Lancewood gave a guttural sigh. "Have a heart, she was joking."
"Not this one," said Smith firmly. "The one who told her might have been, but not this one."
"Well then somebody was or, or might have been. You really do—"
"Damon, it's nothing in 'them,' it's forced on them. The men would probably be just as bad if you could find a way of making them think of themselves as men all the time, if such a way were conceivable." Smith caught sight of Jake. "I say, this must be rather—"
"Go on, I want to hear."
"Well—the bright ones can't help seeing that, right, Sapho...."
"Who was untypical?" said Lancewood.
"And who's mostly folk-lore anyway. Then you really come to, as far as they're concerned, the Matchless Orinda. Sorry, Katherine Philips, born in the same year as Dryden, died young, not as young as Shelley though, for instance, anyway she's quite good. Of course she is. What would you? Having taken the precaution of not being born with the digits one nine in front of her decade, but that's a..... Anyway, after her, let's stick to poetry for the moment, you get the Countess of Winchilsea, even more of a household name, and then you sit around for a couple of centuries waiting for Christina Rossetti, who's quite good, and that's that. If no female had ever emerged they'd have been able to put it down to male oppression but Katherine spoiled all that. Back in the middle of the seventeenth century she showed it was 'possible'. As I say, it works down from the top, so that the ones who don't know what the seventeenth century was feel it as much as the others, well, insofar as they can, hence collective inferiority feelings, hence collective aggression. Admittedly with the novel it's not quite such a—"
"All this 'they' talk." Lancewood gestured with the decanter at Jake, who was all right as he was. then poured sherry for Smith and himself. "The ones and the others. From the way you go on, most people would say you were the one with the thing about women."
"Let's just nail that one right away. My relations with them, with women that is, have been and are normal to an unparalleled, even preternatural degree. Three-point-seven premarital affairs, the precise average, married at twenty-five-point-whatever-it-is, lived happily ever after, or since. Perhaps that's not so normaclass="underline"
"It's probably a bit early to tell," said Jake. "What does your wife think about poetry?"
"She's a biologist," said Smith. He seemed puzzled at the question.
"Curious you should mention centuries," said Lancewood. "One of 'them', which you must admit sounds like something quite different, brought me a new interpretation of 'Hamlet' yesterday. Now this, I want you to understand, is a thoroughly sweet, good-natured, charming little girl, no aggression in the wide world. As to brightness, well you shall hear. Hamlet was a woman." He gave them both his blank look.
Smith gave a great groan but said nothing.
"Even I know that's not very new," said Jake. "Didn't Sarah Bernhardt play him, or her?"
"Indeed she did, and I'd said as much before I realised that of course my little girl would never have heard of her. Quite senseless to expect it. Cruel in a way. Well what could I do, great actress of the nineteenth century, quite natural she should want to play one of the greatest parts, different approach in those days, all that, but I indent have bothered because I'd lost her, as she would have expressed herself, at the nineteenth century. Now she'd clearly heard of it, she even knew it was something to do with a tract of time but all the same there was more to it than that, just as the Age of Johnson or the Nineties, say, don't refer merely to a pair of dates. To her it was, the nineteenth century I mean was, not exactly when old people were young because there can be no such period, but awful and squalid and creepy, with all sorts of things going on—she could easily have come across figures like Dracula and Frankenstein and Jack the Ripper and Dr Arnold and realised they were nineteenth century. Well, the look she gave me, you should have seen it." Lancewood half turned his face away, narrowed his eyes and peered out of their corners. "Suspicion and morbid curiosity and a hint of distaste."
"If you're doing it properly it was more like ungovernable lust," said Smith to Jake's agreement.
"In that case I'm not. She was wondering what I used to get up to with Sarah Bernhardt, whom I must have known at least or why bring her up? Actually quite funny it should have been the great Sarah, in view of her reputed..... I think if one actually challenged my little girl up to the hilt, as it were, she'd say that the years beginning with nineteen were in the nineteenth century up to about 1950, after which it became the twentieth. That would cover the years of birth of even her most senior contemporaries. One understands very well. All these references to people being dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century when it's agreed that that's the number of the century we're in, it must be most frightfully confusing. One does sympathise.
"Well. Her .... 'her' case was roughly that since Hamlet is far too nice and intelligent to be a man, he must be a woman because there's nothing else for him to be. I was ready to come back smartly with what about the way he treats Ophelia, male chauvinism if there ever was such a thing, but she'd thought of that—that was how all the men went on in those days, still do really, and it would have been suspicious if she, Hamlet, had behaved differently. What about old Hamlet and Gertrude?—you'd have expected them to notice. Old Hamlet had noticed, but he needed an heir, so he got Polonius to rig things, which gave Polonius the leverage he needed to be kept on at court when all he was fit for was talking balls. I liked that, quite as good as any other explanation I've come across if you think that's what he did talk. Gertrude hadn't noticed because women weren't allowed to bring up their own children then, any more than they are now really. I must say I thought that part was a little weak. Horatio guessed, naturally, but he couldn't say anything. And what did I suppose it was that had driven Ophelia mad? Obviously a sexual shock, eh?
"I shouldn't be going on like this because it'll only feed your prejudices, but, well, I said what about the whole of the play, there's nothing in it that suggests that things are any different from what they seem. She didn't know about that, she said; 'she thought' Hamlet was a woman."
"I hope you told her she needed weightier authority than that," said Smith. "A Radio 1 disc-jockey thinks Hamlet was a woman. An unemployed school-leaver in Wapping thinks Hamlet was a woman. A psychiatric social worker—"
"That's just sneering, my boy. What she also 'thought', in a different sense, was that Hamlet was a woman in some other .... realer sphere than the play or Shakespeare's sources or anything that might historically have taken place at Elsinore or any other actual spot. Some third domain beyond fiction and fact. That's the terrifying thing."
At the end of a short silence Smith said, "I used to get that from one of my three-point-seven as it might be after films. How did they get on when they started having kids in that place? Did she come back to him in the end? Not might, assuming for fun and for the moment that it's life we're talking about. No—did."
"Not too dull for you I hope, Jake?"