Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [46]
Now they were nearing the end of Act Three. Hippolito, who was played by a friend of Charles, had reached the final lines of the soliloquy in which he declares his intention of having as many women as he can, now that he has discovered that the creatures exist. He was doing rather well in the part, combining a certain foppishness of style with the erotic innocence of one who, kept in solitary confinement by Prospero on the Enchanted Isle, had never till now seen a specimen of womankind. Erasmus, who could not remember envying anyone anything before, found himself envying Hippolito’s assurance as he moved across to exit with the final words of the soliloquy:
I now perceive that Prospero was cunning;
For when he frighted me from woman-kind
Those precious beings he for himself designed …
Erasmus knew that he must go directly, before the entry of Prospero and Miranda, and conceal himself in his cell. But he hesitated some moments longer, looking towards the parkland on the other side the lake, at the yellow of the new oak leaves, the stiff white cones of flower on the chestnuts, more vivid still for the lustreless surface of the leaves. Beyond was the gate in the wall, the ground sloping upward, a hawk wheeling high above …
‘Time you were creeping, Kemp.’ One of the several things about Bulstrode that others found irksome was his habit of trying to direct the play and the way he sought to disguise this under a cloak of facetiousness. ‘Into your den,’ he added now with a false smile.
Erasmus gave him a glance of disdainful surprise before moving forward and ducking into the low structure of canvas and lath they had put up some yards back from the water. Sitting a little way inside it, he was invisible to Prospero and Miranda, who had now appeared by the lakeside. He heard Prospero utter the opening words of his speech with the gusty grandiloquence the tutor brought to the role:
Your suit has pity in’t, and has prevailed.
Within this cave he lies, and you may see him …
Erasmus waited for this to come to an end, then counted to twelve, took a breath and began: ‘To be a prisoner where I dearly love is but a double-tie …’
The first lines did not tax him much, as they were addressed to himself and uttered within the solitude of his cave; he even achieved a certain declamatory force in their delivery. They were the truest of all his lines, the most truly expressive of his condition: Ferdinand’s captivity exactly coincided at this point with his own. He was a prisoner of the play itself; these rehearsals, so chafing to the natural haughtiness of his spirit, his subjection to the condescension of Parker and Bulstrode, these were labours he suffered for his jealous love. No one must replace him, no one else get a chance to play Miranda’s lover.
Now her voice came, asking his whereabouts. From within the crumbling security of his cave he called to her: ‘Is it your voice, my love, or do I dream?’
On learning that it was indeed her voice he was obliged to come scrambling out. She was wearing a peach-coloured camlet gown this afternoon, opening over a stiffened petticoat of the same colour. A lace fichu covered her shoulders but allowed the skin to glow through. Her hair was drawn back softly over her ears and tied in a knot behind. ‘O Heavenly creature! Ten times more gentle than your father’s cruel …’ He had now somehow to cover the space between them, take her hand and gaze into her eyes: ‘While I stand gazing thus, and thus have leave to touch your hand, I do not envy freedom …’
It was a scene that left him feeling strangely weak. Of its effect on her he was not sure, but these days he read an expression of trouble in her eyes. There was a momentousness in these exchanges, conducted always before spectators, that was beyond anything in his experience, a curious tension between avowing and dissembling, in which real feelings chased pretended ones and the studied movements about the stage cast all in doubt until the naked exchange of looks