Act 1, Scene 1
The parlour of JOHN Kenyon’s home, Regent’s Park, 1845. ROBERT enters in evening dress, gloves, hat and tails, and flings himself dejectedly upon the empty chaise. JOHN enters after him, similarly if not more elegantly attired. He softly closes the door behind him, taking off his gloves and cape as he watches ROBERT.
JOHN:
(finally) Robert. You must quit the theatre.
ROBERT:
Humph.
JOHN:
(pouring drinks) All the great poets have tried writing plays and failed. You’re in the company of your simpering Shelley and your overblown Byron just for trying.
ROBERT:
Mmph.
JOHN hands ROBERT his drink. ROBERT downs it.
JOHN:
Theatre whittles your words to a pencil stub. Leave the stage to the grand and empty gestures of the actors.
ROBERT:
(jumps up) Actors?—those saw-armed sycophants!—mangling my words and wilfully misunderstanding the most comprehensive phrase— They supposed ‘impeachment’ to mean ‘poaching’!
JOHN:
Impeachment is not a word for the stage, I think.
ROBERT:
It is: if the dramatist uses it.
(pacing) McReady has used me vilely. He’s closing my play tomorrow.
JOHN:
Tomorrow? You only opened last night—
ROBERT:
(waving a newspaper, he quotes a review) “A Blot In the ’Scutcheon (flings the paper) is a blight on the stage.”
JOHN:
Robert, to be fair, you gave him a vile play to put up—
ROBERT:
(sits, anguished) John. Was it so bad as that?
JOHN:
Well. All art is offensive. That is how we know it’s art.
(gently) Robert. You’ve written six plays in as many years, none of them reaching beyond the second row. Come back to poetry. Sordello was a beginning.
ROBERT:
If that was a beginning, behold, the end is nigh: thirty-three, dissipated and dissolved in drink. (pours himself another drink and downs it)
JOHN:
What, then, would you be me, eternal matron of the arts? Robert, you have a voice! Rough-hewn and eager, yes, tripping over your own tongue but only because you haven’t found your stride. Develop it, use it, go to Italy again if you must, but trust your scope to give you space, knowing… you will always be the boy, pulling frogs and spiders out of your poetical pockets.
ROBERT:
Fine behaviour for one who is over the hill.
JOHN:
That’s only for the likes of me, already cresting it, to say.
ROBERT:
No, you, John, always on the horizon, a constant friend.
JOHN:
(pouring ROBERT another drink) Come, let’s drink to a promising poet—
ROBERT:
‘Promising’! One day the light will shine out of Robert Browning’s—
He downs his drink, goes to the casement windows and opens them.
I vowed, like Shelley, that poetry would command the age. I wrote his manifesto on my heart: there is none to reach the hour but the poet, and none to reach the poet but the age…
Instead I’m the poet that never was, the legs of Ozymandias, standing incomplete, where I never stood at all; no imprint, no body of work.
JOHN:
Robert—
ROBERT:
I long to go to the edge of the known world, to come face to face with some vast, howling unknown—with some siren who’ll unstop my ears and quell the certain knowledge that my words… are writ on water.
JOHN:
…How can you write if you can’t love your own words?
ROBERT:
What’s there to love in the outpouring of an empty soul—I can no more speak to love than I can to art with a heart that has nothing to say. Be the friend you are and face it, John. I’m forgotten.
JOHN:
(quotes from a book of poetry) “From Browning, some ‘Pomegranate,’ which, if cut deeply down the middle, shows a heart within, blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.”
ROBERT:
…Pomegranate.
JOHN:
Yours, to be specific. Based on the poem in your collection—
ROBERT:
Yes yes, I know my work, but, a poem referring to me?
JOHN:
(continues the quote) “Poets ever fail in reading their own verses to their worth—”
ROBERT:
Let me see.
JOHN:
You, the dead poet? You have no interest in an exciting new voice.
