‘In
Romeo and Juliet
?’
‘Bang in the sonnet Willy the Shake writes by way of prologue. Last line of the third quatrain.’
‘I don’t remember it.’ To call Shakespeare Willy the Shake, Appleby was thinking, was the sort of prep. school facetiousness that it took a Packford to rejoice in.
‘
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage
.’ Packford chuckled. ‘Go to the Old Vic or to Stratford, my dear chap, and look at your watch when the curtain goes up. And remember that modern producers still make substantial cuts for performance. When the show’s over, you’ll realise that ‘
two hours’ traffic
’ takes some explaining.’
‘Poetic licence, perhaps?’
‘I don’t think so. It’s a real puzzle. I’ll get at it one day.’
‘But it’s nothing of that sort you’re at work on now?’ Appleby made a gesture towards a large table piled high with books and papers.
‘At work on?’ Packford’s glance followed Appleby’s to the table, and then he shook his head. ‘Oh, no – dear me, no. Just some dull stuff. But this is a good place for it. Quiet, as I was saying. Gets one away from – well, complications.’ Packford paused on this, and then broke rather hurriedly into speech again. ‘Just that old woman – who’s a good cook by Italian standards – and her grandson to tidy up the garden. I forget the day of the week, and I never look at my watch.’ As he said this, Packford took out his watch and studied it, so that Appleby reflected he was a man with that sort of blessed interior economy that is always joyfully expectant of its next meal. ‘The little
vaporetto
punctuates the day. There it is, making for Torre del Benaco now. Garda was the Benacus of the Romans. You’ll stop and have a bite? I never see an Englishman from month’s end to month’s end. Nor even an Englishwoman either. But then, as you know, I’m not a ladies’ man.’ At this, Packford suddenly roared with laughter.
Appleby smiled. The invitation hadn’t been very felicitously phrased, but it was entirely cordial. ‘I’ll be very glad to,’ he said. ‘Judith’s coming along the
autostrada
from Turin. Even if her car doesn’t blow up, she won’t get to Verona till quite late.’
‘Then let’s go up to the
villino
. The view’s just as good from there, and we can get a drink. I keep none of the insidious stuff down here.’ Packford wandered blunderingly about his summer-house, moving sundry objects meaninglessly from one place to another in a sort of ritual tidying-up for the day. ‘What beats me,’ he said, ‘is how you tracked me down here, my dear fellow. There aren’t more than three men in England who know of my having got hold of this little place. I’m in retirement, as they say.’
‘As it happens, I know two of them – so there’s no mystery in the matter.’ Appleby added a word or two making good this claim. ‘And this morning, when I was in Riva, I suddenly remembered what I’d been told. And I decided, of course, to get my dinner off you.’
‘Then, come along. We’ll see what old Giuseppina can do. Perhaps she can serve up her grandson in a collop – eh?’ Packford laughed so unaffectedly at this fatuous witticism that it seemed really funny. ‘Baked Gino pie. A trifling foolish banquet, as somebody somewhere says. But where? My memory’s going, I’m afraid.’
‘Wasn’t it Verona?’ And Appleby looked whimsically at his host. ‘Your mind runs on the place, if you ask me.’
They walked up the long sloping garden through a faint breeze blowing gratefully off the lake. Gino, bare and browned to the waist, made a great business of removing a battered hat and standing respectfully attentive as they went past. Being unconscious of his employer’s late horrific proposals in regard to him, he produced at the same time a dazzling smile. Packford was aware that the boy was entitled to notice; he stopped and in fluent ramshackle Italian gave him what were clearly the first random instructions to come into his head. But within seconds he was entirely absorbed in this occupation. Striding up and down, and pointing now in one direction and now another, he might have been the oldest-established of landed proprietors, effecting dispositions that would benefit his remote posterity.
It was impossible – Appleby again thought – not to warm to Packford. And young Gino obviously thought the world of him. There was a similar performance when they reached the house and Gino’s grandmother appeared bobbing on the terrace. Packford’s imbecile brand of humour must go very well into Italian, for when Giuseppina wasn’t being tumultuously indignant over what was presumably the suggestion of sundry culinary impossibilities she was cackling with laughter. Then the conference turned serious. It was quite beyond Appleby’s linguistic reach, but it went on for so long that one had to suppose a feast of enormous elaboration was being projected. Preparing it and eating it would both take so long that he wouldn’t be in Verona till midnight. He rather regretted the perfectly idle impulse that had made him halt on the road to look up this eccentric man of learning.
