Sexing the Cherry (9 page)

'We have,' said Jordan, 'every mile a torment.'

The soldiers turned aside and conferred amongst themselves, while I sweated for fear that they would make me stand up and thus see my size. Since my battle with the guards Tradescant had told me there was a warrant for my arrest.

'You may go in,' said one of the soldiers.

Then, please,' said I, rolling my eyes winningly, 'please, clear a path for us, for I will have to stagger up the steps into the gallery while my daughter catches any fluids that may flow from me. It is the stench of a three days' dead dog and not for the noses of the tender.'

I saw the soldier's lips twitch, but he said nothing and led us to the great doors leading up to the gallery. He pushed aside the queue waiting for admittance and waved us through.

Once the doors had thudded behind us I leapt from the barrow, picked it up and ran to the top of the stairs where I immediately jumped back in and recommenced my groaning and calling out to Jesus.

The trial lasted seven days, and it was no trial but a means to an execution. The King in his velvet hat, with no jewels about him but his Star of the Garter, bore up proudly in the face of Bradshaw, the chief prosecutor. He won sympathy even from his enemies. On Sunday, when religious folk were at church, Obadiah Sedgewick denounced the King as usual from his pulpit in Covent Garden, and met with silence.

On the seventh day the gallery was packed with goggle-eyed ruffians all in their Puritan clothes come to hear sentence. The clerk stood up and read through all the King's misdeeds, including that of refusing to plead guilty or not guilty because he would not recognize the authority of the court. At length this stick of a man with a spotted youth's face and the balding skull of an ancient read out, solemn as he could, 'Charles Stuart, Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy, you shall be put to death by the severing of your head from your body.'

Then all the commissioners who had signed the death warrant, sixty-eight of them, stood up to signify their agreement.

The King tried to speak, but Bradshaw would have none of it and motioned for him to be led away. The King was already dead in law, and a dead man cannot speak.

We watched the King leave the chamber, his back straight, his cane in his hand. At the doorway to the street he saw crowds of his followers, flouting the ban on their presence, too many for the guards to arrest but still unable to reach the courtroom. They were weeping. Charles turned to his gaolers and said, in a voice loud enough for all of us to hear, 'You may forbid their attendance, but not their tears.'

In winter the frost at midnight brightens the ground and hardens the stars. We kept vigil all night, the three of us, huddled together, watching the execution platform being built by the light of a dozen flares. The carpenters wore black masks and kept looking about them as though they expected a troop of demons to ride through the darkness and claim them. It is bad luck to kill a king.

The executioner himself stood underneath a torch in the wall, sharpening his axe with a whetstone. He sharpened, and the sparks flew in orange spikes. He tested the blade with his thumb, and we saw it run red. There was a sheep in a cage near-by. It was the custom to try out the axe beforehand for those of noble birth. Two men took the sheep struggling from the cage and held it, its legs buckled underneath itself, while the executioner with a single straight swing whistled through the fleece and the muscle and the bone and did it so clean that I fancied I might pick up the head and sew it back on and let the sheep run off.

There was a half-hearted cheer from the crew, who ran a skewer through the animal's body and put it to roast over their fires. The head and the fleece were given to a beggar.

It was not until the afternoon that the King appeared in his linen shirt, his beard trimmed and nothing of him shivering, though many a spectator had fainted with cold. He knelt down and rested his head on the block, and I saw Tradescant's face stream with tears that froze at once and lay on his cheeks like diamonds. The King gave the signal, and a moment later his head was wrapped in a white cloth and his body was carried away.

In the Crown of Thorns that night Tradescant made plans to take ship and leave us. I saw the look on Jordan's face and my heart became a captive in a locked room. I couldn't reach him now. I knew he would go.

I went outside and walked until the lights of the inn were specks in the distance and I was alone with the river flowing out to sea.

At a dancing school in a remote place, Fortunata teaches her pupils to
become points of light.

They begin with her as early as six or seven and some stay for the
rest of their lives.

Most, she releases like butterflies over a flowering world. Bodies
that could have bent double and grown numb she maintains as metal
in a fiery furnace, tempering, stretching, forcing sinews into impossible
shapes and calling her an nature.

She believes that we are fallen creatures who once knew how to fly.
She says that light burns in our bodies and threatens to dissolve us at
any moment. How else can we account for so many of us who disappear?

It is her job to channel the light lying in the solar plexus, along the
arms, along the legs, forcing it into fingertips and feet, forcing it out
so that her dancers sweat tongues of flame.

To her dancers she says, 'Through the body, the body is conquered.'