(quotes) “For the echo in you breaks upon the words which you are speaking—”
ROBERT:
Who’s writing this?—
JOHN:
“And the chariot wheels jar in the gate through which you drive them forth.”
ROBERT:
(snatches at the book) Anonymous.
JOHN:
Here’s a poet who writes about you, and the world turns its head to listen.
ROBERT:
Yes, but who, who is it? (grabs the book) Elizabeth Barrett.
ELIZABETH, now thirty-nine, appears on the chaise ROBERT has just vacated. She is in her room on the third floor at 50 Wimpole Street, a different space from ROBERT and JOHN. ELIZABETH draws herself out upon the chaise as if born to it; it is her home and lair, as much a part of her anatomy as it is a part of the room.
Elizabeth… Barrett?
JOHN:
The Seraphim? Her first publication in 1838?
ROBERT:
Isn’t she the cripple, with the twisted spine and shrivelled legs?
ROBERT tosses the book. ELIZABETH picks it up.
JOHN:
She’s not deformed at all, Robert, she’s a lovely little wren-like thing, perched upon her sofa. She’s a poet whose voice is about to be heard; a poet in praise of you.
ELIZABETH tosses the book, sighs. ROBERT picks it up.
ROBERT:
“From Browning, some ‘Pomegranate’”… When did she write this?
JOHN:
On reading your words, I imagine, and admiring every one.
ROBERT:
Every word? You think?
JOHN:
Would she waste hers on you if she didn’t think yours were any good?
ROBERT:
(opens the book) “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.”
JOHN:
From her latest collection, just published. (points) Bertram, the heroine’s lover, recites her the poems of Browning. (ROBERT reads.) The critics will lap it up.
ELIZABETH:
“When we were grown tired of books, the silence round us flinging a slow arm of sweet compression…”
ROBERT:
John, this is good, you think it good?
JOHN:
I know it to be good.
ROBERT:
“Books are men of higher stature, and the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.”
ELIZABETH:
(calls) Wilson!
JOHN:
(leaning over ROBERT’s shoulder and reading the frontispiece) “Her first volume, also anonymously published, attracted considerable praise.”
ELIZABETH:
(strident) Wilson!
JOHN:
“For her melodious poetic voice.”
ELIZABETH:
(bellows) Wilson!!
ROBERT:
(quotes) “A crown, to crown Love’s silence, silent Love, that sits alone.”
ROBERT sits, engrossed in the book, as JOHN sips his wine and WILSON enters 50 Wimpole Street, carrying a tray and the many things essential to ELIZABETH’s care: her writing implements, a rug, dinner.
ELIZABETH:
Where have you been? My heart, my cough, the weather, every little ache so fierce I— Take that away, I can’t possibly think of dinner.
WILSON:
M’um. (puts dinner aside, pours ink, sharpens nibs, readies pens and papers)
ELIZABETH:
It’s the letdown after the liftoff, I’m sure. All very natural when one is to be jettisoned to fame as I shall be, a blaze across the night sky. The mere effort of illumination is exhausting enough— Wilson, Wilson, draw the drapes, I want my rug, my sleep, so please cease to sharpen my nibs.
WILSON:
M’um. (continues with the nibs)
ELIZABETH:
(throws the rug off) I can’t dream of work until the reviews come in.
ROBERT puts the book down. ELIZABETH picks it up.
Surely they’ll like this part…
ROBERT:
(quotes from memory) “I am warden of the song birds, which are cages to their mind…”
ELIZABETH tosses the book. ROBERT picks it up again, reads.
ELIZABETH:
I don’t care a wit for critics, praise or damnation, I’m ready for their slashing attacks to cut to the quick of who I am. (She begins to write.) I’d enter into the dissection myself only: tch, these nibs are blotting.
WILSON:
M’um. (wipes the nib)
ELIZABETH:
And you’ve forgotten to fill the ink well again.
WILSON:
M’um. (fills it)
ELIZABETH:
When you know my nerves lie beyond laceration—one more drop drop drop drop—that’s too much!
WILSON:
M’um.
