NINETEEN

In the kitchen, Gil and Arby were making tuna fish sandwiches and talking about Titania’s little unseen serving boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the one she and Oberon fight about. This had always been a sore point with Rachel, who was permanently pissed off that Titania gives way in the end, and lets Oberon take the boy, in spite of all the good reasons she’s given earlier in the play for being attached to him. Pretty soon there was a brisk, though quite friendly, argument going on about antifeminist stereotypes, or something like that. It suited me fine. I ate my sandwich and sat quietly on the edge of the conversation. I was feeling totally numb.

But I went back to rehearsal. What else was I going to do? Arby had brought me from the United States to play Puck, that was my job. And Rachel was right: Will Shakespeare had given me a poem, so I owed him a performance—a second performance. Most important of all perhaps, I was an actor, I wanted always to be an actor, so the Globe Theatre—and all other theaters like and unlike it—would always be my world.

Just before we left the house, I slipped back into Arby’s study. I wanted to copy out my poem, so that I could keep it with me. I had the big Complete Works open on the desk, and I was scribbling hastily on a piece of scrap paper, when Arby came into the room and saw me.

He came to the desk and looked at my paper. He didn’t say a thing at first, he didn’t ask me what I was doing or why; he simply reached down to the pile of books on the floor beside the desk, did a little excavation and pulled out two slim paperbacks.

“This is for you,” he said, and he handed me one of the books. It was a copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

I was startled. “Uh—thank you,” I said. “Uh—are you sure you—”

“I have a bunch of copies,” Arby said. He handed me the other paperback. “Do you know this one?”

The title said The Tempest, by William Shakespeare.

“No,” I said.

He said, “Take it. You should read it sometime. Better still, see it acted, if you’re ever in the right place.”

“Why?” I said.

“You’ll know why,” Arby said.

Then we went back to the Globe, and I forgot all about The Tempest in the pressure of rehearsing the Dream. But I didn’t forget about my poem.

I slept like a log that night. I was worn out by all the emotion, not to mention the rehearsing. They had it all down pat, it was a very smooth production by now. Things weren’t like that in my day—in Shakespeare’s day, I mean—when there simply wasn’t time to rehearse so much. Every performance had its awkwardnesses and thribblings.

My day. What was my day? Which side of the four-hundred-year gap?

This Dream was going to look and sound gorgeous; I had to admit that, once I’d reconciled myself to seeing on the stage the clothes I’d seen on the streets only days before. Arby had taken great pains with every detail. Even the music sounded just like what I remembered—not the exact tunes, but the sound of it, the kind of instruments the musicians played.

I was due at the Globe at ten in the morning for our two o’clock opening performance. Mrs. Fisher had gone to work by the time I got up, though she was taking the afternoon off to see the play. I ate a huge breakfast; Aunt Jen cooked me two fried eggs and some thick, meaty English bacon. We’d already done all our catching up with news from home; we were just comfortable together. I reread my poem while I ate—Aunt Jen wasn’t one of those people who ban books from the table a hundred percent of the time—and looked at some of the other sonnets. There was one couplet I liked a lot:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

“Thee” was the person he was writing the poem about, but it seemed to me that it could also mean him, Shakespeare. Even though he’d been dead for almost four hundred years, here we were still acting his plays, reading his sonnets, as if he were alive.

I just wished I could find that comforting.

Aunt Jen said, right out of the blue, “I wish Gabriel could see you this afternoon. He’d have been so proud.”

Gabriel was my father.

I felt my eyes fill with tears, before I’d even had time to think—but they were good tears, somehow, better than the dry pain that I’d had for so long.

She put a hand on the back of my neck. “I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You haven’t,” I said. “I wish he was here too.”

“He’s been on my mind a lot this past week,” she said. “We never talk about him, do we? I think we shall, more often, now you’re getting older.” She sat down opposite me. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt, with a Navajo turquoise ornament on a chain around her neck; she looked rather like a kid, except for the grey ponytail. She said, “Do you remember him well?”

“Not as well as I used to. I remember little-kid things, like him throwing me up in the air and catching me, when I must have been really young. I remember him reading to me, at night when I was in bed. Aunt Jen—I’d like to read his poems.”

“They’re all waiting for you at home,” she said. “They’re difficult—but if you can manage the Sonnets, you can try him. You’ll find yourself in a few of them.”

“Really?”

