PART II. Air and Angels
22
IT WAS STILL EARLY when I reached the town. The sunlight was bluish, laden with soft dust. More like summer really than spring, except for that sensation of pins and needles in the air. The townsfolk were abed, but stirring, I could hear them. I was stared at by dogs, by sleepy cats with cloudy green poison in their eyes. I have always felt a friend to dumb creatures. A milk cart creaked down the narrow main street, the horse with its tail arched dropping a trail of steaming brown pats like hoofs come undone. The milkman wore trousers made from flourbags. He landed a spit between my feet. Admirable aim.
I sat on the steps below a fragment of an ancient rampart. The barracks with its barred windows faced me across the road. To my left was the priory, with broken tombstones, a tower and a green bronze bell. Monks were slaughtered there by Cromwell. Some hard thing struck me on the spine. It was the toe of a boot. He stood behind and above me on the steps with the sun at his back, his hands on his hips. He wore a dark-green frock-coat with black and gold frogging, tight white duck trousers, stout black boots and gaiters laced to the knee. On his square head a cocked hat sat, with a flowing ostrich plume in the band. A white wirebrush moustache bristled under his granite nose. The voice when he spoke was like a distant cannonade.
‘Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, stood there.’ He eyed me distastefully, pointing at the spot where I sat. ‘Strong-bow himself, that was, on them very steps! Now bugger off.’
A most extraordinary fellow. What had I done to merit his displeasure? And the outfit! Extraordinary. I retreated under that fierce blue stare and from a safe distance threw a stone at him. He shook his fist.
I wandered idly up through the town. A joybell chimed, its ponderous music dancing on the morning air. A band somewhere began to clear its brassy throats. Around me in the narrow crooked streets a concourse swelled. There were droves of children, boys in white shirts and sashes, and little girls very pretty in pale-blue dresses wearing flowers in their hair. Fat babies in the arms of their fat mothers hung out of upstairs windows. Shawled crones gathered in gaggles here and there, shuffling their black boots. The menfolk leaned on their blackthorn sticks, their ankles crossed, big hardfaced fellows with knobbly hands and battered tall hats. A priest with a red bullneck and cropped carroty hair, his cassock swinging, strode up and down barking orders, vigorously cuffing little boys. A dogfight broke out, fangs and fur everywhere, foam flying. The band with a discordant blast of music wheeled into view. Strongbow and a group of his peers marched smartly out of a sidestreet, their ostrich feathers dipping. It was the feast of Our Lady of the Harbour. There was to be a procession.
On the footpath near me I noticed a raffish pair, a rednosed portly old man in a tight black suit and an odd- looking hat perched on a head of grizzled curls, and a fat woman with lank black hair and a broad flat yellowish face. They watched the milling crowd with amiable though faintly derisive smiles. There was about them something curious, an air, I could not quite identify it, but certainly they were not of the town. And there were others too, I amused myself by picking them out from the crowd, a young man with a dark brow and hot black eyes, two strange pale girls, a spare stringy man with big ears, all of them ignoring each other yet all joined by an invisible bond. The most outlandish of the lot were the two blonde children, androgynous, identical, exquisite, who, with their arms linked and their heads together, stood sniggering at Strongbow and his men. They wore sandals and shorts and yellow tunics with tight gold collars. Their lips and cheeks were painted, their eyebrows drawn in black. When I looked again for the pair who had been beside me, they were gone. On a broken-down wooden gate near where they had stood a bright red poster was pinned.
PROSPERO'S MAGIC CIRCUS
by apointment to the
CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE
magicians actors
acrobats clowns
wild beasts
THRILLS!
SPILLS!
EXCITEMENT!
Admission 6d
CHILDREN 2d
for one week only ‘WE WERE AMUSED’
HRH
The Queen
The others too were gone, but they too had left posters behind them, pinned to doors, stuck on windows, wrapped around lampposts. This bright spoor I followed. It led me down to the harbour, along the quay, a merry chase, until at last, in a field outside the town, I spied their horsedrawn caravans parked beside a big red tent. The caravans were garish ramshackle affairs daubed with rainbows of peeling paint, with stovepipe chimneys and poky little windows and halfdoors at the front. Grasses and moss, even a primrose or two, sprouted between the warped boards of the barrel-shaped roofs. The horses, starved bony brutes, stood about the field with drooping heads, spancelled, apparently asleep. The tent was crooked, and sagged ominously. A woman unseen began to sing. That sad song, rising through the still spring morning, called to me. I entered the field. The old boy with the odd hat sat sprawled on the steps at the rear of one of the caravans with his hands clasped on his big belly and his rapt smiling face turned upward toward the open door, from whence the singing came. It stopped abruptly, and I stepped forward.
Tardon me, sir. Are you Mr Prospero?’
The old man started and peered at me over his shoulder. Behind him, in the gloom of the doorway, one of the pale girls, the singer, was sitting on a chair, silent now, pulling a daisy asunder with her long glittering nails.
‘Eh?’ the old man grunted. He had plump pink lips and small bright blue eyes, a hooked nose. I remember his boots, worn thin and wrinkled like black paper.
‘Are you-?’
‘I am not,’ he answered cheerfully. Tuck off now.’
The pale girl spoke briefly in a low voice. He looked up at her, frowned, and turned to me again.
‘Why, I believe you're right, my dear,’ he murmured. ‘Well well.’ He struggled up from his sprawling position, but did not rise, and leaned forward to scrutinise my face, my clothes, and craned his neck and peered at the pack on my back. ‘A travelling man, I perceive. Tell me, boy, what is your name?’
‘Gabriel, sir.’
‘Gabriel Sir?’
‘No sir, Godkin. Gabriel Godkin.’
He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.
‘Godkin, eh? Well now, that's a fine name to have, a fine old name. And tell me this now, Gabriel Godkin, who sent you here?’ I did not answer. ‘And you come from where?’ Again, no answer. My silence seemed to satisfy him. He sat and beamed at me with his plump hands resting on his knees. Behind him the girl stirred and sighed. Her face was wide at the eyes, white, curiously boneless. She was not pretty, I would not say pretty, but striking, certainly, with those eyes, the straw-coloured hair, that trancelike calm. The old boy chuckled softly and glanced up at her.
‘He wants to see Prospero, did you hear? Did you hear that?’ He turned to me once again, shaking his head, still beaming.
