Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [21]
‘After all,’ she said, ‘it is about Miranda, is it not?’
‘I cannot for the life of me see what you mean.’ Bulstrode had puffed himself up in an intimidating manner. ‘I cannot tell what you are talking about, Miss Wolpert. The speech is about Caliban, not Miranda.’
‘Miss Wolpert is not referring to the speech,’ Erasmus said with a perceptiveness sharpened by his desire to acquire merit in Sarah’s eyes. ‘She is talking about the laughter.’
This time he was rewarded with a smile before she transferred her gaze back to confront the indignant wizard. Her next words, however, made clear how little she really needed help. ‘Of course I am,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t anything to do with Prospero, so why should he be so vexed? I mean, it isn’t Prospero that …’ Sarah paused and blushed, then went on with increased energy: ‘It isn’t him that Caliban tried to ravish.’ She looked from face to face with a sudden, surprising openness of regard. ‘He was laughing about his attempt on me,’ she said. ‘Or have I not properly understood the matter?’
There was a short silence among the rest of the company, perhaps at this notion of ravishment, perhaps at her forthrightness, though they knew by now what she was capable of: had she not marched up to Erasmus Kemp and enlisted him on the spot? And then, she had a way of holding herself, an unusual habit of emphasis: as she drew to the climax of what she was saying, her voice would quicken, she would raise her head and lower her lashes and a delicate shudder, slight but perceptible, would pass over her like a throb of delivery or release. It was this the men waited for, as Erasmus had jealously noted. They attended on it now, Caliban, Hippolito, Alonzo, the three mariners. Only Prospero, armoured in egotism, was immune. ‘It is the father that should speak for the child,’ he said. ‘She is obedient, as befits a young girl. Besides, she is too well brought up to burst into the conversation in that manner.’
‘I verily believe,’ Erasmus said coldly, ‘that if you could contrive it, Prospero’s would be the only speaking part in the play.’
Bulstrode swelled even redder. ‘That remark is totally unwarranted. Miranda can have the speech for all I care. She can have all the others too. The father can sit dumb while the child explains how she has contrived the shipwreck.’ And with this he stalked some paces off and presented an offended back.
Set on her rights, however, Sarah was relentless. ‘As for obedient,’ she said in her high, clear voice, ‘she contests with her father to prevent him ill-using Ferdinand.’
‘Yes,’ Erasmus said, with a sense of brilliant improvisation, ‘and at the beginning of Act Four she goes against his orders when she visits Ferdinand in his confinement.’ He knew the play in every detail, having sat up half his nights studying it in the hope of improving his performance.
‘So she does.’ On Sarah’s face there was the glowing, slightly inward look of one who has just had the better of an argument. And in fact no one offered further objections; Prospero allowed himself to be cajoled; the rehearsal was resumed and not much later Erasmus found himself once again regarding Miranda’s face from close range. He had heard Prospero promising Ariel his freedom and on this cue had stepped forward, altogether too briskly, like a soldier, shoulders braced for the encounter, only to find himself at once marooned in the limpid depths of her eyes.
‘Fair excellence,’ he said in a voice not altogether under his command, ‘if as your form declares, you are divine, be pleased to instruct me how you will be worshipped …’ He glanced beyond her for some desperate seconds. He knew the view well by now: across the lake, continuing parkland, then a low stone wall with a gate in it, beyond this the upward slopes of the pasture, dotted with yellow clumps of broom and hawthorn bushes in their first delicate suffusion of flower. All the dreams of escape he had ever had