She picked up my paperback. “Poets find truth by writing about what they love,” she said.

“Did he say that?”

Aunt Jen laughed. “No—I just said it. Your father and William Shakespeare say things better than that.” She looked at her watch. “You should leave soon—I’ll walk you to the theater. Mustn’t keep Mr. Babbage waiting, not today.”

I said blankly, “Who?”

She blinked at me. “Your director, of course.”

I sat very still. I said, “We’re so used to calling him Arby, I guess we forget his other name.”

“Arby,” said Aunt Jen with mild interest. “The initials, I suppose. RB. Richard Babbage.”

I thought about that name, and those initials, all the way to the theater. It was a weird echo, and it spooked me out. But I didn’t take it any further, not then. The moment I was back with Arby, it went out of my head. He was so much his very positive self, so firmly planted in the theater of today and his own ideas about what it should be like.

There was always something about the way Arby dressed that told you he had to be an actor, or a director, or maybe a painter. It wasn’t that he looked outrageous, he just never looked ordinary. Quite often he was dressed all in black. Today, as a tribute to the opening, he wore black jeans, a purple shirt open at the neck, and a gold medallion around his neck.

He was also being extremely irritable, rehearsing Gil, Alan Wong, Eric, me and four other “fairies” onstage in the dance that hallows the Duke’s house at the end of the play. He had a group of English musicians up in the gallery, and couldn’t get their tabor player, who was also their leader, to give him the tempo he wanted. By the time they got it right, the smaller fairies were beginning to fool around at the back of the stage. One boy in particular was being obnoxious, trying to start a belching contest, ignoring all warnings. After the loudest belch, Gil flicked a finger sharply against the side of his head, and the kid shrieked as if he were being murdered. And Arby blew.

“Warmun—you just touch one of those kids again, and I’ll have you out of this play faster than light! Are you crazy? People who hit children end up in jail!”

I was so indignant on Gil’s behalf that I made the huge mistake of shouting back at him. “It was the kid’s fault, not Gil’s!”

“Keep your mouth shut, Field!” Arby snapped.

“You didn’t see what was happening! Leave him alone!”

“Shut up!”

“Shut up yourself!” I shouted. I could feel Gil’s hand gripping my shoulder, but it was no good, I couldn’t stop. I was so angry with the world, with everyone and everything—and now suddenly the rage had found an outlet and there was no way to stop it pouring out. “You think you’re God!” I shrieked at Arby. “You have to be right all the time, don’t you, you won’t let anyone else have feelings, it’s all you, you, you! Who do you think you are?”

I was screaming at him like a mad person, and everyone on stage was standing frozen, staring at me. I heard the shrill echo of my voice curve around the theater as I stopped.

There was a moment’s stunned silence, and then Arby said from the stage gallery, “Everyone take a ten-minute break in the greenroom. Or get into costume, if you aren’t already.” His voice was calm and level now. “Keep those small children under control, Maisie. Nat Field, I want to see you up here. Now.” His eyes shifted briefly to Gil. “Alone.”

Everyone quietly moved away, out through the stage exits to the big backstage doors, which led to parts of the theater that hadn’t been there in my other Globe. Gil rubbed my back for an instant and went away; we both knew there was nothing he could do. I hadn’t really been yelling because of him, I’d been yelling because of me.

I went up to the gallery. The musicians’ chairs were grouped there, a music stand in front of each, and Arby was sitting in one of them with his back to me.

For a moment I felt a kind of giddiness, and I put out a hand to the wall to steady myself. In the air, from the wooden O of the roof, I could hear the burbling of the doves that I’d heard four hundred years ago, loud, very loud, growing louder.

Arby didn’t move. His broad shoulders looked different suddenly, yet still familiar, and my neck prickled with uncertainty. He turned his head, and there he still was, the same face, with the long chin and the rather big nose, but with a look of someone else too.

“Sit down, Nat,” he said quietly. “I didn’t intend to have this conversation, but there’s no way to predict how fast a wound will heal. Or how slowly. And you have your deep cut right on top of the old scar, and so you scream.”

I sat down on one of the musicians’ chairs. I suddenly felt he knew far, far more about me than I knew about him. It was like being on the edge of a precipice and trying not to look down. “What do you mean?” I said.

“It’s cruel, isn’t it?” Arby said. “You lost your father, in that terrible way, and part of you froze into a little ice block, like the heart of the Snow Queen. Then a man from the past warmed you to life again, and before you could blink, you lost him too. Time took him away. Cruel, cruel.”

