He wouldn’t come to meet them right away. Dineo could meet them, and I should be in charge of them for the time being, which was what Dineo had already suggested to me. In the meantime he had an idea — something he wanted to work on, which he would tell me about later. He looked pleased with himself in a way that I’d come to perceive with a certain amount of apprehension.
Toward three I picked up Harold and Julia and took them on a tour of Tsau. They had napped. I had them each bring a change of clothes along — my plan was to end our tour at the bathhouse, where they could clean up for the reception and dinner the mother committee had decided to put on.
Tsau impressed them, although it was clear being impressed with Tsau made Harold unhappy. It’s so clean, Julia said, so almost Swiss. She asked good questions, and it was clear she grasped the fact that Tsau was a brilliant machine intended to reroute social power to women in a variety of ways. She was very probing on female-only inheritance. I was eloquent. I explained that the next stage of the equity system would be the setting up of satellites of Sekopololo in major villages like Maun, enclave branches, starting with the same kinds of poor and destitute women who had made Tsau, and that ultimately Tsau should ideally evolve into a training center and Vatican for the broader movement, if all went well. Here I was adumbrating on my own hook a bit. But surely something like this was going to happen. Harold was deliberately superficial in his reactions, saying, whenever some feature of the place struck him as particularly eccentric, What country, friends, is this? His remarks kept verging on the implication that Tsau was a sort of theater, artificial. I love the costume, he said. He was a little offensive — as in referring to the cart boys and girls as porters — but this came from disequilibrium. He kept wondering aloud whether the Overseas Ministry had put funds into any of this. Wherever I introduced him someone was sure to ask if this was the swordsman everyone had heard about, which he didn’t like much. Where are your churches, may I know? he asked me at one point. I told him there were no churches, although certain groups met informally. Even when he was being dismissive, there was something playful about the man that I liked.
I took them into the bathhouse and showed them how it worked. It was reserved for them for a half hour for their exclusive use. Harold was being mysteriously funny and started to say something, but Julia took control and thanked me and led him in. When she let go of his elbow there was a white pinchmark where she’d been gripping.
So where are the foreign bodies? Nelson asked me, later.
Washing up, I said. He had been writing something that he put away quickly when I came in.
In passing he accused me of already starting to sound more British. I denied it, but I know I’m susceptible, and it may have been true. I accused him of already sounding more American, or more prolish, in fact, which meant talking more like the proletariat than usual. This had turned up earlier, when he was telling me with obvious pride how many of his chums had been blue-collar-family boys. He’d denied it. But what I was accusing him of was not a canard. It was real. He was preadapting.
Shaxpur
At first at the reception dinner Harold was like a statue. We were gathered in the central kitchen annex, a low-ceilinged but spacious enough room that felt claustral because the ring of tables we were seated around came close to the walls of the room on three sides. These tables were brainchildren of Denoon’s, with leaves that folded out cut in such a way as to make each table wedge-shaped, so that the table ring could be smoothly and solidly effected. I once saw something like it in a King Arthur movie he claimed never to have heard of. Harold’s coldness was very unfair to the mother committee. They had outdone themselves. We had goat curry, coleslaw, red rice — not my favorite, but popular in Tsau, the red deriving from beetroot juice — and a sort of soda bread that was baked on special occasions only. Denoon was being quiet, too. So naturally Julia and I were, to compensate, being overgracious. It was about as I’d expected between Nelson and Harold. Sotto voce earlier Nelson had informed me that Harold was dying for a drink to the degree that he had asked a couple of mother committee members if there was to be wine or not. Also Harold was a vector of empire, he was not to be trusted, and so on.
Julia was digging Harold to get him to participate, which led finally to his blaring out in his rich voice to the table of thirteen women and Denoon Does anyone have a question about Shakespeare the man, of humble origins dot dot dot. He had been told that most of the women understood English but that he should speak slowly, which he was doing, initially.
The women were shy. It was leaden in the room.
Denoon said By Shakespeare you mean Shaxpur, which he said with a flat a, then added insult to injury by spelling out.
You could see Harold bridling.
Denoon persisted. But tell us anything about this man, he said.
I couldn’t believe that this was going to be about the authorship of the plays. There were ways to talk about Shakespeare that would have gradually included the women and conveyed something. It was evident that Harold was pleased at the turn things were taking. He began to eat the Jell-O he’d been ignoring.
Do I detect a scent of Bacon in the air? Harold said, going into a sniffing routine that was ludicrous and baffling to everyone except the four whites.
The case for Francis Bacon being the author of the plays is better than the case for Shaxpur, as you may or may not know, Denoon said.
Ah, Bacon to skewer! Harold said. What a rarity! What a find! And where else could one find such a rarity? Where else could it survive?
Harold and Nelson were clearly cheered up at the prospect of wrangling over this. They began. Julia made a couple of attempts to torque the exchanges around to a more general intelligibility, but the titans seemed determined not to be more inclusive, no matter what.
I hated to listen to them. In fact I was interested, but by seeming to follow too closely I was afraid I’d be abandoning Julia in her attempts to keep some semblance of connection going via side conversations with various members of the mother committee.
These men were not ignorant. The exchange was civil, at first, but very intense and substantive. Harold conceded it was odd that there were no books or papers of any description included among the chattels in Shakespeare’s will, but not that there was anything arresting about references to the circulation of the blood in three of the plays despite Shakespeare having died twelve years before Harvey published his theory whereas Francis Bacon was an established intimate of Harvey’s and would have known all about this theory. It signified nothing to Harold that Bacon had written as if it were one continuous name Sir Fraunces Bacon William Shakespeare in one of his notebooks. What about the fact that Bacon’s crest contained the figure of Athena shaking a spear? This connected with something I missed re Bacon’s watermark turning up in the paper of some of the first folios and also with Shaxpur never having had a family crest, although the evidence was that he put an enormous amount of time into trying to get one. Nelson presented and Harold refuted each of the reasons a pantheonic member of the nobility would feel the need to disguise being something as lowly as a playwright. I found Harold convincing on this. And so it went. Only once did Harold challenge the factuality of something Denoon was contending. This was that Macbethus Tyrannus! was written in the margin of a history of Scotland in Bacon’s library, in Bacon’s own hand. But then he seemed to believe Denoon and took the position that it was sheer coincidence. Nelson denied it meant anything that when the First Folio came out the preface referred to the author as dead, whereas Bacon was still alive. A preface can say anything, he said.