Still, it was a lovely evening in a lovely place. They sat on the terrace and sipped, uncontaminated by gin, the sweet commonplace vermouth that draws such subtlety from its native air. But Packford wasn’t built for the Italian climate, Appleby thought – and he didn’t feel surprised when the massive figure opposite him produced a silk handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘My dear Appleby,’ he murmured, ‘how I envy you your well-preserved youth. And O, that this too too solid flesh would melt!’
‘I doubt whether that would be very comfortable.’
Packford suddenly sat up. ‘Do you know,’ he demanded, ‘that it’s fashionable nowadays to accept the reading of the Good Quarto?’
Appleby smiled. ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘It’s “sallied,” you see. And they declare that to be a rare form of “sullied.” Absolute nonsense, believe me.’ Having got well on his hobbyhorse, Packford was animated. ‘Hamlet, after all, is fat and scant of breath.’
‘But haven’t eminent persons – I do seem to remember this – declared that to be fat was merely to be sweaty?’
‘Pitiful twaddle, my dear man. I think I can prove – I’m pretty certain I can prove – that Shakespeare’s original Hamlet, who was of course Richard Burbage, weighed close to eighteen stone. Have you ever considered why
Hamlet
is so marvellous a play – such tremendous stuff?’
Appleby merely shook his head at this large question.
‘Partly, at least, it’s because Shakespeare had that wonderful inspiration of the delicate suffering soul in the great puffing wheezing body of a sedentary out-of-condition scholar.’ Packford, as he announced his discovery, gently wheezed himself. ‘Think of the effectiveness of it! Think of the effectiveness of the moment when the great man-mountain declares that Yorick used to carry him shoulder-high! Wonderful stuff, Appleby. And then the grave.’
‘Ophelia’s grave?’
‘Exactly. Think of the episode of supreme savage comedy when Hamlet jumps into her grave and gets jammed in it.’ Packford leant forward as he spoke, and his bulk blotted out the long line of tiny lights that had begun to prick the dusk from Salo to Gardone.
Appleby chuckled to himself in the dusk.
Oh, matter and impertinency mixed
, he said to himself. And Packford, he knew, loved linking a sober discovery to some extravagant hypothesis. When he was able to prove that Burbage was really a very fat man, all this would come out. Meanwhile, Packford relished keeping a discovery up his sleeve for a time. He had his regular technique for surprising the world. First the foolproof case, painfully elaborated and checked and polished in deep secrecy. Then the leak – so that one interested scholar heard uneasily from another that there was some reason to suppose Lewis Packford was at it again, was nursing this or that monstrously upsetting discovery. Then the swift unmasking of his design – in a long letter to
The Times Literary Supplement
, or in a small book attractively got up with telling illustrations, instantly commanding the attention of the fashionable metropolitan reviewers. Before the learned journals could lumber into reasoned appraisal, the whole thing had been accepted as gospel by the common reader and become established as a plain fact of literary history.
And almost certainly Packford was up to something of the sort now – although Appleby didn’t really believe that it had much to do with the corpulence or otherwise of Richard Burbage. All this talk was a determined if light-hearted smokescreen put up by Packford to obscure some actual design. And Appleby thought he could take a dim guess at it.
This eminent literary detective wasn’t in Italy for his health. Even if his own gross corpulence made it medically probable that he should drop down dead at any moment, such a calculation wouldn’t make the slightest impact on Packford’s sanguine personality. No – this wasn’t a rest cure. Nor, for all his delight in his situation and his fluent chattering in Italian with his retainers, was it matter of a lover’s retreat into communion with the soil and culture of his passion. Packford’s wanderings, when they happened, were invariably strategic in conception. This villa was a cunningly chosen lurking place. And Packford, as he had virtually admitted, had been very far from advertising it. Mere chance had put Appleby in possession of his whereabouts. And perhaps – despite the cordiality of his welcome – he wasn’t too pleased at being found out.
Not that Appleby felt in the least an intruder. If he now tumbled to some secret of Packford’s, that would be all in the game, and Packford would acknowledge it as such. And indeed Appleby was determined – quite idly, indeed, since the whole matter was without seriousness of any sort – to discover what he could. Detective work of his own wasn’t commonly his notion of a holiday. But detection that is all amid innocence and merely learned guile, that can’t end in anybody being hanged or imprisoned or disgraced: well that, after all, was about as complete a change as he could run to. So he decided to have a go.