ELIZABETH:
Really you exhaust me.
WILSON:
M’um.
ELIZABETH:
That’s all for tonight.
WILSON:
M’um.
ELIZABETH:
Unless I call you later.
WILSON:
M’um.
ELIZABETH:
Which I may do.
WILSON:
M’um.
ELIZABETH:
I’m about to embark on a brand new piece. I’ve got to set out the structure of the stanza, find an ample spondee, and you know as well as I, the last quatrain will elude me.
WILSON:
M’um.
ELIZABETH:
Well don’t just stand there, I’m out of blotting paper because of these fractious nibs. Go, go and cut me some more.
WILSON goes, ELIZABETH writes, ROBERT reads.
ROBERT:
“A love content with writing his own name on desert sands.”
He snaps the book shut.
John, I must meet this woman.
JOHN:
Impossible, Robert, she’s a recluse, she sees no one.
ROBERT:
I’ll write to her.
JOHN:
One really good poem from you might even cause her to write about you again.
WILSON returns with the blotting papers, a tray of medicine and a glass.
ROBERT:
You think so?
JOHN:
I should think so, if you wrote poems for her to read.
ROBERT:
Her voice is already in my pen.
JOHN:
Pomegranates, Mr. Hades, that’s what we need, the food of the underworld. Feed Persephone your words.
ROBERT takes up his hat and goes. Fade on JOHN as the room darkens. ELIZABETH goes to the casement window. Footsteps approach in the street below. Then fade.
ELIZABETH:
(lets go of the drape, returns to the blotting papers) What’s to be done, with all this time and ink on my hands, but blot out the world with poems… Wilson.
It’s time to watch the waves progress toward a sea that has no shore
Time dispensable as drops
of oceans drowned for one drop more.
WILSON titrates a dose of laudanum in a glass of brandy and hands it to ELIZABETH. ELIZABETH drinks.
Kaleidoscopes of colour are teardrops to the rain
an infinity of countless perfections
as the world made miniature is magnified again
and love, all love, awaits the stony face of time
to carve out change.
WILSON dims the lights till only one remains on ELIZABETH writing. WILSON settles herself in a nearby chair. Scene shift. The next morning, JOHN at breakfast. ROBERT comes and slams several slim volumes of poetry and clippings of reviews on the table.
ROBERT:
John: I’ve tracked down all her collections—her published papers—her reviews— John (opens a volume), John listen to this: “The Seraphim.” Do you know what those are?—blood-red angels of desire—I looked it up. Kenyon: I’ll bet she writes in red ink— No: the ink turns red when it surrenders to her words.
JOHN:
As, I hope, does yours. You wrote last night?
ROBERT:
I wrote the night away.
JOHN:
Excellent. How many poems in all?
ROBERT:
It’s a letter: for her eyes only.
JOHN:
A letter? You were supposed to write poetry—
ROBERT:
She writes lullabies so exquisite they sing themselves to sleep; John, I’m in love.
JOHN:
Robert. You’ve never met her.
ROBERT:
Who needs uncharted waters when the world lies open before me in the depths of those blue, blue eyes?
JOHN:
Brown.
ROBERT:
Eh?
JOHN:
Her eyes, they’re brown.
ROBERT:
Brown. And rich as a velvet dark caress that slides through my fingers and can’t be caught. But I shall have her because: she’s mine.
JOHN:
This is ludicrous.
JOHN savagely rings his little silver servant’s bell and the light widens on ELIZABETH, still writing, WILSON snoring in the chair. WILSON wakes and readies ELIZABETH.
Preposterous. You’ll end up nothing more than Cupid’s dinner.
ROBERT:
Can’t you just see her, Kenyon: a woman of that Amazon class who vows her deeds in action, her fight in song.
JOHN:
You’ve hardly described the bird-like Ba.
ROBERT:
Ba?
JOHN:
Ba, it’s, short for baby, the, the family poet from the cradle, she—
ROBERT:
Ba.