How did he know about my father? I’d never told him. How did he know about Will Shakespeare?

“Has Gil talked to you?” I said.

Arby paid no attention. He wasn’t listening to me. “We think too much about past and present, Nat,” he said. “Time does not always run in a straight line. And once in a while, something is taken away in order that it may be given back.”

He got to his feet, and stood there looking down at me, in his purple and black. The light glinted on the medallion around his neck, drawing my eyes like a hypnotist’s finger. It was as if he had taken us both out of the real world and we were up in the sky, in space, looking down at it. Looking down at the blue planet that the astronauts see. Looking at all the centuries, all the things that happen and are so hard to explain or understand.

That was the picture that came into my head, just for that moment, and I swear he’d put it there.

Arby reached out and took my hand. He said, “An American actor called Sam Wanamaker spent half his life making a dream come true, making it possible for Shakespeare’s Globe to be rebuilt in this place. So it was built, and here it is. The place where Nat Field could be brought to Nat Field. But not by accident.”

The hair was beginning to prickle on the back of my neck again.

“Will Shakespeare had to be saved,” Arby said. “Once the Globe was here, I had my own work to do. To form a company of boys. To choose the right play, and arrange for it to be played at the Globe. To find and cast a boy whose name was Nat Field, who had a fierce painful need strong enough to take him through Time.”

I was staring at him. I must have looked like a frightened rabbit. I said, “Who are you?”

“Just an actor,” Arby said. He let go my hand. “Richard Babbage, from London via Massachusetts, at your service.”

But he slurred the word a little, in his English-American accent. There was no knowing whether he had actually said “Babbage”—or “Burbage.”

The doves were cooing in the roof.

“Everything is repaired, everything is healed,” Arby said. “Nat Field was made well, Will Shakespeare lived to give us his plays. But a part of you is still wounded, still angry, so there is one more thing I must tell you, to bring the healing full circle. I think Will missed you, Nat. He missed his Puck, his aerial sprite, when the sprite went to St. Paul’s and never came back.”

I thought: I miss him too. Oh I miss him too.

He was looking down at the stage, this man we called Arby. He was in profile, half shadowed, unreadable.

I was sitting very still; I hardly dared breathe.

“And though he had lost you, I think he kept the memory of you in his head,” he said. “Toward the end of his life, when he was writing little, and acting less, he wrote one more great play, and he wrote you into it.” He looked across at me. “Do you remember what he used to call you?”

I heard that warm, velvety voice in my memory. Th’art a sprite, an aerial sprite, born of the air. One day I shall write thee an airier Robin Goodfellow—unless thou leave me, or grow old . . .

I said, “Like you said. He called me his Puck. His aerial sprite.”

He smiled. “That play I gave you to read, The Tempest. It’s about a great magician, called Prospero. Will Shakespeare played him, a few times—it was the last part he ever played. And in the play, Prospero has a servant, a spirit, a sort of ethereal Puck, whose name is Ariel. No doubt a good little actor played him, a pretty light-footed boy with a sweet voice, but Ariel was written for Will Shakespeare’s vanished Nat, the boy in his memory. You.”

My aerial sprite. I shall not forget thee, Nat Field.

I couldn’t speak for a moment. Whoever he was, this man, whatever he was, he leaned over me and looked in through my eyes, into the inside of my mind. “You have not lost him, Nat,” he said. “You will never lose him, never.”

Then he was Arby again, director, actor, teacher, boss man, dragon. He put a hand under my arm and yanked me up out of the chair. “Next summer, the Company of Boys will do a production of The Tempest” he said. “And you’ll play Ariel. So you’d better be damn good as Puck today, or I might change my mind.”

I cleared my throat, though I still sounded husky. “All right,” I said.

Arby looked at me with a half-smile. I saw a muscle twitch in his cheek, below his left eye. He said, “At the end of The Tempest Prospero lets Ariel go free. I shall miss thee,’ he says, “but still thou shalt have freedom.’ Go free, Nat—free of grieving. And your two poets will go with you always.”

In the sky overhead a big jet moved across the wooden O, high up, and its distant roar rose and faded. The sound of the doves had gone.

And from the top window in the little roof house over our gallery, the long clear note of a single trumpet rang out, signaling the audience, telling the actors, calling the world to the theater. In one hour from now, our play would begin.