It took Erasmus an hour to choose his clothes for the visit. He tried on various suits, but all of them were lacking in one way or another. Finally he decided on the claret-coloured satin suit with the white, corded-silk waistcoat to go with it, a sumptuous garment this, embroidered all over with small flowers in a darker shade. His hair was dark and naturally lustrous; he had taken recently to wearing it in a bang across his forehead and tied behind with ribbon. Worn thus, it softened his looks, reduced the impression of fanaticism. In the smoothness of his face the eyes were extraordinary: long, narrow, very dark, with a gaze of singular intensity. This narrowness of regard, and the high cheekbones, gave him an appearance of aiming his eyes at people, which his father had too.
The day was bright, the air still slightly engrained with the mist of earlier. Going was slow at first: the lanes above the river were miry and fetid and his mare was soon splashed to her knees. There were no pavements anywhere in the town, he had trouble keeping clear of pedestrians and had frequently to rein in for street-vendors with handcarts and for the little broad-backed ponies labouring up from the waterfront, laden below the belly with goods for next day’s market.
His main concern was to prevent any besmirching of his person above the riding boots; for larger thoughts there was no space in his mind. The visit lay on him now like a heavy sentence, one which there was no evading – he was serving it already as he made his way through the bemusing sunlight amidst sewage smells from the open drains, impatient snortings from his horse, the ring of clogs on the plank walks, quarrelling shouts over right of way.
Coming out of Castle Street he heard the hoarse, glottal whoops of a water-seller and the clatter of his pails, and found his way blocked by the huge barrel mounted on its cart, the skinny horse standing listless while the man slopped out the water into waiting buckets. Edging by between cart and wall, Erasmus cursed the man and his parents and his buckets and barrel. The man grinned and waved his hat in an attempt to make the mare shy up, and one of the waiting women screeched at him, whether joke or abuse he could not tell.
Once north of Pool Lane and on the outskirts of the town, both he and the horse felt easier. The Wolpert house was in open country, built on a wooded rise, its stone gables visible from a good distance, pinnacles of desire to Erasmus as he saw them now, sunlit, rising clear of the trees. As he followed the long curve of the carriageway he knew in some part of his being that these were the last moments of his true selfhood: he was about to reveal a need, and therefore an insufficiency. But what hurt him in this thought also spurred him on. His will was fixed on the girl. In obsessive natures the prospect of pain too becomes an incentive, just as fear of wounds inflames the warrior. In this gentle, windless May weather, with the new green along the beech avenue, songs of warblers falling with their strangely secretive trickle through the foliage, Erasmus found himself gritting his teeth with the violence of his intention.
The ancient footman Andrew came in answer to his ring and stood peering, dishevelled as usual, wigless, his scant remaining hair standing in tufts above his bloodless ears. Erasmus asked for Charles in a voice that nerves had made sharper.
‘They’m at their reharsings,’ the old man said in mumbling tones, blinking around him as if affrighted by the daylight.
‘I wish you’d learn to speak up,’ Erasmus said. He had always thought it an unaccountable indulgence on old Wolpert’s part to keep such a witless fellow in service. ‘Did you say horses? Are they from home?’ He was divided between disappointment and relief.
‘They’m at their speeches. Practisin’. Reharsing.’ There was a touch of reproof here at Erasmus’s misprision. He pointed an arthritic finger towards a coppice of mixed oak and elm some three hundred yards off across the lawns that lay below the house. Through the trees Erasmus saw gleams of water. There was a small lake down there, he remembered.
‘Do you mean to say they are rehearsing a play down there? Who? Miss Sarah too?’
‘Miss Sarah an’ a young leddy from Stanton an’ Master Charles an’ Master Robert an’ a clargyman name of the Reverend Mister Parker an’ the schoolmaster from –’
‘Very well, you need not make a catalogue of it.’ He looked in amazement towards the coppice, where the trees grew thickly together. The yellow of the new oak leaves and the pale green of the elms swooned together in the sunlight to make a delicate haze, fiery round the edges, with a fierce, pure line where foliage touched sky. Abode of angels. Somewhere within this pure empyrean Sarah Wolpert was rehearsing a play. ‘I’ll go down to them,’ he said after a moment, and nothing could have marked his confusion more than this confiding his intention to a servant.
‘The clargyman is performin’ as a savvidge.’ Andrew’s pale mouth drew down. ‘There is some as don’t think it befittin’.’
‘I don’t know what you are talkling about,’ Erasmus replied briskly. He had made a sort of recovery. ‘See to my horse, will you? Or get someone to do it.’
He began to make his way towards the coppice, a certain offendedness growing in him as he did so, a sense of having been excluded. Though so far locked within his breast, his love, he illogically felt, gave him rights.
When he reached the trees he did not know which way to go; Andrew’s clutch at the landscape had given him no very precise idea. The lake was no longer visible. After a moment’s hesitation he decided to go straight forward. He startled a blackbird, which flew off with a low, reproachful fluting. The wood was more extensive than it had looked from the house and it had clearly been neglected of late years; the oaks had bushed out at ground level and there was a thick undergrowth of saplings and bramble and straggling clumps of rhododendron. Erasmus was obliged to make detours. He should not have come through the wood, he realized now, but skirted round it. Glancing up, he had a swift impression of scarlet – the sun was piercing through the red casing of the elm leaf buds. He could hear nothing. He had no idea in which direction the lake lay. He felt uncomfortably hot inside his satin suit. It came to him that he was – not seriously of course but for the moment indubitably, and quite absurdly – lost.
