one. It had been in a ryefield.

  'Nay, never!'

  'There! Aaaaaaah!'

  It was this one ready wench -- black-eyed, the flue on her body black, her hair black and shining as blackbirds that fed on thrown-out bacon fat -- but it might too have been Bess, Joan, Meg, Susan, Kate. What else, he saw already, offered in the lightening evenings of Stratford? Or of Barford, Temple Grafton, Upper Quinton, Ettington (in Ettington, at that ramshackle house of the disbarred muttering lawyer, a ready wench to end all ready wenches), Shottery? WS was growing into a proper young man, ripely pout-mouthed and with a good leg, quiet of speech but flowery withal, a fair seller of fine gloves. Out of the fork of this gentleman, from a tangled auburn bush, thrust and crowed a most importunate Adam. It was not he, it was not WS; it was some outlandish and exterior beast to which he must needs, and all unwillingly, play host. At it, WS watched, as it were, this other one, astonied, hearing him cry with some other's, stranger's, voice, yet aware of the rhythms of his need as starting in iambs and ending in spondees. And then the great vision glowed, its feet set on the fiery ball that made ready to go underground. But the goddess was greater fire, consuming the world as the sun died. He made haste to possess her, through the dark-flued country priestess who lay beneath him. He cried aloud, pumping out his life for her. But this time she laughed, mocked.