'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?'
'It's exactly what they're like. I didn't know anybody else had realised, it's never been said, not in my hearing anyway. Absolutely hit it off to a T. When you get past all the poise and the knowingness and the intimacy there's a tiny alien particle that doesn't understand.' It came to Jake that he had been speaking with some warmth and he altered his tone. 'You'll have to bear with a very ancient historian who spends most of his time coping with drop-outs from Kettering Catering College. Well, what a rarity, listening to two dons discussing their subject,' and so on and so forth.
Not long afterwards Lancewood suggested that they should go over. Smith asked for a quick pee and was shown where. As soon as possible Jake said,
'Damon, what's a wanker?'
Lancewood hunched his shoulders with a jerk, showing that as well as being amused by the question lie wasn't totally surprised by it. Again in a way uncharacteristic of dons, or perhaps of the popular idea of them, he spent no time on prolegomena but went straight to what was intended.
'These days a waster, a shirker, someone who's fixed himself a soft job or an exalted position by means of an undeserved reputation on which he now coasts.'
'Oh. Nothing to do with tossing off then?'
'Well, connected with it, yes, but more metaphorical than literal.'
'That's a relief. Up to a point. Well. I got called it today.'
'No really? By that pupil of yours?'
'No, by that picket of women's-lib women at the gate.'
'Oh yes of course. It's quite clever, all that, their campaign to make people feel old and senile and clapped out and impotent—that's where the literal part of wanker comes in.!
'Clever? As a means of persuading us to admit women?'
'Certainly. I can think of several colleagues of our sort of age who'd be troubled and frightened by such treatment and inclined to do what they could to put a stop to it. Can't you?'
'I suppose so.'
'Have you had anything unpleasant though the post? I gather there's been a certain amount of that.'
'Yes, today I was sent a....'
Although Jake considered Lancewood one of his closest as well as oldest friends he found himself perfectly unable to tell him what he had been sent that day. Luckily Smith came back just then and the three set off. In the
