The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber Page A

idea.
You think you’d write it better. Well, you’re wrong.’
     
    I clasp my hands behind my head. ‘I think
no such thing,’ I say. (Though his complaint
plants the suggestion.) ‘I still have the Devil.
He’s meat enough to try my teeth upon.’
Still scratching at religion, light or dark,
contained or uncontrolled. Kyd shivers sharply.
‘I wish to God you’d finish that.’
                                                                   ‘I will.’
    I lie back leisurely, my elbows spread.
‘When his time runs out. And you must finish yours.
I mean to be helpful, truly. Perhaps the Fates
put us together for that very purpose?
A second opinion can be valuable.’
     
    Kyd bites his lip. He picks off scabs of wax
that cling to the table. Rubs an eyebrow tired.
Picks his nose. Then gathers some scenes and dumps
them on my chest. ‘All right. What’s wrong with it?
In your opinion.’
     
                                 I read with his eyes on me.
    Awareness of his breeding restless thoughts
intrudes on my concentration. At one point
he jumps from the chair, like someone badly stung
by an unseen wasp, and orders on his shelf
some books and papers. Then he’s up again
to stand at the window, flinching at the sound
of each read page. The last sinks to my lap
and he turns to me, tight as drum skin. ‘So, go on.’
     
    ‘It could be good. It is a courageous yarn.’
I must admit, I was half writing it
in my own words even then. Pressed back the thought.
‘But in order to fill the stage with guts and gore,
you’ve sucked the blood from every character
that ought to hold our interest. Chiefly, him.
The lost great Dane.’
     
                                         Kyd makes a slow retreat
    back to his chair. ‘I don’t know what you mean.
Revenge is the interest, isn’t it?’
                                                                     ‘Revenge
    could work like a canker on the man beneath.
Dissolve his metal, even as it shines
through his despair. I can’t find his despair.’
I hand the papers back.
                                             As if they weigh
    much heavier than they are, his outstretched arm
weakens as it receives them. Kyd’s response
is wheedling, pleading for his words to be
interpreted more kindly. We indulge
in a kind of mental arm-wrestling until
his irritation bores me. I must work.
     
    ‘Hamlet is all of us, put in his place.
You need his hesitation, or the deaths
are done with by the end of the first act.
But where’s his anguish? His humanity?
Is he a thoughtless murderer? Your Dane
is a writer’s puppet. Wooden. Yanked on strings.’
     
    He sinks to the floor. I’ve holed him, like a ship.
     
    ‘Go out,’ I say, ‘get supper. Try to tup
some juicy barmaid. Put yourself in the way
of some other humans. Life’s experience
may feed you when imagination fails.’
    Much worse I was to do to him. Much worse,
by the accident of sharing a room. My taint –
the very taint he feared – smeared on his name,
and knowledge of me would be drawn out, in pain.
I never meant to be another’s curse.
     
    After he left, and took his seething with him,
I sat at the window seat and watched the shade
of a winter afternoon becoming night.
Across the street, De Vere’s house, Fisher’s Folly
– newly acquired by the Cornwallises –
was lighting up within. Ann Watson’s hands,
over the red-brick, castellated wall,
unpegged the laundry in the kitchen yard:
mistress’s nightshirts, napkins, tablecloths,
her charges’ clothes.
     
                                         Ann couldn’t keep their house:
    a prisoner can’t earn, and former rent
prevented her husband’s gaolers making more
of his punishment. Her brother, a