She asks them to meditate on a five-pointed star in the belly and
to watch the points push outwards, the fifth point into the head. She
spins them, impaled with light, arms upraised, one leg at a triangle
across the other thigh, one foot, on point, on a penny coin, and spins
them, until all features are blurred, until the human being most
resembles a freed spirit from a darkened jar. One after the other she
spins them, like a juggler keeping plates on sticks; one after the other
she runs up and down the line as one slows or another threatens to
fall from dizziness. And at a single moment, when all are spinning in
harmony down the long hall, she hears music escaping from their heads
and backs and livers and spleens. Each has a tone like cut glass. The
noise is deafening. And it is then that the spinning seems to stop,
that the wild gyration of the dancers passes from movement into
infinity.

Who are they that shine in gold like Apostles in a church window
at midday?

The polished wooden floor glows with the heat of their bodies, and
one by one they crumble over and lie exhausted on the ground.

Fortunata refreshes them and the dance begins again.

In the world there is a horror of plagues. Of mysterious diseases that wipe out towns and cities, leaving empty churches and bedclothes that must be burned. Holy water and crosses and mountain air and the protection of saints and a diet of watercress are all thought to save us as a species from rotting. But what can save us as a species from love? A man sold me a necklace made of chicken bones; he said these chickens were the direct descendants of the chickens who had scratted round the crib at Bethlehem. The bones would save me from pain of every kind and lead me piously to Heaven. He was wearing some himself.

'And love?' I said. 'And love?'

He shook his head and assured me that nothing was proof against love. Not even the slightest amourette could be forestalled by an amulet. Bringing it on, though, was another matter - did I want a bag of spices mixed by Don Juan himself?

'But surely if it can be encouraged it can also be prevented?'

'Not at all,' said the man, 'for everyone is inclined to love. It is easy to bring on, impossible to end until it ends itself.'

'And yet some people never love. My mother is one such.'

He said, 'They have a secret somewhere. Usually.'

I thought of the great lovers, men and women who had made it their profession, who had tirelessly leapt from one passion to another, sometimes running two, three or four at once like a stunt charioteer. What were they looking for?

My own passions had nothing to recommend them. Not only was I chasing a dancer who, on the evidence of her sisters, was too old to move, I had in the past entangled myself in numerous affairs with women who would not, could not or did not love me. And did I love them? I thought so at the time, though now I have come to doubt it, seeing only that I loved myself through them.

On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love
or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not know it, habit being a great binder.

I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing.

When I have shaken off my passion, somewhat as a dog shakes off an unexpected plunge into the canal, I find myself without any understanding of what it was that ravaged me. The beloved is shallow, witless, heartless, mercenary, calculating, silly. Naturally these thoughts protect me, but they also render me entirely gullible or without discrimination.

And so I will explain it as follows.

A man or woman sunk in dreams that cannot be spoken, about a life they do not possess, comes suddenly to a door in the wall. They open it. Beyond the door is that life and a man or a woman to whom it is already natural. It may not be possessions they want, it may very well be the lack of them, but the secret life is suddenly revealed. This is their true home and this is their beloved.

I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams. And perhaps such a thing is enough. To be a muse maybe enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself.

In one city I visited, the entire population had been wiped out by love three times in a row. After the third occasion the only two survivors, a monk and a whore, determined that love should be illegal in their new state and that anyone found indulging in it would be put to death. Cheered by their admirable plan the two of them made love as often as possible and, thanks to the sturdiness of the whore, were soon able to re-fill the city with inhabitants. From their earliest moment children were warned of the dire consequences, personal and social, of love. They were urged to put aside any romantic fancies, the sexes were carefully segregated and all marriages were arranged. Sex itself, tending as it does to fire the heart as well as the groin, was possible only for the purposes of childbearing, or on the three festival nights when a troop of male and female prostitutes were hired from a neighbouring town and asked to satisfy the longings of the city dwellers. Naturally, even after such brief encounters, there were those who vanished in the night. The monk and the whore, now fabulously old but still absolutely in control, declared all such vanishings illegal and sequestered the person's property.

I questioned them about their strictness, likening them to the Puritans holding sway in my own country. They had not heard of Puritanism, but found the idea of bandaging up the male member so as to leave it immovable very appealing. The religious side, they said, was unimportant; the urgency was to prevent another plague of love sweeping the city and causing its hardworking people to give up their jobs and families and take to flinging roses through the windows and composing ballads.

'A few months of that sort of thing/ said the monk, 'and the people are ruined.'