Sexing the Cherry, Page 2

  The words resist erasure. The oldest and most stubborn form a thick crust of chattering rage. Cleaners have been bitten by words still quarrelling, and in one famous lawsuit a woman whose mop had been eaten and whose hand was badly mauled by a vicious row sought to bring the original antagonists to court. The men responsible made their defence on the grounds that the words no longer belonged to them. Years had passed. Was it their fault if the city had failed to deal with its overheads? The judge ruled against the plaintiff but ordered the city to buy her a new mop. She was not satisfied, and was later found lining the chimneys of her accused with vitriol.

  I once accompanied a cleaner in a balloon and was amazed to hear, as the sights of the city dropped away, a faint murmuring like bees. The murmuring grew louder and louder till it sounded like the clamouring of birds, then like the deafening noise of schoolchildren let out for the holidays. She pointed with her mop and I saw a vibrating mass of many colours appear before us. We could no longer speak to each other and be heard.

  She aimed her mop at a particularly noisy bright red band of words who, from what I could make out, had escaped from a group of young men on their way home from a brothel. I could see from the set of my companion's mouth that she found this particular job distasteful, but she persevered, and in a few moments all that remained was the fading pink of a few ghostly swear-words.

  Next we were attacked by a black cloud of wrath spewed from a parson caught fornicating his mother. The cloud wrapped round the balloon and I feared for our lives. I could not see my guide but I could hear her coughing against the noxious smell. Suddenly I was drenched in a sweet fluid and all returned to lightness.

  'I have conquered them with Holy Water/ she said, showing me a stone jar marked with the Bishop's seal.

  After that our task was much easier. Indeed I was sorry to see the love-sighs of young girls swept away. My companion, though she told me it was strictly forbidden, caught a sonnet in a wooden box and gave it to me as a memento. If I open the box by the tiniest amount I may hear it, repeating itself endlessly as it is destined to do until someone sets it free.

  Towards the end of the day we joined with the other balloons brushing away the last few stray and vagabond words. The sky under the setting sun was the colour of veined marble, and a great peace surrounded us. As we descended through the clean air we saw, passing us by from time to time, new flocks of words coming from the people in the streets who, not content with the weight of their lives, continually turned the heaviest of things into the lightest of properties.

  We landed outside the university, where the dons, whose arguments had so thickly populated the ether that they had seen neither sun nor rain for the past five years, welcomed us like heroes and took us in to feast.

  That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.

  When Jordan was a boy he made paper boats and floated them on the river. From this he learned how the wind affects a sail, but he never learned how love affects the heart. His patience was exceeded only by his hope. He spent days and nights with his bits of wood salvaged from chicken crates, and any piece of paper he could steal became a sail. I used to watch him standing in the mud or lying face down, his nose almost in the current, his hands steadying the boat and then letting it go straight into the wind. Letting go hours of himself. When the time came he did the same with his heart. He didn't believe in shipwreck.

  And he came home to me with his boats broken and his face streaked with tears, and we sat with our lamp and mended what we could, and the next day was the first day all over again. But when he lost his heart there was no one to sit with him. He was alone.

  In the city of words that I have told you about the smell of wild strawberries was the smell characteristic of the house that I have not yet told you about. The runners of these plants spread from the beds bounded by stone tiles and fastened themselves over terracotta pots and flaking ironwork and hid the big flags that paved the courtyard. Anyone coming to the outer gate would find themselves confronted by waves of green dotted underneath with tiny red berries, some clutched in spiders' webs like forgotten rubies. There was a way through to an oaked door, and beyond the door the square hall of the house with other doors leading off it. There were four suits of armour in the hall, and a mace.

  The family who lived hi the house were dedicated to a strange custom. Not one of them would allow their feet to touch the floor. Open the doors off the hall and you will see, not floors, but bottomless pits. The furniture of the house is suspended on racks from the ceiling; the dining table supported by great chains, each link six inches thick. To dine here is a great curiosity, for the visitor must sit in a gilded chair and allow himself to be winched up to join his place setting. He comes last, the householders already seated and making merry, swinging their feet over the abyss where crocodiles live. Everyone who dines has a multiplicity of glasses and cutlery lest some should be dropped accidentally. Whatever food is left over at the end of the meal is scraped into the pit, from whence a fearful crunching can be heard.

  When everyone has eaten their fill, the gentlemen remain at the table and the ladies walk in order of precedence across a tightrope to another room, where they may have biscuits and wine with water.

  It is well known that the ceiling of one room is the floor of another, but the household ignores this ever-downward necessity and continues ever upward, celebrating ceilings but denying floors, and so their house never ends and they must travel by winch or rope from room to room, calling to one another as they go.

  The house is empty now, but it was there, dangling over dinner, illuminated by conversation and rich in the juices of a wild duck, that I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.

  I did not speak to her, though I spoke to all the rest, and at midnight she put on flat pumps and balanced the yards of rope without faltering. She was a dancer.

  I spent the night in my suspended bed and slept badly. At dawn I was leaning out of the window, a rope round my waist.

