JOHN CLARE: [Suddenly concerned.] And how old would that be?
BECKETT: I think sixteen is around the usual mark. Why do you ask?
JOHN CLARE: [Slightly evasively.] No reason in particular. Being a poet I am naturally interested in the facts of things.
JOHN BUNYAN: [After a pause.] Well, I should be upon my way. The Earl of Peterborough will not wait forever to hand down his edict, and the path I’m on is hard and without ending. It has been instructive talking with you, and if I should wake tomorrow to my cell in Bedford you may be assured that all the curious things which we have said shall be a great amusement for me.
JOHN CLARE: I shall be right pleased to say I’ve met you, even if only in these ambiguous circumstances.
BECKETT: Yes, you take care. And between the two of us, what did you genuinely think to your man Cromwell?
JOHN BUNYAN: Ah, he was all right. [Less confidently, following a pause.] At least to start with. Yet despite his antinomian certainties, you may be sure that he was not a saint. Ah, well. I’ll leave you to your entertainments in this borough of Mansoul. A good night to you, gentlemen. [BUNYAN walks wearily off to EXIT STAGE LEFT.]
JOHN CLARE: And to you.
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 –