JOHN:
She’s the eldest, but she’s the baby too, because most in need of—
ROBERT:
Ba.
JOHN:
Just, need, I suppose—
ROBERT:
Ba.
JOHN:
Robert, you sound like a sheep.
ROBERT:
The household calls her Ba? Then I say Ba too.
JOHN:
She never leaves that household, she never goes out.
ROBERT:
She lives a life of the mind, and I intend to share it.
JOHN:
You can’t, Robert, she, she’s delicate, possibly consumptive
—with weakened lungs—
ROBERT:
Those are just stories that get bandied about.
JOHN:
This nightingale prefers the cage, she sings her most exquisite in it, trust me.
ROBERT:
I’ll free her, she’ll etherize—
JOHN:
Oh, that, certainly.
ROBERT:
And become her art, and one with me.
JOHN:
Robert, I didn’t intend you to be poetry, I want you to write it!
ROBERT:
I can’t write it till I know it—where’s the ink? I feel another letter coming on.
ROBERT writes. WILSON opens the drapes and floods the room with light.
ELIZABETH:
Such a dream I had, two nightingales, perched upon an age of inspiration. And you, Wilson, were a cat, who brushed her tail against my face…
WILSON arranges her chaise for sleep.
Wake me when the post comes in.
WILSON:
M’um. (WILSON goes.)
JOHN:
Look, Robert, there’s a thing or two about women you should know. They have this great, natural divide, and it goes much, much deeper than you think. Psychic, chasmic, wounded and raw—we’ll never sound it with our little sticks. Each woman is two, on far different cliffs, and yet she inhabits the abyss in between. They’re divided against themselves, against their better natures—
WILSON returns with tea, the mail and papers. ELIZABETH spies them at once.
ELIZABETH:
Oh!— Wilson, the papers, they’ll have the reviews!
ELIZABETH takes the papers but can’t look at them. WILSON pours tea.
JOHN:
They, some women, women like Ba to be specific—they’re unfathomable. You’ll take the lover’s leap and you’ll never get past falling.
As her cousin I ought to know.
ROBERT:
(stands) Cousin? Then you can introduce us!
JOHN:
Impossible, out of the question—
ROBERT:
(taking JOHN’s hand) Cousin: we’re two hands held in destiny’s grasp—
ELIZABETH:
(discovers ROBERT’s letter) He wrote!
ROBERT:
And I wrote to tell her so:
ELIZABETH slashes open ROBERT’s letter.
“Dear Miss Barrett: I love your verses with all my heart, and I love you too!”
ELIZABETH:
“I have been turning and turning what to tell you of their effect on me…”
ROBERT:
“So into me they have gone, and part of me they have become…”
ROBERT & ELIZABETH:
“This great living poetry of yours.”
ROBERT drops JOHN’s hand. He and ELIZABETH stand gaping.
JOHN:
Yes, well, she’ll never write you back.
Letters fall from the sky. ROBERT catches the one that ELIZABETH is reading.
ELIZABETH:
“I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, for such a letter, and from such a hand. Sympathy is very dear to me, but the sympathy of a poet, and such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me.”
JOHN:
Robert—
ELIZABETH catches a letter as ROBERT reads it.
ROBERT:
“Let me return the compliment forthwith because, of all the commerce in the world, none flows so free between friendly states as the currency of praise and admiration.”
JOHN:
Robert—
Their letters fall and flutter around them. WILSON picks them up as she goes about her duties.
ELIZABETH:
“Dear Mr. Browning, my small worth pays poor return in comparison to yours.”
ROBERT:
“Dear, dear Miss Barrett, you do me a kindness I don’t deserve. My grievous poetic faults are many, whereas you—”
ELIZABETH pushes away the tea WILSON offers.
ELIZABETH:
“Oh, Mr. Browning! Not a flower do you plant which does not take root and grow in the heart of my desire for your words.”
ROBERT:
“You rise above such prosaic soil as mine, to build a castle out of dreams.”