He moved forward again. After some moments he thought he heard voices and he turned in the direction of the sound. The trees were thinning out. He caught a glimpse of water. Ahead of him and to his right a man’s voice was raised, sonorous and loud.
Beware all fruit but what the birds have pecked,
The shadows of the trees are poisonous too;
A secret venom slides from every branch.
My conscience doth distract me, O my son!
Why do I speak of eating or repose,
Before I know thy fortune?
Erasmus had come to an involuntary halt. There was a brief pause, then another voice, which he thought he recognized as that of Charles Wolpert, said, ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, the second part of that speech is supposed to be delivered aside. The others are not supposed to hear it, you know. It is marked “aside” on your copy. The part beginning, “My conscience doth distract me”.’
Some words followed too low for him to catch. Then the first voice came again: ‘But they are bound to hear it if the audience is to hear it.’
‘There are theatrical conventions, Rivers.’ A different voice this, higher-pitched, slightly nasal. ‘What Wolpert is getting at is that you are delivering the whole speech in the same tone and at the same pace. You could make a pause by advancing to the foot of the stage and addressing the audience directly.’
‘Thank you, Parker, thank you.’
There was very little gratitude in the tone of this. Erasmus stood transfixed. He would seem ridiculous, blundering out of the wood into the open, into full view. Other voices came now, lower, blending together so that he could make nothing out. These fell away to silence and a moment later, without warning, he heard a girl’s voice, plaintive and sweet, raised in song:
And then take hands.
Curtseyed when you have and kissed,
The wild waves whist …
Erasmus gave one wild glance upwards towards the scarlet blaze of the elm leaves, then one down as if to see where his feet had led him. The new curls of the bracken were red too, he noticed in this moment of vivid particularity, the folded serrations of the fronds rust-red in colour. For a moment he felt on the verge of some momentous discovery. Then the voices joined together, male and female, in a ragged, barking chorus, ‘Hark-hark! Bow-wow!’ It was like some savage incantation and Erasmus, as if summoned by it, moved forward through the last of the trees out into the open, where he came again to a halt, checked by the sudden enlargement, the openness of the sky, the gleaming oval of the lake and the wide view beyond it.
The lake was reedy at the edges and rimmed with pale artificial shores of sand. A rowboat lay tethered on the far side. On the shore to his right, between the water and the trees, a structure to represent a cavern had been made with branches and canvas. Before this, on the sand, a group of people stood close together. One of them was Sarah. She was in a blue dress and a broad-brimmed sunhat tied below the chin. No one had seen him yet. Sarah said, in a clear, excited voice, ‘I’ll read Ferdinand, if you like.’ She took a pace forward, holding up her book:
Where should this music be? i’ th’air or th’earth?
It sounds no more …
As she glanced round to catch the dying echoes, her gaze fell upon Erasmus, who was still standing motionless at the edge of the trees. ‘Heavens,’ she said. ‘It is Erasmus Kemp. Where did you come from?’
‘I came to see Charles.’ Erasmus shouted the lie across the water. His heart was beating heavily. He made a gesture towards the trees.
‘Pat he comes, right on cue.’ This from a portly, loud-voiced fellow who alone among them had made an attempt to dress for the part: he wore a red calico morning-gown and had a sort of wizard’s turban of the same colour on his head. The schoolmaster, Erasmus thought, seeking with immediate jealousy to identify all around her. The curate, Parker, was easy enough to pick out – he had retained his clerical collar.
Sarah quitted the group and came round the lakeside towards him, over the sand, lifting the skirts of her dress. Watching her, not moving, he was briefly aware again of the setting, the water, yellow of broom on the rising ground beyond and scattered sheep grazing; and the strangeness of it came to him: the actors had become spectators, they were all watching him and Sarah. Then his vision narrowed to the young woman approaching him and he felt a pang at the beauty of her present slight disablement, the way the long dress and the soft sand impeded her.
‘Oh, Erasmus,’ she exclaimed, while still some yards off. ‘I am so glad you thought to visit.’ Excitement had dispelled constraint, she was regarding him boldly. ‘Just when we needed someone,’ she said, with a smiling air of wonder, ‘you appeared like a spirit.’
Erasmus cleared his throat. ‘Well, I am mortal,’ he said, and she may have seen something in his eyes to corroborate this, for her look became cooler.
‘Jonathan Rigby fell off his horse and he has broke a leg,’ she said.
‘I am sorry to hear that.’ He was bewildered. This Jonathan Rigby was someone he knew only slightly. ‘I hope ’twas not a bad break.’
‘No, it isn’t that. You see, we are doing a play called The Enchanted Island and he was our Ferdinand, but he can’t do it now. You could take his place if you liked.’ She looked him in the eye for a moment and said in lower tones, ‘If you liked to please me, that is.’