BECKETT: Aye, mind how you go. [CLARE and BECKETT watch BUNYAN depart, and then fall back to their contemplation of the couple sitting on the steps.] Well, for a Roundhead, he seemed nice enough. What was your own impression?
JOHN CLARE: [Slightly disappointed.] I had thought him not so tall as he seemed in the illustrations. [After a pause.] So, you said that in your own day, I’m well thought of. Is it my Don Juan they like?
BECKETT: No, that was Byron. You’re admired for all your writings, for the Shepherd’s Calendar and desperate later pieces such as your “I Am” alike. The journal that you kept while on your walk from Essex is regarded as the most heart-breaking document in all of English letters, and with much justification.
JOHN CLARE: [Amazed.] Why, I’d thought it thrown away! So it’s my hike that they remember, back from Matthew Allen’s prison in the forest to my first wife Mary’s house in Glinton. Ah, that was a rousing odyssey, you may be sure, with all of the heroic things I did and all the places that I went. [A pause, during which CLARE frowns in puzzlement.] How did it end, again? I don’t recall …
BECKETT: Regarding that first wife of yours? Not well. When you got to her house, well, let’s just say she wasn’t in. By then you’d found what I suppose you’d call your second wife, though, Patty, and she ultimately had you put in the asylum on the Billing Road here, where you later died. I’m sorry to be blunt about it.
JOHN CLARE: No, it’s all right. I remember now. I lived with Patty and our children for a while, in what’s called Poet’s Cottage out at Helpstone, but nobody could put up with me for long and so … you evidently know the rest of it. Mind, I do not blame Patty, though she always had a jealousy towards my first wife, who I loved the best.
HUSBAND: She was fifteen. She was fifteen when it all started, with the goings on. There. You can go and tell the police if that’s what your intention is. I’ve got it off me chest.
WIFE: You’ll never have it off your chest. Fifteen. And that’s when it was wonderful, when you were at your happiest. Fifteen.
JOHN CLARE: Well, that’s not all that young.
BECKETT: No?
HUSBAND: Yes! It made me happy! Just the smell, the taste of her, it was like morning in the garden! And the feeling, she was hardly like a heavy, solid thing at all and much more like a piece of down, or like a liquid. Celia, it was marvellous.
JOHN CLARE: Not in the broader scheme of things. Fifteen is not particularly young, considered from a wide perspective. Not out in the country.
WIFE: You disgust me. You’re no better than an earwig, wriggling in the muck.
BECKETT: That’s not a bad line. I’ll remember that, though it’ll more than likely sound like nonsense when I wake. That’s often how it is.
HUSBAND: It wasn’t all one-sided, Celia. That’s all I’m saying.
JOHN CLARE: I’m beginning to have sympathy with him. Women bear grudges for no proper reason.
WIFE: Don’t you speak another word. Don’t you say anything to me.
BECKETT: I can’t say I think that a fair appraisal. I’ve known women with a painful lot in life.
JOHN CLARE: That may be so, but in the main I stand by what I said. The life of a romantic man is never easy. Did you not say earlier that other than the cricket, you came here to see a woman?
BECKETT: That I did. And I will grant you that it was a woman of the difficult romantic kind, at least at first … although it may be she was always in the painful category. These things are by no means easy to determine. It strikes me there could be a degree of overlap between the two varieties.
CLARE: It may be so. It may be this is usually the case. What was her name, your woman?
BECKETT: Oh, you wouldn’t know her. She was born a great while after you’d passed on, some way into the 20th century. A Miss Joyce –
JOHN CLARE: [Astounded, almost frightened.] No, not her! Are you playing a cruel game with me? That is my Mary, Mary Joyce of Glinton …
BECKETT: Ah, no. This would be another girl entirely that I’m speaking of, that is the daughter of James Joyce.
CLARE: [Excitedly.] Why, that was Mary’s father’s name! Surely your woman and my own first wife must be one and the same! How is she? Give me news of her.
BECKETT: [Gently and sympathetically.] No. No, it isn’t her. The Miss Joyce I’m referring to is called Lucia. She was notable in Paris for her dancing in the 1920s, but was brought low by a difficulty in her reason. Sorry if I’ve let you down.
JOHN CLARE: [Sighs heavily.] Oh, it’s my own fault. Being mad, you know, it’s very self-indulgent. I should buck up and get on with things. [A pause.] What was she like, your personal Miss Joyce? Was she a young thing, like my own?
BECKETT: They all start out as young things, all of the Miss Joyces.
JOHN CLARE: Yes, that’s true.
BECKETT: Mine was a very pretty girl, who was afflicted by the old strabismus in one eye which she perceived as having ruined her. You know women and the low esteem in which they often hold themselves.
JOHN CLARE: I do.
BECKETT: There was some trouble with her brother, I believe, when she was young that may have had connection with her later upset. Anyway, the upshot of it was that Lucia lost her marbles.
JOHN CLARE: [Puzzled.] I’m not sure I understand your turn of phrase.
BECKETT: She flipped her lid.
JOHN CLARE: No, I’m no nearer.
BECKETT: Away with the fairies.
JOHN CLARE: Ah! Ah, now, I think I have you. She would be what they call a hysteric?
BECKETT: Close enough. They sent her off to various sanatoriums and psychiatrists. You know the drill. At last she landed in Saint Andrew’s Hospital along Northampton’s Billing Road, where she remains at present.
JOHN CLARE: That’s the place where I was kept, although they called it something different then.
BECKETT: The very same. The institution has an interesting literary pedigree.
JOHN CLARE: You know, I think I am acquainted with the girl you speak of. If it’s who I’m thinking of, I had a romp with her off in the madhouse woods not long ago.
BECKETT: No, I’m afraid that’s just your lunacy that’s talking. Though it’s true you were both settled at the same asylum you weren’t congruent in the chronology of things. You hail from two entirely different periods.
JOHN CLARE: Why, you could say the same of you and me, yet here we are. No, this lass I refer to had dark hair and long legs, very little in the way of bubbies and a lazy eye.
BECKETT: I’ll admit, that’s very like her.
JOHN CLARE: Makes a lot of noise about it with the spending. Mind you, in my own ordeal I spent so hard that there were letters of the alphabet came fluttering from my ears.
BECKETT: Well, you’ve convinced me. That’s Lucia to a T, although I’m mystified about the circumstances of your meeting. You would not be speaking metaphorically?
JOHN CLARE: I don’t believe so, no.
BECKETT: Now that’s a mystery. She didn’t mention it to me when last I visited.
JOHN CLARE: It may be that she was embarrassed. I am not myself what you might call presentable, and I had the impression she was of the better type.
BECKETT: That may be so. She might have thought you were beneath her.
JOHN CLARE: Well, then she’d be right. That was exactly the configuration of our bout.
BECKETT: Leave off with it. You’re getting on my nerves now.
JOHN CLARE: Then I’ll beg your pardon. You have feelings for her still yourself?