ELIZABETH:
“My castle can’t provide the substance you require.”
ROBERT:
“On the contrary, yours is the very structure I seek.”
In her ear.
“If indeed, it’s in that structure you reside.”
ELIZABETH:
(moves away) “Alas, Mr. Browning, it’s the subtext eludes me.”
ROBERT:
“And me. Indeed my ink trails off in silence at the bottom of the page, and I wonder sometimes if anyone can hear me.”
ELIZABETH:
“Rest assured, Mr. Browning, it’s yourself in others to whom you speak.”
ROBERT:
“But am I welcome to… intrude?”
ELIZABETH:
“Oh, I long for you to intrude yourself! The muscularity of your lines, the throbbing of your metre, the extension of its power as you take art to such a length, I can scarcely circumscribe its thrust and yet I feel it, here.”
ROBERT:
“…Where?”
ELIZABETH:
“Here in Pippa Passes, for example, where you describe the lovers’ secret meeting in the woods. The bright shaft burns through the bush as if god plunged and plunged his weapon at their tryst, till the skies break open and the great expanse of their love in perfect poetical pitch and potency… comes.
Is it like that for you?”
ROBERT:
(breathless) “…Oh yes, when it comes, it comes like that, for me.”
Light shift. ELIZABETH swoons onto the chaise.
ELIZABETH:
Oh, Wilson! You spend your whole life waiting for the echo to be returned, and then, after so many years, it comes, unsummoned, uncalled.
WILSON:
You shouldn’t of wrote to him, m’um.
ELIZABETH:
Wilson, I wrote of him, and he responded. There’s a difference.
WILSON:
I don’t know, m’um.
ELIZABETH:
I conjured him, and hence he came into my writing, and from hence into my life.
ROBERT:
“Your trochees are delicious.”
ELIZABETH:
(to WILSON) How he does go on. (to ROBERT) “Go on.”
ROBERT:
“Ditto your spondees.”
WILSON goes. JOHN sits on the end of the chaise.
Kenyon: the world is eclipsed by love; I let the kettle boil and the porridge burn, I wander through the crowds of Piccadilly, indiscriminately shaking the hands of every passerby. Then float home again, vault over the couch and lay my head in the lap of that dream… (drops his head in JOHN’s lap) that one day I will see her.
JOHN:
Robert, her letters are not a prelude to the relationship, they are the relationship.
ROBERT:
(ROBERT rolls over to write.) “Carlyle tells us that a poet without love is a metaphysical impossibility.”
ELIZABETH:
(sprawls on the other end of the chaise) “Byron would have it that love destroys the beloved.”
ROBERT:
“Keats proved him wrong, on a point so small as a Grecian urn.”
ELIZABETH:
“Robert Browning will silence them all with his body of work.”
ROBERT:
“I love the way you write the ‘R’ in Robert.”
JOHN:
(stands) Oh for the love of—
ELIZABETH:
“And you have perfected ‘B’ and ‘A.’”
ROBERT:
“Ba”
ELIZABETH:
“Robert”
ROBERT:
“Dear Ba”
ELIZABETH:
“My dear Robert”
ROBERT:
“Dearest, dearest Ba”
ELIZABETH:
“Dear, dearest, Robert, Robert, Robert…”
JOHN:
Robert:
ELIZABETH snuffs a candle and the light goes out on JOHN. WILSON brings a glass for ELIZABETH. WILSON goes.
ROBERT:
“I’ll show you my ink blots if you show me yours.”
ELIZABETH:
(laughs) “I can’t, my ink blots are here, in a shambles, on the floor—”
ROBERT:
“I’ll come, Tuesday week, and collect them!”
ELIZABETH:
“No, Mr. Browning, that’s not possible—” (hides her glass)
ROBERT:
“Why? Are you out?”
ELIZABETH:
“No, I’m always in but—”
ROBERT:
“Then it’s arranged—”
ELIZABETH:
“No! I’m not— In, to visitors, to viewing, I see no one.”
