In 1897 Henry and Selina stop dead in their tracks to gape, halfway down Scarletwell Street. It’s such an unlikely sight that for a moment it feels like they’re dreaming or enchanted, and they take each other’s hands without a word as if they were a pair of little children. Tied up to its lamppost there outside The Friendly Arms, the animal ignores them. After maybe half a minute, a stout little feller with big side-whiskers comes out from in the public house with a big glass of ale that he gives to the creature, what commences drinking it. The man, who they will later learn is Mr. Newton Pratt, looks from the animal to Henry and then laughs. “Blimey! Did you two know each other, then, back there in the old country?” Henry laughs as well. “Well, speaking personally, I never been to Africa, although I’ll own this feller’s mom and pop could very well have once run into mine. Where did you get him, you don’t mind me asking?” The man doesn’t mind at all. “Got ’im from Whipsnade Zoo when they’d not got the space and they were gunna sell ’im to the knackers yard for glue. Horace, ’is name is. It looks like ’e’s took a shine to your young lady.” Henry looks around and there’s Selina beaming like it’s Christmas morning while the rarity allows her to be petting its dark muzzle. He regards the beast, the black and white stripes of its hide like an amazing jungle flag staked proudly here amongst the cobbles and the chimneypots, the black whisk of its tail keeping the meat-flies off, its bristly mane what’s like the haircut of a Mohawk Indian and swaying like it’s kind of drunk into the bargain. Henry makes his mind up there and then that this is where he’s going to live, him and Selina. They stand talking to the man a while and he tells them that he’s Newt Pratt and that the place they’re in is called the Burrows, or that’s what it sounds like, and now Henry looks he can see creeping, jumping cottontails all over where there’s any grass. The veldt-horse belches. Mr. Pratt asks him his name and he says Henry George, and Newton Pratt says he’ll remember that. But, pretty obviously, he doesn’t.
THE STEPS OF ALL SAINTS
CAST
JOHN CLARE
HUSBAND
WIFE
JOHN BUNYAN
SAMUEL BECKETT
THOMAS BECKET
HALF-CASTE WOMAN
The three broad front steps and sheltering portico of a late Gothic church with Doric columns left and right, a foggy night-time. In the background beneath the portico, there are recesses set into the limestone front wall of the building, to either side of its locked doors. From off, the almost inaudible sound of a piano in the far distance, playing “Whispering Grass”. Seated in right-hand recess, JOHN CLARE, wearing dusty-looking early 19th-century rural dress, including a tall wide-awake hat. The sole is hanging off one shoe. He peers around into the surrounding gloom, hopefully.
JOHN CLARE: Well, this is a haunted sort of evening. Who’s about?
[Pause]
JOHN CLARE: Come on now, look alive … although for me I can’t be bothered with it these days. It’d be alright, perhaps, if not for all the walking and the disappointment. As for what there is of flesh and blood to the arrangement, I’m of the opinion that it’s much like shoes, in that the bodily side of the matter has a fresh smell and a lovely cherry lustre when it’s new, but that’s of no use once the tongue has withered and the sole’s worn through. It’s famously a poor show if the nails are digging in your feet. [Reflective pause as CLARE examines his damaged shoe.] No, in the main I’m happier with a gaseous posterity, so that the spectre of my backside might revisit all these spots that it was fond of formerly. The only pity is that life goes trudging on for as long as it does, since otherwise presumably there’d be more people of my own age and extinction here to talk to. [Cocks head, listening to faint music from off.] That’s a pretty air. I’d like to know who’s furious enough to gouge it into everyone.
[Dragging footsteps approach from off. Enter HUSBAND and WIFE, front right. They are dressed for an evening out, she in long coat and bonnet with handbag, he in loud yellow plaid jacket and dickey-bow with oiled dark hair and pencil moustache. They come to a halt, standing and staring at the empty church steps.]
HUSBAND: We could sit here.
WIFE: We can’t sit here. I can still hear the sound of her. It travels farther in the night.
HUSBAND: We’ll have to sit here. If you need to spend a penny there’s the toilets on Wood Hill not far away. She’s sure to cut it out soon, any road. I don’t know what’s got into her.
WIFE: [Snorts derisively.] I do.
[Resignedly, she goes and sits on church’s second step. Her husband stands staring at her for a moment. She does not look at him, but glares angrily into the fog. When he at last sits down next to her, she shuffles a couple of feet away from him. He looks at her, surprised and hurt.]
HUSBAND: Celia …
WIFE: Don’t.
JOHN CLARE: Hello? I don’t suppose that you’d be dead, now, would you?
HUSBAND: Is this how it’s going to be?
[She doesn’t answer. HUSBAND stares at her, waiting. JOHN CLARE rises from his alcove and walks hesitantly forward to stand behind and between the seated pair.]
JOHN CLARE: Excuse me, sir, but were you talking just now to myself or to the lady here? If, in response to my own querying of your mortality, you were enquiring as to whether this fogbound and uneventful continuity was how your afterlife was going to be, then in my own experience the answer’s yes. Yes, this is how it’s going to be. You’ll hang around in fog and nobody will ever come. If you’re anticipating a creator presently arriving to make lucid his intentions, then it’s my guess you’ll be waiting a long time. But, fair’s fair, if he should turn up, then when you’re finished with him, if you could point him in my direction, I’d be grateful. There were matters I was hoping to discuss. [The pair ignore him. Experimentally, he waves one arm up and down between them, as if to determine whether they are blind. After a moment he stops, and regards the couple glumly.] Of course, it may be that you were addressing your companion, in which case I hope you’ll pardon me for my intrusion. I intended no offence with my assumption that a couple as apparently ill-suited as yourselves might very well be dead. I am myself no stranger to the inconvenient marriage. When I was with Patty, it was always Mary that I thought of. Often did I –
HUSBAND: I said is this how it’s going to be, all night until the morning? If there’s something on your mind then spit it out, for God’s sake.
WIFE: You know.
HUSBAND: I don’t.
WIFE: I don’t want to talk about it.
HUSBAND: What?
WIFE: You know. The goings on. Just leave me be.
JOHN CLARE: [Slowly and with deliberation.] Do you know who I am? [HUSBAND continues to stare at WIFE who glares into the fog.] I ask not out of wounded vanity, but more in the true spirit of investigation. I’ve a fancy I might be Lord Byron, though it strikes me now I hear it spoke aloud that Byron would most surely not say such a thing. If that is so, then otherwise it may be I am King William the Fourth, in which case I would be obliged for news as to what year we suffer presently, and if my pretty Vicky is still Queen. Please take your time about it. It’s a thing of no great consequence, my true identity, as long as it is somebody well thought-of.