Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike Read Free Book Online

times a day as their paths crossed in Elsinore’s stone labyrinth—“How fares my gracious lady?”—was met on this one occasion by a request, plaintive beneath its regal dignity, for a brief audience. She received him an hour later within the fir-floored oriel solar that had once been Rorik’s chamber but which she had appropriated as her private closet, for romance-reading and embroidery and gazing from her two-pillared triple window toward the gray-green Sund, whose restless, moody expanse seemed possessed of a freedom she envied.
    “Dear old friend, adviser to my father and now to my beloved husband,” she began, “I am curious as to your impressions of Amleth’s progress. His activities, ever more manly and martial, take him farther and farther from my weak woman’s scope.”
    Corambus had been thin in Gerutha’s first memories of him, but fleshiness had overtaken him young, and, hishigh post demanding much patient sitting and feasting, had quite mastered his figure by his mid-fifties. Yet there was still something adroit about him; he moved crisply within invisible and supportive constraints, his framing notion of himself as a perfect courtier, a stout prop to the throne. Gingerly he seated himself on a three-legged chair whose flat triangular bottom and narrow spired back ill accommodated his anatomy, and tipped his large head (its rotundity emphasized by the quaint smallness of his ears and nose and the stubby goatee jutting from his chin) to lend a portly attention. He spoke in the twinkling, rounded gestures—a gracefully upheld forefinger, a deftly dropped wink—of a man whose physical substance confidently seconded his sense of his station. “The Prince has a fine seat on a charger, and rarely misses the straw man’s vital area with his lance. He draws the bowstring with a steady hand, but is a trifle quick to release. His chess is indifferent, lacking a degree of foresight; his duelling enthusiastic, if short on finesse; his Latin that of one who can only think in Danish. Otherwise there is little to complain of. He is
rex in ovo
, as should,
natura naturans
, be the very case.”
    Yet the old counsellor’s eyes were watchful from within his impressive head, under its stiff green hat in the shape of a brimmed sugarloaf; he was waiting for Gerutha to declare herself. His hair hung beneath his cap in greasy yellow-gray strands that had darkened the shoulder of his high-collared houppelande, and—another untidy touch—he had one of those wet lower lips thatappear slightly out of control, spraying softly on certain sibilants, drifting to one side or another when relaxed.
    The Queen asked, “Does he seem—how can I say this?—hard-hearted? Disrespectful to his elders, and callous to his inferiors? Somehow
wanton
in his moods, which are so strangely quick to change? With me he can be one moment affectionate, as though he understands me better than any man ever has, and the next moment be just a boy, turning his back as if I am of no more account than a wet nurse to the weaned. I feel, dear friend, an utter failure as a mother.”
    Corambus tut-tutted and allowed himself a knowing smile, a rictus that tipped his head and sucked his shiny lower lip sideways. “You accuse yourself where no other would think to. Not a mother alone raises a prince; the entire state is responsible. Having endured the labor, you discharged the major duty—God often welcomes a young mother to Paradise at that point. By giving the infant suck for a year, you performed what many a noble lady, fastidious of her high bosom, delegates to an uncouth peasant girl. As Amleth learned to walk, to lisp, to string together sentences, to make sense of letters, to begin to grasp the tools and usages and necessities of the world, you were attentive beyond the accustomed royal behavior. Shamefully often, a child born to be God’s agent on earth is worse neglected than the offspring of a trull and a passing highwayman. You have done