ROBERT:
“I could see you.”
ELIZABETH:
“You see me as I am, no more than the sum of my scribblings. So there’s nothing to be gained by coming Tuesday.”
ROBERT:
“Wednesday then, we’ll meet in Kew Gardens—”
ELIZABETH:
“No, I haven’t the strength, I’m very—delicate. I can only know the world from Wimpole Street.”
ELIZABETH, at the window, opens the drape and lets in a little light.
ROBERT:
“Would that I did too. Would that I were the afternoon sun, stealing across your desk to warm your books and papers, to watch you as you peak at the world outside—”
ELIZABETH:
(pulls the drapes shut) “I beg of you, Mr. Browning, I— Have restrictions that forbid me, absolutely, the pleasures of this world.”
ROBERT:
“Restrictions?”
ELIZABETH:
“The, the weather—”
ROBERT:
“It’s sunny.”
ELIZABETH:
“My cough—”
ROBERT:
“Improved by the sun.”
ELIZABETH:
“My father.”
ROBERT:
“Your father?—”
ELIZABETH:
“Yes. Yes, it’s my father, that’s what it is.”
She picks up her glass.
“He fears for me, that I go too far…”
The room darkens.
“When I was six, he declared me poet laureate of Hope End, the home he built for us. But when I decided I wanted to publish professionally, he…”
(quoting, her father’s voice echoing) “‘To publish is beyond your scope, you must henceforth confine yourself within your reach.’”
ELIZABETH takes a long drink.
ROBERT:
“So you were anonymous. Everything you published was anonymous.”
The tree in the garden appears in silhouette.
ELIZABETH:
“There was a tree in our garden. I used to think that I could climb beyond the sight of god, and the light of his small, blinkered eye.”
ROBERT:
“Surely, to deny god is to deny hope.”
ELIZABETH:
“No, to deny god is to open the doors to the infinite. Do not be deceived of god, for what is god but what we poets say it to be?”
Takes another long drink.
“In language lies the creation of the world,
incomprehensible but through words
the poet is the unknown dream
the poem is creation
reaching out, we touch within and become
our own imagination.
Our word is god, and if the world choose not to see, it is a blind eye to god indeed.”
ELIZABETH drinks deeply. Fade on ELIZABETH as she writes. The tree disappears. Light shift. JOHN in his chair.
ROBERT:
Kenyon, she is not to be contained in that house.
JOHN:
Robert, nothing can induce her to leave.
WILSON clumps on with vase after vase of magnificent yellow roses.
ROBERT:
I’m sending her roses—a dozen yellow roses every day until she sees me! They’ll bring the sunshine to her soul, and then: we’ll marry, we’ll elope. She’ll come with me to Italy, she will.
JOHN:
Italy? Oh may the pantheon of gods look down and see: what have I done? Robert, you can’t: you’ll starve—she’ll die.
ROBERT:
We’ll live on love.
JOHN:
In all it’s constancy, I’ve never seen love turn to gold.
ROBERT:
Poetry will sustain us.
JOHN:
Poetry has even less currency!
ROBERT:
I’m going to rescue her from the dungeon of her father’s house.
JOHN:
Robert, you’re a poet, not the son of god, rolling rocks away from tombs, and resurrections— I implore you, out of the depths of my love for you both—let the muse be what the muse is: unattainable. Don’t try to do something at which you can never succeed.
ROBERT:
I—not succeed at love? The simplest, and the most profound? John, there is nothing left to do but love, there is nothing left to know, to be; nothing else exists but love, as it lies between us now.
ROBERT goes. JOHN takes up his hat and umbrella. Lights up on ELIZABETH with yellow roses. JOHN at the door to Wimpole Street.
JOHN:
Ba. This is madness.
WILSON hands JOHN more roses. She takes his hat and umbrella and exits.
(plunks down the roses) This, this liaison, this u-union. Your—your ‘illness,’ your ‘cough’—he knows nothing about you.
WILSON tromps in and out with more roses.