The little breeze had faded away, and when Giuseppina brought out candles they burned without a flicker in the warm, faintly lemon-scented air. It was an evening for dining
al fresco
– and, sure enough, the meal was presently brought out to them where they sat. It wasn’t, after all, in the least elaborate: only a mess of deadly-looking but delicious
fungi
, followed by a chicken displaying a higher proportion of flesh to bone than is at all common south of the Alps. They drank Chianti. And Appleby tapped the flask. ‘It’s like the vermouth,’ he said. ‘Sit down with it in a dark room, and it would be undistinguished stuff. But here – well, it’s another matter.’
‘My dear man, Portia knew that.
Nothing is good, I see, without respect
. You remember?’
Appleby nodded. ‘
How many things by season season’d are
– isn’t that it? –
to their right praise and true perfection!
I suppose it’s true everywhere. But what about Shakespeare’s having had it borne in upon him in Italy?’
Packford set down his glass with caution. ‘Now just what,’ he asked with great casualness, ‘puts that in your head?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know. Would it be your Giuseppina’s candles? Certainly they reminded me of Portia coming home to Belmont.
The light we see is burning in my hall; how far that little candle throws his beams
. And look over there.’ Appleby pointed across the darkness of the lake. ‘Those tiny lights on the farther shore. You could reach out your hand to them. I’d say there really is Italian air in that last act of
The Merchant of Venice
.’
‘And therefore Shakespeare must actually have travelled across Europe and taken a sniff at it?’ Packford leant back and laughed with great decision. ‘Cobweb, my dear Appleby – mere cobweb! There’s a great deal of English poetry that is stuffing with Greek air, if it comes to that. But how many great English poets have ever set eyes on Greece? Two, precisely.’
‘So you think Shakespeare didn’t come to Italy?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Ah.’
Packford looked suspiciously at his guest. ‘I can see,’ he said genially, ‘that you’ve been reading some rubbish or other. There’s enough of it, the Lord knows.’
Appleby shook his head. ‘I don’t read much in that sort of learned way. But didn’t somebody lately find an old map of Verona, and decide that it fitted Shakespeare’s Verona exactly?’
‘There’s no end to what people find it possible to decide – no end at all. He must have been to Venice, since he knew that business was transacted on the Rialto. It’s all like that, the talk of Shakespeare in Italy. Crackpot stuff, like saying he must really have been Lord Tomnoddy, since otherwise he couldn’t have made all those references to hunting and hawking and heraldry.’ Packford reached comfortably for the Chianti flask. ‘And, after all, does it much matter whether he travelled in Italy or not? The plays remain just as wonderful either way.’
‘Oh, quite so.’ Coming from Packford, it seemed to Appleby, this austere critical doctrine verged on the disingenuous. ‘But I’ve known you pursue rather similar curiosities from time to time.’
Packford waved this aside. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘there would be real critical interest in a related question. Did he know Italian? Could he read it? One would give something to be able to answer that.’
‘I seem to remember being told that
Othello
is important there. Isn’t it true that its only source was in Italian?’
‘Ah, yes – Cintio’s
Ecatommiti
.’ Packford paused, as if his mind were wandering. ‘But Cintio’s yarn
may
have got translated into English, you know, without the translation’s having survived. Or a translation into French may have come his way. There’s an English ballad on the story. Unfortunately it’s one of John Payne Collier’s forgeries.’ He chuckled. ‘Now, there’s a fascinating subject: the history of the great Shakespearian forgers! What a pity that it can’t happen any more.’
Appleby was interested. ‘But can’t it? Why not?’
‘Too many experts. Too much science.’
‘Perhaps so. But expert knowledge, and the command of scientific techniques, can work both ways. In some fields I’m familiar with, the forger who commands them can put up quite an alarming show. It’s rather as with warfare. Sometimes science puts the attack on top, and sometimes the defence. Of course I agree that nowadays there are certain directions in which the forger’s liberty has been drastically curtailed. Think of Van Meegeren’s spurious Vermeers and De Hooghs. There wasn’t a chance for them once the chemists came along and spotted a resin of the phenolformaldehyde group, unknown until the last years of the nineteenth century. And it was the same with the most noted of the recent literary forgers, T J Wise.’