  The moon was still visible: it seemed to me that I was closer to the moon than to the ground. A cold wind numbed my ears.

  Then I saw her. She was climbing down from her window on a thin rope which she cut and re-knotted a number of times during the descent. I strained my eyes to follow her, but she was gone.

  It must have been in about 1640, when Jordan was something close to ten, that he met John Tradescant on the banks of the boiling Thames. It was a summer so hot that a housewife never had to lay a fire for her roasted pig; all she need do was tether it in the yard for an hour. For myself, the wafts of heat regularly assaulting me seemed to come from the very doors of Hell, and I am sure that on Judgement Day those who are not on the side of the angels will feel this same scorching on their faces and toes as a foretaste of their torments to come. I could scarcely step outside without sweating off me enough liquid to fill a bucket. These waterfalls took with them countless lice and other timid creatures, and being forced to put myself often under the pump I can truly say that I was clean.

  'Cleanliness is next to Godliness,' said a Puritan passing by.

  'God looks on the heart, not a poor woman's dress,' I retorted, but there was no stopping his little sermon, which he gave with his eyes rolled back as piously as a rabbit's.

  It is true that the ferment in the city is due not only to the heat, but also to the King seeming to turn Papish on us, and Parliament being in uproar, and Cromwell with his lump-shaped head stirring it and stirring it.

  Jordan had got up early one morning to sail his boats and I had promised him an apple after my duties with the dogs. Squinting against the light I s
et off to find him and saw him in the distance sitting on an eaten-up jetty, a gentleman beside him. I hurried myself, thinking it might be some smooth-faced rascal set to chivvy him away.

  As I got closer Jordan waved to me and the gentleman stood up and bowed slighdy, which pleased me a good deal, and said his name was John Tradescant. Then he gave a little pause and said, 'Gardener to the King.'

  He was a good-looking man in his thirties, and he gave no sign of fear that the wormy jetty might dissolve at any moment, with my weight swaying it as a crow would a wren's house. He asked me if I cared to sit down, and I took pity on him and trod back on to the bank. He squatted a while to fiddle in his bag and came out with three peaches. One he offered me, and one he gave to Jordan, who held it in both hands as though it were a crystal ball.

  'I grew them,' said Tradescant. 'You are eating from the King's tree.'

  And then he bit into his and spurted the juice right over himself. Cautiously I bit into mine, but in a more ladylike fashion. Jordan did nothing, and I had to remind him of his manners.

  Tradescant told me he had been walking the length of the river from Putney to Mermaid Dock, troubling himself with a problem. He had seen a little boat sail by and was so enchanted by its easy passage that he forgot his melancholy and relived in his mind his own days of adventure on the seas. For years, until 1637 when his father died, he had sailed to exotic places collecting such rare plants as mortals had never seen. These he housed in his father's museum and physic garden at Lambeth. On his father's death he was forced to return from voyaging in Virginia and take up the family post of gardener to the King. He liked it well enough, but sometimes he felt hollow inside, and on those days he knew his heart was at sea.

  'A man must have responsibilities,' he said. 'But they are not always the ones he would choose.'

  'Indeed not,' said I, 'and for a woman the Devil's burden is twice the load.'

  As Tradescant had stood on the bank watching the boat, his body like stone, his mind racing, Jordan had come running by, shouting encouragement to his little ship. His eyes were for his business, not on Tradescant's thighs, and in a moment the two of them were flat down on the bank and Jordan was torn between the terror of being walloped and the possibility of losing his boat As it was, Tradescant hauled him up, rescued the vessel and took the two of them to sit down on the jetty, where I found them.

  He showed Jordan how to lengthen the rudder so that the boat could sail in deeper water without capsizing. He told him stories of rocks sprung out of the ocean, the only land as far as the eye could see, and no life on that land but screaming birds. He said that the sea is so vast no one will ever finish sailing it. That every mapped-out journey contains another journey hidden in its lines...

  I pooh-poohed this, for the earth is surely a manageable place made of blood and stone and entirely flat. I believe I could walk from one side to the other, had I the inclination. And if a great body of us had the inclination there would be no part of the earth left untouched. What then of journeys folded in on themselves like a concertina?

  But Jordan believed him, and when Tradescant left Jordan and I went home, he skipping ahead and carrying his ship and I a few steps behind. I watched his thin body and black hair and wondered how long it would be before he made his ships too big to carry, and then one of them would carry him and leave me behind for ever.

  How hideous am I?

  My nose is flat, my eyebrows are heavy. I have only a few teeth and those are a poor show, being black and broken. I had smallpox when I was a girl and the caves in my face are home enough for fleas. But I have fine blue eyes that see in the dark. As for my size, I know only that before Jordan was found a travelling circus came through Cheapside, and in that circus was an elephant. We were all pleased to see the elephant, a huge beast with a wandering nose. Its trick was to sit itself in a seat like any well-bred gentleman, and wear an eyeglass. There was a seat on its opposite side, and a guessing game was to offer up a certain number of persons to climb on to the other seat, top syturvy, as best they could, and outweigh Samson, as the elephant was named. No one had succeeded, though the prize was a vat of ale.