You reached across the page and you were lovers, but letters are as far as it can go because, blind as love may be, can you not see if he were to come to you, he would come in time to wonder why he ever came at all? Ba. You’ll both be destroyed.
ELIZABETH:
And is not love a little death, according to the French? Do we not die in the other because we are forever changed by the union?
JOHN:
Ba—
ELIZABETH:
The true leap of lovers is not to deny death, but to define it. And it is the poetry that comes of love that makes that leap eternal.
JOHN:
…He wants to marry you. Elope, and abscond to Italy.
ELIZABETH:
…Italy.
JOHN sits on the chaise.
JOHN:
All I wanted was for him to write—his voice, I love his. He must write.
ELIZABETH:
He does. Every day, twice a day, in his letters. I’ve never touched him but oh he has touched me!
Surely, cousin, you know this touch, surely… someone special’s done the same for you? To whom you’ve never said, never spoken? Someone whose voice wherein your own self speaks…
She stands behind the chaise and touches him.
For his eyes to open is for yours to see, for his heart to beat is for yours to love… If you couldn’t have that for yourself, wouldn’t you want it for me?
JOHN stands.
WILSON:
(hands JOHN his hat and umbrella) It can’t last, Master John, it won’t.
JOHN:
It’s love, Wilson. It outlasts us all.
Scene shift.
ELIZABETH:
“I spent the afternoon on Tennyson’s ‘Timbuctoo.’ And I wonder how you think it compares to his ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ Robert. Robert?”
ROBERT appears, perched in the tree.
ROBERT:
“Sorry, my best, my own, I’m beset by headaches for some time now, and it occurs to me… (ROBERT looks at her) I think it might be best if I were to travel.”
ELIZABETH:
“Travel.”
ROBERT:
“Yes. Some place quite distant, too.”
ELIZABETH:
“Wh… where would you go?”
ROBERT:
“Euh, Timbuktu?”
ELIZABETH:
“Timbuktu?! That’s the other side of the world!”
ROBERT:
“My letters will arrive; Wimpole Street, Timbuktu, it makes no difference.”
ELIZABETH:
“I’ll feel the difference. The postage alone, for a start.”
ROBERT:
“It’s the climate in London, these headaches they… they won’t go away.”
ELIZABETH:
“Well then. It’s best you go. Your headaches will be cured abroad.”
ROBERT:
“Oh, but—”
ELIZABETH:
“The sooner you leave the better. London is the cause; travel is the cure.”
ROBERT:
“No, I—”
ELIZABETH:
“After all, poetry knows no nation but the heart.”
ROBERT:
“Poetry doesn’t know anything! I only said Timbuktu so I could see you!”
ELIZABETH:
“You can’t see me.”
ROBERT pursues her, climbing over the furniture.
ROBERT:
“I’m blind to everything but you.”
ROBERT trips and falls.
“I’ve lost my way, I’ve lost my mind—”
ROBERT crawls towards her.
“I must see you.”
“And you want to see me too.”
He corners her behind the chaise, sprawling across it.
“Let us be more than words! And I give you my word—my word!—that you and I will speak as one, because you are me.”
ELIZABETH:
(a rose in one hand, her glass in the other) “You must believe me when I say that your world and mine can never meet. And you will believe me, if you are me.”
ROBERT:
“Which world do you want to live in?”
ELIZABETH:
“…Both.”
ROBERT:
“Then both it will be.”
ELIZABETH:
“How?”
ROBERT:
“I’d time my visits. Your father need never know I’m there.”
ELIZABETH, clutching her glass, moves closer.
ELIZABETH:
My father.
ROBERT:
“He and I, as night and day, each giving way to the other. I would come, as dawn, as dusk, as close to hear your own heart’s voice, the one that says the same as mine…”
ELIZABETH:
“Tuesday.”
ROBERT:
“Tuesday.”
ELIZABETH:
“Tuesday Daddy’s—out to lunch.”
ROBERT:
“Tuesday is the day.”
Fade.