‘It was June,’ I said. ‘I remember.’
‘Well?’
‘Your father’s death took place before the play of Hamlet ever appeared on the Globe stage. You’re not suggesting that our author got the idea for his play from what happened to your father?’
‘Of course not,’ said William Eliot. ‘I’d never accuse any playwright of making up ideas or borrowing from reality. They’d be justifiably insulted. Anyway, every educated person knows that there’s an older version of your author’s Hamlet, some crude stuff that’s been around for years. And that rough version probably had an even rougher version preceding it. And one before that, and so on.’
‘So it’s not a case of nature holding up the mirror to art, as you wittily put it,’ I persisted. ‘Your father’s death occurred before the play was first performed. But it’s not the other way round either. The play was not composed so far in advance of your father’s death as to indicate that the author might have “borrowed” from reality, even assuming that he’d be prepared to do anything so indelicate. The two things, the play writing and the death, must have been occurring more or less simultaneously. Why, he must have been at work on Hamlet in April or even during May itself if it was first staged in June.’
‘He writes fast.’
‘No more than average,’ I said, pretending to a knowledge of our author’s compositional habits. But what I said applied to any playwright worth his salt. We had no patience with any author who laboured for weeks and then produced a few paltry scenes.
‘So there’s no connection between the events of the play and my father’s death, you think,’ said William.
‘Just coincidence,’ I said with a confidence that I didn’t feel.
‘You’re probably right,’ he said. Then after a pause, ‘You remember that I had a proposition to put to you?’
‘Yes.’
He broke off to order another drink for each of us, and, when our hands were full and our mouths refreshed once more, said, ‘You’ve nowhere to lodge presently?’
‘You know already of the difference of opinion with my landlady, apparently.’
‘I can offer you quarters in my house, that is in my mother’s and stepfather’s house. It’s on the other side of river, not so convenient for the Globe perhaps, but in a rather better neighbourhood.’
‘I like it here,’ I said. ‘This is the players’ district.’
And it was true. Southwark was near to being lawless territory, outside the writ of the City authorities. Our one respectable building was the Bishop of Winchester’s Palace. Otherwise we were all stews, playhouses and thieves’ kitchens, together with an array of prisons from the Clink to the Marshalsea — the ultimate destination for many of our folk. Southwark residents tended towards the unrespectable: coney-catchers and bully boys, whores and veterans. . and yet somehow I, the country parson’s son, felt in my element down here in a way that I hadn’t when I lodged north of the river.
‘I didn’t mean permanent quarters,’ said William. ‘I can see that there are advantages to living near your workplace. Though you’re only temporarily with the Chamberlain’s Men, I understand. There’s a man who is off visiting his dying mother, is there not?’
Who had he been talking to?
‘I’m not interested in your offer,’ I said. ‘I prefer to find my own accommodation.’
‘No offence, Master Revill. I have an ulterior motive in asking you to take a room in my house. I’m not in the business of looking after players who have been thrown out of their lodgings for covering their landladies with piss.’
A smile took the offence out of his words. But I was busy wondering if he knew Nell.
‘Master Eliot, get to the point.’
‘I would like you to help me find the murderer of my father.’
I began to think that my new acquaintance shared more than clothing and a fashionable melancholy with that figure who had swept the London stage, the lord Hamlet. Master William Eliot, like the Prince, had a trace of madness in him.
‘I thought there was nothing suspicious in his death.’
‘Outwardly, no.’
‘When you break it down into a series of events there is nothing particularly remarkable about it. Isn’t that what you said — or something like it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then?’
‘Master Revill, when you see a play you watch as one scene succeeds another, and you will perhaps not at first understand how the scenes are linked, or that the play with all its disparate parts is nevertheless a whole — sometimes a ragged, clumsy whole — but still something complete unto itself. Whether the play is well-made or ill-made there is connection, there is a plan, a plot.’
‘You should not confuse a play with real life. If there is a plot down here in this world, it is not likely to be discerned by us poor mortals,’ I said, and then realised I was echoing the kind of thing my father would have uttered on Sunday (and the rest of the week).
‘Surely you can see,’ said William, ‘that someone has already created that confusion? My father’s death in some of its details, my mother’s remarriage to my uncle and so on — all of this has been revealed on the stage not a few hundred yards from where we are sitting. You say coincidence, but I say coincidence is simply a word for what we don’t yet understand. And if there is a plot behind Master Shakespeare’s work, which there is certainly is, then why should there not be a plot behind what has happened to the Eliot family?’
I made no answer. There was some flaw in his argument but I was unable to identify it.
‘So what am I supposed to do?’
‘Accept my offer of lodgings. You would be received into the house as a friend who has done the Eliot family a favour and who is in need of accommodation for the time being. I can speak for my mother and I believe I can speak for my uncle in this respect. You will of course need to cross the river daily for your work at the Globe. But while you are in my mother’s house, watch and listen.’
‘Watch, listen? For what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Goodbye, Master Eliot. This is chasing shadows.’
I made to rise, but half-heartedly.
‘Please wait.’
He held me gently but firmly by the upper arm until I resumed my place beside him on the bench.
‘If I were not being honest with you, I would claim to have seen something in those shadows. But I cannot say, I cannot see, if there is anything there or not. And that is tormenting me.’
He spoke evenly, but the grip of his hand on my arm and the rigid set of his mouth showed that he was in earnest.
‘You are casting me as Horatio,’ I said.
‘Hamlet’s friend.’ He laughed, but without much mirth. ‘Then you accept?’
‘I don’t know. You must say what I am to look for.’
‘Everything and nothing. I am an interested spectator, a biased one. I need a neutral pair of eyes to see whether there really is anything out of place.’
‘Out of place? How will I recognise what’s out of place in your house, for God’s sake?’
‘You will know what you are looking for when you find it.’
‘Very cryptic, Master Eliot.’
‘William.’
‘It is still cryptic, whatever you prefer to be called. But do your clever words actually mean anything?’
‘That is the very question I would ask about my father’s death. What does it signify?’
‘And why me?’
‘Because you showed quickness and dexterity when you accused the steward of theft this afternoon. More important, you were right to act as you did. Because you are a player, and have a sense of the divide between what men say and what they are. And because you know the play.’
‘That play?’
‘Yes, the play about a father’s death and a mother’s remarriage. Don’t worry that I’m confusing what really happened with what is presented daily on the playhouse boards. But the connection is a. . pregnant one.’
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘But suppose there is nothing for me to find or suppose that I am a less percipient spectator than you give me credit for? You must understand that nothing may come of this pregnancy.’