  One night, pushing along with a ribbon in my hair, 1 thought to try and outweigh Samson myself. I had taken a look at him and he seemed none too big to me. So I got hold of the man who was bawling and jeering at the crowd to pit themselves against a mere beast and said I would take the seat.

  'But, madam,' screeched the little bit of vermin, 'I see you weigh no more than an angel.'

  'You know nothing of the Scriptures,' said I. Tor nowhere in that Holy Book is there anything to be said about the weight of an angel.'

  His eyebrows shot up to Heaven, the only part of him ever likely to get there, and he started banging his drum and bellowing like one at a funeral, saying here was a sight and gather round and gather round. Soon I could hardly breathe for the heat coming off the bodies, and the elephant itself had to be revived with a bucket of cold water.

  'Let me lead you to the chair,' said the knock-kneed knave, the bells on his hat winking and tinkling.

  I am gracious by nature and I allowed myself to be led.

  'I will have to search you,' said the creature, rolling his eyes at the crowd. 'I must be sure that you are free of lead weights and any other advantages.'

  Touch me you won't,' I cried.'I'll show you what there is.' And I lifted up my dress over my head. I was wearing no underclothes in respect of the heat.

  There was a great swooning amongst the crowd, and I heard a voice compare me to a mountain range. However, it silenced my Lord Fool, who made no more remarks about a search and simply showed me the chair.

  I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with air, and threw myself at the seat with all my might. There was a roar from round about me. I opened my eyes and looked towards Samson.

  He had vanished. His chair swung empty like a summer-house seat, his eyeglass lay in the bottom. I looked higher, following the gaze of the people. Far above us, far far away like a black star in a white sky, was Samson.

  It is a responsibility for a woman to have forced an elephant into the sky. What it says of my size I cannot tell, for an elephant looks big, but how am I to know what it weighs? A balloon looks big and weighs nothing.

  I know that people are afraid of me, either for the yapping of my dogs or because I stand taller than any of them. When I was a child my father swung me up on to his knees to tell me a story and I broke both his legs. He never touched me again, except with the point of the whip he used for the dogs. But my mother, who lived only a while and was so light that she dared not go out in a wind, could swing me on her back and carry me for miles. There was talk of witchcraft but what is stronger than love?

  When Jordan was new I sat him on the palm of my hand the way I would a puppy, and I held him to my face and let him pick the fleas out of my scars.

  He was always happy. We were happy together, and if he noticed that I am bigger than most he never mentioned it. He was proud of me because no other child had a mother who could hold a dozen oranges in her mouth at once.

  How hideous am I?

  One morning, soon after the start of the Civil War that should have been over in a month and lasted eight years, Tradescant came to our house looking for Jordan. I was shouting at a neighbour of mine, a sunken block of a fellow with slant eyes and a nose to hang a hat on. This cranesbill was telling me that the King was wrong to make war on his own people, and I was telling him that if the foul-mouthed Scots hadn't started their jiggery-pokery again, always wanting a fight with someone, we'd have had no war. We'd lived with a King and without a Parliament for eleven years, and now we'd got a Parliament and precious little of a King.

  As far as I know it, and I have only a little learning, the King had been forced to call a Parliament to grant him money for his war against the kilted beasts and their savage ways. Savage to the core, and the poor King trying only to make them use a proper prayer book. They wouldn't have his prayer bo
ok and in a most unchristian manner threatened his throne. The King, turning to his own people, found himself with a Parliament full of Puritans who wouldn't grant him money until he had granted them reform. Not content with the Church of England that good King Henry had bequeathed to us all, they wanted what they called 'A Church of God'.

  They said that the King was a wanton spendthrift, that the bishops were corrupt, that our Book of Common Prayer was full of Popish ways,that the Queen herself, being French, was bound to be full of Popish ways. Oh they hated everything that was grand and fine and full of life, and they went about in their flat grey suits with their flat grey faces poking out the top. The only thing fancy about them was their handkerchiefs, which they liked to be trimmed with lace and kept as white as they reckoned their souls to be. I've seen Puritans going past a theatre where all was merriment and pleasure and holding their starched linen to their noses for fear they might smell pleasure and be infected by it.

  It didn't take them long to close down every theatre in London once they got a bit of power.

  But didn't our Saviour turn the water into wine?

  Our own minister of God soon turned Puritan and started denouncing the King from his pulpit.

  'Preacher Scroggs,' I said, one morning after he had delivered his sermon on the text 'And the memory of the wicked shall rot', 'do you not know that our King is so by Divine Right?'

  He fixed me with the better of his two squint eyes and clasped his hands together.

  'Look to the Heavenly King, lady,' he said. 'There is no earthly power but Satan.'

  I heard from his wife that he makes love to her through a hole in the sheet.

  'Does he not kiss you?' I said.

  'He has never kissed me,' she answered, 'for fear of lust.'

  Then lust must be a powerful thing, if to kiss her that most resembles a hare, with great ears and staring eyes, brings it on.